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1587321_0 | PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL | |
1587339_1 | It's a Long Way to Corfu: A Modern-Day Odyssey | for Christos Katehis and Andoni Prikas, two Greek-American sailors far from the legendary Troy, Corfu is a distant destination. The men started across the Atlantic Ocean last Sunday from Sheepshead Bay, near where they live. They were aboard a 40-foot sailboat called Adele, in a bid to fulfill a dream and commemorate the Olympic Games in Athens, which start on Aug. 13. The trip will take about 10 weeks, and their first stop will be in roughly two weeks in the Azores. At a sendoff from the Miramar Yacht Club, Mr. Katehis and Mr. Prikas accepted blessings from a Greek Orthodox priest, pats on the back from family and friends, and kudos from the Brooklyn borough president, Marty Markowitz. ''This will be Brooklyn's gift, from the Greek-American community in Brooklyn to the Greek people,'' Mr. Markowitz said. Of course, he noted, the sailors may be confronted with dangers, like piracy or terrorism. And like Odysseus, who washed up on Corfu clinging to a board, the men face the specter of rough weather. Joe Sammut, the yacht club's commodore, said people had traveled across the ocean by sailboat, but usually with crews of more than two. Still, he said the sailors were well prepared, with bottled water and canned food, a Global Positioning System, a marine sideband radio and a weather tracking system. None of which has kept the men's friends from worrying. ''They're nervous,'' Mr. Katehis said. ''It's a small boat for people who don't understand, but with this boat you can cruise the world.'' Mr. Katehis, 40, a caterer who was born on Corfu, said he and Mr. Prikas, 36, a computer programmer who was born in Queens, hope to set an example. ''I want people to be inspired to follow their dreams, period,'' Mr. Katehis said. ''Everybody should come out of their shell and follow their dreams.'' With that, he said a few more goodbyes and climbed aboard the boat. After a few laps around the harbor, the men motored off. The auxiliary motor is used only for docking and in an emergency. Back on the dock, Mr. Katehis's friend Cindy Fiumano described him as a hard worker with a sense of humor. ''I'm sure people are afraid; it's a scary thing,'' she said. But, she added, ''I'm sure that's not been going through his head, because he's like a big kid.'' JAKE MOONEY NEIGHBORHOOD REPORT: SHEEPSHEAD BAY |
1587228_2 | Thoroughly Modern, Thoroughly New England | still being landscaped, this will eventually make a fine setting to sit or to stroll. ''This expansion really marks the beginning of a new era for the museum,'' said Kathleen O'Grady, chairwoman of the Aldrich board of trustees. ''The building will allow us to strengthen our core mission of presenting cutting-edge contemporary art and, through the dedicated education center, further our nationally recognized education programs.'' Larry Aldrich (1906-2001), a contemporary art collector and fashion designer, founded the Aldrich Museum in 1964. It originally occupied a historic home on Main Street -- adjacent to the new structure -- known as Old Hundred. That building will now provide offices for the museum. Based on an abstraction of traditional New England architecture, the new building has been designed to blend in with the historic neighborhood. For instance, painted wood siding consistent with the buildings along Main Street covers the exterior walls, while a native Connecticut granite base helps the building mesh with its semirural setting. The design also features a double-peaked multilevel roof that slopes downward toward the back. This gives the museum the appearance, from the front, of a traditional New England home and a starker, more modern look from the rear. It is a clever solution to the problem inherent in having a contemporary art museum in a historic district. Much of the building is also designed to mesh the inside with the outdoors. ''We wanted to embrace the context rather than turn our backs on it,'' Mr. Philbrick said. To this end, a series of landscape views are built into the design. Approaching the front door of the museum, for instance, you look through the glass-walled lobby to the sculpture garden on the other side. It makes the building seem transparent at that point. Linking the two wings of the building, on the second level, is an open landing. From here, facing forward, you get terrific views of the old building and Main Street, while to the rear you look out onto an aging ash tree and the sculpture garden. It is just another example of the sensitivity to context with which the building was planned. But the project has been mildly contentious. ''This has been a difficult process for us,'' said Leslie Ide, chairwoman of the Ridgefield Historic District Commission. ''We were very concerned about the whole idea of a new, modern building here. But in the end we |
1587094_6 | Mother-Daughter Deck Chairs | the best thing about the voyage. We shared a queen-size bed. Even on the most high-tech, high-falutin' superships, a cruise is a step back into the past. People stroll up and down the decks arm in arm. A waiter in a white jacket serves real beef bouillon to the queasy. It's not an upper-class thing; the tea is Lipton's, and smoking is permitted on the port side in designated areas. Every cruise begins with a mandatory lifeboat drill; the announcement is piped very loudly into each cabin over an intercom. And sure enough, every passenger turned out on windy decks to listen to crew members explain how to enter a lifeboat during a disaster at sea. There was much good will and surprisingly little facetious banter; a few younger passengers giggled and shouted ''I'm on top of the world.'' Behind me, an older gentleman, no doubt remembering an earlier Titanic movie, sourly whistled ''Nearer My God To Thee.'' Even with a jangly casino that offered blackjack, roulette and slot machines (and an A.T.M.), bingo seemed by far the most popular activity onboard (besides breakfast, lunch, drinks, dinner and late-night snacks). We had to fight to get a table in the Spinnaker Lounge for the last game of the trip. It was a cheerful crowd, but when a burly man named Raymond won a raffle for a free weekend in Atlantic City, and then 20 minutes later won the $20,000 jackpot, things turned ugly. There were boos, Bronx cheers and someone hollered, quite loudly, ''Everybody hates Raymond.'' The Norwegian Dawn offers other gambles, most notably a regular art auction. In the Dazzles Lounge, free champagne is served while an auctioneer speed-sells everything from a Miró watercolor valued at $25,000 (bidding started at $8,000 but it went unsold) to a group portrait of the Florida Marlins 1993 starting lineup, with each player's signature scrawled beneath his chest. Fine art is the Norwegian Dawn's vanity point: a real Matisse, a van Gogh, a Monet and a Renoir hang in its fanciest restaurant, Le Bistro. They are on loan from the personal collection of the owner, Tan Sri Lim Kok Thay, who is chairman of Star Cruises. A series of Andy Warhol Pop Art lithographs line the walls of the central staircase, but the ship's gleaming white hull is covered, graffiti style, with giant painted copies of the signatures of Picasso, Matisse and van |
1587243_0 | PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL | |
1587079_0 | Sex Without Estrogen: Remedies For the Midlife Mind and Body | ''SEX life for women doesn't end with the menopause,'' wrote Dr. Alex Comfort in ''The Joy of Sex,'' his landmark self-help book from the 1970's, ''unless they have been convinced that it should.'' Unfortunately, quite a few women fall into that category. Although 10 percent of a group of women in midlife who were tracked by researchers at Pennsylvania State University said they were having better sex than when they were young, about 60 percent reported a loss of sexual desire, responsiveness or frequency. Are things bound to get worse? After all, the number of women reaching midlife is rising, just as hormone replacement therapy -- formerly the first-line remedy for the sexual difficulties associated with menopause -- has become less popular. But the future is not necessarily grim for aging women, specialists say. The problems these women encounter are varied, and have a range of solutions having nothing to do with hormone replacement. Dr. Comfort, who was also a noted geriatrician, had a pithy summary of the things that can derail a woman's sex life: ''The things that stop you having sex with age,'' he wrote, ''are exactly the same as those that stop you riding a bicycle (bad health, thinking it looks silly, no bicycle).'' The first, ''bad health,'' need not even have a direct effect on hormones or genitals in order to put a damper on a woman's sex drive. ''If a woman is dealing with breast cancer, her ability to reach orgasm is not the most important thing in her life at that moment,'' said Dr. Jill M. Wood, an instructor in women's studies at Penn State. ''Any sort of health issue,'' Dr. Wood said, ''arthritis, diabetes, even a partner having an illness, interferes with a woman's sexual response.'' And how about the biggest physical change of all, when the ovaries stop producing the female hormones estrogen and progesterone? For women who experience some of the most distressing symptoms of menopause, it might be hard to stay sexual through the worst of it. Hot flashes and night sweats can make a woman unwilling to be touched, and vaginal dryness can turn sex into an ordeal. Now that fewer women are taking hormone replacement therapy because of fears about long-term side effects, the worry is that legions of estrogen-deficient baby boomers will be forced to endure those symptoms with no relief in sight, their lives a vast |
1587231_0 | PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL | |
1587058_4 | Travel | and other modern malaises -- seems nearly as distant as that of Ulysses and Agamemnon. More relevant is George Sarrinikolaou's FACING ATHENS: Encounters With the Modern City (North Point, $18), which, while not an attractive book, is an important one. He too writes of the spirit of Greece, but it has changed considerably since Durrell's day. Sarrinikolaou, a journalist turned environmentalist, was born in Athens in 1970 and lived there until he was 10, when his parents emigrated to the United States. Now, returning as an adult, he sees his city ''gripped by greed, corruption and racism'' and finds himself deeply disturbed by the forces that are shaping it today: unbridled growth; systemic corruption; large-scale immigration and the violence and resentment it engenders; ''the mad, unending, exhausting force of competition.'' Sarrinikolaou explores numerous sides of Athens -- the slums and the rich suburbs, the church and the soccer stadium -- as he considers the uneasy relationship of so many modern Greeks with tradition and the past, interspersing these observations with memories from his own childhood. If today's Athens is ruled by cynicism and opportunism, he reflects, there are ample reasons for it: ''In the span since this nation was founded, its leaders have turned on each other and on the people; they have sided with tyrants, killers and other assorted monsters, while, all along, they have stolen from the public coffers.'' The author sees his friends and relatives maneuvering uneasily between the crude and difficult present and a treasured but quickly receding past. The Parthenon, still surviving above Athens's teeming bustle, symbolizes the Greek ideal of omonia, or harmony, which is disappearing from daily life: ''It is as if the ancient Athenians built this temple with their modern descendants in mind, providing them with a spiritual refuge in their time of need.'' The church has ceased to offer any such refuge, having become merely an arena for largely meaningless ritual gestures. This becomes poignantly clear on Easter, the great Orthodox holiday, when city dwellers return to their native villages. Sarrinikolaou watches as the family of Michalis, his cousin's husband, engages in the eating of the lamb, the drinking and finally the time-honored folk dance, the tsamiko. ''And I understand that everything -- the planning, the trip, the lamb -- has been the buildup to this: father, mother and son just dancing. The moment is short-lived. And I sense that the |
1587087_2 | Fighting Dryness, With Pills, Gels and Rings | Because the vagina absorbs what it needs and excretes the rest, sanitary pads are useful. Some women may get a harmless brownish discharge with Replens, said Dr. Isaac Schiff, the chief of the Vincent Memorial Obstetrics and Gynecology Service at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. CAVEAT -- Moisturizers may not provide enough comfort during sexual relations and personal lubricants may still be needed, doctors say. Vaginal Creams These products contain estrogen. BRANDS -- Premarin Cream, Estrace Cream. AVAILABLE -- By prescription only. WHAT THEY ARE BEST FOR -- They are soothing and proven to be effective in building estrogen levels in the vagina to thicken the vaginal tissue. DOWNSIDE -- They are messy, and Dr. Peacocke said they contain possible irritants like propylene glycol. CAVEAT -- As with all medications containing estrogen, there are concerns that it will be absorbed into the bloodstream and affect breast and uterine health. Dr. Schiff said that the estrogen in vaginal creams could be absorbed into the blood, but noted that the absorption rate decreased as the treatment progresses and the vaginal tissue thickens. Vaginal Rings These plastic rings contain estrogen and stay in the vagina for three months. BRANDS -- Estring, Femring. AVAILABLE -- By prescription only. WHAT THEY ARE BEST FOR -- Both brands will help build vaginal tissue; Femring, which contains a higher dose of estrogen, is intended to help with hot flashes. Rings are convenient: they only need to be replaced every three months. DOWNSIDE -- Some women may want a doctor to insert the ring, which means an office visit every three months. Vaginal Tablets This is an estrogen tablet that is inserted into the vagina once daily for the first two weeks, and twice a week thereafter. BRAND -- Vagifem. AVAILABLE -- By prescription only. WHAT IT IS BEST FOR -- Building up the estrogen levels in the vagina to thicken the vaginal tissue. The low level of estrogen is not absorbed into the blood. It is increasingly popular with doctors, and it is not messy. DOWNSIDE -- Does not treat hot flashes. Natural Estrogen Creams and Herbal Remedies These products claim to be replacements for estrogen or to ease symptoms of vaginal dryness. BRANDS -- Various. AVAILABLE -- On the Web and in stores that carry alternative health products. DOWNSIDE -- There is no research to show that the products provide any benefit for vaginal dryness, experts |
1587149_12 | The Virtue In $6 Heirloom Tomatoes | North Carolina -- even as many of its vendors have followed the same path from fringe to hip to the edge of mainstream. There seems to be some agreement among Mackey and businessmen like Steve Demos, the president of White Wave, which makes Silk soy milk, that the battles for consumer attention (good taste, recognizable brands), as well as the fight for agricultural validation (sustainable farming, no antibiotics), have largely been won. It's the push to get their ideas about socially responsible business into the mainstream that is just beginning. Demos says: ''Wall Street -- that's where the fun begins. They only measure one thing, the bottom line. My goal is to demonstrate that the principle-based business model is more profitable than its counterpart, and when we do, Wall Street will chase us instead of the other way around.'' Hence the virtue of big profits. ''Our industry should focus on making the most money possible,'' he says. Mackey, of course, is just as fervent a capitalist -- or neocapitalist, as he calls himself, since he characterizes his early political views as socialist and says his ardor for free markets came late in life. He simply maintains that there is no conflict between an aggressively capitalistic enterprise like Whole Foods and a socially responsible enterprise like Whole Foods. He is steadfast that his company will never compromise with Wall Street on its values -- the 5 percent of profits given every year to charity, the installation of solar panels on the tops of some stores, the payment to employees for their community service. At the same time, Mackey says the company won't compromise its intentions to make as much money as possible along the way. ''One of the things that's held back natural foods for a long time is that most of the other people in this business never really embraced capitalism the way I did,'' Mackey says. It irks Mackey that some of his oldest customers don't accept that the road to profitability runs directly into the mainstream. ''I don't know how many letters we get from people who resent that,'' he says. He affects a mocking tone: '' 'You've sold out,' they say, or, 'Don't forget about the little people who supported you when you were nothing.' '' It's interesting, he adds, that when an idea that began on the fringe hits the mainstream, it's no longer hip and |
1587072_1 | New Looks At Old Questions | enough to prevent fractures and maintain libido in most women. With that knowledge, we need to go back and carefully study which menopausal and postmenopausal problems are related to the surgical removal of ovaries and which are tied to the natural course of menopause itself. And we still need to develop blood tests that can more reliably measure a woman's hormone levels. That's the only way we will know what is normal for a postmenopausal woman. Since the conclusions in 2002 of the Women's Health Initiative, which studied the effects of hormone replacement therapy using the popular formulations Premarin and Provera, several studies have examined the effects of other variations of estrogen and progestin that are more like the hormones a premenopausal woman would make naturally. For example, the Million Women Study, a British study reported in 2003, showed that even estradiol and progesterone, which have been considered bioidentical hormones, increased the incidence of breast cancer; and Well-Hart, a national study reported in 2003, showed that estradiol did not prevent the progression of atherosclerosis. These findings are supported by the fact that postmenopausal women with high levels of their own natural estrogen and/or testosterone are at higher risk of breast cancer than women with lower levels. T HE problem with hormone therapy does not lie in the ''flavor'' of hormones (bioidentical or synthetic), but the fact that women are programmed to have high levels of hormones for reproduction and then shift down to lower, safer levels postmenopausally. However, even this, my favorite hypothesis, needs to be tested. We can no longer take for granted that we understand how postmenopausal women's bodies work. We need to pay more attention to individual organs. The breast duct and lobules, where breast cancer begins, contain fluid with estrogen levels many times higher than the levels in the blood. This would suggest that the breast makes its own estrogen. Is this true in everyone, or only in women with a high risk for breast cancer? And the relationship of estrogen and progesterone to breast cancer is not straightforward. High doses of estrogen and progestin have been used to treat metastatic breast cancer with success. At the same time, current treatments, which reduce estrogen levels, are equally beneficial. How does this work? I wish I knew. The one thing we know for sure is that it's time to get the elephant out of the middle of |
1587096_3 | At the Helm of Home | took two centuries before that vision was fully realized, and for a brief period canals were the main arteries of commerce, not only in France but all across Europe. Railroads soon replaced them as a cheaper, faster means of transporting freight, but France's canals, though largely obsolete, are exquisitely maintained. I had plenty of time to think about all this because I was gliding gently along at about 3 miles an hour, slow enough to spot the bird warbling above me in one of the 100-year-old poplars planted to shade the towpath where horses once drew barges along the canal. We had set off from Paris with clothes and a carload of groceries, a Monopoly board (the Paris version) and a deck of cards; by early afternoon we were in St.-Florentin, a lovely hillside town built around a 16th-century church. Rive de France operates the small port there and rents a variety of pleasure boats with which to ply the canal. Within half an hour I was getting a rapid-fire rundown of our boat: how to start it, how to steer it, and how to work the hand pump toilet. Our boat was a floating mobile home named Rimbaud, with a double bed in a tight but cozy cabin aft and a double Murphy bed that folded out of a wall in the main room, fore. A narrow galley kitchen connected the two. The tiny toilet and a shower were discreetly closeted on one side. Eager to see as much as possible, I pushed the throttle forward and we hummed away at the maximum speed -- just under 4 miles an hour. Before long, I had a white cabin cruiser in view and soon was in its wake, ready to overtake it like an impatient driver on the freeway. A chipper man in his 60's, piloting the boat from a deck chair surrounded with potted geraniums, waved as I pulled by. But my haste was soon tempered by our first challenge a little more than a kilometer a way: one of the 209 locks that divide the canal into gradually ascending or descending steps of water. Our British neighbor caught up with us and we went through the lock together. After our trouble exiting, I suggested he go on ahead so we wouldn't slow him down. He seemed surprised at my suggestion and said the point was to go slow. |
1587404_3 | Threats to Rights and Financial Barriers to Poor Are Cited at Graduations | elective surgery, the ultimate cosmetic all designed to maintain hunger for stasis. While children are being eroticized into adults, adults are being exoticized into eternal juvenilia. There is nothing more satisfying, more gratifying than true adulthood. The process of becoming one is not inevitable. Its achievement is a difficult beauty, an intensely hard-won glory, which commercial forces and cultural vapidity should not be permitted to deprive you of. Anthony W. Marx President, Amherst College Amherst, Massachusetts Our great colleges and universities have hit a wall of blocked opportunity. At our top colleges, only one-tenth of our students are drawn from the poorer half of the population, only 3 percent from the bottom quarter. In our society, economic disparities have been growing, not declining. They have grown also in these educational institutions that are supposed to be a source of redress. The assumptions we all once made of steady progress in this country have proven false: Our nation and our colleges are moving toward an inequality not seen since before the Great Depression. Madeleine K. Albright Former Secretary of State Duke, Durham, N.C. One of the most moving stories to come out of Sept. 11, 2001, involved a passenger on United Flight 93, which went down in Pennsylvania. That passenger, Tom Burnett, called his wife from the hijacked plane, having realized by then that two other planes had crashed into the World Trade Center. ''I know we're going to die,'' he said. ''But some of us are going to do something about it.'' And because they did, many other lives were saved. Since that awful morning, the memory of their heroism has inspired us. It should also instruct us. Because when you think about it, ''I know we're going to die,'' is a wholly unremarkable statement. Each of us here this morning could say the same. It is Burnett's next words that were both matter-of-fact and electrifying: ''Some of us are going to do something about it.'' Those words, it seems to me, convey the fundamental challenge put to us by life. We are all mortal. What divides us is the use we make of the time and opportunities we have. Dick Cheney Vice President Florida State, Tallahassee, Fla. I know it's the custom for graduation speakers to draw from their experiences. There's one very practical lesson that comes immediately to mind. I learned that in the year 2000, when President |
1587188_2 | Thoroughly Modern, Thoroughly New England | eventually this will make a fine setting to sit or stroll. ''This expansion really marks the beginning of a new era for the museum,'' said Kathleen O'Grady, who chairs the Aldrich's board of trustees. ''The building will allow us to strengthen our core mission of presenting cutting-edge contemporary art and, through the dedicated education center, further our nationally recognized education programs.'' Larry Aldrich (1906-2001), a contemporary art collector and fashion designer, founded the Aldrich Museum in 1964. It originally occupied a historic home on Main Street -- adjacent to the new structure -- known as ''Old Hundred.'' That building will provide offices for the museum. Based on an abstraction of traditional New England architecture, the new building has been designed to blend in with the historic neighborhood. For instance, painted wood siding consistent with the buildings along Main Street covers the exterior walls, while a native Connecticut granite base helps the building mesh with its semirural setting. The design also features a double-peaked multilevel roof that slopes downward toward the back. This gives the museum the appearance, from the front, of a traditional New England home, and a starker, more modern look from the rear. It's a clever solution to the problem inherent in having a contemporary art museum in a historic district. Much of the building is also designed to mesh the inside with the outdoors. ''We wanted to embrace the context rather than turn our backs on it,'' Mr. Philbrick said. To this end, built into the design are a series of landscape views. Approaching the front door of the museum, for instance, you look through the glass-walled lobby to the sculpture garden on the other side. It makes the building seem transparent at that point. Linking the two wings of the building, on the second level, is an open landing. From here, facing forward, you get terrific views of the old building and Main Street, while to the rear you look out onto an aging ash tree and the sculpture garden. It is just another example of the sensitivity to context with which the building was planned. But the project has been mildly contentious. ''This has been a difficult process for us,'' said Leslie Ide, who chairs the Ridgefield Historic District Commission. ''We were very concerned about the whole idea of a new, modern building here. But in the end we worked with the architects and made |
1587343_0 | The Sweet and the Sour Of 'For Sale by Owner' | WE are a do-it-yourself nation. Call it Emersonian self-reliance, bootstrapping individualism or the Home Depot effect, but many Americans would rather take care of the home front themselves, thanks. That applies to selling their houses, too. As home prices have soared across much of the nation, many people of modest incomes have found themselves in half-million-dollar houses -- and have decided to cash in. But because a typical agent's fee is 6 percent, some $30,000 of such a sale goes out the picture window at the closing. It's enough money for a starter BMW, or a year's tuition at many colleges. Reaping such a windfall, of course, is hardly automatic. You have to do plenty of homework, not to mention all the agent's legwork. Some sellers lose patience and hire an agent anyway. Still, more Americans are deciding that the potential for rich rewards is worth the headaches. Among the property owners who sold their homes in 2003, some 14 percent -- or one in seven -- bypassed agents, according to the most recent data from the National Association of Realtors, which, naturally, is uneasy about the trend. That is down from the record level of 18 percent, in 1997, but up from 13 percent in 2001. And as rising mortgage rates and a sluggish economy inspire cost-cutting moves, do-it-yourself selling may spread. A proliferation of Web sites devoted to the idea prompted the association to predict last October that ''for sale by owner'' homes could soon account for one sale in four. Ready to try it? Take a deep breath. The first step is to educate yourself, through how-to books or dozens of Web sites, about things like determining your home's value and knowing which legal documents to prepare, where to get them and how to fill them out properly. In addition, you will spend from a couple of hundred dollars to perhaps a few thousand to hire an appraiser, pay a title search company to prepare documents and other forms, and perhaps hire a lawyer to review it all. But no matter how much how-to or professional help you get, showing the property and negotiating the price are still your jobs. The first task can be a nuisance. Basically, it means that you must let any stranger track mud across your carpet and peer into your closets, instead of having an agent screen for serious buyers. The second |
1587089_0 | On Hormone Therapy, the Dust Is Still Settling | TWO years after a bombshell dropped on hormone replacement therapy, there are signs that the rush away from the drugs is ending. In July 2002, a federal study, part of the Women's Health Initiative, was halted when its data showed the dangers of hormone therapy outweighing its long-term benefits. Sales of the drugs -- estrogen and estrogen-progestin -- plunged. But new figures show that in recent months the drop appears to be bottoming out. Some doctors report an upswing in demand from menopausal women unable to find other sources of relief. Drugmakers, who have introduced low-dose versions of the products, are making their first new marketing forays. And some prominent doctors are even beginning to argue that women have been needlessly scared away from treatment. Of course, the grand hope of the past is gone: that giving older women a substitute for the estrogen they produced in their youth could stave off heart disease, strokes and dementia. The new approach emphasizes the lowest dose for the shortest time -- and only for relief of hot flashes and other menopausal symptoms. Does the new détente represent a dangerous compromise or medical moderation? Some women's health advocates caution against rushing back to hormones. ''I would not argue with the idea that the Women's Health Initiative doesn't answer every last question we have about hormone therapy,'' said Amy Allina, program and policy director for the National Women's Health Network in Washington. ''I am concerned, though, that the medical community is resistant to accepting the implications of this research and worried that some women may be getting false reassurance.'' ''Many doctors have had a very hard time figuring out how the world looks now that they have these results,'' Ms. Allina said. ''So there's a tendency to fall back on the old ways, to find reasons why the findings shouldn't apply to their patients.'' Others see a sensible new equilibrium. ''Hormone therapy has lost its luster for the prevention of chronic diseases, but it will still be used for the treatment of hot flashes and other symptoms, and I think short-term use will become nearly as frequent as before,'' said Dr. JoAnn E. Manson, chief of preventive medicine at Harvard's Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston and a principal investigator of the Women's Health Inititative. ''I don't think the pendulum will swing back entirely, but I think it will be used more often than |
1586227_0 | U.S. to Divulge More About Modified Crops | Responding to criticism that a controversial farming practice is shrouded in secrecy, the Department of Agriculture plans to disclose more information about crops that are genetically engineered to produce pharmaceuticals, an official said yesterday. The official, Cindy Smith, the deputy administrator for biotechnology regulatory services, said in an interview that the department planned to begin using its Web site to post its analysis of the risks and environmental impacts of the crops that are being grown in field trials. ''We do agree that more transparency would reassure the public and the stakeholders,'' Ms. Smith said. ''We want to be more transparent in advance of this technology really scaling up.'' Biotechnology companies say that genetically modified crops could be a way to produce certain pharmaceuticals inexpensively. Food companies and environmental groups, however, have objected, particularly to the use of food crops for this purpose. A commonly expressed fear is that drugs might inadvertently end up in somebody's corn flakes. Critics have also complained about the lack of information about the field trials and the lack of public discussion before permits are granted. The Department of Agriculture makes some information about field trials available. But it usually leaves out what pharmaceutical is being produced, the acreage involved, and the location other than the state, because such data are usually classified as confidential business information by the company conducting the trial. The new policy seems likely to mollify critics, although not completely. It would allow the public to comment before a permit is issued for field trials deemed large or risky enough to require a formal environmental assessment. But there would be no comment period, Ms. Smith said, for smaller, more routine trials that receive a more abbreviated risk assessment. The Agriculture Department would still not disclose information that companies consider confidential, she said. The new policy comes as the number of such field trials is on the rise after a hiatus. Companies applied for 13 permits and public research institutions for three, in the 12 months that ended in April, according to a report being issued today by the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a consumer group. That came after a sharp decline in trials that occurred after incidents in 2002 in which corn containing a pig vaccine became intermingled with food crops, even though the authorities said the problems were caught before any such food was eaten. The company |
1586269_6 | Where Butterflies Rest, Damage Runs Rampant | biologically diverse jungle after the Amazon. Environmentalists predict it could disappear within the next two decades. The old-growth pine forests in the northern Sierra Tarahumara and its rich diversity of wildlife face threats from drug traffickers who burn down the trees up to 200 years old to plant marijuana. Villagers who stand against the traffickers have been killed. Two peasant leaders, Isidro Baldenegro López and Hermenegildo Rivas Carillo, were arrested last year without warrants. Amnesty International considers them prisoners of conscience, comparing their arrests to the government's abuses against the forest crusaders Rodolfo Montiel and Teodoro Cabrera of the state of Guerrero. But no forest's plight draws more attention these days than the monarch butterfly reserve. Homero Aridjis, a poet, author and leading Mexican environmentalist, said: ''The federal government has no control. The state government has no control. The forest has become a no man's land.'' The World Wildlife Fund reported two years ago that some 40 percent of the butterfly reserve had been destroyed from 1971 to 1999. Last month, the organization reported that more than 500 hectares have been lost in the last three years. Aerial photographs, the group said, showed that the villages of Francisco Serrato and Emiliano Zapata had lost all of their forests. ''I have climbed the mountains to ask my people why they are cutting the forests,'' said Alejo Claudio Cayetano, an Indian leader in the ejido, or community, of Cresencio Morales. ''They tell me that if they do not cut them, others will, and then they will have nothing.'' People in the ejido of El Paso fight hard to hold on to their forest. The camp of plastic tents beneath their towering pine and Oyamel firs is their battle station, manned by grandmothers and sons, who leave their homes five days a week to help guard the trees. Last year, the leader of the ejido, Armando Sanchez Martínez, discovered a truck loaded with wood that had been illegally cut from their forest. He set it on fire. Then a couple of months ago, after gunmen fired on his truck, Mr. Sanchez bought a handful of rifles and handguns and recruited the other ejido residents to serve on civilian patrols. Their support, he said, was unanimous. ''The illegal loggers wanted to shoot one of us to frighten us and take our forest,'' he said. ''Now they are going to have to shoot us all.'' |
1587842_1 | U.S. May Cut Third of Troops In South Korea | increased concerns about the intentions of that closed society. This week, American and South Korean security officials are conducting regularly planned talks on the future of the alliance. But conservative editorial writers and politicians are already accusing the liberal government of President Roh Moo Hyun of allowing anti-American views to flourish unchecked, provoking Washington to cut back sharply on the American military presence. Conservative South Koreans are also complaining that the United States is surrendering a bargaining chip that would have been useful in nuclear weapons talks with North Korea, even though Pentagon planners say South Korea's security would not be affected. The Grand National Party, a conservative opposition party that has traditionally supported the American military presence, on Monday described the troop cut plan as ''shocking and surprising.'' But not all shared that view. Outside the Defense Ministry in Seoul on Monday, protesters took the news as a chance to rally against the American troop presence. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has been actively drawing up new designs for American forces worldwide, not just in South Korea, to take advantage of new technology to more rapidly assess threats and more quickly move troops to meet them. The Pentagon has also proposed moving two Army divisions out of Germany and making other changes to European-based forces to reflect different security needs since the end of the cold war. Since last year, Pentagon officials have said a reduction of troops in South Korea was a logical, even likely, outcome of the effort to reorganize forces. But the proposal presented to the South Korean government on Sunday by Richard Lawless, deputy under secretary of defense for Asian and Pacific Affairs, was the most specific yet, even though it remains under discussion. In a statement, Mr. Lawless said, ''Details are being worked out as the process of consultation with the Republic of Korea continues.'' Kim Sook, head of the North American division of South Korea's Foreign Ministry, said his government would review the proposal before responding. But he referred to the plan as ''the notification from the United States,'' implying that South Korea might not have much influence over the timing and numbers of American troops to be withdrawn. The proposal was reported Monday in The Wall Street Journal. Mr. Rumsfeld's trip to South Korea in November foreshadowed the changes, but he said his efforts to reorganize forces there would not diminish either |
1587790_2 | Lost Luggage Is Rare, but the Trauma Can Be Acute | to Tim Bruins, a senior account executive at the Maritz Travel Company, a corporate travel agency in St. Louis, that was the fate of 40 passengers who arrived on an Iberia Airlines flight in Barcelona for a cruise that his firm organized. Deprived of their luggage, they were unable to buy new clothes at the first port, Villefranche, France, because it was Sunday and shops were closed, or at the next port, Corsica, because it was a national holiday there. ''At this point, my staff and I began swapping clothes with the participants to make them as comfortable as possible,'' Mr. Bruins said. ''At Rome, our next port, all guests without luggage went and bought new clothes. Of course, all the luggage showed up that day.'' What are frequent fliers to do to prepare for the worst? It helps to pack a change of clothing in a carry-on bag, to include identification inside of luggage in case the luggage tag falls off, and, if checked bags fail to arrive at the airport, to file a claim immediately with the airline's baggage services agent. Passengers can collect up to $2,500 for each lost, stolen or damaged bag on domestic flights, but only a flat $9.07 a pound for lost goods on international routes. John K. Hawks, co-author of ''Traveler's Rights: Your Legal Guide to Fair Treatment and Full Value'' (Sourcebooks, 2003) and executive director of the nonprofit Consumer Travel Rights Center, recommends taking photos of the contents of luggage before it is packed, as well as writing a packing list. ''It comes down to persistence and documentation,'' he said. ''Don't walk away unless you've gotten what you needed from the baggage services agent. The key is to get in writing what the airline will do and the person's name who took your claim.'' Mr. Hawks has two other pieces of advice: ''Never pack any item in your checked luggage that you cannot afford to lose. And never leave anything on the plane you wouldn't want to never see again, no matter what the airlines say.'' For passengers who wonder where vanished luggage goes, the answer is often Scottsboro, Ala., home of the Unclaimed Baggage Center, a store that buys unclaimed bags from airlines and sells their contents to the public. Begun in 1970 by Doyle and Sue Owens on card tables stocked with lost luggage from Greyhound buses, the center has |
1593308_3 | Courting Minorities, Kerry Promises Expanded College Access | at the convention of the National Council of La Raza, to unveil proposals to help educate more highly skilled workers, particularly in the sciences, and to increase the rate at which all students, but especially minorities and women, graduate from college. ''In an era when college graduates will earn $900,000 more than high school graduates over the course of a career,'' he said, ''less than a third of all Americans have a four-year college degree, and less than a fifth of all African-Americans do.'' He promised to spend $300 million to encourage girls and members of minority groups to study science and math in programs like all-girls math and science schools and to double the $95 million budgeted for National Science Foundation graduate scholarships. Mr. Kerry also said he would require colleges to report annual figures on the number of minority, low-income and middle-income students enrolling and graduating, and make available $100 million in incentives to colleges that raise graduation rates of low-income students receiving Pell Grants. He said he would provide $10 billion in federal relief for states that commit to keep their college tuition increases at or below the rate of inflation for two years. He said he would pay for the programs using $30 billion raised by auctioning off more of the broadcast spectrum for digital television and other broadband wireless services. A spokesman for the Bush-Cheney campaign, Steve Schmidt, pointed to a USA Today article on Monday saying increases in financial aid had reduced tuition costs in recent years. ''Kerry's cynical attacks are at odds with the facts that more Americans have college degrees than ever before and the amount students pay in tuition costs is down by a third since 1998,'' he said. Mr. Jackson said Mr. Kerry had hit a nerve by citing the Florida recount, the Bush administration's efforts to roll back overtime rules and the Supreme Court's conservative makeup. ''You can't compare Kerry with Clinton,'' said Mr. Jackson, who noted that President Bush had failed to meet with civil rights groups. ''Compare him with Bush. It's a closed-door policy. So if he speaks of Supreme Court justices who are fair and open, he speaks of workers' right to organize, he is coming right down the center of it.'' Mr. Kerry's listeners in Chicago praised him but said his 50-minute speech was taxing. James Thomas of Detroit, who sells insurance and investments, said |
1588547_0 | Europe Knows It Needs a Lot of Immigrants. But It Also Fears Them. | TERRORISM has come to Europe. The Continent's economic growth seems to lag perennially behind that of the United States. But neither of those things topped the list of worries for some European business and political leaders who gathered here this week for an international business conference. Instead, they worried about babies, or more specifically, about a lack of them. The tone was set by Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, the former president of France, who presented a series of demographic projections indicating that many European countries would be losing population at a rapid rate within a couple of generations. Meanwhile, he said, nothing of the kind would be happening in the United States, thanks to immigration. Those who remember the fears of the 1970's, when there was Malthusian talk of too many people using up the world's resources, might think that a time of falling population would not be all that bad. In her 1995 novel ''Children of Men,'' P.D. James invented a time when, because of some environmental disaster, no babies had been born for decades. Real estate prices fell and some towns gradually lost all their inhabitants, but what made the situation unbearable was the fear the human race was vanishing. There is no danger of that now, of course, at least not from demographic trends. Europeans have babies, just not enough of them to provide future workers to pay their parents' and grandparents' retirement benefits. The pay-as-you-go system seems to demand more workers just to finance benefits already promised. There is an obvious solution, as Jean-René Fortou, the chief executive of Vivendi Universal, noted when asked about Mr. Giscard d'Estaing's demographic worries. ''The Mediterranean was for many centuries a single world,'' he said. ''We could have very strong synergies with the countries'' of North Africa, where population growth continues. Now the opposite is happening. Michael Fuchs, co-owner of the Impex Group, a German advertising company and a Christian Democratic member of that country's Parliament, dismissed talk of immigrants seeking work. They were, he said, trying to get welfare benefits. Moroccan businessmen at the world congress of the International Chamber of Commerce said European visas had become difficult to obtain. Europe fears that visitors will stay, whether as terrorists, welfare recipients or workers who take jobs when unemployment is already high. Taieb Fassi-Fihri, an official in the Moroccan foreign ministry, complained about ''the nonintegration'' of Europe with the Arab world, |
1593023_0 | MEMO PAD | AIRPORT CAPACITY STRAINS -- Mainly because of a return of robust business travel and the growth of low-fare carriers, 9 of the 35 top airports in the United States are operating above their passenger levels before Sept. 11, 2001, and 6 more will exceed pre-9/11 passenger levels by the end of the year, said Marion C. Blakey, the administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration. Over a longer term, more runways and other facilities are needed, the United States Department of Transportation reported last week. The agency said the report is the first to evaluate in detail air travel patterns and economic and population projections against current service and capacity at domestic airports. According to the study, 15 airports will need to add capacity to accommodate growth over the next decade. The list includes Metropolitan Oakland International; Bob Hope in Burbank, Calif.; Long Beach; John Wayne-Orange County; Tucson International; Albuquerque International; San Antonio International; Houston Hobby; O'Hare International; LaGuardia; Kennedy International; Newark Liberty International; Philadelphia International; Palm Beach International and Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International. PRIVATE SCREENERS REDUX -- An 18-month test program at five airports to evaluate the benefits of allowing domestic airports to again use private companies, rather than federal employees, for passenger and baggage screening has been declared a success by the Department of Homeland Security. The agency issued guidelines last week for any airport interested in replacing federal screeners with private ones. The agency said that the test program had shown that security and customer service at the five participating airports was ''comparable to airports staffed with federal screeners.'' Airports wanting to replace federal employees with private ones for security screening can submit applications starting Nov. 19. SECURITY AND PRIVACY -- Corporate travel managers are increasingly uneasy about the way the federal government is putting in place plans with airlines for a passenger screening system that will register and classify travelers based on perceived risks. So far, at least half a dozen airlines have been identified as sharing passenger personal records with the federal government as new passenger prescreening and registered-traveler programs are developed. The corporate travel managers trade association has previously said its main concerns were that mistakes in using detailed personal information from a range of data banks could cause delays and added costs to business travelers mistakenly identified as questionable or unacceptable risks. Nancy Holtzman, the group's executive director, expressed misgivings about the secretive procedures. The |
1593006_4 | Brazil's Big Stake in Cotton Likely to Become Bigger | vast sugar cane fields and orange groves. Perhaps no place better illustrates Brazil's cotton revival than Mato Grosso, a sprawling, sparsely populated state tucked beneath the Amazon rainforest that is drawing farmers in droves from all over the country in search of cheap land and low labor costs. Blessed with soil rich in nutrients and a near-perfect mix of sunshine and rainfall, the state now produces more than half of Brazil's cotton crop, almost all of it harvested on large-scale plantations with American-made machinery. ''This is certainly one of the most competitive cotton-producing areas in the world,'' said Gérald Estur of the International Cotton Advisory Committee in Washington, especially since fields in the state -- as in most of Brazil -- are not irrigated. ''We're talking about a region where yields are equivalent to those for irrigated land. That's pretty remarkable.'' Brazil's cotton boom has put the country at loggerheads with neighboring Argentina, where textile manufacturers complain they are being flooded with cheap cloth made from Brazilian cotton. But Argentina's cotton growers have one advantage over their Brazilian competitors: they can plant genetically modified seeds. That cuts production costs significantly because such crops require half as much pesticide as conventional cotton. Gene-altered crops are still officially banned in Brazil, though the government made an exception this season for soybeans. Cotton farmers here say they could increase productivity even more if genetically modified crops were legalized. In a nod to the growing importance of agribusiness for the Brazilian economy, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, once a vocal critic of genetically engineered crops, has hinted that he now favors legalization. But some influential members of his left-leaning government remain opposed to such a move. Cotton growers are becoming tired of waiting. ''If the government doesn't legalize transgenic seeds soon,'' said Mauro Itio Takahashi, 50, who grows cotton in the states of São Paulo and Minas Gerais, ''a lot of people are going to plant them anyway.'' Even if Brazil does make the switch to biotech cotton seeds, the country's creaky infrastructure and crowded ports will probably limit its ability to grow as a major exporter in the years ahead. It is also unlikely that the country will stop importing fiber anytime soon, given strong local demand for high-grade pima cotton, which is grown primarily in the southwestern United States. ''Brazil's potential to become a big cotton exporter is endless, especially when |
1591611_0 | 4 Rivals Near Agreement on Ways to Fight Spam | Four large Internet service providers agreed yesterday to a partial truce in their battle with one another over potential technology to stop junk e-mail in hopes that they can devote their united energy to fighting spam. More than a year ago the four providers -- America Online, Yahoo, EarthLink and Microsoft -- said that they would work together to create technical standards that could verify the identity of the sender of an e-mail message. Most spam, and nearly all of the messages in the rapidly growing identity-theft fraud known as phishing, is done with a fake return address. Many experts suggest that a system that could identify and discard such falsely addressed messages is one of the most potent possible weapons against spam. ''The biggest thing we can do to reduce spam is sender authentication,'' said Brian Sullivan, the senior director for mail operations at America Online. But the Internet providers have supported different technical approaches. Last month, Microsoft agreed to merge its proposal, called Caller ID, with another, called Sender Policy Framework, or S.P.F., backed by America Online and EarthLink. The new name of the combined standard is Sender ID. Yahoo had continued to support a very different approach, called Domain Keys, that is more technically powerful but would take longer to carry out. In an announcement yesterday, the two remaining camps agreed to give limited support to test each other's technology. ''Over the last year, we had four gorillas learning how to dance,'' Mr. Sullivan said. ''Finally we can work from the same choreography.'' Meng Wong, the author of the S.P.F. protocol, praised the agreement. ''It's good news because we now have a road map,'' he said. ''We can proceed with S.P.F. and Sender ID now and with Domain Keys as a second wave.'' Indeed, proponents said the two approaches had the potential to be complementary. The Internet provider that sends an e-mail message can use both methods at the same time to vouch for the veracity of the sender's address. And the provider that receives a message can also look to either approach to help determine whether a message should be discarded as spam. America Online and EarthLink said yesterday that they would use Domain Keys by the end of the year. And Yahoo said it would probably start using both Domain Keys and Sender ID by the end of the year. Microsoft did not commit itself |
1591614_4 | WHITE HOUSE SAYS PRISONER POLICY SET HUMANE TONE | abuse and torture, Mr. Bush told reporters in the Oval Office that torture ran counter to the values of the United States and that he would never sanction its use. ''Let me make very clear the position of my government, and our country,'' Mr. Bush said. ''We do not condone torture. I have never ordered torture. I will never order torture.'' Briefing reporters after releasing the documents, Mr. Gonzales said they highlighted ''the thorough and deliberative process the administration used to make policy decision on how to wage the global war on terrorist organizations.'' Although he acknowledged that some of the legal issues raised during internal administration debates were controversial, he said the principles settled on by Mr. Bush were ''more narrowly tailored'' than the legal theories offered by his lawyers and made clear that torture was not an option for interrogation. The ''abstract'' discussions about stretching the bounds of the law on torture and interrogation were never made available to ''soldiers in the field, nor to the president,'' Mr. Gonzales said. With the administration clearly eager to distance Mr. Bush from the debate over what kinds of interrogation techniques were allowable or legal, the Justice Department on Tuesday described as irrelevant and unnecessary a detailed, 50-page memo sent by the department to the White House in August 2002 on the legal restrictions on torture, saying the document was now considered irrelevant. The memo, which leaked out in the news media earlier this month, appeared to offer a legal rationale for harsh treatment of Qaeda prisoners, setting a high bar for what constituted torture. It was sent from the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel to Mr. Gonzales. The memo concluded that under international law banning torture, a tactic ''must inflict pain that is difficult to endure'' and that ''physical pain amounting to torture must be equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death,'' according to a copy released by the administration. But a senior Justice Department official said the document was ''overbroad and irrelevant'' and was unnecessary because no one in the administration had ever asked for the legal authority to torture captives. The department is now rewriting the entire memo in a less abstract, more case-specific context, the official said. The official said prisoners in Iraq were clearly covered by the Geneva Conventions and that |
1591555_1 | Fast Track at the Airport | aren't likely to be many complaints about the intrusiveness of the program. A similar program at some border crossings is already in place. A 90-day test starts in July; airlines hope to enroll up to 10,000 frequent fliers. But before the program can expand nationwide, the government must address two concerns. One involves privacy rights, the other the overall flow of passengers. Registered travelers may be willing to let the government sift through their backgrounds so their identities can be verified at airports, but the government cannot use this authorization as a blank check to use a person's data for other purposes. Nor should the program itself be deployed elsewhere, becoming an overarching security screen in public spaces. Participants should be allowed unfettered access to their records and a form of appeal if the information is wrong. The government's track record in this area is not heartening. Congress ordered a far more intrusive and compulsory computer-profiling system to screen all ticket buyers. A General Accounting Office report last March found that after many delays, the Transportation Security Administration had not yet addressed seven of the eight issues identified by Congress as vital -- among them privacy and accuracy. It now looks as if the registered traveler program may be operational long before computer-profiling is done of all passenger manifests, but the government must not be lulled into thinking that because this is a voluntary program, it can be lax about privacy. As for the benefits, travelers have to realize that joining the program won't be like getting E-ZPass for the turnpike. They will still go through security -- shoes, change and laptops in the bin, the whole routine -- but will be spared from additional screening unless they trigger an alarm for some reason. They will presumably gain precious minutes from being in a line, like some frequent-flier lines already in place, that moves faster simply because everyone knows the drill. The program could be especially beneficial for the people routinely picked for extra scrutiny because of things like their names or travel patterns. Airports are starting to be awfully crowded again, and in some terminals the security agency's resources are stretched pretty thin. This raises the other danger posed by the registered traveler program. Those of us who choose not to register shouldn't be discriminated against with even longer waits that would make the fast lanes look more appealing. |
1591797_3 | Until a more thorough study is done, it is impossible to know whether private or federal airport screeners perform better. | -- including the availability of law enforcement officials to the airport and the screening company's resources -- to choose them from among the 19 airports that applied to use private screeners. It is likely that this process yielded airports that gave the private screeners an advantage over the remaining 424 federally screened airports for reasons having nothing to do with whether the screeners were federal or private. This problem is known as selection bias, as the selection and application process stacked the comparison in a particular direction. Indeed, micronumerosity is probably the only reason that selection bias did not cause the studies to find that private screeners outperformed federal ones, irrespective of the true state of affairs. Random assignment of some airports to use private screeners and others to a control group with federal screeners would solve the selection problem. A recent memorandum by the Office of Management and Budget explains the benefit of random assignment: it ''ensures, to a high degree of confidence, that there are no systematic differences between the groups in any characteristics (observed and unobserved) except one -- namely, the intervention,'' which in this case means the intervention to allow airports to opt out of federal screening. In a noteworthy break from past practices, the budget office advised agencies in its revised Program Assessment Rating Tool, ''The most definitive data supporting a program's overall effectiveness would be from a randomized controlled trial, when appropriate and feasible.'' The acting administrator of the Transportation Security Administration, David M. Stone, testified that he planned to continue evaluating the effectiveness of private and federal screeners after the opt-out program took effect. So here is a proposal. Suppose 70 airports apply to opt out of federal screening and are deemed eligible. Rather than grant all 70 authority to use private screeners at once, randomly select half of them to opt out and half to continue with federal screeners. This sample is large enough to estimate the cost difference to within $1 million or so. Allowing all the applicants to opt out at once could strain the agency's capacity to supervise and monitor the program. Random assignment is not only feasible, it is the fairest way to select the eligible applicants. Airports that are not selected could be phased in later, and serve as a control group in the meantime. With random assignment of enough airports, there would be no reason to |
1591806_7 | Top Colleges Take More Blacks, but Which Ones? | middle-class kids,'' said Professor Gates, who plans to assemble a study group on the subject. ''We need to learn what the immigrants' kids have so we can bottle it and sell it, because many members of the African-American community, particularly among the chronically poor, have lost that sense of purpose and values which produced our generation.'' In Professor Guinier's view, there are plenty of other blacks who could also succeed at elite colleges, but the institutions are not doing enough to find them. She said they were overly reliant on measures like SAT scores, which correlate strongly with family wealth and parental education. ''Colleges and universities are defaulting on their obligation to train and educate a representative group of future leaders,'' said Professor Guinier, a Harvard graduate herself who has been studying college admissions practices for more than a decade. ''And they are excluding poor and working-class whites, not just descendants of slaves.'' Harvard admissions officials say that they, too, are concerned about attracting more lower-income students of all races. They plan to spend an additional $300,000 to $375,000 a year to recruit more low-income students and provide more financial aid to these students. ''This increases the chances that we will be able to reach into the communities that have not been reached,'' said William R. Fitzsimmons, dean of admissions and financial aid. While Harvard officials ignore the ethnic distinctions among their black students, Harvard's black undergraduates are developing a body of literature in the form of student research papers. Aisha Haynie, the undergraduate whose senior thesis Professor Guinier cited, said her research was prompted by the reaction from her black classmates when she told them that she was not from the West Indies or Africa, but from the Carolinas. ''They would say, 'No, where are you really from?''' said Ms. Haynie, 26, who earned a master's degree in public policy at Princeton and is now in medical school. Marques J. Redd, a 20-year-old from Macon, Ga., who graduated in June and was one of the editors of Harvard's black student guide, said that Harvard officials had discouraged them from collecting the data on who the black students were. ''But we thought it was one aspect of the black experience at Harvard that should be documented,'' he said. ''The knowledge had power. It was something that needed to be out in the open instead of something that people whispered about.'' |
1589817_0 | Program Would Ease Security a Bit for Frequent Fliers | Airport security officials will enroll 5,000 to 10,000 frequent fliers as ''registered travelers'' in a five-airport pilot program beginning this month, the Transportation Security Administration will announce Wednesday. Security experts have described the problem of finding a weapon among the 1.8 million passengers screened every day as looking for a needle in a haystack; the registered-traveler program is an effort to make the haystack smaller by identifying in advance those who are judged as posing a low risk. For the travelers, the pilot program, which has been discussed for more than two years, will offer ''limited features and limited benefits,'' said a spokesman for the Transportation Security Administration, Mark O. Hatfield Jr. The travelers will consent to having their names matched against several government databases and will provide a fingerprint and an iris scan. Registered travelers will have to pass through the same basic security as all other travelers, and like everyone else, will be encouraged to remove their shoes and their outer garments, said Yolanda Clark, a spokeswoman for the agency. But Ms. Clark said those approved for the program would not face the more careful inspection known as secondary screening unless they set off an alarm as they passed through the metal detectors. Under the current system, some passengers are chosen for secondary screening at random and some because they meet a set of criteria that are secret but are believed to include factors like paying cash for a ticket or booking travel at the last minute, or flying one way. ''We are approaching this pilot with the idea that security could not and would not be compromised in any way,'' Ms. Clark said. The program will begin in Minneapolis by the end of June and will be operated there with the cooperation of Northwest Airlines, which will invite its frequent fliers to sign up, she said. The program will expand to Los Angeles International Airport in late July, in coordination with United Airlines; George Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston in early August, with help from Continental Airlines; and Logan in Boston and Reagan National near Washington, D.C., in late August, in cooperation with American Airlines. In the pilot phase, the registered-traveler cards will be good at only one airport, and only at the security checkpoint that gives access to the gates of the cooperating airline. The pilot program will last 90 days and will cost about $5 |
1589857_1 | F.T.C. Rebuffs Plan to Create No-Spam List | system. Earlier this month, Microsoft agreed to combine its plan with a similar approach backed by America Online and many smaller Internet companies. Yahoo is holding out for a different technical standard that is potentially more powerful, but far more difficult to implement. The commission said it would defer to the private sector on which authentication standard should be employed. If a standard does not emerge, the commission proposed creating a federal advisory committee to encourage the adoption of a standard. Senator Charles E. Schumer, the New York Democrat who has been the most vocal proponent of a do-not-e-mail registry, was critical of the commission's report. ''No one says this is a cure-all,'' Mr. Schumer said in a telephone interview. ''This is the best thing we have and they ought to try it.'' But Senator Schumer has few allies on this issue in either government or industry. Most major Internet companies, along with e-mail marketers, have rejected the concept of a do-not-e-mail list. ''If you do this, you want people to think that if they put their name on the list, they will get less spam,'' said Joshua Baer, the chief executive of Skylist, a company that sends e-mail for marketers. He said that only legitimate companies would use the list, possibly reducing the amount of e-mail that may be of real interest to consumers. Spammers, who use techniques to avoid detection, however, would ignore the list, perhaps even creating the impression that spam is actually growing, Mr. Baer said. Mr. Baer said the new AOL-Microsoft proposal for e-mail sender identification was quite promising and that Skylist had already taken the required steps to verify the mail it sends. Antispam activists are split on whether the list would help or not, although most agree that it is hardly the best solution to the spam problem. ''A do-not-spam list of individual addresses is unworkable,'' said John R. Levine, the chairman of the Anti-Spam Research Group. Indeed, the commission report addressed many of the proposals made for the technical architecture of such a registry and suggested that none of them was sufficient to prevent spammers from using the registry to verify their e-mail lists. The report also looked at another more wide-ranging proposal that would allow the owners of Internet domains -- like AOL.com or ftc.gov -- where e-mail is received to place those domains on a register that bans unsolicited e-mail |
1589807_0 | Treacherous Shoals ... of Trenton?; Harbor Pilots Divided Over Plan to Regulate Them | Ever since men have gone down to the sea in ships, pilots have guided the vessels in and out of harbors, through the fickle currents and other vagaries of local waters. The waterways close to land pose challenges that differ greatly from those of the open seas -- sandbars, rusted wrecks and hidden rocks. And in the bustling harbor that is the Port of New York and New Jersey, where there were more than 11,500 movements of ships carrying cargo valued at $100 billion last year, it can be argued -- and many pilots do -- that the challenge is even greater. But these days, say the group of pilots who finesse cargo ships into their berths at the New Jersey container yards, something akin to piracy is taking place in the harbor. They say the culprits are the New Jersey state government and another group of pilots that the state already regulates. In the name of greater port security, New Jersey is trying to gain control of the pilots it does not regulate and eventually erase all distinctions between the two groups. The measure has tossed the pilots, shipping companies, tugboat operators and the United States Coast Guard into the treacherous political waters of Trenton. The pilotage bill has passed committees in both the Assembly and the Senate and is scheduled to come to the floor of each house on Thursday. Since World War II, pilots have had an amiable division of labor in the New Jersey or New York waters. One group, licensed ''bar'' pilots, boards inbound vessels at Ambrose Light, about 11 miles south of the harbor mouth. The bar pilots are independent contractors regulated by the New Jersey Board of Pilotage Commissioners, a group whose six part-time members are appointed by the governor. These pilots steer vessels up the relatively wide channel in the lower harbor to the Narrows. This is called ''crossing the bar,'' and it occurs just before bar pilots hand off control of the vessel to the docking pilots, who are licensed by the Coast Guard. Most are former tugboat captains. With the aid of tugs, the docking pilots gingerly bring ships through the channels and twisting turns of the inner harbor. They then gently nudge the $50 million to $70 million behemoths into berths. Docking pilots such as Mike Schnepp fear that the bill makes no distinction between bar pilots' skills and |
1589918_0 | World Briefing | Europe: France: Power Cuts As Protest | Electricity workers stepped up their commando-style protests against the government's plan to privatize partly the state-owned utility Électricité de France and cut power to the country houses of Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin and a dozen other politicians. Major companies had their power cut off for a few hours, and parts of Bordeaux and Grenoble were plunged into darkness when the power supply for the streets was cut. Hélène Fouquet (NYT) |
1601019_0 | Sexuality, Drugs And The Ideal Of Sport | THE Olympic Games take place in Athens this month, even as an investigation into the use of steroids has led to suspicions that some of the biggest names in track and field, as well as other sports, are using banned drugs. That makes this an awkward time for the International Olympic Committee to decide, as it did in May, that transsexuals may compete openly in the Games. None are expected to participate this time, but the decision raises difficult questions about the nature of sports achievement. Does allowing a small number of athletes to take large doses of hormones threaten to undermine the international effort to rid sports of performance-enhancing drugs? As a columnist for The Irish Times wrote, because the decision ''officially brings into the international sporting community athletes who have undergone a radical and life-altering course of hormone treatment, it is bound to provide a further smoke screen for the malevolent practitioners of science who engineer the substances that seduce athletes.'' To proponents of transsexuals' inclusion, the issue is fairness. Dr. Joe Leigh Simpson, a member of the I.O.C. committee that made the decision and a professor at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, said it was not fair to leave them without a place to compete. But others disagree. ''Men have an inherent advantage in sports that rely on strength, speed and power,'' said Libba Galloway, senior vice president and chief legal officer for the Ladies Professional Golf Association, which requires that members and players at its events be born as women. ''The concern is that these people would still have a greater muscle mass and other physiological advantages over someone who was born a woman.'' Transsexual athletes and many doctors who treat them dismiss that argument. They say that the prolonged use of estrogen by those transitioning from male to female neutralizes any physiological advantages. ''Estrogen is not a performance-enhancing drug,'' said Michelle Dumaresq, a transsexual Canadian mountain-bike racing champion, who is 34. ''It's a performance decreaser. I still have a very large bone structure, but I no longer have all the muscle mass I did to help me move it.'' In any case, experts say that objections to transsexual inclusion arise less from physiological questions than from vague assumptions of what is natural and what is artificial when it comes to the human body. ''It's no accident that the way people think about the |
1600868_6 | Ceremonies For Any Occasion | of people together and raise a glass or two and say thank you and recognize that it wasn't the end of the world.'' The use of celebrants has been generally treated with approval by members of the clergy familiar with their methods. The Rev. Carlisle Dickson, the interim pastor at the First Presbyterian Church in Clifton, was joined by two celebrants at a 9/11 memorial service last year and was impressed with their expertise in planning the event. He also believes celebrants fill a growing need, particularly by performing services like weddings for people who are not part of a religious group or can't marry through traditional avenues. ''Celebrants can help them celebrate in a creative, imaginative and meaningful way,'' Mr. Dickson said. ''Besides, we Presbyterian ministers don't have any forum for celebrating divorce.'' It is that willingness to celebrate any life event that will attract more people, said Dr. Barbara Fiese, chairwoman of the psychology department at Syracuse University. ''I can see how people would be drawn to this,'' she said. ''In the case of divorce it allows people to recognize this relationship has changed in some way, and for the person involved it can provide closure for the past as well as moving on for the future.'' And when people of different faiths may find difficulty meshing their backgrounds in traditional ceremonies, Dr. Fiese said, designing a service provides a way to learn what is significant in a person's life. Interfaith couples planning to wed are among those who seek out celebrants. Others, like Vanera Frye, are simply looking for something different. Kim Kirkley, who officiated at Ms. Frye's wedding, presides over two to three events a week, mostly weddings. A Westfield native and 1994 graduate of Rutgers Law School, Ms. Kirkley finds work through word of mouth and online advertisements, which is where Ms. Frye found her. They spent hours on the telephone and by e-mail creating original vows, which included an oral history of the couple from their first date to their engagement, recognition of their parents, and their commitment to each other. ''We are breaking a lot of institutional boundaries,'' Ms. Kirkley said. ''I've done ceremonies where the parents are religiously observant and they might be a little hesitant and wish their children to follow their religious doctrine, but people are broadening their ideas and want ceremonies that are meaningful to them and resonate.'' On |
1600704_2 | Feathers, Fur and Jungle Waters | a muscular roar and a mini-tornado in the middle of the Quichua community. The wooden houses on stilts looked empty, but dozens of small children came running out of the forest carrying their toddler brothers and sisters on their backs to see the helicopter. Jiovanny Rivadeneira, a powerful-looking Quichua with black hair curling around his baseball cap, walked over and was clearly happy to see us both. A leading bird guide in the region for almost two decades, he had persuaded his fellow community members to pool their labor and resources and build their own lodge, which opened in the summer of 2003 and is the first of its kind in the park. The lodge is on Añangu Lake, three miles up a tributary of the Napo. Fernando seemed as eager as I was to see it. He wore binoculars and a video camera slung around his neck and carried the hefty ''Birds of Ecuador.'' We loaded ourselves into a dugout canoe and glided upstream into a dimly lighted tunnel of mangrove and fig trees. It was midday, and the 90-degree heat lay like a blanket over the forest. At the lake's entrance, six giant otters exploded out of the water, bouncing up and down, screeching and barking, like guard dogs on pogo sticks. Then wide-eyed and whiskered, they popped up next to the boat, showing off the highly prized coats that have led them to be hunted almost to extinction in the last century. When they submerged, we slipped into a peaceful black-water lake. On the far side, 10 thatched-roofed bungalows perched on the side of a hill. Their plaster walls were painted burned orange and spiraled with decorative stairways in ocher or white. A hum of voices and the sound of thudding hoes rose from the slope, where a work crew from the community was planting a garden. Next to the large dining room and lounge on top of the hill, three men hammered together the last poles of a rickety-looking observation tower five stories high. Norby and Fernando climbed up, and I followed. On the highest platform, Fernando was watching two white-throated toucans, and Norby was walking around holding his cellphone in the air hoping to be struck by a signal. He wasn't immediately successful and for a while at least, we were cut off from the outside world. Behind us, the violet silhouette of the Andes |
1601038_2 | American Indians Expand College Hopes | that's not uncommon for Natives,'' said Danielle Terrance, an Akwesasne Mohawk who is a student development specialist at Cornell University's American Indian Program. ''You're always having to explain who you are.'' During the five-day course here, known as College Horizons, students polished college entrance essays, heard an assistant director in Yale's admissions office describe the touches that can make a dull application sparkle, worked with an associate dean from Princeton on a financial aid application and heard Tallerita Tunney, a Navajo woman who took the course five years ago, describe life at Macalester College in St. Paul, where she graduated in May. ''It's cold in Minnesota, but you learn how to dress warmly and I love it,'' Ms. Tunney said. The American Indian students, all high school juniors or seniors, included Gary Richards, an Oglala Lakota from Pine Ridge, S.D., who wears a rhinestone earring and a braid reaching his waist and aspires to attend law school, and Ashton Thompson, a senior from Philadelphia, Miss., who wrote a college entrance essay about studying her Choctaw language, which is in decline. Twenty-five students packed into a classroom to hear Carmen Lopez, a Navajo woman from Black Mesa, Ariz., who directs the Harvard University Native American Program. ''What's your interest in Harvard?'' Ms. Lopez asked. One student wondered if Harvard had a dental school. Mr. Hegdal wanted to know about business courses. ''Doesn't Harvard have the most books of anywhere?'' asked John Badami III, an Osage from Cazenovia, N.Y., who attends a private school in Connecticut. ''Yes, 15 million volumes!'' Ms. Lopez said. In an interview, she said that Harvard College currently has about 55 Native Americans out of a total enrollment of 6,500, and she would like to help increase that. But her goal was to help students find a college that is a good fit. ''Sometimes I just say, 'You should go check out Cal State,''' she said. Whitney Laughlin, who founded College Horizons in 1998, sat across from Brittney Babb, a Lower Brule Sioux who is a junior from Vermillion, S.D., reading Ms. Babb's file, and asking questions. Did Brittney want a campus with lots of other American Indians? Was she liberal or conservative? What about a women's college? East Coast, West Coast or heartland? Ms. Babb had already expressed interest in Dartmouth, Georgetown and Harvard, and Dr. Laughlin urged her also to consider Mount Holyoke, Bryn Mawr, Haverford, |
1601015_3 | Breaking the Silence | say that the causes of black poverty are both structural and behavioral. Think of structural causes as ''the devil made me do it,'' and behavioral causes as ''the devil is in me.'' Structural causes are faceless systemic forces, like the disappearance of jobs. Behavioral causes are self-destructive life choices and personal habits. To break the conspiracy of silence, we have to address both of these factors. ''A lot of us,'' Mr. Obama argues, ''hesitate to discuss these things in public because we think that if we do so it lets the larger society off the hook. We're stuck in an either/or mentality -- that the problem is either societal or it's cultural.'' It's important to talk about life chances -- about the constricted set of opportunities that poverty brings. But to treat black people as if they're helpless rag dolls swept up and buffeted by vast social trends -- as if they had no say in the shaping of their lives -- is a supreme act of condescension. Only 50 percent of all black children graduate from high school; an estimated 64 percent of black teenage girls will become pregnant. (Black children raised by female ''householders'' are five times as likely to live in poverty as those raised by married couples.) Are white racists forcing black teenagers to drop out of school or to have babies? Mr. Cosby got a lot of flak for complaining about children who couldn't speak standard English. Yet it isn't a derogation of the black vernacular -- a marvelously rich and inventive tongue -- to point out that there's a language of the marketplace, too, and learning to speak that language has generally been a precondition for economic success, whoever you are. When we let black youth become monolingual, we've limited their imaginative and economic possibilities. These issues can be ticklish, no question, but they're badly served by silence or squeamishness. Mr. Obama showed how to get the balance right. We've got to create as many opportunities as we can for the worst-off -- and ''make sure that every child in America has a decent shot at life.'' But values matter, too. We can't talk about the choices people have without talking about the choices people make. Guest Columnist Henry Louis Gates Jr. will be a guest columnist for the Op-Ed page this week. Thomas L. Friedman is on leave until October, writing a book. |
1600831_1 | Environmentalists Can Call This Home | rest of Ladera Ranch, Terramor has a bicycle- and pedestrian-friendly network of neighborhoods. But it also has much more: solar power, recycled building materials, artificial wetlands and reed-filled streams for runoff filtration, energy conservation measures more stringent than those mandated by the state, and even a $1,000 voucher for the purchase of an electric GEM car. Some critics, however, complain that in the process of building a ''green'' development, the company has removed nearly all of the original land cover through its grading and terracing. The development is designed to appeal to people who desire a low-key community where the car is not king, according to Paul Johnson, senior vice president of community development at Ranch Mission Viejo. Environmentally conscious buyers can order homes along Aura Lane, Ethereal Street or Thoreau Street with 1.3- or 2.6-kilowatt solar electric systems. Inside, the houses have flooring made of recycled tires, cork or bamboo. They also have low-fume paint and insulation, and energy-efficient appliances. Outside, plants and trees with minimal water requirements are tended by drip irrigation. Along the development's central areas, the typical main street has been replaced with a network of pathways, courtyards and green space. These were some of the features that persuaded Michelle and Patrick Peters to buy a four-bedroom home in Terramor's Walden Park neighborhood. They plan to move in later this month with their three children. The family, which is moving from a different neighborhood in Ladera Ranch, bought their first Ladera house for $279,000 three years ago and recently sold it for $500,000. Their new house costs $623,000. Ms. Peters, 39, considers herself and her husband ''very environmentally conscious.'' She said that her husband, an Internet fleet sales manager for Toyota, was particularly thrilled with solar electricity in their new house, while she was happy with a neighborhood designed to make cars optional. She has just bought a GEM car, an electric vehicle allowed only where the speed limit does not exceed 35 miles per hour. Her husband, she said, is about to take delivery on a Toyota Prius, powered by gasoline and electricity. Despite her eco-consciousness, Ms. Peters said that she had met a few of her future neighbors, and did not find them to be as environmentally aware as she and even her three children, ages 4, 7 and 8, were. Citing Orange County's notoriously scarce housing market, she said: ''People are happy just |
1604767_1 | Bag It | after the screener's lawyer made it clear that he planned to ask a government official about T.S.A. operations at the trial. The possibilities for mischief are considerable. Congress requires the transportation agency to check all airline baggage with bomb-detection machinery or with hand-held bomb detectors. More than $5 billion has been spent by the government and airports to purchase and install the new equipment. Unfortunately, the machines are unreliable. In 2002, Transportation Secretary Norman Y. Mineta told Congress that the machines have a false-positive rate of 35 percent -- and if a bag tests positive, it must be searched by hand. To do this, agents routinely examine baggage in closed areas, far from prying eyes. To complicate matters, the agency initially recommended that all passengers not lock their baggage to facilitate searches. The agency has since recommended that people buy T.S.A.-approved locks, but these have often been cut by screeners despite the agency's seal of approval. The T.S.A. denies that a nationwide theft problem exists, and stresses that the vast majority of its 45,000 employees have not been accused of wrongdoing. It has nevertheless worked hard to limit its liability for baggage thefts and damage. According to the Air Transport Association, which represents the major United States airlines, the T.S.A. seeks to limit its total liability to $3 million a year -- regardless of how much damage travelers incur. In some ways, the thefts are not surprising. The transportation agency has done an abysmal job of managing its workforce. In June 2003, the agency admitted that it had failed to screen its own screeners and fired more than 1,200 employees after they failed criminal background checks or other internal investigations. Some Americans may believe that luggage thefts are a small price to pay for making air travel safe. But the safety is a mirage. Tests by the Government Accountability Office and other federal agencies have found that the airport safety net continues to be full of holes. Clark Kent Ervin, the inspector general of the Department of Homeland Security, told Congress in April that T.S.A. screeners performed poorly in response to covert tests. More recently, the 9/11 commission report warned that ''major vulnerabilities still exist'' in aviation security. Airport security must be overhauled. Instead of relying on thousands of federal agents following often pointless routines (like treating grandmothers as potential hijackers), aviation security can be improved by relying on innovative |
1604765_1 | Guiding a Child Into College Is Now Part of the Job | Sachs. ''I saw this service as the Consumer Reports on the subject of college. You want to know which features are important, what you want to pay for and what you don't, and all of that came through in the presentation and the counseling sessions.'' Once the province of the rich, private college counseling has become so commonplace that it now is increasingly being offered as a corporate benefit. College Coach, a Boston-based educational consulting company, has contracts with Goldman Sachs and dozens of other corporations, including I.B.M., American International Group and the New York Stock Exchange, to guide their employees through the process. College Coach does counsel individual families, but most of its sales come from corporations, said Michael London, the company's president. He says that employer-sponsored college consulting fills an important niche in corporate benefits. ''When we looked at the work-life arena, we found that the majority of benefits were for child care or elder care,'' Mr. London said. ''But the greatest percentage of the work force are ages 35 to 50, and these are the people who are dealing with their child's education, a stressful and time-consuming period.'' His pitch to employers is that the college application process -- the search for the right schools, the complexities of financial aid, the admissions deadlines, the essays and the anxiety -- can be distracting to employees. The company Web site puts it plainly: ''Where do you think your employees are finding the time to deal with all of these issues? In the workplace, on company time!'' Moreover, College Coach argues that providing college counseling supports diversity by providing the service to all workers and not just to top executives and their children. Mr. London said that when he and a partner started the company in 1998, ''the private college counseling world was an elitist service: if you're a family that has a student that has aspirations to go to a very competitive college and you're rich and you can pay $10,000, then you could get it.'' College Coach offers business clients onsite workshops in subjects like ''Saving for College'' and ''Preparing College Applications,'' Web-based workshops, one-on-one counseling either onsite or on the phone and a help desk, which can be reached by e-mail or telephone. The average corporate client pays about $100,000 a year for College Coach's services -- depending on the number of workshops offered and the number |
1603354_6 | All Thumbs, Without the Stigma | 'Where's my message?''' she said. ''My husband's 25 years old. I've got to become technologically quick.'' Of course, there is some worry, even among users, that speed typing with one thumb could create repetitive strain injuries, like joystick wrist. But the early evidence is inconclusive, according to people who follow the field. Professor Katz said the thumb was unlikely to face as many problems as, for instance, the wrist. The reason, he said, is that the wrists have lots of tendons and have not adapted well to the unexpected use of the forearm for typing. The thumb, by contrast, is opposable and flexible, and has been designed for manifold uses, he said. Still, some users do complain of the occasional problem. ''I did get a small callus,'' said Mr. Emrick, the San Diego resident, explaining that it appeared on the tip of his thumb last October when he started sending text messages with regularity. ''I didn't ice it,'' he added. ''I toughed it out.'' Primer You, Too, Can Join the Text-Messaging Masses It is not essential to use your thumb to send a text message. But it is essential to have a phone with two-way capabilities, meaning that it can receive an electronic note and send one. Most cellphones now have this ability. And all major mobile carriers offer text-messaging service, but generally it is not free. Linda Barrabee, an analyst with the Yankee Group, said it typically costs 10 cents to send a message, while receiving one ranges from being free to costing 10 cents. Users can also pay for messages in bulk. Again, pricing varies, though generally, it might cost $3 for 100 to 300 messages, or $10 to $20 a month for unlimited messaging, Ms. Barrabee said. Text messaging is intended to allow communication between phones: a recipient's address, for example, is actually a phone number. Though text messages and e-mail are carried on different networks, some phones can also exchange conventional e-mail with correspondents at PC's or other devices. There is a caveat: Phones are designed to send and receive messages of no more than 160 characters, whether sent to phone or computer. Some other mobile devices, like the BlackBerry, allow users to send traditional e-mail more easily. But such messaging can be more expensive than sending phone-based text because subscribers must pay for access to a data network, not just a telephone network. Matt Richtel |
1603358_2 | New Strains and New Rules for Agents Along Mexican Border | to tracking illegal immigrants and drug smugglers, using weapons as varied as night-vision cameras and horseback patrols, the agents are particularly on terrorism watch, a high-stakes mission, officials say, given the huge traffic -- legal and illegal -- from Mexico. The task was highlighted July 19 when Border Patrol agents at McAllen-Miller International Airport stopped a New York-bound woman, Farida Goolam Mahomed Ahmed, 48, whose South African passport with no visa or United States entry stamp was found to have three pages torn out. Her bags held a pair of wet jeans. She later admitted sneaking in from Mexico and tearing out the record of her travels, the F.B.I. said, and is being held pending further investigation. The South African Embassy in Washington said Wednesday that Ms. Ahmed is Pakistani, although a family member denies she is. Intelligence officials say that Ms. Ahmed was not on a watch list and is not known to be tied to extremist groups but that checks of flight manifests appear to show her taking 200 overseas flights through the Persian Gulf and elsewhere in the last few years. The small McAllen airport, serving only Continental, American and Northwest Airlines, is one area of enhanced antiterrorism enforcement with Border Patrol agents scrutinizing all non-American passengers. ''We're getting real familiar with the documents,'' said Jesus I. Solis, an agent on duty one recent afternoon, who voiced confidence that he could detect alterations and forgeries. Two of Mr. Solis's fellow agents detained Ms. Ahmed, although the missing passport pages were only noticed by the F.B.I. days later. Illegal immigrants often give themselves away at the airport, Mr. Solis said. Some are led in by the human smugglers called coyotes. ''You can tell,'' Mr. Flores said. ''They look like a child with the parent.'' Others he said, ''hide in the rest room until the last minute.'' The nervous look of many gives them away, he added. Apprehended Central and South Americans often try to pass themselves off as Mexicans because the repatriation is more lenient, Mr. Flores said. Mexicans with no record of previous violations are granted voluntary return, sent back across the border after their fingerprints are taken and a record made. Others with no prior record of illegal entry are sent to detention centers pending immigration hearings until their home countries can provide travel documents, a process that could take weeks under the old rules. Two |
1605300_2 | Senator? Terrorist? A Watch List Stops Kennedy at Airport | a plane yet again. The alias used by the suspected terrorist on the watch list was Edward Kennedy, said David Smith, a spokesman for the senator. At the hearing, Mr. Kennedy wondered how ordinary citizens could navigate the tangled bureaucracy if a senator had so much trouble. ''How are they going to be able to get to be treated fairly and not have their rights abused?'' he asked. Asa Hutchinsonof the Department of Homeland Security, who was testifying at the Senate hearing, said his department was working to address the situation. He said travelers with such problems should contact the ombudsman at the Transportation Security Administration, a division of homeland security, who would help them take steps to clarify their identities. ''There is a process to clear names,'' said Mr. Hutchinson, the department's undersecretary for border security. ''But it does illustrate the importance of improving the whole system, which we are very aggressively working to do.'' On Monday, Mr. Hutchinson told Congress that homeland security officials planned to take over the checking of names of passengers against the no-fly lists. The responsibility is now carried out by the airlines, to ensure that terror suspects do not board airplanes and that law enforcement officials are promptly notified of potential security risks. Advocates for tougher screening requirements say the current system is ineffective because the government does not provide the airlines with a comprehensive set of watch lists, in part because some of that information is classified. Civil libertarians also cite instances in which airlines have mistakenly denied passengers the right to fly. The ticket agents who tried to block Mr. Kennedy from boarding planes to Washington, Boston, Palm Beach and New York worked for US Airways, Senate officials said. Amy Kudwa, a US Airways spokeswoman, acknowledged that Mr. Kennedy was a frequent passenger, but declined to comment on the incidents. Lawyers for the American Civil Liberties Union said they did not know how many people had been mistakenly placed on watch lists. But they said the sluggish responses from the airline and the government to Mr. Kennedy's efforts to clear his name demonstrated the absurdity of the no-fly system. ''It demonstrates all those things that we found problems with in the first place, '' said Reginald Shulford of the A.C.L.U.''If you're Ted Kennedy, you can call a friend,'' Mr. Shulford said. ''If you're an average citizen you cannot. You can complain |
1605314_0 | 'From Myth to Life' -- 'Images of Women From the Classical World' | Smith College Museum of Art Elm Street at Bedford Terrace Northampton, Mass. Through Oct. 10 This show is not pegged to the Olympic Games, but it ties in nicely with the spirit of ancient Greece. Drawn from the finely tuned collection of Celia and Walter Gilbert (she is a Smith alum), ''From Myth to Life'' presents more than 40 objects, mostly of Greek origin, used in Mediterranean culture and ritual over a span of some 1,500 years, from Greece of the 14th to 12th centuries B.C. to the Roman Empire in the second and third centuries. The show, chosen from the Gilberts' collection by Caroline Houser, professor of art at Smith, traces how women progressed from child to adult in the classical world under the protection of various female deities, from Artemis, goddess of wild beasts and the nurturer of the newborn and young, to Demeter, the fertility goddess associated with conception and motherhood. With mostly small objects that reward close attention, the presentation, which includes a boldly bawdy image or two, is a delight. Among the more interesting items are those connected with Aphrodite, the goddess of love, beauty and marriage, who fostered the sexual desire that helped complete a girl's passage from child to married adult. A delicately wrought gold pin from the first century B.C. shows her nude, wearing only armlets and anklets in the form of snakes, gazing into a mirror held by her son Eros (a k a Cupid). An appealing outcome of her machinations is an infant feeder in the form of a mouse, a painted terra cotta from the late fifth century B.C. Liquids poured into the vase through an opening in the mouse's back could be sucked through a narrow spout above its tail As for Artemis, besides her role of huntress, delicately painted on a squat Attic oil container from the fifth century B.C., she's paid tribute by a small terra cotta statue of a little girl in the guise of a dancing bear (mid-fourth century B.C.). It refers to the annual festival where worshipers were initiated as Artemis's Little Bears. The ceremony is based on her association with forest creatures, among whom the bear and its reproductive patterns suggest the cyclical fertility of women. Athena, the goddess of warriors and also of wisdom and the arts of civilization, appears in her warrior guise on several objects, among them a carved |
1606839_0 | Court Goes to Oil Fields In Ecuador Pollution Suit | Hidalgo Zurita watched as half a dozen technicians in white hazardous-materials suits used a motorized drill to search for oil -- in his yard in this small Amazon town. To his dismay, Mr. Zurita, 46, a cattle trader, has readily found oil. ''I've dug five wells in that yard looking for drinking water -- four of them came up with oil,'' he says. ''I've been drinking contaminated water, and it's Texaco's fault.'' Company representatives vehemently deny the accusation. August has brought the start of judicial inspections by Ecuadorean authorities of sites that residents contend were polluted by a subsidiary of what is now ChevronTexaco. It is the latest wrinkle in an 11-year legal battle over whether the company should pay an estimated $6 billion to clean up a swath of the Ecuadorean Amazon. With the help of a team of American and Ecuadorean lawyers, the suit was brought by 88 residents representing roughly 30,000 others, including 5,000 members of five Amazon indigenous peoples. This phase of the trial, which moves from one testing site to another, opened here in a makeshift court set up with portable plastic furniture sheltered from the Amazon sun by two collapsible blue nylon tents. When Mr. Zurita moved into his small concrete house 10 years ago, he says, he noticed a smell of oil and saw black tarlike patches in the yard, but it was too late to move. About 30 feet away was a pit where Texaco once dumped mud, laden with crude oil. It is now covered by a patch of shoulder-high weeds. Over the next six months, experts will analyze soil samples at 122 sites in the jungle to determine if a subsidiary, the Texaco Petroleum Company, left behind toxins that could be fouling the drinking water of some 30,000 residents like Mr. Zurita. The case, which went to United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, only to be sent to Ecuadorean courts, could change the way American companies do business abroad. ''Companies have for years used low environmental standards in the third world as a legal defense for practices they know would be unacceptable in their own countries,'' said Eric Dannenmaier, director of the Institute for Environmental Law and Policy at Tulane University. ''This case may cause that legal defense to crumble.'' Plaintiffs in the case say that drilling by Texaco Petroleum polluted the soil and groundwater in 11,000 |
1606973_0 | Government to Begin Passenger Screening | Officials from the Department of Homeland Security formalized plans on Thursday to begin screening airline passengers against a list of potential terror suspects, taking over a responsibility now carried out by the airlines. The officials said they planned to begin testing the system, which will compare passenger names against terrorist watch lists, in November. They hope to review the results in December and to start screening passenger lists provided by airlines in January. The decision to assume responsibility from the airlines was announced last week. Advocates for tougher screening requirements and civil libertarians have criticized the current system, under which airline employees check passenger names against government watch lists to ensure that terror suspects do not board airplanes and that law enforcement officials are promptly notified of potential security risks. Rear Adm. David M. Stone, an assistant secretary in the Department of Homeland Security, said the new system, called Secure Flight, would be more secure. And with one agency handling the screening as opposed to several dozen airlines, passengers will find it easier to resolve problems if their names happen to resemble those of suspected terrorists, Admiral Stone said on Thursday in a conference call with reporters. |
1604045_0 | PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL | |
1603968_0 | Airport Screening | To the Editor: In ''Plan for Screening at Airports Is Dropped'' (July 25), Matthew L. Wald details the derailment of the Transportation Security Administration's plan for ''data mining'' of passengers. He writes: ''Now the Department of Homeland Security, of which the Transportation Security Administration is a part, has a much more modest goal, which is to integrate the various databases maintained by the F.B.I., the C.I.A., the Immigration and Naturalization Service and the State Department and make them available to all of those agencies.'' Was not the lack of information-sharing one of the main factors that enabled the 9/11 hijackers to slip through security? Wasn't the Department of Homeland Security created three years ago to rectify this problem? Faced with a broken limb, a doctor will first try to set the bone rather than amputate. Perhaps we should correct our intelligence failures before abridging our citizens' right to privacy. JULIA RUBIN New York, N.Y. |
1603961_0 | Sailing Into the Past On Lake Champlain | Beginning this month, the Lois McClure, a replica of an 88-foot 1862-class canal schooner, will circumnavigate Lake Champlain just as the original canal boats did in the 1800's, allowing a rare glimpse into 19th-century maritime transportation and commerce. During the 1800's, Lake Champlain was the principal route for trade among Vermont, New York and Canada. Sailing canal boats hauled raw and manufactured goods along the lake and the Hudson River, which are linked by the Champlain Canal, part of the New York State barge canal system. Over a four-year period, naval architects, master boat builders and hundreds of volunteers designed and constructed the 37.5-ton Lois McClure based on archaeological reports and underwater inspections of two canal boats that had sunk in Burlington's harbor in the late 1880's. The Lois McClure, named after a local philanthropist, relies on sail power only. Its mainmast stands over 50 feet, and the boat is built of white oak, pine, cedar, black locust and mahogany, mostly from Vermont, New York and New Hampshire. A series of placards will explain the history of the canal boats. Interpretive guides will also be on board. Until this Wednesday, the Lois McClure will be docked at Perkins Pier in Burlington, Vt., and be open to the public. Its 12-stop maiden voyage around Lake Champlain will begin with a call at the Lake Champlain Maritime Museum (which is overseeing the project) at Basin Harbor, Vt., from Aug. 21 to 25. Other ports of call include Westport, N.Y., Aug. 26 and 27; Vergennes, Vt., Aug. 28 and 29; St. Albans Bay, Vt., Sept. 2 to 5; Grand Isle, Vt., Sept. 6; Plattsburgh, N.Y., Sept. 9 to 13; Essex, N.Y., Sept. 16 to 19; Whitehall, N.Y., Sept. 22 and 23; Port Henry, N.Y., Sept. 25 to 28; and Shoreham, Vt., Sept. 30 to Oct. 4. The ship returns to Westport from Oct. 7 to 10 and to Basin Harbor from Oct. 12 to 17, before wintering in Burlington, open to the public from Oct. 19 to 30. The Lois McClure will be open from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. during most dockings. Admission is free; www.lcmm.org. WENDY KNIGHT TRAVEL ADVISORY |
1602039_0 | What About Iraq? | A funny thing happened after the United States transferred sovereignty over Iraq. On the ground, things didn't change, except for the worse. But as Matthew Yglesias of The American Prospect puts it, the cosmetic change in regime had the effect of ''Afghanizing'' the media coverage of Iraq. He's referring to the way news coverage of Afghanistan dropped off sharply after the initial military defeat of the Taliban. A nation we had gone to war to liberate and had promised to secure and rebuild -- a promise largely broken -- once again became a small, faraway country of which we knew nothing. Incredibly, the same thing happened to Iraq after June 28. Iraq stories moved to the inside pages of newspapers, and largely off TV screens. Many people got the impression that things had improved. Even journalists were taken in: a number of newspaper stories asserted that the rate of U.S. losses there fell after the handoff. (Actual figures: 42 American soldiers died in June, and 54 in July.) The trouble with this shift of attention is that if we don't have a clear picture of what's actually happening in Iraq, we can't have a serious discussion of the options that remain for making the best of a very bad situation. The military reality in Iraq is that there has been no letup in the insurgency, and large parts of the country seem to be effectively under the control of groups hostile to the U.S.-supported government. In the spring, American forces won an impressive military victory against the Shiite forces of Moktada al-Sadr. But this victory hasn't curbed the movement; Mr. Sadr's forces, according to many reports, are the de facto government of Sadr City, a Baghdad slum with 2.5 million people, and seem to have strengthened their position in Najaf and other cities. In Sunni areas, Falluja is enemy territory. Elsewhere in western Iraq, according to reports from Knight Ridder and The Los Angeles Times, U.S. forces have hunkered down, manning watch posts but not patrolling. In effect, this cedes control of the population to the insurgents. And everywhere, of course, the mortar attacks, bombings, kidnappings and assassinations go on. Despite a two-month truce between Mr. Sadr and the United States military, heavy fighting broke out yesterday in Najaf, where a U.S. helicopter was shot down. There was also sporadic violence in Sadr City -- where, according to reporters, American |
1601973_4 | Resourceful in the Deep South vs. Sleek in an Alpine Landscape | Us Now Praise Famous Men'' (1941). Born and raised in Hale County, Mockbee set out to make a difference, using whatever was at hand. He ended up creating one of the more perfect expressions of local action yielding globally useful ideas, working with his fellow teachers and their graduate students at the Rural Studio, which he helped establish at Auburn University in 1993, and often with his impoverished clients themselves. Together they recycled salvaged building parts, industrial waste and the rural vernacular of shacks, barns, churches and tenant houses into eccentric, soul-saving homes, community centers, chapels and park pavilions. Depending upon your point of view, these structures bring to mind Arte Povera sculpture, outsider art, the Japanese/New Age buildings of Bruce Goff and the desert dream city that Paolo Soleri and his students labored on for years. Mockbee's style, such as it is, can seem superficially postmodern, as evidenced by the contrasting structures of the ''Lucy House,'' a rectilinear volume with flat roof and clerestory windows, attached to a polygon pod with a triangular window. But his buildings are also profoundly, molecularly postmodern in a way few are, because they recycle materials more emphatically than styles. Mockbee's work is collage from the ground up, which avoids the tacked-on flimsiness that makes so much postmodern architecture feel like a stage set. Even in photographs, the Rural Studio buildings feel incredibly solid. The rectilinear part of the ''Lucy House,'' for example, has thick walls built of carpet tiles compressed by a heavy wood ring. Another house, with similarly modernistic lines, is made of 1,000 bales of wax-impregnated corrugated cardboard. Like the automobile tires (filled with dirt and covered with pink stucco) used as foundation for the studio's Yancey Tire Chapel, this cardboard is not biodegradable. It is with us until the end of time, and it looks great as used in this structure, like some rare, unusually shaggy kind of stone. It is unfortunate that the Mockbee show has been crowded into two small galleries at the National Building Museum and doesn't include more examples of his projects and those completed by the Rural Studio since his death. But even at this size, the show feels subversive, like an interloper in this extravagant 19th-century building, which is in some ways an early instance of postmodernism, or at least of the loss of confidence and anxiety of influence that encouraged it. The museum's |
1602360_8 | Building a Bad Reputation | achieve the same effect. The Modern's construction model involves a substructure, or invisible supporting skeleton, onto which large smooth panels -- a signature of the architect's design -- are clipped. That part is fairly standard. But in addition, Mr. Taniguchi designed another, underlying frame that is entirely adjustable, so that if the panels are attached imperfectly they can still be readjusted. Mr. Taniguchi ''never let down his standards,'' Mr. Riley said. ''He just took a bit of a different approach than he might have in Japan.'' Santiago Calatrava, the Spanish architect, may be best known for his flying buttresses of cable and steel, but at the Milwaukee Art Museum his design also included intricate concrete work of almost weblike delicacy. ''At the beginning I was told that doing concrete in the U.S. is impossible,'' Mr. Calatrava said from his office in Zurich. ''There's no tradition for form work. I thought, it cannot be true. Look at the old T.W.A. building, it is a most exquisite example. Look at the Salk Institute.'' So he chose to work closely with local carpenters, teaching them exactly how to achieve the results he desired. ''The team spirit in the U.S. is exceptional,'' he said. ''Once they are in front of a challenge, they rise to it. It was a pure American effort.'' But to help them get to that point, Mr. Calatrava invited the local construction managers to Europe, where they stayed with him and his family for 10 days of bonding. Nadine M. Post, the buildings editor at Engineering News-Record, regards the competition between American and foreign building cultures as beneficial. ''For years everything here was bottom line, but things are changing with so many Europeans and Asians working here,'' Ms. Post said. ''It's a win-win situation. America is getting better architecture. Construction is being held to a higher standard. And foreigners are tapping into a huge market.'' For architects, there is a constant tightrope walk between getting it done and getting it right. Who cares how beautifully smooth the finish is if the building it's supposed to adorn never gets finished? On a recent tour of the Museum of Modern Art, where workers are racing toward a promised completion on Nov. 20, Mr. Taniguchi discussed quality as a matter of scale, and perhaps of priorities: ''The size of everything in New York is very large, even the plates of food. In Japan, |
1602312_2 | Logging On At 30,000 Feet | be the next to add the service, sometime this summer or early fall, followed by Scandinavian Airlines and All Nippon Airways. Singapore Airlines, China Airlines and Korean Air will follow early next year. Mr. Scott said Connexion is in ''active discussions'' with several United States carriers, but none has signed on yet. Boeing's chief rival, Airbus, is part owner of Tenzing, a competing service that claims to have been first to send an e-mail message from an aircraft (four years ago this month). Tenzing has allowed airline passengers to send and receive e-mail messages on about 800 United, Continental and US Airways airplanes since 2003, using dial-up cables connected to Verizon Airfones. Changes are coming to that system as well, though. Until this month, customers had to pay $16 a flight to log into Verizon's JetConnect system, a closed Internet universe of sorts that lets customers click through about 800 pages of news, sports, stock quotes and games, among other things, while also sending and receiving text messages, instant messages and e-mail. But now Tenzing's e-mail service is available separately for $10 on domestic flights and $20 for international flights, with added charges for sending and receiving attachments. (JetConnect's services, except e-mail, are also available for $6 per flight segment.) According to Alex McGowan, vice president for marketing, Tenzing also plans to offer lower prices for shorter flights this year, probably below $5 for flights of up to two hours. In addition to the United States-based carriers, Tenzing is available, with satellite service, on Cathay Pacific and Emirates; Iberia will follow in November. Tenzing, for now, operates at roughly the same speed as most dial-up modem connections, because it relies on radio frequency signals to send and retrieve data. But speeds could improve considerably, depending on whether the airline chooses a satellite connection. Verizon's JetConnect will also get a speed boost next year, while freeing customers from the constraints of wires. Pending Federal Communications Commission approval, the company will begin offering JetConnect through a high-speed wireless connection in late 2005. Hot Spots in Terminals For passengers on airplanes without Internet services, it may still make sense to keep the laptop in the carry-on luggage, as many airports are rolling out wireless Internet access in terminals, lounges and even on the sidewalks. According to Jupiter Research, a market research company, at least 25 of the nation's 50 busiest airports offer so-called |
1602500_0 | Keep the Lampposts Free | LAST month, New York City proposed a revenue-generating deal that will allow six companies to place cellular phone antennas and relay boxes for wireless telecommunications service on 18,000 lampposts and other public structures. This is a bad idea for several reasons. First, there are potential health hazards. According to Gino P. Menchini, the city's commissioner of information technology and telecommunications, the city has taken great care to ensure that the system will not pose a health risk. It's unclear how he's concluded that these antennas are safe when there is such disagreement among scientists worldwide. Interestingly, he and other city officials are using misleading examples that the industry itself often uses to assuage public concerns -- statements like ''antennas give off less radiation than a microwave oven.'' A single antenna may not be alarming, but thousands of antennas clutter rooftops in the city. In fact, many people are unaware that they live in or near a building with these antennas, which are often mistaken for solar panels. Within an eight-block radius of my home in Queens, I can see more than 200 antennas. Cellular phone antennas emit radiofrequency radiation, which according to some recent studies may put people at greater risk for cancer. What's most troubling about this form of radiation is not what it will do in the short term -- an antenna operating at low levels is unlikely to heat human tissue -- but what it may do in the long term. Studies of the safety of cellular technology are so inconclusive that the World Health Organization will convene a conference on mobile communication and health next month. Second, the city has quashed civic participation. With more than 167 million cell-phone subscribers in the United States, wireless technology has presented challenges to municipalities. Many cities create sitting boards or hold public hearings on antenna construction, but New York City has done the opposite. In 1998, despite questionable authority to do so under New York City's charter, the deputy commissioner of buildings exempted telecommunications companies from zoning regulations that would have required them to conduct public hearings before mounting the antennas. Since then, the industry has had remarkable ease placing these antennas in residential and commercial districts, with poor coverage results. Mr. Menchini claims that lamppost antennas will allow the city to shift from residential rooftop cellular base stations. However, the industry will not be required to stop placing |
1602283_5 | They Saved Money on Uniforms | an athletic site inhabited between festivals only by caretakers and priests and attendants of the temples of Olympian Zeus, Hera and Pelops. Elis, a city about 36 miles by road from Olympia, was the festival's administrative base; competing athletes reported there a month before the Games for official inspection and training. Then visitors would begin to arrive both at Elis and Olympia, and in early August the athletes, officials and spectators already at Elis would march in procession to Olympia to open the Games. Visitors were in for a very uncomfortable four days and nights. ''They were expected,'' Spivey tells us, ''to pitch camp or sleep rough in fields between the sanctuary and the two rivers flowing nearby. At best the resulting 'Olympic village' must have resembled a shantytown of tents, dens and improvised wooden shacks, with food and other necessities on sale from numerous hawkers -- doubtless charging extortionate prices. . . . Epictetus, the Greek philosopher who did so much to spread the doctrine of Stoicism or 'long-sufferance' in the first century A.D., could cite Olympia as a byword for persistent inconvenience and unpleasantness in human experience -- overcrowded, underequipped, made bearable only by the quality of the spectacle.'' Another difference from the modern Olympics: at Olympia the spectators were exclusively male; since all athletes except chariot drivers competed naked, women were barred from attendance. Miller devotes a long chapter to what he calls a ''reconstruction'' of an Olympic festival. Though the first recorded Olympics took place in 776 B.C., he chooses the year 300 B.C., the 120th Olympiad, because, as he puts it, ''in one of the ironies of archaeology, hardly anything is left to help us reconstruct the physical setting of the most important competition in Greek athletics during its heyday in the sixth and fifth centuries.'' His reconstruction is long and fascinating, starting with the procession from Elis and proceeding on through the preparation of tracks for the races, sacrifices to Zeus and the festival events one by one. He also examines a most extraordinary feature of the great gathering, the proclamation throughout the Greek world (where there were always a number of wars going on) of the Olympic truce, which guaranteed the safety of all those proceeding to and returning from the festival. They came from all over that world, from cities in Sicily and southern Italy and those on what is now the |
1602347_0 | What Olympic Ideal? | The official mascots for the 2004 Summer Olympic Games in Athens are a pair of fanciful, brightly colored cartoon humanoids, and they're very, very cute; you'd never guess, just by looking at them, who they're supposed to be. Each figure has the shape of an inverted triangle, with a vestigial face and a couple of winsome, vaguely marsupial four-toed feet. One figure is an orangey red, and the other is a vivid blue, and if you didn't know anything else, you'd be right in suspecting that one's a boy and the other's a girl. The shock comes when you learn their names: Athena and Phevos. The first you probably know; the second is typically rendered in English as Phoebus, one of the names of the ancient Greek god Apollo. Athena and Apollo? Even allowing for the cuteness of mascots, it's impossible to see what relationship these hand-holding blobs have with the mythic originals: Athena, an armor-wearing virgin with cold gray eyes, avid for battle; Apollo, who presided over the great oracle at Delphi, patron of the most brilliant expressions of civilized culture: music, medicine, philosophy, law. Those responsible for these darling divinities would have us believe that they ''represent the link between Greek history and the modern Olympic Games.'' This appeal to the ancients and their culture is a standard trope -- one that, for obvious reasons, is being invoked more relentlessly than usual in the current Olympiad. But however much we love to cite the Greeks as a pristine standard, as models for contemporary culture, we do so at no little risk; we may like to think of ourselves as Greek, but the fact is that much of classical thought and culture is extremely foreign to us. Indeed, although this Olympiad's mascots were inspired (so the official Olympics Web site informs you) by an ancient Greek doll, the tradition they really belong to is the fairly recent one of infantile Olympic mascots: Misha the Russian Bear (Moscow, 1980), Sam the Eagle (Los Angeles, 1984), Hodori the Tiger (Seoul, 1988). Hodori, as the International Olympic Memorabilia Foundation's Web site tells you, ''portrays the friendly side of a tiger,'' and when you read this, you realize what the mascots have in common: the aggressive, predatory and rapacious traits of the creatures they represent have been eliminated. So too, all too obviously, with Athena and Phevos, whose demotion from august divinities to |
1601294_3 | U.S. Warns of High Risk of Qaeda Attack | level to orange because of concerns about international flights over the Christmas and New Year's holidays, intelligence officials said they had no information to conclude an attack was now imminent and no specific indication about when one might be carried out. The elevation of the threat level for the financial institutions was set off by the recent arrest of a Pakistani computer engineer who may have been involved in Qaeda communication efforts. A senior American intelligence official, while not discussing the source of the information, said analysts were reviewing recently discovered documents that amount to ''a potential treasure trove.'' Officials emphasized that the threat information went beyond intelligence ''chatter'' picked up from intercepted communications or Internet traffic, which has formed the basis for past warnings. Several episodes in the United States have recently drawn scrutiny from counterterrorism officials, including the apprehension of a Pakistani woman in Texas with a suspicious passport as well as reports from passengers on a recent flight to Los Angeles about odd activity by a group of Syrian musicians. But officials said that neither of these incidents was a direct factor in the decision to go to Code Orange. The information uncovered in recent days overlapped with broader concerns that Al Qaeda might plot an attack on or before the Nov. 2 presidential election in an effort to repeat the disruption caused by the Madrid bombings in March. Officials said they believed that senior Qaeda leaders along the Afghan-Pakistani border, including Osama bin Laden, were personally involved in such plots. Mr. Ridge said he was concerned that Al Qaeda might seek to attack financial institutions in one of three ways: the physical destruction of a building, an outside cyberattack intended to cripple financial markets or an internal attack that would allow someone within an organization to disrupt its operations. From the intelligence gleaned so far, he said, ''the preferred method of attack or what's being suggested in the reporting is car and truck bombs -- the physical destruction or attempted physical destruction of these facilities.'' Like the World Trade Center, financial targets like the New York Stock Exchange and the World Bank are seen as attractive to Al Qaeda largely for symbolic reasons in its effort to wage psychological warfare against the United States, officials said. ''Even the destruction of a single building is not going to undermine the greatest and strongest economy in the world,'' |
1601203_2 | Interim Trade Triumph Short on Hard Details | from the lawsuits Brazil has brought to World Trade Organization tribunals against the United States and the European Union. Those cases, one that led to a ruling against some American cotton subsidies and another pending against European sugar subsidies, helped convince rich countries that the global market was changing quickly, and that farm subsidies that spurred a nation's exports could become a thing of the past even without new trade rules. Pascal Lamy, the European Union trade commissioner, agreed. ''Yes, of course, I think it helped,'' Mr. Lamy said, adding, ''Obviously, the U.S. had to give ground on cotton and we have to give ground on sugar.'' But Robert B. Zoellick, the United States trade representative, denied that Brazil's suits had any effect on the talks here. That was one of several points where the United States and Europe disagree. Their positions reflected increasingly divergent paths on how to help their farmers, who will have a harder time competing with countries like Brazil and Argentina that do not need to subsidize their own farmers. Mr. Zoellick pointedly ignored Mr. Lamy's contention that the United States must eventually follow the European program that is slowly transferring farm subsidies for the production of commodities into subsidies to protect the environment, food security, rural development and animal welfare. The Europeans, without the vast national park system of the United States, maintain that they must protect the countryside to preserve their countries' lifestyles, and the tourism trade it attracts. As a result, the European Union has begun promoting such programs even though they may eventually hurt exports. The direction of the United States farm policy is less clear but seems headed in the opposite direction. In recent budget cuts, Congress kept in place the subsidies for commodities -- at least a third of that being exports -- and cut money for environmental programs. An early effort by Agriculture Secretary Ann M. Veneman to begin changing the direction of subsidies was squashed by Republican leaders in Congress, some of whom successfully bartered their votes to give the president expedited trade authority in return for the 2002 farm bill, which reversed course and increased farm subsidies. At a news conference after the talks, Mr. Zoellick made clear that American farmers and their representatives would continue looking to exports as a key to prosperity. Indeed, he said the United States would cut some domestic subsidies by ''up |
1607909_0 | Metro Briefing | New York: Manhattan: Boat Seized In Harbor | The police confiscated a 45-foot pleasure boat in New York Harbor and arrested its owner about 2 a.m. yesterday after finding three weapons, including a machine gun, on board, the authorities said. Coast Guard officers initially stopped the boat, the My Way, in the harbor near Governors Island, because it was cruising without navigation lights, the authorities said. Under questioning, the owner and captain, Frank Mele, 52, of Weehawken, N.J., admitted having a 12-gauge shotgun, a .30-caliber rifle and an AK-47 on board, the authorities said, adding that they do not believe that the guns were part of any plot. The boat was escorted to a New York Police Department pier in Brooklyn, where its 22 passengers disembarked. The police said the captain had a license to carry the guns in Florida, but not New York. Mr. Mele was charged with criminal possession of a weapon. Shaila K. Dewan (NYT) |
1607823_0 | School Achievement Reports Often Exclude the Disabled | The first time Tyler Brenneise, a 10-year-old who is autistic and mildly retarded, took the same state achievement tests as California's nondisabled children, his mother, Allison, anxiously awaited the results, along with the state report card on his special education school, the Del Sol Academy, in San Diego. But when the California Department of Education issued its annual report on school performance several months later, Del Sol Academy was nowhere to be found. Ms. Brenneise wrote state officials asking why. ''They wrote back,'' she said, ''that the school doesn't exist.'' That is because San Diego labels Del Sol a program, not a school, said Karen Bachoffer, spokeswoman for the San Diego schools. And like most other states, California does not provide report cards for programs that educate disabled children. ''He doesn't count,'' Ms. Brenneise said. ''He's left behind.'' The problem is not confined to California. Around the country, states and school districts are sidestepping the spirit, and sometimes the letter, of the federal No Child Left Behind Education Act when it comes to recording their successes and failures in teaching disabled youngsters. Federal officials have acknowledged permitting a growing number of states to exclude many special education students from reports on school progress, on the grounds that they account for only a small portion of enrollment. But a review of state education records shows that some states and districts are going far beyond this measure to avoid disclosing the quality of the education they provide to such students. Some exempt schools for disabled students. Still others simply do not disclose basic information required by the federal law, for example the percentage of disabled education students who graduate from high school, and about 10 states have not been fully reporting how students do on achievement tests tailored to disabled students, federal officials say. New York City's all-special-education district of 20,000 mentally or physically disabled students, District 75, gives only fragments of the information the federal law requires for accountability, reporting schools ''in good standing'' despite dismal results. The trend toward avoiding accountability is alarming advocates for the nation's six million disabled students, who see it as an erosion of the education act's disclosure requirements. In them, parents and advocates say, they saw a crucial lever for helping their children meet higher academic standards, and a way of finding out which schools were meeting the challenge. ''The reporting system is a shambles,'' |
1603127_3 | Mapuche Indians in Chile Struggle to Take Back Forests | tree farms here,''' said Alfredo Seguel, a leader of a group of young Mapuche professionals called Konapewman. ''Productive fields have been turned over to a monoculture that hurts other activities, helps destroy the land, employs very few people and pays low wages.'' Yet the signs of a landscape transformed are everywhere here. Highways with billboards that proclaim, ''If the forest grows, Chile grows; obey the forestry law,'' run for mile after mile past fragrant groves of trees that are uniformly spaced and nearly identical in height. Chilean exports of wood to the United States, almost all of which come from this southern region, are about $600 million a year and rising. Though an international campaign led by the conservation group Forest Ethics resulted in the Home Depot chain and other leading wood importers agreeing late last year to revise their purchasing policies, to ''provide for the protection of native forests in Chile,'' some militant Mapuche leaders are not satisfied. ''The big companies and the big landowners are usurpers who profit at our expense, and we want them to leave,'' complained José Huenchunao, a Mapuche leader in an area east of here who is among the 18 scheduled to go on trial. ''We are a people who have been defrauded, who have exhausted every legal means of attaining redress, and we have the right to recover what was stolen from us, even if that means incorporating violence within our struggle.'' In an effort to defuse tensions, a special government body, the Commission for Historical Truth and New Treatment, issued a report late last year calling for drastic changes in Chile's treatment of its indigenous people, more than 80 percent of whom are Mapuches. The recommendations included the formal recognition of political and ''territorial'' rights for Indian peoples, as well as efforts to promote their cultural identity. President Ricardo Lagos has hailed the document as an effort to ''correct the errors, at times inevitable, that the Chilean state committed in its treatment of ethnicities.'' But neither Mapuche leaders nor forestry interests seem satisfied, and despite Mr. Lagos's promise to push for adoption of the measures, the Chilean Congress has taken no action. Some Mapuche leaders, including Mr. Huilcamán, who was a member of the commission, oppose the report because they think it ''a colonialist document'' that does not go far enough. But landowners believe that the self-determination provisions of the plan will |
1603278_0 | Metro Briefing | Connecticut: Hartford: Impeachment Lawyer Rejoins Firm | Ross H. Garber, left, one of the lead lawyers who represented former Gov. John G. Rowland in the impeachment inquiry that prompted his resignation, is joining a private law firm's white-collar criminal defense and government investigations practice. Mr. Garber, 37, left his position as the governor's in-house legal counsel shortly after Mr. Rowland resigned effective July 1. He will become a partner at Shipman & Goodwin, a Hartford firm where he was an associate before he left to run for state treasurer in the 2002 election. Mr. Garber, a Republican, joined Mr. Rowland's administration after losing the 2002 race. William Yardley (NYT) |
1606114_0 | Few Nations Check to See if Passports Are Stolen, Interpol Says | Despite heightened terror alerts around the world, people traveling on stolen passports continue to slip across international borders because few countries check to see if incoming passports are among those known to be missing, says Interpol, the international police organization based here. For example, Milorad Ulemek, believed to have ordered the assassination of Prime Minister Zoran Djindic of Serbia in March 2003, traveled in the previous two years using a stolen passport that border control officers in six countries stamped 26 times, including 6 times in Switzerland and 14 times in Greece. ''What's most shocking for me is how few countries are checking to see what passports coming in are stolen,'' Ronald K. Noble, the secretary general of Interpol, said in a recent interview. He said that if European border controls had been tighter, Mr. Djindic might not have been killed. The lack of vigilance in screening for stolen passports is one of most disturbing lapses in an evolving international antiterrorism regime that remains frighteningly lax, Interpol officials say. Any review of the many terrorism investigations around the world shows the extent to which Al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations rely on falsified travel documents to move operatives. Often such documents are traded among associates in a terrorist network, but more frequently they are stolen or bought on the black market and changed with a photograph. Mr. Noble is leading an effort to stop that by linking Interpol's 181 member countries to a stolen travel documents database that will let immigration officials at any border post screen incoming passports and ensure that they are not among the thousands of such documents reported stolen each year. The database, which includes information for 1.7 million stolen passports and other travel documents, is available to all member states, though participation has been sluggish. Two months after the database was ready to receive information in June 2002, only two countries had sent Interpol lists of their stolen passports. Even today, only 49 countries have done so. Mr. Noble has since won support from the European Union to encourage its member states to take part. By Dec. 31, Interpol expects to have several million stolen documents registered from dozens of countries. Interpol would like to be the repository for such information, Mr. Noble said, but privacy protection laws bar many countries from disclosing data from travel documents, even if the documents have been stolen. For |
1606094_0 | But Who Protects the Luggage? | To the Editor: In ''Bag It,'' James Bovard proposes scrapping the federal baggage screening program because of thefts from baggage by airport screeners working in non-public areas. To be replaced by whom? Other people screening our baggage in non-public areas? The solution is not related to which agency is doing the screening, but where it is done. Baggage should be screened and searched in the passenger's presence. A month after Sept. 11, I went on a business trip to Spain. While checking in for our return flight, our baggage was searched completely by a polite security employee, with passengers watching and assisting. The process was efficient and friendly. Shouldn't we be studying methods for screening in countries where screening has been done for years, such as in Europe? Roger Grange Nyack, N.Y., Aug. 19, 2004 |
1606096_0 | But Who Protects the Luggage? | To the Editor: Organized terrorist attacks using airplanes are acts of war against the United States, not simply criminal acts perpetrated against airlines and their passengers. Governments, not corporations, are charged with defending us from such attacks. James Bovard recommends that airlines and airports be made liable for not protecting their passengers against terrorism. Doing so would have the perverse effect of charging the victims of terrorism with negligence for not preventing acts of war against their country. Only trial lawyers would welcome such an outcome. John Link Belmont, Mass., Aug. 18, 2004 |
1607575_1 | The World -- Economic Strains; Old, in the Way And Hard at Work | the United Nations population division. ''Lower mortality is very good news. But we've got to adjust the system.'' Consider the situation in Japan. With half the population over the age 41, Japan is among the oldest countries. With one of the lowest fertility rates -- 1.32 children per woman -- by 2050 there will be about 110 million Japanese, down from 127 million in 2000. And half of them will be over 53. According to projections by economists at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, Japanese public spending on pensions and health will increase by some 3 percent of the gross domestic product by 2050. (The total American budget deficit, which is considered to be too large, is 3.5 percent of the gross domestic product.) Aging will also whittle away Japanese prosperity by cutting into the work force. In 2000 there were almost three people of working age for every person over 60. According to United Nations projections, by 2050 there will be less than one. By 2050, Japan's per capita income would be 23 percent lower than it would be if the dependency ratio remained stable, according to the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development study. This profile is far from unique. By 2050, half of all Italians and Spaniards, for example, will be over 52 years old. Even in the United States, the youngest of the wealthy nations, those over 65 are expected to represent 19 percent of the population in 2030, from 12 percent in 2000, when the bulge of baby boomers reach the autumn of their lives. Even by midcentury, when most boomers will be dead, 21 percent of the population will be over 65. The poor world might help ease the rich world's plight. Broadly speaking, higher fertility rates and lower life expectancies mean that poorer nations are much younger than rich ones. In 2000, the median age in India was 23. Half the population of Brazil was under 25. According to United Nations estimates, virtually all of the increase in the world's population -- from 6.1 billion in 2000 to 8.9 billion in 2050-- will come from the so-called developing world. And its share of the global economy will rise to more than half from about a third today. Developed countries are relying on some of this youth by investing in factories in poorer nations and drawing workers by easing immigration restrictions. Yet |
1607276_2 | Talking in a River Wonderland | leaping overhead or a formidable tarantula lurking in a tree become a common refrain. ''Oh, golly, look at that,'' he cries, his hand clutching at his heart. ''I think I'm going to die!'' The excitement is contagious, and the to-die-for moments start piling up: coming eye-to-eye with a small black caiman, a mere ghost of its 20-foot-long adult self; a breathtaking journey along wooden bridges strung 90 feet up in the forest canopy; the fresh-catch special of the day, toothy piranhas, reeled in by the children themselves. Near-death experiences also make their way into ''Brandy and Mr. Whiskers.'' But usually it's Brandy (whose voice is provided by Kaley Cuoco) who wants Mr. Whiskers to have one. Which is understandable. Brandy's spa vacation was sidelined when the zoo-bound rabbit (voice of Charlie Adler) opened the plane's hatch and sent them both spiraling into jungle oblivion. ''I wanted to do a buddy comedy like the old simplistic Laurel and Hardy, but about a girl who was trying to be a good girl and a boy who would sit around eating his diaper all day long, but with the wonder of the world,'' said Russell Marcus, the series's creator and one of its executive producers. And because Disney had already conquered the African and Hawaiian jungles in its shows, Mr. Marcus turned his attention to the Amazon. ''It seemed to me one of the last magical places on the earth,'' he said. Even a couture hound like Brandy isn't hopeless when it comes to being educated about the rain forest, home to more than half of the world's plants, animals and insects and to one fifth of its fresh water. ''In one of the stories, Brandy learns about the cosmetic properties of some of the rain forest's plants and develops a line of youth gels,'' Mr. Marcus said. In others, she is forced into ant-colony boot camp when she stomps on their hill, and learns the importance of preservation when she threatens to cut down a large tree -- one of the last of its kind -- which she has learned is dense enough to float on the ocean. It's a zany approach that Mr. Marcus thinks may have an impact on the rain forest's future. ''If even a couple of kids say this is a real cool place, we're on our way to saving it,'' he said. Kathryn Shattuck FOR YOUNG VIEWERS |
1607390_1 | Shop, Walk, Work And Demonstrate | disruption. After the Civil War, New York became one of the first cities in the nation to require permits for individuals and groups seeking to use streets and parks for assembly or marches. Bitter lessons had been learned from the 1863 Draft Riots, which left more than 100 people dead and turned the city into chaos, and the 1871 Irish Orange Riots, which left more than 40 dead. The city decided it would allow public assembly only in controlled circumstances. The sources for that control lay not in the courts but with the city's municipal authorities -- mainly municipal agencies, politicians, police and influential citizens' groups -- representing a broad class, ethnic and religious spectrum. Their agenda was to keep order in the city, allowing it to function without economic disruption and preventing violence and loss of life. The timing of the decision to require permits in the early 1870's was no accident. Socialists, trade unionists and unemployed workers sought to redress economic and political grievances on city streets, and looked across the ocean to the model set by Londoners, who had seized Trafalgar Square and Hyde Park as the seats of vox populi. The New York solution was a compromise reached after trial and error. It allowed some parks to be used, but changed that decision after excessive wear and tear. After the 1874 ''Blood or Bread'' melee in Tompkins Square Park, the city closed down the square as a site of protest for many decades. However, in 1896, when a neighborhood association complained about the noise and disruption from Italian street parades, the police turned a deaf ear -- the parade organizers had legal permits. City authorities concluded that if they could control circumstances by setting clear conditions for meeting times and places through the permit, then disturbances to public peace, injury to individuals and interruptions to traffic and commerce could be avoided, while still allowing free assembly. Each permit request was individually determined, but no place and no time frame was ever absolute or guaranteed for public assembly. The public during this period in the late 1800's had little legal recourse if denied a permit except to take to the streets and face arrest. The turbulent 1920's and 1930's saw a proliferation of demonstrations and marches and much more debate over public assembly. In 1941, Robert Moses, who was parks commissioner at the time, banned a protest |
1607576_0 | The World -- People and Pollution; A Greener Globe, Maybe | WITH all the hand-wringing about the economic perils of falling populations, and the prospect of a spreading demographic shift from explosion to implosion, there could be one beneficiary: the environment. For decades, the rise in human numbers has been seen as the chief force threatening rain forests, depleting fisheries, choking the air and polluting the waters. So would an end to humanity's growth spurt make possible a not-too-diminished world with enough room for some wild things, with reasonably breathable air and drinkable water, with a livable climate? Many demographers, economists and ecologists are guardedly, often very guardedly, optimistic. On the plus side, it is becoming clear that the heedless polluting that accompanied 20th-century industrialization is unlikely to be repeated by today's industrializing countries. Globalization, often portrayed as an environmental villain, may help, some experts say, because multinational corporations, setting up factories in poor countries, tend to set higher environmental standards, prompting local communities to demand similar standards for home-grown industries. China, far and away the most important of the developing economies, is already pushing to reduce sooty emissions. Increasing urbanization should also help the environment. Almost all of the extra three billion or so people expected by midcentury will live in or around cities, according to studies by the United Nations and the National Academy of Sciences. City dwellers tend to use energy and other resources more efficiently, and have less direct impact on untrammeled landscapes like forests. Much depends, however, on how those urbanites live, and think. ''An end to growing population pressure in rural areas could be good for protection of the environment,'' said Dr. Joel E. Cohen, the director of the Laboratory of Populations of Columbia and Rockefeller Universities. ''But only if the people who live in the cities understand that it's of interest to preserve watersheds, agricultural lands and wildlife areas.'' On the minus side, some benefits of urbanization could be offset by a drop in the number of people per household. That means more households, more urban and suburban sprawl, and less efficient use of resources. Last year, Jianguo R. Liu at Michigan State, Paul R.Ehrlich at Stanford and other experts estimated in the journal Nature that by 2015, biological ''hot spots'' -- regions where human activity threatens habitat rich in rare species, as in South Florida and China's panda preserves -- would have 233 million extra households because of declining numbers of people per |
1607389_5 | That's Money You're Tossing | per pound. The store collects about two tons of fat and 400 pounds of bone a week, which can be turned into agricultural feed additives or further refined into the base ingredients of such things as cosmetics, soaps and linoleum. The soil created from the compost has been sold in the store's garden shop, and fresh supplies are sometimes delivered in the same cardboard that was baled up and shipped out, Mr. Hempstead said. ''It's reusing trees, that's the advantage to all of this stuff,'' he said, adding: ''Even if we break even, we'd still keep on doing it. Even if there were a slight loss, we'd keep on doing it.'' As for Mr. Cartalemi's venture in Peekskill, there is seemingly almost nothing he can't find a use for. He mills down wooden pallets and lumber collected from construction sites and turns them into towering piles of colored mulch for landscaping and driveways. He uses reclaimed pieces of the Tappan Zee Bridge roadbed to rest heavy equipment on at storage sites. In addition, the columns of his storage sheds are made from abandoned gas pipe. He has a 35-ton piece of scrap steel from the reactors at Indian Point that will be used as ship mooring in New Jersey as soon as a crane big enough to lift it is available. And finally, Karta's mascot, a two-and-a-half foot iguana named Luigi, was found abandoned in a potato sack and lives in a recycled fish tank. Inventive as all these new uses are, however, not all of Mr. Cartalemi's neighbors are excited about his plant. There have been objections to noise, dust and late-night hours. Karta, which is being reorganized in bankruptcy, is having its permits reviewed both by Peekskill and the state Department of Environmental Conservation. With the city, Karta is on the verge of an agreement that will require the size of the plant to be ''drastically reduced,'' Mr. Cartalemi said, adding that at the state level, he is appealing to avoid still further size limits. His argument against such limits: at least half of the debris his company takes in can be reused in some way. ''I'll show you the gold that's in there, it's phenomenal,'' he said, adding, ''I get enthused talking about, and yet it's very, very difficult to get everyone else to understand what it is we do and how important it is.'' IN BUSINESS |
1607591_2 | The World -- Subtract Billions; Demographic 'Bomb' May Only Go 'Pop!' | late as 1970, the world's median fertility level was 5.4 births per woman; in 2000, it was 2.9. Barring war, famine, epidemic or disaster, a country needs a birthrate of 2.1 children per woman to hold steady. The best-known example of shrinkage is Italy, whose women were once symbols of fecundity partly because of the country's peasant traditions and partly because of its Roman Catholicism, which rejects birth control. By 2000, Italy's fertility rate was Western Europe's lowest, at 1.2 births per woman. Its population is expected to drop 20 percent by midcentury. Italy plummeted right past wealthy, liberal, Protestant Denmark, where women got birth control early. Denmark was below population replacement level in 1970, at 2.0 births per woman, and slid to 1.7 by 2001. In Europe's poorest country, Albania, where rural people still live in armed clan compounds, the 1970 rate of 5.1 births per woman fell to 2.1 in 1999. Even in North Africa, regarded as the great exception to the shrinking population trend, birthrates have dropped somewhat. Egypt's, for example, went from 5.4 births per woman in 1970 to 3.6 in 1999. Mr. Chamie, of the United Nations, says the numbers refute what he calls the ''myth of Muslim fertility,'' an unfair characterization, he says, that will disappear as the lives of Muslim women ease. Jordanians, for example, he said, had eight children per woman in the 1960's; now the rate is 3.5. (Across the river, Israel's numbers went from four in the 1950's to 2.7 today.) In Tunisia and Iran, the number may be close to two children, he said. Old notions of Asian fertility are similarly false. China has pushed its fertility rate below that of France; Japan's population is withering with age; and after five decades of industrialization, South Korea, a mostly rural country with six births per woman during its civil war in the 1950's, now has 1.17 births per woman. Alarmed by the trends, many countries are paying citizens to get pregnant. Estonia pays for a year's maternity leave. The treasurer of Australia, Peter Costello, introduced $2,000-per-baby subsidies in that country's 2004 budget. He told his fellow citizens to ''go home and do your patriotic duty tonight.'' Japanese prefectures, tackling the problem at an earlier stage, arrange singles' cruises. Unique among developed countries, the United States has little need to finance romance because its birthrate has held steady at 2.13 per |
1606158_3 | As a Substitute for Hormones, Soy Is Ever More Popular, but Is It Safe? | placebo effect, a significant factor in treatments for menopause. Women taking hormone therapy have found their hot flashes reduced by about 60 percent. Still, both the American Menopause Foundation, an education and advocacy group, and the North American Menopause Society, a medical group, support the use of a moderate-dose soy supplement for menopause if other lifestyle factors are ineffective. The most important issue is what connection, if any, there is between breast cancer and the estrogen in soy. The big worry is that by consuming large amounts of soy, women who are at high risk for breast cancer, who have an undetected breast cancer or who are survivors at risk for recurrence are exposing themselves to estrogen that might promote certain breast cancers. A related concern is that soy supplements may somehow interfere with tamoxifen, an antiestrogen drug taken by women to help prevent breast cancer. But the effect of the estrogen in soy on breast cells is poorly understood. Some studies, for example, those of Dr. Bill Helferich, a nutrition professor at the University of Illinois, suggest that the estrogen can cause breast cell proliferation, and potentially tumor growth. Dr. Helferich fed isoflavones to mice, which made their tumors grow more aggressively. His work has been criticized, though, because he used mice whose ovaries were removed, and therefore had almost no estrogen, even less than a postmenopausal woman would have. Without the body's estrogen competing for receptor sites on breast cells, the estrogen in the isoflavones, called genistein, locked on, and made the tumors grow. Other studies suggest that the estrogen in soy is weak, and so can prevent tumor growth, working, in fact, the way tamoxifen does. For example, Dr. Jin-Rong Zhou, a surgery professor at Harvard, found that isoflavones prevented tumor growth in mice. In his studies, he worked with mice whose ovaries were intact so they had higher levels of circulating estrogen than a postmenopausal woman has. In this model, genistein competed with the body's estrogen for the receptor sites, and in the end, less estrogen attached to breast cells, and the tumors did not grow. But neither Dr. Helferich's nor Dr. Zhou's research model mimics the postmenopausal woman perfectly. Meanwhile, no study in women has shown an increased risk of breast cancer among those taking soy. Epidemiological studies from Japan have found that women who eat soy throughout their lives have slightly lower rates of |
1606165_4 | Can a Robot Save Hubble? More Scientists Think So | because a power converter gave out. It is unclear whether a robot service mission can repair this failure, but NASA engineers are examining the possibility, officials said. Because of the potential of using robots in space, the job of developing a service mission for Hubble was placed under NASA's new exploration initiative, which is to carry out President Bush's plan to return humans to the Moon as a springboard for journeys to Mars and beyond. Craig E. Steidle, the agency's associate administrator for exploration, said his office was considering about half a dozen proposals for robot missions to Hubble. The options are for devices that would not only repair and maintain the telescope but would also add new instruments and, later, safely take it out of orbit at the end of its useful life, or for units that would only take it out of orbit. The telescope, which has no propulsion system, will have to be aimed into an ocean by a supplemental rocket to make sure no debris falls on populated areas. Robotic technology will have to be developed anyway, he said, to assemble spacecraft in orbit or to run operations on the Moon by remote control. A Hubble robot would directly apply to this effort. ''This is a good demonstration of that capability, which we haven't done before, for the exploration program,'' said Mr. Steidle, a retired Navy rear admiral. Alphonso V. Diaz, NASA's new associate administrator for science, told a recent news conference that the leading candidate for fixing Hubble was a Canadian Space Agency robot named Dextre, which was developed to work outside the International Space Station. Dextre was developed by MD Robotics, a subsidiary of MacDonald, Dettwiler & Associates of British Columbia that also built the robot arms used on space shuttles and the station. Several robots have been proposed to work on Hubble, including the University of Maryland's Ranger and a humanoid-looking one called Robonaut, under development by NASA's Johnson Space Center. But Mr. Diaz said Dextre has the greatest potential to be ready on time. NASA is negotiating with MD Robotics for a version of Dextre as well as a robotic arm to grab Hubble in space. Dextre, formally called the Special Purpose Dexterous Manipulator, resembles a headless human shape with two 11-foot-long multipointed arms with retractable clamps as hands. Each arm, equipped with sensors to ''feel'' pressures on objects it handles, can |
1606331_0 | Metro Briefing | New York: Albany: Attacking 'Tire Mountains' | Work is to begin this fall on a plan to get rid of about 30 million used tires stockpiled in 95 places around New York State, environmental officials said yesterday. The first tire mountains to be tackled will be Pinnacle Tire in West Monroe, Oswego County, and Mohawk Tire in Waterford, Saratoga County. Each contains at least eight million tires collected by failed recycling businesses. Initial funding for the new recycling projects will come from a $2.50 fee collected on tires sold since 2003. Old tires are considered an environmental threat because they harbor mosquitoes and can emit hazardous smoke if they burn. About one million will become fill for construction of an overpass on Interstate 87 in Clinton County. Other priority sites are Hornburg Tire in Sinclairville, Chautauqua County; New York Tire in Smithtown, Suffolk County; and Cycletech in Hudson, Columbia County. Anthony DePalma (NYT) |
1604394_0 | U.S. Eights Set Records In Heats | Not long after Sunday's rowing events were over, and the American men's and women's eights won their heats in world-record times, high winds kicked up white-capped waves at the man-made lake outside Athens. On that same lake, several boats swamped and sank at last year's junior world rowing championships, so Olympic organizers did not dawdle in preventing another fiasco. With bad weather on its way, and winds already up to 20 miles an hour, they postponed all of Monday's rowing events, a much smaller-scale version of what happened at the first modern Olympics in Greece, in 1896, when all the rowing was canceled because of terrible weather. But the weather did not faze some of the rowers here, including Jason Read, from Ringoes, N.J., who is the bow seat of the American men's eight. ''I'm used to rowing in the ocean with the beach patrol, so I'm not concerned with any rough water,'' said Read, who once worked for the Atlantic City Beach Patrol. ''I was a lifeguard, too, so I can swim.'' After the boats sank at the junior worlds, national teams prepared for possible rocky waters at the Olympics. The American team, for instance, brought along bailing pumps and also fashioned pieces of carbon fiber to add to their boats' gunwales to keep high water from splashing in. Neither United States eight came close to sinking on Sunday during their 2,000-meter races. They glided atop the water and broke world records, the men coming from behind to beat the two-time world champion Canadians, the women leading the entire way. The men finished in 5 minutes 19.85 seconds, beating the record of 5:22.80 the Netherlands set in 1999. The women finished in 5:56.55, bettering Romania's 1999 record of 5:57.02. Still, each team expects a tough final Sunday. They advanced straight there by winning their heats. ''We're not that naïve to think that everyone else rowed their best race,'' the men's coach, Mike Teti, said. If the men win the gold medal, it will be the first for the American men since 1964. Motivating some of the rowers even more was the death last week of the oldest known United States Olympic medal winner, James Stillman Rockefeller, 102, who won gold in the eight at the 1924 Games. Read said the team should race in Rockefeller's memory. ''The sport hurts when it loses such a distinguished man,'' Read said. ''It's |
1601776_2 | If higher education is so important to the economy, why is its financing being cut more than that of other large programs? | the gaps in average income between those with degrees and those without are enormous. And the more education the better. The median annual income for men with graduate degrees was more than $66,300, more than twice the high school graduate's earnings. Second, higher levels of education are critical to economic growth. A new study by two economists, Edward L. Glaeser of Harvard University and Albert Saiz of the University of Pennsylvania, provides another example of this. The researchers analyzed the statistical relationship between education levels and the economic growth of cities. ''Aside from climate, skill composition may be the most powerful predictor of growth,'' they write. Boston, where there is a high proportion of college graduates, is the perfect example. Well-educated people can react more quickly to technological changes and learn new skills more readily. Even without the climate advantages of a city like San Jose, Calif., Boston evolved into what we now think of as an ''information city.'' By comparison, Detroit, with lower levels of education, languished. So, how are we faring with our higher education? It is simply getting much harder for students to afford college and graduate school. And the nation, Mr. Callan said, is making far less progress enrolling high school graduates than is widely presumed. First, state and federal aid have not risen nearly as rapidly as public and private tuitions for 25 years. Last year, for example, the College Board reports, tuition for an average four-year state school rose 14 percent, but average state aid rose only 3 percent. As a consequence, students take longer to finish college so they can work to defray costs, and they borrow more to pay their way. In the 1960's, according to the Higher Education Research Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles, about 48 percent of students finished their bachelor's degrees in four years. Now, about 36 percent do. And according to the latest analysis from the National Center for Education Statistics, students today owe about twice as much as they did 10 years ago, adjusted for inflation. Most disturbing, lower-income students are not getting a chance to catch up with their better-off peers. Families in the bottom 20 percent of the income distribution, who earn on average about $12,500 a year, are simply overwhelmed by college costs. Tuition, room and board at public four-year colleges averages $10,500, and typical aid is about $2,200 a year. |
1601821_0 | World Business Briefing | Europe: Ireland: Security Strike Continues | Negotiations to end a week-old dispute between management and truck drivers at Brinks Allied, an armored delivery company, collapsed in a disagreement over security procedures, resulting in the continuation of a strike that left 70 percent of A.T.M.'s along the east coast of Ireland, including Dublin, empty during a busy holiday weekend. Machines in bank branches are expected to run out of cash by Friday. Armored trucks are a frequent target of robbers, and drivers at Brinks objected to a new requirement that they drive away from a robbery even if it means leaving a colleague behind. Brian Lavery (NYT) |
1601761_1 | W.T.O. Rules for Brazil in Sugar Dispute | going to use its legal victories in cotton and now sugar to mount other cases,'' said Gary Hufbauer, a senior fellow and trade specialist at the Institute for International Economics in Washington, which describes itself as a private, nonprofit, nonpartisan research group devoted to the study of international economic policy supported by an annual budget of $7 million from charitable foundations, private corporations, and individuals. ''This is the really big question,'' Mr. Hufbauer, ''whether they're going to say, 'O.K., we've done enough and now it's time to negotiate,' or whether they say, 'Well, we're on a roll, so let's bring another case.''' The particulars of Monday's ruling were not disclosed, but Brazilian officials said the decision favored their claims on most counts. The complaint, which Brazil filed in August 2003 along with Australia and Thailand, argued that the almost $2 billion in annual export subsidies that the European Union pays its sugar farmers encourage overproduction and artificially depress international prices. The European Union sets quotas for sugar production for the European market, and farmers must export any surplus sugar at lower prices. In its complaint, Brazil accused the the European Union of exporting more subsidized sugar than is allowed under global trade agreements. Brussels has disputed that claim, insisting that Europe's practice of selling sugar bought from poor countries in Africa, the Caribbean and the Pacific basin should not be counted against permitted exports. The W.T.O. complaint brought by Brazil estimated that global sugar prices would rise almost 20 percent if Brussels scrapped its subsidies. Brazilian sugar producers claim they lose $500 million to $700 million in exports a year because of European subsidies. Though Brazilian officials declined to discuss the ruling in detail, they said they were gratified. ''We're very satisfied,'' Clodoaldo Hugueney, the under secretary for economic affairs at Brazil's foreign ministry, said by telephone from Brasília. ''This ruling, just like the cotton decision, confirms that there are immense distortions in international agricultural markets,'' Mr. Hugueney said. ''And it also confirms that serious negotiations need to take place to do away with farm subsidies, both for exports and domestic consumption.'' In Brussels, Arancha González, a spokeswoman for the European Union's trade commissioner, Pascal Lamy, said European officials would not comment on the decision, according to Reuters. Many trade experts expect the European Union to appeal the decision if it is upheld next month. The ruling came less than |
1601746_0 | Delete: Bathwater. Undelete: Baby. | LIKE many people these days, Jason Kim and Linda Crasco rely heavily on e-mail for their work, running a small educational research and evaluation company in Norwood, Mass. And like many people, they get plenty of spam, some 400 pieces of unwanted e-mail daily. So when their company, Systemic Research, first installed a spam filter 18 months ago, they were impressed by the noticeable reduction in the amount of spam they received. Several months ago, Dr. Kim and Mrs. Crasco were at a meeting when they ran into a program director they knew from the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She greeted them coolly. Puzzled, Dr. Kim and Mrs. Crasco asked what they might have done to offend her. As it turned out, she had sent Dr. Kim and Mrs. Crasco an e-mail message suggesting that they work together on a grant application. The application deadline had since passed, and the acquaintance was more than a little miffed that she had gotten no response from them. The two entrepreneurs were flabbergasted. Not only did they have no idea the e-mail had been sent, they had no idea that it had been snuffed out as junk. As spam has become the bane of in-boxes, spam filters have come to the rescue. Added on to or built into popular e-mail services and programs like Yahoo Mail, Hotmail, Eudora and Outlook, the filters are helping many people feel less besieged by spam. Some people who despaired of spam to the point where they were ready to change their e-mail addresses or give up on e-mail altogether are so happy with their filters that they now consider e-mail to have re-emerged as a viable form of communication. Yet filters can also create more work, requiring constant vigilance and frequent tuning in order to teach the software to recognize certain types of junk. And as the experience of Dr. Kim and Mrs. Crasco shows, filters can also make mistakes, siphoning important e-mail messages off to the electronic slag heap. Some e-mail users are learning to make do with an imperfect system while others remain frustrated, even angry, that better mechanisms have not emerged. The current gold standard in filtering is called Bayesian scoring. The method, which is used in the latest versions of Eudora, among other programs, works by looking at words in an e-mail message and assigning each a probability of being |
1601748_5 | Another Try At Inventing Superphone | its software design. A hundred times in your first days, you'll wonder how to do something -- bookmark a Web site, change your e-mail signature, turn off the radio for use on an airplane. You'll take a wild guess, punch a likely button, and -- hey! -- you'll be right. When you're typing, you can skip apostrophes and capitalizing the first words of sentences; the Sidekick does all that for you. Similarly, when you're typing an address, most communicators stop you in your tracks while you try to figure out what crazy Shift-Opt-Alt keystroke produces the @ symbol. But on this gadget, the @ symbol gets its own key. With every discovery like this, you'll feel like sending Danger an Amazon gift certificate. All of this reflects a respect for your time, and a rebellion against software clutter, which will seem particularly familiar to fans of the TiVo, BlackBerry or Palm. (Even the user manual is smart and funny. In one of the example screen illustrations, the subject lines in the e-mail In box include ''My Accord needs a new windshield'' and ''Ideas for a new horror movie about my toddler.'') Now, T-Mobile's press materials always seem to bend over backward in emphasizing that this is not a business machine. It's aimed at cool under-35ers in big cities. (What shall we call them -- metrollectuals?) The company may be trying to avoid unflattering comparisons with the BlackBerry. But apart from that business of wirelessly synchronized e-mail, why is it such a risky comparison? What business user wouldn't mind having a built-in camera, Web browser and speakerphone, which the BlackBerry lacks? What company wouldn't prefer to pay $300 per phone instead of $400? And who wouldn't rather pay $20 a month for unlimited Internet use (on top of a voice plan) instead of $40? Finding nits to pick with this extremely successful device is a little like winning the lottery and then complaining about the taxes. But here they are: Only T-Mobile offers service, which may give you pause. You can't be online and on the phone simultaneously. And although there's a belt case, there's no screen cover, so you worry about scratching that screen. Otherwise, though, this is one sidekick with looks, brain and personality. It's a delight to be around: responsive, respectful and very entertaining. And who wouldn't want a relationship like that? STATE OF THE ART E-mail: Pogue@nytimes.com |
1602178_3 | Tension Over Secessionism Seethes on Georgia's Coast | two warning shots over its bow, according to Captain Bochoroshvili and Lt. Badri Ivanadze, the commanding officer of the boat. ''I was trying to talk with them but they did not answer,'' Lieutenant Ivanadze said. The boat then fired 40 times into the vessel's bow, the officers said. Only then did the Izabel use its radio, the officers said, to call to Sukhumi for help. The Georgians decided not to try boarding the ship, they said, because it was just outside Sukhumi and Georgia did not want to skirmish directly with Abkhazian forces. ''We knew it was better to leave,'' Lieutenant Ivanadze said. The Izabel I's provenance remains a mystery. Georgian officials first said it was registered to Turkey. But Captain Bochoroshvili said checks of an international shipping registry had found four vessels with that name. Its origins and ownership are unknown. He said that whoever used the radio spoke fluent Russian, without an accent. One effect of the shooting is that for now the sea lanes are quiet. The captain said Georgian vessels and radar had detected no traffic at Abkhazia's ports, although they had heard that a Russian passenger vessel might have sneaked through. They also said that President Saakashvili's statements had been misinterpreted. According to a transcript of the president's remarks prepared by the BBC's monitoring service, Mr. Saakashvili said, ''I earlier gave an order, and it still stands, that we should immediately open fire on and sink every ship that enters Abkhazia.'' But the coast guard officers said the order was more complex. First, they said, vessels are warned to stop. Then documents are checked. Vessels that are found to be in violation are ordered to stop at a Georgian port and pay a fine. Force, the officers said, is to be used only as a last resort against boats that do not comply. ''It's not like we are just seeing a boat and shooting,'' said Lt. Svetlichni Genadi, who commands Patrol Boat 210, which will be stationed off the Abkhazian coast this weekend. Georgian officials also noted that only the coast guard is at sea; the navy, with its larger ships equipped with cannons and missiles, is in port. Mr. Gomiashvili, the deputy foreign minister, said Georgia had no wish to slip toward war. ''The military option is not even being considered,'' he said. ''We can not start fighting with our civilians. We had that |
1606687_0 | Fire Testing Is Questioned In Findings On Towers | For more than two years, federal investigators have been struggling to resolve a critical and contentious question concerning the collapse of the World Trade Center towers: was the spray-on fireproofing initially placed on the twin towers' innovative lightweight floors sufficient to protect them in a major fire? Now, a series of federally sponsored tests that ended here today has produced a provocative but complex finding: the fireproofing, as it was installed during the construction of the trade center in the 1960's, met the standards of the day. But, in a conclusion that may have ramifications for understanding other tall buildings and future structures, investigators from the National Institute of Standards and Technology found that the test used to determine fireproofing sufficiency, then and now, may itself be flawed -- unable to predict accurately what will be required in a real-life fire. As a result, the towers indeed may been more vulnerable to a fire than anyone could have known. The questions about the fireproofing in the towers have become part of an emotional debate over whether the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which oversaw the building of the trade center, and the structural engineer involved in its design deserve part of the blame for the towers' collapse. Doubts have been raised not only about whether the original fireproofing was sufficient, but also about whether the Port Authority did enough to make sure that the lightweight, spray-on material did not fall off as the years passed, as inspections conducted at one point suggested might have been happening. The debate over the sufficiency of the fireproofing on the World Trade Center's lightweight floors -- essentially metal and concrete decks supported underneath by a series of inch-thick zigzagging rods -- intensified in May 2003 when federal investigators concluded that the Port Authority, back in the late 1960's, apparently never performed the formal laboratory fire test on the design. That meant there was no way for the Port Authority to say for sure that the towers' floors would hold up against an extremely intense two-hour fire, as was required then under the New York City building code. The Port Authority, when the towers were built, said it was committed to meeting or exceeding the city code, even though as an agency created by the two states, it was not required to do so. For federal investigators, then, determining just how well |
1606596_0 | Who's Knocking at the Door? Check Your E-Mail First | THE Internet is renowned for its ability to create communities of people with common interests, no matter where in the world they are. But a new Web site aims to build a community among users who are not so far-flung. The site, called I-Neighbors (www.i-neighbors.org), seeks to connect people with others nearby, enabling them to get to know people well enough to trade plant-sitting duties, perhaps, or feel comfortable dropping by for a chat. By offering a one-stop shop where people can exchange e-mail with their neighbors, find information about them and be matched to those with similar interests through a social networking feature, the free site aims to initiate online interactions that will translate into more contact offline. ''The idea is that this breaks down some existing barriers to communication,'' said Keith Hampton, the site's founder and an assistant professor of technology, urban and community sociology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Sending an introductory e-mail to a list might remove some of the awkwardness that could accompany a belated introduction to a new neighbor, for example, or minimize concerns about knocking on a door and interrupting a family dinner. E-mail and member profiles can also provide personal information -- the type of data more easily gleaned at school or in the workplace -- that could motivate someone to initiate contact. Set for public release today, the site has already attracted 11,000 unique visitors in the United States and Canada, and 240 digital neighborhoods have been established. While most of the neighborhoods have only a few members to date, Scott Gordon's experience with the Web site's prototype, E-Neighbors, suggests its potential. Mr. Gordon, 43, a business executive who lives in Lexington, Mass., sent an e-mail to his neighborhood's list wondering if any recreational tennis players wanted to play. Within 24 hours, he had two responses from people living within two blocks of him. Those weekly tennis matches have continued for two years. ''That was so simple and it happened so quickly -- two discoveries like that,'' he said. The e-mail list has also helped him accomplish some home improvements. Based on recommendations from neighbors, Mr. Gordon has hired a painter and a window washer, and is contemplating hiring a carpenter. Reviews from neighbors, he said, lend an authority to the opinions that anonymous Web reviews lack. Others who used the prototype Web site appeared to have experienced similar benefits. |
1606705_1 | Internet Gives Teenage Bullies Weapons to Wound From Afar | of many ways that the technology lubricating the social lives of teenagers is amplifying standard adolescent cruelty. No longer confined to school grounds or daytime hours, ''cyberbullies'' are pursuing their quarries into their own bedrooms. Tools like e-mail messages and Web logs enable the harassment to be both less obvious to adults and more publicly humiliating, as gossip, put-downs and embarrassing pictures are circulated among a wide audience of peers with a few clicks. The technology, which allows its users to inflict pain without being forced to see its effect, also seems to incite a deeper level of meanness. Psychologists say the distance between bully and victim on the Internet is leading to an unprecedented -- and often unintentional -- degree of brutality, especially when combined with a typical adolescent's lack of impulse control and underdeveloped empathy skills. ''We're always talking about protecting kids on the Internet from adults and bad people,'' said Parry Aftab, executive director of WiredSafety.org, a nonprofit group that has been fielding a growing number of calls from parents and school administrators worried about bullying. ''We forget that we sometimes need to protect kids from kids.'' For many teenagers, online harassment has become a part of everyday life. But schools, which tend to focus on problems that arise on their property, and parents, who tend to assume that their children know better than they do when it comes to computers, have long overlooked it. Only recently has it become pervasive enough that even the adults have started paying attention. Like many other guidance counselors, Susan Yuratovac, a school psychologist at Hilltop Elementary School in Beachwood, Ohio, has for years worked with a wide spectrum of teenage aggression, including physical bullying and sexual harassment. This summer, Ms. Yuratovac said, she is devising a new curriculum to address the shift to electronic taunting. ''I have kids coming into school upset daily because of what happened on the Internet the night before,'' Ms. Yuratovac said. '''We were online last night and somebody said I was fat,' or 'They asked me why I wear the same pair of jeans every day,' or 'They say I have Wal-Mart clothes.''' Recently, Ms. Yuratovac intervened when a 12-year-old girl showed her an instant message exchange in which a boy in her class wrote, ''My brother says you have really good boobs.'' Boys make many more explicit sexual comments online than off, counselors say. |
1606638_3 | Brazil's Problem in a Nutshell: Bolivia Grows Nuts Best | low that production dropped off the map,'' said Zico Bronzeado, a former Brazil nut harvester who now represents Acre in the lower house of Congress. The low prices drove growers to abandon the business, the critics say, selling their lands to loggers and cattle ranchers in a process that deforested vast stretches of the Amazon and further enriched the Brazilian elite. To help break the Mutrans' domination, the Acre state government has supported construction of a nut processing factory, which recently began operating, to compete with plants in Bolivia. ''We want exports to take place from this side of the border so that we can get the benefits here,'' said Mr. Bronzeado, a member of the left-wing Workers' Party. By Mr. Bronzeado's calculations, the price paid to local nut producers in Acre has tripled since 2000, thanks to Bolivia's challenge to the Mutrans' monopoly. As a result, former rubber tappers and nut harvesters are abandoning cattle ranches and returning to the jungle to resume their trade, which has in turn slowed the rate of deforestation in the region. Here in the Mutran family's traditional redoubt, however, where there is no competition from outsiders like the Bolivians, production has dropped to almost nothing. Like most landowners in the region, the Mutrans have expanded into cattle ranching, cutting down the jungle and its Brazil nut groves to make way for pastures and to prevent squatters from seizing land and claiming title on grounds that it is unproductive. Under Brazilian law, owners of Brazil nut groves that originally belonged to the state can cut down only those trees that have been certified as dead or ''nonproductive.'' But in the rush to convert Brazil nut groves to pasture, that restriction has been little observed or enforced. Here and there along a highway busy with trucks carrying logs and cattle, a few Brazil nut trees still stand alone in pastures, forlorn and scorched. But without the protection of other trees around them, and with the bees that pollinate them driven away by heavy smoke, they are easily toppled by the heavy winds and rainstorms that often rip through the area. ''The problem is that there is not even one monitor to keep an eye on this,'' said Alfredo Kingo Oyama Homma, a biologist at the government-run Brazilian Enterprise for Agricultural Research in Belém, the state capital. ''So it's a virtual invitation to destroy.'' Marabá Journal |
1603564_1 | How the Greek Vase Shaped Many Styles And Western Design | Not all the selections are regularly on view at the Met, so the show may deepen your appreciation of the Met's holdings and its collecting history. (The decorative-arts side of this history is recounted in an essay in the catalog by Heather Jane McCormick, a doctoral candidate at Bard.) Meanwhile the students' spare, implicitly neoclassical installation of their selections should also expand your sense of the importance of the decorative objects as relatively ego-free vehicles of visual thought and innovation. For better and for worse, nothing has done more to shape Western civilization than the culture of classical Greece. The Italians conjured much of the Renaissance from its literature, architecture and sculpture, as derived mostly from secondhand Roman sources. In the 18th century, as excavation of Greece began in earnest, the contact became more direct, the influence more insistent. Large chunks of what was unearthed were carted off to European museums and private collections, where they began to work their spell on artists, designers and architects as well as on the kings and aristocrats who employed them. David's ''Oath of the Horatii,'' Keats's ''Ode on a Grecian Urn,'' the high-waisted, diaphanous gowns favored by the ladies of Napoleon's court, the gold-on-orange Tapestry Room designed by Robert Adam for Croome Court in the 1760's and now at the Met -- these are but a few specific examples. Another is the facade of the old New York Stock Exchange on Wall Street, with its temple-like columns and pediment, although in America, neoclassical was usually called Federal. Despite the fame of such landmarks as the Elgin Marbles in London or the Pegasus in Berlin, the chief transmitter of le goût Grec was the Greek vase. As Hans Ottomeyer, director of the Deutsches Historisches Museum, Berlin, writes in his illuminating essay in the catalog, vases were small, portable and intact relative to statues and buildings. They are also fabulously interdisciplinary, their shapes are sculptural and their details are implicitly architectural, as suggested by the Greek column krater at the beginning of the Bard show. In addition their smooth surfaces encouraged what may have been the West's first sustained succession of schools of painting. In fascinating highly specific ways, the show demonstrates the transmission of style as it really happens in the details, object by object. It begins with two red and black vases: the open necked column krater and a relatively bottle-like hydria, or |
1603535_0 | Shopping | Boating | THERE'S nothing quite like spending a summer day boating with the family. The captain and first mate (a k a Mom and Dad) want to plop down in deck chairs, grab a beer and watch their fishing lines bob in the water. The crew members (a k a their children) threaten mutiny as the shore recedes and pass the next few hours torturing one another and shattering any shred of tranquillity. What if boat boredom could be banished for good? Just give them the creature comforts of home, and they'll be begging to hit the high seas. NANCY M. BETTER |
1603647_2 | Japan's Economy Continues to Grow, but at a Slower Rate | may be putting a damper on consumer spending. Consumption among Japanese households declined a surprising 2.6 percent in June, compared with figures a year earlier, serving as a warning that the recovery remains fragile. Many economists, however, said they were not too alarmed by the fall, given that household spending rose for seven consecutive months before June's decline. The public sector has also been a drag on the economy over the last few quarters, as government spending has slowed. That is consistent with a promise made by the administration of Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi to reduce deficits built up over the last decade as previous administrations tried to revive a weak economy with big doses of public spending. Despite worries that the lift from exports will soon diminish, that sector remained relatively healthy in the second quarter. Automakers, consumer electronics companies and industrial equipment manufacturers are enjoying robust profit growth because of strong overseas sales. Japan's current account surplus, a broad measure of trade in goods, services, tourism and investment, rose 15.7 percent in June from a year ago, mostly because of healthy export growth. Still, one reason that economists expect Japan's expansion to slow over the next year is that China's torrid growth seems likely to cool off. Japan's economy is closely tied to China's through trade, so Japan will be affected by any slowdown there. Worried that an overheating economy could ignite inflation, the Chinese authorities have been trying to slow the pace of growth by placing curbs on bank lending and other measures. So far, they have successfully cooled growth without bringing it to a halt. ''We're less worried about China than we were three months ago,'' Mr. Jerram said. Another potential risk for Japan's economy is the rise in oil prices, although economists say the increase does not seem to be hurting much so far. Also, economists say Japan may be less vulnerable than the United States to rising oil prices. While an increase raises costs for companies, Japanese consumers are less affected by higher gasoline prices because few Japanese commute to work and so spend less on average on gasoline than do Americans. But Toshihiko Fukui, the governor of the Bank of Japan, recently cited rising oil prices as a threat to Japan, if not directly, then through the effect that the increase is having on important trading partners like the United States and China. |
1604963_2 | Awe (and Maybe Acolytes) From Bold Architecture | Church officials and art experts are eager to see if the same holds true for a more spiritual terrain. The dome of Mr. Piano's sanctuary is second in size in Italy only to St. Peter's Basilica. But the Padre Pio Church is more reminiscent of a sleek airport terminal, and visiting it has become a rite of passage for pilgrims. That thriving flock is, however, an exception for European Roman Catholicism, which, according to a Vatican report, has ''shown a downward trend'' of baptized adults from 35 percent of Europeans in 1978 to 26.5 percent in 2001. ''I think that's the whole purpose of this church, to counteract some of the unfortunate things that have been happening,'' Mr. Meier said, referring to his Rome project, whose design was chosen over proposals by five other architects, including Mr. Gehry. ''I think that architecture can play a role in bringing people to the church. Whether it will have any major effect, I couldn't say. I think it will bring tourists, but to say it will bring converts, I don't know.'' A major challenge confronting a renewal of religious architecture, experts say, is that there are so many forms of expression vying for attention. Centuries ago church-commissioned domes towered above secular buildings in prestige. That is no longer the case. ''Religious architecture is less important today than for the architects of the past,'' Rita Capezzuto, an editor at the Milan-based design magazine Domus, said. ''To do a museum, a library, I think that is more fundamental.'' Major Italian churches to a large extent have become museums, chock full of paintings and sculptures and frescoes, but with a dearth of believers at Mass. In Rome, Florence and Milan it often seems that most pilgrims entering cathedral doors are tourists following a guide. But some experts say that modern, architecturally important churches do exist in Italy; it is just a matter of knowing where to look. ''People have been ignoring religious architecture and its achievements in Italy,'' said Francesco Dal Co, the editor of Casabella, the oldest architecture review in Italy. ''So when Meier builds his church, we think it's an epiphany, but it isn't.'' Mr. Dal Co cited the works of Giovanni Michelucci, considered the father of modern Italian architecture, who built several churches, most famously the Motorway Church overlooking a Florence highway. ''You don't see new churches because you are walking around the |
1604953_4 | The 3 R's and Beyond, With a Software Boost | Standard for Students and Teachers (www.amazon.com, $130, ages 8 and up) includes full versions of Word, Excel, Outlook and PowerPoint, and appropriately leaves out Access, Publisher and Outlook, found in the more expensive professional edition. To help students bone up in particular areas, Middle School Advantage 2004 (www.encoresoftware.com, $40, ages 11 and up) covers 10 subjects, though the material varies in quality. Typing Instructor is an excellent keyboarding tutorial; U.S. History is a textbook on CD-ROM (it is read aloud, which is nice); Advantage Writing and Vocabulary is a dry but useful tutorial. Also included are Classic Library (the texts of 2,000 unabridged classics, from Shakespeare to Aesop to Dickens), Human 3D (a text, pictorial and animated tour of the human body); Rosetta Stone 1.7.7 (an immersive Spanish tutorial); and Basic Math 2 and 3 (a geometry and algebra primer that is a little tricky to use). For making a report cover at the last minute, there is no better tool than Print Shop 20 (www.printshop.com, $50, for Windows) and Print Shop for Mac OS X Edition (www.mackiev.com, $50). These new programs put thousands of clip-art items at your fingertips. The Mac version lets you work directly with iPhoto to import your own images. College-bound students may appreciate Kaplan SAT-ACT PSAT 2005 Gold Edition (www.topics-ent.com, $40, ages 15 and up), which can ease the stress associated with the SAT. Tutorials, several full-length, computer-scored practice tests and eight extra verbal and math sections add up to relatively painless practice. Despite the sharp slowdown in new software for children over the last few years, it is still possible to find high-quality titles that make learning more engaging by providing age-appropriate challenges and instant performance feedback. Such products may even help your family avoid the pain of encountering an academic problem -- like the multiplication table or a tough spelling test -- by heading it off at the pass. Now that's a good use of technology. Smart Shopping Taking a Look Online Before You Leap When it comes to buying software, a little planning goes a long way. Before you find yourself standing in a crowded store, scratching your chin and wondering what the difference is between the gold and platinum versions, take a few minutes for some online research. It pays to check the Web site of the publisher, as well as that of competitors, for technical details. When I cut and |
1605084_2 | Corzine Says He Won't Push McGreevey Out of Office | had brought upon himself, the ultimate decision about when to leave rested solely with him. With news reporters, photographers and camera crews cameras circling, Mr. McGreevey has governed under a kind of house arrest since returning to work on Monday, making no public appearances other than to wave as his bodyguards escort him between his car and the State House. Mr. McGreevey's aides say he is adamant about completing several projects during the next three months, and on Wednesday he met to discuss plans to build a stem cell research institute and the Xanadu shopping and entertainment complex in the Meadowlands. ''We've got to kick this stuff to the side and do our job,'' said George Zoffinger, director of the Sports and Exposition Authority, after the meeting with the Governor. Yet even as the administration strained to escape the debris of the scandal, there was yet another reminder of the corruption problems that ultimately doomed Mr. McGreevey, as his top fund-raiser, Charles Kushner, pleaded guilty to hiring a prostitute to silence a witness in a campaign finance investigation. When the case first became public last month, the United States attorney, Christopher J. Christie, emphasized that the governor was not involved in the matter, but on Wednesday, when asked whether Mr. McGreevey was now under investigation, Mr. Christie's response was far more provocative. ''There's an ongoing investigation, the specifics of which I will not discuss in any detail,'' he said. Mr. McGreevey's lawyers insist that the governor was the victim of an attempted extortion. Shortly before he announced his resignation last Thursday, his lawyers called the F.B.I. to report that Golan Cipel, identified as the man with whom Mr. McGreevey had the affair, had threatened to reveal the relationship unless the governor paid him more than $1 million and approved the charter for Touro College to open a medical school in New Jersey. But Mr. Cipel's lawyers say they were planning to file a sexual harassment suit against Mr. McGreevey, and they accuse his legal team of trying to silence them with offers of a seven-figure settlement. They insist that Mr. McGreevey's representatives tried for months to keep Mr. Cipel quiet, sending him letters and even knocking on his door to say a settlement was being negotiated. Mr. Christie declined to discuss the status of the extortion allegations, saying only, ''It's very, very early in an investigation.'' The news of Mr. |
1604970_0 | Spotting Signposts to Higher Education | ON the last day of sixth grade, as my eldest daughter prepared to graduate to the unknown world of middle school, her teacher gave a final assignment: list on a sheet of paper both your short-and long-term goals in life. Then, with the aid of one of those laminating machines that preserves any school project for posterity, Mrs. Frisenda encased her students' dreams beneath a layer of clear film. My daughter's list, which hung on the refrigerator for a long time, said, ''My long-term goal is to be a pediatric oncologist. But first, I will need to find my new locker.'' This pretty well summed up the nature of ambition, I think. Lofty, world-conquering aspirations would be so much easier to achieve without more prosaic, nagging concerns. Every time I passed the refrigerator I used to think: ''My long-term goal is to be a good writer. But first, I must defrost something for dinner.'' Three years have passed. Middle school, conquered. High school, under way. So this summer, with my daughter on the brink of becoming a sophomore, we started to think about the next lofty goal: college. Did I say we? It started with one of those sinking feelings of parental panic. Mine occurred at a cocktail party, where the conversations made it clear that while I had been worrying about whether to thaw leftover chili or spaghetti sauce, savvier parents had been homing in on the strategies of SAT prep classes, math tutors and books that claimed to know the secrets of the 50 best small liberal arts colleges in America. As a parent of two teenagers, I don't need more panic. So what if my daughter won't graduate until 2007? I went home and started shopping online for a college. Although this was foreign territory (when I was growing up, the biggest precollege anxiety was trying to remember to bring an adequate supply of sharpened No.2 pencils to the SAT test), I quickly learned that the first step was to get basic advice. At sites like www.collegeboard.com, princetonreview.com and petersons.com, online tools help prospective students choose a college, understand the differences among majors and take online practice tests. I also found college-counseling companies -- at sites like ivywise.com, greenesguides.com and roadtocollege.com -- where fees for advising high school students on how best to market themselves as applicants start at $99 (for application-essay editing from editors at Road |
1605425_4 | Mies Villa, Jostled by History, Is in a Race Against Time | not make such big sheets. Mr. Stubbs painted a much bleaker picture. ''It was poorly restored,'' he said. And recent years have brought even more decay. The house is now beset with drainage problems, he reported. At the edge of the stair to the garden, the stucco is falling away. The travertine steps leading to the garden are pulling away from the building. And the downhill elevation of the building, the part leading to the garden, is rotating outward. Some of the columns have lost their stainless steel casing. One retractable window is jammed at the basement level. It is now up to the current owner, the city of Brno, in what is now the Czech Republic, to fix it all. In 1993 the Villa Tugendhat Fund and Friends of Tugendhat were formed to preserve the house. In 1995 Brno received a $15,000 grant to pay for preliminary research from the Samuel H. Kress European Preservation Program, part of the World Monuments Fund. Then the International Music and Art Foundation, based in Switzerland, got involved, pledging $100,000, because a trustee, Nicholas Thaw, was also a trustee of the World Monuments Fund. The Robert Wilson Foundation matched the $100,000. But that's barely a dent in the estimated $3 million price tag to get Tugendhat back where it was in 1938. In 2001 Tugendhat was inscribed in Unesco's World Heritage List as one of the world's most significant monuments. And that has put pressure on Brno to stabilize and restore it now. There are ''some obligations following from the Unesco rules,'' Ms. Sancova said. ''We cannot leave the villa to be neglected.'' Who has the commission to fix the great Tugendhat villa? So far, no one. ''It took the city of Brno over a year to find an architect,'' Mr. Stubbs said. The jury chose a Czech firm called Omnia, said Ian Morello, the field program's administrative assistant at the World Monuments Fund. But a competing firm contested the jury process. Brno's Anti-Monopoly Office stepped in to decide whether the competition was fair, ruling that eventually the City Council would have to approve the winner. When will that happen? Ms. Sancova said, ''The final decision cannot be determined in terms of time exactly.'' ''Brno has been slow on the uptake,'' Mr. Stubbs complained. ''The good news is that the Czechs are extremely good at conservation. They just have to get to it.'' |
1601603_0 | World Business Briefing | Asia: Malaysia: Exports Rise | Malaysia's exports rose 22.2 percent in the first half of the year, to 39.75 billion ringgit ($10.46 billion), as demand from the United States and Hong Kong for the country's electronics surged more than expected. Malaysia's trade surplus fell to 5.09 billion ringgit, however, as factories imported more raw materials. Wayne Arnold (NYT) |
1601543_1 | Berry Sales to U.S. Offer Security to Amazon Farmers | river to the middlemen, but they always pay the lowest price possible,'' he said. ''Now I have a lot more security because I know what price I'm going to get ahead of time.'' Mr. da Costa's American buyers may be relative newcomers, but they are already helping change the face of the tropical fruit trade in this part of the Brazilian Amazon. Because Sambazon offers guaranteed contracts, hundreds of peasant families are able, for the first time, to lock in a price for the bulk of their crop before the harvest. And as their sales become more lucrative, people have an incentive to preserve their habitat instead of abandoning it in search of work in nearby cities like Belém, where many former river dwellers live in poverty in crime-ridden shantytowns. ''The idea is to show the locals that it can pay off to become stewards of the forest,'' said Ryan Black, chief executive and a founder of Sambazon in San Clemente, Calif. While those may sound like the words of a seasoned environmental advocate, it was Mr. Black's nose for business that drew him into the conservationist movement. He and a friend, Ed Nichols, came up with the idea for importing tropical fruit after tasting açaí during a surfing trip to northeastern Brazil in 1999. A few months later, they founded Sambazon, short for Saving and Managing the Brazilian Amazon. Rich in antioxidants and amino acids, açaí is thought to be one of the most nutritional fruits of the Amazon basin. So Mr. Black and Mr. Nichols first went after the health-conscious, processing the fruit into packs of frozen pulp mixed with guaraná, another berry from the Amazon that contains natural stimulants. Then they started distributing it to juice bars and fitness clubs throughout Southern California, where açaí smoothies soon began supplanting wheatgrass protein shakes as the drink of choice among athletes and body builders. Sambazon açaí is now carried by thousands of juice bars and grocery stores across the country, including such retail chains as the Whole Foods Market, Wild Oats and Trader Joe's. Chefs are also beginning to experiment with the fruit, whose taste has been likened to blueberry with a hint of chocolate. The Blue Door restaurant at the Delano Hotel in Miami Beach serves it with dinner entrees like veal tenderloin. In most Brazilian cities, açaí is also a recent phenomenon, even though it has been |
1601572_0 | Editorial Notebook: The Statue of Security; Liberty Is Open Again to the Masses, But Just to the Hem of Her Robes | For anyone who has ever trekked up the spiral staircase of the Statue of Liberty and peered through the crown's narrow windows, the statue's reopening this week, for the first time since the 9/11 attacks, is bittersweet. Its surrounding grounds and facilities have been spruced up, and members of the National Park Service gamely claim that the statue, an international icon, is better than ever. But there's no way to ignore the loss of what was the main attraction: tourists can no longer knock themselves out by climbing those storied 354 steps. It's perhaps an unavoidable result of the vigilance against terrorism, but a sad one nonetheless. The new tour stops short of the hem of Liberty's robes, at the top of her thick concrete pedestal, in a room that holds only 30 people at a time, or about 3,000 people a day who are quickly shuffled in and out. While a guide gives a short talk and shows a video, tourists are invited to look up at the ceiling, where a few glass panels give a glimpse of a few feet of the interior. Tourists can also step into the open air on a deck that lines the pedestal. That's as good as it gets. And that's only after each visitor is screened twice, by X-ray and metal detectors before boarding a ferry to the monument, and then on the premises by new scanners looking for explosives and narcotics. Throughout the statue's base are monitors showing the routes to the nearest exits in case of an emergency, while across the bottom scrolls a constant message: ''If you see something, say something.'' Oddly enough, this antiterrorism mantra, which appears in bilingual postings in city subways and buses, is only in English at this symbol of America's polyglot immigration. Larry Parkinson, a deputy assistant secretary for law enforcement and security at the Interior Department, says greater access to the statue itself has not been ruled out. But it isn't in the works right now, and the motives for caution seem to stretch beyond security. There is concern about wear and tear on the statue. The people who used to climb the stairs were apparently not unlike those unconscionable climbers of Everest who left behind proof of their presence in the form of garbage -- in this case, mostly chewing gum and food refuse. But it's hard to avoid the impression that |
1601649_0 | Corrections | An article in Business Day on July 15 about the licensing of three experimental cancer drugs from Cuba by a California biotechnology company, CancerVax, included an erroneous reference from the U.S.-Cuba Trade and Economic Council about the status of another Cuban drug, PPG, which is used to lower cholesterol. The federal government has not given permission for an American company to license it. |
1606474_0 | Seeking Peace in a Once and Future Kingdom | Highlighting history's weight in modern Asia, China and South Korea, two of the region's closest economic partners, tried to patch over the sharpest crisis in 12 years of diplomatic relations by agreeing Tuesday to discuss calmly the boundaries of a kingdom that disappeared from maps 1,300 years ago. China may be South Korea's largest trading partner and South Korea may be China's largest source of new foreign investment, but that did not prevent South Koreans from taking on their huge neighbor this summer over the boundaries of Koguryo, a kingdom of hunting tribes that ruled much of modern-day North Korea and northeastern China from 37 B.C. to A.D. 668, when it was conquered by China's Tang dynasty. Koreans see the kingdom as the forerunner of their nation, a flourishing civilization that bequeathed to modern Korea its name. In July, Koguryo tombs and murals in North Korea were given World Heritage status, the first such listing by Unesco for the Communist country. But while protesters dressed as ancient Koguryo horsemen picketed the Chinese Embassy here, China's state-controlled New China News Agency recently called the kingdom a ''subordinate state that fell under the jurisdiction of the Chinese dynasties and was under the great influence of China's politics, culture and other areas.'' Earlier this year, the Chinese Foreign Ministry deleted references to Koguryo from the Korean history section on its Web site. For two years, a Chinese government study group, the Northeast Project, has been issuing academic papers bolstering the position that the ancient kingdom was merely a Chinese vassal state. Behind the campaign, China fears that one day the two million ethnic Koreans in northeastern China will support a ''greater Korea'' that will spill over modern borders. ''The history of Koguryo is related to Korea's politics, society, diplomacy and security today and in the future,'' Kim Woo Jun, a diplomatic history professor at Yonsei University, said in an interview on Tuesday. ''Fundamentally, China wants to have complete control over the areas where ethnic Koreans reside. They are getting ready for the future.'' Suddenly, this summer, South Korea's love affair with China soured. In a survey early this year, 80 percent of South Korean parliamentarians said China was South Korea's most important economic partner. By contrast, in a survey of lawmakers this month, only 6 percent of the respondents showed a similar esteem for China. Now, editorialists routinely warn South Koreans about ''Sinocentrism,'' |
1606495_0 | Findings on Abu Ghraib Prison: Sadism, 'Deviant Behavior' and a Failure of Leadership | Following are excerpts from the executive summary of the final report of the Independent Panel to Review Department of Defense Detention Operations, which was released Tuesday. The full text is online at nytimes.com/international. OVERVIEW The events of October through December 2003 on the night shift of Tier 1 at Abu Ghraib prison were acts of brutality and purposeless sadism. We now know these abuses occurred at the hands of both military police and military intelligence personnel. The pictured abuses, unacceptable even in wartime, were not part of authorized interrogations nor were they even directed at intelligence targets. They represent deviant behavior and a failure of military leadership and discipline. However, we do know that some of the egregious abuses at Abu Ghraib which were not photographed did occur during interrogation sessions and that abuses during interrogation sessions occurred elsewhere. In light of what happened at Abu Ghraib, a series of comprehensive investigations has been conducted by various components of the Department of Defense. Since the beginning of hostilities in Afghanistan and Iraq, U.S. military and security operations have apprehended about 50,000 individuals. From this number, about 300 allegations of abuse in Afghanistan, Iraq or Guantánamo have arisen. As of mid-August 2004, 155 investigations into the allegations have been completed, resulting in 66 substantiated cases. Approximately one-third of these cases occurred at the point of capture or tactical collection point, frequently under uncertain, dangerous and violent circumstances. Abuses of varying severity occurred at differing locations under differing circumstances and context. They were widespread and, though inflicted on only a small percentage of those detained, they were serious both in number and in effect. No approved procedures called for or allowed the kinds of abuse that in fact occurred. There is no evidence of a policy of abuse promulgated by senior officials or military authorities. Still, the abuses were not just the failure of some individuals to follow known standards, and they are more than the failure of a few leaders to enforce proper discipline. There is both institutional and personal responsibility at higher levels. . . . DETENTION AND INTERROGATION OPERATIONS . . . In Iraq, there was not only a failure to plan for a major insurgency, but also to quickly and adequately adapt to the insurgency that followed after major combat operations. The October 2002 Centcom war plan presupposed that relatively benign stability and security operations would precede a |
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