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1625883_0 | Saving Shangri-La | Progress in China is not easy to chart. Every step forward seems to be paired with a move back, in the direction of the hard Communist past. This pattern of advance and retreat requires constant analysis to determine whether the nation is moving, even generally, in the right direction toward more freedom, better laws and a cleaner environment. More recently, there have been a series of setbacks -- the bridling of Internet traffic, the arrests of journalists, including a New York Times researcher, the uphill battle of farmers trying to hold onto their land against those who are greedy for development or cheap electricity. One positive sign has been the opening of a public debate over whether to destroy Tiger Leaping Gorge. That debate is a step beyond a similar debate over the Three Gorges Dam -- a fight the environmentalists lost. If Hu Jintao, China's powerful leader, is listening, he and his government will heed the calls of the environmentalists this time and preserve Tiger Leaping Gorge, a magnificent natural phenomenon, saving an important part of China's cultural and ecological heritage for future generations. The gorge, often said to be the deepest in the world, is sometimes referred to as China's Grand Canyon. Others argue that the two-mile-deep ravine is the real location for Shangri-La, a magical and peaceful place described in the 1933 novel ''Lost Horizon.'' In reality, the area is a Unesco World Heritage site that is inhabited by an estimated 100,000 people. Among those farmers and tribal communities are the Naxi, who practice a rare matriarchal tradition and preserve an ancient form of hieroglyphics. If they share the fate of thousands of others displaced by thousands of other dams in China, they will soon join the sad army of China's poor and dispossessed. The argument for damming this treasured site is that the area, which is near Tibet, needs more water and China needs more energy. For months now, China's manufacturing districts in the east have suffered blackouts, a problem that has given more clout to those arguing for more dams on rivers like the one now roaring through Tiger Leaping Gorge. Such arguments are understandable, but they are shortsighted in the extreme when it comes to this site. This is one of the few unspoiled places in China, a destination for increasing numbers of Chinese and foreign tourists in recent years. China's environmental movement is |
1625890_0 | Ivoirian Throngs Assemble to Shield President From the French | French and Ivory Coast military commanders appealed for calm Monday in Abidjan, as government supporters, whipped into a frenzy by reports that French tanks were assembling near the home of President Laurent Gbagbo, gathered by the thousands to form a human shield around their leader's neighborhood. French soldiers fired in the air to disperse the crowds, and helicopters hovered overhead, witnesses and news agency reports from Abidjan said. For much of the day, as state-run radio urged government supporters to protect the president from French action, angry mobs ran through the streets taking aim at French citizens and anyone else mistaken as French. France took pains to say it had no intention of deposing Mr. Gbagbo (pronounced BAG-bo). The spokesman for the French peacekeeping force in Ivory Coast, Col. Henri Aussavy, insisted that his troops had not surrounded the president's residence. ''We have absolutely no tanks in front of his residence,'' he said by telephone from Abidjan. The spokesman for the United Nations peacekeeping mission in Abidjan said 750 foreigners, mostly French, were taking shelter in the United Nations compound there. Hundreds of others sought safety at the French military base. By the end of the day, French and Ivoirian military officials said, some of the protesters had begun streaming back home. But the streets were far from calm. In New York, France pushed for swift action by the United Nations Security Council to impose sanctions, including an arms embargo and travel bans for individuals who violated an international cease-fire in Ivory Coast. China asked for more time to decide whether to support immediate sanctions or try to negotiate a grace period to measure compliance before sanctions take hold. The Council is scheduled to meet Tuesday to discuss the violence in Ivory Coast. The African Union is expected to send South Africa's president, Thabo Mbeki, to seek a political solution. Meanwhile, United Nations agencies drew up plans to evacuate nonessential staff. The anti-French violence erupted Saturday after an air raid by Ivorian warplanes killed nine French peacekeepers and France retaliated by destroying most of the country's air assets, including the two Sukhoi attack jets used in the bombing. The attacks against the French military base followed two days of heavy bombing by government warplanes against rebel-held towns in the north and signaled the total collapse of an 18-month-old French-brokered cease-fire between Mr. Gbagbo's government and his rebel foes. ''We flirted |
1629286_1 | Licenses Sought as Court Action Is Awaited on a Bear Hunt | authority and ordered the department to process all bear-hunting license applications by Dec. 2. The New Jersey attorney general's office, on behalf of Mr. Campbell, has appealed the decision to the State Supreme Court. Meanwhile, the appellate division heard arguments last Thursday on a lawsuit filed by a group seeking to hold the hunt on the 192 square miles of state-owned land within the 1,600-square-mile area. A decision from the court on the land issue could come as early as Monday. Officials at the Newark Watershed Area and the Delaware Water Gap Recreational Area, which are also within the 1,600 square miles, said they were awaiting the court's decision before announcing whether their land would be open for the hunt. The possibility that state land will be closed to hunting leaves hunters like John MacGregor of Piscataway to scout out alternative locations on private land. ''Closing the state land makes things more difficult. It narrows down the locations,'' Mr. MacGregor said. ''Hunting bear is a difficult sport. It's a different game than hunting deer because you need to explore different territory, but it's certainly more enticing.'' Mr. MacGregor and his hunting partner, Vince Torio of Rahway, said they planned to spend at least three days in the woods during the six-day hunt and expressed hope that the season would not be held up by court challenges. ''The hunt is a necessary thing because it can help curb the bear population and keep people a little safer,'' Mr. Torio said. On Nov. 13, two bear cubs attacked two Boy Scouts who were camping with their troop in the Yards Creek Scout reservation in Warren County. According to a report by the Department of Environmental Protection, which investigated the attack, the boys were near a campsite when the cubs, accompanied by an adult female bear, approached and began to tear through a backpack that contained Pop Tarts. The report said one bear tried to bite the left arm of one of the scouts, leaving four scratches, and then bit the scout's right hand, leaving three puncture wounds. Such events, hunting advocates say, are proof that a hunt is necessary, while Mr. Campbell said the state would rely on contraceptive programs and public awareness to control the state's bear population, which he estimated at nearly 1,600. Last year the state held its first bear hunt in 33 years, and 328 bears were killed. |
1629249_4 | NEWS SUMMARY | to shape the terms for providing services to disabled children. In updating the law governing special education, Congress pared down rights that advocates for disabled students won during the Clinton administration. A22 NEW YORK/REGION B1-8 New York Port Bustling With Asian Trade The Port of New York, which fell into a slump in the second half of the 20th century, is beginning to thrive again because of an explosion of trade with China. Trade through the port has grown faster in the last five years than at any time since World War II. Last year, $100 billion of wares moved through the port. A1 A Conflict Heads West Hundreds of demonstrators from across the globe are flooding the streets of New York to press their case that the Chinese government is persecuting the practitioners of Falun Gong, a form of spiritual calisthenics and meditation. Supporters say 1,100 have died and thousands more tortured and imprisoned for their beliefs, chiefly in China, but increasingly in other countries. B1 Immigrants Off to Oxford Two CUNY students, both from the former Soviet Union, are among several first-generation United States immigrants named as Rhodes Scholars. B1 Cross Burned on Long Island A cross was burned on the front lawn of the home of an interracial couple in Lake Grove, Suffolk County. The incident is being investigated as a hate crime, the police said. B7 Neediest Cases B8 SPORTSMONDAY D1-9 Players Suspended After Brawl The National Basketball Association imposed its harshest collective penalties ever, suspending the Indiana Pacers' Ron Artest for the remaining 72 games of the season and suspending his teammates Stephen Jackson and Jermaine O'Neal for a combined 55 games for fighting with fans Friday night. A1 OBITUARIES A25 Dr. Robert F. Bacher Nuclear physicist and one of the leaders of the Manhattan Project, he was 99. A25 BUSINESS DAY C1-8 Division on Tax Code President Bush is likely to be pulled by conflicts between parts of his political base, as key Republican groups are already divided about how or even whether to proceed with an overhaul of the tax code. C1 Digital-Only Record Label Major record labels are looking to digital sales as a first step on the road to the larger music marketplace after years infighting over how to sell music online and grappling with the Internet, which the record industry says has threatened its underlying economic structure. C1 TV, Phone |
1629240_3 | Parts of Special-Ed Bill Would Shift More Power to States and School Districts | House and Senate in the next Congress, groups representing children in special education said they would have fared worse had Congress been forced to start rewriting a bill from scratch again next year. ''All the people on the advocate side were protective of current law,'' said Kathleen H. McGinley, deputy executive director for public policy at National Association of Protection and Advocacy Systems. ''But this is the best we could do in this environment, and I don't think it's likely we would do better starting over next year.'' There are some features in the new law that please advocates for the disabled. One, aimed at reducing the over-identification of African-Americans for special education, requires the federal government to better monitor special-education enrollment and investigate racial disparities. Another creates new demands for states to publicly report on the academic progress of disabled students. Elaine Roberts, a lawyer based in Houston who represents disabled children, said that with the growing importance of standardized exams in rating school performance, schools had tended to exclude disabled students from accountability systems, instead opting to give them alternative exams that can be more open to manipulation. Parents who insist their children take grade-level exams instead find themselves ''quickly outnumbered'' in meetings with school officials, she said, adding, ''The parents are looking for something meaningful.'' One of her clients, Kelli D., a 16-year-old in Texas found to have attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, bipolar disorder and clinical depression, was forced out of her neighborhood school after she was accused of buying antidepressants from another student. Kelli now attends an alternative school for children who have discipline problems. She says that long before that, the schools had given up on her, promoting her from one grade to the next whether or not she advanced academically. ''They pass me and they don't really care,'' Kelli said. In school, she said, her younger brothers learn important things, like how to write in script. She cannot. ''That's all that really matters to them at school, how to get rid of me,'' she said. Her parents agreed, saying that Kelli had not brought home homework since the third grade. ''For all practical purposes they just continue to push Kelli up and move her on,'' her father said. ''They're not educating her.'' The law also takes aim at the disproportionate share of minority students tracked for special education. According to the Civil Rights Project |
1630330_4 | What Gave Us the Right | she is fascinated by the prominence of so many of her classmates in Washington. And so she put aside the poststructuralist approach to political identity and antebellum political culture she'd deployed in books like ''95 Theses on Politics, Culture, and Method'' to ponder age-old questions about truth and power. Her most impressive achievement is to demonstrate how far the ideas we associate with Straussians have strayed from the ideas of Leo Strauss (1899-1973), the German Jewish émigré philosopher who was a central figure at the University of Chicago after World War II. Strauss was skeptical about democracy; the Straussians believe it can take root in places as unlikely as Baghdad. Strauss treated nature as inchoate and unknowable; his disciples turn to it for fixed principles. ''Patriotism was a suspect virtue for Strauss,'' Norton writes; the contrast need hardly be stated. Like most European conservatives, Strauss was an opponent of modernity; his students think America is great because it is modernity embodied. Although academic in nature, these differences between Strauss and today's neoconservatives provide the depth missing in more journalistic accounts. Conservatism cannot take firm root in America's individualistic and populistic political culture. It can remain ''a remnant'' -- Albert Jay Nock's term for an enlightened elite -- or discard its core convictions. The Straussians chose the latter, assuring their influence but diluting the power of their ideas. Norton might have elaborated her chapter on the real Strauss into a major book. Instead, she has written a short, gossipy, polemical and unpersuasive sketch devoted mainly to telling secondhand stories. Some of them -- the existence of Straussian ''truth squads'' disrupting classes at Chicago -- are pure hearsay. Others -- the suicide of Clinton Rossiter, a conservative political scientist at Cornell, after he was rudely treated by a Straussian colleague for siding with black demonstrators -- are exaggerated; Rossiter's death, as the account upon which Norton relies makes clear, was the outcome of his emotional problems, not his politics. At the same time, Norton is far more Straussian than she acknowledges. For Strauss/ ians, ''secondary sources are dispensable.'' Her book too offers no footnotes. The Strauss/ ians see persecution everywhere. Norton writes of persistent efforts by conservatives to silence the left. Strauss was an elitist; Norton can barely conceal her disdain for the ''minor academic institutions'' two Straussians appointed to President Bush's Council on Bioethics came from. Allan Bloom, Strauss's most famous |
1630382_3 | A Summer Isle, Off-Season | availability of an excellent meal, and space opens up on the ferries and airline flights from the mainland. Hundreds of new homes have been built on Nantucket over the last 20 years. Celebrities are among the arrivals, and the prices of even ordinary houses have reached seven figures. Some high-end businesses downtown reflect more the spending habits of the well-to-do newcomers than they do the longtime residents, some islanders say. ''When Ralph Lauren moved here, I realized the place was in a worrisome spot,'' said Cary Hazlegrove, a photographer whose book ''Nantucket: The Quiet Season'' is to be published in March by Chronicle Books, referring to Mr. Lauren's decision to buy a building in town. But public land ownership and historic districting protect nearly half of the island, and islandwide zoning rules limit the impact of development on Nantucket's time-warp quality. ''If you want somewhere to listen to the sound of your own heartbeat, this is where to come,'' Ms. Hazlegrove said. In Nantucket Town, where wall-to-wall tourists shuffle along the cobblestones in summer, the off-season brings not only elbow room and cheaper prices but a consciousness-expanding perspective as well. Back up for a good look at the harbor and houses of the historic district, and it's easier to imagine the whaling ships sailing out on four-year voyages and the wives scanning the ocean from their remote island, looking for a sail. Not that the hardy women of Nantucket didn't keep busy. Centre Street, said Mimi Beman, owner of Mitchell's Book Corner, at 54 Main Street, (508) 228-1080, was known as Petticoat Row because it had so many shops owned by women. With the men and teenage boys gone most of the time -- and equality for women a tenet of the dominant Quaker religion -- Nantucket took female independence for granted. But when its women left their faraway island, they found themselves with fewer opportunities. In the case of Lucretia Coffin Mott, born on Nantucket in 1793, the resulting indignation helped create the 19th-century women's rights movement that eventually gave American women the vote. Her birthplace is gone, but the site is marked by a plaque on the 1831 house at the corner of Fair Street and Lucretia Mott Lane, now the Ships Inn. An autumn walk in town, with an eye to history and architecture, works well on uncluttered streets and only gets more atmospheric if the day |
1630605_1 | THE READING FILE | in My Head ''You Hume it, I'll play it ,'' by John Mizzoni, who teaches philosophy at Neumann College, in Aston, Pa., explains why pop music is useful to his trade. The article is in The Philosopher Magazine (www.philosophersnet.com) and the opening lyric is from the group Green Day. Excerpts follow: Last week, I stood in front of a class of 30 undergraduates and, strumming my guitar, sang, ''I want to be the minority; I don't need your authority. Down with the moral majority, 'cause I want to be the minority.'' Teaching philosophy with popular music is a way of opening their minds to the pervasiveness, relevance, importance and joy of philosophy. With music they sit up and take notice; light bulbs go on, sparks fly, and interest heightens. In the context of philosophy of religion, one of the philosophical problems we address is the problem of evil and possible solutions to the problem. One solution is the notion that evil must be part of God's plan, for doing good would not be possible without adversity in the world to overcome. In this part of the course I use a song called ''Cruel to Be Kind.'' Although most of the time I will only play a verse or a chorus from a song, in this case I play the whole song because every line fits in well with the problem of evil. Descartes' cogito (''I think, therefore I am'') is an example of an epistemological certainty while at the same time a metaphysical commitment that the self is essentially a thinking thing. Neil Diamond's ''I Am I Said'' not only hints at Descartes' assertion of his own existence, but also it parallels the solitary nature of Descartes' project. Diamond's song helps to bring out the solipsistic and solitary outcome of the individual meditative self. A different conception of the self, one that stands in contrast to the individualist one, is the view that the self is essentially a social being. A contemporary song by Lenny Kravitz starts off with an allusion to an extreme kind of social self: ''I am you and you are me, why's that such a mystery?'' The title of the song is ''Believe'' and in the song Kravitz ventures into the topic of religious belief. The lyrics relate to Kierkegaard's nonrational ''leap of faith'' approach to the problem of justifying the existence of God. As Hegel |
1630655_0 | Fear of Flying With Humiliation | To the Editor: The screening procedures that the Transportation Security Administration have adopted are for the most part degrading and at times almost brutal. I have seen elderly women and even one child who could not have been more than 9 years old undergo this indignity. That being said, I find it somewhat strange that Maureen Dowd would propose a ''database of trustworthy American frequent travelers'' (column, Nov. 25). She seems to be opposed to government intrusion, yet here she supports the invasion into our privacy that gathering the information for such a list would require. Fred Seifer Louisville, Ky., Nov. 25, 2004 |
1630482_0 | PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL | |
1630430_0 | Cuba Penalizing Dollar Exchanges | The Cuban government has prohibited United States dollars to be used in transactions without a 10 percent penalty to convert them into Cuban pesos. Although most Americans are not allowed to visit Cuba legally, the nonprofit Center for Constitutional Rights estimates that 64,000 a year will have gone this year -- down from at least 160,000 in 2003 -- traveling under exempt status or via package tours from Canada or Mexico. For Americans who go there, the most economical strategy is to first convert United States currency into Canadian dollars or some other stable foreign currency, said Bob Guild, program director of Marazul Charters, a Miami company that now takes about 7,000 people there a year under government-licensed programs. ''Someone has to figure out the U.S. exchange rate for the euro and Canadian dollar,'' Mr. Guild said, ''but as it is today, if you are going to exchange more than $200, it would be wise to do it before you go.'' Based on recent exchange rates and transaction fees, the dollar-to-euro-to-peso conversion makes $200 worth anywhere from 185 to 191 Cuban convertible pesos. Direct conversion of the same dollar amount to Cuban currency, with the new penalty, equates to 180 convertible pesos. The conversion is even costlier for foreign traveler's checks, which Cuban hotels charge 3 percent to cash. United States credit cards are not accepted in Cuba. Mr. Guild recommends making the first step of the two-part exchange at the Bank of America in the Miami International Airport, where most legal United States travel to Cuba is routed; the costs are lower there than online (but it's wise to call the bank first). And online currency-exchange services generally require two days to process. In Cuba, Mr. Guild recommends sticking with the more widely used sites -- a bank, hotel or cadeca (exchange house) -- and avoiding currency exchanges with people on the street who may try to trade regular pesos, which are worth far less but resemble convertible pesos, for American dollars. Convertible bills say ''pesos convertibles'' on them, but coins are less easily distinguished: Convertible coins picture a place, while the nonconvertible ones have images of people on the front. There's no charge to exchange convertible pesos to American dollars when leaving Cuba, but in the United States, pesos cannot be converted. LYNN WADDELL TRAVEL ADVISORY |
1630628_4 | For Many Cubans, an Uneasy Farewell to the Dollar | with which state salaries are paid. Those pesos are worth only about four cents, even in Cuba. The currency switch is also a clever way for the government to tap into the more than $800 million that Cubans in America wire home every year to family members. Now expatriate Cubans must either send the money in some other currency or let the Castro government collect 10 cents on the dollar in taxes once their family members change the dollars for pesos. For more than a decade, the dollar has remained the dominant currency on the island, used to buy everything from shampoo to furniture and automobiles. The state even embraced the enemy currency, setting up dollar stores, where people with United States currency could buy clothes, food, appliances and durable goods not available to most Cubans. State companies devoted to tourism also collected American dollars. A dual economy quickly evolved. Cubans receiving money from relatives in the United States or earning tips in the tourist industry lived far better than people who depended on meager government salaries paid in Cuban pesos, which range between $5 and $50 a month. The state provides free education and health care as well as subsidized food rations. Today, Cubans say the food rations they can buy with the old pesos at government stores are not enough to live on. As a result, people here have learned to survive through a daily struggle to get hard currency by whatever means necessary. Factory workers steal cigars from corrupt warehouse managers and sell them on the street. Prostitution is widespread in Havana. Teachers and engineers moonlight as cab drivers. Fishermen sell fish illegally door to door. ''If you don't do it, there is no way to survive,'' said Tania, a 32-year-old worker in a cigar factory who did not want her last name published. She was selling stolen Cohiba cigars from the dingy back room of a house near a major hotel in the Vedado neighborhood. Her salary, she said, was about $4.50 a month. ''I have two children,'' she said. ''What are they going to eat? One has to do bad things.'' The introduction of the new currency comes as the Cuban government is reining in private enterprise and re-establishing centralized control over much of the tourist economy. Last April, the government stopped granting licenses for new restaurants and rooming houses. It also reduced the number |
1088929_2 | U.S. Says It Caught a Chinese Smuggler Seeking Gyroscopes That Can Guide Missiles | at which he agreed to be transferred to Boston to face charges, the Pentagon delivered a report to Congress detailing China's buildup of tactical missiles on its coast facing Taiwan. The report concluded that China was ''still decades'' away from being able to project military force far beyond its borders but that its cruise and ballistic missiles ''will give Beijing the 'credible intimidation' needed to accomplish political and military goals without having to rely on overwhelming force-on-force superiority.'' In the gyroscope case, a man identified by authorities as an associate of Mr. Yao, a Canadian citizen of Chinese origin, Collin Xu, was arrested two weeks ago in Boston. The authorities charge that he took delivery of the fiber-optic gyroscopes, all but one of which was a dummy, and he is being held without bail. Mr. Xu pleaded not guilty. His lawyer, Richard M. Egbert, declined to discuss the case on Friday, saying, ''The facts will come out when we develop them.'' An affidavit filed in Boston by a customs agent, Timothy N. Gildea, asserts that Lions Photonics first sought to buy four advanced gyroscopes in December 1997 from a Massachusetts company that is not identified in the complaint. Officials familiar with the case say the company was Fibersense Technology Corporation of Canton, Mass., which makes fiber-optic gyroscopes for the military, chiefly for missiles, aircraft and space vehicles. The complaint says the company told Mr. Yao and Mr. Xu, who said the gyroscopes would be used for a ''superspeed train navigation system,'' that they would need permission from the State Department because the gyroscopes were on the State Department's munitions list, a compilation of technologies that can be exported only with a license. Two such applications were filed in May 1998, one listing the end user as Zhejiang University, and another listing the final user as Changsha Rail University, both in China. The applications were immediately denied by the State Department, which noted that China was a ''prohibited destination'' for the gyroscopes. In August a new order was received by the Massachusetts company for nearly identical equipment, listing a new company as the purchaser: Micro Techland in Montreal. An exemption to the State Department licensing rules permits the shipment of some types of equipment without a license to Canadian companies for use in Canada. Their suspicions aroused, officials at the military manufacturer alerted the Customs Service, which soon began its sting |
1088890_4 | Expert to Help Devise Format For Delivering Music on Net | year to participate, suddenly makes him an even more influential man: companies with technologies that end up being incorporated into the standard format stand to make millions simply from patent royalties or licensing fees. Internet anarchists, pirates and utopians have been predicting that the delivery of music on the Internet would put record labels out of business. Their vision seemed to be confirmed late last year when the industry began a series of lawsuits motivated out of fear -- blocking bands like the Beastie Boys from putting MP3 files of their music on line, for example, and unsuccessfully suing Diamond Technologies, which put the first portable Walkman-like MP3 player on the market. But attendees at the meeting, who saw presentations about Internet business models by the heads of technology at Universal Music and BMG Music, said that the record labels now seemed to have a focused notion of what must be done to help the industry migrate successfully from the CD era to the Internet age. Others in the music business, however, were less enthralled by the meeting. These critics saw it as a step forward for the record industry but a move backward for a long-nurtured Internet dream. In that vision, artists have seen the Internet as a way for their music to reach fans directly; as a way for fans to get music at lower prices because there are no materials costs for transmitting music on line, and as a way for musicians to get a bigger share of the profits from their work by avoiding the record-label middle man. Nina Crowley, who runs the Massachusetts Music Industry Coalition, a national artist's rights organization, noted the absence of musicians and artists at Friday's meeting. ''It's probably the only chance artists have had in 30 years to gain back some ground,'' she said. ''But the R.I.A.A. is going to beat them to it if they don't take some control.'' And won't some pirates feel betrayed that the person who helped open the Internet to music fans is now trying to restrain it for big business? Maybe. But Mr. Chiariglione said he never set out to abet piracy. When the initial standards were set for MPEG, home recording devices for digital piracy did not exist. But now piracy is a primary concern. ''For the technology to be put to good use,'' Mr. Chiariglione said, ''you have to create a boundary.'' |
1093695_0 | THE MARKETS: COMMODITIES | SUGAR DROPS 3.15 PERCENT. Sugar fell after a report that Brazil, the world's largest grower, increased exports while supplies are ample and demand is weak. Sugar for May delivery slid 0.18 cent a pound, to 5.54 cents. |
1093701_0 | '400 Years' in Irish Jail Lasts Just 16 Months | Four Irish Republican Army guerrillas convicted of terrorist crimes were sentenced today to a total of 400 years in prison by a judge in Belfast, Northern Ireland. But under the terms of the Northern Ireland peace agreement approved last year, they will be freed by July 2000. The four men were silent as they were sentenced by Sir Robert Carswell, the Chief Judge of the British province. But they laughed and waved to friends as they were led out of court. One of them, Bernard McGinn, 41, was sentenced to life for his involvement in the murder of Stephen Restorick, the last British soldier to be killed by the I.R.A. before it called a cease-fire in July 1997. The soldier's mother, Rita Restorick, said outside the court, ''I feel justice has been done, but at the same time we have a problem about early release.'' About 300 Catholic I.R.A. and Protestant paramilitary prisoners have already been released early under the peace agreement. The other three men were sentenced for the killing of two other soldiers and involvement in the deaths of two civilians in a bombing in London. Northern Ireland remained tense at nightfall after two nights of clashes between Catholics and Protestants and the police in Portadown. The disorder erupted after the killing of a prominent Catholic lawyer, Rosemary Nelson, by Protestant paramilitaries on Monday. Catholics said the disturbances were provoked by Protestants pounding on drums on the night of St. Patrick's Day. The Protestants, of the patriotic Orange Order, said they were merely celebrating the holiday. The Catholics said the drumming was deliberate provocation on the eve of Ms. Nelson's funeral. Police officers were attacked on Wednesday and Thursday nights by young Catholics throwing gasoline bombs. The police responded by firing plastic bullets. There were no serious injuries. Tonight Catholic political leaders, including Martin McGuinness, the chief negotiator for Sinn Fein, the I.R.A. political wing, called for an end to the violence. He and Gerry Adams, the Sinn Fein president, had just returned from Washington, where meetings with President Clinton and with the Protestant Unionist leader Davd Trimble apparently failed to settle the dispute over the disarmament of the I.R.A. and Protestant guerrllla groups. The leaders are facing an April 2 deadlline for settling the disarmament problem. The dispute is threatening the final approval of the return of home rule to the new Northern Ireland Assembly by the |
1091716_0 | Laying Rubber Over VW Image of Frugality | |
1093387_3 | Rare Expose in China Warns Of Unrest Over Dam Project | every other month. The journal was long known as having a conservative bent, but in the last year or two it has become more provocative. ''Often we publish pieces that are not in keeping with official views, in order to encourage discussion,'' said Zhang Jian, an editor at the journal. Still it is hardly a radical forum. The journal is published by the Strategy and Management Research Society, a small research organization with close ties to the Government and military. It is formally registered with the State Council Office of Economic Restructuring, but it calls itself an independently financed, nongovernmental group. The society's directors include retired military and economic leaders; one is Wang Daohan, an elder statesman and a mentor of President Jiang Zemin. The latest journal was printed in mid-February as the Chinese New Year holiday was winding down, and the critique of the dam has not yet been widely noticed. Mr. Zhang, the editor, said he knew of no official objections to the article up to now. Officials of the Relocation and Development Office of the Three Gorges Project Construction Committee, in Beijing, said today that they only saw the article this week and could not yet comment. Li Rui, the party elder and most senior critic of the dam, said the project was too far along to cancel. But, he added, ''there is no second thought or debate on this among the leaders,'' and he dismissed speculation that Prime Minister Zhu Rongji might try to halt the project, which by the latest official estimate, widely seen as low, will cost $25 billion. On Tuesday the official New China News Agency quoted officials overseeing the project as saying it faces a $3 billion deficit for the current phase of construction, from 1998 to 2003. They expect to raise most of the money needed with domestic bank loans and bond and stock issues. The Yangtze has already been diverted around the dam site, near Yichang, and construction is well under way. China hopes to gain international financing for some of the costs. Mr. Li said he and other domestic opponents hoped the Government would at least decide to hold the reservoir -- a serpentine 400-mile-long lake -- to a lower level than planned. This could lessen the number of uprooted people but would also reduce the economic benefits. Under the current design, the dam's generating capacity would be 18,200 |
1093246_0 | Wright's Sagging Balcony | To the Editor: Your story on March 11, ''Saving Fallingwater From a Fall,'' pointed out ''Wright's failure to put enough reinforcing rods into the concrete -- despite strong admonitions to do so.'' But the consequences of Frank Lloyd Wright's not listening to others are insignificant when measured against the consequences of others' not listening to Wright. In the case of Fallingwater, the problem of the sagging balcony originated when the concrete was poured into formwork. It should have been tilted slightly upward to compensate for the eventual sag of the drying slab. That was Wright's instruction to the on-site apprentice, to insure that such was the case. When the oversight was discovered, that apprentice was removed and replaced by Edgar Tafel -- who completed the job correctly, as evidenced by all the remaining cantilevers built, which are extant and level. As for the question of the suspect balcony: Would not Wright have performed the remedial work necessary at the time of the error to prevent a future collapse? After all, he did live another 23 years! PAUL SHEEHAN New York City The writer is an architect who worked for Edgar Tafel from 1987 to 1990. |
1093334_0 | NEWS SUMMARY | INTERNATIONAL A3-14 China's Huge Dam Project Gets Rare Public Criticism A major intellectual journal in China has published a searing expose of social problems caused by the construction of the giant Three Gorges Dam. Such blunt dissection of Government policy is almost never seen in print in China now. A1 U.S. Envoy Suspected of Lying The head of the American delegation to the Kosovo peace talks might have lied when he testified before Congress three years ago about death squads in Haiti, according to a State Department inquiry. A12 European and American intermediaries prepared to shut down the Kosovo peace talks without agreement, as the Serbs continued to pour troops and tanks into Kosovo. Officials warned that the NATO allies were ready to carry out their threat of a bombing campaign. A12 Forty ethnic Albanians killed in January were unarmed civilians, and the slayings were a crime against humanity, a forensic team said. A13 Russian Official's Surprises Russia's top prosecutor stunned Parliament by saying he would stay on, in defiance of President Boris N. Yeltsin. And he shocked the country when he appeared in a sexual video aired on a Government channel. A3 Espionage Case Under Review The Energy Department is investigating allegations that its intelligence chief was improperly barred from briefing Congress last year about a Chinese espionage case at a nuclear weapons laboratory. A11 Israeli Politician Convicted Aryeh Deri, a powerful Israeli politician, was convicted of corruption in a verdict that outraged the ultra-Orthodox Sephardic Jews who consider him their champion. A14 Balloon Edges Towards Goal The Breitling Orbiter 3 headed into the home stretch over the Atlantic in its bid to become the first balloon to circle the world nonstop. A8 World Briefing A6 NATIONAL A16-23 U.S. Study of Marijuana Supports Medical Use The active ingredients in marijuana appear to be useful for treating pain, nausea and the severe weight loss associated with AIDS, according to a study commissioned by the Government. The report also said there was no evidence that giving the drug to sick people would increase illicit use in the general population. A1 Study of Heartburn-Cancer Link Chronic heartburn can greatly increase a person's risk of developing one of the deadliest of cancers, adenocarcinoma of the esophagus. A18 U.S. Says 'Vitamin' Is Water The F.T.C. accused two companies of bottling salt water, labeling it ''Vitamin O'' and selling it as a dietary supplement for |
1095477_1 | Aid to Environment, Or Threat to Lake?; Cornell Pursues Pumping Plan, But Critics Fear Fouled Water | warming by reducing the need to burn coal to generate electricity. For the most part, government officials have agreed, and construction is expected to get into high gear in April. But a small, determined coalition of critics from Ithaca and surrounding Tompkins County says the school's plan should never have been approved. They recently garnered support from as far afield as the Natural Resources Defense Council, a private environmental organization, and Ralph Nader. They say New York State environmental officials granted permits for the project in violation of a provision of the Federal Clean Water Act, which prohibits new releases of anything into a lake or river that is included on a list of ''impaired'' water bodies. Even though the project would return to the lake only the water that it removed, that would be considered a new release under state law. The south tip of Cayuga Lake was added to a list of impaired water bodies last year. Officials with Cornell and the state contend, however, that the listing is in a special category not covered by the Federal ban on discharges. At the last minute, even as several dozen train cars loaded with miles of pipe sit along the lake shore, a burst of E-mails and letters persuaded the United States Environmental Protection Agency to begin a review of the project and the permits granted by the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation. The review, which could result in the permits being revoked, is expected to be finished in early April, said Mary Mears, a spokeswoman for the E.P.A. She said it was ''fairly unusual'' for the agency to conduct such a review, because states are given the authority to track water quality. There is no panic yet at Cornell. Engineers and administrators say that they attended to every detail through five years of planning, research, and scrutiny. They have gained endorsements from the local Sierra Club chapter, the county and town governments, even from a biology professor at Ithaca College down the hill -- not a usual source of support for Cornell. But some supporters of the plan say they are beginning to wonder whether any big project, good or bad, is possible anymore. ''This is a major societal problem,'' said Dr. John Confer, the biology professor at Ithaca College, who teaches ornithology now but is also an expert in the dynamics of lakes. He said |
1095499_0 | E-mail: Friendly or Alienating? | To the Editor: Avraham Balaban's rumination on the new voluntary alienation that E-mail engenders is too pessimistic (Op-Ed, March 22). Perhaps he's only nostalgic for the enforced neighborliness that people must endure in a tiny country like Israel, where everybody, as they say, is in your shoes as soon as you step through your front door. He overlooks the vast increase in immediate, informal communication E-mail has given us, not the least value of which is protection from many of those wicked faces we must otherwise endure in the workplace. E-mail has proved for many of this vast country's mobile population a way of finding, resuming and maintaining contacts and friendships that have often lapsed or been lost for 50 years and nourishing them over uncrossable gulfs around the world. JASCHA KESSLER Santa Monica, Calif., March 22, 1999 |
1090186_0 | World Briefing | ASIA AFGHANISTAN: NEW CLASHES -- Fighting intensified between the ruling Taliban militia and the opposition, a day after both sides announced they had agreed to hold peace talks in Turkmenistan on March 10. Opposition forces said they had gained some ground in the central province of Bamiyan. (Reuters) CHINA: MILLIONS BEING RESETTLED -- China has started resettling two million more people to make way for the Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River, bringing the total number displaced to three million, the official New China News Agency said. The agency said one million people are being resettled along the upper reaches of the river. (Reuters) INDIA: SAVING THE TIGER -- Fourteen countries with tiger populations pledged to work to set up programs to save tigers from poachers and developments that destroy their habitats. India, Bhutan, Nepal and Myanmar, which share common borders, agreed to cooperate on wildlife management. Britain said it would contribute $80,000 for conservation. (Agence France-Presse) JAPAN: 13 ADMIT SCANDAL ROLE -- Thirteen former defense officials pleaded guilty to being involved in a multimillion-dollar scandal in which major companies are said to have overcharged the Government. Defense Minister Fukushiro Nukaga resigned in November over the scandal, although he was not accused of being directly involved. (Agence France-Presse) THE AMERICAS MEXICO: POLITICAL INFIGHTING -- In a barb at President Ernesto Zedillo, Manuel Bartlett Diaz, who has announced he will seek the governing party's nomination for presidential candidate in 2000, called on the party's other candidates to declare their intentions and resign from public office. Mr. Zedillo is believed to back his Interior Minister, Francisco Labastida Ochoa, to be the candidate. Julia Preston (NYT) CANADA: NUNAVUT PREMIER PICKED -- Paul Okalik, a 34-year-old Inuit lawyer, has been chosen the first Premier of the Arctic territory of Nunavut when it comes into existence on April 1. Mr. Okalik, of Iqaluit, was one of 19 legislators elected last month to the first Nunavut legislature. He was selected by the new legislators, and had not been expected to win. Anthony DePalma (NYT) EUROPE SWITZERLAND: EMERGENCY TRADE MEETING -- The European Union called for a special meeting of the World Trade Organization in Geneva on Monday to denounce Washington's preparations for sanctions on $520 million worth of European goods. The American move, protesting Europe's preference for importing bananas grown in the Caribbean, was described as ''irresponsible unilateral action.'' Elizabeth Olson (NYT) DENMARK: PROSTITUTION LEGALIZED |
1096287_1 | 'Mad Cow Disease' Seen in French Zoos | same way that British cattle were dying from mad cow disease. As a result, feed manufacturers stopped adding British beef to their products in 1996. That year, Dr. Noelle Bons, a neurobiologist at Montpellier University in France reported that a rhesus monkey and two lemurs from the local zoo had died of a brain disease similar to mad cow disease. But a link to animal feed could not be proved. In the study reported today, Dr. Bons and her colleagues fed a large portion of infected cattle brain to two young lemurs that had never before eaten meat. One animal received one dose, equivalent to a 154-pound person's eating a one-pound hamburger made entirely from cow brain. The second got two similar doses a couple months apart. After five months, one animal showed ''a loss in vitality'' and was killed by its cage mates, Dr. Bons said. Researchers then killed the other lemur, and the tissues of both animals were examined for the presence of infectious prions. Another 20 lemurs from three French zoos were also killed as part of a program to cull certain animals. Two showed subtle neurological symptoms but the other 18 looked completely normal. All had eaten animal feed containing British beef for many years. Finally, 3 young lemurs that had never eaten beef were also killed; they showed no signs of infectious prions, Dr. Bons said. But the 2 animals intentionally infected and the 20 lemurs living in different zoos showed identical patterns of infection. In primates, the infection first takes hold in epithelial tissues of the gut, moves to tonsils, esophagus, lymph nodes and spleen and then spreads up the spinal cord to the brain, Dr. Bons said. This is the first time that such a pattern has been shown in animals incubating a prion disease, said Dr. Paul Brown, a senior research scientist at the National Institute of Neurological Diseases and Stroke in Bethesda, Md., and co-author of the paper. Dr. Bons said she suspected the pattern was typical of most prion diseases, called spongiform encephalopathies, found in many mammalian species. Prion diseases take many years to spread, incubate and produce symptoms, but once symptoms appear the disease usually progresses swiftly and is always fatal. Thus far, 39 people in Britain and one Frenchman have died from new variant C.J.D., which most experts think is contracted from eating infected beef, particularly brain tissue. |
1096382_0 | Talking to Women | To the Editor: A March 28 Week in Review article on women's magazines cites a statement by the 35-year-old writer Danielle Crittenden that women of her generation are ''even more miserable and insecure, more thwarted and obsessed with men, than the most depressed, Lithium-popping suburban readers of the 1950's.'' But lithium was not introduced in America as a natural drug to help manic-depression until the mid- 1960's. Ms. Crittenden was probably thinking of Valium, an addictive drug that was overprescribed to women in the 1950's. This is the kind of bad health care for women that the feminist movement worked hard to correct. LARRY ARMSTRONG Spokane, Wash., March 29, 1999 |
1096304_1 | As Clock Ticks for Peace Pact, British and Irish Leaders Huddle | destroyed, possibly leading to a new round of sectarian violence between paramilitaries of the Protestant majority and the Catholic minority. The peace agreement would give more political power to Northern Ireland's Catholic minority and more influence in the province's affairs to the overwhelmingly Catholic Republic of Ireland. Gerry Adams, the leader of Sinn Fein, points out that the peace agreement does not require disarmament before May 2000 and that the I.R.A.'s 21-month cease-fire is evidence of its support for peace. An Easter deadline for agreement was set after Mo Mowlam, Britain's Northern Ireland Secretary, said she would begin selecting a Cabinet on Wednesday or Thursday. The new Cabinet must be formed to pave the way for the transfer of home rule powers to the Assembly. The province has been governed directly by Britain since 1972. While she could extend the deadline, as she has in the past, Ms. Mowlam invited the two Prime Ministers to her official residence outside Belfast tonight to meet Northern Ireland political leaders, with a view toward achieving a compromise in the next two days. Mr. Blair, arriving here at 7 P.M. after spending the day in London dealing with the situation in Kosovo, looked grim, saying before he met the politicians that if they failed, this would be ''the greatest betrayal of the people I can think of.'' Mr. Ahern arrived from Dublin, where he had been under pressure to state neutral Ireland's position on the NATO attacks in Yugoslavia. ''This is small buns compared to Kosovo,'' one British official said. ''Not to those involved in it,'' replied a colleague. Tonight's talks came after a day of apparently fruitless discussions between the two principal political adversaries, Mr. Adams and David Trimble, leader of the Protestant Ulster Unionist Party, who is also First Minister of the Assembly. Mr. Trimble has the power to deprive Sinn Fein of ministerial posts in the new Cabinet and said he would do so unless he was convinced that the I.R.A. had made a ''credible beginning'' to disarmament. While the I.R.A. has repeatedly stated unequivocally that it will not disarm, politicians were looking anxiously to the guerrilla organization's annual Easter proclamation, expected this week, for a change of tone, possibly a softening of its stand on disarmament. Officials and experts note that both Mr. Adams and Mr. Trimble must be able to defend any compromise as honorable to their hard-line supporters. |
1096278_2 | Unlikely Tool for Species Preservation: Warfare | in the February issue of the journal Conservation Biology by Paul S. Martin, a paleoecologist at the University of Arizona, and Christine R. Szuter, editor in chief of the University of Arizona Press. Dr. Martin says the theory could partly explain why bison, elk, deer and bears escaped the fate of other, even bigger North American animal species that became extinct 13,000 years ago. These included, among others, mammoths, mastodons, camels, giant sloths, tapirs and predators that depended on them, like giant short-faced bears, a giant wolf called the dire wolf and the saber-toothed cat. The bison is the largest surviving life form in North America, and Dr. Martin is the chief advocate of the view that the earlier vanished species of megafauna, as they are called, were hunted to extinction in a continentwide ''blitzkrieg'' lasting several centuries by human hunters who had migrated to North America from Siberia 15,000 years ago or more. ''The land had been stripped of most of its native megafauna through human influence'' long before Lewis and Clark appeared on the scene, Dr. Martin and Dr. Szuter write. And except for the influence of humans, they say, much larger populations of the surviving bison, elk and deer would have greeted the white explorers. Other scientists contend that the ancient megafauna were extinguished by climatic change or disease, or by a combination of factors. Be that as it may, it is abundantly clear that Indians and their ancestors, called paleo-Indians by scientists, transformed the landscape and ecological relationships of the Western Hemisphere, with both positive and negative effects. Indians rearranged the land with earthworks, farm fields, houses, towns and trails. As top predators, the impact of their hunting on many species rippled through pre-Columbian ecosystems. Indians also set frequent fires for one reason or another, and many pre-Columbian forests were more open and parklike as a result. In the West, the Indians' fires helped create, renew and maintain grassland ecosystems. Grasses with deep roots flourished, and the tender new shoots that sprang from them after the fires provided ideal forage for bison. The ecological loop came full circle when the Indians killed the bison, the underpinning of their hunter's way of life. The idea that Indian warfare created game sanctuaries in buffer zones between tribes has been proposed by a number of authorities. In the 1960's, Harold Hickerson, an anthropologist, found that in the 18th and |
1089168_3 | THE MARKETS: Market Place; Worldwide, Things Are Not Going Better for Coke | Sanford C. Bernstein & Company, predicts that the drop in the Brazilian currency's value will reduce Coke's earnings more than the 6 percent he had originally forecast, given the rest of the global risk facing the company. In 1998, Coca-Cola reported, currency devaluation worldwide reduced earnings by 9 percent. In addition, Mr. Pecoriello expects case volume in Brazil to fall 13 percent this quarter, far worse than the 3 percent decline in the fourth quarter of 1998. Global volume will grow by 4 to 5 percent, he predicts, down from the 6 percent growth recorded last year and well off the 7 to 8 percent growth target of Coca-Cola's management. ''If Coke doesn't adjust marketing spending for the volume shortfall, margins should come under additional pressure,'' Mr. Pecoriello wrote in a note to investors last week, referring to the company's worldwide operations. He rates Coca-Cola stock as ''market perform,'' while Coke's chief rival, Pepsico, is rated ''outperform,'' the highest ranking. And while he predicts that Coke's earnings for this year will come in at $1.46, he cautions, ''There's still risk in our numbers.'' Another analyst, Marc Cohen of Goldman, Sachs, said Brazil was one piece of what might be a very large problem for Coca-Cola. ''I'm growing increasingly concerned that the growth rate of the company is slowing,'' he said, citing compound earnings-per-share growth just under 13 percent for the 1990's -- not the 15 percent the company has repeatedly promised. In Colombia and Venezuela, volume is also in a downward spiral, off more than 16 percent in the fourth quarter. And Colombia shows signs of shrinking demand for soft drinks over all, said Laura D. Meizler, a Latin American beverage analyst with Salomon Smith Barney. ''Substitute products have been growing,'' she said, noting that malt drinks are among them. The good news for Coke's shareholders is that a personal appearance by Mr. Ivester tends to have a soothing effect on the skeptical, who find comfort in his command of the business and his breadth of experience. ''One of the virtues of a 113-year-old company is that we've traveled over bumpy roads before,'' he declared in Chicago. ''We have seen the movie before.'' The bad news is that in many countries around the world -- in Japan, Russia, Germany, Colombia, Venezuela, South Africa, Brazil, to list just the big box-office names -- Coke's epic is only in the first reel. |
1089107_1 | Centers Publish Breast Cancer Guide | a plain-English version of recommendations that the cancer network has been issuing and updating yearly for doctors since 1995. They are in the format of a 24-page magazine article with many diagrams and flow charts, and a glossary. Dr. Ted Gansler, director of health content for the American Cancer Society, said the recommendations were more specific and more directive than information that the cancer society offered patients in the past. ''It's what we find many patients want,'' Dr. Gansler said. ''It's moderately complex, for patients who want take an active role in their treatment.'' But he added that the material was meant to be taken as ''guidelines, not recipes,'' for women and their doctors to use together. Some cancer experts had reservations about the guidelines. Dr. Patricia Ganz, a breast cancer specialist at the Jonsson Cancer Center at the University of California at Los Angeles, said, ''Getting information out to consumers is very important, but these guidelines are very dense for the average consumer. It's surprising they didn't make it a little more user-friendly.'' In addition, Dr. Ganz said, in some cases the guidelines call for more aggressive testing and treatment than many physicians would recommend, particularly for very small tumors. She said patients who took the recommendations as the letter of the law might become unduly frightened that their own doctors' treatment plans were inadequate. The guidelines, she said, should be used in discussing treatment, but should not be allowed to dictate it. The document begins by listing information women must find out in order to use the guidelines, including details about the stage of cancer, number, size, grade and type of tumors, involvement of lymph nodes and presence of estrogen receptors. Because biopsy results are so important in determining treatment, the guidelines stress that all women get a second opinion, or pathology review, on the biopsy tissue. Once the diagnosis is clear, a woman can follow a series of ''decision trees'' to find out what cancer experts would recommend. Dr. Gansler noted that the breast cancer information was the first in a series of patients' guidelines that would be offered for the most common forms of cancer. Prostate cancer recommendations will be next, he said. The breast cancer guidelines can be obtained from the American Cancer Society by calling (800) ACS-2345 or visiting its Web site, www.cancer. org or from the cancer network at (888) 909-NCCN, or www.nccn.org. |
1089125_0 | THE MARKETS: COMMODITIES | SUGAR PLUNGES. Sugar futures fell almost 4 percent amid signs of weakening demand from India and Russia, the world's biggest consumers. In New York, sugar for May delivery fell 0.24 cent, to 6.02 cents a pound. |
1089108_0 | Search for New Planets Yields Confusion | The discovery of planets around other stars has made Epicureans of astronomers. Not that they now put out the fine silver, pop the cork and dress for dinner by candlelight every long night under the observatory dome; they are still unwrapping their tired sandwiches and tearing open the corn chips, thank you. But nowadays their tastes run to the cosmic musings of the eponymous founder of Epicurean philosophy. Epicurus, a Greek philosopher in the fourth century B.C., did not explicitly predict the existence of planets around stars other than the Sun, but he believed in an infinity of worlds, meaning other ordered systems beyond the visible universe as it was then conceived. This contrasted to the Earth-centered cosmos of the contemporary Aristotle, whose cosmology prevailed in Western thought for more than two millennia. Only in the last three years have astronomers established the reality of latter-day Epicurean speculations about a plurality of worlds, which in recent centuries came to mean planets beyond the solar system, some possibly inhabited. But while astronomers tip their hats to Epicurus, they just wish he had advised them how to make sense of the distant planets being detected by their telescopes. Finding something is not the same as discovering what is found. The more astronomers study the growing evidence of extra-solar planets, the less the planets resemble anything in the one planetary system they had known and had based their theories on: the Sun's family of planets. At last count, astronomers in the United States and Europe had observed 18 nearby Sunlike stars showing telltale motions from the gravity of large, unseen planets orbiting them, and they fully expect to find more. Yet they suspect they have seen enough to begin rethinking how nature creates and destroys planets and choreographs their orbital minuets. Nine of the objects hug closer to their parent stars than Mercury is to the Sun, closer than standard theory predicted planets could be; one is so near that it makes a complete revolution -- its full year -- every 3.1 Earth days. The other nine travel unusually elliptical, or oval-shaped, orbits, several of them plunging in relatively close to their stars and then swinging far out again; orbits in the solar system are almost circular. Several extrasolar planets are at least three times as massive as Jupiter, the solar system's giant, and one is estimated to have 11 times the Jovian |
1089173_2 | Doctors Warn of the Dangers in Muscle-Building Drugs | the last couple of years as several professional athletes have acknowledged using the chemicals to help build muscle. While the National Football League and the International Olympic Committee have banned the use of these chemicals, the baseball player Mark McGwire, who set a home run record with the St. Louis Cardinals last year, has said he uses a testosterone-boosting drug called androstenedione, which is related to DHEA. DHEA has also become popular as an aphrodisiac, some doctors said. A guide on the use of DHEA found in at least two drugstores yesterday said the chemical ''helps fight disease, increase sex drive and improve mood and energy.'' ''It's gotten to a scary level,'' said Gary Guerriero, co-owner of the U.S. Athletic Training Center in midtown. ''People are just taking things because they are available and they are not taking the precautions that should go along with them.'' Although there is no documented scientific evidence that DHEA is an aphrodisiac, the drug could possibly increase sexual aggressiveness because it boosts the production of testosterone, said Dr. David H. Barad, director of reproductive endocrinology and infertility at Montefiore Medical Center. And taken with large amounts of alcohol, he said, it could produce a feeling of enhanced libido. ''Alcohol would help the body absorb the DHEA faster,'' Dr. Barad said. ''That's probably why these women took it that way.'' Over-the-counter use of hormone-producing chemicals like DHEA has been the source of heated controversy for years among doctors and scientists. In September, the New England Journal of Medicine published six articles that described numerous cases of people becoming severely ill with nausea, lethargy, impotence and heart disorders by using over-the-counter chemicals and herbs to improve their health. The journal criticized supplement makers and practitioners of alternative medicine for advocating the use of ''unproven and potentially harmful treatments.'' Dr. Millman said chemicals like DHEA act very much like anabolic steroids, could have severely damaging side effects and could stunt growth in children. DHEA is believed to increase testosterone levelsand possibly cause hairiness in women, male pattern baldness and high blood pressure. It could also put women at greater risk for heart disease, he said. In men, doctors said, DHEA could cause impotence and enlargement of the heart. Jason Merritt, a personal trainer at the Eastern Athletic Club in Brooklyn Heights, said that many of his clients have used DHEA, at his recommendation, and that he has |
1096171_0 | Questioning Three Gorges Dam | In China, where even a slight relaxation in suppression of debate can indicate a softening of official policy, it is encouraging that some publications have cast an increasingly critical eye on the Three Gorges Dam being built on the Yangtze River. The official line is that there is no turning back on a project that will destroy one of the world's great scenic areas, inundate hundreds of archeological sites and force 1.3 million people to resettle elsewhere when the dam's 400-mile reservoir floods towns and farmlands. But the insoluble social, environmental and technical problems that have plagued the project cannot be wished away, and they may now be getting some consideration. The dam has been a matter of internal disagreement within the Communist Party for some time. As far back as 1956, a vice minister of electric power, Li Rui, produced a report arguing for smaller dams on tributaries of the Yangtze rather than a 600-foot behemoth at the Three Gorges. In 1992, when the final vote to approve the Three Gorges project was taken in the National People's Congress, a third of the delegates abstained or voted against it, even though the dam was championed by Li Peng, who was then Prime Minister. But all public debate on the project has been banned since the Tiananmen demonstrations in 1989. So it is noteworthy that the Chinese journal Strategy and Management, a publication with some links to the Government, printed an article by a scholar under a pseudonym detailing the failure of resettlement efforts so far, and the extreme problems of relocating hundreds of thousands of people into steep hillsides that are barely habitable. In February, People's Daily, the party-controlled newspaper, ran articles on engineering issues and problems with excavating cultural relics that would be destroyed in the flood zone. Other newspapers have reported on official corruption connected to the project. Chinese media reports have also noted that existing flood-control systems and older dams are neglected and in danger of collapse as attention is diverted to new projects like Three Gorges. Last December, Prime Minister Zhu Rongji, who is considered neutral on the project, raised concerns about the project's safety and suggested it may be necessary to bring in international experts to monitor the engineering. Li Peng, who now heads the National People's Congress, is expected to fight any retreat on the project. But the thaw in repression of criticism |
1096115_0 | Philosophy Illuminates Minds Darkened by Misfortune | During an unusual course in philosophy and literature that Earl Shorris was teaching specifically for the poor and homeless, a student who had a history of violent behavior telephoned Mr. Shorris. The student had become so angry at a colleague, he reported, that he wanted ''to smack her up against the wall.'' Mr. Shorris feared the worst. Was this a call from jail? No, because instead of striking outward, the student had reflected inward and asked himself, ''What would Socrates do?'' Not even a university provost, I imagine, would raise such a question in the heat of confrontation. But in his 1997 book on American poverty, ''New American Blues'' (W. W. Norton), Mr. Shorris also tells of prisoners in a maximum-security prison reading Boethius's ''Consolation of Philosophy,'' and of yet another prisoner who recommended that Mr. Shorris take his homeless students to museums and teach them Plato's ''Allegory of the Cave.'' It is startling to read about lives that have been ruined by criminal choices, crippling addictions, disturbed minds or accumulated misfortunes being so touched by Great Books and High Art. But Mr. Shorris has been proselytizing for their salvational potential for some years, and earlier this month The New York Times reported that his initial 1995 class, which was created after intensive screening of candidates, has now become a model for a five-year multistate program run by Bard College. There are also courses being taught in New York City and New Brunswick, N.J., as well as in Seattle and Anchorage, Alaska, and Mr. Shorris is also taking his message to British Columbia, Mexico and France. The irony is that all this is taking place in a period when so much energy has been expended in universities to undercut the authority of the very material Mr. Shorris is promoting to the imprisoned and the homeless: Plato and Aristotle, Euripides and Pericles, William Blake and symbolic logic. As Mr. Shorris makes clear in his book, one of the inspirations for his enterprise was the educational philosophy of Robert Maynard Hutchins in the 1950's at the University of Chicago, where Mr. Shorris says he received ''the best education in America.'' The undergraduate degree required 14 yearlong required courses and allowed only 2 electives. But even the University of Chicago (where I did graduate work in a program that had similarly ambitious devotion to Great Books), has long since left behind such rigors |
1094552_2 | A New Threat to Irish Peace | credible that the organization has genuinely changed. So why is the I.R.A. so determined to keep all its weapons now? In part because disarmament is a symbol of trust, which many Catholics do not feel. In El Salvador, the guerrillas turned over most of their weapons to the United Nations after the war ended. They felt safe in part because former guerrillas were joining a new civilian police force. Many Catholics in Northern Ireland do not yet have this sense of security. The latest illustration was the murder March 15 of the attorney Rosemary Nelson, who had defended a man accused of an I.R.A. killing of two police officers. She said she had received death threats from the Royal Ulster Constabulary, Northern Ireland's overwhelmingly Protestant police. Her accusation is credible to many Catholics because there is evidence of possible official complicity in previous killings. One is the 1989 murder of Patrick Finucane, a lawyer with accused I.R.A. clients. The British Government has asked a constable from England and the American F.B.I. to supervise the R.U.C. investigation into Ms. Nelson's death. But the R.U.C. cannot be impartial. Britain assigned London police the task of investigating threats against Ms. Nelson. It must also take the investigation of her death out of R.U.C. hands. Sinn Fein leaders argue that Mr. Trimble is making demands not required by the peace agreement, while changes wanted by Catholics, such as police reform, are still far off. This is correct, but misses the point that Protestants also lack trust. Many do not believe the I.R.A. has really changed. In part because of the I.R.A.'s refusal to disarm, the peace agreement is in serious danger of rejection by Protestants in the assembly. Allowing Sinn Fein ministers into the cabinet before the I.R.A. turns over a single gun is seen by Protestant groups as surrender. London and, notably, Dublin have sided with Mr. Trimble on this issue. They are asking the I.R.A. to make at least a symbolic start toward disarmament. The I.R.A. -- and Protestant paramilitaries, which are also declining to disarm -- have so far refused. ''The dead control the thinking of the living,'' says Paul Arthur, a professor of politics at the University of Ulster. Each side constantly asks: How much can we give up before we betray our dead? They need to be asking: How much can we hold back before we betray the living? |
1091476_3 | Saving Fallingwater From a Fall | and a slower bending (called creep by engineers) which occurs mainly in the building's first year, Mr. Silman said. In this case, the house never stopped bending. ''If it was still moving after 60 years, the inevitable conclusion is that it would eventually move far enough to fall into the river,'' Mr. Silman said. (The bending of Fallingwater's concrete trays is distinct from settling, a far more mundane problem.) At first, Mr. Kaufmann, said to be worried about the cantilevers until he died in 1955, kept tabs on the problem, by having detailed measurements made every year. But after the family donated the house to the conservancy, which opened it to the public in 1964, measuring was discontinued. Four years ago, Ms. Waggoner decided to take another look at the cantilevers. That's when the extent of the problem became clear. These days, movement detectors, wired to key parts of the structure, send data to a laptop computer hidden under a bathroom sink. Each week, the data are sent by modem to Mr. Silman. Wright was known for creating buildings with irritating faults -- his flat roofs often leaked -- and many are deteriorating with age. Mr. Silman's firm has helped save several Wright buildings, including the architect's Wisconsin studio, Taliesin, which was severely damaged after a 200-year-old oak fell through its roof last year. Mr. Silman's solution to the Fallingwater problem is straightforward: he plans to drill holes through the concrete structure, then insert steel cables through the holes. The cables will be slowly tightened, increasing the tension in the concrete. (This is called post-tensioning.) The plan, however, won't be made final until architects and designers have a chance to weigh in during a public forum on April 10, at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh. ''This is an icon, and I want to do it right,'' Mr. Silman said. ''I want there to be a consensus.'' Ms. Waggoner, whose office looks down on the building from a Wright-designed guesthouse, said Fallingwater ''represents all the aspirations of the 20th century.'' She added, ''These problems don't diminish the importance of what this building did for architecture.'' She is charged with raising as much as $6 million for Fallingwater projects (including unsexy jobs like bringing the drinking water into Federal compliance). Mr. Silman's post-tensioning will cost about $1 million and is expected to be finished by the end of this year. |
1092803_0 | Screening Method for Cervical Cancer | Cervical cancer, curable if detected early, kills more women in the developing world than any other cancer for the lack of a simple, inexpensive and effective screening method. But researchers in Zimbabwe believe they have found just that, in vinegar, a trained eye and a flashlight. Reporting in the current issue of The Lancet, researchers said they simply swabbed a woman's cervix with acetic acid (vinegar) and a minute later looked to see if some cells had turned white, an indication of the presence of precancerous lesions caused by the human papilloma virus. The technique itself is not new. Doctors used it before -- and sometimes even after -- more sophisticated testing became widely used in industrialized nations. In those countries, screening for cervical cancer is done by examination of the cells of the cervix after a Pap smear has been taken. But in less developed countries, this kind of screening may not be available. Researchers estimate that only 5 percent of women in developing countries are routinely screened for cervical cancer, compared with 70 percent in industrialized nations. ''What makes the screening program really successful is not the test itself but the ability to cover a lot of people with the test,'' Dr. Paul D. Blumenthal, an author of the Lancet paper and an associate professor of gynecology and obstetrics at Johns Hopkins University. ''It provides immediate results in hard-to-reach populations whether in a developing country or in rural or center-city settings in the industrial world.'' Worldwide, cervical cancer kills 200,000 women each year, mainly in Africa, Asia and Latin America, said the researchers. In the United States, the disease led to 4,900 deaths last year. In the two-phase, cross-sectional study by the University of Zimbabwe and a nonprofit reproductive health center affiliated with Johns Hopkins, 10,934 women were screened by nurse-midwives in 15 primary-care clinics around Harare, the capital. Visual assessments and Pap smears were done in both phases. In the first phase, if the visual assessment suggested an abnormal condition, the woman received a colposcopy (a microscopic examination). In the second phase, all women had the colposcopy. The acetic acid test detected more than 75 percent of potential cancers, although false-positives in visual assessments were high in the second phase. American researchers see little application for the simpler screenings here, though pockets of women may not be screened. Dr. Diane Solomon, senior investigator at the National Cancer |
1092802_3 | New Tools Yield Clues to Disasters at Sea | maintenance. Life on oil tankers, freighters and even fishing boats is safer. Few bulkers fly the American flag or carry American crews, but thousands of the giant vessels are registered in countries like Cyprus, Liberia and Panama. The Derbyshire was only four years old when she went down and had won Lloyd's highest general rating. The 47-year-old captain, Geoffrey V. Underhill, was a master mariner who had completed many voyages. Besides, at 965 feet, the ship was one of the largest afloat and was viewed as very safe. As bulkers go, she was comfortable -- each crewman had his own cabin and shower. Wives were welcome, and two had joined what would be its last voyage. After a stop in New York in July 1980, the ship went to Canada and loaded thousands of tons of iron ore concentrates bound for Japan, where they were to be turned into cars, ships and girders for skyscrapers. A typhoon intervened. Winds of up to 100 miles per hour drove waves to heights of 60 to 100 feet. ''Vessel hove to violent storm,'' the Derbyshire radioed hours before she disappeared. The signal meant she was moving forward just enough to maintain steerage way, struggling to keep her bow into the waves, the safest pose in heavy seas. The Agony Families Push For Investigation After the Derbyshire vanished, family pain was sharp for Peter Ridyard, whose 25-year-old son, David, had been aboard. Mr. Ridyard was a ship surveyor for the Salvage Association, a group based in London that assesses damaged vessels for insurance companies like Lloyd's of London. Experts say his tireless hunt for the truth helped advance the case. In particular, Mr. Ridyard warned that the Derbyshire, and sister ships, might have had structural flaws at a heavy wall that separated engine from cargo spaces and lay astern, near the ship's vast superstructure. Weakness at this spot, called frame 65, would have left the Derbyshire and her sister ships prone to breaking in two, he suggested, and that might explain why the ship had vanished so quickly without any calls for help. In 1986, his hunch strengthened as a sister ship ran aground on Irish rocks and split in half near frame 65. But an inquiry drew no firm conclusions, stating in 1989 only that the Derbyshire was probably lost to rough weather. It was at this point that Mr. Lambert of the |
1092848_1 | Renegade Protestants Kill Lawyer in Ulster | men of the Orange Order have tried to walk at the beginning of the Protestant ''marching season'' each July, provoking province-wide violence. The main paramilitary groups in Northern Ireland have maintained a cease-fire while their political representatives took part in the negotiations that led to the peace settlement that was signed last April 10 and that faces a deadline this April 2 to be put into effect. The Red Hand Defenders are a small band of dissidents dedicated to upsetting the accord, and Mrs. Nelson's death is the third they have claimed since May, when they began a campaign of pipe bomb attacks on Catholic families and arson at churches. In the hours after the bombing, young Catholic vigilantes in Lurgan threw firebombs at members of the largely Protestant Royal Ulster Constabulary and the British Army. ''The sole aim of the murderers is to remove any chance of reconciliation,'' Prime Minister Tony Blair said in London. ''They will not be allowed to succeed.'' Mrs. Nelson and a group from Garvaghy Road came to London last month to discuss the Drumcree standoff with Mr. Blair. She was quoted in this morning's Irish News as saying that the confrontation had left relations in the town in tatters. The bombing occurred as the political leaders of Northern Ireland gathered in Washington, where they will try to resolve remaining disagreements with the help of President Clinton, who was a force behind the accord last April. The White House spokesman, Joe Lockhart, opened his daily briefing with a statement from the President calling the bombing ''despicable and cowardly.'' David Trimble, leader of the Ulster Unionists and First Minister of the new Northern Ireland Assembly, called the murder ''an appalling act'' and said, ''At the end of the day it is going to be counterproductive and it is not going to succeed.'' Gerry Adams, president of Sinn Fein, the political wing of the Irish Republican Army, called Mrs. Nelson a beacon for truth and justice whose killing put a heavy burden on the signatories to overcome obstacles to putting the pact into effect. The accord was endorsed in referendums in the Irish Republic and in Northern Ireland, a British province. Britain has set April 2 as the deadline for transferring home rule to Belfast, but politicians in Northern Ireland are at an impasse over disarming the paramilitaries. Mr. Adams insists that Sinn Fein must take the |
1094893_0 | Notebook; A Problem in Special Ed | Despite increased attention to the needs of disabled students, the nation faces a chronic and persistent shortage of certified special education teachers, according to the Federal Department of Education's annual report on educating the disabled. In the 1995-96 school year, the latest in the national survey, there were 33,000 fewer fully certified special education teachers than there were positions, or about 9 percent of the 355,000 slots, said the report, which was released this month. There was better news for the youngest children. Reflecting a hiring effort, the teaching slots for disabled children 3 to 5 years old more than doubled, to roughly 27,000 in 1995-96 from 13,000 in 1987-88. The teaching shortage for that group, as high as 25 percent in 1987-88, was about 13 percent in 1995-96. MICHAEL POLLAK |
1094767_8 | NATIONAL ORIGINS: Plant City, Florida; Where Strawberries Thrive Till Summer Comes | on the Plougastel peninsula in Brittany produced the garden strawberry now cultivated everywhere, in a wide number of hybridized varieties. Two-thirds of Mr. Simmons's strawberries are Sweet Charlies, and a third are Camarosas. Camarosas are California-bred, but Sweet Charlies are Florida natives, developed at the nation's only research lab devoted to strawberries, the Research and Education Station of the University of Florida, located near Dover, just a few miles down the road from the Simmons properties. Every year, scientists there produce 100 to 150 experimental genetic crosses. Seeds taken from them are germinated, and 10,000 to 15,000 plants are set out in trial beds each year. The scientists consider themselves lucky if 1 in 10,000 shows promise. ''This center has released two varieties in 10 years,'' said David D. Dunigan, a plant virologist on the Dover staff. ''We have a couple now that we're keeping a close watch on. This is no work for people in a rush.'' Strawberry hybridization is a kind of balancing act. Obviously, bad-tasting strawberries won't sell, so those are eliminated. The goal is a juicy sweetness, balanced by a slight undertone of acid, in a berry that is soft, with no hint of woodiness, but still firm enough ''to make it to Montreal in the back of a semi,'' in Dr. Dunigan's words. Looks and size do not affect taste, but they affect sales. Everyone knows that perfectly symmetrical scarlet jumbos can taste like polystyrene. The very best strawberries I ever tasted came from the village of Dalat, in the mountains of Vietnam -- phenomenally sweet little things, bursting with juice, the essence of strawberrydom. They were also mottled and misshaped, just the kind of thing American consumers scorn. In addition to flavor, glamour and road-worthiness, Dr. Dunigan and his colleagues look for good plant architecture. If the berries develop underneath the leaves, they are hard to pick efficiently, so the scientists choose varieties whose berries stand apart from the foliage. Yet another attribute the breeders seek is disease resistance, which is one of the reasons they are so partial to Sweet Charlie, which was named for the late Dr. Charles Howard, the hybridizer who came up with it. Sweet Charlie is naturally resistant to Colletotrichum acutatum, a highly dangerous fungus that attacks strawberry plants. No variety is perfect, of course. And even the best varieties require the most finicky kind of care throughout the |
1094915_0 | Our Virtual Jeeves | To the Editor: What ''good old days'' is Avraham Balaban referring to in his March 22 Op-Ed article, ''Remote Control''? He thinks that E-mail leads to alienation. But for those who could afford it in the 19th century, neighborliness was gladly avoided. Back then, butlers insured that casual visitors didn't disturb a lady or gentleman at work on other matters. Instead, one left a visiting card at the door, sent a letter of introduction or simply corresponded in writing. Butlers could also control the length of stay of certain visitors. Mr. Balaban seems to lament the fact that E-mail can serve these purposes, controlling even ''the length of the communicative act itself.'' Why should this be cause for regret? E-mail allows many more people to afford a ''virtual'' butler than could ever afford the real thing, and many find it just as useful to living a civilized life. AARON FRIEDMAN Swarthmore, Pa., March 23, 1999 |
1094799_2 | Japan Intercepts Two Boats That May Be North Korean | destroyer, the first time that it had done so, and the second vessel was found. The authorities did not explain why they felt compelled to dispatch destroyers to investigate or what they found mysterious about the ships. The vessels were about 100 feet long and bore the names of real Japanese fishing boats. Transport Minister Jiro Kawasaki told reporters that one boat used the name of a vessel that was sailing elsewhere and that the other used the name of a boat that was no longer operating. Military officials also dispatched three destroyers and an airplane to track the ships, and Maritime Safety Agency patrol boats joined the chase. The patrol boats fired more than 1,200 rounds of warning shots from machine guns on two occasions on Tuesday night, more than 100 miles from Sado Island. It was the first time that Japan had fired warning shots at sea since 1953, when a patrol boat fired off the bow of a Soviet spy ship near the northern island of Hokkaido. The warning shots were intended to force the two boats to stop for boarding. But they continued at very high speed, a pace that suggested that they had been fitted for military purposes rather than fishing. Film taken by Japanese aircraft showed no sign of fishing equipment and no people on deck. ''We started firing shots as the ships ignored orders to stop and we are continuing fire,'' a senior Maritime Safety Agency official, Kazutami Sugihara, said at a news conference, according to Agence France-Presse. ''It is unthinkable that fishing boats can move at such speed, and we believe they have been modified.'' North Korea is periodically accused of infiltrating South Korean waters. In December, South Korean naval vessels sank a North Korean semisubmersible boat that Seoul said was being used to drop off or pick up commandos. Similar charges have been made, more rarely, about North Korean vessels' sneaking into Japanese waters. Japanese intelligence officials say North Korean vessels have occasionally picked up kidnapped Japanese citizens and smuggled them to North Korea. Japanese officials also say that they monitor hundreds of radio transmissions each week that they believe are instructions from North Korea to agents in Japan, but that they cannot break the codes. North Korea denies that it infiltrates the waters of other countries. But it has not commented on the new incident. Japanese officials are trying to |
1094816_2 | High Court Expands Authority Of Judges on Expert Testimony | in a dispute over the reliability of testimony by an expert on tire failure in a lawsuit growing out of an automobile accident. By overturning the 11th Circuit's limited view of the Daubert precedent and finding the tire expert's testimony inadmissible, the Court today added an important weapon to the arsenal of critics of the civil justice system who have complained that ''junk science'' has been finding its way into too many courtrooms and distorting the deliberations of unsophisticated jurors. The case, Kumho Tire Company v. Carmichael, No. 97-1709, attracted briefs from a variety of business groups urging the Court to make it clear that the judge's role was an expansive one. Groups representing trial lawyers and consumers, on the other hand, urged the Court not to take from juries their historic function of evaluating evidence. The case today was a lawsuit brought by a family whose Ford minivan was involved in a single-car accident on Interstate 65 in Baldwin County, Ala. Seven people in the minivan were injured and one was killed. One of the vehicle's tires had blown out, and the plaintiffs, suing the tire manufacturer, wanted to present testimony by an expert in tire failures to prove that the accident was due to a manufacturing defect rather than wear or poor maintenance of the tire, which was bald in spots and had imperfect repairs of two punctures. The Federal District Court in Mobile, regarding the proposed testimony as technical rather than scientific, nonetheless applied the approach of the Daubert decision. Finding the expert's analytical methods not sufficiently reliable, the court excluded the testimony and granted summary judgment to the tire company. In reversing that ruling, the 11th Circuit said the trial court should not have applied the Supreme Court's guidelines in the Daubert decision for evaluating scientific testimony. These factors were: whether the expert's theory or technique had been tested; whether it had been subjected to peer review and publication; whether there was a high ''known or potential rate of error'' in the method, and whether the theory or technique enjoyed ''general acceptance'' within a ''relevant scientific community.'' In his decision today, Justice Breyer said a trial judge could pose any or all of those questions, as circumstances warranted. The Court then went on to apply the analysis to the tire expert's proposed testimony, concluding that the district judge had properly exercised his discretion in excluding it. |
1089989_1 | No End to Violence in Ulster: Each Side Now Kills Its Own | there were 65 such attacks, 26 more than in the same, less-settled period last year, just before the peace agreement. The attacks ceased last year in the weeks just before the April 10 signing, but that same night they resumed -- and their number has been mounting ever since, to the current rate of one a day, the highest in 10 years. Mr. Kearney died from an attack by a methodical Irish Republican Army squad of 10 people who dragged him from the bed where he was playing with his two-week-old daughter, shot him three times and then locked him in the elevator of his building and ripped out telephone lines so no rescuers could reach him before he bled to death. His crime had been punching an I.R.A. official in a pub argument. Mr. Peden barely survived shotgun wounds and 10 hours of assault by members of the Ulster Volunteer Force that required months of hospital treatment and a double amputation, leaving him with two stumps on either side of his groin and a palsied and stunted body that needs a daily dosage of 42 pills to keep functioning. His was a case of mistaken identity. Peace seems to aggravate the vigilantes. ''The groups weren't challenged when they had the guns behind them, and this is the way they point out that they still have them,'' said David Hanna, chief information officer of the Royal Ulster Constabulary. ''They've had social control for 30 years now, and they don't want to lose that edge in the new circumstances.'' Sam Cushnahan, director of Families Against Intimidation and Terror, a nonsectarian organization that seeks to give voice to victims of violence, said, ''It's all about power and control.'' The Squads From Discipline To Savage Revenge The militias took on their enforcement role, particularly in Catholic neighborhoods, to supplant the reviled British security forces and the largely Protestant Royal Ulster Constabulary, and to maintain unity and discipline in their communities as the sectarian conflict became more intense. They became such an accepted and feared institution of life in Northern Ireland that in many cases young men would be delivered to punishment squads by their relatives and then picked up and taken home bloodied and battered afterward. The original aim was to curb drug dealing, vandalism, car theft and other ''antisocial behavior,'' but today the scores being settled are just as often grudges, disputes |
1090053_1 | Jim Crow Past Haunts a Life Lived in Exile | old criminal conviction that he and others consider racially based. But he turned 63 this week, and sees time slipping away. He would like, however briefly, to go home again. This is, admittedly, more a story about Georgia than New York, but some New Yorkers are key figures in an appeal to Washington to make Mr. King's return possible. Besides his niece, they include Elizabeth Holtzman, the former Congresswoman and Brooklyn District Attorney, who is a longtime friend of the King family. Last month, she met with the Deputy Attorney General of the United States, Eric H. Holder Jr., to see what could be done. ''I know he's sympathetic to us,'' Ms. Holtzman said. ''But being sympathetic is one thing, and doing something is another.'' Thus far, the Justice Department has promised only to re-examine the case, which runs like this: In the mid-1950's, the draft board in Albany approved a student deferment so that Mr. King could pursue a master's degree at the London School of Economics. Board letters to him began, ''Dear Sir.'' It was all done by mail -- quite routine. BUT one day in 1958, back from London, Mr. King called on the board in person. That's when the clerk there saw he was black. From then on, the letters were addressed ''Dear Preston.'' To Mr. King it was about the same as being called ''boy.'' He refused to respond. ''This had to do with keeping black people under control,'' he said by phone from Lancaster, an English accent poking through every vowel. ''Understand my perspective. The board is entirely white. Everything around you is segregated by law. It's part of the air you breathe. And the cherry on the cake is this disrespect shown to people who bear the status of otherness.'' While not ''dying to serve in the Army,'' he was prepared to go, he said. All he wanted was to be called ''Mister.'' That did not happen. Mr. King lost his deferment, and was ordered in those pre-Vietnam War days to report for his Army physical. After he kept ignoring ''Dear Preston'' letters, he was charged with draft evasion, convicted in Federal court in 1961 and sentenced to 18 months in prison. Rather than go to jail, he jumped bail and fled the country. ''It would have been an absurdity to surrender,'' he said. ''It doesn't have any sensible bite to me. It |
1089954_0 | Surveys Uncover Substantial Melting of Greenland Ice Sheet | The southern half of the Greenland ice sheet, the second largest expanse of land-bound ice on earth, after Antarctica, has shrunk substantially in the last five years, scientists have found in airborne surveys using new and more precise techniques. Experts have said for some time that a warming atmosphere has caused many mountain glaciers around the world to shrink. But until now, they have not known what was happening to the Greenland ice cap. While five years is too short a period to determine a trend, the new findings, reported in today's issue of the journal Science, provide the first precise evidence that it, too, is diminishing. If the big ice sheets melt even partly, sea levels will rise around the world. Melting might also disrupt the ocean currents that modulate the earth's climate by distributing heat around the globe. Though the observed shrinkage in Greenland has evidently not yet had a major impact, it is not trivial. Each year from 1993 to 1998, on average, southern Greenland lost about two cubic miles of ice, enough to cover Maryland with a sheet one foot thick, said William B. Krabill, the expert in remote sensing who led the National Aeronautics and Space Administration team that surveyed the ice. In an aircraft equipped with laser altimeters, the team in 1993 and 1994 measured the thickness of the ice across all of Greenland. Last year, guided by satellite-based positioning that enabled them to retrace their original path exactly, they resurveyed the southern half of the island. This year they plan to resurvey the northern half. The measurements are intended to provide a base line for continuing studies. The laser-altimeter method for the first time allowed scientists to measure the ice well enough to gauge whether it was growing or shrinking. Remote sensing by satellite proved not sufficiently sensitive to detail changes on the fringes of the ice sheet, where most of the shrinkage has taken place. The magnitude of the shrinkage ''is a little surprising,'' said Dr. Richard Alley of Pennsylvania State University, an expert on glaciation and the behavior of ice sheets. Dr. Alley also said the shrinkage might be related to a general warming of the earth. But it is unclear at this point whether the shrinkage resulted from natural or human causes or both. The earth's average surface temperature has increased by about 1 degree or a little more since |
1090010_4 | Gene Study Bolsters Hope for Treating Diseases of Aging | ''It provides strong support,'' he continued, ''for what we've been saying all along for the promise of telomerase in treating aging and cancer.'' Geron, which has financed several advances in the telomere field, but not Dr. DePinho's present work, hopes to add the telomerase gene to the cells of human tissues that have lost the capacity to proliferate. Dr. Harley said the finding that short telomeres increase the risk of cancer was ''a major new piece of data that may explain why the frequency of cancer goes up in old age.'' Other experts are not ready to concede that the relevance of the mouse results to human aging or cancer had been proved. Dr. Robert Weinberg, a cancer expert at the Whitehead Institute in Boston, said the new report was ''very interesting'' and ''validated the notion that telomere integrity is essential for cellular proliferation.'' The loss of proliferative capacity in telomere-deficient mice could be the same process that occurs when human T-cells are depleted in AIDS, but that and any other relation to human aging remains to proved, in Dr. Weinberg's view. ''The truth, is,'' he said, ''I don't know how many other aspects of human aging are or are not connected the telomere shortening.'' Dr. Guarente also said it was too early to say whether the telomere-deficient mice are an accurate model for some or any of the aging processes seen in humans. ''It is an extremely interesting study with possible relevance to human aging,'' Dr. Guarente said, ''but we'll need a lot more information before we can be certain of that relevance.'' Dr. DePinho is also cautious about interpreting his findings, saying telomere attrition is one component of aging, which, along with other factors, affects the ability of an organism to withstand acute stress. ''From these studies,'' he said, ''we've learned that if you can maintain telomere function you are better able to maintain overall fitness, so I think that is very good news. But we aren't going to be erecting any Ponce de Leon fountains around Geron. It won't reverse organismal aging as we know it.'' A difficulty in extending the findings from mice to people is that mice evidently use the telomere system in a somewhat different way. Mice have very long telomeres and presumably the mice that die a natural death die from causes other than telomere shortening -- like oxidative damage, accumulating genetic errors |
1089936_0 | THE MARKETS: COMMODITIES | SUGAR PLUNGES. Sugar fell 6 percent on expectations that Brazil, the world's top grower, will process more crops for export, adding to swollen stockpiles. In New York, sugar for May delivery fell 0.35 cent, to 5.5 cents a pound. |
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1090295_0 | There Goes the Neighborhood | THROWIM WAY LEG Tree-Kangaroos, Possums, and Penis Gourds -- On the Track of Unknown Mammals in Wildest New Guinea. By Tim Flannery. Illustrated. 326 pp. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press. $25. ''IT is always slightly unnerving arriving at a new location'' in New Guinea, Tim Flannery says. ''You have no idea what the locals will be like or how you will be received.'' What an understatement! This man walked alone into a village for the first time and overheard three locals agreeing to kill him, and that is far from the most threatening situation he found himself in. The title of his book, ''Throwim Way Leg,'' is pidgin for going on a journey. Flannery, a celebrated mammalogist and paleontologist at the Australian Museum in Sydney, made 15 long research excursions into New Guinea beginning in 1981, when he was 26; in a dozen years he identified at least 17 new species of mammals, and his ''Mammals of New Guinea'' (1990) is the standard scientific guide. But ''Throwim Way Leg'' is more than an account of his fieldwork. It is an enthralling introduction to the mountain people of New Guinea -- unimaginably remote, charming, cunning, cruel, subtle and appealing -- and to their magnificent land. Flannery is not always an eloquent writer, but his evocations of the New Guinean landscape carry you away. About 12,000 years ago, when the ocean swallowed an ice-age land bridge between Australia and New Guinea, life on the island was cut off from the world. In a place with no pack animals, where walking is the only locomotion and passage in any direction requires scaling mountains rising from 5,000 to 15,000 feet, people became so isolated from one another that today almost 1,000 languages are used. Equatorial monsoons sweeping the mountains create alpine swamps in the clouds, and on such wet vertical terrain arable tracts and dwelling spaces are few and distant, so the islanders formed tribes in tiny villages, warring with one another for 500 generations. No common identity developed and there is no political history -- kingdoms, pyramids, common religion, shared culture, all that. Early in this century the Netherlands claimed the western half of the island and Australia the eastern half. But they stuck to the coast. Only in the late 30's was much contact made with mountain people, the vast bulk of the population. Now the world is moving in. In 1963 |
1090654_5 | Microsoft Will Alter Its Software In Response to Privacy Concerns | outraged. ''I think this is horrendous,'' said Jason Catlett, president of Junkbusters, a consumer privacy organization based in Greenbrook, N.J. ''They're tattooing a number into each file. Think of the implications. If some whistle blower sends a file, it can be traced back to the person himself. It's an extremely dangerous feature. Why did they do it?'' Privacy groups have long warned about the dangers of centralized information and electronic monitoring. The groups have been discussing the implications of the serial number on the Pentium III with Intel, and while some privacy advocates acknowledge that the number can play an important role in protecting both privacy and security, others have called for a boycott of Intel, arguing that the likelihood of misuse of the number outweighs its benefits. Beyond the fear of a centralized Big Brother, they add that the rise of the Internet has made it possible for individual companies to freely use detailed personal information for commercial ends. ''The problem is the absence of legal rules that limit the collection and use of personal information,'' said Marc Rotenberg, director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington. ''It's clear to me that large Internet companies such as Microsoft, AOL and Netscape will try to squeeze out privacy.'' Microsoft executives said on Friday evening that they had developed the feature for technical reasons related to the need to distinguish between millions of different hardware and software objects on the Internet. They said they had never considered the privacy implications. Microsoft software engineers say the roots of the company's numbering system go back to a system developed by computer researchers at the Open Software Foundation in Cambridge in the early 1990's. In an effort to develop technology that would enable computers to communicate across networks, a numbering system called a Universally Unique Identifier, or UUID, was established as part of a software standard known as the Distributed Computing Environment, or DCE. Microsoft relied on this standard when it developed a remote computing capability for Windows known as Object Linking and Embedding, or OLE. The company's designers changed UUID to GUID, for Globally Unique Identifier, and that term is now widely used by software applications. For example, the GUID is used for ''cookies'' -- files that World Wide Web sites send to a visitor's hard drive to identify the user later and to track his or her travels through the Web. |
1090609_3 | Fiddling While Antarctica Burns | shrink, lose weight and are vulnerable to early death. A decline of krill due to melting of the ice shelf could wreck much of the Antarctic ecosystem that depends on them. Rising temperatures also increase precipitation -- which, in Antarctica, takes the form of snow. Excessive spring snow has disrupted the nesting and breeding of Adelie penguins, leading to the extinction of many of their colonies. At the same time, more adaptable species like chinstrap penguins, elephant seals and fur seals are increasing their numbers, threatening to displace sea ice- dependent animals like Weddell seals, crabeater seals and leopard seals. What these changes in the Antarctic Peninsula suggest is that rapid warming could speed up a global chain reaction of extinctions that -- thanks to the impact of humans -- is already under way. ''Weedlike'' species that are highly adaptable to disrupted habitat (pigeons, rats, deer and elephant seals) will displace more specialized creatures (tigers, monarch butterflies, river dolphins and Adelie penguins) that depend on unique ecosystems like tropical rain forests, coral reefs and the Antarctic ice shelf. Rising temperatures may kill off certain plant species as well. At Palmer Station, I met Tad Day, a plant biologist who studies Antarctica's only two flowering plants: hairgrass and pearlwort. He has found that warming improves growth of pearlwort but appears to have a negative impact on hairgrass. Hairgrass, which was the dominant species in Antarctica, is now being displaced by pearlwort, a mosslike plant. ''Global warming,'' Dr. Day told me, ''has the capacity to shift the competitive balance of species in ways that, until we get out there and do the research, we don't understand yet, and that could have important consequences on our ability to produce food and fiber.'' Increasingly reliable climate models now predict a 2-to-6-degree planetary warming in the next century, with regional shifts in agriculture that will favor the industrial north at the expense of the poorer nations of Africa and Latin America. There will also be increases in extreme weather events, coastal storms and the spread of tropical diseases. In that light, the work of Antarctic scientists like the ones I met suggests that -- for better or worse -- environmental change will define much of the politics of the 21st century, whether in Washington or at the South Pole. David Helvarg is a television documentary producer and the author of ''The War Against the Greens.'' |
1090643_0 | For the Homeless, Rebirth Through Socrates | The students, mostly in sweat shirts and jeans, sit around a long table dotted with soda cans and cookies and consult their highlighted copies of Plato's ''Apology.'' Two professors guide their debate over whether Socrates, on the verge of execution, was arrogant or humble. Outside, the sun sets on the neogothic campus. There could hardly be a more archetypal college scene than this one in the University of Notre Dame's O'Shaughnessy Building, with its seven stained glass windows representing the seven liberal arts, ancient disciplines from rhetoric to astronomy. Yet the 10 students in this weekly seminar fit no typical profile for Notre Dame or any university. They are current or former residents of the South Bend Center for the Homeless, men and women with the weathered features and oblique emotional balances of those who have spent many nights in the streets. It may seem quaint, if not useless, to bring philosophical literature to the homeless, an idea conceived in some pristine ivory tower. But that is not how the students view it. ''Those of us in the grip of addiction use this process to rethink our lives,'' said Michael A. Newton, 50, originally of New York City, who has been homeless for 16 months. ''Socrates makes clear that you have to have the courage to examine yourself and to stand up for something. A lot of us have justified our weaknesses for too long a time.'' This class, which includes works by Shakespeare, Montaigne and Melville, was inspired by Earl Shorris, a New York author, who created a humanities course for the poor, although not necessarily homeless, on the Lower East Side of Manhattan four years ago. There are now seven such courses in the country and 40 more are planned in the next five years. Money is coming from various sources, including the Federal Department of Education, foundations and state commissions on the humanities. Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson in Dutchess County is taking a central role and offering credit to those who complete the courses that it is sponsoring. ''Martin Luther King Jr. said years ago that a man can't ride your back unless it is bent,'' said Louis M. Nanni, executive director of the South Bend Center for the Homeless. ''This is just one more way for our guests to straighten their backs.'' There is evidence that these courses have impact. Mr. Shorris said the first course |
1092123_27 | What the Jumans Didn't Know About Michael | then my kids still have a five times greater risk,'' she says. ''When I was pregnant I had amnios. If, God forbid, there was something wrong, I would have had an abortion. So, if I'd known this was in my past, I would not have had children. How could you pass this disease on when you know about it?'' Like Michael Juman, Connie began to search for information about her birth mother, finally petitioning the state to have her adoption documents unsealed. Was the woman (who is identified in her records simply as E.) ''exceptionally bright,'' as Connie and her parents had been told? Maybe. ''She was described as an exceptionally intelligent girl,'' a caseworker wrote in 1962, ''though she is not in complete contact with reality at the present time.'' Had her mother in fact worked as a nurse, specifically a licensed practical nurse? That is unclear. ''She had a very sporadic employment record,'' the document says. As for the ''breakdown,'' the medical history lists the diagnosis as ''schizophrenia, catatonic type.'' She was treated for it as an inpatient at Rockland State Psychiatric Hospital in 1956, 1958 and 1960 and at Jacobi Hospital in 1962. And the father of her baby, who left her feeling so distraught that she did not want to talk about it? ''E. conceived the child while she was hospitalized for psychiatric care at Jacobi Hospital. [Connie's maternal grandmother] maintained that her daughter was raped by a fellow patient there. . . . Following the birth, E. seemed completely out of touch with reality, did not accept the fact that she had had relations with a man nor did she accept the fact that she had had a baby.'' Like Michael Juman's, Connie's records also include accounts of her parents' discussions with a caseworker. Also like Michael's, sentences have been underlined: ''In response to question about their knowledge of illnesses with hereditary implications, [Connie's adoptive father] thought of diabetes or mental illness. When questioned further, he said that he really didn't know the significance nor does he truly worry about it.'' The nature-versus-nurture equation is not the only measure of the distance traveled in the past 30 years. Today being a victim means telling your story. For decades the Jumans tried to honor Michael's privacy, rarely talking of his adoption beyond the circle of family. Later they tried to keep his illness a secret too, |
1092386_3 | The Nation: Pondering a White House Shrink; Every First Family Is Unhappy in Its Own Way | think I am still normal. If I had any problem along that line develop, the White House can acquire the best almost instantaneously.'' Asked whether Presidents should undergo a mandatory psychological exam as part of their annual physical, former President Jimmy Carter replied: ''No -- You don't have a mandatory requirement in the law to check a President for athlete's foot.'' But he added, ''I believe that mental illness should be considered with the same import as physical illness.'' That's an unfulfilled wish. Despite President Clinton's plea during his last State of the Union Address that ''no American should ever be afraid to address'' mental illness, and despite the public's embrace of ''Analyze This,'' the new mobster-in-therapy hit, there is considerable doubt over whether Americans are ready to accept a President on the couch. ''My guess is that it may be fine for a mafia boss to have self-doubts, but not Presidents of the United States,'' said Andrew Kohut, director of the Pew Center for the People and the Press. ''The public wants Presidents to steer straight ahead and not look back, not over-think his hang-ups. The ghost of Thomas Eagleton still haunts us.'' Thomas Eagleton was the Democratic Senator from Missouri who was dumped from George S. McGovern's 1972 Presidential ticket over the disclosure that he had been hospitalized for depression and received electro-shock therapy. The Eagleton experience notwithstanding, some say a President who owned up to psychotherapy might be able to engender public sympathy. ''Rather than call it a mental health problem, I would couch it in familial terms,'' suggested Henry Sheinkopf, a Democratic political consultant. ''If you say my President has a problem that required counseling because he wanted to protect his family and children, that's much more palatable. Still, the idea of their leaders needing help is tough for many Americans to tolerate.'' And it worries Senator Ted Stevens, Republican of Alaska. ''The signal to the world that the American President, the leader of the free world, is having to get advice as to his mental condition might destabilize a lot of things, including stock markets and negotiations,'' he said. ZBIGNIEW BRZEZINSKI, President Carter's national security adviser, said there would have to be precautions against a Free-Associator-in-Chief divulging secrets. ''The psychiatrist would also probably have to sign a document obligating him to raise an alarm if he detected serious problems that could affect the President's ability |
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1095277_2 | Reactions Mix Worry About 'Leap Backward' and Support for Lesser of Evils | sovereign country and that it does not carry the legal legitimacy that a U.N. Security Council resolution would have lent it.'' Outright opposition came mostly from politicians with leftist or Communist backgrounds. In Spain, Willy Meyer of the Communist-led United Left called the action a ''leap backward in civilization in favor of barbarism,'' while in France, Robert Hue, head of the French Communist Party, said the strikes were a ''direct violation of the United Nations charter.'' Tony Benn, a longtime Labor militant, led a group of the party's left-wing members in the House of Commons in denouncing the allies for conducting a ''war of aggression.'' They were far outnumbered by Labor members who shouted out their backing of the Government's decision to bomb. Prime Minister Tony Blair said, ''We really have no alternative but to act in the interests both of humanity and the wider strategic interests of the region.'' British newspapers gave their backing to the bombardment while expressing anxiety about whether it would persuade President Slobodan Milosevic of Yugoslavia to negotiate. ''A deadly gamble, but we are right to strike at Milosevic,'' The Independent headlined its editorial. The Guardian said Britain should be making ''discreet but serious preparations for the use of ground troops.'' German newspapers gave cautious support to the attacks, noting that they represented the first hostile action by German forces since the end of World War II. Reactions sometimes followed the pattern of traditional alliances. Many Turks welcomed the air strikes as a blow in defense of the Kosovo Albanians, who are fellow Muslims. ''A slap for the Serb Hitler,'' the normally sedate newspaper Milliyet said. Greeks and Greek Cypriots, with historic ties to Orthodox Christianity, the faith embraced by the Serbs, deplored the strikes, saying they proved that Europeans still had not found a way short of war to solve their problems. With French Air Force and naval units involved in the attack, President Jacques Chirac and Prime Minister Lionel Jospin have so far unequivocally backed NATO action against their historical Serbian ally. Ahead of Mr. Jospin's address before the French Parliament on Friday, only Interior Minister Jean-Pierre Chevenement, a left-leaning nationalist who resigned as Minister of Defense at the outbreak of the Persian Gulf war, hinted at objection to NATO raids. He expressed his ''conviction that Serbian and Kosovar coexistence can be achieved only through political channels.'' CONFLICT IN THE BALKANS: IN EUROPE |
1095211_0 | High-Voltage Benefits Of Improved Batteries | ONE of the most primitive and troublesome components under a car's hood, the battery, is due for an update, auto company executives say. As a result, there could be a cascade of new technologies that would make cars more fuel-efficient and less likely to turn up dead on cold winter mornings. For as long as cars have had batteries, they have stored electricity with a chemical reaction involving lead and acid. Although 6-volt systems were once common, automotive electrical systems were standardized at 12 volts in 1955. Thus, the design now in use has outlived such mainstays as carburetors, bias-ply tires and leaded gasoline. Engineers want to redesign the electrical system partly because they would like to run more parts of a standard car on electricity, even if the basic energy source is still a gasoline-driven engine. Two candidates for conversion to electricity are power steering units and some components of transmissions. Both now typically operate on hydraulic power, which in turn is produced by a pump driven by belts that run off the driveshaft. Electric pumps can produce hydraulic pressure more efficiently in applications where the need for pressure is sporadic. And in some applications, engineers think they can dispense with hydraulics altogether and do the job with electricity. But 12-volt motors that pump hydraulic fluid or move mechanical components like steering systems are relatively big and inefficient. Further, the cables that move electricity around at 12 volts are thick and heavy, and the heavier the cable the more energy is lost within the cable itself. With higher voltage, engineers could use thinner cables, saving weight and energy. At 12 volts, ''we end up adding so many pounds of wire,'' said Robert C. Stempel, an advocate of the change. Mr. Stempel, the former chairman of the General Motors Corporation, is now chairman of Energy Conversion Devices Inc. of Troy, Mich., which pioneered nickel metal-hydride batteries, the kind used in cellular phones and laptop computers. ''Isn't it time to raise voltage?'' he asked. The standard car battery is known in the industry as an S.L.I. battery, for starting, lighting and ignition. By adding cells, lead-acid S.L.I.'s could be made to run at any voltage. But these batteries are bulky already and would quickly become more so as their voltage was increased. Mr. Stempel hopes to sell nickel metal-hydride batteries with more than one pair of terminals, each pair giving off |
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1093936_2 | The Way We Live Now: 3-21-99 -- The Ethicist; A Slap in the Face | seem to be breaking any laws. Still, Koenderman suggests intervening, but gently: ''The parent may be acting out of frustration and rage. By saying something -- Hey, take it easy' -- you give the parent a moment to stop and think. And it is good to demonstrate that you as a member of society disapprove.'' This point will not be lost on the child. After a few years of getting knocked around, many kids come to believe they deserve their fate. Hearing another adult take issue with the treatment a child is receiving might help counteract that effect. Even if your rebuke doesn't have immediate results, someone else might hear you, and next time they'll speak up, too. And after that, who knows? Not so long ago, corporal punishment in schools was commonplace. Today, several countries have made it illegal for even a parent to spank a child. If you're worried about saying the wrong thing, try distracting the mother instead of forcing a confrontation. Ask her for directions or about how to switch trains. As long as your intervention wins the kid a moment of peace, it's a risk worth taking. ''To supply props for a movie, I rented chairs from a fancy furniture company. When the movie came out, the company sent me one of their most expensive models 'as a courtesy.' The job is over, so it's not exactly a bribe. Can I keep it?'' You're not going to like this answer, so you'd better sit down. On something you paid for yourself. Corruption requires nothing so vulgar as a quid pro quo. Political contributions may not buy specific favors, but they create expectations for the future. Similarly, even if you never again patronize this company, your future prop choices could be influenced by the possibility of finding another comfy ''courtesy'' in your mailbox (if it is a very big mailbox or a very tiny chair). In a pristine world, drama critics would know no actors, fire inspectors would meet no landlords and military pilots who kill skiers would be tried by skiers, not military folk. We cannot demand such isolation, but we can avoid retroactive corruption. Buy your own chair, and enjoy good posture and a clear conscience. To send Randy Cohen your own question about ethics, write to: ethicist@nytimes.com or The Ethicist, The New York Times Magazine, 229 West 43d Street, New York, NY 10036. |
1091921_5 | Russian Philosophy Is Given Its Head; Freed From the Orthodoxy of Marx and Lenin, Intellectuals Explore Limitless Possibilities | Philosophy). ''Liberalism was reduced only to minimal government and private property, with disastrous results.'' In theory and practice liberalism itself had turned into a kind of dogma. And corruption, poverty, a dwindling industrial base and agricultural system, and governmental chaos hadn't exactly help salvage the capitalist dream. One Western import that has captured the imagination of the younger generation of scholars, however, is French post-modernism. ''Every second person considers himself a postmodernist,'' Mr. Mironov said. In many ways post-modernism seems the perfect philosophy for a post-communist society. After years of listening to the ruling party dish out the ''Truth,'' post-modernism's insistence on competing notions of truth is a refreshing change. Its skepticism of authority extends to Western assumptions about the straight path of progress and universal values. Thus, those who hold on to a sense of Russia's uniqueness are drawn to it as well. Anna Kostikova, 34, teaches at Moscow State University and has a ready giggle. She chose contemporary French post-modernism as her speciality even before the Soviet Union was disbanded. Post-modernism is not necessarily the most popular field, she said, but it does characterize the country's state of mind. ''You can't not be a post-modernist in contemporary Russia,'' she said, her dark brown hair haphazardly tied back. ''Our country is very unstable both economically and politically, and no ideology can be adequate to the situation. In this sense post-modernism is being realized not as a popular philosophy but as the acceptance of various philosophies and their existence.'' Svetalan Shakirova, 31, also considers herself a post-modernist. She got interested in philosophy after reading ''Das Kapital'' in the eighth grade, but she wrote her thesis on the idea of male and female in philosophy. Philosophy is the ''science of elderly men,'' she says through a translator. Perhaps. Yet she and 10 colleagues also from Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan (formerly part of the Soviet empire), nonetheless traveled 1,500 miles to St. Petersburg for a seminar on gender theory. This unfamiliar intellectual stew has fed anxiety about the future of Russian intellectual life. This generation of scholars is a transitional one; what will the next one bring? Intellectual life has suffered from the loss of state support. Gone are the comfortable salaries, subsidized journals, research grants and other perks. A senior professor now earns $100 to $200 a month; circulation of the once subsidized Viprosy Filosofii has fallen to 7,000 from 85,000 in |
1091930_0 | World Briefing | EUROPE RUSSIA: JEHOVAH'S WITNESS RULING -- Final judgment was deferred in a closely-watched court case against the Jehovah's Witnesses, who have been charged with violating Russia's restrictive law on religion. A judge sent the case to a panel that includes two linguists, a psychologist and two experts on religion. Rights advocates, who see the case as a test of religious tolerance, said the order was an attempt to put off a politically-charged decision. Celestine Bohlen (NYT) ICELAND: A VOTE TO RESUME WHALING -- Parliament voted for whaling to start again and asked the Government to prepare for a resumption by next year, ending a 10-year ban. The International Whaling Commission banned whaling in 1982 because of concern that many species were endangered. Whaling stopped from 1985, although Iceland, which left the commission in 1992, continued until 1989 to take some whales. (Reuters) NORWAY: HOLOCAUST FUND SET UP -- Norway set up a $58 million fund for Jewish victims of the Holocaust, split between about $25 million for victims of death camps and their families and $33 million for Jewish organizations. About 2,200 Jews were arrested in Norway in 1942. A total of 767 were deported to death camps, most of them to Auschwitz, and only 30 of them survived. (Reuters) THE AMERICAS MEXICO: A SURGE IN MIGRANTS -- The number of undocumented Central Americans passing through Mexico en route to the U.S. surged by 30 percent in January and February as a result of the devastation caused by Hurricane Mitch, immigration authorities said. Mexico deported 20,000 Central Americans in the first eight weeks of this year. The hurricane killed 9,000 people. Sam Dillon (NYT) MEXICO: GOLF COURSE RULING -- The new governor of Morelos State, Jorge Morales Barud, has blocked developers' plans to carve a golf course and an industrial park out of an ecological reserve near Tepoztlan, south of Mexico City. The project, which set off a 1995 uprising by villagers, was supported by the previous governor. Sam Dillon (NYT) BRAZIL: POWER BACK ON -- Power returned to southern Brazil after at least a third of the country's population was plunged into darkness. Electrical energy was restored in nine Brazilian states plus the Federal District of Brasilia. (Reuters) ASIA INDIA: HEARINGS ON GRAFT -- Accepting a demand from the opposition, the ruling coalition has agreed to an airing next week of corruption charges made against it in parliamentary committees. |
1092004_3 | The City Calls It Hazardous Housing, but the Tenants Call It Home | neighborhood newspapers in which community leaders referred to the tenants as mentally ill. Jonathan L. Gaska, district manager of Community Board 14, which represents the Rockaways, said his office had received complaints about the house for years. Then, last summer, anonymous complaints from people who said they lived in the area claimed that the house was filled with patients from the Creedmoor Psychiatric Center in Queens. The landlord and tenants insist that no one came from Creedmoor. But many of the tenants are from the margins of society. Some are mentally impaired or physically disabled, and most rely on some form of public assistance. Freddy Barringer, 49, a welfare recipient who was the superintendent of the house and a tenant, said the tenants were a mix of elderly and young people. ''But everybody was capable of taking care of themselves,'' he said. ''And we all knew each other. Iit was like a big family.'' He said there was nothing fancy about 175 Beach 115th Street. ''Even though it was only a room, it was home,'' he said. ''And they took that away from us.'' Mr. Safos, the owner, said he and his father, Matthew Safos, bought the house in July for $120,000 and put more than $70,000 worth of repairs into it. They replaced all 63 windows, repainted and recarpeted the entire house and furnished each room with a new bed, refrigerator and desk, he said. Each floor had a communal kitchen and bathroom.Tenants paid about $300 a month. ''It wasn't the Hilton, but we made it as nice as we could,'' he said. Indeed, many of the tenants said they were very comfortable in the house and did not consider the place a hazard. Mr. Safos produced copies of city documents showing that as far back as 1938, officials were aware that there were 28 rooms in the house. But Ilyse Fink, a spokeswoman for the Buildings Department, said yesterday that even so, the building was granted a permit for a first-floor landlord apartment and 14 additional rooms to be rented only in the summertime. She said no records existed showing that the house had ever been legally converted from 14 to 28 rental rooms for year-round occupancy. The house, like many in the Rockaways, was clearly built as a hotel to accommodate beach lovers at the turn of the century. But Ms. Fink said 14 rooms on the |
1093068_0 | Letting Little Go to Waste; An Enterprise Evolves From the Byproducts of Industry | Over a decade ago, Michael R. Daley was touring a plant that burned old tires for energy when he learned that it paid haulers to cart away gypsum, one of its byproducts. Mr. Daley was astounded: Gypsum, he knew, is used in plaster, toothpaste, paints, even molds for false teeth. So Mr. Daley set up shop near the plant to collect and resell the gypsum. Since then, his company, Triad Energy Resources Inc., has grown into a successful small enterprise, all by setting up next to corporations and finding uses for their wastes. Triad makes soil additives from the C & H Sugar Company's sugar-filtration byproducts in Crockett, Calif. It turns leftover skins and seeds from Australian wineries and fruit processors into fertilizer and compost. And it is now contracting with fish processors in Oregon to turn their detritus into fertilizer and fish food. ''If companies were smart, they'd all locate near sources of waste,'' Mr. Daley said. Corporate America is, in fact, catching on. More and more companies are buying their neighbors' wastes or selling their own. And a growing number of economic development agencies and private developers are building ''eco-industrial parks'' -- eco-parks for short -- for this purpose. Some are doing it to attract jobs, others to reduce trash flows, still others simply to make money. But all are working on the principle that one company's waste can be its neighbor's raw material. And they are taking advantage of the fact that many wastes that cannot be recycled back to their original uses can still be profitably used as materials for other products. ''A park that makes environmental and economic sense is an idea whose time has come,'' said Dustin Bielagus, a developer who is building an eco-park in Londonderry, N.H. Eco-parks are rising in Mississippi and Mexico. They are on the drawing boards in Puerto Rico and Mesa del Sol, N.M. The Dow Chemical Company is building one near its plants in eastern Germany. In California, local officials plan an eco-park in Oakland, while the Cabazon Band of Mission Indians is looking for companies to set up at its trash-to-energy plant near Palm Springs to extract materials from the trash before it is burned. While the environmental movement spawned the idea of such industrial symbiosis, it is no longer the primary force. ''People realize that where materials are thrown out, there is money to be made,'' |
1095006_0 | THE MARKETS: COMMODITIES | SUGAR FALLS. Sugar prices eased to a 12 1/2-year low as oversupply worries outweighed signs of increased buying by importers taking advantage of low prices. May sugar contracts fell 0.13 cent in New York, to 5.47 cents a pound. |
1094996_1 | World Briefing | said they would turn over to an independent commission by May 15 lists of all accounts and safe deposit boxes seized during the German occupation. The commission will attempt to find rightful claimants. The banks did not say how much money had turned up. Craig R. Whitney (NYT) NORTHERN IRELAND: HOME RULE DELAY -- The British Northern Ireland Secretary, Mo Mowlam, said she might delay the scheduled transfer of home rule powers from the Government in London to the Northern Ireland Assembly in Belfast. The transfer, anticipated by Easter, has been blocked by a dispute over disarmament of the I.R.A. that has stalled the creation of a new Protestant-Catholic cabinet in the Assembly. James F. Clarity (NYT) TURKEY: OCALAN TRIAL RULING -- Citing security concerns, a court ruled that the Kurdish rebel leader Abdullah Ocalan must stand trial on a heavily guarded prison island. The court rejected a bid by Mr. Ocalan's lawyers to have him moved from Imrali Island in the Sea of Marmara, about 35 miles south of Istanbul. Mr. Ocalan has been the island's sole inmate since his capture on Feb. 15 by Turkish commandos in Kenya. (AP) ASIA INDONESIA: MORE PRISONERS FREED -- Continuing its release of political prisoners, the Government said it would free 10 elderly men who were jailed in connection with what officials called a Communist coup attempt in 1965. The incident led to massacres of hundreds of thousands of people and to the presidency of Mr. Suharto. Seth Mydans (NYT) AFGHANISTAN: PEACE MOVE -- The opposition Northern Alliance has offered to release more than 1,000 Taliban prisoners as a way to move the Afghan peace effort ahead, a spokesman said. At the same time, the Alliance commander, Ahmad Shah Masood, accused the Taliban of jeopardizing peace prospects by starting several new offensives. (Agence France-Presse) BANGLADESH: POLITICAL TALKS -- Leaders of the two main political parties will hold talks with international donors who have expressed concern that partisan bickering and political strikes have badly slowed the economy and scared off investors. The meetings will probably take place next month, though no dates have been set, said a spokesman for Prime Minister Sheik Hasina Wajed. Barry Bearak (NYT) THAILAND: AIDS VACCINE TESTS -- A California-based company, VaxGen Inc., began tests in Thailand of a vaccine against the virus that causes AIDS. The first results, which involve intravenous drug users, are expected in about 30 |
1094984_0 | Notes From the Land of the E-Less | MY dear Aunt Mildred, a 98-year-old Roman Catholic nun who lives in a convent, stopped me at a recent family gathering to broach the topic of the newfangled ways of modern society. ''Do you use the Internet?'' she asked. ''No, Aunt Mildred,'' I confessed, ''I'm not quite up to speed with that yet.'' ''Well,'' she replied, thrusting a card into my palm, ''when you get up to speed, here's my E-mail address.'' It is getting to be embarrassing to be off line. A half-dozen times a day, people ask for my E-mail address. And I have to tell them: I don't know how to E-mail. After more than a decade of paying off college loans, I now discover at the age of 40 that I am illiterate. The fact is, half of American households still do not have computers. Not everyone is sitting around surfing the Net, visting Web sites and zipping off clever notes to their E-mail pals. It just seems that way. There was a time when it was perfectly acceptable, even a bit stylish or edgy, to be a Luddite. People thought you were an Individual, or at least eccentric. Now you're just a dud, the technological equivalent of a cigarette smoker or a mink wearer. As an example of how society is losing patience with techno-laggards, observe the nastiness that is creeping into the computerized voices on telephone menus. The old message: ''If you are not calling from a touch-tone telephone, please stay on the line, and an operator will be with you shortly.'' The new message: ''If you are not calling from a touch-tone telephone, hang up and call back from a touch-tone telephone.'' In other words, Get with the program, Buster. Inter-nots, as we might be called, have become social misfits. With E-mail, even far-flung co-workers can essentially shout across the room to one another, sharing office gossip and trading work tips. People who are out of the loop, like me, are just out of luck. I know they're talking to one another. Worse yet, maybe they're talking about me. There is a whiff of superiority about all of this, a country-clubby we're-in-and-you're-not superiority. The smugness is well founded. Is there a realm of life that is not made quicker or easier for those with a computer? Heaven help the poor suitor who is unable to conduct a courtship without being able to tap |
1094374_0 | Roller-Coaster Odyssey Through a Calamitous Era | FREDY NEPTUNE A Novel in Verse By Les Murray 255 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $25. Freddie Boettcher, an Australian farm boy of German descent, runs off to sea before World War I. In Constantinople he contracts leprosy; the disease is arrested, but it leaves him unable to feel pain or any other physical sensation in most of his body. This physical blankness plus enormous strength attend a wildly extravagant career. He is impressed into the German Navy, serves at a British cavalry station in the Middle East (he meets Lawrence of Arabia and judges him a popinjay), works as a rough laborer back in Australia and as a strongman in a circus (where he gets the name Fredy Neptune) and goes on a weird gangster mission to the United States. He rides the Depression rails, becomes a Hollywood extra (Marlene Dietrich brings him lunch and recites Rilke), serves on a German zeppelin, beats up brownshirts in Bavaria, is strafed by Japanese planes in World War II and scouts with Australian commandos in New Guinea. Finally he settles back home with his patiently resourceful wife, two grown children and a mentally impaired German boy he had rescued years before from a Nazi sterilization squad. All this (I've been chokingly succinct) makes ''Fredy Neptune'' sound like an antipodean Tintin. Yet the subtitle suggests that this suspiciously hyper-picaresque ricochet through the hells of our century is a novel disguised as a poem. In fact, it is a poem disguised as a novel disguised as a poem. Les Murray, neither cartoonist nor novelist, is Australia's most distinguished poet. At the heart of ''Fredy Neptune,'' a heart that only quite reveals itself toward the last of its 10,000 blank-verse lines, is a notion so audacious and unnerving as to belong to poetry's flash of transforming revelation, not fiction's tidal sea-changes. Part of the revelation is the meaning of Fredy's physical numbness. We know it has a metaphorical purpose from the beginning. Soon we realize that his role is to be a witness to the terrible events of history. No detached witness, Fredy launches himself at every outrage as well as he can, which is not very well. He is a Superman who can't fly, a Paul Bunyan attended by the tiniest of blue calflets. Numbness is his only strength, the very condition of sentience. When the body can't feel, the mind is free to |
1094397_5 | Digital Polish for Factory Floors; Software Simulations Lead to Better Assembly Lines | systems sold by Rockwell International have used simulation to design assembly lines that can handle different-sized items, enabling factories to produce small batches of products cost-effectively. ''We're headed to where modeling will let us design plants that can efficiently build a single-lot size of one item,'' said Randall L. Freeman, vice president for global marketing at Rockwell Automation. Computer simulations of the tread-etching process has enabled tire makers like Goodyear Tire and Rubber to switch production from one type of tire to another in about an hour -- a process that previously took an entire work shift. And simulations have shown cookie companies like the Nabisco unit of RJR Nabisco Holdings how to use the same packaging machines to make five-pound bags for price clubs, one-pound bags for grocery stores and six-cookie packs for vending machines. Various forces are driving the trend toward computer modeling. For one thing, computer technology has finally caught up with manufacturing pipe dreams. ''Only recently have computers been powerful enough to quickly simulate what happens if you change something in a chemical reactor,'' said David E. Waite, Dow's manufacturing manager for information technology. Economic and marketplace forces are at work, too. Companies that spent much of the 1990's paring ancillary product lines and work forces are now trimming capital investment, lest shareholders think they have lost their cost-cutting touch. Consumers, meanwhile, have grown increasingly picky and expect to be able to choose among myriad colors, sizes and shapes for almost any product. That means that manufacturers must mix and match parts as the orders come in. And that, in turn, means having tools that can respond to electronic commands to switch paint wells, move clamps or change packaging and labels. The Progressive Tool and Industries Company in Southfield, Mich., a designer of car assembly lines, recently used computer simulation to replace fixed-position clamps on a client's line with ones that slide; the clamps pivot out of one another's way, and can be programmed to react when parts of different sizes or shapes come down the line. ''It would be awfully risky to try this without simulating it first,'' said Donald A. Hemberg, Progressive Tool's general manager. Global competition is also playing a role, encouraging manufacturers to replace old products with newer versions at an ever-more-rapid pace. ''When you're facing a product life cycle of nanoseconds, you can't drive revenues just by lowering unit costs,'' said |
1094400_1 | Irish Premier Sees Progress On Arms Issue In the North | the I.R.A. political wing, and David Trimble, the Protestant First Minister of the Northern Ireland Assembly. Mr. Ahern said on Irish national radio: ''I have to keep at them to move further. I believe we will find a formula.'' The dispute has blocked the next step in the northern peace effort -- the formation of a Protestant-Catholic cabinet in the Assembly to accept home rule powers from Britain, which has ruled the predominantly Protestant province directly since 1974. The return of home rule is provided for in the peace agreement approved last April 10. The accord is intended to end sectarian violence in the province and to give more power to the Catholic minority and more influence in northern affairs to the overwhelmingly Catholic Irish Republic to the south. While they did not confirm Mr. Ahern's optimism, Mr. Adams and Mr. Trimble have refrained from the sharp attacks on each other that often characterize their exchanges. They met privately in Washington last week with each other and with President Clinton, who urged them to settle the disarmament dispute. Mr. Trimble has insisted that the new cabinet cannot include Sinn Fein members until the I.R.A. has begun to disarm. Mr. Adams points out that the peace agreement does not require disarmament before May 2000 and contends that the I.R.A.'s 21-month cease-fire is evidence that it wants peace. Mr. Adams said today that he welcomed the ''positive rhetoric'' from Mr. Trimble in recent days. But he repeated that he could not deliver what Mr. Trimble calls ''a credible beginning'' to I.R.A. disarmament -- including turning over detonators, timing devices and explosives. The I.R.A. arsenal is estimated at 100 tons of weapons. Mr. Ahern's statement today renewed speculation among officials and experts on what might be in a settlement formula. Most agree that it would be based on a statement on disarmament that both leaders could defend as honorable to their hard-line supporters. Both Mr. Ahern and Mr. Adams also called for an independent investigation of the killing last week by Protestant paramilitaries of Rosemary Nelson, a prominent lawyer who represented Catholics accused of committing terrorist crimes. The killing led to three nights of violence in the northern city of Portadown. Catholic protesters said they had been enraged by the pounding of drums by Protestants, some of whom shouted approval of the killing. Protestants said the drumming was to celebrate St. Patrick's Day. |
1094408_1 | With Balloon's Work Done, Its Builder Reveals a Secret | a camel track, at 26.9 degrees north latitude, 28.2 degrees east longitude. The balloon bounced twice before settling to the ground just after 8 A.M. today (1 A.M. Eastern time). Dr. Piccard and Mr. Jones face a hero's welcome when they fly to Geneva from Cairo on Monday. The balloon was sponsored by a Swiss watch-making company, Breitling, and its captain, Dr. Piccard, is Swiss. The co-pilot, Mr. Jones, is British and the balloon was built in England. For the first time, Don Cameron, whose company in Bristol, England, Cameron Balloons, built the Breitling Orbiter 3, disclosed some of the technical innovations that helped bring the balloon to victory. In an interview today, he said the experience gained from previous flights had led to success. Cameron Balloons has built many long-distance balloons, including those flown by various competitors in recent round-the-world attempts. All these balloons were Roziers -- hybrid balloons lifted by separate compartments containing helium and hot air, which is generated by propane burners. (Such balloons are named for their inventor, Jean Pilatre de Rozier, whose hydrogen-and-hot-air balloon exploded in 1785, making him the first person in history to die in an air accident.) Fully inflated, the Breitling Orbiter 3 stood 180 feet high -- about the height of the Leaning Tower of Pisa -- and contained a volume of gas and hot air equivalent to that of the water in seven Olympic-size swimming pools. ''I would say that the most important improvement we built into the Breitling Orbiter 3,'' Mr. Cameron said, ''was a layer of foam insulation we installed around the helium-filled central section just a few millimeters thick. The foam filled the space between the gas-tight inner cell and the outer, aluminized plastic cover. ''This helped to keep the helium from heating up, expanding, and leaking out during the day, and also kept the helium from cooling and contracting too much at night, forcing the pilots to heat air with their burners to maintain altitude. The net effect was to save propane fuel and extend the balloon's duration and range.'' How effective was the new foam insulation? ''The Breitling Orbiter 2, which lacked the foam layer, ran out of fuel after only 10 days and had to land far short of going around the world,'' Mr. Cameron said. ''The Breitling Orbiter 3 stayed up for 20 days and still had propane to spare. Judge for yourself.'' |
1095836_1 | Disabled Return to Old School but Segregation Is Charged | 380 with some disabled Hasidic children of elementary school age who attended I.S. 71. The district made the switch because the State Department of Education had ruled that the swapped Hasidic children, who have disabilities like Down syndrome, were improperly segregated at I.S. 71 and needed to spend part of the day with other children their age. The disabled Hasidic children will now remain at P.S. 380, although they are taught separately in bilingual Yiddish classes. But parents of the other disabled students want their children to have some contact with the Hasidic children, and raised that issue with school officials in a meeting last week. A Hispanic community organization, United We Stand of New York, videotaped the Hasidic students using separate entrances from other children at both P.S. 380 and I.S. 71. A visit to the schools last Thursday confirmed the use of the separate entrances. ''How are we going to learn about each other's culture if we are learning separately?'' asked Ramdai Aklu, whose son Shiva will be moved back into P.S. 380. The principal of P.S. 380, Joe Belesi, said school officials from District 75, a citywide district which supervises students with multiple disabilities, wanted to post escorts for the students only at the front door, where there is a ramp. Last month the disabled Hasidic students, who are supervised by District 14, began using the other entrance; there is no ramp but there is more room for their school buses, Mr. Belesi said. He added that second graders in regular classes use the same door as the Hasidic children in the afternoon. But parents and Hispanic community groups said that some of the Hasidic children could benefit from the ramp, and that separate entrances evoke the segregated American South of previous decades. They also say that District 14 maintains separate therapy rooms for the older disabled Hasidic students who still attend I.S. 71. ''What this issue comes down to is segregation,'' said Luis Garden Acosta, president of El Puente, a Hispanic community group. Rabbi Leopold Lefkowitz, a member of the board of District 14, did not return calls for comment. But Mr. Belesi said District 14 officials were looking for ways to integrate the Hasidic children during parts of the school day. ''There are plans for integration being worked on at the district office,'' he said. ''It will be done.'' JULIAN E. BARNES NEIGHBORHOOD REPORT: WILLIAMSBURG |
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1095831_1 | Women of Which Cloth? Tweed? Cashmere? | matters like nail polish, hem lengths, heel heights and hair color. And they do so at some risk. When Rabbi Mychal Springer, 33, director of pastoral care and education at Beth Israel Medical Center, wore an above-the-knee skirt to work one day, an Orthodox woman recoiled, lambasting her in front of patients and staff members. ''You're not a rabbi -- your skirt is too short!'' Rabbi Springer recalled the woman as saying. Her reply today: ''So if my skirt was longer, I'd be a rabbi?'' As more and more women have entered the clergy over the last three decades, a question that leaders of age-old faiths never much pondered is being asked every day: What will I wear? There are nearly 500 rabbis nationwide who are women and the Episcopal Church has 1,500 active priests who are women. The issue of how to present themselves in public, to strike a balance between decorum and worldliness, is an open-ended one. A clergywoman, many say, can't look tarty, dowdy, girly or overly ''mannish.'' To break through what Ms. McSpadden has called ''the stained-glass ceiling'' and rise in a denomination's hierarchy, even a woman's hairstyle has to be right. ''Jesus wasn't big on style,'' said the Rev. Joanna Adams, 54, senior pastor of Trinity Presbyterian Church in Atlanta, who has her nails done every week, always in a pastel. ''But women in the clergy live in the real world, and a part of who we are is how we present ourselves. Appearance isn't everything, but at the same time, loveliness is not a sin.'' Dressing for services poses the least conflict. Both Christians and Jews say they feel comfortable wearing the flowing unisex liturgical robes that allow clergywomen to blend easily with the men. The plain robes are traditionally worn with other ornate vestments, which many women use as style statements. An embroidered prayer shawl or lace? Yarmulkes in white crochet, plaid or gold? The Rev. Berle Ingram, a United Methodist minister and a doctoral candidate at Union Theological Seminary, said that some clergywomen drape colorful stoles around their shoulders for a more feminine effect. ''In Lent, the color that the ministry wears in their stoles is purple,'' she said. ''With more and more women, I have noticed there are a variety of shades of purple, lavender, gradations of pink, and stoles with fuchsia highlights. It's a way of making softer or bolder |
1095590_0 | Books in Brief: Nonfiction | LETTERS OF INTENT Women Cross Generations to Talk About Family, Work, Sex, Love and the Future of Feminism. Edited by Anna Bondoc and Meg Daly. Free Press, $23. This collection of epistolary exchanges between young feminists and their ''foremothers'' may not have turned out exactly as planned. The editors, Anna Bondoc and Meg Daly, acknowledge that the older women took advantage of the format (the 20- and 30-somethings fired the initial salvos; the veterans responded) to get in ''the last word.'' And how. When the freelance journalist Liza Featherstone asks the psychologist Phyllis Chesler, her former employer, why feminists make such harsh taskmasters, Chesler shoots back that ''a feminist boss who occasionally yells or criticizes real errors is not breaking your spirit. Women tend to experience everything 'personally.' ''In a similar vein, the poet and essayist Katha Pollitt reacts to the magazine editor Emily Gordon's notion that established women writers should help their younger counterparts with ''When did sisterhood become mother-daughterhood?'' Happily, many of the young correspondents pose larger questions. The journalist Sara Hammel asks Arie Taylor, the first black noncommissioned officer in charge of women's Air Force training, why women would choose to be in combat anyway. The reply is straightforward: ''When men restrict who can fight and die for America, they restrict who can run America.'' In the end, despite Daly's claim that letters have brought together an ''interconnected web'' of women, the reader has a sense of having encountered a host of independent spirits -- committed to feminist ideals, but determined to tread their own paths. Polly Morrice |
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1095835_1 | On Line, Few Kick Tires, but Many Look | insurance, financing, accessories and news about recalls. The rapid acceptance of these basic Web shopping services has forced the pioneers, which also include Microsoft's Carpoint (carpoint.msn.com), to develop new ways to sustain their initial popularity. And it has drawn car manufacturers and dealers on line, too. For example, General Motors introduced a Web site early this month (www.gmbuypower.com) that it calls the world's largest virtual showroom. The site lets shoppers search for vehicles with the equipment of their choice on almost 6,000 dealers' lots. Shoppers cannot buy cars, but they can exchange E-mail with dealerships, schedule test drives and apply for financing. Industry analysts say G.M.'s site is far more sophisticated than those of most car makers. Still, investors may not be wrong to bet, at least in the short term, on services like Autoweb.com and Autobytel.com. Many shoppers turn to them even after they've visited other on-line resources. ''Consumers still perceive the independent services to be more reliable sources of information,'' said Chris Denove, director of consulting operations at J. D. Power & Associates, the automotive consultant. ACCORDING to Jupiter Communications, an Internet research firm, 94 percent of all car purchase requests submitted over the Internet last year came from car-buying services. Just 4 percent came from manufacturers' Web sites; the other 2 percent came from dealers' sites. Among independent services, Carpoint had the most visited Web site last month, followed by Autoweb.com, Cars.com (a service backed by eight big newspaper publishers, including The New York Times Company), and Autobytel.com, according to Media Metrix, which tracks Internet use. To retain users, the independent services have been introducing new ways to assist consumers. Carpoint, for example, introduced a car maintenance service in November, which, among other things, lets users track maintenance visits. Autobytel.com offers its users a ''dream car''; they get an E-mail whenever a car meeting their specifications becomes available from an affiliated dealer. And Autoweb.com is setting up a service center that, among other things, will provide advice on selected topics from an on-line mechanic. Another fairly recent development on line is help for consumers who are shopping for used cars. This is a trickier market for Internet commerce, according to researchers like Forrester; each used car is unique, and Web users, who tend to be affluent, are more interested in new vehicles. Still, the fast growth of the nine-month-old Cars.com, which lets users search its newspaper affiliates' |
1095649_3 | Trolling 'Low' Culture For High-Flying Ideas: A Sport of Intellectuals | to argue that any distinctions between high and low are themselves merely political. The main goal is to reveal the deeper political meanings latent in all cultural activity. In this view it may even be that wrestling matches reveal more about society than elaborately disguised ''higher'' activities. But aside from this neo-Marxist view, there is another influence on these intellectual preoccupations: a Western fascination with cultures believed to have a closer connection with Nature. Such cultures may possess forms of knowledge ignored by the rationally structured sciences of the West. Rousseau is often named as this tradition's godfather, but this view, which combines a romance about a lost world with a dissatisfaction with the high culture of the West, has had important consequences for the interpretation of world cultures. The anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss has shown, for example, that even the notion of the ''primitive'' has to be revised: myths of so-called primitive societies display sophisticated systems of thought. Contemporary multiculturalism taps into similar sentiments. THIS romance remains potent even within Western culture, in which intellectuals -- who have presumably been exquisitely trained in rational analysis -- look to more ''primitive'' activities with a certain amount of envy. Those who have mastered their bodies and use their bodies for power have certainly tapped into a kind of knowledge not usually associated with intellectual life; intellectual envy mounts when the physical mastery also comes from a culture that is deemed more ''natural.'' There is a dark side here: this envy has helped inspire disastrous intellectual devotion to various forms of criminality as well as to German fascism and third world terrorism. The envy, however, also has an influence on intellectual considerations of Low culture, in which admiration can end up tempering any left-over sense of condescension. But the strange thing about the ideologies of Marxism and Romanticism, which have had such an impact on university and intellectual life, is that it is possible to reject their prepackaged views about Good and Evil and find something revealing about their approaches. One doesn't have to go as far as the cultural-studies radicals to argue that there are meanings latent in mass culture; one doesn't have to be a Romantic to attend to aspects of human existence other than the rational, and one doesn't have to accept either view that there are no other distinctions worth making. Such issues may now be worth wrestling over. |
1095932_1 | Drug Marketing Starts Legal Battle | the brand name Evista, to prevent the bone-thinning disease osteoporosis, also in postmenopausal women. The disease is a major cause of broken bones in elderly women, including fractures in the hips and spine that can be crippling and even life-threatening. Zeneca, which filed suit against Lilly on Feb. 25 in Federal District Court in New York, wrote to thousands of doctors in the United States and posted a letter on its Web site asserting that Lilly's sales representatives had falsely told doctors that Evista could prevent breast cancer and had created a widespread misperception that Evista could be used in place of Nolvadex. Lilly countersued on March 19, denying the accusation and demanding that Zeneca stop its comments about Lilly's sales force. The case is scheduled to go to court in May. The F.D.A. had already written to both companies in January, accusing them of placing misleading advertisements in consumer magazines and telling them to stop. Lilly was said to have implied that Evista could prevent breast cancer and Zeneca was told it had wrongly omitted mention of the risks of Nolvadex, which include blood clots and a slight increase in the risk of uterine cancer. A spokeswoman for the drug agency said that it could seize a product or obtain an injunction against advertisements that violate regulations but that those measures were rarely taken. Both Zeneca and Lilly said they had stopped using the offending advertisements and other promotional materials. The warnings to Lilly and Zeneca are striking because the companies are the first to jockey for position in an enormous and potentially lucrative new market: cancer prevention. ''Breast cancer is not the most frequent problem facing women, but it's the one that concerns them most,'' said Dr. Wulf Utian, director of obstetrics and gynecology at the University Hospitals of Cleveland, who has no connection to either company. Even though far more women die of heart disease than breast cancer, women worry more about the issue of which drugs or hormones might cause breast cancer or prevent it. ''It is very confusing for women, and also very confusing for average practitioners,'' Dr. Utian said. ''There is a huge need for additional studies.'' The first treatment approved for problems associated with menopause was estrogen, which is now available in a variety of formulations. In addition to relieving hot flashes, insomnia and other problems, estrogen has also been shown to prevent |
1096517_0 | Florida Details Wide Abuse At Agency for the Retarded | A state report has documented widespread neglect of patients and misuse of funds at an agency for the mentally retarded that was put under state supervision earlier this month. The report, obtained today by The New York Times and other news organizations, was conducted by the Florida Department of Children and Families after a former employee of the agency made accusations that clients were abused and neglected and that senior staff members routinely took the center's money for their own use. The center's executive director, Maureen Robinson, was fired earlier this month after state investigators determined that she had used money from several grants to pay herself a yearly salary of $180,000, and that she was driving a 1997 Jaguar that may have been insured with the agency's money. Such practices contributed to a cash shortage that, according to the state's investigation, has pushed the agency, Metatherapy Institute Inc. of Homestead, Fla., close to insolvency. Ms. Robinson could not be reached for comment. The acting district administrator for the department, Sara Herald, said the state was still investigating many of these accusations. No charges have been filed against any individual, Ms. Herald added. The state-appointed receiver, Kenneth Marlin, is expected to give a report to the state next week on the agency's finances. Metatherapy, one of the largest agencies of its kind in this area, runs rehabilitation and therapy programs for 63 mentally retarded adults. It also provides temporary housing, job training and counseling for about 100 homeless men and has a substance abuse program. The problems facing the agency exemplify what critics call the lack of accountability and oversight that have plagued such institutions here. Metatherapy is the fourth nonprofit agency serving the developmentally disabled to be put under receivership in Miami-Dade and Monroe Counties in the last five years. Anita Bock, who until February served as the district administrator for the department, is temporarily supervising Metatherapy. The problems there, Ms. Bock said, reflect much of what she has encountered at other agencies over the years. ''It was initially very shocking for me,'' said Ms. Bock, who had been district administrator since 1992. ''But I became used to encountering these problems in the nonprofit arena. There's very little accountability.'' ''On a scale of 1 to 10, this situation is a 5,'' she said. ''I have seen 1's in my tenure with the department.'' In the report filed on Feb. |
1096691_0 | Compromise On Arms Proves Elusive In Ulster | After two days of intensive negotiations, Prime Ministers Tony Blair of Britain and Bertie Ahern of Ireland failed tonight to persuade Protestant and Roman Catholic leaders to compromise on the bitter dispute over the disarmament of the Irish Republican Army. But the Prime Ministers, working against a Friday deadline, said they would resume talks with the leaders on Wednesday morning. Mr. Blair stayed overnight near Belfast and was said to be prepared to go to London on Wednesday afternoon to answer questions in Parliament about Kosovo, then to return here later in the day. When the negotiations ended tonight at about 11, several participants said there had been no breakthrough, but they disagreed on how much, if any, progress had been made. After meeting with party leaders for four and a half hours on Monday night, the Prime Ministers swept back and forth over this British province in a military helicopter today, emphasizing at several meetings that time is running out for settling the issue, which threatens to cripple or collapse the Northern Ireland peace agreement approved last April 10. The British Government has set a deadline of this Friday for an agreement. The sticking point is the insistence by Protestant leaders that the overwhelmingly Catholic I.R.A. make a ''credible beginning'' on disarmament before its political wing, Sinn Fein, is allowed to sit in a new Protestant and Catholic Cabinet of the Northern Ireland Assembly. The Assembly is the body that would carry out the home rule provisions of the peace agreement. The Cabinet is to be created to pave the way for the return of home rule powers to the province by the London Government after 27 years. Failure to compromise this week could lead to another delay and possibly to a return to the widespread sectarian violence the peace agreement is supposed to end. The I.R.A. has observed a cease-fire for more than 20 months, but has repeatedly stated that it will not surrender a single bullet or an ounce of Semtex explosive. Unless it does, Protestant leaders say, Sinn Fein will be excluded from the new Assembly Cabinet. Sinn Fein points out that the peace agreement does not require disarmament before May 2000. As they began their day with short speeches at the Hazlewood Integrated College, an interdenominational high school in Belfast, the two Prime Ministers sounded optimistic. ''After talking to the parties here last night and |
1096590_0 | China's Dam Project | To the Editor: In evaluating China's Three Gorges Dam Project, it is important to avoid attributing Western sensibilities to the Chinese people (editorial, March 29). While traveling along the Yangtze River last May, I spoke with residents from several towns slated for inundation. They were enthusiastic about the project and saw it as their patriotic duty to participate in ways that their leaders directed them to, even if that created temporary difficulties for them and their families. The notion that the collective good supersedes individual aspirations is foreign to late-20th-century Americans. It is wrong to withdraw financial support from the Three Gorges project simply because it does not conform to American priorities. STEVEN LANDAU Brooklyn, March 29, 1999 |
1096612_0 | Compromise On Arms Proves Elusive In Ulster | After two days of intensive negotiations, Prime Ministers Tony Blair of Britain and Bertie Ahern of Ireland failed tonight to persuade Protestant and Roman Catholic leaders to compromise on the bitter dispute over the disarmament of the Irish Republican Army. But the Prime Ministers, working against a Friday deadline, said they would resume talks with the leaders on Wednesday morning. Mr. Blair stayed overnight near Belfast and was said to be prepared to go to London on Wednesday afternoon to answer questions in Parliament about Kosovo, then to return here later in the day. When the negotiations ended tonight at about 11, several participants said there had been no breakthrough, but they disagreed on how much, if any, progress had been made. After meeting with party leaders for four and a half hours on Monday night, the Prime Ministers swept back and forth over this British province in a military helicopter today, emphasizing at several meetings that time is running out for settling the issue, which threatens to cripple or collapse the Northern Ireland peace agreement approved last April 10. The British Government has set a deadline of this Friday for an agreement. The sticking point is the insistence by Protestant leaders that the overwhelmingly Catholic I.R.A. make a ''credible beginning'' on disarmament before its political wing, Sinn Fein, is allowed to sit in a new Protestant and Catholic Cabinet of the Northern Ireland Assembly. The Assembly is the body that would carry out the home rule provisions of the peace agreement. The Cabinet is to be created to pave the way for the return of home rule powers to the province by the London Government after 27 years. Failure to compromise this week could lead to another delay and possibly to a return to the widespread sectarian violence the peace agreement is supposed to end. The I.R.A. has observed a cease-fire for more than 20 months, but has repeatedly stated that it will not surrender a single bullet or an ounce of Semtex explosive. Unless it does, Protestant leaders say, Sinn Fein will be excluded from the new Assembly Cabinet. Sinn Fein points out that the peace agreement does not require disarmament before May 2000. As they began their day with short speeches at the Hazlewood Integrated College, an interdenominational high school in Belfast, the two Prime Ministers sounded optimistic. ''After talking to the parties here last night and |
1096515_3 | Even Milosevic Foes Criticize Western Media | by either side,'' he said. ''I watch and read our media and the international media, including The New York Times and The Washington Post, and I'm in touch with students all over the world.'' But Dusan complains that Serbs are being demonized and that the world talks of Nazis now to justify an act of aggression on a sovereign country fighting an insurgency. ''NATO says this is the worst humanitarian crisis in Europe since World War II,'' he said, ''but three years ago a half-million Serbs were cleared out of Krajina. But it wasn't in the interests of the U.S. to put Croatia down, so there was less information and no outrage. ''I understand NATO must justify its actions, but the bombing of Yugoslavia is wrong. I know Slobodan Milosevic is doing bad things, and lots and lots of people in Serbia hate Milosevic. But there are also a lot of innocent people here, and now his regime is stronger than ever. Horrible things are happening, but horrible things have happened all through the Balkans.'' Radio 021, the only independent media outlet in Novi Sad, Serbia's second-largest city, was also shut down. ''Everything will be shut down, and then what?'' Dusan asked. ''It will be another 20 years before democracy comes here, and there's a bigger humanitarian crisis than before.'' Vuk Micovic, like Dusan, is a student leader who published his phone number on the Internet. Students use the World Wide Web and E-mail almost exclusively to exchange information, he said. ''Most of the authorities don't even know what E-mail is,'' he said. ''During the student protests our Web page was popular, and the police broke in and said, 'Where is that Internet?' as if they could confiscate it.'' Mr. Micovic, 23, uses the Yugoslav Internet service provider EUnet and a university provider called Afrodite. In Novi Sad, he said, it can take four hours to get a connection. No one knows how many people in Yugoslavia use the Internet or E-mail. A study financed by the United States Agency for International Development suggested that perhaps 50,000 in this country used E-mail; Belgrade alone has nearly two million people. A spokesman for EUnet, who would not give his name, said that his company and the various other providers had about 60,000 subscribers in Yugoslavia, and that at least 100,000 people used E-mail. They include the Serbian Orthodox Church, which has |
1091042_1 | U.S. Says Europeans Withhold Banana-Trade Data | at punishing their 15-nation bloc for its stance in the banana dispute. The world trade forum has found that the European Union's banana import rules give unfair preference to exporters in Caribbean and African nations, most of them former European colonies. Washington contends that European Union rules deprive American-based banana companies of $520 million a year in lost sales in Europe. The trade organization had planned to make a final determination on the amount of damages a week ago, then requested more information, and is not expected to rule until later this month. Angered at the delay, the United States went ahead and imposed 100 percent tariffs on $520 million worth of European imports -- mostly luxury items such as pecorino cheese and cashmere sweaters. At the session today, Roderick Abbott, the European Union's representative, said the United States was single-handedly ''declaring war'' on any nation ''whose compliance it decides is inadequate.'' Although the European Union had hoped to get strong backing from members of the 134-nation world trade body, representatives of some countries said the organization had been distracted by the banana dispute and urged it to address other problems. John Weekes of Canada told delegates that trade between the United States and European Union nations amounted to only 5 percent of global commerce. No decision was made at the meeting, which was closed to outsiders. Delegates briefed reporters afterward. The United States received a strong expression of protest from Caribbean Community nations on Sunday, when they suspended an anti-drug-trafficking agreement that President Clinton signed in 1997. Small Caribbean countries say their economies will be devastated unless they have a ready market for bananas. Ms. Hayes argued today that the European Union had shirked responsibility to comply with trade rulings, and had repeatedly engaged in delaying tactics, including, she said, calling today's special session. A key example, she maintained, was failure to give necessary information to a panel of three arbitrators who were to determine how much money United States companies exporting bananas from Central America and elsewhere in the region had lost as the result of their near-exclusion from European markets. Mr. Abbott hinted that some compromise could be reached. ''Discussions are getting more concrete,'' he told reporters, adding that the Europeans thought the arbitrators would find considerably less than $520 million in lost sales, though they did not think the figure would be zero, either. INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS |
1091098_3 | Schools Inquiry Is a Lesson In Tangled Political Tensions | his aides. Mr. Pataki's proposed state budget includes $3.5 million for the investigation of the city's school system, signaling that he intends a much broader inquiry than he has let on. But last week, Joseph L. Bruno, the Republican majority leader of the State Senate, said the inquiry should not receive more than $1 million. Many Senate Republicans are no fans of Mr. Giuliani, seeing him as too combative and too politically moderate, but they also think he represents their best chance of winning the Senate seat now held by a Democrat, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who is retiring next year. They are dismayed by the Governor's investigation and have been working frantically to repair the rift between Mr. Pataki and Mr. Giuliani. Now, Mr. Silver says he will not allow the budget to include any money for the investigating commission. He says he is not opposed to an inquiry, but he does not want it to be controlled by the Governor. ''This is a political witch hunt,'' he said today in an interview. ''If there's an extra $3.5 million around, it should go to fixing schools and buying textbooks.'' Mr. Giuliani welcomed those comments, saying that the Legislature should ''try to either eliminate it or reduce it dramatically.'' But even Mr. Silver acknowledged today that there is no way to prevent the investigation from proceeding. Like any other part of the state budget, the amount allocated for the investigation will be decided in negotiations between the Assembly and the Senate, and possibly the Governor, as well. Mr. Silver's protestations aside, there will be some money for the inquiry, unless he makes it a defining issue, in which case he will have to sacrifice other budget items he values. More likely, the Speaker is signaling that he wants something from Mr. Pataki in exchange. Even if the budget does not contain a specific allocation for the investigating commission, Mr. Pataki has ample ability to pay for it with money squirreled away in a variety of places. He has already found $350,000 in the current budget for the commission to begin its work. In responding to Mr. Silver's statements, Michael McKeon, Mr. Pataki's press secretary, said: ''The first question this raises is what is he afraid of, what is he trying to hide? We are fully confident that we will have the resources to go forward with a full and thorough review.'' |
1091049_3 | Fishing Nations, Worried About Supply, Will Trim Fleets | tons, the international food agency says. Despite strict controls on fishing in recent years, New England fishery managers concluded in December that the cod fishery in the Gulf of Maine is collapsing. The Clinton Administration has already proposed new spending to take some of the region's boats out of service, and last month the National Marine Fisheries Service proposed guidelines for buying back licenses and scrapping boats throughout American fisheries. The new international measures recommended in February, at the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization, will have no immediate impact. The first step is to get an accurate measure of how much fish the world's fleets really can catch. Each nation that signs the agreement pledges to reduce overcapacity, starting between 2003 and 2005. ''This is the first significant international document on the management of fishing capacity,'' said Dominique Greboval, a fisheries planning manager with the Food and Agricultural Organization. ''It might not look like much, but in terms of approach it is a significant departure.'' The agency has estimated conservatively that the fishing industry's overcapacity is at least 30 percent. Gareth Porter, a fisheries expert for the World Wildlife Fund, has estimated overcapacity at almost 150 percent. And the food agency found several years ago that worldwide, the fishing industry was spending $54 billion more than it was taking in every year. The world's fishing fleet numbers about four million vessels -- about one-third of them large enough to have decks and motors, the agency says. About 40,000 are larger than 100 tons and longer than about 78 feet. And more than a thousand of those are owned in the United States. The new agreement, which was pushed by the United States and Japan, is one of a series of United Nations pacts since 1995 to address overfishing, and the most explicit on controlling overcapacity. But the political barriers to following through are daunting. ''There is so much invested in the way things are that changing and downsizing the industry is an enormous task,'' said Anne Platt McGinn, of the Worldwatch Institute, an environmental research organization. ''Probably the European Union is going to have the hardest time of all, because their fishermen are so over-subsidized.'' As in the United States, government programs in Europe have encouraged the modernization and expansion of the fishing industry, but other programs have aimed at reducing the size of the fleet to control overfishing. |
1091016_5 | A 'Bonus' From Mars: Evidence Of Its Past; Glitch Gives a Spacecraft More Time for Photographs | erosion. This left open the question of whether the early Mars environment could sustain flowing surface water for long periods. Dr. Michael C. Malin of Malin Space Sciences Systems in San Diego and Dr. Michael H. Carr of the United States Geological Survey in Menlo Park, Calif., reported that the new pictures supported the view that ground water, rather than rainfall, played an important role in the formation of most of the water-eroded landscapes. Many of the dry channels appeared to be the result of short-duration floods, presumably fed by frozen reservoirs just beneath the surface. Other scientists suggested that volcanism could have melted these reservoirs and brought the water to the surface. But Dr. Malin and Dr. Carr also found the first strong evidence that in some places water had flowed for extended periods over great distances. A prime example is a narrow, meandering valley in Nanedi Valles. Surveyor pictures detected a 600-foot-wide trough at the bottom of the 1.6-mile-wide canyon, indicating to the scientists that flowing water had steadily eroded the channel deeper and deeper over a long period of time. Dr. Albee, the chief scientist, said Surveyor's nonphotographic results had also produced important findings. The magnetometer revealed large remnant magnetic fields in the Martian crust, indicating that at one time Mars had a global magnetic field presumably generated by convections in a molten core. An analysis of radio signals has shown that the planet's gravity field is lumpy, which may mean that an ancient cratered terrain lies buried under the present crust. And the spacecraft's laser altimeter, measuring variations in surface elevations, has given scientists a more detailed view of the terraced landscape of the north polar cap. For its mapping mission, the Surveyor is orbiting Mars from pole to pole, passing over a given part of the planet at the same local time on each orbit. Mapping pictures are to be taken repeatedly of the entire planet from a 250-mile altitude over almost two Earth years, the equivalent of one Mars year. Although the global map is mainly intended for interpreting the planet's geologic history and planning future missions, Surveyor will be directed to take special pictures of the borders of the southern polar ice cap in May. The pictures will be used in selecting a safe and interesting landing site for the Polar Lander spacecraft, already on its way for a scheduled landing in December. |
1091099_0 | Britain Postpones the Creation of Ulster's Cabinet for 3 Weeks | Britain announced a three-week postponement today in the effort to create an executive cabinet that is to give the Roman Catholic minority more power and return home rule to this British province. Mo Mowlam, the British Northern Ireland Secretary, said the delay was needed to give the politicians more time to seek compromise in the dispute over disarmament of the Irish Republican Army. But Gerry Adams, the president of the I.R.A.'s political wing, Sinn Fein, clearly anticipating the delay, blamed it on the British Government and said, ''now we're into crisis time, big time.'' The executive cabinet, which was to have been formed by members of the Northern Ireland Assembly this Wednesday, was delayed by the dispute over the disarmament of the I.R.A. The Protestant First Minister of the Assembly, David Trimble, has ruled that until the I.R.A. begins ''credible'' disarmament, Sinn Fein will not be allowed to take its two places in the new cabinet. Mr. Adams says, accurately, that the agreement setting up the Assembly does not require disarmament before May 2000. He says the I.R.A.'s current 19-month cease-fire is evidence that it supports the peace effort. The police of the Royal Ulster Constabulary declined to comment tonight on a report in today's issue of the Belfast Telegraph newspaper that the police had warned Mr. Adams of a threat to his life by an unspecified I.R.A. splinter group that opposes his participation in the peace effort. Efforts to reach a compromise failed again today as Mr. Adams met in Dublin with Prime Minister Bertie Ahern of the Irish Republic. Generally, northern Catholics look to the overwhelmingly Catholic Irish Republic to support their demands. But Mr. Ahern has said that it is unrealistic to expect Protestants to sit in a cabinet with Sinn Fein until the disarmament dispute is settled. Mr. Adams and Mr. Trimble are to meet in Belfast on Tuesday, but officials and experts said a breakthrough in the dispute was unlikely. In announcing the delay, Ms. Mowlam said she was dropping the March 10 deadline and extending it to the week starting March 29. That would mean that the politicians would be talking about it as the first anniversary of approval of the overall peace agreement approached on April 10, presumably increasing public pressure for a settlement. Ms. Mowlam said the delay would give the northern political parties ''the time and space to find a way |
1089443_4 | Monsanto Visionary in a Cubicle; Could His Company's Special Culture Survive a Merger? | the company with a huge debt load. Earnings suffered, and heavy reorganization charges and layoffs were announced. The stock tumbled in October after the deal with American Home Products collapsed, and it has been treading water ever since. The shares closed today at $44.375, down 6.5 percent so far this year and a 31 percent drop from their 52-week high of $63.9375 in August. The company has also come under sharp criticism, especially in Britain, for its genetically altered seeds. When Mr. Shapiro was in San Francisco last year, he was hit in the face with a pie thrown by someone protesting ''Frankenstein foods.'' Monsanto executives, however, say their long-term strategy is sound. The company bought seed companies to speed its genetically modified seeds to market. Monsanto says that such products have been proved safe and could even bring great environmental benefits. Indeed, company executives say that a revolution is under way in food, nutrition and health care, and that it involves using biology and genetic science. So Monsanto has spent heavily on research and development to create a pipeline of blockbuster drugs, like its popular new arthritis drug Celebrex, and it is modifying corn and soybean seeds to make their crops more productive and more resistant to disease. Mr. Shapiro and other Monsanto executives say that for the last few years they have staked the future of Monsanto not just on what the company plans to create but also on how it plans to create it. ''All companies think they have the smarter guys,'' Mr. Shapiro said. ''So we came to the conclusion that our biggest competitive advantage was our culture. If we got a higher percentage of people's potential, we could win. In an environment where people care about what they're doing and feel a personal bond, it will release a lot of potential.'' Mr. Shapiro talks about companies' having complex ecosystems, of trying to create a setting where employees can be honest, of channeling a worker's energy and creativity. And he says that the right corporate environment comes down to two things: authenticity and caring. He rejects traditional corporate structures as cold and debilitating. When Mr. Shapiro, who has been with the company in various capacities for nearly two decades, first visited Monsanto's huge corporate campus in St. Louis, where the buildings are lettered, he said that it was as if he could hear the voice of |
1102753_3 | The World; All in Favor of This Target, Say Yes, Si, Oui, Ja | categories of targets, the North Atlantic Council has now largely removed itself from reviewing specific targets, though individual governments have not. Most major targets still have to be cleared through the political-military chains of command of each ally, leading to second-guessing that has frustrated some commanders at NATO and the Pentagon and, inevitably, slowed the campaign. ''You have these criss-crossing objectives,'' said Andrew F. Krepinevich, executive director at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a research group in Washington. ''On the one hand, NATO's credibility and viability will be best served by a quick defeat of Milosevic. On the other hand, many NATO members have reservations about going after certain targets or have concerns about the risks to pilots.'' In the case of the United States, the chain of command flows from General Clark, who also serves as commander of all American forces for Europe and Africa, to the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the Pentagon. A group within the Joint Staff, called the J-2T, works closely with General Clark's planners. FROM the Joint Staff, decisions on major targets move up through Secretary Cohen's office and, when considered particularly sensitive, across the Potomac to the White House. Only then do the targets go back to General Clark's staff with a stamp of approval. A White House aide said that while Mr. Clinton approves targets of supreme sensitivity, he has yet to display President Johnson's penchant for micro-managing from afar. Routine strikes against military targets are no longer reviewed by political leaders. The major targets are still vetted but approved more quickly, as evidenced by the attack late Thursday on Yugoslavia's state-run television, which several allies, led by France, had previously considered too sensitive to strike because of the potential threat to civilians. For all its unwieldiness, NATO's consensus approach serves its purpose, officials say, assuring that each ally stands behind whatever plan emerges. ''NATO has 18 besides us,'' said Maj. Gen. Charles F. Wald, a planner at the Joint Staff who has become a leading Pentagon spokesman on the war. ''They all have a vote on everything. They can vote on whether we start this or not. They can vote on whether we continue. They can vote on everything. And that is the strength, and probably the weakness a little bit, of what we have going on here. But the beauty of the fact is we are a coalition.'' |
1102878_11 | WHAT PRICE GLORY?: A special report.; Cuban Players Defect, but Often With a Cost | often shrouded in secrecy. Most players whose families have made it to America have denied they knew about or had a hand in the plans. For instance, the wife and two sons of Rolando Arrojo, the Tampa Bay right-hander, joined him two months after his 1996 defection, but the details of their flight by sea have remained closely guarded. Silence is the rule among relatives of defectors in Cuba, as well. The secrecy is understandable. Orlando Chinea, a 42-year-old pitching coach, was among the four players who, along with Toca, boarded a 16-foot boat and made the run northward across the Straits of Florida 13 months ago. After a day at sea, the players were picked up by a Bahamian fishing boat, but only Toca was ultimately allowed to stay abroad because of his Japanese wife. Chinea and the others -- Angel Lopez, Jorge Diaz and Maykel Jova -- were returned to Cuba. Since then, Chinea says life has become intolerable. His house is kept under surveillance, he said. He has been banned from working as a coach. ''My future is very uncertain,'' he said. ''I cannot even be sure of my life here.'' But for Colina, the 28-year-old first baseman, life in America for the moment is blessed because he has been joined by his wife and daughter. Colina defected one night in November 1996, along with Jesus Ametller and William Ortega of the Havana Industriales, during a baseball tournament in Chiapas, Mexico. Saying they were taking a walk, they met up with Joe Cubas, a Miami agent who specializes in helping Cuban athletes defect, in a nearby cemetery. After six months in Costa Rica, all three signed minor league contracts with American teams. Then Colina's family had to execute its own escape. Dianelis Colina, 30, said she tried unsuccessfully for nearly two years to persuade the Cuban immigration authorities to let her rejoin her husband. ''They made our lives impossible,'' Dianelis Colina, who worked as a basketball instructor here, said of the Government. ''As far as legal means, he did everything he could.'' The conflicting versions of what happened next, offered by those in America and those in Cuba, reflect the persistent fear of retaliation. Roberto Colina's relatives in Cuba maintain he hired a speedboat in Miami to pick up his family and whisk it directly to Tampa, paying $9,000 for each passenger. But Dianelis Colina maintains that |
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