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1102586_1 | Disabled, Married and On Their Own; Mount Kisco Couple Are Among Those With Handicaps Trying to Live Like Everyone Else | -- is emblematic of a larger effort among those with physical and mental handicaps to pursue independent lives. Like the Launhardts, others with disabilities want to have careers, shop in stores, attend public events, travel on public transportation and take vacations, for example. Stephen Gold, a lawyer with the Public Interest Law Center of Philadelphia, who represents disability groups, said people with physical and developmental disabilities have long faced discrimination reminiscent of segregation based on race. Efforts to overcome such obstacles are being closely watched as the United States Supreme Court takes up a case that some lawyers have called the Brown vs. Board of Education of the disability rights movement. One of the questions the court is reconsidering is whether states must provide publicly supported housing to help disabled people pursue their goals. Federal law now mandates that the states must do so. ''The case clearly relates to everything that Ken and Judy stand for,'' said Richard Sweirat, executive director of Westchester A.R.C., formerly known as the Association for Retarded Citizens, an organization in White Plains providing housing, advocacy, case management and other services for the retarded. When the Launhardts were younger, each lived at home. But their aging parents, in a move to protect their children's future, sought placement for them in group homes. Each lived in group settings until they married four years ago, and they now live together in a one-bedroom apartment in Mount Kisco, which is paid for partly with their earnings and partly with state funds. Until last year, however, there was a limited commitment from Albany to provide public housing in group community homes for New York's retarded population. Last August, two months after 26 retarded adults were found living in homeless shelters in Westchester, Gov. George E. Pataki proposed a major expansion of a housing program for the developmentally disabled. As of last summer, the state housed about 32,000 mentally retarded people, with 6,500 on waiting lists. Westchester A.R.C., the largest of 22 nonprofit organizations helping the retarded in the county, serves 1,600 clients a day, from infants through the elderly. For those like Mr. Sweirat who work on behalf of developmentally disabled people, the case now before the Supreme Court is especially worrisome because it could undo some benefits. ''We get nervous when things go back into court,'' Mr. Sweirat said. Three of the cases that the Court is reviewing involve |
1102580_2 | Long Ago, When Ships Set Sail From Fairfield | Southport, shallower, engaged in coastal trade with similar vessels. Besides custom house account books, diaries and letters, navigational equipment once used by Fairfield captains are displayed. One, a sextant (used in celestial navigation to find a ship's position), was given to Capt. Isaac Jennings for helping rescue the crew of the Garland, a British vessel. The medicine box from the Garland, drawers filled with packets, vials and instruments, can also be seen in the exhibition. There is a moving painting of the wreck of the Rienzi, another ship where Captain Jennings was instrumental in rescuing survivors. ''Not only do we have this large painting done by Bridgeport artist Frank W. Pulling, we have the original sketch Captain Jennings made from memory,'' Ms. Endslow said. There are also portraits of ship captains in formal dress. But the most captivating paintings and story is of the barque Edna, a circa-1850 painting of the ship shows it, sails unfurled, flags flying, leaving Castellamare, a port near Naples, Italy. The Edna, built in Black Rock, and its captain, Israel Bibbins of Fairfield, voyaged to the Caribbean, South America, Europe and Africa. Neither man nor ship ended well, with the captain dying four years later in the port of Marseilles in the South of France, and the Edna lost at sea the following year. A fortuitous coincidence strengthened the exhibition, which opened with not one but two portraits of the Edna. After seeing a photograph of the Historical Society's painting, Captain Bibbins's great-great-grandson, Robert McKenna, called Ms. Endslow to ask if she would like to borrow its long-separated companion. Mr. McKenna arrived from Texas to deliver his prized possession on March 22. ''This is the first time in over a hundred years that the two portraits of the barque Edna are exhibited together,'' said Ms. Endslow. A second gallery deals with more contemporary boating activities including shellfishing and yachting. Throughout, the exhibition is spiced with James Wiser's detailed ship models and interactive activities for children. Around the time of the Civil War, the Erie Canal and the railroads redirected traffic, and Fairfield's maritime era began to wane. By the end of the century, Fairfield's sailors were more likely to be recreational than commercial, though shellfishing continues to be important. The Fairfield Historical Society (636 Old Post Road, Fairfield; 203-259-1598) is open Tuesday through Saturday, 10 A.M. to 4:30 P.M. and Sunday, 1 to 4:30 P.M. |
1102886_1 | Following Mothers, Women Heed Call To Nation's Pulpits | undertook theological studies two decades ago. Statistics suggest that the wave is still building. The number of women studying in Christian seminaries for a master of divinity degree increased eight-fold since 1972, to 8,203 students in 1997, the last year for which figures are available. Among denominations, the Episcopal Church did not ordain women as priests until 1977. But now women make up nearly 1 in 7 of its clergy members. They also make up about 1 in 6 pastors in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, formed from the merger of three churches, none of which ordained women before 1970. The Jewish Theological Seminary's rabbinical school, which serves Judaism's Conservative movement, graduated only men until 1986. Women now make up one-third of its enrollment. Reform Jews ordained their first woman in 1972. Since then, 29 percent of those ordained for the Reform rabbinate have been women (a proportion that has risen to 45 percent in the 1990's). But it is within the Unitarian Universalist Association, historically the nation's most liberal religious body, that the process has moved the furthest. The association will soon announce that for the first time, women outnumber men among its active clergy members, making up 51 percent of the total, up from fewer than 3 percent in 1968. The changes reflect feminism's influence on organized religion, a process that has had visually arresting moments. Until last year, the world's Anglican bishops gathered as an entirely male body in their once-a-decade Lambeth Conference. But when they met in July 1998 in Canterbury, England, the bishops included 11 women, who gathered for a group photograph on a sunny hillside with cathedral spires in the distance. But the entry of women into leadership positions has also sharpened differences among religious groups. Women's ordination separates mainline Protestant denominations from many of the evangelical churches, and from the Roman Catholic and the Eastern Orthodox Churches, whose priesthoods are restricted to men. Women serving as rabbis are a dividing line between Orthodox Jews, which do not allow them, and the Reform, Reconstructionist and Conservative movements. In the denominations that ordain them, women still encounter significant barriers. A recent survey of female clergy members in 15 denominations found women to be paid less on average than men, even when the levels of education and experience were similar. Adair Lummis, a professor of the sociology of religion at the Hartford Seminary and a |
1102660_0 | PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL | |
1102581_2 | When Autistic Child's Growth Is at Stake | behavioral analysis. ''Everything else was so vague,'' Ms. Buckenheimer said, as she recalled times when her son was uncontrollable. ''Will didn't talk,'' she said. ''He refused to sit down or make eye contact. He'd just wander around the house walking on his toes and flapping his arms.'' Three years later, Will responds to others and initiates conversation. He plays with other children and sings. He is reading, knows colors, numbers and shapes and his vocabulary is growing. The definition of optimal treatment for children with autism is controversial. Autism experts seem able to agree only on the critical importance of early intervention, citing the window of opportunity that exists for children, between 2 and 6, when brains are thought to be more pliable. Initial home programs are supported by the Federal Government's ''Birth to 3'' mandate through the state's Department of Mental Retardation, but once a child turns 3, individual school districts are authorized to provide an appropriate education. Programs and policies vary widely from one town to the next. The interpretation of the word ''appropriate'' is what the Buckenheimers have taken up with the Stamford school district. The Buckenheimers's lawyer, Gary Mayerson would not comment specifically on the ongoing litigation. He said a 1993 Federal court decision had stated that school districts are required ''to provide a serviceable Chevy, not a Cadillac.'' ''School district lawyers routinely repeat that phrase to parents in due-process hearings,'' said Mr. Mayerson, who has 20 years of trial experience seeking appropriate educational services for disabled children around the country. ''The problem is that many school district's vision of what is a serviceable Chevy is more like a car stuck in the break-down lane.'' Some parents argue that the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act encourages lowest common denominator programs. ''Do you withhold the most effective medication from a child with a potentially fatal illness?'' asked Kathy Roberts, mother of an autistic daughter and director of Giant Steps, a private program in Fairfield that offers an eclectic therapeutic approach to educating autistic children. ''The standards set by the Connecticut Task Force Manual on Autism are really very minimal,'' she said. ''Imagine telling parents of normal children that the goal is to provide only an adequate education.'' Separately or in combination, commonly promoted therapies range from the social pragmatic method to drug therapy, sensory integration and applied behavioral analysis. Comprehensive applied behavioral analysis, based on the principles |
1100695_4 | World Briefing | ambush on a highway near Tunceli, the agency said. (Reuters) THE AMERICAS BRAZIL: DIPLOMATIC CUTBACK -- As part of an effort to slash Government spending, required by the fiscal austerity agreement signed with the International Monetary Fund last November, the Foreign Ministry is closing its embassies in Cameroon, Kuwait and Tunisia, and 12 consulates. Included in the ''temporary deactivation'' are the consulates in Atlanta and San Juan. Larry Rohter (NYT) BRAZIL: AMAZON DECREE LIFTED -- The Government has revoked a decree that banned all new permits for clearing land in the Amazon River basin. The action was taken after loggers and ranchers agreed to new regulations aimed at slowing the pace of deforestation in the world's largest rain forest. In return for promises of faster handling of applications, landowners pledged to limit the use of fire and to restrict activities in areas that are already damaged. Larry Rohter (NYT) MEXICO: POLITICAL FIGHTING -- In-house bickering is becoming increasingly public in the opposition Party of the Democratic Revolution. A presidential hopeful, Porfirio Munoz Ledo, has said the party's leading presidential candidate, Mayor Cuauhtemoc Cardenas of Mexico City, above, should pull out of the race. Mr. Munoz Ledo accused Mr. Cardenas of failing to fight for his perceived victory in the 1988 presidential election, which P.R.D. members believe was stolen by Carlos Salinas from Mr. Cardenas by fraud. (NYT) MIDDLE EAST JORDAN: I.M.F. APPROVES LOAN -- The International Monetary Fund has approved $220 million in loans to help Jordan pay for a three-year program of fiscal and major structural reform and to offset problems caused by lower exports because of rising Middle East tension. An I.M.F. spokesman said Jordan would receive $61 million immediately. (Reuters) AFRICA ZAMBIA: ESPIONAGE CASE ADVANCES -- A magistrate ruled that the High Court should hear a case against 12 journalists from the independent Post newspaper charged with espionage over a report suggesting that Zambia was ill-equipped to defend itself against neighboring Angola. The charges carry a minimum jail term of 20 years. (Agence France-Presse) UGANDA: REBELS KILL 37 CIVILIANS -- Thirty-seven civilians have been killed in three attacks this week by rebels of the Allied Democratic Forces in western Uganda, according to an army commander, who blamed ''lax security, poor organization and indiscipline'' in the Ugandan Army for failing to prevent the attacks. The rebels have been fighting to topple President Yoweri Museveni since August 1996. (Reuters) |
1097719_0 | But Will It Work? | The Revival Of Pragmatism New Essays on Social Thought, Law, and Culture. Edited by Morris Dickstein. Illustrated. 453 pp. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. Cloth, $69.95. Paper, $23.95. Thirty years ago, pragmatism was dead beyond all hope of resurrection. Pragmatism, that is, in the sense of the philosophical movement associated with C. S. Peirce, William James and John Dewey, rather than the frame of mind associated with car salesmen and local politicians. What had killed it was not much in doubt. On the one hand, philosophy had become a tough, technically complicated subject whose practitioners thought badly of the informal musings of Dewey and the exuberant essays of James; on the other hand, readers who wanted to brood on the meaning of life and death were more attracted to the angst of existentialism than to the modest optimism of the pragmatists. ''The Revival of Pragmatism'' is a substantial collection of essays by some of the most distinguished philosophers, legal theorists, cultural historians and literary critics writing today, including Richard Rorty and Hilary Putnam, Judge Richard Posner, Stanley Fish, Richard Poirier and Ross Posnock. Agreeably enough, they remain true to pragmatism's earliest years by being of more than one mind about whether there is a revival, and far from agreed about just what it might be a revival of. C. S. Peirce's reaction to William James's coinage of ''pragmatism'' a century ago was to rename his own philosophy ''pragmaticism.'' The usage did not stick, but the gesture is famous, and has evidently stuck in the minds of the essayists here. Pragmatism was, strictly, a philosophical theory about truth; it held that what William James breezily called ''the cash value'' of a statement was a matter of its payoff in action. Truth was what worked. It was this thought that gave pragmatism its reputation as a very American form of philosophy. It also gave rise to endless misconceptions -- such as the complaint that we are entitled to believe anything that makes us feel good, or that we need only to believe something firmly enough for it to be as good as true. William James's pragmatism and Norman Vincent Peale's emphasis on the power of positive thinking struck many British commentators as much too close for comfort. What pragmatism involves in addition to a theory of truth is debatable. About his wonderful book ''Art and Experience,'' Dewey once said that it did |
1097840_2 | Reassembling Art Shattered In a Quake | Fine Arts Administration of Italy. During the first critical weeks, Giuseppe Basile, an inspector at the state Central Restoration Institute in Rome and director of pictorial restoration at the basilica, orchestrated a force of 300 restorers and volunteers, who sifted through the rubble to recover and catalogue the pieces of the crumbled paintings. In the following months, Mr. Paggetta and his crew of nearly 100 workers rebuilt the missing sections of the ceiling and the supporting arch above the entrance. As insurance against future quakes -- the region of Umbria is historically unstable; seismologists have charted more than 50 tremors since September 1997 -- the entire ceiling was reinforced with strips of Kevlar, the bulletproof material used in police vests, and strapped across the back of each vault leaf like giant Band-Aids. Circular steel braces now anchor the bases of the crumbled 15th-century arches. A calibrated network of sensors monitors the ceiling, plotting expansions, contractions and, above all, the shifts caused by earth tremors. The entire operation, expected to cost $28 million by completion, has been financed by the Italian Government. To draw attention to the disaster, the Vatican and several Italian cultural agencies have organized ''The Treasury of St. Francis of Assisi,'' an exhibition of 100 objects that is on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York through June 27. ''There is no such thing as absolute security,'' says Mr. Paggetta, his voice bobbing over a chorus of hammers and electric drills and chatter from the scores of unseen workers on the scaffolding above him. ''If a cataclysm occurs, there's nothing we can do. But we can and have done much to insure that the basilica will suffer little or no damage if struck by a quake like the one that caused this damage.'' Far beneath the basilica, in the 16th-century stables known as ''Il Stallone,'' the mood is less ebullient. There, in a hastily constructed but fully modern restoration laboratory, a half-dozen white-coated restorers struggle with what is probably the most difficult pictorial conservation effort in Italian history. Giotto's ''St. Jerome'' lies in a series of milk crates and plastic trays, shattered into 30,000 pieces. The remnants of Cimabue's ''St. Matthew,'' another 30,000 pieces -- some of them as small as one square millimeter -- lie in another series of containers. The scene is as dramatic, and pathetic, as a Mannerist deposition. Shards of Giotto's |
1097788_28 | Why a Priest | lay people to allow the church to regulate their sex lives? For while American Catholics tend to believe and accept the church's teaching on most doctrinal issues, according to Gallup polls, more than 80 percent of them, in defiance of doctrine, approve of artificial contraception, two-thirds say that premarital sex is morally acceptable (among Catholics under 35, the figure is as high as 9 out of 10), nearly half say that homosexual activity can be morally acceptable and roughly half say that abortion (excluding late-term ''partial birth'' abortions) should be legal in many or all cases. In addition, most American Catholics would support a married clergy, and most approve of the notion of female priests. Diocesan priests, as liaisons between the church hierarchy and the laity, are caught in a morality gap between the two -- asked to promote unpopular views that in many cases they themselves do not share. According to a 1994 Los Angeles Times survey, nearly half of American priests believe that birth control is seldom or never wrong; even more say the same of masturbation. As a result, few Catholics hear preaching on touchy sexual issues on any given Sunday. This is about to change, say the seminarians at Mount Saint Mary's -- they have every intention of preaching on these topics, and some deacons already have done so in the parishes they were assigned to last summer. ''If people had the great opportunity we have to learn and to pray and to study,'' Bashista said, ''maybe they would come to a consensus with what the church is teaching and think of the beauty of it rather than the Thou Shalt Not. And that is our obligation: to preach and to teach the truth in charity and in love, and to be patient.'' After asking permission from his pastor, Cook preached against contraception in the parish he was assigned in Omaha, Neb., last summer. ''I was nervous,'' he recalled. ''If I hadn't really prayed on it and done it in a way that I think was not overbearing. . . . I said: 'What is the nature of marriage? To give of oneself.' I didn't use the word 'contraception' until the end. People came up to me afterward and said: 'No one ever preaches on that. Thank you.' '' Holloway gave me a tape of a lecture he delivered to teen-age boys, in which he told |
1097448_2 | Is the U.S. Income Gap Really a Big Problem? | with the lowest wages. And, finally, there's the extraordinary bull market in securities, mostly owned by the haves. All these changes, Mr. Feldstein says, are in themselves positive, and tend to benefit some individuals without making others any worse off. By the Pareto criterion, that's a change for the better. Finis Welch, a labor economist at Texas A & M University who gave this year's prestigious Ely Lecture at the American Economics Association annual meeting, takes a different approach, focusing on inequality's consequences rather than its causes. Mr. Welch argues that rising inequality has had important positive effects along with at least one negative. He points out that, while the market's uneven rewards for skills have caused the wage gap between high-paid and low-paid individuals in general to widen dramatically, they have also sharply narrowed the far more disturbing wage gaps between blacks and whites and between women and men. Under these circumstances, it is hard to believe that most Americans would prefer the more homogenous income distribution of the late 1940's, when racism and sexism severely limited occupational choice and pay. Growing inequality could have devastating effects if it convinced those at the bottom that efforts to move up are doomed to failure. But largely the opposite has happened. Young Americans are finishing high school and going on to college in record numbers, an obvious plus. STILL, one clear response to increased wage inequality that Mr. Welch identifies is unambiguously troublesome. Low-skill, low-education men react to their falling earnings potential by giving up on work and relying instead on welfare and other social programs for income, an option that did not exist before the mid-1960's. Policy makers are more conscious of the pitfalls and are more inclined than ever before to tie benefits to work. That, together with the tightest labor market in memory and a recent surge in pay among the less skilled, may be drawing some drop-outs back into the work force. ''Everybody was just wringing their hands'' about income inequality, Mr. Welch said, ''but I just kept thinking that people have more of a sense of control over their destinies than when I was a kid.'' Mr. Welch, who overcame a devastating accident that left him a paraplegic at 18, seems in step with the mood of most ordinary Americans, who seem to feel that, whatever has happened to the income distribution, opportunities abound -- and |
1097543_0 | At the U.N. Activists Vie With Vatican Over Abortion | In a novel twist to the fight over legal abortion, an organization of Roman Catholic activists has begun a drive to demote the diplomatic status of the Vatican at the United Nations, though in reality it only hopes to curb its lobbying style. Catholics for a Free Choice, which says it has 8,000 members and disagrees with the Catholic Church's traditional opposition to abortion and birth control, is leading a coalition of more than 70 similar voluntary organizations seeking to downgrade the Vatican status from ''permanent nonmember state observer'' to a more modest ''nongovernmental organization.'' As one of only two such nonmember observer states, along with Switzerland, the Holy See, as the Vatican calls itself here, is entitled to take part in United Nations policy-setting conferences and to vote on the recommendations they issue just like any member government of the organization. Although the Vatican cannot vote in the annual General Assembly, Pope Paul VI and Pope John Paul II have addressed the world group, and the Vatican's Permanent Observer addressed its 10th special session on disarmament. By contrast other Christian sects like the Anglicans and the Methodists as well as major faiths, such as Islam, Buddhism and Judaism, are represented by accredited nongovernmental organizations that have none of these privileges. They may only address policy-making United Nations meetings by invitation and cannot vote on recommendations, though they can lobby delegates in the corridors. ''It is time to challenge the Vatican's pretense to be a state,'' said the President of Catholics for a Free Choice, Frances Kissling. ''Why should a few acres of office space and tourist attractions in the center of Rome have a voice in making United Nations policy? The Roman Catholic Church deserves the same nongovernmental status as the World Council of Churches or any other religious body,'' she said this week in an interview. ''To insure the United Nations does not promote one particular religious view, religious entities like the Catholic Church should not be given the status of a nonmember state,'' said Anika Rahman, of the Washington-based Center for Reproductive Law and Policy. So far Catholics for a Free Choice and its allies have distributed 5,000 postcards to other nongovernmental organizations accredited here. They are addressed to Secretary General Kofi Annan and ask him to open ''an official review of the Holy See's status at the United Nations.'' A further 15,000 postcards have been printed |
1097808_3 | The Way We Live Now: 4-4-99; Crashing the Academy | us to decide whether we are going to continue our current evolution into mere conveyors of knowledge, or become seekers after something akin to wisdom. For if students come to us in the future cyber-dominated world, it will be not because we know things (the machines will know more), but for precisely those qualities that computers can never have: our ability to pose crucial questions, and also to venture answers to them. I see it in my own work. The presence of computers has pushed me to be interested not only in facts and interpretations, but also in truth. I ask students now not just what Wordsworth's ''Tintern Abbey'' means (difficult question though that surely is), but if it conveys a knowledge that they can use. The poem, which is about deep despondency -- a condition not unknown to my students in the age of Prozac -- prescribes a highly disciplined, subtle form of recollection as a way to spiritual equanimity. Should you do it, follow Wordsworth's path in times of trial? Can it work? If not for everyone in the room, then for some? What I'm describing may sound like standard old-hat humanism. But in fact, it's a radical project that has never really got under way. Critics like Leslie Fiedler and Northrop Frye (in their very different ways the descendants of the now unfashionable Matthew Arnold, who predicted that literature would replace religious faith as a source of spiritual sustenance) came closest. In the 1950's and 1960's, they uncovered complexes of myth, culled from a wide span of literature, and forcefully argued that those myths provided a key to general human desires, hopes, hatreds and anxieties. But their stunningly complex (and flawed) project died, cut off by the rise of skeptical theory and the knee-jerk reaction against all hopes for literary knowledge. The advent of computers, and the rise of places like Jones University, have put higher education at a crossroads. Professors can become more interested in knowledge without regard to wisdom, becoming more computerlike, and thus irrelevant, or we can take a few more steps down the road that Frye and Fiedler -- and Socrates -- opened up for us. If we do that with conviction and due modesty, we'll have no trouble keeping up with the Joneses, and achieving a good deal more besides. Mark Edmundson is a professor of English at the University of Virginia. |
1097520_3 | As It Opens to Outsiders, Cuba Is Infected by Crime | from the streets after they have either being sent back home to the countryside or interned in ''rehabilitation centers,'' work camps where repeat offenders receive counseling while putting in up to four years of agricultural and other labor. While not illegal here or penalized as a criminal offense, prostitution is regarded as ''antisocial'' and a magnet for related crime such a drug use. In his speech, Mr. Castro, disclosing rarely published crime information, said the use of Cuba as a transshipment point for Colombian cocaine destined for the United States and Europe ''persists.'' And he announced new, stricter penalties for drug trafficking, which this year were made to range from 15 years in prison to death. As an offshoot of the trafficking, there has also been increased drug use in Cuba, Mr. Castro said. The Cuban leader also noted a loosening of morals. He excoriated Cubans who drive tourists around and rent out rooms illegally, police officers who accept bribes, parents and pimps who induce young women to sell their bodies and those who steal merchandise from their jobs. ''We have to fight through every legal means, including public shame,'' he said. ''We have to inspect the inspectors, and also control the controllers.'' But American and other Western officials say more controls only invite more lawbreaking because illegal activity is the only way many Cubans who do not get dollar remittances from family members in the United States can complement their meager state salaries, most of which are paid in a local currency that is no longer accepted for many transactions that now take place in dollars. A 31-year-old driver with a wife and two young sons who said he earned 260 pesos a month, or $13, making bricks, said he could make $40 or more driving a foreigner around for the day. Some Western officials said that the anticrime measures and policing went beyond what was warranted, serving to complement the increased anti-American statements and a law, also passed in February, to rein in the small but growing number of dissidents and independent journalists. ''There was an impetus for more opening within Cuba and from foreign countries that Castro feels went too far,'' a Western diplomat here said. ''He's now aiming at telling us, 'No, we stay where we are.' That's rather unrealistic. The train is already moving.'' Some Cubans say one reason for the rampant underground activity is |
1097380_0 | PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL | |
1097761_2 | College and Money; And Never Lie About Your Grades | particular industry. Today, the buzzword in college job hunting is ''information interview.'' Contact an alumnus and ask if you can meet for half an hour. ''Explain that you're looking for information and advice and that you are not applying for a job,'' said Patricia Rose, the director of career services at the University of Pennsylvania. Alumni are often approachable, and a meeting may be more than informative -- it may lead to a job later. If you have no connections but can muster the guts to make a cold call, find out who is in charge of a company's recruiting and ask for a half-hour meeting or even a brief phone conversation. More often than not, recruiters admire such persistence and agree to talk about their company. Step 2: Keep It Short Students tend to compensate for their limited experience by inflating the length of their resumes. Across the board, recruiters agree that resumes should be only one page (that doesn't mean reducing the font size to anything smaller than 10 points, though). And unless applying for a very creative position, avoid fancy fonts and loud paper. Recruiters also recommend omitting the traditional ''objective'' at the top. It wastes precious space, and you may accidentally send a company a resume with the wrong objective -- that is, one meant for another kind of job. (Recruiters say it happens all the time.) The consensus is that the cover letter is the most effective place to state your objective. ''I actually don't think an objective is helpful at all,'' said Ms. Henkel, adding that she spends an average of five minutes reading each cover letter and resume that comes across her desk. ''I prefer just to get more meat about the person.'' Work or volunteer experiences should be in a sequence that makes sense to the field being pursued. If you volunteered in Tanzania for a summer and want a job in social services, that work may be more relevant than a summer job as a waitress. But if you're pursuing a career in hospitality, the waitressing job might be more important. In most situations, it is important to include your grade point average. Obviously, a great one can be flaunted. But you can try to disguise one that isn't so hot. For example, if the G.P.A. in your major is higher than your overall G.P.A., label it and list it next |
1098977_1 | China's Premier Twice Voices Displeasure Over Not Getting Into the Club | 13 years,'' Mr. Zhu told his audience at the Willard Hotel. ''Surely the time has come to end these talks and move forward to open new channels of U.S.-China trade.'' At the Blair House meeting this morning, members of Congress argued that China had regressed in its human rights performance since Mr. Clinton's state visit there last summer and pressed the Prime Minister to explain why. Some cited specific cases to illustrate their complaints. The agreements and the human rights confrontation came on the final day of Mr. Zhu's stay in Washington. He is to leave on Saturday morning for Denver, followed by stops in Chicago, New York and Boston. Chinese officials hope those stops on Mr. Zhu's trip will give him a chance to interact with ordinary Americans and to escape the charged political climate in Washington. In contrast to the deadlock over trade talks on Thursday, the two sides were able to finish several accords today. Foreign Minister Tang Jiaxuan and Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright signed a pact that doubles, to 54 from 27, the number of weekly flights between the countries. By 2001, when the increase takes effect, each side will also have the right to add one airline company to the three on each side that now fly the trans-Pacific route. Mr. Zhu and Vice President Al Gore spent much of the day presiding over a forum on the environment at the State Department. The two countries, the world's biggest producers of greenhouse gases thought by many experts to cause global warming, signed an accord that provides American financing for clean-air projects in China. They also witnessed the signing of a commercial agreement to build a natural gas pipeline in southern China. Though the environment is a special area of focus for Mr. Gore, it was Mr. Zhu, at least in the public session, who appeared more eager to discuss the details of the two countries' environmental policies. In contrast to Mr. Gore, who read some perfunctory opening remarks from notes, the Prime Minister discarded his prepared speech after a few minutes and spoke off-the-cuff, in some detail, about the seriousness of the country's pollution problems and his efforts to bring them under control. Mr. Zhu spoke frankly of ''the devastation of Mother Nature'' in China as a result of soil erosion, deforesta tion, and emissions from factories, cars and coal-burning furnaces, the country's |
1101930_4 | Where Rubber Meets the Road, a Chip | includes a hidden chip that stamps each tire with a unique identification number. A mechanic will be able to send a signal to the chip, asking the tire for its number. Using that number and a handheld computer, a mechanic or engineer could look up information about the tire that has been stored in an external, networked database. Unlike bar codes or other indentifiers that might be applied to the outside of the tires, the embedded identification chips can withstand more rugged conditions and will not wear off over time. ''You can track the life of that tire,'' said Brian Logan, Goodyear's project manager for tire technology. ''You can track where it's been, if it's been repaired or how many times the tire has been retreaded.'' That information, however, comes from a person who enters the data into a database under the corresponding identification number. The tires are not yet smart enough, Mr. Logan said, to record and store their own repair history. Goodyear is now testing its intelligent tires in commercial trucks and buses and commercial aircraft. The company is also working with Lockheed Martin, a defense contractor, to develop a system that will refine the maintenance of military planes and their landing wheels. Knowing when to add more air pressure to a tire could help companies save money. Driving with over- or under-inflated tires causes them to wear unevenly, which makes the tires more susceptible to flats. And a vehicle that is driven with underinflated tires burns more fuel. Teri Short, a manager of systems engineering for Continental Airlines, said another benefit of the technology was that it would allow workers to check the air pressure in airplane tires just after the plane had landed, instead of waiting three or four hours for the tires to cool, as is typically done now. When the tires are hot, the air pressure readings are distorted, but the technology will automatically convert pressure readings to cool-tire readings, regardless of the temperature of the tires. ''It would definitely save time,'' Ms. Short said. Douglas Love, a spokesman for the Automobile Club of New York, an affiliate of the American Automobile Association, said that most drivers did not check their tires' air pressure as often as they should because they hated to touch dirty tires. ''Anything that gives people an alternative to getting dirty,'' Mr. Love said, ''is a good step.'' WHAT'S NEXT |
1101958_0 | THE MARKETS: COMMODITIES | SUGAR PLUNGES. Sugar prices plummeted on expectations that surging output from Brazil will overwhelm demand from buyers in Russia and Asia. In New York, sugar for July delivery fell 0.23 cent, to 4.52 cents a pound. |
1103462_6 | Where Paprika Is Measured In Pounds, Not Pinches | under water this spring. The flood waters enrich the soil. PAPRIKA is paprika, you might think. But no. It is almost as complex as the Hungarian language, which is related only to Finnish and Basque, as far as anyone knows, and sounds like something falling down stairs. According to Dr. Somogyi, the botanist, the best paprika comes from plants that are started indoors, then bedded out in April or May. With that head start, he said, they ripen earlier, in August, when the sun is hot. ''That gives them 30 percent more pigment and flavor than the later harvest,'' Dr. Somogyi explained. ''With paprika, the redder the better.'' But most emphatically not the redder the hotter. Hungarian paprika is made in a number of styles, ranging from eros (fiery) through feledes (semisweet) to edesnemes (premium sweet), which is most commonly used in cooking. If Hungarians want their food spicy, they often add dried, crumbled cherry peppers. At the city museum in Szeged, which has a collection of paprika memorabilia, they show a film in which old women complain about having to douse their hands in water to stop the stinging from handling hot peppers. Until 1859, it was worse: the seeds and veins of the peppers, which contain the heat-producing substance called capsaicin, had to be removed by hand. But in that year the Palffy brothers invented a machine to do it. And starting with the early-20th-century work of a scientist named Ferenc Horvath, the Hungarian breeders have gradually bred the hot out. As things now stand, there is no premium-grade Hungarian paprika available on the American market. Several Hungarian brands, including Budapest's Best and Pride of Szeged, are sold in fine-food shops and some supermarkets, and they are superior to most of the products sold under familiar brand names or house labels. But they don't have the deep, round flavor, with more than a hint of the taste of fresh peppers, that you find in Hungary. ''What you find here,'' Mr. Lang said recently, ''is mid-level commercial quality -- acceptable, but nothing to write an ode about. As with wine, as with other things, the best comes from small growers and small mills, which produce small quantities of the finished product, mostly consumed at home.'' Most paprika, even in Hungary, is ground from the stems as well as the shells of the peppers. That's one shortcut that lowers the |
1103488_2 | The Internet vs. the First Amendment | his or her computer screen. At the same time, Internet speech doesn't have more constitutional protection than speech disseminated in a more old-fashioned and limited manner. In particular, direct threats or other messages that by their very utterance cause harm receive no more protection on the Internet than anyplace else. Releasing a computer virus through E-mail deserves no greater immunity than crying ''Fire'' in a crowded theater. What about someone who posts a Web page with detailed, step-by-step instructions on how to assemble an explosive device from readily available materials? Such instructional materials are not quite like yelling ''Fire'' in a theater; they do not cause harm in a purely reflexive or automatic manner. Instead, they change the mix of ideas and information in the heads of the speaker's audience. Speech disseminating such instructions on the Internet, however reprehensible, is thus entitled to a degree of First Amendment protection. But it is not entitled to the same level of protection to which speech advocating ideas is entitled because it is rarely part of any dialogue about what is true or what ought to be done. Distributing such materials doesn't try to persuade anyone to take a course of action, but instead provides the means for committing a crime. Thus, the United States Courts of Appeals have held that distributing pamphlets on how to evade taxes, make illegal drugs or kill someone can amount to aiding and abetting a crime and may be punished as such, depending, of course, on the particular facts. The First Amendment, therefore, should shoulder none of the guilt in the Littleton killings. In truth, the First Amendment leaves considerable room for government to exert control, and the advent of the Internet neither broadens nor narrows government's options. Nor, for that matter, is the Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable searches and seizures among the culprits here. Those who launch murderous plots by posting their deranged plans on a Web site are exposing their schemes in a public space, one that government agencies may freely browse without a warrant despite the fanciful argument that all talk on the World Wide Web is as private as E-mail messages might be. At the same time, it would be a grave mistake to assume that either government surveillance or control can play an important role in preventing violent crimes. Doing more to keep lethal weapons out of youthful hands -- something |
1103469_0 | Ejido Pino Gordo Journal; All Across Mexico, a Chainsaw Massacre of Trees | The shepherds of this remote mountain settlement till the earth behind oaken plows and grind their corn between smooth stones. They have no television, telephones or electricity. Yet by one standard, the village enjoys vast wealth: it is surrounded by magnificent forests. So when outsiders recently bulldozed a logging road and began applying chainsaws to hundreds of 200-year-old trees, villagers panicked. Men, women and children walked for 36 hours across a canyon to board buses for the Chihuahua state capital, where they held a sit-in at the Governor's Palace this month. ''We don't want our forests felled,'' a Raramuri-speaking Indian leader, Francisco Ramos, told authorities through an interpreter in negotiations that followed. ''We didn't plant the trees, God did, to collect water from the rain and give homes to the animals. The trees are not our property. We're just taking care of them.'' Government officials were stunned by the Indian protest and the news coverage it prompted, and Chihuahua state officials recently announced a halt to the illegal logging around the village in the Sierra Madre, about 850 miles northwest of Mexico City, at least for now. But a federal official denied that any decision had been made. Conservationists said they hoped for an environmental victory, but it was only one skirmish in a war for Mexico's beleaguered forests. All across Mexico -- from Chihuahua in the north, to the central woodland preserves that are wintering grounds for North America's monarch butterflies, to the tropical jungles of Chiapas in the south -- timberlands are being cleared at a devastating rate. Poachers are even cutting the few surviving forest preserves around Mexico City. ''Deforestation is pushing us toward environmental collapse,'' said Senator Adolfo Aguilar Zinser, who has proposed legislation to create a National Forestry Commission with broad powers to confront what he calls an emergency. ''The Government should declare a national forestry disaster.'' The country has destroyed half its forests in four decades and, unless the devastation slows, will finish them off in half a century, Senator Aguilar said in an interview. Mexico's forests still cover an area larger than California. But since it is mountainous, Mexico needs extensive timberlands to capture rain water and prevent flooding, he said. One year ago, wildfires that sent smoke clouds drifting into Florida and Texas focused American attention on the crisis. But far more trees are lost every year in Mexico to timber clearing |
1100166_2 | World Briefing | guarantee a price for the pipeline and agree to pay any excess. No final agreement on the guarantee was reached, but it was expected to total about $2.4 billion. Stephen Kinzer (NYT) FRANCE: TUNNEL FIRE REPORT -- A report on the Mont Blanc tunnel fire, which took 41 lives, faulted France and Italy for carrying out only two safety drills in the Alpine pass since it opened in 1965. But officials said their investigation had uncovered no obvious problems or administrative shortcomings that could be blamed for the fire that ripped through the tunnel on March 24. (Reuters) SWITZERLAND: RWANDA CHARGES DROPPED -- Genocide charges against a former Rwandan official were dropped because Swiss law does not allow such charges to be tried. Lawyers had protested the charges of genocide and crimes against humanity against Fulgence Niyonteze, 34. The Swiss military court will continue to try the former mayor on charges of murder and incitement to murder during the country's 1994 mass killings. Elizabeth Olson (NYT) THE AMERICAS NICARAGUA: MINES DESTROYED -- Nicaragua became the first Latin American country to comply with a worldwide ban on land mines under a Dec. 4, 1997, convention when it destroyed the first 5,000 of 120,000 mines in its arsenal. They were exploded in ditches along the shore of Lake Managua, northeast of the capital. (AP) ASIA PAKISTAN: MISSILE TEST REACTION -- Reacting to India's test-firing of an intermediate-range missile that reportedly traveled 1,250 miles, Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif said his Government did not want to enter an arms race with its neighbor, India, but reserved the right ''to strengthen its defense with every development in this region.'' Celia W. Dugger (NYT) NORTH KOREA: GENERALS PROMOTED -- Kim Jong Il promoted 79 generals in what appeared to be an attempt to lift the morale of the country's increasingly hungry military. Mr. Kim issued an order creating one colonel general, two lieutenant generals and 76 major generals, said the official Korean Central News Agency. North Korea's economic collapse has cast doubt on its ability to feed and arm its 1.2-million-member military, the world's fifth largest. (AP) TAIWAN: WAR GAMES DOWNSIZED -- Taiwan will hold its main annual war games in June, but will deploy only limited forces in small drills in what analysts said was a deliberate downsizing to avoid provoking China. The Defense Ministry said a scaled-back operation would replace the summer exercises that |
1100250_0 | Sinn Fein Rejects a Proposal to End the Impasse Over Disarmament | The political wing of the Irish Republican Army said today at peace talks in Belfast that it rejected a proposal by the British and Irish Governments to resolve the impasse on guerrilla disarmament that is blocking the formation of a new Northern Ireland Government. The announcement by Mitchel McLaughlin, chairman of Sinn Fein, the political wing of the I.R.A., deepened the growing pessimism around the talks. The negotiations resumed today after a 12-day suspension to examine the two Governments' framework declaration. The action also isolated Sinn Fein as the sole outright objector among the parties to the pact, including the moderate Catholic Social Democratic and Labor Party and the Irish Government in Dublin. Those two delegations share Sinn Fein's long-term goal of unifying the predominantly Protestant North with the largely Catholic Republic of Ireland. The talks broke off inconclusively April 1 on the eve of a Good Friday deadline after the around-the-clock presence of the British and Irish Prime Ministers, Tony Blair and Bertie Ahern, had failed to bring about an understanding. The accord promising the return of home rule to Northern Ireland and seeking an end to three decades of sectarian violence was reached on Good Friday a year ago. There is growing urgency to put the full settlement into effect, because of the imminence of the most politically volatile period in Northern Ireland's year, the Protestant Orange Order marching season, which has sparked provincewide violence. The process for an accord has faced many hurdles and 11th-hour crises. But the dispute over disarming, called ''decommissioning'' in the parlance of the negotiations, is proving to be the most daunting. The issue is a demand by the Ulster Unionists, a Protestant party that is the largest in the province, that the I.R.A. has to make a ''credible start'' at decommissioning before Sinn Fein could occupy the two seats to which it is entitled in the executive of the new power-sharing Northern Ireland Assembly. The legislature is the centerpiece of the Good Friday agreement and becomes effective only on the transfer of home-rule powers to it from the British Parliament here. That defining move, in turn, awaits the creation of the executive branch. The original accord set no obligation for disarmament before the Assembly and other agencies were set up. Sinn Fein is adamant that it will not allow such a ''precondition'' to be created now. The party points out further that |
1098380_0 | Judge Upholds Ban On Assault Weapons | A Federal judge has dismissed a challenge to the state's ban on assault weapons, ruling that supplemental guidelines issued by the state's Attorney General adequately clarify which guns fall under the law, officials said yesterday. The Coalition of New Jersey Sportsmen filed a suit in United States District Court in Camden seeking to overturn the law on the ground that it was vague. ''There's a tremendous amount of confusion out there,'' said Gary J. Needleman, a lawyer for the coalition, who said the ruling may be appealed. ''I've had guns returned by the police that are assault weapons and they didn't realize it, and I've had guns seized that aren't on the list.'' The list is of 37 weapons or types of weapons named under the ban, which was approved in 1990. Attorney General Peter G. Verniero issued guidelines for dealing with weapons that are similar to those on the list after charges were dismissed against a Monmouth County man by a state judge who said that, because the man's gun was not specified on the list, he could not have known it was banned. METRO NEWS BRIEFS: NEW JERSEY |
1101419_1 | Santo Domingo Memo; Caribbean Unity? Bananas Are Getting in the Way | pacts and tariff concessions for regional trade and investment. But even though these countries have been striving for unity to cope with economic globalization, the gathering failed to reach consensus on some issues, underscoring the diversity of the countries involved. Among the most divisive issues was the recent World Trade Organization ruling allowing the United States to impose sanctions against European-made goods in retaliation for the European Union's trade preferences for bananas grown in its former colonies. The banana dispute pits small eastern Caribbean islands like St. Vincent and the Grenadines against Central American countries, where Chiquita Brands and other American companies are major banana growers that contend they will be hurt by the European Union's quota system. The issue was a hot topic in a closed-door session here in which Mr. Castro railed against the trade group, which regulates international trade, as ''a fearful instrument of re-colonization and exploitation of the world,'' the Cuban Government news media reported today. Since the Association of Caribbean States represents countries on both sides of the banana dispute, it was up to the eastern Caribbean islands that oppose the ruling to issue their first formal statement on the decision. They did today, under the aegis of another regional group, the Caribbean Community. Their statement called the ruling ''the single most dangerous threat to the economies of the Caribbean banana exporting countries'' and warned that putting it into effect ''without consideration of the vulnerability of the Caribbean banana industry would lead to severe social and economic dislocations.'' Speaking at the opening of the meeting in the National Theater here Friday night, President Jules A. Wijdenbosch of Suriname used the banana dispute to call for increased concerted action by Caribbean states. He said that the battle was being fought by two major economic powers, the European Union and the United States, without direct involvement by the smaller countries most affected. One of the association's goals is for members, who represent 200 million people and a gross domestic product of $500 billion, to coalesce in a trading bloc that would be one of the largest in the world. ''More than ever it's our responsibility to demonstrate our presence in international and regional organizations and demand that our concerns are an integral part of the agenda, the debate and the general solutions,'' Mr. Wijdenbosch said. But Presidents also used the summit meeting, the second held by the |
1101385_1 | Privacy on Internet Poses Legal Puzzle | Internet: identity, privacy, anonymity and free speech. Mr. Reitinger's opposite number on the panel was Nadine Strossen, a professor at the New York Law School and president of the American Civil Liberties Union. They were joined by Frans Kaashoek, an associate professor at M.I.T., who has been in charge of the anonymous remailer since it began operating in 1996. An anonymous remailer, a type of data-network relay, is essentially a technological buffer, offering confidentiality to its users. It can be used to mask the origin of a piece of E-mail or the computer from which a person is browsing the World Wide Web. It does this by stripping off the identifying information on an E-mail, for example, and substituting an anonymous code number or term. Sophisticated remailers, like the one at M.I.T., also route messages through many different relay computers around the world, leaving no record of the path an anonymous message traveled after leaving the remailer. But computer experts have occasionally tracked messages from remailers, either because a person used an anonymity service incorrectly or because of security flaws in a remailer. There are about 40 anonymous remail services worldwide. They are used by, among others, dissidents and human rights representatives in nations with repressive governments, whistle-blowers in companies or government agencies, minority groups fearing discrimination and people simply wishing to avoid the bulk E-mail advertising that marketers increasingly send over the Net. In Kosovo, some people with on-line connections have started using anonymous remail services to try to maintain confidential communications and avoid detection by the Serbian military. But anonymous remail services, Federal prosecutors say, are also used by child pornographers, extortionists, software pirates and drug dealers. Though not illegal, remailers are often viewed with suspicion by law enforcement agencies. They occupy a gray area in cyberspace, and Mr. Kaashoek good-naturedly underscored that fact by wearing a black ski mask for much of the panel discussion. After his opening, Mr. Reitinger turned to his theme. ''Anonymity has a down side to it,'' he said. ''It's hard to put a pseudonym in jail. There are not a lot of indictments that say, United States of America versus John Doe. If people are truly anonymous, there can be no law enforcement.'' Mr. Reitinger and Ms. Strossen have debated these issues in the past, so their early exchanges had the practiced rhythms of old sparring partners. Her opening salvo: ''We've got |
1101376_1 | An Unfamiliar Tale of Pride and Prejudice | which characters stand frozen in place, singing to themselves about their emotions. And it's easy to poke fun at the opera's convoluted plot, which asks us to believe that Leopold, the Prince of the Empire, who is smitten with Eleazar's daughter Rachel, successfully courts her in disguise as a Jewish painter, and that Rachel is actually the daughter, stolen as an infant, of Eleazar's nemesis, Cardinal Brogni. Yet Halevy, whose centennial is this year, was the revered teacher of Gounod and Bizet, and was in effect the composer laureate of France. Ms. Queler's performance provided a timely reminder of Halevy's achievement in this work. For all the opera's episodes of standard-issue spectacle (the original production was an extravaganza with soldiers in real armor and a menagerie of horses), Halevy's music has distinguished qualities. The melodies mostly shun ornate display and are often inspired; the scoring is imaginative, from the nuanced writing for woodwinds, to the pealing off-stage organ during a Te Deum, to the use of anvils that Verdi remembered when writing ''Il Trovatore.'' The choral writing is mostly block harmony, but this keeps the text vivid and the textures lucid. Halevy has a tendency to stick to foursquare phrasing, though this is dictated to some extent by Scribe's prosaic libretto. But altogether, it is an authentic and often noble work. Surely, it cannot be coincidental that the turn in opinion about ''La Juive'' coincided with the rise of anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany. Audiences may have been uncomfortable with Halevy's depiction of the Christians' unabashed hatred of the Jews and with stereotyping in the character of Eleazar. Both aspects of the work are still discomforting. Halevy, a Jew, tried to present the good and bad sides of the hero and his persecutors, but the balance seems strained. For example, Act II begins with an intensely moving Passover seder at Eleazar's house. The music is consolingly lyrical and poignant, with its touches of chromaticism and choral refrains. Halevy wisely refrained from quoting Jewish musical sources. The scene is utterly French, and absolutely true. Yet following this is a scene in which Eleazar, like some operatic Shylock, sings gleefully about the gold coins he will soon be counting when Leopold's wife, who knows nothing of her husband's attachment to Rachel, comes to the jeweler's house to buy a gold chain. The music rings false, as if Halevy felt forced to include it. |
1101391_3 | The Net's Real Business Happens .Com to .Com; A Market That Dwarfs Retail E-Sales | transcend mere back-office efficiency. Alex Cahill, a BOC purchasing manager in Murray Hill, cites the example of tungsten hexafluoride. The company sells the gas in six-foot steel cylinders that are worth $10,000 each when filled, making for an unwieldy, expensive inventory. ''In previous years, our stock has been bloated to accommodate for miscommunication, upturn in demand, returns or problems with quality,'' Mr. Cahill said. ''So it was typical to have three months of inventory in the system -- which could be between 50 and 60 cylinders, with a bunch en route.'' The primary reason for such ''blind stocking,'' as Mr. Cahill put it, was the inefficiency of the order fulfillment process. ''We have quite a lot of people interested in each purchase order,'' he said. ''All that communication was handled through faxes, E-mails or the phone, one on one -- which is great until someone goes on vacation or sick leave, or they leave the office for a few hours, or transcribe something incorrectly.'' Under the system, which the San Diego site put in place in March 1998, BOC negotiates a bulk purchase with suppliers for a year's worth of gas, and posts the information on a restricted-access Web site. This site, or ''extranet,'' is accessible only to select BOC suppliers and customers, and to BOC employees like Ms. Ruszkay who place orders by choosing from an on-line catalogue of gases that has been screened for price and selection, based on the bulk purchase agreement. As the order progresses through delivery, both the supplier and BOC will update the Internet order page, noting the shipping dates, quantity, and shipping method. This gives key personnel instant access to the order's status, which cuts down the need for correspondence, slashes the amount of time spent processing purchase orders and greatly reduces the opportunities for human error. Perhaps more significantly, Mr. Cahill said the system's precision had enabled the company to reduce substantially the number of filled cylinders it keeps in stock, saving his division ''several hundred thousand'' dollars in annual inventory costs. Fulton Wilcox, BOC's director of technical business development, conceded that the estimated $60 million worth of business the company transacted last year on the Internet represents but a tiny portion of BOC's annual revenue of $1.2 billion. But because the buyers using the system tend to be the biggest and most valued of BOC Gases' customers, dollar volumes tell only |
1101439_9 | Plant Sterility Research Inflames Debate on Biotechnology's Role in Farming | their unsprayed predecessors, the DNA-cutting enzymes are made and the gene that makes the sterilizing toxins is primed to kick in months later when the plant matures. ''It's quite an elegant solution,'' said David Culley, a molecular biologist at Washington State University. Mr. Oliver figures it could have been done much better -- and more quickly -- if he and his colleagues had the kind of budget and access to crucial patents available to many corporate biotech researchers. ''If Monsanto had done this, they would be in the field by now,'' he said. Perhaps. But even though researchers have been looking at a wide variety of chemical-gene switch combinations, industry sources say no one is close to field tests on switches in crops for anything other than internal breeding programs. ''There is always something wrong,'' said Stephen Evola, co-president of the biotech research arm of Novartis, the Swiss agribusiness and pharmaceutical company, noting that the chemical switch had to be safe and inexpensive and its interaction with the plant very specific. Achieving reliable control is especially challenging because the behavior of gene promoters, which control the timing, level and location of gene activity, is far from being fully understood. ''We are at the very beginning of a long learning curve,'' said David Lawrence, a scientist at Zeneca Group P.L.C. of Britain. Some chemicals that are extremely useful in the current research phase, like steroids, are seen as obvious nonstarters for commercial applications because they have strong impacts on animals. Systems based on lactose solutions, which are already used as switches for turning on genetic activity in bacteria, have also been tested in plants. So have copper and ethanol. Companies are also exploring gene switches tailored to chemicals farmers use anyway, like fertilizer. Other researchers are studying nonchemical switches like light, moisture and viruses. They suspect, though, that plants encounter such things so frequently and in so many ways that it may be impossible to use them outside of a carefully controlled laboratory. Mr. Oliver is fatalistic about where his contribution will end up. His office is, with impish defiance, decorated by a large poster of Arnold Schwarzenegger, the original Terminator. But he repeatedly describes seed sterility as an underfinanced diversion from his studies of drought-resistant moss. ''I'm very confident the science will pan out,'' he said. ''But this technology will flourish or die for reasons I have no control over.'' |
1100131_0 | NEWS SUMMARY INTERNATIONAL SQN# | ABU-HAKIMA-Ahmad Mustafa. Professor, scholar, historian and world authority on Eastern Arabia, born August 28, 1923, in Abbasiyya, Palestine, died April 9, 1998, in Ottawa, Canada. A truly contented man, wherever he traversed he brought optimism and love to the lives of many, many people around the world. Always remembered in our hearts, thoughts and prayers. Family and Friends |
1100025_0 | NEWS SUMMARY INTERNATIONAL SQN# | URQUHART-Kate F. April 14, 1999. Beloved wife of Irving Herschbein. Loving sister of Richard Urquhart. Loving aunt and greataunt. Contributions in her memory may be made to Historic Woodville and Hope Foundation, both of North Carolina. Interment Saturday. April 17th. 3 PM, at Grace Episcopal Church Cemetery, Lewistown-Woodville, North Carolina. |
1099784_4 | Putting Things Right In the Everglades | their essential character -- though in a different and truncated form compared with the original. ''I think the plan gets us very close'' to that goal, said Michael L. Davis, an ecologist and deputy assistant secretary of the Army. He oversees the Army Corps of Engineers, which devised the plan with many Federal, state and local agencies under the aegis of the Interior Department, and he has been deeply involved in the plan's preparation. No one claims that the plan is perfect, or ever will be. After the initial version was made public in October, some scientists and environmentalists criticized it on grounds that it did not go far enough in removing the welter of artificial plumbing in which the system is trussed up, and that it would take too long to gain results. It has since been revised after negotiations among the Army Corps and other groups, notably the National Park Service. Under the plan in its present form, Mr. Davis said, 80 percent of the water that now goes out to sea would be redirected into the Everglades. This, he said, would give the Everglades half the total expanded water supply; now, farms and cities get 70 percent of a smaller supply. In the southern part of Shark River Slough, in the heart of the national park, the flow would be 90 percent of what computer models suggest was its historic volume. That should be enough to insure recovery, said Richard G. Ring, the park superintendent. In the plan as originally proposed last fall, the restored flow would have been about 70 percent of the historical volume. Mr. Ring and his staff protested, and after intense talks, the target was changed. The additional water will come mostly from treated urban runoff, and it remains to be seen how successfully that water can be purified. The planners envision a series of filtering marshes to remove agricultural runoff and other pollutants from reclaimed water before it flows into the natural system. The project also is intended to break down the compartmentalization of the Everglades somewhat by removing some levees and canals. The first phase of decompartmentalization has been speeded up as a result of the recent talks, and is to be completed by 2010. In all, roughly two-thirds of the project is to be finished by then. Some critics are reserving judgment pending more detailed study. But, ''we're pretty encouraged'' |
1099793_0 | THE MARKETS: COMMODITIES | SUGAR PLUNGES. Sugar prices fell to a 12 1/2-year low on expectations that big harvests in Brazil and Europe would add unneeded supply to world markets. In New York, sugar for May delivery fell 0.18 cent, to 5.25 cents a pound. |
1099804_3 | New Recruits in the War on Sprawl | been granted them. ''If two years ago you had told me you would have a governor who would propose something like this, I'd have said no governor would be that foolish,'' he says. ''But that's what we've done. What I underestimated was that sprawl can be a pretty good political issue. You had a public that was ready.'' But what made the public ready? What persuaded a freeway-loving, edge-city-building boom town like Atlanta to impose the equivalent of martial law on its transportation policies? One answer is dirty air. Atlanta's smog, most of it caused by automobiles, has placed the entire 13-county metropolitan region out of compliance with the Federal Clean Air Act, and until a plan is drawn up for dealing with that problem, all Federal money for new highway projects is frozen. That's no small issue. But by itself, it could not have created the G.R.T.A. -- land-use planning and New Urbanism won't have a dramatic impact on the region's air quality, especially in the short run. A better explanation is traffic. The residents of metro Atlanta currently drive an average of 35 miles a day to and from work -- more than their counterparts in any other big city on the planet. Their median commuting time is 31 minutes, far above the national average, and the projection for two decades from now is 45 minutes. As Governor Barnes puts it, ''People in Atlanta are just tired of sitting in cars.'' The Chamber of Commerce also worries that once Atlanta develops a national reputation for gridlock, businesses won't want to locate there anymore. Existing companies won't want to expand. The whole engine of metropolitan prosperity, built to a large extent on real estate itself, will sputter. As Yogi Berra might say, Atlanta will become so crowded that nobody will go there. That is a disturbing enough prospect to turn even a dyed-in-the-wool suburban home builder into an incipient New Urbanist, and it helps explain why John Williams and the metropolitan business leadership were prime movers behind the G.R.T.A. What it will mean in the end nobody knows, not even the Governor. It is widely assumed that Mr. Barnes and his Council of 15 will decree an expansion of mass transit, discourage new residential subdivisions in some outer suburban counties and smile on pedestrian-friendly, mixed-use development of the sort that Mr. Williams and many of his colleagues now specialize |
1101752_0 | Technology Can Cost | To the Editor: I'd like to side with the optimists who think that technology has increased overall productivity (news article, April 14), but because I often see (and pay for) many of the costs that technology simply shifts onto others, I'm still skeptical. For example, when a company saves on its printing and mailing costs by E-mailing long documents, we should also take into account the added labor time and printing costs paid by customers who must download the materials. Similarly, when a company saves on labor costs by replacing service representatives with an automated phone system full of unnecessary information, we should deduct from its savings the cost in wasted time to its customers. DEBORAH STONE Cambridge, Mass., April 15, 1999 The writer is a professor at Radcliffe Public Policy Institute. |
1101729_1 | The Job Description Reads, 'Do It All' | show for the Walker of the work of the sculptor Robert Gober, which will travel to museums in Malmo, Sweden, Washington and San Francisco after it closes on May 9 in Minneapolis. ''From the get-go, you're contriving to find colleagues across the country and globally who are interested in your program and willing to make a commitment.'' The biggest concern of most curators is time -- or, rather, its lack. A relentless schedule of meetings, receptions, dinners and travel piled on top of the basic curatorial functions of organizing and packaging shows, preparing catalogues and doing administrative tasks makes it extremely difficult, curators say, to do the pondering, research and planning that is the raison d'etre of curating. ''It would be fantastic to have more time to work with the art and the ideas that one would hope are at the heart of the job,'' said Mr. Garrels, 47. ''Instead, you kind of struggle to create a little island to have time alone to deal with those things.'' Stephanie Barron, the senior curator of modern and contemporary art and the vice president of education and public programs at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, is known for producing distinguished shows like ''Degenerate Art: The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany'' in 1991 and ''Exiles and Emigres: The Flight of European Artists From Hitler'' in 1997. Ms. Barron, who declined to give her age, said the only way she can keep a serious intellectual project going ''is to try to squeeze in one day a week where I take no meetings and no calls.'' BILL VALERIO, a curator at the small Queens Museum of Art in New York, concurred. ''I do 5,000 things a day,'' he said. Mr. Valerio is currently working on an exhibition of Greek-American artists with Peter Selz, professor emeritus of the history of art at the University of California in Berkeley. The show, proposed by Mr. Selz, was chosen partly because of its potential appeal to the large Greek-American population in Queens. Organizing shows in a smaller museum, Mr. Valerio said, means that ''you also have to know about such things as the design and decor of exhibition spaces and even how to act as foreman of a construction site, because we tear down walls, reinstall them and change electrical systems between exhibitions.'' Being able to connect with a highly diversified public, one with varying |
1101769_0 | The Met's Greek Galleries | One of the most important traditions in Western culture is the act of restating the centrality of ancient Greek civilization. The images and artistic forms of ancient Greece exude an air of familiarity, which reaffirms our sense of cultural ancestry. But that familiarity is deceptive. What we know about the people depicted in red-figure and black-figure paintings on ancient Greek kraters and amphorae obscures what we do not know about those vessels and the people who used them. The same is true of the funerary sculpture, the marble grave steles that do so much to reinforce our sense of the primacy of the human figure. The restoration of the Greek Galleries at New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art has the effect, quite literally, of letting new daylight in upon the Met's collection of Greek antiquities. The artifacts themselves have been cleaned and beautifully reordered, and if the light that pours in through the skylights, for the first time in more than 50 years, isn't actually Mediterranean, it is revealing enough to let us see the Mediterranean light that seems latent in the esthetic clarity of these objects. What makes this restoration exceptional is that it represents a rediscovery of the Metropolitan Museum's original purpose, in architecture and in content. The Met's Greek Galleries join Grand Central Terminal and the Reading Room of the New York Public Library as masterpieces in the archeology of a living city, reinventions of a humanistic, democratic design for urban existence. The restoration of Grand Central and the Library's Reading Room reawakens us to what might be called the capacious hopefulness of the city that first built them. The same is true of the Greek Galleries. The space these galleries define is exalted. In a new light, the viewer turns to the artifacts on display and sees not only their familiarity, restated here once again, but also their profound and welcome strangeness. |
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1099112_1 | Colorado: Can man and ram coexist? | mountain air. Despite this attention, the sheep have only recently prospered in 20th-century Colorado. While the state's elk population has increased a hundredfold in this century to 800,000, the sheep population barely made it to the 1970's. Wild sheep populations were decimated by hunters and by diseases that were introduced by domestic sheep. In the last 25 years, through intensive management, the state's wild sheep population has roughly tripled, to about 7,600. Now, biologists are discovering that stress can cause their immune systems to collapse, rendering them vulnerable to pneumonia. And, as the heartbeat meter documented, people can cause stress. The rails-to-trails project symbolizes the shift of Colorado's rural economy from selling minerals to selling scenery. Tourism is now the region's backbone. The Upper Arkansas is Colorado's most popular rafting river, with the number of boaters doubling in the last decade, to 250,000 a year. Beginning May 15, a scenic railroad will start taking passengers, for the first time in 32 years, from Canon City, about 12 miles west through Royal Gorge and back. And if hikers and bikers have their way, tracks will be torn out west of Royal Gorge, allowing for a 160-mile trail from Canon City almost to Vail that passes through there at an easy grade at an altitude of 6,000 feet. The rails-to-trails movement now counts 1,000 rail trails nationwide, generating as much as $1.5 billion in food, lodging and bike shop rentals. The Colorado project requires bureaucratic steps that will take several years. As it proceeds, sheep watchers can spot the animals from a respectful distance, from the four viewing sites across the river from the herds. The turnouts, on State Highway 50 west of Royal Gorge, have informative plaques and are supported by the Rocky Mountain Bighorn Society. Wildlife officials have built almost all the planned raft and kayak launching facilities on the river's south bank, across the water from major sheep populations. The proposed trail, however, would introduce a steady flow of people and their pets on the other side of the river along a corridor that separates about 300 wild sheep in Bighorn Sheep Canyon from their water source. Long ago, the bighorn sheep became habituated to the rumbling freight trains that have passed through here for over a century. But they are spooked by people. ''Their eyesight is amazing: they could pick us out if we were on that ridge |
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1099414_0 | Rift in Effort To Curb Births With Rights For Women | A consensus reached at a 180-nation conference in Cairo five years ago on a new strategy for limiting world population growth by improving the status of women is now facing serious religious, ideological and financial difficulties. The new strategy would allow the world's population to rise from its present level of about 5.9 billion people to close to 9.8 billion by the year 2050, and then hold it at around that level. But a review conference convened here at the end of last month to see what progress countries were making toward the Cairo goals broke up with barely half its work completed. Instead of comparing experiences with the Cairo program, the 180 governments represented spent days wrangling over such sensitive issues as abortion, contraception, sex education for teen-agers and women's rights to the frustration of the more than 700 private organizations interested in population and women's issues attending the session. The meeting did not even discuss money for the Cairo program. It is increasingly unclear whether the world will be able to raise spending on population policies from $10 billion a year at present to the $17 billion required under the new strategy in the year 2000, or the nearly $22 billion needed by 2015 at a time when Western aid to developing nations is falling. ''We are having a replay of the differences which surfaced at Cairo by some of the countries who feel they lost out then,'' acknowledged Bangladesh's representative, Anwarul Karim Chowdhury, chairman of the review conference, which will reconvene next month to complete its work. ''We are sorry to see a meeting that was supposed to take stock of how countries are implementing the Cairo program turn into an attempt to renegotiate that program,'' said Anika Rahman, of the Center for Reproductive Law and Policy, one of the private lobbying groups attending the talks. Citing a ''huge gap between promises and performance,'' June Persaud, the Guyanese delegate who spoke for the Group of 77, as the 130 developing member countries of the United Nations call themselves, predicted the industrialized world will provide only 33 percent of the $5.7 billion it is supposed to contribute to the program by 2000. Unlike earlier United Nations efforts to curb population growth, which emphasized numerical targets, the Cairo strategy assumes women will automatically limit the size of their families as they become healthier, richer and more educated and enjoy |
1099174_3 | The Dangerous Necessity of Eating | and re-invented every day by the European Economic Community bureaucrats in Brussels. Last time I was there, I noticed the mysterious initials GM on some food products in the supermarket. In my naivete, I had thought this indicated that they were produced by some global subsidiary of General Motors, probably out of recycled car seats. But GM stands for ''genetically modified'' food, and this opens up a whole new world of food anxiety. It seems that there are junior Frankensteins out there, using genetic manipulation to produce chickens as big as emus and potatoes the size of the Goodyear blimp. Several big food stores in England and France have already pulled GM food off their shelves. More protests have erupted over a new law requiring restaurants to warn their customers of all GM foods on the menu. The catering industry hates this new rule. Imagine taking your beloved, or someone else's, out to a romantic candlelight dinner. On the menu: ''vegetable soup (with GM tomato paste); beef pie (with GM soya); chocolate mousse (with GM lecithin). Your waiter has been selectively bred for efficiency and politeness, and all kitchen staff have been UV sterilized.'' We have lots of GM food in America, of course. It's just that the manufacturers don't tell us. I appreciate their consideration. GM food would be just one more thing to worry about and, in the long run, our bodies and digestive systemss will adapt to it, just as they have adapted to such taste treats as disodium phosphate, maltodextrin and titanium dioxide. If we are what we eat, all these improvements in food technology should produce a superior human being. The obvious next step is for scientists to create genetically modified people who can safely eat the GM food. Here's a great project for the Brookhaven National Laboratory. Long Island would be the perfect place to start collecting genetic material for a new race of super eaters. We have lots of elderly people who have spent a lifetime on a diet that would kill someone from California in a week, yet they have flourished into old age. My grandmother, for example, never read a nutrition label in her life, and ate nothing but plain, unmodified meat and potatoes, washed down with Guinness. ''What you don't know can't hurt you,'' was her motto. She lived to be 99 years old. OUT OF ORDER E-mail address: liorder@nytimes.com |
1099341_1 | Charity Plea In Italy Draws Money Used To Pay Priests | relief project, ''Rainbow.'' The Catholic relief organization Caritas has been so deluged with clothes, blankets and food that organizers had to appeal to donors to hold back for now. Bishop Nicora said that while donations to Catholic Church charities had grown steadily over the last few years, contributions earmarked to sustain the clergy had declined just as steadily. He blamed priests' reluctance to ask for help, as well as Italians' instinctive mistrust of large institutions, including the Rome-based Central Institute of Support to the Clergy, which collects money for priests' salaries. But some Catholics also detect a link between the drop in contributions to the clergy and the scandal surrounding Michele Cardinal Giordano, the Archbishop of Naples, who is being investigated by state prosecutors on allegations of usury and extortion. The Vatican has steadfastly supported Cardinal Giordano, lodging a formal complaint with the Italian Government after prosecutors raided his office in August, a step it viewed as a violation of church sovereignty. But in an unusual display of openness, the latest issue of Sovvenire, a church magazine distributed to those who donate to the clergy, published letters from angry readers. ''I have always contributed money to sustain the clergy,'' Gianfranco Pederzoll, a donor from the outskirts of Milan, wrote. ''But I won't do it as long as Cardinal Giordano manages church funds to ends which we all know.'' An unsigned editorial urged readers not to rush to judgment, but the fact that the magazine aired the grievances was in itself a sign of dismay within the church. Bishop Nicora said he did not personally believe that there was a link between Cardinal Giordano's legal troubles, which began last summer, and the drop in direct contributions to priests' salaries, which fell from $25 million in 1994 to $23.75 million in 1997 and $23 million last year. ''Unfortunately, we have witnessed a slow, progressive decline that is continuous, but not clamorous,'' he said. The American Constitution bans government subsidies to religious organizations. In some European countries, such as Germany and Austria, the state subsidizes parochial schools. In Italy, a country where Catholicism was the state religion until 1984, the sometimes hazy division of church and state remains a thorny issue for many. In 1990, the Italian Government instituted a system whereby taxpayers could earmark .8 percent of their taxes for a variety of charitable entities. Forty-six percent of Italy's 30 million taxpayers |
1099108_0 | Brazil: A bit of jungle near Rio's beaches | The hundreds of thousands of visitors who travel to Rio de Janeiro each year go there thinking not of eco-tourism but of sun, sand and shopping. Yet within the limits of the sybaritic city lies a natural wonder, Tijuca National Park and Forest, 13 sprawling square miles of jungle, mountain peaks, trails and waterfalls that offer travelers a miniversion of the Amazon. Known to Rio's residents as the city's ''green heart,'' the Tijuca forest is said to be the largest urban nature reserve in the world. But that should not inspire visions of a tame, neatly laid out tropical equivalent of Central Park. The park is a thick and wild tangle of exuberant vegetation, and exploring it can be more adventure than bargained for: three or four times a year, hikers stray too far off trails and rescue squads and helicopters are called out to find them. Granted, some sections of the park, like the area around the main entrance in Alto da Boa Vista, are designed more for Sunday strollers than for serious backpackers. And no overnight camping is permitted in the park. But a pair of recent visits, including a guided hike with 19 other weekend warriors up a steep incline to the top of Morro do Cochrane, altitude 2,334 feet, gave me at least a sense of what the Portuguese bandeirantes found when they first came through here 500 years ago. Tijuca National Park is an Atlantic, rather than an Amazon, rain forest, one of the few remaining pockets of such growth along a Brazilian coastline that has been largely denuded for cities and agriculture. Its trails meander through thickets of 100-foot trees with exotic names: jaboticaba, ourico, imbauba, cupuacu, acai. Occasionally, you come across orchids growing wild. Once into the heart of the forest, a cool stillness prevails. The tree canopy blocks out most sound and light. It is so dense that during a trek in March, I could hear thunder and heavy rainfall above me, but all that trickled down onto my head was a slight dewy drizzle. Monkeys, especially the dominant marmoset species, are more often heard than seen, though it is fairly common to come across sloths and agoutis. Insect and bird life are ample, including charming hummingbirds and colorful toucans. Over the years, I have also encountered the Brazilian cousin of the opossum, the gamba, and the raccoon, the coati. There are |
1103668_7 | A Home Page Away From Home | iPass relies on local phone numbers, wherever possible, for access to the Internet, Ms. Johnson and Mr. Franke are using it to cut down on their connection charges overseas. But those charges are adding up. Ms. Johnson and Mr. Franke currently pay between $4 to $12 an hour for Internet access alone, which runs $20 to $40 a month. And then there are the costs of simply dialing up the Internet. Because the couple are staying mostly in hotels, even local phone calls tend to be extremely expensive. And when local numbers have not worked, Ms. Johnson and Mr. Franke have had to gain access to the Internet through long-distance calls. Sometimes they have also had to turn to cybercafes. That has usually been the case when iPass has failed them, or when they have been unable to afford a room with a phone or when the quality of the phone lines has simply been too poor. They estimate that they spend $15 to $30 a week for computer-generated phone calls and cybercafes. But relying on Internet cafes can create its own set of headaches. When Geoff and Lauren Slater took off on a journey in late 1996 that eventually took them to more than a dozen countries, they soon discovered that cybercafes tended to sprout up and disappear with alarming frequency. And access to the Internet from the cafes varied enormously in price; a cafe in La Paz, Bolivia, charged the Slaters 50 cents an hour, while a cafe in Chile charged them $8 an hour. Before he went on the road, Mr. Slater quit a job as a planning director for Boston's transit system, while Ms. Slater was an education services manager for a software company. Now the couple call Vermont their home, although their global adventures are still posted on line at the www.madriver.com/users/rtw2vt site. Matt Donath, a former long-term traveler who is now home in Chicago, spent weeks in India before he finally found a cybercafe that had working equipment. He also discovered that many cafes he visited would deliberately overestimate the amount of time he spent on line, often tacking on the time he had to spend simply waiting to be connected. Clearly, money is useful to the digital dharma bum, and several sites post sponsorship information. Some of the travelers have managed to attract sponsors, although many appear to be flying solo. Ms. Von-Willcox |
1103653_5 | Students Search the Web for Their First Real Jobs | and Kaiser-Permanente feed them into resume management databases. Many of the databases organize the resumes by matching words in them with a list of keywords that the companies are looking for. Seeding a resume with the right keywords can become a full-time obsession for some college seniors -- particularly those business or computer science majors who hope to work for large companies. George Tarnopolsky, a business management and marketing major at Cornell University, said he had even seen students add a section called ''keywords'' at the bottom of their resumes, right under ''experience'' and ''education.'' Once the section is added, Mr. Tarnopolsky said, the number of times employers look at your resume increases from ''something like three times a week to five times a day.'' (People using Monster.com, for example, can check how many employers have looked at their resumes.) Liberal arts students do not usually spend as much time focusing on keywords because their target employers are less likely to have large, automated resume-management systems. And in general, these students may find the Web less useful. Many liberal arts students search for jobs in the nonprofit arena or at government agencies -- positions that are often the hardest to find. Those employers do not often rely as heavily on national on-line job boards, like Careerpath. Also, nonprofit employers rarely have the resources to visit campuses for interviews. Instead, such employers are starting to send job listings to college career centers, for posting on their on-line job boards. Or they send information about the positions to an on-line service called Jobtrak. Jobtrak maintains a database of job openings for use by college career centers only. Employers send their job postings to Jobtrak and designate the colleges they would like to target. They pay $18 per listing per college, or less if they are posting to more than one. More than 800 campuses use the service. To give employers yet another way to narrow their recruiting, the Ivy League schools, along with Stanford University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, served as hosts of an ''Ivy+ Virtual Career Fair'' two weeks ago. The one-week ''fair'' took place on the Web. Only students from the 10 elite colleges could enter. Once they logged in, they were required to add their resumes to an electronic book, which was open to employers. Students could browse job openings and ask employers questions via E-mail or |
1103860_0 | Paid Notice: Deaths GOLDSCHMIDT, FLORENCE G. | GOLDSCHMIDT - Florence G. Born in Brooklyn, New York on July 15, 1918 passed away in Dallas, Texas on April 26, 1999. She is survived by her loving husband, Arthur; daughter and son-in-law Karen and Norman Lerner; daughter and son-in-law Joan and Dr. Alan Weinstock; and grandchildren Rachel, Elie and husband Naama, Yosef, Devora & Chana. Services were held on Wednesday, April 28, at Shermans Flatbush M.C., 1283 Coney Island Ave., Brooklyn. A shiva will be held at the Lerners residence. |
1103759_2 | U.S. EASES POLICY ON SOME SANCTIONS | a gesture of friendship toward Iran, but they acknowledged that the action would doubtless encourage improved ties between the United States and the Government of President Mohammad Khatami, who is perceived to be a relative moderate among Iranian leaders. The policy shift comes only two weeks after President Clinton made strikingly conciliatory comments about Iran during a public appearance in the White House in which he saluted that nation's ''enormous geopolitical importance over time'' and said that it had ''been the subject of quite a lot of abuse from various Western nations.'' An American exporter, Niki Trading Company, recently sought a special export license from the Treasury Department to sell millions of tons of food products, mostly grain, for about $500 million, to Iran, a deal that now seems likely to be approved. Administration officials had seen the deal as a promising line of contact with Iran after two decades of bitter hostility following the 1979 Iranian revolution. While the State Department labeled Iran last year as the ''the most active state sponsor of terrorism,'' the Administration is hopeful that easing the sanctions might help give Mr. Khatami leverage that could allow him to rein in rival factions of the Government that support anti-American terrorist groups. Under the policy shift, the sale of food, medicine and other ''human necessities'' would be included in trade sanctions only if a nation is in armed conflict with the United States or is diverting food and medical supplies for military purposes. Today's move by the Administration would not affect trade with Cuba, which is limited principally by Congressional sanctions. Mr. Eizenstat noted that the sale of medicine and medical supplies to Cuba was already allowed under legislation approved in 1992, and the regulated sale of food, pesticides and related items was permitted under a policy shift announced in January. American companies are allowed to sell food, medicine and other goods to Iraq under the so-called oil-for-food program overseen by the United Nations. American companies are already permitted to trade food, medicine and other goods to North Korea under a deal brokered by the State Department to end that country's program to develop nuclear weapons. The United States Government has provided tens of thousands of tons of donated food to North Korea as a result of the widespread famine in that country. Few of the countries affected by today's decision offer large markets to the |
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1096978_0 | Ulster Talks Miss Goal But Blair Sees Gains | Talks to resolve the last issues blocking the formal start-up of the Northern Ireland peace plan adjourned inconclusively today, but Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain said he thought they had established a ''satisfactory basis'' for a final settlement. In statements outside Hillsborough Castle, the official residence of Britain's Secretary for Northern Ireland, Mr. Blair and Prime Minister Bertie Ahern of Ireland tried to put a hopeful cast on what was a disappointing end to round-the-clock talks to meet a deadline of Friday. Mr. Blair said that the parties would gather again in 12 days after what he called ''a short pause for reflection to make sure we finalize things properly.'' Mr. Blair and Mr. Ahern said that while the talks had missed their deadline, they had produced a framework for clearing the main obstacle. That is the dispute over whether the Irish Republican Army must start disarming as a condition for the members of its political wing, Sinn Fein, to take their seats in a new Northern Ireland Assembly cabinet. The showdown over arms decommissioning had provoked gloomy predictions this week that the whole painstaking peace process, which has passed through many moments of menacing crises, might not survive this one. A new declaration by the British and Irish Governments that emerged from today's session sought to balance the Ulster Unionist Party's demand for I.R.A. disarmament with Sinn Fein's insistence that there can be no such precondition. It said simply that ''while there is no precondition to decommission, there is an obligation to decommission.'' It was on Good Friday a year ago that the parties agreed to the peace settlement aimed at ending violence between Catholics and Protestants that has cost more than 3,200 lives in the last three decades. That carefully calibrated accord set up a number of new Government panels aimed at giving equal weight to the largely Protestant desire to keep Northern Ireland British with the widespread Catholic wish to see it move closer to the Irish Republic. Central to that agreement was the creation of a new Northern Ireland Assembly that would exercise home-rule powers now in the hands of the British Parliament in London. That shift of authority, scheduled to occur today, would have led to the establishment of a 10-member executive, in which two seats would belong to Sinn Fein because of the count in an election last June. Under the formula laid |
1097021_3 | Clinton's Speech on Kosovo: 'We Also Act to Prevent a Wider War' | price for Mr. Milosevic's present policy of repression. . . . For 10 years and more now a dictator has sought to make himself powerful by convincing the largest group, the Serbs, that the only way they can amount to anything is to uproot, disrupt, destroy, and kill other people, who don't have the same means of destruction, no matter what the consequences are to everybody around them, no matter how many innocent children and their parents die, no matter how much it disrupts other countries. Why? Because they want power, and they want to base it on the kind of ethnic and religious hatred that is bedeviling the whole world today. You can see it in the Middle East, in Northern Ireland. You can see it in the tribal wars in Africa. You can see that it is one of the dominant problems the whole world faces. And this is right in the underbelly of Europe. We have to decide whether we are going to take a stand with our NATO allies and whether we are prepared to pay the price of time to make him pay the price of aggression and murder. Are we, in the last year of the 20th century, going to look the other way as entire peoples in Europe are forced to abandon their homelands or die, or are we going to impose a price on that kind of conduct and seek to end it? Mr. Milosevic often justifies his behavior by talking about the history of the Serbs going back to the 14th century. Well, I value the history of this country, and I value what happened here in the 18th century. But I don't want to take America back to the 18th century, and he acts like he wants to take Serbia back to the 14th century -- to 14th-century values, 14th-century ways of looking at other human beings. We are on the edge of a new century and a new millennium where the people in poor countries all over the world, because of technology and the Internet and the spreading of information, will have unprecedented opportunities to share prosperity and to give their kids an education and have a decent future, if only they will live in peace with the basic human regard for other people that is absolutely antithetical to everything that Mr. Milosevic has done. CRISIS IN THE BALKANS |
1096939_0 | New Video Releases | Beloved Taking on a daunting job of literary adaptation, Jonathan Demme's film gives Toni Morrison's novel a pulse on screen. Through manifestations of terrible events real and demonic, the former slave Sethe (Oprah Winfrey, left with Danny Glover) tries to reconcile the horrors of her experience with the possibility of renewal. From the corporeal world comes Paul D. (Mr. Glover), an old friend bearing a slave's name. Floating from the depths of a river comes the beautiful Beloved (Thandie Newton) to bring Sethe face to face with an unspeakable past. Though it begins slowly, '' 'Beloved,' '' Janet Maslin wrote in The New York Times, ''accelerates into a gripping, wildly imaginative film that's not quite like any other.'' 1998. Touchstone. $107.37. 172 minutes. Closed captioned. R. Release date: Tuesday. American History X Playing on the savage scowl and swastika tattoo of a skinhead named Derek (Edward Norton), Tony Kaye's controversial film creates visual enticement as it builds rhetorical fever from the ersatz poetic idiom of videos and commercials. Derek has committed vicious acts, recreated in almost loving detail, and done a little time in prison. Later he repudiates the violence, in an ''inflated yet gut-slugging film that dares to address America's neo-Nazi culture with brutal candor'' (Maslin). 1998. New Line. $105.77. 118 minutes. Closed captioned. R. Release date: Tuesday. Meet Joe Black In a latter-day version of the 1934 film ''Death Takes a Holiday,'' the Grim Reaper becomes a piece of blond eye candy named Joe Black (Brad Pitt) and pops in on the gilded world of the happy tycoon William Parrish (Anthony Hopkins). Parrish has everything, including a heart problem that is about to kill him. In return for showing Death around his opulent domain, the mogul can have some extra time to get squared away for ''the next place.'' Joe learns about peanut butter and falls for Parrish's daughter (Claire Forlani), but it all takes ''so long that every character regrettably wears out his or her welcome'' (Maslin). 1998. Universal. $107.37. 160 minutes. Closed captioned. PG-13. Release date: Tuesday. I Still Know What You Did Last Summer A group of pals from a small North Carolina town are still paying for a youthful indiscretion: accidentally running over a man and then inadvisably tossing his body in the harbor. Fully recovered, the victim has taken up a cargo hook and is dispatching the young people like tuna on a |
1096968_0 | THE MARKETS: COMMODITIES | SUGAR DROPS. Sugar prices fell more than 5 percent on persistent concern that a global glut will overwhelm weak demand. In New York, sugar for May delivery fell 0.32 cent, to 5.59 cents a pound. |
1098465_1 | Internet Hide And Seek | Computers, Freedom and Privacy conference here today. Moments later, during a panel discussion, he added, ''If you're serious about prosecuting crime on the global communications infrastructure, you have to have traceability. ''Should communications on the Internet be traceable in some circumstances? And if so, what should the rules be?'' The issue is a broad one because anonymity is not of interest only to criminals and dissidents, and not available only to the technically astute. New technologies are emerging that enable even casual Internet users to be anonymous on line for the first time. At the same time, new technologies are being deployed to gather ever more personal information from users. In recent weeks, a debate has emerged over new technologies that have been deployed to allow companies to track individual users on the Internet. The Intel Corporation embedded a unique identification number in its Pentium III processor that would enable network operators to identify individual computers on the Internet, and the Microsoft Corporation designed a ''globally unique identifier'' that secretly appears in Microsoft Office documents and can be used to trace files back to a specific person. The Microsoft Office identification number was used in the Melissa investigation. Some privacy tools are being simplified and made available commercially to a broad audience, allowing anyone to browse the World Wide Web and use E-mail without being identified. The technologies are morally neutral. They could be used, for example, to commit a crime or to report one anonymously. The tools, like the Anonymizer (www.anonymizer .com), are also useful simply for browsing the Web without having to give up personal information to marketers, for visiting sex-related Web sites without potential embarrassment, posting messages on newsgroups using pseudonyms and for avoiding spam, the bulk-mail advertising pitches that advertisers send incessantly to E-mail addresses they have culled from the Net. ''The Internet has shifted the balance away from privacy, and these are attempts to bring it back,'' said David Banisar, an officer of the Electronic Privacy Information Center (www.epic.org). There are other anonymity systems in the works. At AT&T Labs-Research in New Jersey, a system called Crowds is being tested that operates on the premise, familiar to any New Yorker, that one can be anonymous in a crowd. In the Crowds system, large groups of geographically dispersed Internet users would be able to band together and their individual Web page requests would be randomly forwarded |
1098466_3 | Joy of E-Mail Lights Up the Life of a Retarded Teen-Ager | Rauba, got along famously, the class was too much for him. With 19 other students in the class, he found it hard to focus on the keyboard and the monitor. ''It was more of an attention problem'' than a skill problem, Mrs. Rauba said. After a few weeks, we moved him out of the class. When I signed Zach up for the evening Homh class, I wondered if a kid who had benefited so much from technology early in his life could ever master some technology to use in his life now. The first few classes were the basics -- turning on the computer, getting a log-on name and a password. The teacher, Christine Costantino, encouraged the 13 students, who ranged in age from 14 to 40, to pick their favorite food as their password because it's easy to remember. The students sat in front of the lab's Gateway computers -- each participant was helped by a high school student -- and got a chance to research a favorite animal. By the second class, a mother suggested that her daughter would much rather research the Backstreet Boys than tigers. The printer was very busy that night with shots of the Backstreet Boys in various poses. Students from the high school's National Honor Society sat among the students and encouraged them to send E-mail to one another and to them. Zach lit up when a senior, Jenn Leonard, leaned over his computer and said, ''Send me an E-mail, and I'll write back to you.'' The students, including Zach, all needed prompting from the helpers, but they loved going to the printer and getting pictures and just talking to the other kids. Most had no trouble maneuvering the mouse, and no one got frustrated enough to quit before the hour was up. Each student was given an address at Hotmail, the free Web-based E-mail provider. Each E-mail address was handed out on a piece of paper so the student could share it with friends and family and use it to check E-mail at the class's next session. The students started out by doing an Internet search for a music group. Zach typed with one finger but wanted to do it himself. Adam Karpman, a high school junior, helped him navigate the Web. Zach's friend Laura Klein, who is in his living-skills class, brought her Backstreet Boys CD to class. Her mother, Joy, |
1103974_0 | When 'They' Are 'Us' | Nearly all the commentaries about the massacre in Colorado seem to share the assumption that the behavior of the killers reflects some deep failure in the nation's culture -- in our treatment of violence and in the way we bring up our children. Even the tough-talking William Bennett has been moved to suggest that our young boys need more love and attention. But what if these two killers had not been privileged whites but poor African-Americans or Latinos? Almost certainly the pundits would have felt it necessary to call attention to their ethnicity and class. That is what happened after the assault by a group of black teen-agers on a female jogger in Central Park in 1989 -- the incident that spawned so much analysis of ghetto youth culture and ''wilding.'' The message then, too, was that something was pathologically wrong -- not with America, however, but with the black community. This is not to suggest that race and class are irrelevant to discussions of violent crime but rather that there is a disturbing double standard in the way we discuss the problems of different groups of people and in the way we label deviant behavior. If the terrorist act of white, middle-class teen-agers creates an orgy of national soul-searching, then surely the next time a heinous crime is committed by underclass African-American or Latino kids, we should engage in the same kind of national self-examination. Some problems, of course, are characteristic of certain groups, the result of their peculiar history, socioeconomic environment and cultural adaptation to life in this country. This is as true of urban Afro-Americans as it is of rural Anglo-Americans in Appalachia or Asians. Thus we might ask why mass murders seem exclusively the doing of young white men who often come from the middle class. What is at issue here is the principle of infrangibility: our conception of normalcy and of what groups constitute our social body -- those from whom we cannot be separated without losing our identity, so that their achievements become our own and their pathologies our failures. We should speak not simply of black poverty but of the nation's poverty; not the Italian-American Mafia problem but the nation's organized crime problem; not the pathologies of privileged white teen-age boys but, yes, Mr. Bennett, of all our unloved, alienated young men. It is right that we all grieve over the tragedy of |
1103953_0 | THE MARKETS: COMMODITIES | SUGAR SOARS. Sugar prices rose more than 8 percent, the biggest gain in six years, on speculation that Russia is stocking up on cheap supplies. In New York, sugar for July delivery rose 0.34 cent, to 4.42 cents a pound. |
1097933_0 | Everyone Wants to Use the Parks; New York's Wilderness | To the Editor: A coyote in Central Park (news article, April 2)? How about a timber wolf, mountain lion or black bear? A few centuries ago, all three roamed the wilderness of New York City. One of the fascinating aspects of American wildlife is the different ways species have responded to the development of the country. Wolves, lions and bears have been long gone from cities, but other species have demonstrated a remarkable ability to coexist and even flourish alongside people. Ecologists are still debating how widespread coyotes were in the East before the arrival of European settlers. One theory holds that coyotes spread eastward after the wolves were extirpated. How their presence in the cities and suburbs will affect our wildlife remains to be seen. DAVID S. WILCOVE Arlington, Va., April 2, 1999 |
1102369_0 | A Historical Alchemist Turns Medicine Into Gold | The British medical historian Roy Porter was embarking on his first sabbatical in nearly three decades of frenetic teaching and writing when he fell spectacularly ill last fall. ''I got a gigantically enlarged testicle,'' he said cheerfully. What was particularly notable about his condition, which turned out to be a cluster of easily removable benign cysts, was that it was the first time he had been sick in decades. As it happens, Mr. Porter's unexpected descent into the world of the unwell was a fine illustration of one of his favorite observations, that illness of the body often has its roots in the mind. ''I've been teaching nonstop for 27 years, and I've been healthy for 27 years,'' he said recently in his vast, cluttered cavern of an office at the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, where he is a professor of the social history of medicine. ''And within a fortnight of taking sabbatical leave, when I finally had nothing urgent to do, I got sick.'' Mr. Porter has not had much time to be sick. He has written more than three dozen books on topics ranging from the Industrial Revolution to madness through the ages to the history of London. (His latest book, written with G. S. Rousseau, is on the history of gout.) Through them all he has earned a reputation as an expert who can bring potentially dry subjects to life, making his work appreciated as much by the general public as by specialists. He is the model of a popular historian -- appearing on talk shows, writing book reviews, being consulted by governments -- but is still admired by academics for the rigor of his research and the sweep of his knowledge. The books crammed onto his shelves reflect his eclectic interests and his twin obsessions, the history of the 18th century and the history of medicine. This year he is off in yet another direction. ''I'm deep into the roots of feminism,'' he said. Last year he produced ''The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity'' (W. W. Norton), a breathtakingly thorough survey of medicine, its place in society and its implications for civilization from the time of the ancient Greeks, when Hippocrates devised his famous oath, to the present. Yesterday it was declared the winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Award for history. The book might have lived a |
1102379_5 | Dream House With Scenic View Is Environmentalists' Nightmare | with the law are clearly angry at the Beas. They say it is very feasible to build houses that blend in so well with the gorge that they are nearly invisible, thus preserving the vistas that make the area, which is essentially a large wooded canyon with one of the greatest concentrations of waterfalls in the world, so special. ''The house they have put up is an obscene gesture,'' said Daniel Dancer, a writer and photographer who eight years ago built his own house farther east in the gorge in Underwood, Wash. ''They totally overdid it. We might have liked to make our home a little taller or a little closer to the bluff, but I'm a firm believer in the importance of following these rules, which are there to protect the gorge.'' But others are clearly on the Beas' side, and regard the house as a way to fight the gorge protection act. Earlier this year, The Skamania County Pioneer News complained in an editorial that bureaucrats and environmentalists ''want us all living in camouflage yurts.'' And, invoking the region's most famous explorers, a recent letter to the editor of The Columbian, a daily newspaper published in nearby Vancouver, Wash., said: ''The right of an American family to venture west and establish a home secure from capricious government interference is threatened along the very stretch of river where Lewis's and Clark's discoveries culminated.'' The order to move the Bea house was described by one member of the gorge commission as the ''least-worst of a lot of terrible solutions.'' But the Beas, aided by the Pacific Legal Foundation, a property-rights group whose offices are in Sacramento, Calif., are fighting the order in court, and the battle could stretch on for months. Mr. Bea said the real fight was between the gorge commission and the county, which approved his plans in the first place. ''I simply think we're a bone between two dogs here,'' he said, adding: ''We're not moving the house. It's ridiculous. Would you move your house?'' But Mr. Gorman of the Friends of the Columbia Gorge said that the house was clearly in the wrong place and that the Beas should accept the offers of help to move it. ''If they relocate the house now,'' he said, ''the Beas could be in their home this spring and still live in one of the most beautiful places on earth.'' |
1100648_8 | Sugar Companies Play a Pivotal Role in Effort to Restore Everglades | he ran on a promise to drain the swamps in south Florida and reclaim it for farmland. ''They called it reclaiming,'' Mr. Buker said. ''Now it's restoration. They were reclaiming swampland, and now we are restoring a delicate ecosystem.'' At least 200 family farms are in the district, but more than 80 percent of the sugar is produced by two large companies. The older company, United States Sugar, is owned by its employees and two charities controlled by the C. S. Mott family in Flint, Mich. It has operated farms here since 1928. The second, Florida Crystals, is owned by Jose Pepe and Alfonso Fanjul, the scions of a Cuban sugar magnate who fled the island after Fidel Castro took over. The Fanjuls rebuilt their sugar business in South Florida in the 1960's and now control several sugar companies in Florida and the Dominican Republic under a corporate umbrella, Flo-Sun Inc. Both companies give heavily to political campaigns on all levels and to both major parties, having a vital interest in maintaining Federal support programs for sugar prices. During the 1996 Presidential race, Jose Pepe Fanjul served on Bob Dole's finance committee, while Florida Crystals employees and Alfonso Fanjul raised money for the Clinton campaign. ''They are very powerful,'' said Representative Dan Miller, a Florida Republican who has failed three times to overhaul the Federal sugar program. ''Sugar's goal is basically to get the program going to keep up the high price of sugar.'' During the last three election cycles, the Fanjul family pumped more than $575,500 into campaigns for Federal offices, and its sugar companies donated at least $843,000 directly to national committees for both major parties, according to Federal Election Commission records analyzed by the Center for Responsive Politics, Washington group that tracks the influence of money in politics. Over the same period, United States Sugar donated at least $584,000 to national party committees while its employees gave $276,000 to Federal candidates, the records show. The Fanjuls' contacts extend to the White House. In February 1996, for instance, President Clinton interrupted a meeting with Monica S. Lewinsky to accept a call from Alfonso Fanjul, according to White House records made public in the investigation by Kenneth W. Starr. The two later spoke for more than 20 minutes. Environmentalists say the companies were so powerful that Florida agencies turned a blind eye to the phosphorus pollution problem for decades. |
1101249_2 | Silver Town Stakes New Claim to Fame: No Phones | a fund to provide service to remote areas. Bob Shirley, a telecommunications analyst with the commission, has been trying to find companies to serve Silverton, but in Washington's $3.67 billion telephone market, no company has the incentive. ''Those are a small number of folks, they're going to be very high-cost to serve, and they're not likely to spend all day talking to Australia,'' he said. He estimated that there were 300 households in the state that could not get phone service. U.S. Cellular, a company that provides mobile cell phone service, had been interested in Silverton's business, until it recently found that providing service was not feasible, Mr. Shirley said. He plans to talk with several other wireless companies. In emergencies, Silverton residents rely on a police radio, kept at Denny and Diane Boyd's house, to reach the Sheriff's Office. But if the couple is not home, or if the radio breaks or cannot get a signal, there is no way to get help short of driving to a ranger station near the inn. Each year, mostly in the summer, 125,000 cars drive the Mountain Loop Highway, a Federal scenic byway, to enjoy its many hiking trails and the fishing and camping along the Stillaguamish River. Too often, they need the sheriff's radio. ''If we're gone, everyone else is out of luck,'' Ms. Boyd said. The Boyds have had to answer their door at all hours, to cold, frightened or drunken strangers whose cars were not equipped for mountain roads. One group of bedraggled travelers ended up soaking their shirts in motor oil and using them as torches to find their way out of the woods. ''People don't realize how dark it gets here,'' Mr. Boyd said. Norm Frampton, 44, who retired to Silverton from a pharmaceutical company in Seattle, paid cash for his house and now spends his days volunteering and working in his garden, says he pays about $200 a month making calls from pay phones and his cellular phone. A few driveways west, Jeffrey and Diane I. Dukes were just getting back from Seattle. It was Tuesday, their day to check E-mail. At his old office, ''my computer had its own telephone line,'' he said. He gets by without a phone now, but his wife misses one. ''That question keeps coming up, when you go to write a check,'' she said: She has to explain to shop |
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1101175_2 | Ideas & Trends: From Eyeglasses to Wheelchairs; Adjusting the Legal Bar for Disability | seeking special treatment. ''If having a disability is the gate through which everyone must enter to get into the promised land of reasonable accommodation, the width of the gate is pretty important,'' said Christopher Bell, a former associate legal counsel for disability cases at the E.E.O.C. and a partner at Jackson Lewis, a New York-based law firm that represents employers. Certainly, more Americans appear willing to be identified as disabled. The Social Security disability program, for example, which was created to give an income to working-age adults who are too handicapped to hold down a job, has more than tripled its outlays since its inception in 1975. The number of students who have been classified as ''learning disabled'' has skyrocketed as more parents have discovered the accompanying advantages -- more one-on-one time with teachers, more time to complete exams and sometimes even taxpayer-financed tuition for private tutors. The Clinton Administration and a spectrum of groups representing everyone from diabetics to the H.I.V.-positive have submitted supporting briefs to the Supreme Court arguing that the law was specifically intended to address correctable disabilities. After all, they say, it is the people with the most surmountable handicaps who are most likely to seek mainstream jobs. They maintain that it is absurd for employers to claim that a job applicant is too disabled to take a job and yet not disabled enough to sue for discrimination. As Mr. Murphy's lawyers wrote in their brief to the Court, ''The A.D.A. does not permit U.P.S. to have it both ways.'' FOR now, these advocates say, employers are benefiting from the courts' overly narrow interpretation of disability. John Parry, head of the Mental and Physical Disability Law Commission of the American Bar Association, says about 92 percent of the complaints that currently make it to court under the act are decided on behalf of employers, many simply on the grounds that the employee does not qualify for protection. ''This is really about making the obstacles to justice less onerous,'' Mr. Parry said, referring to the three cases before the Supreme Court. Employers like U.P.S. counter that for especially risky jobs they have the right to set high physical standards, even ones that average non-handicapped people might not meet. Norman Black, a spokesman for U.P.S., said: ''We don't see this as a case about disability at all. This is a question about safety.'' But lawyers for the workers |
1101167_2 | Ideas & Trends; Your Mind May Ease What's Ailing You | and his colleagues reported longer survival rates for breast cancer survivors who took part in support groups emphasizing emotional expression and active coping skills. Other researchers have reported comparable findings for melanoma and lymphoma patients, though three studies failed to find that psychosocial support lengthened survival for cancer patients. A 1988 study by a team led by Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn found that meditation, a stress-reduction technique, increased rates of improvement in psoriasis patients who were also receiving standard medical treatment. Equally intriguing are studies that tackle the mind-body equation by finding links between severe stress and illnesses. A large study published last year found that people who suffered abuse in childhood, had a parent who was alcoholic, an addict or a battered woman, or endured other stressful situations, were two to four times more likely to suffer serious illnesses like heart disease, emphysema and stroke than other adults. The frequency of disorders, the researchers reported, increased with the number of ''adverse childhood experiences'' a person had been exposed to. OTHER scientists have found that veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder also were more likely to suffer from a variety of severe maladies, including heart disease and diseases of the respiratory, digestive and musculoskeletal systems than were veterans without the stress disorder. An artificial division between conditions that belong to ''psychiatry'' and those that belong to ''medicine'' is ''nonsense,'' said Dr. Matthew Friedman, executive director of the National Center for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, ''because stress is something that happens to the brain. It's not something in the ether that happens to the mind. Stress is very real. It has lots of medical effects. It also has psychological effects.'' Neuroscientists, who are slowly unraveling the complex interrelationship of genetics, chemistry and cellular function in the brain, seem considerably more comfortable jettisoning the dualism of Descartes than many clinicians in routine medical specialities. With the help of new tools, including PET and M.R.I. scanning, gene knockouts and other technologies, they are revealing the brain as much more plastic than was once thought. Brain chemistry and structure, studies have shown, may be altered by ''psychological'' experiences, including learning and stress. The result is a much more integrated view of human functioning. ''We now realize that the brain is a lot more involved in governing many different functions in the body,'' says Dr. Bruce McEwen, director of the laboratory of endocrinology at Rockefeller University and an |
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1100934_4 | Open House for the Ancients | museums in our sense of the word, they liked displaying art for personal pleasure. The Roman collectors were the ancestors of today's donors and lenders at the Metropolitan. The removal of the Greek artistic patrimony began long before Lord Elgin carried away much of the Parthenon frieze. Although collecting is by nature a largely hit-or-miss affair, depending on availability, we are lucky that buyers are sufficiently diverse to insure a wide variety of acquisitions at the Met and elsewhere. For every collector or curator who admires poignant reliefs like the girl with her doves, there is another with a taste for pornography (the American E. P. Warren was a pioneer in this department), for terra-cotta figurines, or for glass. No three dimensional vision of the Greeks can be gained solely through the display of collected objects, and every viewer must bring something to them. Didactic screeds on the walls can help, but the attention span of most museumgoers, when it comes to panels of written text, is relatively small. Better to have seen ''Electra'' with Zoe Wanamaker, who recently succeeded in generating electricity comparable to Judith Anderson's ''Medea'' half a century ago, or to have read some Thucydides or Plato. For those who can go there, the landscape of Greece provides the best of all possible contexts for what we see in museums. The matchless light, at least outside the urban smog, and the blue radiance of the Aegean, or the towering crags at Delphi where the gods still seem to dwell amid peasants and hoteliers, summon up the world of the ancient Greeks as no text can do. Nor can one ignore the physical remains of this great culture -- those still standing, like the Parthenon, and those that have been unearthed by archeologists. But curiously, ruins, however well preserved, pose the same problem of randomness that we find in museum displays. The remains look old and fragmented. They lack freshness and, above all, color, which the Greeks adored. Gray was not the color of Greek civilization. The decay in ancient objects is itself an impediment to understanding them, even if it sometimes adds to their seductiveness. That is why, all those years ago, I was so carried away by the ''Gemma Augustea,'' an onyx cameo that looks as if it had just been put up for sale in an elegant and expensive boutique. With an object like that, |
1100859_3 | Best Invention; How the Bean Saved Civilization | Moreover, it was difficult to sail when the sea was rough. Between the 12th and 13th centuries, however, the modern rudder was developed. Fixed at the ship's stern and hinged, like a door, it moved just below the surface of the water and could be operated by a single man, thanks to a tiller on the deck. As usual, the dates are vague, but something between the hinged rudder and an oar fixed at the stern is found in a bas-relief in Winchester Cathedral; it dates from 1180, barely 100 years after the Bayeux Tapestry. Why is the rudder so important? Suffice it to say that without this invention, Columbus could not have sailed to America, and the history of the rest of the millennium would have been rather different. I would like, however, to discuss a series of inventions that, rather than characterize this millennium, have enabled us to celebrate its conclusion. Without these inventions, perhaps we would never have been born. A thousand years ago we were squarely in the middle ages. Of course, ''Middle Ages'' is a scholastic convention. For example, in certain countries -- including Italy -- the term ''Middle Ages'' is employed even when the writer is referring to the time of Dante and Petrarch; in other countries, scholars already speak of these years as the Renaissance. To make things a bit more clear, let us say that there are at least two ''Middle Ages'': one lasting from the fall of the Roman Empire (fifth century A.D.) to the year 999, and the other, beginning in the year 1000 and continuing at least until the 15th century. Now the Middle Ages before the year 1000 can deservedly be called the Dark Ages, a term carelessly used to cover all the centuries between the 5th and the 14th. I say ''deservedly'' not because those Ages were full of burnings at the stake, for there were flames and pyres also in the highly civil 17th and 18th centuries (we must not forget ''The Scarlet Letter''), or because superstitious beliefs were widespread, for when it comes to superstitions -- though for different reasons -- our own New Age is second to none. No, they can deservedly be called the Dark Ages because the barbarian invasions that took place during this time beset Europe for centuries and gradually destroyed Roman civilization. Cities were deserted, in ruins; the great highways, |
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1100852_0 | Best Feat of Engineering; Nearer My God | The instructions were simple. Build it of stone so it might stand forever against the ravages of time, wind, water and fire. Don't clutter the space with columns, but make it big. Replace as much of the walls as possible with glass to let the light of God shine through. Oh, and try not to go over budget. It was thus, during the 12th and 13th centuries, that teams of highly skilled builders and craftsmen created magnificent stone structures of unprecedented height and unrivaled beauty. The most impressive of these Gothic cathedrals still punctuate the landscape of northern France, standing in tribute to human ingenuity and faith in God. Author, most recently, of ''The New Way Things Work'' |
1101352_0 | Best Idea; When Tristram Met Isolde | In the ancient world, romantic love would seem to have been virtually unknown, and rarely celebrated. Our generic term ''love'' didn't exist. The sentiment of romantic love as we know it was the homoerotic love of older Greek men for boys; marital love, which surely existed, seems oddly not to have been much honored, at least in surviving literature. Plato's elaborately extended metaphor of the republic, or the perfectly balanced state, discusses marriage primarily as mating; by contrast, Plato's ''Symposium'' celebrates homoerotic love in the most blushingly romantic terms. How different this is from the extramarital erotic attraction of heterosexuals, which results in devastation and violent death. In Euripides' ''Hippolytus,'' for instance, the young Queen Phaedra falls in love with her husband's illegitimate son, who rejects her, and causes her to commit suicide; Phaedra is no romantic, but rather the victim of an ungovernable, unwished-for passion imposed upon her by Aphrodite. Such sexual desire is akin to a curse. Where to the classical mind the intervention of eros in human affairs signals chaos, disaster and retribution, to the more modern, romantically inclined sensibility, eros is the very engine of life's story, a seemingly inexhaustible fund of fantasies of (mostly heterosexual) desire. The adulterous tale of Sir Launcelot and Queen Guinevere, the wife of King Arthur, in Sir Thomas Malory's ''Morte d'Arthur'' strikes a startlingly contemporary note, though written in 1469; the illicit romances of Helose and Abelard, Tristram and Isolde and other medieval lovers concentrate upon an intensity of genuine feeling not found in earlier literature. By the 14th and 15th centuries, in aristocratic European societies at least, eros had become a fine art, worthy of a courtier's fullest attention. Not coarse sexuality, but a refined gentilesse is the ideal of these romances; the love of the courtier for his lady, usually another man's wife, has been interpreted as a secularization of the medieval cult of the Virgin Mary, a ''feminization'' of the patriarchal Roman Catholic Church. These tales are inevitably from the male perspective: the lady is saintly, and of an unearthly beauty; or, in later refinements, the lady is cruel, even diabolical, and the courtier's passion becomes his punishment. In subsequent centuries in the West, romantic love has triumphed as a sort of private, personal mystique linked with a high cultural value. The quintessential romantic-minded heroine is Flaubert's Emma Bovary, a finely drawn portrait of a woman doomed |
1100868_6 | Best Story; The Book That Killed Colonialism | spice route from beginning to end. There was a problem, though. Portugal lacked the population required to support a maritime force capable of controlling half the non-Catholic world. As a result, it was forced to hire sailors from Germany, France and especially the Netherlands. This weakness would eventually spell the downfall of its monopoly in the spice trade. One Dutch sailor in the Portuguese fleet, Jan Huygen van Linschoten, made extensive notes during his six years of travel throughout the archipelago. He paid particular attention to the weaknesses of his employers. Portugal, not surprisingly, had done its best to mask its vulnerabilities, but all these were exposed in 1596, when van Linschoten returned home and published a book, ''A Journey, or Sailing to Portugal India or East India.'' The book -- a virtual travel guide to the region -- was quickly translated into French, English, German and Latin. Two years after van Linschoten's work was published, the Netherlands, through a consortium of Dutch companies, sent its own fleet to Indonesia. The Dutch fleet's first attempt failed, but gradually, wave after wave of Dutch ships reached the islands, driving out the Portuguese and bringing untold wealth to the Netherlands. Lacking not only manpower but also the diplomatic stature to protect its interests, the Portuguese were unable even to put up a fight. In part, the success of the Dutch can be attributed to their good working relationship with Java's powerful feudal lords and to their professionalism. Initially at least, they had come to trade, not to conquer / and on that basis created what was then the largest maritime emporium in the world at its seat in Batavia (now Jakarta). Over time, however, the Dutch shippers needed military force to safeguard their monopoly. To keep international market prices high, they also limited spice production. For this reason, almost the entire populace of the Banda Islands, source of nutmeg, was exterminated in the early 17th century. The island was then stocked with European employees of the company. For field workers they brought in slaves and prisoners of war. Also for the purpose of controlling spice production, people from the Moluccas were forcibly conscripted, placed in an armada of traditional Moluccan boats and sent off to destroy competitors' nutmeg and clove estates. Buru Island, where I was a political prisoner from 1969 to 1979, was turned from an island of agricultural estates into |
1101344_12 | Best Time to Be Alive; No Time Like the Past | something about progress? All of us are going to be very careful about any use of a word that's associated with social Darwinism and 19th-century optimism. But I have to think, in specific areas, who could deny it? First of all, I think of medical progress. With the best medical care in the year 160, the Emperor of Rome and his wife had 13 children and 9 of them died before they grew up; Mozart's wife had 9 children and I believe 7 of them died. And that is just taken for granted in so many cultures. Of course, there's also technological progress that has changed the nature of labor for millions of people in parts of the world, and it's going to continue. Most important is what I see happening today: more and more, people are impelled by communications into confrontation with one another. It's much harder to be unaware of people who are different from you. There's a different sense of human society and humankind. Patterson: With respect to the idea of equality, one can see a measure of progress emerging, certainly in the West over more than a couple of centuries. But progress is not linear. When you look at a place like England, you see clear social and political progress being made in the late 17th century, but by mid-18th century, you realize that the aristocrats have taken over the electorate, which was smaller in 1740 than it was in 1690. The principle of spiritual equality, at least within Christianity, is another case. Of course, if you weren't a Christian, you weren't equal. Baker: Can I shift the focus of the subject to the effect of population? When I was born, the population in this country was 120 million people. It's now 260 million. In my lifetime it has more than doubled, and I'm aware -- I'm 71 years old -- of being in a crowd suddenly. I'm aware that in a very brief time, this particular place has changed rapidly. What about China in your age? We're talking about a population a. Spence: Their population in 1540 would have been around 150 million, and they were very used to running cities with more than a million. So much of their political strategy was to live together in harmony. The basic idea was that people could walk down crowded streets without getting in fights all the |
1101530_1 | Art Review; Glory Comes Home to the Classics | the sculptures, now Greek, which have been arranged artfully for a change. The corridor has become one of the greatest public places in the city. It is being reopened as the centerpiece of the second phase of a three-part campaign to overhaul all the Met's galleries of Greek and Roman art. The campaign has grown to $150 million. This vast undertaking is deeply, admirably unfashionable. When the Met opened in 1870, collecting antiquities was universally regarded as fundamental to the mission of a great museum. The first work the Met acquired was a Roman sarcophagus. Greece and Rome were the cornerstones of Western civilization, and all educated children were supposed to learn Greek and Latin. That was the way of the world. But tastes and philosophies change -- except at the Met, which fortunately seems to take the long view of civilization. One of the first parts of the museum to be put together, the antiquities collection is the last major department to be overhauled. The initial phase of the renovation, completed in 1996, was the refurbishment of what is now the Belfer Court for prehistoric and early Greek art, a large room with beamed ceiling designed by Richard Morris Hunt in 1902. The second phase encompasses the immense corridor (inspired partly by the Braccio Nuovo at the Vatican) and six large, classically proportioned rooms, three on either side of the corridor, which were added to the museum in 1917. With the current redesign, they serve the purpose for which they were conceived by the architects McKim, Mead & White, displaying the art that chronologically succeeds what's in the Belfer Court next door: Attic sculpture and decorative materials from the sixth through the fourth centuries B.C., the Archaic and Classical periods. It's a fair guess that these rooms and the collection in them have never looked better. For one thing, the walls of the corridor, which had been stuccoed because the museum could not acquire enough stone when the place was being built during World War I, are now sheathed in gray limestone, as had been intended. For another, all the works of art -- around 1,200 objects -- have been cleaned, a monumental feat. The presentation is logical, spacious and handsome, though you wouldn't quite say it is simple. Antiquities displays, often the oldest in a museum, traditionally tend to be stuffy and shopworn, geared to specialists. Objects are |
1101518_3 | There's Plenty of Choice in a Diet for a Healthier Heart | grams, 4 ounces of tofu has 6 to 13 grams and 1 cup of soy milk has 4 to 10 grams. The beneficial substances in soy appear to be plant estrogens called isoflavones, antioxidants which may have an added benefit of reducing the risk of breast cancer. WHOLE GRAINS -- A continuing study of more than 34,000 postmenopausal women in Iowa has shown that eating one or more servings of whole-grain foods (in place of refined grains) can reduce the risk of death from heart disease by a third. Such foods include cereals like Wheaties, Cheerios and Shredded Wheat, brown rice, oatmeal, corn, bran, wheat germ and breads in which the first ingredient listed is whole wheat. Check the nutrition information label and look for cereals with 3 to 6 grams of fiber and breads with 2 grams of fiber per serving. SOLUBLE FIBER -- Foods rich in soluble fiber reduce cholesterol by increasing its excretion. Last month the Kellogg Company introduced grain products, under the trade name Ensemble, that are enriched with psyllium, the soluble fiber in the stool softener Metamucil. If you try psyllium-rich foods, introduce them gradually, be sure to consume plenty of liquid with your meal and don't be surprised if they increase intestinal gas and bowel frequency. Other foods rich in heart-protective soluble fiber include dried beans and peas, oats and oat bran, barley, apples, citrus fruits, corn and flaxseed. Flaxseed, which should be ground to derive its full benefits, also contains the kind of heart-protective oil found in fish and substances called lignans that may act as cancer blockers. Ground flaxseed can be added to cereal, yogurt and the batter for pancakes, breads and other baked goods. SUPPLEMENTS -- The study of Iowa women also highlighted dietary calcium, either from foods or supplements, as a heart-protective, probably because it helps lower blood pressure. Most helpful was a diet that contained more than 1,400 milligrams of calcium a day, about the amount in a quart of skim milk or yogurt or calcium-fortified orange juice. A dietary supplement, Chinese red-yeast-rice, sold as Cholestin, contains the same cholesterol-lowering compounds found in the statin drugs. It is highly effective and much cheaper than the statins, but it may have the same potential side effects of liver and muscle damage, and the Food and Drug Administration is trying to reclassify it as a drug. Two B vitamins -- folate |
1101611_3 | NATO Admits Pilot Bombed 2d Convoy on Kosovo Road | civilians without hampering their attacks on Serbian forces. There is also the question whether it is possible to dependably distinguish civilian from military targets at an altitude of 15,000 feet. General Leaf said the episode began about 12:30 P.M. local time when a pair of United States F-16's saw Albanian villages being set on fire north of Djakovica. Their call sign was Bear 21. The episode was first documented last week at NATO. A pilot in Bear 21 saw people running from a house that burst into flames and jumping onto a vehicle, which NATO officials said may have been a tractor. Believing that they had set the house on fire, he attacked the vehicle with a laser-guided bomb, destroying it. NATO officials added today that in addition to the Bear 21 attack, another bomb was later dropped north of the town in an attack by a different group of F-16's, Bear 41. Serbian television later showed destroyed tractors at that site, raising the possibility of civilian casualties. NATO's principal disclosure today, however, was of the later attack southeast of the town on a convoy of more than 100 vehicles. That raid involved several sets of aircraft, including F-16's, French Jaguars, OA-10 observer planes and a flying airborne command and control aircraft, the AB-triple-C. Another important link was NATO's command center in Vicenza, Italy, the Combined Air Operations Center, which coordinates the raids. The raids on the second column began when two F-16's, Bear 31, saw the convoy. From the start, the pilots were worried about the possibility of civilian casualties. With many villages aflame there was reason to think that many refugees might be on the road. General Leaf said the pilots in Bear 31 had an ''extensive discussion'' with the command plane about whether the convoy was a civilian or military target. It was not easy for the pilots to identify the vehicles from their altitude, and while F-16's carry advanced military technology, these systems have their limits. Potential targets are shown in the F-16 cockpit on a special display, which is about 4.5 inches wide and 4.5 inches high. The targets are not shown in color, but in shades of green. An F-16 pilot has to look out the cockpit to see the color of the vehicles below him, an important factor since military vehicles are often painted dark green. He cannot use binoculars because the cockpit |
1101590_0 | Defining 'Disability' Down | Nearly a decade after it was enthusiastically signed into law by President Bush, the Americans with Disabilities Act faces a major review by the Supreme Court. Over the next two weeks, the justices are to hear four cases that will help define the true dimensions of the law. The Court's role should be to reaffirm the nation's commitment to fair treatment of people with some kind of physical or mental impairment. Tomorrow the Court will take up the first of the cases, involving two Georgia women diagnosed with mild retardation, mental illness and brain damage. Georgia is challenging a sound appellate court decision that held that the Act, and a 1991 regulation designed to carry it out, forbade the states to segregate individuals in an institution when a small, supervised group home would be medically and socially more appropriate. Some 58 former state commissioners and mental health directors from 36 states, including New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, have filed an amicus brief, urging the Court to reject Georgia's ''alarmist claims'' about the fiscal impact of requiring an end to unnecessary segregation of the mentally disabled. By following that wise and humane advice the Court would honor the law's language and purpose. The three other cases are employment disputes that raise another basic question. Are people whose conditions can be medically corrected so that they can function normally considered ''disabled'' and thus entitled to protection under the statute? One case involves a truck driver whose high blood pressure is controlled by medication. A lower appellate court, viewing his condition in its medicated state, held that he was not a person with a disability and thus not entitled to sue his employer for discrimination in dismissing him. In another similar case, twin sisters were denied jobs as pilots because they did not meet a United Airlines requirement for uncorrected vision. The same appeals court in Denver barred a lawsuit because their correctable vision was not a disability. In the final case, a lower appellate court in San Francisco went the other way, finding that a truck driver who sees out of only one eye but whose brain has compensated for the deficiency was disabled and therefore entitled to sue the employer that dismissed him. The Court in these cases will not reach the ultimate issue of whether these individuals were ''qualified'' for the jobs or were appropriately rejected because their impairment |
1101559_0 | Johnson Gets Set for Olympic Encore | The remarkable track and field career of Michael Johnson will continue for another two years at least, he said. Johnson opened his 1999 United States season here with a victory in the 400 meters Saturday in 44.51 seconds, fastest in the world so far this year. Afterward, he said his chief goal was to repeat his double gold medal performance of the 1996 Olympics by winning the Olympic 200 and 400 meters next year in Sydney, Australia. ''My focus this year is to re-establish myself in the 200 meters, and continue doing what I've been doing in the 400,'' Johnson said. ''Next year, of course, my goal is to win the Olympic 200 and 400 again.'' Johnson set the world record of 19.32 seconds in the 200 meters at the 1996 Games in Atlanta. His personal best in the 400 is the 43.39 he recorded in winning the 1995 world championships. What about going after Butch Reynolds's world record of 43.29? ''If along the way the 400 record happens, then it does,'' Johnson said. ''But I've always felt, as far as world records are concerned, all I can do is put myself in the best shape I can be in, which I've always tried to do, and just go out there and run the best races I can.'' Johnson's philosophy is built around winning big races. That explains why, despite having been the world's dominant runner at 200 and 400 meters since 1990, he didn't break the rather soft 200-meter world record until 1996, and still has not broken the 400 record. ''I prefer to put my focus on winning races as opposed to breaking records,'' he said. ''That includes winning every race that I run, and next year winning the double Olympic gold again. ''But you could say that I try to break the world record every time I go out and run -- because every time I go out I try to run the best I can.'' Injuries have slowed Johnson the last two years. In 1998 he actually fell from the world 200-meter ranking for the first time since 1990. ''On the surface it was my hamstrings,'' he said, ''but the trouble was really caused by an imbalance in my hip alignment. We got all of that taken care of last summer, and I haven't had any problems since then.'' Johnson hasn't yet decided whether he will |
1096858_0 | Hopeful Prime Ministers Hover at I.R.A. Disarmament Negotiation | For the third consecutive night, Prime Ministers Tony Blair of Britain and Bertie Ahern of Ireland pressed Protestant and Roman Catholic leaders Wednesday night to compromise in the bitter dispute over the disarmament of the Irish Republican Army. The dispute is blocking the advance of the peace effort in this British province. The two men left Ulster Wednesday morning after two days of negotiations, took part in parliamentary debates in London and in Dublin and returned Wednesday night to Hillsborough Castle, 15 miles south of Belfast, the residence of the Northern Ireland Secretary, Mo Mowlam, to try to reach a settlement by Friday, the deadline set by Ms. Mowlam. ''I think we can make it,'' Mr. Blair said before leaving Wednesday morning, promising to return if he felt a compromise could be reached Wednesday night. He returned in a helicopter about 8:30 P.M. As the talks continued at 1:30 A.M. today, no settlement had been announced. Outside the gates, a group of Protestants aligned with the Rev. Ian Paisley, who opposes the peace agreement, yelled ''Traitor!'' and ''No surrender!'' at official cars. A settlement of the disarmament dispute would pave the way for the transfer of home rule powers by Britain to the new Northern Ireland Assembly. The transfer is part of the peace agreement approved in Belfast last April 10. The agreement gives more political power to the Catholic minority in Ulster and more influence in the north to the overwhelmingly Catholic Irish Republic. Failure to settle the disarmament problem could lead to increased sectarian violence. The daunting problem is that the transfer of home rule powers may not start until the new Northern Ireland Assembly, led by a Protestant First Minister, David Trimble, forms a cabinet. Sinn Fein, the I.R.A. political wing, is to receive two of the cabinet posts. But Mr. Trimble says he will not form a cabinet with Sinn Fein until the I.R.A. makes a ''credible beginning'' to disarming its arsenal, estimated at 100 tons of weapons and explosives. The I.R.A. has observed a cease-fire for 20 months, which is regularly cited by Gerry Adams, the Sinn Fein leader, as proof that the group supports the peace agreement. On Wednesday, the I.R.A. issued a statement that was immediately and predictably described as negative by Protestant Unionists and as positive by Sinn Fein. The statement, part of an annual proclamation marking the anniversary of the 1916 |
1096835_0 | Motorola Offers Mobile Phone That Can Span Continents | Paving the way for worldwide wireless phone use (and possibly some whopping roaming charges), Motorola is introducing a new mobile telephone that can be used in the United States, Europe, the Middle East and Asia. The phone will be able to receive radio signals from the predominant digital frequencies in Europe, Asia and the Middle East (900 and 1,800 megahertz) and in the United States (1,900 megahertz). It will be available in the second quarter of this year; the price has yet to be announced. Until recently, most mobile phone users have not been able to use the same phone across continents because of differing frequency standards. Yet Motorola's development is still just the beginning; it does not get the 800-megahertz frequency, which is a predominantly analog (as opposed to digital) frequency used by 85 percent of mobile phone users in the United States. If this sounds confusing, that's because it is confusing, said Herschel Schosteck, a wireless market analyst from Wheaton, Md. But he said the significance of the Motorola announcement was that it paved the way for telephones to work across numerous standards, technologies and radio frequencies -- and hence to make the situation less confusing to consumers. Before long, he said, wireless phones will work in many places around the globe. ''For the group of people who are international travelers, this is going to be very useful,'' he said. NEWS WATCH |
1096825_5 | Behind Closed E-Mail | discussions about the superintendent's midyear review, according to The Arizona Republic. That board member, Kristy Ryan, has also criticized the president's request for comment by phone or E-mail on a draft of the job review for the superintendent, according to the newspaper. Mr. Delaney, of the Attorney General's Office, said the Scottsdale board's ethics monitor had been asked to review the E-mail issue to see if the open meetings law had been violated. ''We're not quite sure if there was a violation,'' said Mr. Delaney, who is chairman of the state's Open Meeting Law Enforcement Team. (It is called Omlet -- ''we break a few eggs,'' he said.) As chairman of that panel, Mr. Delaney trains public officials about the use of E-mail. ''People say it's like a conference call, and I say that's also no good, and the same with faxes,'' he said. ''I don't care if you're doing it by pony express, if all of you are reaching consensus where the public can't see it, it's wrong.'' It is not only E-mail that raises open-meetings questions. In 1995, for example, a school board president in Jefferson County, Colo., left a voice-mail message for other school board members about his planned testimony against a state school-governance bill. Two other board members accused him of violating the state open-meetings law. They were supported by Troy Eid, executive director of the Institute for Information, Law and Policy at the Center for the New West, who wrote an op-ed article in 1995 in The Rocky Mountain News that said: ''The Jeffco controversy shows how information technologies can be abused to short-circuit the public's ability to monitor and influence government decision-making. The solution is not to abandon these technologies, but to insure that the law keeps pace with the people who depend on them.'' But no formal complaint was ever filed. Also in 1995, the chairman of the board of regents of the Nevada state university system sent a fax to all but one of the other regents, seeking their approval to issue a press release criticizing the regent who was left out, who had questioned the hiring of a new president for the University of Nevada at Las Vegas. The State Attorney General's Office filed a successful lawsuit that said such communication violated the law on open public meetings. Once an official's E-mail is available to the public, voluntarily or through the |
1096709_7 | Between Tech Fans And Naysayers, Scholarly Skeptics | except for friends and enemies,'' said Sherry Turkle, a professor of the sociology of science at M.I.T. Like Dr. Winner, Dr. Borgmann has written extensively on the high social cost of high tech. And like his fellow skeptics, Dr. Borgmann starts many conversations by pointing out that he is not against computers per se. ''The question is,'' he said, ''how the computer will insinuate itself into culture at large, and into leisure, how it will further isolate people from one another.'' AS the veteran skeptics enter their 60's and 70's, it is logical to assume that a younger generation of scholars will pick up where they leave off. Indeed, a number of departments devoted to science and technology studies have sprouted in the past two decades at places like M.I.T., Cornell University and the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. But compared with fields like environmental ethics, in which virtually every major academic press is publishing books, young philosophers of technology remain relatively scarce. ''Your average graduate student in philosophy is very unlikely to get any exposure at all to the philosophy of technology,'' said Dr. Light, who is 32. As a graduate student, he said, he was fortunate to meet Andrew Feenberg, a philosopher at San Diego State University who encouraged him to pursue the study of technology. Dr. Light hopes not only to bring more philosophers to the study of technology, but also to make them a more visible part of public discourse. ''When you work on issues like the effects of technology on society, we're remiss if we don't talk about our work in a public context,'' he said. Dr. Weizenbaum is not heartened by the level of public discourse about technology. ''Speaking globally,'' he said, ''society is suffering from a gigantic failure of critical thinking. In a certain sense people are getting dumber. People seem to have lost the capacity for skepticism and what I call critical thinking.'' But Dr. Borgmann is relatively optimistic. He said he believed that the public was more likely now to turn its attention to technology and its effect on the world. ''You come to a point,'' he said, ''where a lot of people are going from a station wagon to an S.U.V., or from old-style TV to high-definition TV, or a machine that runs at 266 megahertz to one that runs at 500, and they'll ask, 'Is that all?' '' |
1098075_2 | News Reports Bolster Support for Bombings | to Kosovo, would risk abetting Mr. Milosevic's own desire to rid the province of its ethnic Albanians. Mr. Blair conceded today that his Government would accept an unspecified number of refugees, adding that the ''ultimate objective'' must remain repatriating them to Kosovo. The French Defense Minister, Alain Richard, said Paris did not want to be seen taking a position apart from its allies. But Mr. Blair and Mr. Richard twinned these moves with aggressive statements about the need for NATO to persevere in the bombing. Mr. Richard announced ''even more intense attacks'' by France's Mirage 2000-D fighter-bombers, and Mr. Blair said, ''People have to be prepared to go on, have to be prepared for the longer haul in order to make sure that our objectives are secured and successful.'' In his briefing today, the NATO spokesman, Jamie Shea, stressed the alliance's commitment to caring for the exiles, saying it was ''fully mobilized'' behind the refugee assistance effort, building campsites and ferrying aid into Albania and Macedonia. Though there has been acknowledgment of the historic menace of Balkan instability to Europe, the coming together of a joint political will on the Continent has not been based on a perceived threat to national political and economic interests, the traditional threshold issue. What is driving the growing support for NATO is the sense of responsibility for forestalling human rights abuses and punishing those who commit them. A Guardian editorial said approvingly that European policy was increasingly in the hands of ''humanitarian hawks.'' In Germany, Prime Minister Gerhard Schroder, Defense Minister Rudolf Scharping and Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer, who were stern critics of United States policy in Vietnam and the installation of nuclear weapons in their country in the 1980's, are now taking Germany into its first war in 50 years. A recent German newspaper headline read, ''Dictators Look Out -- the 1968'ers Are in Charge.'' Not all members of Mr. Fischer's Green Party are content with the Government's unflinching backing of NATO's aerial strikes. Roland Appel, a party leader in Dusseldorf, called it the party's ''most difficult test'' and pleaded with members to avoid reflexive pacifism that could split the party and force it out of the country's ruling coalition. Mr. Schroder said today that he saw no reason to change the strategy of relying primarily on military force rather than diplomacy. Gunter Verheugen, a top Social Democrat within the Foreign Ministry, was |
1098096_1 | Oil Company Confronts Cluster of Brain Tumors | very unusual pattern of brain cancer here,'' said Jim Lowry, who heads a task force on the brain tumors at BP Amoco, the oil giant based in London that was created when British Petroleum acquired Amoco of Chicago last year. ''You essentially have this puzzle, and it points to a certain space and a certain time.'' Cancer clusters are rarely found to have a common cause. Epidemiologists say that in large populations, it is statistically inevitable that clusters of similar cases will show up in one place or another. In addition, cancer can develop over such long periods that much of the evidence may be buried in the deep past. ''The track record in these cases is not very good,'' said Peter Inskip, an epidemiologist at the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Md., who studies brain tumor cases. ''More often than not, people have not come up with a convincing answer.'' But Amoco, after consulting the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other agencies, found the circumstances at Naperville so striking that it brought in experts from Johns Hopkins University and the University of Alabama at Birmingham to investigate. Of the 20 brain tumors, which have caused 5 deaths so far, 7 were a rare malignant cancer called glioma, which strikes only 5 of every 100,000 people each year. And five of the gliomas occurred among chemists and lab technicians who worked over many years in the same laboratory on the same corridor handling toxic chemicals, including some known as heavy metal catalysts. In that lab, the brain cancer rate was eight times higher than in the general population, the medical experts said. Now, after a two-year investigation costing millions of dollars, BP Amoco officials hope that a comprehensive report due in just weeks will provide some answers. If nothing else, it may sort out the thousands of chemicals found in the laboratories, to identify for further study those used in common by the cancer victims. If the cause is determined to be work-related, officials say, the company will ''do the right thing'' by compensating victims. In the meantime, a number of brain tumor victims have sued BP Amoco, arguing that the company knowingly exposed its employees at Naperville to toxic chemicals and unsafe conditions for years by ignoring complaints about a faulty ventilation system. BP Amoco officials dispute the accusations and say the medical investigators have largely ruled |
1098023_4 | New York's a Jungle, and One Scientist Doesn't Mind | have is New York City. All these different cultures can be found here. They all bring their healing plants, food plants, relaxing plants, beverages with them. I give a class at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. I do my shopping for it in Chinatown and Harlem and also Dean & DeLuca in SoHo. They have amazing tropical fruits that no one else has. Q. Do your two worlds -- New York and tropical rain forest -- sometimes clash? A. Rarely. Though once, I was home in Westchester unpacking my collection of rain forest hunting tools. And I had had this dart set that had curare poison on its tip. I was very tired and I stuck myself and I started feeling a little funny. So I called up the number of Poison Control and they said, ''You should call Dr. Balick -- he's our specialist.'' And I said, ''Man, this is Dr. Balick!'' So the woman on the other end of the phone asked my symptoms and said, ''Now you get yourself to a hospital, but you call in advance first.'' I then called one of the local hospitals and said, ''I have a curare stick wound from a poisoned dart and I'm coming in an ambulance.'' And the physician in charge, thinking it was a joke, hung up. I eventually ended up in the E.R. of another hospital -- where there were people with heart attacks and knifings; I was the guy in the corner with the poisoned dart wound from the Amazon. Q. The use of botanicals and herbs in Western society has increased. Do you find this a positive trend? A. Well, it is fascinating. In the last few years, probably over a third of the American public has begun using botanical medicines for some aspect of their health care. People now know if they get into a car wreck, they go to an emergency room, but if they want to stave off a cold, they might take echinacea. If they want to help with their memory retention, they might take ginko. Actually, I only recommend that people utilize herbs under the care of a trained health care professional. There are specific situations where you shouldn't be using herbs. For example, if you have a disease of the immune system like lupus or scleroderma, you shouldn't be using echinacea. I'm also concerned about the |
1103261_1 | New Ford Division to Focus On Recycling of Auto Parts | Kwik-Fit, Europe's largest independent fast-fit repair chain. The manager of Ford's new business development, Bill Li, 29, came up with the idea for the recycling company and will be its chief operating officer. He said huge growth potential existed in the vehicle recycling business because demand for used parts by repair shops far exceeds supply. About 10,000 such operations, ranging from small, antiquated junkyards to large, modern vehicle dismantling operations, exist nationwide. Most are family owned and are being run by second and third generations. About 11 million vehicles a year are sent to the junkyard because they have been damaged in accidents or have reached the end of their life. About three-quarters of the scrapped vehicles are recycled or their parts are resold. The rest are shredded and buried in landfills. To reduce the amount of scrap that goes to landfills, Ford's goal is to recycle or re-use at least 90 percent of every vehicle, Mr. Li said. In Europe, the law will require nearly all vehicles to be recycled or reused after the turn of the century. Mr. Li said about half of the new company's business would come from selling used parts -- everything from body panels, doors and lights to engines and transmissions -- to car dealerships, auto body shops and auto repair companies. The company eventually intends to link its recycling centers with its customers through the Internet to track down used parts. Mr. Li said that computer systems did not yet exist to track parts and that Ford's research showed that repair shops found the used part they were seeking only about 10 percent of the time. ''That would be like going to the store and finding milk only one out of 10 visits,'' he said. ''That's unacceptable.'' With an on-line inventory of parts, consumers should have to wait less time for repairs and possibly pay less for parts, he added. Indeed, insurers often prefer that repairs be made with used parts because of the lower cost. As for the recycled materials, Ford and its suppliers likely will be the biggest customers of the company's recycled metals, glass and plastics, Mr. Li said. The establishment of the recycling subsidiary plays into the theme of environmental leadership advanced by the company's chairman, William Clay Ford Jr., and the focus on entrepreneurial spirit set by its president, Jacques Nasser. Indeed, Mr. Li said he got the |
1103227_4 | Doctors Fighting Backlash Over Vaccines | the National Vaccine Advisory Committee said that fear of misuse was strong, privacy should be enforced and use of a registry by tax, immigration or other agencies must be prohibited. It opposed a national registry and said that parents should be allowed to keep their children from participating. A central data base ''is in no way what we're talking about,'' said Dr. Robert W. Linkins, chief of the systems development branch of the C.D.C.'s National Immunization Program. In Idaho, a state immunization registry for preschool children was approved last month after the Idaho Christian Coalition initially opposed it but later endorsed it after changes in the language. In Texas, Parents Requesting Open Vaccine Education, a group that uses the acronym Prove, insisted that the state's immunization registry include only children whose parents approved of their being included in the registry in writing. The group also asked that the data not be shared with other states. In California, Brad Dacus, the director of the Pacific Justice Institute, a network of politically conservative lawyers, questioned the need for a childhood vaccination for hepatitis B, which is often spread by sexual contact or intravenous drug use. The C.D.C., however, notes that about 25 percent of all people infected with hepatitis B have no known risk factor. Hepatitis B, which infects 200,000 Americans a year, is acquired by exposure to blood or body fluids from an infected person. It is about 100 times easier to transmit than is H.I.V., the agency says. Universal vaccination, the agency says, is not only easier to achieve with young children, but protects low-risk children from accidental infection by others. Besides, the C.D.C. adds, no one can predict which children will grow up to become high-risk adults. Experts add that some critics ignore what would happen if their advice was taken and vaccination programs were curbed -- if laws requiring vaccinations for measles and other diseases for entry to school were eliminated. ''We can credit largely the school laws with the near-elimination of measles from this country in the last few years,'' said Dr. Neal A. Halsey, a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health and the director of its Institute for Vaccine Safety. A January 1998 article in The Lancet detailed the sharp rise in pertussis rates in the 1970's and 1980's in countries where popular accounts of adverse reactions led to sharp drops in vaccination. |
1103251_0 | Private Spy In Space To Rival Military's | If all goes well today, years of planning, delay and debate will culminate in the launching of the world's most powerful civilian spacecraft for observing the Earth and its human dramas, inaugurating the first real rival to military spies in the sky. The satellite, built by Lockheed Martin for Space Imaging, a Colorado company, is to be hurled from a California launching pad into an orbit some 420 miles high, where its cameras will be able to record cars, homes, hot tubs, roads, buildings, bridges, convoys, tanks, jets, missiles and mass graves -- though not individual people. And before the year is out, two more American companies plan to loft reconnaissance craft with similar powers. In all, a dozen or so are expected to be launched in the next decade. Though civilian ''remote sensing'' satellites have been observing the Earth since 1972, their images are wide-scale and the details fuzzy. The new surveillance technology is likely to be a powerful new tool for miners, geographers, urban planners and disaster-relief officials, to name a few potential clients. But the sharp-eyed cameras to be launched today raise fears, too, about lost privacy and the possibility that images from such satellites will be just as valuable to adversaries like Slobodan Milosevic. Experts on space reconnaissance in and out of the Federal Government agree that the national security implications of the new technology have been inadequately thought out -- a worry thrown into sharp focus by the crisis in the Balkans. ''Any time a powerful new technology is introduced, there's a battle over the uses to which it's put,'' Christopher Simpson, a reconnaissance expert at American University in Washington, said in an interview. ''Here, the potential for beneficial uses is very high, on balance. But the potential for abuse certainly exists and we'll no doubt see some of that.'' The Clinton Administration released this genie in 1994 when it lifted technical restrictions on private companies, letting them build a new generation of satellites that could peer down to see objects on the ground as small as a yard wide -- enough to distinguish between a car and a truck. Even white lines on the black asphalt of parking lots are said to be discernible. Today, the new companies organized to take advantage of the change have backlogs of orders, including at least $1 billion from Federal intelligence agencies eager to supplement their spy satellites. |
1103263_1 | Portadown Journal; Front Line in Ulster Conflict Is Measured by Feet | in bulletproof vests and visored helmets waited, blocking their passage through the Roman Catholic housing project beyond. A pennant with a golden scroll reading, ''Drumcree: Here We Stand. We Can Do No Other,'' was snapping in the wind. A statement of protest, a prayer, the singing of ''God Save the Queen,'' and the weekly confrontation was over. Sheep in the hillside pasture remained curled in sleep. The point, said Mr. Gracey, had been made: ''We want the world to know we have not gone away.'' The 62-year-old Mr. Gracey himself has not left Drumcree since the Orange Order effort to march through the all-Catholic Garvaghy Road residential area ended last July in violence and humiliation for the Orangemen, known to one another as The Brethren. They were urged by other Protestants to abandon their protest then. Weapons, bombs and catapults had turned up in their ranks during the nightly barricade encounters with police, and three young Catholic boys had been burned to death in their beds by Protestant paramilitary fire bombers in the town of Ballymoney. But Mr. Gracey, David Jones, spokesman for the Portadown Orangemen, and others of the group refused to leave and have kept the vigil since then. They were dismissed for months as a desultory group of obstinate nay-sayers, but they are now being joined each Sunday by increasing numbers of backers and bolstered by ''support Drumcree'' rallies across the province and in militant Protestant communities in England and Scotland. Their influence and the possibility that the Drumcree standoff will once again convulse the province in rioting grows with each day that negotiators in Belfast, Dublin and London fail to resolve a guerrilla disarmament impasse. The issue is blocking the formation of the new government for Northern Ireland envisioned in the peace settlement signed last April. There is little sympathy in the order for the peace settlement and much anger at David Trimble, the designated First Minister of the new Northern Ireland Assembly and a Nobel Peace Prize winner, who represents this area in the British Parliament. Four years ago, Mr. Trimble led the march down the Garvaghy Road and danced a jig of victory with the Rev. Ian Paisley -- a fierce opponent of the peace settlement -- when the parade succeeded in penetrating police lines. Portadown is known as the Orange Citadel because the order was founded near here in 1795. Local Catholics steer |
1100342_3 | Wiring the Schools For E-Mail and More | education, but the school's motive is not intercontinental correspondence. ''Access to the outside world wasn't really the initial purpose of our electronic mail, and it still isn't,'' said Wolfgang Heidmann, Dalton's technology director. Instead, the school used its E-mail program to set up an internal conference system, with subjects ranging from sports to ethical problems. All sixth-grade students receive E-mail accounts to use throughout their high school years, and most of the conferences have no limits on who can participate. Judith Sheridan, who teaches a senior course on Shakespeare and monitors the class's E-mail conference, said that ''the conferences are seen as an extension of the classroom,'' allowing shy students to share their thoughts and inviting all students to continue discussions. One 24-hour ''thread'' on the Shakespeare conference comprised 15 postings from five students and Ms. Sheridan. Norm Fruchter, of New York University's Institute for Education and Social Policy, agrees that computers can be helpful, but he cautioned that ''the primary difference is still the quality of teachers in the classroom, including what they do with technology.'' Teachers must also play a crucial role in insuring that on-line behavior follows the rules of classroom behavior. ''The approach to behavior that is not tolerated on-line should be the same as it is for behavior that is not tolerated off-line,'' said Alex Fowler of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an Internet policy group. At the Dalton School, Ms. Sheridan said that her E-mail duties included peacekeeping. ''Every conference is monitored by an adult, so if there's an unfortunate remark, the adult can remove that remark and warn the student to pay attention to the protocols of the conference.'' Most school E-mail systems have policies detailing ''acceptable use'' of their systems. Obscenity is a standard, if ill-defined, prohibition. Other areas are more fuzzy. The Board of Education's current Internet usage policy prohibits the use of E-mail accounts to send or receive personal messages, while Stuyvesant's policy has no such prohibition. Elspeth Taylor, who oversees the Board of Education's technology program, said that as E-mail became more widespread, her policy would have to change: ''I don't think anyone really believes that no E-mail messages are going to be on the system for personal purposes.'' Practices like the removal of offensive material from postings raises civil liberties issues. Bill Stamatis, who studies the Internet for the United Federation of Teachers, said there would be conflicts over |
1100347_0 | Schools and Web Safety; Balancing the Dangers and the Discoveries As Students Go on Line | THE image of a cherubic fourth grader sending E-mail to a cherubic fourth grader in another school is a heartwarming reminder of the promise of the Internet. The image of a cherubic fourth grader unwittingly sending E-mail to a pedophile, or finding pornography or hate speech on the World Wide Web, is a chilling reminder of the technological dangers that many parents and teachers fear. ''Every good and bad thing about the human condition is in some way on the Internet,'' said James Bosco, chairman of the Consortium for School Networking, a nonprofit group based in Washington that promotes the use of telecommunications for education. The challenge for schools that provide E-mail and Internet access is to set policies that allow the first scenario to happen and prevent the second. The two main tools available, filter technology and policies that define ''acceptable use'' of the Internet, are not infallible. But many educators view the challenge of acceptable use as an educational opportunity, not a danger -- as long as the education works. ''As a system, we do filtering of E-mail, and we always will do some filtering,'' said Elspeth Taylor, chief information officer of the New York City Board of Education, ''but we do recognize the limitations of filtering.'' Filtering programs, which block E-mail and access to Web sites containing certain keywords or phrases, are often criticized because they can't keep up with the fast-changing Internet and because they accidentally block valuable sites and E-mail. Administrators at Stuyvesant High School in New York view their filtering program as secondary to their acceptable-use policy, which prohibits obscene and offensive material. All students who want a school computer account must sign the policy, and Steve Kramer, the school's assistant principal for technology services, says ''there has been extraordinarily little infraction of the rules.'' But Bill Stamatis, an Internet expert for the United Federation of Teachers, says that teachers will not always know what their students are doing. ''Kids are very smart, and most kids know more about the Web than most teachers,'' he said. ''They'll find ways to be heard, and who's going to control it?'' Ultimately, Mr. Bosco said, ''the welfare of the child is the prerogative and responsibility of the parent.'' Parents may not know as much as their children about the Internet, but they need to have a sense of their children's on-line whereabouts and companions; virtual reality is |
1100436_0 | Taking a Close Look With Satellite Images | Want to be the first on the block to have an aerial shot of your house? Images taken from a Russian satellite -- with resolution said to be sharp enough to see specific homes and even cars -- can be ordered at www.terraserver.com. Aerial Images Inc. commissioned Sovinformsputnik, a branch of the Russian Space Agency, to collect images covering five million square kilometers of Earth in February 1998. The pictures are now being loaded onto Terraserver, where Web surfers can order digital or print images starting at $7.95. ''This type of imagery used to be reserved for cold war military planners,'' said John Hoffman, president of Aerial Images. ''Most people in the past only saw these types of images in museums.'' There are innumerable uses for the photos, Mr. Hoffman said. ''Political parties can use it to assess the neighborhoods they want to target. People are using the imagery to lay out tower structures for cellular towers. Or let's say you're planning a trip to Paris and you want to get a bird's-eye view of the city.'' It also makes you nostalgic for the cold war, when you knew who was spying on you. LISA NAPOLI NEWS WATCH |
1100333_5 | Hired Organizers Can Create Order Out of Computer Chaos | out in front of me,'' she said. Another executive who got help from a professional organizer, Bill Finlay, chose to keep his calendar on paper. Mr. Finlay, president and chief executive of Helvoet Pharma, a pharmaceutical supply company in Pennsauken, N.J., sought the assistance of Ira Chaleff of the Institute for Business Technology, a white-collar productivity consulting firm based in Boca Raton, Fla. Mr. Finlay switched to ACT for scheduling and tasks in 1997, yet he still carries a Franklin Planner when he is out of the office because he considers his laptop too bulky and distracting to flip open at meetings. ACT is designed to work with the Franklin Planner. ''I'm a hybrid,'' Mr. Finlay said. ''I would love to meet the geek who is completely electronic.'' E-mail is another issue. According to a 1997 survey of more than 1,500 white-collar workers worldwide sponsored by Priority Management Systems, 72 percent of workers used E-mail in 1997, up from just 41 percent in 1990. The number of E-mail messages tripled between 1994 and 1997 in the United States alone, the study reported, and is expected to almost triple again, to 6.6 trillion messages, by 2000. Kerry Gleeson, president of the Institute for Business Technology, said most people who use E-mail did not know how to organize it because they rarely got any formal training. Some people need to check E-mail frequently, while others can get by with checking no more than three or four times a day. Messages should be dealt with as soon as they are checked -- acted on and deleted, or transferred to category folders, or deleted immediately. Some professional organizers suggest setting up filters to screen out messages you know you do not want -- like jokes from a certain person. People seem to give as little thought to organizing their computer files as they do to organizing their E-mail or their bookmarks of favorite Web sites. Valerie Klung, a sales education and professional development manager for Blue Shield of California in San Francisco, sought help last year when she was having trouble finding files. A professional organizer, Eve Abbott, taught her to categorize files according to all the different responsibilities she has at work, to name them so she would be able to find them later and to combine different types of files -- like a word document, a spreadsheet and a graphic file that |
1161357_0 | French Stalling on Iraq | Negotiations have dragged on for months on a United Nations Security Council resolution to send an international inspection team back to Iraq, while Saddam Hussein takes advantage of each delay. This week, as the council prepared to vote, France balked at the plan, asking for more time to see if new language could be crafted that would move Russia and China from abstention to support. The French tactic is mischievous and dangerous. The Security Council can and should act immediately and get inspectors back into Iraq. The pending resolution has been watered down already, but it has acceptable provisions establishing a new inspection commission to replace the one Iraq barred last December. The new monitoring group would not only re-establish inspections but also would set up a new system of electronic sensors and checks on stocks to ensure that Iraq is not building biological, chemical or nuclear weapons. Passage of the resolution would also clear the way for re-entry of inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency. If Iraq carries out its disarmament tasks, the Security Council can ease sanctions, while monitoring the uses of oil export revenues. Russia and China, which have long looked after Iraq's interests at the council, were prepared to abstain on the new resolution, allowing it to pass. That is why France's last-minute delaying tactic, apparently dictated by President Jacques Chirac, is dismaying. French disarmament experts have been vigilant in identifying Iraqi abuses, but Mr. Chirac is sensitive to Iraq's threat to cut off commercial ties with France. The French president wants the foreign ministers of the Western democracies to discuss the measure in Berlin later this week. Since the resolution is the product of painstaking negotiations, there is no reason to think that acceptable new provisions can be added that are favorable to Russia and China. Further delays risk unraveling the consensus already backing the measure. The composition of the Security Council changes next month, and the resolution would have to be redrafted to win approval of the new members. France ought to stop temporizing and get behind a resolution allowing for resumption of a tough monitoring system in Iraq. Any further delay gives Mr. Hussein new opportunities to pose a threat to his neighbors. |
1161256_0 | A Tool for Anonymity on the Internet | In the last few years, the online world has been getting more and more like a small town as advertisers and marketers have developed smoother, faster and subtler ways of tracking sites visited and purchases made. This week, a Canadian company, Zero Knowledge, announced a new product that it said could help people avoid this scrutiny and live anonymously online. The new software tool, named Freedom, promises to shift the balance of knowledge and information back to the individual. Austin Hill, the chief executive of Zero Knowledge, says the company ''is about individuals owning their identity.'' The system allows a user to set up pseudonyms that become their identity. When a user sends e-mail, browses the Web, participates in a chat session or posts a message to a newsgroup, the activity is filtered through the company's network of servers. When it flows out into the general Internet, a person becomes known by the pseudonym. The software, which is available at www.freedom.net, costs $49.95 for up to five pseudonyms for one year. The company's server network works like an anonymous pony express. Internet activity is encoded in a nested set of envelopes and each link in the chain opens up an envelope, pulls out another envelope and then delivers it to the address on that envelope. Eventually the nesting ends and the information arrives at its destination. Anyone who wants to trace information would have to determine from each server in the chain where it got the information. And the servers in the Freedom network keep no records, imitating a common solution adopted by many companies after the embarrassing e-mail that emerged in the antitrust case against Microsoft. Zero Knowledge says it does not know the true identity of the people using its software. The company expects that many parents will buy the service for their children who may not be schooled in the potential dangers of speaking freely where all can hear and messages can be stored. ''When I talk about archived speech and say that message is going to be there forever, every parent in the room comes to me and says, 'Where do I get this?' '' Mr. Hill said. As to concerns that fraud, libel, spam, hate speech or verbal abuse could spiral out of control on the Internet, the company says it hopes to avoid such problems by shutting down the pseudonyms of troublemakers. And only |
1161270_2 | Viruses And Their Cures | shame to waste more time and energy on viruses and worms, which are so easily avoided. Here we go. For people who have no reason to believe their systems have been infected: 1. Back up (make copies of) all your important files. 2. Get in the habit of making regular backups. 3. Get an antivirus program and use it. 4. Update the program frequently by downloading new virus signature files from the software maker's Web site. People who suspect their computer may be infected should start with steps 3 and 4, make sure their systems are virus-free, and then do steps 1 and 2. In anticipation of a surge in virus hoaxes in coming weeks, many of the world's antivirus software makers are offering fully functional, 90-day trial versions of their programs, including free updates, until Dec. 31. The Microsoft Corporation has assembled links to these free programs on a Web page at www.microsoft.com /y2k/antivirus/antivirus.htm. Many new computers come from the factory loaded with an antivirus program, so you may not need to buy one. But whether the program comes already installed or from a store shelf, it should be updated quickly. In the last month, several significant viruses and worms have been detected for the first time, including Prilissa, Babylonia and Worm.Explore.Zip(pack), alias the MiniZip worm, which is particularly nasty. Many people install an antivirus program and assume, erroneously, that they are safe from future infection. This is like installing smoke detectors in your home and then never changing the batteries. I use Symantec's Norton Antivirus for both my Windows and Macintosh computers. (While early disk-based viruses typically targeted one type of computer or another, newer e-mail-based viruses attack different kinds of computers impartially.) Norton Antivirus 2000 version 6.0 for Windows costs $39.95 and the Macintosh version 6.0 is $69.95; they can be downloaded from Symantec's Web site (www.symantec.com). Another highly regarded antivirus program for is McAfee's VirusScan 4.0, which costs $29.95 and is available at www.mcafee.com/centers /anti-virus/). The most prevalent villains on the virus scene are so-called macro viruses, which typically arrive in e-mail attachments. Virus writers seem to be particularly fond of Microsoft products, including Windows, Word, Outlook and Outlook Express, so users of those programs should be especially vigilant. In general, simply reading an e-mail message will not infect your computer, even if the subject line of the message says, ''There is a mean, ugly, nasty |
1161253_4 | The Web: New Ticket to a Pink Slip; On the Job, the Boss Can Watch Your Every Online Move, and You Have Few Defenses | monitoring movement, according to companies that sell filtering and monitoring software. If employees are surfing to pornography sites, said John Carrington, president of Websense Inc., ''it's like having porno magazines all through your office.'' If blocking and monitoring software is in place, Mr. Carrington said, ''a company can say, at least we tried.'' Many companies that track Web use say they also watch to make sure that employees are getting their work done. In a recent survey of about 1,200 employers by Vault .com, a company that publishes reports about workplace issues, 54 percent reported that they had caught employees browsing Web sites that were not related to work. In response to the perceived abuse of resources, many companies have posted policies outlining what use of e-mail and the Web is permitted and what is not. Xerox, for example, flashes a message on the screen every time employees log on. It tells them not to use the Web for anything but work. As in the Xerox case, the repercussions of violating those polices can be drastic: In a survey commissioned by Websense of 200 human-resources officers in midsize and large companies, one in three reported that their company had fired employees for misusing the Internet. A few cases noted in the survey, taken in November, stemmed from shopping, stock trading, gambling, sports and computer games. But the vast majority involved pornography. Just this month, for example, The New York Times Company fired 23 employees in a central processing center in Norfolk, Va., for distributing pornographic images via e-mail, according to Nancy Nielsen, a spokeswoman for the company. The action was not a result of monitoring but was in response to an employee complaint. ''A lot of people were made very uncomfortable'' by the distribution of the material, Ms. Nielsen said. So far, only a handful of employees have argued in court that an employer's electronic surveillance invaded their privacy. Not one case, according to Mr. Cornish, who has been following the subject, has been tried by a jury. Some experts suspect that if the employees had faced a group of their peers, they may have found a more sympathetic audience. In addressing judges, however, employees have failed: not one has ruled in their favor. The case of Mark L. Simons, a former employee of the Central Intelligence Agency, is one example. In 1998, Mr. Simons was convicted of possessing child |
1163403_2 | Pact Between New Jersey and Netherlands May Mean Cleaner Air for State | environmental protection, said the agreement is the first that specifically calls for the exchange of such credits to achieve goals set by the Kyoto treaty. The treaty, known as the Kyoto Protocol, was drafted after worldwide attention was focused on global warming by the Earth Summit of 1992 in Rio de Janeiro. Reduction goals are based on a percentage of a country's 1990 emission levels, and begin taking effect in 2008. The treaty has been signed by more than 150 nations, but the United States Senate has not ratified the agreement, largely because of doubts about relinquishing control over the nation's emissions standards and the costs involved. Under one project envisioned as part of the New Jersey-Netherlands agreement, the Dutch government would pay the additional fuel cost for a power plant in Jersey City to switch from coal to natural gas. The switch would cut carbon dioxide emissions by one-third, said Eric Svensen, director of environmental policy for Public Service Electric and Gas, the utility that owns the plant. At the same time, the switch away from coal would also reduce emissions of sulfur and nitrous oxide, which contribute to smog. So New Jersey residents would get cleaner air, without having to pay extra for it. ''We wouldn't go over to natural gas currently, because natural gas is a more expensive fuel,'' Mr. Svensen said. Mr. Verkerk, the former Dutch solicitor general for environmental enforcement, said his government would buy credits to achieve up to half of its emissions reduction goal. The Dutch people will achieve the rest themselves, he said, by using cleaner fuel, curbing automobile emissions and other measures. He and Mr. Shinn, the state's commissioner of environmental protection, said that once other countries begin buying pollution credits, an international emissions credit bank could be established, allowing for more international agreements to reduce emissions. One goal of the pilot agreement, the officials said, was to help work out details of the emission credit process. ''This is very much in its infancy,'' Mr. Shinn said. New Jersey and other states have their own emission reduction goals that are components of national goals. The United States is the world's largest producer of greenhouse gases, so there is some irony, Mr. Svensen said, that its states may be the first to sell emission reduction credits. ''What had always been contemplated,'' Mr. Svensen said, ''was that the U.S. would be the purchasers.'' |
1163399_0 | SOVEREIGN ISLANDS/A special report.; For Cruise Ships' Workers, Much Toil, Little Protection | The kitchen on a cruise ship starts bustling for breakfast before 6 a.m., and some days the workers do not stop peeling, cooking and washing until after the midnight buffet. For laboring as long as 18 hours a day, seven days a week, most galley workers are paid $400 to $450 a month. These are the migrant workers of the oceans, the thousands of dishwashers, assistant cooks, cabin cleaners and brass-rail polishers who toil unnoticed and unheard aboard luxury cruise ships. Most are from third-world countries, working for months without a day off, living in shared quarters with little or no access to the ship's public areas. Long hours and subsistence wages are part of their contracts, as is the threat of being fired without notice or cause. Yet people from some of the world's poorest nations are so eager for work that some pay middlemen the equivalent of a month's wages to get these jobs, a fee that violates international law. These are boom times for the cruise industry. Record numbers of passengers are packing bigger and grander ships, providing record profits for the dominant lines. The Carnival Corporation, with 45 ships the world's largest cruise company, is averaging $2.8 million a day in profits this year, almost all tax-free because the company, which is based in Miami, is registered in Panama. But the benefits have been slow to trickle down to the 70,000 or so workers who keep the fleets running and the passengers dining and dancing. Though living conditions have improved, pay for most workers has risen little, and some say their work has become more grueling as ships have grown into floating cities bustling 24 hours a day. Even though 90 percent of the nearly six million passengers sailing out of United States ports in 1999 were American, and most lines have their headquarters in the United States, the companies escape American minimum wage requirements and other labor laws the same way they avoid corporate income tax and many criminal and environmental laws: they register their corporations and ships in countries like Liberia and Panama, where laws are lax and enforcement is weak. Cruise industry representatives say that they provide good job opportunities and that wages are competitive with the rest of the maritime industry, and often much better than what workers could earn at home. ''The most appropriate comparison to shipboard jobs would be jobs |
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