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553362_0 | The Nissan Motor Company has gone to great lengths to give customers what they want. Japanese buyers of the Nissan Sunny, known as the Stanza in the United States, can choose from nearly 200 variations with different engines, bodies, tires and transmissions. The company has sold fewer than a dozen units of some combinations. But those days are over. Nissan, which said Friday it will lose money this year for the first time in about four decades, is trying to save money by cutting back on the number of variations it is offering, even it if means sacrificing market share. It is also leaving some models on the market longer than the customary four years. And it is trying to use the same parts in more models. Right now, for instance, there are about 70 kinds of steering wheels used in its automobiles, when far fewer would do. The move at Nissan is part of a big change occurring in Japan's auto industry. Buffeted by a slowdown in sales and a host of other problems, Japan's auto makers are being forced to modify the vaunted system by which they design, produce and sell automobiles, even as this system is being emulated around the world. The system, first developed by Toyota and often called "lean production," involves rapid introduction of models, a flexible manufacturing system that can make many kinds of cars on the same assembly line, low inventories and long-term relationships with suppliers. But now, manufacturers are starting to cut the number of products they offer, slow the pace at which they bring out products, reduce their reliance on low prices as a marketing strategy, keep larger inventories and loosen historic bonds with suppliers. And a severe labor shortage in Japan might make it more difficult to attract and retain the skilled, disciplined workers who are a hallmark of the system. Reworking the Toyota System "We're looking right now at the most significant shift and the greatest pressure on the Japanese system since it achieved pre-eminence in the early 80's," said Harley Shaiken, professor of work and technology at the University of California at San Diego, who is studying Japanese auto factories this summer. "The Toyota system that powered Japan in the 80's will need an overhaul for the 90's." No one expects Japanese companies to abandon lean production, only to modify it. And no one expects the big Japanese | A Lower Gear for Japan's Auto Makers |
553275_3 | his inner circle were grumbling, but long before they considered a rebellion. He executed two of his closest aides to deflect an expected Bush Administration blitz of verifiable charges that his regime was trafficking in cocaine to earn hard currency. "Castro's Final Hour" also sheds new light on several of the Cuban leader's foreign adventures in the days when he was impossibly overextended. Mr. Castro sent experienced officers to train Nicaragua's Sandinista army in counterinsurgency, and planned a joint Nicaraguan-Cuban invasion of Honduras and El Salvador in case the United States under Ronald Reagan invaded Nicaragua. Anticipating that the 1990 Nicaraguan election could end in a Sandinista defeat, Mr. Castro tried but failed to persuade President Daniel Ortega Saavedra to cancel the vote. And in nearby Panama, Mr. Oppenheimer tells us, Mr. Castro was far more involved than we originally knew, shipping 80,000 weapons there and training hundreds of Manuel Antonio Noriega's officers in anticipation of the United States invasion. With Cuban soldiers in Angola to support the Marxist Government, Mr. Castro made himself an obstacle to a negotiated settlement of that country's civil war in the 1980's, long after the Russians and even his own generals realized an outright military victory was impossible. Havana could not afford to keep an army on the march so far from home, so his officers were forced to engage in the most complex illegal ventures. In one ploy, Mr. Oppenheimer discloses, they exchanged Cuban sugar on the Angolan black market for ivory and diamonds, which they proceeded to sell in Panama in order to feed and clothe their troops. But the book stumbles again in the concluding chapter, "Requiem for a Revolution," when Mr. Oppenheimer returns to ponder the unconfirmable. He advises Mr. Castro to liberalize the political system before violence breaks out, even after he has concluded that Cuba's modest economic liberalization, undertaken to attract tourism, will quicken the regime's collapse. Evidently Mr. Castro has learned his own lessons from the falling dominoes of Marxist regimes from Moscow to Managua: Those that reform their political systems cannot prevent change from spinning out of their control, while those that restrict liberalization to economics alone, such as the Chinese and Vietnamese, may manage to hold off their final hour. Clifford Krauss, a correspondent in the Washington bureau of The New York Times, is the author of "Inside Central America: Its People, Politics, and History." | Failed Dictator of a Small Island |
547956_2 | jammed or snarled again, Dr. Hoffman and Dr. Franklin Chang-Diaz, another astronaut, were prepared to take a spacewalk today to attempt to untangle things. They had taken preliminary measures for such a contingency. Electric Motor Fails The retrieval of the satellite came hours after officials of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration had given up any thought of being able to reel out the full 12-mile of tether on the satellite for the planned 30 hours of experiments in space physics, the dynamics of tethered flight and the generation of electricity by the cable joining the satellite to the shuttle. Earlier yesterday, the astronauts made their fourth attempt to extend the tether, after three unsuccessful attempts on Tuesday. Dr. Hoffman slowly spooled in nearly 90 feet of the tether and was to reverse and feed the line out faster than before. But the electric motor that pulls the tether failed. By now, the situation was particularly frustrating. The mechanism seemed to be completely jammed. As James Hartsfield, the commentator at Mission Control, put things: "The tether cannot be reeled out and it cannot be reeled back in." After further troubleshooting, engineers advised the astronauts to try two possible remedies. The first effort was to "pop the clutch" on an electric motor at the top of the deployment tower. The motor guides the tether at the end of the tower, as it is fed out into orbit. But this attempt to force the snag loose was fruitless. The astronauts were successful on their next effort. Working inside the shuttle cabin, they commanded the tower to retract about two feet. The tether remained stuck. And then they commanded the tower to extend back to its full height while the tether motor pulled in the other direction. This time the tether came free. But Mission Control decided against any more attempts to deploy the satellite. As the astronauts and their ground controllers grappled with the recalcitrant tether system, all hopes for a thorough demonstration of tethered space flight vanished. NASA, which developed the tether machinery, and the Italian Space Agency, which provided the satellite, had invested $379 million in this effort. Once the dynamics are understood, promoters of the concept say, tethered flight may become a promising technology for deploying satellites, erecting space stations, stringing extensive radio antennas and generating electricity for operating spacecraft. If the cable of copper and fiber had been | Astronauts Abandon Test of Tethered Satellite |
552901_0 | If a doctor has had a problem with drugs, alcohol or mental illness in the past, who has the right to know? Regulators in New Jersey and New York say they do because they cannot count on medical societies to monitor their own members. But medical societies say that doctors who have overcome such problems will be unfairly stigmatized and that the process will discourage others from seeking help. Not surprisingly, debate on the issue has moved beyond the circles of those who speak for doctors and those who monitor them, and into the courts. Less predictable is the legal theory that the Medical Society of New Jersey wants to use in its fight: the argument that the questions are discriminatory under the Americans With Disabilities Act, the far-ranging measure intended to protect people with physical or mental disabilities that took effect in January. New Question Vincent A. Maressa, the executive director and chief counsel of the New Jersey medical society, which is based in this Trenton suburb, argued that the disabilities act prohibits employers from discriminating against workers with past, but resolved, histories of mental illness or drug and alcohol abuse. The medical society has already challenged the use of the questions before state courts, and has been rebuffed. New Jersey regulators decided to ask doctors, "Have you ever been treated for alcohol or drug abuse?" after a 1987 report by the state Commission of Investigation estimated that up to 16 percent of the 29,000 medical and osteopathic doctors licensed to practice in New Jersey may have drug or alcohol problems. According to the report, the medical society testified that 10 percent of New Jersey's doctors may be alcoholic, 3 percent may be addicted to drugs and 3 percent may be "psychotic, mentally ill" or otherwise impaired. Calling these statistics "extremely alarming," the report said, "Far more drastic reforms must be imposed in order to protect patients from physicians whose impairments have not been officially identified, and who thus continue unrestricted practice." Dale G. Breaden, executive vice president of the Federation of State Medical Boards in Fort Worth, Tex., said he knew of no other efforts to use the disabilities act to protect a licensed professional from questioning. About 35 other states ask about current drug and alcohol use and mental illness, either when a doctor first applies for a license or on renewal applications, he said. But he | New Jersey and New York Want to Monitor Doctors' Past Problems |
552802_0 | A headline in some copies yesterday about the arrest of Walker Railey, a former Dallas minister, on a charge of trying to murder his wife misstated the year she was attacked. It was 1987. | Corrections |
550319_9 | and transportation system. For example, some wheat that has been stored in grain elevators in North Dakota and Montana by the Federal Government since the late 1950's is still edible. Through a complicated system of import licenses, Mexico has prevented American farmers from dominating its food markets -- and perhaps bankrupting hundreds of thousands of peasant corn farmers in southern Mexican states. Under the free trade accord, Mexico will allow the duty-free import of 2.5 million tons of corn a year, an amount roughly comparable to shipments in recent years. Any extra shipments will be subject to an initial tariff of 215 percent that will be phased out over 15 years. American corn growers welcome the move because the Federal Government has been cutting its subsidies since 1985. "Government support to agriculture has declined since the mid-1980's, and implicit in reduced Government support has been a promise to find new markets," said Peter J. Wenstrand, who raises corn on his 1,500-acre farm near Essex, Iowa. "Any time you talk about increased trade, it helps corn." The Politics The Farm Lobby Is Deeply Divided The North American Free Trade Agreement has split the farm vote in Congress, and eventual approval of the agreement will depend partly on whether this split persists. Florida, Texas, California and Hawaii will be hurt the most by Mexican competition because they have very similar growing seasons and crops, and lawmakers from rural areas in these states have been critical of the agreement. But the unusual alliances within American agriculture have also produced some other critics in Congress. The nation's severe restrictions on sugar imports, for example, have the support not only of sugar cane growers but also of sugar beet growers and corn farmers, whose product is used to make corn sweetener. Sugar beets are grown in states like North Dakota that would otherwise be expected to support the pact. Senator Kent Conrad, Democrat of North Dakota, criticized the free trade pact in a speech on Wednesday to members of the American Sugar Alliance, a Washington-based industry group. "It's unfair, it's outrageous and it's a sellout of American sugar interests," he said. But other Democrats from farm states have raced to the agreement's defense. "Right now, if you want to get big applause -- there's a lot of unemployment -- you just say anything against foreigners," Representative Neal Smith of Iowa said. "But that's not responsible." | FREE TRADE ACCORD EXPECTED TO TRIM NATION'S FOOD BILL |
549479_0 | To The Living Section: Whatever the preference for each of us, pro or con, in genetically engineered foods [ "Gene-Spliced Foods: Is It Safe Soup Yet?" June 17 ] , one thing remains abundantly clear: nonlabeling deprives the consumer of the right of choice, which should be one's option in a free society. An Anjou or Bartlett pear is distinguished by a label. A Rome or Delicious apple is also identified. So are all varieties of vegetables and greens. Why the decision to camouflage the gene-spliced varieties? If something so vital to our well-being (we must eat to live) is unilaterally decided for us without option or regard to right of selection, what are we coming to? The Food and Drug Administration has in effect issued a command to the public to "do as you are told, whether you like it or not!" We have a right to know. That right must be protected and defended, not relinquished to those who think they know better. DIANA MERCHANT New York City | Don't Gene-Splice Choice |
549505_0 | To the Editor: In reporting on efforts to negotiate a settlement of the strife in Northern Ireland, you write that "violence in the province . . . began with Catholic protests over discrimination in jobs and housing." You then note that "this gave rise to a guerrilla campaign by the Irish Republican Army to end British control of the province" (news article, July 29). The reader receives the false impression that the Roman Catholics of Northern Ireland initiated and maintained the tragic violence that has persisted for almost 25 years. The truth leads to a different conclusion. In 1968, when Catholics began demonstrating to attain the civil rights consistently denied them since the partition of Ireland by the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921, they did so peacefully, inspired in considerable measure by the civil rights movement in the United States. Violence erupted when extremist sectarians of the Orange Protestant majority responded to peaceful protest with sustained, violent brutalization of the Catholic community. The Irish Republican Army was a minuscule presence in both the Republic and the six counties (Northern Ireland) in 1968-69. The provisional wing of the I.R.A. became a significant force because the beleaguered Catholic population accurately felt itself defenseless and abandoned. The Government of the Irish Republic could do little but offer ineffectual protest. Despite occasional obeisance to reform, British power supported the oppressive social-political system it had created in Northern Ireland, perverting its own judicial system in doing so. It was only in desperation that many Catholics looked to the provisional Irish Republican Army for protection and advancement of their cause. The masses of the Catholic people in Northern Ireland yearn for peace with justice. We may hope that the Orange majority also desires peace and is willing to concede justice for all to achieve that blessed condition. And we may hope -- and pray -- that the present negotiations prove successful. THOMAS P. ROBINSON New York, July 31, 1992 | How Violence Began in Northern Ireland |
549499_0 | To the Editor: As a physician watching young gymnasts competing in the Olympics, I realized that what we are celebrating is a form of female child abuse in the name of sport. One girl, Betty Okino, had pins inserted in her knees; her coach complained bitterly that his young charge lacks proper competitive spirit and drive, and must "prove herself" to be accepted. Dominique Dawes is in chronic pain and has had stress fractures; she requires physical therapy to remain functional. These young Olympic athletes are not women but girls. It was adults who identified them as having physical abilities that would make them potential international sports competitors, and used this as a rationale for disrupting their young lives. For years the girls have been subjected to rigorous physical training that interferes with their ability to lead normal lives, educationally and socially. The close relationships with coaches and other athletes constitute a form of brainwashing. The rigors of training directly damage young bodies; many of these girls will grow into women tormented by arthritic pain. The demands of training impair normal sex hormone development at puberty, putting young female athletes at risk of developing osteoporosis and fractures at an early age. To decide whether the conditions of these girls' lives are abusive, consider ordinary children and women. How many young adolescents, without ceaseless external pressure, would be driven to compete ferociously, day after day, despite pain? How many, without years of constrained existence, would choose to spend most of their free time in rigorous physical training, rather than play or socializing? Who gave informed consent regarding the risks of physical injury and a future of chronic pain for these girls as they grow older? Coaches, parents and society tolerate overt abuse of these children, starting at an age at which they cannot be expected to make mature decisions about what Olympic-level training and competition will entail. Perhaps once again we need a Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. KATHERINE FORREST, M.D. Portola Valley, Calif., Aug. 1, 1992 | The Gold Isn't Worth It for Olympic Gymnasts |
551467_1 | country's industrial base -- what officials call the "real" economy. It has long been an article of faith among the establishment here that the business of Japan was the business of producing things and selling them worldwide, not playing money games. Somehow, it was believed, the markets did not matter to those engaged in more serious pursuits, like building autos or computer chips. But Mr. Hata seemed to acknowledge for the first time Tuesday that what is really at stake now is the health of the economy, not just the well-being of speculators. He confirmed that banks, securities companies and other financial institutions were facing "the most severe situation since the Second World War." Indeed, the evidence has been mounting: corporate bankruptcies are at record levels; banks are carrying tens of billions of dollars in bad loans and the banks have had billions of dollars of their capital wiped out because of the drop in stock prices. Mr. Hata added that a "vicious cycle" was developing where some financial institutions were being forced to sell shares to raise cash and bolster their profits. While he did not name names, he said such sales were only worsening the problems of the financial institutions by causing the stock market to slump further. Mr. Hata would only go so far as to concede that "there has been much debate" about the prospect that the faltering banking system and ailing markets might weaken the overall economy. But the urgency of the package and the unusual measures proposed demonstrated the lengths to which the Government was willing to go to rescue the markets. And the shift in attitude was echoed widely today in financial circles. "With the index at 17,000 to 18,000, the impact is very limited," said Yoshihisa Kitai, the senior economist at the Long-Term Credit Bank. "But at 15,000 or lower, then it will have a big impact on economic growth." Confidence Undercut Just a year ago the Economic Planning Agency argued strenuously that land prices, which had been falling in tandem with stocks, could not possibly undercut an economy that was "shifting to cruising speed." But an economy that a year ago was shifting to cruising speed is now close to stalling. Economic growth has slowed to a rate of less than 2 percent, from 4.5 percent last year. And the banks, which outwardly seemed to be absorbing their losses with equanimity, | Wake-Up Call in Tokyo; After 2 Years of a Stumbling Stock Market, Official Japan Says It May Have a Problem |
547466_3 | by Yang Shangkun, China's President, and then Prime Minister Li. Bo Yibo, another elderly leader, and Wan Li, Mr. Deng's bridge partner and chairman of China's legislature, are also believed to be here. Tight Security for Deng "Deng came on a special train with three cars," said a local driver who has been inside Mr. Deng's compound. "He rode in the middle car, and army men were in the front and the rear ones. When he arrived, none of us were allowed to be at the station. They shooed away the buses and the taxis." Tight restrictions are imposed when leaders come to town, and Mercedes-Benzes snake through the tree-lined streets in the hills. The police have set up checkpoints around town, and at night they sometimes refuse to allow cars to pass. One minibus was stopped three times in the middle of the night and told to take a detour to its destination, said a Chinese business executive who was in the bus. The policemen beamed a searchlight at the bus, searched the luggage of the passengers and asked if anyone had knives. Mr. Deng stays in Lianfengshan Park in Mao Zedong's old house, part of a compound of villas where several elderly leaders stay. The Deng villa was apparently renovated a few years ago, said a Chinese who visited the compound. Summer Brings Life Two town workers said separately that Mr. Deng's children spend most of their time on a large red-and-pink brick estate built into the cliffs of the Jinshan peninsula, where the streets wind through patches of pruned poplars and red roses. Beidaihe sleeps in the winter and then booms all summer. Yellow-sand beaches are crowded these days with screaming children, old cadres and young couples who come in droves under the guidance, and expense accounts, of their Government ministries. Almost all Government departments operate resorts here for employees. Along the beach are the State Council Resort, the Beijing Old Cadres Sanitarium, the Public Security Resort and the People's Daily Resort. Beidaihe, a town of 50,000, also has local bureaus of the New China News Agency and The Guangming Daily. Some of the buildings are high-ceilinged colonial houses built by foreigners early in this century, while others are modern round-windowed compounds partly hidden behind high hedges. Brown-eyed Susans peer out of flower gardens and darkened windows appear through tufts of trees. Nobody knows what happens inside. | By the Sea, China's Leaders Chart the Nation's Path |
547426_0 | Rae Dalven, a translator of modern Greek poets and historian of Greek Jews, died on July 27 at Beth Israel Medical Center in Manhattan. She was 87 years old and lived in Manhattan. Friends said she had been in declining health but they did not know the cause of death. Dr. Dalven was retired as a professor of English literature and department chairwoman at Ladycliff College in Highland Falls, N.Y. Born in Preveza, Greece, she immigrated to the United States with her family as a youngster. She graduated from Hunter College and earned a doctorate in English at New York University. Translated Greek Poetry Among her translations was "Modern Greek Poetry" (Gaer, 1949). In a review, W. H. Auden wrote, "we should be very grateful to Miss Dalven for introducing us to a world of poetry which has been closed to us" by the language barrier. Mr. Auden later wrote the introductions to her "The Complete Poems of Cavafy" (Harcourt, Brace, 1961) and "The Fourth Dimension" (Godine, 1977), translating Yannis Ritsos. Dr. Dalven also wrote two plays, the first of which, "A Season in Hell," about the French poets Rimbaud and Verlaine, was produced Off Broadway in 1950. Last year she finished "Our Kind of People," an autobiographical play about a family of Greek-Jewish immigrants. It was performed at a synagogue in Manhattan and is scheduled for presentation this fall at a Brooklyn theater and the Greek Orthodox Cathedral in Manhattan. Studied Greek Jewish Group Dr. Dalven's special interest was the history of Jews in Greece, especially the community in Ioannina in northern Greece, most of whose members were driven out during World War II. They were Romaniotes, who traced their ancestry to Palestinians and who migrated as early as 300 B.C. They retained their customs and liturgy, which differed from those of the more numerous Sephardim whose ancestors were expelled from Spain. Dr. Dalven was the editor of "The Sephardic Scholar," a journal; a board member of the American Friends of the Jewish Museum of Greece and a past president of the American Society of Sephardic Studies and of the Sisterhood of Janina, a Romaniote group. Her marriage to Jack Negrin ended in divorce. She is survived by several nieces and nephews. | Rae Dalven, 87, Former Professor And a Historian of Jews in Greece |
547446_0 | To the Editor: You report that Paulinho Paiakan, a Kaiapo chief who "has emerged in recent years as a worldwide symbol of Brazilian Indians' defense of their Amazon homelands," has been accused of rape by an 18-year-old white woman (news article, July 5). As you report, there is a growing backlash in Brazil against recent victories by Indians fighting for their rights and survival. Now, as has happened so often in the past, the alleged crime of one leader is being used to attack a whole people. Unfortunately, errors and distortions make your article an instrument of this attack. You state that "the 5,000 Kaiapo earn millions of dollars a year in royalties from gold and mahogany extracted from an archipelago of reserves." However, under pressure from the Brazilian Government (allowing gold mining was a condition for the demarcation of the Kaiapo reserve), 5 communities (out of 14) in one reserve have allowed gold and mahogany extraction. Like other indigenous groups in the world, these communities have felt forced to sell resources to pay for infrastructure and services such as health and education, which the Government has not provided. Many other Kaiapo neither engage in nor benefit from these activities. Kaiapo leaders such as Paulinho Paiakan and Raoni have long crusaded against gold and mahogany extraction. It was for this reason that Raoni and other indigenous leaders helped form the Fundaco Mata Virgem, which you misidentify as "the Brazilian Rain Forest Foundation, a Kayapo support group." The Fundaco Mata Virgem comprises prominent Brazilian anthropologists, physicians, ecologists and indigenists. It works in partnership with the Rainforest Foundation to assist not just the Kaiapo, but also many other indigenous peoples, who seek to defend their lands and forests, obtain medical and educational services and to develop sustainable alternative sources of income to prevent destruction of their natural patrimony. It is not surprising that Paulinho Paiakan's case is being used to attack the indigenous movement and its supporters inside and outside Brazil. For centuries white people have invaded Indian territories, destroyed Indian resources and wiped out Indian peoples. Now that the remaining indigenous peoples of the Amazon are finding effective ways to fight back, they deserve support. LARRY COX Exec. Dir., Rainforest Foundation New York, July 17, 1992 | In Brazil, Indians Start Fighting Back |
547368_0 | World Economies | |
548699_3 | and maintenance of social order. This conception of government rests less on Marx than on Confucius. The sense of continuity from earlier Chinese dynasties, less visible in the Maoist era, has become more apparent in the last decade. The core convictions of "Emperor Deng" seem to have little to do with economic ideology. Instead, what Mr. Deng is passionate about is the Communist dynasty's right to rule and the need for a strong central government. The redesign of the Communist road is evident when officials are asked what kind of a country they are trying to build. Officials sometimes describe their work as "mozhe shitou guo he" -- crossing the river by feeling with one's feet for the stones to step on. But there tend to be long silences when they are asked what is on the other side of the river. Lei Yu, a prominent reformist who is now vice chairman of the Guangxi region in southern China, ventured an answer to that question in an interview earlier this year. Whatever changes, he said, the fundamental aim of Chinese socialism is collective prosperity and the absence of large income gaps between the rich and poor. "If people live better, without big income gaps, that's the important thing," Mr. Lei said. By that definition, however, bastions of free enterprise like Taiwan are more socialist than mainland China. Taiwan is far more prosperous than the mainland and by some calculations enjoys a more egalitarian distribution of wealth. By standard measures, China's economy already has veered off the Communist road. The state sector now accounts for only half of industrial output, and its share is dropping steadily. A report prepared by China's National Information Center predicted a few weeks ago that by the year 2000 the state sector would account for only 27 percent of industrial output, with collectives making up 48 percent and private enterprise producing 25 percent. The economic flexibility -- which is almost certain to accelerate after the death of Mr. Deng and the other first-generation revolutionaries -- will not necessarily lead to democracy and greater respect for the human rights associated with it, however. China's leaders seem much more envious of Singaporean wealth than of its voting system, and some of the "four dragons" in the past combined bustling markets with brutal repression. That deft combination may be what China's leaders hope to adopt for themselves. THE WORLD | China Sees Singapore As a Model for Progress |
548972_0 | TOP to bottom, this year's hot technology ranges from BMW's versatile station-wagon sunroof that opens over either front or rear seats to the run-flat tire introduced on Thursday by Bridgestone/Firestone Tires of Nashville. The new tire adds convenience at the same time that it eliminates weight and the need to carry a spare. Unfortunately, it is also expensive and, for the moment, is available only to people who own or plan to own Corvettes. But that will change. Bridgestone, the Japanese company that bought Firestone in 1988, has been researching run-flat tires for 15 years, and it plans to make them available for a variety of cars in the future. According to John Taylor, a spokesman for Bridgestone, the system incorporates tires with Corvette's unidirectional tread, new wheels that hold the tire even when it is flat, and an internal gadget that senses low pressure and sends a radio signal to a dashboard gauge. "You need the gauge," Taylor said, "because a tire may go flat and you won't know it." The turbine-style wheels, manufactured by Bridgestone, look nothing like those offered on standard Corvettes, and Taylor said that was done on purpose. "Our goal was to produce an innovative wheel," he said. "We want people to see it on the street and point to it as a run-flat system." Advantages, he said, are that a driver can control the vehicle in case of a puncture and that the car can be driven safely to a service center. The tire, which contains a supporting sidewall, can travel at least 50 miles at 55 miles an hour after it has lost part or all of its pressure. For now, the price for run-flat protection at all four wheels is $5,000, but Taylor said wider applications will lower the cost. The system will be available as an option package on new Corvettes sold by Callaway Cars of Old Lyme, Conn., and by Callaway distributors around the country. ABOUT CARS | A Tire That Runs on Empty |
548810_2 | without dirtying the air the way incinerators do. Compost contains nutrients that are released slowly to plants, making it a useful addition to soils in landscaping, agriculture and nurseries. Since it retains water well, compost is useful in areas that have sandy, quick-draining soils, as in much of Florida, or where water for irrigation is in short supply, as in some areas of California. The compost produced in the Connecticut experiment is being tested to determine its purity and effectiveness compared with composts prepared by other methods. Some other methods have resulted in compost too contaminated with bits of plastic or pieces of bone to be used in agriculture. A final report is expected by yearend and it could spark more interest. Although composting is well known to gardeners, it is only gradually gaining adherence as a method of disposing household trash. Those who like the idea say it should be seen as a form of recycling because it removes material from garbage cans, processes it and creates a product with value. "We are saying that organics have a value as well as the glass, metal and paper that is now collected for recycling," said Charles Cannon, executive vice president of the Solid Waste Composting Council. The council is a trade group formed by Procter & Gamble, DuPont, Kraft General Foods and other corporations that generate, directly or indirectly, large amounts of waste to promote composting. An Unusual Alliance Environmentalists And Corporations If widely adopted, composting could have a big impact on trash disposal. According to reports prepared for the Environmental Protection Agency, leaves and other yard waste, food scraps and paper that are not likely to be recycled make up about 50 percent of municipal waste nationally. Since all are composed of carbon compounds, they are adaptable to the composting process. "Conventional recycling is only going to get 15 to 20 percent of solid waste," said Bruce Jones, who is a composting specialist at Procter & Gamble. "But when you look at the organic fraction, it's 50 percent. That could have a big impact on waste management." He said he and Mr. Beyea had a common interest in the subject and decided on the joint project, thereby forging an alliance between one of the nation's leading environmental groups and one of the largest consumer products companies. "Jan and I had been talking and we said let's do something to | All About/Composting; Two Towns Experiment With the Alchemy of Trash |
548825_2 | Mozart that is higher than Fuji. WE learn about piracy ancient and modern, the latter practiced by Filipino thugs, armed with M-16 rifles, who steal boats, engines, money, cargoes, lives and hostages. (The M-16's, Mr. Hamilton-Paterson reports, are not hard to come by: you enlist in the army, and the moment you've got your gun, you desert.) As for the traditional buccaneers, the legendary Spanish Main brawlers like Blackbeard and William Dampier, Mr. Hamilton-Paterson cites a scholar who offers evidence to suggest they were -- shiver me timbers -- probably gay. The book's overriding theme is the spoiling of the seas. In Fraserburgh, Scotland, the author boards the Garefowl, a small trawler heading out into the overfished North Sea, and notes the anger and despair in his companions' voices. The seabed is littered with discarded junk from the oil rigs (one night the nets brought up a life-size sex doll), and catches are diminished by bureaucratic rulings that also diminish the fish stocks. European legislators seem unaware that the smaller fish they decree must be thrown back do not survive the trauma of the net. "The violence of their capture and the hauling up through 60 fathoms has ruptured capillaries, made flotation sacs bulge out of mouths," Mr. Hamilton-Paterson writes. "Those fish with patches of scales torn off will anyway become prey to disease, to worms and saprophytes." Meanwhile, the boats of too many nations anxiously pursue an ever-decreasing harvest. The situation in the north Pacific is equally grim. Mr. Hamilton-Paterson states that, for six months of the year, 1,500 Japanese, Taiwanese and South Korean ships lay up to 50 miles of drift net each -- a nightly total of up to 50,000 miles, enough to circle the planet twice. Marketable fish are kept, the rest dumped overboard by the ton. Countless sea birds become entangled in the nets and perish. This technique (known as "strip-mining the oceans") will, the Japanese promise, be discontinued next year. But a billion-dollar industry does not just fade away. What will take its place? Who will set the quotas and how will they be enforced? Mr. Hamilton-Paterson is at his brilliant best when addressing matters like these. Though he always displays erudition and a rippling, sinewy intelligence, some of his other chapters have a deskbound feel. These cover, discursively, all manner of arcane historical and philosophical maritime-related subjects, often in supertanker-length paragraphs that will | Water, Water, Everywhere |
548903_3 | Rehoboth, snagged a cable in 169 feet of water more than 40 miles offshore. The old encrusted cable was about two miles from its charted position, Mr. Gifford said, and the clammers eventually had to cut the dredge loose. The Gifford company is suing A.T.& T. for $65,000 for the loss of the dredge and other damages, and demanding that the company remove the cable, laid in 1896 between New York and Haiti and taken out of service in the 1940's. But A.T.& T. says that it does not own the cable, and that it does not know who does. Death Penalty Proposed After the first successful trans-Atlantic telegraph cable was laid in 1866, the United States proposed an international code that would equate intentionally damaging a cable to piracy, which could carry the death penalty. The international community rejected the proposal as "overly severe," but the debate reflected the importance attached to the new technology. In 1888, Congress passed the Submarine Cable Act to foster the fledging telegraph industry, making the intentional damaging of a cable a criminal act. A.T.& T. relied on this law, as well as international treaties, as the basis for its civil suit against Gifford Marine. Gifford Marine is looking to the Limitation of Liability Act of 1851 to curb its losses if it eventually loses its fight with A.T.& T. This law, which was enacted to protect a nascent shipping industry, limits the losses a shipper can be forced to pay to the value of his ship and its cargo. The combined value of the Little Gull and Cape Fear is about $1 million, and if it is ruled that only one of the boats damaged the cable, the loss would be pared to about $500,000. But Mr. Gifford is not admitting that either of his boats did the damage, saying they lack the power to break an armored cable. "Attaching two of my boats and taking us to court because they were in the vicinity of a break is wrong," he said. "That's like saying you were near the scene of a crime so you must have done it." Decision Is Reversed American Telephone and Telegraph won the first round in Federal District Court in Camden, where Judge Joseph H. Rodriguez ruled that the company had an implied right to file its $3.5 million civil suit against Gifford under the Submarine Cable Act. | Clammers and A.T.&T. Battle Under the Sea and in the Courts |
549031_3 | 10 to 18 years old to hold safety certificates if they are not accompanied by people older than 18. The current law allows young people to operate boats without safety certificates as long as someone older than 16 is on board. Menaced by Teen-Agers In addition to giving harbor patrols additional powers, the legislation would enable them to prosecute of Coast Guard cases that "practically speaking do not belong in the Federal courts," Lieutenant Olive said. It is not unusual for yachtsmen with years of experience on Long Island waters to be menaced by teen-agers in a Cigarette speedboat at 60 miles an hour with a six-pack of beer and little regard for boating rules, channel markers, no-wake zones or the damage that they might inflict, said Chief Alan Loeffler of the harbor police in the Town of Islip. Under Federal law, the Coast Guard has the authority to board any boat, inspect it and insist on administering a battery of sobriety checks, including a Breathalyzer test. If the operator refuses, that can be held against him and he may be detained, fined up to $1,000 or arrested. Requirement for Court Order State law now says state and local harbor officers cannot insist on a sobriety test without a court order and may not introduce the refusal as evidence in court. The officers can only write a ticket charging the operator with a violation that carries a fine up to $100. "No states require a license to operate a boat," Commander Miller said, "probably because boaters consider the open waters the last frontier, where they can be free of the rules and responsibilities they leave on land. "The water is a far more hostile environment than the road. If you crash your car and are rendered unconscious, you may survive on land, especially if you're wearing a seat belt. Out on the water, where the sun and motion are added stress factors, if you hit a buoy going 60 miles an hour while intoxicated, you may drown if you're thrown from the boat." "We don't have white lines and stop signs on the water," Chief Loeffler added. That makes "it more difficult to prove that there has been a violation or threat to other boats. The most important aspect of this legislation will allow us to report to the judge that a boat operator refused to take a sobriety test." | Law Would Classify Drunken Boating as a Crime |
548804_8 | to have a strong presence in the international market," said Harry W. Millis, an independent tire analyst based in Cleveland. Mr. Gault must also find a way to either make money from or dispose of the pipeline. Perhaps most important, Mr. Gault, who is in the second year of a three-year contract, must identify a successor and develop an orderly transition. But in the meantime, he is riding a wave of enthusiasm. "He has an ability to motivate people and I feel that our people here are more enthusiastic about Goodyear," said Bruce W. Wilkins, a 48-year-old production manager at the plant in Gadsden who has worked for Goodyear for 27 years. "It seems to go all the way from the top to the plant floor. It's something we haven't experienced at Goodyear before. I hope it lasts." A NEW BLIMP FOR THE 90'S Perhaps the most visible change by Stanley C. Gault has been the makeover of the Goodyear blimp. Mr. Gault found the gray craft with black lettering too somber for a revitalized Goodyear. After considering options including a polka-dot pattern and a tire-tread design, Mr. Gault decided on a bright yellow field with blue lettering, carrying the message "#1 in Tires." "We wanted something that would be bold enough to stand out even on a cloudy day," Mr. Gault said. "We wanted something that says change, that says excitement and newness." The new designs were put on three blimps between January and March, at a cost of $10,000 each. The Goodyear blimp dates back to 1925, and the gray-and-black design had been used by Goodyear since the late 30's. In World War II, the blimps escorted battleships from their docks out to sea, looking for enemy ships on the horizon. More recently, they have been used not only by television networks for overhead shots of athletic events, but also by several cities for pollution studies and by an international scientific agency to search for the Loch Ness monster. Many within Goodyear were stunned by Mr. Gault's decision to redesign the blimp. "A lot of us thought, if it ain't broke, why fix it," said Michael A. Wittman, manager of airship programs. "But the reception has been phenomenal and people love it. He wanted to know where the message was in the old blimp, and that was something we never thought of. Now, with the new design, I | At Goodyear, a Turnaround of Spirits as Well as Profits |
548914_0 | MY favorite reading when I was a kid -- other than Red Ryder comics, of course -- was in the pages of Popular Science and Popular Mechanics, and it had to do with coming automotive attractions. Things like cars that could fly. Or cars that rode on cushions of air. Or whose wheels turned sideways to ease parallel parking. There used to be lots of that sort of stuff, because cars as they stood were fairly boring. They were appliances, and the editors of the day figured they needed the hype if automobiles were going to be made interesting. A lot of people still see cars that way, probably because they work so well. Over the years, automobiles have even come to be understandable, more or less, and that takes them out of the realm of high-tech. Or does it? Today's average automobile probably has enough computing power under the hood to run a small business, and the electrons are proliferating, all of which is good for the consumer. Microchips embedded in ignition keys prevent the wrong key from stealing the car. Sensors hooked to a central computer prevent skids with antilock braking systems. Black boxes control fuel flow, making engines amazingly efficient. And infrared key fobs now pop the trunk as you approach with arms full of groceries or unlock the doors for quicker and safer entry, particularly at night. Safety, in fact, is the one of the chief elements behind the push for higher technology in cars. That is not surprising, given the mood of today's customers, and a new survey shows that 9 out of 10 buyers put safety at the top of the list when they sally forth to find a vehicle. The study, done for the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, indicated that driver-side air bags ranked highest in customers' considerations, although antilock brakes ran a close second, with 64 percent saying ABS was "very important" in making their choice. Also high on the list were passenger air bags, seatbelts with height-adjustable anchor points, and advanced side-impact protection. But the really interesting things are still to come, and a glimmer of the future can be found in the Advanced Safety Vehicle project being sponsored by the Japanese Ministry of Transport. The program is a big component in Japan's effort to reduce traffic accidents, and it involves a wide range of specialists and companies. Its aim | About Cars; Safety Drives the New Technologies |
548844_2 | futures. Describing projects in Central and South America, Asia and Africa, the author explores the particular successes and failures of human-scale attempts to foster ecologically renewable and economically viable development. Mr. Stone knows the "excruciating difficulty of accomplishing anything in rural work." He sets high standards for success; yet, touring remote portions of the tropics, he does see some signs of it. On the slopes of Kilum Mountain in northwest Cameroon, two British naturalists enlist Oku tribespeople and other villagers to mark boundaries of a 17,000-acre forest that is home to birds like the red-crested Bannerman's touraco, stands of podocarpus trees and other rare species. The pair also sets up an experimental tree nursery, introduces cool weather crops like kale and broccoli and conducts educational workshops on an assortment of topics. In upland Irian Jaya, an Indonesian province abutting Papua New Guinea, fieldworkers help organize groups of the Hatam and Arfak peoples to combat deforestation and soil losses, to diversify agriculture and to protect forests. The author offers similar stories from Ecuador, Costa Rica, the Caribbean island of St. Lucia, Zambia and Thailand. In each case, representatives of nongovernmental aid agencies, educated nationals or inspired freelancers have joined with locals to implement sound development. At the same time, they have founded or streamlined small business ventures like beekeeping, butterfly ranching or seaweed farming in attempts to provide needed capital and also to husband valued resources. Mr. Stone's narrative proceeds in somewhat jerky fashion, interrupted by fairly standard if deft accounts of the rise of the conservation movement and the history of development. But his survey is on the whole fascinating and full of surprises, as when he tells of the Brazilian iron mine "where scarlet macaws fly freely over the open ore pits, where brilliantly blue Morpho butterflies flash and flutter" in the virgin forest preserved on company land. Contending that steps toward healthy development bring into play a "cluster of ideological forces," among them democratic principles and market economics, the author argues for shifts in funding policies that would encourage more small-scale projects, and for more debt-for-nature swaps and similar measures. Making villagers partners in their own betterment and focusing on the demands of what Edward Seaga, the former Prime Minister of Jamaica, once called the "kitchen economy" are vital, the author says, if the South is to move from "despair to stability." Gina Maranto writes about the environment | Planning From the Bottom Up |
549030_3 | subsidiarity as a way of life in the community." Subsidiarity means that the European Community ought to legislate only on matters that cannot be handled at a national or regional level. George Walden, Member of Parliament, writing in The Daily Telegraph, says it is intended as "our protection, our Thames barrier against a floodtide of Brussels legislation." But, he adds: "To many, it sounds more like a voodoo incantation than an insurance policy against federalism." Subsidiarity is not a term one expects to hear from the ordinary Brit. The conflict between plain Anglo-Saxonisms and imposed Latinisms is as old as 1066. The term is one to distrust, seeming to carry opposed meanings. In Britain, and probably in Scotland and Wales, it means national sovereignty. To Jacques Delors, president of the Commission of the European Community, it means working in tandem -- essentially, that Britain bow down. Subsidiarity , therefore, is as much of a paradox as the new "united" Europe, which has spawned more disruptive nationalist aspirations than have previously been known. Wifelets and Nymphets THE MARQUESS OF BATH IS dead, and his son, Viscount Weymouth, takes over the title. This 60-year-old eccentric, who changed his family name from Thynne to Thynn as a gesture of defiance, prides himself on a bedroom decorated with scenes realized out of the Kama Sutra, in which free copulation is encouraged. He does not believe in Christian marriage, favoring polygamy, and he seems to have invented the term wifelet to describe members of his harem. This is perhaps one diminutive for women who are less than wives and more than mistresses, but the pejorative clings to the suffix, as it would if Britlets existed to name the children of these islands. Both -let and -ette (or -et ) coexist as diminutive forms, though -ette / -et breathes femininity and daintiness. Vladimir Nabokov's nymphet in "Lolita" had a French origin (properly nymphette), and faunet would not work as a male equivalent, though faunlet might. At the turn of the century, British women did not demur at suffragette , but in the 1920's students at the women's colleges of Oxford objected to undergraduette. Cigarette began as a diminished cigar suitable for women, and when men began to smoke what Oscar Wilde called the perfect type of enjoyment (the brevity being a recommendation), they preferred, in Britain anyway, to call it a fag. With the importation of | Brits in Euroland |
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549127_2 | would have increased the price by about $35 a ton. But as Aug. 1 approached, word rippled through the newspaper industry that the newsprint manufacturers were not going to be able to make the new price stick, because there was so much excess newsprint available. "I've got a nagging intuition that there is way too much newsprint out there to make this thing happen," said Homer E. Taylor, vice president of supply for Knight-Ridder Inc., owner of The Philadelphia Inquirer and The Miami Herald and one of the largest consumers of newsprint. Essentially, the economics of producing newsprint make such gluts very difficult to avoid. Building newsprint mills is very expensive. But once the mill is operating, the cost to the company of producing each ton of newsprint is very small. The newsprint companies need cash to pay for the cost of building the mills, so they produce as much paper as they can and then sell it for whatever the market will bear. And now, what the market will bear is so low that even highly efficient operations like Bowater cannot sell paper for more than it costs to make and deliver it. In the first two quarters of this year, Bowater, the nation's largest newsprint manufacturer, reported an overall operating loss for the first time since the company went public in 1984. Though the company makes a profit from products like the coated paper used for magazines, the loss from newsprint dragged the whole operation into the red. "The industry cannot continue to operate as it has in a money-losing situation," said David G. McMaster, president of Bowater. Of course, the older and more remote mills, like some of those in Canada, could simply stop producing paper, thus bringing supply and demand more into equilibrium. But the social costs of such a Darwinian solution in lost jobs and shattered communities has prompted the Canadian Government to step in and save newsprint mills that might otherwise stop production. For instance, the Kimberly-Clark Corporation and The New York Times Company jointly operated a newsprint mill at Spruce Falls in Ontario, about 500 miles north of Toronto. Because it had been unprofitable for years, the owners decided to stop operating it and in December gave it to the employees. Through loans from the former owners and subsidies from the Canadian Government, the plant is now producing almost as much newsprint as | Newsprint Makers' Troubles May Haunt Papers One Day |
549195_2 | nine of our boxers reached the finals." Cuba suffered only two setbacks in gold medal bouts. On Saturday, Irish welterweight Michael Carruth defeated Juan Hernandez at 148 pounds, and today, Su Choi Chol of North Korea defeated Raul Gonzalez at 112 pounds. In other finals today, featherweight Andreas Tews of Germany beat Faustino Reyes of Spain; light welterweight Hector Vinent of Cuba easily defeated Mark Leduc of Canada; light middleweight Juan Lemus of Cuba prevailed over Orhan Delibas of the Netherlands; light heavyweight Torsten May of Germany beat Rostislav Zaoulitchnyi, and superheavyweight Roberto Balado of Cuba had an easy time with Richard Igbineghu of Nigeria. Sagarra is known as a taskmaster and disciplinarian. He admitted as much and said that those habits, more than technical training, were the strength of his system. "I am strict," he said. "I am demanding of myself and of the boxers. That is the principal secret. If you don't demand from yourself, how can you can set an example for another person to demand from himself? "As coaches, we are the first people who have to do these things so the others can follow our example." In the context of Cuban sports, Sagarra is perhaps most significant in that he represents a bridge from -- and a final break from -- an era in which Soviet advisers occupied key coaching positions. In his time as coach, he has wrapped Cuban soul and style around Soviet mechanics, and now it is Cuba that is exporting coaches. "What Sagarra has done is synthesize his personal experiences, the experience of Cubans, knowledge gained form other countries and blended it in a package that is uniquely Cuban," said Corona Martinez, the Cuban Ministry of Sport. Sagarra was born in Santiago de Cuba, where he began boxing as a child, although not in the ring. Former Street Fighter "I was a one of those who was constantly fighting in the streets," he said, "and that's why they told me I had qualities for boxing. That's why I entered into boxing." "I was always in the gym watching," he continued. "I liked to watch the boxers train. One day a man -- I only know that his last name was Leon -- saw me and he asked me if I like to box, because I was always looking at the gym. He asked me, 'If you like to watch that much, | Coach Remains Mystery, But Cuban Boxers Aren't |
551816_0 | A MILITARY electronics company based in San Diego has developed a microwave camera that it says will allow aircraft pilots to peer through fog and see the runway. Invented at the Thermotrex Corporation, a subsidiary of the Thermo Electron Corporation in Waltham, Mass., the camera creates an image based on the microwave radio signals emitted by most objects on the ground. Unlike visible light, these weak microwaves can penetrate fog and clouds. Company officials say the signals vary with the composition and the location of each object, making it possible to assemble a coherent picture from what seems at first to be a confused jumble. Most objects emanate microwave signals, which occur when heat causes molecules in the material to vibrate. These molecular vibrations give rise to tiny vibrating electrical fields, which produce microwave signals that can be detected by a sensitive radio receiver. The intensity of these signals depends on the composition and the temperature of each object. Company officials said the direction of each object could be identified by the wavelength of the signals and the way they hit the antenna. Faster Than Computer The key to the invention, said John Loveberg, project manager in charge of developing the camera, is the use of an optical processor that is far faster than a computer at making sense out of the incoming radiation. The microwave signals are captured by a large radio antenna, then converted to sound vibrations that pass through a crystal. The sound vibrations change the way the crystal deflects light from a laser, Mr. Loveberg said, and the pattern of these deflections matches that of the objects that produced the original microwave signals. Both the antenna and the optical processor have been used before, but this is the first time they have been used together in one system. Four company researchers, led by Brett Spivey and Paul Johnson, received patent 5,121,124. Patents are available by number for $3 from the Patent and Trademark Office, Washington, D.C. 20231. | Patents; A Microwave Camera Aids Pilots in Fog |
551840_0 | The Ford Motor Company has invented a computer algorithm for an advanced traction-control system that prevents a car from spinning its wheels if a driver steps too hard on the gas. Traction-control systems, still in their infancy, are the opposite of computerized anti-lock brakes, which stop a car from sliding into an uncontrollable skid. A basic traction-control system, available on some luxury cars, monitors wheel rotation to determine when the wheels are spinning faster than the car is moving, and then slows the engine enough to let the tires regain their grip. The patent envisions a more sophisticated system that analyzes road conditions and comes close to actually predicting whether the wheels will slip. The patent covers an algorithm, or series of mathematical procedures, by which a computer process can calculate the road's slope and its friction. Roger May, a patent attorney for Ford, said the company hopes to introduce the system on its 1998 or 1999 models. "You won't be able to 'peel rubber' any more with this," he said. The key to estimating road conditions is to analyze differences in rotation between the wheels that are powered by the engine and the ones that are not. In addition, the new processor would gauge how hard the engine is working to make the car move by measuring the torque, or force, placed on the axle. Two Ford researchers, David Sol, who has since left the company, and Ross M. Stuntz, received patent 5,132,906. Patents are available by number for $3 from the Patent and Trademark Office, Washington, D.C. 20231. | Patents; Applying Math To Tire Traction |
551830_0 | Plans to resume the Middle East peace talks on Monday were jeopardized today when Palestinian delegates angrily postponed their trip to Washington, saying they had been "humiliated" by Israeli soldiers at the border crossing into Jordan. An Israeli military spokesman denied the charge, and accused the Palestinians of creating "a provocative act." While officials on both sides say they assume that they will eventually settle the dispute, which centers on Israel's travel-permit procedures for Palestinians, there is a question about whether it will be ironed out in time for the scheduled start of peace negotiations Monday morning in Washington. All key participants -- Israel, the Palestinians, Syria, Jordan and Lebanon -- have expressed hope that, with a new and more flexible Israeli Government in place, they can achieve real results in a process that has sputtered since getting under way last October. 'Harassment,' She Says There was no reason to assume that the Palestinians' balking today would amount to anything more than a temporary delay. Nonetheless, these sorts of disputes have persisted for months. And the questions of perceived honor and face-saving raise inevitable questions about how fast the talks will move once they get going. Even before today, Palestinians and the Arab nations had challenged the Americans' ability to serve as an "honest broker" after President Bush agreed to $10 billion in United States loan guarantees for Israel while allowing the Government of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin to complete nearly 10,000 apartments at Jewish settlements in the occupied territories. The dispute today broke out at the Allenby Bridge, 20 miles east of Jerusalem, the main transit point from the Israeli-occupied West Bank to Jordan. In past rounds, Palestinian delegates have usually crossed the bridge, teamed up in Amman with their Jordanian counterparts, then flown on to Washington as the single group they technically are during the talks. This time, the Jordanian team left on its own today for the United States. And this time, the Palestinians dug in their heels on Israeli procedures at the bridge that their spokeswoman, Hanan Ashrawi, angrily described as "harassment, humiliation and intimidation." "Our delegation is at the mercy and the whim of the occupier," Mrs. Ashrawi said, adding that unless the delegation is assured of being treated "with respect and dignity," it will refuse to set off for Washington even if it means delaying the talks. The Rite of Return The Palestinian protest, | Palestinians on the Way to Talks Stumble Over Israeli Travel Curbs |
552461_0 | RESEARCHERS have developed a new technique that allows them to see and photograph areas of the brain's surface as it deals with language, memory and other tasks. Using fiber-optic light and a special camera attached to a surgical microscope, a team of scientists at the University of Washington School of Medicine in Seattle has become the first to make optical images of the surface of the human brain as it responds to nervous stimulation. The researchers said the technique, called optical imaging, may one day be used during surgery to map the areas of a patient's brain correlated to speech, movement and other activities. Using these images, surgeons could avoid or minimize damage to crucial areas when operating on the brain. "Optical imaging could be a very powerful research tool and is likely to have very real practical application in brain mapping," said Dr. George A. Ojemann, an expert in studying the brain centers involved in language who helped develop the new technique. Optical imaging joins a growing number of imaging methods developed in recent years that are revolutionizing human brain research by giving scientists an unparalleled look at the organ's structure and functions. "This is just the beginning of the era of imaging the brain," said Dr. Mortimer Mishkin, chief of the Neuropsychology Laboratory at the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, Md. "Optical imaging may complement other methods because of its resolution and speed, but it won't be the last development. Without question, there is far more to come," he said. Getting a New View The other techniques developed recently include scans using fast magnetic resonance imaging, or M.R.I., which detects radio signals from stimulated water molecules in tissue, and positron emission tomography, or PET, which tracks brain metabolism as active cells absorb radioactive glucose. They have already joined advanced X-ray methods in helping scientists peer into the brain, Dr. Mishkin said. The University of Washington researchers described optical imaging in a report published in the current issue of the journal Nature. They took pictures of the surface of the brain's cortex, or outer layer, in five patients who had portions of their skulls removed for epilepsy surgery. With the help of computer-assisted imaging and enhancement, the researchers, Dr. Michael M. Haglund, Dr. Daryl W. Hochman and Dr. Ojemann, were able to see changes in the brain's surface that corresponded to the activity of neural cells. In | Optical Imaging Offers Gentler Way to Monitor Human Brain at Work |
552443_6 | food sources for primates in the American tropics. While Tarzan may have been the only human to get extensive use out of vines for transportation, these bushropes serve as public transit for many other animals, from howler monkeys to ants, that prefer to traverse the forest canopy without setting their feet on the ground. "Without vines, trees a few yards apart would be isolated. As it is, with so many vines around, there are plenty of pathways for animals," Ms. Holbrook said. "It's a highway network up in the forest canopy." Rattans, the climbing palms that provide the raw material for patio furniture and handicrafts sold around the world, have become the most important nontimber forest product in Asia. Mr. Phillips said this multibillion-dollar industry was still largely based on the harvesting of wild vines from the rain forests of Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines. Perhaps the most intriguing uses of vines are medicinal. Early studies have suggested that vines as a group may be the best source of drugs in the plant world. Curare, a drug used in surgery, and diosgenin, a steroid used in oral contraceptives, were first discovered in tropical vines. People living in rain forests derive from vines a variety of substances, like poison for darts, ant-bite and snakebite remedies, and drugs to treat diarrhea, conjunctivitis and syphilis. For many Indian peoples in the Amazon basin, vines are a source of hallucinogenic drugs, like a drink called ayahuasca, which is made from the bark of a tropical vine. The importance of these vines in Indian religion can be seen by an extensive field knowledge of these hallucinogen-carrying vines, as well as by the prominence of drug-induced visions in Indian art. As indigenous peoples adopt more modern life styles, they may be losing the knowledge of how to identify vines and pick out the useful ones. Ethnobotanists say that scientists need to make quick use of that source of information because vines can be difficult to classify. "Often all you can see of a canopy vine is a long, thin stem that disappears up into the trees," Mr. Phillips said. "The fact that their leaves and flowers are often in the canopy makes them hard to identify from the ground, and the knowledge about which kind of vine is poisonous and which is medicinal is often the first to go when indigenous peoples lose their traditions." Dr. | After Fight For Light, Vines Rule Forest Top |
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547486_1 | modifying taste stimuli through a complicated network of chemical and electrical signals before sending signals to the brain. As scientists scramble to decipher those signals, they are finding that taste stimuli can affect the taste-bud cells in unexpected ways. The stimuli sometimes exert their effect by interacting with messenger molecules in the taste buds, and they sometimes directly stimulate tiny electrical currents within the cells. For example, researchers at the Roche Institute of Molecular Biology in Nutley, N.J., recently published their identification of an important protein messenger in taste buds, gustducin, that is activated in response to all sweet and some bitter taste stimuli. Dr. Robert F. Margolskee and his colleagues at the institute said gustducin's role in taste buds was comparable to that of protein receptors called transducins in the eye. Transducins, which are far better studied messenger chemicals, help to translate the light that reaches the retina into messages to be sent to the brain. Gustducin, which is found only in taste buds, acts as an intermediary between the receptor molecule for sweet stimuli and a chain of subsequent steps, finally sending a message to the brain that something sweet has been tasted. "Taste research has not been a high-priority item with our major funding agency, the National Institutes of Health," said Dr. Stephen D. Roper, a neurobiologist at Colorado State University in Fort Collins, "although this may change now that connections have been established between taste and the control of food intake." As scores of studies recently summarized by Dr. Roper in The Journal of Neuroscience have shown, each of the four basic tastes impinges upon taste cells in its own way, setting off reactions that change the cells' electrical charge and trigger the release of chemical messengers that ultimately tell the brain what is being eaten. Take, for example, the shrimp marinade. Each flavoring ingredient registers individually yet somehow gets integrated into a memorable taste sensation. The sodium in the soy-based marinade flows readily into taste cells through channels in their membranes; the sour-tasting lemon juice closes the channels that normally let potassium flow out of the cells; the honey is greeted by cell-surface receptors that carry sweet taste stimuli over the threshold of the cell membrane; the bitterness in the orange rind closes potassium channels and also may link up with receptors, setting off a chain reaction that ultimately releases calcium within the cell. At | How the Taste Bud Translates Between Tongue and Brain |
547669_0 | Rae Dalven, a translator of modern Greek poets and historian of Greek Jews, died on Thursday at Beth Israel Medical Center in Manhattan. She was 87 years old and lived in Manhattan. Friends said she had been in declining health but they did not know the cause of death. Dr. Dalven was retired as a professor of English literature and department chairwoman at Ladycliff College in Highland Falls, N.Y. Born in Preveza, Greece, she immigrated to the United States with her family as a youngster. She graduated from Hunter College and earned a doctorate in English at New York University. Translated Greek Poetry Among her translations was "Modern Greek Poetry" (Gaer, 1949). In a review, W. H. Auden wrote, "we should be very grateful to Miss Dalven for introducing us to a world of poetry which has been closed to us" by the language barrier. Mr. Auden later wrote the introductions to her "The Complete Poems of Cavafy" (Harcourt, Brace, 1961) and "The Fourth Dimension" (Godine, 1977), translating Yannis Ritsos. Dr. Dalven also wrote two plays, the first of which, "A Season in Hell," about the French poets Rimbaud and Verlaine, was produced Off Broadway in 1950. Last year she finished "Our Kind of People," an autobiographical play about a family of Greek-Jewish immigrants. It was performed at a synagogue in Manhattan and is scheduled for presentation this fall at a Brooklyn theater and the Greek Orthodox Cathedral in Manhattan. Dr. Dalven's special interest was the history of Jews in Greece, especially the community in Ioannina in northern Greece, most of whose members were driven out during World War II. They were Romaniotes, who traced their ancestry to Palestinians and who migrated as early as 300 B.C. They retained their customs and liturgy, which differed from those of the more numerous Sephardim whose ancestors were expelled from Spain. Dr. Dalven was the editor of "The Sephardic Scholar," a journal; a board member of the American Friends of the Jewish Museum of Greece and a past president of the American Society of Sephardic Studies and of the Sisterhood of Janina, a Romaniote group. Her marriage to Jack Negrin ended in divorce. She is survived by several nieces and nephews. | Rae Dalven, 87, Former Professor And a Historian of Jews in Greece |
547652_1 | taxes may someday apply to themselves are exploring ways to recycle carbon, a process that trees carry out naturally by absorbing carbon dioxide and using the carbon as a raw material for wood. The thinking behind programs like New England Electric's is that because the earth has only one atmosphere, it does not matter where the carbon dioxide is produced or absorbed, as long as it is absorbed somewhere. It's a zero-sum game, global greenhouse-wise. New England Electric serves more than 1.2 million customers in three states and gets 40 percent of its power from coal, a prodigious producer of carbon dioxide. As part of a pilot project the utility will pay $450,000 to Innoprise, a forest products company in Sabah, Malaysia, to keep 300,000 to 600,000 tons of carbon dioxide in the trees instead of in the air. Innoprise will continue to produce tropical hardwood, between 2.5 million to 4 million cubic meters a year as part of the worldwide market of 90 million cubic meters. But on about 2 square miles, or 5 percent of its annual harvest area, it will strive to minimize what is known in forestry as "residual stand damage" (what the Pentagon would call collateral damage). "Maybe 10 percent of the trees in a forest are marketable, but to get that 10 percent, they destroy 40 to 50 percent of the forest -- sometimes higher," said R. Peter Calvert, the utility's principal fuels planner. Workers simply cut what they want, without regard to the other trees, he said, adding, "It's like being selective with a meat cleaver." Damage can be reduced by more than half, by cutting the vines off the tree crowns before they are felled, to avoid bringing down neighboring trees, and practicing "directional felling," so a tree does not break a neighbor as it falls. And if logging roads are better planned, there will be less erosion and less pollution of local rivers. The work will be monitored by the Rainforest Alliance, a nonprofit organization in New York. Richard Donovan, director of the alliance's timber project, said the logging company would also send foresters into the woods to mark the trees to be harvested, sparing those that are too small and leaving big ones to reseed the area. The result, Mr. Donovan said, will be a better forest when the loggers return for a second round, 15 to 30 years later. | COMPANY NEWS: Inside the Global Greenhouse; Woodman, Spare That CO2 Eater |
547678_2 | stable, aligned properly with the Sun and performing normally, European engineers said. They planned a new attempt to raise its orbit. Franco Bonacina, a spokesman for the European agency, said: "The spacecraft apparently is doing fine. We have confirmed that it is stable in a position pointing to the Sun." Although the exact source of the trouble had not been identified, Mr. Bonacina said, engineers suspected that Sun-seeking sensors on the craft had sent incorrect data indicating a misalignment that perhaps did not even exist. The solution, they said, may be as simple as sending up a computer program correction. Descent to Ionosphere The astronauts steered Atlantis into a lower orbit with two separate firings of its orbital maneuvering rockets. Their braking force sent the spaceship into a controlled descent from an altitude of 265 miles to a new orbit 184 miles above Earth. This put the shuttle well into the Earth's ionosphere, the region above the atmosphere where charged particles and electrons are plentiful and the magnetic forces are strong. Out into this environment the astronauts plan to deploy a five-foot satellite containing instruments for studying the physics of the ionosphere and the magnetic fields. The $160 million spherical satellite was designed and paid for by the Italian Space Agency and built by Alenia, an Italian aerospace company. One of the seven crew members is Franco Malerba, the first Italian astronaut. Italian scientists and engineers have been active in planning the mission.. Monitoring Satellite's Dynamics At all times the satellite is to be connected to the shuttle by the thin cable. Mission planners have allowed five hours for the tethered satellite to be unreeled slowly to its full length, placing the satellite 12 miles above Atlantis. Engineers want to monitor the dynamics of releasing, controlling and retrieving a satellite on a string. The other objective will be to determine the abilities of a cable strung between to orbiting bodies to generate electricity. Electrons should collect on the satellite's surface and flow down the conducting tether to the shuttle. There they will be returned to the ionosphere, effectively closing the circuit needed to conduct electric current. The plan is to reel the satellite back in late Wednesday afternoon. This could be the riskiest part of the experiment. If the cable should become tangled or the satellite wobbles out of control, the astronauts are to send commands to cut the tether. | Shuttle Moves Lower For Key Experiment |
551253_4 | America's haves and have-nots and feeding a protectionist backlash. But the potential for hefty earnings-gains from education, she argues, implies that America need not choose between a stagnant closed economy that protects blue-collar workers and an open one that grows at the expense of the least fortunate. If virtually all Americans could acquire skills, a great majority would be likely to prosper in the global market. Tuition as Tax Surcharge Mr. Bishop warns, however, that raising average skill levels might take a costly reorganization of the education system. He sees promise in "doing what the Germans do" (and what the Clinton campaign promises to do), tying the last years of high school for noncollege-track students to apprenticeship programs. But he is concerned that many students with college potential are being priced out of the game by rising tuition rates. Representative Tom Petri, a Republican from Wisconsin who has led the effort in the House to restructure college loan programs, offers a more optimistic view. While he agrees that higher education is now out of the reach of many middle-income families, the double-digit return estimated by researchers suggests that "most students ought to be able to pay for college or technical training out of their future earnings." His preferred solution would be to offer more generous Federal loans that students would repay as a percentage surcharge on their future income taxes. Those who chose low-paying occupations, or simply did not get much from the extra years spent hitting the books, would be helped along by the majority who used college as a ticket to affluence. Mr. Ashenfelter agrees that the benefits from pooling the risks of investment in higher education offer "a classic justification for Government intervention." So, apparently, does Mr. Clinton, who has proposed college loans that could be repaid either through an income tax surcharge or through community service after graduation. Even the free-marketeers in the Bush Administration are willing to test the idea of income-contingent loans: the education bill just signed by the President includes a $500 million demonstration project. No one is claiming that increased education is the magic bullet for curing what ails the American economy. But in Ms. Sawhill's view, the Ashenfelter-Kreuger research reveals what amounts to the next best thing. "It is the one investment", she said, "that would increase overall productivity and narrow the income gap that has been widening since the mid-1970's." | Twins Study Shows School Is Sound Investment |
551336_4 | people use space under varying circumstances. Have the child stand at one end of a 6-foot strip of masking tape on the floor, then ask him or her to walk toward various imaginary people -- like a parent, teacher, police officer, stranger, acquaintance or close friend -- and stop to talk at an appropriate distance. Using a silhouette of the human body, explain where and under what circumstances it is proper to touch different people and the messages conveyed by touching. *Inability to interpret or use gestures and postures properly. Some children may not realize what they and others are saying with their bodies; for example, they may not know that slouching conveys diffidence or lack of interest or that pointing at people or standing with arms folded tightly can annoy people. Turn off the sound on a TV show or movie and ask the child to interpret the characters' body language. Take videos of the child under various routine circumstances and explain to the child the unintended meaning of postures or gestures. *Misinterpretation or misuse of facial expressions. Some youngsters often fail to make eye contact, or they smile or frown at the wrong times, or they misunderstand the facial messages sent by others. Cut out pictures of faces and develop a picture dictionary of facial expressions. Have the child practice facial expressions in the mirror. Take photos or movies of the child's face under various normal and practice circumstances and have the child interpret the messages conveyed. *Inappropriate use of sound quality. A child may say the right things or laugh at the right times but in the wrong ways: too loudly, softly, shrilly, harshly or gently or with the accent on the wrong words. Using a tape recorder, develop an "audio dictionary" of voice tones that reflect different emotions and attitudes. Demonstrate how to say the same words with different meanings, and have the child practice changing the messages by varying the tone and emphasis. *Inappropriate dress or poor personal hygiene. Some children may be rejected because they dress oddly, bathe infrequently, pick their noses in public or have other unacceptable habits. Have the child look at people on TV, at the mall or in magazine photos to create an awareness of the messages sent by different manners of dress and appearance. Discuss the importance of personal hygiene and help the child overcome problems with personal hygiene. | Personal Health |
552735_1 | comprehensive than similar efforts by regional Bell holding companies. For example, Bell Atlantic plans a similar trial of 500 customers in Pittsburgh starting in December. Ameritech has a Chicago trial of 1,000 customers, which began in June, that uses modified cellular telephones that communicate with a small and specialized network of radio transmitters. In the Florida trial, GTE, the nation's largest local-telephone carrier, will be joined by the American Telephone & Telegraph Company, the long-distance carrier and telecommunications equipment maker; Northern Telecom of Canada, a major maker of switching equipment; and OKI Telecom of Japan, a maker of cellular telephones. GTE will pay most of the $25 million to $35 million cost of the trial. GTE will use a phone adapted to work like a familiar cordless phone near the house and more like a cellular phone in a more distant "premium" zone. A cordless phone sends a radio signal to a base station inside a home, which is connected by wire to the traditional phone network; a cellular phone sends a radio signal, on a different set of frequencies, to a network of radio transmission towers, which also connect, by wire and signal, with the traditional network. The GTE trial will use an OKI Telecom phone that acts like a cordless phone in the "home zone," near the customer's house, where phone use will cost $15 to $40 a month. In a premium zone distant from the customer's house, the phone will act more like a cellular phone and cost 7 cents to 25 cents a minute, which is still cheaper than cellular's 35 cents to 60 cents a minute. In this trial, "we will find out how just how mobile customers want to be," by looking at actual use and how customers respond to different prices, said John K. Dion, general manager of GTE's PCS group. Engineers agree that the limiting step in developing the future phones lies not in technology but in determining what customers want. "In the past, telecommunications used to be technology-driven or regulation-driven," Mr. Dion said. "Now it's market-driven." PCS devices will provide higher quality and wider coverage because smaller radio transmission towers will be available in a wider variety of areas. Known by various names, such as micro-cells, these smaller cellular networks will provide signals deep within office buildings, subways and other areas where cellular telephone calls typically fade out in a shower | GTE Leads Major Test of Personal Phone Devices |
552734_1 | Should it be an extension of the world's land-based telephone networks, simply linking remote spots to the nearest phone company? Or should it be a celestial telephone network in its own right, employing an orbiting array of switches and computers that can route calls to any spot on the globe without ever coming near a telephone pole or copper wire? The questions are not academic. Governments from some 160 nations agreed in March to allocate a band of radio frequencies for these "low-earth orbit" satellite systems, and the F.C.C. hopes to award two or three licenses for the American portion of the frequency spectrum as early as next year. But analysts say there simply is not enough money to support all the approaches, meaning hard choices lie ahead for investors and policy makers. 'A Natural Oligopoly' "This may not be a natural monopoly, but it's certainly a natural oligopoly," said Janice Obuchowski, a telecommunications consultant and former Assistant Secretary of Commerce. "So you have a lot of investors who are not only kicking the tires, but trying to see which systems are likely to make it." The luxury plan is Motorola Inc.'s much publicized Iridium project, a $3.4 billion proposal to launch 66 satellites (recently scaled back from the original plan for 77). Each would weigh a hefty 1,500 pounds and carry sophisticated switching equipment. The four rivals propose launching between 12 and 48 satellites that would generally be lighter, cheaper and much less sophisticated. TRW Inc. of Cleveland has proposed a 12-satellite plan called Odyssey with a price tag of $1.3 billion. The Loral Corporation, a military contractor and aerospace concern based in New York, has formed a venture with Qualcomm Inc., a communications company in San Diego. They propose a 48-satellite system costing $1.5 billion. Two start-ups, the Ellipsat Corporation of Washington, and Constellation Communications Inc. of Herndon, Va., have developed proposals that would cost about $500 million. As low-orbit systems, all of the competing designs would use a fundamentally new approach to satellite communications. Since their inception more than three decades ago, communication satellites have typically been huge pieces of equipment launched into "geostationary" orbits 22,300 miles above the Equator. From that position, the spacecraft appear to hover over one spot by matching the earth's rotation. Low-earth-orbit satellites, by contrast, circle the earth at distances of a few hundred to several thousand miles. Because they move across | Wireless Phones: Different Visions |
548257_4 | promotions are relatively poor. And the surge in enrollments should increase competition among graduates and gradually whittle down their average pay advantage over the degreeless, economists say. But some, including Professor Bloom, warn against concluding that young people would be better off heading straight from the senior prom into the job pool. "This is no reason not to go to college," said Richard Freeman, a labor economist at Harvard University. "There have always been a lot of unsuccessful college graduates, just like there are lots of high school graduates who are successful." While a college education may no longer be the automatic passport to comfortable life it was once considered, it pays dividends -- social and intellectual -- other than the ones that show up in a paycheck. "I'm glad I finished," said Ms. Johnson, the mechanic. "Even though school wasn't my real interest, meeting people from different backgrounds really broadened my horizons." What is more, everyday observation strongly suggests that an even bigger share of high school graduates is now falling into jobs once assigned to dropouts. "It's better to be an engineer when there is a shortage of engineers," Professor Freeman said. "But it's not better to be a ditch digger even when there are a lot of engineers." Still Better Odds In any case, the odds of working and earning more are still greater for college graduates, and are likely to remain so. A recent analysis by Professors Bloom and Freeman showed that college graduates now earn an average of 52 percent more than high school graduates versus 26 percent more a decade ago. Besides, Labor Department predictions of weak professional job growth could be off the mark. Despite the downsizing of the military industry, which is hitting male college graduates hard, the demand for more educated workers in other manufacturing and service industries could accelerate as technology becomes more sophisticated. "If work changes a lot, even if it's simple, employers want people who have proved they can learn," Professor Bloom said. John Bishop, an economist at Cornell University, points out that the labor bureau predicted in 1980 that professional jobs would account for only a quarter of employment growth in the decade, but that the actual share was 53 percent. "The B.L.S. has consistently under-predicted the growth of skilled jobs," he said. Besides, Professor Bishop said, the "Baby Bust" will hold down the total number of | More College Graduates Taking Low-Wage Jobs |
566011_2 | when seeing the face of one's grandmother. Others searched for the counterpart of a cinemascope screen in the brain, a place where the separate streams of sensory information are projected to form a complete image. But who would be watching the screen? Most neuroscientists now agree that there is no little man, no grandmother cell, no theater screen. Hence the binding problem. Where or how are the separate pieces of information bound together? Several proposed solutions are being debated here this week. They invoke a range of concepts like synchrony of oscillation, re-entry networks, chaos, convergence zones and the notion that there really are anatomical sites that give unity to perception. A leading contender, though highly controversial, is the oscillation theory. The idea is that separate populations of cells -- those responding to aspects of the color, shape, texture, motion, smell and sound of the bus along with those holding memories of buses experienced in the past -- all send out nervous impulses at the same firing rate or frequency for a fraction of a second. As they all fire or "oscillate" at this critical frequency, the perception of the bus is created in a network. So binding, according to this theory, is a matter not of where but of when. Consciousness is but a stream of oscillating networks, forming and falling away every 50 to 100 milliseconds. Seeing Cows and Purple Cows The brain's use of frequency as the means to integrate separate parts of a perception has obvious advantages, said Dr. Charles Gray, a neuroscientist at the Salk Institute and early proponent of the oscillation theory. If visual objects were mapped in space, he said, the brain would need special sites for every possible image, whether real or imagined -- cows, purple cows, purple cows with blue spots, purple cows with blue spots flying stealth bombers and so on ad infinitum. "The number of objects we see in a lifetime exceeds the number of neurons that could code information that way," Dr. Gray said. "With a temporal code you can have cells that respond to certain features interacting with cells that combine with other features." In 1986, Dr. Gray and Dr. Wolf Singer of the Max Planck Institute in Germany found the first evidence of a temporal binding code in animals. Inserting many recording electrodes into the brains of an anesthetized cat, they discovered that sets of neurons | Nerve Cell Rhythm May Be Key to Consciousness |
566086_0 | To the Editor: Your Sept. 30 article on chefs whose environmental politics make the kitchen hotter details disagreement about boycotting genetically engineered food. Whether or not one believes genetically engineered foods are desirable or should be boycotted, we believe consumers should reject the Food and Drug Administration's new policy on the safety and labeling of genetically engineered foods. The F.D.A.'s new policy threatens to weaken established regulations protecting the food supply. With genetic engineering, a virtually limitless number of genetically encoded substances, many of them not traditionally part of the human diet, can now be added to organisms used as food. Crops under development include potatoes engineered to produce a moth protein that prevents bruising damage, tomatoes engineered to produce a fish protein that slows freezing and cucumbers engineered with viral genes that confer disease resistance. To consumers, genetically engineering a food organism to produce a new substance in its edible tissue is the same as adding a chemical to the food during processing. Genetically encoded substances added to foods would therefore be regulated under F.D.A. regulations for foods that contain added chemicals. The F.D.A.'s policy ostensibly accepts this principle. However, the policy, which Vice President Quayle announced as "regulatory relief" for the biotechnology industry, appears to establish a weak, separate set of procedures for foods obtained from genetically engineered crop plants. These procedures protect consumers less than those for conventional chemicals added to food. Manufacturers will have considerable new discretion about whether or not to disclose their new products to the F.D.A. or seek F.D.A. safety approval. The policy also ignores F.D.A. requirements for labeling food ingredients. The F.D.A. requires labels not because most food ingredients are hazardous, but because consumers have a right to know what is in their food. Nevertheless, the F.D.A. will not require labeling of foods containing new genetically encoded substances except in exceptional circumstances. Although the F.D.A.'s policy was adopted last May, the agency is now reviewing thousands of letters from consumers who object to that policy. Let's hope that the F.D.A. takes a long, hard second look at its policy, which in its present form sacrifices food safety and the right of consumers to know on the altar of regulatory relief. REBECCA GOLDBURG D. DOUGLAS HOPKINS New York, Oct. 9, 1992 The writers are, respectively, senior scientist and senior attorney, Environmental Defense Fund. | Don't Let F.D.A. Get Cosier With Drugmakers; Mutant-Foods Policy |
563114_1 | derided and pilloried ever since his evisceration in debate by Lloyd Bentsen in the last campaign -- came slashing back to brake the Bush decline by carrying out the assignment traditionally given Vice Presidents: to smite the opposition candidate where it hurts most. Stammering like a human being as he groped to marshal arguments, grinning too delightedly at his own sallies -- "You're pulling a Clinton" gave an eponym to changing a position -- Quayle was an imperfect but effective debater in command of his basic message: Even if you're unhappy with Bush, you can't trust Clinton. And when hit by the charge that his was a negative campaign, Quayle could present his unassailable, hard-earned credentials: " 'Personal, negative attacks' -- has anyone been reading my press clippings for the past four years?" The dramatic clash between the scarred, nothing-to-lose Quayle and the smooth, everything-to-gain Gore was made the more memorable by the presence of a Greek chorus in the person of the tongue-tied Stoic hero, Admiral Stockdale. He represented everything the two candidates were not: elderly, hard of hearing, unversed in soundbiting, too polite to point for oratorical emphasis, admittedly "out of ammunition" on complex domestic issues, comfortable in his own skin and uncomfortable in the limelight, and above all not afflicted with the need to prove his character. Unlike his running mate, Ross Perot -- who took a free four-year education at Annapolis and then tried to slip out of his service obligation by professing shock at sailors' profanity -- the decent and brave Stockdale served and suffered, ennobling his captivity. Because his moment of glory was not his moment of fame, he came across as the antithesis of slickness. As he groped painfully for words, the audience identified with his pain. We were embarrassed with him but proud of him, because he is what he is, and reminded us vividly that political figures are often not what they seem to be. This was one of those great moments in American life when the nation comes together to share an experience neither frightening nor artificial. It was not a crisis nor a movie but a political-emotional event. Issues, shmissues -- this was uniquely American drama, grace stumbling under pressure, each participant being changed in the crucible of those 90 nationally watched minutes. The Admiral's life, not his character, will be changed by his moment representing Everyman; look for | Essay; Humans Confront Android |
563006_0 | After slowly building for nearly two years, Japan's trade surplus with the United States and the rest of the world soared to an all-time high in September, in spite of numerous Japanese Government pledges to take measures to bring its trade into balance. The surplus is having a particularly pronounced effect now because the Japanese and American economies are both weak, and the Governments are struggling to stimulate growth. The growing surplus is providing a major lift to the Japanese, while proving a drain on the American economy. Worldwide Surplus Up 25 Percent Some business leaders and economists said that the prospects of further growth in Japan's surplus was thus setting the stage for more serious clashes between Tokyo and Washington when attention turns from the Presidential election to the nuts and bolts of America's economic problems. Japan's worldwide surplus rose 25 percent in September from a year earlier to a record $12.1 billion, the Finance Ministry reported. The surplus with the United States reached $4.84 billion for the month, and $30.4 billion in the first nine months of this year, also a record. The figures released today are measured on what is known as a customs-cleared basis. They do not include various expenses, including insurance and freight. If the surplus were measured with all the costs included, called the balance of payments basis, it would be from 20 percent to 30 percent larger. Those figures, the most commonly cited, are not expected for several weeks, but they are also likely to show yawning Japanese surpluses. What the trade imbalance signifies for Americans is that "we are losing our competitiveness and at a fairly rapid rate, far more than most people believe," said Joseph T. Gorman, chairman of TRW Inc., a major technology company and auto parts manufacturer, and chairman of the U.S.-Japan Business Council. Mr. Gorman said that he felt his council was making progress in cooperating with Japanese companies to increase their imports of American goods, but that he was frustrated at how little tangible progress was being made even after years of effort. The problem is underscored by the fact that Japan's surplus is responsible for most of the country's current economic expansion, which nevertheless is meager, while helping keep America's growth at an anemic pace, economists say. Robert Alan Feldman, economist here for Salomon Brothers Asia, said Japan's trade surplus would provide about 60 percent of | Japan's Trade Surplus Hits New High |
561040_1 | one Mr. O'Keefe mentioned. Mr. O'Keefe, a budgeteer who has yet to sit for Senate confirmation of his post and who has never served in the military, decided after conferring with Defense Secretary Dick Cheney, who likewise has never served, that he has the moral authority to discredit the cultural ethos of the entire Navy based on the conduct of a group of drunken aviators in a hotel suite. Then last week Mr. O'Keefe announced a budgetary plan that would move the Navy away from its operational centerpiece, the aircraft carrier. In an era marked by greater emphasis on swift, maneuverable response, he reasoned that future confrontations would begin after lengthy diplomacy -- unlike the dozens of recent crises met or pre-empted through the quick dispatch of carriers. A vacuum has emerged where the Navy used to have a spine. It was evident in the Tailhook investigation, termed a cover-up by the Pentagon inspector general, that should have been resolved quickly and without sweeping damnation. It is evident today, as the Navy is being maligned and diminished before our eyes. Where are the senior admirals? We measure the greatness of institutions by their resilience and tenacity under stress. These traits are manifested through leaders who were imbued, as they made their way up the promotional ladder, with a solemn duty to preserve sacrosanct ideals and pass them on to succeeding generations. A true leader knows that this obligation transcends his own importance, and must outlast his individual tour of duty. In the military the seemingly arcane concepts of tradition, loyalty, discipline and moral courage have carried the services through cyclical turbulence in peace and war. Their continuance is far more important than the survival of any one leader. It is the function of the military's top officers to articulate that importance to the civilian political process. And an officer who allows a weakening of these ideals in exchange for self-preservation is no leader at all. Key military officials began making such swaps during the Vietnam War, beginning an unhealthy pattern that still predominates. Too often, gaining high promotion means hitching one's wagon to a political star, all the while either ducking or finessing politically sensitive issues. Today at the highest levels of the U.S. military one searches vainly for a leader who deserves mention along with the giants of the past. Those who might have reached such heights failed the | Witch Hunt in the Navy |
561012_7 | integrated circuits in developing receivers capable of monitoring tens of millions of radio channels simultaneously. The receivers were built by the Silicon Engines Company in Palo Alto, Calif., and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. These receivers were designed to sift through the natural radio noise of the cosmos and identify possible artificial signals, which are usually confined to a narrow range of frequencies and are highly polarized and coherent. Once every second, a computer will examine each channel, looking for a signal that is constant or relatively constant. Natural signals tend to be spread over a wide and varying range of frequencies. The search will be conducted over the range of radio frequencies between 1,000 megahertz and 10,000 megahertz, the microwave region of the spectrum where there is the least background noise from astrophysical sources. These "magic places" in the spectrum would presumably be recognized by another advanced civilization as the frequencies of choice for interstellar communications. Astronomers are planning a coordinated two-prong search strategy, one operation looking at known solar-type stars and the other conducting an all-sky survey. In the first program, known as the targeted search, the world's largest radiotelescope, the 1,000-foot-wide dish antenna at Arecibo, Puerto Rico, will systematically tune in on some 800 stars within 100 light-years of Earth that are similar to the Sun in both age and size. Presumably these stars could have planetary systems where life might have evolved. The targeted search, directed by the Ames Research Center, will eventually enlist other telescopes at Green Bank and, to cover the Southern Hemisphere, in Australia. Using such large antennas, this search will be the most sensitive and will be able to listen to 14 million channels in the radio band between 1,000 and 3,000 megahertz. For the all-sky survey, directed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, telescopes will be searching the full microwave spectrum up to 10,000 megahertz but in a somewhat more cursory way. The first reconnaissance will be conducted by NASA's 112-foot deep-space tracking antenna at Goldstone in the Mojave Desert of California. Other antennas will tune in later to widen the search. As astronomers prepared to begin the survey by switching on receivers at Arecibo and Goldstone, Dr. Tarter said that everything before had been prologue. "We will do more searching in the first minute this time than all other efforts have done for the past 30 years," she said. | Astronomers Open New Search for Alien Life |
560004_2 | their families, which is based in Concord, Mass., lost her jaw to cancer 20 years ago and has since had reconstructive surgery. "Parents are embarrassed, but kids will ask me why my face looks funny," Ms. Wilson said. "I tell them that I was very sick, that this is what the doctors did to make me better and that it isn't painful. That honors their curiosity and doesn't tell them that it's bad." Older children sometimes face more difficult problems with others' reactions. Jill Krementz, the author of "How It Feels to Live With a Physical Disability" (1992, Simon & Schuster, $18), found that while many of the disfigured children she interviewed received support from their peers, a few were teased mercilessly or even attacked by schoolmates because of how they look. "The only children who had a really painful time from their peers were the ones who had facial disfigurements," Ms. Krementz said, adding that children who are missing limbs or have other disabilities are more likely to receive comments on how well they are doing. "But because the other kids don't know what to say and are fearful of saying the wrong thing, they sometimes avoid the disabled kids altogether," she continued. Since adolescence is a time when all children are more sensitive about how they look, it can be particularly trying for children who are disfigured. They are bombarded by messages on television and in magazines that equate physical beauty with success, popularity and attractiveness. They are told (and believe) that even small defects, like a pimple, can lead to social rejection. They long simply to blend in with their peers. "One of the hardest parts of facial disfigurement is that you lose your anonymity," Ms. Wilson said. "You have no control over people staring at you. We need, as parents, to get children to see the person behind the face." Getting to Know the Child Behind the Face IF your child looks different from his peers, there are some things you can do to help everyone in the class or play group understand one another better. The first step is usually to meet with teachers and administrators at your child's school to talk not only about your child's disabilities, if any, but also about his strengths. Try to anticipate questions, and offer to provide information that will help them appreciate your child for who he is. | PARENT & CHILD |
560031_0 | To the Editor: For those professionals who have been working with children caught up in the child welfare system, your series of articles on "Shattered Lives: When Foster Care Fails" (front pages, Sept. 8 to 10) comes as no surprise. Your portrayal of the inadequacies of the overburdened child welfare system and the overwhelmed and poorly trained or prepared staff are clearly accurate. But the series focuses primarily on the mental health consequences for the affected children and omits another very important issue, namely the increased frequency of developmental disabilities including mental retardation, pervasive developmental disorders, learning disabilities, attention deficit disorders and neuromuscular problems that are being noted among children in the foster care system. A series of reports in recent years have suggested that up to 40 percent of the children served by child welfare agencies have developmental disabilities. Higher rates of premature births, lack of prenatal care, increased maternal substance abuse and H.I.V. infection rates may account for some of these findings, but there are other medical and environmental factors that may also contribute to the adverse outcomes. Our own center, the Children's Evaluation and Rehabilitation Center of Albert Einstein College of Medicine, is the largest of its kind for children with disabilities in New York State. Almost 20 percent of the 7,000 children brought here each year for the diagnosis or treatment of a developmental disability are currently not being cared for by a biological parent. This frightening figure illustrates the total breakdown of family structure among the children we serve. Though it may not be entirely representative of children living in the Bronx, it does highlight the potential destructive effects on mental or physical development among children who have been abandoned or had to be removed from parental care. One interesting, but unfortunate, confirmation of the poor staff training for child welfare personnel mentioned in your series is the fact that it is usually the foster parent who identifies the child's developmental problem and need for help, and not the child welfare worker who is supposed to arrange and monitor the placement. HERBERT J. COHEN, M.D. Director, Children's Evaluation and Rehabilitation Center Bronx, Sept. 16, 1992 | More Developmental Ills Seen in Foster Children |
562446_0 | World Economies | |
562517_4 | the sale of each ton of sugar under a heavily subsidized, three-decade arrangement with the former Soviet Union, sales of each ton of Cuba's principal crop, sugar, provide the means to purchase only 1.4 tons of oil. Harshly affecting nearly every sector of the economy, Cuba's annual oil imports have fallen to about 6 million tons from a Soviet-era high of about 13 million tons. In an additional blow, a lack of money forced Cuba to suspend indefinitely its construction of a large Soviet-designed nuclear power plant that would have reduced dependence on oil. In deals with former Soviet republics, economists estimate, Cuba has been able to reconstitute only about one quarter of its lost trade with the Soviet Union. More important, what imports remain are at world market prices, not subsidized as in the past. To stem its economic collapse, Mr. Castro's Government has thrown whatever resources it could muster into a few priority fields like foreign tourism development and biotechnology, which it has hoped would supplant the sugar industry as income sources. With these investments providing mixed results, Mr. Aldana and many mid-level party officials gingerly urged greater economic and even political reforms. Last year, in an interview with an American reporter, Mr. Aldana indicated that the Communist Party was prepared to allow opposition figures to run for seats in the National Assembly. Crackdown on Dissidents Since Mr. Aldana's interview, however, tolerance for criticism of the Government has all but disappeared. Dissidents have been taken from church services by plainclothes agents, and one critic of the Government, Sebastian Arcos, faces a six-year prison sentence in a trial now under way for having written a letter to the United Nations complaining of human rights violations. In the economic realm, the reforms proposed by party pragmatists like Mr. Aldana were aimed at allowing small farmers to sell their own produce and introducing limited free enterprise by Cuban tradesmen. But at Cuba's fifth Communist Party Congress last October, Mr. Castro invoked a distaste for inequality as he personally beat back suggestions to allow farmers to market their own produce. At the same time, he pushed through constitutional reforms that allow him unilaterally to declare a state of emergency in case of crises that "affect internal order or the security or stability of the state." Since then, economists say, the Government has plowed ahead with survival schemes inspired by the inefficient Soviet | Castro Steels a Suffering Nation for Confrontation |
562488_5 | and shrublands, Dr. Fishman said, the NASA plane on a number of days flew through the equivalent of "a smoke-filled room, but then on an enormous regional scale." "At one point, just north of Brasilia, almost every instrument went off scale," he said. "It was unbelievable. People went wild. We were approaching a Stage 2 smog alert in Los Angeles, and that at 11,000 feet." In a Stage 2 alert, on a three-stage scale, children and the elderly are advised to stay indoors. Tropical storms over Brazil pumped the pollution quickly up to great heights, the scientists found, and high-altitude winds carried it to southern Brazil. "We saw a great outflow from south Brazil, curving toward the South Atlantic," Dr. Fishman said. "I am confident that we have registered a part of the impact on the ozone bulge coming from South America." Crossing the Atlantic, researchers detected high ozone levels between 25 degrees west and 25 degrees east, often three times as high as expected. Where Fire, There's Smoke "We found ozone and a bunch of nitrogen gases with the potential to make ozone at levels two to three times higher than you'd expect at a remote ocean site," said one of the researchers, Robert Talbot of the University of New Hampshire. As they approached Africa, they said, pollution became heavier and they picked up thick currents of smoke and particles from the seasonal fires set by farmers, ranchers and herdsmen. That day and on the ones before, satellites registered fires across much of the southern tier of Africa -- in Angola, Zambia, Zaire and South Africa. While ozone concentrations cannot be seen with the naked eye or by a camera from space, the NASA team had developed a method to extrapolate its presence from satellite data. By looking at smoke plumes and wind patterns, they assumed that fires were the main source for the Atlantic ozone. But only on this mission are scientists getting on-the-spot measurements and a sweeping view including Brazil, the South Atlantic and Africa. Adding to their sense of discovery is the knowledge that few studies have been made of the skies over the South Atlantic, most of them shipboard measurements. "There's no weather here -- there are no big storms, no hurricanes, no monsoons," Dr. Fishman said, "so meteorologists generally ignored it." The most powerful tool the scientists are using for their new map is | Massive Ozone and Smog Defile South Atlantic Sky |
564326_6 | They are supposed to help you through." Kevin Slater, the multicultural consultant, said that many disputes between blacks and whites in Oneonta entailed the overt or unspoken threat to call the police. And that reflex, he added, was driven by fear. "All the images you see on television and film, up until a few years ago, were of black men as big, destructive and threatening," he said. "Police see themselves as protectors of the whites. When it comes to blacks, they see themselves as suppressing an insurrection." Mayor Brenner attributes the tension to the behavior of black students, who he says are quick to take offense. "A part of that is the place from which they came, the baggage they bring with them, the heritage they bear," he said. "The white student is less likely to answer viscerally. He doesn't feel threatened as much as a black person would." As a move toward healing, Mayor Brenner said the police force would hire its first minority officer. However, the Mayor noted that some things are not easily changed. He confessed that he had spoken with a top executive of Bresee's, the 93-year-old family-owned department store that anchors Main Street, who told him the store had a policy of following blacks and those who display suspicious behavior. "In her mind, she combined the two," Mayor Brenner said. At weekly community meetings on race relations, the store's practices are the topic of regular discussion, as is a possible boycott. Mark Bresee, the owner, denied his store had a policy of following black customers, but he said sales people were instructed to call security "if they felt intimidated." Most of the shoplifters the store catches are white, he added. Mr. Bresee, like many whites here, said there were no racial problems in Oneonta. He appeared shocked to hear that the black students and residents have felt persecuted, and presumed they were viewing unrelated slights through a prism of race. Mr. Bresee said most disturbances were among white students on weekend nights. Clashes between fraternities have left three white students hospitalized since school started. He recalled a visit to the store by 20 drunk fraternity brothers who frightened sales people. But one of the youths explained they were hazing a new member, who had to try on women's underwear. "Of course, I let them do it," he said. "There were 20 of them and they'd | Singling Out Blacks Where Few Are to Be Found; Amid Hills of Rural New York, Students From Inner City Find Not-So-Hearty Welcome |
564446_0 | A POCKET-SIZED monkey with a koala-like face has been discovered in a remote part of the Amazon, the latest evidence that the world's largest rain forest has yet to give up all of its secrets, a biologist says. The monkey, which has a hint of zebra stripes, is a previously unknown species, and its discovery "shows how poorly we still know an area like the Amazon," said the biologist, Dr. Russell Mittermeier of Conservation International. The environmental group, based in Washington, conducts research projects aimed at preserving biological diversity. Dr. Mittermeier's scientific description of the monkey was published in the current issue of the Brazilian scientific journal Goeldiana. The monkey, christened the Maues (pronounced mah-WAYSS) marmoset, was found this year by Marco Schwarz, a Swiss biologist, in an undisturbed area near the Maues River, a tributary of the Amazon 800 miles upriver from the Amazon delta. The Maues marmoset is the third new monkey to be discovered in Brazil since 1990, Dr. Mittermeier said. With the latest discovery, Brazil now has 68 known species of primates, more than one-quarter of all the primate species in the world, Dr. Mittermeier said. Primates include monkeys, apes, lemurs and humans. SCIENCE WATCH | New Type Of Monkey Is Found |
563477_0 | To the Editor: "Peru's Invisible Judges: A Faceless Tyranny?" (news article, Sept. 27) describes fears that stripping defendants of their rights in secret courts with anonymous judges will set back justice and catch both innocent and guilty. You fail to say that the United States "war on drugs" has pushed use of "faceless judges" in Peru, Colombia and Bolivia. Since 1987, the Drug Enforcement Administration and the State Department have pressed Andean countries to strengthen and put resources into these special courts to get top drug traffickers and guerrillas. This is under Administration of Justice, a little-known United States aid program, which gave Colombia, Peru and Bolivia $16 million in fiscal year 1992. As in Peru, the prosecution in Colombia can present evidence and witnesses kept secret from defense lawyers, violating due process. Critics fear that these measures will be used to stifle democratic dissent, rather than criminal terror. Indeed, in Colombia special courts are being used to prosecute organizers of nonviolent political rallies. In Bolivia and Colombia, special courts have sentenced far more peasant coca farmers and petty processors than top traffickers and guerrilla leaders. The Administration of Justice program was developed for problems of underfunded, corrupt and inefficient judiciaries, whose reform is vital for improving justice and curbing human rights violations in the Andes. This program should contribute to better personal protection for judges, lawyers and witnesses, improved salaries, and more humane and effective investigative police forces. Stripping away the rights of defendants is not the way to do it. CHUCK CALL Associate, Washington Office on Latin America Washington, Oct. 1, 1992 | Washington Backs Secret Latin Courts |
563254_0 | The animal house at the Sarajevo zoo is almost silent now, except for volleys of automatic rifle fire directed toward it from the heights immediately above. Gone are the roars of the caged lions and leopards and the wolves' howls that punctuated the summer nights. Gone, too, is the lone zookeeper who risked his life to take them food. While the battle for survival by 400,000 people trapped by the Serbian siege continues, the struggle has been all but lost at the zoo. Only one animal, a female black bear, remains alive of the 100 there when the siege began in April. She is mangy, perhaps half her weight when her ordeal started, and she barely has the strength to stand upright against the rusting bars of her cage when visitors arrive with a loaf of bread and a few snatches of grass. 'People Made This War' "Many of us are dead and almost everybody is hungry, but I feel more sorry for the animals than for the people," said Adem Hodzic, a 32-year-old taxi driver who runs every second or third day across the 150 yards of grassy space that separates the animal house from the sandbagged militia headquarters where Mr. Hodzic and other volunteers guard the city's northern perimeter. He added: "People made this war, but the animals had nothing to do with it. They're only victims." The scene in the animal house is wrenching. A putrid odor pervades the concrete building, and cage after cage is littered with the carcasses of lions, tigers, leopards and pumas. From the skeletal remains of some and the whole carcasses of others, it is clear that some died sooner than others, and that their surviving mates fed on the bodies before they, too, succumbed to hunger. In the cage where there were once four bears, the sole survivor prowls amid the jawbones and rib cages and tufted skins of the others. The big cats and bears and wolves lasted longer than the giraffe, the ponies and the buffaloes, which were in paddocks exposed to Serbian positions when the siege set in. By midsummer, they were dead, shot out of pity, perhaps, or maybe for target practice. One zookeeper was killed by a sniper while trying to keep up the feeding and another was wounded. A third continued on the deadly missions until August, entering the zoo only at night when there | Sarajevo Journal; In the Zoo's House of Horrors, One Pitiful Bear |
560967_1 | territory. Cabinet officials in both Singapore and Indonesia have expressed strong concerns and urged that the ship steer clear of populated islands and avoid the most direct route, the Strait of Malacca, where piracy and collisions have been frequent recently. Several countries have said that if the ship runs into trouble, Japan should not count on making an emergency port call. Neighbors in the Dark Japanese officials have repeatedly offered assurances that the risk of a major accident is minuscule. But much of the friction over the shipments seems prompted by what one Southeast Asian diplomat recently termed "Japanese arrogance" in not disclosing the security and emergency arrangements for what many say is a ripe target for terrorists: a slow-moving, lightly guarded cargo of nuclear fuel that, albeit with considerable work, could be turned into dozens of crude atomic weapons. The cargo ship, the Akatsuki Maru, left Yokohama in August for Cherbourg, France, where it will pick up the plutonium. The date of its departure from France has not been announced. Japan has little choice but to go ahead with the shipments. For years, it has been shipping the waste from its nuclear plants to France and Britain for reprocessing, and those countries have said they will not become permanent storage sites for the material. After developing a security plan with the Pentagon -- the United States has approval rights over the shipment because it originally sold the nuclear fuel to Japan -- Tokyo has refused to tell its neighbors what countries the ship will pass in its long voyage across the Atlantic and Pacific. In a terse statement the other day, the chief Cabinet secretary, Koichi Kato, said, "The route will be decided shortly before the ship leaves France." No matter which way it traverses the globe on a journey of roughly 15,000 miles, the ship seems virtually certain to cut through the heart of the South Pacific, a region used for decades as an atomic testing ground for the United States and France, a dump for radioactive wastes and recently a destruction site for chemical weapons. "The pattern is this," President Dowiyogo, who was not invited by the Government, said today at a conference of opponents of the plan that Japanese officials declined to attend. "Other countries, larger and more powerful than us, impose upon the Pacific peoples the unwanted costs of their technologies, while they extract all | Japan's Plan to Ship Plutonium Has Big and Little Lands Roaring |
560943_0 | World Economies | |
560982_1 | most hated by President Fidel Castro, did not return telephone calls to the office of his construction company in Miami or his foundation's public relations agency in New Jersey. Mr. Montaner could not be reached in Miami or at his offices in Madrid. The widening of differences between Mexico and Cuba comes at a bad time for Cuba, analysts said. Having lost nearly all the trade and economic support it once received from countries of the former Soviet bloc, Cuba has worked vigorously over the last two years to strengthen its economic and political ties in Latin America. Mexico, which has long been a diplomatic lifeline for the Cuban Government, became increasingly important to that strategy as some other Latin American governments and Spain grew more openly critical of Mr. Castro's unwillingness to move toward more pluralistic government. With the House of Representatives' recent approval of a bill to strengthen the United States economic embargo against Cuba, Latin American diplomats and other experts had expected Mexico's role as a channel for foreign investment and trade to increase. While Mexico still buys only a tiny fraction of Cuba's exports, the value of Mexican imports jumped from $7.5 million in 1988 to $48.9 million in 1990, according to figures of the Mexican Central Bank. Mexican exports to Cuba have fallen slightly, from $118.9 million to $100.1 over the same period. Cuban Voices 'Astonishment' In an interview Wednesday, a member of the Cuban Politburo, Roberto Robaina, said that when Cuban officials learned of Mr. Salinas's meetings with the two exiles, "we made clear our disagreement, and more than that, our astonishment." "This is very strong," said Mr. Robaina, the leader of Cuba's Communist youth organization. "These two people are symbols of the greatest reactionism, of the greatest aggression against our internal stability." Mr. Robaina spoke almost as sharply about the meetings during a news conference Sept. 25, but he was received by Mr. Salinas hours later at the presidential residence. The Mexican Foreign Ministry also issued a brief communique stating, "There are no consequences or reasons that modify the current state of bilateral relations, which correspond to the traditional friendship that prevails between the two peoples." But a Mexican official and foreign diplomats said the meetings had followed appeals to Mexico by United States officials who stressed the potential importance of Cuban-American support to Congressional passage of the trade agreement next year. Some | Mexico's Chief, in a Shift, Meets Two of Castro's Main Foes in Exile |
561488_3 | about five acres of land, materials for a simple house, seed, pesticides, a supply of food and a set of clothes. They are moved to their new homes at Government expense. Transmigration has been around in one form or another since the turn of the century, when the Dutch owners of coffee and rubber plantations forcibly moved thousands of laborers from Java to Sumatra. The current, voluntary program dates back to 1969, when the Government decided it had to defuse a population time-bomb on Java. Indonesia was then, and remains today, one of the few nations to undertake a serious, voluntary effort at population control by redistribution. 'The Largest Colonization' During the Government's five-year planning cycle that began in 1979, 535,000 families were resettled. From 1984 to 1989, 750,000 families were moved. As the numbers grew, so did the criticism. Environmentalists said settlements were being carved out of rain forests. Human rights groups worried about encroachments on tribal lands, especially in Irian Jaya, the Indonesian half of New Guinea, which is home to tribes barely out of the Stone Age. Survival International, a human rights organization based in London, has described transmigration as "the largest colonization program in history" and said "tribal peoples have been pushed aside" for new migration sites. Worried by the criticism, in the late 1980's the Government began to emphasize sending fewer families to better locations. Satellite imagery is being used to select sites with fertile soil where environmental damage can be contained. The program hopes to move 60,000 families this year, less than half of its annual goal a few years ago. The decision to scale back has been attributed both to the need for change and to a drop in the Government's revenue from oil, a critical export. The cutbacks have quieted some, but not all, of the criticism. According to the World Bank report, two-thirds of the migrants report that they have higher incomes as a result of joining the program, and most said they were satisfied with their lives. "Just after I first arrived here in 1986, several families went home to Java because they were uncomfortable here and they found life as migrants too difficult," said Nani, a 38-year-old farmer who lives at a migration site in Sumatra. "Now, nobody talks about leaving. Even though I get homesick for Java and I think sometimes the life there was easier, we will | Rearranging the Population: Indonesia Weighs the Pluses and the Minuses |
560231_2 | What about the role of genetics in aggression and violence? Historically there has been a lively debate between so-called nurture versus nature in describing the origins of human behavior. We now know that most human behavior is a composite of both. Any mother will tell you her newborn child comes into the world with a distinct temperament. Is this biology? Is this genetics? We do know it is not environment. We do know a black baby is not destined to be violent any more than a white or Hispanic child just because of the color of his eyes, skin or parents' skin. The great majority of our children of all races are not violent. Epidemiological surveys have shown, however, that a small proportion (6 to 10 percent) of adolescent males account for a substantial part of all delinquent acts and the majority of serious and violent offenses. These adolescents have histories of serious conduct problems at an early age. Risk factors include association with deviant peers, poor school involvement and parenting practices, and exposure to family violence. To this end, research programs at the Department of Health and Human Services explore the effects of the environment on children's ability to deal with frustration and stress, on ability to learn, on self-esteem, and ability to give and accept love. Our research programs also explore the effects of illicit drugs and alcohol on aggressive behavior, the effects of exposure to violence on mothers and children, the effects of child and sexual abuse on both child and adult behavior and the effects of intra-family violence. For example, a recent study found evidence that being a victim of physical abuse leads to a cycle of violence. The experience of being abused, more than any other factor -- poverty, deprivation, marital conflict, childhood health or temperament -- increases risk for chronic aggressive behavior. We need sound research to inform policymakers, communities, teachers, clergy and families about who might be at risk for being victims or perpetrators of violence and what interventions might prevent it. Violence is a national crisis of many dimensions, including public health. I have full confidence in the scientific and ethical merit of the Public Health Service's research activities on the problem of violence and pledge that these programs and their leadership are free of any racial bias. LOUIS W. SULLIVAN, M.D. Secty. of Health and Human Services Washington, Sept. 24, 1992 | U.S. Violence Studies Are Free of Racial Bias |
560082_2 | to become President of The Citadel, the military college in South Carolina. He had been at the Citadel for less than a year when he resigned because alumni and the board of the school resisted his efforts to liberalize the curriculum and admissions policies and to control hazing. Too many people in the United States, he wrote afterward, compromise and accommodate in order to accomplish tasks. "I do not advocate a P.O.W. name, rank and serial number stance at every board of directors meeting here at home. "But neither do I advocate suppressing moral sensibility in the interest of cooperation -- or tenure." In 1984 he accused his former military superiors of fabricating the incident that pulled the United States into the Vietnam War. As a Navy pilot in 1964, he said, he had not seen the North Vietnamese attack the destroyer U.S.S. Maddox in the Gulf of Tonkin. Commissioned in 1946 James Stockdale was born Dec. 23, 1923, in Abingdon, Ill., the son of a potter. After graduation from the Naval Academy he was commissioned as an ensign in 1946, then spent most of his career in the Navy in aviation. He was a test pilot, a squadron commander of supersonic fighters and an air wing commander. After his release from the prisoner of war camp, he spent several years as president of the Naval War College in Newport, R.I. Mr. Stockdale moved to California after he left the Citadel to be a senior research fellow at the Hoover Institution, the conservative research center at Stanford University, and he has worked there ever since. Mr. Stockdale's wife, Sybil, met Mr. Perot in the late 1960's when they worked together to call attention to the plight of American prisoners of war in Vietnam. He said today that he and Mr. Perot had been friends "ever since I got off the plane from Hanoi in 1973." The Stockdales, who have been married 45 years, have four sons and five grandchildren. Together, they wrote a book, "In Love and War," which was turned into a television movie by NBC in 1987. When he headed the Naval War College he used to teach about the Book of Job. "You have to be a man," he would tell his students, "as Job was asked to be a man by his Lord, and stand up like a man when you are faced with undeserved hardship." | THE 1992 CAMPAIGN - Man in the News: James Bond Stockdale; Eager to Face the Test |
560118_2 | a dismal market. "I didn't come in expecting anything better because people out of college were having trouble getting jobs," said Sara Gold, a second-year student who graduated from the University of Michigan in 1991. Ms. Gold smiled, shrugged and added, "That's why a lot of people are here in law school." In the fall of 1990, as Ms. Gold was applying, 425 employers interviewed at Penn. In 1991, there were about 325. "This year we've had a little bit more, well, slippage," said Ms. Davis said, adding, "I'm trying to think of the word you use when people call and break your heart and say, 'We're crossing Penn off our list.' " Other schools, too, have been crossed off lists. The National Association for Law Placement, which represents law schools and about 800 employers, is still compiling figures on this fall's recruiting season. But a survey by The New York Law Journal concluded that the 25 largest New York firms are interviewing at an average of 21 law schools this year, down from 26 last year. Trying to Help Carolyn Wehmann of Magness & Wehmann, a Manhattan consulting firm that works for law schools and firms, estimates that in the last five years large East Coast firms have cut their recruiting budgets, including summer program salaries, by half. In addition, she said, many lawyers on the recruiting side complain that their partners say they should "just get out of the business -- that they don't have to do this anymore." Howard Maltby, dean of students at Columbia University's law school, said his office tries to brief students -- whom he described as "still a little too sanguine" -- on the job market by tracking the summer programs at the 25 largest New York firms. In 1980, Mr. Maltby said, the programs hired 600 summer clerks. In 1990 the figure was 1,200. Last summer it was 850. The number projected for next summer is 800. Lean Times in Midwest In this risk-averse population, only the most richly credentialed can be blase. At Columbia, Mr. Maltby said, the number of requests by students for on-campus interviews is up. Students are also casting resumes around the country. Paula Patton, executive director of the National Association for Law Placement, reported a flow of job inquiries from the East and West coasts inward, a result of the widespread impression -- largely mistaken, she added | Balance Shifts as Firms Enjoy Buyer's Job Market |
566651_2 | him who have not made up their minds on the issue. And while most of his constituents do not know Nafta from a cheese spread, the ones who come to his office to lobby him view the agreement as a matter of life and death. "This isn't a moral issue for me an issue of conscience," Mr. Cardin said. "I'm going to vote for it or against it depending on what I decide it means for the jobs in my district." His district is in many respects a microcosm of the country as far as international trade is concerned. Extending from Baltimore's newly developed Inner Harbor, the district takes in two wide strips of the city and some of the northwest and southwest suburbs. It has large Bethlehem Steel, General Motors and Westinghouse factories and a Domino Sugar refinery. It has the nonunion plants of national consumer-products companies like Procter & Gamble and McCormick, the spice company, that are eager to sell their wares in Mexico. The district also has strong unions, which fear losing jobs to Mexico. It has the vestiges of a once flowering textile industry. And it has one of the largest ports on the Atlantic Seaboard, which stands to benefit from imports and exports alike. To help him decide how to vote, Mr. Cardin's staff is trying to evaluate how the various industries in the region might fare under the trade agreement. 'Faces of the Employed' A preliminary analysis shows that jobs would clearly be lost in the garment industry. Financial services companies like USF&G, the insurance conglomerate whose headquarters are in the Third District, would probably not be affected one way or another. Procter & Gamble, which makes Dawn, Ivory and Joy detergents in Baltimore, does not export from this plant to Mexico, so there should be no effect on jobs. But the staff found that the steel products made in Baltimore would probably find a market in Mexico and that General Motors ought to be able to sell in Mexico many more of the commercial vans it builds at its plant on Broening Highway. For a politician like Mr. Cardin, this kind of cold analysis may be helpful but it is generally not decisive. Even if he decides that more new jobs would be created than lost in his district as a result of the trade agreement, he says, he still may vote against | Politics of the Trade Pact: A Lawmaker Who Is Torn |
566540_0 | American women gained another option for birth control today as the Food and Drug Administration approved Depo-Provera, an injectable drug that prevents pregnancy for three months. The contraceptive, which is available in more than 90 countries, has been the focus of a two-decade battle for acceptance in the United States because of disagreements over its cancer-causing potential and because of suggestions that it could be used coercively. The F.D.A. followed the advice of an outside panel of scientists who recommended unanimously last June that the drug be approved as a contraceptive. The maker of the drug, the Upjohn Company of Kalamazoo, Mich., said it should be available in January by prescription. It would be administered by a doctor or a nurse at an office or clinic. The F.D.A. said the drug was more than 99 percent effective in preventing pregnancy. Fewer Choices in America For decades, American women have had fewer contraceptive choices than people in Europe and the rest of the world. That situation has changed rapidly in the last two years year with the approvals of Depo-Provera today and of another long-term method, the Norplant implant, in December 1990. David J. Andrews, acting president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, called the approval "a very exciting development that is long overdue." The agency pointed out that the drug has possible side effects, notably weight gain and menstrual irregularities. The drug, a synthetic hormone similar to natural progesterone, can also cause women to feel tired, weak, dizzy and nervous, and may cause headaches and abdominal pain. In addition, recent studies indicate that the drug may contribute to osteoporosis, the disease that can leave bones thin, brittle and easily breakable. Despite potential drawbacks, the agency said the contraceptive's benefits appeared to outweigh its risks. "This drug presents another long-term effective option for women to prevent pregnancy," Dr. David A. Kessler, the Commissioner of Food and Drugs, said in a statement. "As an injectable, given once every three months, Depo-Provera eliminates problems related to missing a daily dose." 'Long Overdue' Development Dr. Andrew Kaunitz, chairman of the Association of Reproductive Health Professionals, a group that promotes reproductive health, said Depo-Provera "should be considered a mainstream contraceptive choice for women in the United States." The drug is effective birth control that is well suited to a wide variety of women, he said. Mr. Andrews said Planned Parenthood was "glad that the | U.S. Approves Injectable Drug As Birth Control |
566540_3 | program director for the nonprofit women's health group. "We are concerned about bringing a drug linked to cancer into a country where the risk of breast cancer already is so high." In addition, Ms. Pearson said, health advocates for low-income and minority women are concerned about Depo-Provera being pushed on women at clinics because it is an easy means of providing contraception and of assuring compliance. There have been a number of reported incidents in developing countries of Depo-Provera being forced on poor woman, she said. The F.D.A. said that although early animal studies had raised questions about increased breast-cancer risk, numerous later worldwide studies have found the overall cancer risk in humans "to be minimal, if any." At the agency's advisory committee meeting that resulted in the recommendation for approval in June, the report of an international study by the World Health Organization indicated that if all women were counted, there was no additional breast cancer in Depo-Provera users. However, for women under 35, the breast cancer rate increased slightly, it said. But the same study also found that Depo-Provera protected women against endometrial cancer of the uterus. As a condition of the drug's approval, Upjohn agreed to continue studies of the level of the synthetic hormone in users' blood over time and to follow the effect of the drug on bone density to see if it contributes to osteoporosis. Depo-Provera is administered as an injection into the muscle at the back of the arm or in the buttocks. It is delivered as tiny crystals suspended in a water-based solution. Over time, the hormone leaches from the crystals into the body. More than 30 million women around the world have taken Depo-Provera since it was introduced in 1969, according to Upjohn. World Health Organization figures indicate that nearly 9 million women are now using the drug in 90 countries, including Britain, France, Germany, Sweden, Thailand, New Zealand and Indonesia. Could Increase Acceptance Dr. Joseph Speidel, president of the Population Crisis Committee, a nonprofit group that promotes family planning in developing countries, said approval by the United States was likely to erase lingering concerns about the drug's safety and increase its acceptance by women around the world. "This will encourage a number of countries that are reluctant to approve or promote Depo-Provera," Dr. Speidel said in an interview. "Some countries, like India, have a requirement that a drug must be | U.S. Approves Injectable Drug As Birth Control |
562252_5 | sharp drop in hormone production that accompanies menopause. It is on the difficult subject of hormone replacement therapy that the weakness of Ms. Greer's elliptical and fidgety style becomes most evident. On the one hand, she is scathingly critical of the medicalization of middle-aged women and menopause, and she attacks those who have relentlessly promoted lifelong estrogen treatment as a cure, not only for such temporary menopausal symptoms as hot flashes and mood swings, but also for aging itself. She faults the medical establishment for its ignorance about many of the details of menopause, and the pharmaceutical industry for hawking pills and patches indiscriminately. On the other hand, she seems to support the use of estrogen replacement in many cases, at one point saying, "What cannot be denied is that patients usually do feel better on estrogen, a great deal better, so much better that they realize for the first time just how unwell they had felt before estrogen. . . . One is obliged to question the morality of withholding estrogen, rather than the wisdom of prescribing it." The reader is likely to be equally confused by the book's lengthy discussion of traditional treatments like henbane, a coarse and foul-smelling plant historically associated with the practice of witchcraft. Taking on her multicultural-research mantle, Ms. Greer seems to view the famous little plant as a useful sedative for menopausal symptoms, but she also describes it as highly poisonous -- it is a member of the nightshade family -- and in need of a dilution that she fails to explain. In addition, she blithely repeats questionable theories with little scientific evidence to support them, like the idea that liquor is bad for an older woman because alcohol will burn up what little stores of estrogen she has left, and that the aging woman should take up gardening as a way of breathing in native estrogens found in many types of plants. Ms. Greer is no fool, but she is sometimes as loose and flippant with her medical reporting as she accuses the established health-care system of being. In the end, though, much is redeemed by Ms. Greer's glorious final chapter, called "Serenity and Power," which is so rich with song and wisdom that it alone is worth the price of admission. Here we read Emily Dickinson ("Our Summer made her light escape / Into the Beautiful") and Elizabeth Bishop ("The art | The Transit of Woman |
562213_0 | For years, the Japanese Government has refused to say much about its most daring nuclear energy plan: to turn Japanese nuclear waste into plutonium at European reprocessing centers, then ship it to Tokyo to be burned as fuel. The secrecy, the Government says, is needed to keep plutonium from terrorists. But now, weeks before the first lightly guarded convoy is to leave France, countries along its possible routes -- South Africa, Malaysia, Singapore, Chile -- are telling Japan to steer clear of their waters. While the risk of a disaster may be minuscule, the countries say, the results would be devastating: a speck of plutonium can cause cancer and it stays radioactive for thousands of years. Most aggrieved are the Pacific island nations that have long been sites of nuclear testing and dumping grounds for radioactive waste. "Japan has not even had the courtesy to tell us where the shipments are going, or what the emergency plans are," said Bernard Dowiyogo, the President of Nauru (pop. 9,000), last weekend in Tokyo. The Japanese Government is rushing to assure the world that it is taking precautions, though it won't say what they are. It is no more forthcoming about the economics of the plan. When Japan started down the plutonium recycling path, experts said uranium would become scarce and expensive. But it has turned out to be plentiful and cheap -- one reason other countries have abandoned a recycling technology that Japan says it is committed to conquering. | OCT. 4-10: Shipping Plutonium; Not in Our Backyard, A Tiny Nation Tells Japan |
562221_0 | To the Editor: "Shortchanging the World's Children" (editorial, Sept. 17) reminds us that in September 1990 more than 70 heads of state met at the United Nations about the world's children. They set goals and pledged support to reduce the infant mortality rate by one-third and the child malnutrition rate by 50 percent, and to insure basic education for 80 percent. What is regrettable is not just that the United States contribution is falling $100 million short of the stipulated support. The real regret is that the summit's goals are so shortsighted, sentimentally defined and neglectful of real conditions and trends. In third world countries, where population is growing nearly 3 percent a year, and far outruns the means of absorbing, employing and supporting the annual increments, what will be the result of cutting infant mortality by one-third? It will be mainly a jump in the population growth rate to about 4 percent; and an intensified accumulation of these children in the rural and urban slums festering in poverty, disease, prostitution, crime and other forms of misery, as we see in Peru, Mexico City, Calcutta and much of Africa. In the stagnant or slow-growing countries, what will be the ocupations for those children who would be saved from early death, strengthened by better nutrition, and educated to literacy and numeracy? They will suffer through their short life expectancy, or revolt impotently or in organized violent movements like Shining Path; or stream into illegal migration -- to the United States, Western Europe or other enclaves of relative prosperity. The implication here is not to abandon those suffering children. It is rather: (a) to link up remedial actions with preventive actions -- chiefly family planning, contraception, delayed marriage, old-age support (to reduce reliance upon a few surviving children); (b) to plan the remedial actions to stress skill training and well-paying jobs, also housing, medical care and social security, and (c) to program the contributions on a scale suited to remedying these problems, not just to making limited improvements that lead to exacerbated misery. EDWIN P. REUBENS New York, Sept. 21, 1992 The writer retired as a professor of economics at City College, CUNY. | Saving the Children Isn't Half Enough |
562242_0 | I read with interest "Welfare Mothers Facing Time Limit for College" [ Sept. 6 ] . It stated that the first graduates of the Mothers on the Move program "moved on to jobs paying $30,000 or more." As a college graduate with many graduate school credits and extensive work experience in the public and private sectors, I am quite curious as to the nature of these $30,000 jobs that are available to these, or other, students in the current economic climate. I would appreciate further comment on this, and also the course curricula completed that qualified the students for these positions. ELISABETH S. CAFIERO Carmel | Where Are Those High-Paying Jobs? |
562160_1 | and David S. Herman, who are both certified music therapists, get to know children by watching their response to music. The Heartsong sessions, in which groups of 10 to 15 children sit in a circle with student volunteers, move quickly from song to song, as Ms. Goldstein plays the piano and Mr. Herman strums the guitar. The songs may spring from what a particular child says or does, or may stress dynamics and rhythm; songs are also designed to make each child feel welcome in the group. To start each session, Ms. Goldstein, who works most weekdays in the therapeutic recreation department of the Rusk Institute, moves around the circle and sings good morning to each person. Some children join in the singing, while others hold back, but even the shyest boy one recent morning moved his hands to the rhythm. Drumbeats Are Significant Some children are in wheelchairs, and they have been brought from group homes like Ferncliff Manor in Yonkers. Others have been diagnosed with autism or learning disabilities, or they have speech and hearing difficulties and emotional problems. At the first session, which Ms. Goldstein called a get-acquainted time, the therapists watched how each child beat on a drum that was passed around the circle. Loud or soft, steady or sporadic, the children's drumbeats are "very significant," revealing "how they relate to the world," Ms. Goldstein said. The drum is also used to teach social lessons like taking turns and listening to others and helping with physical coordination. For instance, when Ms. Goldstein told the group to "beat once on the drum," most children couldn't do it. Beating one time and stopping takes "a lot of coordination," Ms. Goldstein said. She said she expected the children to learn "the kinesthetic feel of beating once" as the weeks went by. Helping Children to Connect The first week, however, the leaders said they tried to relax the children while they made mental notes about especially resistant, angry or withdrawn youngsters. Even ferocious feelings have their place in music-therapy sessions, Ms. Goldstein said, so long as children don't hurt themselves or other people. Mr. Herman, who has worked with both children and adults in such places as the Village Child Development Center and the Terence Cardinal Cooke Health Care Center, both in Manhattan, said much new research was needed on the ancient relationship between medicine and music. "Music provides a | Using Music as a Joyful Tool to Help Disabled Children |
562115_0 | THIS WEEK | Scare Tactics |
561906_9 | When water and electricity are rationed, usually as a result of Shining Path sabotage, they are unevenly distributed, with the rich sections getting more than the poor ones. Now Peru, like other countries, finds that its secondary cities are exploding too. Arequipa, Ilo and Cusco are all expanding at 5 to 8 percent a year. "The big cities do not offer the same attractions they offered 10 years ago," said Francisco Leon, a United Nations economist. "They are saturated, so people are turning to intermediate cities, but that creates new problems. Where do you get money to provide basic services? You have many of these places that are essentially going from being small villages to complete cities in a matter of years." Forest Is Falling To the Settlers And there are potentially long-lasting environmental consequences. One casualty of the Susana Higushi settlement is one of Lima's few natural forests: a stately stand of eucalyptus trees in the desert that surrounds the city. On many nights, one or two of the trees are mysteriously cut down, expanding the borders of the shantytown and at the same time slowly destroying one of the few remaining barriers in Lima to total desertification. The settlement continues to grow with the arrival of people like Fernando Ortiz, who stood outside his straw hut one day pulling nails out of boards that he planned to use to shore up the structure. He and his wife, Maleni, fled Ayacucho, the cradle of the Shining Path, arriving about a month ago. They had given up a good school for their daughter, a clean hospital and a home with electricity and running water for a patch of dust and a hope that they could avoid guerrilla violence. Mrs. Ortiz said she was so troubled by the violence that she did not mind losing those amenities. The only thing she really laments, she said, is that her daughter is not speaking her native Quechua, and will inevitably lose much of the cultural heritage of the Indians of the Peruvian Andes. "In the sierras the people are very strong and alive, and you can feel it in the language," she said. "Here in the city, a lot of that disappears." But as her husband pointed out, that was a small price to pay. "Many of us don't have a choice," he said. "This is the best we can do right now." | Squalid Slums Grow as People Flood Latin America's Cities |
562122_0 | CALAMITY seemed to be scheduled, like bingo. There was The Morning They Made Coffee With Saltwater, The Day the Swimming Pool Emptied Itself, The Evening the Elevators Became Ovens and The Night the Lights Went Out, to name a few. Somehow calamities turn into tales, and what one remembers are the ocean and an endearing small cruise ship, the Crown Jewel, on her maiden voyage from Barcelona to New York last summer. As some 600 passengers found out, the term maiden voyage, loaded with images of speed and celebrity and champagne, is a magnificent euphemism. "The tenor of a delivery crossing is unique," writes John Maxtone-Graham, in his new book "Crossing and Cruising." "All is not only new," he adds, "it is also scarcely unpacked." Crown Cruise Line, which was still unpacking its ship in midocean, gave no warning that this first cruise might be lacking in finesse. Expectations were high as passengers swaggered with the machismo of the well-traveled through the lounges of Kennedy Airport, en route to Spain. "How many cruises have you folks been on?" "Twenty-two." "Forty-eight." "One hundred and ten." During the 14 days of our passage, many people would succumb to disappointment.They had paid to be pampered, and they were not. I, however, sensed the makings of a good time. The Crown Jewel is an intimate ship, with a traditional atmosphere that spares you the design cliches of many new vessels. Her maiden itinerary, with eight full sea days and calls at Gibraltar, Lisbon, the Azores and Bermuda, was not the usual string of duty-free ports and night sailing. I found an eclectic group of people, age 15 to 60-something, and some found me with such icebreakers as "So are you here to solve a midlife crisis?" With the cooperation from the weather, and it usually cooperates on the southern route across the Atlantic, I quickly fell into the escapist life known as shipboard. Aship's whistle, you see, can make me cry. When the hawsers are dropped and a ship floats free from its dock, it always seems to me as if two people are being torn from each other's arms. The Crown Jewel was not merely sailing from Barcelona. She was leaving, for the first time, the country where she had been built, and she might never be back. Ships visiting the Olympics filled the harbor, ships that might never meet again, and when | A Choppy Maiden Voyage |
562222_0 | To the Editor: "A Census Disparity for Asians in U.S." (news article, Sept. 20) reflects the psychological malaise about money and happiness that is afflicting many people in this society. You report that Asian-American males earn lower salaries than Caucasians despite their higher education credentials. You conclude therefore that an advantage in schooling fails to bring a wage advantage. Contrary to your conclusion, I was pleasantly surprised that the income gap is so close, not so wide. Many of us came to this country only 20 to 30 years ago. For recent immigrants, this is success, not a lamentable case of oppression. The glass is surprisingly full not unequally empty. Like many immigrants, I came to this country to go to graduate school. My material possessions then included a typewriter and a "Long March" brand suitcase (still in my garage). I came looking for education. I got the degrees I wanted; and I found the mentors I love and respect. Education separates man from beast. And, as a businessman, I believe that education always pays off. If we were to disrespect education and therefore never got any, do you know what the mass of us would be earning today? You have mistaken achievement for failure, welcome for persecution and joy for sorrow. Despite all its ills, America is still one of the best places to say and do what one loves. JAMES CHAN Philadelphia, Sept. 23, 1992 | What Income Figures For Asians Also Show |
562275_0 | THE REDISCOVERY OF THE MIND By John R. Searle. 270 pp. Cambridge, Mass.: A Bradford Book/ The MIT Press. JOHN R. SEARLE'S new book, "The Rediscovery of the Mind," could, at a stretch, have been called "The Critique of Cognitive Reason," and indeed one chapter of it is. Just as Kant's "Critique of Pure Reason" attacked the science of speculative metaphysics, which tries to spin a substantial web out of the pure silk of armchair reflection, so Mr. Searle's book takes aim at the dogmas of cognitive science, the ruling philosophy behind much of today's neurophysiology, linguistics, psychology and (above all) artificial intelligence. But such a title would have made it sound ponderous and boring, and Mr. Searle is never that. He likes to tell lively stories about driving, skiing and eating pizzas. His stories often have an explosive polemical point. When he thinks he sees a flaw in what somebody says, he will sidle up behind that person and blow an enormous raspberry. Not literally, of course, for Mr. Searle writes (and presumably behaves) in a temperate and civilized manner. Still, he pulls no punches when it comes to polemics, which in his case it usually does. The victims of his best-known raspberry -- a little story called the Chinese room argument -- are those who believe that the mind is essentially a computer program and those who believe that a computer able to fool a human into thinking it has a mind really does have a mind. With his Chinese room argument, Mr. Searle suggested that a computer could "give a perfect simulation of some human cognitive capacity" with no cognition whatsoever. As he says in his new book: "Simply imagine that someone who understands no Chinese is locked in a room with a lot of Chinese symbols and a computer program for answering questions in Chinese. The input to the system consists in Chinese symbols in the form of questions; the output of the system consists in Chinese symbols in answer to the questions. We might suppose that the program is so good that the answers to the questions are indistinguishable from those of a native Chinese speaker. But all the same, neither the person inside nor any other part of the system literally understands Chinese." Since Mr. Searle presented the Chinese room argument in 1980, there have been plenty of objections to it from those whose | The Lesson of the Drunkand the Streetlight |
565146_2 | for use in healthy women," Dr. Fugh-Berman said, "While the benefits of tamoxifen for primary prevention are highly questionable, the risks are well-documented." Tamoxifen is a synthetic hormone that was discovered 30 years ago and has been in clinical use for more than 15 years. The drug competes with the female hormone estrogen and blocks its effects, and has proven particularly useful against tumors that depend upon estrogen to grow. But on some tissue, the drug produces a mild estrogen-like effect and may afford some older women some protection against heart disease and osteoporosis, a bone-thinning condition. Possible Side Effects The drug can cause depression in a small percentage of women, as well as nausea, vomiting, hot flashes and weight gain in some. In addition, research indicates that the drug can increase the risk of cancer of the lining of the uterus, as well as the chance of developing blood clots. Animal studies indicate the drug could also increase the risk of liver cancer, although scientists said no one knows if this is true of humans. Representative Donald M. Payne of New Jersey, chairman of the subcommittee that began looking into the trial before it began in May, said there was reason for further caution. "In the last year, new research has been published about the dangers of tamoxifen, and new concerns about the study have been raised," he said. Dr. Michael W. DeGregorio of the University of Texas Health Center in San Antonio, told the hearing that he was concerned by evidence that tamoxifen might stimulate the growth of tumors in younger women, and that treated women who later developed breast cancer might get a form that was resistant to tamoxifen therapy. "There are a number of unknowns," he testified. "It may be time to re-review the safety issues about this trial." Dr. Peter Greenwald, the cancer institute's director of cancer prevention and control, said health officials were following studies and other indications of problems with the drug and would stop or modify the trial if serious problems were identified. "No intervention is totally without risk, and tamoxifen does have some potential side effects," Dr. Greenwald said. But he said an estimated 4.5 million women have taken tamoxifen. He added that the cancer institute continues to follow thousands of woman who took the drugs years ago in treatment trials and that all indications are that the drug can be | Questions Raised on Drug Used in Breast Cancer Study |
565101_4 | Caucus, said today: "My worst fear is that they will unscientifically correlate race or social class with violent behavior. That would lead to discriminatory policies." Ronald Walters, chairman of the political science department at Howard University and a member of a group called The Committee to Stop the Federal Violence Initiative, said, "We perceive this as being a particular threat to the black community because of its focus on inner-city youths." Professor Walters said he objected to treating violence as a disease, as called for by using the public-health approach. "If there is a reason for this kind of research, the aim is to find a drug," he said. "And if you begin using drugs to pacify young black males, as is often done with ritalin for hyperactivity, you're creating a regime of social control." The Department of Health and Human Services' plan, Professor Walters said, has come about because the Bush Administration has no interest in allocating resources to overcome the economic and social problems of the inner cities. Whole Program Threatened Such accusations have put Dr. Sullivan on the defensive and led some specialists in the agencies that comprise the Department of Health and Human Services to worry that the whole program may be canceled. Dr. Sullivan himself today insisted there was "no violence initiative with a capital V and a capital I." Instead, he called the document a "planning process for a possible future initiative." The plan would have a proposed budget of about $400 million spread out over the next five years. Most of the research and programs would be sponsored by the Federal Centers for Disease Control and the National Institute of Mental Health. Many of the projects would be expansions of work already under way. Since 1983, for instance, the disease centers have financed research examining whether there is a statistical link between the presence of guns in society and the frequency of violent death. One study compared Seattle and Vancouver, British Columbia, two cities with similar histories, climate and social and economic characteristics but with different gun-control policies. The study found that they had nearly the same rates of burglary, robbery and assault, or similar levels of aggressiveness. But homicide was 60 percent higher in Seattle than in Vancouver, and murder by firearms was 500 percent higher, apparently because handguns are much easier to obtain on the United States side of the border. | Dispute Threatens U.S. Plan on Violence |
566358_3 | set fire to huge areas of Brazil and southern Africa. Scientists here in Namibia also hope that their findings will draw attention to man's own contributions to Africa's erosion and focus on the need for better land management. Specialists have long warned that overgrazing, the cutting of trees and the planting of unsuitable crops damage the fragile arid and semi-arid soils. "People do not cause desertification," Dr. Garstang said, "but they can exacerbate it." Evidence of drought and degraded land is strong across northern Namibia, where 13 years of abnormally low rainfall have turned savanna grass to straw, dried up creeks and water holes and left cattle thin and mangy. Dust devils dance over the plains, and a sudden blast of wind can bring a blizzard of white dust, dense as mist. Among the researchers working here, the scientists from the University of Virginia are probing air and soil around the Etosha Pan, which is now a dried-up lake but which in wetter years was one of Africa's most important breeding areas for flamingos. When the lake last held ample water, in 1979, more than 200,000 flamingos nested on its islands. On a recent afternoon, the only signs of life were some ostriches that seemed to shimmer and float in the heat. At midday, the thermometer registered 126 degrees in the sun. "This is part of mapping the communication between Africa and South America," said Dr. Robert Swap, who was surveying soil conditions and collecting dust. As he stopped for more sampling among thickets of thorn and mopane trees, another team member fielded binoculars, on the lookout for the lions, leopards and other predators that call this place home. Dr. Swap said the dust was likely to contain particles of plants, animal dung and minerals that could be identified and matched with other samples to gain greater insight into the migration of soils. At the team's base camp in Okaukejo, other researchers hoisted filters onto a tower to trap windborne particles. "These will go back to Virginia for isotope analysis," Dr. Garstang, an atmospheric chemist, said as he put on surgical gloves to change the filters, now dotted with virtually invisible dust, and sealed them in sterile bags. The Chemistry Of the Clouds The isotopes in the dust, the basic elements, will be matched with isotopes from other regions in a process called chemical fingerprinting. Scientists say that with this | Winds Sweep African Soil To Feed Lands Far Away |
566358_7 | Asia is of such magnitude, the scientists maintain, that it may account for as much as half the iron in the oceans. Some of the most exciting recent findings, according to Dr. Garstang, show that breeding grounds of fish and dense marine life in swaths of the Atlantic Ocean coincide with the main dust paths coming off Africa. "It's like fertilizer falling into the ocean," Dr. Garstang said. "There is still a lot of work to be done, but satellites tell us that plankton blooms and the dust plumes off Africa coincide." Feeding Forests In the Amazon Equally astonishing to Dr. Garstang was the presence of African dust in the Amazon, which he and fellow researchers detected during a NASA-backed expedition in 1987. Using sensors on a plane and following the winds, they tracked dust from Africa to the rain forest around Manaus, almost 1,000 miles from the Brazilian coast. "Tropical storms acted as a huge vacuum cleaner," Dr. Garstang said. "They sucked the dust clouds inland from the ocean, and the rain dumped the dust on the forest." In its findings, published last year, the group calculated that during every rainy season, the eastern Amazon receives more than 13 million tons of African dust with vital nutrients, including phosphates, which speed plant growth. The research has raised intriguing questions: To what extent does the Amazon depend on the African fertilizers? More complex still, are the African droughts and desert and the South American rain forest linked in a see-saw effect. Dr. Robert Talbot, a member of the group, has argued that records show that the South American rain forest has expanded and contracted just as African deserts have expanded and contracted. The question therefore is whether the forest's waxing and waning is linked partly to the supply of African nutrients. On several points, Dr. Garstang and his colleagues are challenging accepted wisdom. They contend that their findings show that the Amazon rain forest is less of a self-sufficient system than scientists have said. "Not only is African dust fertilizing it," Dr. Garstang said, "but we also found that most of the rainwater is not generated by the forest, as people said, but comes from the ocean and the coast. Any long-term strategy to protect the Amazon rain forest has to take account of the links between the forest, the global climate and arid regions as far away as Africa." | Winds Sweep African Soil To Feed Lands Far Away |
566340_2 | them as well, the intellectual impairments induced by lead often mean they cannot keep up in a regular classroom and instead require remedial education. While a loss of five I.Q. points may not impede a child with a high I.Q., say 125, it could make the difference between success and failure in school for a child on the low end of normal intelligence, say one whose I.Q. falls to 85 from 90, Dr. Mahaffey explained. In the Cincinnati study, for example, an average deficit of eight I.Q. points -- to a score of 83 from 91 -- was found as children's average lifetime blood lead concentrations rose to 35 from 10 micrograms per deciliter. The Australian researchers noted that while "the results indicate that the deleterious effects of environmental lead are not large, and that only a small fraction of the overall variation in I.Q. can be attributed to lead exposure, the social consequences of such an effect are not negligible." They estimated that low-level lead exposure could result in a doubling of the number of children who need remedial education. American health authorities estimated last year that each one-microgram reduction of lead in a child's blood would produce a net savings to society of $2,000. The savings would result from a reduced need for medical attention and remedial education and from avoiding losses in productivity. The new findings show that contrary to assertions by industry and some scientists, the losses in intellectual ability and school performance among children with elevated levels of lead in their blood are not solely the result of genetics or socioeconomic status or any other known influences on mental development. Both the Australian and Boston studies took into account factors like the mother's I.Q., parenting styles, other illnesses, birth order, parental smoking and a host of other possible influences on a child's I.Q. The Australian study, the largest long-term study of lead's effects ever conducted, involved nearly 500 7-year-olds in the lead-smelting community of Port Pirie. The children had been followed from the time their mothers were pregnant, and levels of lead in their blood were measured often. In an earlier report, when the children were 4, the research team, headed by Dr. Peter A. Baghurst, found significant impairments in neurological development as lead levels in infancy and early childhood rose to 30 from 10 micrograms per deciliter. Dr. Baghurst is with the Commonwealth Scientific | Study Documents Lead-Exposure Damage in Middle-Class Children |
566431_4 | But she said, "We already have evidence that PTSD creates lasting changes in the nervous system." So she is studying the possibility that, if someone had children after being traumatized, those biological changes could "in some way be inherited." But researchers say that some of the problems are clearly a response to the erratic behavior of a traumatized father. In a study of 86 children of 40 Vietnam veterans from 1985 to 1988, Dr. Harkness found that many were having more trouble at home than at school. She said that this could indicate that a child's behavior deteriorates whenever the child is around the troubled parent. In fact, everyone in the Mount Pleasant group talked of developing techniques to stay out of the way of their fathers' eruptions. "For a few years, I wouldn't even sit down at the table with him," said one, who is now a college student. "I never knew what would happen next." Dr. Harkness also found that the child of a physically abusive veteran is more likely to have severe behavior problems, poor school performance and difficulty in making friends than the child of a nonviolent veteran. In general, many of the veterans' children also become easily depressed and have more difficulty obeying rules than other children. The researchers say that as these children grow older, they may find it difficult to separate from their families and lead independent lives. Many have learned from their fathers that they should not trust outsiders and that a desire for separation is a betrayal. "One father I counseled would refer to his family as 'my little squad,' " Dr. Margolin said. A related issue has been highlighted by Dr. Yael Danieli, a psychologist in New York City who is a founder and the director of the Group Project on Holocaust Survivors and Their Children. She maintains that an additional burden facing the children of Vietnam veterans may be the stigma attached to their fathers' deeds. "These children have been told that people like their fathers were killers and criminals," she said. "No wonder they grow up feeling alienated and isolated." Indeed, the older ones in the Mount Pleasant group recalled a deep reluctance about letting schoolmates know that their fathers served in Vietnam. As one young man put it, "I was too embarrassed." Experts say that the next step is to develop programs to help these young people. | Vietnam's Scars Reach a New Generation |
562645_4 | freedom from heavy-handed regulation has allowed many industries, but especially in the service sector, to function more efficiently. In fact, the second surprising conclusion is that America's biggest advantage consists of Washington's relatively hands-off attitude, compared with Tokyo or Bonn. This means, for example, that American companies are relatively free to lay off unnecessary workers, to change prices or to enter new businesses or leave old ones compared with their counterparts elsewhere. America's competitors, on the other hand, have forgone higher living standards for all in order to protect the jobs of some. "It's not obvious that the U.S. should be copying a model elsewhere," said William Lewis, director of the McKinsey Global Institute and an Assistant Secretary of Energy under President Jimmy Carter. The United States has moved faster in this direction since the mid-1970's, deregulating airlines, telecommunications, trucking and some parts of banking, among other things. Today, United States airlines are almost a third more productive than European airlines, the study reported, based on the number of workers needed to book passengers, fly them and serve them. The researchers said they had expected the far greater size of the American passenger air market to explain most of that difference. "Big enterprises ought to have advantages over smaller enterprises," Professor Solow said. "There are traces of that. But over all, it's not important." In the case of airlines, for example, the cutthroat competition turns out to be far more effective in keeping the airlines efficient, than their large size or their ability to use the hub system, which brings together large groups of passengers headed for different destinations. In fact, the researchers found the much-vaunted hub system actually reduces the productivity of American airlines by requiring peak staffing. "It means you have ground crews and ticketing agents and a lot of them," Professor Baily said. "You can't service one plane at 4 and another at 4:30 with the same crew." If the analysis in the report is correct, it suggests that Americans bent on improving the nation's competitiveness would be ill advised to retreat from freer trade, openness to foreign direct investment or the deregulation, all of which have characterized the Carter, Reagan and Bush years. "The case studies of service industries point up the role of competition much more sharply than the rest of the economy," Mr. Lewis said. Competition Need Seen Indeed, the report urges the next | U.S. Output Per Worker Called Best |
562706_6 | waves to carry the round-trip messages. As for the telescope itself, the Arecibo observatory has been used since the 1960's to bounce radar signals off Venus and detect diagnostic radio signals from all kinds of celestial phenomena, from the cores of galaxies to the remnants of exploded stars and collapsed stars spinning rapidly and radiating pulses of energy -- pulsars. To collect the radio waves, a bowl-shaped jungle valley in the limestone hills has been covered with 38,778 panels of aluminum mesh stretching over nearly 20 acres. It has been engineered to a precise concavity for accurate observations. Enough light penetrates the mesh to support a lush growth of ferns and orchids underneath. Suspended by steel cables high over the center of this bowl is the feed support platform. Radio waves collected by the bowl are reflected to a focusing point there. A steel arm supporting the receivers and other instruments can be moved in a complete circle for precise pointing. One must take the catwalk or cable car out to the platform, 600 tons hanging in midair, and walk its narrow gangplanks to really appreciate the immensity of the telescope. At the time, the arm was moving slowly, like those revolving restaurants atop some modern hotels, as astronomers took aim on a pulsar. In the tradition of scientists who are always trying to quantify the amazing, Dr. Paul Horowitz, a Harvard University physicist who is conducting his own more modest extraterrestrial search at a telescope in Massachusetts, remarked: "You measure a bowl by how much cereal it will hold. I've heard of calculations that this bowl would hold 357 million boxes of cornflakes." Today the feed platform was slowly moved and pointed in the direction of GL615.1A, the first of the stars to be examined for evidence of extraterrestrial civilizations. View From the Future On the drive away from the observatory, there was speculation as to what future archeologists might surmise if they happened on the ruins of these stone pillars, aluminum panels and huge steel cables and girders. Here a society with scientist-priests communicated with their gods in the heavens? Some Columbuses sought the cosmic Indies, never found? Or this was the place where humans listened in the jungle stillness and for the first time heard that they are not alone in the universe? The plan of the scientists, and their advice to others, is to stay tuned. | Astronomers Start Search For Life Beyond Earth |
564137_0 | World Economies | |
564729_0 | "Be useful as well as ornamental" was one of my father's favorite sayings when I was growing up. And it looks as if I wasn't the only girl who heard it. As we all know by now, it's "the year of the woman." More women than ever are running for political office. Experts commonly attribute the rise in women's political participation to the confluence of several events and trends: the Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas imbroglio, the chipping away of abortion rights, the growing presence of women in the work force. But while these cultural phenomena are indeed sending women into politics, American demographics and natural biological forces are motivating them, too. The demographic factor is well known: the age wave. Seventy-six million Americans were born between 1946 and 1964. Hail the baby boom, a mass production following World War II. These men and women have been moving through society like a pig through a python, changing social life since they were born. Their interests have been the country's issues. Now, as boomer women enter midlife, menopause has become one of their concerns. Two generational spokeswomen, Gail Sheehy and Germaine Greer, have recently written books on the subject. Though the books broke new ground, another point needs to be made. In concert with the age wave, this change in female biology will certainly contribute to women's rise to political power. As menopause proceeds, levels of the female hormone estrogen steadily decline -- unmasking natural levels of testosterone. Testosterone is one of nature's potent cocktails. The predominantly male hormone is linked with assertiveness in animals and people. Scientists have established that men (and male monkeys) of high rank often have elevated testosterone levels. In many societies, middle-aged women (with relatively high levels of testosterone) gain influence in political, religious, economic and social life. As Margaret Mead once said, "There is no greater power in the world than the zest of a post-menopausal woman." So it is likely that boomer women will attain authoritative political positions as well. Certainly, there are cultural reasons for women's midlife rise in status. Released from the constant chores of rearing children, menopausal women are freer to pursue activities outside the home. But biology, in this case, is working in their favor. How ironic, too, given the fact that science has historically been used to bar women from power. Menstrual cycles made us unreliable in combat, biology left us | Mighty Menopause |
564669_0 | MY brother and I never regretted that our parents' limited finances precluded a hefty dose of after-school lessons in this, that and the other activity. After school for us meant play time. Alone, with each other and with friends on the block, we played with dolls, pets, marbles, stamps, Erector sets, trucks, puzzles, bikes, jump ropes and roller skates. Groups of us played street games like stickball and hide-and-seek. Way back in the 1940's, a fellow third-grader and I built a rocket and studied the stars for possible destinations. Even my mother, a teacher, agreed that after dark was time enough to do homework, a pattern I later passed on to my sons. The richness of my own childhood had convinced me that cutting into children's time for spontaneous play by overloading them with activities scheduled by parents could impair, not foster, their development by interfering with their chance for self-discovery and enjoyment of life. The Value of Play "All children play; they can't help but do it," says Dr. Jerome Kagan, a child development expert at Harvard University. The very universality of play should be a clue to its importance to human development. Play, as some experts put it only half in jest, is the work of childhood. Play gives children a chance to explore their talents and interests and exercise physical and mental skills. It allows them to test ideas and practice activities in the safety of make-believe. It helps them learn to share and assert themselves and develop tolerance, persistence and patience. Through various kinds of play, children can develop better hand-eye coordination, stronger bodies, improved problem-solving skills, a richer imagination and interests in a wide range of subjects, from astronomy to art. Dr. Brian Sutton-Smith, an expert on play at the University of Pennsylvania, has written, "Research has shown that children who play often both solitarily and socially become more creative and imaginative than those whose exposure to play and toys is limited." Dr. Sutton-Smith is the author of "Toys as Culture" (Gardner Press) and a forthcoming book, "The Search for Play" (Harvard University Press). A recent study by Dr. Lawrence S. Newman at the University of North Carolina showed that playing with various objects enhanced children's memories. Children aged 4 and 5 were much more likely to remember objects they played with than the same items they studied as drawings. Dr. Newman, now at St. | Personal Health |
565932_0 | World Economies | |
562936_5 | Carthage, Tenn. For luck's sake, his advance men brought the country with them to Atlanta, setting up a facsimile of a barn in Mr. Gore's off-stage holding room. Among the props was a saddle, a cow's skull, a scarecrow, several pumpkins, wooden barrels, bales of hay, and red-and-white checkerboard cloths. Also, back in Mr. Gore's hotel room, a mule harness. The Price of Fame It has not been a good year for Mary Matalin, the Bush deputy campaign manager. With her President, she has been through a riot in Los Angeles, a hurricane in Florida and a 50-point drop in Mr. Bush's popularity. She also had the misfortune to fall in love with her political rival, James Carville, the Clinton strategist whom she must rebut at every turn. So when she got on a plane from Washington to Atlanta this morning, all she wanted was a little sleep. But the stranger sitting next to her, recognizing her from her television appearances criticizing Bill Clinton, would not stop jabbering, even though she kept her eyes tightly closed. As she hurried off the plane, the man called after her: "Good luck. I know you'll do well because I programmed you while you slept." No Need for Background The spin is over: Early signs promised a healthy dose of post-debate spin. By 7:20 P.M., with the debate less than half an hour old, the Clinton campaign had already faxed the third draft of its "Debate Talking Points -- Clinton-Gore '92" to its press offices on the third floor of the building where reporters were housed. "Dan Quayle doesn't know what he's talking about," was one point. "Al Gore set the issue in this election: it's change versus more of the same," was another. And this stunner: "Al Gore was on the side of American jobs." The Republicans, for their part, made a special effort to beat the Democrats to the press hall, and to present their exuberant (and apparently sincere) claim that Mr. Quayle had vindicating himself, winning the debate handily. But a funny thing happened. Given the presence of real news -- a debate that must rank as one of the most exciting, if peculiar, of all Presidential elections, not a single reporter seemed to feel the need to be spun. They sat hunched over their laptop computers, feverishly typing, while Republican and Democratic officials of a high-caste sort the reporters would | THE 1992 CAMPAIGN: The Surrounding Scene; Did Not, Did So: Debate Offers Proof Young Are Better Seen Than Heard |
562772_4 | baby boom reaching middle age and by the relatively new openness in talking about the disease. In decades past few women with breast cancer were willing to go public. Gains in Survival At the same time, oncologists have been developing new ways to treat breast cancer, and the latest study results demonstrate that postoperative therapy has the potential to improve the quality and often the length of life for nearly every breast cancer patient. According to treatment recommendations developed by the world's experts and published last week in The Journal of the National Cancer Institute, breast cancer treatment for the vast majority of patients should begin with breast-conserving surgery, often followed by radiation therapy and sometimes by chemical or surgical destruction of ovarian function. But in nearly all cases, the researchers recommended further treatment, called adjuvant therapy, with cancer-killing drugs or the hormone-like medication tamoxifen or both as a way of delaying or perhaps permanently preventing recurrence of the cancer. The particular treatment combination would depend on the size of the tumor, whether it has spread to nearby lymph nodes, whether its growth is stimulated by the hormone estrogen and whether the woman has already passed through menopause. The studies described showed that even women over 70 could benefit from adjuvant chemotherapy if they were otherwise healthy enough to withstand the side effects of the drugs. At the least, the experts said, tamoxifen, which has far fewer side effects than chemotherapy, could be used in elderly or chronically ill women to prevent a recurrence, decrease the chances of a cancer developing in the other breast and, as an additional benefit, reduce the risk of heart attack. Adjuvant therapy has been recognized for more than a decade as beneficial to women with cancer that has spread to the nodes. The experts concluded that "it is now apparent that all patients with node-negative breast cancer should have an oncologic consultation at the time of diagnosis" to discuss the risks and benefits of the various treatment options. And for the overwhelming majority of such patients, the experts urged doctors to recommend some form of adjuvant therapy: chemotherapy with or without tamoxifen or tamoxifen with or without chemotherapy. This advice supports a controversial recommendation by the National Cancer Institute in 1988 to offer adjuvant therapy to most node-negative breast cancer patients. About the only patients for whom this treatment is not currently recommended are | Personal Health |
562918_27 | City for an example. They are shutting down factories right now, not because of their economy but because they're choking to death on the air pollution. They're banning automobiles some days of the week. Now what they want is not new laser-guided missile systems. What they want are new engines and new factories and new products that don't pollute the air and the water but nevertheless allow them to have a decent standard of living for their people. Last year 35 percent of our exports went to developing countries, countries where the population is expanding worldwide by as much as one billion people every 10 years. We cannot stick our heads in the sand and pretend that we don't face a global environmental crisis. Nor should we assume that it's going to cost jobs. Quite the contrary. We are going to be able to create jobs as Japan and Germany are planning to do right now if we have the guts to leave. Now, earlier we heard about the auto industry and the timber industry. There have been 250,000 jobs lost in the automobile industry during the Reagan-Bush-Quayle years. There have been tens of thousands of jobs lost in the timber industry. What they like to do is to point the finger of blame with one hand and hand out pink slips with the other hand. They've done a poor job both with the economy and the environment. It's time for a change. Q Admiral Stockdale, did you have something you wanted to say here? STOCKDALE I know that I read where Senator Gore's mentor had disagreed with some of the scientific data that is in his book. How do you respond to those criticisms of that sort? Do you ---- QUAYLE -- deny it? GORE Well, ---- STOCKDALE ---- take this into account? GORE No, I -- let me respond. Thank you, Admiral, for saying that. You're talking about Roger Revelle. His family wrote a lengthy letter saying how terribly he had been misquoted and had his remarks taken completely out of context just before he died. He believed up until the day he died -- no, it's true -- Q I ask the audience to stop please. GORE ---- he died last year and just before he died he co-authored an article which had statements taken completely out of context. In fact, the vast majority of the world's | Excerpts From the Debate Among Quayle, Gore and Stockdale |
561777_4 | the course with decisions from the United States Supreme Court," Professor Smit said, "decisions in which the justices quote Thomas Aquinas and John Locke and St. Augustine and Plato and Aristotle." Professor Mirollo said the teaching method now relates the works to contemporary life. "We stress gender," he said. "We stress class issues. We stress political issues. We apply the most modern theories." Jeanette Brown, a 17-year-old freshman from Washington, said this critical approach made the difference. "I was hesitant about coming to Columbia because of the core and because of the DWEM's," Ms. Brown said, adding that she still had "some problems with a big institution like Columbia saying that this is what's important to study." "But the professors are getting around it," she said. "My professor's maybe 30, she's a woman, and we're looking at the women's roles in 'The Odyssey' and 'The Iliad.' I'm being encouraged to look at the works in a new light." 'Brainwashing"? It was in Professor Smit's classroom that Plato was the DWEM of the day. And it was in his discussion of the "Republic" with his 23 students that he illustrated his approach. "Plato," he told students, "believed that justice and model behavior could be taught, that you could change human nature through education. But the Platonic attitude also dominates in totalitarian systems. Lenin found in the Platonic way that through education you could shape the way people think. The Nazis did the same thing. It was brainwashing." He paused. "This course is constantly being attacked as a brainwashing course," he said. "A brainwashing course for American democracy. Do you think this course is brainwashing?" There was a yes. "You don't have to look to Nazi Germany to find a government that dictates what we're going to learn in school," the student said. "Look at what we learned about slavery or immigration" until multi-culturalism brought about changes. And a no: "Professor Smit isn't enforcing the ideas of Plato on us," said another student. "We're just discussing them." After the class, Professor Smit said that one of his students had provided another reason for taking the course. "It was a black student," he said, "a native of Ghana. He was fascinated by the course. He worked his tail off and got straight A's. So I asked him why he had worked so hard. And he said, 'I want to know my enemies.' " | At Columbia, the Classics' Olympian Reign Is Challenged |
566169_0 | The Bush Administration in 1989 approved the export of American computers and missile-design software that were used to develop a high-powered Iraqi weapon known as the "super gun," the head of the House Banking committee said today. The chairman, Representative Henry B. Gonzalez, charged that the computers and software for the weapon -- which could be fired on Israel and other Middle Eastern nations -- were approved for sale even though they had clear military applications and were obviously destined ultimately for Iraqi use. Moreover, the Texas Democrat said, the license to export the software was granted to the Space Research Corporation, a Maryland-based company owned by Gerald Bull, a ballistics expert convicted in the United States of arms-export violations in 1980. Mr. Bull was found shot to death outside his Brussels apartment in 1990. A spokesman for the Commerce Department declined to comment today on the sale. In the past, the agency has defended its export policies as not having violated any rules. Pentagon officials acknowledge they did not stop the sale, to the Maryland company's Belgian parent concern, despite Mr. Bull's history. Documents Turned Over Mr. Gonzalez's statements were based in part on documents turned over to Congress by the Commerce Department, including copies of the export licenses. His comments amplified news reports about the exports that were made Monday, when some of the documents were made public. The export of weapons technology that found its way to Saddam Hussein in the 1980's adds yet another element to the debate on whether the Bush Administration secretly helped the Iraqi military. "The case most illustrative of the U.S. role in enhancing Iraq's military capability is the export licenses approved for the Space Research Corporation," Mr. Gonzalez told a hearing of the Senate Banking Committee panel. For two years, Mr. Gonzalez has been investigating American aid to Iraq before the 1990 invasion of Kuwait, including $1.5 billion in exports of technology with potential military uses. The Congressman said the export licenses had been approved in 1989 even though the company and an affiliate "had been identified in 1989 as important players in Iraq's military technology procurement apparatus." President Pulls Back A week ago, President Bush said in a Presidential debate that following the gulf war "the battlefield was searched and there wasn't one single iota of evidence that any U.S. weapons were on that battlefield." But the President later corrected | Exports by U.S. Aided Iraq 'Super Gun,' House Banking Chief Says |
566218_1 | their son, Ralph, is the company's chairman. Starting in the mid-1970's, sales of pasta sauces grew by about 20 percent a year, creating what is now a $1.2 billion industry. While annual increases have dropped to the single digits for most big commercial brands, the growth is expected to continue. The producers of pasta sauce, both large and small, happily continue to increase their orders for tomato paste or canned California tomatoes from year to year. Mr. Gennari said more new pasta sauces have been introduced this year than in any of the 14 previous years he has been in the business. "Many of them are by significant companies," he said, citing Hunt, which has expanded its line of sauces, and Campbell, which introduced the Healthy Request line of canned sauces this year. Del Monte Foods, the country's leading vegetable processor, is about to come out with a line of pasta sauces. At the same time, there still seems to be room for fledgling companies with humble beginnings and a family recipe, like the Cantisanos of Ragu. For example, in 1985 Frank Dell'Amore could no longer keep up with customers' requests to buy the homemade tomato sauce that he was serving in his pizzeria, Filomena's, in Burlington, Vt. So he began commercially bottling the sauce, which is based on his grandmother's recipe. In the last year Dell'Amore Enterprises has sold $300,000 worth of sauce in jars bearing a wistful photograph of Mr. Dell'Amore's grandmother, Filomena d'Agosto, when she was 19 years old. Those sales were 30 percent higher than the previous year and meant peeling more than 300 pounds of garlic a month by hand. The distribution area of the sauce has expanded from the Burlington area to the entire Northeast and beyond. Because it takes time to peel garlic and cook tomatoes, many people prefer opening a jar of prepared sauce to starting from scratch. Even though Campbell reported that 60 percent of the time, consumers add ingredients instead of using the sauce direct from the jar, it takes less time to add some seasonings than to cook a pot of tomatoes, even canned ones. Convenience aside, it does not require a Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science or a Nobel Prize in Medicine to understand that pasta topped with sauce provides, at modest expense, a filling meal that is longer on carbohydrates than fat. Consumers have long known | Sauce Makers Smile At the Rage for Pasta |
565022_4 | an effective military alliance with Croatian forces, or perhaps a coup in Belgrade that might have toppled Mr. Milosevic's nationalist government. A Tour of the Front Mr. Izetbegovic has turned recently to a clandestine tour of the few patches of territory his Government still controls, usually to proclaim that the battle for a sovereign, unified Bosnia will continue. And although those in power here accept that Serbia and Croatia have effectively annexed most of the country, and that the Muslim-led Bosnian militia can only hope to hang on to the little it still holds, they still say they are a long way from giving up. "We know only too well that fighting on involves enormous hardships and dangers, but the alternative would be still worse," said Kemal Muftic, a senior adviser in Mr. Izetbegovic's office. "What faces us is genocide, the extinction of the Muslim people of Bosnia, and the end of 500 years of history. So we must either confront our enemies now, with all that entails, or accept still greater suffering and death." Appeal for Outside Aid For months, senior officials here have been speaking in apocalyptic terms, partly out of a desire to prick the conscience of the United States and its European allies, which have said that they have no intention of committing troops here in support of the Bosnian Government. But by almost every measure -- casualty counts, refugees, cities and towns emptied of their populations or substantially destroyed, reports from the battlefronts of new setbacks and defeats -- the situation facing the government and those who depend on it could scarcely be worse. All figures here tend to be sketchy, since the Government has no telephone connections outside Sarajevo, and the reports it does receive, by messengers traveling through the mountains and by short-wave radio links, are taken mostly from those areas it still controls. These are augmented by sketchy accounts from tens of thousands of Muslim refugees who survived Serbian "ethnic cleansing" offensives only to end up living with a few miserable bundles of belongings in tent camps and school gymnasiums. From these sources, the Health Ministry in Sarajevo has estimated that 127,000 people are dead or missing, of whom 16,000 have been confirmed as having been killed. Hospitals and clinics are said to have treated 129,000 people who have been wounded. In Sarajevo alone, more than 3,700 people have been killed, 30,000 | Serbs and Croats Now Join In Devouring Bosnia's Land |
564918_0 | There would be a mini-Olympic Village for the athletes, and men and women on the course of Augusta National under a plan proposed today by the Atlanta Committee for the 1996 Summer Olympic Games, which formally announced its intention to push for the inclusion of golf. "We wouldn't be here if we didn't think our chances were good," said Billy Payne, president and chief executive officer of the Atlanta Committee for the Olympic Games. Today's news conference was called by the committee and was attended by Payne, the United States Olympic Committee president, LeRoy Walker, and the heads of the Professional Golfers Association and the Ladies Professional Golf Association. Its purpose was to set out the proposed conditions under which golf would return to the Olympics for the first time since 1904. Equal Access Each country would be allowed its own selection process. The only provision is that selection couldn't be strictly off a money list or any other professional rating system, because amateurs must have equal access. That provision probably means that some sort of Olympic points system will be devised in the United States for amateurs and professionals. The plan needs approval from the International Olympic Committee, which is expected to begin considering it in December. The World Amateur Golf Council, which would organize the competition, recently voted to permit competition between pros and amateurs in Olympic golf. An Olympic tournament would be the first women's tournament at Augusta National. "We consider this a very positive step for women's golf," said Charles Mechem Jr., commissioner of the L.P.G.A. The plan calls for 72-hole tournaments for men and women to be played at different times during the Olympics. Although both Deane Beman, commissioner of the PGA Tour, and Mechem expressed their support, not all golfers were immediately so enamored of the idea. "I'm not juiced about it," the United States Open champion, Tom Kite, told The Associated Press. "I don't know of anyone who really is. We have a lot of international events that serve the same purpose." N.H.L. Dreams On Gil Stein, the president of the National Hockey League, is scheduled to meet in Chicago Thursday with officials of U.S.A. Hockey to discuss his plan to include N.H.L. players in the 1994 Winter Olympic Games in Lillehammer, Norway. This matter, along with several others, will be discussed further next Tuesday in New York at a special meeting of | No Green Jackets. How About Gold Medals? |
564764_2 | the president of the United Automobile Workers Local 599 here and a supporter of Governor Clinton. "Too often we think about the immediate problems and not the long term. And that's what's got us in our predicament in the auto industry. I think Clinton is right on this. He says we can have higher mileage cars and more jobs." When told that Mr. Bush's contention was being rejected by many voters in Flint, the birthplace of General Motors and a center of manufacturing for some of the company's largest Buick and Oldsmobile models, Republican officials expressed surprise. "Listen, those are the same people who will be standing in unemployment lines if the Clinton-Gore proposals are put into effect," said John T. Truscott, the press secretary to Gov. John Engler, a Republican who is running the President's campaign in Michigan. The clash between Mr. Bush and Mr. Clinton focuses on corporate average fuel economy standards, or Cafe standards. Enacted by Congress in 1975, they first took effect in 1978. The law sets out a formula for measuring the average fuel economy of a manufacturers' products and essentially means that for every large low-mileage car like the Lincoln Town Car, Ford must build two high-mileage Escorts. Manufacturers' fleets are now required to average 27.5 miles per gallon, though there are waivers in the rules to allow slightly lower average fuel economies. David L. Greene, a researcher at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, said the standards had saved consumers $250 billion in fuel bills. The Energy Department says average gasoline consumption is now 7.3 million gallons a day, 100,000 gallons a day less than in 1978, even though there are 50 million more cars and trucks on the road. Even though auto companies fought the law's passage, asserting that it would lead only to small and uncomfortable vehicles, some executives grudgingly acknowledge that it helped the industry. New materials that reduced the weight of vehicles, innovations in aerodynamic design, developing front-wheel drive, manufacturing better radial tires, changing engine designs and a host of other inventions prompted by the law have helped American cars compete with Japanese cars in quality and fuel-efficiency. "To some degree, Cafe standards helped us get a headstart on recognizing problems with our cars that we weren't paying attention to," David L. Kulp, the manager of fuel economy and planning at Ford, said in an interview in the | Bush May Gain Little by Fuel Stance |
560307_0 | Conflict on Ordaining Women A popular auxiliary bishop of the Archdiocese of Baltimore, Bishop P. Francis Murphy, has joined a handful of Roman Catholic prelates in declaring that he is in favor of the ordination of women. "Justice demands it," Bishop Murphy wrote in the current issue of Commonweal, a biweekly magazine edited by Catholic lay people. "The pastoral needs of the church require it." The bishop's position moved the head of his diocese, Archbishop William H. Keeler, immediately to restate tradition. "Our church's doctrine, which I personally accept and uphold, is very clear," the Archbishop said in a statement. "This teaching reflects an unbroken tradition in the Roman Catholic Church of the West and the Orthodox Church of the East of calling only men to the ordained priesthood." Bishop Murphy's position came in a five-page article on the controversial pastoral letter on women that is to be considered by the nation's bishops at a meeting in Washington next month. Bishop Murphy wrote: "For 15 years I have experienced and felt the profound pain of women over their exclusion from the sacrament of Holy Orders. I am also well aware of the widespread disagreement among members of the church over this issue. "Today, I can say that I am personally in favor of the ordination of women in a renewed priestly ministry. I believe this issue to be as important as the issue Paul raised with Peter; namely, the admission of Gentiles into Christianity." In recent years, Pope John Paul II has made it clear that the issue is a closed one not open to discussion. Nonetheless, a few bishops, including Bishop Kenneth Untener of Saginaw, Mich., have publicly advocated opening the priesthood to women. Others have urged that the issue be reopened. Lubavitch Homecoming The huge synagogue broke out into spontaneous song and fathers lifted their children to get a better view when Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson, the head of the Lubavitch Hasidic movement, rejoined his congregation for prayers on Rosh ha-Shanah this week. It was the 90-year-old rabbi's first appearance in the synagogue since a major stroke seven months ago left him partly paralyzed and unable to speak. On each day of the two-day Jewish New Year holiday, Rabbi Schneerson sat for more than an hour on a specially constructed balcony overlooking the synagogue. Although he did not stay for the entire service, Rabbi Schneerson, who is known | Religion Notes |
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