id stringlengths 5 10 | title stringlengths 0 2.44k | text stringlengths 0 2.9k |
|---|---|---|
1524371_1 | Mongolia Is Having a Mine Rush | materials to the world. ''Last year, China surpassed the U.S. as the No.1 consumer and importer of copper, and the holy grail in our business is to be the low-cost supplier to China,'' said Robert M. Friedland, chairman of Ivanhoe Mines, over breakfast at Millie's, one of several American-style restaurants that have sprung up in Ulan Bator, Mongolia's capital, 50 miles south of Bornuur. Mr. Friedland, one of Canada's wealthiest businessmen, is investing $5 million a month to develop an immense copper and gold deposit in the Gobi Desert, about 50 miles north of the border with China. His name is familiar in the mining world for the discovery of one of the world's largest nickel deposits, in Labrador, and for a leaking dam that led to the cyanide pollution of a 17-mile stretch of the Alamosa River in Colorado. His copper project in Mongolia, known as Oyu Tolgoi or Turquoise Hill, is tentatively scheduled to start production in 2006. Right now, 13 drilling rigs are busy probing and mapping the ore deposits, about a quarter-mile below the desert surface. Geologists estimate that there are some 21 million ounces of gold and 17 million tons of copper there. These estimates, audited by an outside company, AMEC, make it one of the largest copper finds in the world, ranking with major mines in Argentina, Chile and Indonesia. The release of the estimates last July caused Ivanhoe's stock to double, and eased Mr. Friedland's task of lining up financing for the $900 million cost of developing the mine. Its potential output of $1 billion a year would double Mongolia's gross national product. ''Ivanhoe remains poised to take advantage of the single most important theme in mining today: China,'' HSBC analysts wrote last month in a report on the company. Mongolia has gone from being the middle of nowhere to an epicenter of prospecting attention because of the rapid rise of Chinese manufacturing. To supply its factories, China stepped up imports of copper concentrate, needed for all kinds of electrical wiring, household plumbing, motors, computer parts and other uses, by 40 percent in the first half of 2003, and there is no sign of slowing. ''There are 500 million people in southern China who want an air-conditioner,'' Mr. Friedland said. ''Mongolia is in the catbird seat.'' In Soviet times, Mongolia was closely aligned with Moscow, and it has long been historically skittish of |
1524240_1 | El Greco, Bearer Of Many Gifts | made this point a century ago. Impressed by the crowds standing before an El Greco and talking heatedly, ''as they might talk about some contemporary picture,'' he described him as ''an old master who is not merely modern, but actually appears a good many steps ahead of us, turning back to show us the way.'' And this is how he has been perceived popularly: as a recent discovery, a proto-modernist anachronism who miraculously anticipated Romanticism, Symbolism, Expressionism and the whole ethos of the wild and crazy, go-it-alone artist. Everyone came to see him as if looking into a mirror. The Romantics considered him a kindred spirit who must have been mentally unbalanced. The 20th century turned him into an astigmatic, hashish-loving mystic. To Greeks he became the quintessential Greek painter; to the Spanish, the quintessential Spaniard. Never mind that this is pretty much all historical hooey. El Greco was his own man, of his own time, and his art begs to be considered as part of the late 16th century, not the early 21st. El Greco himself had something to say about mass appeal: ''Although it may seem that the masses have a vote in architecture and in music or rhetoric or painting, the fact is that this happens only when time and informed opinion have revealed the truth. And if once in a while popular taste is right, it is usually by accident and is not worth taking into account.'' Informed opinion in his day considered him a great but peculiar artist, capricious and extravagant except in his portraits, which amazed and influenced Velázquez -- El Greco's singularity having partly to do with a migratory upbringing. Born Domenikos Theotokopoulos in Candia, now Heraklion, the capital of Crete, in 1541, he trained as a post-Byzantine artist, painting icons. The show starts with them and, by the last gallery of the exhibition, you can see the abstract, conceptual side of these Byzantine pictures as a latent source for his final style, with its fantastical corkscrew figures, elongated and dematerialized, indifferent to verisimilitude and independent of nature, form dissolving into flat pattern and imaginary space. There is something about the quality of light, too, that connects to his Byzantine roots -- a golden glow, flickering and seeming almost to come from within the figures and emanate out in works like ''Adoration of the Shepherds,'' which El Greco painted as an old man |
1531500_0 | A Crucial Case for the Supreme Court | In an alarming ruling earlier this year, a closely divided Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals refused to dismiss a patently unmeritorious libel action against Consumer Reports for a 1988 review that rated the Suzuki Samurai sports utility vehicle ''not acceptable.'' It said the car, since discontinued, had a life-endangering tendency to tip and roll over. The court's refusal to reject this flimsy libel case and avoid an expensive jury trial has set an awful First Amendment precedent that threatens to chill reporting about important public issues, especially health and safety. Dozens of media organizations, including The Times, are calling upon the Supreme Court to add the case to this term's docket and undo the damage. These calls for review come nearly 40 years after the Supreme Court's seminal decision in The New York Times Company v. Sullivan, which sought to safeguard robust reporting and comment about public issues by making speech about public figures actionable only when there is clear and convincing evidence that the publisher spoke with ''actual malice.'' Among other things, that decision elevated the role of summary judgment as a tool for minimizing the speech-silencing specter of costly lawsuits by public figures. In ruling that Suzuki had presented sufficient evidence to merit a trial, the Ninth Circuit majority considered only Suzuki's side of the case. It declined to consider uncontradicted evidence by Consumers Union, publisher of Consumer Reports, debunking the weak anecdotal evidence Suzuki introduced to back its claim of actual malice. According to the ruling, a court should review the entire record only after a trial verdict has been reached, and millions of dollars spent on lawyers and other costs. Left to stand, the Ninth Circuit's standard for getting libel cases dismissed before trial would wreck the protective framework of Times v. Sullivan and its progeny. For the sake of free speech, not to mention consumer safety, this is one case the Supreme Court must not pass up. |
1531526_2 | F.D.A. Finds Cloned Animals Safe for Food | ''I think it warrants a discussion that goes beyond the narrowest scientific issues,'' said Carol Tucker Foreman, the director of food policy at the Consumer Federation of America. Ms. Foreman said polls had shown that American consumers were ill at ease with animal cloning. ''When you say 'animal cloning,' many people react as if you are at least opening the door to human cloning,'' she said. Some food companies are also cautious, worried that such food, even if safe, might be shunned by consumers. That has happened to some extent with genetically modified crops. ''It's fine to get the stamp of approval from the F.D.A. but we also need to get the stamp of approval from consumers,'' said Kathleen Nelson, senior director for legislative affairs at the International Dairy Foods Association. Ms. Nelson said that while biotechnology offered benefits for the food industry, the Food and Drug Administration needed to build ''a strong and impressive body of science on the safety of the products.'' Cloning involves using a cell from an animal to make a nearly genetically identical copy of that animal. Dolly the sheep, the first clone of an adult mammal, was born in 1996. Since then, cows, pigs and horses, among others, have been cloned. But the regulatory status of food from cloned animals has been in limbo. In June 2001, the agency asked cloning companies and farmers to keep off the market voluntarily the milk and meat from clones, and from the more conventionally bred offspring of clones, so it could assess the potential risks. That has contributed to financial struggles for the handful of small companies hoping to make a business out of cloning. And it has frustrated a few farmers and breeders who own clones. They have to dispose of milk from cloned cows and cannot sell semen from cloned bulls. ''You milk it, you dump it,'' said Karyn Schauf, owner of Indianhead Holsteins, a breeder and dairy farm in Barron, Wis., that has two clones of a now-dead prized dairy cow but cannot sell the clones' milk. ''Not being able to treat them as regular animals really puts a cap on their value.'' Donald P. Coover of Galesburg, Kan., who sells semen for breeding, has been freezing semen from some clones of an Oklahoma bull named Full Flush, waiting for the voluntary moratorium to end. He said that this year alone he sold $100,000 |
1526101_2 | NEWS SUMMARY | Action California's governor-elect, Arnold Schwarzenegger, asked Gov. Gray Davis to suspend action on all pending bills and to stop appointing judges and members of state boards and commissions. A26 Red Cross Faults Detentions The International Committee of the Red Cross said the detention of more than 600 prisoners in Guantánamo Bay was ''unacceptable'' because they were being held for open-ended terms without legal process. A1 Chicago Trash Strike Is Settled Representatives for the Teamsters union and the Chicago Area Refuse Haulers Association reached an agreement on wages, health benefits and pensions, ending the region's nine-day garbage strike. A18 C.I.A. Leak Inquiry Intensified Officials said the F.B.I. was doubling the number of investigators on the politically charged case of the leaked identity of an undercover C.I.A. officer. A18 Mayor Discusses F.B.I. Inquiry Mayor John Street of Philadelphia said he was not the focus of a federal investigation into corruption in his administration after Philadelphia police found listening devices in Mr. Street's City Hall office. A18 SCIENCE/HEALTH New Breast Cancer Drug A new drug regimen can reduce the chance that breast cancer will recur in postmenopausal women. A1 NEW YORK/REGION B1-8 Record Companies Sue New Jersey Flea Market A group of record companies filed a lawsuit against a New Jersey flea market where more than 15,000 counterfeit CD's have been seized during raids in the past three years, saying that flea markets knowingly act as havens for illegal discs. B1 Clash Over Air Safety Heated words were exchanged between the Environmental Protection Agency and the White House Council on Environmental Quality over how to inform the public about air safety after the collapse of the World Trade Center, according to documents. B3 Assemblyman Indicted The leader of the Brooklyn Democratic Party, Assemblyman Clarence Norman Jr., was indicted on charges of misappropriating campaign funds and improperly claiming travel expenses that were reimbursed by taxpayers, law enforcement officials said. A1 Arrests in Kidnapping Case Police officers in Carteret, N.J., arrested two people in the kidnapping of a United States senator's wife from her home in Virginia. B6 WEEKEND B1-28 B29-40 ESCAPES D1-8 OBITUARIES A29 SPORTS D1-8 Yankees Tie Series The New York Yankees beat the Boston Red Sox 6-2, to tie the American League Championship Series, 1-1. D1 Details Emerge in Bryant Case The woman who accused Kobe Bryant of rape told the police that the Los Angeles Lakers All-Star invited her into his |
1526016_0 | Talk to It (Your Car) | While the Chrysler Pacifica offers a built-in microphone and speakers that allow you to use your cellphone hands free, a new system lets you leave your phone in your pocket or purse. UConnect, a $275 system, links cellphones wirelessly to a microphone, control buttons and the car's radio speakers. The wireless technology is Bluetooth, a world-standard radio system. You'll also need a Bluetooth-equipped phone (most cellphone providers have them, and some existing phones can use adapters) and you'll have to teach UConnect to recognize the phones' radio signature.. Chrysler, Dodge and Jeep dealers can add a slightly simpler version ($299 plus installation) to all their models except the Chrysler Sebring and Jeep Wrangler, in which noise while driving with the top down could inhibit use of the phone. Bluetooth is built into many cars sold overseas, where cellphone use is heavier in many places than in the United States. Here, it is or will soon be available in some models, including ones from Acura, Audi, BMW, Lexus, Lincoln, Maybach and Toyota. For others, you can get aftermarket Bluetooth kits like the Parrot DriveBlue (about $225) or Bluetooth headsets (about $100 for use with Bluetooth phones, about $180 for other phones requiring Bluetooth adapters). Bluetooth can also link with computers and navigation systems. So your phone could not only communicate with your car's microphone and speaker but with the address files on your laptop or your personal digital assistant, and your P.D.A. could use Bluetooth to get navigation data. IVAN BERGER DRIVING: BELLS AND WHISTLES |
1526100_0 | New Drug Regimen Greatly Cuts Risk of Recurring Breast Cancer | A new drug regimen can markedly reduce the chance that breast cancer will recur in postmenopausal women, a large international study has found. The results were so strongly, and surprisingly, positive that the investigators ended the study early and offered the drug to women taking a placebo. The study involved 5,187 women at hundreds of medical centers in the United States, Canada and Europe. It asked what to do after they finish the recommended five-year course of tamoxifen, the standard treatment to prevent breast cancer recurrences. Tamoxifen, which blocks the hormone estrogen, is remarkably effective in postmenopausal women whose cancers are fueled by the hormone, about 100,000 women each year. But women gain no additional benefits after they take tamoxifen for five years, and so doctors have told them to simply stop taking it then and hope for the best. They are better off for having taken it: the drug's effects last for years after it is stopped. But they are left vulnerable to a return of their cancer. Half of all recurrences happen five or more years after a woman is first diagnosed, and women face a 2 to 4 percent chance each year that their cancer might return. The new study found that if women take a different drug, letrozole, sold by Novartis under the brand name Femara, after their five years of tamoxifen, they can cut that yearly risk nearly in half. An average of 2.4 years after their tamoxifen treatment ended, 132 women who were taking placebos developed new breast cancer or recurrences of their original cancer, compared with 75 of the women taking letrozole, a 43 percent reduction. ''Up until now, tamoxifen has been one of the most effective drugs in the treatment of breast cancer, or almost any cancer,'' said Dr. Jeffrey Abrams, the associate chief of the clinical investigations branch of the National Cancer Institute. ''But we lacked a treatment that could be used after tamoxifen. That's why this study is so important.'' The study results, along with two editorials, will be published in the Nov. 6 issue of The New England Journal of Medicine, but the journal released them yesterday because of their clinical importance. Since so few women, in either group, had recurrences, as a new cancer in the opposite breast, as a recurrence in the original breast or as a metastasis elsewhere in the body, and since a recurrence does |
1530760_4 | It Isn't Just the Peddlers of Pills: Big Companies Add to Spam Flow | of the more common ways that names are gathered and used, but the exact limits will be left up to the courts to define. Moreover, if the federal bill passed by the Senate is enacted it would void most state spam laws, including California's. Not surprisingly, companies that are active users of conventional mail solicitations have gravitated to e-mail, which can be far cheaper, to push certain products. These include Morgan Stanley's Discover Card, Altria's Gevalia Coffee, Schering-Plough's Claritin, and The New York Times, which uses opt-in e-mail lists to sell subscriptions. One such list maker is Xuppa.com, a 38-person firm working from a cramped office in Midtown Manhattan across Seventh Avenue from Macy's department store. It has gathered half a billion e-mail addresses since it started four years ago, but most of those are no longer valid. The 65 million names left on its lists, Lance Laifer, Xuppa's chief executive, says, have given permission to receive marketing messages. Visitors to Xuppa.com are encouraged to enter its $1 million sweepstakes. To do so they must enter not only their e-mail address but postal address and telephone number. Entering the contest gives Xuppa permission to market to users. On the same Web page, some 75 other offers from advertisers are displayed, each adjacent to a check box -- some already checked by default. When Xuppa users enter the contest, their personal information is passed to any advertiser whose offer is checked. ''There are a lot of people who would rather register and give their e-mail addresses than pay for services,'' Mr. Laifer said. This process of putting many offers on one page where users enter information is called co-registration, and it has become a main way for names to be gathered online. Dozens of partners are listed on separate links, yet once a single button is clicked each of the advertisers can claim -- with some degree of truth -- that the user agreed to receive marketing messages. Such sites stretch users' consent beyond any recognition, argues Seth Godin, a former Yahoo executive, who coined the term ''permission marketing'' to define the practice of sending e-mail marketing to people who ask for it. ''The people who are talking about permission marketing are almost entirely doing it wrong,'' Mr. Godin said. ''Greed and avarice drove people to wreck the system.'' The trade in e-mail names is not limited to the back alleys |
1530689_4 | To Get Back in the Game, Be Ready for a Switch in Positions | looks like, worry about what it says.'' Second, know what you want in the marketplace. ''Regardless of what titles you held or what you did in the past, you may have to reinvent yourself,'' Ms. Webb said. State employment offices or one-stop career centers have numerous services to help job seekers redo their résumés and perform self-assessments. They can also help research where applicants should send a résumé and for what kinds of positions. There is also the Internet. Many employers maintain Web sites that list job openings, and applicants can send their résumés directly. The big online job listing services, like HotJobs.com and Monster.com, contain information about issues like compensation and job availability, as well as listings of openings that employers have placed. These Web sites also maintain databases of job seekers' résumés, and their services are generally free for people seeking employment. For people who are employed, posting one's résumé online can be risky, given that one's employer can stumble on it. Employers certainly seem to like using the Internet for job recruiting. In a a 2002 survey by staffing.org, a nonprofit group that studies hiring practices, employer-respondents identified Web postings as the most effective way of filling jobs, 3.23 on a scale of 5. Still, many experts scoff at the Internet. Mr. Van Horn of the Heldrich Center called it ''a good research tool, but not necessarily a great way to get a job.'' Mr. Challenger was even more blunt and dismissive. ''The Internet,'' he said, ''is the worst thing that could have happened to a lot of job seekers.'' That is because Internet job postings frequently generate so many applications that the likelihood of getting a response can be akin to winning the lottery. And while the Internet actually provides its own networking opportunities, with chat rooms and message boards, that sense of openness often deceives people into thinking they are doing enough by staying home and surfing the Web. According to Mr. Van Horn, Mr. Challenger and other employment experts, the most important thing in finding work is still human contact. The tactic worked for Mr. Hardiman. He knew someone who knew someone else at the Career Education Corporation, which owns the Pittsburgh Culinary Institute. It was through these connections that Mr. Hardiman got his interview and, ultimately, a job offer. ''In the end,'' he said, ''friends care about friends, and they help.'' BOUNCING BACK |
1529283_2 | Disagreement: It's the Nature Of the Species | one another. And it is also getting ugly. State officials said that they were investigating allegations that about a dozen traps, set by state wildlife workers to capture the bears to gather information about their health and living patterns, were moved, damaged or tripped. They are also looking into a report that someone poured a strange liquid -- a soda, according to one theory -- into the gas tank of one of the wildlife worker. ''Emotions are high,'' said Martin J. McHugh, director of the state Department of Environmental Protection's Division of Fish and Wildlife. ''Bears are beautiful, majestic animals.'' And those emotions are heightened on both sides of the issue. Ms. Smith, the director of the Bear Education and Resource Group, plans a demonstration on Nov. 1 outside the governor's mansion. Ms. Smith argues that the hunt will do little to reduce the state's bear population, which in some estimates is as high as 3,000. ''It's not going to accomplish anything,'' she said. ''It's a trophy hunt.'' Mr. Rogalo, of Stanhope, N.J., said the hunt was an important step, not only in reducing bear populations but also in making brazen, garbage-eating bears less comfortable around humans. ''There's too many bears,'' Mr. Rogalo said, noting that while hunting other animals in the woods in recent years he has seen many more bears. ''From my and my family's experience afield, I think a bear hunt is long overdue.'' AND of the animal rights advocates, who question the wisdom of the hunts, Mr. Rogalo said: ''They were brought up on Disney.'' Such sentiments, stacked on top of the geese kills and net-and-bolt proposals, have animal rights advocates concerned that New Jersey is gaining a reputation as an especially unfriendly place for wild animals. ''Just the goose kills alone were enough to make people say, 'Just what on earth was the mentality of people with regard to wild animals?' '' said Stephanie L. Boyles, a wildlife biologist for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. And, here in New Jersey, where the hunt is still set to begin Dec. 8, some say that the controversy over the black bear, if nothing else, may yet provide a lesson in perspective. Dr. Barry E. Truchil, a sociologist at Rider University, said of the bear-human conflict, ''We tend to describe them as a problem for us. From their standpoint, we're a problem for them.'' Our Towns |
1529170_2 | Moves by Britain and I.R.A. Toward Peace in Ulster Hit a Last-Minute Snag | Mr. Blair of success that the announcement that elections would be held on Nov. 26 was made in London at 7 a.m. on Tuesday before he embarked. ''We are very, very close to what I thought would be quite a historic day in Northern Ireland,'' Mr. Blair said tonight in a brief news conference held many hours after it was scheduled. He described the setback as a temporary ''glitch'' and said he and Mr. Ahern would work to get the process back on track. Hours later, both men reappeared to say that conversations were under way among local politicians and would continue ''over the next few days.'' Mr. Blair said that the situation was ''deeply frustrating'' but that there had been many similar moments in the recent politics of Northern Ireland. People should not lose sight of how much progress had been made, he said. Mr. Trimble had said his disillusionment set in when he heard John de Chastelain, the retired Canadian general charged with the disarming of paramilitary groups in Northern Ireland, confirm this afternoon that he had witnessed the decommissioning of the I.R.A. weapons but could not specify what he had seen because the I.R.A. had exercised its right to keep the matter confidential. Two previous such acts had also been kept confidential, but Mr. Trimble said it had been his clear understanding that this time there would be ''greater transparency.'' He said he had also been led to believe that there would be ''some clarity about the future,'' a reference to his political need for an I.R.A. renunciation of paramilitary activity. The size and importance of the I.R.A. move was not in dispute. General de Chastelain's assistant weapons monitor, Andrew Sens, an American, estimated that the weaponry he had seen put out of action on Tuesday ''could have caused death and destruction on a huge scale had it been used.'' General de Chastelain described the weapons as ''light, medium and heavy ordnance and associated munitions'' including automatic and semiautomatic guns, machine guns, bombs and explosive materials. The unfolding events on Tuesday followed six weeks of intensive talks between Mr. Trimble and Gerry Adams, president of Sinn Fein, the political wing of the Irish Republican Army. While the peace agreement of 1998 succeeded in ending decades of sectarian violence and transforming the tenor of life in Northern Ireland, it has not had the same success establishing sustainable politics. |
1529094_3 | A Nice Place to Have a Snack or Catch Up on Your Reading | of tape was analyzed for each driver. The subjects were told they were being studied to learn ''how traffic and roadway conditions affect driving behavior.'' The researchers found a mixed picture. Some of the drivers' activities were more common when the car was stopped than when it was moving, including dialing a cellphone, talking on the phone, reaching for objects and performing grooming activities. But eating, drinking, manipulating the radio or CD player, smoking or paying attention to a baby or a child were just as likely to happen when the vehicle was moving. It was not statistically clear whether any of the activities led to accidents because there were none during the period that was taped. Researchers could have extended the experiment and observed some accidents and correlated them with activities in the car, but analyzing the tapes was labor-intensive, and running the program long enough to get statistically meaningful results was beyond the scope of the $400,000 project. A handicap for safety investigators has been that until recently, the standard form that police officers use to record information on crashes has not included a box to check for cellphone use or other distractions. Now some states are including such information, although the data will only be available for police-reported crashes, which are a small fraction of the total. Rear-end collisions, a type that is often connected to driver distraction, usually do not generate police reports. During the AAA study, most of the cellphone use was timed by the drivers; the 28 who used a cellphone placed 122 calls but received only 15. They were more likely to use it in the dark or twilight conditions or in bad weather. Cellphones, Dr. Stutts said in a telephone interview, ''are about the only distraction I can easily think of that involve physical distraction of holding the phone, manipulating buttons -- plus an auditory distraction, a cognitive distraction, thinking of what you're going to say.'' By contrast, she said, eating a hamburger is less demanding. ''You may not have to look at it, or pay attention to it,'' she said. The solution in New York and other jurisdictions has been to allow cellphone use only if it is hands-free, though that does not eliminate cognitive distraction, experts say. In fact, the AAA study found that many cellphone users had a headset or other hands-free equipment but did not use it too |
1529154_0 | Swift-Footed W. | On the eve of our invasion of Iraq, I went to ancient Troy in Turkey. It's a haunting spot, quiet and deserted, though if you scrunch up your eyes you may still catch a glimpse of Helen on the walls. Those walls include a gate that shows signs of having been widened -- or so my guide claimed, probably fancifully -- as if to accommodate a giant wooden horse. At the time, I wrote about the lessons of the Trojan War for Iraq, but now I find my mind wandering back to Troy again. Homer seems even more relevant today: In ''The Iliad,'' he describes how the Greeks are sapped by a prolonged, dreary, unnecessary conflict that does not go nearly as well as it was supposed to, partly because their leader antagonizes his allies. And in ''The Odyssey,'' we have a king who inherited his throne and whose arrogance and impulsiveness cost the lives of his soldiers. ''The Iliad'' is the greatest war story ever told, but it's not fundamentally about war -- after all, it never mentions the Trojan horse and covers only a few weeks in a war that lasted 10 years. No, ''The Iliad'' is ultimately not about war but rather about how great men confront tragedy, learn moderation and become wise. In case ''The Iliad'' isn't lying around the Oval Office, let me recap for our warriors in Washington. Achilles is both the mightiest warrior and a petulant, self-righteous, arrogant figure. A unilateralist, he refuses to consult with allies; he dismisses intelligence about his own vulnerability; he never reads the newspapers. So the Greeks are nearly defeated, and while Achilles sulks in his tent, his dearest friend, Patroclus, is killed. Then the impulsive Achilles careers into action and overdoes it in the other direction, desecrating Hector's body, but in the end he returns to his tent, calms down and shows a new sense of his own limits, a new compassion, a new moderation and a new wisdom. That is a constant theme in the classics: ancient heroes like Achilles and Odysseus do not avoid mistakes, but they learn from them. Through their errors, they come to understand moral nuance as well as moral clarity, and to appreciate moderation. Indeed, the subtitle for ''The Iliad'' could be ''Achilles Grows Up.'' Unfortunately, until recently this administration hasn't shown much signs of growing. Yet over the last few |
1529178_5 | China's Boom Adds to Global Warming Problem | done several studies of Chinese energy use. But environmentalists are also loath to criticize China too strongly, partly because Chinese emissions per person are still so much lower than those in the developed world, and partly because China has been trying with some success to improve the energy efficiency of its industries. Programs like requiring electrical appliances and building designs to waste less energy show considerable promise, said Barbara Finamore, the director of the Clean China Program at the council. The central government in Beijing has had repeated difficulties in forcing provincial governments to pursue recent efficiency programs. China no longer has the central planning mandates to order improvements, but has not yet developed market-based incentives, like higher prices, to encourage people to curb their consumption of fossil fuels, Ms. Finamore said. China's central bank is nervous that some sectors of the economy, especially luxury housing construction, are growing too fast, and it is trying to restrain them. If it succeeds, that could temper somewhat the increase in energy use. China is not alone in consuming a lot more energy, although its enormous population of roughly one and a quarter billion, and rapid economic growth mean that its increases dwarf those of any other country in the developing world. India, for example, is also showing rapid growth in energy use. In populous countries from Indonesia to Brazil, power plants are burning more and more coal and oil to meet ever growing demand for electricity from industry and households. Even some climate experts in developing countries are conceding that their emissions need to be addressed when international talks begin in 2005 on what will follow the Kyoto agreement, which calls for industrialized nations to reduce their emissions by 2012. Considerable reluctance persists among developing countries, however, to accept the kind of specific limits prescribed for wealthy countries by the Kyoto Protocol. ''There's going to be a fairly heated debate about what developing countries should do in the next round,'' said Rajendra K. Pachauri, an Indian engineer who is the chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a United Nations group that assesses the causes and consequences of rising temperatures. The Chinese government is drafting a series of new economic policies, some of which will concern energy, and is expected to release them soon. Senior Chinese officials did not respond to requests for interviews over the last two months. Two fairly |
1529178_6 | China's Boom Adds to Global Warming Problem | those of any other country in the developing world. India, for example, is also showing rapid growth in energy use. In populous countries from Indonesia to Brazil, power plants are burning more and more coal and oil to meet ever growing demand for electricity from industry and households. Even some climate experts in developing countries are conceding that their emissions need to be addressed when international talks begin in 2005 on what will follow the Kyoto agreement, which calls for industrialized nations to reduce their emissions by 2012. Considerable reluctance persists among developing countries, however, to accept the kind of specific limits prescribed for wealthy countries by the Kyoto Protocol. ''There's going to be a fairly heated debate about what developing countries should do in the next round,'' said Rajendra K. Pachauri, an Indian engineer who is the chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a United Nations group that assesses the causes and consequences of rising temperatures. The Chinese government is drafting a series of new economic policies, some of which will concern energy, and is expected to release them soon. Senior Chinese officials did not respond to requests for interviews over the last two months. Two fairly senior Chinese officials said in earlier, separate interviews, after President Hu Jintao succeeded Jiang Zemin in March, that an active debate was under way over the extent to which conservation should be balanced against economic growth. Growth in Chinese coal consumption should slow somewhat in the next four years. Completion of the Three Gorges dam and five nuclear power plants will provide considerable additional electricity for China's national grid by 2007, although posing different environmental risks from coal. But Larry Metzroth, a coal and electricity specialist at the International Energy Agency, warned that with no further large hydroelectric or nuclear power projects planned in China, coal consumption ''is going to pick up again after 2007.'' Beijing's official New China News Agency recently predicted that China's capacity to generate electricity from coal would be almost three times as high in 2020 as it was in 2000. If China can continue to sustain 8 percent annual economic growth, then the next big growth area in greenhouse gas emissions is likely to be cars. China is already the world's fastest-growing car market, with sales up 73 percent this year. China has just one-twentieth as many cars now as the United States, because car |
1529181_0 | Editors' Note; SPECIAL TODAY -- Cars | The Motor City and car-mad California once seemed made for each other, but now they are headed in different directions. Also: Articles on safety, buying and selling, model trends and technical innovations that include a navigational device that's easy to love. SECTION G |
1530335_0 | PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL | |
1530344_7 | High Anxiety | as concerned about who gets first chair in the orchestra, or the lead in the fall play or who wins the essay contest. One Westchester educator, who reacted to the friction by agreeing to speak only on the condition that he not be identified, has a daughter who earned a full academic scholarship to a solid college, partly based on her talents as an athlete. ''There was resentment that she got the money, and a few other scholarships available locally that she wasn't given,'' he said. ''There's competition for ever more limited dollars.'' With everyone looking for that special edge, the sense of others' advantages raises the pressure -- for example, if Mom went to Harvard or, even better, if Grandpa gave a building to Yale. ''All the issues involved with legacy, athletes and affirmative action just exacerbate all the emotional feelings,'' said Carol Gill, a private college counselor in Dobbs Ferry. (Of course, even the decision to hire a private counselor like Ms. Gill is something some families can't do or won't do.) Ms. Schulzinger talked about a girl in her high school class who applied as an American Indian. ''She was like one-twentieth Native American, and her sister even got a Native American scholarship to Columbia,'' she said. ''She told me this herself in physics class.'' The early decision equation has also changed the mix. Increasingly, for the most high-profile colleges, statistics show that an early application, in the fall, with the student committing to go to the college or university if accepted, gives a student a distinct advantage over a regular application, which is usually sent between Dec. 1 and Feb. 1. As a result, many students feel they have no choice but to apply during the fall early decision window. ''This increases their opportunity,'' said Marjorie Jacobs, director of counseling at Scarsdale High School. ''Over 50 percent of our class applies early, and has since the 1990's. Now, perhaps 65 to 70 percent of our students are out early and looking early. They understood it's to their advantage.'' EARLY decision is complicated on another front, though. Early decision applicants make an early commitment, and they must take what they are offered in financial aid, rather than waiting until spring and comparing financial aid packages, assuming they are accepted at several schools. Income issues leap to the foreground. ''Who's applying early?'' said Ms. Jacobs of Scarsdale. ''Kids |
1530253_0 | The Nation: No, You Go First; Cutting Greenhouse Gases, or Not | IN the international debate over how to deal with global warming, the United States and China occupy center stage. The United States has long been the dominant producer of carbon dioxide emissions and the other heat-trapping greenhouse gases associated with rising temperatures. China still lags far behind in total emissions, but its vast population and rapid rate of economic growth put it high on experts' lists of future sources of the warming gases. India is not too far behind. China is rapidly increasing its consumption of coal and oil to fuel an ever more electrified and mobile society. India is experiencing a similar energy surge for similar reasons, and like China, it hopes rapid growth will help to reduce widespread poverty. But if the United States, China and India are critical to meeting the threat of greenhouse gases, the question is: who goes first? The emissions restrictions called for in the pending climate treaty known as the Kyoto Protocol apply only to industrialized countries that ratify it. There are provisions that could allow a rich country to gain credits for investing in emissions-reducing projects in poorer ones, but the rules remain mired in disputes over how to measure gains and what kinds of projects should qualify. In the meantime, President Bush has rejected the Kyoto pact, objecting that it is costly and ignores China, India and other big developing nations. Nonetheless, many global warming experts say that history and logic require the United States to take the lead. In almost all international environmental agreements in recent decades, the so-called developing world has essentially been allowed to sit out the first round or two. Whether the goal has been curbing global warming, restoring the ozone layer or phasing out toxic organic chemicals, there has long been a broad consensus that the first steps should be taken by the industrial powers. The 1992 climate treaty, which underpins the pending Kyoto Protocol, explicitly speaks of ''differentiated responsibilities'' for advanced and advancing nations. After all, the logic goes, rich countries achieved their prosperity in part because they were unhampered by restrictions on the use of natural resources. Still, the Bush administration remains opposed to any emissions restrictions, though it has been sending mixed signals of late. Last November, for example, during international treaty talks in India on the climate change issue, Paula J. Dobriansky, the under secretary of state for global affairs, said, ''We |
1530389_1 | For Many College Students, A Job (or Two) to Pay Tuition | low-paying on-campus jobs involving faxing, filing and checking identification cards. In past years, she said, many departments complained that they could not fill all their positions. But this year, that has not been a problem. Ms. Steinfeld estimated that 20 to 30 percent more students are applying for on-campus jobs than at this time last year. By the end of the academic year, she expects that the campus will employ 12,000 students, compared with the 10,000 of previous years. Some students will even have shorter shifts this year as the university tries to provide more job seekers with at least some work. ''I think it's about economic factors,'' Ms. Steinfeld said. ''Tuition's expensive, text books are expensive. Parents can't contribute as much to living expenses any more. We have parents calling and coming into the office with students, telling us that their children need to get a job.'' Adrienne Caulk, a freshman at N.Y.U., said she would like to be spending her time adjusting to the rigors of campus life. Instead, she has been in the career service center, scanning the job boards for an office or clerical position. Ms. Caulk, an international-business major from Philadelphia, has a $4,000 work-study grant. ''I'm just looking for a paycheck and right now I'm not being choosy,'' she said. ''I think a lot of people's parents' income has gone down and now they need to be more responsible. But I won't do anything demeaning. I'm not going to strip my way through college.'' Amelia Feuer, another N.Y.U. freshman from the Philadelphia area, said that when her older brother was in college several years ago, he was more likely to receive spending money from their parents. ''That's not the case for me,'' she said. ''My dad lost a lot of money in the stock market.'' She has landed a $10-an-hour job as a tutor at a Manhattan elementary school, part of the federal work-study program at N.Y.U. The number of college students working at least part time has been rising steadily since the 1980's, according to a 2001 study commissioned by Upromise, an Internet company that helps families save for college education. In 2000, about 57 percent of full-time college students were working part time or full time compared with 49 percent in 1984. But at some colleges and universities there has been a more pronounced spike in student employment in the last several |
1530195_0 | PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL | |
1530090_3 | Animal-Watching Deep In The Amazon | spacious and, though there were candles instead of electric lights, had such amenities as complete bathrooms. It was in stark contrast to the Indian village a mile away, where generations of a family crowded into bare straw huts and wore cheap half-shredded western clothes. Nonprofit organizations had recently turned the lodge over to the poverty-stricken Indians to try to help them survive as one of the few tribes in Peru that still have their own language and culture. Thus men who ate loin of monkey sliced with a machete found themselves learning where to put spoons in a table setting and women who had never slept in anything but a hammock were trying to master hospital corners. The lodge had only been open six months, but bookings for the dry season were coming in, and with the help of outside advisers, things were running smoothly. The advisers had also helped these indigenous people rediscover some of their native crafts, and we watched a woman with a toddler sucking at her breast weave a fan from grass she had cut; she had just learned how to do this but her hands flew, as though some ancient memory had been reawakened. Most of the men were out working in the manioc fields, but some lounged about, cleaning their nails with their machetes. The medicine man, Gregorio, and his friends took us through the forest to show us its medicinal marvels and to demonstrate how his people harvested brazil nuts, their main industry. The trees had dropped what looked like cannonballs on the forest floor; each contained a cluster of about a dozen raw brazil nuts. A local man named Eddie delicately shaved the shells off the nuts with the ever-useful machete, which sliced within a millimeter of his fingers. The clean white unroasted nuts were crunchy and delicious, tasting slightly of coconut. Gregorio took us through enormous strangler figs, lopped off a liana and opened his mouth and drizzled water into it -- the vine contained about a liter of water. He showed us a ''malaria bush,'' which contains the quinine used to make the medicine that fights malaria. He rubbed the moist pulp from the bark of one tree on a cut on my hand, and to my surprise it had closed up by the next day. He found a lemony leaf for headache, and another to help with the heartache |
1530209_4 | Personal Business; A Tight Job Market Dampens Ivy League Hopes | an assistant dean for undergraduates at Yale. ''It's not to sound blasé about it because things could be better, and it certainly has been a challenge compared to a few years ago.'' Steve Pollock, the president of WetFeet Inc., a company in San Francisco that offers recruiting services, said major companies are more likely to continue recruiting at elite universities because of the high caliber of job candidates and the businesses' long history at the schools. ''The companies usually have a core set of schools they focus on, and many are top-ranked academically,'' he said. Many universities have extensive and loyal alumni networks, and they have been bolstering their career services departments by adding staff members and holding workshops. Some want students to come in for career counseling as early as their freshman year. Last year, Brown University began turning to parents and professors for job leads. It even approached potential employers at professional conferences on campus. ''We're being much more proactive to establish relationships; we use every opportunity to reach out as much as possible,'' said Kimberly G. DelGizzo, Brown's director of career services. Still, many recent Ivy League graduates remain in a holding pattern. Ms. Roewe said that her Wharton roommate, who also graduated last spring, had a $7-an-hour internship at Universal Studios, and that another former classmate was working at a Gap store. Margie Tsaousis, 22, who received a political science degree from Vassar College last spring, worked as an unpaid intern at City Hall in San Francisco before being hired as a legal assistant in that city. She is paid $10 an hour and receives no benefits. As graduates look for high-paying jobs, many may be wondering if the high price of their education was worth it. Ms. Roewe noted that it cost her parents around $100,000 in tuition alone to send her to Wharton for four years. Last week, the College Board reported that it now costs an average of $26,854 a year to attend a four-year private school, including tuition, fees, room and board, up 5.7 percent from last year. Carlos Sanchez, 22, of Los Angeles said he thought that the bachelor's degree in economics he received from Princeton in May would land him a six-figure job at an investment bank. The reality check came when he met with a recruiter at a temporary agency. ''She asked, 'What is your ideal job?' and I |
1530355_0 | PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL | |
1530379_0 | PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL | |
1527120_1 | Satellites and Airborne Searches Spot Harmful Ocean Debris | feet deep, said Mr. Vélez-Arocho, who runs the E.P.A.'s marine debris program. ''When they drift for miles or months, they catch sea birds, turtles, seals and endangered animals,'' he added. ''They're a huge problem on the West Coast.'' The nets have been known to travel from the open seas to coral reefs teeming with marine life. Once they reach the reefs, divers have to cut them out by hand and load them onto inflatable boats, a process that is not only difficult, but also dangerous. For environmentalists, the goal is to get to the nets before they reach the reefs, where the risk of entanglement is greatest. That is where Dr. Churnside and his team have stepped in. Using ocean circulation models, the team estimated where currents, winds and other conditions might concentrate debris. From space, three different satellites measured sea surface temperatures and roughness to find regions where swirling eddies might suck in debris and cause mass accumulations. That led the team to make more than a half-dozen trips in a small twin-engine plane equipped with a groupof sensors to detect objects floating along the coast. Color and thermal imagers let them see what was above the surface, and laser-based radar, or lidar, let them see what was beneath it. But because conditions changed by the minute, Dr. Churnside and others had to be fed satellite data from colleagues in Maryland even as they crisscrossed northern stretches of the Pacific Coast. ''We predicted convergence regions weeks ahead of time,'' said Karen Friedman, a contractor for the oceans agency who helped analyze data from the satellites. ''But we had to update the info starting a couple days beforehand and then provide real-time data as the flights were taking place.'' The team successfully located a variety of debris near Alaska and along the coast of British Columbia. But because it was only a test, none of the debris was actually removed. Dr. Churnside said he hoped to expand the project next year to survey an area of coral reefs north of Hawaii. If the scientists can track down debris there, he said, they can send a ship with a crane to scoop it up before it damages the reefs. ''The outer islands of Hawaii act as a comb, picking up a lot of debris,'' said Tim Veenstra, president of Airborne Technologies, an Alaska-based company that managed the project. ''It wreaks havoc |
1527260_0 | World Briefing | Europe: Northern Ireland: Leaders Push Election Process | Substantial progress in the Northern Ireland political stalemate, but no breakthrough, was reported after talks between Prime Minister Tony Blair; his Irish counterpart, Bertie Ahern; Richard N. Haass, President Bush's special envoy; Gerry Adams, president of Sinn Fein, the political wing of the Irish Republican Army; and David Trimble, leader of the province's largest Protestant party. They are working against a deadline this week for rescheduling elections to a power-sharing assembly. Warren Hoge (NYT) |
1527128_0 | Fly Me to the Moon | The launching of China's first manned spaceflight, scheduled for this week, has caught the fancy of the world's most populous country. In the United States, however, interest in the space program is at a low point. Moreover, after the Columbia accident, the manned space program seems to lack focus and a sense of mission. What is needed is a new goal, one that is not only achievable but that will provide the experience needed if mankind eventually decides to go farther into space: a permanent human presence on the moon. What might we do on the moon? We can test applications involving nuclear propulsion, radiation control and advanced communications. We can gain experience building habitats in a hostile environment. We can develop solar-powered devices for use in space. We can investigate the practicalities of using laser power transmission for electricity and develop and refine other power technologies for future exploration. We can develop better long-term life-support systems and medicine appropriate to sustain life in low gravity. Of course, these suggestions are for the short term. The space program has already had many spinoff applications and technology developments that have improved our way of life. Just as those improvements could not have been foreseen, there will be many practical spinoffs as we develop a permanent lunar habitat that will lead to improvements in our quality of life that cannot now be predicted. Especially in view of China's achievements, the lunar space station should be an international program. It would be a powerful vehicle to bring nations together, decreasing the chances for international conflict. A reoriented and reinvigorated manned space program would offer a viable partnership to other space-faring nations that might welcome this opportunity to participate with the United States in developing a lunar habitat. For the United States, it would be a chance to explore practical ways to exist in space for very long periods. The United States needs a practical goal, and a permanent human presence on the moon would invigorate a splendid program that appears to need a better short- and long-term focus. Not only would this project give America renewed interest in the space program, but it would also extend our experience in manned spaceflight toward a simple goal that Americans can easily understand and support. William E. Howard III works on space and technology issues for the government and private sector. |
1527110_2 | New Pill Fuels Debate Over Benefits of Fewer Periods | author of ''The Hormone of Desire,'' said she was concerned about the regimen's possible long-term effects. Specifically, she said, a normal hormonal cycle, which continuous use of the pill suppresses, includes two weeks of significantly reduced blood pressure, part of the reason women of reproductive age have fewer heart attacks and strokes. Menstrual bleeding rids the body of excess iron, another risk factor for cardiovascular disease. Dr. Rako says her research points to a link between long-term use of the pill and a higher risk of cervical cancer, asserting that women who use oral contraceptives are less able to fight off the humanpapilloma virus, the leading cause of this cancer. But the American Cancer Society, on its Web site, indicates that there is no definite evidence linking the use of oral contraceptives with cervical cancer. It says that some research suggests a relationship between oral contraceptive use for five years or more and an increased risk. Research is under way to resolve this issue, it said in recommending that women and their doctors discuss whether the benefits of using the pill outweigh this ''very slight potential risk.'' Finally, Dr. Rako said, the pill decreases the testosterone in a woman's body, and the reduction can adversely affect libido, energy levels, muscle tone and brain function. ''We cannot yet know, or even imagine, what some of the additional serious consequences of extended pill use will be,'' she said. ''The complexity of hormones' effects upon one another and on every organ system in the body is far from fully understood.'' In June, the menstrual suppression panel of the Society for Menstrual Cycle Research, a multidisciplinary group interested in women's health, issued a statement saying there was not enough evidence to suggest that the treatment was ''entirely safe and reversible.'' ''We need well-designed, randomized, placebo-controlled trials of long-term oral contraceptive use for menstrual suppression, examining women's experiences, bone health and risks for blood clots and strokes,'' it said. ''These studies should include women who are not taking any oral contraceptives, and not just compare women on different schedules of active pills. We also need studies to assess the recovery of fertility following discontinuation.'' Dr. Leslie Miller, an associate professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Washington, is studying low-dose birth control pills. Her goal is avoiding periods altogether, a technique that has not been approved by the F.D.A. Dr. Miller has not |
1527165_1 | Where Faith Grows, Fired by Pentecostalism | are not encouraged to ask for any help. They seem to have all of it.'' Not so in the developing world, where Christianity is drawing followers as never before. That growth is changing the complexion and practice of the Christian faith and other religions in a fervid competition for souls, generating new tremors in places like Nigeria, which are already marbled with ethnic and political fault lines, and causing schisms between the old Christians of the north and the newer ones of the south. It is also beginning to be felt in the political life of these countries. The new Christian expansion is particularly striking in Pentecostalism, a denomination born only about 100 years ago among blacks, whites and Hispanics in an abandoned church in Los Angeles. Emphasizing a direct line to God, its boisterous, unmediated style of worship employs healings, speaking in tongues and casting out demons. Spreading Pentecostal congregations -- a quarter of all Christians worldwide -- are bumping up against established Christian churches and Islam in Africa, and chipping away at what has long been a virtual Roman Catholic monopoly in Latin America. In Brazil, where the national identity has been intertwined with Catholicism since the Portuguese landed 500 years ago, the emotional services at thousands of Pentecostal churches amount to a religious revolution in the world's largest Catholic country. In the 25 years of John Paul II's papacy, Brazil's Protestant population has quadrupled, with the biggest surge coming in the 1990's among evangelical and Pentecostal groups. More than 25 million Brazilians belong to such churches, leaving pastors like Ezequiel Teixeira of the New Life Project Church in Rio de Janeiro so giddy that he predicts, ''In another 25 years, Brazil will have a Protestant majority.'' By some estimates, more than a third of Guatemala's population is now Protestant, and Pentecostal churches are making significant inroads in Argentina, Colombia and Chile, where Catholics account for 70 percent of the population. Across the tropics and the south, Christian worship, especially Pentecostalism, has captured hearts and minds in countries where the precariousness of ordinary living -- blackouts, robbery, disease, corruption -- makes rich and poor alike turn to divine intervention. ''It allows for spiritual or divine agency, so that God has the power to fix and heal and also to protect you,'' said Lamin Sanneh, a professor at Yale Divinity School who specializes in West Africa. ''You might fall |
1527208_2 | Farmers Help Deliver Modified Crops to Brazil | business. But then more and more farmers began planting genetically modified soybeans smuggled from Argentina, and Mr. Pippi's sales took off. ''I've been selling Massey Ferguson for 40 years, and I can't recall a more favorable outlook for agriculture round here,'' said Mr. Pippi, who also grows soybeans. Unwilling to put his other business at risk by breaking the law, Mr. Pippi had refrained from planting genetically modified soybeans, but now he says he will and predicts most Brazilian farmers will do the same. On a national scale, although only about 17 percent of the soy plants in Brazil's fields are transgenic, the country's soybean production has risen nearly 60 percent in the last six years, closing the gap on the United States, which is expecting a drought-diminished harvest in 2003. On Oct. 10, the United States said that Brazil was about to surpass it in soybean exports. Santo Ângelo farmers say that by planting the genetically modified seeds their average yield has already risen from around 30 to nearly 50 bushels an acre. ''Unlike farmers in America or Europe, Brazilian farmers get no subsidies, so this is important in helping us compete,'' Mr. Pippi said. Too much genetically modified soy, however, could pose a problem. Brazil's top export market for soybeans is the European Union, which has introduced stringent regulations on the origins of all genetically modified food because of concerns by consumers. Domestic consumers could also prove resistant. The stance in Europe appears to be softening considerably from three years ago, when genetically modified foods were described as Frankenfoods. But if Europeans continue to resist, ''we will just have to look for other markets,'' said Amauri Miotto of Rio Grande's Fetag, a federation of farmers working small, family-owned properties. ''There are plenty of poor, hungry people in the world who need cheaper food.'' There is no reason Brazilian farmers cannot produce both conventional and genetically modified soybeans, said Carlo Lovatelli, president of the Brazilian Association of Vegetable Oil Industries, or Abiove, though he said they should be paid a premium for conventional crops because they cost $20 to $30 a metric ton more to produce. Detailed labeling and testing required for export shipments will eat into the improved margins of those planting genetically modified soybeans. Farmers here, however, say those costs are marginal compared with the savings on herbicides and in time, because the fields of genetically modified |
1525317_0 | After the Storm, a Better Look at Ravaged Coasts | Measuring the beach has long challenged coastal geologists. Benchmarks are few, and most of them like dunes and high water lines shift from tide to tide and from season to season, as the beach responds to everything from the winds to the phases of the moon. Now, though, scientists are using a radarlike system called lidar to bring new speed and precision to coastal mapping. Geologists from the United States Geological Survey put the technology to the test in Hurricane Isabel, and it is yielding strikingly detailed images of the coast before and after the storm. In particular, it is providing abundant data on the stretch of Hatteras Island, N.C., where the hurricane came ashore on Sept. 18, cutting a new inlet in the process. The scientists say the data offer new information about how inlets form in storms. When combined with other new data, they say, that information will help predict which barrier islands are particularly vulnerable to breaching in coastal storms. ''In the old days, about five years ago, we would send teams of graduate students out to the beach with levels and stuff to survey the beach,'' said Dr. Asbury H. Sallenger Jr., a research oceanographer at the Geological Survey in St. Petersburg, Fla. ''You could never get enough information to really get a picture of the spatial changes in the morphology of the beach, where it's high and where it's low and so on.'' Besides, he said, by the time the laborious measuring process was completed, the beach would have changed its shape anyway. With lidar, he said, ''a plane can survey hundreds of kilometers of coast in a single day,'' and it is accurate to within 10 to 15 centimeters, well under a foot. Just as radar measures the time it takes a radio signal to reach and bounce off its target, lidar sends a pulse of laser light down to earth and measures the time it takes to bounce back, keeping track of its location through a Global Positioning System. ''If you know the speed of light through the air and you know where the aircraft is relative to the earth, which we do with G.P.S., then you can calculate pretty simply the elevation of the earth's surface,'' Dr. Sallenger said. ''If we sent teams out to do this it would take years and years.'' Geological Survey scientists using lidar flew the coast from |
1526994_1 | Genetically Modified Food and the Poor | debate than that of genetically engineered crops, which contain transplanted genes from other species to make them easier to grow or more nutritious or flavorful. The evidence suggests that such foods are safe (Americans have been eating them for six years) and could reduce world hunger. But genetically modified crops have not overcome widespread resistance mostly because the industry is tightly controlled by five conglomerates. The companies must realize that relaxing their grip on the technology is in their long-term interests. One of the problems is that the companies have done nearly all the research on the crops' safety on their own or financed it elsewhere. If they want to build consumer confidence, they should embrace independent tests of the products' safety and impact. While safety concerns have been the focus of debate, the real problem is that genetic engineering is hurting the poor. It makes cotton cheaper to grow for highly subsidized American producers, further undercutting the price of cotton and forcing West African producers out of business. Poor countries should fight back by adopting the technology themselves. Unfortunately, so far most of them have failed to approve it. African farmers work tiny plots without the benefit of fertilizers, irrigation or pesticides. The risks they face from genetic modification are remote -- but unlike Europeans, the average African would benefit hugely from crops engineered to resist bugs or need little water. The other reason Africans do not grow such products is that the major companies like Monsanto, Dupont and Syngenta have no financial interest in developing them for African crops -- and tightly control the technology. There are two methods of transferring genes, for example. Both were developed by universities, but industry giants now hold the licenses. The companies permit others to do research with the technologies but want control over any product commercialized as a result. Several poor nations are trying to develop improved versions of local crops, but these efforts have been crippled by the biotech companies' control over the technology. The world shouldn't ban genetically modified food. It should develop a cassava root resistant to the mealy bug and drought-proof corn. Antiglobalization activists are right that corporate greed is the problem. But they are wrong that genetically modified crops should be banned. The real crime of genetic modification is not its risks but that it is squandering its promise, widening the gap between rich and poor. |
1528261_3 | * Back pain; * Mottled vertebrae; * Anxiety | Michael Reiss, sat at the side of her bed and explained again that although she had breast cancer that had spread, it could still be treated. He recommended hormone-blocking drugs designed to interfere with the tumor-promoting estrogens made by her body. These medicines could slow, even stop the progression of the disease, sometimes for years. They did this while causing none of the devastating side effects of traditional chemotherapy. The patient listened in silence, her eyes cast downward, avoiding his. ''I'll be fine'' was the only answer she offered. When the medications arrived that night, she didn't take them, nor did she the next day or the next. After she refused treatment, the medical team met to discuss her case. We had all noticed her oddities: she rarely made eye contact and was visibly nervous around strangers. She slept very little, spending hours walking in the hallways. And there were other clues that she was eccentric: She taught at a university yet lived in a roadside motel. She had no visitors, though a sister and nephew lived nearby. Why would this odd but smart and pleasant woman refuse a treatment that could extend her life and cause virtually no side effects? I couldn't understand it. An even more important question to us as physicians: Had her thinking been affected by her illness? Was she even competent? Was that why she was making what seemed an unreasonable decision? 3. Conclusion We considered the possibilities. If the cancer had spread to her brain, that could certainly affect her behavior. In addition, some diseases can cause behavioral changes, for example, longstanding syphilis. Her insomnia and nervousness could be due to an overproduction of thyroid hormone. Certain vitamin deficiencies could cause abnormal thinking. Liver disease could as well. We had to be sure that her choice was her own and not a result of any disease process. A scan of her brain showed no evidence that the cancer had spread there. Tests for syphilis, vitamin-B12 deficiency and thyroid disease were all negative. Blood tests showed that her liver was working normally. Could she have a psychiatric disorder that kept her from understanding her illness or the treatment we offered? We consulted the staff psychiatrist. After lengthy interviews, he concluded that she was anxious but not depressed; she was probably a little paranoid, but he had no doubt that she was capable of making her |
1528434_0 | PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL | |
1528429_1 | The Fall of a Wall Street Ward Boss | a result, the various exchanges that trade put and call options on both Nasdaq and the Big Board would be forced to have a staggered opening, threatening already fragile trading systems. Executives from the other exchanges objected and argued strenuously for a simultaneous opening. But it was not to be. When the Big Board opened for trading that day, TV viewers around the world watched Mr. Grasso, first with his head bowed, then joining the floor in ''God Bless America.'' ''Like Robert Moses and Lyndon Johnson before him, Dick Grasso was a master at using all the levers of power available to him,'' Mr. Frucher said. ''That generates awe and respect, but also resentment.'' The controversy over Mr. Grasso's $140 million pay package may have been the main impetus for his ouster last month. But the seeds of his downfall appear to have been planted long before his compensation ever became public. Toward the end of his career, Mr. Grasso seemed to consider himself bigger than the institution he ran, leading to a series of missteps that attracted the scrutiny of the Big Board's secretive practices, according to more than a dozen people who worked with him and competed with him over the years. At the same time, he failed to recognize that the culture outside the exchange was changing and that practices with even the appearance of a conflict of interest, like sitting on the board of a listed company, no longer passed muster. Because of his inability to modify his methods, the 211-year-old institution he ran so ably now faces the prospect of a complete overhaul. His abrupt departure has created a leadership vacuum, paving the way for continued chaos at the exchange. Its regulatory arm is scrambling to appear tough, and the trading floor is polarized. Whoever leads the Big Board next is unlikely to take his cue from Mr. Grasso, who managed through intimidation and an old-fashioned favors system that resembles the dealings of a 19th-century ward boss more than it does the practices of a modern chief executive. Former colleagues said he required the executives of every department to report to him, guaranteeing that he alone knew what was happening throughout the exchange. He wielded the exchange's regulatory unit like a weapon, some of these people said, instilling fear in the members and the workers. For example, a few years ago Mr. Grasso even became |
1528529_0 | PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL | |
1528298_6 | New Lures on Caribbean Shores | last year because of ''crime against passengers and crew,'' said Jennifer de la Cruz, a spokeswoman for Carnival. Later, other cruise lines bypassed St. Croix, causing shops and the cruise ship terminal to close. Now, with surveillance cameras in place and more police, it is possible, according to industry representatives, that at least some ships will return. A well-regarded dive shop, St. Croix Ultimate Bluewater Adventures, has been seeking new divers by giving free scuba demonstrations in hotel pools and last month staged a large underwater wedding. There is a new scuba shop and a new pier for dive boats at the 129-room Divi Carina Bay Resort and Casino, which is offering new nightly bargain rates as well: $174 for a standard room Jan. 4 to Feb. 7, and after that, $190 until April 9, compared with $225 last winter, when the occupancy rate was only 50 percent. Perched along a beach protected by a reef, the hotel expects to open 50 more rooms that can be turned into 25 suites by the end of March. The Bahamas, on the other hand, seem to be in a mild upswing. There are 700 Bahamian islands and 22,000 rooms in a variety of hotels, villas and timeshares; the major excitement is in the Outer Islands with the Nov. 15 opening of the 183-room Four Seasons Resort Great Exuma at Emerald Bay. The resort will have a spa and fitness club, Zen garden and 18-hole golf course; a casino will follow. Set on a crescent-shaped inlet, the hotel is British colonial in style with a cluster of three-story pastel stucco buildings with shutters and white tile roofs. Through the end of June, Bahamas air arrivals were up 1.2 percent, hotel occupancy rates were 63.9 percent and room rates were up 5.7 percent over 2002, according to the Bahamas Ministry of Tourism. ''Some resorts have done spectacularly well, like Atlantis,'' said Vincent Vanderpool-Wallace, director general of tourism, referring to the megaresort on Paradise Island, ''and others not so well.'' ''We know what the problem is: customers want properties spruced up a bit,'' he added. ''Atlantis has shown us that sun, sand and sea are not enough. People don't buy rooms, they buy an anticipated experience.'' The 2,300-room Atlantis is popular, said Howard Karawan, executive vice president of Kerzner International, which developed, owns and operates the resort, because of its many activities. The occupancy rate |
1528520_1 | Some Stories Are So Jarring They Don't Go Away | else I know, a colleague, a relative, could find himself in that position. In the United States, a person commits suicide every 17.2 minutes. Women attempt it three times as often as men, but men succeed by much larger numbers. The ratio of male to female suicides in the United States is currently four to one, a figure that holds for other countries with some exceptions. In China, the suicide rate is highest among rural women for reasons experts are still trying to fathom. Within the United States, depending on the year, New Jersey, Massachusetts and New York generally trade places as the state with the lowest rate. In 2001, the last year for which statistics were available, New Jersey ranked 49th, which sounds hopeful until you consider that even at the bottom of the list, it lost 588 residents to suicide. The greatest frequency is in Nevada, Wyoming, New Mexico -- the mountain states -- and for two main reasons: firearms are more available -- suicides by firearms are by far the most common -- and the population is less dense. Lanny Berman, executive director of the American Association of Suicidology, says that in those states, ''the distance between the person in trouble and the persons who can help them is great.'' Richard Josephs was 53 when he, presumably, took his life -- midlife crisis, people are apt to assume. But among men, the rate dips slightly in middle age. Among women, the reverse it true: women from 45 to 54 have the highest rate. Hormones and the emptying nest are the main reasons psychologists cite, but the sad truth is, suicide among the middle aged is wildly understudied. ''I know personally experts on suicide and seniors and suicide and adolescents,'' says Dr. John Kalafat, an associate professor at Rutgers and a past president of the suicidology group, ''but off the top of my head, I couldn't name an expert on middle-aged suicide.'' Despite New Jersey's low rate, the state has a highly regarded network for survivors. Groups for friends or relatives of suicides exist in Madison, Dumont, Jersey City, Piscataway, Fair Haven, Hamilton, Brant Beach, Lakewood and Somerdale, said Peggy Farrell, chairwoman of the state chapter of the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention. Ms. Farrell, who is also a facilitator of the Piscataway group, lost a son, an assistant district attorney in New York, to suicide. When she |
1528545_0 | PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL | |
1528859_0 | Long-Term Questions Linger In Halted Breast Cancer Trial | Recently, scientists made the startling decision to halt a large multinational clinical trial that was testing a new drug regimen for breast cancer. The five-year trial was stopped after just two and a half years when results showed that the study drug cut the yearly rate of breast cancer recurrence by nearly half. The decision has already provoked controversy: breast cancer recurrence is not necessarily the same as death, the critics say, so it is not clear whether the new drug actually saves lives. The National Breast Cancer Coalition, a patient advocacy group, argued that researchers should have continued the study to see if the new drug prolonged lives. The issue gets to the core of biomedical research. What is ideal for researchers may not always be ideal for subjects or for the demands of public health. In this study, the researchers were looking to see if letrozole, which blocks estrogen synthesis, was more effective than a placebo in preventing the recurrence of breast cancer in women who had already taken the estrogen-blocking drug tamoxifen. Because the advantage of letrozole on disease-free survival was apparent early on, the researchers had to halt the study. Dr. James N. Ingle of the Mayo Clinic and a principal investigator in the study said he was surprised by the criticism over ending the study. ''Preventing disease recurrence is a valid endpoint,'' he said. ''If you sit down with patients, they will tell you that they don't want their cancer to come back. That's their first concern. ''In fact, I can't think of a study of breast cancer where actual survival is the primary endpoint. Disease-free survival is a well-accepted outcome with strong precedence in cancer research.'' But to some researchers, the study stopped short of answering important questions. Does letrozole promote actual survival? What are its long-term adverse effects? How long should women continue to take it? The results, for example, suggest a slight increase in osteoporosis in women taking letrozole compared with a placebo. So, other side effects may emerge over time. The pursuit of perfect data may be the researcher's dream, but the perspective of a woman with breast cancer is vastly different. If you were privy to the interim analysis, you would most likely choose the new drug over the placebo. Imagine the outcry if investigators had withheld the early evidence of the drug's benefit and finished the study, hoping for |
1528850_2 | Grant Aims at More Healthful Crops | on conventional plant breeding rather than on genetic engineering because it would cost as much as $10 million to get each genetically engineered crop approved in each country. Still, he said, HarvestPlus will do research in genetic engineering because the technology may be used to create some crops that cannot be developed by breeding. An example, he said, is golden rice, a genetically engineered crop with higher than normal levels of beta carotene, which the body converts to vitamin A. The crop, still years from being ready for use, has been the center of controversy, with companies pointing to it as an example of the potential of biotechnology and biotech critics portraying it as more of a public relations tool than an effective remedy for malnutrition. The foundation's grant will allow HarvestPlus, which has been subsisting on a shoestring budget for nearly a decade, finally to get off the ground. Historically, Dr. Bouis said, organizations that give money for health are not interested in agriculture and those that finance agricultural research are interested in improving yields, not nutrition. Some scientists said crops bred to have higher nutrient levels would have lower yields, making them unattractive to farmers. ''It's been a very hard sell,'' Dr. Bouis said. The World Bank is contributing $12 million to the effort and the United States Agency for International Development has given $2 million. HarvestPlus is run by two agricultural research centers that are under the auspices of the World Bank: the International Food Policy Research Institute in Washington and the tropical agricultural center in Colombia. Dr. Bouis said it could take 8 to 10 years for the effort to have a major effect on public health, though some crops might be ready sooner. Indeed, he said, a yellow sweet potato that can provide vitamin A was found in a seed bank and is already being introduced to Africa, where people normally eat white sweet potatoes lacking in the nutrient. HarvestPlus will strike alliances with seed and biotech companies, in part to help distribute the seeds, Dr. Bouis and other officials said at a news conference last week. Brian Halweil of the Worldwatch Institute, an environmental research group, said that biofortification was a good short-term solution but that the ultimate answer was a more diverse diet. ''These people are nutritionally deficient because they eat only three bowls of rice a day and nothing else,'' he said. |
1528892_3 | Where the Moors Held Sway, Allah Is Praised Again | Later, at an Arab leadership conference in Seville, Granada's socialist mayor encouraged him and other Muslims to move to the city. ''He said if we ever build a mosque, it should be in Granada because the last stronghold of the old Muslim community should be the first of the new,'' Mr. Castiñeira said. Eventually a small group of converts settled in the city's old Moorish quarter, Albaicín, looking across at the Alhambra, the medieval Moorish citadel that for centuries was the center of Islamic power on the Iberian peninsula. They found land for a mosque and in 1981 Mr. Castiñeira and another convert embarked on a trip to the Persian Gulf, hoping to gather the $10,000 they needed to buy the land. They accepted contributions from Libya, Morocco and even Malaysia, but much of the financing came from the Emir of Sharjah, one of the rulers of the United Arab Emirates. They say they rejected any support offered with strings attached. By the time the financing was in place, though, Granada's socialist mayor was gone and local opposition kept the project from going forward for 20 years. Across Europe, plans to build mosques have met resistance in traditionally Christian communities, where people worry that the growth of Islam is changing the character of their towns. In Berlin, for example, construction of a mosque has been stopped because its minarets were built higher than the local government approved. But nowhere, perhaps, has a mosque stirred as much emotion as in Granada, where the location, across a ravine from the reddish-brown ramparts of Islam's last stand, carries unmistakable symbolism. At one point, the city offered Mr. Castiñeira and his colleagues a building site in an industrial zone on the outskirts of town. ''Political lobbies have done everything they could to stop this mosque,'' he said, adding that a core of ''right-wing Catholic families'' continued an expensive legal battle against the mosque until the end. The mosque was scaled down to half its proposed size and the height of its Spanish-style minaret was cut down to satisfy local demands. Even then, the Muslims were asked to first build a full-scale model of the minaret to reassure the neighborhood. Today, the whitewashed brick mosque blends seamlessly into the increasingly gentrified neighborhood. Hundreds of tourists visit the garden each day and Mr. Castiñeira said a few people convert to Islam there each week. Granada Journal |
1508532_2 | Fortifying the In Box as Spammers Lay Siege | either deletes the message that contains them or strains it into a separate folder. Brightmail augments the filter by maintaining 250,000 e-mail accounts as spam traps. Staff members harvest any spam messages that evade the filters, then generate rules to recognize those messages. The Hotmail filter is upgraded every 10 minutes to incorporate the new rules. Brightmail estimates that it catches about 90 percent of the spam that runs through its filter, and that for every million pieces of mail, one false positive, or legitimate message, is mistaken for spam. Hotmail users have the option of making their filters more selective -- thereby increasing the risk of false positives -- by switching to a setting that instructs Hotmail to scan message headers as well as the body text. At a third setting, Hotmail permits only messages sent from addresses on a list created by the user. Users can also set up their own filters to route messages with specific keywords in the subject line to designated folders. Yahoo Mail (mail.yahoo.com), another free Web-based service, uses a proprietary filter called SpamGuard. It works by determining whether a message should be classified as spam or as legitimate bulk mail. The method backfired last month when Yahoo blocked an e-mail message sent from the Federal Trade Commission confirming listings on the new Federal Do Not Call Registry. Rather than relying on a round-the-clock staff, Yahoo Mail puts the responsibility of updating SpamGuard in the hands of its users. If spam makes it to user's In box, a link in the message can label it unsolicited mail, and its signature is then incorporated into SpamGuard. Online Services Online services like the Microsoft Network and America Online provide more extensive protection than free Web-based e-mail accounts. America Online 8.0 (www.aol.com) handles spam with a rule-based filter, which might be compared to a colander that lets through only those messages that pass a series of small tests. For instance, a message containing an Internet Protocol address known to be linked to spammers would be filtered out. So, who makes the spam rules? AOL (basic service, $23.90 a month; broadband service, $54.95 a month; software only, $9.95 a month) provides a ''Report Spam'' button and keeps a 24-hour staff, so that if new spam slips through to enough of the service's 35 million users and they report it, a support team immediately writes a new rule to |
1508486_2 | U.S. Agency Scales Back Data Required On Air Travel | each passenger, and will provide T.S.A. with an authentication score and code indicating a confidence level in that passenger's identify,'' according to the plan. The system would be the government's main method for transmitting around the country the names on a ''watch list'' of people to be questioned or even arrested. Ms. Kelly said it would also allow ''dynamic targeting on a real-time basis.'' For example, she said, if the Homeland Security Department had a tip that three terrorists were trying to enter the northwestern United States dressed in gray suits and with yellow briefcases or other ''characteristics or behaviors,'' Capps II would distribute that information. The existing system uses other characteristics to flag passengers for extra scrutiny, including how long in advance the reservation was made and the method of payment. Ms. Kelly would not specify how the existing system worked or how Capps II would work, but said that it, too, would consider other factors. The new system will be tried out soon in an ''internal test,'' she said, using data from actual passengers. The test would be a dry run that would not affect travelers. The goal of Capps II, the department says, is to ''significantly reduce the number of passengers who are misidentified as potential threats to passenger or airline security, thus reducing inconvenient delays for innocent travelers.'' Putting the system into effect could take six months, the department says. At the American Civil Liberties Union, Jay C. Stanley, a spokesman for the Technology and Liberty program, said after a quick review of the new plan that it appeared to address some of his group's objections. But, Mr. Stanley said, the passenger name record could include such information as dietary preferences, which can indicate religion, names of other people traveling in a group, the name of the hotel the traveler was staying in, and even how many beds were in the room. In addition, Mr. Stanley cited a line in a plan describing how decisions on whom to screen would be made: ''The risk assessment function is conducted internally within the U.S. Government and will determine the likelihood that a passenger is a known terrorist, or has identifiable links to known terrorists.'' He said that meant the decision could be made by other federal agencies using a combination of Capps II data and other, more sensitive, information. ''We don't know what they're linking to,'' he said. |
1508579_0 | Metro Briefing | New York: Gowanus Included In River Cleanup Plan | Federal officials have selected the Gowanus Canal in New York and the Passaic River in New Jersey to be included in a pilot project that aims to clean up polluted urban waterways. The Urban Rivers Restoration Initiative, a joint project of the Environmental Protection Agency and the Army Corps of Engineers, will determine ways to clean up decades of industrial pollution, restore wildlife habitat and promote recreational activities. The initiative includes $50,000 grants for each project. Andrew Jacobs (NYT) |
1508452_6 | In Bush's Words: 'Taking the Fight to the Enemy' in Iraq | international flights, for example. Now what we can do is, we can be, obviously at home, continue to be diligent on the inspection process of baggage as well as making sure those who board aircraft are properly screened. And obviously we're talking to foreign governments and foreign airlines to indicate to them the reality of the threat. We're conscious of folks flying -- you know, getting lists of people flying in our country and match them now with a much improved database. International flights coming into America must have hardened cockpit doors, which is a positive development. . . . You know, let me talk about Al Qaeda just for a second. I made the statement that we're dismantling senior management, and we are. . . . We're dismantling the operating decision makers. We've got more to do. And the American people need to know we're not stopping. We've got better intelligence gathering, better intelligence sharing. And we're on the hunt. . . . Q. You met yesterday with the Saudi foreign minister, who wants the administration to declassify these 27 or 28 pages about his government in this report on 9/11. . . . Can you tell us, is there any compromise in sight on this? And could you at least summarize the material in that classified document? . . . A. John, the foreign minister did come and speak to me. And I told him this, I said, we have an ongoing investigation about what may or may not have taken place prior to Sept. 11. And, therefore, it is important for us to hold this information close so that those who are being investigated aren't alerted. I also told him in the document that if we were to reveal the content of the document -- 29 pages of a near 900-page report -- it would reveal sources and methods. . . . Now at some point in time, as we make progress on the investigation and as the threat to our national security diminishes, perhaps we can put out the document. But in my judgment, now is not the time to do so. . . . Q. Saddam Hussein's alleged ties to Al Qaeda were a key part of your justification for war, yet your own intelligence report, the N.I.E. [National Intelligence Estimate], defined it as, quote, low confidence that Saddam would give weapons to Al Qaeda. |
1503163_0 | Reading, Writing and Special Attention in Queens | Finding the special education students in Marilyn Murphy's first-grade class is challenging. Are they at Table 1, reading aloud and sounding out words like ''tomorrow'' and ''itchy''? Are they playing phonics games on computers or listening to the storybook ''Amelia Bedelia'' on tape? Or are they writing about the book they just completed? Although Ms. Murphy's class is divided into three groups based on reading levels and other skills, it is nearly impossible to determine which of the 6-year-olds receive special education services. Children with attention problems or autism sit among the highest achieving students. This is not unusual at Public School 87 in Middle Village, Queens. In recent years, the school -- where about 20 percent of the children are considered special education students -- has earned a reputation for successfully integrating students with disabilities into mainstream classes. Last April, when Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein announced a host of special education initiatives, he pointed to P.S. 87 as a model of what he would like to see more of throughout the city. The school uses a wide array of activities and teaching methods to engage children with an equally wide array of learning abilities. And it has trained its teachers on how to observe children to determine what methods each student will respond to best. If there is one lesson to be learned from P.S. 87, it is how much work and money are needed to create a successful special education program. Using funds available for special education and private grants, the school has been able to offer dozens of extra activities, from computer learning programs to music, sports, ballroom dancing and even yoga. Classes are kept small -- about 22 students in each -- and nearly all have at least one full-time instructional aide. Teachers attend countless seminars, and many complete 40-hour training programs to work with special education students. The school spends an average of $17,341 per student each year, compared with a citywide average of $10,049. New York City has long been criticized for its costly special education services, a patchwork of programs that at best delivers inconsistent results. Many say a bloated bureaucracy too often segregates children who have been wrongly identified as disabled. And New York has lagged behind other cities in moving disabled children into mainstream classes. At P.S. 87, however, disabled children are never segregated from the general student population. Ms. |
1501820_0 | Don't Evict the Heart of a City | To the Editor: Re ''Learning From China,'' by Nicholas D. Kristof (column, July 1): I grew up in the Chelsea section of Manhattan in the 1960's, when it was overwhelmingly a neighborhood of housing projects, small factories and working-class Puerto Rican and Irish households. My father, who is now 85 and on a fixed income, still lives in the same two-bedroom apartment in which I grew up, for which he now pays something close to $1,000 a month. The neighborhood being what it is today, I'd say that if rent control were to be rescinded tomorrow, my father's chances of staying put would be somewhere between none and nil. No doubt some ''starving actor'' whose father back in Atlanta is bankrolling his nascent career would be happy to pay three times what my dad can afford. I guess in Mr. Kristof's free-market dream my father would just be collateral damage, much like the Chinese peasants at Three Gorges. GLENN BALDWIN Chicago, July 1, 2003 |
1501793_2 | U.S. IS CONSIDERING TROOPS IN LIBERIA TO MONITOR TRUCE | the United Nations. The United States has come under increasing pressure from the United Nations, Britain, France and West African countries to take a more active role in quelling the unrest. Recently Dominique de Villepin, the French foreign minister, called for the United States to intervene, as did Mr. Taylor. Last week and again today, Mr. Bush pressed Mr. Taylor to make good on a promise to step aside as part of a fragile cease-fire agreed to last month. Some former American diplomats said joining an international peacekeeping effort in Liberia would be a way for the United States to show the world that it was willing to work with the United Nations and the European allies after the rift over the war with Iraq. It would also be a way to signal that the United States is serious about helping to bring peace and prosperity to Africa as the president prepares to travel next week to Senegal, South Africa, Botswana, Uganda and Nigeria, they said. Pentagon officials have been reluctant to support sending troops to Liberia, fearing that American forces could get caught up in a complex civil war at a time when the United States military is already stretched thin because of large deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan. The military, administration officials said, remains haunted by the attempt to bring peace to Somalia, an effort that led to the deaths of 18 American troops in 1993. Administration officials said the decision would be made solely on the basis of whether committing American troops would be helpful on humanitarian grounds and successful in bringing lasting peace. ''It will not be because of what Belgium or Luxembourg or France thinks about the United States,'' said one senior administration official. Susan E. Rice, who was assistant secretary of state for African affairs in the Clinton administration, said she expected the White House to settle on a plan that would primarily involve sending troops into Liberia to provide command, communications and intelligence capabilities to the West African peacekeeping forces on the ground. While Pentagon officials have voiced their distaste, State Department officials have made a case that American involvement would not only help end the fighting between rebel groups and Mr. Taylor's forces, but would help stabilize the region. Mr. Bush has long been skeptical about using the military for peacekeeping operations. During the 2000 campaign, he set out specific criteria for |
1501732_0 | Europe Acts to Require Labeling of Genetically Altered Food | The European Parliament approved legislation today to require strict labels for food and feed made with genetically altered ingredients, a move that was hailed by environmentalists but pilloried by American farmers. Intended to better inform wary European consumers, the legislation would require supermarkets to label all food containing more than 0.9 percent of a genetically modified organism. So, for example, a cookie made with genetically modified corn oil would carry a label that states: ''This product contains a genetically modified organism.'' The legislation also ensures that genetically modified (or G.M., as they are called here) foodstuffs like grains will be traced from the moment of their inception to their arrival in the European Union through the processing stage and into the supermarket. ''This should give consumers greater confidence,'' said David Byrne, the European commissioner for health and consumer protection. The new laws are expected to receive final approval by the European Union's 15 member states this fall. They would not take effect until early next year. The Bush administration criticized the legislation today, saying it would be burdensome for food producers, could prejudice consumers against genetically modified food and become a barrier to free trade. ''The European Union's practice may lead other countries to block trade by imposing detailed information, traceability and labeling requirements and prompt a host of new nontariff barriers just at a time we are trying to stimulate world trade,'' Richard Mills, the spokesman for the United States Trade Representatives, said in a statement released today. Genetically modified foods, which are common in the United States, are passionately opposed by many Europeans, who call them ''Frankenfoods'' and fear they may pose long-term health and environmental risks. These crops have been biologically altered to build in a number of desirable characteristics, from insect resistance to faster growth to greater sugar retention. European countries permitted the sale of some mutated crops, like soya, in the 1990's, and those are still found in European food. But five years ago, fueled by concerns from environmental groups, seven European countries, including France and Italy, instituted an unofficial ban on the sale of any new genetically altered crops. The Bush administration, which views the moratorium as an illegal trade tactic, filed the equivalent of a lawsuit with the World Trade Organization in May. President Bush heightened tensions over the issue by blaming Europe's food policy for worsening Africa's hunger crisis. Many African countries, |
1501711_2 | Stars and Stripes Forever; Smithsonian Works To Preserve That Special Flag | over because its glass case was too small to accommodate its size, which was typical for garrison flags, made to be seen over long distances. The flag's full length was unfurled when it was hung vertically in the history museum, which opened on the National Mall in 1964 and was initially called the Museum of History and Technology. It was designed with the Star-Spangled Banner as its centerpiece. ''This was part of the cold war ideology,'' Marilyn Zoidis, the flag curator, said. ''The museum was meant to show the intersection of history and technology, and the flag was the symbol of what America was all about.'' In a proposed renovation of the museum, the Smithsonian still plans to have the flag as the signature display, but it is too fragile to be hung again. Even though precautions had been taken to limit damage, the flag was sagging under the weight of a 1914 conservation that turned out to be a botched repair job. In an effort to stabilize the flag, a heavy linen backing was added, stretching it to a rectangular shape and tripling its weight to 150 pounds. Three decades of hanging further aggravated its condition, even though an opaque screen shielded it from light and pollution. Once each hour the screen was raised by a pulley system to patriotic music and narration to reveal the flag, which had begun to have large holes. Those gaps, caused by the flag's constant rubbing against the linen backing, spurred the Smithsonian to convene an experts' conference in 1996 to devise a plan to halt the flag's disintegration. Now that that process is near completion, museum officials are trying to figure out how to encase the frail flag in a way that allows conservators access for continued cleaning and maintenance but that also displays it clearly. While no final design has been decided for the museum renovation project, budgeted at $80 million, Mr. Glass and other officials said they were leaning toward a large glass-enclosed room at the building's center that would be similar to the conservation laboratory, with its own heating, ventilation and air conditioning, that now houses the flag. In December 1998 the flag was lowered from the wall -- it was so large it had to be moved in a specially made crate -- and transported into the laboratory. Using tools ranging from old-fashioned needles to space-age near-infrared spectral |
1501765_0 | BUSINESS DIGEST | Biotech Food Labeling Rule Advances in European Union The European Parliament approved legislation to require strict labels for food and feed made with genetically altered ingredients, a move that was hailed by environmentalists but pilloried by American farmers. Final European Union approval is expected this fall. The Bush administration criticized the legislation, saying it would be burdensome for food producers, could prejudice consumers against genetically modified food and become a barrier to free trade. [Page A3.] Tech Stocks Lead Market Higher Stocks in computer-related companies rallied after Merrill Lynch told investors to buy shares of Microsoft. The Nasdaq composite index jumped 38.60 points, or 2.4 percent, to 1,678.73, the highest since May 2002. The Standard & Poor's 500-stock index added 11.43 points, to 993.75, and the Dow Jones industrial average climbed 101.89 points, to 9,142.84. Microsoft added 73 cents, to $26.88. [C6.] Factory Orders Are Modestly Higher Demand for the products of American manufacturers rose modestly in May, the Commerce Department reported, providing some hope that manufacturing industries might be emerging from its slump. [C2.] Judge Rejects Another Investor Suit A federal judge dismissed a lawsuit that said a conflict of interest at Merrill Lynch caused the sharp drop in a technology-stock mutual fund three years ago. The judge, Milton Pollack, dismissed two similar suits regarding its research earlier in the week. [C4.] Once-Daily AIDS Drug Is Approved Gilead Sciences received approval from the Food and Drug Administration for a new once-a-day AIDS drug, Emtriva, setting the stage for competition with Epivir, which GlaxoSmithKline sells. [C4.] Finance Chief Leaving Interpublic Sean F. Orr is stepping down as the chief financial officer at the Interpublic Group, which has suffered through accounting irregularities, earnings shortfalls and federal inquiries. [C5.] Ads Seek to Curb Drunken Driving The federal government is spending $13 million for a campaign against drunken driving this month, historically one of the worst times for alcohol-related deaths. Advertising. [C5.] Alstom Stock Sale Is Approved Shareholders of Alstom, a struggling French power and transportation company, overwhelmingly approved the sale of as much as $692 million in stock, a move seen as vital to the company. Patrick Kron, the chief executive, called the approval ''an important step in our program to strengthen the balance sheet of the company.'' [World Business, Section W.] Fiat Selling Aerospace Business Fiat agreed to sell its aerospace components business, FiatAvio, for about $1.73 billion to Finmeccanica, Italy's |
1506272_6 | 'The Real World, Yellowstone': Wolves on View All the Time | patiently watch for hours until the animals make the fatal mistake of leaving the bare ground, where they have the strategic advantage. ''Bison are very agile and defend themselves in a group,'' Mr. McNulty said. ''But when they move through snow they are forced to go single file and can't fight cooperatively. They get bogged down in the snow.'' That is the moment the wolves wait for. One encounter began in the half-light of daybreak, as wolves initiated their assault on a shaggy, snowbound bull. ''He hooked one wolf and threw it up in the air, and kicked another,'' Mr. McNulty said. The drama continued all day and into darkness, which shielded the victor from view -- for a while. ''The next morning wolves were seen on the carcass,'' he said. But one of the attackers was mortally injured by the bison. Hunting is risky for wolves. Biologists have documented eight wolves killed by prey in the park. And if hunting does not kill them, it can cause serious injuries. ''The only weapons wolves have is four canines,'' Mr. McNulty. ''Imagine trying to kill a bison with your teeth. You are exposed during that attack.'' All the more frustrating, then, is being chased off the kill. Two days later a grizzly bear poached the bison carcass in the Pelican. Wolves are no match for a grizzly, which swatted them away. The bear ate its fill and slept on the carcass. With six large predators, including wolves, roaming its prey-rich plains, Yellowstone is unlike anywhere else in the Lower 48, Mr. McNulty said, providing a glimpse not only into an unusual ecosystem, but also into an era that seems gone forever. ''We're seeing the same system early frontier naturalists saw on the prairie,'' Mr. McNulty said. ''After they left, the prairies were overrun with Europeans and wildlife was extinguished.'' For Dr. Mech, who has chased wolves to study them from Minnesota to the Arctic for 45 years, the epiphany came when he watched seven minutes of a movie taken in Yellowstone by Bob Landis, the filmmaker. It was always assumed, he said, that wolves killed the old, sick and the weak because those animals fell behind in the chase. Not true, he said. Wolves look for these animals from the outset. ''They scan the herd and minimize the possibility of damage to themselves,'' he said. ''For me that's the outstanding event.'' |
1507853_0 | Totaling Up the Bill for Spam | When Indiana University installed its new e-mail system in 2000, it spent $1.2 million on a network of nine computers to process mail for 115,000 students, faculty members and researchers at its main campus here and at satellite facilities throughout the state. It had expected the system to last at least through 2004, but the volume of mail is growing so fast, the university will need to buy more computers this year instead, at a cost of $300,000. Why? Mainly, the rising volume of spam, which accounts for nearly 45 percent of the three million e-mail messages the university receives each day. Unwanted commercial e-mail, or spam, has become the bane of the Internet because it is so cheap and easy to send that all sorts of companies and individuals do so, prodigiously. Spammers these days pay as little as 0.025 cent to send an e-mail message. The computing costs for the recipients, or their Internet providers, to process each message are similarly tiny. But with billions of spam messages sent each day, all these fractions of cents start to add up to real money. Even greater are the costs of trying to block spam, catch spammers and undo the damage they cause to recipients. Gauging the cost of tiny bits of computer power and the value of many moments of wasted time, multiplied by millions of e-mail users, leads to big, if inevitably imprecise, numbers. One company, Ferris Research, says the cost is $10 billion in the United States this year. The Radicati Group estimates the worldwide cost at $20.5 billion. Another firm, Nucleus Research, shoots higher. By its reckoning, the economic cost is $874 a year for every office worker with an e-mail account, which multiplied by 100 million such workers amounts to about $87 billion for the United States. ''Spam is one of those areas where we see a severe impact on productivity,'' said Rebecca Wettemann, research director of Nucleus. ''The average worker receives 13.3 spam messages a day, which takes six and a half minutes to process. Do the math and that comes to 1.4 percent of their productive time.'' Not everyone thinks the sky is falling. Peter S. Fader, a marketing professor at the Wharton School who has studied e-mail, says the research firms' estimates vastly overstate the actual cost of spam. ''I am deeply skeptical that these crude top-down methods are accurate,'' he said. |
1507870_0 | Diverging Estimates Of the Costs of Spam | Spam has become the bane of the Internet because it is so cheap and easy to send that many businesses and individuals do so. Spammers these days pay as little as 0.025 of a cent to send an e-mail message. The computing costs for the recipients, or their Internet providers, to process each message are similarly tiny. But all these fractions of cents add up. Even greater are the costs of trying to block spam, catch spammers and undo the damage they cause. But gauging the overall cost of spam is not easy, and estimates are widely divergent. Business Day, Page C1. |
1503468_2 | Rumsfeld Doubles Estimate For Cost of Troops in Iraq | sought to erase the impression that those comments meant that the American commitment could not shrink more rapidly. ''The numbers of U.S. forces could change, while the footprint stayed the same, in the event that we have greater success in bringing in additional coalition forces, in the event we are able to accelerate the Iraqi Army,'' he said. With American forces suffering almost daily attacks in Iraq, that statement did not satisfy Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, who challenged Mr. Rumsfeld by saying that ''we have the world's best-trained soldiers serving as policemen in what seems to be a shooting gallery.'' Mr. Kennedy said that ''the lack of a coherent plan is hindering our efforts at internationalization and aggravating the strain on our troops.'' Mr. Rumsfeld said 142,000 military personnel had returned to their home bases, although most of those serve in the Air Force and Navy, leaving the burden in Iraq to American ground forces. The current ground force figure, 145,000, is down from its peak of 151,000. And he announced the withdrawal of one high-profile unit from the war zone, saying all three brigades of the Third Infantry Division, which spearheaded the attack on Baghdad, would leave Iraq by September. In sketching how Iraqis will help stabilize their nation, General Franks said that 35,000 Iraqi police officers had been hired and that plans called for training a new Iraqi army of 12,000 within one year and 40,000 within three years. As recently as May, senior allied officials speaking to correspondents in Baghdad said the Bush administration had hoped to shrink the American military presence in Iraq to two divisions, about 30,000 to 40,000 troops, by autumn, with a third multinational division also present. Answering complaints that American unilateralism had alienated its allies, Mr. Rumsfeld and General Franks said that 19 nations now had forces supporting the Iraq effort, that 19 others had promised troops and that discussions were under way with 11 more. Those allied forces already in Iraq, and those committed, totaled 30,000, they said. Asked by Senator Carl Levin of Michigan, the ranking Democrat on the committee, if he would support having France and Germany take part in the postwar stability force, Mr. Rumsfeld said he would. ''We have reached out to NATO,'' Mr. Rumsfeld said. But he cautioned that ''it would be incorrect to say that we expect that international forces will replace |
1503343_4 | It's beginning to look as if the politicians in Washington need to take another look at economic policy. | they paid fairly well, if not as well as jobs derived from capital spending. Government health care spending also produced many well-paying jobs. Other government spending programs conducive to good job growth were for highways, water and air facilities, and police and firefighters. Military spending also added good jobs, but not at an equivalent rate. The weakest job-creating spending on average was consumption itself, which is exactly what is driving the economy today. Tax cuts of both Democrats and Republicans are intended to stimulate just that. But such spending may well not create an adequate number of jobs, partly because so much leaks to imports. Mr. Medoff updated the study to find out what the quality of jobs has been in the current administration. He finds that the score, combining number of jobs with quality, has declined almost as rapidly in this administration as it did in the first Bush administration. On average, over the course of the Clinton administration, the score rose. The lack of job creation for so long has been a mystery. To many, it suggests business is simply more productive. But most models link rising productivity to growing capital investment, and capital investment has been sinking for three years. More likely, business is cutting back on labor aggressively to maintain profit margins. Rising measures of productivity are truly meaningful when both efficiency and the number of jobs are growing simultaneously. A sensible new economic program, therefore, would reject individual tax cuts and emphasize government spending that creates jobs. This could include adequate transfer of money to the states -- as much as $100 billion. It could also include seriously financing the president's new education bill, which has been neglected; a drug prescription plan for Medicare that is more generous than what Congress is considering; new ideas about providing health insurance to those who have none; and innovative investment in transportation infrastructure. Capital spending is usually harder to stimulate directly, although generous new depreciation allowances have already been created. Given the disturbing state of the economy, a jobs program is what the nation now needs. It might even be just what the electorate wants to hear. Economic Scene Jeff Madrick is the editor of Challenge Magazine and the journal Indicators, and he also teaches at Cooper Union and New School University. His new book is ''Why Economies Grow,'' from Basic Books and the Century Foundation. E-mail: challenge@mesharpe.com. |
1503464_0 | Personal E-Mail at Work | To the Editor: Re ''Putting All Your E-Mail in One Basket'' (June 26): While many employees, particularly in the top echelons of the company, may consider their business e-mail address a prerogative of employment, certainly they should be aware that work suffers from this infringement on the corporation's intended use for this channel of communication. A separate e-mail address for home and business is not too much to ask. If there is an emergency and one must be reached at work, there is still the telephone, not an antiquated method of communication. Each individual should make a pronounced effort to separate his personal life from his working life. NELSON MARANS Silver Spring, Md. |
1503465_0 | Personal E-Mail at Work | To the Editor: Re ''Putting All Your E-Mail in One Basket'' (June 26): Anyone who uses a company or Internet service provider e-mail address today that is not portable can benefit from changing to a Web-based account. The great thing about these services is that they are available from any computer connected to the Internet and don't rely on any dedicated e-mail system. Among the most widely used services are Yahoo Mail (mail.yahoo.com) and Microsoft Hotmail (www.msn.com). Both are free and link to such additional services as digital picture uploading and chat rooms. One drawback to these services in comparison with a company e-mail system is that they don't usually provide automatic notification when a message comes in. And privacy concerns that arise in using corporate e-mail for personal messages may be amplified by using these accounts. Not only can the corporate network administrator see your e-mail, but so can anyone who has access to your Web network traffic. HOWARD UNGAR Bethesda, Md. |
1505136_3 | At Sea or on Safari, Satellite Phones Hook Users | last month, he was in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico when Tropical Storm Bill brought huge waves and 50-mile-an-hour winds. Using the satellite phone, Mr. Hilborn was able to call Mr. Maxwell to learn the direction in which the storm was moving, then steer out of the worst of it. All the while, he said, he did not have the added worry about a radio signal, which can be less dependable than a satellite connection. ''If I had not gotten the information from them, I would have sailed this thing straight into the heart of the storm,'' Mr. Holborn said. ''In those kind of conditions, you can make a mistake and it can get serious fast.'' The satellites used by the Globalstar and Iridium systems are in low-earth orbit (up to about 930 miles) to allow users to carry small phones instead of the cumbersome models that some reporters still carry. Smaller phones, with smaller antennas and less signal power, cannot pick up signals from satellites in higher orbits. Another provider, Thuraya, uses low-earth orbit satellites to operate in Europe, Africa, the Middle East and Asia. The phones can be used for wireless Internet connections, although the low-earth satellites usually only have enough bandwidth for slow-speed data transmission. One provider of high-bandwidth satellite phone services is Inmarsat, but it uses larger phones. Another problem with both kinds of satellite phone service is that the phones' antennas must be pointed at a wide expanse of sky, which is rare in big cities. Satellite phones equal or surpass most cellphones in reception and sound quality, and are far less prone to the static that plagued models a few years ago. Reception is also superior to that of radio transmitters, which were once the only alternative for people at sea and far from cities. At Kesagami Lodge, a fishing lodge in northern Ontario, the nearest town, Moose Factory, is 40 miles away. The lodge now depends entirely on satellite phones to maintain contact with the outside world. A satellite connection was critical when an employee, Rheal Groux, had an attack of appendicitis and the lodge owners were unable to call for help by radio because there was no signal. They were able to use a satellite phone that belonged to a local resident. ''Rheal owes his life to the satellite telephone,'' said Bob Mattson, co-owner of the lodge, adding that he |
1505127_0 | AOL E-Mail on a Screen | You Can Take With You Q. As retirees who like to keep in touch with our e-mail, we have been intrigued by the dropping prices of hand-helds with Web access, but have resisted buying one because of the need to subscribe to a separate Internet service provider. Are there any such devices that would allow us to use our current I.S.P., America Online? A. Although America Online once offered a wireless device called the AOL Mobile Communicator -- similar to a Blackberry -- for checking AOL e-mail and sending instant messages, the company has announced that it will discontinue the service on Aug. 1. A list of wireless devices capable of sending and receiving AOL mail is online at devices.aol.com/mobile/index.htm. To use many of them, you must pay a service fee and buy the device, but if you have a cellphone, you might be able to receive AOL mail on it instead. Phone plans that include the America Online mail and instant messaging services are listed at devices.aol.com/mobile/aolcellphone.htm. You can also check AOL mail through most Web browsers on Internet-connected computers at hotels, libraries and Internet cafes. Just log in with your screen name and password at www.aol.com. Q. You recently described the limitations of the Remote Access feature in Windows XP in controlling one's computer from afar. Doesn't the Professional version of Windows XP offer a better tool? A. Yes. The Remote Desktop feature of Windows XP Professional enables users to connect to their computers remotely if both computers use that operating system. If the computer you want to connect to is running Windows XP Professional but you are working from a computer with Windows XP Home Edition or an earlier version of Windows, you can get software from Microsoft's site to connect to the Windows XP Professional system. A link to the software and more details about the Remote Desktop feature of Windows XP Professional are at www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/remotedesktop. Q. Will a firewall like those found in software from Norton or McAfee prevent spyware from making transmissions from my hard drive? Will all spyware be stopped, most of it, or merely some? A. Many firewall programs will watch commonly used Internet applications that have been cleared to use your Net connection without triggering a warning, and alert you to suspicious activity. For example, the firewall program may issue an alert if it notices that a number of e-mail messages |
1502018_3 | E-Mail Hucksterism, Offensive but Effective | of Elima Biotronic, the maker of Opus-X, an herbal concoction that is marketed as increasing sexual pleasure. Mr. Casselle was a founder of NetNoir, a Web site for blacks, and an executive at Pacific Century CyberWorks, the highflying Hong Kong Internet company that crashed in 2001. Sex pills, he said, seemed like a natural opportunity. ''You have a marketplace with no credible players -- there is all that spam and late-night infomercials,'' Mr. Casselle said. ''The market is ripe for consolidation, like coffee houses before Starbucks.'' The total market for all sorts of herbal sexual pills, he estimates, is $1 billion to $2 billion a year. The first penis enlargement pills were introduced about five years ago by companies like HerbalO, of Chatsworth, Calif., and CP Direct of Phoenix, maker of Longitude. They were sold in men's magazines and on late-night TV, but soon migrated to the Internet, where there are almost no boundaries on taste or language. Scott Richter, president of OptInRealBig, which sells sexual products, remarked, ''A lot of people would be embarrassed and wouldn't walk in to the Walgreen's and say, 'I want to buy penis enlargement pills.' I wouldn't.'' The affiliate programs, created first to sell the pills on sexually explicit Web sites, were quickly taken up by senders of spam. People who had lists of e-mail addresses could count on being paid $20 to $50 for each pill order, with the distributors providing the graphics and sales pitches used in the e-mail. ''Unfortunately, spam is a cheap game to get into,'' said Michael Clark, managing partner of Herbal Partners, which sells more than 300,000 bottles a year of Herbal Vigor pills, largely through affiliates. A marketer, he said, could arrange to send millions of spam messages a day through a computer in Eastern Europe for $1,500 to $3,000 a month. And a list containing 10 million e-mail addresses can cost just a few hundred dollars. ''That means you only need to take in $150 a day to break even,'' Mr. Clark said. ''If you can send out 10 million e-mails a day from your bedroom, and you make $50 a bottle, you can make a decent profit.'' Most spammers, moreover, are affiliates for dozens of other kinds of questionable merchandise -- cable descramblers, credit-repair schemes and other pills with dubious claims, like coral calcium, human-growth hormone and illegal generic Viagra. Mr. Richter said the biggest |
1505484_0 | The Phenomenology of Harry, or the Critique of Pure Potter | You knew, of course, that Harry Potter's desire for a gold cauldron instead of a pewter one is an obvious example of commodity consumption, and that snobbish centaurs and enslaved elves are indicative of a conservative worldview in which ''social hierarchies prevail among magical people and creatures.'' No? You have much to learn. You must have missed the panels on J. K. Rowling's oeuvre that have occasionally popped up at academic conferences over the past couple of years. But now, with a new Harry Potter book and a new series of book-length studies on the way, the academy is starting to bring the scholar's full toolkit to bear on Potterville. Historians and philosophers, literary critics and sociologists, psychologists and lawyers are all taking a turn at deconstructing Harry. In the soon-to-be-published ''Wisdom of Harry Potter,'' (Prometheus), for example, Edmund M. Kern, an associate professor of history at Lawrence University in Wisconsin, is preoccupied with the books' moral philosophy. Harry's wisdom is the Stoics', with their fatalism and their belief in endurance and perseverance, he argues: ''Fate shapes Harry's life, but his responses to it are not unlike what ancient philosophers such as Zeno, Marcus Aurelius, or Seneca would suggest.'' Why, seeing how Harry reacts to the evil Voldemort, one would almost think, Dr. Kern surmises, that he had read the 16th-century Dutch philosopher Justus Lipsius, who wrote the neo-Stoic classic ''The Book of Constancy,'' which counseled steadfastness during the ongoing political violence of that time. Aside from Lipsius, Stoicism has influenced early Christian writers like St. Augustine, medievalists like Boethius, Renaissance masters like Erasmus, Spinoza and Kant, and contemporary thinkers like the University of Chicago philosopher Martha C. Nussbaum, Mr. Kern points out. The Harry Potter books, he writes, ''might just comprise the most visible contribution to Stoicism's re-emergence as a viable, practical philosophy offering comfort and guidance in these uncertain times.'' A bit enthusiastic, perhaps, but such outsize claims may spring from insecurity. After all, no less a figure than Harold Bloom has derided Ms. Rowling's writing as ''goo,'' while William Safire in this newspaper scornfully (though presciently) predicted that ''scholarly tomes will be written about the underlying motifs of the Potter series,'' despite its being largely ''a waste of adult time.'' Christian fundamentalists, meanwhile, are continually trying to ban Harry from libraries, insisting that witchcraft and wizardry are devilish temptations. So perhaps it is no surprise that nearly |
1504288_0 | PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL | |
1504308_0 | PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL | |
1504325_0 | PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL | |
1504141_0 | There's Hope in Liberia's History | Liberia is ready to be rescued from disaster, and the time is ripe for persistent but modest American involvement in this process. I have full confidence that a joint effort with West African nations will be successful. I made my first visit to Liberia as president in 1978, when the nation was a symbol of stability and economic progress in West Africa. The visit represented a continuation of the strong ties between our countries that had been maintained for more than 150 years, since freed American slaves established a government there in 1822. President William Tolbert enjoyed worldwide acceptance as an enlightened Christian layman, having been the elected leader of the Baptist World Alliance, representing almost all organizations of this major Protestant faith. My wife, Rosalynn, and I noticed the minimal level of security, both for Liberian public officials and for visiting dignitaries, quite different from what we had experienced on other foreign visits. When questioned, American Embassy personnel explained to the Secret Service that Liberians were a peaceful people and violence was unlikely. Two years later, a sergeant named Samuel Doe was assigned to a beach patrol near the president's home and he and his platoon decided to present some of their grievances to the highest authority. Within a few hours, the president and his 13 cabinet members were executed, and Sergeant Doe and his youthful followers became the governing authority. A struggle among warlords continued, and President Doe was captured in Monrovia, tortured and dismembered in September 1990. By that time, Charles Taylor gained control of 95 percent of the country, excluding only the small area surrounding the capital. The 13-member Economic Community of West African States sent troops into Monrovia to protect what was left of the government, and chose a distinguished professor as acting president. The Carter Center adopted Liberia as one of its peace efforts in Africa, and I began visiting the country in 1990, working closely with the Economic Community of West African States and its military arm. By traveling throughout the country, we also became well acquainted with civilian leaders and the different warlords, and encouraged other nations in the region (primarily Nigeria) to attempt to stabilize the country so that a democratic government might be established. As time for elections approached, there were two principal demands for any warlord wishing to be president: disbanding his army and turning in all weapons. This |
1504019_0 | Tate to Tate, by Boat Along the Thames | Visitors to London have a new way to travel between the two Tate galleries, Tate Britain and Tate Modern. A 40-minute Tate to Tateboat service takes a circular route, stopping at three piers on the Thames, including the new geometric steel-and-timber Millbank Millennium pier opposite Tate Britain. Other stops include Waterloo Pier alongside the London Eye, the Saatchi Gallery, London Aquarium, Bankside Pier near Tate Modern and Shakespeare's Globe. The new 220-seat catamaran, Hurricane Clipper, has been festively decorated by the British artist Damien Hirst, with dots in 35 colors. ''It's a bit of fun,'' said Mr. Hirst. ''Happy, optimistic, bright. If I'd done sharks, then people might not have wanted to get on.'' It is the fastest tour boat operating on the Thames, cruising at 27 knots. Video guides to Tate Modern and Tate Britain by the artists Anish Kapoor and Sam Taylor-Wood are shown on board. ''Flash and Tidal,'' a lighting artwork by Angela Bulloch, changes color at night with the ebb and flow of the tide, bathing the Millennium Pier in chartreuse, then blue. Flashing lights are programmed to behave differently on different nights of the week. The service runs daily between 10 a.m. and 5:18 p.m. Tickets cost $7.35, children and senior citizens, $3.70, family (two adults, two children) $16.40. They can be bought on board, or at Tate foyer ticket booths, Tate's Web site and the London Eye customer service desk. The Web site, www.thamesclippers.com has timetables, and www.tate.org.uk provides online ticket sales and gallery information. Tickets are valid all day with a maximum of three return journeys. Holders of Travelcards for subways, trains and buses, are entitled to a third discount. TRAVEL ADVISORY |
1504043_3 | Commercial Property/7 World Trade Center; Building Being Reborn Using Part of Old Foundation | tipping effect of winds on the building and to control movement in an earthquake. The effect of winds in the narrow corridors of Lower Manhattan is sufficiently complicated that designers built a model of the structure and tested it in a wind tunnel. ''We need to hold the building up and hold it down,'' Mr. Klein said. Ultimately, the engineers were able to use 55 existing caissons, some from the previous office building and some from the Con Ed substations. In addition, 92 new ones were added to provide adequate support. A complicated series of transfer beams was needed to match the loads of the new building to caissons installed for previous structures, said Silvian Marcus, executive vice president of Cantor Seinuk Group, the structural engineer for both the original office building and the current project. ''In some cases, the cost of the transfer beams and straps was so high that caissons had to be abandoned,'' he said. The new building is outside the boundaries of the original island of Manhattan, whose Hudson River shoreline roughly followed Greenwich Street, Mr. Tamaro said. Adding the new caissons meant drilling into an area already crowded with utility lines and subways. Indeed, the No. 1 and 9 subway line actually runs under to footprint of the old building; it will be adjacent to the new one. ''The biggest risk in construction is what you find in the ground,'' Mr. Klein said. In addition, the new building extends 22 feet south of the original structure and that much closer to the slurry wall that keeps the Hudson River out of the pit that remains where the Twin Towers stood, Mr. Tamaro said. Some of the new caissons interfered with the tiebacks supporting the slurry wall, which had to be moved. Mr. Klein said that builders typically try to do a historical search on sites, but that documentation of old construction projects is often hard to find. In spite of the difficulties, all the caissons have been installed and the building is rising on top of them. THE foundation for the project is particularly critical because the new 7 World Trade Center will be more substantial than the one it replaces, with a hardened structure intended to increase safety and resist collapse. In addition, the heavy transformer in the electrical substation adds to the load on the foundation. The new building with have a core |
1504366_0 | BEAR HUNT SCHEDULED | Amid increased complaints about bears breaking into houses and garages and acting aggressively toward pets and people, the state Fish and Game Council voted last week to approve the state's first bear hunt in 33 years. The state plans to issue 10,000 licenses for the six-day hunt, which is to be held in December and is to be limited to prime bear habitat, in the northwest corner of the state north of Interstate 78 and west of Interstate 287. Robert Hanley BRIEFINGS: ENVIRONMENT |
1504159_0 | PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL | |
1504068_1 | New Kind of Snooping Arrives at the Office | track down the bad eggs and sometimes even send detectives into the office to poke around for evidence after hours, most scrutiny focuses on computers, the weapon of choice for corporate wrongdoers. A growing band of specialists in a field called human-resource forensics are using the latest technology to record everything from the Web sites employees visit to the files they delete to the data they download, even as workplace and legal experts are raising red flags about some of those efforts. Though some forms of surveillance are perfectly proper, they say, using technology to spy on employees can damage workplace morale and, if taken to extremes, test the boundaries of what is ethical or legal. At the very least, these experts urge companies to think hard before turning their workplaces into areas where no one feels trusted. The key, says Arthur G. Tisi, chief executive of atthought.com, a technology-services company in Tarrytown, N.Y., is being consistent and ''maintaining a moral compass.'' The most important decision for companies to make, Mr. Tisi says, is whether extensive surveillance will violate the corporate culture or otherwise be counterproductive. ''For example, if your institution is all about freedom of information and you're monitoring your employees, there is an obvious conflict,'' he said. If a company monitors employees' activities, Mr. Tisi says, it should identify the reason why: whether it is to gauge employee productivity, contain costs, fight corporate espionage or comply with legal requirements. He also suggests formulating a policy and creating a committee of people from all parts of the organization to implement it. Margaret Blair Soyster, an employment lawyer in New York with the law firm Clifford Chance, says that employers should have a written policy advising employees that their e-mail messages are not private but can be read by their supervisors, that the technology they use at work belongs to the company and that the company reserves the right to monitor the computer activities of employees. ''It should also make it explicit that technology shouldn't be used in any way that could contribute to a hostile work environment,'' she said, adding that even circulating off-color jokes through e-mail could fall into this category. ''And employees should sign off on the policy.'' SUCH precautions probably make it easier for companies to deal with troublemakers without becoming embroiled in legal disputes, experts say. Ms. Soyster recalled the case of a company that |
1504003_7 | The Whole World Is Watching | ourselves, these are the quintessential traits that celebrate our spirit and geography and tap into the most favorable impressions of America abroad (while inspiring the wrath of fundamentalists from Karachi to Houston). ''The American Effect'' deserves more than one viewing, but each visit should end lying atop the ''Dream Machine'' of the Russian artist Sergei Bugaev, who goes by the name Afrika. Visitors are invited to spread themselves out on a titanium sheet covered with American political memorabilia, including carpets woven with images of John F. Kennedy and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Folkloric Russian items are thrown into the mix -- wooden sleds that keep the titanium platforms aloft and keepsake chests stuffed incongruously with American flags (imagine for a minute the exact opposite: Soviet flags poking out of handsome Samsonite cases). In keeping with the mix-and-match motif, the bed pillow is emblazoned with a hammer and sickle and the words ''Proletariat of all countries unite.'' Mr. Bugaev, who trained as a psychotherapist, has invited his friends to sleep on these ''beds,'' after which he has taken notes documenting the peculiar intersections of American and Russian psychic space. Since I was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, where Mr. Bugaev is now based, I was happy to take the bait. I couldn't spend an entire night in the Whitney, but I did allow myself 10 minutes on ''Dream Machine.'' I found my Russian identity subsumed by that of my adopted country. I dreamed of chasing my first American squirrel at 9, my first corn-chip-flavored American kiss as a teenager, the Long Island funeral of my Russian grandmother, my terror upon entering the second grade and, finally, my first encounter with the Pacific Ocean in Los Angeles only two months ago (I ran up to an incoming wave and, with a drunken sense of endless New World possibility, slapped its foamy crest). Yes, I thought a lot about my trip to L.A., the fascination of seeing a beat-up Ethiopian restaurant shoe-horned into a grimy strip mall, a gaggle of Iranian Jewish men in traditional garb negotiating a 10-lane throughway after Sabbath services. Don't get me wrong: I despised Los Angeles. And yet I wanted to move there immediately, because that Californian megalopolis is the future, frightening and sublime. And that, perhaps, is the real American Effect. ART/ARCHITECTURE Gary Shteyngart is the author of the novel ''The Russian Debutante's Handbook.'' |
1504445_2 | Internet Chat Seen as Tool To Teach Theft Of Credit Cards | card fraud do so to gain the recognition and respect of peers. Mr. Robson, who said he visited the channels only to browse, added that hackers involved with the credit card fraud know who has written the cleverest programs and that ''fame is power down here.'' Bill McCarty, the principal author of the Honeynet Project's report, said that these I.R.C. channels and affiliated Web sites have made engaging in online credit card fraud easier than it has ever been. Mr. McCarty, a professor at Azusa Pacific University, said he noticed the underground chat groups when attackers used his computer to log into chat channels specializing in credit card fraud. ''We didn't go after them,'' he said. ''They came to us.'' The total amount of online credit card fraud last year was more than $850 million, according to Celent Communications, a Boston consulting firm. Dan Clements, chief executive of a credit card fraud prevention organization called CardCops, said that the most professional and dangerous thieves stay out of chat groups. But Avivah Litan, a vice president at Gartner Research, estimates that about half of online fraud derives from chat channels and other underground Internet-based communication methods. The Federal Bureau of Investigation now has several undercover operations in place to detect and disrupt credit card fraud originating from Internet chat channels, said Bill Murray, a spokesman for the agency. But tracking users of these groups can be difficult. Many are based in foreign countries and almost all conceal their names and locations, in part by connecting to the chat channels through remote, unrelated computers they have hacked into -- a fairly easy tactic for even moderately experienced computer programmers. To complicate detection further, the servers on which #ccpower is based are registered in Azerbaijan. (The person who registered the servers did not respond to an e-mail message.) Users of underground chat channels frequently shift locations when they suspect that they are being monitored by government authorities or if the owners of the servers being used shut down the channels. But new channels can spring up overnight, even as security experts attack the problem with more fervor. ''People around the community come from all over the world,'' Mr. Robson wrote in an e-mail message. ''Many are looking for other people to provide things they can't find or get in their countries. When a spot is closed, another gets opened and everybody just moves |
1507244_6 | Amazon Indians Honor an Intrepid Spirit | of Indians in Latin America, who came here from England for the ceremony at the invitation of Mr. Villas Bôas's family. Also attending was Orlando's widow, Marina Villas Bôas, who was a 25-year-old nurse when she first arrived here in 1963. She said that from ''the very first day,'' she was swept away by the jungle setting and the man, then nearly twice her age, who dominated it. ''This was where we fell in love and where our sons were conceived and spent the first years of their lives,'' she said. ''So I am of course overcome with emotion to be here again in these circumstances and to see this outpouring of affection and regard from Orlando's friends.'' But the region, isolated as it is -- a journey of nearly two days by bus, four-wheel drive vehicle and boat from Brasília -- is changed from what it was only a generation ago. Today most of the area around the Xingu park has been deforested. Tribal leaders complain that they now see runoff from pesticides and fertilizer in the headwaters of the Xingu, which lie outside the reserve. During the quarup, the chiefs and shamans called on Orlando Villas Bôas's two sons, Orlando Jr. and Noel, to continue their father's mission, a challenge the two men said they would accept. ''The destiny of the peoples of the Xingu is still uncertain, because of what is happening around them,'' said Orlando Villas Bôas Jr., who spent the first four and a half years of his life here. ''Brazil may have changed, and the times, too, but in my father's absence someone still needs to work to guarantee that 60 years of effort are not lost.'' When Mr. Villas Bôas died last December in the state of São Paulo, where he was born, he was buried with a flood of tributes and a funeral attended by thousands. But Mrs. Villas Bôas said his family regarded the religious ceremony here as being of even greater importance. ''If it had been up to Orlando, this is the place where he would have spent his last day on earth,'' she said as a pair of shamans sang to his spirit a few feet away. ''His work and his memory, his entire life, were here, and we believe, as the Indians do, that once this quarup is over, we will have no more motive to be sad.'' |
1507206_4 | Endangered Species: Slow Food | sustained in many ways. Some need help in marketing, and we help them create a network of sales. Others need structures to be built. Others involve the imparting of knowledge of old farmers to young farmers. Every presidia has its own story, its own needs. If you are opposed to agribusiness, does this mean you're opposed to globalization? I'm for virtuous globalization, where there's a just and true commerce to help small farmers. It's important to have a commerce that's organic and sane and against genetically modified organisms and processes that poison the land with chemicals. For example, there is coffee in Chiappas, amaranth in Argentina. Slow Food is able to provide them with more money and better offers than big business would be able to. But if the products cost more, is it making the Slow Food that's available just a luxury for the wealthy? It wouldn't end up costing that much more, because we avoid the middle man. Food can't cost so little. You need to be prepared to pay more for quality. We're too used to cheap food. And we need to be eating better-quality food but less of it. There are problems of obesity because people don't understand that. Slow Food believes you should eat less, eat more in moderation. And that would help solve this elitist critique, and it would also improve the food that we do eat. Food is not expensive, and I don't see down the line that it will cost less. I see that down the line we need to be eating more moderately. Twelve percent of Italians' income is spent on food, and 10 percent is spent on cellphone-related costs. It's right there. So the goal is not to make it cost less. The goal is to eat less. How do you feel about cuisine, as opposed to the raw materials? Here in New York, for instance, top chefs are melding all sorts of cuisines. There is no local cooking. As long as the products are genuine, you can do whatever. I've never seen a good fusion restaurant in Italy, but it is possible that I've tasted good fusion food in other places. The primary materials, that's what's most important. And if you have a talented chef who can create new and interesting things, that's great. You're in Naples, so what did you eat for lunch? Pasta and tomato sauce. Q&A |
1502733_0 | The online journals known as Web logs are finding favor as an efficient way to communicate within the workplace. | For Nicholas Tang, the deluge of work-related e-mail messages became overwhelming. ''It got to the point where I was getting hundreds of e-mails a day, sometimes more than a thousand,'' said Mr. Tang, director of operations at Community Connect, a company in New York that operates AsianAvenue.com and other online communities with an ethnic focus. For several years Mr. Tang viewed this daily surge of e-mail messages as an unpleasant but necessary part of his job managing a team of eight engineers. Then, a few months ago, he began using an alternative to e-mail, a Web log. Web logs, or blogs as they are known, are a type of frequently updated online journal, often featuring excerpts from news articles and links to other blogs. So far, Web logs are best known as a medium for communicating with the general public -- like the blog by the noted journalist Andrew Sullivan (www.andrewsullivan.com), which is devoted to culture and politics, and sites like the Veg Blog (www.vegblog.org), which is about all things vegetarian. In the corporate context, some chief executives, for better or worse, have adopted blogs as a way to share their personal wisdom with the wider world. But a growing number of businesses, government organizations and educational institutions are using Web logs to manage and improve the flow of information among employees. These blogs, not accessible to the public, typically allow many people to contribute entries that can be read by others in the organization. It may be too soon to tell whether the corporate blog will emerge as a genuinely useful tool for business communications or simply another way for bores and blowhards to blather. But a growing circle of adopters, like Mr. Tang, swear by their blogs. At Community Connect, Mr. Tang's engineers use a service called LiveJournal to post updates about tasks like fixing server computers or configuring software. Hitting the upload button sends the text to a private site, viewable by the authors and their managers, including the date and time of the postings and, often, links to relevant Web pages. ''When I want to know something I check the Web log,'' Mr. Tang said. ''It saves me the trouble of e-mailing people or yelling across the room to get a status update.'' Mr. Tang has also used blogs to coordinate group projects, like the recent process of interviewing job candidates for a programming position. The |
1502134_1 | On the Trail of Estrogen And a Mirage of Youth | estrogen and progestin, that were not balanced by benefits. Some women said they could never give up the pills, not because they needed them for severe menopause symptoms but because they were convinced that estrogen prevented wrinkles or because it staved off mental fogginess -- benefits that have never been demonstrated and are highly questionable. Some women and doctors said the risks found in the Women's Health Initiative study -- over a five-year period, one woman out of 100 who took the hormones had a disabling stroke, a heart attack, or breast cancer -- were too small to worry about. Ms. Seaman, a journalist and women's health advocate, has followed the estrogen trail for decades, collecting anecdotes and asking piercing questions. She confronted Robert Wilson, for example, a doctor whose 1966 book, ''Feminine Forever,'' was quietly sponsored by an estrogen maker, Ayerst Laboratories, and helped establish many of the estrogen myths. ''At 50,'' Dr. Wilson stated, women taking estrogen ''still look attractive in sleeveless dresses or tennis shorts.'' ''How do you know,'' Ms. Seaman retorted, ''that it isn't from the tennis?''' In her new book Ms. Seaman takes on all forms and uses of estrogen, including birth control pills, the subject of her previous book, ''The Doctors' Case Against the Pill.'' Her thesis is that estrogen's benefits tend to be asserted, not proved, and whenever a benefit evaporates on examination, another arises to take its place. Yet, as much as I enjoyed reading Ms. Seaman's book, I kept finding myself thinking, yes, but. Yes, but she tends to hold estrogen critics to a looser standard than she does estrogen promoters. For example she quotes a Canadian doctor at 1970 Senate hearings on birth control pills saying that he noticed ''a striking increase in a rare chromosomal defect known as triploidy among the babies of women who conceive within six months of going off the pill.'' Ms. Seaman never tells us that this is not scientific evidence, nor is it true that studies found that pill use leads to this birth defect. In fact, this is exactly the sort of anecdote that Ms. Seaman rightfully scorns when it is used to praise estrogen. Ms. Seaman correctly stresses that some of the hoped-for benefits of estrogen therapy are, at this point, just wishful thinking. That includes using estrogen to prevent Alzheimer's disease. Yes, but why does she then undermine some of her |
1502176_0 | Beliefs; A professor offers a critique of legal responses to reported cases of sexual abuse by the clergy. | When it comes to sexual abuse by the clergy, ''I have as much experience with this issue as just about anyone,'' Patrick J. Schiltz said. Mr. Schiltz is associate dean of the University of St. Thomas School of Law in Minneapolis. From 1987 to 1995, when he left private practice to become a law professor, he represented not only Roman Catholic dioceses, but almost every major Christian denomination in cases of sexual misconduct by the clergy -- more than 500 of them, throughout the United States and in several foreign countries. He has spent hundreds of hours listening to victims of such abuse describe their pain. Just listening can be unbearable, he said, adding, ''How much worse it must be to experience that pain.'' Mr. Schiltz said he had also spent hundreds of hours ''being frustrated by the decisions of some of the bishops I have advised.'' That is not, however, the part of Mr. Schiltz's outlook that is likely to meet with resistance these days. In several recent talks, an article in the current issue of America, the weekly Catholic magazine published by Jesuits, and a forthcoming article for the Boston College Law Review, Mr. Schiltz makes some other points that challenge conventional sentiments. His first argument is that current litigation over sexual abuse by the clergy, besides posing economic peril for religious institutions, is rife with implications for religious freedom. He worries that emerging legal theories in sexual abuse cases, which are not limited to cases involving minors, could greatly expand the notion of what constitutes ''reasonable'' supervisory duties of religious leaders. These theories, he argues, may cripple those leaders' ability to extend pastoral care to victims of abuse because doing so would create new fiduciary obligations and consequent legal risks for those church leaders. Mr. Schiltz also says the theories growing out of litigation could chill the willingness of religious groups to engage in public controversies or take chances on flawed leaders with any sexual misbehavior in their histories. (By today's standards, even St. Augustine would not be considered a safe bet for clerical ranks, he notes.) And these theories may justify unprecedented government intrusion in internal church matters. Is Mr. Schiltz exaggerating these dangers? Possibly. Still, it seems that those who normally exercise great vigilance about any risks to First Amendment liberties should pay attention to these concerns. Mr. Schiltz has also said that, over the |
1506790_1 | Insular Japan Needs, but Resists, Immigration | an economic powerhouse or whether its population shrivels and the slow fade of its economy turns into a rout. Japan is at the leading edge of a phenomenon that is beginning to strike many advanced countries: rapidly aging populations and dwindling fertility. The size of this country's work force peaked in 1998 and has since entered a decline that experts expect to accelerate. By midcentury, demographers say, Japan will have 30 percent fewer people, and one million 100-year-olds. By then, 800,000 more people will die each year than are born. By century's end, the United Nations estimates, the present population of 120 million will be cut in half. Better integration of women into the workplace may help in the short term, but experts say the only hope for stabilizing the population is large-scale immigration, sustained over many years. Failing that, the consequences could include not only a scarcity of workers and falling demand, but also a collapse of the pension system as the tax base shrinks and the elderly population booms. To stave off such a disaster, Japan would need 17 million new immigrants by 2050, according to a recent United Nations report. Other estimates have said Japan would need 400,000 new immigrants each year. But Japan is the most tenaciously insular of all the world's top industrial countries, and deeply conservative notions about ethnic purity make it hard for even the experts here to envision large-scale immigration. Seventeen million immigrants, as the United Nations forecasts, would represent 18 percent of the population in a country where immigrants now amount to only one percent. Even that modest figure consists mostly of second- and third-generation Koreans and Chinese whose ancestors were brought to Japan when it maintained colonies on the Asian mainland. As the Nakashimas, from Vietnam, know all too well, even long-term immigrants face frequent discrimination and are not accepted as ''real'' Japanese. ''The kind of figures the demographers talk about are unimaginable for Japan,'' said Hiroshi Komai, a population expert at Tsukuba University. ''In a quarter-century we have only absorbed one million immigrants. ''Societies have always risen and faded, and Japan will likely disappear and something else will take its place, but that's not such a problem. Greece and Rome disappeared too.'' Mr. Komai's belief that Japan cannot absorb newcomers is free of the nativism that is common among members of the conservative political leadership. Rather, he insists, it |
1508090_0 | World Briefing | Europe: Vatican City: Offensive Against Gay Marriage | Facing increasing legal recognition of gay marriage, the Vatican's orthodoxy watchdog, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, plans to issue instructions to clergy and Catholic politicians on Thursday that it hopes will help stop the trend. The group's document, ''Considerations Regarding Proposals to Give Legal Recognition to Unions Between Homosexual Persons,'' comes after months of opposition by Pope John Paul II and high-ranking Vatican officials to legislative proposals in several countries supporting same-sex marriages. Jason Horowitz (NYT) |
1507986_0 | A CONVERSATION WITH/Zeda Rosenberg; Agency Seeks a Virus-Killer for Women To Help Control the Spread of AIDS | Dr. Zeda F. Rosenberg, chief executive of the International Partnership for Microbicides, spends her days redesigning global strategies for curbing AIDS. Instead of focusing on the treatment of the disease, Dr. Rosenberg, 49, is trying to create a whole new system for stopping it, and she hopes to use women as a target population to do so. In much of Africa and Asia, H.I.V. is transmitted primarily through heterosexual relations. Currently, no product is widely available that allows women to prevent its spread. As a result, Dr. Rosenberg and her organization are working to develop a topical microbicide to kill H.I.V. in the vagina long before the virus attaches itself to human cells and causes disease. For women living in regions where their cultures limit their autonomy -- and can leave them vulnerable to a spouse's unsafe sexual practices -- the microbicides may offer a measure of protection. In countries like Zimbabwe and India, where many women are unable to enjoy the same rights and freedoms as men, widespread use of microbicides could finally put a brake on the exploding AIDS statistics, said Dr. Rosenberg, who was previously the scientific director for the National Institutes of Health's H.I.V. Prevention Trials Network. The microbicide partnership, which is financed by the Rockefeller and Gates Foundations and several European governments, will ''act as a convenor, catalyst and financial engine for microbicide research and development,'' Dr. Rosenberg said. She answered questions in her office in a sleek high-rise here. Q. The use of microbicides to prevent H.I.V. transmission seems like such an obvious idea. Why haven't we heard much about it until recently? A. Well, actually the idea for a microbicide has been around since about 1989, when a number of women's activists and others thought that progress on the H.I.V. vaccines was not moving as quickly as everyone hoped it would. If you will recall, 1984 was when Margaret Heckler, the then-secretary of health and human services, said we'll have a vaccine in two or three years. Well, getting a vaccine is a very difficult process. I would love to have a vaccine for AIDS, and as soon as possible. But we're now in 2003, and we don't have a vaccine that's near effectiveness trials. And all this time has gone by, and one can't help but wonder if perhaps there were intermediary steps that could have been taken, that may not be |
1506571_0 | Major Change in Mental Health Care Is Urged | Mental health care in America is often inadequate and needs ''fundamental transformation,'' a presidential commission reported yesterday. The commission described the present system as a ''patchwork relic'' of disjointed state and federal agencies that frequently stepped in the way of people who were seeking care instead of helping them. The panel said each state should draw up plans to treat the mentally ill. The report called for a more streamlined system strongly focused on early diagnosis and treatment in patients' own communities, a high expectation of recovery and methods for helping people with mental illnesses find work and housing. One proposed means of early diagnosis would use questionnaires to screen high-school students, with parental permission, for signs of mental or emotional disturbance, with follow-up testing and treatment for those who need it. The report did not recommend increased spending on mental health, but called for a more coordinated and efficient use of the money available now. The commission also said mental health should be addressed with the same urgency as physical health, with equivalent insurance coverage. Currently, many plans put tighter limits treating mental illness than for physical ailments, and President Bush has asked Congress to pass ''mental health parity'' legislation, requiring equal coverage. About 5 to 7 percent of American adults have serious mental illnesses, according to the report, and 5 to 9 percent of children suffer serious emotional disturbances. The report was prepared by the President's New Freedom Commission on Mental Health, a 22-member group that Mr. Bush formed in April 2002. The commissioners included psychologists and psychiatrists, as well as administrators from state and federal agencies. In 86 pages, they discussed the failings of the current system and described six major goals for transformation. Advocacy groups for the mentally ill praised the report. ''I think it brings us out of the dark ages,'' said Richard Birkel, national executive director of the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill. ''The goals and standards they have set are good ones. Get people into treatment early, have high expectations of recovery. This is the opposite of what we have now. This really envisions a very modern health care system in mental health.'' The main shortcoming of the report, Mr. Birkel said, is ''limitations in terms of actual next steps, a clear road map for how we get there.'' But, he added: ''I'm not surprised by these limitations. Otherwise it would have |
1503575_3 | The Changing South Finds Its Way on I-85 | $11 billion since 1986, a pattern echoed on interstates across the South. (In the Carolinas, the road is known as the Autobahn, thanks to the number of German automobile companies along its edges.) A key moment for South Carolina came in 1992, when BMW began construction of its plant in Greer. Along with its suppliers of seats, tires, metal parts and the like, BMW has pumped about $4 billion into the region. To assure dependable ''just in time'' production, BMW suppliers are required to locate within three miles of I-85. ''BMW: Bubba Makes Wheels'' reads a popular local T-shirt. Driving past Exit 60, you can see the undulating form of the Zentrum museum -- zentrum means center in German -- filled with vintage and racing BMWs, built to lure travelers from the road. Though the interstate offered business the way in, the attraction was low wages -- in South Carolina, they are 15 to 20 percent lower than the national average -- and the absence of unions. Later, states eager to lure industry sweetened the pot with tax breaks and training incentives. As the carmakers flourished, the local agricultural businesses -- most notably, the peach farmers -- began to wane. While South Carolina is second only to California in peach production, the land devoted to peaches in South Carolina has shrunk to about 17,000 acres from about 42,000 over the last 15 years, said Martin Eubanks, who follows the crop as a commodities merchandiser with the South Carolina Department of Agriculture. ''Most of that is due to urban encroachment and industry,'' Mr. Eubanks said, the sort of development by I-85. Industrial growth has led to the closing of many packing plants, Mr. Eubanks said, and as a result, South Carolina growers cannot assemble the volumes of fruit that groceries demand. The peach crop contributes $50 million to the state's economy, according to the South Carolina Department of Agriculture. Many growers near Gaffney have turned almost entirely to roadside sales. On a June morning at Jolley's Peaches, in a small, temporary building just off Exit 92, Martha Jolley had arranged peaches in bags and baskets, and jars of peach preserves and peach cider in what looked like old-fashioned whiskey bottles. ''My brother-in-law Donny grows the peaches,'' Ms. Jolley said. ''We opened June 6, but the good ones don't really come in till later in July.'' Down the road, the Sunny Slopes |
1503700_1 | Universities to Share Patented Work on Crops | hundreds of thousands of children each year -- needed to obtain permission from more than 40 patent or contract holders. The rice is not yet on the market. Besides Cornell, the initiative's participants include the University of California, the University of Florida, Michigan State, North Carolina State, Ohio State, Rutgers and the University of Wisconsin. The effort is supported by the Rockefeller Foundation and the McKnight Foundation and includes the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center in St. Louis and the Boyce Thompson Institute for Plant Research in Ithaca, N.Y. The universities say that they will not let one another or other groups use their patented technologies broadly, but that they might preserve rights to the technologies for minor crops or humanitarian purposes, instead of giving total control to a single company. ''What they are more or less agreeing to do is not make everything freely available but to do smarter licensing,'' said Gary Toenniessen, director for food security at the Rockefeller Foundation. As an example of what has previously occurred, Mr. Toenniessen said, Cornell developed a gun used to insert genes into plants and licensed most rights to DuPont. Now, he said, ''if the University of California wants to use the particle gun to genetically engineer a strawberry, they have to deal with DuPont -- even if the technology was developed at Cornell.'' The members of the initiative, known as Pipra for the Public-Sector Intellectual Property Resource for Agriculture, will also put information about their patents into a database to provide a clearinghouse for licensing such technology. The members are also considering pooling their patents into packages, so that a crop developer could get license for a complete set of technologies that would be needed to create genetically engineered crops for little or no charge. Robert M. Goodman, a professor at Wisconsin and adviser to the McKnight Foundation, said that though companies control much of the needed technology, ''25 to 30 percent is in public hands, and that, in the aggregate, is more than any private company has.'' Bryan W. Hurley, a spokesman for Monsanto, the leader in genetically modified crops, said the initiative did not conflict with the company's efforts. ''What you are getting is respected institutions saying biotechnology has legitimate benefits that can and need to be applied to subsistence crops,'' Mr. Hurley said. Corporations seeking to generate support for biotechnology have become more willing to provide royalty-free |
1503578_2 | Greek Verities Endure as Times and Players Change | is a fractured pageant of history and myth. Scenes flicker past. The Furies torment Electra and Orestes for their crime. We see individuals crushed in the name of family, rulers twisted by ambition, and nations decimated. Bloody deeds that were described in Act I are performed now. Memories are like propaganda: they compete to shape the future. We watch Iphigenia go to her death shouting that she is proud to be the instrument of Greece's victory. But Electra tells us she begged for her life and had her mouth covered so no one could hear how she cursed her father. Ms. Yerushalmi pushes different styles and periods at us in this act: Iphigenia in a bright orange wig and Empire dress, the Furies in shredded pink and black robes. Act I had visual simplicity: the Chorus members were in light, simple robes; Electra and Orestes wore black. This evoked the ancient and was a refuge for us. Now, we must watch history and memory lose their coherence. I respect the directorial intent here. But when things grow too fussy or gimmicky, it doesn't work. Our attention wanders, or we don't connect the individual scene to the whole. (The problem was aggravated by a set in which big rectangles served as all-purpose props.) This is a continuing and extremely interesting challenge for postmodernist theater. How do you get the pieces and the whole to strengthen, not dilute one another? Act III is the shortest, and in terms of world view, the boldest. In the third play of the Aeschylus trilogy (''The Eumenides''), Orestes, pursued by the Furies, appeals to Apollo, his protector. Apollo sends him to Athena, and she casts the deciding vote in a trial that exonerates him. Killing is wrong, but in the new order killing a paterfamilias is more wrong than killing a mother. In Aeschylus the Furies accept Athena's offer to join the new regime and give their blessing to a prosperous, all-powerful Athens. In this act, ''Memory of Troy: The Trial,'' no gods prize one group over another. Orestes and Electra are taken to Troy to witness the devastation wrought by the Greeks. Long shafts of red light strike the stage and the bodies of the chorus: Troy is burning. The sons of Europe battle the sons of Asia; they kill their men and enslave their women. (The Trojans wear black net masks; the lower half |
1503602_0 | Sowing Seeds of Destruction | Though President Bush deserves praise for going to Africa and talking about hunger, his proposals for addressing the problem are likely to make it worse. American farm and trade policies -- particularly the promotion of American-style agricultural biotechnology -- will do little to alleviate hunger. In the weeks before the president's trip, the administration stepped up its efforts to promote biotechnology and genetically modified food. In May, the United States filed a complaint with the World Trade Organization against the European Union for its moratorium against the approval of genetically modified crops. The administration claimed that European policies have turned some African nations against biotechnology, thereby undermining American efforts to help Africa. In a speech last month to biotech leaders, the president said, ''We must help troubled nations to avert famine by sharing with them the most advanced methods of crop production.'' The president is right that African farmers will benefit from new knowledge and technology. But he's wrong about which technologies we should be offering. African farmers neither need nor want to produce American-style genetically modified crops. It is easy to understand Africa's lack of enthusiasm. The first generation of genetically modified food crops -- corn and soybean seeds -- were created to make pest management simpler on America's large, mechanized farms. The technologies would be far less effective on African farms, which are small and diversified and rely largely on human labor. These technologies don't make economic sense. In the United States, most farmers planting genetically modified seeds break even -- the increase in seed costs, approximately 35 percent, is covered by reductions in pesticide expenses or marginally higher yields. In stable, well-irrigated environments, these crops enable individual farmers to cultivate more land. In Africa, however, these benefits can be burdens. For cash-poor farmers, the cost of genetically modified seed would be prohibitive. Moreover, genetically modified crops need near-perfect growing conditions. In dry areas, they require irrigation systems and the water to run them. They also need to be managed with special care. For example, crops are engineered to work with specific herbicides; the wrong herbicide can ruin an entire crop. In Africa, where pesticides are often misbranded, sold in unmarked containers or handled by people who cannot read, this can be a problem. Governments will also bear increased responsibilities and costs in carrying out and assessing health and environmental safety testing for these crops, a task few |
1502892_7 | Doctors' Toughest Diagnosis: Own Mental Health | health care reform. In the midst of his depression, he had asked his psychiatrist if he should stop seeing patients, and she had unhesitatingly endorsed his continuing to work. But upon receiving his renewal form, Dr. Miles said, the Minnesota Board of Medical Practice began an investigation, demanding a letter from his psychiatrist and full access to the records of his psychotherapy sessions. ''They wanted absolutely everything,'' he recalled. Over the next three years, a battle of wills ensued. Dr. Miles refused to provide his psychiatric records. He threatened lawsuits. He sought a ruling from the federal Department of Justice, under the Americans With Disabilities Act. He wrote publicly about his illness and his struggle in a prominent medical journal. ''The irony was that to protect the confidentiality of my records, I had to blow away the confidentiality of my diagnosis,'' he said. In 1999 the board changed its licensing form. The new form asked only whether the doctor had, since the last renewal, suffered from a mental disorder that impaired the ability to practice medicine with reasonable skill and safety -- the same question asked about physical illnesses. While many states now use a similar ''impairment'' criterion, Dr. Miles said, other states still ask about diagnoses. In one case, he said, a young doctor was investigated because he admitted on a licensing form to having been hospitalized 10 years earlier, before he had attended medical school. In another case, the grief counseling sought by a doctor who had lost his child to a genetic illness ''became a signal of potential disability,'' Dr. Miles said. Dr. Miles said he was not arguing that state medical boards should be lax about investigating doctors who were in fact impaired. ''But I think patient safety is best served by having a pathway by which docs can get the help they need,'' he said. In the journal article, Dr. Miles, Dr. Hendin and their colleagues called for more research on depression and suicide among doctors, for increased attention to the issue by institutions like hospitals and medical schools and for educational efforts stressing ''the public health benefits of encouraging physicians to seek treatment for depression and suicidality.'' Meanwhile, Dr. Miles said, doctors themselves can begin by taking responsibility for their own mental health. ''Docs who think they are depressed should get help first, and worry about sorting out the career issues second,'' he said. |
1502909_0 | A Wildlife Corridor, Green but Imperiled | It stretches from the forests of the North to the farmlands in the South, from woodlands where bobcats scream and cerulean warblers warble to lawns where deer and groundhogs graze. More than 4.5 million people drink water drawn from its aquifers. Fourteen million people use it each year for recreation, more than visit Yellowstone, Yosemite and the Grand Canyon combined. Twenty-five million people live within an hour's drive. It has been mapped, studied and reported on. Conservationists are trying to preserve as much of it as possible. And the Forest Service says much of it could be gone in a few decades. Still, it does not have much of an identity in the public consciousness. To geologists, it is the Reading Prong, a wide swath of hills and ridges that are the nubs of the ancient Appalachian Mountains, worn down by 250 million years of wind and rain and now facing the final insult of having McMansions with 10-acre lawns built on their flanks. It is the Highlands region, stretching from northwestern Connecticut through New York and New Jersey and on into Pennsylvania -- about two million acres of public and private land, developed and undeveloped, dotted with reservoirs and parks, but under intense development pressure. Unlike, say, Adirondacks or Berkshires, ''Highlands'' is not a name that strikes familiar chords. The Highlands Coalition, an umbrella organization of over 100 private and public groups, is working on the problem. It is striving for land preservation and for what may be called brand recognition in another context. A bill being considered in House and Senate committees may create the first national stewardship area. Not a national park or a national forest, the Highlands Stewardship Area, if approved, would be a new sort of preservation entity created for a region where no wilderness is left, where the sweeping actions that created vast protected parks and forests are impossible. The bill, which has bipartisan support, but is vigorously opposed by the New Jersey Builders Association and the National Association of Home Builders, calls for spending $25 million a year for 10 years for land conservation and $2 million a year to help landowners and municipalities with technical details. Beyond the money, the measure would give national recognition to the Highlands region and help fix the identity of this patchwork quilt of woods and towns as a single entity in the public mind. It would |
1502919_0 | TV Program Canceled Over Remarks on Gays | MSNBC said yesterday that it had canceled its Saturday afternoon television program featuring Michael Savage, the conservative talk radio host, after he made antigay remarks that the network called ''extremely inappropriate.'' Mr. Savage's program, ''Savage Nation,'' has been on MSNBC since March. His joining the network angered gay and lesbian groups because of his outspoken stance against homosexuality. The remarks made on last Saturday's show came in response to a man who called in during a discussion about airline security and told Mr. Savage that he should ''go to the dentist because your teeth are real bad.'' Mr. Savage proceeded to ask the man if he was ''one of those sodomists.'' When the man responded that he was, Mr. Savage said: ''You should only get AIDS and die, you pig. How's that?'' Mr. Savage went on, ''O.K., do we have another nice caller here who's busy because he didn't have a nice night in the bathhouse who's angry at me today?'' In light of those comments, Jeremy Gaines, a network spokesman, said ''The decision to cancel the program was not difficult.'' Mr. Savage's program has generated outsize attention relative to its importance to MSNBC. With an average audience of 347,000, it is shown once a week, on Saturdays at 5 p.m. Since the program made its debut on March 8, there have been 15 episodes broadcast. Mr. Savage, a longtime radio talk show host, was hired as part of an effort by executives to broaden the network's appeal to those cable news viewers who are to the right of the political center. After he was hired in the late winter, groups, including the National Organization for Women and the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, called for MSNBC to reverse its decision. In the wake of their complaints, Kraft Foods and the Procter & Gamble Company announced they would not advertise on the program. In a statement yesterday, Cathy Renna, a spokeswoman for the gay and lesbian alliance, said '''Michael Savage's latest rant made the clearest possible case for why this kind of behavior has no place on any reputable news network.'' Calls to Mr. Savage's office were not returned. |
1502601_0 | PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL | |
1502459_0 | Page Two: June 19-July 5 | IN Europe, foods made from genetically altered ingredients are called ''Frankenfoods.'' In the United States, they are barely noticed. Vive la différence, you say? Not when global trade is in the balance. The European Parliament approved legislation last week to require strict labels on food and feed made with genetically altered ingredients. The new laws are expected to receive final approval by the European Union's 15 member states this fall and take effect next year. But the Bush administration has already objected to the labeling requirement, filing the equivalent of a lawsuit with the World Trade Organization in May. GRAPHIC |
1502588_0 | PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL | |
1502257_2 | The Man Who Loved Chekhov | a novel of his own: ''The Book Against God.'' Wood has made himself deservedly famous for the intellectual dazzle, literary acuteness and moral seriousness of his essays on everything from the King James Bible to Don DeLillo. Even a casual acquaintance with his collection of essays, ''The Broken Estate,'' immediately suggests the extent to which, for him, it is the great, heavy, morally searching novels of the 19th and early 20th centuries that are the touchstone for all other work; for contemporary novels he notoriously has far less regard. Inevitably, Wood's first foray into fiction raises the question that he himself has so eloquently articulated: what kind of fiction does his criticism desire -- and get? The fact that the novel tries -- and, it should be said, fails -- to achieve the kind of artistic and moral augustness that it so obviously aims for, and which its author has so highly esteemed in his critical writings, raises interesting questions about his work -- not as a novelist, but as a critic. As its title suggests, the new novel is about Big Things, things we know Wood to be interested in: literature and faith, to start with. (The author became a philosophy student and later a literary critic after abandoning the evangelical brand of Anglicanism in which he was raised in the North of England.) The book follows the trajectory familiar by now to readers of so many bildungsromans over the past 10 or 15 years, from ''Bright Lights, Big City'' to ''The Corrections.'' Its hero, Thomas Bunting, a native of a village near Durham who's now living glumly in London, is a shiftless 30-something intellectual going through all the usual crises: of career (he's a perennial graduate student who can't finish his dissertation in philosophy, perhaps because what this avowed ''secularist'' is really interested in is composing the grandiose tract of the title); of love (he's bungling his marriage to a beauteous upper-class pianist named Jane); and of mortality (the climactic meltdown typical of this genre takes place at his father's funeral). That the father in question bears a suspicious resemblance to that other Father -- he's ''evasive'' and ''difficult''and ''there was nothing he didn't know'' -- nicely ties together the book's emotional, familial and religious threads. This doubting Thomas yearns to kill off the Almighty; and succeeds. The question he -- and we -- are left with is: |
1502325_6 | Pirate Movies Weren't Always Shipwrecks | Or would you feel the roll of a stout ship beneath your feet again? -- Charles Laughton in ''Captain Kidd'' Real pirates, after all, were outcasts and outlaws, escaped convicts and slaves. When Blackbeard was killed off the coast of North Carolina, slavery was still legal in the United States, and a third of Teach's loyal crew was black. Without parsing out distinctions within the 300-year history of corsairs, privateers, buccaneers and the like, it's fair to say that pirates were not strictly or merely thugs of the sea. They were often plundering from plunderers. They were resourceful, daring, almost crazily brave. There is, however, no evidence that they ever planted treasure chests for later recovery, or set up planks to promenade offending passengers into watery graves. These are literary inventions, exuberantly taken up by filmmakers. Our collective consciousness would be poorer without them. STILL, some of the most outlandish pirate fantasies -- and the tradition of pirate fashion -- have a basis in fact. In addition to giving himself a rock star name, Blackbeard dressed entirely in black and, in marauding mode, attached lighted cannon fuses to the ends of his hat, producing a portable smoke-machine effect. On shore, he kept the ribbons in his beard, drank prodigious quantities of alcohol and was reportedly irresistible to women. In line with this image, it comes as no surprise that Johnny Depp defined his ''Pirates of the Caribbean'' character, Capt. Jack Sparrow, by doing a fairly precise impersonation of Keith Richards -- going for a fusion of the Flynn and Newton prototypes, a pirate rogue who's both dashing and dissolute as a crocodile. In the new epic, Captain Jackwalks the plank with Elizabeth Swann (Keira Knightley), the abducted daughter of the governor of the Jamaican town of Port Royal -- but other genre conventions appear to have been enhanced by the inclusion of a supernatural curse. The more shocking news is that ''Pirates'' is the first movie released by Disney Studios bearing a PG-13 rating. In the past, movies rated PG-13 or R have been released by Disney's satellite companies. I take this as further proof of the irrepressible pirate tendency to shatter taboos. Which leads me to conclude with a printable joke: What kind of movies do pirates like best? The ones that are rated Aarr! FILM Michael Almereyda's films include ''Nadja'' and ''Hamlet.'' His next is about backyard wrestling. |
1502478_0 | PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL | |
1502434_9 | The Lure of Data: Is It Addictive? | chirps at him -- and he acknowledges having used it to check e-mail while in the men's restroom. There is no down time in the car, either. ''I talk on the phone, but I have a headset,'' Mr. Lax said. Does he do anything else, like using his Sidekick to read e-mail? ''I won't be quoted as saying what else I do because it could get me arrested,'' he said, laughing. Mr. Lax said he loved the constant stimulation. ''It's instant gratification,'' he said, and it staves off boredom. ''I use it when I'm in a waiting situation -- if I'm standing in line, waiting to be served for lunch, or getting takeout coffee at Starbucks. And, my God, at the airport it's disastrous to have to wait there. ''Being able to send an e-mail in real time is just -- '' Mr. Lax paused. ''Can you hold for a second? My other line is ringing.'' When he returned, he said he shared this way of working with many venture capitalists. ''We all suffer a kind of A.D.D,'' he said. ''It's a bit of a joke, but it's true. We are easily bored. We have lots of things going on at the same time.'' The technology gives him a way to direct his excess energy. ''It is a kind of Ritalin,'' he said, referring to the drug commonly taken by people with attention deficit disorder. BUT he said technology dependence could have its down side. ''I'm in meetings all the time with people who are focused on what they're doing on their computers, not on the presentation,'' he said. During the Vortex telecommunications conference, held in May in Dana Point, Calif., he and dozens of others were using wireless Internet access. He said that he was paying attention to the speaker, using his Internet connection to look up information about the cable industry. ''I was supporting the effort of the speaker by figuring the elements he was talking about,'' Mr. Lax said. He paused. ''I was also doing e-mail so I guess I wasn't giving 100 percent,'' he added. ''I was 40 percent supporting the effort, and 60 percent doing other things.'' Indeed, he said, the technology can be a bit distracting. ''But it's not a problem,'' he said. ''Being able to process lots of data allows me to be more efficient and productive.'' ''It allows me to accelerate success.'' |
1502628_0 | PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL | |
1504607_3 | The Dirt On the David | all restorations, however, serious issues are at stake. Ms. Parronchi told a British newspaper that Ms. Falletti, an art historian, favors more technological methods because they seem more impressive. Ms. Falletti countered by accusing Ms. Parronchi of possessing a horror of all that is modern -- in this case, of the chemical-soaked poultices with which Ms. Falletti and the others at the Accademia wish to clean the statue. The relative failure of such a high-profile project as the 20-year campaign to restore Leonardo's ''Last Supper'' should warn us about both the seductive promises of science and the zealous interventions of the restoration industry. At a time when the more venturesome solutions to conservation problems regularly steal the headlines, Ms. Parronchi's old-fashioned method might come across as a throwback to the days when Greek wine and stale bread were the restorers supplies of choice for scrubbing dirty frescoes. But her badger-hair brush also happens to be highly effective and perfectly safe. Although Ms. Falletti has speculated that Ms. Parronchi's humble tools could damage the statue, her previous undertakings -- most notably her work on the Medici tombs carved by Michelangelo for the New Sacristy in San Lorenzo in Florence -- underscore the soundness of her methods. Ms. Parronchi also seems to have valid reasons for her reluctance to subject ''David'' to newfangled restoration techniques. She has argued that the compresses favored by Ms. Falletti will leave untouched the pockets of grime in the statue's many pits and grooves, subtly diminishing its beauty. These concerns are shared by James Beck, a Columbia University art historian and Michelangelo expert who had to fend off libel claims in the Italian courts after criticizing what he regarded as the insensitive cleaning of a 15th-century tomb in Lucca. With Ms. Parronchi gone, the Accademia has hired a new restorer. Work will resume sometime in the fall, chemical compresses at the ready. Though it would have been better served by Ms. Parronchi's swabs and brushes, ''David'' will no doubt come through this latest rumpus. After all, any statue that survived Costoli's acid bath and Mr. Cannata's hammer blow can probably survive almost anything. But in the meantime we are left to contemplate a disquieting situation in which a beloved masterpiece is becoming a victim of art-world politics. You might call it a restoration tragedy. Ross King is author of ''Brunelleschi's Dome: How a Renaissance Genius Reinvented Architecture.'' |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.