id stringlengths 5 10 | title stringlengths 0 2.44k | text stringlengths 0 2.9k |
|---|---|---|
1559038_1 | Where the Rubber Meets the Sublime | arranged to represent the dead Christ lying in the lap of the Virgin. Solemn and graceful, it's a kind of junkyard Pietà. Other sculptures also refer to religion, an important part of Ms. Booker's life. ''Baptismal Dance'' (1994) consists of bone, fruit peels, and wood arranged in the vague shape of a crucifix. In place of Christ is an accretion of peels that look a bit like dried flowers; at the same time it has a steady radiance. Ms. Booker, who lives in New York, was born in Newark. Later, she earned a degree in sociology from Rutgers University. Although she has not lived in New Jersey for years, the landscape remains a profound influence on her art. ''Echoes in Black (Industrial Cicatrization)'' (1997) is a direct statement on the Jersey landscape. It is a rapturous yet alienating mural made from a tangled mess of tires and other discarded rubber. It covers an entire wall of the museum, the rubber spilling out of its frame. Cold, grim and toxic, this is a representation of a landscape choked by industry. Ms. Booker is not the only artist to have worked with tires. Robert Rauschenberg, in the 1950's, made a car tire print on a long strip of paper, while Allan Kaprow, in the 1960's, produced environments using tires. But Ms. Booker, to my knowledge, is the only recognized artist to skillfully cut and carve the material into sculptures. The show includes about a dozen of Ms. Booker's tire sculptures, from the early 1990's to last year. Clever, surprising, sensual and funny, they make a case for Ms. Booker as one of the most innovative sculptors at work in America. So what makes her tire sculptures so heavenly? Partly it's the way she transforms this dull, base material into refined objects. For instance, ''Splintered Reality'' (2003) consists of curved, twisted and coiled splinters of tire from a high-speed blowout woven together to create a dazzling work of art. It has a crystalline sublimity. But it's also their sensuality and sexiness. Rubber breasts, udders, and penises flop about in her works with a lewd comicality. The title of ''Male Referendum'' (2003), I think, tells us all we need to know about that work, while droopy mammary glands flap from ''Nomadic Warrior'' (1995-96), a viscous mound of tire, fruit, bone and metal. ''(Wench) (Wrench) III'' (2001), an oversized metal wrench covered in sharp rubber |
1559023_0 | PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL | |
1559052_0 | PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL | |
1559083_0 | PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL | |
1562151_4 | A dish of protein with a side of comedy is being used to promote foods with a soy additive. | on grocery shelves with the Solae label so that we can feel comfortable that consumers who see our ads can indeed find our product,'' he added. More important, a much wider cross-section of consumers have turned to soy. ''Soy products don't just sell to those 2 percent of people who are disciples anymore,'' Mr. Sutton said. ''They're shifting to the mainstream consumers, who connect food choices not just with health but with lifestyles and taste.'' That is why the ads depict tasters from widely divergent demographic groups, and why they highlight products like Snapple. ''We're saying, 'Hey, you already love these foods, and now the Solae mark serves as ''proof of protein,'' a sign you can buy them without compromising taste or health,''' Mr. McNeil said. The push for Solae is particularly critical now to DuPont, which owns 72 percent of the Solae Company. DuPont is selling its $7 billion textile business, once its mainstay line. DuPont's agriculture and nutrition segment, about a $5.4 billion annual business, will be its biggest business, accounting for more than a quarter of its $20 billion in annual sales. By advertising to consumers, and on widely watched TV programs, DuPont may be enhancing its stock price along with its sales of Solae. ''DuPont has always wanted to be considered in the same peer group as, say, 3M, a high-growth industrial business with a lot of consumer products,'' said Frank J. Mitsch, a managing director specializing in the chemical industry at Fulcrum Global Partners, an independent research firm. ''There are still a lot of investors who are most comfortable buying stock in companies whose products they know and can touch and identify, and it certainly can't hurt DuPont's image to be promoting a product that is known to have cholesterol-lowering properties.'' The commercials will eventually be shown on Oxygen, VH1, the Learning Channel and Bravo during shows like reruns of ''Friends,'' ''Trading Spaces,'' ''Paula Zahn Now'' and ''Oprah After the Show.'' Solae is introducing the $6 million campaign on E! Entertainment's pre-Academy Awards red carpet show on Sunday. It is, after all, a mainstream event. And it usually features actors and actresses with the kinds of faces and figures that make watchers resolve to push away those fat-and-carb-laden chips in favor of healthier fare. ''Watching all those beautiful people can certainly make you more interested in eating healthy,'' Mr. McNeil said. THE MEDIA BUSINESS: ADVERTISING |
1562207_0 | Another Recall Involving Ford, Firestone Tires And S.U.V.'s | Auto safety regulators said on Thursday that Bridgestone/Firestone North America had begun the first tire recall since the government started using a new early warning system created in the wake of the rollover problems of Ford Explorers equipped with Firestone tires in the late 1990's. The latest recall again involves both Firestone and the Ford Motor company. About 290,000 Firestone tires will be replaced on Ford Excursion sport utility vehicles; the move comes after accidents that have been linked to five deaths. A Ford official said the tires, which were made at a plant in Joliette, Quebec, were used on about 80,000 Ford Excursions, including 2000, 2001, 2002 and some early 2003 models. The tires are Steeltex Radial A/T tires in size LT265/75R16, Load Range D. While the size of the recall is small in comparison with the millions of Wilderness tires recalled by Ford and Firestone in 2000 and 2001, it raised fresh questions about Bridgestone/Firestone North America, a Nashville-based division of the Bridgestone Corporation of Japan. Three years ago, Ford ended its nearly century-long relationship with Firestone after tread separations and failures of Wilderness tires led to 271 deaths in rollovers. Since then, questions have been raised about the 41 million Steeltex tires Firestone produced, which were used on the Excursion, Ford's largest sport utility vehicle, as well as 15-passenger vans, motor homes and ambulances. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration ended an inquiry into the Steeltex tires in 2002, concluding they did not perform appreciably worse than a competitor's tires. Later that year, a personal injury lawyer, Joseph Lisoni, pressed the traffic safety agency to reopen its investigation, but his petition was denied last year. Mr. Lisoni, who represents several plaintiffs who were injured or whose family members were injured or killed in accidents involving Steeltex tires, is seeking to have class-action status granted for all people who bought vehicles with Steeltex tires. The recall of just one type of Steeltex tire on Thursday, which Firestone referred to as a ''voluntary safety campaign,'' was prompted by the new early warning system, which requires manufacturers to submit a variety of data each quarter to the government. The first data came in December and disclosed three recent accidents that led to five deaths and four other accidents that led to injuries. ''They submit information about warranty claims, crashes, injuries, fatalities, lawsuits and so on,'' said Rae Tyson, a spokesman |
1562045_6 | Ground Zero's Ephemeral Elegance | the Friuli-Venezia Giulia region of northeastern Italy. Within days of that catastrophe in May 1976, special relief funds had been set up around New York to aid victims and survivors. In March 2002 Nemo Gonano, the president of the Scuola Mosaicisti, wrote to New York officials offering the gift of a mural from the people of Friuli-Venezia Giulia, ''recalling how New York came to our aid in difficult times.'' Port Authority officials realized that this offer, combined with a blank wall, made for ''one of those great coincidences,'' Mr. Davidson said. ''It's a perfect counterpoint to the overall look.'' Once the artists were told the size of the wall, they made the mural to fit, said Mark J. Pagliettini, program manager for priority capital programs at the Port Authority. More than 30 artisans worked on the piece for four months. It was shipped to New York in 56 segments and assembled last month -- in the bitter cold -- by Romeo Burelli, Luca de Amicis and Igor Marziali, working with T. Moriarty & Son, a Brooklyn contractor. According to the artists, ''Iridescent Lightning'' expresses creation, abstractly depicting as a lightning bolt the moment when the fingers of Adam and God touch, said Michael P. DePallo, the director and general manager of the PATH system. But viewers have seen other things in it: a stock market graph, naturally; a Richter scale, understandably; and an electrocardiogram. Nonetheless, Mr. DePallo said, ''Everybody we've talked to is generally very positive.'' The Port Authority plans to find a new spot for the mural in the permanent PATH station being designed by Santiago Calatrava, DMJM + Harris and STV, said Carla Bonacci, senior program manager for priority capital programs. Mr. Calatrava has described the permanent station as a ''lamp of hope in the middle of Lower Manhattan, creating an unbroken line of natural light from the platforms to the sky.'' To its credit, Mr. Davidson's temporary station has already set that tone. Earlier this month, shortly after 4 one afternoon, sunshine streamed into the concourse through an open-air clerestory above the scrims. Skyscrapers rose in the distance. In the foreground, bundled-up commuters crossed concrete floors etched with shadows. The sun highlighted the red letters on one of the scrims, forming this quotation from Truman Capote: ''New York is a diamond iceberg floating in river water.'' Cold. Brilliant. Inextinguishable. At that moment, in that place, it was. |
1556689_0 | E-Mail at The Washington Post Disrupted by a Missed Payment | Sometimes it doesn't take a hacker to bring down a computer network. The Washington Post said yesterday that it had inadvertently allowed the registration for one of its Internet domain names -- washpost.com -- to expire. That lapse had the immediate effect of shutting down the e-mail system that reporters and other Post employees use to exchange messages with the world, something they were unable to do for much of the day. In a message sent to newsroom employees over another computer server yesterday morning, Steve Coll, the managing editor of The Post, wrote that ''Network Solutions, which manages Internet addresses, apparently notified The Post of the pending expiration via a drop-box that was not being monitored.'' Mr. Coll wrote that ''all external e-mail has been disrupted and external senders are receiving delivery failure notices.'' In general, the cost of renewing an Internet domain name is under $100. The Post said that it had been able to renew its registration for washpost.com by midmorning, before any outsider had a chance to lay claim to it. But the disruption to the newspaper's newsgathering efforts was significant enough that Post editors were advising reporters to set up temporary e-mail accounts using Yahoo and Hotmail. In interviews, several reporters said the loss of e-mail made them realize how dependent they had become on technology to do their jobs. ''I know I'm missing things,'' one reporter said. Another said that many people in the newsroom, especially those who believed they should be paid more, expressed regret that they had not ''snapped up the domain name and parlayed it into the reward that they know they so well deserve.'' By 5 p.m. yesterday, the newspaper had restored some e-mail functions, a spokesman for The Post, Eric Grant, said, but did not yet have ''100 percent e-mail capability.'' Mr. Grant declined to say if any of The Post's production operations or other Web services -- including its main news Web site, washingtonpost.com, whose domain name did not expire -- had been affected by the lapse. The Post is not the first company to allow its registration to expire inadvertently. Last May, for example, Alameda Power and Telecom, a California utility, allowed its domain name to lapse through an oversight, The Contra Costa Times reported at the time, drawing complaints from nearly 100 customers whose messages to the company bounced back. THE MEDIA BUSINESS |
1556642_0 | Experts Urge Bird Vaccination Against Flu | Three international health organizations yesterday urged countries in Asia where avian influenza is spreading to consider large-scale vaccination programs to protect billions of healthy birds. The move -- which would be a first, involving a vast undertaking in eight countries -- underscored the desperation of international public health experts trying to contain the outbreaks of a highly virulent strain of avian influenza. And it would face considerable hurdles, both practical and scientific. It is not clear exactly how many birds would have to be vaccinated, but with an estimated 6.6 billion chicken and other poultry in the countries, inoculating even a fraction would be a daunting task -- especially since the birds must be injected individually. And because the existing bird vaccine is not highly effective, about half would continue to spread the virus. In smaller outbreaks in the past, health officials have relied on standard strategies like identifying infected farms, equipping cullers with protective gear to slaughter infected birds and quarantining flocks. Now, as avian influenza has spread to half the Asian continent, health experts say such measures have been scattershot, because health care systems are rudimentary and money is lacking. Equally important, health officials say, the effects of the avian flu epidemic on human and animal health remain to a great extent unknown. ''There is no blueprint to help us'' deal with such a large-scale epidemic,'' said Dr. Klaus Stöhr, leader of the World Health Organization's influenza program, one of the groups urging vaccination. ''We have to start with a blank piece of paper,'' Dr. Stöhr said, but ''even if we are creative, there will be no quick fixes.'' The other two groups are the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization and the World Organization for Animal Health, which held a meeting in Rome on Tuesday. The organizations and virologists there said that no measure could be ruled out because of the ''unprecedented'' nature of the current epidemic. It is caused by a strain of the A(H5N1) avian influenza virus that mutated from one that caused smaller outbreaks in Hong Kong in 1997 and 2003. While health officials are deeply concerned that the spread among bird populations might lead to huge economic losses and food scarcities in some areas, their biggest fear is that the virus might swap genes with a human influenza strain to create a new one that could cause a worldwide epidemic among people. The |
1555470_0 | PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL | |
1555439_0 | PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL | |
1555469_1 | Religious Instruction Meeting Special Needs | tuition. Twelve students are currently enrolled, grouped according to age and ability. The children's problems are not mild learning disabilities or attention deficit disorder; rather, some students are autistic. Others have significant language delays, or severe learning disabilities and other problems. David Roher, a special education teacher at White Plains High School, is one of Project SNOW's teachers. He says working with his students, who are 9 to 11 years old, is particularly gratifying. ''What we teach them is the basics of Jewish practice that gives them a sense of pride in their identity,'' he said. ''It's just a modification of the regular curriculum. We don't set a ceiling on what they can do. We draw from them, and what they're teaching us. We try to empower the children.'' The studies may mean doing a yoga class to teach the Hebrew alphabet, incorporating singing and music as much as possible, and essentially doing whatever it takes to make the classes more engaging for children who may find pen-and-paper tasks difficult. While Matan's newest effort is perhaps the latest attempt to address these issues, it's not the only one. ''In Westchester, a majority of synagogues have programs for children of congregants with special needs,'' Irene Lustgarten, the director of the Board of Jewish Education in Westchester, said in a telephone interview. ''Synagogues make every effort to help. Many parents value the social aspect of synagogue life, and work out compromises with the rabbi and the school.'' She said the Matan educators ''are well trained in Judaica and special needs.'' ''There are children with very special needs who may not be able to do a synagogue program,'' she added. ''But Matan is not all there is.'' Catholics, too, have worked to make religious education available to all. ''All our parishes have special religious education,'' said Linda Sgammato, the director of special religious education for the catechetical office, the Department of Education for the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York, which includes Westchester, Rockland and Putnam Counties, in a telephone interview. ''Right now, we seem to have a great number of children with autism coming into religious school,'' she said. ''We don't want to turn somebody away. We want them to understand their faith, and have a relationship with God.'' Irene Kollar, the director of religious education at Our Lady of Fatima in Scarsdale, said in a telephone interview: ''Every child has the |
1555460_0 | PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL | |
1555171_0 | BOOKS IN BRIEF: NONFICTION | TILT A Skewed History of the Tower of Pisa. By Nicholas Shrady. Simon & Schuster, $21.95. For Nicholas Shrady, the Tower of Pisa has some very human traits -- stubbornness, contrariness, a gravity-defying persistence -- and it has been driving people crazy for 800 years. ''What lies behind the tower's pristine white-marble facade and timeworn tourist cliché . . . is a rich cautionary tale of inspired architecture and human machinations, temporal ambitions and spiritual longing, science and superstition,'' Shrady writes in ''Tilt,'' his lively and engaging account of the fiascos and history surrounding the tower. The structure was begun in 1173 as the bell tower for the cathedral of Santa Maria Maggiore and took more than 200 years to complete. Galileo may have (but probably did not) conducted his experiments about the gravity of falling objects in the late 1500's from the tower. World War II brought an American Army sergeant, Leon Weckstein, to within seconds of calling in artillery strikes on the tower. But its precarious overhang (13.5 feet from perpendicular) has always been the looming threat, and 16 commissions did little to remedy it. The 17th started work in 1990, the tower almost collapsed in 1995 and, after a monumental soil-extraction process and $30 million, restoration was completed in 2001 with 300 more years of stability predicted. In his informative and often amusing book, Shrady, the author of ''Sacred Roads: Adventures From the Pilgrimage Trail,'' finds great hope in this; the endearing old cuss of architectural treasures ''symbolizes all that is wondrous and strange in a world that is fast losing good measures of both.'' Tyler D. Johnson |
1555321_0 | PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL | |
1555242_9 | A Queen Gets Her Sea Legs | below us on the ocean's floor. The afternoon begins on the top deck complete with ''virtual golf'' (standing in a mesh cage whacking golf balls at the wall). TUESDAY, JAN. 20 -- As far as the eye can see there is nothing but azure water, a perfect setting for a glorious day of nothing. I chuckle thinking back to the first days of the trip and my desire to attend every lecture and participate in every event. The truth is that this is the best of it -- cutting through two-mile-deep ocean where our closest neighbors are a school of flying fish. I spend most of today buried in a book. The hot sun shines on the port deck where rows of passengers laze in teak lounge chairs outfitted with handsome green cushions. Because this boat is so large it has been easy for everyone to find a nook, and while I have been aware of the 2,000-plus other passengers, I have not felt constricted by them. WEDNESDAY, JAN. 21 -- On the top deck four elderly British gentlemen engage in an intense table-tennis tournament while others challenge each other in paddle tennis and basketball. My husband tests one of the plunge pools (none of the several pools on board is really big enough for lap swimming) and my cousin samples the Regatta Bar's pina colada. We eat lunch in the Kings Court, which feels like a food court in a mall, but it is the most efficient choice. Everyone's priority is soaking up sun. SUNDAY, JAN. 25 -- The last three days pass in similar fashion: hours on deck in the sun. On Friday evening John Maxtone-Graham, the maritime historian, and Stephen Payne, chief architectural designer of the QM2, join the cocktail party we organize to thank my father for arranging the trip. Because of a frustrating problem with the tender boats, we stay on board all day Saturday while in St. Thomas. We try the popular Todd English restaurant, where lunch is pleasant but ultimately unremarkable. As we pack, we remark on how quickly the time has passed, how genuinely excited everyone was to be part of this historic voyage. MONDAY, JAN. 26 -- We arrive at dawn in Fort Lauderdale amid the buzz of helicopters and the spray of fireboats. A Navy ship, its crew in dress whites, accompanies us. At breakfast we hug Joan goodbye. On |
1559855_0 | Students and Records Overlooked In Special Education Overhaul | LAST summer, as part of his overhaul of the New York City schools, Chancellor Joel I. Klein reorganized the special education system, which assesses and educates 150,000 children with handicaps ranging from minor learning disabilities to severe retardation. The restructuring, he promised, would remove bureaucratic deadwood and shift teachers and resources to classrooms, where they are most needed. But nearly six months into the school year, those who rely on the system and work for the system -- parents, advocates for children, teachers, principals, school psychologists, regional office supervisors -- said in scores of interviews that they had never seen the city's special education system in such disarray. There has been widespread loss or misplacement of student records as 37 special education district offices were moved and consolidated into 10 regional offices; thousands of people who make the system go, from psychologists to clerks, were given new responsibilities with inadequate or no training; there are less than half as many special education administrators and clerks, a reduction so drastic that phone calls to the 10 new regional offices by parents, psychologists and principals often go unanswered; and, worst of all, large numbers of children are failing to get badly needed services they are entitled to under federal law. Among those who say the problems with special education are the worst in memory are: Robert Leder, principal of Herbert Lehman High in the Bronx for 25 years; Rita Silverman, principal of Public School 229 in Queens; Dr. Beth Krieger of Region 3, Queens, one of the city's senior supervisors of psychologists; Anne Marie Caminiti, a longtime Staten Island parent advocate; Rita Horvath, a legal aid social worker for 28 years; Jill Chaifetz, director of Advocates for Children; Jill Levy, the principals' union president; and Randi Weingarten, the teachers' union president. Special education has long had to serve too many needy children with too few resources, and most interviewed agreed that the chancellor's restructuring could work out if properly executed. There is also excitement about some of the innovations, like the training of 900 teachers to use the Wilson program, considered a model for teaching reading to learning-disabled children. But repeatedly the same metaphor came up: Changing a flat tire while the car is barreling down the highway. ''They may be great ideas,'' said Ms. Silverman, P.S. 229's principal, ''but so many kids this year lost services and you can't buy back |
1562357_1 | Pfizer Gives Up Testing Viagra On Women | said the researchers were changing their focus from a woman's genitals to her head. The brain is the crucial sexual organ in women, he said. Drugs that affect brain chemistry ''could be an extremely interesting area of investigation,'' he said. Pfizer's problem has been that its research effort has largely been led by cardiologists and urologists, said Dr. George Nurnberg, professor of psychiatry at the University of New Mexico School of Medicine. ''Psychiatry hasn't been a major player,'' he said. That is a mistake with women, he said, because psychology is more important in their sexuality than it is in men's. Still, Viagra can be effective in some women, Dr. Nurnberg said. Women who once had normal sexual function but then suddenly lost all desire -- often as a result of taking antidepressants -- can be helped by Viagra, he said. Women who have always had low libido levels are unaffected by Viagra, he said. ''That's because hormones trump Viagra,'' said Dr. Jennifer R. Berman, assistant professor of urology at U.C.L.A. and director of the Female Sexual Medicine Center. Much of Pfizer's research found that the real factor in determining desire and sexual function in women is hormone levels, Dr. Berman said. Procter & Gamble is testing a patch with testosterone, the male hormone, as a means of improving female sexual function. Some gynecologists are already prescribing testosterone for patients who complain of low libidos. Estrogen treatments and supplements are also commonly used. The market for such treatments could be huge. A study published in 1999 in The Journal of the American Medical Association found that 43 percent of women experienced some form of sexual dysfunction, compared with 31 percent of men. But that study has been roundly criticized, and some women's health researchers say the entire search for a female Viagra is wrong-headed. ''The idea that there is some normal level of sexual functioning drives me up the creek,'' said Leonore Tiefer, a clinical psychologist in New York. ''These companies believe that sex is matter of organ function, like breathing or excretion. I don't think there's an answer to the question of what women should want sexually.'' But Dr. Boolel say critics like Dr. Tiefer are being insensitive. ''To women who have it, female sexual dysfunction is real and distressing, and to say it's an invention is an insult to women's health,'' he said. Karen Katen, president of Pfizer |
1560837_0 | PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL | |
1560787_0 | PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL | |
1560796_0 | PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL | |
1560748_0 | PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL | |
1557776_1 | Maybe Pilots Should Stick to the Script | that everyone who didn't raise their hands might want to speak to those who did about their faith'' during the four and a half hour flight. When the plane landed, many passengers reported being upset. News accounts over the weekend said that the pilot called passengers who did not accept Christ ''crazy,'' but Mr. Wagner said that it was American's understanding that the pilot actually ''said something along the line of 'look at all these crazy people who were willing to raise their hands.''' Mr. Wagner added, ''He did say that if any passenger wished to speak to him he would make himself available after the flight to talk.'' Reached at his home yesterday in Annapolis, Md., Mr. Findiesen said he had no comment. American Airlines began a private inquiry Friday into what Mr. Wagner described as the pilot's ''poor judgment'' and ''inappropriate'' comments. The pilot has not been suspended, but is ''not scheduled to fly for a few days,'' he said. American's 11,000 pilots are covered by ''policies that affect all our employees'' regarding the discussion of ''topics that are inappropriate in the workplace with other employees and with our customers,'' he said. ''Our policies center around making all of our customers feel comfortable when they fly on American. We realize that we operate in a society with people from varied and diverse backgrounds.'' Flight crews are not only intensely supervised by airlines and federal regulators, they also have strong internal controls -- through peer pressure and labor union procedures -- that work to identify and correct violations of professional standards or behavior. Even if it had not become news, an instance of a pilot's using his authority on a plane to evangelize for religious converts would have been immediately reported by other crew members and dealt with appropriately, one pilot I spoke with said. Most airlines have training procedures and operational policies in effect to cover things like flight announcements. ''Our crews have specific guidelines, and one of those rules is to not express personal or political views,'' said Julie King, a spokeswoman for Continental Airlines. Catherine Stengel, a Delta Air Lines spokeswoman, said, ''we pretty much do it in training; we go over what the speaking announcements are,'' though crew members are sometimes ''allowed to tailor those announcements for special circumstances,'' among them the often poignant speeches some pilots made to passengers shortly after 9/11, she said. |
1557678_0 | Of Hearts, Minds and Menopause | Symptoms of depression, even when mild, put postmenopausal women at much higher risk for cardiovascular disease, according to a new study. The researchers, who reported their work yesterday in The Archives of Internal Medicine, said their conclusions were based on data from the Women's Health Initiative and 93,676 postmenopausal participants. It is the largest such group ever studied. All the women were given psychological screening. After following their health for an average of four years, the researchers found that depressed postmenopausal women were 50 percent more likely to die of cardiovascular disease. The women in the study were described as generally healthy. Women with histories of severe depression were not included. The results support theories that treating depression with drugs can lower the risk of cardiovascular disease. ''That, of course, is the prime question,'' said the lead researcher, Dr. Sylvia Wassertheil-Smoller of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx. The relationship between the two illnesses is unclear, however. Either condition might lead to the other, the study said. Over all, the study found, almost 16 percent of the women had symptoms of depression. Other studies link depression and heart disease in men and women, Dr. Wassertheil-Smoller said, but it is unclear whether her study's results extend to men. VITAL SIGNS: AT RISK |
1557822_0 | Diagnosis Menopause | To the Editor: Re ''Hormone Use After Cancer Can Be Risky, Study Says'' (Feb. 3): The article refers to ''treating'' menopause, suggesting that it is a disease rather than a natural process. Or does society's penchant for valuing comfort at any cost influence scientific inquiry? Certainly, debilitating problems might require help. But tolerating small discomforts rather than undergoing surgery or taking drugs might prove safer in the long run. MARGARET TARPLEY Nashville |
1557709_2 | ARTS BRIEFING | the Russian National Orchestra. Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, a nominee in the spoken word album category for the audiobook version of her memoir, ''Living History,'' was a runner-up to Al Franken and his ''Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right.'' INDIA: GRAMMY AFTERMATH -- In the mountain pine forests of the Kangra Valley, 38 miles outside Dharamsala, the Indian hill station that is home to more than 100,000 exiled Tibetans including the Dalai Lama, there was news of an accolade yesterday, and in Dharamsala there was rejoicing, Agence France-Presse reported. The monks of the Sherab Ling monastery had won the Grammy Award for traditional world music album for ''Sacred Tibetan Chant.'' ''It is great news,' said Thupten Samphel, a spokesman for the Tibetan government in exile. ''It is international recognition of the rich spiritual music of Tibet.'' POET'S PROGRESS -- The United States poet laureate Louise Glück, left, is to leave Williams College for a position as writer in residence at Yale University. She will teach poetry writing courses at Yale next fall. The Pulitzer Prize-winning Ms. Glück, 60, of Cambridge, Mass., who has taught at Williams since 1983, usually only in the fall, has a renewable term at Yale, said Dorie Baker, a Yale spokeswoman. James G. Kolesar, a Williams spokesman, noted that Ms. Glück had taken past leaves to teach elsewhere, The Associated Press reported. HARRY POTTER: IT'S ALL GREEK -- Harry Potter may soon stand alongside Homer's Odysseus in the libraries of classical scholars. After a year of work, Andrew Wilson, a teacher of classics in Bedford, England, has completed what he says is the longest translation of a text into classical Greek in 1,500 years. The work is ''Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone,'' the English title of the first volume of the international best-selling J. K. Rowling novels recounting the adventures of the boy wizard. Mr. Wilson said the project was commissioned by the publishers. ''I think what the official line is,'' he said, ''is that it can be used in schools to encourage people to learn Greek. Having got kids reading English, J. K. Rowling is quite keen to have them reading Latin and reading Greek.'' The BBC reported that the Greek book is to be issued later this year, along with a Gaelic version. FOOTNOTES Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie are taking their hit |
1556012_0 | Technology Briefing | Internet: Governments Urged To Fight Spam | Governments around the world were urged to cooperate more in their fight against the proliferation of spam, or unsolicited e-mail, at a conference yesterday organized by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Governments should use their spending power ''as a carrot to encourage suppliers to develop more effective antispam protection systems,'' the panel said. Paul Meller (NYT) |
1555928_3 | Speeding Flight Check-In At Self-Service Kiosks | at Zapp Packaging, near Los Angeles, is able to check in electronically and to get priority security screening at some airports. On a December flight, Mr. Zawaideh helped his mother, who travels infrequently, obtain a boarding pass at the check-in counter. ''I got through the kiosk in about five or six minutes,'' he recalled. ''I had to wait in line with my mother for an hour and 15 minutes.'' After Sept. 11, as stories about delays and missed flights abounded and more passengers avoided short flights, several major carriers expanded their kiosk services and others increased incentives to use them, like awarding bonus frequent-flier points. Increasingly, airlines have been promoting the kiosks in an effort to attract new customers. Last fall, for example, in an attempt to take business travelers from American Airlines, America West installed 10 check-in kiosks at Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport and said it planned to extend use of the machines to all its markets in the next year. America West's kiosks allow passengers to check in, change seats, upgrade to first class and print receipts. The kiosks at US Airways can be used in Spanish as well as English, and allow the reissuing of tickets if a flight is canceled. Some airports are having trouble finding space for all the new kiosks. McCarran International Airport in Las Vegas is testing a common-use check-in system called SpeedCheck, developed jointly by I.B.M. and Arinc of Annapolis, Md. In the first phase, 38 SpeedCheck kiosks in McCarran's ticketing area are being shared by 12 airlines. Six more kiosks are at the Las Vegas Convention Center, where those attending meetings can check in and, if they have only carry-on luggage, go straight to airport security points. The second phase, intended to start in the second quarter of this year, calls for the installation of kiosks at airport counters for use by passengers with check-in baggage. For international flights, the kiosks are to be equipped with passport readers. Suitcases would be given to an airline employee behind the kiosk. In the last phase, with no starting date yet established, according to Arinc, SpeedCheck will be extended to charter flights. The SpeedCheck system has drawn the interest of airport officials nationwide. If it succeeds, it is likely to encourage other big airports to introduce common-use kiosk systems. Before SpeedCheck, several major Las Vegas hotels offered airline check-in to their guests. Now, some |
1555852_0 | Hormone Use After Cancer Can Be Risky, Study Says | Breast cancer survivors who took hormone therapy for menopausal symptoms had many more cancer recurrences than women who did not take hormones, a new study has found. The study, conducted in Sweden, was halted abruptly when the difference between the groups became apparent, because the researchers judged that even short-term use of the hormones carried an ''unacceptable risk.'' Although previous studies had shown an increased risk of breast cancer in healthy women who took hormones, the new report describes the first controlled experiment to study the drugs in breast cancer survivors. Researchers say the findings mean that women who have had breast cancer should avoid hormones and find other ways to treat menopause. That conclusion is just one more piece of bad news about hormone therapy, which has also been linked to increased risks of heart attacks, blood clots and strokes. Once widely promoted to keep women young and healthy, hormones were subsequently found to heighten the risk of some of the very conditions they were supposed to prevent. Now women are advised to take the lowest dose for the shortest time possible, and the packaging carries a ''black box'' warning, required by the Food and Drug Administration to alert users to the risks. Hormone use has dropped sharply since July 2002, when a large study in the United States called the Women's Health Initiative was stopped ahead of schedule because it detected an increased risk of breast cancer in women who took Prempro, a widely used hormone combination. Before the study, about six million women a year were using combination hormones; after it was published, the figure dropped by more than half. Part of the health initiative, a study of women taking estrogen alone, has been allowed to continue because so far no serious adverse effects have been found. Results are expected next year. The new study included 345 women who had been treated for breast cancer, had no recurrence and had severe menopausal symptoms like hot flashes or night sweats. Assigned at random, 174 women received hormones and 171 did not. After a median follow-up of 2.1 years, 26 women taking hormones had a recurrence or a new breast cancer, as opposed to only 7 not taking hormones. Most of the women with recurrences had taken the hormones for two years or less, and most were still taking them when the tumors were diagnosed. Most of the women |
1556042_0 | Corrections | An article in Business Day yesterday about electronic stamps and other proposed deterrents to e-mail spam misstated the affiliation of David Farber, a computer scientist who said electronic postage systems were likely to be too complex and would impose costs on noncommercial users who should be able to send e-mail free. He is a professor at Carnegie Mellon University, not the University of Pennsylvania. |
1555864_4 | After the Nightmare, Saving Cambodia's Treasures | the Indians. ''Their presence was politically important,'' he said. ''They were the first to return, with few resources and under very difficult conditions. There was a cease-fire, but still great insecurity. Perhaps their method was not correct, but it is good to remember the conditions.'' Finally in 1991 Cambodia's warring factions signed a peace treaty. The following year Unesco named the Angkor temples a world heritage site on condition that the Phnom Penh government commit itself to a detailed restoration program. And in 1993 the International Coordination Committee was created to channel international aid to the zone, including the training by Japan of a new generation of Cambodian archaeologists and architects. There is enough work to keep everyone busy. The World Monuments Fund is active in conserving Preah Khan and two smaller temples. A Chinese team is restoring Chau Sey Tevoda outside the eastern gate of Angkor Thom. A Swiss team is reinforcing the structures of the ''pink'' temple of Banteay Srei, 20 miles northeast of Angkor Wat. Japanese experts, who have already restored the northern library of the Bayon, are restoring the towers of Prasat Suor Prat and rebuilding part of the causeway across the moat leading into Angkor Wat. Italians have reinforced the moat's outer wall. Since the late 1990's a German team has been working inside Angkor Wat to restore and preserve the 1,850 stone reliefs of ''apsaras,'' the ''celestial dancers'' of Indian mythology who have given their name to the Cambodian Angkor authority. ''Many are in alarming condition, because of the weather and because nitrates, phosphates and sulfates are seeping through the walls,'' Hans Leissen, who heads the German team, explained. The most ambitious project -- reconstruction of the vast temple of Baphoun inside Angkor Thom -- is being carried out by the French School of the Far East using a method known as anastylosis, which was first developed by Dutch colonialists a century ago in Indonesia. This involves dismantling a damaged monument stone by stone and then rebuilding it, if necessary with modern support systems. French experts began work on Baphoun in 1960 and had laid out 300,000 numbered stones, some weighing up to two tons, when they were forced to flee the Khmer Rouge in the early 1970's. By the time work resumed in 1995, however, all archives had been lost. ''Every place has a stone and every stone has a place, but we |
1555864_5 | After the Nightmare, Saving Cambodia's Treasures | team is restoring Chau Sey Tevoda outside the eastern gate of Angkor Thom. A Swiss team is reinforcing the structures of the ''pink'' temple of Banteay Srei, 20 miles northeast of Angkor Wat. Japanese experts, who have already restored the northern library of the Bayon, are restoring the towers of Prasat Suor Prat and rebuilding part of the causeway across the moat leading into Angkor Wat. Italians have reinforced the moat's outer wall. Since the late 1990's a German team has been working inside Angkor Wat to restore and preserve the 1,850 stone reliefs of ''apsaras,'' the ''celestial dancers'' of Indian mythology who have given their name to the Cambodian Angkor authority. ''Many are in alarming condition, because of the weather and because nitrates, phosphates and sulfates are seeping through the walls,'' Hans Leissen, who heads the German team, explained. The most ambitious project -- reconstruction of the vast temple of Baphoun inside Angkor Thom -- is being carried out by the French School of the Far East using a method known as anastylosis, which was first developed by Dutch colonialists a century ago in Indonesia. This involves dismantling a damaged monument stone by stone and then rebuilding it, if necessary with modern support systems. French experts began work on Baphoun in 1960 and had laid out 300,000 numbered stones, some weighing up to two tons, when they were forced to flee the Khmer Rouge in the early 1970's. By the time work resumed in 1995, however, all archives had been lost. ''Every place has a stone and every stone has a place, but we had only photographs to work from,'' explained Pascal Royère, the French architect in charge of the project. Gradually, though, the temple is being rebuilt, with work due to be completed around 2005. In contrast, the sprawling temple of Ta Prohm, where huge banyan trees still grow out of the ruins, is to be left much as it was found in the mid-19th century. An Indian team will secure some perilous walls and address an annual flooding problem, but it will not touch the trees. ''The trees, too, are part of the world heritage,'' Mr. Borath said. ''They are part of the memory.'' ''In any event,'' he added with a smile, ''it is difficult to know in places if the building is held up by a tree or the tree is held up by a building.'' |
1555846_1 | Adventure or Inquiry? Two Visions of Cosmic Destiny | The shuttle and the space telescope were a marriage of convenience, the visions driving them composing a sort of yin-yang heartbeat inside NASA. In the 1970's, astronomers, who had long dreamed of a telescope above the blurry atmosphere, had no choice but to build a telescope that could be launched and maintained from the coming space shuttle. Proponents of the shuttle then argued that their winged spaceship would be a great boon to science, a claim that came true in 1993 when spacewalking astronauts corrected a flaw in Hubble's optics. Subsequent service calls by the shuttle have continued to hone and improve the telescope's capabilities. As I pondered the imminent demise of this heavenly relationship, I was drawn to a pair of images, each emblematic in its own way of the era and of an attitude toward space and humanity's place in it. One was taken from the shuttle Challenger 20 years ago this month. It shows Capt. Bruce C. McCandless floating alone in space above a blue Earth, like a human satellite or a lonely star child. He was testing a nitrogen-propelled backpack designed to allow astronauts to buzz around freely in space. The other, taken by the Hubble in 1995 and nicknamed the Pillars of Creation, shows huge columns of primordial gas being boiled away to reveal nests of hot new stars being born in the Eagle nebula some 6,500 light-years from here. It is a vision of Genesis as a continuing project. Together these pictures represent the poles of the space program, the dialectic that has driven debate about it since the rockets began to blast forth from Cape Canaveral half a century ago. One is the drama of human exploration: footprints and golf balls on the Moon, spacewalks, zero-gravity shenanigans, space sickness, claustrophobic dramas in a tin can as humans learn like fish crawling out of the sea to adapt to a new environment. This is the inspirational adventure that serves as the loss leader, loosening Congressional purses for other space activities. The other is science, the endless inquiry into the brute divine processes through which we originated, performed by talented robots embodying all the ingenuity and persistence of their human designers and minders back on Earth, able to go where no human could tread, through radiation belts and galactic silence, to see what human vision could not even imagine until the holy pixels came beaming |
1557522_1 | A Town Forever on the Brink of Death Wants Visitors | butte that resembles a ridiculously tall, top-heavy cupcake. Although the rate at which it is crumbling is more or less glacial, Mr. Pompei said the battle to contain the process was intensifying. At the start of this year, he said, engineers began a soil-fortification project that will cost more than $15 million and take 10 years. There may be more work to come, and one reason is that Civita, inexplicably unheralded by many travel books, seems at long last to be catching the eyes of tourists, who are directed by road signs that advertise, in Italian: ''The town that's dying.'' Franco Sala, who owns the town's sole inn, said that its three bedrooms were being occupied more frequently and that a promotional Web site for Civita, www.civitadibagnoregio.it, registers 60 hits a day, compared with fewer than 10 four years ago, when he started it. He said a combination of factors, including the recent international broadcast of a Brazilian soap opera with an Italian character from Civita, had lifted the profile of this ever-slumping place. ''Now it's the prima donna,'' Mr. Sala said. It is certainly difficult. Because of the canyon that surrounds it, the only way to enter or leave is by a concrete footbridge that takes more than five minutes of walking, much of it at a daunting incline, to cross. Cars do not fit, so supplies are brought in on mopeds, which inherited the task, not so many years ago, from donkeys. There is not a single food market. There is no pharmacy. Mr. Sala tried briefly in the mid-1990's to live here, then headed for terra more firma, further reducing the local population, a figure that is a matter of some dispute. ''There are about 16 people,'' said Astra Zarina, a Latvian who taught architecture at the University of Washington and retired here with her American husband, Tony Heywood, who is also an architect. ''There are about 12 people,'' said Sandro Rocchi, who lives here part time and teaches a course in agriculture at a nearby school. ''Let's see,'' Mayor Pompei mused, his eyes rolling upward as he did a head count. ''One, two, three,'' he said, then continued in silence. ''Not more than 10 people,'' he concluded. He is the mayor of all of the municipality of Bagnoregio, which officially includes and governs Civita and has about 3,900 residents. Civita was never exactly teeming. Even before |
1557508_0 | Still Spam, but Less of It | To the Editor: A Feb. 5 letter suggests that e-mail postage would not stop spam and analogizes to junk mail, which we still get even though the senders must pay postage. Even if some marketers continued to send e-mail advertisements, the number would drop. Simply put, only those advertisements expected to generate a response rate high enough to justify the cost would be sent. The Viagra and pornography advertisements and letters from Nigerian generals wanting my bank account information that fill my mailbox would probably not be effective any longer. That is probably why I get about five pieces of postal junk mail and 100 pieces of junk e-mail each day in my unfiltered account. ANDREW C. HUGHES Brookline, Mass., Feb. 5, 2004 |
1557599_0 | U.S. and Australians Reach Wide-Ranging Trade Accord | The United States completed negotiations for a free trade agreement with Australia on Sunday, and proponents called it a landmark deal that could increase American manufacturing exports by as much as $2 billion annually. The agreement, a rare trade victory for the Bush administration, was reached as America's annual trade deficit -- now $500 billion -- and the loss of manufacturing jobs to foreign competition are festering as issues in this presidential election year. While Australia has a population of less than 20 million, it is the ninth-largest trading partner of the United States and only the second industrialized nation to open its market to American goods through a free-trade pact, which will basically eliminate tariffs. The United States and Canada have such a pact as well. The new agreement, which still must be approved by Congress, was reached after extended talks that broke a monthlong deadlock. Robert B. Zoellick, the United States trade representative, and Mark Vaile, the Australian trade minister, announced the accord at a joint news conference here. ''This is the foundation to deepen our ties further, '' Mr. Zoellick said. Nonetheless, the Bush administration failed to win agreement on several items sought by the American pharmaceutical and entertainment industries, and agricultural issues remained a sticking point. The United States refused to open its sugar market and Australia refused to dismantle its system for marketing wheat, rice and other commodities that has been strongly criticized by American farmers and agribusiness. But supporters of the trade pact said its main significance, assuming Congressional approval, was the virtual elimination of import duties on American manufactured goods to Australia. Currently, the United States pays 10 times as much as Australia does in tariffs in the joint trade between the two countries. ''This has never happened before -- never,'' said Frank Vargo, a spokesman for the National Association of Manufacturers, a trade group that is among the most critical of American trade policy. ''This is really the platinum standard that could boost exports by $2 billion,'' he said. Other manufacturers have expressed alarm about the effects of new trade agreements, fearing they could further expose products to inexpensive competitors in developing countries. A coalition of more than 18,000 companies has called for a moratorium on such agreements to halt the deterioration of the American manufacturing base. While Republicans and Democrats have threatened to block a new trade agreement with five Central |
1556271_0 | World Briefing | Europe: Northern Ireland: Peace Accord Review Starts | The British and Irish governments and Northern Ireland's political parties began a formal review of the the so-called Good Friday Agreement of 1998 that created the Catholic-Protestant government that has been suspended since October 2002. President Bush's new envoy to Northern Ireland, Martin Reiss, met with all the groups. Brian Lavery (NYT) Correction: February 5, 2004, Thursday A report in the World Briefing column yesterday about a review of the 1998 Northern Ireland peace accord by the British and Irish governments and Northern Ireland's political parties misstated the given name of the Bush administration's new envoy to Northern Ireland, who met with all the groups. He is Mitchell Reiss, not Martin. |
1559536_2 | On Last Legs, Old NASA Tower Gains Supporters | Web site, www.savethelut.org, to rally support. A NASA contractor has already brought in equipment to dismantle and decontaminate the tower's red segments before they head for the blast furnace. The demolition, which is to take about six months, would consist of separating the individual components and then blasting the paint off with high-pressure water jets. Before proceeding, every segment must be completely enclosed to prevent the wastewater from causing the very type of damage the E.P.A. and NASA are trying to avoid. Decontamination alone is expected to cost $2 million, said Burton R. Summerfield, chief of the division of safety, health and the environment at the space center. He added that the price might be higher if the area must be dredged and additional cleanup work done. Still, he said, the tower must be dismantled. ''It has stayed here long enough,'' Mr. Summerfield said, as he stood just outside the storage area. ''It's very responsible at this point, after the 20 years that it has been here, to move forward.'' The tower's lead-based coating, combined with other chemicals and the presence of asbestos, got E.P.A.'s attention and put NASA at risk of paying hefty fines in case it did not conform. ''At this point, the issue is not about historical preservation; it's about environmental compliance,'' Mr. Summerfield said. But Norris C. Gray, a veteran of the space program who in 1950 took part in the first launching from Cape Canaveral -- that of a captured German V-2 rocket, for ballistic missile research -- said saving the tower could help the American space program in the future. ''They ought to take and preserve that thing and do something with it because it's the younger people that need it,'' said Mr. Gray, who is 83. ''We need young people coming into our space industry real bad. We don't have enough of them. Anything like that would help us.'' Mr. Tierney says NASA should give his group time to raise enough money to begin the restoration. ''The tower has been left there for 21 years,'' he said. ''Leaving it there for another month to allow us to do this isn't really going to make a lot of a difference. ''We have likened this particular launch tower to the dock from which the Santa Maria sailed on Columbus's historic voyage to find the New World. This really was to go to a new world.'' |
1559530_1 | OBSERVATORY | Cells communicate in a number of ways. Gap junctions, for instance, are even smaller and shorter channels between cells that allow ions and small molecules to cross. In plants, small strands of cytoplasm known as plasmodesmata allow molecular transfers. The researchers say their nanotubes appear to be another form of cell communication. Stronger Nanobundles Those cellular nanotubes consist of membrane material and are fairly fragile; mechanical stress or even fixing the cells for study could break them apart. In the laboratory, nanotubes are usually made of carbon, and they are much stronger: their combination of high strength and high stiffness is what makes them so attractive as materials. The problem with carbon nanotubes is what happens when a bunch of them are bundled together to make a fiber. There are only weak forces to link one to another, so the tubes tend to slip and slide, making for a rather limp fiber. Now, a research team from Switzerland, France and Britain has reported success in strengthening bundles made from single-walled carbon nanotubes. Their technique, described in the journal Nature Materials, involves irradiating the bundles with an electron beam. The researchers found that irradiation formed cross-links between adjacent tubes in a bundle. A normal nanotube is a highly ordered structure, with the carbon atoms arranged just so. But the electron beam knocks a few of these out of their regular places, and the researchers say it is these atoms -- as well as carbon-oxygen groups created during purification of the tubes -- that are involved in the cross-linking. The researchers found that an electron beam of moderate energy made for the stronger bundles. Too much energy, they discovered, damages individual tubes so much that the fiber breaks down into an amorphous mass. Unprotected Protection Governments can designate ecologically important land for protection, but that doesn't necessarily mean it will be protected. Indonesian Borneo, or Kalimantan, is a case in point, according to research led by Dr. Lisa M. Curran of the Yale forestry school, who found that the acreage of protected forests there declined by 56 percent from 1985 to 2001. The results, reported in Science, used satellite data and field research to document changes in Kalimantan, where the timber industry provides wood for international markets. About 11,000 square miles of the forests have been destroyed. Other forested areas are increasingly isolated -- bad news for the vast diversity of plants |
1560510_1 | Hunt for Chief Raises Questions for Coke | been the mastermind behind much of the company's restructuring efforts. ''It gives them one more year to evaluate him as a candidate,'' said Michael C. Bellas, the chairman and chief executive of Beverage Marketing. ''Lots of the fruits of what they've been working on will be a little more discernible at the end of the year, especially some of the new programs that are put in place.'' With senior management in flux, it made sense for the board to reinstate Donald R. Keough, a former Coke president, to the board, analysts said. His presence on the board could also help Mr. Heyer's chances of getting Coke's top job, some analysts said. They said that Mr. Keough has long been thought to have been at least partly responsible for Mr. Heyer's move to Coke from AOL Time Warner in 2001 and his quick rise through the ranks at the company. ''It could very well be that this was a tactical move to put someone who had history back on the board during this period when Doug Daft is going to go into lame duck status,'' said Debbie S. Wang, a beverage analyst at Morningstar Inc. ''If they're even thinking about the possibility of bringing in an outsider, I can understand why they would have wanted someone on the board like Don who brings a real measure of stability and continuity for this kind of transition.'' In October, Coke's directors voted to set aside the mandatory retirement age of 74 for its directors, paving the way for Mr. Keough to rejoin the board. The decision to scuttle the age restriction also allows Warren E. Buffett, a Coke director and the chairman and chief executive of Berkshire Hathaway, to remain eligible to stay on the board after he turns 74 this August. Mr. Daft's retirement announcement comes after a particularly trying year for Coke, with extensive layoffs, federal investigations into the company's business practices and the departure of several senior executives. Still, the company's reputation on Wall Street has improved lately. Analysts cite better relationships with bottlers, the introduction of several successful products and the efforts to revitalize Coca-Cola Classic as examples of progress. Shares of Coke fell 6 cents, to $50.94, yesterday as investors waited to see what the changes will ultimately mean for the company's bottom line. Wall Street analysts, who for nearly a year have favored Mr. Heyer for the |
1558510_0 | John Hume | No one did more to bring about the peace that has settled over Northern Ireland in recent years than John Hume, the professorial politician, civil rights advocate and admirer of Martin Luther King, who announced this month that his current terms in the European and British Parliaments will be his last. After years of subordinating his health to his sense of mission, he is finally heeding his doctors' call to take a well-earned retirement. He will be missed. Mr. Hume's greatest achievement, among many, was convincing Gerry Adams, leader of Sinn Fein, that more could be accomplished through politics than terror. Sinn Fein is essentially the Irish Republican Army's electoral wing. Mr. Adams was already rethinking his views when the two men began secret talks in the late 1980's. What helped complete his change of heart were Mr. Hume's formidable intellect, patience and persuasive skills. Sinn Fein's retreat from violence coincided with the rise of more enlightened Protestant politicians like David Trimble, the Ulster Unionists' leader. Together, these changes made possible the 1998 Good Friday peace accord, which, despite setbacks, endures as a foundation of Northern Ireland's peaceful revival. Mr. Hume and Mr. Trimble shared the 1998 Nobel Peace Prize for their contributions to it. Perhaps predictably, Sinn Fein's movement into the mainstream has come largely at the expense of Mr. Hume's own Social Democratic and Labor Party, once the largest vote-getter among Northern Ireland's Roman Catholics. In the province's legislative elections last fall, Sinn Fein outpolled Mr. Hume's party for the first time. On the Protestant side, Mr. Trimble's party was edged out by the far less enlightened Democratic Unionists, led by the Rev. Ian Paisley. Those election results have complicated plans for reviving Northern Ireland's home rule government. Despite this, the peace that John Hume did so much to achieve becomes more entrenched with each passing year. There could be no more fit tribute to this man of vision and courage. DAVID C. UNGER APPRECIATIONS |
1558487_2 | Privacy Issue Delays Change In Airport Screening System | Aviation Administration, which was then in charge of aviation security. The system is operated by the airlines based on their computer records about passengers, and some computers are so old that they cannot store all the letters in a passenger's name. The replacement system, known as CAPPS II, was mandated by Congress, and would be operated by the Department of Homeland Security. Airlines would submit the name, address, telephone number and birth date of each passenger. The department would turn that information over to a commercial database company, which would try to learn whether the name represented a real identity. The company would report back with a numerical score akin to a credit rating but not with any other data on the passenger. The government's aim is to cut the number of people who are now diverted for ''secondary screening'' to about 4 percent from 14 percent now. Secondary screening generally refers to close use of a metal-detecting wand and a hand search of carry-on bags. Asa Hutchinson, the under secretary for border and transportation security, said Thursday in a news briefing, ''Our system right now is not effective.'' Mr. Hutchinson would not say what intelligence led to the cancellation of the British Airways flights on Thursday, but he said it had been a decision of the British government, based on intelligence that was shared and jointly analyzed. Federal law enforcement and intelligence officials said the intelligence had been similar to information that led to cancellations in early January and early February. The intelligence, they said, included information obtained in interrogations of captured terrorists from Al Qaeda, as well as information from electronic intercepts of communications among Qaeda suspects, and other information that they would not describe. At least some of the information, the officials said, referred to specific threats on specific days against British Airways flights, including direct references to threats against British Airways Flight 223, a midday flight from Heathrow Airport near London to Dulles International Airport near Washington. In a meeting with reporters last week, Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge said the threats of terrorist attacks in December and January had been the most compelling and credible he had seen since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Mr. Ridge said he believed that government actions during the last three months, including the request for the cancellation of several international flights, had probably prevented a catastrophic terrorist attack. |
1558547_0 | F.C.C. Opens Phone Lines To Plug-Ins Over the Net | Homes could start being connected to the Internet through electrical outlets, and consumers and business may find it easier to make cheaper telephone calls online under new rules that the Federal Communications Commission began preparing on Thursday. Taken together, the new rules could profoundly affect the architecture of the Internet and the services it provides. They also have enormous implications for consumers, the telephone and energy industries, and equipment manufacturers. Michael K. Powell, the F.C.C. chairman, and his two Republican colleagues on the five-member commission said the twin moves, and a separate 4-to-1 vote Thursday to allow a small company providing computer-to-computer phone connections to operate under different rules from ordinary phone companies, would ultimately transform the telecommunications industry and the Internet. ''This is a reflection of the commission's commitment to bring tomorrow's technology to consumers today,'' Mr. Powell said. He added that the rules governing the new phone services sought to make them as widely available as e-mail, and possibly much less expensive than traditional phones, given their lower regulatory costs. At the same time, once the rules allowing delivery of the Internet through power lines are completed, companies could provide consumers with the ability to plug their modems directly into wall sockets just as they do with a toaster, desk lamp or refrigerator. Under the new rules, expected to be completed in coming months, electric utilities could offer an alternative to the cable and phone companies and provide an enormous possible benefit to rural communities which are served by the power grid but not by broadband providers. A number of utility companies have been running trials offering high-speed Internet service through their transmission lines. While the technology has been developed, it is not clear if such a service would be profitable or able to compete in markets dominated by cable and telephone companies. But F.C.C. officials noted that the vast majority of the nation's households did not yet have high-speed Internet service, leaving the market wide open to rivals. In the phone proceedings on Thursday, a majority of the commissioners suggested that new Internet phone services should have significantly fewer regulatory burdens than traditional telephone carriers. The commissioners also voted 4 to 1 to approve the application of a small Internet company, Pulver.com, ruling that its service of providing computer-to-computer phone service, called Free World Dialup, should not make it subject to the same regulations and access charges |
1558539_6 | 4 Indicted in a Steroid Scheme That Involved Top Pro Athletes | Conte communicating with professional athletes and coaches about steroids, defeating steroid testing, attempts to keep these activities covert and concealing financial transactions,'' Mr. Novitzky wrote in the affidavit. One e-mail message that was said to be written by Mr. Conte and sent to someone identified only as an elite track and field athlete warned the athlete not to use both ''cream'' and testosterone gel, saying the combination would cause a positive test result. ''Whoever told you that it is ok is a complete idiot,'' said the e-mail message, which later warned, ''Please understand that too much is just as bad as not enough. You are ready to rumble. It is time to run in the 49's.'' The affidavit also said that among the retrieved garbage were two personal notes from an elite track and field athlete and world record holder. One dated March 24, 2003, read: ''Victor, Thank you for the help at nationals!'' The other, with the same date, said: ''Victor . . . Jim . . . Just wanted to let you know I appreciate everything that you did. All that I have accomplished this season would not have been possible without your support. Thanks!!'' In another e-mail message to a coach, Mr. Conte noted that ''L=liquid, C=cream.'' The e-mail message said: ''L and C is what I gave you for your triple jumper. S is what they take before competition readily available in Greece. And remember that all e-mails are saved for a very long time, so be careful about how you say what you say. Searches for keywords like 'anabolic' and many others are going at all times by big brother.'' The affidavit noted that anabolic steroids come in liquid and cream forms. The grand jury has subpoenaed baseball's drug-testing results from last year, but Major League Baseball and the Players Association are in discussions with the United States Attorney's office to quash the subpoena. If the talks fail to keep the confidentiality of the results, baseball will probably go to court to try to bar the grand jury from having access to the information. But three lawyers said it is unlikely that baseball will be able to prevent the grand jury from securing those anonymous test results. ''They'll get the stuff,'' said Stephen Saltzburg, a law professor at George Washington University who is a former deputy assistant attorney general in the criminal division of the |
1559977_3 | Bridge Out of Nowhere Leads a Town to Its Future | subdivisions with names like River Knoll sprawling on the hilltop. ''Art and culture have never been high on the agenda,'' said Carol Whiteside, president of the Great Valley Center, a nonprofit regional public policy organization in Modesto, Calif. ''Many rural places don't understand the value of landmarks.'' Mr. Calatrava's bridges, which number 20 worldwide with 5 more under construction, are famous for their ''swerve'' -- an appearance of arrested flight or movement that has been compared to the balanced posture of a discus thrower just before the release. ''A bridge adds energy to the landscape,'' Mr. Calatrava has written. ''Building a bridge is a symbolic gesture, linked with the realities of the people crossing and the surmounting of an obstacle.'' The obstacles in Redding have been formidable. The city itself has contributed $3 million to the project, including $1.5 million in federal highway beautification funds. It had wanted to build some sort of footbridge since the mid-90's, to join the arboretum, now under construction, and the new Turtle Bay Exploration Park, a museum dedicated to the natural history of the river and designed by the firm of Bohlin Cywinski Jackson. Both of those projects have been largely subsidized by the McConnell Foundation, whose founders, local entrepreneurs named Leah and Carl McConnell, were committed to community projects. Their fortune was based on timely purchases of stock in the Farmers Insurance Group in 1928 by Mr. McConnell's parents. Mrs. McConnell, who died at 90 in 1995, outliving her husband by 10 years, grew up in the nearby mining camp of Humbug and was known as a shrewd businesswoman who favored $5 watches while keeping her jewels in a safe deposit box. But the foundation's ''big-time-itis,'' as one correspondent put it in a letter to The Redding Record Searchlight, has not sat well with many in the community. Since Redding's founding as a railhead for miners in the 1880's, it has prided itself on its cowboy-style independence, which manifests itself in things like the municipal power authority, generating power separate from the state power grid. ''We're as far away from California as you can be in California,'' said Ken Murray, a former mayor and the host of ''Murray in the Morning,'' a radio talk show here. Many people would have preferred something more folksy, like a covered bridge. ''It doesn't fit in with the natural surroundings,'' said Tom Keffer, an archaeologist biking along |
1559994_0 | A Way Out for Haiti | Ever since President Woodrow Wilson sent in the Marines in 1915, the United States has made intermittent -- and sometimes inconsistent -- efforts to bring about stability, democracy and prosperity in Haiti. The last decade, especially, has seen striking examples of contradictory American policy, and the cumulative result has been economic stagnation and turmoil in Haiti, where more than 40 people have died during an uprising this month. American policy on Haiti in the last 10 years has gone from one extreme to another. The Clinton administration strongly supported the ousted president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, sending 20,000 troops in 1994 to restore him to power. The current administration then cut off all American assistance to the Aristide government while giving advice and moral support to Mr. Aristide's opponents. Entrenched in their own economic and political divisions, Haitians tend to regard politics as an all-or-nothing, life-and-death struggle. The more support one side or the other has received from its partisans in Washington, the less inclined it has been to compromise. If the United States is to help Haiti overcome its crisis through dialogue and reconciliation, therefore, Republicans and Democrats have to reconcile their own differences. And this may indeed be happening. Secretary of State Colin Powell ended an apparent administration flirtation with a coup in Haiti, stating clearly on Tuesday that Mr. Aristide should finish his term. The Bush administration has concluded that Mr. Aristide, however flawed he may be, is the only legitimately elected leader in Haiti, and perhaps the sole remaining source of stability. At the same time, Mr. Aristide's American supporters recognize his responsibility for the crisis and would like to see Haiti make a new start. Prominent African-Americans like the Rev. Walter Fauntroy, president of the National Black Leadership Roundtable, have suggested that Mr. Aristide should step down now. This convergence of American opinion on Haiti offers the prospect of a more united and thus more effective American approach. The next step should be for leaders on both sides of the aisle to collaborate on a new strategy for Haiti. Such a strategy could be based on these elements: * Mr. Aristide should serve out his term, which expires in 2006. But at the same time, we need to prepare the succession. It will take at least the two years Mr. Aristide has left in office to organize fair elections. Major American and international efforts to do so |
1556904_1 | Engineer's Papers Dispute Hubble Decision | of the next decade as originally planned. In explaining his decision, Mr. O'Keefe had cited a recommendation of the board that investigated the Columbia space shuttle disaster last year that NASA must develop a way to inspect and repair damage to the shuttle's thermal protection system. While the National Aeronautics and Space Administration was committed to developing this ability for missions to the International Space Station, which could serve as a ''safe haven'' for the astronauts if the shuttle was damaged, Mr. O'Keefe said it was too risky and expensive to develop an ''autonomous'' inspection and repair capability for a single mission to the telescope. The new reports challenge Mr. O'Keefe's conclusion, citing data and references from NASA documents in arguing that the administrator's statement ''cannot be supported.'' The Columbia Accident Investigation Board recommendations and NASA's plans for ''return to flight'' include ultimately developing just such an ability to inspect and repair the tiles independently of the station. That autonomous ability is needed because the shuttle might fail to make it to the space station, or the space station may become too big and complex to serve as a repair base, according to the papers. One of the reports concludes that missions to the telescope ''are as safe as or perhaps safer than'' space station missions ''conducted in the same time frame.'' The author is a NASA engineer who wrote the reports based on internal data and who declined to be identified for fear of losing his job. Copies of the documents were provided to The New York Times by an astronomer who is not part of NASA and opposes the decision to let the telescope die. ''Those documents certainly undercut the public position of the agency,'' said Dr. Garth Illingworth, an astronomer at the University of California at Santa Cruz and a member of a committee that advises NASA on space science. Dr. Illingworth added that it was important to open up debate on these issues. ''We need to get real information out there, and not just have a few people in NASA saying we know what's best,'' he said. A Congressional staff member who was given the documents said they appeared to be credible. ''We are taking them seriously,'' he said. Referring to the requirement of an autonomous repair capability, he said, ''NASA's going to have to spend the money to do this'' if the agency follows the |
1556836_1 | Camus and the Neo-Cons: More in Common Than They Might Suspect | emerging in new configurations. So neo-conservativism continues, now even taking center stage, named as the ideology behind President Bush's foreign policy. In neo-conservatism's continued evolution, though, how are lessons learned from the past to be applied to a transformed world? An example from the past may show how vexed such questions can be. Consider the period just after the Second World War, when another tyranny had just collapsed. It seemed as if the Allies had, through their trials, learned something about totalitarianism and democracy. Could those concepts be used to understand the Soviet Union, the West's erstwhile partner? Was it something very different (a humanitarian revolutionary state gone awry) or something very similar (a fascistic state beyond saving)? Such issues affected the impassioned arguments between the two most important writers in postwar France, Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre. In his new book, ''Camus and Sartre: The Story of a Friendship and the Quarrel That Ended It'' (University of Chicago), Ronald Aronson, who teaches at Wayne State University, traces the nuances of their friendship, their mutual influences and hostilities, and the themes that still haunt contemporary debates. Their schism over Communism was not academic. At the time of France's liberation, buoyed by its Resistance role, the Communist Party had 400,000 members; that figure almost doubled by 1946, and the party joined a coalition government. In addition, according to Mr. Aronson, the party dominated the largest trade union, published dozens of newspapers including the country's two largest, and had a payroll of more than 14,000. The Communist Party was part of the mainstream in a way it never was in the United States. But its allegiances were just as open to question: it slavishly followed Soviet leadership; fellow travelers idealized the Soviet Union, despite readily available accounts of horrors. André Gide, who visited Russia in the 1930's, said he doubted whether anywhere, even in Hitler's Germany, the ''mind and spirit are less free, more bowed down.'' Camus had joined the party in Algeria in 1935 and left two years later in dismay. Mr. Aronson even implies that Camus' views on absurdity and freedom grew out of that experience. Then, in France, during the German occupation, Camus did heroic work as editor of a Resistance newspaper, Combat. Sartre, in their developing friendship, called Camus an ''outstanding example'' of a life lived in ''engagement.'' After the war, both men saw an opportunity to remake |
1558692_0 | A Triumph for Big Sugar | America's sugar growers may not be competitive in the global marketplace, but they know how to play in Washington. The sugar lobby has managed to exempt its product from a free trade deal with Australia, a triumph that comes at the expense of American consumers and the nation's broader trade agenda, not to mention the world's poor. The agreement was reached last weekend, after Australia gave up on its demands that its farmers be given unfettered access to American beef, dairy and sugar markets. The Australians won minor concessions on the dairy and beef fronts, but nothing on sugar. A system of quotas restricts the amount of sugar imported into the United States, inflating domestic prices. Americans pay as much as three times the world price, which is one reason candy manufacturers have had to export thousands of jobs in recent years. Robert Zoellick, the United States trade representative, had earlier faced down the sugar lobby -- an alliance of Florida cane growers and Midwestern sugar beet farmers -- when he agreed to include sugar as part of the proposed Central American Free Trade Agreement. Central American nations' quotas (the amount they can sell in the United States) will moderately rise over time. The deal with Australia is a huge setback in the process of liberalizing global agricultural trade. Poor nations whose only viable exports are agricultural goods are hampered by excessive protectionism. And by making a deal with Australia that leaves out sugar, Washington has jeopardized chances for meaningful progress on a hemispheric Free Trade Area of the Americas, and the latest round of negotiations at the World Trade Organization. As part of this effort to lower trade barriers, developing countries are rightly insisting that rich nations stop subsidizing their farmers and open up their markets to competition. The agreement sends a chilling message to the rest of the world. Even when dealing with an allied nation with similar living standards, the administration, under pressure from the Congress, has opted to continue coddling the sugar lobby, rather than dropping the most indefensible form of protectionism. This will only embolden the case of those around the world who argue that globalization is a rigged game. |
1558659_0 | When Philosophy Makes a Difference | When the Library of Congress first talked to the 76-year-old Polish philosopher Leszek Kolakowski, it was to ask him to nominate candidates for a new $1 million humanities prize. So he was taken aback when the Library later called to tell him he had won the award himself. If Dr. Kolakowski was surprised, most Americans were probably puzzled; his name is not well known in the United States. But for those who wonder why this philosopher was selected for the first John W. Kluge Prize for Lifetime Achievement in the Humanities and Social Sciences, Dr. James H. Billington, the librarian of Congress, explained it in his announcement three months ago: ''Very rarely can one identify a deep, reflective thinker who has had such a wide range of inquiry and demonstrable importance to major political events in his own time.'' Born in Poland and ejected from his university position and from the Communist Party in the 1960's because of his increasingly anti-orthodox beliefs, Dr. Kolakowski in exile became a major figure in the Polish Solidarity movement in the 1980's. His three-volume dissection of Marxism, ''Main Currents of Marxism'' (1978), is considered a definitive work on the subject. But he is also a lucid and engaging essayist whose books and other writings touch on subjects like Spinoza, Kant, modernism, authority and free will, and the relevance of philosophy in everyday life. Despite such impressive credentials, Dr. Kolakowski remains a modest man, deflecting personal questions. ''You don't need to know about my life,'' he said in an interview as he sipped coffee in the living room of his house in northern Oxford, where until several years ago he was a research fellow at All Souls College. Likewise, he declined to reveal just how he reacted to the news of his recent award. Yes, but how about the cash? He looked down at his cup and gave a sly smile. ''I never had great problems with spending money,'' he said. The life of Dr. Kolakowski, whose name is pronounced LESH-ehk ko-wah-KUHV-skee, was torn apart twice, first by Nazism, then by Communism. The son of intellectuals, he was moved with his family after the German invasion to a succession of small towns and villages in central Poland and was forbidden to attend school. ''The Germans closed the schools for the Poles,'' he said. ''The great idea was that Poles be swineherds for the Germans and |
1561933_2 | McGreevey's Optimism on Budget Plan Meets Criticism of Its Sources of Financing | leader and a Republican. Mr. McGreevey, however, said that he was keeping to his promise not to raise sales and income taxes, and he has challenged his critics to find other ways to cut the budget, or other ways to raise revenue. ''This budget reflects my values and reminds me of why I wanted to be governor,'' he said. ''The first two years were difficult. With this budget we're moving to a better vision of New Jersey.'' The governor's proposed budget is $1.7 billion more than the current budget, which expires on June 30. It includes $200 million in aid to school districts, $125 million to revamp the embattled Department of Youth and Family Services, $33 million to hire 200 state troopers and $10 million to cover tuition at community colleges for students who graduate in the top 20 percent of their high school classes. During a question and answer session with reporters, Mr. McGreevey became testy when he was asked for specifics about his proposal to raise $150 million from a new environmental impact fee on petrochemical companies. Would the taxes be on gasoline as well as on other petroleum products like plastics? Some critics have said that the fees were a ''stealth tax'' that motorists would eventually pay at the gas pumps. The governor backed down a few months ago on a plan for a gasoline tax increase 15 cents per gallon. ''No,'' the governor said to a question about whether it was a stealth tax. ''You'll have the finalized details within two to three weeks. This is a tax on petrochemicals, understanding that there have been environmental abuses in the past.'' But because of the confusion about who would pay the tax and on what products, the assembly speaker, Albio Sires, a Democrat, later issued a statement about news reports about a gas tax increase of 3 cents. ''The governor assures me that this will be a tax on polluters and not on New Jersey drivers,'' Mr. Sires said. Mr. McGreevey also said his critics were wrong to compare him to former Gov. Christine Todd Whitman because of his proposal to pay for this budget out of money that the state did not yet have. ''There is a profound distinction between the previous administration that borrowed in the abstract and this one that is using dedicated revenue sources to pay for what we're doing,'' Mr. McGreevey said. |
1552487_0 | Economic Memo; Even for Financial Experts, Analyzing the Job Market Is an Adventure | Is the job market improving more quickly than most people realize? Even though the government recently ignited new talk of a jobless recovery by reporting a measly gain of 1,000 jobs in December, nearly every other measure of the labor market offers a more encouraging picture. The gap suggests that President Bush may be running for re-election with a stronger economy than is widely understood and that the Federal Reserve might raise interest rates more rapidly than many investors now expect, economists say. Since September, the number of people receiving state jobless benefits has fallen by almost 500,000, or over 13 percent. A survey of executives suggests that companies in the service sector are increasing their employment at the fastest rate since 2000. The amount of help-wanted advertising being placed across the country has risen more than 10 percent since May, according to an index compiled by the Conference Board, a research company in New York. In early January, Americans reported being more confident about the economy than they had been in more than three years, according to a University of Michigan survey that often moves in tandem with job-market changes. ''We've seen a clear pickup,'' said Linda S. Paulk, the president of Snelling Personnel Service, a national employment agency based in Dallas that is placing about 19 percent more workers in jobs than it was a year ago. ''And we've seen consistency in the pickup, which we hadn't seen in the three years prior.'' The Labor Department's survey of tens of thousands of businesses, which showed the gain of 1,000 jobs, is one of the most widely respected economic indicators, and few analysts are willing to dismiss it. It could prove correct, while the other signs ultimately look ephemeral. Even if the job market is improving, it remains well short of healthy by almost any measure. But for all of the payroll survey's strengths, it often underestimates job growth at economic turning points because it misses numerous start-up businesses, many economists say. When the economy was emerging from a recession and a jobless recovery in the early 1990's, the Labor Department initially reported weak employment gains, only to revise the numbers when more complete data became available. For the last three months of 1992, for example, the department initially reported average monthly gains of 65,000 jobs; it now says the economy was adding 177,000 jobs a month at the |
1550413_0 | MEMO PAD | International Traffic Up For Most U.S. Airlines Despite tightened security measures that included more than 15 canceled foreign flights over the holidays, most domestic airlines carried significantly more international traffic last month than in December 2002, according to the airlines' monthly traffic reports. Foreign airlines are also reporting more robust traffic on overseas routes. British Airways' passenger traffic on routes to North and South America rose 5.9 percent in December, even though it was among the airlines forced to cancel a handful of flights because of security fears over the holidays. The airline said it had a 4.7 percent increase in traffic in first-class and business-class seats, mostly attributable to heavier demand for premium seats on long-haul flights. A discernible increase in business travel has been lifting international traffic across the board, said Philip Roberts, editor in chief of the Unisys R2A Scorecard, a monthly research report. International traffic was not ''impacted in any measurable way'' by the tightening of security and the canceled foreign flights, Mr. Roberts said. In fact, he added, ''there seems to be a message that customers are feeling travel is safer'' as a result of the higher security at domestic airports and the introduction last week of stricter visa procedures for visitors to the United States. Mr. Roberts said that the increase in foreign travel had not led to higher international fares and was not likely to for some time because of intense competition on both Atlantic and Pacific routes. However, he said, the demand for business-class seats is rising in tandem with the increased capacity in airlines' premium cabins on international flights. ''If you don't book far enough in advance'' he said, it is now sometimes ''difficult to get the flights you want.'' JetBlue Will Charge For Fox Programs JetBlue Airways, which already offers 24 channels of live television on in-seat screens, said that it was adding movies, satellite radio and other features to its inflight entertainment systems. Customers will have to pay a fee, to be announced later, JetBlue said, for the movies and other new digital video programs, though the existing DirecTV and the new XM Satellite Radio programs will be free. The News Corporation's Fox Entertainment Group will supply the first-run movies, as well as television features, news and sports programs, promotions for Fox products and other features. JetBlue said it would begin testing that service in the spring and expected |
1550364_2 | Some Fliers Could Avoid Extra Scrutiny | and may also inspect the carry-ons. That takes only an additional three or four minutes, he said, so ''individuals will have to decide'' whether obtaining a card is worthwhile. It is not clear who would bear the cost of running a background check on the traveler; one idea is that the applicant would pay. Some passenger advocates had hoped for more. ''I don't think that will be helpful,'' said David Stempler, president of the Air Travelers Association, who said the problem was having to get to the airport early to allow for screening. ''We had expected that either there would be a separate security lane for registered travelers, or in the alternative, a priority lane with the regular checkpoint,'' Mr. Stempler said. Mr. Hatfield, in a conference call with reporters on Monday, also said his agency was continuing on a schedule that it laid out last September to introduce by this summer a revised computer system that would identify ticket buyers who needed extra attention from security agents. The program, the Computer Assisted Passenger Prescreening System, known as Capps 2, has provoked objections from privacy advocates, because it involves the use of commercial databases. Agency officials say airlines will supply the passenger's name, phone number, home address and a new element, date of birth, which the agency will forward to commercial database companies that will respond with a numeric ''score'' that indicates the likelihood that the passenger's identity is legitimate. The data gathered in the search would be retained only until the passenger had completed the itinerary, according to officials. Major airlines in the United States, wary of offending their customers, have refused to supply data for a test of the system, but Mr. Hatfield said his agency could use data from European airlines on passengers arriving from Europe. When the system takes full effect, he said, the airlines would either supply the data voluntarily or be ordered to do so. Agency officials say the airlines have told them they will not resist a uniform order. The new system would replace an older version that uses less information and refers about 14 percent of ticket buyers for extra scrutiny. The goal is to cut that to 5 percent or less, Mr. Hatfield said. In addition to identifying passengers who may be threats to aviation, the new system is also supposed to point out those wanted for violent crimes, he said. |
1552047_0 | Ecuador Indians Fend Off Oil Companies With Tourism | An Achuar Indian, Cristóbal Callera treads through the jungle like a child of the rain forest. But on a recent day he had a gaggle of heavy-footed tourists in tow, the rain falling in waves and the trail mired in mud. Mr. Callera stopped frequently before what appeared to be unremarkable plants, slicing them open with a pocket knife and explaining how they could be used to treat everything from jungle rashes to chicken pox. ''For us, the forest is like a pharmacy,'' explained Mr. Callera, 38, his blue rain slicker soaked. ''That is why we do not want to destroy the forest.'' It was a jungle tour not unlike others offered by resorts and eco-lodges across Latin America -- a walk through mysterious forests where strange birds shriek and unseen rustling elicits gasps from visitors. But while many ecology-friendly getaways are operated by big tour companies or foreign entrepreneurs, the Kapawi Ecolodge and Reserve is run with the participation of the Achuar, the region's dominant Indian tribe. For the Achuar people, Kapawi is becoming an increasingly important symbol of their independence as they try to resist oil companies that want to drill here. The idea, indigenous leaders say, is to demonstrate options to oil exploration. ''We do not need petroleum,'' said Fernando Antik, 28, chief of a nearby village, Kusutkau. ''We need more tourists.'' The lodge, named for the village of Kapawi, is barely 120 miles southeast of the capital, Quito. But it is surrounded by nearly impenetrable Amazonian forest. There are no roads, telephones, electrical grid. The outside world comes via 12-seat Cessnas that land on a 2,300-foot dirt strip. The lodge itself uses solar power for electricity. Water for the dozen thatched-roof cabins is heated in heavy black bags set out in the sun. More than 30 of the lodge's 44 employees are Achuar, who do everything from cook meals to make repairs. Achuar guides lead tourists on fishing trips to hook monster catfish the size of dogs on the Capahuari River or on bird-watching trips to spot horned screamers, pavonine quetzals or pheasant cuckoos. ''Kapawi is an exception among eco-lodges because it tries to practice what it preaches in terms of community involvement,'' said Amanda Stronza, an American anthropologist who did a case study on Kapawi for the Stanford University Graduate School of Business. The local people could not be more different from the tourists, many |
1552065_0 | A Memorial Worth Preserving | If it had been possible to look ahead, just a few months after 9/11, to the memorial design that was unveiled last Wednesday morning at Federal Hall National Memorial, we would have been surprised not only by its beauty, but also by the fact that the footprints of the twin towers are preserved intact, as essential elements in the design. For a very long time it seemed as though sheer political and financial pressure would force those footprints to be freed for development. Protecting those footprints was a remarkable achievement, the result of true aesthetic vision and popular will. Now, Gov. George Pataki and the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation must continue their success in helping to create a worthy memorial. They must vigorously stop even well-meaning attempts to dilute or clutter this powerful space. The memorial design presented by Michael Arad and Peter Walker is a vision of how all the elements that might come into play can be combined to greatest effect. What they created is not a version of the National Mall in Washington, not a space for the establishment of other, more specific and potentially more literal memorials. The real memorial is the single coherent work of art created by Mr. Arad and Mr. Walker, and it must be protected as such. The purity of what they have created is a visual purity, embodied in the broad expanse of the space itself, in the congregation of all those trees, in each visitor's emotional discovery of the two voids. The ground level of this memorial takes its power from sight lines that must not be interrupted with artifacts or statues. The artifacts from the destroyed towers are naturally held sacred by the victims' families and many other Americans. They should and will be preserved for future generations to see -- both in museums at ground zero and in the spaces underneath the memorial itself. The architects have already indicated that is their intention, although those plans are only now being contemplated in detail. While the ground level of the memorial presents a single, intense aesthetic experience, a visitor's understanding of what happened on Sept. 11 can then grow more specific and detailed with each step down to the bedrock below. It is imperative that the public, the officials and the builders all agree from the beginning that the memorial space is to be regarded as something close to |
1550714_0 | Choir Founder Admits He Erred in Allowing Counselor to Keep Working With Students | Walter J. Turnbull, the embattled founder and director of the Boys Choir of Harlem, acknowledged yesterday that he had made a mistake in allowing a counselor to remain in contact with students after the man had been banned from the school for molesting a 14-year-old student. ''It happened; I handled it badly,'' Mr. Turnbull said during his first interview since the choir's board asked him to resign. ''And what kinds of things and structures can we put in to make it never happen again?'' Investigators for the New York City schools have urged the dismissal of Mr. Turnbull and his brother, Horace, the choir's executive vice president. The allegations against the brothers have left the choir, which has performed on many of the world's greatest stages, hanging in the balance, since Mr. Turnbull has been so integral to its identity and success. This week, the New York City Department of Education named an interim principal for the choir's affiliated school. In the interview at his lawyer's office, Walter Turnbull, 59, conceded that he had made a mistake in not removing the counselor, Frank Jones Jr. ''The trust that I had was misplaced,'' he said. Mr. Turnbull never reported the abuse, which came to light when the student's mother went to the police in the fall of 2001. Mr. Jones was convicted and sentenced to two years for sexual abuse. Mr. Turnbull said he thought the board's request that he step down was excessive and could jeopardize the choir. ''I'm heartbroken that such a wonderful opportunity for the development of young people is under attack,'' he said. ''After 35 years of work and 6,000 kids -- based on one incident.'' Lawyers for the abused student, a 14-year-old boy, have also accused Mr. Turnbull of hitting students during rehearsals, which he denied yesterday. ''I don't use physical force -- that is not true,'' he said. ''I was taken aback by that.'' Nevertheless, Mr. Turnbull acknowledged that his standards were high, for his students' performance and behavior. ''I would call myself tough, but no less caring,'' he said. Mr. Turnbull's lawyer, Alan L. Fuchsberg, has submitted a proposal countering the board's request for his resignation, which the trustees are expected to decide on this afternoon. The proposal would redefine Mr. Turnbull's role, eliminating some of his administrative duties. It also suggests the appointment of an interim independent monitor and an employment search to |
1553882_6 | East German Steroids' Toll: 'They Killed Heidi' | It was affiliated with the powerful sports club Dynamo, which was sponsored by the Stasi, the East German secret police. At 16, Heidi began to receive round blue pills wrapped in foil. This was the steroid Oral-Turinabol, but coaches typically called them vitamins that would increase strength and help the athletes endure the stress of training. In Heidi's case, the Oral-Turinabol was given in tandem with birth control pills. Six months later, Heidi's clothes no longer fit and she felt ''like the Michelin Man or a stuffed goose,'' Krieger said. By the time she was 18, she weighed 220 pounds, had a deep voice, increased body and facial hair and appeared mannish. On the streets of Berlin, Krieger said, Heidi was derisively called a homosexual or a pimp. Once on a commuter train, in the presence of her mother, she was called a drag queen. She went home, removed her skirt and never wore one again. At the airport in Vienna, where Heidi had gone for a track meet, a flight attendant gave her directions to the men's bathroom. Even later, as she considered a sex-change operation, Krieger said, a psychologist asked, ''So you want to change from a man to a woman?'' The insults stung, but Heidi kept taking the blue pills. She had wild mood swings, from depression to aggression to euphoria. Once, she swiped at a boxer who had taunted her. When she stopped taking the birth control pills, her breasts began to hurt severely. She felt out of place at the sports school and in her own body, but the shot-put was a way to measure up, to fit in. By 1986, she had become the European champion. ''The only thing I could do was sports,'' Krieger said. ''I got to travel, I received recognition. I got the feeling that I belonged. That's what I wanted, to belong. From my point of view, I deserved it. I had worked hard. To question whether these were hormones I was being given, I didn't ask or suspect.'' Clearly, though, the steroids had a profound effect on her performances. And Heidi received drugs in large doses. As a 16-year-old, she put the shot just over 46 feet. Three years later, she pushed beyond 65 feet 6 inches. Trainers and doctors referred to her as Hormone Heidi. According to medical research records uncovered by Brigitte Berendonk, a onetime West German |
1553847_2 | Costa Rica to Be 5th Country In New Trade Pact With U.S. | nations, with their lower labor costs, are especially feared. The creation of something like a textile free-trade area would make the United States cotton and textile industries part of a tariff-free supply chain with the garment factories of the Central American region. ''We believe this will be extremely helpful when competition over textiles heats up globally with the removal of quotas next year,'' a senior trade official said during a telephone press conference on Sunday. The administration will have trouble convincing Congress that this agreement will help stanch the bleeding in the American textile industry, which has lost hundreds of thousands of jobs in the past three years. Senator Ernest F. Hollings, a Democrat of South Carolina and an avowed protectionist, has already asserted that Cafta will get rid of the rest of the jobs. At least 80 percent of United States exports to the five countries will become duty free immediately if the pact is approved. The United States' trade with these five Central American countries is significant. They import $9 billion worth of products from the United States every year, the rough equivalent of American exports to Russia, India and Indonesia combined. And the United States imports $11 billion worth of goods from the five countries, with nearly three-fourths of the products entering duty free under special-preference programs. The compromise announced on Sunday with Costa Rica would require a gradual opening of nearly every aspect of its insurance industry and three main areas of its telecommunications industry. Supporters of the trade pact, which was negotiated in one year, view it as a long overdue helping hand to a region that has been ravaged for decades by war and economic deterioration. Mr. Zoellick said that the new trade agreement could also lead to stronger democracy in the region. But critics say the pact asks too much from the smaller countries, especially in demands for protection of United States intellectual property rights, which could limit the availability of inexpensive medicines. And while the United States won its demand for opening the countries for its agricultural exports, with gradual competition for essentials like onions, potatoes, corn and rice, it largely left the American sugar industry protected. The administration's $19 billion in annual farm subsidies were not part of the negotiations. The Dominican Republic is also negotiating with the United States to join Cafta. Mr. Zoellick began those discussions earlier this month. |
1553897_1 | E-Mail on Wheels | computers. Briefly, this schoolyard of tree stumps and a hand-cranked water well becomes an Internet hot spot. It is a digital pony express: five Motomen ride their routes five days a week, downloading and uploading e-mail. The system, developed by a Boston company, First Mile Solutions, uses a receiver box powered by the motorcycle's battery. The driver need only roll slowly past the school to download all the village's outgoing e-mail and deliver incoming e-mail. The school's computer system and antenna are powered by solar panels. Newly collected data is stored for the day in a computer strapped to the back of the motorcycle. At dusk, the motorcycles converge on the provincial capital, Ban Lung, where an advanced school is equipped with a satellite dish, allowing a bulk e-mail exchange with the outside world. The Motoman program is sponsored by American Assistance for Cambodia, a group based in Phnom Penh and run by Bernard Krisher, the Far East representative of the Media Laboratory of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The Media Lab gives technical advice to the Motoman program, which offers third world schools a way to cut costs by sharing one dish and one uplink fee. To some, the Motoman system is a cumbersome compromise, made necessary by a government that makes money through monopolies that inflate the prices of satellite dishes and uplink fees far beyond the means of villages like this one, where individual incomes average $1 a day. ''The 50 poorest countries in the world get more money from telephone access fees than anything else,'' said Nicholas Negroponte, a founding director of the Media Lab. An advocate of an Internet bridge to rural Asia, Mr. Negroponte spoke outside a computer-equipped, online school he and his wife, Elaine, pay for 120 miles west of here. Almost as he spoke -- in early January -- police were raiding Internet cafes in Phnom Penh, confiscating equipment for making Internet telephone calls. The cafes charged as little as 5 cents a minute to call the United States, far below the government-mandated minimum of 96 cents for phone calls using conventional technology. In Phnom Penh, dozens of Internet cafes offer access for 50 cents an hour, and 20 stores sell used computers imported from Japan. About 1,000 Netizens a day log on to the Web site of King Norodom Sihanouk, www.norodomsihanouk.info. A used desktop computer can be bought for about $30 |
1548751_1 | Keeping Track of Visitors | concerns that the United States would excessively humiliate certain travelers, or treat them in an undignified manner. Despite earlier worries that visitors from the Middle East might be singled out for special scrutiny, the program applies to visitors from all over the world. It exempts only tourists from 28 nations whose citizens need not get visas to come to America, though citizens of those nations will be subject to the identification procedures if they are coming here for more than 90 days -- to study, say, or to work. And the United States has required that passports from these countries include fingerprints. The idea of using biometrics -- a physical reading, like a fingerprint -- in addition to a photograph to help verify someone's identity is hardly novel, and should strengthen security at the border. The claim that checking visitors' fingerprints violates their privacy is misplaced. Flying a commercial airliner to another country always entails a surrender of some measure of privacy. Moreover, tamperproof identity checks should lessen the need for the cruder forms of profiling that have been used to screen for potential terrorists. Under the new system, visitors are checked against various lists of wanted criminals and terrorists, and their photos and fingerprints are compared to those taken in their home countries when they applied for visas. The idea, obviously, is to make sure that the person getting on the plane is the same one who was granted the visa. When the program is fully operational, it will also be used at border crossings and at exit kiosks, which will essentially check people out when they leave the country. This last piece of the program is critical. Some of the Sept. 11 hijackers had overstayed their visas, a problem the government has never done a good job of tracking. Indeed, the government has a poor record in fulfilling most Congressional mandates relating to information systems and immigration or border security. That has to change. The security benefits of the program begun this week will be lost if the task is left half-done. Failing to provide all the equipment and personnel needed to do the job right could prove the biggest threat to the system and could deter foreign visitors. Overly long waiting times at customs or excessive delays in processing visa applications would make foreign visitors feel far more unwelcome than a quick scan of their index fingers. |
1548768_0 | 'Wired' Passenger in Paris Was in Motorcycle Garb | When Richard Reid was found with a fuse in his shoe two years ago on a flight from Paris, the discovery foiled a terrorist plot. But on Tuesday, the suspicious wiring on another flight from Paris turned out to be a false alarm. With the United States and France on heightened alert over the prospect of an international hijacking, French security officials at Charles de Gaulle Airport removed a woman from a Delta Air Lines flight bound for Cincinnati after an airport screener noticed some odd wiring in her coat, officials said. The wiring turned out to be an electrical heating system built into her motorcycle jacket, American officials said, and the French determined after a brief detention that the woman had no police record and no known ties to terrorism. The woman, whose name and nationality were not disclosed, was then booked on a later flight, officials said. But officials on both sides of the Atlantic were taking no chances after nearly two weeks of terrorist scares and flight cancellations prompted by the code orange, or high-alert status, which was declared by the United States on Dec. 21. So when Delta Flight 43 arrived at the Cincinnati airport on Tuesday afternoon, it was rerouted away from the main terminal, explosive-sniffing dogs were brought on board, and passengers and luggage were rescreened. F.B.I. investigators interviewed about two dozen passengers before concluding there was ''nothing of note,'' a law enforcement official said. ''There's an attitude that more caution now is better than less,'' the official said. The discovery of the electronic wiring in the woman's jacket ''was really the catalytic event,'' combined with broader concerns of American intelligence officials about threats to flights bound for the United States out of Paris, London and Mexico City, the official said. Flights from those cities continue to undergo heightened security checks, and a Bush administration official, confirming a report on ABC News on Tuesday, said investigators remained keenly interested in finding a passenger who did not show up for an Air France flight to Los Angeles on Dec. 24. That flight was canceled because of security concerns. ''He has potential terrorist links and has received some sort of pilot training and is of Middle Eastern descent,'' the official said. Some investigators suspect that the man may have been part of a terrorist plot but that the abrupt cancellation of the Dec. 24 flight ''potentially |
1548854_0 | World Opinion Is Fragmented On Tighter Security for Visitors | No one would dare to seem soft on terrorism these days. But the new security measures imposed on travel to the United States have sparked strong and starkly different reactions around the world, veering from loud cheering to swift retaliation. In a sense, the response provides a fresh global analysis of the trauma of Sept. 11, 2001, as countries and airline companies, unions and associations frame their views according to their perceptions of their own vulnerability to terrorism and of the likelihood that a plane could be transformed into a guided missile against the United States. Rather than one deep divide, in which players line up either with or against the United States, several fissures have been exposed. Biometrically coded identification like fingerprinting is either the only reliable way to track passengers or a racist act that violates human rights as it singles out citizens of certain countries. A plan to install armed marshals on some airplanes entering the United States is accepted by countries like Israel, which has long used the practice, but is opposed by countries like Portugal, Sweden, Denmark, South Africa and Thailand, which view it as potentially chaotic and dangerous. Some critics of the new measures are suspicious that they are part of a crass political campaign by the Bush administration to keep Americans on guard at least through November's presidential election. There is widespread agreement, however, that coming to the United States will not be more enjoyable because of what William Gaillard, head of communications at the International Air Transportation Association, calls ''the hassle factor.'' ''People are not afraid of flying, but all these security measures take the fun out of flying; it's as simple as that,'' Mr. Gaillard said in Geneva, where the trade group that represents most international air carriers has its European headquarters. ''Is the Bush administration trying to make a point in an election year?'' Michel Ayral, an air transport director for the European Union in Brussels, described the carrying out of the new security measures in a telephone interview as ''unilateralist and impetuous.'' Part of the difficulty in analyzing the new American security measures is figuring out just what they are. One component is the new procedure that went into effect on Monday that requires the fingerprinting and photographing of visitors from most countries around the world. Citizens of 27 countries, including Australia, Japan, New Zealand, Singapore and most European |
1548814_3 | Spam Keeps Coming, but Its Senders Are Wary | in their recent cases against mailers. Still evidence in the e-mail stream suggests violations of the new law are rampant. Postini, a company that filters e-mail for corporations, said that 84 percent of the messages it had seen since Jan. 1 were spam, up from 80 percent in mid-December. But Andrew Lochart, the company's director of product marketing, said the increase was mainly a result of a slowdown in legitimate message traffic over the holiday period. Postini's analysis shows that few messages carry the required postal address and other information, and those that do appear to be from mainstream marketers. ''The volume of e-mail the legit senders send is dwarfed by the junk coming from the bottom feeders who hide their identity and who, for the most part, know how to make themselves untraceable,'' Mr. Lochart said. Brightmail, another filtering company that mainly serves large Internet providers, found that 61.2 percent of the messages it processed were spam in the first four days of this month, compared with 58 percent in December. For mainstream marketers, the most difficult part of the new law is complying with the requirements for removal from e-mail lists. Marketers often hire dozens of e-mail companies, each with its own mailing list, to send out solicitations. Until now, those mailers were responsible for taking people off their lists if they asked to be removed. Now the company whose product is advertised must keep its own do-not-e-mail list assembled from requests sent to each of the companies that it uses to send e-mail offers. In theory, an e-mail user who asks to be taken off a list for a particular sales offer should never receive another solicitation from that marketer again, regardless of which mailing-list company sends the offer. ''This caught many advertisers and list vendors off guard as they only had two weeks to prepare for the logistics of doing this,'' said Michael Mayor, the chief executive of NetCreations, a New York e-mail marketing company. As is often the case, in fact, new regulations make for new business for vendors of all sorts. Ms. Kouzamanoff of Inter7 said that many of her clients were shifting away from using a small number of high-volume servers to send e-mail to avoid having mass mailings detected by spam filters. ''People are sending slower, from more different places, and that means they have to buy more servers,'' she said. TECHNOLOGY |
1547717_0 | British Cancel Another Flight Bound for U.S. | British Airways canceled another flight to the United States on Friday as the Bush administration faced questions from American allies about the reliability of the intelligence information that has led to the recent rash of flight cancellations. The British airline grounded a flight from London to Washington -- the third cancellation over all in 24 hours -- and canceled a flight scheduled for Saturday from London to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Seven international flights have now been canceled since last Saturday after the Bush administration began an aggressive approach to defending American airspace when the nation was put on orange or ''high'' alert on Dec. 21. Administration officials said no arrests had been made in connection with any of the more than a dozen international flights subjected to rigorous scrutiny. And officials have acknowledged that even now, they are uncertain whether they have succeeded in foiling a terrorist plot. ''I don't think we know yet, and we may never know,'' a senior administration official said. The latest concern over the tighter security -- perhaps unparalleled in commercial aviation history -- was raised by Mexico on Friday. A spokesman for President Vicente Fox questioned decisions by the United States on New Year's Eve and New Year's Day to cancel Aeromexico's Flight 490 from Mexico City to Los Angeles. The spokesman, Agustin Gutiérrez Canet, said that armed Mexican agents had been scheduled to fly aboard the flights and that the authorities made special efforts to interrogate passengers closely and inspect luggage. ''Those revisions have found nothing suspicious,'' Mr. Gutiérrez said. ''Where was the risk?'' In another indication of the turmoil resulting from the increased security measures, an American official said that the cancellation of the British Airways flights was not in response to United States safety concerns, but rather was prompted by the refusal of British pilots to fly with armed marshals on board. The United States put other nations on notice earlier this week that it would not allow certain suspicious flights into its airspace without armed marshals on board. In addition to the flight cancellations, foreign airliners have been escorted into American airspace by F-16 military fighters, and a Mexican flight from Mexico City to Los Angeles was turned around in mid-air. The events have left both domestic security officials and international travelers on edge over the prospect of another attack by Al Qaeda. American officials said they were determined to |
1547750_1 | Drop in Business Clients Is Seen After Cancellations | travel season, which they expected to improve over last year, when bookings were depressed by the SARS epidemic and the looming war with Iraq. But the industry's outlook dimmed yesterday as more flights were canceled. ''Given the uncertainties involved, all of a sudden you're playing roulette with the possibility that a flight will operate,'' said Robert W. Mann Jr., an airline industry consultant in Port Washington, N.Y. ''The idea of on-time performance has a new dimension: Is the government going to cancel a flight for you?'' By yesterday, seven flights bound for the United States had been canceled during the holidays, including three by British Airways, which also canceled a scheduled flight to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, from London. The cancellations were in addition to jet escorts by military fighter planes within the United States and the emergency landing of an Air France flight in Newfoundland, where the plane, passengers and baggage were searched. The moves came a week after the government elevated its terror alert to ''high,'' which raised the prospect that the expected increase in travel between the United States and international destinations this year might be thwarted. With many companies closed for the New Year's holiday, neither the airlines nor travel industry experts would estimate whether the incidents were causing passengers to cancel other flights yesterday or over the weekend. ''Quantifying the effect on people's willingness to fly, or the overall cost to airlines at this point is nearly impossible,'' said Chris Tarry, an airline analyst in London. But Mr. Mann said the psychological damage could not be discounted. ''From an industrywide level, this throws cold water on revenue growth,'' he said. Mr. Mitchell said that the longer the episodes continued, the greater the chances that companies would cut back on employees' trips and that the relatively small number of leisure travelers who fly internationally during winter months would put off their plans. ''There is definitely going to be an impact,'' Mr. Mitchell said. But, he added, ''that impact will be mitigated if we get through this quickly.'' The prospects of lost business loom largest at the carriers singled out by the government for terrorism concerns, particularly British Airways and Air France. Should companies and travelers not feel safe using those airlines, they are likely to shift their business to other carriers, a practice the industry calls ''booking away.'' A major example is Pan American World Airways, whose |
1547709_0 | The Battle Against Junk Mail and Spyware on the Web | Americans are smitten by the idea that new technologies will revolutionize life as we know it and greatly expand human potential. This was true of the inventor Thomas Edison, who predicted in the 1920's that the motion picture camera would transform public schooling and might even replace textbooks. An early broadcasting executive, Margaret Cuthbert, made a similar leap when she envisioned radio as ''a great national headquarters for women,'' which would elevate housewives everywhere through high-minded programming like lectures and university courses. Instead of edifying housewives, however, radio gave them long-running melodramas that were dubbed soap operas because they entertained while selling laundry detergent. The story of technology is the story of noble aspirations overtaken by a hard-core huckster reality. This process is on vivid display in the debate about electronic junk mail, which makes up more than half of all the e-mail that travels on the Internet. The communications breakthrough that was supposed to link people and information in revolutionary new ways is turning into a forum for digital detritus that pushes Viagra, pornography and penile enhancements. The spam law that Congress recently enacted will have little impact on this blight. The law makes it easier to know who is sending the spam because it requires the senders to furnish return addresses and other information. But it also guts stronger state statutes, which would have given spammers more incentive to knock it off. The new measure will have little impact on spammers based abroad. Those of us who receive, say, 50 junk e-mail messages a day should consider it a victory if the new law keeps that number constant. We should be ecstatic if the number of unwanted messages goes down, even a little bit. The new spam law does nothing about the invisible programs that invade our computers as we move from one Web site to the next. These insidious programs -- variously known as adware, spyware and snoopware -- can cause computers to call up aggressive ads or can actually track a user's movements through the Internet for use by marketers later on. The most sinister programs can record everything the user does, whether offline or surfing the Net. Internet advertisers realize that ads work differently in the virtual world than in the real one. Ads that are noticed while sitting passively at the edge of a story in a magazine seem to have an impact in |
1549273_0 | Putting the Sex Trade on Notice | Around the world, about one million women and children are seduced into leaving their homelands every year and forced into prostitution or menial work in other countries. Most are duped with promises of good jobs in more prosperous nations. These cases are not confined to remote parts of the world. Of the 15 nations the State Department listed last year as having done little or nothing to stop this growing human rights abuse, five of the worst offenders were in the Western Hemisphere: Belize, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Haiti and Suriname. A study by the Inter-American Commission of Women at the Organization of American States in Washington shows that Latin American nations have mostly sat back as women and children were treated as chattel. Women from Colombia were smuggled as far away as Japan, and Dominican women ended up against their will in Switzerland. Young Mexicans were enslaved in several states, including Texas, Florida and New Jersey. Costa Rica and Belize became destinations for impoverished women from Nicaragua, Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras. Without passports or money, they were forced to supply sex to tourists, usually from the United States and Europe. At least 70 Internet sites promote sex tourism in Costa Rica. Fortunately, all that is beginning to change, largely because of pressure from Washington. Since the United States first passed a law against human trafficking in 2000, an unusual alliance of religious groups, including conservative evangelicals, and liberal women's and human rights organizations has pressed for more action. Evangelical groups were partly responsible for President Bush's strong statement at the United Nations on human trafficking. They also won the appointment of John Miller, a former congressman from Washington State, as an adviser on human trafficking to Secretary of State Colin Powell. The Bush administration deserves credit for its tough stance. Its efforts in Eastern Europe and Asia in particular improved law enforcement and helped women freed from captors. But Washington has yet to give as much attention to Latin America. That needs to change if sex traders are to understand that their free ride in our backyard is over. |
1552686_5 | Heading for the Stars, And Wondering if China Might Reach Them First | collaboration with developed countries, state news media reported. China has also joined with Brazil on satellite launches. In all, China plans to launch 10 satellites this year, and a total of 30 by 2005; it currently has 16 in orbit. The satellites have scientific, commercial and military applications. More bold are China's plans to build on the success of last year's Shenzhou 5 space orbit, and eventually to land on the Moon. Officials say next year's Shenzhou 6 mission is expected to carry two astronauts on a five- to seven-day space journey. Efforts to reach the Moon are beginning in earnest this year, and some experts in the United States speak ominously of a ''Red Moon'' -- the possibility that China might one day launch military astronauts into space with the aim of setting up a Communist lunar base. Last March, Luan Enjie, director of the China National Aerospace Administration, described the Moon as ''the focal point wherein future aerospace powers contend for strategic resources.'' But Mr. Luan and other Chinese officials say China's lunar ambitions are wholly peaceful. Mr. Luan suggested that one of China's primary motivations for reaching the Moon was possible economic exploitation. He told People's Daily, the Communist Party's official newspaper, that China was also interested in developing lunar energy resources, like helium-3, a rare form of the element that scientists say could power advanced reactors on Earth. In an interview this week, Ouyang Ziyuan, chief scientist for China's Moon program, said the program was part of China's larger efforts to become a leader in space. ''China has made a lot of achievements in satellite applications and manned space flight, but we haven't done much in deep space exploration,'' he said. ''We need a breakthrough in this field to fill the gap. As a starting step, the Moon program is very necessary.'' United States government documents, like the Air Force's Space Operations Doctrine and its Space Command's Strategic Master Plan, talk much about maintaining ''space superiority'' near Earth and even about using weapons in orbit. But they remain silent about the Moon. ''There is nothing in Air Force planning for the Moon,'' said Theresa Hitchens, vice president of the Center for Defense Information, a private research group in Washington. Still, some analysts believe the Moon is part of a larger American military plan and interpreted Mr. Bush's speech as unilateral in emphasis, with echoes of the |
1552690_0 | Intolerance in Northern Ireland: Religion, and Now Race | The young couple from China were sitting in front of the television set in their newly rented row house in South Belfast, just before Christmas, when they heard glass shatter. They looked up to see two men standing in their living room with bricks in their hands. One of them battered the Chinese man's face repeatedly. When his wife, nine months pregnant, ran to help, they punched her in the face and tossed her to the ground. Then the men demanded money. The attack drew a crowd of curious neighbors, who watched the men walk out of the couple's home. ''The men got nervous and left,'' said the 31-year-old wife, who with her husband and new baby is now homeless and living rent-free at the Balfour Hotel here. The woman, fearful of more violence, requested anonymity. ''Everyone just watched them walk out. Nobody did anything.'' Although the police arrested one man, he has not been charged and is now free, pending forensics, said a police spokesman. Belfast, once the engine of violence between Catholics and Protestants, is being seized by a new kind of hostility -- racism, fueled in large part by the recent arrival of Asians, blacks, Indians and Pakistanis in Northern Ireland, which in 2001 was still 99 percent white. During the so-called Troubles, the violent 30-year conflict between Catholics and Protestants here, few immigrants, no matter how desperate, chose to settle in Northern Ireland. That slowly began to change with the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, which ushered in a period of relative peace and prosperity. Foreigners looking for jobs, primarily in the health care, restaurant and university sectors, started to trickle in, most of them unaware of the Byzantine rules, credos and allegiances that govern Northern Ireland. Few speak English well, and most stand out because of their skin color. As a result, the number of attacks on foreigners has jumped sharply, particularly in the hardscrabble neighborhood called the Village in South Belfast, which is populated by people called loyalists for their fierce allegiance to the British crown. From April through December, 212 racist incidents were recorded in Northern Ireland, ranging from assault to arson, police statistics show. Five years ago, only a handful of such incidents were reported. The violence has worsened lately. In the last two months, a six-foot plank was thrown through the window of a Pakistani home, two houses have been pipe bombed, |
1552830_3 | The Bush proposal on illegal immigrants is a tentative but important first step. | in the United States, as populations age. As for benefits to developing nations, preliminary results of an incomplete survey by Mark Rosenzweig of the Kennedy School and his colleagues show that earnings increases for migrants over what they made in their home countries are steep. To give an idea, the average increase in annual wages for unskilled labor in 1996 was $7,400, and it was much higher for skilled labor. Also, one fourth of the workers sent ample sums home. What is critical to the equitable distribution of benefits, however, is that workers return home after a few years. Cycling workers would allow more poor workers from a wider range of nations to migrate. Further, says Jagdish N. Bhagwati of Columbia University, these workers are often agents of change when they return, even if they are unskilled, because they bring back new attitudes, financial resources and knowledge. But simply requiring workers to return home is not enough. Attractive incentives must be provided as well, and those in the Bush plan are inadequate. Devesh Kapur, a professor of government at Harvard, who with his colleagues has done comprehensive research in the field, suggests that one possibility is to have the United States retain part of the wages paid to new legal migrant workers in an investment account that is given back to the workers only when they return to their home countries. As for the power of businesses over their recruits in the Bush plan, Mr. Kapur says that employees should be required to work for their sponsoring company for only a limited time, and then be allowed to look for other jobs. For all its benefits, however, greater labor mobility is no panacea in itself. In the United States, for example, a Bush-style immigration program would work best, in my view, in tandem with a reasonable increase in the minimum wage. As for sending nations, Mr. Rosenzweig points out that returning money in the form of remittances is most productive when the economy can adequately channel them to useful investment and social programs. Moreover, some older policies work at cross purposes. Mr. Kapur notes that one reason so many Mexicans flee to the United States is that the North American Free Trade Agreement subjected them to low-price American agricultural competition that is subsidized by the government. More labor mobility, then, is an exciting potential source of growth for all, but |
1552705_2 | The Electronic Verification Is in the Mail | code against the old one. If the fingerprints do not match, then the user knows the document has been altered. Because the actual document is not sent to the database, the creators of the service say privacy is uncompromised. An altered document is not necessarily one that has been tampered with. A faulty data transmission could also change the file and, thus, the resulting hash code. ''If you buy a bottle of Tylenol, and the seal has been broken on it, nobody knows whether there's been a crime committed at that point,'' Mr. Smith said. ''But you sure throw that bottle in the trash.'' Electronic Postmarks can be purchased from the Postal Service site (www.usps.com) for 10 to 80 cents each, depending on the number purchased. The Postal Service estimates sales to date in the tens of millions, though only 5 to 10 percent have been used so far (postmarks purchased but not yet used remain in electronic accounts). Documents carrying the Electronic Postmark must also be signed electronically, using what is called a digital certificate, an electronic representation of the user's identity. One brand of these certificates, GeoTrust, is available through a link on the Postal Service site. The GeoTrust certificate is $19.95 and lasts one year. Authentidate plans to develop the postmark technology for other software, including Adobe Acrobat, Microsoft Excel and PowerPoint, and e-mail programs. Lauren Weinstein, a founder of People for Internet Responsibility, an online advocacy group based in California, questioned the Postal Service's wisdom in turning to a private vendor like Authentidate to develop the service. ''You want to be able to trust what's inside,'' Mr. Weinstein said in a telephone interview, adding that since Microsoft and Authentidate own the software, only those companies know precisely how electronic postmarking works. ''There's going to be a lot of people that are going to claim that this is bad just because Microsoft is involved.'' Others have expressed concern that an Electronic Postmark attached to e-mail could amount to a government-endorsed e-mail tax, something that might be mandated to ensure secure delivery of a document. ''It's a novel idea,'' said Chuck Chamberlain, the manager of business development for the Postal Service of that suggestion, but added that it was hardly feasible. Mr. Smith also dismissed the viability of such a mandate. ''This is only by election of a user, where they see value to doing it,'' he said. |
1549526_4 | Beijing Leaders' Populist Touch Is Not Felt by Most Rural Poor | peasants whose wages disappear in an impenetrable web of unpaid debts. Their woes are a major source of rural instability, the official media suggest. They regularly carry reports of construction workers who beat their bosses, or threaten to kill themselves by jumping off towers they have built, to draw attention to wage arrears. Villagers seek jobs around Yunyang because of big government-financed resettlement projects connected with the massive Three Gorges Dam, about 180 miles down the Yangtze. But government backing has done little to ensure that they are paid. Mr. Li was one of several hundred people recruited to build grand stone stairways, known as the 10,000 steps, connecting Yunyang's relocated city center to the banks of the dam-swollen Yangtze. But while most sections were completed in the last year, workers say they were paid only 30 percent to 50 percent of their promised wages. After Mr. Wen's visit with Ms. Xiong, he ordered local officials to resolve the issue, according to reports in the local news media. Mr. Wen personally intervened not only in Yunyang, but also in other individual disputes around the country. Newspapers and television have reported on the matter regularly, a sure sign of high-level emphasis. But though Ms. Xiong got her money, the limits of Mr. Wen's suasion are clear. At a new Yunyang construction site, not far from the 10,000 steps, workers swathed in layers of sweaters against the wet winter chill complained bitterly that the government had not acted on the prime minister's orders. Mr. He, the crew chief, who said he was a former colleague of Mr. Li on the stairway project, now commands a group of workers building a local park. He said his 27-man crew was owed $7,250 in outstanding wages, though their work was finished last spring. Guo Siyin, another crew chief on the stair project, said he and 30 of his men were owed $8,500. In the two months since Mr. Wen's visit, the workers said they had repeatedly visited the Yunyang County government offices, but achieved little. ''I was there yesterday, and the official told me that we might have some money soon, but only if we stop protesting,'' Mr. He said. ''If we protest any more, he said, we will not get a penny.'' Government officials and construction company bosses blame one another for the bottleneck. Yuan Shaodu, a deputy director of the county construction committee, |
1553596_0 | PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL | |
1553466_1 | Business; So, the Fish Glow. But Will They Sell? | with larger philosophical concerns about genetic engineering. In fact, they say, the fish may need a little more genetic tweaking to really impress people. They suggest that the fish are not all that spectacular, considering the price. Stores generally sell GloFish for $5 to $10; an ordinary silver and black zebrafish may sell for 33 cents to about $3. That is a ''pretty stiff difference for a fish which, in regular light, just has a pink cast to it,'' said Jim Walters, the owner of Old Town Aquarium in Chicago. He said the fish were selling reasonably well but would not be a huge hit. The GloFish is another reminder that the technical problem of genetic engineering is only one hurdle to success in the marketplace. The first genetically modified crop - the Flavr Savr tomato - flopped not because of opposition to genetic engineering, but because of cost pressures in the tomato business. There was also a debate about whether the tomatoes, which had a gene to retard rotting, really tasted better. Alan Blake, the chief executive of Yorktown Technologies, the company that is selling the GloFish, said that sales were meeting or exceeding expectations, except in stores where the fish were priced above the suggested retail level of $5. ''Based on all the feedback we've been getting, when the fish are priced at $5, sales are brisk,'' he said. Also, he and some others in the fish industry said that sales could climb this month, when many hobbyists cash in holiday gift certificates. One problem, some retailers say, is that in normal light the fish do not look as colorful or shiny in the tank as they do in photographs. ''Right next to our tank we have a picture of what they are supposed to look like,'' said Alex Murphy, a salesman at New York Aquaria in Mamaroneck, N.Y. ''Looking at the picture and looking at the tank, they are different.'' Some consumers are disappointed when a fish called a GloFish does not glow in normal light or after the lights are turned off. ''It's not like a glow-in-the-dark sticker or poster or anything like that,'' said Chris Hardwicke, a salesman at the Wet Spot Tropical Fish in Portland, Ore. The fish glow when exposed to black light, which emits ultraviolet rays. But most hobbyists do not use black lights because the light doesn't penetrate water well. Although |
1553569_0 | PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL | |
1553356_0 | Pilots in Europe Look Askance at Marshals | DO guards with guns protect airplanes and their passengers from terrorist attacks? For many Americans, long used to the association of law enforcement with weapons, the answer might seem an obvious yes. But since the United States ordered foreign airlines to deploy sky marshals on some flights to the United States, the question has stirred passionate arguments among airline pilots in Europe, particularly those in Britain, who remain apprehensive about such a role. On Jan. 16, Asa Hutchinson, the United States under secretary for border and transportation security, held inconclusive talks in Brussels with European civil aviation officials, but most of them were not in favor of deploying sky marshals, Gilles Gantelet, a spokesman for the European Commission, said later. Even in those lands where the governments have accepted the American view -- like Britain -- pilots and their managers remain unconvinced and want strict ground-rules covering the way armed guards are deployed. ''My starting position has always been that guns and planes don't mix,'' said Rod Eddington, the chief executive of British Airways, which flies 72 flights a day to and from the United States. The dispute began in late December, when the United States secretary for homeland security, Tom Ridge, said that foreign airlines would be asked to deploy sky marshals on specified flights to, from or over the United States if intelligence information indicated a potential threat. Airlines that did not comply, officials said, could be denied access to American airspace. The use of armed guards as a deterrent to hijackers has been common in the United States for decades. El Al, the Israeli airline, has long used armed, plainclothes marshals on all its flights, and some European airlines, like Lufthansa, have deployed them on selected flights, particularly since 9/11. But in Britain there has been strong resistance to the idea. Armed police officers are still relatively unusual here, and most plainclothes and uniformed officers conduct routine business without weapons. Indeed, security experts in Britain say prevention efforts on the ground before a flight are more effective than intervention in the air. ''Americans have a particular view of how to provide security, and many in the world do not share that vision,'' Amit Chanda and Kate Joynes of the World Markets Research Center, a private political and economic analysis group, wrote in the International Herald Tribune. ''The history of the United States gives it a level of |
1553643_2 | Résumés That Make It Happen | unemployment runs out. You probably weren't home eating bon-bons.'' Ms. Shirit recently advised a client hoping to change her job as a retail executive to public relations, a move the client feels she could make with relative ease. Ms. Shirit agreed that it was a possible transition but that the client's résumé needed updating to reflect her new goals. ''One of her bullet points,'' Ms. Shirit said, ''was 'executed overall boutique operations.' That's good -- executed is a good word. But then she had things like, 'Hiring and training of entirely new team.' That doesn't tell me anything. Accentuate what you did. Be specific. You have bullets there for a reason: to highlight your skills.'' John Karras, director of graduate and Web-based career services at DeVry University in Chicago, calls the years between jobs the ''trade-off factors'' or ''value added,'' when a job seeker can develop extra assets like international travel, fluency in a foreign language, advanced degrees or strong technical or computer skills. ''Focus on the day-to-day activities that may be transferable from position to position,'' he said. ''Companies are often asked what they look for, and they say, 'A leader, a problem solver, someone who is dependable.' They rarely list job experience.'' It is also important to focus on job responsibilities rather than job title, because titles can be ambiguous. ''Take an inventory of the responsibilities you've had over the course of your careers and prioritize them in terms of points of marketability for the job sought,'' Mr. Karras said. ''List the most relevant point first, even if it relates to something done many years ago.'' What's more, you don't have to put your age on your résumé, or list your year of college graduation. Employers in many industries -- especially those that do not require a special degree, like law or medicine -- enjoy hiring older people because they are often more focused and know what they can and cannot do. However, ''If the issue is really breadth of experience rather than age -- if, for example, you have more experience than your potential supervisor -- address the issue head on, turning a potential negative into a positive,'' Mr. O'Neill said. '''As you'll see, I've managed teams of people before. I understand the challenges you face. I can help you succeed. I look forward to the chance to roll up my sleeves and get the job done.''' |
1553614_2 | Ideas & Trends -- Sp@m ShEn@nig@nS!!; That Gibberish in Your In-Box May Be Good News | spammers can't easily fake their identities. Other speakers proposed eco-electronic solutions like digital postage stamps that would put a price on sending e-mail -- trivial for an individual user but making hit-or-miss barrages prohibitively expensive. Like epidemiologists discussing how to predict and control a biological outbreak, conferencegoers compared the merits of various filtering techniques. Which is better: first-order Bayesian, token grab bag, sparse binary polynomial hash or markovian weighting? The meaning of the terms may be opaque to outsiders, but the underlying message comes through: the spammers are up against some increasingly advanced cybernetic artillery. Many experts believe that solving the spam problem will require a combination of approaches. But laws take forever to pass and amend. Technological fixes like sender authentication and electronic stamps would also take time to carry out, but filtering is already here -- and it is reducing the spammers' messages to feeble signals swamped by a roar of alphanumeric noise. The turning point came in August 2002 when a computer scientist, Paul Graham, issued a manifesto called ''A Plan for Spam,'' describing how to filter e-mail using a statistical method discovered in the 18th century by the English theologian and mathematician Thomas Bayes. Bayesian e-mail filters had been studied for years, but with Mr. Graham's paper the idea went mainstream. Presented with thousands of examples of good and bad e-mail, a Bayesian filter compiles a list ranking each word according to how likely it is to appear in junk e-mail. Rising to the top of the roster are high scorers like Valium, Xanax, mortgage, porn and Viagra. Settling toward the bottom are words like deciduous, cashmere and intensify. Hovering in the middle are the vast number of neutral words that can swing either way. When a new piece of e-mail arrives, the filtering program counts up the words and computes an overall ranking. If the number exceeds a certain threshold, the message is rejected as spam. A message from a friend saying that she is so worried about refinancing her mortgage that she took a Valium will pique the filter's interest. But most of the text will probably consist of words with neutral or very low rankings, dragging down the score and allowing the e-mail to go through. If a spam promising ''l0w m0rtg@ge rates'' slips by, the filter is informed by the user that it has made an error. The mutation is then moved |
1553585_0 | PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL | |
1553436_0 | PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL | |
1547906_1 | Burtynsky's Account: Adding Up the Price That Nature Pays | Now, as 2004 begins, Mr. Burtynsky, 48, has decided to step back. ''I'm taking this year off, in a way, without having a monolithic idea of what I want to do,'' he said recently over coffee in a restaurant near his West End Toronto studio. ''I'm allowing the year to be very splintered, where I'm just letting myself touch on different things that have piqued my interest. There are just a lot of things that I want to go look at.'' Mr. Burtynsky's photography is widely collected by major institutions in North America and Europe. The National Gallery of Canada is touring a major retrospective of his work, which will land at the Brooklyn Museum of Art in 2005. But he's taking stock now, thinking about the meaning of the photographs he has done so far and where he will go from here. He has no plans to abandon his trademark look: finding and freezing conflicting ideas within each image. ''I'm trying to invest an image with a dialogue that allows you to enter it and makes you think different things about it,'' he said. ''One day you might like it for its aesthetic value, and the next day you might abhor it for what it represents.'' Lori Pauli, the curator at the National Gallery of Canada who designed Mr. Burtynsky's retrospective, said that his calculated ambiguity helps shift the images from documentary -- which they are since they are neither staged nor digitally manipulated -- into the realm of conceptual art. Mr. Burtynsky will continue to work with this technique, but with closer attention to an underlying theme that binds all of his blasted landscapes: oil. ''One of the threads I saw in all the things I did, anything I photographed, was that this was all possible as a result of cheap fuel,'' he said. ''Yes, we have the technologies and machinery, and the industrial age taught us how to build efficient machines, but fuel was the energy source, and that affected the scale at which we were able to transform that landscape.'' Mr. Burtynsky has explored the notion of oil before, making images of oil refineries with their burnished steel piping, and of the vast fields of derricks, hundreds upon hundreds of them bobbing endlessly as they siphon the crude from deep below the earth's surface. What that activity has spawned is part of Mr. Burtynsky's perennial quest. |
1548120_0 | PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL | |
1548194_0 | Corrections | An article last Sunday about the aging of the world population reversed two figures that described the rate of population growth in the United States last year. According to the Census Bureau, on average an American was born every 12 seconds; one died every 20 seconds. (On Monday the bureau issued a new estimate: one birth every 8 seconds and one death every 13 seconds.) |
1548111_0 | PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL | |
1548098_0 | PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL | |
1548107_2 | Gay Marriage: A Compromise | purists on both sides of this issue will not accept compromise. Rabbi J.B. Sacks Rosen, a gay activist who served for nine years as rabbi to Congregation B'nai Jacob in Jersey City, says he entertains compromise only because it ''affords the civil rights of marriage to those who should be receiving them in any event.'' But he laments ''its refusal to allow clergy to follow the dictates of their conscience regarding their particular religious tradition.'' The Rev. Howard John-Wesley, senior pastor of St John's Congregational Church in Springfield, Mass., says: ''What you propose as a compromise is nothing more than a total sell-out. 'We release ourselves from being moral voices of truth for fear of pressure from gay rights groups in our faith.'" As with all compromises, though, this one would appeal to moderates in both camps. There is precedent in our churches and synagogues for this kind of tacit recognition that some behaviors that are not religiously approved are nonetheless acknowledged because they are legal. Consider common-law marriages, which are recognized in 13 states and honored by other states under the "full faith and credit" clause of the Constitution. Couples in these relationships have the legal status of married couples but no married religious status in most faiths. Nevertheless, practically speaking, when parties to common-law marriages attend many of our churches and synagogues, we treat them as married. We call them Mr. and Mrs., acknowledge their anniversaries and extend their children religious rites and education in the same manner as children born of religiously sanctified marriages. In the debate over gay marriage, the possibility of different venues of marriage and varying degrees of legitimization opens the door for possible give and take. What would be achieved with this arrangement? Religious leaders will acknowledge that gay marriage is here to stay -- in a civil context. And homosexuals will acknowledge that normative religious sanctification of gay marriage is virtually impossible and will not happen. Church and state will remain separate but will collaborate in forging an overall solution for what is both a religious and civil dispute. Because the bulk of marriages in the United States are solemnized under religious auspices, it is we clergy who should initiate this compromise in the hope of avoiding a religious and secular slug fest in which there will be no winners. SOAPBOX Gerald L. Zelizer is rabbi of Congregation Neve Shalom in Metuchen. |
1547977_0 | PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL | |
1548023_0 | From Cereal to Juice, a Year of Innovation | Many consumers may look back at 2003 as the year in which the economy and stock market finally started to bounce back. But it was also a year of product innovation. Consumers could buy portable cereal that never becomes soggy, plastic wrap that clings only to the things they want it to cling to, and orange juice that could lower cholesterol. Packaged-goods companies, in fact, turned out a record 33,678 new food, beverage, health, beauty, household and pet products in 2003, about 6 percent more than the 31,785 introduced the previous year, according to Marketing Intelligence Service in Naples, N.Y., which tracks new products worldwide (www.productscan.com). The previous record year for new products was 2001. The company said 8.5 percent of the new products last year earned its innovation rating, which means that they offered ''breakthrough features or benefits'' in areas like packaging, technology and merchandising. Here are a few of them: Kellogg Drink'n Crunch Portable Cereals. An inner cup contains cereal; an outer cup is filled with milk. The cereal and milk mix in your mouth, not in the cup, so the cereal never becomes soggy. PAM for Baking With Flour. Each squirt of the cooking spray includes flour. Aquafresh Floss 'n' Cap Fluoride Toothpaste. Floss is inside a cap at the top of the tube. Glad Press'n Seal Sealable Plastic Wrap. Adhesive on the plastic sheet makes sticking easier. Minute Maid Premium Heart Wise. An 8-ounce serving contains 1 gram of plant sterols, an ingredient responsible for reducing cholesterol. VIVIAN MARINO BULLETIN BOARD |
1547813_4 | Remedial Work | to justify its use. There was (and is) no compelling evidence that testosterone relieves fatigue or nervousness, and later there was evidence that it might be harmful. Testosterone now qualifies as a postmodern exemplar of snake oil, regularly hawked in that new digital bazaar, the Internet. Women, alas, have been forced to live the most hair-raising chapters in this history: estrogen treatment. Following the isolation of the ''female principle'' in the 20's, doctors began to recommend estrogen to treat the symptoms of infertility and, most notably, menopause. As ''Black Oxen'' attests, the treatment rapidly reinvented itself as an anti-aging tonic. Doctors urged women to undergo ovarian transplants, X-ray ''stimulation'' of the ovaries and, ultimately, hormone replacement therapy; by 1975, 27 million American women were taking hormone treatments. Only later did it become clear that the scientific data suggesting efficacy were far from definitive; by 2002, a large study of hormone replacement therapy sponsored by the National Institutes of Health had to be abruptly stopped because of serious side effects, and experts counseled against estrogen for chronic disease. The estrogen story, however, also illustrates how daunting it is for society to patrol the border between therapy and enhancement. Despite decades of wrongheaded enthusiasm, the initial motivation was undeniably medical -+it looked as if estrogen replacement could prevent osteoporosis, cardiovascular disease and cognitive decline, all worthy goals of preventive medicine. If you accept this subtler version, then the estrogen saga -- and its implications for the future of enhancement -- really becomes a cautionary tale about immature science leading to premature medical applications, egged on by a credulous, grasping public. That's a little different from a broad cultural imperative for perfection. Moreover, there are inherent limitations to the power of these case histories to predict the shape of the future. The initial medical use of estrogen and testosterone, for example, gained momentum in the 20's and 30's, before the Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act of 1938 changed the landscape of prescription medicines by requiring drug companies to prove safety before receiving F.D.A. approval. Perhaps the most important challenge resides in the quandary posed by Gertrude Atherton in ''Black Oxen'': once a drug is approved, some patients are going to demand it as an enhancement, and some doctors are going to give it to them. This is an unsavory fact of medical life: Market demand is an essential component of this dynamic, as |
1548468_10 | Reliving 9/11, With Fire as Teacher | of course, do not make an entire trade center, or even one of the wide-open, acre-size floors in either of the towers. So Dr. Kevin McGrattan, a mathematician at the building and fire research lab, is using the Fire Dynamics Simulator to knit together data from the small-scale tests and calculate the sweep of the fires over the entire 102 minutes of the disaster -- from the impact of the first plane until the second tower fell. His simulations of multiple-floor fires in the north tower show red splotches -- the hottest areas -- starting out near the holes punched by the plane in the north face. As the fires consume the combustible materials there, they creep southward around the floors -- generally remaining hottest around the outside, where broken windows can provide oxygen. Another set of fires rage through elevator shafts and air ducts in the core, spreading the blaze to higher floors. Two other researchers at the lab, Dr. Howard Baum, a fellow at the institute, and Dr. Kuldeep Prasad, a research engineer, have the daunting job of computing how that heat seeps into the steel of the towers. ''No one has yet put all this stuff together, where you have a detailed, physics-based model of the fire, a detailed structural analysis, and have them intimately coupled together,'' Dr. Baum said. But the researchers have come up with a way to do just that, and have already discovered that missing or flawed fireproofing insulation on the steel could be much more important in the disaster than anyone suspected before. Simulations by Dr. Prasad indicate that heat can flow through gaps in the insulation and reach wide stretches of the steel, weakening it structurally and making it more likely to fail. One thing the investigation has not done yet is find a specific sequence of failures that could have brought the towers down. But early studies of how isolated parts of the buildings might fail have produced their own unexpected twist. Suspicion has long centered on the floor trusses, which some experts believe to have been poorly fireproofed and especially susceptible to buckling in a fire. Those suspicions have been bolstered by videos and photographs that show the trusses sagging and possibly giving way in the minutes before each tower collapsed. But preliminary calculations suggest that long before they buckle, the trusses are likely to expand in the heat |
1548593_1 | Officials to Consider Role of Preservation at Ground Zero | rarely dealt with as unconventional a site as ground zero. To begin with, the trade center site falls far short of the ordinary 50-year age requirement for registry eligibility. That, however, can be overcome with a finding that it possesses exceptional significance. More challenging, the site is both a mass graveyard and a neighborhood in its own right, brimming with emotional resonance but almost devoid of the three-dimensional structures that once made it a global cynosure. It is now a raw-edged precinct in which every protrusion of steel or concrete can signify to many people the most memorable and painful day they will ever know. In the review, for instance, a balance may have to be found between preserving the remnants of the towers' footprints, which are still partly visible as rusted steel column footings around the base of the site, and accommodating a permanent PATH terminal. As another example, participants may find themselves weighing the loss of the last of the trade center garage, with levels that are still vibrantly color coded, against the construction of Freedom Tower. No one expects this to be easy. ''In a difficult process of such high visibility, with so many interested parties, perhaps not everyone will be happy,'' said Bernadette Castro, New York State commissioner of parks, recreation and historic preservation, in what may prove to be a considerable understatement. Ms. Castro is also vice chairwoman of the federal Advisory Council on Historic Preservation which oversees the review process. She said she might end up recusing herself from one of the two roles. Ground zero is subject to review under Section 106 of the preservation act because the government is providing financing for the new PATH terminal, through the Federal Transit Administration; the reconstruction of West Street-Route 9A, through the Federal Highway Administration; and the activities of the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, through the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Kevin M. Rampe, the president of the development corporation, said historical resources at the site would also be studied under a separate environmental review. The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which owns the trade center site and is developing the permanent PATH terminal, will probably be most directly affected by the review. Its cultural resources consultant is Dr. John A. Hotopp, senior vice president of the Louis Berger Group, which was involved in the recent disinterment and reburial of some |
1548592_0 | A Chance for Scholars to Assess Ground Zero's Historical Significance | Architectural preservationists are coming to the rescue one more time. Thanks to these intrepid souls, the ground zero design process may shortly enter a new stage. Legitimacy, it might be called. Preliminary discussions are being held today on a federal review of plans to develop the World Trade Center site. As stipulated by the National Historic Preservation Act, the so-called Section 106 review requires that the site's historical significance be officially evaluated before federal money can be used to rebuild it. For the first time, in other words, independent scholars will have the opportunity to address publicly the historical meaning of ground zero and its value to future generations. This is welcome news indeed. Not since the milestone Supreme Court decision that upheld the preservation of Grand Central Terminal has there been a landmarks issue of comparable importance to the future of urban America. The review may well liberate the site from the clutches of politicians, architects, their publicists and other unqualified figures who have presumed to speak in history's name. And it could slow the breakneck redevelopment timetable imposed by Gov. George E. Pataki. More important, if done properly the review will be a pioneering undertaking in cultural archaeology, for it will explore not merely the value that is inherent in urban artifacts but also the mechanisms a society uses to confer value on some artifacts and withhold it from others. Historical significance, that is to say, is in the memory of the beholder. In the case of ground zero, it resides in the conflicts that arise when memories disagree. So the review ought to arouse philosophical as well as historical debate. What is there, after all, to be preserved? A void? Little physical evidence remains of the twin towers. The void itself has been voided by the new temporary PATH rails that run under the ground where the towers once stood. This voided void is densely packed with history nonetheless: with the layers of ideology encoded by the towers and by the critical responses to them, and with the changing perceptions of architecture as the city around them evolved. Peering into this void could substantially alter the scope of historic preservation itself. I propose that we begin this cultural excavation by sifting through the stratum nearest us in time: the plans developed by the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation since its creation after 9/11. We can learn about the |
1548520_1 | Rubin Gets Shrill | projections that this deficit will decline over time aren't based on ''credible assumptions.'' Realistic projections show a huge buildup of debt over the next decade, which will accelerate once the baby boomers retire in large numbers. All of this is conventional stuff, if anathema to administration apologists, who insist, in flat defiance of the facts, that they have a ''plan'' to cut the deficit in half. What's new is what Mr. Rubin and his co-authors say about the consequences. Rather than focusing on the gradual harm inflicted by deficits, they highlight the potential for catastrophe. ''Substantial ongoing deficits,'' they warn, ''may severely and adversely affect expectations and confidence, which in turn can generate a self-reinforcing negative cycle among the underlying fiscal deficit, financial markets, and the real economy. . . . The potential costs and fallout from such fiscal and financial disarray provide perhaps the strongest motivation for avoiding substantial, ongoing budget deficits.'' In other words, do cry for us, Argentina: we may be heading down the same road. Lest readers think that the most celebrated Treasury secretary since Alexander Hamilton has flipped his lid, the paper rather mischievously quotes at length from an earlier paper by Laurence Ball and N. Gregory Mankiw, who make a similar point. Mr. Mankiw is now the chairman of the president's Council of Economic Advisers, a job that requires him to support his boss's policies, and reassure the public that the budget deficit produced by those policies is manageable and not really a problem. But here's what he wrote back in 1995, at a time when the federal deficit was much smaller than it is today, and headed down, not up: the risk of a crisis of confidence ''may be the most important reason for seeking to reduce budget deficits. . . . As countries increase their debt, they wander into unfamiliar territory in which hard landings may lurk. If policymakers are prudent, they will not take the chance of learning what hard landings in [advanced] countries are really like.'' The point made by Mr. Rubin now, and by Mr. Mankiw when he was a free agent, is that the traditional immunity of advanced countries like America to third-world-style financial crises isn't a birthright. Financial markets give us the benefit of the doubt only because they believe in our political maturity -- in the willingness of our leaders to do what is necessary to |
1548529_1 | U.S. Institutes Fingerprinting At Entry Points | had now passed. Intelligence leads have pointed to potential attacks ''around New Year's and beyond'' on British Airways flights between London and Dulles International Airport outside Washington, an administration official said. Those flights were canceled for two straight days last week because of security concerns, and were delayed for a third day on Monday. An American official said part of the concern over the London-Dulles flights was driven by intercepted communications that contained phrases believed to refer to British Airways Flight 223, the London-Dulles flight that has been the focus of the heaviest American and British security. Last Wednesday, Flight 223 was escorted to Dulles by American fighter planes, and flights on Thursday and Friday were canceled. Officials said delays and possibly cancellations on the London-Washington route were likely to continue indefinitely. In contrast, concern has lessened over international flights into Los Angeles from Paris and Mexico City. Those routes, like the London-Washington flights, were the subject of intense concern for much of the last two weeks, but officials said intelligence developed through electronic eavesdropping and other means narrowed the prospect of attacks to the Christmas and New Year's holidays. American officials said that they believed the fingerprinting program would strengthen border protection over the long haul, but that they did not expect it to have any immediate impact on the recent efforts to deter another terrorist attack since the country went to high alert. At airports around the country Monday, some international visitors said the additional screening procedures were slowing down customs lines, as inspectors struggled with new digital fingerprint scanners and cameras on tripods. Citizens of 27 countries, including Australia, Canada, Japan, New Zealand, Singapore and most European nations, are exempted from the program if they are visiting as tourists for fewer than 90 days. But if citizens of those countries are traveling here on work or student visas, or for more than 90 days, they are subject to the new procedures. They, along with all residents of other countries -- about 24 million travelers a year, including some repeat visitors, the Department of Homeland Security said -- must be fingerprinted and photographed under the new rules. Between 5:30 a.m. and 6 p.m. Monday, 27,420 foreigners were fingerprinted and photographed under the new program, department officials said. ''So far it's going well,'' Robert C. Bonner, the commissioner of Customs and Border Protection, said of the program, which the |
1550942_4 | Strong Depth Of Emotion And No Frills In 2 Footprints | in this direction in late 2001. Mr. Gehry urged me to read Seneca, but Marcus Aurelius proved more helpful. Where have we come from? Where are we going? What is the nature of this place? Ms. Tharp boxed my ears until I admitted that continuity matters more than rupture, especially at times when rupture isn't hard to find. She suggested reading Carl Kerenyi's ''Eleusis,'' a Jungian study of the religious center of ancient Athens. Subtitled ''Archetypal Image of Mother and Daughter,'' the book characterizes the Eleusian mysteries, which were initiated by Demeter's search for Persephone, as a quest for identity. This seemed like an accurate way to describe what New York was going through as it began to fantasize its future. But where might that quest lead? It led me to question whether New York still practices the Western arts of self-renewal. It has been decades since the city's cultural institutions have exercised leadership in this regard. The erosion of that leadership is part of the twin towers' story. Never was this clearer than in the weeks following 9/11, when the city's rear-guard activists began clamoring for the restoration of Ye Olde New York street patterns to the World Trade Center's superblock site. I could understand the archaeological impulse. But why stop with Olde New York? Why not keep digging and digging until we get to the dark, archaic bottom of things? To Eleusis itself, for example, and to the Callichoron, the Well of the Beautiful Dances. According to legend, Demeter came and sat by the well to mourn the loss of Persephone, her daughter, to the underworld. The women of Eleusis gathered round to comfort her, an event later ritualized in dance as part of the Eleusian mysteries. For two millennia, Athenians went there to be initiated into the belief that death is a blessing, not a curse. Separation, reunion, abundance: that was the eternal Mediterranean cycle, for cities as for crops. Remembering follows dismemberment. You go down into the earth to be separated. You return to be reunited and to flower. Mr. Walker's deciduous trees will keep the city mindful of change. If we are a Western city, and if we believe that Western values are worth fighting for overseas, the peaceful struggle must be conducted here at home. A Western identity, even a hybrid one, cannot be taken for granted. It must be earned anew, by redescribing |
1554043_0 | Leaving Some Children Behind | The No Child Left Behind Act is potentially the most important school initiative to come along since the country embraced compulsory education in the early 20th century. But the goal of providing all children with qualified teachers and high-quality schooling may slip away unless Congress provides the money needed to do the job and holds the line against groups that are working to undermine the law. Those interest groups are especially peeved by a provision that requires the states to raise achievement levels for all categories of students, including children with disabilities, who have usually been shunted into separate classes and excluded from state achievement tests. A hard-core faction of school administrators and legislators argues that the six million children who receive special education services under federal law will never catch up and should be exempted from higher standards. Congress has thus far rejected this argument and must continue to do so. The percentage of children with cognitive disorders, like retardation, that make it impossible for them to learn is relatively small. No Child Left Behind has already established flexible procedures for states that wish to exempt these children from the requirements of the law. But many of the children who have been dumped into special education classes are not disabled. They are teachable children who have fallen behind or who present disciplinary problems. Among those with disabilities, perhaps as many as 70 percent are teachable children who suffer from learning or language-related disorders. These children tend to flower when provided with teachers who know how to teach them -- but such teachers are rare in public schools. According to federal estimates, only about a quarter of all teachers know how to teach reading to the 4 in 10 children who do not catch on automatically. Critics of No Child Left Behind want to abandon disabled children by counting them out of the push for higher standards. The better solution is for well-trained teachers to help them succeed. |
1553992_5 | Built for the Arctic: A Species' Splendid Adaptations | did 25 years ago. He and other researchers fear that while the worldwide population of polar bears, estimated at 30,000, is not imminently threatened, subgroups like that of the western Hudson Bay may well be wiped out if the climate continues to heat up. ''It would be a sad day,'' said Dr. Schliebe, ''if polar bears weren't around for future generations to enjoy.'' Especially considering that the polar bear has barely begun to live. Genetic and biochemical analyses reveal that polar bears diverged from brown bears -- the group that includes grizzly and kodiak bears -- a mere 150,000 or so years ago, making the polar bear one of the most recently evolved mammals on earth and roughly as youthful as modern Homo sapiens. The bears are believed to have become isolated from other brown bears during a glacial period, said Dr. David Paetkau, president of Wildlife Genetics International in Nelson, British Columbia, and to have quickly adapted to a glacially based life. Today the bears are found throughout the circumpolar north, around Alaska, Canada, Greenland, Norway and Russia. They do not live in the Antarctic, and any depictions of polar bears with penguins is a Santa Claus fantasy. Polar bears are renowned, and beloved, for their bright white fur, although the fur in fact has no pigment. Each hair is a clear tube that reflects all wavelengths of light and so appears white. Scientists have a variety of theories to explain the coat's cast. By the most familiar one, white fur evolved because it allowed the bears to blend in with the snow and more easily sneak up on prey. But as Dr. James D. Roth, a research assistant professor in biology at the University of Central Florida in Orlando, points out, during the winter when polar bears are hunting, it is almost always dark. Dr. Roth says some experts have proposed that the white fur is instead a way of minimizing heat intake, when the places where the bears summer can reach 90 degrees. ''Heat stress is such a problem for the animals,'' he said, ''and being white could help.'' Polar bears share with all bears an extreme disparity between the size of the mother, in the quarter-ton range, and that of a newborn cub -- about a pound. ''It's dramatic trait in the bear family,'' Dr. Paetkau said. ''They're off the chart among placental mammals, and closer |
1553998_0 | 'Overlooked' No Longer | ''The Complete Guide to Mental Health for Women,'' edited by Dr. Lauren Slater, Dr. Jessica Henderson Daniel and Dr. Amy Elizabeth Banks. Beacon Press, $24.95. Why women's mental health? Why not just general mental health? The answer, the authors of this home reference conclude, is that men and women are different, in mind, body and psyche. ''They are different in hormonal development, in brain development, in physiological development and in social development,'' they say. Add to that the fact that models of female psychological development are for the most part male, and the authors' contention that ''we have been overlooked'' appears to be well founded. The book is a collection of observations by psychologists and psychiatrists. Among the many topics covered are postpartum depression, menopause, aging and its effects on mood and memory, why women are at greater risk for developing schizophrenia in midlife or old age, issues of sexuality, women of color and relationships, domestic violence, and afflictions from addiction to eating disorders. We learn that little is known about what a ''normal'' female sexual response is, that women exposed to trauma develop later problems at rates higher than men, and that depression in women strikes earlier than in men. The book provides valuable advice on drug and other treatment options, exercise and physical activity, how to find and choose a therapist, and what questions to ask a psychiatrist. BOOKS ON HEALTH |
1554007_6 | In a Mental Institute, the Call of the Outside | of my work as clinical director. Until one recent meeting of unit leaders, when Dr. C. announced: ''We've come to a decision. Enough is enough. No more cellphones!'' I was shocked. As far as I knew, our wireless experiment had been going reasonably well. ''Why?'' ''Because they were too disruptive.'' Dr. C. was uncharacteristically irate. ''There was a constant ringing on the unit. All these different ring tones. Some people would put them on vibrate mode and sneak them into group and then want to walk out to answer their calls. Or they would be talking to their friends and would ignore the nurses. ''Plus, patients would arrive on the unit without a cellphone and when they found out that everyone else had cellphones, they would get them.'' Internet access, e-mail, instant messaging -- that was one thing, in Dr. C.'s eyes. But cellphones brought in the world in real time. They were too ''now,'' too intrusive. The final straw was the new camera phones: how could you ensure anyone's privacy? Clearly these devices brought in the outside world with startling and unwelcome immediacy. What about patients' rights to communicate? The other unit chiefs besieged her with questions. What about their autonomy? Dr. C. countered: patients with cellphones interfered with the other patients' rights to peace and quiet. She would not be swayed. ''There's only one exception,'' she said. ''Patients who are looking for jobs need to have voice mail, something that doesn't indicate that they are in a psych ward. So we keep their cellphones in the nurses' station and they can retrieve them once a day to answer their calls.'' And so our experiment ended. Laptops and Palm Pilots, yes. Internet connections and e-mail, fine. But no cellphones. Two months later, things are much quieter on the unit, Dr. C. reports. Much more asylum-like again. After a certain amount of grumbling, patients are again participating in activities. Is it over? I don't know. Here at the institute, our enthusiasm for wireless connectivity has been tempered by reality. We have reclaimed a fragment of asylum. But my guess is that we will face a next challenge by the wireless world, and that we will continually have to work to define our relation to it. My guess is that the battle has just begun. A DOCTOR'S JOURNAL Dr. David Hellerstein is clinical director of the New York State Psychiatric Institute. |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.