id stringlengths 5 10 | title stringlengths 0 2.44k | text stringlengths 0 2.9k |
|---|---|---|
1599734_0 | Study Shows Air From 9/11 Didn't Inflate Cancer Risk | After the World Trade Center collapsed, air samples collected nearby showed that levels of some cancer-causing chemicals had soared but had fallen so quickly that the pollution spike was unlikely to increase cancer risks in nearby communities, researchers reported yesterday. The chemicals, called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, are often found in sooty particles generated when fire consumes anything from tobacco to jet fuel. They have been linked to lung, skin and bladder cancers as well as other health problems. Earlier studies had estimated that between 100 and 1,000 tons of the chemicals spewed into the air after the attacks, both from the smoldering fires and from the exhausts of diesel-powered construction vehicles that flooded into the area. But this is the first study to track trends in these chemicals in samples of the most harmful particles of sooty pollution, those smaller than 2.5 microns across. Motes that minuscule can travel deep into the lungs and enter the bloodstream. Larger particles tend to drop out of the air quickly and also are expelled from the lungs by coughing and other defenses. The researchers found that P.A.H. concentrations in the samples captured shortly after the attacks soared to some 65 times the average levels measured in city air, and the types detected tended to be those most likely to come from a source like burning wreckage. Within 100 days, however, those chemicals were largely gone, as were the fires. From then until spring 2002, the samples contained declining amounts of the varieties associated with diesel exhaust, the researchers said, and by May of that year returned to amounts typical for New York City air. At least for these hydrocarbons, the duration of potential exposure was so short, compared with a typical lifetime, that ''cancers from these chemicals is not something to worry about,'' said Dr. Stephen M. Rappaport, an author of the study and professor of environmental health at the University of North Carolina. The study, published yesterday in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, was conducted by scientists at the university and the National Exposure Research Laboratory of the Environmental Protection Agency, in Research Triangle Park, N.C. The paper can be found online at pnas.org. Dr. Rappaport cautioned that the analysis had involved only polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons and not the many other potentially harmful substances, including asbestos, that drifted in the wind after 9/11. While cancer rates are unlikely to |
1599645_0 | OBSERVATORY | Some Erosion, and Voilà! It's common to think of the processes that shape the Earth as acting on time scales of millions of years, but some things can happen in the equivalent of the blink of an eye. Like cutting a gorge, for instance. Scientists at the University of Vermont and other institutions have dated gorges on the Susquehanna and Potomac Rivers and found they were created in a burst of erosion beginning about 35,000 years ago. The scientists analyzed surface rocks at the Great Falls of the Potomac and the adjacent Mather Gorge outside Washington, and Holtwood Gorge on the Susquehanna in central Pennsylvania. The rocks were sampled for an isotope of beryllium that is produced when cosmic rays strike exposed surfaces. Knowing the concentration of the isotope for a specific sample enabled the researchers to determine when it had first been exposed. The gorges studied, which are about 30 to 65 feet deep, consist of distinct bedrock terraces. So by dating the terraces, the researchers were able to determine how fast the gorges were cut. At Holtwood Gorge, the rate was about two feet per thousand years. The cutting was even faster on the Potomac -- more than two and a half feet per thousand years. The findings were reported in the current issue of Science. The rapid erosion ended at both sites about 14,000 years ago, about 4,000 years after the end of the last ice age. But the scientists suggest that glacial melting could not have been the main cause. Rather, they say, increased storms during a period when the climate was cold and unstable produced more flooding on the rivers. A Big Dust-Up The space that Earth travels through is full of dust, tiny particles believed to come from comets and asteroids. By some estimates, Earth picks up on the order of 1,000 tons of dust every year. But some times are dustier than others. For instance, a 2.5 million year period about 35 million years ago was extremely dusty -- under-the-bed and behind-the-refrigerator dusty. Scientists know this because they've discovered sedimentary rocks in an Italian quarry dating from that time that have high levels of a helium isotope that is carried on dust particles. In 1998, a research team proposed that this increase in dust was the result of a shower of comets, and that the dust would have come from the Earth passing |
1599660_4 | Wi-Fi Service Expands Its Reach | have hooked up with T-Mobile to offer Wi-Fi in their airport lounges. Northwest Airlines has begun to install Wi-Fi at its domestic airport lounges and charges $6.95 a day. Continental and Alaska Airlines both offer the service free to airport lounge members. For information on the availability and pricing of Wi-Fi, executives can consult a variety of Web sites, including Jiwire.com, Wifihotspotlist.com and Wifi411.com. One unpleasant discovery that they are likely to make is that they cannot ''roam,'' that is, log onto the hot spot of one service provider at one airport at the beginning of the day and log onto the hot spot of another service provider at a second airport later in the day, all for one fee. Also, fees can be high, especially if you are a novice and unsure how to log on. ''Unless you're going to be at an airport for a pretty good length of time, it's not cost-effective,'' said Jerry Olivier, an information technology consultant in Overland Park, Kan. ''By the time you log on and mess with getting into the airport's system, you've lost 20 minutes.'' Jeremy Coyle, a software consultant in Hoboken, N.J., is a devotee of the Wi-Fi service at Continental Airlines' lounges. But he refuses to pay a daily fee if he is in an airport not served by Continental. ''Seven dollars and ninety-nine cents per session is difficult to justify if you're only going to use it for one hour,'' he says. Another issue is security: According to experts, if you or your employer have installed a virtual private network, or software that provides secure access to your employer's data bases, on your laptop, as well as a personal firewall that prevents unauthorized users from accessing your computer, your e-mail transmissions generally should be secure. However, they say, when in doubt, do not send any sensitive information in an e-mail message. Beyond the projected growth in Wi-Fi hot spots, travelers can expect richer services at airports in the not-too-distant future. Mr. Snyder of Concourse Communications says his company will soon test a service that allows users to print their work once they step off an airplane, and will also test a voice-over Wi-Fi service that allows users to make phone calls from their laptops and other devices. Similarly, Dan Lowden, vice president for marketing at Wayport, says his company is testing live TV over Wi-Fi and will eventually |
1597216_2 | U.S. Cuts Off Financing Of U.N. Unit For 3rd Year | its one-child policy -- have long been criticized by American social conservatives and some religious groups for dictating family size and forcing women to have abortions by threatening their jobs or imposing special taxes. The United Nations agency's leaders counter that they in no way condone abortion. In fact, they say, their work in China has greatly reduced coercive family planning. Active in 32 Chinese counties, the program has helped drive down the female sterilization rate by 16 percent since it began operations in 1998, and increased the use of contraceptives, to 90 percent. The rate of abortions to live births in those counties is now below the level in the United States, the agency said. Sarah Craven, the chief of the agency's Washington office, said the administration's contention that the agency indirectly supported China's coercive policies was ''false and absolutely baseless.'' Women and girls in sub-Saharan Africa and elsewhere in Asia will be deprived of potentially life-saving help, she said. ''This is very troubling,'' Ms. Craven said. The agency ''does not, has not and will never support coercive activity of any kind.'' A State Department investigation in 2002 found ''no evidence'' that the agency knowingly took part in managing a program of coercive abortion or involuntary sterilization. The department's 2004 human rights report on China acknowledged that the United Nations agency had actively worked to eliminate target and quota systems for regulating childbirth, though the government found other methods to keep its policy in place. Mr. Boucher said Friday that there were ''not enough changes, or the changes were not significant enough to sever the connection between funding for the population program and the Chinese law and practice.'' Administration officials note that the $35 million is but a fraction of their overall spending on family planning and reproductive health worldwide. This year, the United States is providing $429 million, to numerous nations, Mr. Boucher said. ''That's a commitment the administration made and kept,'' he said. But Tim Wirth, the former United States senator from Colorado who now directs the United Nations Foundation, a private organization that supports United Nations activities, said the Bush administration had isolated itself from the international community. No other nation has withheld contributions over the China issue, and some, like the Netherlands, have increased donations to compensate for the American reduction of funds. ''The administration has once again embarrassed the United States,'' Mr. Wirth said. |
1599256_0 | Aside From Politics: Colonial History, Old Masters, Funky Jazz | ''GAMES FOR THE GODS: The Greek Athlete and the Olympic Spirit,'' at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, may not be quite as snugly tailored to a national convention as the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Childe Hassam retrospective in New York, with its paintings of American flags and pristine New England churches. Still, a show with images of guys and gals racing, wrestling and throwing spears is in the competitive spirit of the occasion. The fact that some of the figures belong to the Classical Greek culture from which Western democracy springs doesn't hurt. Timed to coincide with the Summer Games, the Boston show includes a wide range of material, from marble and bronze sculptures to painted vases and coins. The catalog is advertised as being geared to ''the art lover and the thinking sports enthusiast.'' Maybe it will also appeal to thinking convention delegates, who will remember that the ancient Greeks were as contentious and xenophobic as they were idealistic, and in the Olympics, as in politics, as in life, the best man or woman doesn't always win. Idealistic is one word for Isabella Stewart Gardner (1840-1924), whose fabulously wacky museum of a home is a short walk from the Museum of Fine Arts. Armed with money, brains and an adventurous disposition, the socially prominent Mrs. Gardner acquired Renaissance paintings and vanguard contemporary art with equal relish. Bernard Berenson was her personal buyer; John Singer Sargent, her in-house portraitist. When she ran out of space, she erected a cut-and-paste version of a Venetian palazzo and filled it to the ceilings. This astonishing pile, as precisely cluttered as it was on the day Gardner died, recently turned 100 and is concluding its centennial celebrations with an exhibition about her love affair with the city of Venice and the salon culture of artists, writers, patrons and musicians associated with the Palazzo Barbaro. As for the rest of the museum, there's nothing like it anywhere, with such incomparable paintings as Titian's ''Rape of Europa,'' and the ghosts of a Vermeer and a Rembrandt painting stolen from the museum in 1990. You'll find Rembrandt, however, across the Charles River in Cambridge. A small pen-and-ink biblical study by the artist and anatomical sketches by Rubens are among the 70 works in ''Dutch and Flemish Drawings From the National Gallery of Canada'' at the Arthur M. Sackler Museum at Harvard. Several of the university's other |
1599257_4 | Boston Rises Above Unflattering Stereotypes | say that he was raising his own son with a different set of values than those he had grown up with,'' said Mr. Landsmark, now president of the Boston Architectural Center. Today's Boston is more complex politically, too. Mr. Grogan, of the Boston Foundation, said the ''Irish domination of politics'' had been diluted. That is partly because of increased diversity over all and ''the waning power of the Catholic Church, which was under way before the scandal'' involving sex abuse by clergy, he added. Mayor Menino, elected in 1993, is the first Italian-American to hold that post, and the first non-Irish-American mayor since 1925. Massachusetts is still a Democratic bastion, with its entire Congressional delegation made up of Democrats and led by its two senators, Edward M. Kennedy and John Kerry. The Legislature has the country's highest proportion of Democrats, 84.5 percent. But Massachusetts has elected Republican governors since 1990, and the Democrats are hardly all of the liberal persuasion. The Legislature, for example, has a large contingent of conservative Democrats led by the powerful speaker of the House. Their influence was clear this spring when the Legislature voted narrowly for a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage, in hopes that the amendment would eventually be adopted and supersede a court decision that led to same-sex marriages becoming legal in the state in May. Boston politics has always had a plasticity, a sense that, as United States Representative Barney Frank, a Democrat, put it, ''the personal is really intertwined with the political'' and what matters is ''what kind of relationship my nephew had with his uncle.'' And Boston has always had a political self-assurance, a pride in being pioneers on several fronts, including the American Revolution, women's rights and same-sex marriage. That confidence to tease progress out of history explains a lot about Boston. A city that decades ago had lost much of its manufacturing and shipping industries and its pre-eminence as the center of the American literary world, sprang back to outcompete the country in education, medicine and science, fields that, crucially, do not require natural resources. History -- from the Old North Church to Bunker Hill to well-preserved colonial and 19th-century buildings -- is still evident everywhere in Boston. But intertwined with the past is the glitteringly futuristic Leonard P. Zakim Bunker Hill Bridge, a new convention center overlooking Boston's now-sparkling harbor, and the nearly completed Big Dig, which |
1599172_0 | PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL | |
1599315_2 | Brazil Carries the War on Drugs to the Air | with foreign correspondents last year, he expressed annoyance that some pilots of drug-running aircraft were so confident of their immunity from retribution that they would make obscene gestures at the Brazilian Air Force pilots tracking them. The United States had been cooperating with operations to shoot down drug-running planes in Latin America, but it began to back away from its support in April 2001 when a Peruvian jet shot down a small plane, mistakenly identified as a drug carrier, and killed an American missionary and her child. Because the United States had provided intelligence and technical support to the operation, relatives of the victims sued the United States government and won a settlement. ''U.S. law may forbid assistance to countries that implement shootdown laws under certain conditions,'' a State Department official said when asked to comment on Brazil's move. The official said, however, that the United States, which is scheduled to provide Brazil with $10.2 million in drug and law enforcement aid this year, ''agrees with the Brazilian assessment that the threat posed by drug traffickers is both very serious and increasing,'' and added, ''we have been in consultation with the government of Brazil about the provisions of U.S. law.'' Mr. Viegas acknowledged that there had been ''difficulties'' winning American support for his government's plan, which requires eight precautionary steps before an order to shoot down a plane may be issued. But he said that recent bilateral talks had led to ''perfect clarity that the decree will be well received by the American government'' and that Brazil would be able to act ''without being exposed to commercial sanctions.'' Two years ago, Brazil inaugurated the $1.4 billion Sivam radar system, which uses American technology and for the first time allows the government to monitor air activity in the whole of the vast Amazon region. But after an initial decline of 30 percent, which Brazil attributed to traffickers' concerns about the improved tracking capabilities, illegal flights began rising again. Just last year, Brazil recorded 4,128 ''unauthorized flights,'' some of which were innocent violations like those made by ranchers in the Amazon flying from one plantation to another. Mr. Viegas said, however, that there had been a ''real increase'' of deliberate violations of Brazilian airspace, apparently by drug smugglers who realized that the government's hands were tied. The new policy will go into effect in late October, and will be preceded by a |
1599014_0 | A Plan for Screening At Airports Is Dropped | AFTER the attacks of Sept. 11, one of the first things the government said it needed was a better way to decide who should be screened more closely at the airports, so it would spend less time on harmless grandmothers and more time on people who might actually pose a threat. But almost three years later, travelers are still being chosen for the more thorough secondary screening using a system developed in the 1990's, based on factors like whether the traveler paid cash for the ticket. The Transportation Security Administration spent millions of dollars designing a replacement system using a computer technique called ''data mining'' to determine whether a traveler was presenting a real identity, but was unable to meet the objections of privacy advocates in Congress and elsewhere. In mid-July the agency gave up on the idea. Now the Department of Homeland Security, of which the Transportation Security Administration is a part, has a much more modest goal, which is to integrate the various databases maintained by the F.B.I., the C.I.A., the Immigration and Naturalization Service and the State Department and make them available to all of those agencies. The transportation administration already uses a computerized ''no fly'' list, a giant step from mid-September 2001, when security officials faxed lists of names to the airlines. But it cannot say when the beefed-up no-fly list will be complete for use on domestic flights. A more thorough system of checking identity and history already exists for travelers coming to the United States from abroad. The system it has given up on was called Capps 2, for Computerized Passenger Prescreening System. It was to replace a system called Capps, developed by Northwest Airlines in the 90's under contract with the government, intended to single out passengers whose checked bags should get closer attention. That idea is archaic now that all checked bags are screened for bombs. The problem with Capps, according to security experts, is that it is based on information in airline computers, in a file called the Passenger Name Record. But some airlines' computer software is so old that it does not even provide enough space to enter all the letters in a passenger's name. The government, however, wanted to tap in to the computer databases and the expertise of the private sector, which routinely looks at driver's license records, real estate transactions, credit reports and telephone subscriber records, to |
1599118_0 | All Aboard, for a Security Check | COULD fighting terrorism really be this hassle-free? Last Monday, the federal Department of Homeland Security began screening passengers on the Shore Line East rail line that goes from New Haven to New London, part of a 30-day security trial the agency has also run in other parts of the country. Passengers must board the train through one car, then pass through a multistep security check. That sounds intrusive, but last Tuesday when I rode a rush-hour train in the morning, I went through the process and was in my seat in less than two minutes. Moments before the 8:16 a.m. express train departed on time for Old Saybrook from New Haven's Union Station, I stepped into its special screening car, bare of seats and full of flashy screening equipment, and stood in a small, foyer-type area. A mini-army of nine security personnel, all neat in their crisp white shirts and black trousers, peered my way expectantly. They looked like eager restaurant waiters. Five passengers, myself included, boarded the train through that special car. That meant we were outnumbered by security personnel by almost two to one. The experiment on Shore Line East, which is operated by Amtrak, is the third and last of a three-phase trial that started last May in Maryland, following the terrorist bombing of passenger trains in Madrid in March. Chris McKay and Tony Pinto, two managers from the homeland security department, greeted the passengers with warm smiles and ''welcome aboard.'' They told us to place our bags on the airport-style X-ray machine. It took barely 30 seconds for me to pass through it. Then, just ahead, came enough bells and whistles for a Sharper Image catalog. There were three special computerized machines that scan each passenger's train ticket for traces of nine kinds of explosives. I presented my ticket and was through that hurdle in about 10 seconds. There were also three machines that scanned a small, white paper disk, wiped across the hands of passengers chosen at random, for explosive residue. I got a pass on that one. I wondered: What if my husband, who two weeks ago handled rocket fuel from our son's model-rocket kit, were going through this process, say, the day after launch? Would he set the alarms off? Mr. McKay would not say for what type of explosives the system tests, so my husband will have to take his chances. Mr. |
1594116_1 | Students Seek More Than Just Summer Cash | was not a directive, Mr. Galant emphasized, but rather an opportunity to get a head start. Unfortunately, that head start conflicted with final exam study time. What to do? He said yes to Mr. Fialkov. Mr. Galant says working for Newlight has been an invaluable experience. Phoning chief executives twice his age and older, requesting delivery of confidential information, he has learned quickly, he said, how to establish his authority. ''Between learning about the companies and hearing Herman's and the rest of the firm's reactions, I've gotten a much better sense of what makes a good business,'' Mr. Galant said by e-mail. And the summer has just begun. Ambitious college students like Mr. Galant began settling into their summer jobs as long as two months ago. There is good news for stragglers, though: It's not too late. Employers are still hiring, according to career counselors like John McCrudden, internship director at Southampton College and president of Long Island Job Connection. ''The jobs are out there,'' Mr. McCrudden said. In many cases students pass the jobs up, he said, rather than work at the prevailing wages. Those jobs often end up filled by recent immigrants, Mr. McCrudden said. Long Island slightly outpaces the national average in student hiring, said Andrew Sum, director of the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University in Boston. About 46 percent of Long Islanders ages 16 to 24 who seek work this summer will find it, compared with a rate of about 42 percent nationally, Mr. Sum said. He says that regions with strong retailing and tourism industries tend to hire many students in the summer. ''For the most part, students who seek work are now working,'' said Nancy Armstrong, a business teacher at Sachem High School in Lake Ronkonkoma and the district's school-to-career coordinator. Cheryl Davidson, director of the Long Island Works Coalition, a nonprofit organization that connects schools and local businesses, said, ''What's hot are jobs offering training in professional skills and allowing some autonomy.'' While thousands of Long Island students continue to work as lifeguards, cashiers and office temps, many others are landing more demanding gigs. ''Summer jobs used to be answering the phones and making copies,'' Ms. Davidson said. ''That's really changing. The positions today seem to be more hit-the-ground running'' kind of jobs, requiring greater responsibilities, she said. ''More small companies are now hiring students,'' she added, noting that in |
1594201_0 | PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL | |
1594208_0 | Ah, the Beauties of Genetic Engineering, and Other Sculptures | FOUNDED in 1988, the Pacific Rim Sculptors Group has more than 150 members throughout Northern and Central California. Around three-dozen of them are showing in ''Off the Rim: Selections From the Pacific Rim Sculptors Group,'' a jaunty if not entirely satisfying exhibition at Grounds for Sculpture here. This is the first time a West Coast sculptors' organization has exhibited at the 35-acre park. Given the range of artists included, it is difficult to summarize the work on view. A tendency toward concise, elegant and generally compact visual statements is evident, however. In addition, there is an absence of the kind of spectral, overly sentimental tableaus favored by East Coast artists. Make of this what you will. Among the more diverting displays are Ann Weber's ''Almost 16'' (2002) and ''Fifteen and a Half'' (2002), a pair of minarets made of strips of cardboard woven and stapled around a metal frame. Although they look slick and shiny from afar, bathed in tungsten light, the overall tenor of the work is unkempt. Why? Many reasons I guess, but it suggests to me that these pieces, for the artist, were more of a material challenge than a sensual pursuit. By contrast, Masako Onodera brings splendid craftsmanship to bear on her sculptures of genetically modified vegetables. ''Genetically Modified Organisms -- Corn'' (2001), for instance, consists of clear, blown-glass corncobs inserted into forged steel husks. Lush, beautifully proportioned, and entirely synthetic, they mimic the oversize but frequently tasteless genetically modified produce sold at supermarkets. Ms. Onodera is also exhibiting ''Too Yellow to Eat'' (2003), a series of yellow, delicately blown glass tomatoes with steel bolts for stems stacked tightly in a wooden box-like frame as if ready for transport to market. There is something both marvelous and terrifying about the fulsomeness and crystal sheen of these tomatoes, which look like prototypes for some new, radically permissive genetically altered produce. Ms. Onodera is not the only artist to be making work about genetically modified food, or the effects of genetic engineering on the human body. In short, the objects that she makes are of her own design, but the ideas behind them are commonplace. The same goes for much of the sculpture in this exhibition, which tends to remind you of the work of a lot of other artists. Rarely, if at all, does genuine originality shine through. Ellen Vogel's ''Interconnected'' (2003) is a happy exception. The |
1594398_18 | THE LOST YEAR: Classes in Crisis; City Retools Special Education But Pupils Slip Through Cracks | she said, adding that a summer workshop would be held for principals. Paper Children As children in preschool who get special ed services start to turn 5, they are evaluated to determine what kind of help they will need in kindergarten in the fall. This early intervention is meant to ensure that the children are prepared from Day 1 of school. In the past, lists of these children, called turning-5 cases, were distributed in January. Assessment teams visited preschools during the second half of the school year, observing children, talking to preschool directors and interviewing parents. This year, amid all the turmoil, many turning 5 cases were not assigned until late March. Still, the city demanded that all be completed by June 1. So the last week of May, when Brooklyn officials still had hundreds to do, they summoned a half dozen psychologists to the Region 7 office, and ordered them to do several hundred evaluations in three days -- without observing the children, consulting with teachers or talking to parents, according to two psychologists and a social worker. ''It was unethical,'' said Florence Manglani, the P.S. 95 psychologist, who said she had never been ordered to do anything like that in her 16-year career. ''Children needed to be seen, teachers need to be talked to, parents should have been informed.'' Though city officials deny that these orders were ever given, Ms. Manglani said she was told to give the children the same kinds of services they were already receiving, but less of them. ''If the child was getting speech three times a week, we were to lower it to once or twice,'' she said. ''Occupational therapy three times -- make it once.'' ''These children were treated like paperwork,'' said Ms. Manglani, who said she did 20 evaluations in three days. She said she feared that cutting corners in this way would haunt the schools come fall. ''Children may get the wrong program,'' she said. ''Some may need smaller classes or more services, but we wouldn't know. How could we know if we never looked at these children?'' Correction: July 7, 2004, Wednesday An article and a picture caption on Sunday about problems in New York City's overhauled system of special education used a misspelled given name in some copies for an autistic boy who regressed after a school psychologist stopped visiting his class. He is Zander Urban, not Xander. |
1594050_0 | Against Happiness | Jim Holt's essay (The Way We Live Now, June 20) made me consider again what my own thoughts are on the subject of happiness, and one thing it is not is the goofy, giddy, smiley-face-on-the-bumper-sticker version. How about Aristotle's idea of happiness (eudaemonia)? If I remember correctly, he boils it down to the habit of living a virtuous life, which is further defined as being mindful of choosing the mean between extremes (i.e., to be courageous is to be neither foolhardy nor a coward). This delicate balance is the result of striving and self-discipline. Anyone can count himself happy if he goes to bed at night after a day of trying to be a decent, conscious and responsible member of the human race. That can bring us a tremendous sense of well-being. Penelope Bodry-Sanders Myakka City, Fla. |
1594062_3 | De Gaulle Airport Acts to Ease Crowding | checking in at Terminal 2E would then ride buses to their planes). But that decision depends on government approval, which depends in turn on various expert assessments, all of which takes time. An investigation into the collapse has focused on the added stress that three walkways may have placed on the elliptical concrete tube that housed the boarding gates. The walkways led passengers to some of the gates from part of the check-in area. No one expects a determination on the reason for the collapse to be made very soon, but talk of razing the entire structure has abated. Some relief may come from moving as many as 15 flights a day from Charles de Gaulle to the smaller Orly airport south of Paris. A government decision on the airport authority's request for such a move is expected this week. Still, no one expects anything dramatic to change before the vacationers start arriving in force this month. Most of the flights coming into Terminal 2E were on long-haul carriers that require more substantial immigration barriers and a greater police presence than flights connecting Paris with other European cities. Shifting those flights to terminals that are configured to handle the heavier load means consolidating most of the shorter-haul flights in other terminals. One result is that passengers transferring from one flight to another are more likely to need to take a bus between terminals. So far, the airport's efforts seem to be working. Though some lines were long on a recent day, the only evidence of the closed terminal building were small notices taped to the arrival and departure monitors. ''I've waited about 15 minutes,'' said Mary Cavell from Thibodaux, La., waiting to check in to her Delta flight home, ''and that's much better than what I've experienced in the past.'' Airport officials say passengers can help ease the situation by coming prepared, by leaving behind articles like nail clippers that slow down security checks and, in particular, by not leaving luggage unattended. ''Every time, we have to evacuate the area,'' said a border police officer in Terminal 2C. Passengers planning to pass through Charles de Gaulle can get updates on flight times at 08.36.68.15.15 (for those in France). Other information on airport conditions is available at (33-1) 48.62.22.80 or www.adp.fr. Disabled passengers are advised to explain the degree of assistance they require when making their reservation. TRAVEL ADVISORY: CORRESPONDENT'S REPORT |
1594027_0 | Goodbye, Columbus | HISTORY LESSONS How Textbooks From Around the World Portray U.S. History. By Dana Lindaman and Kyle Ward. 404 pp. The New Press. $26.95. HAD you gone to high school in Norway, your textbook would have taught you Columbus was old news: the most important arrival in America was the Viking Leif Ericson's in the early 10th century. If, on the other hand, you'd spent your teenage years in Cuba, you'd have learned that when Columbus discovered Cuba, he thought it was the promised land and didn't want to go any farther. These and other extracts in ''History Lessons: How Textbooks From Around the World Portray U.S. History'' tell us two things: historical narratives are biased and untrustworthy; and America's impact on the world cannot be underestimated. Interesting history is interested history, so the secondary school texts excerpted here generally relate international events as they reflect local concerns. French textbooks recount the Suez Canal crisis of 1956 through the prism of growing nationalism in their own troublesome colony, Algeria. Caribbean textbooks are sugar-centric, gauging the effects of the Monroe Doctrine and the Great Depression on sugar prices. The Canadians, meanwhile, rarely miss an opportunity to insert their own countrymen into global events: ''the sky above Juno Beach was to be protected by R.A.F. bombers, many of which were flown by Canadian bomber crews''; ''most Canadians are unaware of the crucial role Canada played in the development of the atomic bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki.'' Much entertainment is to be found in what's excluded and included. An excerpt from a British textbook on the American Revolution snootily refers to ''the colonies'' -- as in, ''the colonies did not have uniforms, men or money'' -- and notes that Tom Paine, the author of ''Common Sense'' and godfather of America, ''earned a living first as a maker of ladies' underwear.'' Compare that coy little fact to the reverential treatment of Paine in American textbooks like ''A People and a Nation'' (where Paine is ''a radical English printer'' who called ''stirringly for independence'') or ''The Great Republic'' (where he ''belonged to no country'' and ''lived by his pen.'' Dana Lindaman, a graduate student at Harvard, and Kyle Ward, an assistant professor of history and political science at Vincennes University, assert that ''History Lessons'' is a comparative study offering a corrective to the ''isolationist tendency'' of American textbooks. ''If we wish to move beyond judgment |
1595323_1 | As Bird Flu Persists, Global Leaders Prepare for the Worst | A(H5N1) strain of bird flu, and they have been racing to develop an effective vaccine. Laboratories working with the W.H.O. have used genetic manipulation to develop tiny quantities of a possible vaccine, and the organization said Thursday that two American companies had been able to grow small batches of vaccine from those samples. The W.H.O. urged that human trials of the vaccines be stepped up. But even if a vaccine could be developed before the winter flu season, it would be difficult to inoculate more than a small fraction of the world's population, health experts warned. China is negotiating to buy its own supply of Tamiflu, a senior Chinese health official said in an interview. Taiwan has already bought a large stockpile of Tamiflu, and is seeking to buy more and to set up its own production facilities. In Japan, the Health Ministry is also trying to arrange for domestic production of Tamiflu, which is now made at a single factory in Europe by the drug company Roche Holding. The A(H5N1) virus is so deadly that a vaccine for it cannot easily be grown in eggs, the usual method of production. Scientists have produced experimental vaccines by using newer genetic manipulation techniques to modify the virus. This would allow it to be grown in eggs while still providing protection in people after it is turned into a vaccine. But extensive safety and tests on humans will be needed before a vaccine can be produced, and liability issues in the use of a genetically modified vaccine could make companies reluctant to invest in production in the United States. Dr. Bruce Gellin, director of the National Vaccine Program at the Department of Health and Human Services in Washington, said researchers were also looking to produce vaccines from cell cultures, an approach that might be needed if an avian influenza pandemic led to an egg shortage. Health experts say that these preparations may not go far enough. Tamiflu, an antiviral, is only effective if given in the first two days after the onset of infection. Since many people with little more than the sniffles would take Tamiflu before it became clear they did not actually have bird flu, the amount of Tamiflu needed in a health emergency could be enormous, said Dr. Roy Anderson, an epidemiologist at the University of London. Tamiflu is a fairly new drug, still under patent and very costly. |
1595359_0 | NASA Rescue Plan Is Reported to Have High Risk of Failure | NASA's emergency plan to use the International Space Station as a safe haven for shuttle astronauts whose craft cannot safely return to earth would carry a high risk of failure if it were ever tried, according to internal space agency documents. The documents say the space station lacks adequate support systems and supplies to assure that its own occupants and a shuttle crew could stay alive for more than a few months at best and a few weeks at worst -- not enough time, under many possible situations outlined in the documents, to carry off a rescue plan. While some of the astronauts could return to earth on the Russian Soyuz craft, which is docked at the space station, it is far from certain that they could all be rescued. In a sense, the information in the new documents simply underscores what the nation has always known about spaceflight but tragically relearns from time to time: It is a risky business. The documents, which have not been made public, were presented on June 9 to NASA officials in charge of spaceflight and safety as part of the effort to return the shuttle fleet to space by next spring. They were given to The New York Times by senior NASA employees who say that the current state of agency planning puts astronauts and the space program at undue risk. A space station program official said that the National Aeronautics and Space Administration believed it could launch a rescue vehicle in time to bring back all crew members. ''That's why we study these situations so intensively,'' said the official, Mark Uhran, the assistant associate administrator for the station program. ''So we can be sure we have captured all possible scenarios and have a plan in place so we can ensure that the web of our safety net is adequate.'' A NASA spokesman, Allard Beutel, said the plan was ''a backup plan to a backup plan to a backup plan,'' and very much a work in progress. The space agency, he said, has worked to eliminate the kind of launching debris that doomed the shuttle Columbia in 2003, so the need for such a rescue becomes increasingly remote. A station rescue plan was recommended last August by the independent board that investigated the loss of the Columbia and its crew of seven. Since then, NASA has held out the emerging space station plan |
1599905_1 | Panel Sees No Unique Risk From Genetic Engineering | not recommend changes to existing regulations, but rather deals more with the science needed to determine whether food from genetically engineered crops and animals might be harmful. It does not, for instance, explicitly recommend mandatory reviews of new genetically engineered foods by the Food and Drug Administration. It says that assessments should be made on a case-by-case basis. Right now, companies that create such crops voluntarily consult with the F.D.A. The report suggests that in some cases, surveillance might be needed after a food gets to the market to check for possible health effects, something not done now. It also calls for some information on the composition of genetically modified foods to be made public rather than kept proprietary. Both sides in the polarized debate about genetically engineered foods found things to like and not like in the report. ''They've clearly identified that there are significant problems with our technological ability to both identify changes that might happen in G.E. crops as well as to evaluate what those changes might mean,'' said Doug Gurian-Sherman, a senior scientist at the Center for Food Safety in Washington, which opposes biotech crops. But backers of biotech were heartened by the report's determination that the risks of biotech foods are not unique. Michael Phillips, vice president of agricultural science and regulatory policy of the Biotechnology Industry Organization, said in a statement that the report ''should lay to rest the few naysayers who continue to question the safety of these crops.'' The report was commissioned by the three agencies that regulate genetically engineered crops: the F.D.A, the Department of Agriculture and the Environmental Protection Agency. It was produced by a committee of mostly academic scientists led by Bettie Sue Masters, of the department of biochemistry at the University of Texas Health Science Center in San Antonio. Genetic engineering involves the transfer of a specific gene from one organism to another. Cross-breeding, by contrast, involves the mixing of thousands of genes, most unknown. Another breeding technique is to bombard plants with radiation or expose them to chemicals to induce hundreds of random mutations in hopes of finding one that will confer a desirable trait. The report said that genetic engineering was more likely to cause unintended effects than the other techniques used to develop plants except for the mutation-inducing technique. Right now, crops produced by techniques other than genetic engineering go through virtually no regulatory scrutiny. |
1599860_2 | A Writer Is Back in the Saddle After His Fall From Grace | always a good way to sell books, gave way to crisis after he wrote ''The Last Brother,'' a 1993 book about Senator Edward M. Kennedy that was panned by some as a worthless bit of fakery. The experience left him depressed and embittered. In the fall of 1997, his car slid off an icy New York State road and landed on him at the bottom of an embankment. He survived, but his depression and addiction to Ativan, a tranquilizer used to control anxiety, grew. He was hospitalized in 2001 and eased off the drug. Mr. McGinniss was offered an opportunity to become a writer in residence at a liberal arts college backed by Soka Gakkai, a Buddhist sect that he came to believe was a cult. His fall was ''Greek in its dimensions,'' said Dennis Holahan, his attorney, friend and agent. ''He was pretty much destroyed. When I met him, he was in exile, just out of the hospital and teaching at a Buddhist cult university in Orange County. How much lower can you go than that?'' With ''The Big Horse,'' Mr. McGinniss is back in the saddle and riding, albeit with less abandon than before. The book's pivot is Mr. Johnson, a hardscrabble trainer in the last furlong of his career because of illness. In a racket that is described in the book as ''90 percent'' disappointment, Mr. Johnson has seen his share. But a last shot at redemption arrives in the form of Volponi, a dark horse that in 2002 won the coveted Breeders' Cup Classic early in his career against 43-1 odds and then began losing races in complicated, ornate ways. It is a well-told miniature, the kind of nonfiction work that drops a reader headlong into a subculture and then gracefully reveals its secrets. When Mr. McGinniss roots for Mr. Johnson and his horse for a final comeback, he is hardly a bystander. Sitting at the Saratoga track, a gorgeous time machine that transports fans back to a mannered era, Mr. McGinniss does not buy the metaphor: ''What do I have to be redeemed from?'' he asks. There is only the question, no hint of rancor. Mr. McGinniss is a very nice guy. He was a nice guy when he managed to get a place at the table with Richard M. Nixon's image makers for ''The Selling of the President.'' His obvious decency got him on |
1599889_3 | A Spitting Image Of Cuba | as an afternoon snack. In a country where milk, cigarettes, coffee and pork chops were marked off on a ration card -- with only so much allotted to each family and only so much in the store (so that my grandmother awoke before dawn to go stand in line with her card) -- the fruit trees offered rare abundance. In America, where we are surrounded by abundance, it's easy to lose awareness of it, even to forget about it. In New York, where I live, I can go down the street at 3 a.m. to the 24-hour market and get as much milk or coffee or as many cigarettes or pork chops as I want. For a few months every summer, I can even buy nisperos and mammees at the delis in the Latino enclaves along Fifth Avenue in Brooklyn. But these fruits are not soft and ripe like the ones sold in the open air markets in Merida -- the mammees with a thin slice cut out to entice customers, as if it were a señorita lifting up the hem of her skirt to show a little calf, or a caballero with his shirt half unbuttoned. They are hard as candies. Here I see them only long after they've been picked. The trees that spit them down belong to another place and time. My Brooklyn fruits, though, become a reminder of abundance amid abundance, for it takes work to coax the fruits to the ripened state I remember from my youth. Although I have to make a 20-block trek to the delis that sell them, and I often pay as much as $10 for a single mammee, the excitement is worth it: I feel as if I'm carrying my childhood in a paper bag as I climb the stairs to my apartment. Once I'm home, I wrap them in clear plastic bags and stick them in a dark closet. Somehow, the darkness of a New York City closet lets these fruits flourish and sweeten as naturally as they do under the bright tropical skies. If there were ration cards in New York, they would be for my nisperos and mammees. On special occasions, I pull them one by one from the plastic bags in the dark closet, where they are tucked between the old paint cans and the tool box and the cleaning supplies. They are eaten for dessert |
1598408_4 | For Some Beta Testers, It's About Buzz, Not Bugs | day testing World of Warcraft on weekdays and five to six hours a day on weekends. Early testing also gives him a chance to influence the game's development. Mr. Swaney recalls telling developers that Ironforge, the capital city of the dwarves in this massively multiplayer online role-playing game, felt like a ghost town. In the most recent version of the game, he said, patrolling guards and street vendors lend the capital a pleasant, bustling atmosphere. Wendy Dunham said she found herself testing Octiv's Volume Logic plug-in for iTunes, which adjusts the volume of audio files, after she took one too many flying leaps off her couch to turn down the volume on her stereo. ''The soundtrack to 'Titanic' has got some really quiet parts and all of a sudden you get to a crescendo, and it can really shock you,'' said Ms. Dunham, a Web designer from Hopkins, Minn. The plug-in not only evens out the wide variations in volume, she said, ''it actually brings out things in the music that you didn't even know were there.'' Gmail's organizational threading feature -- which groups e-mail sent back and forth as conversations -- was a major reason Yanni Loukissas, 27, a graduate student in architecture at M.I.T., sought an invitation from a friend. ''People here prefer to e-mail you rather than cross the hall and come into your office, so it's helpful having that history of exchanges easily at hand,'' he said. Still, beta testing is often less about testing and improving software than it is about flaunting status. Savvy companies seem to have seized upon this impulse, turning chances to acquire beta versions into marketing opportunities. It is not unusual for them to reward their most loyal customers with beta slots. In allocating betas for Star Wars Galaxies, for example, LucasArts gives the most active members of the game's community accounts before turning to a random lottery system. Veteran players are likely to be invited as testers, Mr. Blackman said, as are users who post prolifically on the forum. Blizzard Entertainment has a similar method of distributing testing slots for World of Warcraft, making a handful of accounts available as giveaways at fan sites. Beta testers are added on in phases as server capacity allows, so the speculation that precedes each new round of e-mail to newly selected gamers has the not-unwelcome effect of enhancing the game's appeal. ''Every time, |
1598411_3 | On the Trail of a Persistent Pest | computers will also be outfitted with Global Positioning System receivers, which will allow health officials to pinpoint specific areas where virus-carrying mosquitoes live and breed. J.Barry DuVall, director of East Carolina's Center of Wireless and Mobile Computing, said the hope is that eventually those positions will be transmitted in real time, so that in the future, the C.D.C's map might be able to tell people the exact location of an outbreak of the West Nile virus. ''Imagine having an up-to-the-moment Web site that has a complete footprint of virus activity worldwide,'' Dr. DuVall said. The test in North Carolina this fall will employ two wearable computers on loan from the Army. Using a wearable computer allows users to keep their hands free to handle the mosquitoes at the same time they are looking at the digital images on a large screen projected in front of them, said Anthony G. Gutierrez, chief of the Army's Molecular Biology Laboratory and an adviser to the project. But a wearable computer also has its drawbacks, Dr. Gutierrez said. ''They're expensive, they're not convenient, and you look like a cyborg wearing one,'' he said. ''And it's really easy to get tangled up in the woods.'' In the long run, he envisions a reliance on less expensive hardware like hand-held organizers so that the identification system can be used in poor regions of the world afflicted by malaria and other mosquito-borne illnesses. A lighter and cheaper system could also be useful to soldiers stationed in remote areas, Dr. Gutierrez said, or could have commercial uses. For instance, hikers may one day bring along a hand-held organizer that can locate the latest outbreaks of West Nile virus or accurately identify the mosquitoes that could cause them to become ill. Dr. Anderson hopes that the technology and the mosquito identification system will be simple enough to understand that anyone, including children on school field trips, can use it. To that end, the test in North Carolina will use students from a class at the university. Researchers will record the time it takes students to adjust to the devices and whether they can accurately identify the mosquitoes with the key provided. ''We want to see how the learning of the whole process goes with students,'' Dr. Anderson said, ''because in the end it's the public that will be on the front lines of identifying and controlling these mosquito-borne illnesses.'' |
1595577_1 | Albany Impasse Is Felt in Wallet And Town Hall | in the balance because it is unclear if lawmakers will restore any of the money. And homeowners in New York City do not know whether they will get $400 property tax rebate checks that the mayor and the City Council have already approved, but Albany has yet to sign off on. In New York's system, the governor proposes a budget in January, and the Legislature usually negotiates a plan that increases spending above his proposal. The budget is supposed to be in place by April 1, the beginning of the fiscal year, but lawmakers have failed to meet that deadline every year since 1984, and by Friday, the budget was already 100 days late, 27 days from exceeding the record on Aug. 4 in both 1997 and 1999. Lawmakers left Albany for summer break last month without performing the most fundamental job of government: passing the budget. Without a final spending plan, no one knows if the governor's proposal will stand or if lawmakers will increase spending, by how much or when. As a result, many recipients of state aid, including school systems and nonprofit organizations, find themselves in limbo, unsure of what they can count on. In the case of unfilled summer jobs, the idea of waiting for money underlined Albany's budget dysfunction. As of Tuesday, about 10,000 poor children, 14 to 17 years old, found themselves without jobs because of Albany's failure to pass a budget with $10 million more in it to hire them, said Jan Hennessy, the director of youth services for the New York Association of Training and Employment Professionals. State leaders have allocated $25 million a year to create 25,000 jobs over the last several years, but this year only $15 million of that was included in the emergency spending bills. Ms. Hennessy said that if the aid for summer jobs materializes later this summer, some teenagers could be hired to work double-time shifts during the dog days of August. ''It is not a lost cause yet,'' she said, still hoping Albany will act. And for lower-income college-bound students, the lack of a state budget has created major uncertainties. Mr. Pataki has proposed deferring one-third of the amounts of the Tuition Assistance Program awards until students graduate. That could discourage some students from entering college at this time, education advocates said. ''Students right now, without effectively knowing if they are getting TAP, are in |
1595537_3 | MAJOR PORTION OF ISRAELI FENCE IS RULED ILLEGAL | had ''the right, and indeed the duty, to respond in order to protect the life of its citizens,'' the court said the path of the barrier could work toward creating a ''de facto annexation'' of Palestinian land by Israel through the creation of ''a fait accompli on the ground that could well become permanent.'' The court said Israel should begin ''dismantling forthwith those parts of that structure situated within the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including in and around East Jerusalem'' and make reparations for damages caused to the Palestinians. Judge Buergenthal, the American, said in his dissent that the court should have declined to hear the case because it lacked sufficient information and evidence ''for its sweeping findings.'' Leaving open the possibility that some or even all sections of the barrier in the West Bank violate international law and acknowledging that ''the wall is causing deplorable suffering to many Palestinians,'' the judge said the court should not have ruled until it had considered ''all relevant facts bearing directly on issues of Israel's legitimate right of self-defense'' He said the impact of ''repeated deadly terror attacks'' was something ''never really seriously examined by the court.'' Israeli officials have acknowledged that the barrier has made life difficult for some Palestinians, but argue that it has saved innumerable lives since construction began. ''The fence is unpleasant, but believe me, being attacked by a homicide bomber is much less pleasant,'' said Ehud Olmert, Israel's deputy prime minister. ''The fence may not be convenient, but it doesn't kill people.'' There have been no deadly Palestinian bombings inside Israel's 1967 borders in almost four months, the longest such stretch since the Palestinian uprising began almost four years ago. The barrier's path is about 100 yards wide, and Israel's Defense Ministry, which is responsible for the construction, says it has had to remove tens of thousands of Palestinian olive trees. Israel chose not to make oral arguments to the court earlier this year, saying the body lacked jurisdiction in the matter. Israeli officials said they would rely instead on their own judicial branch for guidance. The country's Supreme Court last week ordered the government to reroute about 20 miles of the barrier under construction northwest of Jerusalem and in a second decision froze construction on another part of the project. The court said Israel must balance security concerns with the needs of Palestinians. Mr. Sharon has said his |
1595583_0 | World Briefing | The Environment: Gender Identity Problems In Britain | Male fish are changing sex because of female hormones in British rivers polluted by sewage, the government said. In a survey of 1,500 fish at 50 spots, some 500 of the males showed female characteristics, raising concerns about their ability to reproduce, the Environment Agency said. Even though the sewage had been treated, it still contained enough hormones from women's waste to cause the changes. Such changes have been noted around the world, but the British research has been the most comprehensive so far, the agency said. Sarah Lyall (NYT) |
1595501_2 | Those Who Were Inspired To Hate the Modern World | traditionalist organizations and Web sites in 34 countries. Even the arts now reflect traditionalist influence. The British composer, Sir John Tavener, whose seven-hour work, ''The Veil of the Temple,'' will receive its United States premiere on July 24 as part of the Lincoln Center Festival, writes religious minimalist music and praises traditionalist writers, describing one, Firthjof Schuon (1907-98), as he ''in whose mystical presence I live.'' One of the central documents of traditionalism is a relatively brief book, first published in 1927, ''The Crisis of the Modern World.'' Its author, René Guénon (1886-1951), born in Blois, France, to Catholic parents, had been a student of mathematics but soon turned to theosophy, Masonry, medieval Christianity, Hinduism and, finally, Islam. Guénon moved to Cairo and later seemed to retreat into solitude, fearing evil sorcery. His philosophy was, as Mr. Sedgwick acknowledges, ''not especially original.'' But he had a charismatic impact. In the 1920's, Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy, the curator of the Department of Indian Art at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, wrote that ''no living writer in modern Europe is more significant'' than Guénon. In the 1940's, André Gide believed that if he had read Guénon earlier, his life would have been changed. Guénon's argument was that the 20th-century West represented the final stage of a final age, the apotheosis of worldly decadence, in which materialism was emphasized over the spirit, individuality over community. The Renaissance, he proposes, was not a rebirth but a death; science, rationality and humanism were products of delusion. A cure -- or at any rate, a refuge -- could be found in the primordial truths that underlay all religions before modernity's distortions. Guénon scorned democracy; he believed in a hierarchical religious elite and saw himself as one of its elect. He was right about one thing: there was something revolutionary about the notion of the individual that developed after the Renaissance. He was right, too, that religious and aesthetic compromises were required in a democratic culture with its beliefs in rights and liberties. But he could not imagine any way for a democratic culture of religion to develop: his religious truth left no room for reason or autonomy. The Reformation, for him, was a deformation. These views are what traditionalism shares with varieties of Islamic fundamentalism. They are also what led it to flirt with various leadership cults and, ultimately, with Fascism, most obviously in the work |
1596550_2 | In the Ballroom, A Redefinition Of 'Couple' | Mr. Halley, 40, who runs a talent agency that books stylists and makeup artists. The International DanceSport Federation, which oversees competitive ballroom dancing worldwide, says that allowing all-male couples alters the fundamental nature of the sport. ''Just as the Hopak dancers do not have to start adding other ethnic groups' elements to their dances because to do so would fundamentally contradict what the dance is about, DanceSport does not have to start adding dances about some other relationship,'' Jim Frasier, who heads the legal commission of the Europe-based federation, wrote in an e-mail message, referring to the Ukrainian folk dance to explain why his organization has sought to restrict same-sex couples. Citing as an example the pasodoble, a dance based on movements performed during a bullfight with the man in the central matador role, Mr. Frasier added: ''It is performed by a man and woman because it is about the relationship between a man and a woman, using the metaphor of the matador and the cape to express one more aspect of the man/woman relationship.'' To many Americans, ballroom is still principally a sexually expressive dance hardly associated with the athletic agility and stamina required of sport. It has failed to gain wide media exposure and sponsorship in the United States but nevertheless has increased in popularity over the past 30 years, both at the grass-roots level in communities, colleges and secondary schools and at private dance studios. The United States Amateur Ballroom Dancers Association, based in Virginia, has been pivotal to that growth, notably through investment in its Youth and College Network. But many of its college groups are in open revolt against the association's interpretation of the International DanceSport Federation's ruling, although primarily because it would leave scores of women on the sidelines, unable to compete at two of the association's national competitions. (In ballroom dancing, women outnumber men three to one, according to some estimates.) Nevertheless, many of those interviewed at the collegiate level say they see this as an equal rights issue for gay men and women: thus the invitation to Mr. Halley and Mr. Guzman. ''If we don't start working with our affiliates, they are going to lose all trust in U.S.A.B.D.A. and Y.C.N. and will leave the organization altogether and find another one to join or none at all,'' Garry Morris, the Youth and College Network coordinator, warned in October in an e-mail message |
1596688_0 | National Briefing | Science And Health: Study On Soy Supplements | Menopausal women who took soy supplements for five years had an increased risk of a uterine problem that can sometimes lead to cancer, researchers reported. The supplements, which contain a form of estrogen found in plants, have been promoted as a safe alternative to hormone therapy to treat menopausal problems. But a study of 298 women, half taking the supplements and half taking placebos, found that 6 women taking soy developed excessive growth of the uterine lining, a condition called endometrial hyperplasia. No cases occurred in the placebo group. Researchers warn that the supplements are ''potent drugs'' and urge women to consult doctors before taking them. The study, at the University of Perugia, in Italy, was published in the July issue of the journal Fertility and Sterility. Denise Grady (NYT) |
1599478_3 | Trade Talks in Geneva Offer More Hope This Time | down, while the United States, which in the past tended to blame Europeans for intransigence, is on defense. Seeing the writing on the wall, the European Union gave in to demands of poor nations this year and, while retaining other features of its Common Agriculture Policy, has offered to eliminate all export subsidies for farm goods. But the United States has made no public offer to reduce its cotton subsidies. Instead, it has invited officials from four African nations to visit Washington for additional talks. Begun three years ago in Qatar and known as the Doha round after Qatar's capital, this series of negotiations was supposed to finally help developing countries build their own farm trade by reducing the $300 billion in subsidies and supports that the wealthiest nations provide their own farmers. Those subsidies -- more than the domestic output of sub-Saharan Africa -- make it nearly impossible for farmers in poor countries to compete against subsidized imports, losing out in their own markets and with little chance of exporting. Last year's conference broke up in part because the African nations were disheartened by the United States' refusal to reduce its $3 billion a year in subsidies for cotton, a crop that plays a big role in efforts by developing nations to connect with the garment industry, a toehold on the ladder of industrial development. While the United States has not offered a reduction in subsidies, the spokesman for Mr. Zoellick, Richard Mills, said it ''understands and recognizes the sensitivity and importance of cotton'' for the African nations. He suggested that a solution might be cutting tariffs on cotton. Mr. Mills said that among his other efforts to push along the talks, Mr. Zoellick deserved credit for persuading the Europeans to agree to eliminate their export subsidies. ''We made clear no deal would be possible without their elimination,'' he said. Mr. Lamy, in his tenure as trade commissioner, has helped persuade the European Union to begin the politically difficult process of reducing subsidies to farmers that lead to overproduction and the flooding of world markets with cheap food. Instead, agriculture payments are slowly shifting to support for the environment, animal welfare and rural development. Indeed, the Europeans have begun reducing support for sugar production before the W.T.O. rules in a second case brought by Brazil, this one against the European Union for its sugar subsidies. It has been tougher |
1599498_0 | Some Steps Put in Place To Aid Border Security | Immigration officials said they had already started taking some of the urgent steps recommended last week by the Sept. 11 commission to enhance border security, but with intelligence reports describing the threat of a new attack as extraordinarily high, the effort remains far from complete. The Department of Homeland Security, created after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has collected digital fingerprints and photographs from more than six million foreign visitors since January, the first move toward creating a comprehensive system to screen travelers as they arrive and depart. State Department officials, who were criticized for issuing visas to the hijackers, started collecting similar data in December as foreigners applied for visas in 174 of 211 visa-issuing embassies and consulates around the world. Over the past six months, officials said, the two departments have turned away hundreds of criminals, travelers with fraudulent passports and fake documents and others barred from entry to the United States after immigration workers screening visitors in airports and State Department officials interviewing visa applicants in embassies compared their names, fingerprints and photographs to those in available security databases. Significant loopholes remain, however. There is no plan yet to screen systematically millions of visitors from Mexico and Canada, a problem cited in the commission's report. Most travelers from those countries, who make up the bulk of foreign visitors here, enter and leave the United States without any automated analysis of their photographs or fingerprints. The system intended to track the departures of foreign visitors with digital technology -- a security measure set up to ensure that travelers do not vanish into the shadows after their arrival in the country -- might take several years longer than expected to implement at land crossings. ''It is not clear the system can be installed before 2010, but even this timetable may be too slow, given the possible security dangers,'' the commission said of efforts to expand the entry-exit screening system. Meanwhile, the Bush administration is still working to integrate its terrorist watch lists so that border agents screening travelers have that data at their fingertips. And the United States has yet to develop federal standards for issuing driver's licenses and birth certificates, a problem highlighted by the ease with which the Sept. 11 hijackers were able to obtain such documents. The Sept. 11 commission called for such national standards, but proposed legislation governing them has yet to pass |
1599564_3 | Lifting Grand Central's Shroud; Restoration Returns a Landmark's Luster | ago, but by the time officials got around to inspecting the exterior again last year, serious problems had begun to emerge. The most pressing concerns were problems in the building's skin that might lead to more water leakage and structural damage. Consultants from Building Conservation Associates, a firm specializing in restoration, and others from Metro-North went up in bucket trucks to inspect each stone on the building's facade, mapping it and identifying which needed to be replaced. In certain spots, entire blocks were removed so workers could peer inside. They discovered that water had infiltrated through cracks in the brick, corroding sections of the building's steel frame. While examining each stone, banging each with a mallet to test its soundness, they discovered cracks in the intricate molding below the building's cornice, the stone lip that encircles the top of the building 80 feet above the viaduct. Pieces were loose, and some could even be pulled out by hand, so workers quickly set up a protective netting around the entire cornice in case a piece broke away. Engineers also studied various techniques for cleaning the facade. The soot that mars the buildings actually comes from pollutants in the air that react with the limestone to form a thin black crust, said Raymond Pepi, president of the consulting firm that helped in the restoration. They tried out various chemicals but elected in the end to use water, he said. The strategy was to loosen the grime with a fine, continuous mist, so it can then be washed away. ''The theory behind this is it's not so much the quantity of water you put on the building as it's just important to have a very fine mist, this nebulized mist, hitting the wall over a period of time,'' Mr. Pepi said. Besides the more visible work on the facade, some of the most important restoration is taking place out of public view. A portion of the roof over the vaulted ceiling is being replaced with a new high-tech epoxy membrane that should last 30 years. The flat roof in two northern and southern roof courtyards that provide light and air to the terminal will be redone as well. Cracked brick in the courtyard walls, which has led to water damage, will also be replaced. These courtyards are what sit behind the series of large, half-moon shaped windows that tower above the main concourse. |
1594861_2 | U.N. Report Shows Concern Over Rise of H.I.V. in Asia | than 1 percent of a country's population is living with H.I.V., the country is in a general epidemic that is much harder to stop than if the prevalence is less than one percent, Ms. Cravero said. In Asia, she said, ''many countries have prevalence rates less than one percent, and some are hovering around one percent.'' ''So that is where the window of opportunity comes,'' she added. ''You either drive it down now through maximum scaling up of prevention or you spend exponentially more money and energy trying to drive it down.'' She said the H.I.V. epidemics in Asian countries began largely among drug users who inject themselves, prostitutes and gay men, but now ''are fast moving into the general population.'' To stop the rise, countries need to vastly increase their efforts for prevention and treatment, she said. But in Asia, current prevention strategies largely miss women and girls, who lack the option of abstaining from sex and have little control over whether their husbands use condoms or have extramarital sexual contacts, she said. Health workers have less than half of the $12 billion that is needed for treatment and prevention by the end of 2005, if the course of the epidemic is to be reversed, Ms. Cravero said. More than 22 percent of the $12 billion is needed for Asia alone. In response to questions raised by political leaders, scientists and advocates, the United Nations used newer statistical methods to derive the latest infection estimates of 37.8 million people. Using those methods, the number could vary from 34.6 million to 42.3 million, the United Nations said. The figures were lower in Cameroon, Ivory Coast, Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda, Zambia and Zimbabwe and higher in Senegal. But the new figures do not represent real changes in the numbers of people infected, the United Nations said. If the United Nations had continued to use its older methods to calculate the current figure, the estimate would have been 43 million, Dr. Piot said. Because there is no logistical and ethical way to test everyone, the United Nations based many of its earlier estimates on surveys conducted in antenatal clinics and assumed that the figures represented a broader population. But experience has shown that such surveys lead to overestimates in urban areas and underestimates in rural areas. The United Nations and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta have conducted workshops training |
1594894_6 | Pondering China's Rates Through a Central Prism | is very worried -- it has slowed down dramatically,'' the executive added. Investment accounts for nearly half of all economic output in China, while consumer spending remains anemic. So what appears to be a nationwide decision by developers and road contractors that they have enough excavators could be an early sign of a broader slowdown. Beijing does seem to have learned something from the last time it hit the brakes, in 1993, when it halted many projects already under way. The developers of many of them then defaulted on loans from state-owned banks. Officials have been more cautious this time, trying to discourage new projects from starting while letting existing ventures be completed. One sign of this is that sales of wheeled loaders, useful for moving gear at construction sites as well as lifting dirt into the backs of trucks, fell more slowly this spring than excavator sales did, down an estimated 47 percent from March to June. Projects that are still going ahead threaten to glut what had been tight real estate markets. Here in Guangzhou, China's third-largest city after Beijing and Shanghai, there is not a single full floor available in any high-quality building suitable for multinational offices, according to Eric Lam, an analyst here with Colliers International, a commercial real estate consulting firm. But over the next two years, enough new space to satisfy five years' worth of demand is to be completed, and rents will fall 15 percent or more, Mr. Lam predicted. Developers are racing to finish first and lock in tenants before the glut has its effects. Most big Chinese cities are facing similar gluts. Keeping the lights on in all those buildings will be a challenge for China, where provincial power regulators have been slow to approve new plants that would compete with the regulatory agencies' own generators. Newspapers have begun publishing energy conservation tips, suggesting that air-conditioner thermostats be set at 82 degrees Fahrenheit instead of the usual 79 degrees. Two power plants failed in Guangzhou last week and a third ran out of coal, and blackouts have spread to residential areas as well as the industrial parks that are affected first in most of the country. ''It's serious, it's very serious; you've got factories closed two days a week everywhere,'' said Harley Seyedin, chief executive of the First Washington Group, which is based here and owns a power plant in neighboring |
1594920_0 | Saw Your E-Mail. Gotta Run. Signed, Big Brother | To the Editor: Re ''Intercepting E-Mail'' (editorial, July 2): For years, we've seen employee privacy in the workplace disappear as new monitoring technologies have proliferated. As the lines between home and work continue to disappear, these technologies have encroached even further into the private lives of working Americans. Legislatures have remained silent in the face of this increasing threat to privacy. Now their inaction is having dire consequences for privacy far beyond the employer-employee relationship. Courts, faced with enforcing electronic monitoring laws that have not been updated in years, are ill equipped to resolve this glaring black hole in our privacy laws. Congress must take the threat to personal privacy on the Internet seriously. JEREMY GRUBER Legal Director National Workrights Institute Princeton, N.J., July 2, 2004 |
1594918_0 | Saw Your E-Mail. Gotta Run. Signed, Big Brother | To the Editor: The decision by the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit to permit third-party eavesdropping on e-mail content is a painful blow to American citizens' freedom of speech (''Intercepting E-Mail,'' editorial, July 2). Thanks to the Patriot Act, the government has already been given expanded wiretapping powers and the right to snoop on what we're reading at our local public libraries. Now it has also been given carte blanche to monitor our e-mail accounts. Where can we expect the unwelcome eye of Uncle Sam to intrude next? ULYSSES LATEINER Somerville, Mass., July 2, 2004 |
1596351_1 | The Old Man Has Begun to Fear His Old Friend the Sea | continue to search the seas for the marlin that ends up on dinner tables across the nation. Born just as the commercial fishing of marlin began here in the 1930's, the old men, like the one in Hemingway's story, used to fish alone in skiffs. Now the boats are bigger and have engines, but the fishing remains the same. The fishermen drag a bonito, attached to a hook and line, across the waters until a marlin bites, and then fight to reel in a fish that can weigh several times more than they do and can swim at more than 50 miles an hour. It is a contest the fishermen often lost, sometimes fatally, before mechanized reels became popular here, about two decades ago. Back then, once a marlin bit, the line would whip around as the fisherman scrambled to grasp it. Sometimes it would become entangled around his fingers or legs, and the marlin would yank him into the sea. In the most famous case, an 81-year-old named Shigeru Itokazu was killed in 1990 after a line became coiled around his thumb and a marlin pulled him into the sea, shortly after he had appeared as the subject of a documentary, ''The Old Man and the East China Sea.'' A lean man, standing 5-foot-3, Mr. Fukumine once had his middle finger entangled in a line and ripped away by a marlin. A doctor here reattached the finger, but upside-down. He had it properly reattached in Ishigaki, a bigger island in Okinawa, and had missing flesh replaced from his backside. After World War II, as this island served as a focal point for a black market trade between Japan and Taiwan, China and Hong Kong, Mr. Fukumine worked on boats that smuggled goods, like women's clothing, until the United States occupying forces cracked down on the trade in 1950. Then over the next two decades, he joined eight-man fishing boats that hauled in several marlin a day, before setting out aboard his own skiff. Of the old men here, Mr. Fukumine is known for his boldness, in going out to stormy seas when others do not dare. One day two decades ago, when waves were so high that no one else went out to sea, Mr. Fukumine did. Trying to reel in a fish, he fell overboard, as his boat moved on toward the island of Iriomote. He drifted for |
1596308_0 | When the Brain Says, 'Don't Get Too Close' | A century ago, neurologists noticed that when ladies wearing big feathered hats ducked through entryways, they would align their bodies just so. It was as if they could feel the tops of doors with the tips of the feathers. From this and other observations, the scientists concluded that each person holds within the brain a mental representation of the body and its parts -- even the clothing it wears -- as it moves through space. Those early scientists could not explain how the brain creates such sensations, or body schemas. But using modern methods for probing brains, researchers are uncovering the cells and circuits that are responsible. For example, research has found that brain cells become active as objects approach the space around the body. These cells will fire when, say, you see an insect fly toward your face. This so-called peripersonal space extends to arm's length; people with longer arms have a bigger peripersonal space. And when they use a tool, a rake, a joystick or an automobile, their body schema and peripersonal space expand to include it. Moreover, perceptions change as the body schema changes in response to outside stimuli. A hill looks steeper when you wear a backpack than when you do not. The findings, from laboratories worldwide, offer tantalizing biological explanations for many phenomena, including anorexia and syndromes in which stroke patients neglect one side of the body. They may explain why people are sucked into video games, and even why drivers get so upset when their car is dented. ''To act efficiently, we need to locate objects in the space around our bodies,'' said Dr. Angelo Maravita, a psychology professor at the University of Milan. ''We need to hold a constantly updated report on the body's shape and posture.'' The new research draws on the principle that the brain forms internal maps of the external world; groups of cells hold mental models of everything a person sees, hears, feels and knows. The brain also forms a mental map of the body itself. Clumps of brain tissue represent each hand, foot, trunk or lip. If someone touches your hand, cells in the brain's ''hand area'' become active. Neurons respond to both vision and touch in at least six brain areas. For example, a cell will fire when the right hand is touched, or when the person sees an object moving toward it. The closer the object, |
1596417_0 | Britain's Stiff Upper Lip Is Being Twisted Into a Snarl | Once Britons wore their stoicism on their sleeves, acting almost as if they would rather die than complain. ''For my own sake I do not regret this journey,'' the great failed explorer Capt. Robert Falcon Scott wrote in the journal found beside his frozen corpse in Antarctica in 1912, ''which has shown that Englishmen can endure hardships, help one another, and meet death with as great a fortitude as ever in the past.'' But there is a growing sense that the famous British habit of stoutly taking it on the chin is going the way of the farthing, the gentleman in the bowler hat and the empire. Just as in the United States, whose citizens have never been shy about sticking up for themselves, complaining is becoming a way of life in Britain. ''There seems to be a general acceptance that there is something going on in society which is really eating away at personal responsibility,'' said David Hooker, director of claims at Norwich Union, one of Britain's largest insurers. ''It seems now that anything that happens to you in your life, someone else has got to take the blame.'' That is certainly the case in Manchester, Britain's third-largest city, which last year spent £2.5 million, or $4.6 million, defending itself against American-style personal-injury lawsuits. ''The philosophy used to be that you would take things in your own hands and deal with them in your own way,'' said Paul Murphy, a member of the City Council. ''You'd stand in the queue -- that was the British way.'' Now, he said, would-be litigants take photographs of sidewalks undergoing repairs and then make trip-and-fall claims against the city -- nearly 90 percent of which end up being dismissed as spurious. Much of the new ''compensation culture,'' as it is disparagingly called in the populist tabloids, has to do with the introduction, in 2000, of a ''no win, no fee'' payment structure, similar to that in the United States, in personal-injury cases. But the change is also in attitudes. Britons used to revere stiff-upper-lip figures like Lord Uxbridge, who, hit by a cannonball at Waterloo, is said to have remarked to the Duke of Wellington, ''By God, sir, I've lost my leg'' -- and then, it was said, buried it with full military honors. Now, the new heroes are moody celebrities like the soccer star David Beckham. Rather than suffer in silence when |
1596312_2 | Driving? Maybe You Shouldn't Be Reading This | cellphone to two or three other friends, managing it all so skillfully -- under the table, during a bathroom break -- that none of us has even noticed. I talk to my brother on the telephone and hear him clicking at his computer in the background, or to my mother and hear her loading the dishwasher. Is it any wonder that occasionally one of them will interrupt the conversation with ''What did you just say?'' I do it, too. Just not as flashily as the text messagers or the people at the gym with books propped on the treadmill handlebars. When I'm out for my morning walk, disdaining the people who are walking their dogs while reading the newspaper, talking on the cellphone and drinking a latte, what am I doing? Listening to an audio book on my iPod. Wouldn't want to waste time by just exercising, would I? Still, in the long run, multitasking is what wastes time. Last year, psychologists at the University of Michigan reported that when they asked subjects to perform two or more experimental tasks -- solving arithmetic problems, say, at the same time they identified a series of shapes -- the frontal cortex, the executive function center of the brain, had to switch constantly, toggling back and forth in a stutter that added as much as 50 percent to the time it would have taken to perform the tasks sequentially instead of simultaneously. In another study, scientists at Carnegie Mellon put subjects in an M.R.I. machine and asked them to listen to complicated sentences at the same time that they mentally rotated geometric shapes. The two tasks activated different parts of the brain, but each region was operating at a suboptimal level. Here, then, was high-tech confirmation of the common-sense wisdom of Publilius Syrus, a Roman philosopher from the first century B.C., who warned, ''To do things at once is to do neither.'' (Publilius also came up with ''Better late than never'' and ''A rolling stone gathers no moss.'') But things have changed in the last 2,000 years. ''We are awash in things,'' James Gleick writes in ''Faster,'' ''in information, in news, in the old rubble and shiny new toys of our complex civilization, and -- strange, perhaps -- stuff means speed. The wave patterns of all these facts and choices flow and crash about us at a heightened frequency. We live in the |
1628551_0 | It's Easy Being Green | Though nobody seemed to notice, Republican and Democratic voters seemed to be of similar minds on one issue this election: the environment. Across the country, in red states and blue states, Americans voted decisively to spend more money for natural areas, neighborhood parks and conservation in their communities. Of 161 conservation ballot measures, 120 -- or 75 percent -- were approved by voters. Three-and-a-quarter billion dollars were dedicated to land conservation. In Florida, for example, President George W. Bush won at least 60 percent of the vote in Lake, Indian River and Collier Counties. On the same ballot, more than two-thirds of the voters in each of those counties approved local park bonds worth $126 million, by margins as high as 73 percent. In Gallatin County, Mont., where the president beat John Kerry by 56 percent to 41 percent, 63 percent of voters approved $10 million in bonds to buy conservation easements to preserve ranchlands. In Chesterfield County, Va., which Mr. Bush carried 63 percent to 37 percent, voters passed a $20 million park bond by 76 percent to 24 percent. It was the same in the states where Mr. Kerry prevailed. In Massachusetts, 10 townships approved extra taxes to support conservation and historic preservation. In Los Angeles, which Mr. Kerry won by 73 percent to 26 percent, 76 percent of voters approved a $500 million water-quality bond that included $100 million for conservation. And in both Burlington, Vt., where Mr. Kerry won 75 percent of the vote, and in Kendall County, Tex., where the president won 81 percent of the vote, voters approved $5 million to protect open spaces. So what's the story? Simply put, these measures unify Americans. It's hard to be against new parks and trails, or to disagree with wanting to protect farms and forests from development. What's more, voters have learned that these measures often provide local solutions to water-quality problems: preserving natural lands in watersheds can help protect drinking water sources or reduce storm-water runoff. It helps that success is contagious. For example, more than a decade ago, New Jersey created a program to provide extra money to local communities that had approved measures to raise money for local conservation programs. The program has enjoyed sustained support from Republican and Democratic legislators and governors. Now, every county in New Jersey has a program to finance land conservation, along with more than 200 of the |
1628532_3 | Breaking Ground With a Gay Movie Hero | life, and not just based on sex,'' said Robin Lane Fox, an Oxford historian who was a consultant on the film. ''They'd been together since boyhood, 25 years. That's what Oliver, with the Hephaistion scenes, was trying to present.'' But historians of cinema said the depiction of a gay or bisexual leading man in a major Hollywood film had little precedent. When Warner earlier this year released another classical epic, ''Troy'' -- based on ''The Iliad'' -- it changed what Greek scholars regard as a love relationship between Achilles and Patroclus into a family tie. In that film, Patroclus is Achilles' cousin, and Achilles, played by a glisteningly buff Brad Pitt, is decidedly heterosexual. As for ''Alexander,'' Warner Brothers' president, Alan F. Horn, explained: ''Oliver Stone is a final-cut director. He was very clear at the point at which I green-lit the movie that Alexander was a bisexual character. He felt very strongly about being historically accurate.'' At least some experts say they believe the resulting film will be credited with breaking a taboo that was due to fall. ''I think it will be seen as a landmark,'' said Thomas Waugh, film professor at Concordia University in Montreal and author of ''The Fruit Machine: Twenty Years of Writings on Queer Cinema.'' Mr. Waugh added: ''The films in which Hollywood has broken through have been social-issue melodramas -- 'Philadelphia' or 'The Hours.' That's much different than a swords-and-sandal epic, where you're presumably aiming at a so-called general audience, which in Hollywood's mind is basically dominated by teenage boys.'' ''Alexander,'' which is rated R, will be open to those under 17 only if they are with an adult. Hollywood's willingness to depict gay culture openly has gone in cycles, generally following society's reigning mores. Often movies have lagged behind television, which in series like ''Soap'' in the late 1970's and early 80's and ''Will & Grace'' now has treated the subject directly. Today gay characters are common throughout series television. As mainstream cinema came much closer to accepting homosexuality in the last decade, it usually chose to do so in comedies like ''The Birdcage,'' which took in $124 million at the domestic box office for MGM in its 1996 release, or ''In & Out,'' which had $64 million in domestic ticket sales a year later. Mr. Stone's films have often weathered criticism for taking extreme political or social positions, and in ''Alexander'' |
1628640_8 | China Widens Economic Role in Latin America | America is finding it difficult to obtain the capital it needs to finance its own growth. As a result Brazil, like neighboring Argentina, has been forced to court Citic, the state-controlled China International Trust and Investment Corporation, in hopes that at least a small part of China's estimated $500 billion in foreign reserves will make its way to the region. Thus far, China has been mainly interested in infrastructure projects that would assure a more steady flow of the products it is already buying from Brazil and Argentina. In particular, railways, ports, highways, gas pipelines and other energy-related projects are being studied. Earlier this month, a Citic delegation visited two dam sites in the Amazon that would be essential to the alumina and steel joint ventures in Brazil. Such projects have raised questions about the environment, especially in the Amazon. Environmental groups here look at China's dismal record on projects like the Three Gorges Dam and worry that the Chinese will be tempted to export their problems to Brazil. In fact, several of the projects being considered would be highly polluting, while others would be energy-intensive and probably inflict damage to the environment similar to what occurred at Three Gorges. Of special concern are a pair of plants that would process coal in Brazil, partly for export back to China. ''It would be sad if at the moment the Chinese are beginning to worry about being green, we continue on the old path of not evaluating this criterion in our commercial transactions,'' the columnist Washington Novaes wrote this month in O Estado de São Paulo. Brazil must avoid falling into the trap of being ''a big supplier of commodities without compensation for the high environmental and social costs'' that accompany that role, he added. Brazilian analysts agree that hard negotiations on this and a host of other issues lie ahead. Though the relationship with China is inherently unequal, they note, Brazil can get more of what it wants only if it avoids being impetuous and is as hard-nosed and pragmatic as the Chinese themselves. ''They want Brazil to continue to be a big producer of commodities so as to regulate prices, to depress them on world markets,'' said Gilberto Dupas, director of the Institute of Advanced Studies at the University of São Paulo. ''For China, any alliance with Brazil is eminently pragmatic and opportunistic, and much more tactical than strategic.'' |
1628578_0 | U.S. Drops Effort for Treaty Banning Cloning | Faced with polarizing division in the 191-member General Assembly, the United States on Friday abandoned its aggressively pursued attempt to obtain a United Nations treaty banning all human cloning, including that done in the name of medical research. The outcome -- an agreement to come up with a nonbinding declaration against cloning to reproduce humans -- fell far short of the American goal and represented a setback for President Bush. He called for a worldwide ban on all cloning when he addressed the United Nations General Assembly in August, and he made limiting stem cell and other related research an issue in his presidential campaign. All 191 United Nations members have agreed on the need for a treaty to prohibit reproductive cloning. But a vote has been stalled for three years by sharp differences over whether to broaden the ban, as the United States wishes, to prohibit cloning to create stem cells for research, part of a field known as therapeutic cloning. The push for a total ban has set the Bush administration against close allies like Britain and much of the world's scientific establishment, who contend that it would block research on cancer, Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, diabetes, spinal cord injuries, multiple sclerosis and other conditions. The White House argues that enough stem cells from human embryos exist for research and that cloning an embryo for any reason is unethical. Negotiations have been going on for more than a year in the General Assembly's legal committee, which draws up treaties. A vote was scheduled for Friday on two competing versions, but with scant hope of the kind of consensus emerging considered necessary for an effective treaty. The United States backed a resolution proposed by Costa Rica to outlaw all forms of human cloning, while opponents of such an absolute prohibition supported a Belgian measure banning reproductive cloning outright and offering nations three options for therapeutic cloning: outlawing it, putting a moratorium on the practice, or regulating it through national legislation to prevent misuse. Instead of proceeding to a showdown vote on Friday night, the committee agreed instead to take up a nonbinding declaration proposed by Italy with ambiguous language that avoided raising objections and to schedule meetings in February to shape the final wording. The Italians' proposal prohibits ''any attempts to create human life through cloning processes and any research intended to achieve that aim.'' Regardless of what language |
1626634_3 | Lions in Winterization; Weather-Beaten for 93 Years, Library Sentries Get a Makeover | of detail in the lions' carving, a roughness in the overall finish and the development of some hairline cracks. Furthermore, Fortitude has a crack three-sixteenths of an inch wide in its northward mane that has been enlarged by the freeze-and-thaw cycle. ''If we don't stabilize it, a two-foot chunk could fall off,'' Mr. Griswold said. In addition, at its southward mane, Fortitude is now displaying the edges of a two-foot-by-three-foot area of marble patches believed to have been placed there at the time of the sculpture's creation in 1911. The sections of added marble had been installed to correct a flaw in the stone, Mr. Griswold said. Although in the end the preservation team is fighting entropy itself, ''we can continue to be vigilant in our maintenance,'' said Mr. Griswold, who is principal and senior conservator of Griswold Conservation Associates in Beverly Hills, Calif. He has previously restored the 13th-century Gothic limestone arches at the Cloisters in Manhattan and the original lead-cored Warner Brothers prop of the Maltese Falcon, the black bird that was hacked at by Sydney Greenstreet in the 1941 movie. (Mr. Griswold was able to discern the actor's knife scratches.) The conservators said they were mindful of the recent controversy over the restoration of Michelangelo's David in Florence to mark its 500th anniversary and whether it was cleaned unnecessarily. ''In conserving the lions, we must preserve their authenticity as well,'' said Robert C. Bates, an architect overseeing the project who, as a principal with Walter B. Melvin Architects, brought in Mr. Griswold for his expertise. Mr. Bates said that the repairs to the lions must be minimal, and reversible if necessary, and would have to protect not only the sculptor's original artistic intent but also the historic evidence of the lions' public presence. Mr. Griswold agreed. ''There should be a lot of appropriate caution about altering the lions' appearance at all,'' he said. ''But unlike the David, the lions are outdoors, and there are practical reasons for keeping water out of the cracks and cleaning off the biological growth and dirt particles that could damage the sculpture.'' So the lions' overall layer of New York dirt and grit is being removed gently by whisking with nylon scrub brushes. Then they are being misted with a hand-held steam cleaner. Dirt, moss and mold will be rinsed away with a detergent that leaves no chemically active residue. And to |
1626604_4 | Using a New Language in Africa to Save Dying Ones | Xhosa, Venda, Tsonga and other South African languages. One of Microsoft's motivations in localizing its software is to try to head off the movement toward open-source operating systems like Linux, which are increasingly popular. South Africa has already adopted Linux, which it considers more cost efficient and more likely to stimulate local software development. Patrick Opiyo, the Microsoft official in charge of the Swahili program, portrays the effort as more about community outreach than business development. Besides Swahili, the company is looking at making its products more available to those who speak Amharic, Zulu and Yoruba and the other two widely used languages in Nigeria -- Hausa and Igbo. In Kenya, Microsoft has rounded up some of the region's top Swahili scholars to come up with a glossary of 3,000 technical terms -- the first step in the company's effort to make Microsoft products accessible to Swahili speakers. Sitting around a conference table recently in Microsoft's sleek offices in downtown Nairobi, the linguists discussed how to convey basic words from the computer age in Swahili, also known as Kiswahili, beginning with the most basic one of all. ''When these modern machines arrived, Kiswahili came up with a quick word for something that didn't exist in our culture,'' said Clara Momanyi, a Swahili professor at Kenyatta University in Nairobi. ''That was 'kompyuta.''' But scholars subsequently opted for a more local term to describe these amazing machines, she said. It is tarakilishi, which is a combination of the word for ''image'' and the word for ''represent.'' The Swahili experts grappled with a variety of other words. How does one say folder? Should it be folda, which is commonly used, or kifuko, a more formal term? Is a fax a faksi, as the Tanzanians call it, or a kipepesi? Everyone seemed to agree that an e-mail message was a barua pepe, which means a fast letter. Everyone also seemed to agree that the effort they were engaged in to bring Swahili to cyberspace was long overdue. ''Every continent seems to have a language in the computer, and here we are with nothing,'' said Mwanashehe Saum Mohammed, a Swahili expert at the United States International University in Nairobi and one of the Microsoft consultants. ''This will make Africans feel part of the world community. The fact that the continent is full of poor people doesn't mean we shouldn't be on the world map -- |
1628249_0 | Conferees Pass Compromise for 6.5 Million Special Education Pupils | A House-Senate conference committee gave near unanimous approval to major changes in the law that governs special education for 6.5 million disabled students, charting new ways for schools to identify children for extra help more swiftly, reduce legal challenges by dissatisfied parents and make it easier for schools to remove disruptive students whose misbehavior is not caused by their disability. The bill, widely expected to have votes by the full House and Senate on Friday, stopped short of more sweeping changes proposed last year in a House bill. That version, which school administrators and state officials supported, drew bitter opposition from the parents of disabled children and their advocates. It would have let governors limit states' reimbursements to lawyers who won suits on behalf of disabled children and would have let schools remove disabled children who violated codes of conduct, whether or not their misbehavior was related to medical conditions. Instead, after weeks of House-Senate talks, a more moderate approach that passed the Senate with a bipartisan majority in May prevailed in most areas. ''A nation, at its best, is evaluated by how it cares for its children,'' Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, said. ''This is really about hope for children that, too often, don't have it.'' Senator Judd Gregg, the New Hampshire Republican who is the departing chairman of the committee, said the bill met ''four basic goals: make sure students are learning, free teachers from burdensome bureaucratic requirements, help parents and schools work together better and create the safest classroom environment possible for all students.'' The bill would broaden the ways for schools to identify special education pupils, allowing schools to reach children in earlier grades and, the lawmakers said, reduce the relatively high share of minority children who are tracked toward special education. It would also give districts the flexibility to spend up to 15 percent of federal special education money on services to children who are not in special education, but who may need extra help to succeed in regular classrooms. Regarding the contentious issue of classroom discipline, the compromise bill maintains federal protections that require schools to show that a disabled child's misbehavior is not a result of a disability or of the school's failure to provide services that could have prevented the outburst. But if a review determines that the misconduct |
1628128_4 | Empty Maternity Wards Imperil a Dwindling Germany | 1970's are now in their childbearing years. ''It's simple arithmetic, but even the hospitals don't realize it,'' said Reiner Klingholz, director of the Berlin Institute for Population and Development. Dr. Klingholz drew attention here last spring when he calculated that without new immigrants, Germany's population would wither from 82 million to 24 million by 2100. If the country maintained its current rate of 230,000 immigrants a year, it would still shrink by 700,000 over the next 15 years. Along with the shrinking comes aging. At current birthrates, the number of schoolchildren will fall nearly 12 percent by 2050. One in every three Germans will be over 65, double the ratio today. For those who believe demography is destiny, those numbers add up to a slow-motion calamity. Some problems, like the financial burden of the elderly on a smaller working-age population, are easy to predict. Others, like the political drift of an aging society, are open for debate. ''Rumsfeld was right: this is 'old Europe,''' Mr. Schirrmacher said. ''With the loss of young people and the growth of old people, this country will become more timid and angst-ridden.'' Other European countries, notably Sweden, have nudged up their birthrates by offering incentives to families to have extra children. But the German government, already battling a tide of red ink, does not have the resources to embark on an ambitious family policy. Even if it did, Mr. Schirrmacher noted, demographic trends take generations to reverse. Immigration is only a temporary solution, he said, because the new arrivals so swiftly adopt the German lifestyle. Germany's birthrate is roughly equivalent to that of Spain or Italy, but lower than that of France, which has been encouraging larger families since the 1930's. France also has a stronger tradition of working mothers. ''Spain, Italy and Germany will be the first societies in human history with more older people than children,'' said Mr. Schirrmacher, whose book, ''The Methuselah Conspiracy,'' has sold 400,000 copies here. ''What will it mean for popular culture? How will they vote?'' In a report last June, Deutsche Bank warned that Germany would have to curtail its public services, because tax revenue from a declining population would not be enough to support them. Höchst, which is owned by the city of Frankfurt, hit a financial wall five years ago, when the local government said it could no longer afford to cover the hospital's operating losses. |
1628179_0 | U.S. Catholic Bishops Agree to Join New Ecumenical Group | The top hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church in the United States decided yesterday to join the broadest alliance of Christian churches in the country so far, a new ecumenical group that would bring the church to the same table as conservative evangelicals and liberal Protestants. Members of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops have played a central role in the formation of the group, Christian Churches Together in the U.S.A., since discussions began with leaders of other denominations in fall 2001. The conference approved membership in the group at a meeting in Washington. Despite its emergence after an election campaign marked by controversial pronouncements on faith and politics by conservative Catholic and Protestant leaders, the new group is expected to skirt most controversial public policy issues, at least for now, said clergy members involved with the organization. Its goal appears instead to be more modest: to create a forum, once a year, where the leaders of a range of churches can discuss topics of common interest, from charity work to interfaith relations. If the group wants to take a stand on abortion or stem cell research, however, its members can vote to do so, said the Rev. Arthur Kennedy, executive director of the secretariat for ecumenical and interreligious affairs at the bishops' conference. Yet formulating a common position on such a divisive issue may be difficult, given that the group will make decisions only by consensus. The organization has about 23 members, Father Kennedy said, including Eastern Orthodox churches; the historic Protestant denominations, like the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America; evangelical churches; ethnic churches; and religiously oriented groups, like the Salvation Army and World Vision. The decision by the bishops' conference to join Christian Churches Together was seen from the outset as essential to the group's existence. Although most churches engage in ecumenical dialogue with other Christians, those talks are usually bilateral. Moreover, evangelicals and Pentecostals have often not participated regularly in such talks. Through this new group, they can be brought into greater contact with the more traditional churches. ''This is more of an informational exchange,'' said the Rev. Richard John Neuhaus, editor in chief of First Things, an ecumenical monthly magazine. ''Churches are agreeing that their leaders should meet, like university presidents and others who meet regularly. It's a way of getting to know one another and finding out what others are doing and getting ideas.'' |
1623818_3 | Did the F.D.A.'s approval of Applied Digital's implantable chip help its long-term outlook? | about Applied Digital's vision for VeriChip. The company's executives have told investors that VeriChip is addressing markets worth hundreds of billions of dollars. VeriChip, they have said, could become the theft- and loss-proof successor to the credit card, a device to monitor the whereabouts of children and mentally impaired adults and a tool to prevent anyone other than a police officer from using a gun issued to the officer. But Applied has not demonstrated that it is technically feasible for Veri-Chip-driven data systems to operate at the reliability levels needed in most of the financial, security and medical uses bandied about by the company's enthusiasts. To be sure, Digital Angel and competitors like AllFlex USA and Avid Identification Systems have been using similar implanted radio tags to permit pet shelters, laboratories and veterinarians to identify millions of animals. But the infrastructure investment that would be needed to have a major impact on VeriChip's intended human markets is far larger and more complex. It is also difficult to see how Veri-Chip would compete economically with other available technologies. None of the alternatives do everything VeriChip can, but biometrics, like face and iris scans or fingerprints, and radio tags embedded in smart cards or wristbands have a head start toward commercialization. Generally, they are also less expensive to deploy than VeriChip. So far, VeriChip's biggest success has been in Mexico, where several hundred Mexicans have enrolled in a version of the medical application that was approved by the F.D.A. in the United States. A smaller group, which includes Rafael Macedo de la Concha, Mexico's attorney general, were implanted with chips to control access to documents vital to the battle with drug traffickers. Mr. Silverman said the F.D.A. clearance would unlock the domestic medical business, which he said was VeriChip's best application. But the F.D.A. approval limits the chip to encoding a 16-digit identification. The chip cannot carry such basic data as blood type or organ donor instructions, and it is useless if the health care worker does not have the scanner and a computer or other means of accessing electronic records. The approval letter from the F.D.A. also contains ominous warnings about potential risks, like migration of the implanted chip and interference with magnetic resonance imaging device, which are widely used in hospitals. There is no evidence that such possibilities are problems with VeriChip, but critics hope such warnings will help scare |
1624930_0 | Renewing Their Vision by Mining Ancient Worlds | New civilizations make it their business to feed on old ones. They use ancient ideals to help them define or justify themselves. During the 19th century, for instance, both regions of the United States laid claim to an impeccable Greco-Roman lineage. The South chose to pretend it was ancient Greece, while the urban North strove to become the new Roman empire. American artists learned to do better. That is what a charming exhibition at the New York Library for the Performing Arts, ''Mirrors to the Past: Ancient Greece and Avant-Garde America,'' reminds us. Photographs, books, theater programs, music scores and clothing -- handmade scarves and tunics -- tell the tale. As the 19th century headed to its end, a truly idealistic arts revival began. Ancient Greece embodied intelligent freedom for artists rebelling against American materialism and conventionality. The physical expressiveness of Greek art spurred the experiments of Isadora Duncan, the founding mother of modern dance. (Her brother Raymond wove the clothing.) English translations of Greek drama gave playwrights narrative and mythic structures of real depth. A combination of nostalgia and literalism makes some of the artists look naïve and silly now. Those photographs of Ted Shawn's Greek warrior dances look like early models for the pseudo-aesthetic poses of pumping iron. But even the best artists are tourists when they first visit another civilization. The lesser ones stay giddy and shallow. The better ones dig in and find ways to translate what they find into an original vision. World War I was the turning point for theater: the emotional and political resonance of the plays won out over the thrill of masks and scanty costumes. The path for the rest of the 20th century was set. A 1917 production of ''The Trojan Women'' by Euripides made the play an antiwar classic. The Federal Theater Project turned it into ''The Trojan Incident'' in 1938; the captured women were European refugees. An all-male cast performed it during the Vietnam War. Just last year the Classical Theater of Harlem blended the original text with the documentary testimony of women who survived massacres in Bosnia and Rwanda. Actresses and other artists seized on the psychological potency of Clytemnestra, Electra, Antigone and Medea. In the 1940's Martha Graham began building an entire dance theater repertory around these tragic heroines. There is a video here of ''Night Journey,'' her astonishing version of ''Oedipus Rex.'' It should really |
1627432_0 | Glasses, Scalpels, Bikes: Turning Waste Into Help | EVERY year, Americans throw away millions of items that would be welcomed in poorer countries, and a wide range of groups make it their mission to recycle them. Some of these campaigns are decades old and well known, others are more spontaneous, and still others fill special niches. Here are three organizations that illustrate these possibilities. THE LIONS CLUB Ever since Helen Keller challenged members of the Lions Clubs in 1925 to become ''knights of the blind in this crusade against darkness,'' they have donated much of their volunteer resources to vision services. The best-known part of this effort is the recycling of eyeglasses, which are collected in more than 13,000 collection boxes and sent to seven recycling centers in the United States. There, members clean the glasses, determine the prescription using a machine known as a lensometer and categorize each pair by prescription. Since 1994, Lions Clubs have distributed more than 20 million pairs of glasses in countries like Angola, Brazil, Cambodia, Gambia, Ghana, Mexico, Romania, Rwanda, Sri Lanka and Tajikistan. Information: lionsclubs.org PEDALS FOR PROGRESS In the mid-1970's, David Schweidenback was a Peace Corps volunteer in Ecuador. He noticed that his neighbor, a carpenter, was one of the most well-off men in his town. His bicycle allowed him to do more than anyone else: he could carry more tools and get to more places faster. When Mr. Schweidenback returned to the United States, he knew he wanted to send bikes to Ecuador. In 1991, he decided to try collecting some bicycles. His goal was to get 12 bikes; he got almost 150. He soon realized that he could put his plan into effect on a much larger scale, and Pedals for Progress was born. Mr. Schweidenback did not simply want to send bikes. He thought that the bikes could be a tool to help change the lives of the people in the community that received them. Pedals for Progress collects bikes by working with about 150 civic organizations, like the Eagle Scouts, the Girl Scouts and Rotary Clubs, to sponsor collection drives in their communities. The bikes are checked to make sure they are in fairly good working order before they are shipped. Pedals for Progress then coordinates with a nonprofit group working in an area of a developing country in need of transportation alternatives. It helps the group receive the bikes and open a rudimentary bicycle shop. |
1627420_0 | Discarded in America, a Life Changer in Mongolia | FIVE-YEAR-OLD Gersenz Orkhon's brow furrowed. His plastic tools were arrayed on his wheelchair work tray, and with a screwdriver he pried the tracks off his yellow toy bulldozer. Ignoring visitors to his apartment, he grumbled to his grandfather, ''This screwdriver's not very good.'' A little more than a year ago, Gersenz, who has a mild case of cerebral palsy, wailed when strangers approached, his vocabulary was limited to a few grunts and his only means of getting around was an orange crate fitted with rough wooden wheels. The change was wrought by a Zippie 2, a wheelchair designed for children, complete with adjustable headrest, royal blue harness, fuchsia frame and backrest embroidered in pink with the name of a faraway American girl, Lanie, on it. The bridge between a used pediatric wheelchair destined for a California landfill and a cozy third-floor apartment in a Mongolian housing block is Wheels for Humanity, an American charity operating on a shoestring. It was founded a decade ago by David Richard, a former golf equipment salesman from Wisconsin now living in Studio City, Calif., who was moved to action by a glaring humanitarian disconnect. On one end, the mountain of discarded wheelchairs in the United States was growing ever higher. An aging population required more chairs, but a more restrictive legal environment banned resales of used ones. On the other end, disabled people in developing countries were still stagnating in back rooms or dragging themselves through streets in scenes evoking medieval Europe. ''We would be shocked to see an elderly woman, disabled by polio, crawl across a city street, or to see a 10-year-old boy with cerebral palsy carried everywhere on his mother's back,'' Mr. Richard wrote recently in one of his simple one-page appeals. (The Web site is wheelsforhumanity.org.) From a modest start in 1995, salvaging 150 wheelchairs from friends' garages and shipping them to Guatemala, he gradually built his charity to the point where he expects to send about 5,000 refurbished chairs to about 20 countries this year. ''We move slowly because it costs money to move this stuff around,'' Mr. Richard said by telephone from North Hollywood, Calif., where Wheels has its headquarters and a 10,800-square-foot warehouse for rebuilding the wheelchairs. ''This year, with a total budget of $500,000, we will move 5,000 chairs.'' While this is a fraction of the estimated 300,000 wheelchairs that are discarded annually in the United |
1630242_2 | Report Faults F.A.A. Action On Handling Risky Cargoes | the Office of Hazardous Materials and the Office of the Chief Counsel must develop acceptable alternate ways of doing business,'' said the report, which was signed by Alexis M. Stefani, the principal assistant inspector general for auditing and evaluation. The aviation agency stepped up its enforcement of hazardous cargo rules after the crash of a ValuJet plane in Florida in May 1996 that was carrying spare parts from another airplane, including oxygen generators that generate emergency oxygen for passengers if cabin pressure is lost. The generators activated, producing heat and releasing oxygen that created a fatal fire. Since that time, the airlines have added fire detection and fire suppression systems to more cargo holds, but stepped-up enforcement has revealed that materials that can start fires or leak toxic substances are commonly shipped by air. The report said government oversight of hazardous materials shipments was ''in flux.'' For example, the dangerous-goods program was suspended after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, so the inspectors could work on security instead. Later, when various F.A.A. security jobs were transferred to the new Transportation Security Administration, the cargo security function went along, but then was transferred back to the aviation agency. One source of hazardous materials is passengers. The report said the Transportation Security Administration, which searches checked and carry-on baggage, seized 8,300 pounds of materials like fireworks, road flares, tear gas and flammable aerosols in the last six weeks of 2003. But the security agency has no way of tracking passengers who take such materials onto aircraft, even if they are repeat offenders, or putting them ''on notice'' that they are breaking safety rules, the report said. The F.A.A., responding to the report, said it had agreed to develop a streamlined process for dealing with infractions by passengers. The decision to issue a notice of violation would be made lower in the organization, it said, and passengers would be promised a 50 percent reduction in penalty if they paid within 30 days. The agency plans to publish a proposed rule next fall, the report said. Correction: November 30, 2004, Tuesday Because of an editing error, an article on Saturday about the Federal Aviation Administration's enforcement of restrictions on hazardous materials aboard airplanes referred incorrectly in some copies to the year of a ValuJet crash in Florida attributed to fire caused by oxygen generators carried on the plane. It was May 1996, not 1966. |
1630256_0 | Arts, Briefly; Aga Khan Awards | Temporary housing built from earth-filled sandbags and a tilting disc shaped library in Alexandria, Egypt, are among the seven winners of this year's Aga Khan Award for Architecture. The recipients of awards, which are presented every three years and amount to a total of $500,000, are to be announced today in Delhi, India, by Prince Karim Aga Khan (below). The prize recognizes projects that attain architectural excellence ''while reflecting the values of the primarily Muslim societies the projects are intended to serve.'' The other winning projects are a village primary school fashioned from compressed-earth bricks in Gando, Burkina Faso; the restoration of Al-Abbas Mosque near Asnaf, Yemen; a revitalization program for the Old City of Jerusalem; the B2 House, a modern structure on a traditional terraced site in Ayvacik, Turkey; and the giant twin Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Snohetta, the Norwegian firm that designed the library in Alexandria, was recently chosen to design a cultural building at ground zero in New York. ROBIN POGREBIN |
1630206_1 | Good News About Poverty | people in the East Asia and Pacific region living on less than $1 a day. By 2001, there were 271 million living in extreme poverty, and by 2015, at current projections, there will only be 19 million people living under those conditions. Less dramatic declines in extreme poverty have been noted around the developing world, with the vital exception of sub-Saharan Africa. It now seems quite possible that we will meet the United Nations' Millennium Development Goals, which were set a few years ago: the number of people living in extreme poverty will be cut in half by the year 2015. As Martin Wolf of The Financial Times wrote in his recent book, ''Why Globalization Works'': ''Never before have so many people -- or so large a proportion of the world's population -- enjoyed such large rises in their standard of living.'' As other research confirms, these rapid improvements at the bottom of the income ladder are contributing to and correlating with declines in illiteracy, child labor rates and fertility rates. The growth in the world's poorer regions also supports the argument that we are seeing a drop in global inequality. Economists have been arguing furiously about whether inequality is increasing or decreasing. But it now seems likely that while inequality has grown within particular nations, it is shrinking among individuals worldwide. The Catalan economist Xavier Sala-i-Martin looked at eight measures of global inequality and found they told the same story: after remaining constant during the 70's, inequality among individuals has since declined. What explains all this good news? The short answer is this thing we call globalization. Over the past decades, many nations have undertaken structural reforms to lower trade barriers, shore up property rights and free economic activity. International trade is surging. The poor nations that opened themselves up to trade, investment and those evil multinational corporations saw the sharpest poverty declines. Write this on your forehead: Free trade reduces world suffering. Of course, all the news is not good. Plagued by bad governments and AIDS, sub-Saharan Africa has not joined in the benefits of globalization. Big budget deficits in the U.S. and elsewhere threaten stable growth. High oil prices are a problem. Trade produces losers as well as winners, especially among less-skilled workers in the developed world. But especially around Thanksgiving, it's worth appreciating some of the things that have gone right, and not just sweeping reports |
1629507_3 | Many Women Say Airport Pat-Downs Are a Humiliation | security, who are automatically wanded. Under the previous rules, travelers were randomly selected for secondary screenings or taken aside if they set off metal detectors. Security would ask travelers to remove their shoes and coats, and then use a magnetometer to scan their bodies. Carry-ons were inspected by hand. With the new rules, security personnel are given more latitude to select whomever they want for secondary screenings, whenever they want, and to conduct more intrusive pat-downs and more thorough examinations of carry-on bags. In both cases, travelers have the right to seek a private area, and women can request female inspectors. A provision in the new rules -- which says that a screener's ''visual observation'' of a passenger is enough to order a secondary screening -- seems to single out women, something that many women searched attribute to a belief that bras are good places to conceal nonmetallic explosives. The provision states, ''T.S.A. policy is that screeners are to use the back of the hand when screening sensitive body areas, which include the breasts (females only), genitals and buttocks.'' At the Fort Lauderdale airport on Nov. 5, Ms. LuPone says she removed her shirt after vehemently protesting, revealing the thin, see-through camisole that she was wearing. Next, she was given a pat-down by a screener who, she said, ''was all over me with her hands,'' including touching her groin area and breasts. Ms. LuPone said she demanded an explanation. ''We don't want another Russia to happen,'' she said one of the screeners told her. Nancy Davis Kho, a financial data developer from Oakland, Calif., said, ''They're totally overlooking the need to preserve a person's dignity.'' Ms. Kho said she was mortified at La Guardia Airport in New York on Sept. 28, when a female screener patted her down, ''running her hands under bra straps and just about everywhere else,'' while other passengers gawked. Lu Chekowsky, an advertising executive from Portland, Ore., said her cosmetics case set off the alarm at the airport there a couple of months ago. Since then, she says, she has been patted down so many times that she has taken to wearing baggy trousers, flip-flops and a big sweatshirt to make the procedure less onerous. ''Routinely, my breasts are being cupped, my behind is being felt,'' Ms. Chekowsky said. ''And I feel I can't fight it. If I were to say anything, I picture myself being |
1629432_0 | REALLY? | THE CLAIM: Alcohol kills brain cells. THE FACTS -- When ancient Greeks wanted to reassure guests that their wine had not been spiked with poison, they toasted to good health. While that may be less of a worry today, there remain hazards from indulging in too much alcohol -- including, of course, hangovers. But one thing people who drink socially probably don't need to worry about is sacrificing brain cells in the process. The research indicates that adults who drink in moderation are not in danger of losing brain cells. The notion that alcohol snuffs out brain cells has been around for years. Many studies have linked drinking with mental deficits, and long-term damage from years of heavy drinking has been well documented. The developing brain is particularly vulnerable, some studies show, putting teenagers and unborn children at greatest risk. But Dr. Roberta J. Pentney, a former researcher at the State University of New York at Buffalo, found that alcohol disrupts brain function in adults by damaging message-carrying dendrites on neurons in the cerebellum, a structure involved in learning and motor coordination. This reduces communication between neurons, alters their structure and causes some of the impairment associated with intoxication. It does not kill off entire cells, however. A study in 1999 that examined the brains of alcoholics appeared to confirm this. Published in the journal Neuroscience, the research found that subjects who developed Wernicke-Korsakoff syndrome, a severe disorder that ravages the memory and stems from a thiamine deficiency associated with alcoholism, had a marked reduction in cell density in the cerebellum. But there was little difference between alcoholics who did not develop the syndrome and normal subjects, suggesting that it was largely a lack of thiamine in the Wernicke-Korsakoff patients that killed off their cells. Other studies, including one published in The British Medical Journal in 1997, have produced similar findings. THE BOTTOM LINE -- Alcohol may not kill brain cells per se, but it can impair brain function, among other things. ANAHAD O'CONNOR Really? scitimes@nytimes.com |
1626391_0 | Close Encounters of the Ursus Kind | To the Editor: Re ''Bigger and Bolder Population of Bears Incites Fear in Japan'' (news article, Nov. 7): If those bears attacking humans in Japan were not fazed by noisemakers and rubber bullets, they will not be deterred by shouting at them, as posters advise. My Catskill mountain acquaintances, farmers and hunters, offer our Japanese friends some country wisdom when encountering an aggressive bear: $(6$)If you're on a slope, run downhill, but never uphill. (Bears' powerful forelegs enable them to bound uphill like a hound dog, but they stumble clumsily going downhill.) $(6$)Never climb a tree. Bears can also climb, and if you're out on a branch, they'll shake you down like a rotten crabapple. $(6$)If you are trapped and cannot flee, make yourself appear bigger. Grab a poncho or blanket and flare your arms out like Dracula. $(6$)Scream at the top of your lungs. This won't scare the bear, but it might just attract a Samaritan hunter with a 12-gauge shotgun. $(6$)Finally, my idea: Japanese hikers and tourists could equip their backpacks with giant self-inflating Godzilla balloons. As one codger farmer put it, ''If that don't scare the critter, nothing will!'' Les Dreyer Rock Hill, N.Y., Nov. 8, 2004 |
1626420_4 | Warning: Military service can be a drain on later earning power in civilian life. | this advantage persisted for at least a decade. A possible explanation for this racial disparity is that a record of military service may be a positive signal that helps minority workers to (at least partially) overcome the discrimination they face in the labor market. For white veterans, however, military service mainly amounts to a loss of civilian work experience. Several studies find that while in the armed forces, military personnel earn higher salaries than their civilian counterparts. The pay of military personnel also increased sharply relative to that of civilians since 2000, according to a new study by John T. Warner and Curtis Simon of Clemson University. But all is not so rosy. Wives of men in the armed forces earn 30 percent less than other married women their age with the same education, according to a study by Col. Casey Wardynski of the United States Military Academy. In part, the spouses fare poorly because military bases are overwhelmingly in low-wage, rural areas. In addition, because military wives are often forced to relocate, they have little opportunity to advance within the same company, and little bargaining power because they cannot easily move to another location in search of better pay. The limited labor market opportunities for wives of military personnel was of little consequence in the 1960's, when fewer than a third of them worked. But now, with two-thirds of wives of soldiers in the labor force, the earnings gap significantly lowers family incomes. To reduce the economic burden on military families, Colonel Wardynski recommends considering giving preferences to spouses of military personnel for civilian jobs on military bases. Despite the economic sacrifices -- and the increased risk to life and limb from the war in Iraq -- enlistments rose noticeably in all branches of the armed forces except the Navy from 1999 to 2003. The weak job market, intensified military recruitment efforts and patriotic zeal have undoubtedly increased recruitment, Mr. Warner said. ''Without regarding the danger,'' Adam Smith once remarked, ''young volunteers never enlist so readily as at the beginning of a new war.'' As the war in Iraq persists and the job market continues to strengthen, the costs of reaching the Pentagon's growing target for enlistments are expected to rise as well -- for the Treasury and for veterans. Economic Scene Alan B. Krueger is the Bendheim professor of economics and public affairs at Princeton University. E-mail: akrueger@princeton.edu. |
1631043_3 | Board Accepts Nuclear Vow By Iranians | to reflect Iran's insistence that it was freezing its programs as a voluntary confidence-building measure, not because of outside pressure or coercion. The face-saving solution for both sides was celebrated with Champagne last night at the residence of France's ambassador to the agency, one participant said. The Iranians drank water. There was nothing to stop the United States, or any other agency board member, from voting against, abstaining from or adding an opposing footnote to the resolution. But unlike the Security Council, the I.A.E.A. has a long tradition of passing resolutions by consensus. . The imbroglio over Iran's nuclear program coincides with brutal political battles at home, with Iran's presidential campaign already underway, though the election is not for another six months. There is also deep hostility to any effort from the outside to limit what Iranians in all walks of life consider their sovereign right to develop a nuclear energy program. But the messiness of this negotiation and fluidity of Iran's position raise the possibility that there is a resistance among some factions in Iran to any agreement that may ultimately lead to improved relations with the West. Even on Monday, Hossein Mousavian, the head of the Iranian delegation, refused to state categorically that Iran had agreed to a complete shutdown of the 20 machines, saying his country had agreed in a letter to stop all ''testing.'' Asked by reporters whether the centrifuges would continue to spin, he said, ''These are technical issues which I really don't know.'' But Mohamed ElBaradei, who heads the nuclear monitoring agency, told reporters on Monday that the machines had stopped operating and had been put under camera surveillance. That action allowed the agency to verify Monday that Iran had frozen all of its uranium enrichment, reprocessing and conversion activities, processes that are crucial both for producing nuclear energy and for making bombs, he added. ''This is clearly a first step in the right direction,'' Dr. ElBaradei said. -------------------- Pro-Nuclear Protest in Tehran By The New York Times TEHRAN, Nov. 29 -- Nearly 500 members of a hard-line militia force protested Monday outside the British Embassy in Tehran, saying Britain had betrayed Iran over its nuclear activities. The protesters, mostly bearded men in black shirts, were pushed back by nearly 100 riot police officers when they tried to attack the embassy's main gate. Protesters threw stones and firecrackers, and set a British flag afire. |
1631081_2 | Congress Trims Money for Science Agency | imaging and PET scans, depend heavily on physics, just as research on the human genome depends heavily on computers to catalog and analyze billions of bits of data. Dr. Harold E. Varmus, former director of the National Institutes of Health, said the budget cut was ''very distressing.'' Dr. Varmus, now president of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, said: ''We have the ability to understand the genome of the cancer cell in our hands. But we need computational improvements, faster and better machinery and software to compare the genome of cancer cells with the genome of normal cells.'' While cutting the budget of the science foundation, Congress found money for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the Alabama Sports Hall of Fame in Birmingham, the Country Music Hall of Fame in Nashville, bathhouses in Hot Springs, Ark., and hundreds of similar projects. The science foundation helped finance research that led to Web browsers, like Internet Explorer and Netscape, and to search engines like Google. Its research has produced advances in fields from astronomy to zoology, including weather forecasting, nanotechnology, highway safety and climate change. At the University of Southern California, the foundation is supporting research on an artificial retina, to restore sight to blind people, and on silicon chips that could be implanted in the brain to replace neurons damaged by disease or injury. Cornelius W. Sullivan, vice provost for research at the university, in Los Angeles, said the budget cut ''sends a very bad signal to scientists.'' Mr. Stonner, of the science foundation, said the cut would erode the confidence of graduate students and encourage professors to be more conservative in conceiving and pursuing new ideas -- just the opposite of what the agency wants. ''We hope a lot of researchers will think wild and crazy thoughts,'' Mr. Stonner said. ''That's how you get breakthroughs in science.'' Todd C. Mesek, a spokesman for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, which is receiving $350,000, said the money would be well spent on education programs to teach children about language, the mathematics of music and geography (''cities where rock and roll was fostered''). Some of the money, Mr. Meek said, will be used for ''toddler rock,'' a music therapy program. One of the more contentious provisions in the bill provides $12 million for the Yazoo Backwater Pumping Plant in Mississippi. Senators Trent Lott and Thad Cochran of Mississippi, |
1631089_0 | Bacteria Enlisted For New Trials On Dental Health | Can genetically engineered bacteria prevent tooth decay? A small biotechnology company is about to take the first step toward answering that question. The company, Oragenics, is expected to announce today that it has received permission from the Food and Drug Administration to conduct the first clinical trial in which genetically modified bacteria will be put into people's mouths. The new bacteria, which are genetically neutered so they do not make the acid that eats away at teeth, would be designed to replace the acid-producing bacteria already present in most mouths. ''The idea is simply to use good bacteria to fight bad bacteria,'' said Jeffrey D. Hillman, the chief scientific officer at Oragenics, based in Alachua, Fla. Dr. Hillman says that if it all works as planned, people might eventually receive a single painless five-minute treatment, in which a dentist would rub the bacteria on their teeth, and be protected from cavities for life. There is still a long way to go to prove the treatment's effectiveness, however. The first trial, which the company said it hoped to start as soon as January, will be a small test of safety, not effectiveness in fighting cavities. Still, even getting to this point has been a challenge. Dr. Hillman has been working on this therapy for 25 years and first applied to the F.D.A. for permission to begin a clinical trial in 1998. The agency, the company said, has demanded change upon change to make sure the modified bacteria would not run amok, cause undesirable changes in the mouth, or revert to a cavity-producing form. To win approval, Oragenics has agreed that the 15 volunteers in the first trial will not even have teeth -- they will have dentures. That way, if something unexpected happens, the dentures can be plopped into bleach to exterminate the microbes, which mainly stick to teeth. ''The F.D.A. has its failsafe,'' said Chuck Soponis, the chief executive of Oragenics. A spokeswoman for the F.D.A. said the agency was not allowed to discuss clinical trials under its purview. Oragenics's approach, which it calls replacement therapy, is part of a broader movement to view tooth decay as an infectious disease, probably the world's most common one. Currently, cavities are ''basically treated as a surgical problem rather than an infection problem,'' said Martin Taubman, head of the department of immunology at the Forsyth Institute in Boston, a private dental research organization. |
1624032_0 | MEMO PAD | BAGGAGE THIEVES BAGGED -- After police staged a months-long undercover sting, five baggage handlers at Kennedy Airport were charged last week with stealing laptop computers, cameras, compact discs and cash from the checked bags of passengers, according to the Queens district attorney's office, which estimated the total value of the stolen goods to be $23,000. The baggage handlers who were charged in the thefts were employees of Swissport USA, which transports luggage and cargo from terminals to aircraft. Some of the stolen goods were sold to undercover detectives or on eBay, the online auction house. Since April, about two dozen employees of the Transportation Security Administration have been arrested on charges of stealing from checked bags at six airports. A STEP UP FOR SMALL JETS -- Most business travelers dislike the cramped seating, low ceilings and meager storage space on the 50-seat or smaller regional jets that major airlines deploy on short-haul routes. But lately, airlines have been ordering new models of narrow-body jets in the 70-to-100-seat range that offer more room, more seats and storage, and greater fuel efficiency than regional jets. Recently, for example, United Express, the United Airlines subsidiary, has started using new 70-seat Embraer 170's on its Washington-Dulles service to Houston and Indianapolis, and between Chicago and Indianapolis on flights operated for United Express by Chautauqua Airlines. WHERE AM I NOW, AGAIN? -- The thick pocket-size monthly American Express Executive Travel SkyGuide, which lists global airline schedules in exhaustive detail, is now available electronically in a service called eSkyGuide. The annual subscription is $19.99 for those who already subscribe to the print edition, which costs $79 a year and has more than 90,000 subscribers, said Janet Libert, the editor and publisher. Nonsubscribers can get the new electronic service -- for use on laptop computers, personal digital assistants and other personal electronic devices -- for $69.95 a year. "Our subscribers are the real road warriors," Ms. Libert said. "For example, they average 185 nights a year in hotels." CHINA, HERE WE COME -- Domestic airlines are rushing to add or enhance nonstop service to China as demand grows sharply. On Sunday, United Airlines began daily nonstop service between O'Hare in Chicago and Pudong International Airport in Shanghai. ''United is the only U.S. airline to provide nonstop passenger service between the United States and mainland China,'' said Graham Atkinson, senior vice president for worldwide sales and alliances. United |
1624099_4 | Peering at the Sticker on a Cleaner Car; California's New Emissions Standards Ignite a Debate Over Price | day are characterized by boxiness, from the Hummer to the Chrysler 300C. ''It's been decades since the auto industry showed you could produce vehicles that had half the drag coefficient than vehicles do today,'' he said. ''But look at them. To most people, they're not the kind of cars they want to drive.'' Ms. Bedsworth said Ford could also extend the Explorer's steel body over the tops of the tires to improve wind resistance, the way Honda designed the body of its tiny hybrid electric car, the Insight. But Mr. Austin said ''most people think the Honda Insight is an ugly car.'' Tweaking the Tires Some new tires improve fuel efficiency with designs and materials that lessen the force needed to propel them down the road. Ms. Bedsworth says she believes further improvements are possible, but Mr. Austin said new federal tire pressure regulations might induce automakers to use larger tires that would impede efficiency gains. Mike Wischhusen, the director of industry standards and government regulations at Michelin, said changing tire size would not necessarily change fuel economy performance by itself. His company's chief executive, Eduoard Michelin, recently outlined a goal of improving tire performance, as it relates to fuel economy, by 50 percent by 2020. Under the Hood Ms. Bedsworth said a variety of technologies could be combined to improve efficiency under the hood. A 42-volt starter generator, a mild form of hybrid technology, would allow the Explorer to shut down at stoplights. The modified Explorer's engine would also combine three technologies that are in use today, though not all in one vehicle. The altered S.U.V. would have a diesel-like direct-injection gasoline engine that puts air and fuel directly into the engine cylinders rather than into precombustion chambers. The engine would also employ variable valve timing, a technology that ensures that the engine valves open and close in the most efficient manner, and cylinder deactivation, which shuts down one-half of the engine if it's not needed. Mr. Austin said the last two technologies ''don't make engineering sense'' when packaged together because they were so similar in nature that using them jointly would not be worthwhile. Ms. Bedsworth said Honda employed both technologies in its Odyssey minivans, but only one technology -- variable valve timing or cylinder deactivation -- was used in each minivan, depending on the version. Ms. Bedsworth said there would still be some added benefit to using |
1625724_0 | Driving Without Air, but Driving | KNOWING that a tire is losing air may be useful, but it doesn't solve the essential problem. Sooner or later, the leak must be plugged or the tire replaced. That repair can be much later -- more than 100 miles down the road -- if the tire is a ''run flat'' design that lets a driver keep motoring, though at a slower speed. Run-flat tires also make a lot of sense for sports cars like the Chevrolet Corvette and Dodge Viper, which have little space to carry a spare. Most run-flat tires sold today are the self-supporting type, their sides reinforced to prevent them from collapsing against the wheel when they are deflated. Not surprisingly, the stiffer sidewalls usually result in a firm ride. A new run-flat tire from Michelin called the PAX system was designed with sidewalls of normal flexibility to give a more comfortable ride. Its ability to keep rolling without air results in part from special wheels that lock the tires in place, keeping them from squirming off the wheel after the air has escaped. In addition, a plastic ring around the wheel's center provides support after deflation. It is lubricated to prevent heat buildup caused by friction between the ring and tire. The weight saved by eliminating the spare tire is mostly offset by the added weight of the PAX tires and wheels. Storage space usually reserved for the spare is reclaimed, but more important is the safety and convenience of not having to change a flat alongside a busy highway. And with no requirement for a spare, designers are free to call for front and rear tires of different sizes. When a self-supporting run-flat tire is punctured, it can be removed and reinstalled like a standard tire -- or replaced with a conventional tire if a duplicate is not available. Removing a PAX tire from its wheel takes special tools, so the service is available for now only at about 200 Michelin tire dealers in the United States or from one of Michelin's roadside service trucks; the PAX wheel cannot be fitted with a regular tire. To service 2005 Honda Odyssey minivans equipped with the PAX tires, Honda dealers will stock ready-to-roll wheel and tire assemblies. So far, the only aftermarket run-flats are snow tires and replacements for cars originally sold with this technology. Like the space-saver spares supplied on most new vehicles, deflated run-flat |
1625723_1 | AUTOS ON MONDAY/Technology; A Car's New Job: Checking Its Own Tires | loads. About 10 percent of new vehicles sold in the United States today have pressure monitors, either as standard equipment or as an extra-cost option. Among other applications, the monitoring systems are needed in vehicles that use ''run flat'' tires, a type that can be driven even after a puncture has allowed all the air to escape. High-performance sports cars like the Chevrolet Corvette and Dodge Viper use run-flat tires to eliminate the need for a bulky spare. Monitors are also available for use in existing cars, trucks, recreational vehicles and motorcycles from tire retailers and accessory companies. Such systems cost about $200 to $400, plus installation of the sensors and receiver unit. The regulations originally proposed by the safety administration allowed a choice between two monitor types, either direct- or indirect-reading. Indirect systems work by comparing the relative turning speeds of the wheels, using data that are collected by sensors for the antilock brakes. When one tire softens enough to reduce its diameter, making it turn faster than the others, the driver is alerted by a light on the dashboard. The indirect system is simple and inexpensive, and it needs no additional sensors or batteries in the wheels, but it is also less informative: no warning is sent until one tire is at least 20 percent low. Nor can the system report which tire needs air. And because it works only when the tires are rolling, it cannot issue a warning when the car is standing still. Direct-reading monitors have pressure sensors inside each tire, attached to the valve stem or the wheel -- or, in the case of Tire IQ, a system being developed by Goodyear and Siemens, an electronics supplier, built into the tire itself. The sensors measure the actual pressure and transmit the information by radio signal to a display. In response to widespread criticism and court rulings, the government's revised proposal allows only direct-reading pressure monitors. The safety administration estimates the systems will add about $70 to the cost of each new vehicle. In early systems, pressure sensors had to be moved from wheel to wheel when tires were rotated; later designs can be reprogrammed for the wheels' new locations or even sense them automatically. The first direct sensors used small radio transmitters with batteries rated to last 5 to 10 years. Newer passive systems are read by radio-frequency identification devices similar to those in |
1627648_1 | Unused PC Power to RunGrid for Unraveling Disease | of far-flung machines that can take on daunting scientific problems. A comparatively simple but well-known distributed computing effort is the SETI@home program, begun in 1999, which uses the spare power of personal computers to scan radio signals for signs of extraterrestrial intelligence. Grid computing technology could be useful for all kinds of scientific problems that require vast computing and can be broken up into small chunks for processing. But biology and medicine are ideal areas, the project participants say, given the increasing use of computers in the search for genetic markers for disease and in seeking clues to the basic processes of life. The new network's resources will be devoted to a series of problems chosen by a 17-member advisory board. Its first mission will be the Human Proteome Folding Project, directed by the Institute for Systems Biology, a nonprofit research organization in Seattle. The proteome project seeks to identify all the proteins in the human body and their functions. At the Institute for Systems Biology, the community grid will be used to compute how new genes fold into proteins and then match those shapes against a three-dimensional protein database, looking for similarities. That could provide important clues about what a specific gene actually does in the body -- and those clues could, in turn, help scientists understand disease, move toward the discovery of drugs or solve biological puzzles. ''This is a perfect problem for this kind of computing,'' said Dr. Leroy Hood, president of the Institute for Systems Biology, ''and it could have a big impact on biology.'' Researchers wishing to take advantage of the grid must agree to keep their research and software tools in the public domain. Several other projects have sought to harness the power of personal computers to explore areas like the evolution of disease-causing bacteria and to identify chemical compounds that show promise against smallpox. I.B.M. was a sponsor of the smallpox project last year, along with the Defense Department. ''The hope is that the World Community Grid project can expand the impact of this kind of computing to a much broader set of applications,'' said Ian Foster, a computer scientist at the Argonne National Laboratory near Chicago. Those wishing to join the grid project and donate computer time will be able to download software from a Web site, www.worldcommunitygrid.org. When the machine is turned on but not in use, the program will use |
1627690_1 | Kraft Foods Will Sell Altoids And Life Savers to Wrigley | sold primarily in Europe. Kraft's reorganization plan, announced last January after a year of disappointing sales and earnings, includes the elimination of 6,000 jobs, or 6 percent of its global work force, and the shuttering of 20 manufacturing plants worldwide. ''This divesture is part of our strategy to transform Kraft's portfolio,'' said Roger Deromedi, Kraft's chief executive, in a prepared statement. Kraft, which is based in Northfield, Ill., declined to comment further on the deal, which also includes the candy brands Crème Savers, Trolli gummy candy and Sugus, a chewy candy sold in Europe and Asia. The deal underscores Kraft's predominance in the center aisles of the grocery store, where it sells products like Wheat Thins, Oreos, Raisin Bran and Miracle Whip. Candy and chocolate are sold primarily in checkout areas, drugstores and convenience stores like 7-Eleven. Analysts say Kraft is weak in these areas. ''I don't think the potential upside Kraft saw from these brands was worth the incremental cost of marketing and sales support,'' said Don Stuart, a partner at Cannondale Associates, a consulting firm specializing in packaged goods. Leonard Teitelbaum, an analyst at Merrill Lynch, said that Kraft realized it was not going to become No. 1 in the candy and chocolate business, as it is in cookies and crackers, for instance. Kraft ranks No. 4 in the confection market, behind Hershey, Master Foods (which owns Mars), and Nestlé, according to Information Resources, a market research company. Analysts consider the deal a boon for Wrigley's, which has been trying to build upon its core gum business. Mr. Teitelbaum said he believed Wrigley would be able to do more with the brands than Kraft did. ''They have more muscle than anyone in the fast-growing drugstore and convenience store channel,'' Mr. Teitelbaum said. ''This is what Wrigley has refined over decades.'' Wrigley, whose 2003 sales of $3.1 billion were a fraction of Kraft's $31 billion, has been itching to add to its stable of products. Two years ago the company, which is based in Chicago, was rebuffed in a bid to acquire Hershey for $12.5 billion. Sales of Life Savers are down 15 percent over the past two years, according to Information Resources. But the deal for the candy brands was hotly contested, with Hershey, Mars, Nestlé and Cadbury Schweppes also vying for them. Kraft's stock fell 20 cents to close at $34.68. Wrigley rose 72 cents, to $68.08. |
1627627_0 | Another Way to Fight Breast Cancer Relapse | Most women who have breast cancer and are past menopause should take a type of hormone-blocking drug known as an aromatase inhibitor to prevent cancer recurrence, experts said yesterday. The recommendation, by the American Society of Clinical Oncology, applies only to postmenopausal women who have breast cancers that are estrogen-receptor positive, meaning that estrogen makes the tumors grow. Most breast cancers -- two-thirds to three-quarters -- are sensitive to estrogen. But aromatase inhibitors are prescribed only for women past menopause; they may not work in younger women. Three aromatase inhibitors are prescribed for breast cancer in the United States: anastrozole (Arimidex), letrozole (Femara) and exemestane (Aromasin). Until recently, women with estrogen-sensitive tumors were advised to take a five-year course of an older drug, tamoxifen, which blocks the effects of estrogen and has been proved to prolong survival in women with breast cancer both before and after menopause. About half a million women in the United States use tamoxifen. The new recommendation says that postmenopausal women can take aromatase inhibitors alone for five years instead of tamoxifen, or can switch to the newer drugs after tamoxifen. The professional group said it was not clear which treatment was better. But the group said that treatment should at some point include an aromatase inhibitor. ''Tamoxifen is the most important drug in the history of medical oncology,'' said a member of the panel that made the recommendation, Dr. Harold J. Burstein, a breast cancer specialist at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston. ''It has saved more lives than anything we do for cancer patients.'' But, Dr. Burstein said, in recent years three large studies have showed that aromatase inhibitors worked as well as tamoxifen, and significantly reduced recurrence rates in women who took them after taking tamoxifen for two to five years. A technical report for doctors on the use of aromatase inhibitors, to be published in January in The Journal of Clinical Oncology, was posted yesterday on the journal's Web site, www.jco.org, and a guide for patients was posted at www.plwc.org. Several doctors who helped write the technical report (not including Dr. Burstein) had financial ties to the drug companies that make tamoxifen or aromatase inhibitors. The report merely formalizes what many doctors have already been doing, Dr. Burstein said. The panel left the decision about how and when to use aromatase inhibitors to doctors and patients. Side effects of those drugs, and of |
1627642_1 | MEMO PAD | the highest score among the top 12 airports for ''healthy entrees.'' Miami topped the rankings with ''85 percent of its restaurants offering healthy choices,'' said the report, which defined healthy as low-fat and vegetarian. But in a statement yesterday, another group, the Center for Consumer Freedom, criticized the committee's emphasis on vegetarian fare, calling it an animal-rights group with well-documented ties to the activist group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. The center described itself as a ''nonprofit coalition supported by restaurants, food companies and consumers.'' Colleen Young, a spokesman for the physicians committee, said that the center routinely criticized its reports because they were ''basically threatening to their clients.'' She denied that the committee was associated with PETA, but said it had received some PETA funds in an unrelated campaign some years ago. PASSENGER RECORDS SOUGHT -- The Transportation Security Administration has ordered domestic airlines to turn over all passenger records from last June, to test the feasibility of Secure Flight, a proposed new system that would allow it to create a centralized database for identifying ''passengers known or reasonably suspected to be engaged in terrorist activity.'' Under the order, issued Friday, the airlines must supply the computerized records, which contain passengers' names, itineraries and other personal information. Currently, individual airlines maintain various watch lists of people considered to be risks. Critics have said those lists are full of errors that can create problems for innocent passengers. Industry representatives responded cautiously to the order. ''We continue to support the concept of Secure Flight,'' said James C. May, president of the Air Transport Association, a domestic airlines trade group that has expressed concern in the past about the security agency's practice of hiring contractors to examine passengers' personal and financial records. FALSE ALARMS -- A fake image of a gun designed to test security screeners' alertness backfired last week at two airports, creating major disruptions at both. At Dulles International Airport near Washington, several hundred passengers were evacuated for about an hour Thursday after a screener reported seeing a suspicious image on a checkpoint screen. In a similar incident the next day, security officials evacuated about 5,000 passengers at Miami International Airport. Security officials said that screeners are routinely tested with random test images of weapons, but the tests are typically halted before any alarm is sounded. They blamed computer glitches for last week's incidents. JOE SHARKEY BUSINESS TRAVEL |
1627679_1 | Klein Apologizes After Student Records Are Left on Street | protecting the privacy of our students.'' The office on East Tremont Avenue coordinates home-schooling services for children assigned to District 75, a citywide special education district for the most severely handicapped and mentally or physically ill children. The records included files for children with cancer, cerebral palsy and other debilitating illnesses as well as others who were victims of abuse. The office in the Bronx does not oversee students whose parents teach them at home as a matter of personal preference. The chancellor said that he had referred the matter to the Office of the Special Commissioner for Investigation for the New York City School District, which typically handles inquiries into malfeasance by the school system and its employees. The Daily News, which found the records after a tip from a parent, took possession of the records and at first resisted the city's demands to return them. But yesterday the newspaper said it would turn over the documents to the special commissioner for investigation, Richard J. Condon. Mr. Klein vowed that the officials who mishandled the records would be called to task. ''There will be accountability that comes out of this,'' he said. And he scolded The Daily News for publishing the names of some of the students whose files were found. ''There's no public interest in the individual names, and I hope the press would respect that,'' he said. But Eileen Murphy, a spokeswoman for The Daily News who once worked as a spokeswoman for Chancellor Klein, said that the newspaper had printed names only with parental permission. ''We would not have disclosed the name of any individual student without the authorization of his/her parent,'' Ms. Murphy wrote in a prepared statement. ''In each instance where a student's name was revealed and information related to his/her file was disclosed, we were expressly authorized to do so.'' As for the student records, Ms. Murphy wrote, ''We have been asked by Special Schools Investigator Richard Condon to turn over those documents, and we plan to cooperate with that request.'' Richard Cooperman, the principal who oversees the city's home schooling program, referred questions to the chancellor's press office. However, Jerry Russo, the chancellor's press secretary, referred questions back to the principal, saying it was up to Mr. Cooperman to decide whether he wanted to comment. Mr. Russo said that any records not archived by the school system were supposed to be destroyed. |
1629654_0 | Food Imports Close to Matching Level of Exports, Report Says | Next year, for the first time in nearly five decades, the United States could import as much food as it exports, the Department of Agriculture said. Until now, the United States exported more food than it imported. One out of every three acres in the United States is planted for export and agriculture has been one of the few economic sectors that produced a predictable trade surplus. But in a revised quarterly report issued this week, the Agriculture Department predicted that in 2005 the imports of farm products would equal exports, which are estimated at $56 billion. Foreign competition and record crop production in the United States, which pushed down world prices for grains, oilseeds and cottons, were blamed for the drop in export sales from the record of $62.3 billion set in this fiscal year, which ended on Sept. 30. With the United States trade deficit deepening, reaching 5 percent of the gross domestic product in its fullest expression, this forecast was unwelcome news. Earlier this year, the Agriculture Department had predicted a $2.5 billion surplus in agriculture for 2005. This turnaround has occurred in less than a decade. Throughout the 1990's agricultural products were racking up increasingly large trade surpluses; the record, of $27.2 billion, was earned in 1996. Indeed, political support for the $16 billion in federal farm subsidies every year is based in part on the importance of agriculture exports. But as the United States concentrated on farm exports, American consumers have been buying more imported goods. This year the rise in imports was especially marked for processed foods, essential oils used in food and beverage processing, snack foods, red meat, wine, beer and fresh vegetables, according to the Agriculture Department. Canada remains the United States biggest market for agricultural products, buying $9.7 billion. The next four projected big buyers are Mexico, at $8 billion; Japan, at $7.7 billion; the European Union, at $6.5 billion; and China, at $4.6 billion. Several Congressional aides said this forecast could have an effect on the debate over the financing of farm programs in the next Congress. New regional and international trade agreements have been held up by agricultural and farm policies. |
1627275_1 | Ivory Coast Says France Caused Crisis | here. ''They were organizing with Charles Taylor and mercenaries from Sierra Leone. So we launched a counterstrike with aircraft on specific targets.'' The attacks, which began on Nov. 4, hit a French peacekeepers' camp in the rebel-held North a week ago, killing nine French soldiers and one American civilian. France retaliated by striking the Ivoirian Air Force, destroying much of its tiny fleet. Mr. Gbagbo contended that France had overreacted, precipitating a week of mob violence fueled by anti-French sentiment among Mr. Gbagbo's supporters. ''What happened is very unbelievable,'' he said of the French action. ''They immediately, without any prior investigation, decided to perpetuate their own justice.'' Michel Barnier, France's foreign minister, speaking on Europe 1 radio Saturday morning, stated France's position. ''We have thought and we have said that this was a deliberate attack on the part of Ivoirian fighter jets,'' he said. ''That's why the president of the Republic immediately replied by having all these planes neutralized so that they don't attempt against the lives of our soldiers.'' Mr. Gbagbo replaced his army chief of staff with Col. Philippe Mangou, former chief of army operations, seen as a hard-liner, Reuters reported Saturday. An eerie calm prevailed on the streets of the this battered city on Saturday after a week of anti-French violence spurred by clashes between the Ivoirian and French armies. Hundreds of foreigners waited at the airport for flights out of the country, but the desperate scenes of Westerners trying to flee had given way to orderly lines of passengers waiting for scheduled commercial flights, which had begun flying within the region. French and Ivoirian soldiers maintained an uneasy distance from one another, with a truckload of a dozen French troops, riot shields dangling from their arms, standing by at the departure terminal. Mr. Gbagbo's invocation of the region's troubled history of civil war speaks to the deepest fears of aid officials here, who warned that for all the focus on the departure of thousands of French citizens and other Westerners, another mass departure is of greatest concern to them. They said it is the prospect of mass departure of large numbers of people whose roots are in neighboring African nations, who were drawn by the lure of plentiful jobs in Ivory Coast's once-booming economy, that poses the greatest threat to the stability of a strife-prone region. ''Any massive displacement would lead to regional war,'' said Jo |
1627204_1 | Tested in Translation | Eiffel Tower out the living room window. For the first six weeks, I went to French language classes from 8 in the morning to 5 at night. It was one-on-one with a female teacher in her 40's who didn't speak any English. Every day we'd go to lunch and the waiter would ask me for my order. One day, I said I wanted riz avec cravate. And the waiter said, ''You eat your tie?'' I meant to say riz avec crevette, which is shrimp with rice. About three weeks into my language immersion, I pulled my silver Mercedes out of my garage and I was broadsided. I got out of my car and went over to see an elderly man bleeding at the wheel. He had hit his head. I was wiping his brow with my shirt. A crowd came from the surrounding apartments and houses. The police came and probably immediately thought it was my fault. I called my relocation counselor. While the police were writing up the incident, she went into a little store, got a camera and started snapping pictures. The crowd started yelling in French, ''You ought to be ashamed of yourself.'' Someone else yelled, ''You are an American.'' I thought for a second and called back, in French, ''Yes, but I love France.'' It was obvious I couldn't speak the language fluently, but the crowd clapped and then dispersed. After my language classes, I'd get to the office at 5:15 p.m. and work until midnight. About a year into my job, I announced a decision to close the radiation therapy business. I was sitting in my office and heard chanting. Three hundred protesters with signs marched right up to my office. The leader demanded to see me. There were horror stories circulating about how strident the French unions were, holding executives hostage in the boardroom. I said, ''Let's go outside and talk in front of the building.'' That was the start of the strike. It was a 57-day strike. They picketed 24 hours a day. It ended when they realized we were not going to back down. The sale of the radiation therapy business was completed some time later. I had a wine cellar when I was in Paris, in a stone cellar three floors underground that was used to keep horses during Napoleon's time. As I traveled Europe over three years, I bought wines |
1626970_27 | Box Office in a Box | through it again.'' Chapek, like most of the other video executives I spoke with, has high expectations for what either format could do for the content. The sound and picture would be better, but the new discs would also have far more capacity and be more interactive. The games on current-technology DVD's, for instance, especially those for kids, are rudimentary. That could change. Even more important, a new-technology disc would offer a far better encryption than what currently exists on DVD's. This might not quash piracy completely, but it would be an improvement over the current situation. ''We could put the genie back in the bottle,'' said Fox's Dunn. I asked Lieberfarb what another new format would mean for the industry's future -- whether he thought it would further change the way Hollywood does business. He waved the question away. In his view, the game board isn't confined to the studios and the films they make, or even to the retailers they wrangle with. A product like the DVD has rippled through the entire computer, consumer-electronics and entertainment industries, he said. Any widely accepted new format hops from one venue to another and defines the way we use those products; in ways subtle and not so subtle, it also defines the way we live. Lieberfarb allowed that high-definition discs may affect content in some as yet unforeseeable way. ''But at the guts of this battle is patent portfolios,'' he said. ''Consumer electronics and personal computers typically find themselves commoditized. But patent portfolios give the patent owner the ability to collect a toll that isn't subject to the marketplace.'' Or to put it another way, it's not who makes more cars that matters, it's who owns the road. ''This is a big-time industrial battlefield,'' Lieberfarb continued. ''It's Silicon Valley, and Seoul, and Tokyo, and Hollywood.'' And the companies that win the format war, he concluded, will win big. The movies, whatever form they take, will still be the movies. VI. The Big Picture It's striking that many of the people who work directly on DVD's -- the home-entertainment producers, directors and marketers -- seem to feel they are involved with something revolutionary and hugely disruptive. On the other hand, the higher up the pecking order you go inside the studios, the more likely you are to hear that the DVD, while making a big difference to consumers and being far more |
1626953_1 | Hold the Rum | by real pirates with a walk on the plank. Roger presents a familiar figure in children's books and sitcoms: the goofball who saves the day. The illustrations might seem familiar, too -- Brett Helquist is the illustrator for the studiedly strange ''Series of Unfortunate Events'' books by Lemony Snicket. Here his work is warm and appealing, and smaller children can enjoy the story and maybe get a nice chill from the spooky, skull-like image of Roger after he spatters himself with flour and soot. ''What if You Met a Pirate?,'' on the other hand, is the kind of richly detailed work that an aspiring pirate might consult to separate myth from fact before deciding to go into the swordly seafaring trades. ''Real pirates weren't flashy dressers,'' the writer and illustrator Jan Adkins lets us know. No silver buckles on the fancy boots, no jeweled rings or colorful, rich coats. And the peg leg? How do you expect him to climb the rigging? Oh -- and please mentally correct the previous paragraph: according to Adkins, no pirate ever walked a plank. They did have eye patches, however, because injuries were common, and the gold earring was actually useful: if a drowned sailor washed up on shore, the ring would pay for a decent burial. Busting myths, Adkins tells us that the real pirates were pretty shabby, and smelled just awful because fresh water was too precious to waste on bathing. ''The work was hard, monotonous, dirty and dangerous.'' In fact, ''a fortunate pirate might swashbuckle just a few hours each month.'' Even so, Adkins explains, piracy was, ''in some ways, better than most jobs,'' since few employers in the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries operated under the democratic ideals of a pirate ship. He revels in describing and drawing the pirates' ships, discussing the mechanics of their craft and telling us about the terminology and about the legendary pirates and the gore. The book is also marvelously gross: there are illustrations of Blackbeard's severed head, of a seasick pirate throwing up into the ocean, and of another fellow using the ''seat of ease.'' Surely your own child is far too refined to wonder about such things as how a pirate at sea might relieve himself, and he certainly wouldn't giggle at the sight. But then, he might. CHILDREN'S BOOKS John Schwartz writes about business and science for The New York Times. |
1627109_0 | PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL | |
1630080_1 | Africa Needs a Million More Health Care Workers, Report Says | of nurses and doctors from poor African countries to Europe and North America. By the group's calculations, Africa needs a million more health workers. Wealthy nations must educate enough of their own nationals, the group says, rather than rely on doctors and nurses whose training has been paid for by African countries that are losing the fight against disease. The African Union estimates that poor countries subsidize rich ones with $500 million a year through the migration of health workers. The group of specialists also supports growing efforts to channel doctors and nurses from rich countries, as well as from nations that willingly export health workers -- Cuba, Egypt, India and the Philippines -- to volunteer in Africa. It mentioned that the Institute of Medicine in the United States has recommended an AIDS corps of American professionals to help care for and treat people with H.I.V./AIDS. The Joint Learning Initiative also called for the creation of an education fund that would pay to educate tens of thousands of health workers who are not doctors and nurses but are trained to diagnose and treat major killers in Africa -- pneumonia, AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis -- as well as to perform basic life-saving surgeries like Caesarean sections. Such workers, used for decades in many African countries, are not attractive to employers in Western nations that rely on credentialed professionals. African countries had banded together at the international assembly of the World Health Organization this year to push rich countries to compensate them for the loss of migrating health workers, but the group said in its report that computing who should pay how much and to whom was impractical in the fluid and largely undocumented global market for health professionals. Instead, it said rich countries should voluntarily contribute to an education fund. ''Political pressures and public embarrassment are likely to grow as manpower shortages in the midst of health crises become linked to rich country's poaching of medical workers from those same countries,'' the Joint Learning Initiative's report said. The Joint Learning Initiative commissioned studies that documented the importance of health workers in lowering death rates for infants, children under 5 and women in childbirth, controlling for the effects of higher income and female literacy in each country. Researchers found that mortality rates fell with the rise of health worker density, defined as the number of doctors, nurses and midwives per 1,000 people. |
1630109_4 | 3-D Maps From Commercial Satellites Guide G.I.'s in Iraq's Deadliest Urban Mazes | taking individual images and adding multiple layers of data, including information from a super detailed interpretation of the picture, a traditional topographic map, weather reports, spies or soldiers in the field or intercepts of telephone calls or e-mail messages. The commercial satellites now in orbit have about a two-foot resolution, meaning a black and white object two feet wide turns up as a single pixel. A card table covered with a white tablecloth would appear as a tiny dot; only when an object reaches the size of car -- about three pixels -- can viewers distinguish what it is. That is an enormous step forward from the first civilian satellite, launched in 1972, which had a resolution of about 260 feet. It is still not as sharp-eyed as the best spy satellites, believed to have a resolution of about six inches, according to Jeffrey T. Richelson, author of several books on intelligence. But the images are still very useful. Early this year, for example, the State Department asked the geospatial agency to assess the extent of the ethnic violence in the Darfur region of western Sudan. Claims had already been made about the burning of more than two dozen villages. But the United States government wanted documentary proof. The images would not be of much use if they were classified, as the goal was to share this documentation with the world. So on April 30, agency analysts ordered new images from Digital Globe, owner of one satellite, asking for scans within a 36,000 square mile region. It quickly turned up evidence of the violence: 129 of the 133 structures in one village had been destroyed, while 180 of the 240 structures in a second village were gone. In all, 2,351 destroyed dwellings were identified in the photographs, which were posted on a federal government Internet site. The agency also used satellite images to examine refugee camp locations and help determine safe locations to drop food, said Paul Rabatin, who worked on the project. Other government agencies are also relying on satellite images --particularly in operations outside the United States and Europe, where it is harder to find plane-based cameras. The demand has been strongest from the military, which has had trouble getting its own next generation of spy satellites into space. The Air Force, for example, now considers digital images taken by private satellites to be an essential part of |
1630122_2 | Hi, I'm Your Car. Don't Let Me Distract You. | holding the cellphone to make the call. Drivers using a cellphone headset had to redial their calls 40 percent of the time because of mistakes, compared with an error rate of 18 percent for drivers who held the phone. The study concluded that in most cases, drivers ''overestimated the ease of use afforded by hands-free phone interfaces.'' Drivers can be easily distracted, even when they have both hands on the wheel. ''In many cases, it's the amount of brain power you're using,'' said David Champion, the senior director of auto tests for Consumer Reports. ''Even if you're using a hands-free phone, you're using quite a bit of brain power to actually have a discussion.'' Apart from regulating the use of cellphones in cars, state laws are silent on other distracting technology inside a car. The states and the federal government have left it up to the automakers to design features like navigation systems and DVD players so they are safe for drivers to operate. The Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, which includes most of the world's top automakers like General Motors, DaimlerChrysler, Ford and Toyota, has written a set of safety standards for vehicle technology. Under those standards, the automakers agreed to design DVD players and in-car televisions so that the driver cannot not see them while the car is in motion. They also agreed not to make devices that obstruct the driver's view or require the use of more than one hand. ''The goal is to minimize both visual and mental distractions,'' said Gloria Bergquist, vice president of the alliance. Ms. Bergquist said the industry believed it had drawn up guidelines that strike a proper balance between encouraging the design of entertainment-related features and keeping drivers safe. ''The guidelines recommend that no more than two seconds be required to look at a device -- like a radio -- to operate it, minimizing the amount of time a driver's eyes and a driver's mind are focused'' on the device, she said. ''The old driver distractions such as the crying child in the back seat remains as powerful as ever,'' she added. ''Today, however, a DVD player can help avoid that distraction by keeping the kids happy and entertained.'' Still, with navigation systems, DVD players, speaker phones and satellite radio, some experts said that drivers have too many gadgets diverting their eyes from the road. And since the use of these potentially |
1630022_2 | Ancient Conqueror, Modern Devotees | antiquity, he is commonly considered a founding father of Western civilization and history's most brilliant military tactician. That there are few undisputed facts about his life and personality has made him an easy target for wild theories and has added to his near-mythic luster. In ''Alexander the Great,'' his 1973 biography, which was reissued this fall by Penguin, Robin Lane Fox, the British dean of Alexander studies and an adviser on Mr. Stone's film, counts 1,472 books and articles on Alexander from the last 200 years. Many of these works, he warns, ''adopt a confident tone and can be dismissed for that alone.'' Of the more than 20 books written by Alexander's contemporaries, none have survived except as paraphrases in the work of later authors. Among the oldest surviving accounts is Plutarch's admiring and anecdote-rich ''The Life of Alexander the Great'' (reissued last spring by the Modern Library), which emphasizes Alexander's scholarly bent, the legacy of his tutor, the philosopher Aristotle. While in Asia, Plutarch writes, Alexander slept with a copy of Homer's ''Iliad'' under his pillow. However appealing, such stories are not to be confused with facts. As the classicist Victor Davis Hanson points out in the introduction, Plutarch ''wrote almost 400 years after Alexander's death, as distant in time from his subject as we are from the Pilgrims at Plymouth Rock.'' All of which suggests why the current Alexander fad is likely to reveal little of news value about Alexander and a great deal more about ourselves instead. Consider, for example, ''Envy of the Gods: Alexander the Great's Ill-Fated Journey Across Asia,'' to be published in January by De Capo Press. To retrace the path of Alexander's Greek and Macedonian army, the author, a classics instructor named John Prevas, traveled through what is now Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and Tajikistan. Iraq -- including Gaugamela in the Tigris River Valley, where Alexander routed Darius in 331 B.C., and Babylon, where he died eight years later -- was off limits because of the American-led invasion. Everywhere he went, Mr. Prevas found disturbing levels of anti-Western sentiment, much more so, he suggests, than would have been the case in Alexander's day. ''Alexander and I traveled over the same roads, deserts and mountains although we traveled nearly 2,400 years apart,'' he writes. ''The topography has hardly changed, but the world I traveled through to research this book is a far more |
1630042_0 | W.T.O. Ready to Take Action Against U.S. Over Trade Law | The World Trade Organization was expected to approve the imposition of $150 million in trade sanctions against the United States by the European Union, Japan, Canada and four other countries Friday in response to an American antidumping law that was declared illegal in 2003. As a result, tariffs could be imposed on American exports of steel products, textiles, machinery, footwear and some food like corn. The law, known as the Byrd amendment, states that levies raised from antidumping tariffs collected on cheap imports to the United States should be distributed to the American companies that compete against the importers. The seven trading partners of the Unites States complained that this punished importers twice -- once with the levy and again by giving a financial gain to their American competitors. The figure of $150 million was based on an estimate of the damage caused to importers by the Byrd amendment. Japan and the European Union are the hardest hit by the Byrd amendment. Japan is claiming about $80 million in damages and the union is claiming about $50 million. The union has drawn up a list of 80 products it might impose the sanctions on. Japan is also said to be considering imposing sanctions on steel products. The W.T.O.'s approval for sanctions was to have been granted on Wednesday but American negotiators questioned some of the terminology in the demands submitted by the union and others, a person close to the negotiations said. But the wording of the demands remains unchanged after American officials discussed them with the seven complainants Thursday, this person said. ''Whatever the Americans' concerns were, the solution didn't entail changing the documents at all,'' the person said. Peter Mandelson, the union's new trade commissioner, said earlier this week that the union would impose sanctions early next year if the Byrd Amendment law was not repealed. His spokeswoman, Claude Veron-Reville, said Thursday that the union remains on course to impose sanctions. ''Nothing has changed,'' she said, referring to the delay in the W.T.O.'s approval. |
1630071_0 | At the Airport: Indignity vs. Security | To the Editor: As a frequent traveler between Newark Liberty International Airport and Tel Aviv, I have been singled out for special security procedures several times. But I have never felt at all demeaned or humiliated by the pat-downs, even though I have been asked to lift my shirt, expose my bra, or even unzip my jeans. The key difference that all airlines might consider is that El Al Airlines conducts these special searches in a separate room or behind a privacy screen and women are always inspected by a female security agent. My young children frequently travel alone and they have also been searched. I'm thankful for the intense security and apprehensive that airlines might be pressured in a way that turns out to be tragic for us all. Mary Partridge Herzlia, Israel, Nov. 23, 2004 |
1625313_0 | Airwaves Are Abuzz Over Wesleyan | IT'S 6 p.m. Monday. Benjamin Michael is at the mike at WESU-FM (88.1), Wesleyan University's radio station. Broadcasting from a modest studio over Broad Street Books in Middletown, he and his co-host, Garnett Ankle, knock around issues involving politics and equal rights. Then, as they do each show, they open up the phone lines. But six years after Mr. Michael, 29, of Haddam Neck began volunteering at WESU, he is worried that his days as a broadcaster are numbered because of a proposed transformation of the 65-year-old radio station. Douglas Bennet, president of Wesleyan University, is pursuing a link with a National Public Radio affiliate in Fairfield, WSHU, an alliance he said he hoped will produce ''a richer offering with a larger audience.'' The partnership could take place by Jan. 1 or even earlier, he said, at which time the university will reduce the number of shows hosted by area residents, among other changes. Shows hosted by students could also be affected. The issue is as heated as the topics WESU examines on the air. Transmitting from a 1,500-watt tower, WESU broadcasts roughly 140 hours of music and information a week in a mix that includes Italian top 40; music and current events from the Caribbean, and gospel and new age music. Some people involved with WESU oppose the affiliation with NPR. Mr. Michael, for example, is upset that extensive NPR programming will force out local hosts like himself or shift local programming to the middle of the night. Others said they hated to see the station lose its free-form style. Others questioned the need for another public radio affiliate in central Connecticut and the right of the university to govern WESU. Mr. Bennet, former chief executive and president of National Public Radio, met last Sunday with WESU's board of directors to address their concerns. He gave the board a week to come up with an alternative proposal. ''I am anxious to provide the highest-quality programming and most relevant local service we can,'' he said in an interview late last month. ''Many student shows and some community shows will remain.'' He said one objective would be to secure more time for student broadcasts and to enable students to learn from professional broadcasters. The university would decide which hosts would stay, which would go and which new shows would join the lineup, Mr. Bennet said. A few shows would automatically stay |
1625183_8 | Beyond 'Sweetie' | her. (Previously, the emphasis was only on abnormalities in pregnancy.) ''It wasn't very hard to convince them that we needed this,'' Ms. Rabiner says. The course director of physiology, who chooses materials for the class, as well as the senior associate dean for education are women. ''Sometimes, it's just very hard for male students to think of women's issues, like the challenges of motherhood,'' says Dr. David Stevens, who teaches physician-and-client communication at N.Y.U. Medical School. ''Having a significant number of female students in the classrooms changes the dynamics completely.'' Just 15 years ago, a ''patient'' in medical textbooks meant a 40-year-old white man weighing 70 kilograms, or about 155 pounds. ''But most women are not 70 kilos,'' says Dr. Lois Katz, associate chief of staff of New York Harbor Healthcare System and a professor at N.Y.U. Medical School. ''They respond to diseases and medications differently. Many male physicians simply didn't think about it.'' Much of the seminal research on women's health issues was conducted by female doctors and scientists, and their efforts got a boost from the government in 1997, when the Office on Women's Health was established under the Department of Health and Human Services. At the same time, the Food and Drug Administration required that clinical trials of new drugs reflect women and ethnic minorities. Now when professors at most medical schools present research findings, they are careful to choose studies with both male and female subjects as well as members of minority groups. At schools where teaching is based on the case method -- using discussions of individual patients' illnesses -- examples of diseases that mostly affect women have been added. In 2001, Harvard Medical School, for instance, introduced into its renal physiology class the case of a young woman who developed an eating disorder after abusing laxatives. It replaced the case of a man with kidney disease. The new case ''maintained the underlying principles of renal physiology that the original case purported, while at the same time including an important women's health issue -- eating disorders,'' Dr. Hope Ricciotti, director of the women's health theme at Harvard, explained in an e-mail message. The introduction of this case, Dr. Ricciotti said, was a direct result of adding women's health in 1999 to nine existing themes, ranging from geriatrics to ethics, that had already been woven into Harvard medical courses. Ms. Rabiner, who leads the N.Y.U. chapter |
1625519_3 | Bigger and Bolder Population Of Bears Incites Fear in Japan | their droppings.'' But with tourism the economic lifeline of this corner of Hokkaido, officials are discussing a quintessentially Japanese solution: building an elevated footpath designed to allow tourists to walk through bear country without risking a scratch. Bear-human conflicts are more violent hundreds of miles south of here, in the mountain villages of Honshu Island, home to almost all of Japan's roughly 12,000 Asiatic black bears. This fall, news reports read like a police blotter of muggings of the elderly. On Oct. 11, two bears attacked Shizuko Sasai, 76, as she was doing farm work outside her home in Toyama, on the Sea of Japan. A few minutes later, the pair attacked Masatoshi Yamazaki, 77, as he was walking down a road. Finally, they attacked Taku Murai, 90, as he sat in front of his house. The septuagenarians suffered facial scratches and Mr. Murai's arm was broken. In other attacks, a 63-year-old man collecting mushrooms was bitten on the right arm and a 73-year-old who discovered a bear eating persimmons from his trees was scratched on the head, hand and face. A 74-year-old woman was found lying on a country road with a fractured skull and telltale scratches to her arm and face. This fall, bears have been found in houses, a firehouse and the garden of a day care center. Across Japan's mountainous bear country, sightings through the end of September were up 55 percent over last year, a survey by prefectures found. The toll is far from one-sided. This year hunters have killed dozens of bears suspected of attacking or threatening people. With the national bear hunting season opening on Honshu on Nov. 15, hunters are preparing to tramp the mountains. But hunting is fading in Japan. Today, bear lovers probably far outnumber bear hunters. This fall, the Japan Bear and Forest Association, a nature preservation group, campaigned to ''collect tree nuts and bring them deep into the mountains so that bears don't have to come down from the mountains.'' The public swamped the group with nuts and flooded its telephone lines. After a week, the group suspended the campaign, saying it could not cope with the deluge of nuts. By the time this year's hibernation begins in late November, the number of people injured by bears in 2004 is expected to exceed 100, almost 10 times the annual average of 11.3 for the previous 10 years. ''I |
1625372_0 | PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL | |
1625206_0 | Impromptu Classroom | TO Brazilians, the boats that chug up and down the Solimões River are the Greyhound buses of the Amazon: the only affordable way to visit relatives or travel on business. In that land of few roads and expensive air fares, the Solimões, as the Amazon River is known there, is the local highway. But for me, the Fernandes II, which I took this August from the Colombian-Brazilian border to the Amazonian capital of Manaus, was a four-day, $27, all-meals-included, hang-your-hammock-where-you-will floating language institute. I had tried to study Portuguese in New York, but while I learned Spanish fairly well working in the city's Latino immigrant communities and taking advantage of its Spanish radio stations and newspapers, Portuguese was trickier. Nothing forced me to practice daily, and one class a week was not enough. Time for the boat method. Flying in from Bogotá, where I had been visiting friends, I arrived in the Amazonian outpost of Leticia, Colombia, on a Sunday. I had been told boats left every few days from the adjoining Brazilian town of Tabatinga, but the next boat did not leave until Wednesday. That gave me plenty of time to shop for the $5 hammock that would be my bed onboard and strategize about how I would avoid the few Britons I met around town who were planning to take the same trip. (Nothing against the British, but they tend to speak English.) Two boats were leaving dusty Tabatinga that Wednesday, and I headed to the dock, where I spotted the British visitors on the sleeker Manoel Monteiro. So I took my chances with the Fernandes II, a rickety charmer whose three decks were enclosed by white railings, and whose side was emblazoned in red letters with the motto, ''Jesus não desiste de você.'' I wasn't sure what it meant -- something about Jesus not doing something -- but I figured I would find out. Sure enough, just as the modern, sterile look of the Manoel Monteiro attracted the tourist crowd, the ''Jesus não desiste de você'' (''Jesus will not give up on you,'' I learned later) attracted the Evangelical Christian crowd. The 100 or so passengers hanging up their brightly colored hammocks in crisscrossed fashion on the middle deck included dozens of gentle Bible-toting, teetotaling Christians, mostly Brazilian with a few Peruvians thrown in. My hammock neighbors, Etevaldo and Maria Augusta, helped me secure my blue hammock |
1628888_0 | PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL | |
1629059_4 | City and F.B.I. Reach Agreement on Bioterror Investigations | will try to wave this document around to assert authority in a spirit that was not intended.'' The effort to draft such rules actually predate the 9/11 and anthrax letter attacks of 2001, some officials said. William A. Zinnikas, the weapons of mass destruction coordinator for the F.B.I.'s New York office, said he and Marcelle Layton, his counterpart from the city's Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, began discussing the need for such guidelines in 1999. ''It was derived from a common acknowledgment of the problems we would all face if an incident of bioterrorism were to develop in New York City,'' Mr. Zinnikas said. But the effort did not move at a ''lightning pace'' until after the 9/11 and anthrax attacks, Mr. Pulaski said. ''Before that, there was just no immediacy.'' The communication gaps, turf disputes between departments, fear of sharing information, and other complications highlighted by the anthrax letter attacks, a crime that remains unsolved, were reinforced by other, less well publicized bioterrorism scares, officials said. Law enforcement and public health officials referred specifically to an investigation in the summer of 2003 of a suspected case of brucellosis, also known as undulant fever, a disease that can be caused by a biological attack but that is usually acquired from consuming unpasteurized dairy products. Accounts of the tension vary, but officials said that after a Syrian man checked himself into a New York hospital and seemed to be suffering from an illness that could have been deliberately induced, the medical staff resisted turning over to the police potentially relevant information about him and his case. The police, according to two separate accounts of the case, reacted by pursuing the investigation very aggressively at the hospital. Encouraged by the health department, the medical staff at the hospital finally began cooperating more fully. Both the medical investigators and the police eventually concluded that the man had acquired brucellosis, which is not contagious person-to-person, naturally during a vacation back home. Some physicians continue resisting the trend in New York and at the federal level toward joint investigations by medical and law enforcement officials, and, in particular, the sharing of sensitive medical data that identify individuals by name. Victor Sidel, a past president of the American Public Health Association and the New York City Public Health Association, expressed concern that such information-sharing might dissuade sick people from seeking medical help and hence, encourage |
1628983_4 | The Castro Collection | third party that Sotheby's had the painting for a number of years,'' Pepe Fanjul said. ''I'm sure they have their side of the story.'' Alfonso Fanjul Jr., the steely, 67-year-old entrepreneur known as Alfy who rebuilt the Fanjuls' Cuban sugar empire in the United States, was more direct. ''I have been surprised by the behavior of the art world in general when it comes to paintings that clearly belong to my family,'' he said. ''I had hoped that they would see that it is important that we should be promptly notified when our artwork came into their hands. We would particularly like to know what the auction houses and others know of these paintings.''Starting in the 1850's, the Fanjuls' ancestors began buying land and consolidating their control of Cuba's sugar business. By the turn of the century, they were among the country's dominant producers. It was a wildly lucrative business, and one built on the backs of poorly paid, landless farm workers. Money from sugar built an extravagant mansion that Mr. Fanjul's maternal grandfather, Jose Gomez-Mena, stocked with fine European art, including dozens of Sorollas. In 1936, Mr. Fanjul's father, Alfonso Fanjul Sr., married Mr. Gomez-Mena's daughter, Lillian, uniting two of Cuba's largest sugar fortunes. When Fidel Castro, whose father owned a modest sugar plantation, led the overthrow of Fulgencio Batista's government in 1959, the Fanjul family's holdings became a target. Mr. Castro's government renamed the Gomez-Mena mansion, with all of its furnishings and art intact, the National Museum of Decorative Arts. Pepe Fanjul recalls boarding a National Airlines flight from Havana, when he was a teenager. He was hustled aboard the plane by a friendly airport bartender and was seated across the aisle from the film star Errol Flynn, who, along with a girlfriend, was also leaving the country. Even while fleeing Cuba after the revolution, Mr. Fanjul was surrounded by a dash of glamour. For most other Cubans, airline flights and movie stars were well out of reach, a measure of Mr. Fanjul's privileged upbringing. When Pepe, Alfy and their three siblings left Cuba for the United States, they were forced to abandon most of the family's art and its other wealth. The family owned some real estate in Manhattan and had other money invested abroad by their parents, but their exile marked a sharp comedown. ''The family was in a state of shock,'' Pepe Fanjul said. ''We |
1628743_0 | Spend $150 Billion Per Year to Cure World Poverty | No plan can ignore that in African and other less-developed countries population already outruns the present means of support yet goes on rapidly expanding. This eats up any increments in production, keeps wages low and strains agricultural resources. The necessity here is to cut the birthrates directly. Edwin Reubens Weston, Fla. |
1628755_6 | A Village Preserves A Shangri-La | a trickle of scraggly backpackers who made a three-day bus trip from Yunnan's capital, Kunming. But in 1995, Lijiang opened an airport with direct flights from several Chinese cities, and the trickle grew to a flood. Last year, the city had more than three million visitors. The rapid influx has affected local customs. For example, with swelled demand for lumber to build new and bigger homes, some farmers, earning only a few hundred dollars a year, are willing to risk fines to log local forests. ''Naxi culture taught us that we must protect small trees and only cut big trees,'' Mr. Cun said. ''Now, everything is cut.'' By giving local residents a chance to buy shares in the eco-lodge for a few dollars a family and letting them earn dividends, the village has an interest in protecting the forests and in keeping the tourists coming back. The lodge has also created jobs. For a few dollars a day, young English-speaking villagers work as trail guides leading guests to nearby sites. For the more adventurous, Wenhai can be the starting point of a three-day trek through the Tiger Leaping Gorge, which tracks an upper stretch of the Yangtze River through one of the world's deepest ravines. (Environmentalists are fighting plans to dam the gorge for a hydropower project that would flood much of the area, but not Wenhai, which is at a higher elevation.) Other activities include horseback riding, visiting local schools and, from November to March, bird-watching. For me, relaxing with a cup of hot tea and a novel seemed a better idea. But I had happened to book my trip to Wenhai over the weekend of the Grave Sweeping Festival, when Chinese pay tribute to their ancestors with offerings of food and wine, and the He clan, who have a stake in the lodge, invited me to join them. We spent the afternoon eating delicious roast potatoes and fried pork strips, and I peppered Mr. Cun with questions about the festival and other local ways. After lunch, the oldest member of the He family, a 74-year-old woman with a wide toothy smile, lighted a small fire and burned paper money for deceased relatives. Smoke from similar fires on hillsides around the valley drifted into a blue sky and the sun broke through scattered clouds, lighting the peaks of the Jade Dragon Snow Mountain. The next morning, I would hike |
1629025_3 | THE READING FILE | the aim of economic development is to benefit humanity rather than to destroy the natural world. It is important to remember that richer societies are in a much stronger position to create a positive environment for human beings than poor ones. Even in the developed world there is still a long way to go before material want can be abolished. In the third world the consequences of 'sustainable development' are even starker. Terrorism Takes to the High Seas In the war on terrorism, one arena that has received relatively little attention is the open sea. And that is a dangerous oversight, write Gal Left and Anne Korin in ''Terrorism Goes to Sea,'' in the November/December issue of Foreign Affairs. Excerpts follow: Intelligence agencies estimate that Al Qaeda and its affiliates now own dozens of phantom ships -- hijacked vessels that have been repainted and renamed and operate under false documentation. Security experts have long warned that terrorists might try to ram a ship loaded with explosive cargo, perhaps even a weapon of mass destruction, into a major port or terminal. Ominously, there have been cases of terrorist pirates hijacking tankers in order to practice steering them through straits and crowded sea-lanes -- the maritime equivalent of the Sept. 11 hijackers' training in Florida flight schools. These apparent kamikazes-in-training have questioned crews on how to operate ships but have shown little interest in how to dock them. Shoes and Schizophrenia Marc Abrahams writes in the British newspaper The Guardian that a paper in the journal Medical Hypotheses, written by Jarl Flensmark of Malmo, Sweden, links shoes to schizophrenia. Excerpts follow from Mr. Abrahams's article, in which in he quotes from Mr. Flensmark's paper: ''Heeled footwear,'' he writes, ''began to be used more than 1,000 years ago, and led to the occurrence of the first cases of schizophrenia. Mechanization of the production started in Massachusetts, spread from there to England and Germany, and then to the rest of Western Europe. A remarkable increase in schizophrenia prevalence followed the same pattern.'' He cites evidence from other parts of the world, too -- Turkey, Taiwan, the Balkans, Ireland, Italy, Ghana, Greenland, the Caribbean and elsewhere. Flensmark boils the matter into a damning statement: ''After heeled shoes is [sic] introduced into a population, the first cases of schizophrenia appear and then the increase in prevalence of schizophrenia follows the increase in use of heeled shoes.'' |
1628439_0 | Still Playing After All Those Years | The winner of Saturday's football game between Lehigh University and Lafayette College will not take home a cup, a jug, an ax, a spittoon, a skillet, a bucket, a bell, a 10-gallon hat or a statue of a farm animal. For the first time in the 120-year history of the series, however, the victor will advance to the postseason via an automatic bid to the N.C.A.A. Division I-AA championship tournament. That prospect has disrupted Lafayette Coach Frank Tavani's sleep pattern this week and helped sand down his emotional defenses. ''We're just that little guy down the road, looking to gain some identity,'' Tavani said gruffly, and not entirely believably, at a luncheon for the news media and fans this week. Moments later, Tavani choked up and had to pause while paying tribute to his overachieving team, which was not regarded as a Patriot League title contender when the season started. He recovered quickly. ''After that little breakdown, I'm ready to kick some Lehigh butt,'' he said. No. 8 Lehigh (9-1, 5-0) and unranked Lafayette (7-3, 4-1), colleges perched on hillsides 16 miles apart like opposing sentries in the football-steeped Lehigh Valley, don't need a trophy to embody what their 140th game means. Their rivalry is the longest ongoing rivalry in college football. It began in 1884, 11 years after Princeton first met Yale, but Lehigh and Lafayette frequently played more than once a season early on and had just one fallow year, which makes their matchup the nation's most played. Lafayette holds the overall edge, 72-62-5, but has lost eight of the last nine. The Leopards' hopes of reaching their first playoff game ride on their best record since 1992 and the consistency of the senior tailback Joe McCourt, who has rushed for more than 100 yards in each of the last six games and 1,000-plus yards in three seasons. Lehigh has an eight-game winning streak thanks to the league-leading junior quarterback Mark Borda, junior tailback Eric Rath and one of the Division I-AA's top defenses. The Mountain Hawks want to maintain their momentum but have a tad less to play for, since the team is expected to receive one of eight at-large slots in the 16-team national tournament even if Lafayette wins. The rivals' tradition is spring-fed by the area's athletically prolific high schools. Eight projected Lehigh starters are from the area and five Lafayette players are locals. That |
1629925_0 | Arctic Countries Agree on Perils of Climate Change but Not Solution | The United States and the seven other countries with Arctic territory jointly expressed concern yesterday about profound changes in the Arctic climate and said they would consider new scientific findings concluding that heat-trapping emissions were the main cause. But they did not agree on a common strategy for curbing such emissions, to the disappointment of environmental groups and Arctic indigenous groups. The joint statement on Arctic climate, which emerged after several days of negotiations in Reykjavik, Iceland, reflected the continuing opposition by the Bush administration to anything other than voluntary measures to slow the growth in such gases. This put the United States at odds with the other Arctic countries, all of which are among the 128 nations that have ratified the Kyoto Protocol, a treaty poised to take effect in February that requires participating industrialized countries collectively to cut emissions below levels measured in 1990. The other Arctic countries are Russia, Canada, Denmark, Norway, Iceland, Sweden and Finland. The talks took place at a meeting of the Arctic Council, an international body that was created in 1996 to foster cooperation among the world's northernmost countries and six Arctic indigenous groups that participate in sessions but do not vote. The statement followed the release on Nov. 9 of ''Impacts of a Warming Arctic,'' a summary of a four-year assessment of high-latitude climate shifts done by 300 scientists at the request of the council. The study documented an array of shifts in climate ecosystems, and ice conditions, and concluded that ''human influences, resulting primarily from increased emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, have now become the dominant factor.'' The report said the changes could imperil indigenous groups and many species while offering some benefits, like longer growing seasons and new shipping routes in ice-free waters. In a speech to senior officials at the meeting, Paula J. Dobriansky, the United States under secretary of state for global affairs, said that once the full science report was released early next year, ''the United States will take the findings into account as it continues to review the science on climate change.'' Environmentalists and representatives of Arctic indigenous cultures said the science was clear enough to justify stronger actions to stem gases linked to the changes. ''In terms of what the planet needs, this is far from enough,'' Sheila Watt-Cloutier, chairwoman of the Inuit Circumpolar Conference, told the Reuters news agency. The group |
1624565_0 | World Business Briefing | Americas: Brazil: Trade Surplus Narrows | Brazil's trade surplus narrowed to $3.01 billion in October from $3.17 billion in September as imports hit a record monthly level, the trade ministry said. Still, that brought the accumulated trade surplus so far this year to a record-breaking $28.12 billion, a 38 percent increase over the comparable period in 2003. Imports, which tend to peak at the end of the year, rose to a record $5.84 billion last month from $5.75 billion in September. Exports dropped to $8.84 billion from $8.9 billion. Economists expect Brazil, South America's largest economy, to finish the year with a trade surplus of almost $33 billion, up from $24.8 billion in 2003. Todd Benson (NYT) |
1624587_2 | The Dollar's Long-Term Direction: Down | that to smoothly and significantly narrow the current account deficit requires a depreciation of at least 20 percent in the dollar, making it much more costly for Americans to buy imported goods and travel abroad. The imbalance is fueling a stupendous buildup of foreign debt in the United States. At the end of last year, the nation's net financial deficit -- broadly, what Americans owe the rest of the world minus what the rest of the world owes to the United States -- amounted to nearly 30 percent of total output. And both sides are digging themselves deeper into holes, with American debts mounting and foreigners acquiring ever greater piles of depreciating paper assets. Economists who speak of the current account deficit often quote the economist Herb Stein: ''If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.'' So what will it take for the brakes to be applied? Barry Eichengreen, a professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley, argues that Asian policy makers are going to force a change. He contents that as they move away from their present export-led growth strategies, which require cheap currencies, to focus monetary policy on managing internal demand, Asian governments will support the dollar less, buy fewer Treasury bonds and shift some of their foreign reserves to other currencies, like euros. Indeed, China's decision to raise interest rates last week put upward pressure on the yuan and indicated a willingness to take market-based measures to cool its galloping economy. ''Asian policy is changing,'' Mr. Eichengreen said. ''The end is growing increasingly near.'' This suggests that President Bush's efforts to maintain open markets will increasingly be up to others. The United States' leading trade partners -- Europeans, Asians and even Canadians -- are promising more challenges to Washington on trade issues, bringing disputes to the World Trade Organization and going after new markets as well. A cheaper dollar would stimulate American exports but would create some conflicts with other countries. And a dollar depreciation, on its own, would do little to curb the nation's dependence on foreign money. For a devaluation to work effectively, economists explain that other measures to reduce the nation's excess spending are needed as well. The situation, some suggested, is analogous to the problems faced by Ronald Reagan early in his second term, when the United States, despite robust growth, suffered from an expensive dollar, weak exports and big |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.