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1606444_2 | New Therapy On Depression Finds Phone Is Effective | telephone a powerful ally, said the study's lead author, Dr. Gregory E. Simon, a psychiatrist at the Group Health Cooperative, a 500,000-member health plan in Washington. ''This represents an important change in the way we approach treatment,'' Dr. Simon said, ''not only using the phone, but being persistent, proactive, reaching out to people and finding them where they are. Depression is defined by discouragement; very often they're not going to come to you.'' The researchers followed 600 men and women receiving antidepressant treatment at Group Health clinics. The patients were randomly assigned to one of three treatment plans: usual care, in which they were instructed simply to follow their prescription; telephone management, in which they received two phone calls and a mailer with advice and support for continuing the prescription; and phone therapy, in which trained counselors provided up to eight sessions of advice on how to combat the negative thinking and inertia that fuel depression. Participants in the last group also had workbooks that reinforced the phone therapy, and counselors encouraged them to do homework between sessions. ''One thing we had them do was to list their 10 most common negative thoughts, and then when they had one, to write it down, 'O.K., that was Thought No. 3,''' Dr. Simon said. ''This is a way of practicing stepping back from those thoughts and seeing their effect.'' By the end of the study, 80 percent of those who had received phone therapy said their depression was ''much improved,'' compared with 55 percent of those who were given usual care. Of those who received encouragement by phone but not explicit therapy, 66 percent said they were ''much improved.'' The researchers do not know what component of the phone therapy made it effective or whether the increased attention itself made patients feel better. But for therapists trying to treat patients who are overwhelmed or hard to reach--single parents, low-income people. for example -- the study may provide an alternative to in-person care. In rural areas, where stigma can be a barrier to treatment, it is nearly impossible to visit a therapist discreetly, Dr. Miranda of U.C.L.A. said. ''I was working in rural Idaho, where there's really only one mental health worker, and everyone knows where that person works and what their car looks like,'' she said. ''By working on the phone, you can catch people at home and they have some privacy.'' |
1606513_3 | Junk E-Mail And Fraud Are Focus Of Crackdown | cases on more than 50 of the most active spammers. Prosecutors had hoped to announce some prominent convictions earlier this summer. But the cases have proven to be more complex than expected, in part because of new evidence turned up at each step. ''These cases never end,'' said Steve Linford, the director of the Spamhaus Project, a clearinghouse of information on spammers based in London that works with law enforcement agencies. ''When they seize a whole bunch of computers from one gang, they normally see a lot of information that leads to another gang.'' Indeed, federal and state prosecutors have arrested some people whose names they will not reveal at the news conference this week because those first suspects are leading them to others involved in spam and other crimes, officials said. In April, the Justice Department brought what it said was the first criminal prosecution under the new spam law against three people in suburban Detroit. Last month, however, the case was quietly dismissed at the government's request. Terrence Berg, the prosecutor on the case, said such dismissals were normal procedure and the charges could be brought again after more evidence was developed. Spam has proven to be a plague of the modern world that has defied nearly every effort to mitigate its effects. Major companies and Internet providers have spent millions of dollars on software meant to identify and discard unwanted messages, but the spammers have found myriad techniques to get around the barriers. Efforts to develop technical standards that would help separate ''good'' e-mail from ''bad'' have been delayed by bickering among the big e-mail providers. It is unclear whether the heightened spate of criminal prosecutions will make much difference in the in-boxes of the half-billion e-mail users around the world. ''There is such a large number of spammers,'' said Enrique Salem, a senior vice president of Symantec, ''that no matter how many you arrest, more people will send spam.'' But Mr. Linford of Spamhaus said he thought that the current wave of prosecutions had the potential to at least temporarily diminish the flood of spam. ''Spammers believe that they will never be caught,'' Mr. Linford said. ''If they get 10, 20, 30 well-known spammers, the rest of the spam community will start to notice. Any spammers who can be made to give up because they think the F.B.I. is getting too close is very good for |
1604591_0 | Ambitious Cleanup for a Sea of Tires | |
1604506_1 | Over-the-Counter Menopause Test Kits Offer Few Answers | What is more difficult to discern is the time before menopause when most women begin experiencing symptoms. Known as perimenopause or the climacteric, this typically lasts two to three years, but it can stretch out in some women to as long as eight years before menopause. It is during perimenopause, rather than menopause, that women are likely to question what is happening to them -- perhaps because their menstrual cycles have become shorter or they have missed a period or two or they have begun to experience hot flashes or mood swings. Yet during perimenopause, the test may not give an accurate result because the hormone it measures -- follicle-stimulating hormone, or F.S.H. -- fluctuates from day to day and even from hour to hour. ''The levels are fluctuating so much that although an elevated F.S.H. is certainly evidence that your hormones are in the perimenopausal state, it doesn't say what's going to happen next,'' said Dr. Marcie Richardson, co-director of the Menopause Consultation Service at Harvard Vanguard Medical Associates in Boston. She noted that 20 percent of women in perimenopause who go for three months without a period will start having them again. ''And if the test says your F.S.H. is negative, it doesn't rule out that you're in this process and you're just at a point where your F.S.H. is low,'' Dr. Richardson said. F.S.H. levels are not necessarily elevated even when a woman is experiencing hot flashes, said Dr. Jennifer Hayes, a menopause researcher who directs the Center for Women's Health at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. A woman normally experiences menopause between the ages of 42 and 58, most often around age 51. It happens when the oocytes, or egg cells, in her ovaries are used up. As menopause approaches, levels of the hormone estrogen decrease. At the same time, F.S.H., a hormone that works to stimulate estrogen production, increases. Once a woman has passed the point of menopause -- when she is postmenopausal -- her F.S.H. level will be as much as 10 times higher than it was earlier in her life. But during perimenopause, the levels are uneven. For this reason, test kit instructions advise that a woman test herself twice and that the tests be done a week apart. They also note that F.S.H. levels are highest in the morning and advise that women test themselves soon after waking. Women who are |
1604517_2 | Brazil Starts to Crack Down on Counterfeit Goods | Washington trade group that has lobbied the Bush administration to revoke Brazil's benefits under the preferences program. Despite the arrest of a handful of suspected smuggling kingpins like Mr. Law, critics say Brazil's enforcement of intellectual property rights has worsened in the 19 months since President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva took office. ''There's been no progress at all,'' said Steve Solot, senior vice president for Latin American operations at the Motion Picture Association, which represents big Hollywood studios. Mr. Solot, whose industry lost an estimated $120 million in Brazil last year from copyright violations, expressed appreciation that Mr. Law had been arrested, ''but that doesn't help us that much,'' he said. ''We need an institutional change.'' Brazil appeared to take a step in that direction in March 2001, when the government of President Fernando Henrique Cardoso created a cabinet-level committee to fight piracy, which was continued by Mr. da Silva's administration. But the committee has been widely criticized as ineffective under both presidents, having done little more than distribute brochures outlining the ills of piracy and being the co-sponsor of a conference on counterfeiting. More recently, the Brazilian Congress has moved aggressively to tackle the piracy problem. In May 2003, the lower house convened a special committee to study the adverse economic impact of copyright piracy, smuggling and tax evasion. The result was a severely critical 344-page report urging the government to adopt a national plan to fight counterfeiting. Other recommendations include disbanding the cabinet committee on piracy, lengthening prison terms for intellectual property crimes and increasing police surveillance on the border with Paraguay, long a hotbed of contraband and smuggling. ''We found that the piracy problem in Brazil is out of control,'' said Luiz Antônio de Medeiros, the head of the congressional committee. ''Our report has specific recommendations on how to address this problem. Now it's up to the government to do its part.'' Faced with the prospect of losing trade benefits in its biggest export market, many political analysts expect Mr. da Silva's administration to move swiftly to put some of the committee's recommendations into effect. After receiving the report last Thursday, Mr. da Silva's justice minister, Márcio Thomaz Bastos, announced plans to create an antipiracy task force including government and police officials, as well as representatives from the private sector, but he did not say when he would actually create the task force. Brazilian officials say |
1604517_4 | Brazil Starts to Crack Down on Counterfeit Goods | they are as interested as the United States in enforcing intellectual property rights, citing the effect that piracy has on Brazil's own economy. According to the congressional report, counterfeiting and smuggling costs the country the equivalent of close to $10 billion a year in lost tax revenue. The Brazilian music industry has also been hit especially hard by copyright violations. Six out of every 10 CD's or cassettes sold in the country are counterfeit copies, costing the music industry here the equivalent of about $220 million a year in lost revenue, according to the Brazilian Association of Record Producers. Some small record companies like Abril Music have been forced out of business by music piracy. ''We're the ones who are interested in stopping this problem; it's not just a matter of placating the United States,'' said Clodoaldo Hugueney, the under secretary for economic affairs at Brazil's foreign ministry. ''But in a country like Brazil, which has major budget constraints and a serious problem with public security, you have to understand that intellectual property crimes have to be weighed against other issues that are more urgent,'' he added. ''We expect the United States to take that into account and to recognize that we're doing all we can to combat piracy.'' In the past the United States has revoked trade benefits for other countries for failing to protect intellectual property. In 1997, for instance, the Clinton administration suspended half of Argentina's benefits under the general system of preferences because its pharmaceutical patent law was deemed unsatisfactory. And in 2001 Ukraine's trade preferences under the system were revoked because it failed to protect intellectual property rights. But it may be more difficult to take a hard line with Brazil, which has become an influential player in global trade talks in recent years. Brazil and the United States are currently sharing the chairmanship of the final round of negotiations to create a Free Trade Area of the Americas, though the talks have been bogged down by disagreements over issues like agriculture and intellectual property rights. Stripping Brazil of some its existing trade benefits could sour the talks even more, analysts warn. Although revoking all the benefits from the general system of preferences program is not unprecedented, ''it also isn't necessarily the best way to engage reform,'' said Jeffrey J. Schott, a senior fellow at the Institute for International Economics, a group in Washington that |
1604603_0 | Nice Guys Are Not Finishing First | A CYCLIST revealed what it's like to perform without feeling the burden of the Bush administration's policy on Iraq, without thinking about hostility by political association, without checking the preset limits on her freedom to express herself. The cyclist didn't censor her emotions at the end of Saturday's women's road race. She simply flashed an obscene gesture as she crossed the finish line. And yet, she did not elicit worldwide glowering, morph into a microcosm of her country's arrogance or become an example on the United States Olympic Committee's most-wanted list of behavior miscreants. That's because she was not an ugly American. Judith Arndt was a German -- no qualifiers attached. Arndt can be as naughty as she dares at the Athens Games, while the American competitors are trying to eat with the right forks, say please and use their library voices. ''We've got to conduct ourselves as model citizens,'' Allen Iverson, of ''Dream Team'' infamy, said yesterday. ''That's not too much to ask for.'' Who body-snatched this man? The U.S.O.C. has done such a good job of preaching sportsmanship as a security measure -- as in kill anti-Americanism with kindness -- that even rebels like Iverson have been hammered into conformity. The good-taste effort by the U.S.O.C. and its athletes is admirable -- and smart in the current climate -- but in this odd version of curb your enthusiasm, playing nice is dulling the edge on the American team. ''It's difficult to legislate behavior,'' said Jim Scherr, the chief executive of the U.S.O.C. ''We hope it doesn't have to be a conscious thought. ''Certainly, if athletes have a natural routine to help their performance, and if they change that, it could affect them in competition, but I haven't seen that.'' Of course, there are no visuals for comparison. For the most part, the United States athletes have not been a preening vision of superiority at the Summer Games. And their gold-medal count reflects their wallflower persona. America is in the background with 3 gold medals, while China has collected 10, Australia 6 and Japan 5. It does not reflect well on American culture, but some United States athletes need to pound their chests to get their hearts racing. Some need to scowl, stare and pump music into their heads to accompany their defiant strut before the start gun. Somehow, intimidating others is motivating to them. But so far, it |
1604621_2 | Battling Tire Mountain, Armed With a New Cleanup Fund | New York has been on a much slower pace in cleaning up its scrap tire problems than other states. Since 1990, the nation's stockpiled tires have been cut by 75 percent, to 275 million, and West Virginia, South Dakota and Ohio have gotten rid of all of theirs. ''New York has been stagnant,'' Mr. Blumenthal said. Old tires can be turned into fuel or used for road material and other civil engineering projects. A less desirable option is to shred and dump them in a landfill. ''The problem in New York is there aren't many options,'' Mr. Blumenthal said. Comparatively few scrap-tire programs exist in New York. An exception is Nucor Steel in Auburn, which accepts scrap tires to make high-carbon steel. ''That is a true recycling facility,'' Mr. Blumenthal said. Family members of Thomas P. Fortino said he had searched for options to get rid of his tires to no avail. The state closed his business in 1989, but let him to reopen 18 months later under the condition that he shred the tires, said his son, James A. Fortino, 42, who is one of 10 children. Mr. Fortino said his father had been unable to keep going because of the burden of the added costs of leasing and maintaining the shredder, along with complying with increasing state environmental regulations and his own health problems. Mr. Fortino returned the shredder and the state closed his business in 1997. ''He was broke, trying to pay his bills,'' said another son, Thomas J. Fortino, 46. The state seized a $160,000 escrow account Mr. Fortino was required to establish for cleanup efforts. He and his wife, Joan M. Fortino, lived in a double-wide trailer until his death at age 70. Mrs. Fortino died in January. Mr. Fortino's relatives note that the state once brought him old tires from maintenance vehicles, police cars and Thruway wrecks. But they also complain that the state forced him out of business, and claim that the resulting stress led to Mr. and Mrs. Fortino's deaths. Mr. Fraser responded: ''That's their position. We made numerous attempts to get the owners to bring the facility into compliance, clean it up and improve safety.'' Still, David A. Fortino, the nephew of the former owner, said the family was glad the tire pile would soon dissipate, adding, ''I don't think there's anyone who wouldn't want to see this place cleaned up.'' |
1602962_1 | A New Weapon in the Battle To Make a Convention Secure | than the ping of traditional sonar. ''It becomes sort of intuitive, what you're looking at,'' said Scot T. Tripp, a Coast Guard project manager for research and development. ''The software allows you to walk around it and see it on any side.'' The equipment, called the Mobile Inspection Package, was developed at the Center for Ocean Technology in the College of Marine Science at the University of South Florida. New York is to be its first real mission. The device is expected to cut down the need for divers. ''They can scan in a few minutes in zero-visibility water what it would take a team of divers hours to do,'' said Larry Langebrake, director of the center. The device beams live images to computers on a boat and on shore, and records them, so that any change will be detected, Mr. Tripp said. ''The basic application for this is to go into an area you want to secure, know what's down there, know it's safe, then you can go back,'' he said. ''It takes the drudgery of searching an area off the divers and allows them to search the area if something is found.'' The tool is being tested on a 41-foot patrol boat in New Orleans, small enough to get around New York Harbor quickly during the convention. Scientists hope to test the device on a moving target this week in New Orleans's downtown harbor. The polluted lake, where years ago fish were said to leap into the air for a gulp of oxygen, is similar to the waters of New York Harbor. ''This will give us a capability we don't have now,'' Mr. Tripp said. ''With acoustic imaging, you're not worried about water clarity.'' Mark DuPont, a chief warrant officer with the Coast Guard's northeastern district, approved of testing the device for the convention. ''A lot of our ports are dark ports, dark waters,'' he said. ''As long as the tests yield the results they want it to, it will be sent to New York.'' Eventually, the device will be part of a fully automatic underwater robot that will explore the lower depths, Mr. Tripp said. In its current form, it will be able to create images of objects on the harbor's floor, he said. The scientists are curious about what they will see in New Orleans, and beyond. ''Especially,'' he said, ''when we get to New York.'' |
1602935_2 | In These Days of Insecurity, Stick to Itinerary Is the Rule | while or never,'' said Bruce McIndoe, the chief executive of iJet Travel Risk Management, a company in Annapolis, Md., that provides electronic reports on conditions that affect travelers throughout the world. Now, Mr. McIndoe said, companies realize that ''the world is a much more dynamic place'' and that ''the risks of travel can shift from day to day,'' affected not just by the obvious specter of terrorism but also by politics, weather, civil disaster, street crime and culture, among other factors. The World Travel and Tourism Council recently commissioned a study that looked at attitudes toward business travel risks, said Vincent Worthington, the chairman of the international travel industry trade group. ''What we found,'' Mr. Worthington said, ''is that travelers, interestingly enough, are willing to travel when there is a threat, as long as they think that the destination they're going to, and the people they're working for, are taking measures to mitigate against that threat." Besides gathering reliable information on travel conditions, and ensuring that traveling employees can be found and given adequate assistance during a crisis, companies have learned how important it is to balance risk against potential liability when sending employees to other countries. Here, again, technology enables travel managers to ''capture and look at'' internal travel data for patterns of trouble, Mr. McIndoe said, as insurers increasingly express concern about the potential for lawsuits. ''Insurance companies are very much focused on what is the company doing proactively to avoid or mitigate threats'' to travelers, Mr. McIndoe said. He said he knew of a company that sent three employees successively to an area where they were robbed, and paid a heavy price when a fourth employee was killed under similar circumstances. ''The employees all knew what was going on,'' he said, ''but the company did nothing about it, and they got their heads handed to them'' in court. As travel managers work more closely with security directors and others to assess risks and perfect crisis intervention plans, business travelers are increasingly making it a point to become educated before they go. ''Individuals are definitely taking more responsibility to make themselves aware of what's going on in other parts of the world, and they're asking questions,'' Mr. Hosking said. Mr. McIndoe said that business travelers, perhaps because of their experience, clearly grasp the connection between cultural awareness and safety. His company recently looked at how clients in the |
1602923_0 | Into the Mind of the Autistic | ''Through the Glass Wall: Journeys into the Closed-Off Worlds of the Autistic'' by Dr. Howard Buten. Bantam Books, $23.95. ''Asperger Syndrome and Your Child: A Parent's Guide'' by Dr. Michael D. Powers with Janet Poland. Quill (Harper/Collins), $14.95. At on time or another, every child experiences sadness, anger and loneliness, and displays a range of odd mannerisms. When these normal feelings are overwhelming and interfere with their daily lives, the behavior has become a disorder. Autism and Asperger's syndrome are closely related pervasive developmental disorders. Asperger's is often less severe, but both are marked, among other characteristics, by flawed social interaction and repetitive behavior. Many autistic children never learn to speak, and if they do they may speak in odd ways. They also have difficulty making eye contact. Children with Asperger's have normal language skills and I.Q.'s, although their communication skills are impaired. These books provide an empathetic look into the two complex syndromes and into the minds of children who have them, as well as offering guidelines for parents. Dr. Buten, the founder of an autism treatment center outside Paris, suggests that clear definitions and descriptions of autism are frustratingly elusive. ''There are violent, hyperactive autistic people,'' he writes, ''and there are inert and gentle autistic people, verbal ones and nonverbal ones, heartbreakingly retarded ones and astonishingly brilliant ones, graceful ones and clumsy ones, obsessive-compulsive ones and easy-to-please ones, beautiful ones and ugly ones.'' The author notes that even though people with autism may not read the emotions of others, what is certain is that our emotions can be transmitted to them. ''I was amazed to learn, some years ago,'' he writes, ''that many people who work with the autistic do not take the trouble to look them straight in the eye.'' It is vitally important to do so, he says. Dealing with autistic people is difficult, Dr. Buten acknowledges, but possible. ''Accepting the autisms of the autistic -- being able to appreciate them, even -- demands certain human sensibilities that are not given to everyone,'' he says. While many autistic children are mentally retarded, children with Asperger's syndrome are often intellectually precocious, and many demonstrate impressive skills in a particular area. Dr. Powers, a psychologist at the Yale Child Study Center, says that these skills may include unusual talents in math or music, or in visual and spatial understanding. Even so, dealing with the syndrome is not easy, |
1607140_0 | National Briefing | Southwest: Texas: Cuban Refugees Reach U.S. | Six Cuban refugees suffering from malnutrition and dehydration from two months at sea landed on Mustang Island, about 22 miles southeast of Corpus Christi. The refugees, five men and one woman, left Manzanillo on June 25 aboard a raft; five days later in the Cayman Islands they bought a 30-foot boat and set out again, the authorities said. Their trip to Texas covered hundreds of miles. The woman was in stable condition at a Corpus Christi hospital; the men were treated and released to join relatives in Dallas and Miami. Steve Barnes (NYT) |
1605562_0 | Virginia Underground | THE temperature was in the 90's, and I was at the boiling point. The sewer pipe had broken in the dining room wall. The house painters had been on the job three weeks. Three copperheads had been spotted in a flower bed, and my husband was on the golf course. ''You need to chill out,'' said the sage 19-year-old handyman, wielding a paintbrush like a scepter. I agreed. Two days later I was cooling off, standing 260 feet underground in the belly of Skyline Caverns, where the temperature is a constant 54 degrees, looking at an exotic topography of dripstones and flowstones. For three days in early June, my friend Karen and I drove 200 miles through the lush and rolling Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, with the Blue Ridge Mountains to the east and the Alleghenies to the west. On what we dubbed our Big Chill Weekend, we managed to visit four of the seven major commercial caverns that stretch from Front Royal to Roanoke. Along the way, we did a bit of antiquing, dropped in on a bluegrass jam session, hiked through clover fields and ate fresh peach cobbler at a roadside cafe. But mostly we marveled at the fairyland landscape of the limestone caverns we visited. Caves are mysterious -- even on a scripted tour with a 14-year-old guide. One expects to spy a troll amid the rock draperies and tent formations, or to stumble across a dragon's den deep in the recesses of a chamber. I don't know who named the formations, but maybe things looked different years ago, by candlelight, when the shapes were originally identified. Nativity scenes and Capitol domes were common; one bridal chamber had a formation loosely resembling a canopied bed. Also depicted were Stonewall Jackson's horse, the Leaning Tower of Pisa, a 170,000-pound eagle, Pluto (the god not the dog, though you couldn't really tell ) and Cleopatra's throne. All caves had chambers with soaring ''cathedral'' ceilings -- Luray had one 100 feet high, or 10 stories. Underground lakes reflected ceiling formations with crystal clarity, making the water seem bottomless instead of its actual depth of 2 to 10 inches. We went before peak tourist season, so our tours, about an hour long, were small and informal. History and rudimentary geology were explained, and it was easy to ask questions. The same corny joke was told three times: Ahead you will find |
1605640_1 | Looking for Mr. Right Whale | a Sayville resident and president of Cresli, which is based at Dowling College in Oakdale. ''Having the public on board, we can show them what diversity we have and what's happening to that, and explain human and marine interaction in the coastal region.'' And not least, the paying passengers -- $200, plus meals -- allow Cresli to do research and turn a small profit, a rare combination in the marine sciences. Day 1's main attraction proved to be humpback whales, which can run to 40 tons and 50 feet. The weather was clear and the waters calm, ideal whale-watching conditions. Spotting is still done the old-fashioned way, looking for the spout, with a boost from aerial survey information and an onboard ''fish finder'' that indicates the presence of food, which for these varieties of whale is small schooling fish and/or tiny crustaceans. In the United States all whales are protected by law and boats are prohibited from approaching them too closely, but the humpbacks evidently had not been notified and came to the boat. Some appeared a few yards from the bow, sometimes announcing their appearance with a huge exhaling whoosh, and many came within 20 or 30 yards. Some would swim alongside before diving with a dramatic show of flukes. A few favored their worshipful watchers with a bit of oily blow -- composed, Dr. Kopelman said, of water mist and mucus, ''not necessarily a nice experience.'' More than once a whale thrilled onlookers with behavior called spy-hopping, poking an enormous head out of the water, seemingly to examine the alien creatures examining it. Occasionally a whale would stage a full breach, launching itself out of the water. Ephraim Shimoni, a 24-year-old Brooklyn college student and self-professed ''whale junkie,'' said he saw his first whale aboard a Cresli trip in August 2002. ''Now I read about whales and wait for this all year,'' he said. ''It's the most amazing thing in nature. You're addicted. How could you not be, unless you're brain-dead?'' Others were novice watchers, like Barbara and Sam Pulis, both 57, from Westbury. Ms. Pulis said a whale-watching trip was something she had always wanted to do, so in true boy-buys-mom-a-catcher's-mitt fashion she chose the trip as her husband's birthday present. ''It's just so exhilarating,'' she said. ''I identify with whales. It's like visiting their house. You're not going to see them any other way.'' The experience |
1605738_0 | PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL | |
1605805_2 | It's Who You Know. Really. | matter as much,'' said Harry J. Holzer, professor of public policy at Georgetown University. Honors graduates of Harvard Law School will probably receive a host of job interviews, regardless of how many partners they know at how many law firms. But, Professor Holzer said, when it comes to relatively unskilled jobs, such links are crucial. When hiring a baby-sitter, the fact that an applicant may have worked for a neighbor or relative carries far more weight than a résumé. In fact, in a recent working paper, Professor Arrow and Mr. Borzekowski conclude that a worker's net worth can have a lot to do with the worker's network. In their model -- and it is just a model, not based on empirical data -- a person with one corporate connection would be expected to earn $19,570. By contrast, a person with links to five companies would be expected to earn $30,410. Ultimately, they conclude, ''the difference in the number of ties can induce substantial inequality and can explain 15-20 percent of the unexplained variation in wages.'' The economists also suggest that network effects may help account for income inequality among races. In 1998, for men 24 to 40 years of age who had finished high school but had no further education, the average income for African-Americans was $26,223 and for whites was $33,123. If one hypothesized that the average African-American worker had links to 3.2 companies and the average white worker had links to 5.7, that would go a long way toward explaining the large wage gap, Professor Arrow said. THE hypothesis makes sense, said Jeffrey A. Robinson, assistant professor of management and entrepreneurship at New York University's Stern School of Business. ''Minorities are often disconnected from the web of social relationships that lead to hiring decisions.'' Professor Arrow has not pursued the policy implications of his findings, but others have. To improve the lot and prospects of middle-income workers and the working poor, it may not be enough merely to focus on the traditional twin pillars of job training and education. Policy makers may also need to focus on upgrading the number and quality of workers' links to companies. ''The challenge is to expand the role of social brokers -- individuals, nonprofit and government agencies -- that can facilitate connections to companies once people have the skills,'' Professor Robinson said. ECONOMIC VIEW Daniel Gross writes the ''Moneybox'' column for Slate.com. |
1605714_0 | Bear Tales | Smokey Bear, the beloved national forest-fighting icon, turned 60 early this month. But who knew that New Jersey, home of the black bear hunt, once had its very own Smokey counterpart? Actually, this one used ''the'' as part of his name: Smokey the Bear. He died last year, after living the last few years of his life in residence at the Popcorn Park Zoo in Forked River. Like other animals at Popcorn Park, Smokey had a story to tell. John Bergmann, the zoo director, says state troopers found the bear in a rickety trailer that a traveling circus left, broken down, on the shoulder of the Garden State Parkway. Troopers had the trailer towed to the zoo, which is a federally licensed rescue agency affiliated with the Associated Humane Societies. The zoo, nestled in the Pine Barrens, was founded in 1977 to provide refuge for sick, elderly, abandoned, abused or injured animals. Which may make it one of the few safe places for black bears if state officials go ahead with plans for another bear hunt this year. And that leads to Boo Boo (left), a black bear and current Popcorn Park resident with a story to tell. Boo Boo, a relatively small 300-pound female, came to the zoo from Sioux City, Iowa, after having been used as down payment on a used car. Seems that her owner, who ran a petting zoo, showcased her as a cub but then bargained her away when she became too large to handle. The car dealer who accepted her, Mr. Bergmann said, correctly guessed that the deal would bring him some publicity but didn't foresee the attention it would attract from city officials and the Humane Society. Through their intervention, Boo Boo came to live at Popcorn Park. The zoo, telephone (609)693-1900, is open daily from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., weather permitting. Admission is $3.50 for adults, $2.50 for children and older patrons. Christine Contillo BY THE WAY |
1605582_0 | Gaudí's Unfinished Masterpiece Is Virtually Complete | WHEN the revolutionary Catalan architect Antonio Gaudí died in 1926, a battle broke out here among politicians and architects over whether to complete his spectacular Sagrada Familia church. He began work on it in 1883, but at the time of his death it was only 15 percent complete. Purists asked if anyone but the architect himself could carry out his fantastic, surrealistic plans, which included towers topped with sculptures of local fruit and a central nave designed to look like a forest. Eventually, the various factions agreed that his surviving plans were sufficient to guide the project, and construction went forward. But in 1936, during the Spanish Civil War, the crypt and Gaudí's study, which held many of his notes and designs, were destroyed by shelling. Though work resumed in 1952, it has gone very slowly. More than 50 years later, the church is still only 40 percent finished. (It now holds 4,000 people; when it reaches its final circumference, 295 by 196 feet, it will accommodate 14,000.) The Junta Constructora del Templo, which oversees the project, optimistically predicts that it will be done in 30 years. Toni Meca, 41, a Barcelona advertising executive and film producer, was not willing to wait. ''I wanted to finish the cathedral virtually because I knew it would be the only way for many people to see it completed,'' he said in a recent interview here. ''It is the most important building in the world. Even a child can respond to it because Gaudí based his designs almost solely on forms found in nature.'' So Mr. Meca set out to construct the cathedral in 3-D. He had made 3-D models of buildings for his work in advertising, but never anything so complex, so he recruited a series of technical experts -- and pieced together contributions from, among others, Microsoft, Compaq/HP and Intel. All told, 150 people worked on the project in some capacity. The team began by studying all of Gaudí's buildings and interpreting the plans, drawings and models for the cathedral. Then they shot 7,000 photos to capture every detail of its interior and exterior, including bell towers, elaborately ornamented facades and spectacular spiral staircases, as well as the apses, chapels and crypt, where Gaudí is buried. Then they built perfectly proportioned copies of all the church's figures and decorations, which technicians turned into computer models -- an especially time-consuming process because Gaudí |
1601344_1 | Water, Water Everywhere. And When It Shifts, So Does Earth's Gravity. | that water doesn't stay in one place. It evaporates here, condenses there, freezes up north and melts down south. And because gravitational force changes with mass, as Earth's water goes, so goes its gravity. Measurements of tiny changes in the Earth's gravitational field have given the clearest picture yet of where the water is going. The data, from the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment, a pair of satellites, show the seasonal changes in water distribution around the globe, particularly in the Amazon basin, the largest watershed on the planet. ''What we are trying to do is get a snapshot of how the water mass over the Earth changes from month to month,'' said Dr. Srinivas Bettadpur of the Center for Space Research at the University of Texas, which along with a research institute in Potsdam, Germany, operates the experiment, known by the acronym Grace. Maps of the changes, published in the July 23 issue of the journal Science, show that gravitational force in the Amazon increases from February through May as rains bring billions of tons of water to the region. Gravity decreases from July through November as the basin dries out. ''This is basically remote sensing,'' Dr. Bettadpur said. ''You're measuring changes in mass on the Earth, and the thing that changes the most is water.'' But it isn't remote sensing in the conventional sense, when a camera or other instrument on a satellite takes images or measurements of the surface. Grace's satellites are the instruments, Dr. Bettadpur said, and what is being measured is the distance between them. The two identical spacecraft are in polar orbits about 130 miles apart. As they travel above different parts of the Earth, the varying gravitational pull alters the distance between them slightly. The satellites have a microwave link between them and are equipped with global positioning system receivers so the changes in distance can be precisely calculated. Dr. Bettadpur said the maps and data from future studies would be useful to hydrologists, whose models of water distribution are often local or, at best, regional in scope. Grace, he said, will allow them to see the bigger picture. The water that falls in the Amazon, after all, has to come from somewhere else. ''What has happened is that mass and energy has gone from one part of the globe to another,'' Dr. Bettadpur said. ''A hydrologist in the Amazon wouldn't notice that.'' |
1601441_1 | As Public Adjusts to Threat, Alerts Cause Less Unease | incorporated into their lives the periodic shifts in alert status from orange to yellow and back again. The most recent warnings also contained something that psychologists say can make a threat less anxiety provoking: specific details. In experiments measuring the impact of different kinds of threats on anxiety levels, scientists find that general alerts are much more disturbing than specific ones. In one recent study, Dr. Andy Morgan, a psychiatrist at Yale University, compared how people reacted when alerted to a mild electric shock by the flashing of a blue light, and how they reacted when they had no warning. People were far more anxious, Dr. Morgan found, when they were given no details about what to pay attention to. Even a week later, when brought into the lab for testing, the people in the no-warning group were far more anxious. ''When we hear specific threats, it gives us a cue, some information to focus on,'' Dr. Morgan said in a telephone interview. ''Unless we work at the buildings or have loved ones who do, that information should actually lower anxiety.'' The latest warnings probably stirred in some people -- particularly those dealing with other life stresses -- common symptoms of upset, like sleep problems, headaches or hypervigilance. And some people may have ordered an extra cocktail or two or smoked a few more cigarettes, experts said. But more striking was the evidence of habituation. Repeated warnings, intended to heighten Americans' awareness of the possibility of a terrorist act appear to have had the opposite effect, especially since so far, they have not been followed by attacks. Results from polls by the Pew Research Center suggest that since the first terror alert was issued in 2002, people's anxiety level has decreased with each successive warning. ''People do get desensitized,'' said Dr. Paul Slovic, a psychologist at the University of Oregon who studies risk perception. ''It happens with storm and tornado watches the very same way.'' People living in tornado country, researchers find, usually ignore storm watches altogether, unless their town or area is specifically named. Even then, few take any action to avoid the storm unless they see the sky darkening, the wind come up or some other real evidence. When there is little a person can do individually to prevent a danger or prepare for one, the brain begins to accept this risk as a normal part of life, |
1602799_7 | When the Games Were Everything | so invitations to participate in the first modern Olympics were issued to ''gentlemen'' only. But a young Greek shepherd named Spyridon Louis, who was allowed on the Greek team at the last minute, won the first modern marathon. Afterwards, he turned down all honors -- gold, cash, jewelry, free meals, free haircuts, free coffee for life -- that the ecstatic Greeks pressed on him, even an offer of marriage from an aristocratic beauty, who in offering herself before the race to the winner-to-be had presumed that only a member of her own class could win. The modest winner accepted the olive wreath that was his due, returned to his little village of Marousi, and married his sweetheart. This startling crack in the class barrier presaged the I.O.C.'s tearing down of other culturally determined barriers, including gender. Nor has Spyridon Louis been forgotten: the new Olympic stadium at Athens is named for him, and ''to do a Louis'' -- to carry the day so unexpectedly -- has become part of the Greek language. We in the West are Greco-Roman Judeo-Christians, the inheritors of a double tradition that has had incalculable effect on the entire world. We are in a position to pick and choose from the abundant variety of our shared past. We hardly need to imitate ancient Greek bellicosity, racism, classism and sexism, or to laud the supreme worth ancient Greece placed on domination. (Actually, there are not a few among us who continue to admire just such things, but our society as a whole no longer pays special lip service to these values.) But we must remain exceedingly grateful to the Greeks for introducing us to the peaceful uses of competition and the thrilling experiences made possible by organized athletics, not least of which is the sense of human solidarity that comes to bind athletes from so many different places to one another and also gives the immense Olympic audience an abiding feeling for the interconnectedness of the human family. Finally, there is tremendous ecumenical value in humanity's abandoning its daily preoccupations and spending a couple of weeks riveted on a cooperative world of physical grace and human perfectibility: all that one can win by his own -- or her own -- feet and hands. Op-Ed Contributor Thomas Cahill is the author of ''How the Irish Saved Civilization'' and, most recently, ''Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea: Why the Greeks Matter.'' |
1602772_1 | It's Not Just The Jobs Lost, But the Pay In the New Ones | 30 years. The trend is most striking in factories, which accounted for the bulk of job losses in the last three years and tended to pay above-average wages. In contrast to previous recoveries, when companies rehired a large proportion of laid-off workers, manufacturers have added only 91,000 jobs this year, having eliminated more than two million jobs in the previous three years. The largely permanent decline in manufacturing employment, which has been more acute after this recession than in previous ones, spans all levels from blue-collar workers through senior management. It has coincided with a bulge in the number of jobs in low-paying fields that are comparatively easy to enter: retail sales, hotel services and clerical work. The ragged pattern of the recovery has given rise to the political debate, with Senator John Kerry, the Democratic nominee, saying that new jobs pay, on average, $9,000 a year less than the jobs that were lost. White House officials disagree, saying that such calculations are based on an erroneous comparison of median wages between industries that are expanding and contracting. The main error, they say, is that even low-wage industries like retailers and fast-food chains hire high-income executives and managers. ''McDonald's has C.E.O.'s and accountants, and investment banks hire janitors,'' said N. Gregory Mankiw, chairman of the president's Council of Economic Advisers. ''Simply knowing what broad categories are rising and falling doesn't tell you anything about the jobs people are getting.'' But a growing number of analysts say the evidence increasingly suggests that the current recovery has indeed been tilted toward lower-paying jobs. Industries ranked in the bottom fifth for wages and salaries have added 477,000 jobs since January, while industries in the top fifth for wages had no increase at all, according to an analysis of Labor Department payroll data by Economy.com, an economic research firm. ''Since employment peaked, we've lost many more higher-paying jobs than lower-paying jobs,'' said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Economy.com. ''In recovery, we've created more lower-paying jobs than higher-paying jobs.'' Though acknowledging that the payroll data was inconclusive, Mr. Zandi said that the pattern had become firmer over the last month and that it was increasingly similar to what had been found in the Labor Department's household survey, which categorizes work by occupation as well as industry. But many economists say the long-term pattern, and problem, are quite different. Daniel Aaronson, a senior economist at the |
1607957_0 | Portraying 9/11 as a Katzenjammer Catastrophe | IN THE SHADOW OF NO TOWERS By Art Spiegelman Unpaged. Pantheon Books. $19.95. The central image in Art Spiegelman's new book of comics is that of the north tower's glowing skeletal form, incandescent and ghostly in the fleeting seconds before its collapse: a searing image, witnessed by the author himself, that sunny morning of Sept. 11, 2001. It is an image that conjures up the moment when history swerved from its expected course and time seemed to stop, and an image, too, that embodies the haunting aftermath of 9/11, the afterimage that's been burned into our collective imagination. In the three years since the terrorist attacks, there has been an outpouring of books, plays, poems, paintings, movies and other artworks that have attempted to come to terms with that terrible day. For the most part they have been highly mediocre efforts, ranging from the earnest but trite to the willfully sensationalistic; from the blatantly political to the narcissistically personal. All too often these creative efforts have tried to impose a conventional narrative upon those events, consciously or unconsciously pushing the horror and the chaos of 9/11 into a sanitized form with a beginning, middle and end -- an end that implies recovery or transcendence. But while our therapeutic culture may want to subject all experience to simplistic 12-step procedures, closure vis-à-vis 9/11 remains elusive, and the artistic efforts, which enshrine that closure, tend to feel hollow and forced. It is a testament to Art Spiegelman's uncompromising vision that ''In the Shadow of No Towers'' -- his account of 9/11 and its aftermath -- makes no effort to contain or domesticate the surreal awfulness of that day. But while the volume seems meant as a kind of bookend to his two ''Maus'' books (which memorialized his father's experiences at Auschwitz and his own efforts to understand his father), it lacks those earlier books' hard-won intimacy, their layered complexity and metaphorical weight. ''No Towers'' is ultimately a fragmentary, unfinished piece: brilliant at times, but scattershot, incomplete and bizarrely truncated. What it does do is suggest one aesthetic approach for grappling with the enormity of 9/11. Thus far words alone have proven curiously inadequate as a means of testimony. In the immediate days after the attacks, people struggled to articulate what they had witnessed, frequently resorting to comparisons with disaster movies like ''Independence Day'' and ''Towering Inferno'' to convey the magnitude of what |
1607972_0 | Agony of the Sleepless Night (It May Go Back to Goliath) | ''A Woman's Guide to Sleep Disorders,'' by Meir H. Kryger, M.D. McGraw-Hill, $14.95. ''Restless Nights: Understanding Snoring and Sleep Apnea,'' by Peretz Lavie. Yale University Press, $27.50. Sophocles wrote that sleep was the only medicine that ''gives ease.'' But not everyone can fill the prescription. While some of us can fall easily into slumber, countless others, plagued by sleep disorders, cannot sleep a wink, or worse, struggle for breath throughout the night, only to face a day of sleepiness, fatigue and impaired judgment. The National Sleep Foundation says that 47 million American adults may be at risk of injury and physical and emotional difficulty because they do not get enough sleep. Recently, the National Institutes of Health estimated that 50 million to 70 million Americans of all ages suffer sleep-related problems. But hidden in those statistics is the fact that sleep disorders often are undiagnosed or misdiagnosed in women, writes Dr. Kryger, a sleep researcher at the University of Manitoba. Unlike men, ''women have sleep problems related to hormonal and bodily changes from menstruation, pregnancy, and menopause,'' he writes. As Dr. Barbara Phillips, who directs the Sleep Clinic at the University of Kentucky College of Medicine, puts it in the book's foreword: ''The truth is, women sleep differently than men,'' reporting a greater need for sleep, and more sleep problems. Dr. Kryger covers a wide range of topics in his book, offering a detailed discussion of sleep ailments including restless legs syndrome, snoring and apnea, and drugs and products that contribute to sleep disorders. Almost 80 percent of women report more disturbed sleep during pregnancy than at other times, the author points out. More than two-thirds of women experience some form of sleep disturbance linked to menstruation. Most women with sleep apnea are postmenopausal, and women whose menopause was caused by removal of the ovaries have the highest rates of sleep problems. Dr. Kryger also offers advice on how to deal with insomnia. Among his suggestions: use the bedroom for sleep and sex only; get out of bed if you cannot fall asleep after 20 to 25 minutes and do something relaxing; do not discuss money or watch exciting television programs before bedtime; avoid heavy or spicy meals; do not check the time through the night, avoid daytime or evening naps (or limit them to no more than 10 to 20 minutes); and restrict time in bed since more time |
1607992_2 | When Checked Bags Are Checked by Thieves | or a special tool, and then relocked as the bag continues into the hands of airline baggage handlers. But problems have dogged the program. Many passengers have complained that T.S.A. inspectors, unable to open the locks under the prescribed system, simply break them to get access. And of course the locks have no value if some T.S.A. screeners are doing the stealing. The airlines and the T.S.A. have not yet been able to agree on a formula for assessing liability for claims, since checked bags pass through the hands of employees from both. ''There was a period of about a year where the T.S.A. and airlines were involved in very serious negotiations'' to work out a formula for calculating liability, said Diana Cronin, a spokeswoman for the Air Transport Association. ''But the talks really didn't go anywhere,'' she added. Now, the T.S.A. is trying to work out agreements with individual airlines rather than the industry as a whole, she said. Both the T.S.A. and the airlines accept claims from passengers. But while some readers told me they've had their claims settled to their satisfaction, usually by airlines, many more said they have gotten a bureaucratic runaround, with some claims languishing for a year or more. Any hopeful signs? Nope. In fact, the liability issue may become even cloudier because airports will soon be able to replace T.S.A. screeners with screeners employed by private security companies working under contracts financed by the federal government. Federal officials insist that replacing federal employees with workers from private enterprise doesn't portend a return to the bad old days at airport checkpoints when, as a recent T.S.A. study said, ''employee background checks were inadequate; training was minimal, as were wages; and screener turnover rates were high.'' Starting in mid-November, airports can apply to opt out of federal security screening and instead select a private security company whose workers would receive the same training as T.S.A. screeners and who would be supervised at each airport by a federal security director. The T.S.A. says transitions from federal screeners to privately employed ones will begin about mid-2005. Since November 2002, five airports (the largest is San Francisco International) have employed private screeners in a two-year pilot program. A study of that program, released recently by the T.S.A., found little difference in performance between the private screeners at the five airports and the federal screeners at the rest of |
1617212_0 | World Briefing | Europe: France: Plutonium Shipment Arrives | Defying protestors, a heavily guarded cargo of 300 pounds of weapons-grade plutonium from the United States docked at the port of Cherbourg in the dead of night. The shipment was unloaded and will eventually be transported in armored trucks under heavy security 700 miles overland to the southeastern town of Cadarache to be turned into fuel for nuclear reactors. On Tuesday, a French court barred protesters from going within 100 yards of the shipment. Ariane Bernard (NYT) |
1622135_0 | NASA Prepares to Spy on a Satellite | Scientists are about to get their first really close and revealing look at Titan, the invitingly mysterious giant moon of Saturn. The Cassini spacecraft is on course to pass within 750 miles of Titan at 12:44 p.m. Eastern time on Tuesday. Its cameras and imaging radar system are expected to break through the moon's opaque atmosphere and for the first time map wide swaths of its hidden surface. Because Cassini's antenna will be pointing away from Earth through the flyby, at least nine hours will pass before the spacecraft is expected to begin transmitting the first pictures. At a diameter of 3,200 miles, Titan is half again as large as Earth's Moon and only slightly smaller than Jupiter's Ganymede, the goliath of solar system satellites. Unlike all other known moons, Titan is enveloped in a thick atmosphere of nitrogen gas mixed with a permanent smoggy haze, to the frustration of astronomers. No one has been able to see the Titanian surface for the smog, which has encouraged rampant speculation. The carbon-based compounds causing the smog suggests a possible landscape dotted with ethane lakes and tarlike hydrocarbon deposits. Titan's chemistry, scientists think, may be similar to conditions that contributed to the origin of life on Earth. When it went into an orbit of Saturn in July, Cassini flew within 200,000 miles of Titan, not close enough for effective radar observations. The radar system, based on technologies tested on the space shuttle and the Magellan mission to Venus, is capable of measuring the contours of the hidden landscape, determining if there are bodies of liquid ethane and producing images of broad surface features. The images will serve as guides to the next stage of Titan exploration. In January, the European-built craft Huygens, released by Cassini, is scheduled to plunge through Titan's atmosphere and land in the middle of the mystery. |
1622155_1 | Big Fish, Little Fish Battle Over the Amazon's Bounty | stocks of the most popular species diminish to worrisome levels, tensions are growing between subsistence fishermen and their commercial rivals, who are eager to enrich their bottom line and sate the growing appetite for fish of city-dwellers in Brazil and abroad. In response, peasant communities up and down the Amazon, here in Brazil and in neighboring countries like Peru, are forming cooperatives to control fish catches and restock their rivers and lakes. But that effort, increasingly successful, has only encouraged the commercial fishing operations, as well as some of the peasants' less disciplined neighbors, to step up their depredations. ''The industrial fishing boats, the big 20- to 30-ton vessels, they have a different mentality than us artisanal fishermen, who have learned to take the protection of the environment into account,'' said Miguel Costa Teixeira, president of the local fishermen's union. ''They want to sweep everything up with their dragnets and then move on, benefiting from our work and sacrifice and leaving us with nothing.'' Local authorities are sympathetic to the fishermen's plight but say there is little they can do. Brazil's Constitution and supporting legislation have established an open channel policy, which makes it illegal to close a river or lake to public navigation or even to charge access fees. The biggest source of conflict is the mighty pirarucu, a type of striped peacock bass that is the largest freshwater fish in the world. Notable also because it ''breathes'' with specially evolved lungs and an air bladder and can survive a nasty dry season by lying in river mud until the flow of water returns, the pirarucu can reach lengths of up to eight feet and weigh over 200 pounds. ''The pirarucu is the boss of all fish in the Amazon, definitely the king,'' said Antônio Pinto, president of a regional council of 11 cooperatives that practice managed fishing. ''Everyone wants to catch them, not only because they are so big, but also because the price for them is so good once they get to market. That's why we need to be so careful.'' Here, for example, an initial fish census in 2000 found only 26 bass in the local lake, which the commercial operators and poachers from neighboring villages can reach by sending skiffs through channels that connect with the river. Alarmed residents agreed on a fishing accord that imposed a moratorium on catches. A year later, that number |
1622131_5 | Not Just Another Pretty Face | annals of crocodilian research, and would probably take years to gain general acceptance and appropriate nomenclature. The researchers also would like to know which of the two crocodiles is the ''true'' Nile crocodile, that is, the crocodile so-named by the ancient Egyptians, who worshiped the reptile, modeled their river god Sobek after it, and on occasion mummified specimens with all the thanatoptic reverence normally reserved for pharaohs or -- wouldn't you know it--the pharaoh's favorite cat. Dr. Thorbjarnarson and Dr. Amato hope to obtain DNA samples from a mummified crocodile and compare them with those of the living varietals of the Nile. Beyond rummaging through the past, conservationists are struggling to salvage some sort of future for the more critically endangered crocodilians. Not long ago, nearly all members of the order were under siege, shot as rank vermin or skinned like swank ermine, their swampy homes drained to make way for pastures and pavement. But in the last 30 years, through the enactment of wetlands protection laws, bans on hunting and international trafficking in endangered animals and other measures, some species have recovered: visitors to the Florida Everglades soon grow blasé at the sight of American alligators, while in many rivers and parks of Latin America practically every rock is topped by a basking spectacled caiman, a gargoyle's glower stapled on its face. Despite the success stories, about a third of all crocodilian species remain severely threatened, with several approaching oblivion. Among the imperiled are the Orinoco crocodile of Venezuela and Colombia, the Cuban crocodile, the Philippine crocodile, and the gharial of the Indian subcontinent, the most aquatic of all the crocodilians as well as the Most Likely to Succeed Pinocchio, its outrageously elongated snout specifically designed for catching fish. More endangered still is the Chinese alligator, a compact and relatively mild-mannered meat eater that, at an average length of seven feet, is only about half the size of its American counterpart. The alligators once abounded by the hundreds of thousands, if not millions, through the lower Yangtze River basin in southeastern China. But over 5,000 years of rice cultivation, much of their terrain has been destroyed, and today, only 100 or so survive in the wild. Working with environmental groups in China, Dr. Thorbjarnarson and his colleagues have begun reintroducing captive-bred alligators back into several choice sites. Last year they released three young adults into a dammed-up stream, where |
1619063_0 | Finding a Mother Lode in Mongolia | In the table-flat vastness of the Gobi Desert, the Canadian-owned mining camp looks unimpressive: a gray gravel landing strip, two clusters of traditional ger shelters and a few warehouses, their zinc roofs glittering to the rare airplane passing through an otherwise empty sky. Only a dusty spider web of roads linking 11 drilling rigs hints at the riches below: about $60 billion worth of copper and gold, one of the five largest copper deposits known in the world. People of the Bronze Age once smelted metal from an outcropping that Ghenghis Khan's horsemen later called Turquoise Hill, where surface rocks were shot through with bluish copper traces. Now, after centuries of slumber, this mineral province only 50 miles north of China, is to burst into life again, driven by an industrializing China that is scouring the globe for minerals. For almost three years, Robert M. Friedland, the Canadian-American chairman of Ivanhoe Mines, has flown around the world in his private jet, promoting Turquoise Hill, his company's premier property, and drawing interest from a series of blue-chip mining companies from Australia, Canada and the United States. In July, a letter of intent to explore a production joint venture finally came. The sender was the Jiangxi Copper Company of China. While Japanese and South Korean companies are also negotiating participation, China is knocking on Mongolia's door for what is to be a $2 billion development. That price is double the $1 billion gross national product of Mongolia. ''Jiangxi is the largest copper company in China, and they are having trouble getting sufficient concentrate to feed their smelters,'' Mr. Friedland said on a recent visit to Ulan Bator, Mongolia's capital 350 miles north of here. ''They will soon be producing 500,000 metric tons of copper per year, but their mines only produce 200,000 metric tons, so they will have a shortfall of 300,000 tons a year.'' This looming shortfall prompted China to build a highway and a power line to the border of Mongolia, a nation of only 2.7 million people inhabiting an area the size of Western Europe. Aware of a coal deposit 90 miles northwest of here, China also is studying laying a rail line across this corner of the Gobi, a bone-dry, windswept landscape brought to life for American movie viewers in the recent documentary ''The Story of the Weeping Camel.'' Far from China's polluted cities, the coal could be |
1619066_2 | Smaller Can Be Better (Except When It's Not) | ''especially if you are using the phone in a car, or in a hurry.'' Jim Wicks, vice president and director of the consumer-experience design group at Motorola, said he understood such frustrations. He said that up until about two years ago, the conventional thinking was to make products smaller while trying to see how many features could be crammed into them. Often, he said, the result was products that were not only too small but laden with a confusing array of buttons. Stu Asimus, chief merchandising officer of Radio Shack, said he has generally found that many consumers gravitate to compact electronic devices like cameras and cellphones. But ultimately, he said, preference rules buying decisions, and many people -- often older ones -- prefer devices with what they consider a satisfying size and heft. For example, he said many of Radio Shack's 7,000 stores in the United States still sell many single-piece ''candy bar'' cellphones as opposed to phones that flip open clamshell-style. ''The reason people want the candy bar phones is that they don't like the small buttons you usually find on little tiny flip phones,'' Mr. Asimus said. He added that Radio Shack sells MP3 players that are about the size of a half dollar, but the advantages of their size is offset by the equally small size of their display screens. Personally, Mr. Asimus, who is 50, said, ''I want to scan the songs without having to put on my glasses.'' Mr. Wicks said his response to miniaturization was to recognize that products like cellphones ''need to be small, but they have to get back into this game of great usability.'' To accomplish that goal, Motorola will release what may well be the world's thinnest cellphone, the RAZR V3, later this fall. (Panasonic's DG 55, which weighs two ounces, is widely considered the smallest mobile phone in its overall dimensions, but is not as thin as the new Motorola.) The aluminum, clamshell-style RAZR V3, about the width of a credit card, weighs 3.4 ounces and measures a half-inch deep when closed. Its full-size keypad uses a series of backlit, chemically etched pressure plates rather than conventional keys. Mr. Wicks described the V3 as the product of an intricate weaving that included some rethinking about what needed to be small on a mobile phone and what did not. For instance, he said, most consumers do not want smaller |
1619130_1 | What's the most cost-effective way to encourage people to turn out to vote? | and other voter mobilization strategies. To evaluate the efficacy of these methods, Professors Green and Gerber conducted a remarkable series of experiments in which potential targets of voter mobilization drives were randomly assigned to one of two groups: a treatment group that received a mailing, say, and a control group that did not. The researchers then examined actual voting records to see if turnout increased for the treatment group relative to the control group. The experiments were conducted in conjunction with both partisan campaigns and nonpartisan get-out-the-vote drives. Which method yields the highest payoff in additional votes per dollar spent? Here are some of their main conclusions: Door-to-door canvassing, though expensive, yields the most votes. As a rule of thumb, one additional vote is cast from each 14 people contacted. That works out to somewhere between $7 and $19 a vote, depending on the pay of canvassers -- not much different from the cost of that three-pack of underwear. Canvassers who matched the ethnic profile of their assigned neighborhoods were more successful. The effect of leaflets on turnout has not been evaluated as thoroughly as canvassing, but results from two partisan campaigns indicate that one vote was generated for every 66 leaflets hung on doors. In another experiment, just one vote was added for every 200 nonpartisan leaflets. Over all, leafletting costs $14 to $42 a vote. (A salutary aspect of the book is that one, two or three stars are placed next to the central findings to signify the degree of confidence the authors have in the results. This is only a one-star result.) Direct mail is less cost-effective than leaflets. Mailing costs totaled around $60 for each additional vote cast. Telephone calling is also not highly effective, with the cost per vote ranging from $200 for heavily scripted calls to $45 for more personalized calls. Even worse, recorded messages and e-mail had no detectable impact on turnout. Some candidates mail negative messages to their opponent's supporters to discourage voting. Mailing a negative message depresses votes, but at a very low rate. The cost per vote diminished was about $300. (This is another one-star finding.) In just-completed research, Professor Green and Lynn Vavreck of the University of California, Los Angeles, placed 5,500 get-out-the-vote commercials on cable networks across randomly selected geographic areas in four states shortly before the general elections of 2003. The ads hardly affected turnout, although the |
1620370_9 | Bush vs. the Laureates: How Science Became a Partisan Issue | into its analysis, he said; by contrast, the Bush administration drew contorted conclusions but never revealed the details. ''The Clinton administration got these lowest possible costs by taking every assumption that would bias them down,'' he said. ''But they were very clear about what the assumptions were. Anybody who wanted to could wade through them.'' Tilting the Discussion Some of the loudest criticisms of the administration on climate science have centered on changes to reports and other government documents dealing with the causes and consequences of global warming. Political appointees have regularly revised news releases on climate from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, altering headlines and opening paragraphs to play down the continuing global warming trend. The changes are often subtle, but they consistently shift the meaning of statements away from a sense that things are growing warmer in unusual ways. The pattern has appeared in reports from other agencies as well. Several sets of drafts and final press releases from NOAA on temperature trends were provided to The Times by government employees who said they were dismayed by the practice. On Aug. 14, 2003, a news release summarizing July temperature patterns began as a draft with this headline: ''NOAA reports record and near-record July heat in the West, cooler than average in the East, global temperature much warmer than average.'' When it emerged from NOAA headquarters, it read: ''NOAA reports cooler, wetter than average in the East, hot in the West.'' Such efforts have continued in recent weeks. Scientists at the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, a leading research center studying climate, worked with public affairs officials last month to finish a release on new studies explaining why Antarctica had experienced cooling while most of the rest of the world had warmed. The results, just published in a refereed scientific journal, showed that the depletion of the ozone layer over Antarctica had temporarily shifted atmospheric conditions in a way that cooled the region, but that as the layer heals in coming decades, Antarctica would quickly warm. The headline initially approved by the agency's public affairs office and the scientists was ''Cool Antarctica May Warm Rapidly This Century, Study Finds.'' The version that finally emerged on Oct. 6 after review by political appointees was titled ''Study Shows Potential for Antarctic Climate Change.'' More significant than such changes has been the scope and depth of involvement by administration |
1618909_5 | A Small Island, a Big Exporter of Energy; Trinidad Is Supplying Most U.S. Imports of Liquefied Natural Gas | help guide the policies of large gas-exporting nations. It has held talks with Algeria and Indonesia to interest them in joining the Louisiana terminal venture. And next year, Trinidad is seeking a more active role in the Gas Exporting Countries Forum, a group of more than a dozen nations that also includes Qatar, Iran and Nigeria. Trinidad, a former British colony that gained independence in 1962, views trade as another priority, with Port of Spain competing against several American cities, including Miami and Atlanta, to be selected as administrative headquarters for the planned Free Trade Area of the Americas. The government, meanwhile, intends to invest about $700 million to build a pipeline that would transport gas to seven islands in the eastern Caribbean, including Barbados and Martinique. Trinidadian officials hope to persuade Venezuela to prepare its own gas for export to the United States from Trinidad plants. Despite all the activity, concern persists over the energy industry's influence as memories linger of the painful adjustment Trinidad faced in the 1980's after oil prices plummeted. But that has not prevented natural gas from ascending to the heights of the economy after oil production reached a peak in 1978. As in many developing countries that are rich in resources, there is a perception that the wealth generated from Trinidad's oil and gas is not widely shared, creating big problems for a nation whose population is largely divided between people of African and Indian descent. Unemployment remains stubbornly high, at around 10 percent. Crime is also a prominent concern, underlined by a spate of kidnappings of wealthy Trinidadians in the last two years. A pressing issue Trinidad faces is how to wriggle more royalties out of the multinational energy producers active in its territory. ''The issue of who gets what and how from our gas and oil needs to be revisited,'' said Winston Dookeran, a member of Parliament and former central bank president. [In the budget released on Oct. 8, the government laid out a plan to channel substantial energy revenue to social programs and public security. Included are an increase in old-age pensions of more than 10 percent, lower taxes on brown sugar and funds to hire 744 police officers.] Despite a gross domestic product of about $8,000 a person, about a fifth of the population still lives in poverty. On average, Trinidadians are richer than most Caribbean islanders though still poorer |
1618804_3 | Planting-Time Soy Quandary for Brazil | some farmers have ended up producing both the traditional and genetically modified varieties, which are sometimes harvested and marketed with no distinction between them. ''We are awaiting a definitive solution to the biotechnology issue in Brazil, so that growers will have clarity and the ability to choose the technology they want,'' said Lucio Pedro Mocsanyi, a Monsanto spokesman in São Paulo. The company is already collecting royalties in Brazil's southernmost state, he added, and ''we are studying ways in which we can expand that charge to other areas of Brazil this year.'' The confusion here has also led to tensions between Brazil and some of its main customers. Some European countries either forbid or severely restrict the importation of genetically modified food products, and while China does not follow a similar policy, it does insist that genetically modified soy be clearly labeled. ''The legislation foresees this clearly,'' Mr. Rodrigues said of the bill awaiting approval. ''There has to be a separation of one thing from the other so that buyers in or outside Brazil can be certain the product they are buying is genetically modified or not.'' With legislators preoccupied with midterm municipal elections until the end of the month and several other pieces of legislation having priority on the official agenda, it is not clear when Congress will get around to voting on the biotechnology bill. In addition, the environmentalist caucus, opposed to genetically modified crops, and the evangelical caucus, which opposes stem-cell research, are threatening to vote together to delay or defeat the bill. Even if the law is approved, other hurdles appear to lie ahead, thanks in part to Roberto Requião, governor of the leading agricultural state of Paraná, a major producer and shipper of soybeans. He has ordered that the port of Paranaguá, in his state, be closed to genetically modified crops, and has also threatened to close highways to trucks hauling them. ''The only thing missing is for them to legalize marijuana,'' Mr. Requião complained recently in criticizing the federal government's position. His defiance, should it continue, would probably lead to a long and complicated court test with important constitutional implications. ''There is a discussion going on as to whether a state can have a law that contravenes a federal law,'' Mr. Rodrigues acknowledged during the interview here. ''But that is a judicial issue with diverse interpretations, and I don't want to get into that.'' |
1616524_4 | Internet Grants to Schools Halted As the F.C.C. Tightens the Rules | John D. Rockefeller IV, Democrat of West Virginia, sent a letter on Friday to Mr. Powel, seeking an explanation. The Universal Service Administrative Company was set up to provide money to the states for phone and Internet services in four areas -- schools and libraries; rural health care; remote or underserved areas that are more expensive for phone carriers to service; and low-income customers. Officials say the spending restrictions have been applied only to the schools and libraries and to relatively small rural health care programs. The Clinton administration decided to list the money held in the universal service accounts on the federal budget, which had the effect of reducing the deficit by billions of dollars. But after considerable debate, former officials recalled, the Clinton administration decided not to apply a series of restrictions that are imposed on money considered part of the public Treasury. As late as April 2000, William E. Kennard, the chairman of the F.C.C. at the time, issued an opinion that the fund should be maintained outside the Treasury, and by implication, not be subject to the rules that are now being applied to it. Some lawmakers have recently criticized the E-Rate program as laden with fraud and waste, and the F.C.C. has given it more scrutiny. Last October, the F.C.C. in consultation with the White House budget office ordered the company to begin applying generally accepted accounting principles for federal agencies by Oct. 1, 2004. But officials said it was only last summer when they began to realize that the change would have consequences that would sharply limit the program's ability to spend and manage its money. The problems have been made worse, some officials said, by the decision of the F.C.C. over the last nine months to reduce the level of contributions made to the library and school program by telephone companies by $550 million. ''There was a lot of pressure to keep the contribution factor down until the election passes, after which it will then have to rise again,'' said Anne L. Bryant, a member of the board of the universal services company and executive director of the National School Boards Association, which represents 95,000 school board members in 15,000 school districts. F.C.C. officials say they reduced the contribution level because it appeared that the universal service company had been holding more than $3 billion, and they were concerned that it would be |
1616438_0 | The Ethics Of Biotechnology | To the Editor: ''The Travels of a Bioengineered Gene'' (editorial, Sept. 30) argues that the study demonstrating the unexpectedly broad spread of recombinant genes from a creeping bentgrass developed by Monsanto and Scotts -- one that can tolerate Roundup herbicide, which is made by Monsanto -- raises broader questions about regulating biotechnology. But even without the study, there are broader questions about the research agenda and the commercial strategy of agricultural biotechnology: How large a societal problem is a weedy golf course? To what kind of risks are we willing to subject ecosystems we value for the sake of a perfectly manicured green? David H. Guston New Brunswick, N.J., Sept. 30, 2004 The writer is an associate professor of public policy at Rutgers University and director of its Center for Responsible Innovation. |
1616428_0 | Church and State Clash, Noisily, in Spain | Missionaries used to leave this southern Spanish port for the Americas to preach Christianity, and now, centuries later, the Sunday morning Roman Catholic Mass can still draw a crowd here. On Sunday, men and women, dodging the Andalusian sun, came in their finery. Some of the fine baroque churches here were filled with exuberant music and white lace as young people gathered for weddings. From one pulpit, though, a priest urged obedience, telling his flock again and again to submit to church teachings and accept the will of God. ''We must resign ourselves and think of the hereafter,'' he said. The message delivered here on the Bay of Cádiz and the Sunday scene were classic, but obedience and submission seem to have little appeal for many modern Spaniards. Summarizing the country's mood, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, the new Socialist prime minister, said the other day that Spaniards wanted more freedom, less dogma and a greater separation of church and state. ''They want more sports, less religion,'' he said. In recent days, his government has followed up with a series of social reforms, adapting old laws to the liberal mores of today's Spain. The proposals have infuriated the senior clergy, who say they have not been consulted or even informed. As a result, a noisy confrontation is building between a left-of-center government that says it has a public mandate for change and a church hierarchy that sees a further erosion of the influence and power its has enjoyed here for centuries. Things came to a boil on Friday, when the cabinet approved a draft law allowing same-sex couples to marry and adopt children. The proposal, still subject to approval in Parliament, was preceded by some unusually harsh criticism. Permitting same-sex marriage would be like ''imposing a virus on society,'' said Juan Antonio Martínez Campo, a spokesman for the Spanish Bishops' Conference. Speaking on national television, he said the decision would be tantamount to introducing ''a counterfeit currency,'' with grave consequences for society. The prime minister, also on television, retorted that the new marriage law was an overdue ''extension of civil rights.'' As gay couples and their friends celebrated in the streets of Madrid, other senior church officials and conservative civilians joined in a chorus of opposition. The church's strong reaction set off a deluge of anticlerical caricatures and articles in the press. One writer suggested that more gay priests should be |
1619747_4 | An Eye on China's Not So Rich and Famous | screams at exciting moments in the game. She got up and smashed the picture tube to smithereens with his remote control. In western China, another soccer fan got himself into trouble when he dreamed he had won four million yuan ($481,000) betting on the sport. Elated, he fell out of bed, bumped his head, promptly fainted and was rushed to the hospital, where he spent four days recovering. The Internet has spawned many tales. On Page Four, tales of the Internet suggest that it's something of an addiction, or worse. For example, a teenager's mother, thinking him missing, discovered him at an Internet cafe, where he had been playing video games for more than 10 hours. After he ignored her entreaties to leave, she took him to a doctor, who diagnosed ''eruptive deafness.'' And another man was sued for divorce because of liaisons he had set up on the Internet. Page Four has stories about bad drivers, including one who, distracted by an attractive woman, crashed through a flowerbed; about oddities (a farmer who regularly drinks machine oil, supposedly to no ill effect, and a man who laughed so hard that he dislocated his chin); about Westerners (a pair who arrived from France to teach in China but could not speak enough Chinese to make it out of a provincial bus station). As I chuckled while reading these stories one morning over breakfast at my Beijing hotel, I discovered that I wasn't the only one who took a bit of a guilty pleasure in Page Four. ''Don't you love it?'' said an American who lives half the year in China, half in New York, grinning. Other English-speaking residents, he confirmed, also relish Page Four the way people in the United States savor some light reading. But these stories (one is lead to believe) are not made up. And some are sad, even distressing. Yet they do shed light on modern China, and some show how human nature is the same everywhere. And, thanks to the Internet, you can see for yourself. Go to www.chinadaily.com.cn and click e-papers, click on China Daily, on home news, look for ''home scene'' on the lower left and click on a geographic area. The last time I checked, Page Four was still going strong. Essay JUDITH H. DOBRZYNSKI a former reporter and editor for The New York Times, is managing editor, business news, of CNBC. |
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1618204_0 | Little-Tested Law Is Used Against Journalists in Leak | In 1974, a magazine called Counter Spy identified Richard Welch as the C.I.A. station chief in Athens. Eighteen months later, he was shot to death outside his home there. Whether the magazine helped set the stage for Mr. Welch's murder, by a terrorist group called November 17, has never been established. But the practice of exposing covert intelligence agents, which became something of a cottage industry in the 1970's, certainly led to enactment of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act in 1982. That law, all but unused in the intervening decades, is today the basis for a grand jury investigation into the disclosure last year of the identity of Valerie Plame as a covert agent for the Central Intelligence Agency. It was the subject of intense debate in the early 1980's, with many arguing that it would damage the ability of journalists to report the news. In the end, most legislators were convinced that the law was carefully drafted to protect the mainstream press. Yet now, like a time bomb set to go off two decades later, it has swept six journalists into the center of the Plame investigation. One of them, Judith Miller of The New York Times, was ordered jailed Thursday for refusing to name her confidential sources, although she has written no articles about Ms. Plame. Another journalist, the syndicated columnist Robert Novak, who was the first to publish Ms. Plame's name, refuses to say whether he has testified before the grand jury. The trust legislators placed in the law not to turn mainstream reporters into criminals remains valid: neither Ms. Miller nor Mr. Novak faces any serious threat of criminal prosecution. But it seems they can be jailed nonetheless for contempt. What trouble the journalists face arises from what they know, not what they have published. That explains why Ms. Miller, who conducted interviews for an article but did not write one, may be jailed if her appeal fails. The law has two main parts. One makes it a crime for people with authorized access to classified information -- government officials, not journalists -- to identify covert agents. The other part applies to people without such authorized access, like journalists. People in that second group can be punished only if they engage in a ''pattern of activities intended to identify and expose covert agents'' knowing ''that such activities would impair or impede the foreign intelligence activities of |
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1621057_1 | In the End, Emotions, Not Cleverness, Truly Stir the Soul | and Koma three times this season. What I long to see in the world around me today is more of the ''changeless basic material'' used by all truly brave artists: the changeless basic material of passion. So much self-declared new art touts its intellectual credentials. There are elaborate displays of technique, anti-technique and the artist's thoughts about both. There is technological know-how. There is language filled with theory, irony and constantly updated cultural references. There is a shortage of unembarrassed emotion, of passion in all its variety. Ms. Comfort is a true dance-theater artist with her own physical language -- very exact, but using the whole body. Everything feels fresh yet ancient in ''Persephone,'' her meditation on the Greek myth. Tigger Benford's score, based on Javanese gamelan music, does not sound derivative and gives us a sense of ritual and delicate formality. Our first vision is of women in white on a white stage -- a vision of serenity. Demeter (Aleta Hayes), the goddess of vegetation, and her daughter, Persephone (Cynthia Bueschel Svigals), are seated on the ground. Four women and one man stand behind them. All move their arms and torsos in a quiet, undulating rhythm. The mother and daughter step across the floor together; Demeter's arm cradles Persephone's. They sing together -- a quiet chant. The others turn, jump and cartwheel gently. It is an earthly paradise. But its lulling movements hint that when nothing changes, even paradise is not enough. Hades enters quietly, dressed in red, and stands on the side watching. In the original myth, he kidnaps Persephone. Here he does not. Ms. Comfort gives Persephone consciousness. She is ambivalent; she makes choices. And she deepens emotionally. Hades compels; he is erotic, not rapacious. Persephone is drawn to him because he is drawing out her desires. She is excited and fearful; she turns back guiltily, then quickly moves forward. When Demeter realizes her daughter is gone, the sounds that come from her throat -- tonal moans, rising to a ''NO,'' then a long, terrible cry -- have the raw force of tragedy. The strips of white that covered the stage are slowly ripped up, revealing the black stage underneath. The earth goes barren while Demeter mourns. In the underworld Persephone is aroused and repelled. Sex takes place while creatures hurl themselves about and cavort frantically. Hearing her mother's anguished call, Persephone flees back to earth. All |
1617765_0 | Report on Iraq Arms Deals Angers France and Others | The Bush administration's handling this week of a report on Saddam Hussein's attempts to purchase weapons and buy influence has angered French officials and set back a year of American efforts to repair the rupture caused by the Iraq war, French and other European officials said Friday. The anger of France and others is focused on the assertions in the report by Charles A. Duelfer, the top American arms inspector in Iraq, that French companies and individuals, some with close ties to the government, enriched themselves through Iraq's efforts to gain influence around the world in the years before the war. Administration spokesmen said Friday that there was no intent in releasing the report to endorse its findings or blame France or any other country for corruption, or to link any alleged corruption to that country's subsequent opposition to the war in Iraq. On the other hand, Vice President Dick Cheney and others in the administration are citing the Duelfer report as evidence that Mr. Hussein had sought to corrupt foreign countries in order to have sanctions on Iraq lifted. Although Mr. Cheney did not say so directly, French officials say it was obvious that he was referring to France and other countries that had opposed the war. French officials say that the report's charges, based on documents and interviews in Iraq, have been denied in the past, but that Mr. Duelfer's report did not contain the denials. They also complain that France was not given more than one day's notice before the report was issued. They were incensed that the report also mentioned Americans in connection with similar charges but that unlike the French they were not identified because of American privacy regulations. ''You protect American citizens, but you put in danger a number of private citizens in other countries who may be innocent people,'' said Jean-David Levitte, the French ambassador to the United States. ''These names are from an old list, published months ago, and those mentioned denied it flatly.'' A European diplomat said the damage to French-American relations was so great that it could disrupt a new spirit of cooperation with France on other fronts, namely the joint American and European efforts to put pressure on Iran to dismantle its suspected nuclear weapons program and to organize an international conference next month on Iraq. ''This report does great damage,'' Mr. Levitte said. ''There really is a sense |
1615940_0 | U.S. Takes a Closer Look at Visitors | TOUGHER entry requirements for visitors to the United States are making sweeping changes in the way visitors from Europe, Japan, Australia and other industrialized nations are being received at American airports. Starting last Thursday, travelers from 27 nations -- including Britain, Germany and Japan, which are the three biggest sources of overseas visitors to the United States -- were to be photographed and fingerprinted for the first time at American airports. On Oct. 26, passengers from 21 countries, most of them in Europe, will have to carry machine-readable passports to visit this country without visas. The stricter requirements are part of efforts to improve national security. The government began fingerprinting and photographing visa-carrying travelers in January. But this is the first time that visitors from industrialized countries who do not typically require visas to visit for no more than 90 days will be required to provide digital fingerprints and photographs to determine whether they match computerized watch lists for suspected terrorists, criminals and violators of American immigration law. In 2003, about 12 million of the 18 million overseas visitors to the United States came from the 27 nations, most of them European, that will now be required to participate in the fingerprinting program, according to the Travel Industry Association of America, which represents the nation's largest airlines, hotels, cruise lines and car rental companies. Hoping to allay concerns and avoid confusion among these travelers, the Department of Homeland Security plans to start running advertisements about the fingerprinting and photographing program this month in several newspapers overseas. The program is known as U.S. Visit. The State Department also sent out a cable last month to American consulates and embassies around the world, encouraging them to increase efforts to inform travelers in 21 industrialized nations that they need to have machine-readable passports in hand by Oct. 26. Otherwise, they will have to apply for visas. Homeland Security officials emphasize that the fingerprinting and photographing is quick -- typically no more than 15 seconds -- and easy; the fingerprints are taken digitally, leaving fingers clean. ''One of our highest priorities is to make sure the United States continues to be a welcoming nation and that travelers continue to come to the United States,'' said Anna Hinken, the outreach manager for U.S. Visit. ''We believe those goals are entirely compatible with ensuring security for both travelers and visitors. ''We're trying our best to make |
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1615968_6 | This Diverse Realm, This Melting Pot, This China? | important at the time. We also learn something of international commerce and movement of peoples during the early centuries of our era. Look at the sudden naturalism and realism in Luoyang in the 6th century. It's like the Greek miracle, and can be attributed only to Westerners in China. Artistic developments reflect the larger cultural spheres. In other words, archaeology enriches our understanding of each historical period as revealed by its cultural production. The relationship between northern and southern China during this period is completely revised by the content of this show, by some of these rather bizarre things that reflect such disparate influences.'' This exhibition is most interesting for all the non-Chinese material and ideas it includes: it's almost like seeing a Chinese international fair. Excavated Roman glass, for example, makes a good showing here, part of the trade in luxury goods from the West. There are extraordinary Hellenistic silver items, some actually produced in the eastern parts of the Roman empire (probably in present-day Iran), and some made in the style of that part of the world. It is astonishing to encounter acanthus leaves and images of the Olympian deities, appreciated and collected in China in the fourth and fifth centuries by the Northern Wei dynasty, much as Louis Vuitton is in contemporary Shanghai. A plate with a figure of Dionysus was made in Rome, probably owned by someone in central Asia and finally brought to China. A number of silver vessels from Central Asia, found in fifth-century Chinese sites, reflect the influence of Sasanian Persia, the great Central Asian empire of the earlier part of the first millennium, and the eastern Roman empire. A nautilus cup is made of a shell from Indonesia. An exquisite necklace of gold, pearls and stones came from Rome or Iran, but was excavated from the tomb of a Chinese princess. Similar jewelry has been found in Georgia and in India; it was a trademark of the sixth- or seventh-century international elite, a class of people that few today can even imagine. A ceramic jar from a Buddhist site in the form of an amphora has a portrait of Pan, but puts him in an Asian crown. A fifth- to sixth-century ewer is clearly Greek or Roman in form and decoration, but with all kinds of little errors that show it was made by someone misunderstanding the originals on which it was |
1615992_1 | WLNG Found Its Style, And Is Sticking With It | hours to tell a story if I need it, and that's how it should be.'' It helps, Mr. Sidney said, that the station owns the land and building where its studio is located, and its broadcast towers, and does not have to answer to any corporate headquarters. Second, the station has worked hard to solidify ties to the local business community, which relies on WLNG to build traffic at stores and events. The advertisers, ranging from Lamplighter Wines in Southampton to Hildreth's Department Store in the East End to Suffolk County National Bank, even narrate their own spots. John Gatta, advertising consultant for the bank, a frequent advertiser, said the station's live remote from the bank's Cutchogue branch helped make its 20th-anniversary celebration last year a hit. ''It was a great success,'' Mr. Gatta said. ''A few hundred people came down and it was mostly because they heard about it from Paul on the radio.'' The remote broadcast from Westhampton Beach, which ran live all day, was one of about 250 live remotes WLNG does each year from local stores, street fairs, antique auctions, car shows, sporting events. It even broadcast live from the Cole Brothers Circus, when it appeared in August in Southampton and Greenport. At most of these remote broadcasts, Mr. Sidney works from the mobile control room, and one or two of the other D.J.'s do live on-the-air interviews in the crowd. When not broadcasting from a remote location, Mr. Sidney and his staff work out of their modest studio on Redwood Road, by the waterfront of Sag Harbor Cove. Most radio stations these days have converted to digital technology. But WLNG is an oldie station in more than just its repertory; it still has about 20 percent of its music on ''carts,'' audio cartridges, that are strewn about the 800-square-foot control room. The rest of its music is on CD. In general, the repertory is reminiscent of New York City's signature oldies station, WCBS-FM (101.1). ''If you don't like Elvis Presley or Perry Como, then you will like the Pointer Sisters or the Eagles,'' Mr. Sidney said. ''There is something for everyone.'' Listeners also get a big dose of local news, weather and information, like birth announcements, birthday and anniversary wishes and reports of missing pets. ''If someone loses their puppy, we treat it as a big deal,'' Mr. Sidney said. ''This is radio the way |
1623386_1 | Artistically Speaking, It's All Greek to Me | clean and old. ''For earlier composers,'' said Steven Blier, who assembled the New York Festival program, ''their idea was a sense of classical purity, of spareness.'' In more recent music, a quality of Greekness can be evoked by the use of slightly unbalanced meters, like 5/4 or 7/8. But Mr. Blier kept feeling that the music didn't sound Greek enough. ''What you hear,'' he said of the various composers, ''is how nationalistic their own music is. They're so deeply into their tribute to Greek culture, using Greek poems, but what you feel is how beautifully themselves they are.'' You could also say that all classical vocal music bears a touch of Greek inspiration. Opera, after all, grew out of the experiments of a group of 16th-century Florentine artists who wanted to recreate the spirit of Greek drama. The Greek language is touched with music. The music is what gets lost in the translations of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides. These texts were written to be sung and danced. Each line of the original is woven into complex meters, and the syllables remain imbued with the music and the dance steps that once accompanied them, like the faint traces of color you can still discern on some of the famous ancient statues, once brightly painted, now known to us as carvings of white marble. I was a classical-civilization major in college, and I've often reflected on the many similarities between music and the Greek language. Both music and Greek attract people through beauty yet demand a quasi-scientific rigor and discipline from their acolytes. Both intimidate people by representing a body of knowledge you are supposed to have to study to appreciate it; both are commonly seen as being available only to aficionados. Both are able -- sometimes memorably -- to reach out from the past and touch us today with compelling, visceral immediacy. For many Western musicians, a ''Greek influence'' has, in practice, meant simply a personal tribute to the roots of the culture that spawned them. Our very instruments were created by the gods. And all of Greek art sits at the bottom of the mass of past culture -- music, art, architecture, literature -- that any artist has to assimilate, ignore or somehow deal with in his or her own struggle to create something new to add to the heap. Once, on the island of Samos, I stumbled across a music |
1623613_4 | The World: Nuclear Secrets; If Brazil Wants to Scare the World, It's Succeeding | claim is not true. In the past, Brazil made similar statements about its space program, trying to hide the role of French and Russian technology obtained through exchange programs or on the international black market. ''There is foreign assistance, and they carefully mislead people or spin it in such a way that it fits their definition of what indigenous means,'' said David Albright, a physicist and former nuclear inspector who is president of the Institute for Science and International Security. ''We know the Germans helped them make an earlier model of centrifuge, and we think the Germans provided them the technology on how to work with carbon fiber centrifuges.'' Doubts have also been raised about just how innovative Brazil's centrifuge process is. They focus on a type of magnetic coil that supposedly makes Brazilian centrifuges more efficient and durable than other nations'. The government has insisted on blocking these from inspectors' view. But ''these claims of a need to protect industrial secrets are exaggerated, since this technology is used routinely in other applications in other parts of the world,'' Dr. Goldemberg said. ''National pride is involved here, but I don't know if that is worth arousing the suspicion of the rest of the world.'' The situation has been complicated by Brazil's apparent desire to deal with the outside world under principles that routinely govern relationships here. In the simplest terms, Brazil is arguing that it deserves a wink-and-a-nod exemption from full inspection because Brazilians are nice people, unlike those nasty North Koreans or Iranians. Brazilian society functions on the basis of what is known as ''jeitinho,'' a notion that all formal laws and rules can be maneuvered around if one is clever or charming enough. Of course, the more powerful you are, the better your chances of getting around cumbersome procedures by ''driblando,'' the verb Brazilians use to describe a soccer player's adroitness with the ball. After inspectors were finally granted partial access to the Resende plant this month, there were predictions that the standoff would soon be overcome by some jeitinho. Most likely it will. But even so, foreign experts expect another confrontation over inspections in the coming years, this one involving the navy's decades-old campaign to build a nuclear-powered submarine. ''Submarines are not subject to the safeguards regimen, that's my view of things,'' said Roberto Abdenur, who became Brazil's ambassador to the United States early this year after |
1623441_0 | PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL | |
1618725_0 | World Briefing | Americas: Brazil: Expert On Indians Shot Dead | The police said the death of Apoena Meirelles, one of the country's leading anthropological experts on contacts with primitive Indian tribes who was shot on the street over the weekend in the Amazon boom town of Porto Velho, may have been an assassination ordered by criminal smuggling gangs. Mr. Meirelles, a former director of the government agency in charge of Indian affairs, was on a special assignment to investigate and suppress illegal mining for diamonds on reservations of the Cintas-Largas tribe, which he originally contacted in 1969. Larry Rohter (NYT) |
1618593_0 | Snooze Alarm Takes Its Toll on a Nation | When his clock-radio goes off at 7 a.m., David Epstein's latest wake-up strategy roars into high gear: he stumbles out of bed, walks across the room and pushes the snooze button. Then he climbs between the sheets. A few minutes later, his travel clock rings. He presses snooze and rolls over for more sleep -- until the alarm on his BlackBerry goes off. Sitting up, he punches keys to reset it for 10 more minutes, then it's back to the pillow. The pattern repeats amid a cacophony of assorted rings until his real wake-up time, 8 a.m. In a nation that clocks around six to seven hours of sleep a night when an average of eight hours is recommended, it is a rare person who wakes up without an alarm. And because it is usually a struggle, pushing snooze to delay the day has become as much a part of the wake-up ritual as a cup of coffee. But is a bumpy arousal for 30, 60 or even 90 minutes a way to recoup much-needed sleep? Or is it a recipe for exhaustion? Although scientists have not specifically tackled the question, sleep researchers agree that short bouts of sleep are far from ideal. The restorative value of rest is diminished, especially when the increments are short, said Dr. Edward Stepanski, who has studied sleep fragmentation at the Rush University Medical Center in Chicago. And a teeter-totter effect of dozing and waking causes shifts in the brain-wave patterns. ''Even a subtle noise that doesn't actually wake you up is disruptive enough to affect the sleep quality,'' Dr. Stepanski said. ''That's why someone who falls asleep with the TV on may wake up exhausted. So, if a person is rousing themselves enough to reset a clock, there's likely to be an even more profound effect.'' It is an axiom of sleep research that not all sleep is equal. A night's sleep is divided into five continually shifting stages, defined by types of brain waves that reflect either lighter or deeper sleep. Toward morning, there is an increase in rapid eye movement, or REM sleep, when the muscles are relaxed and dreaming occurs, and recent memories may be consolidated in the brain. Sleep-deprived snooze-button addicts are likely to cut short their quota of REM sleep, impairing their mental functioning during the day. How tired a person is when the snooze-button frenzy begins is |
1620239_0 | An Old Church's New Tilt Inspires Tourists and T-Shirts | Few famous cities are as conspicuously defined by a single building as is Cologne. Yet this city's glorious cathedral, a masterpiece of Gothic architecture and Germany's most popular tourist attraction, is being shunted aside these days by a church so humble and disfigured by war that it does not show up on local maps of houses of worship. The rival attraction, the Church of St. Johann Baptist, has something the Cologne Cathedral cannot match: a leaning tower. Two weeks ago, as workers were digging a subway tunnel near the church, its bell tower began to list precariously. Since then, curious tourists have flocked to St. Johann to take pictures, vendors have hawked T-shirts and the tourism office has begun debating whether it should try to cash in on what it readily admits is another European city's franchise. ''Cologne already has some parallels to Pisa,'' ventured a spokesman, Olaf Pohl. ''We have a warm climate, we're very Catholic and we have a lot of churches. Now we could have our own leaning tower.'' Never mind that outside his office, tourists scuttled across the windswept square in front of the cathedral with their collars turned up against the northern European chill. Or that Cologne needs a dodgy campanile about as much as the Italians need a German recipe for red sauce. The Leaning Tower of Cologne, as it is inevitably called by taxi drivers and hotel clerks, is the latest diversion in a city known for its playfulness -- or cynics would say, its penchant for chasing will-o'-the-wisps. During a recent photography trade show here, hundreds of visitors, many of them Japanese, traipsed to St. Johann's working-class neighborhood to take pictures of the red-brick tower, which moved about three feet off-center before it was stabilized. As the photos circulated on the Internet, the church attracted a fresh flow of camera-toting residents and out-of-towners. Christa Borghoff, who runs a nearby beverage shop, said she has sold nearly 400 T-shirts, at about $15 apiece, with a drawing of the church and the words ''Leaning Tower of Cologne,'' in the local dialect. While the experts theorize about what caused the mishap -- loose soil or a faulty drilling machine are among the prime suspects -- and the city explores whether the tower can be righted, people here are savoring the fact that their one-stop town has become, if temporarily, a two-stop one. ''People have suggested |
1620713_0 | Chinese Groups Seek to Halt a Dam and Spare a Treasured Place | Environmentalists in China who earlier this year helped persuade Prime Minister Wen Jiabao to suspend a dam project in southwest China are now fighting plans for another hydropower project that they say would endanger one of the world's deepest gorges and force the relocation of 100,000 people. The new dam proposal, for Tiger Leaping Gorge, would divert water from the Jinsha River in the mountainous northern section of Yunnan Province to the fast-growing provincial capital, Kunming, partly to ease urban water shortages. Reports in the Chinese news media say preparatory work, including some blasting, is already under way. But the central government has not granted final approval, and Chinese environmental groups have issued a public petition to halt the project. Next week, Chinese environmental groups hope to draw attention to the proposed dam during an international conference on hydropower in Beijing. ''This is a very beautiful area,'' said Wang Hui, a professor at Qinghua University who is one of the project's leading opponents. ''That gorge is among the highest in the world.'' He added: ''The whole economic policy is very pro-development. In order to have high-speed economic development, they do not care about the environment.'' For more than a year, China's coastal manufacturing hubs have experienced sporadic blackouts as the country's energy supplies have failed to keep pace with the roaring economy. Officials in several provinces have seized on the shortages as reason to develop more hydropower. But opponents have warned that many of the proposals are shortsighted and are intended, in part, to enrich local officials and state-dominated energy companies. Environmentalists say the proposals in northern Yunnan threaten to ruin one of the few unspoiled places in China. Until recently, they had little reason to believe that any top government officials shared their concern. This spring, however, Prime Minister Wen unexpectedly suspended plans by provincial officials to build 13 dams along the Nu River, which runs inside Yunnan's northwestern border. The river flows through a region considered so biologically diverse that a United Nations agency has designated part of it as a World Heritage site. The Jinsha River flows through the same environmentally sensitive region, moving east until it becomes the Yangtze. Last year, officials began discussing plans for a series of dams on the Jinsha. Few details have been provided to the public, but the official Yunnan Daily reported last year that officials wanted to build one of |
1620745_0 | Study Suggests Design Flaws Didn't Doom Towers | After the most sophisticated building analysis in United States history, federal investigators have arrived at the clearest picture yet of the sequence of events that led to the collapse of the World Trade Center towers, largely ruling out a design flaw in the buildings as a central factor in the catastrophe. Since the twin towers fell, questions have reverberated among families of victims and some fire-safety experts about whether insufficient fireproofing or an unusual weakness in the innovative, lightweight floors played a critical role in the collapse. Instead, the investigators tentatively conclude in nearly 500 pages of documents released Tuesday, the twin towers failed because the structural columns at the buildings' core, damaged by the impact of the airliners, buckled and shortened as the fires burned, gradually shifting more load to the tower's trademark exterior pinstripe columns. The exterior columns ultimately suffered such extraordinary stress and heat that they gave way. The investigation -- based on an analysis of thousands of photographs and videos, an examination of nearly every element used to construct the towers and meticulous computer-enhanced modeling of the plane impacts and spreading fires -- is not yet complete. A final report by the National Institute of Standards and Technology is not scheduled to be issued until December or perhaps January. In interviews Tuesday, the lead investigator, as well as other engineers who have studied the collapse, said the evidence increasingly suggested that the giant structures -- given the extreme conditions, including temperatures that reached more than 1,000 degrees -- performed relatively well on Sept. 11, 2001. ''We always said we had no preconceived notions, and that we would look at the failure information dispassionately,'' said S. Shyam Sunder, the lead investigator at the institute, a division of the Department of Commerce, which has conducted the two-year, $16 million inquiry at the request of Congress. ''The buildings performed as they should have in the airplane impact and extreme fires to which they were subjected. There is nothing there that stands out as abnormal.'' Elements of the design and construction of the towers, investigators said, certainly played a part in how long the buildings stood. Buildings designed differently -- with more robustly protected and spread-out emergency stairwells, for example -- engineers said yesterday, might still have resulted in fewer deaths. But the most severe shortcomings identified at the World Trade Center in the institute's comprehensive review do not pertain |
1622451_0 | In Reply to Tightening of Sanctions, Castro Bans the Yankee Dollar | In a televised address, President Fidel Castro of Cuba announced Monday night that United States dollars, which have kept his country's ailing economy afloat for the past decade, would be banned from all commercial transactions in two weeks. In his speech, Mr. Castro called the measure a response to the Bush administration's decisions to strengthen economic sanctions by placing new limits on the amount of money people can send to relatives in Cuba and imposing multimillion-dollar fines against banks that have transferred dollars to Cuba. His aides said Cuba was ''protecting itself from external economic aggression,'' and they asked Cubans to tell their relatives to send euros, British pounds or Canadian dollars. After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 sent the Cuban economy into a tailspin, the government legalized United States dollars as a way of attracting foreign investment and remittances. Since then the government has become dependent on dollars to buy everything from oil to food and medical supplies. Its people rely on an estimated $1 billion a year from relatives in the United States. After Nov. 8, though, stores, restaurants and other businesses will only accept a national currency known as the convertible peso, which has no value outside Cuba. Banks will end dollar transactions and convert dollar accounts to pesos. Officials announced that the government would charge Cubans a 10 percent fee to exchange dollars for pesos; there will be no fee to change other currencies to pesos. Diplomats and other political analysts saw the measures as more pragmatic than philosophical. Some analysts said that by forcing Cubans to turn in their dollars, Mr. Castro's government could then use the currency to buy needed food and fuel on the international market. In recent weeks the country has suffered serious shortages of electricity. Blackouts are common most afternoons in neighborhoods across the capital. Several hotels have been forced to close for days at a time, and public pressure had grown so intense that Mr. Castro fired the minister of industry, who was considered a close political ally. ''I don't think this is a political decision at all,'' said Ricardo Pascoe, Mexico's former ambassador to Cuba. ''It's a pragmatic move. Cuba has to buy more oil than it had planned, and so it urgently needs dollars.'' Marifeli Pérez-Stable of the InterAmerican Dialogue, a policy institute in Washington, said Mr. Castro was using the American sanctions as a |
1619437_4 | Brazilians Battle Indians: 'This Land Is Our Land' | trying to stitch together a majority in both houses of Congress, continues to pursue the support of Roraima's three senators, all of whom oppose the reservation. Lucio Flavio Pinto, editor of Amazon Agenda, a newsletter, cited an additional factor in Mr. da Silva's turnabout. As leftists, he said, the president and his party have in the past been viewed with suspicion by the armed forces, who also have never liked the idea of an Indian reservation straddling a sensitive border area. ''Lula's real problem is the military, who because of deep budget cuts have been deprived of raises and new equipment,'' Mr. Pinto said. ''But the armed forces also have national security concerns that he can more easily address. They are worried about the balkanization of the Amazon, the creation of a separate state or 'liberated area' under foreign control.'' Indian leaders contrast that nationalistic rhetoric with the reality of what they describe as a flourishing black market in gasoline from Venezuela, where gasoline costs 20 cents a gallon, less than one-tenth of its price here. In addition, there are ample indications that marijuana, gold and diamonds are being smuggled across the border to Guyana and enriching local interests. ''We're enforcing ourselves the laws on the books that the government does nothing to enforce,'' complained Dejacir Melchior da Silva, the leader of Agua Branca, a community at the border here. ''We are tired of waiting for the federal police or the soldiers to act. There are a lot of things on paper, but no one bothers to make it work.'' In less than a decade several small Indian villages have been surrounded by an army garrison and a rapidly growing white squatter settlement that recently has been given the status of a municipality. Indian residents complain that soldiers harass young women, smuggle liquor into what is supposed to be an alcohol-free zone, and barge into their homes without permission. ''We want that base out of here,'' said Eusébio de Souza Oliveira, who lives in one of the Indian villages. ''They built it so close to us that we can't hunt and fish anymore, and the soldiers have come to knock down the fences we put up to protect our animals. It's very bad for us.'' Other powerful local political and economic interests have not hesitated to use violence to express their opposition to the reservation. Since Mr. da Silva came |
1615800_0 | World Briefing | Europe: Spain: Cabinet Clears Way For Gay Marriage | The government kept its campaign promise and approved same-sex marriages, and also cleared the way for homosexuals to adopt children. If the proposed change in the civil code is approved by Parliament, which is expected, Spain will become the third country in Europe, after the Netherlands and Belgium, to fully legalize gay marriages. Several other European nations have adopted lesser versions, like civil-union contracts. The move underscores the loss of influence in the country by the Roman Catholic Church, which issued harsh public criticism of the proposal this week. A recent opinion poll said that 62 percent of those questioned supported equal rights for all couples, though some did not want to use the word marriage for gay unions. Marlise Simons (NYT) |
1617371_2 | Town Hall Tonight! | gay parents and grandparents, or are in mixed-race families. How can we make the lives of these ''new'' families better? How will you use your bully pulpit to promote acceptance of all kinds of families? JACK MILES, author of ''God: A Biography'': The United States cannot defend itself against Islamist terrorism without the help of the world's Muslims. Yet according to the 9/11 commission report, two-thirds of the world's Muslims fear that the United States may attack them. Lt. Gen. William G. Boykin, your deputy undersecretary for defense intelligence, caused a scandal among the world's Muslims by repeatedly saying that Muslims hate the United States ''because we're a Christian nation.'' Are you prepared to say to the world's Muslims that the United States is not a Christian nation but a religiously neutral nation whose Constitution prohibits the establishment of any religion? ANA MARIE COX, editor of Wonkette.com: Personal experience can often change political opinions. So, just hypothetically: Let's say your vice president's daughter was gay . . . Oh, wait. Umm . . . What if you were responsible for the biggest deficit in American history -- oh, ha. O.K.: Let's say you invaded a country based on faulty intelligence . . . Er, oops . . . No, we got it: How did ''The Pet Goat'' end, anyway? Questions for Kerry CHARLES FRIED, professor at Harvard Law School and former solicitor general: In the next four years there may well be several appointments to make to the Supreme Court. In order to give the voters an idea of what kind of men and women you would appoint, please tell us whether you approve or disapprove of the decision of the supreme court of your state of Massachusetts to make gay marriage a matter of constitutional right under a state constitutional provision very like that in the federal constitution. PATRICIA NELSON LIMERICK, chairwoman, the Center for the American West, University of Colorado at Boulder: Since the public owns the National Parks, Monuments and Forests, and the lands under the Bureau of Land Management, how should we weigh the interests of all those with an investment in them: local residents, tourists, environmental groups, people working for companies based in other states and sometimes in other countries? What is the most effective balance between top-down management out of Washington-based agencies and local preferences and desires? Also, what have been your own favorite |
1618438_1 | Caged in Disney in Beijing, Yearning for a Better Life | other performers, leaving her to tend to the first of many such wounds. Loosely constructed, ''The World,'' which plays today and tomorrow at the New York Film Festival, drifts along pleasantly for much of its two-and-a-half-hour running time. Mr. Jia has a terrific eye and an almost sculptural sense of film space (especially in close quarters), and he brings texture and density to even the most nondescript rooms. And while he's too in love with the film's overarching metaphor, he nonetheless gracefully incorporates the theme park into the everyday lives of its workers. In one scene, we pass by a miniature Leaning Tower of Pisa with the nonchalance of an Italian citizen; in another scene, the pyramids of Egypt, complete with drifts of sand and a masticating camel, make a suitably dramatic backdrop to a fight between friends. In time, something of a story fades emerges, built on incident, mood and the amorphous desires of the film's characters. Tao befriends a Russian woman whose melancholic smile, crumpled family photograph and horribly bruised shoulders speak volumes about her plight. The scenes of the two women trying to communicate despite their language differences at times veer dangerously close to melodramatic excess, in particular when the Russian starts to drunkenly serenade Tao, but Mr. Jia manages, for the most part, to keep sentimentality at bay. In the end, what makes Tao herself a figure of greats pathos isn't that she understands the other woman's tragedy; it's that because, locked inside this false world, Tao does not and, suggests Mr. Jia, cannot see her. In a sense, however, this miniaturized world creates a prison for the filmmaker, as well. Mr. Jia isn't just enamored with his metaphor; he's mesmerized by it. As he wanders around the amusement park, repeatedly cutting away to the phony Eiffel Tower jutting into the China sky, the pyramids and even the Manhattan skyline, he increasingly comes across less like a filmmaker who knows what he's after and more like a besotted tourist. Even when he occasionally takes us outside the park, for a glimpse of the whirring Beijing street life, with its teaming humanity and a shocking glimpse of Chairman Mao beatifically smiling over the city, you get the sense that Mr. Jia is as eager to return to his manufactured world as much as any of the film's other caged birds. The World Written (in Mandarin, with English |
1622952_2 | How the Ancients Became Trendy: The Road From Euripides to Revolution | of a later era's gleefully discarded rules and radical rebellion? The exhibition is mute about this; neither does it explore its own premises too deeply, leaving its characterization of the avant-garde somewhat wispy. It also provides no historical context, no hint of the roles Classical Greece has played in modern Western culture since the Renaissance, or its iconic significance for a wide variety of cultural movements in the 19th and 20th centuries, in Europe as well as in the United States. The show's focus, then, is almost restrictively narrow. Indeed, the achievement of Barbara Cohen-Stratyner, the curator, is limited to drawing attention to this particular connection and in providing a slew of examples, taken from the library's Billy Rose Theater Collection, Jerome Robbins Dance Division, the Music Division and the Rodgers and Hammerstein Archives of Recorded Sound. Yet the linkage itself is important, and the early examples may be the most provocative. Isadora Duncan, for example, shown posing at the Parthenon in 1904 and in Edward Steichen's famous 1920 portraits, believed that she could strip away the manners of received European culture; in Greek art she believed she found universal and natural gestures. Her siblings were just as Grecophilic. Her sister Irma founded a children's school in Moscow; Isadora is shown among the young pupils, all draped in Hellenic tunics (1921). Her brother Raymond designed brightly colored Greek-inspired textiles with stamped floral borders (also on display). More suggestive is a photograph of Raymond posing in a tunic, mockingly contemplating the metallic statue of a warrior guarding the vault of the bank his father, Joseph Charles Duncan, had opened in San Francisco in 1874. In that image, a conception of Grecian aestheticism and innocence overtly challenges the surrounding bourgeois, mercantile culture. A Classical Counterculture The Duncans were not alone. George Cram Cook, educated at the end of the 19th century at Harvard, Heidelberg and the University of Geneva, abandoned academic life to become a small farmer on his family's estate in Davenport, Iowa. In 1915 he founded the Provincetown Players and championed the plays of Eugene O'Neill. But the utopian lure of ancient Greece became overwhelming. He moved to Delphi, donned peasant clothing and claimed to have direct contact with the oracle. ''Back to Greece!'' one of his colleagues once said, explaining that it was Cook's ''solution for every modern ill.'' It offered a similar liberation for the artist and dancer |
1623026_4 | China's Bank, In Transition, Raises Rates | at MG Financial Group in New York. The Peoples Bank said in a statement that its moves were partly aimed at keeping money in the banking system. Economists at the International Monetary Fund and elsewhere have watched with concern in recent months the slowing growth of deposits at Chinese banks. Affluent urban Chinese families in particular are turning away from depositing money in banks at the extremely low interest rates offered, choosing instead to lend money directly to struggling businesses at double-digit interest rates. Steeply rising prices and low, government-mandated interest rates have prompted companies across China to borrow heavily over the last two years, feeding an extraordinary economic boom. The borrowers have erected forests of apartment buildings and many new factories, expecting that prices will go up fast enough to ease the cost of repaying the loans. ''On the borrowing side, if the interest rate is 5.3 percent, then take as much as you can get, because the real rate is minus 4 percent,'' said Nicholas Lardy, a Chinese banking expert at the Institute for International Economics in Washington, in a telephone interview a few hours before the official announcement. Many of the most fashionable boulevards in China's urban centers are lined with new luxury apartment buildings with long rows of empty windows, because few buyers can afford them. Yet new apartment buildings continue to be built nearby, construction often proceeding around the clock, as is common in China. Chinese leaders have expressed growing concern in recent months that many bank-financed projects cannot support themselves and will result in another wave of nonperforming loans at state banks. Economic data released last Friday showed that the tempo of economic growth in China barely slowed in the third quarter despite these measures, and suggested that the Chinese economy may have started to accelerate again in September as the effects of the initial controls began to wear off. The frenzy has driven up prices of a wide range of commodities, from iron ore for the steel in building girders to copper for household plumbing, enriching many countries that export them. By raising the interest rate now but leaving the exchange rate unchanged, Beijing runs the risk that speculators will pour even more money into China -- possibly stoking inflation further -- in the hope that Beijing will eventually have to allow the currency to appreciate. Partly for that reason, the International Monetary |
1623038_0 | World Briefing | Americas: Cuba: U.N. Opposes U.S. Embargo | For the 13th consecutive year, the United Nations General Assembly voted overwhelmingly against the four-decades-old United States commercial embargo of Cuba. The Cuban foreign minister, Felipe Pérez Roque, accused Washington of unleashing a ''worldwide genocidal economic war'' against his country and a State Department adviser, Oliver Garza, told the body that the motion was ''an attempt to blame the Communist regime's failed economic policies on the United States and to divert attention from its human rights record.'' The vote on the resolution, which is nonbinding, was 179 to 4, with one abstention. Warren Hoge (NYT) |
1623024_0 | Radar Images Suggest a Saturn Moon's Landscape Contains Basins of Ice | The Cassini spacecraft's first radar images of Saturn's largest moon, Titan, have revealed a diverse frozen landscape of bright streaks that may be ice ridges or wind-driven deposits, and dark regions that are probably smooth basins filled with dirty ice -- or, in some places, lakes of exotic liquid, perhaps methane. If they did not dispel the mystery of Titan, the black-and-white radar images gave scientists tantalizing clues to challenge or revise some hypotheses about the nature of the Titanian surface, long hidden beneath a dense atmosphere. It is the only moon in the solar system with a substantial atmosphere and evidence of a complex organic, or carbon-based, chemistry that could yield insights into processes that led to life on the early Earth. In its encounter with Titan on Tuesday, the Cassini spacecraft penetrated the opaque atmosphere with cameras, infrared sensors and a radar system designed to map hidden landscapes. The first processed radar images were made public Thursday by scientists here at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. They appeared to show more features than could be seen in the regular photographs, released soon after the flyby. At a news conference, Dr. Charles Elachi, director of the laboratory, who is also leader of the radar investigation, said the radar survey covered a strip 75 miles wide and 1,200 miles long, about 1 percent of the planet-size moon's surface. Bright regions in the images represented rough terrain, and darker areas were interpreted as smooth, flat surfaces. Dr. Elachi noted a 150-mile-wide dark region that looked (as a researcher's daughter put it) like a Halloween cat. The region, he said, was probably a smooth basin with icy surfaces and possibly lakes of liquids. On Wednesday, scientists examining conventional photographs and other data said they saw no evidence of bodies of liquids on Titan. Some members of the radar imaging team said they thought it more likely that the smooth surfaces were expanses of dirty ice, frozen water mixed with tarlike hydrocarbons related to methane. Dr. Ralph Lorenz of the University of Arizona reported that measurements of Titan's surface heat ''were consistent with a surface covered in organic material'' and that the dark regions were richer in organics than the brighter areas. Even though Titan's mass is estimated to be half water and half rock, any lake would not be liquid water. It would be frozen solid on a surface with temperatures as low |
1622911_1 | Noguchi's Exploration of the 3-Dimensional World | wood, these bony-looking vertical articulations, whose cleverly joined parts are notched to fit exactly into each other (without benefit of glue, nails or other fixatives) add up to surreal abstractions of body traits and attitudes. They are a quintessentially Noguchi synthesis (with some borrowings from artists like Yves Tanguy) of the human and totemic. Chief among them is ''Kouros'' (1946), the biggest and most robust, a creature of pink Georgian marble fully nine feet tall. Its name is the Greek word for man, and it evokes ancient Greek statues depicting youth in full flower, as well as the potent ancestor figures of more primitive worlds. Its slender, planar elements, gracefully shaped and precariously held in balance by their support of one another, start at the top with a small budlike face, hooked onto a long, sleek bonelike piece that represents the torso, bottoming into a vaguely phallic shape. The torso looms above, but hooks into, the main support piece, another figure whose understated mass is achieved by elegant carving, with an eyelike hole in its rounded top. What is ''Kouros''? A god, a chieftain, a symbol of the awesome energy that rules the universe? In any case, it's a presence to reckon with. A number of smaller but also impressive structures of this kind are also displayed to dramatic effect. Among them are the mahogany ''Remembrance'' (1944), whose several hanging pieces, one with phallic swellings, are suspended from a boomerang-shaped arm that balances on a sort of two-legged oar; and ''Trinity,'' a warlike three-sided structure of black slate that bristles with aggressive protuberances suggesting knives, fins and penises. Projecting a different outlook, the gloomy, pessimistic ''Hanging Man'' (1946-47) affixed to a nearby wall is possibly an expression of the artist's reaction to the devastation of World War II. The sculpture's three bladelike, bonelike aluminum elements, suspended from a single wire, seem to speak of death and the vulnerability of humankind to life's catastrophic blows. But although the 1940's loom strong in Noguchi's long career, there are many other areas of brilliant achievement covered by the show. Not least of them are the products of his early days in Paris (1927-28) where, rejoicing in the vitality of the artistic community there, and serving for six months as studio assistant to Brancusi, he turned from the academic disciplines he had pursued to make a commitment to modern art. Part of a series |
1622907_0 | Socking It to Dan Rather: A Nonpolitical Whodunit | On an October evening in 1986, the CBS anchor Dan Rather was accosted and beaten up while walking on Park Avenue by a stranger who repeatedly demanded, ''Kenneth, what is the frequency?'' This mysterious attack immediately became part of pop culture lore. (The rock band R.E.M. recorded a song called ''What's the Frequency, Kenneth?'') More than a decade later, Mr. Rather, with the help of a reporter from The Daily News, pinned the assault on a murderer named William Tager, but an article by Paul Allman in Harper's Magazine in 2001 cast doubt on that conclusion, arguing that the crime was connected to, of all people, Donald Barthelme, the father of postmodern fiction. Mr. Allman pointed out that Mr. Barthelme, who, like Mr. Rather, was born in 1931 and went to school in Houston, wrote a story called ''The Indian Uprising'' that includes the name Kenneth and the phrase ''what's the frequency?'' Was the attack the work of a crazed fan? Did Mr. Barthelme order the hit? Or is it just a coincidence? Mr. Allman's fascinating, if dry, dramatic adaptation, ''Kenneth -- What Is the Frequency?,'' which runs through Nov. 21, raises these questions in the intellectually intrepid spirit of a Don DeLillo novel. Mr. Rather, who desperately searches for his attackers to the annoyance of the executives at CBS, is presented as the symbol of rational truth. (Remember, the play, whose ideas about journalists are somewhat quaint, was written before the scandal involving Mr. Rather and the possibly forged documents about President Bush's National Guard service presented on ''60 Minutes.'') While this playful mystery occasionally summons up the mood of a very silly ''X-Files'' episode, Mr. Allman never totally succeeds in translating his ideas into riveting drama. He traces the connections between the men with a heavy hand, and his game actors are forced to articulate highly literal explanations of the play's themes. Toby Wherry, whose impersonation of Mr. Rather is funnier than it is accurate (it's reminiscent of Nixon), says lines like, ''I'm the first line of defense defending reality.'' If that's so, let's hope that the second line is ready to step in on a moment's notice. ''Kenneth -- What Is the Frequency? The 78th Street Theater Club THEATER REVIEW |
1621651_0 | PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL | |
1621518_1 | What's So Gay About American Music? | Carson Kressley of ''Queer Eye for the Straight Guy,'' who can say? And if it does exist, just how is a gay sensibility expressed in music? Especially purely instrumental, or ''absolute,'' music? The latest to enter the discussion is Nadine Hubbs, a professor of music and women's studies at the University of Michigan, whose new book, ''The Queer Composition of America's Sound: Gay Modernists, American Music and National Identity,'' has just been released by University of California Press. This is an ambitious, provocative and impressively documented work, with more than 70 pages of detailed footnotes for a 178-page text. It tries to prove that what has come to be considered the distinctive American sound in mid-20th-century American music -- that Coplandesque tableau of widely spaced harmonies and melancholic tunes run through with elements of elegiac folk music and spiked with jerky American dance rhythms -- was essentially invented by a group of Manhattan-based gay composers: Copland, of course, and Virgil Thomson, Paul Bowles, David Diamond, Marc Blitzstein, Leonard Bernstein, Samuel Barber and Ned Rorem. Ms. Hubbs's treatise, which focuses mostly on Copland and Thomson, is enriched by her keen sensitivity to traces of coded gay sexuality, veiled homophobia and cultural anxieties in American music and life during the early decades of the 20th century. The book will rightly provoke heated discussion in musicological and queer-history circles. My gay brothers and sisters should welcome Ms. Hubbs's account of the pivotal role played by gay composers in the development of a musical idiom that as the book argues, still signifies ''America,'' not just in the concert hall but also in movies, television and commercial culture. Yet, I suspect that many musicians, however fascinated by Ms. Hubbs's treatise, will share my discomfort over the notion of trying to identify anything as elusive as a gay sensibility in music. It's significant, I think, that most of the advance praise for the book (''a landmark study,'' ''breathtakingly original history'') comes from cultural historians, not musicians. My aim here is not to review the book but to raise the stakes for the debate Ms. Hubbs's work is sure to provoke. One admiring blurb on the dust jacket comes from a well-known musicologist, Susan McClary, winner of a MacArthur Foundation ''genius'' award, whose contentious 1991 article ''Constructions of Subjectivity in Schubert's Music'' became a manifesto for a number of queer theorists. Ms. McClary tried to identify homosexual |
1621814_3 | Spain Is Seeking to Integrate Growing Muslim Population | one of several initiatives, Spain recently announced that 2005 will be The Year of Morocco, while Morocco has declared 2006 to The Year of Spain. The culture ministers of the two countries said that events and themes would include theater, contemporary art exhibitions, translations of literature and restorations of artworks. The new foundation, however, reflects Spain's quandary when dealing with any religious issue. Spanish officials have openly said they would like to reduce Spanish Muslims' dependence on foreign financing. A number of Spain's 400 Muslim prayer houses and mosques have received money from Libya, Morocco or Malaysia. Europe's largest mosque, located just outside Madrid, was built by Saudi Arabia. Spain initially planned to subsidize mosques directly, but backed away from that idea. Officials said the government could not justify financing mosques when it is striving for a greater separation between church and state. The government hopes to tackle one of the country's most prickly issues, reducing both the state financing of the Roman Catholic clergy and, in turn, Catholic influence on politics. Of Spain's 43 million people, only one in five consider themselves practicing Catholics. But the clout of the Catholic hierarchy is still regarded as enormous. The discussion about financing other religions has drawn fresh attention to this issue. In keeping with a longstanding pact with the Vatican that dates to the time of Generalissimo Francisco Franco, the government pays the clergy's salaries and meets many other costs for the Catholic Church. In next year's budget, which was just announced, the government will pay $175 million in salaries for the clergy. Its real contribution to the church, though, will far exceed that. It is not yet clear how the new foundation's money will be distributed, or how much will be available for Spain's estimated 15,000 Jews or for its Protestants, especially the evangelical denominations, who are said to have 300,000 members. Mr. Escudero, of the Islamic Commission, a former Catholic, brushed aside the differences. He said Muslim groups should concentrate on getting public financing in proportion to their numbers. Either the government should contribute fairly to all religions, or to none, he said. The new foundation ''could become just a cover-up for a very unjust and lopsided situation,'' he said, referring to the government payments to the Catholic Church. ''We have debated going to the constitutional court over this,'' he said, ''but we think it's better to avoid confrontation.'' |
1621451_1 | Freedom Philosophers | of postwar liberalism? Especially when so many people claimed not to be suffering at all, but having a good time? To answer questions like these, neoconservative intellectuals required a ''sociology of virtue.'' Demanding it was one thing; producing it, another. Geopolitics remains the field over which the neocons send their fastest and heaviest think tanks rolling. But with ''The Roads to Modernity,'' by Gertrude Himmelfarb (who, as it happens, is Kristol's mother), we now have a historical and philosophical prologue to the sociology of virtue. In recent years, Himmelfarb has moved from studying the Victorian mind in her role as intellectual historian to championing the Victorian moral sensibility as a partisan in the culture wars. Here she shifts the focus of both her research and her polemic back a century, to the Enlightenment -- an era she wants to annex (with certain caveats) for cultural conservatism. The very idea once would have been unthinkable. It was the left that proclaimed itself the legitimate heir of the 18th century's faith in progress. Those days are long gone. The philosophes spoke of Man and of subjecting the world to Reason, abstractions under assault by a host of neo-Marxist, post-structuralist and anticolonialist critics, who suspect that the Enlightenment's rhetoric of emancipation conceals a lust for domination. Surprisingly, perhaps, Himmelfarb spends little time arguing with the academic left -- and none with the strain of conservative thought best exemplified by Russell Kirk, for which the Enlightenment was, almost literally, the devil's own doing. Instead, she plunges directly into the 18th century, quickly and neatly distinguishing between two opposed sets of thinkers -- the British (who are the good guys) and the French (who are, well, French). The scheme makes for exciting intellectual pugilism. The thinkers of the Parisian Enlightenment (she focuses on Voltaire, Diderot, Helvétius, Holbach and a few lesser figures) are rationalists, hostile to religion and adherents of a universalism that Himmelfarb finds disingenuous. For all their talk of progress and brotherhood, they remained elitists. She quotes Diderot: ''The general mass of men are not so made that they can either promote or understand this forward march of the human spirit.'' Since the rational powers of the downtrodden have been stultified, not least by religious superstition, it's best that the power to make decisions for the good of all rest in the hands of an enlightened sovereign (or, failing that, in a state |
1619619_0 | Airports of America Arise: Free the Baggage Trolleys | This is a complaint. It's time for the people who run America's airports to give a little consideration to the poor overburdened traveler whose suitcase is too heavy, its wheels warped inconveniently somewhere in midtrip. Europe's airports offer trolleys at no cost. In Switzerland, the cart for suitcases can even go on the escalator. In Hong Kong, there are two sets of courtesy trolleys. A big one lets you lug your heavier bags to the ticket counter. A smaller one helps you with your carry-on luggage. Both kinds are free and plentiful -- a relief to the strong and the feeble alike. Not so in America. Take Newark's international airport. I arrived there this week from Hong Kong along with several hundred other weary travelers. There were no small trolleys for hand luggage, of course -- that sort of convenience is not even on the airport management's radar. But after we got our baggage, the three-wheeled gizmos for rolling bags out to the curb were priced at $1 per wheel. A woman in uniform stood by to hand out trolleys and take $3 from each passenger. Other travelers from my flight, many of whom had not changed their money into dollars, struggled either with their currency or, more often, their overloaded bags. The scene is not unique to Newark. American airports generally make passengers from around the world fork out $3 apiece to push around their own luggage. Most officials paid to worry about the nation's airports concentrate on security -- a very legitimate priority. Next, they seem to worry about how the passenger actually gets to the nearest airfield. In New York City, the main concern has been getting a train from Lower Manhattan to Kennedy Airport. This grand plan, which would have included a multibillion-dollar tunnel under the East River, is now in well-deserved limbo. Despite bipartisan support by everybody from President Bush to Senator Hillary Clinton, the train-to-the-plane turned out to be one of the few things Congress removed from the Santa's bag of tax loopholes passed by both houses last week. Rather than get too alarmed, New Yorkers should realize that there is already a manageable train-to-the-plane from Manhattan. It goes to Newark. But that route, as anybody who has taken it knows, works better if you're traveling around the world carrying only your kid's Spider-Man backpack. Nobody seems to be thinking very hard about how |
1619655_2 | Bear Baiting As a Way of Life Is on the Ballot | hunter from Eagle River, a suburb of Anchorage. Mr. Norby, who heads a coalition of organizations that is fighting the ballot measure, said: ''Every hunter's goal is to make a quick, clean kill. The chances of accomplishing that are much greater at a bait station. A dead bear doesn't care if it was shot at a bait station or while you were walking in the woods. It is still dead.'' The face-off displays the rift between sportsmen's and animal advocacy groups, which are frequently at odds over wildlife management here. People on both sides of the question said the rancor was reminiscent of highly charged campaigns in 1996 and 2000 over ballot measures that outlawed a practice in which hunters used planes to track wolves and then landed and killed them. ''This is a values issue, and for that reason it is very emotional for a lot of people,'' said Matthew H. Robus, director of the wildlife conservation division at the State Fish and Game Department, which has regulated baiting since 1982. ''Emotions often drive votes more than facts.'' Nineteen states that permit the hunting of black bears ban baiting, a survey by the Humane Society of the United States says. Voters in Maine, among 10 states where baiting is legal, will also vote on a proposal next month to end it. Eleven other states with black bears forbid hunting them at all. Campaigns over bear baiting have been contentious in many states, as have disputes over baiting other animals, particularly deer. The two sides see Alaska as one of the most significant battlegrounds. Aside from the heavy symbolism that hunting restrictions carry in Alaska, a place many outdoors people regard as the United States' last great frontier, the state has the largest black bear population in the country. State statistics place the minimum population at 60,000 to 100,000, four times the number in California, Oregon or Maine. Last year, hunters took 2,386 black bears statewide, including 579 at bait stations. Baiting is illegal for grizzly bears, and only Alaska Natives can hunt polar bears. ''I think this is a test case,'' said Jennifer Yuhas, executive director of the Alaska Outdoor Council, a hunters' advocate. ''People in the Lower 48 involved in the extreme antihunting groups have said that if we can get this passed in Alaska, that would really send a message. Next thing, it will be: 'By the |
1616664_5 | Slow Learner on Energy-Efficiency Front; While U.S. Backslides, France Offers Lessons in Cutting Oil Use | diesel engines, which burn 30 percent less fuel than regular engines. Two-thirds of cars registered in France are diesel-fueled, according to the European Automobile Manufacturers' Association. That compares with diesel sales of less than half of 1 percent in the United States. One hurdle to diesel sales in the United States is that compared with conventional gasoline-powered cars, diesels emit more smog-forming pollutants, though they offer lower emissions of the kind that contribute to global warming. Still, with better technology, some carmakers like Chrysler plan to offer new diesel models later this year. While diesels have made little headway, fuel-efficient hybrid cars -- with electric motors that take over for the gas engines at low speeds and stops -- are gaining in popularity. But so far, only a few carmakers offer them, and there is a waiting list for some of the more popular models, like the Toyota Prius. An additional disparity between the United States and France is the approach to nuclear energy. With domestic production of oil a tiny 3 percent of the two million barrels it consumes each day, France has turned to nuclear power as its economic savior; 80 percent of its electricity now comes from the country's 19 nuclear plants, compared with 40 percent in Sweden, 30 percent in Japan and Germany and 20 percent in the United States. ''Because it didn't draw a lucky geological hand, France has always looked for energy independence,'' said Dominique Maillard, the country's top official in charge of energy policy as the director of energy at the Ministry of Industry. ''We used nuclear power as a path to offset our dependency on imports.'' The United States, in contrast, has turned up its nose at nuclear energy, in part because of the risk of a meltdown (much reduced in recent years, experts say), and in part because of the controversy over the disposal of nuclear waste. The biggest factor, though, was the soaring cost of building nuclear plants to satisfy more rigorous standards. Since the accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear reactor in Pennsylvania in March 1979, no new reactors have been built. With oil prices rising and concern about global warming spreading, nuclear power advocates argue that a new generation of power plants can overcome the problems with nuclear energy at an acceptable cost. To be sure, the depiction of the United States as the world's energy wastrel |
1616645_0 | World Business Briefing | Asia: Malaysia: Exports Rise | Malaysia's exports rose 23.7 percent in August, compared with the same month a year ago, led by demand from the United States for electronics, petroleum products and chemicals. The growth was slower than expected, but was enough to push the country's monthly trade surplus to a record 8.06 billion ringgit ($2.12 billion). The government has predicted that Malaysia's economy will grow 7 percent this year. Wayne Arnold (NYT) |
1616660_2 | U.S. Regulator Threatens Action Against A.I.G. On Press Releases | A.I.G. said in its initial press release that the authorities were investigating ''certain transactions'' involving one of its subsidiaries, ''including three transactions'' with ''PNC between June 2001 and November 2001.'' The authorities, according to A.I.G., said the company should have specified that it also carried out five other transactions with two insurance companies, which were not named. A.I.G. contended in its press release yesterday that, unlike the PNC transactions, none of the other transactions ''had the primary purpose of moving troubled, volatile or underperforming assets off the balance sheet'' of another company. A.I.G. said in the statement yesterday that it stopped selling both kinds of transactions before 2003, and that the five involving the two other insurance companies were either canceled or revised. ''I understand A.I.G.'s position,'' Professor Coffee said. ''I'm not saying it's clear that A.I.G. did misstate. But it is clear that the two agencies think the statements tend to minimize the scope of the investigations.'' For Mr. Thorndike and other industry analysts, the S.E.C. and the Justice Department were looking into something investors had known about since A.I.G.'s initial disclosure of the PNC transactions in January 2002. The transactions were regarded as limited and not likely to have a major impact on the business of A.I.G., a worldwide company with assets of nearly $800 billion. Some analysts said the S.E.C.'s reported challenges of the language in the press releases did not seem to make a major difference in the substance of the case. Harry Radovich, an analyst at the Merrill Lynch Basic Value Fund, which has $8.5 billion in investments, including A.I.G. stock, said that the words ''certain transactions'' in the initial press release suggested to him, from the start, that the investigation involved more than three transactions. ''So,'' he said, ''the scope of it is beyond the three transactions. I'm not exactly sure where the issue is here.'' A.I.G. initially disclosed in a two-paragraph press release that the Justice Department had joined in the investigation. Yesterday the company said that the criminal investigation involved, among other matters, the role of its subsidiary, A.I.G. Financial Products, ''in the sale and promotion of securities designed to achieve an accounting result which did not conform to GAAP,'' or generally accepted accounting principles. A.I.G. Financial Products is now a part of A.I.G.'s Capital Markets Division. Its business, analysts said, is referred to as ''structured finance'' and would include, for example, |
1616604_2 | U.S. Nuclear Cargo Draws Protests in France | official protest with the White House, French officials said. By contrast, France's economy minister -- and a presidential hopeful -- Nicolas Sarkozy on Friday described the atmosphere between the United States and France as ''more serene'' after he left a meeting in Washington with Secretary of State Colin L. Powell. Nonproliferation and environmental experts say transporting weapons-usable nuclear material is an unnecessarily risky operation. ''Here the United States is telling the whole world that the greatest threat to our security is nuclear terrorism and we must keep nuclear-weapon material out of hands of terrorists,'' said Gary Milhollin, director of the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control in Washington. ''And here we are shipping this stuff around for no good reason. Just dispose of it -- embed it in concrete, bury it.'' Mr. Milhollin and other nonproliferation and environmental experts contend that even if the plutonium is well guarded by troops, it could be hijacked or diverted by terrorists or criminals. The transport of the fabricated mixed oxide fuel rods back to the United States will also be unsafe, because they will still contain usable plutonium that could be extracted later, Mr. Milhollin said. Antinuclear activists have gathered at Cherbourg in recent days to protest the imminent arrival of the two British-registered vessels carrying the plutonium sent by the National Nuclear Security Administration, an arm of the Energy Department. On Sunday, the French police arrested three activists with the environmental group Greenpeace who were in a flotilla protesting the shipment. One was Eugène Riguidel, a French round-the-world yachting champion whose sailboat was impounded by the police. The protesters were released Monday. Greenpeace charges that carrying the plutonium on a long overland trip constitutes a ''considerable'' risk, and that the cargo's containers could be blasted open with shoulder-launched rockets. To prove the vulnerability of such shipments, Greenpeace has tracked convoys and posted license plates and itineraries on its Web site. In February 2003, the organization blocked a convoy carrying about 300 pounds of plutonium in the eastern French city of Chalon-sur-Saône. But the American and French governments, as well as Areva, a giant holding company created in 2001 to consolidate the country's nuclear activities, have rejected charges that the operation is unsafe. France has long been a depository and fabrication center for spent nuclear fuel and plutonium from foreign sources, including Germany, Belgium, Switzerland and Japan. ''Areva has traveled more than one |
1615277_4 | Venezuela's government seeks to show that its oil riches are well spent. | after an economically devastating antigovernment strike last year, the government mounted a l public relations effort aimed at winning hearts and minds abroad. From the summer of 2003 until last summer, the government has spent more than $1.6 million on lobbying in Washington, according to the Center for Public Integrity in Washington. Venezuela reaches government officials through Patton Boggs, one of Washington's best-known legal and public affairs firms, and reporters and policy makers through the Venezuela Information Office, a lobbying organization of left-leaning activists created and financed by Venezuela. Those advocates not only spiff up Venezuela's image, but they doggedly unearth damaging evidence of Bush administration ties to opposition groups determined to remove Mr. Chávez from office. Collecting documents from the National Endowment for Democracy, a nonprofit agency financed by the United States government, activists showed that $2.2 million was spent from 2000 to 2003 to finance organizations like Sumate, which helped organize the recall effort, or to pay for training for Venezuela's political parties. Such revelations proved extremely useful in Venezuela, where anti-American sentiment mined by Mr. Chávez helped him win support. But it did little to dispel claims outside of Venezuela that his government was undemocratic and radical. The president's rambling attacks on the Bush administration, accusing the United States of orchestrating efforts to remove him, made him look abroad like the tin-pot leader of a banana republic. Venezuela's sliding economy, along with recurring reports of government meddling in the media and out-of-control National Guard troops, did not help. The new ads, though, present a different direction as the country tries to put a positive spin on its leftist government and what Mr. Chávez calls his peaceful revolution, said Bernardo Álvarez, the ambassador in Washington, whose office commissioned and paid for the campaign. Mr. Álvarez said the government wanted to explain why oil-generated social spending was not only popular with many of Venezuela's 25 million people, but that it was also bringing stability that would make the country more attractive to investors. He declined to reveal how much the ad campaign cost, but full-page ads in The New Yorker run about $75,000 and quarter-page ads in the Op-Ed page of The Times cost $45,000. ''It's a way for us to say, 'Look, sirs, if you want to invest in the country, let me tell you what it is that we're doing,''' Mr. Álvarez said. THE MEDIA BUSINESS: ADVERTISING |
1609813_0 | Out of the Horror in Russia, Lessons for the World | To the Editor: Re ''Grief in Russia Mixes With Harsh Words for Government'' (news article, Sept. 7): The entire world weeps with the Russian people for this recent unspeakable tragedy. Remorse and sympathy alone will not put an end to what has become a global epidemic of terrorism and senseless mass homicide. What will be effective, however, is a worldwide unity that speaks and acts against terrorism, suicide fanatics and those who teach and recruit individuals for such heinous actions. No individual, group or nation can continue to cast a blind eye to terrorist groups. Partisan politics, ethnic and religious biases and perversions of religious teachings cannot be tolerated by any of us. It should be apparent that discussions of root causes of dissatisfaction and frustrations as a justification for terrorist attacks upon innocent victims are baseless. These vicious inhumane acts have no justification. Until we all enjoy a safe environment to resolve global inequities and differences, none of us will be immune to senseless slaughter and suffering. A failure to provide this universal safe environment will continue to hurl us closer to the end of civilization. Elliott Moskowitz New York, Sept. 7, 2004 |
1608446_1 | Sorry, E.T., but Parcel Post May Beat Phoning Home | be found. ''Our results suggest that carefully searching our own planetary backyard may be as likely to reveal evidence of extraterrestrial civilizations as studying distant stars through telescopes,'' they wrote. In an accompanying commentary, Dr. Woodruff T. Sullivan of the University of Washington said that although this was not a new idea, the new paper was the first quantitative analysis of the comparative costs of the ways of delivering information between the stars. He compared the notion of a message in a bottle to the monolith left as a calling card by aliens in ''2001: A Space Odyssey,'' adding, ''If astroarchaeologists were to find such, it would hardly be the first time that science fiction had become science fact.'' Although the result sounds counterintuitive, the problem will be familiar to anyone who ever spent time shrinking a digital photograph before trying to send it over the Internet through a dial-up connection. It would be much easier to drive a truck of photo albums across town or put them in an overnight-mail box than to go through the process of scanning and shrinking each photo. The paper, Nature's cover article, is being received with bemusement by veterans of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, or SETI. Dr. Paul Horowitz, a Harvard physicist and SETI expert, called it ''a fun and an enjoyable read, but I wouldn't turn off my radio telescope and go out with my butterfly net.'' The new argument is based on a simple observation. The farther a light beam or radio wave is sent, the more it spreads out, and the smaller fraction of its energy is recaptured at the other end. Moreover, if the recipients are not looking in the right direction at the right frequency when the signal arrives, it will shoot past and be lost. A letter, by contrast, does not disperse in transit, and waits at its destination until it is read. And with modern nanotechnology, the authors point out, that letter can contain quite a lot. Some 1022 bits of information -- much more than the sum of all the written and electronic information on Earth -- can be encoded into a cube weighing about 2.2 pounds, Dr. Rose and Dr. Wright say. Even allowing for thousands of pounds of lead to protect the message from cosmic rays and the weight of fuel, they calculated that it would take 100 million times as much |
1608446_2 | Sorry, E.T., but Parcel Post May Beat Phoning Home | Extraterrestrial Intelligence, or SETI. Dr. Paul Horowitz, a Harvard physicist and SETI expert, called it ''a fun and an enjoyable read, but I wouldn't turn off my radio telescope and go out with my butterfly net.'' The new argument is based on a simple observation. The farther a light beam or radio wave is sent, the more it spreads out, and the smaller fraction of its energy is recaptured at the other end. Moreover, if the recipients are not looking in the right direction at the right frequency when the signal arrives, it will shoot past and be lost. A letter, by contrast, does not disperse in transit, and waits at its destination until it is read. And with modern nanotechnology, the authors point out, that letter can contain quite a lot. Some 1022 bits of information -- much more than the sum of all the written and electronic information on Earth -- can be encoded into a cube weighing about 2.2 pounds, Dr. Rose and Dr. Wright say. Even allowing for thousands of pounds of lead to protect the message from cosmic rays and the weight of fuel, they calculated that it would take 100 million times as much energy to radiate those bits from the world's largest radio telescope to an antenna 10,000 light-years away as to send it them in a ''letter.'' The hitch is that the package could not travel as fast as radio waves. At only one-thousandth the speed of light, it could take 20 million or 30 million years to reach distant stars, but that is still a blink compared with the galaxy's age, 10 billion years. The main advantage of radio waves, the authors argue, is the possibility of two-way communication. But other beings could be so far away -- hundreds or thousands of light-years -- that even at the speed of light a reply would be impossible. ''If you're simply trying to say, 'Here we are,' a radio wave is the best way to do it,'' Dr. Rose said in an interview. But he added that any detailed information would require a long message. Still, he acknowledged that someone out there might be trying to communicate that way. ''We'd be goofy not to keep looking for radio waves,'' he said. Dr. Jill Tarter, an astronomer at the SETI Institute, intends to keep on doing just that. ''We've always reserved the right to |
1608490_3 | NEWS SUMMARY | be necessary for women over age 70 if they take the cancer drug tamoxifen. A19 NEW YORK/REGION B1-5 U.S. Agrees to Restore Planned Housing Aid Cuts The federal government agreed to restore almost all of the $55 million in housing aid to New York City that had been slated to be cut under a change to the government's main housing program for the poor. B1 East Side Dispute Over Pit Bulls Residents of Turtle Bay, a quiet Manhattan neighborhood, are in a heated dispute over the fate of three dog-killing pit bulls. B1 CIRCUITS G1-8 ARTS E1-8 Studio Blocks Antiwar Film Warner Brothers declined to distribute an antiwar documentary that was to be an add-on to the 1999 Gulf War movie ''Three Kings,'' scheduled for fall release. E1 Conservatives See Book Bias Conservative authors and commentators deplored the lack of attention being paid to their point of view by book publishers. E1 HOUSE & HOME F1-14 OBITUARIES C14 SPORTSTHURSDAY D1-9 Capriati Wins Opening Round Jennifer Capriati beat Magui Serna, 6-0, 6-2, in an opening round match at the United States Open. Amelie Mauresmo, of France beat Julia Vakulenko of Ukraine in second round play, 3-6, 6-2, 6-2. D1 Downtown Flushing, Queens, one of the city's most vibrant ethnic enclaves, is a virtual stranger to the Open, which is unfolding less than a mile and one subway stop away. B3 BUSINESS DAY C1-13 Masking a Caller's Identity A technology until now known mainly among software programmers enables customers to create phony outbound phone numbers in order to mask their telephone identities. C1 Military Insurance Inquiry State and federal investigators and members of Congress are broadening their efforts to address problems in the sale of life insurance and mutual funds to young soldiers and other service members. C1 Cuts in Vehicle Production General Motors and Ford Motor said that they would cut car and truck production because vehicles are piling up in inventory. Each company saw a sharp drop in sales, along with the auto industry as a whole. C1 Textile Industry to Seek Help Officials of the United States textile industry said that they would petition the Bush administration to block an expected flood of Chinese imports. C1 Business Digest C1 World Business W1 EDITORIAL A22-23 Editorials: Mr. Bush and the truth about terror; corporate kleptocracy; Lebanon's lost sovereignty. Column: Maureen Dowd. Bridge B3 TV Listings B7 Crossword B2 Weather A18 |
1608550_0 | World Briefing | Europe: Northern Ireland: Another Try | At the start of political talks in Belfast aimed at restarting a joint Catholic-Protestant legislature, Protestant parties insisted negotiations were pointless unless the Irish Republican Army fully disarmed. The sides are to meet with Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain and his Irish counterpart, Bertie Ahern, in two weeks. Brian Lavery (NYT) |
1615034_1 | Vetting Those Foreign College Applications | the largest company in a little-known field. Perhaps 80 companies nationwide evaluate educational credentials, producing about 175,000 reports yearly. Without them, the vast American export market in education would grind to a halt. Empire State College, part of the State University of New York, sends all its international applications to an evaluator. That way, ''we don't have to have specialists on staff who know all the ins and outs of all these different countries,'' said Beth Chiquoine, the college's director of college assessment services. Harvard Business School sends the paperwork for all of its admitted foreign students -- about 300 a year -- through an evaluator for vetting. Outside academia, evaluators are used by the Joint Commission on National Dental Examinations and even by the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, which lets applicants for certain visas submit evaluators' reports to help prove they have the required education. For a nonexpert, assessing foreign credentials can be startlingly difficult. A common trap for novice evaluators is the East-Central European degree called a ''magister.'' Often thought equivalent to an American master's degree because of its name (literally, ''master''), this is actually a lower-level degree akin to our bachelor's. Another misleadingly named degree is Oxford's ''Master of Arts,'' a worthless credential that the university, for obscure historical reasons, sends to every undergraduate seven years after matriculation. When the evaluators are not helping admissions officers sidestep blunders, they spend their time on more involved research -- figuring out, for example, what topics were covered in Physics 101 at the University of Baghdad, circa 1970. For use in such projects, World Education Services, like many evaluators, keeps a cache of sublimely obscure documents -- crumbling Bangladeshi course syllabuses, out-of-date Indian course catalogs, long-obsolete encyclopedias. Some of these sit on shelves in the company's library; many hundreds more are digitized on its servers, along with all the credentials ever submitted by clients. Naturally, evaluators live in terror of fraud. On a recent morning, Mariam Assefa, the company's Ethiopian-born chief executive officer, sat at her computer in a downtown Manhattan office and clicked through a database of British universities. The diploma mills were highlighted in red. ''Sherwood, Stafford, Kingsfield, Knightsbridge, Harrington,'' she read. ''These are all names that we are supposed to assume are very British-sounding.'' She snorted. ''Right out of 'Masterpiece Theater.''' Ms. Assefa keeps a file of fake degrees and letters of recommendation. One of |
1611799_3 | Russians Cite Porous Security in Terror Bombings of 2 Planes | the women arrived from Dagestan, a republic adjacent to Chechnya, at the Domodedovo International Airport in Moscow at 7:45 p.m., accompanied by two other Chechens. They were promptly stopped. ''Police officers spotted them, confiscated their passports and handed them over to a police captain responsible for antiterrorism operations to examine their belongings and check these people for their potential role in terrorist attacks,'' Mr. Ustinov said. ''The captain let them go without any checks, and they started to try to obtain tickets in the same buildings.'' Next, he said, the women received help from Armen Arutyunov, a man apparently acting as a ticket scalper, who took an amount in rubles worth roughly $68 from one woman and $103 from the other. Two minutes before the end of passenger registration for Flight 1047, Mr. Arutyunov handed 1,000 rubles, worth $34, and a ticket for a flight the next day in the name of Ms. Dzhbirkhanova to the Sibir Airlines official; the official wrote on the ticket ''Admit on Flight 1047'' and let Ms. Dzhbirkhanova board the jet, Mr. Ustinov said. At about 11 p.m., as the plane was en route to Russia's Black Sea port of Sochi, it exploded, scattering its wreckage and cargo for miles. The second aircraft, carrying Ms. Nagayeva, exploded at the same time while flying another route. Everyone on both planes died. Both the Sibir official and Mr. Arutyunov have been arrested, Mr. Ustinov said. In the portion of his remarks available thus far, Mr. Ustinov made no suggestion that the airline official who accepted the cash payment was aware that Ms. Dzhbirkhanova planned to commit a terrorist act. He also did not address how the women managed to pass through luggage checks -- a procedure separate from purchasing a ticket. A spokesman for Domodedovo International Airport, which is responsible for luggage checks, declined to comment. Ilya Novakhatsky, a Sibir Airlines spokesman, suggested the case against the official who accepted the $34 was overblown, and was drawing attention away from another element of the case. ''It is the work of airline representatives to help passengers, including rebooking them,'' he said. ''Inspection is the work of airport security. It is paid for by the airlines, but carried out by the airport. Employees of airlines are not authorized to inspect luggage.'' Mr. Ustinov's remarks also did not explain how Ms. Nagayeva boarded the plane the authorities say she later |
1611728_0 | Michael Jameson, 79, Expert on Antiquity | Michael Hamilton Jameson, a scholar of Greek antiquity who in the 1960's helped unearth the relics of battles fought more than two millenniums ago, died on Aug. 28 in Stanford, Calif. He was 79 and lived in Palo Alto, Calif. His family said his death followed a brief illness. Previously associated with the University of Pennsylvania, he retired in 1990 as Crossett professor emeritus of humanistic studies at Stanford University. Mr. Jameson led explorations that shed new light on the Peloponnesian War, in which Sparta defeated Athens in 404 B.C. His field work also discovered significant evidence from the Persian Wars (500-449 B.C.) described by Herodotus. Mr. Jameson's most notable finds included remnants of the town of Halieis, a strategic harbor on the Argolid, the easternmost peninsula of the Peloponnesus. Mr. Jameson wrote books about the tragedies of Sophocles and agriculture and slavery in classical Athens. He was co-author of ''A Greek Countryside: The Southern Argolid From Prehistory to Present Day.'' Michael Jameson was born in London. He graduated in 1942 from the University of Chicago, where he also got his Ph.D. in 1949. He started teaching at the University of Missouri before his nearly two decades at the University of Pennsylvania. He joined the Stanford faculty in 1976. Mr. Jameson is survived by his wife of 58 years, Virginia Broyles Jameson; and four sons: Nicholas, of Los Angeles; Anthony, of Saarbrücken, Germany; John, of Tokyo; and David, of London. |
1613727_3 | Surfing the Northwest, Where the Winds Are | people sprawled in the aisles between the rows or on the rocky shore affixing sails to boards. ''What are you rigging?'' was a common question; the sizes of the sail and board to use depend on wind speed and the sailor's weight and skill level. Windsurfing isn't easy to learn, but recent changes in board design have helped. A novice must first understand the physics of wind and how to position the body, board and sail to harness its power (back to the wind, sail almost parallel to the body). The boom controls speed and, at the novice level, the mast controls direction. Tilting the sail forward and backward in a bow and arrow technique allows moving downwind or upwind. After a rider learns some mechanics, sailing across the water feels aeronautical. It's as if the wind locks you in its powerful grip and lifts you across the water. Using a large beginner board, it is surprisingly easy to control the rig until a gust of wind blows in and you begin to rock back and forth in a peculiar tug of war. ''Don't leave wind to find wind'' is a windsurfer's adage, meaning that if you've got it good, the search for better is often foolhardy. A twist on that maxim might explain why so many die-hard sailors have opted to set up permanent residence in Hood River: Don't leave fun to find fun. IF YOU GO Rigs, Launch Sites and Weather-Checking Pagers THE windsurfing season in the Columbia River Gorge can begin as early as mid-May and run through early October, with the most consistent winds June through August. The Columbia Gorge Windsurfing Association (windsurf.gorge.net/cgwa) maintains a list of public launch sites. Typical parking charges are $4 to $5 a day and $25 to $50 a season. Several shops in Hood River rent equipment, with a full rig with two to three sails running at about $55 for a one-day rental. Big Winds (207 Front Street, 541-386-6086; www.bigwinds.com) or Brian's Windsurfing (100 Marina Way, 541-386-1423; www.brianswindsurfing.com) can provide two-hour group lessons for beginners for $55 to $70, including use of equipment. Pagers for checking wind conditions are available for rent at shops including Big Winds and the Gorge Surf Shop (13 Oak Street, 541-386-1699). Ann and Pat Frodel, who are windsurfers themselves, own and operate the GorgeView B&B (1009 Columbia Street, 541-386-5770), a relaxed, homey place that caters |
1613737_1 | Jews in the New Wilderness | a 1516 Genoese multilingual edition of the Psalms), its interest is not primarily antiquarian. Instead, its curator, Michael Terry, who is the chief librarian of the Dorot Jewish Division at the library, has done what a consummate collector does: gather unusual materials from disparate places and juxtapose them, revealing hidden resonances, creating connections and, finally, informing those less learned about what is being shown, with finely detailed, often playful commentary. One does not casually pass through this chamber-size exhibition of 94 objects; one works through it slowly, spurred by Mr. Terry's notes. The chronology can sometimes be confusing, but much startles. The exhibition begins with the first illustrated edition of Columbus's account of his ''Regarding the Newfound Islands'' (Basel, 1493), in which Luis de Torres is shown arriving in Cuba. De Torres, a Jew converted by the Inquisition, was recruited by Columbus to be a translator in the Indies. As far as Columbus was concerned, de Torres, who spoke Hebrew, Aramaic and some Arabic, clearly knew the requisite Oriental languages. He never reached the Orient, but de Torres did find a version of paradise, Mr. Terry informs us, eventually becoming ''the first European settler in the Western Hemisphere.'' The Inquisition played a more central role in later Jewish journeys. A Dutch engraving from 1647, for example, shows São Tomé island, off the west coast of Africa. Jews entering Portugal after being expelled from Spain in 1492 were heavily taxed. If Jews could not pay, their sons, ages 2 to 10, were enslaved and sent to São Tomé, a Portuguese outpost, where they were raised as Roman Catholics while having to fend off crocodiles and work in the sugar trade. Within a year only 600 children remained alive out of the 2,000 exiled. Additional slaves were brought from the African mainland. In a generation, the island became the world's biggest sugar exporter. (Relics of Jewish ritual survived there for centuries.) When Portugal colonized Brazil a generation later, the grown children were sent there to work the sugar trade. The Inquisition also exiled to Brazil suspected ''Judaizers,'' secretly practicing Jews. But later this traffic was halted: a Spanish or Portuguese traveler to the New World had to prove ''limpieza de sangre,'' or blood purity, a standard requiring non-Jewish ancestry back four generations. (Such genealogies are on display.) But when the Dutch temporarily wrested control of Brazilian colonies, the Jews thrived. Johan Maurits, |
1609304_2 | Does a Tiger Lurk in the Middle of a Fearful Symmetry? | based in the United States that is dedicated to preserving the zone. ''It's probably the only good thing to come out of the Korean War and cold war. So we have to preserve this as a nature reserve.'' The DMZ Forum recently held a conference in Seoul to gather support for designating the zone a Unesco World Heritage Site, a classification that would curb all development. William B. Shore, secretary of the forum and a former fellow at the Regional Plan Association of New York, said the zone should become a center for eco-tourism as an alternative to turning it into a weekend getaway for residents of Seoul. ''People are now willing to pay large sums to see wild animals in the proper setting,'' Mr. Shore said. ''Eco-tourism would protect the DMZ from becoming the Hamptons of South Korea.'' South Korea and North Korea, however, would have to ask for World Heritage status. North Korea has shown no interest in the issue, said Sohn Hak Kyu, governor of Kyonggi Province, which abuts the zone and was host for the conference. A unified peninsula would focus on North Korea's economic development, and prewar landowners could lay claim to pieces of the zone, Mr. Sohn said. ''There will be strong resistance from North and South Korea to such a designation,'' he said. Although South Korea has not expressed support for the designation, it has begun recognizing the zone's natural legacy. Early this year, South Korea's National Tourism Organization proposed creating an eco-tourism center here in Chorwon, an area about 60 miles northeast of Seoul and famous for its bird-watching. Tourists would be permitted just south of the zone in a so-called civilian-controlled area, a heavily militarized zone that includes cordoned-off minefields and roads flanked by antitank defenses. South Korea built ecologically friendly safeguards into the new road and railroads, with so-called eco-bridges and eco-tunnels to allow animals to cross safely over or under the roads. North Korea, which initially suspected that the crossings served some military purpose, has not shown any interest in building similar safeguards into its portions of the roads, Mr. Sohn said. For some South Koreans, the zone represents something deeper than a natural paradise. It is the only tract of land that has remained intact from before Korea was divided. As a last refuge for species no longer seen elsewhere, but off limits to all but a few |
1609067_2 | Casinohampton | agency only recently accepted the Shinnecocks' complete application for federal recognition, which has been brewing in some form or other since 1978. Agency officials say it is ready for review, which means that a decision might come sometime in the next decade. Unfortunately, a federal district judge, Thomas Platt, does not want the Indians to wait that long, and he has threatened to decide the Shinnecocks' status himself. This proposed end run around the administrative process is a doubly bad idea. Not only would it add fuel to the legal battle in the Hamptons, it would also very likely provoke a flood of status claims in the courts from other casino-coveting would-be tribes. It's understandable that the Shinnecocks are tired of waiting. But because of the hostility and distrust surrounding their plans, a slow approach is needed now. Those most likely to be harmed by a Shinnecock casino need time to find a way to talk the tribe out of it, by offering some other, less-noxious means of economic development. Some have suggested the sale of lucrative development rights on a portion of the tribe's reservation. Others have floated other ideas for the casino site, like a conference or retreat center, or a museum. The Shinnecocks themselves say they have discussed all manner of money-making ventures, including a cellphone tower, waste management plant, windmills and a paint factory, but none have materialized. An oyster hatchery failed. The tribe should keep brainstorming, and local officials should help. That will be difficult -- tribal leaders seem to have burned bridges with every politician in the area. But there are potential intermediaries, like the Group for the South Fork, a respected environmental nonprofit that once fought alongside the tribe in resisting encroaching development, but has since parted ways with it over the casino. The group could be an honest broker of a face-saving way out of this casino dead end. Extracting sustainable wealth from the Shinnecocks' prime real estate should not be impossible. These are the Hamptons, after all, not the Mississippi Delta or Pine Ridge. The unpredictable Judge Platt holds one key to a sensible outcome of this high-stakes confrontation. By deferring to the Bureau of Indian Affairs, slowing the rush to bulldoze and build, he could forestall a devastating court battle and the permanent loss of good will between the parties. The Shinnecocks may yet be convinced that a casino is |
1609095_0 | Jennifer Katz, Evan Lipson | Jennifer Lynn Katz, the daughter of Kay Jacobs Katz of Rockville, Md., and the late Dr. Barry Stephen Katz, was married last evening to Evan Jacob Lipson, the son of Frank Lipson of Potomac, Md., and the late Helaine Orkin Lipson. Rabbi M. Bruce Lustig performed the ceremony at the Washington Hebrew Congregation in Potomac, Md. Ms. Katz, 30, will keep her name. She is a policy analyst in the mayor's office of operations in New York. She graduated from the University of Virginia and received a master's degree in public administration from Columbia. Her mother is an eighth-grade English teacher at Parkland Middle School in Rockville. The bride's father, a physicist, worked for the Defense Department in Arlington, Va. Mr. Lipson, 30, is a fourth-year medical student at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York. He was an associate producer for ''Larry King Live'' in Washington. Mr. Lipson graduated from the University of Maryland. His father is an antitrust lawyer for the Federal Trade Commission in Washington. The bridegroom's mother was a physical therapist at Georgetown University Hospital. He is the stepson of Audrey Rothstein. WEDDINGS/CELEBRATIONS |
1609073_4 | In Sea Cliff, the Battle of the Tower | really it is a fiberglass stealth tower that would dwarf everybody in the neighborhood,'' Ms. Seiden said. The cellphone works on basic radio technology. When a cellphone call is made, its signal is usually picked up by a local antenna operated by the subscriber's company. If a caller moves out of range -- one to seven miles, depending on local terrain and traffic volume, a Verizon Wireless spokeswoman said -- the cellphone's signal is normally picked up by another antenna. But if too many trees or buildings are in the way, or if the antenna is overloaded with calls, the call won't go through, or will be lost. Although capacity varies according to tower height and location, typically one tower can accommodate between 100 and 250 calls at one time. Overloading increases as the number of wireless subscribers rises. Jo Bradshaw, chief executive of a Web site called wirelessadvisor.com, said there were nearly 1.5 million cellphone users in Nassau and Suffolk Counties, which have a combined population of 2.7 million. Vince Cannuscio, former Southampton town supervisor and president of Beacon Wireless Management, a company based in Hampton Bays that develops cell sites on the Island, said seamless service becomes even more important as more and more people use wireless as their primary phones to replace traditional land-line phones. And Sgt. John Johnson, a spokesman for the Suffolk County Police Department, said that more than 50 percent of calls to its 911 operators come from cellphones. Steve Powell, a Verizon Wireless technician who drives around the Island in a test vehicle looking for dead spots, dropped calls and areas that need better signal strength, said, ''If there are dead spots, I'm willing to bet there was an attempt at coverage in those areas.'' Deep pockets may be why some of the neighboring towns have avoided towers. ''I think influential resistance has thwarted the cell tower incursion,'' Mr. Coston said. Mike Kulak, a contractor engineer who asked that the wireless companies he works for not be named because he wants to continue getting jobs from them, cited economics as the main reason cellphone reception may be weak in certain areas. ''It's simple: the richer your neighborhood, the poorer your reception is going to be,'' he said. ''The poorer your neighborhood -- look at Queens. Great reception. The politics of cell towers has nothing to do with technology or the laws of physics.'' |
1609323_0 | As Population Rises, So Does Poverty | To the Editor: Your Aug. 29 article about declining fertility (''Demographic 'Bomb' May Only Go 'Pop!,''' Week in Review) seems to dismiss that 99 percent of human growth is projected to occur in the world's poorest countries. For example, 24 countries of sub-Saharan Africa, the most impoverished region on earth, are expected to double their current populations by midcentury. In today's world of 6.4 billion people, 840 million are malnourished, 2.8 billion (two in five) struggle to survive on less than $2 a day, 1.1 billion lack safe drinking water and 2.4 billion are without basic sanitation. Moreover, our human numbers are estimated to grow by another 2.6 billion before leveling off. To conclude that the so-called population bomb is fizzling because fertility has fallen substantially in the richer countries is to engage in an exercise of coddling the comfortable and ignoring the afflicted. Werner Fornos President, Population Institute Washington, Aug. 30, 2004 |
1609116_0 | Here We Are Again | For five years, environmental and public advocacy groups in the Hudson Valley have been fighting a proposal from St. Lawrence Cement to build an immense new coal-fired cement plant just south of Hudson, N.Y. As it stands, the proposal is moving with excruciating slowness through the Department of Environmental Conservation's approval process, heading toward eventual adjudication. The state has outlined nine major areas of concern that St. Lawrence Cement must address, including the plant's damaging visual impact in a historic, scenic region and the environmental impact of a toxic plume that would reach across much of the Northeast. Recently, St. Lawrence Cement announced some changes to its plan -- changes that have the effect of running full speed to stay in the same place. It hopes to make the plant nearly invisible by shifting it slightly south of the original location and by building it at a lower elevation. It also wants to lower the smokestack -- again to reduce visual impact -- by 45 feet. That still means the stack would loom nearly 600 feet above the Hudson. This would all sound good, if we had not heard it before. The present location for the cement plant -- in a quarry -- was originally said to make the plant nearly invisible. But when balloons were launched over the quarry last April to show the actual physical dimensions of the plant, ''invisible'' went out the window. Observers were struck not only by the height of the future plant but by its extraordinary bulk, all of it set against views of the Hudson River, the Catskills and the Berkshires. The new site would make the plant less visible from some locations but more visible from others. The real trouble with these changes is the stack reduction. In 2001, St. Lawrence Cement engineers argued that the stack could not be lowered without greater fuel and water consumption and without an increase in dangerous emissions. And yet this is precisely what they are proposing now. If anything, a lower smokestack is likely to mean greater local deposits of wind-borne pollutants. This would only worsen air quality in a region that the American Lung Association ranks among the worst in the country. What is the endgame here? The Department of Environmental Conservation seems to be in no rush to move toward adjudication. St. Lawrence Cement has asked for a lengthy delay as a result |
1609324_0 | As Population Rises, So Does Poverty | To the Editor: Re ''Old, in the Way and Hard at Work'' and ''Demographic 'Bomb' May Only Go 'Pop!''' (Week in Review, Aug. 29): The problems of countries where the population is aging and growing more slowly may be difficult, but they are problems of adjustment for mostly industrialized and wealthy nations, not problems of survival. Meanwhile, another three billion people or so will be born to women in the poorest places of the world, where a billion people already struggle to stay alive on less than $1 per day, and where the rights of women and girls are far from secure. And the global population increase will be that small only if contraceptive use keeps rising at the current rate -- an assumption by no means guaranteed under the Bush administration, which has cut financing for international family planning. Investments in the health and rights of women and girls around the world are one of America's great public policy achievements. We ought not abandon them prematurely. Ellen Chesler London, Aug. 31, 2004 The writer is senior fellow, Open Society Institute. |
1608204_0 | World's Caviar Faces a Ban | THE United Nations agency that controls trade in endangered species has halted exports of caviar until the countries where it is produced comply with an agreement to protect sturgeon, an official of the agency said yesterday. The main exporting countries, those that border the Caspian Sea, have failed to provide an accurate measurement of how much much sturgeon is illegally harvested, the official, Jim Armstrong, deputy secretary general of the Convention on the International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, said in an interview at the agency's headquarters in Geneva. The countries had not complied with a conservation agreement signed in 2001. It took affect this year, and the agency has not issued new permits since January. As a result of the ban, the legal supply of Caspian caviar in the United States -- the osetra, beluga and sevruga that sells for up to $3,000 a pound in the West -- is likely to dry up once the 2003 harvest is consumed. Prices are already rising. International trade in the world's 20-odd varieties of sturgeon has been regulated by the agency since 1998, after a drastic rise in poaching. Last year, Iran, Russia, Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan exported 150 tons of beluga, osetra and sevruga caviar from the Caspian, which sells in the West for between $1,500 and $3,000 a pound. The agency has also frozen much smaller exports of those species from the Black Sea; of Amur River sturgeon from China and Russia; of Canadian sales of four Great Lakes varieties to the United States and even of American exports of paddlefish roe to Japan. The agreement, which was signed in 2001 and came into force this year, does not affect the international trade in caviar taken from farmed sturgeon, a tiny but fast-growing industry in California, France and Italy. Nor does it affect domestic markets, including that in Russia, where most illegal caviar is consumed. Exporters cannot legally ship caviar without a permit from the agency. In the United States, the Customs Service and the Fish and Wildlife Service check incoming shipments for the necessary export permits and other paperwork. Officials of the United Nations agency do not believe that there is much illegal sturgeon fishing in Iran, the other major exporter of Caspian caviar, but as a signer of the 2001 agreement it is subject to the ban. Dr. Armstrong said the illegal trade in |
1608211_0 | U.N. Cites Gains for Women Worldwide, but Health Issues Linger | The number of girls in school and women in parliaments has risen, and their overall access to contraception has improved in the past decade, according to a new report by the United Nations Population Fund. The report cites 23 countries, including Zambia, Bangladesh, Guatemala and Paraguay, as having made especially significant improvements in conditions for women, particularly regarding reproductive health and education. But there has been little progress in other goals set 10 years ago at the International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo, the report says. The number of women who die during childbirth and pregnancy remains high, the H.I.V. epidemic is exploding among women and children, and too little attention is being paid to preventing adolescent pregnancy and diseases, it states. The findings were released at a gathering here of nongovernmental organizations to take stock, midway, of the 20-year goals drawn up in Cairo in 1994. The landmark ''Cairo consensus'' shifted the debate over population control away from traditional family planning, involving quotas and targets, to one governed by women's rights and women's health, and laid out an ambitious agenda. In all, 179 countries adopted the plan of action calling for universal access to reproductive health care, and lower infant, child and maternal mortality rates. ''I do believe we have made tremendous progress from Cairo,'' said Jill Sheffield, the president of Family Care International, a group based in New York. Still, organizers pointed to a number of obstacles they must overcome to bolster the status of women and to save lives, including the strain on resources from the H.I.V. epidemic and resistance from religious fundamentalists. ''I think the glass is distinctly more than half empty,'' said Gita Sen, a visiting professor of population and international health at Harvard University and a longtime women's rights activist. ''Religious conservatism has had an enormous impact.'' President Bush was criticized for his decision to drop United States support for the Cairo agreement over its acceptance of abortion and for cutting financing to international family planning groups that provide information about abortion. The administration was excoriated for promoting abstinence over the use of condoms, particularly in developing countries ravaged by H.I.V. and AIDS. ''In a reversal of its historic role, my own country has emerged as one of the most significant obstacles to progress,'' said Timothy E. Wirth, a former senator from Colorado who led the American delegation to Cairo in 1994 |
1612210_0 | In Stricter Study, U.S. Scales Back Claim on Cuba Arms | The Bush administration, using stringent standards adopted after the failure to find banned weapons in Iraq, has conducted a new assessment of Cuba's biological weapons capacity and concluded that it is no longer clear that Cuba has an active, offensive bio-weapons program, according to administration officials. The latest assessment contradicts a 1999 National Intelligence Estimate and past statements by top administration officials, some of whom have warned that Cuba may be sharing its weapons capacity with ''rogue states'' or with terrorists. It is the latest indication that in the wake of the Iraq intelligence failures, the C.I.A. and other intelligence agencies are taking a closer look at earlier threat assessments and finding fault with some of the conclusions and the way the reports were prepared. The new assessment says the intelligence community ''continues to believe that Cuba has the technical capability to pursue some aspects of an offensive biological weapons program,'' according to an intelligence official. He added, ''There is still much about Cuba that is cause for concern, including the production and export of dual-use items and cooperating with countries on the State Department's list of state sponsors of terrorism.'' The term ''dual use'' refers to items that could be used for both civilian and military programs. Administration officials said that the new assessment had been prepared at the request of the State Department for a report it will be making to Congress and that it had adopted tougher standards because the past assessment on Iraq had been proved wrong. ''The new assessment is the product of a fresh, hard look at the reporting,'' said an intelligence official. He added that the new standards were ''exceptionally stringent in how we treat our sources, evidence and analysis.'' The Bush administration's past assessment accusing Cuba of producing germs for possible biological warfare has been a matter of dispute since it was first disclosed in the spring of 2002. Cuba angrily disputed the charges, and some experts suggested that Cuba's large pharmaceutical industry involved conventional activities and materials that were misinterpreted as a threat by opponents of Fidel Castro, the Cuban leader. In March 2002, John R. Bolton, under secretary of state for nonproliferation, asserted that ''the United States believes that Cuba has at least a limited offensive biological warfare research and development effort'' and had also ''provided dual-use biotechnology to other rogue states.'' A month later, he ratcheted up his comments |
1610948_2 | Reservation Comes Into Play as Officials Make Water-Management Decisions | effort of agencies to compensate for them -- will help, or hurt, or both, depending on which part of the ecosystem is involved. ''We're trying to mimic natural systems,'' said Dan Kimball, the superintendent of Everglades National Park. ''And you know hurricanes are part of the natural system here.'' Mr. Kimball added, ''They can eliminate a lot, but can spread a lot of seeds at the same time.'' The decades of development that have brought people and their farms and shopping malls to the state provide various cargoes to be carried into the estuaries with the leftover rain. There is agricultural runoff, loaded with nutrients that transform the waters they linger in. There are the seeds of invasive species that take advantage of the storm's disturbance to insinuate themselves into new soil. And there is the urban runoff, with all the associated animal waste and fertilizer and assorted chemicals. ''When a hurricane goes through, an estuary can see raw sewage coming in, and that can change an ecosystem for years,'' said Fred H. Sklar, the chief environmental scientist with the South Florida Water Management District. Algae blooms, a sign of water overrich in nutrients, are likely to appear, and fish kills in oxygen-depleted waters are possible, Mr. Sklar said. In Everglades National Park, the new water coming in from the gates near the Miccosukee reservation may cover alligator nests and kill off a portion of the season's unhatched or newly hatched animals. (Miccosukee representatives say the same thing has happened to alligator nests on their side when the gates are closed.) But at the same time, the washing-machine effect of the storm on the waters of the Everglades and the estuaries off the Florida coast, scientists say, can have a cleansing effect, flushing decaying plants and other debris out of the system. Mr. Sklar said that human activities, like the introduction of invasive species, have more of an effect on natural systems than hurricanes -- but hurricanes can exacerbate the impact of the human activity. Some of the invasive species, like the Australian pine, Brazilian pepper trees, the fern called lygodium and melaleuca, a eucalyptus-like tree planted by the tens of thousands because its thirsty roots helped drain the soil, are likely to be vulnerable to hurricane winds. But their seeds compete aggressively with native species in the spaces cleared by the hurricanes. The refrain in Florida is that trees |
1610798_0 | PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL |
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