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1148196_0 | Family Planning Choices Are Still Too Few | To the Editor: The claim by Mary Ann Glendon and Mary Haynes (Op-Ed, Oct. 20) that parents' desire for large families is a fundamental obstacle to reducing fertility is belied by historical evidence that birth rates decline when the economic, educational and legal status of women improves. The ends of family planning can be met without resort to coercive means. ELLEN O'MEARA Seattle, Oct. 20, 1999 |
1148194_0 | Family Planning Choices Are Still Too Few | To the Editor: Mary Ann Glendon and Mary Haynes (Op-Ed, Oct. 20) assert that only ''bribes, bullying, threats or outright coercion'' can overcome women's desire for large families. Moreover, they see no ''unmet need'' for contraception in Kenya. Yet an estimated one-third of maternal deaths in Kenya are the result of unsafe abortions. Similarly, in Zimbabwe 25 percent of all maternal deaths in 1997 were attributed to unsafe abortion. Such widespread recourse to unsafe abortion suggests a very real need for safe and effective contraceptive methods. To abandon international family planning programs now would undercut the strides women have made in claiming their basic human rights to plan their families and enjoy sexual and reproductive health. JANET BENSHOOF President, Center for Reproductive Law and Policy Washington, Oct. 21, 1999 |
1142749_0 | Rio Journal; Where New Rich Adopt a U.S. Kind of Stylishness | This city's most conspicuous symbol has always been the giant statue of Christ that stands atop Corcovado mountain. But out in the Barra da Tijuca, the part of town where Rio's newly moneyed reign, a rival is now being erected: an 88-foot-high replica of the Statue of Liberty made of plastic and fiberglass. In a neighborhood that already boasts a pair of apartment buildings that resemble upright versions of the Leaning Tower of Pisa, the structure going up at the entrance to a new entertainment mall called the New York City Center probably should surprise no one. But to the guardians of established values here, so blatant an imitation of and homage to the United States comes as an affront, proof that the 200,000 or so residents of the Barra are a different, embarrassing breed of Brazilian. ''The Barra da Tijuca can now be deemed the most ridiculous place in the world, exceeding even Miami,'' a newspaper columnist, Tutty Vasques, wrote in Jornal do Brasil, a leading daily here. ''Bad taste is going unchecked and is careering out of control down the Avenida das Americas,'' the main street of the district, turning the Barra into ''something that makes even the new rich feel ashamed.'' Separated from the rest of Rio by a ridge of mountains, Barra da Tijuca barely existed 20 years ago but is now the fastest growing area of the city that has always set the cultural pace for the rest of Brazil. While Rio's traditional neighborhoods recall Lisbon, Rome or Paris, the atmosphere in Barra da Tijuca is more like that of American Sun Belt cities like Los Angeles, Phoenix, Houston or Miami -- and deliberately so. ''This is another country out here, one that takes Los Angeles as its model,'' said Jose Maria Herdy de Barros, acting president of the Barra Association of Commerce and Industry, which represents more than 700 businesses in the area. ''What we have tried to do is copy the best things about the United States without adopting the bad things.'' To the dismay of Brazilian nationalists, the good things apparently include the English language, as evidenced by malls called Barra Shopping, Barra Garden, Barra Point and Barra Square. Residents shop at stores -- some advertising ''sales'' instead of the equivalent Portuguese word -- called World Top Lock, Bike Box, Bad Kid, Royal Canine, Fight Center, Water Planet and Fast Way. And |
1142810_0 | The U.S. Should Let Cuba Be Cuba | To the Editor: In his Sept. 29 column on Cuba, Thomas L. Friedman says Communism is ''great for producing missiles, but terrible when it comes to breakfast, lunch and dinner.'' In fact, Cuba had not produced many missiles, but it did double the life expectancy of black men in 40 years by providing nutrition and health care. He also says Cuba's economic problems stem from its ''failed Marxist economics.'' Anyone who has lived in Cuba recently knows otherwise. As a result of economic reforms, Cuba has five economies: four are capitalist or quasi-capitalist and one is a decaying socialist economy, which can no longer provide the average Cuban with a day's caloric needs. TOMAS HOPKINS PRIMEAU Mexico City, Sept. 29, 1999 The writer is an assistant professor of international relations at the Instituto Tecnologico y Estudios Superiores de Monterrey. |
1143139_0 | Foreign Affairs; A Deadly Embrace | Flipping through the room-service menu at my Havana hotel the other morning, I noticed it listed four types of breakfast: American, Continental, Creole and Russian. Now, there aren't too many places in the world where you find ''Russian breakfast'' on the menu, especially this one, which consisted of caviar, smoked salmon and champagne for $125! Only a Russian businessman with an account at the Bank of New York could afford that breakfast. Never mind. The Russian breakfast at the Melia Cohiba is among the few traces left in Cuba of the once-widespread Russian presence here. The huge, ugly Russian Embassy compound is so understaffed that a Russian diplomat here asked an American friend of mine, half-jokingly, whether he was interested in renting a room in the compound. It's a long way from the Cuban missile crisis. For Russia today, Cuba is just another deadbeat country that owes the Kremlin billions of dollars. For Cuba's regime, though, Russia is something more. It is a fate to be avoided, a grim reaper to be outpaced. Fidel Castro's regime doesn't have much to boast about these days, but it will brag about this: ''We didn't collapse with the Soviet Union!'' Indeed, I was given an official pamphlet entitled ''The Cuban Miracle And Its Future.'' I figured it was about how Cuba had increased its sugar cane production. No. It was all about how Cuba survived the loss of $6 billion a year in Soviet aid, and why the Cuban people now ''can smile at their hasty gravediggers.'' In fact, Cuba's surviving the U.S.S.R.'s collapse is no miracle. It is the product of hard political realities that are worth examining. It starts with the old man. Unlike in Eastern Europe, Castro and his comrades are the original leaders of the Cuban revolution. They were the ones who seized power 40 years ago, and they will shoot to kill to preserve it. There will be no velvet revolution here. Moreover, Cuba is an island, and it is easier than Eastern Europe to isolate from global trends. ''You go into parts of Eastern Cuba and put your car radio onto 'scan' and it will just go round and round, without ever coming up with a station,'' remarked a Western diplomat here. Also, while there are some dissidents still here, over the years most have left for Miami, been evicted or defected, so the protest movement lacks |
1143097_1 | FOOD STUFF | A Store Without the Fat Even with ice creams getting richer and steakhouses expanding, Andrea Halperin has opened F3, a big duplex store selling nothing but fat-free and sugar-free foods, more than 5,000 of them, at 770 Second Avenue (41st Street). The high-tech wire shelving holds no produce, fresh meat or fish, but is loaded with grocery items, dairy products, packaged sandwich meats and frozen foods, including sorbets, frozen yogurts and ice creams. Items range from Jell-O to Campfire marshmallows to Frontera salsas. Some products -- like rice for risotto, strawberry jam, dried fruit, Dijon mustard and balsamic vinegar -- are the kinds of naturally fat-free items that might be in any up-to-date pantry. But F3 (for Fat Free Food) does not sell any olive oil to go with the vinegar (the closest it comes is a spray for the frying pan) so salads will have to depend on fat-free vinaigrette, available in everything from supermarket-style Wishbone to fancy food brands like Annie's. Sugar-free items take up the second floor. ''I wanted to show people who need to or want to eat fat-free or sugar-free just how many products they could choose from,'' said Ms. Halperin, who formerly worked in marketing for companies like Nestle. ''I carry a number of organic items but I also know that some of the products are highly processed and loaded with additives. Everything is a trade-off, but if fat-free is your concern, this is where you'll find it.'' Travels Through Paste Dahlias Exotic Flavor Pastes are just what the name promises: a series of moist seasoning blends to use in marinades, sauces or on grilled meat, fish or vegetables. Each effectively carries the flavor profile of a country: India, China, Thailand, Cuba and Morocco. The Indian paste has a hot muskiness with an overlay of curry, the Chinese hints of star anise with the pungent sweetness of hoisin sauce, and the Thai is oily, spicy and sharp, with a clean lime and lemongrass finish. The Moroccan hits on the fragrant complexity of cumin and cilantro but is the oiliest of the lot, while the Cuban tastes too much of green olives and could be sweeter. A nine-ounce jar is $7.25 at ABC Carpet and Home, 888 Broadway (19th Street); Citarella, 2135 Broadway (75th Street) and 1313 Third Avenue (75th Street), and Garden of Eden, 162 West 23d Street and 310 Third Avenue (23d Street). |
1145409_3 | A Disputed Study Suggests Possible Harm From Genetically Altered Food | in a review that his data did not support his conclusions. The Royal Society, Britain's senior scientific academy, reviewed Dr. Pusztai's work and earlier this year declared it too flawed to draw any conclusions about the effects of the transgenic potatoes, in part because the experiments had lacked proper controls. The Royal Society yesterday issued a statement reiterating that conclusion and criticizing The Lancet for lending ''some authenticity'' to the study. In his commentary, Dr. Horton said publication was not meant to be a ''vindication'' of Dr. Pusztai and his co-author of the paper, Dr. Stanley W. B. Ewen, a pathologist at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland. The Lancet also published a sharp critique of the paper by scientists at the National Institute for Quality Control of Agricultural Products, which is based in the Netherlands. The critique criticized the study for not, for example, accounting for big differences between the genetically modified and ordinary potatoes that were not associated with genetic engineering. They also said the study did not find consistent effects. Dr. Pusztai could not be located and did not respond to an E-mail request seeking comment. Dr. Ewen declined to be interviewed, but said in a statement: ''We are convinced that further experimental work is required to test the safety of G.M. foods.'' G.M. is a commonly used term meaning genetically modified. In another article on lectin in the same issue of The Lancet, Scottish researchers suggest that more studies must be done on the safety of lectin before its genes are used to make crops insect resistant. The study, by scientists at the Scottish Crop Research Institute and the University of Dundee, found that snowdrop lectin can bind to human white blood cells in a test tube. The authors said the results defied the conventional view that the snowdrop lectin would not affect humans. Editors of peer-reviewed journals say it is not unusual to publish papers opposed by a minority of the reviewers. But some questioned whether it was proper to publish any article found scientifically lacking merely to present data to the public, especially when scientists can now publicize their own results on the Internet. ''To me, it tarnishes the reputation of the journal that publishes it,'' said Floyd E. Bloom, editor of Science. ''If you're just going to take it because it's controversial, well, there are a whole lot of controversial things.'' In 1988, |
1145443_0 | Around the World, Dismay Over Senate Vote on Treaty | Around the world today, government leaders and arms experts reacted with dismay and even anger after the United States Senate defeated, without much debate, a nuclear test ban treaty that had been decades in the making. For many, there was a sense that the treaty may now be dead. There are countries that fear American power, and those fears have been heightened by what looks like an American renunciation of any controls over its huge nuclear arsenal. There are also nations that rest secure in the shadow of American might and leadership. For them, the appearance that Americans are moving away from international agreements and responsibilities can also be alarming. In either case, the Washinton's example is important. ''If the United States, the sole superpower, refuses stubbornly to ratify a global nuclear test ban treaty that will make the world safer for all, why on earth would any other country want to do it?'' The Straits Times of Singapore asked in an editorial. Germany's Defense Minister, Rudolf Scharping, called the Senate's decision ''absolutely wrong,'' and an aide to President Jacques Chirac of France echoed the tone of the comments in Europe when he called the Senate vote on Wednesday night ''a setback to the process of nonproliferation and disarmament.'' A Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman, Vladimir Rakhmanin, called rejection of the treaty ''a serious blow.'' China also registered ''profound regret.'' At a news conference, a Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, Zhang Qiyue, said China remained committed to the treaty and would accelerate its process of studying and then ratifying the treaty. But she gave no timetable. The Japanese Foreign Minister, Yohei Kono, said, ''We had hoped for the U.S.'s leadership in nuclear disarmament and in preventing nuclear proliferation, and so the result is very regrettable.'' Of the seven acknowledged nuclear weapons countries, only two -- France and Britain -- have ratified the treaty. Russia, the United States and China have only signed it. Israel, which is assumed to have a nuclear weapons program, has also signed. North Korea, whose nuclear program has caused much nervousness in Asia, has not signed. India and Pakistan, both of whom have tested nuclear bombs, have also not signed, and by wide agreement are not now under as much pressure to do so, even though many experts believe that the tensions between these two countries have made their region a potential ground for nuclear conflict. ''All said and |
1145431_0 | Life 101: Useful Skills for College and Beyond | These are the lessons from today's class at Southampton College: *A smart budget has more money coming in than going out. *Do not make the password for your A.T.M. card something obvious, like your birthday. *Pay the full balance on credit cards, if possible, but definitely more than the minimum. ''When I was in college, I had a roommate who thought as long as she had a checkbook with checks in it, she could write checks,'' Suzette Carlow, a guest lecturer from European American Bank, told the students. ''That's not the way it works.'' Not exactly macroeconomics. Rather, it is College 101, a one-credit seminar required of all new students. Highlights of the syllabus: ''Values -- What Matters to You?'' and ''Home for the Holidays: Readjusting.'' The course at Southampton, a campus of Long Island University, is part of a proliferation of life-skills seminars nationwide, with more than 70 percent of colleges and universities offering some sort of academic class designed to help students adjust to adulthood and campus life. The trend has exploded over the last decade, as budget-strapped and consumer-oriented colleges have battled high dropout rates, searching for strategies to increase student success. Now, with large groups of immigrants and first-generation college students pushing enrollments to record numbers, administrators say the courses are critical. Besides teaching skills like how to balance a checkbook and deal with the opposite sex, the classes also create a comfortable environment of small-group discussions in a world often dominated by droning lectures. ''Most of us who went to college 20 or 30 years ago managed to handle this on our own,'' said Betsy O. Barefoot, until recently the co-director of the National Resource Center for the Freshman Year Experience at the University of South Carolina in Columbia. Ms. Barefoot acknowledged that the courses, ''to many people, seem like hand-holding and coddling,'' but she and John Gardner, the University of South Carolina historian who is considered the father of the modern life-skills movement, said they were a necessary adjustment to changes in higher education. ''The kind of people who are going to college now are not those for whom colleges were historically designed,'' Mr. Gardner said. ''It's really very subversive. It's about changing the structures and policies of college to make it more realistic for the people we serve.'' So, to help connect students to the campus community at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, |
1145375_0 | Educating Women | To the Editor: Your Oct. 13 editorial ''The Six Billion Mark'' aimed precisely at the heart of the challenge facing many countries like Canada and the United States that wish to support international population control efforts but face domestic resistance from the anti-abortion lobby. So as not to allow the debate to be mired in this track, countries must target more foreign aid toward the basic education of girls. Study after study has shown that educating women leads to fewer, healthier, better-spaced and better looked-after children, with mothers who have the means to support them. Meanwhile, Oxfam International reports that countries like Canada and the United States continue to spend less than 2 percent of their foreign aid budgets on basic education. ALAN CASSELS Victoria, British Columbia Oct. 13, 1999 The writer is a health program consultant. |
1148640_0 | Who Will Care for Our Children? | To the Editor: We were surprised to learn that available financing to assist New York's low- and moderate-income families with the cost of child care is not getting into the hands of the families that need it, mainly because ''there are not nearly enough day care providers to meet the demand'' (news article, Oct. 25). How can this be allowed to happen while there are so many openings available in preschools serving both children with disabilities and those without, dually licensed as preschools and day care centers? Inclusionary preschools can be found in every community. In light of the fact that 82 percent of families eligible for government-subsidized child care are not receiving the help they need, one answer is for local government to make better use of existing resources. MARGERY E. AMES New York, Oct. 25, 1999 The writer is executive director, Interagency Council of Mental Retardation and Developmental Disabilities Agencies. |
1146690_0 | Putting Fertility First | There are now six billion people on the planet, we are told, and many characterize humanity's arrival at this milestone as a catastrophe. Family-planning activists responded to it with calls for more financing to address the ''unmet needs'' of hundreds of millions of women. According to many of these groups, supplying contraception to third world women will provide the key to reducing the rate of growth. Yet the population controllers' central premise -- the malleable concept of ''unmet need'' -- is fundamentally flawed, and their estimates of 150 million to 500 million women of reproductive age who do not immediately desire another child are wildly off base. In much of the third world, contraceptives are readily accessible, yet fertility rates remain high. According to the United Nations family planning agency's 1999 report, 99 percent of Costa Rica's population has access to contraception, along with 96 percent of Haiti's, 93 percent of Zimbabwe's and 89 percent of Peru's. Yet all of these countries have fertility rates well above the level needed to replace those who die. In the early 1990's, demographic surveys in Kenya revealed that at least 90 percent of the population knew where to obtain contraceptives, but only one-third of the population chose to use them. Donald Warwick noted in his 1982 book ''Bitter Pills'' that administrators of family planning programs in developing countries were often satisfied if 10 percent of the eligible population accepted the help during the first year; they were delighted with a rate of 20 percent. Even when contraceptives are used, there appears to be only a loose correlation with overall fertility. In 1989, World Bank estimates indicated that 56 percent of Japanese women used modern contraceptives and that the total fertility rate for Japan was 1.5 births per woman. Meanwhile, in Turkey, contraceptive use was 63 percent but total fertility was estimated at 3.4. The key to understanding these statistics lies in something that population controllers have long ignored: the desires of parents for large families. In a 1994 study published in Population and Development Review, Lant Pritchett, a senior World Bank economist, and Lawrence Summers, then director of research at the World Bank (and now Treasury Secretary), found that women's preferences about the numbers of children they will have account for up to 90 percent of differences in fertility across countries. In many countries, helping parents achieve their desired family size would result |
1146309_0 | Weakness in Numbers | The military coup in Pakistan and the news that there are now six billion people on the planet are not unrelated. Pakistan is just one of many countries in which high population growth has fueled urbanization, unemployment and depletion of resources, which have made the state increasingly hard to govern except through tyrannical means. More and more, it is population growth that threatens stability in the third world. The overwhelming majority of births occur among the poor, so that while middle classes grow in absolute numbers, in relative terms they are shrinking in those countries most threatened by war and revolution. And without sizable middle classes, civil institutions of the kind that democracies require are very difficult to build. If one looks at countries that have experienced war, famine and revolutionary upheaval in recent decades -- Iran, Indonesia, Rwanda, Haiti, Nicaragua, Ethiopia, Algeria, Sierra Leone, Somalia and Yemen are all examples -- a common element is population growth that led to urban overcrowding or severe strain on resources. That is Pakistan's situation in a nutshell. For years Pakistan has been a family-planning nightmare, with yearly population increases of about 3 percent, enough to double the population every generation. Its 135 million people increasingly inhabit vast cities and shantytowns and depend on alkaline, nutrient-poor soil. There is barely enough water to sustain the population now, and the water table is being rapidly depleted. Karachi, the largest city, has more than 10 million residents, and 500,000 are added each year. A million of its inhabitants live in squatter settlements. Electricity and water systems are in increasing disrepair, and urban warfare among Sunnis, Shiites and other Islamic groups is chronic. Huge numbers of young people are reaching working age without any education or prospects of employment. While population growth does not in and of itself cause ethnic and political unrest -- Pakistan has always been fractious, and its neighbor Afghanistan was all but ungovernable even without severe population pressure -- the growing numbers exacerbate stresses like urbanization of the poor to aggravate existing political and ethnic tensions. Urban populations are harder to satisfy than rural ones, in part because city dwellers require many things that only governments can supply, like well-maintained transportation and sewage systems. Urban populations are captive to rising prices because they do not grow their own food. In cities, crowds can gather quickly and communication is easy, making revolt an |
1144756_4 | Montredon Journal; French See a Hero in War on 'McDomination' | though his supporters had come up with the cash. It was a stand that lasted only three weeks. He smiles when asked about his change of heart. ''The conditions in there were really bad,'' he said. ''And the food was inedible. And I said to myself, 'If all these people are trying to help me by raising the money, why should I refuse to come out?' '' Mr. Bove said his actions had been announced in the local paper the day before. ''There was nothing menacing about it,'' he said. ''The children were there. There was singing. It had a festival atmosphere.'' The owner of the McDonald's, Marc Dehani, sees it a bit differently. He says $120,000 worth of damage was done. But even though Mr. Bove awaits trial on state criminal charges, McDonald's has decided not to take any civil action against him, out of fear of turning him into a martyr. The restaurant chain has lately tried to calm protests by issuing statements pointing out that the franchises in France are owned by the French, employ French workers and almost exclusively sell food grown in France. In the press, Mr. Bove is often described as the last holdout against creeping American imperialism. But he is eager to say that he likes Americans. His parents were researchers who spent years at the University of California at Berkeley studying diseases that attacked citrus trees. Mr. Bove lived there until he was 7 and still speaks English. But his contempt for American eating habits is obvious. He offers statistics on the rate of obesity in America -- about three times that of the French -- and disdains Americans for eating all day long. He says America has no right to force its hormone-enhanced food down French throats. Mr. Bove said he intended to travel to Seattle in November, when the World Trade Organization is expected to meet and consider the tariff issue again. The United States' decision to impose the tax was authorized by the W.T.O. With four other farmers, Mr. Bove owns about 500 sheep. About half are raised to produce milk for Roquefort cheese. The rest are sold as meat. Mr. Bove says he has never eaten at McDonald's, not even once. No, he insists, he is not curious. He does, however, like grilled hamburgers with sliced tomatoes and onions. ''And mayonnaise,'' he added. ''But only the homemade kind.'' |
1141934_2 | Japanese Fuel Plant Spews Radiation After Accident | an interview with The Associated Press: ''So much has been made of Japan's sophisticated technology that supposedly makes nuclear energy safe. The accident proves that's absolutely not true.'' In the past, Japan has compounded nuclear accidents with slow and often misleading information given to the public. Commentators are already predicting a strong backlash in public opinion against the industry, and perhaps against a deeply embarrassed Government. The confused emergency response has been matched by a confused political one, with rival agencies alternately seeking to dismiss concerns about the country's vast nuclear energy program, or calling for a sweeping re-evaluation. Early today the chief of the Natural Resources and Energy Agency, Hirobumi Kawano, still ruled out the idea that an uncontrolled reaction could occur at a nuclear plant in Japan, and told reporters he did not intend to instruct power companies to re-examine their safety measures, Kyodo reported. A top official of the Ministry of International Trade and Industry, however, said the accident was serious enough to lead Japan to reconsider its nuclear power policy. Japan operates 51 nuclear power plants. Officials requested the assistance of United States military forces in Japan to handle the accident. According to the Japan Self-Defense Agency, the Government was informed that American forces here are not equipped to deal with nuclear accidents. [In Sarov, Russia, where he is on a study mission, Secretary of Energy Bill Richardson said Russia and the United States were prepared to send nuclear specialists to help Japan if Tokyo asked for assistance. [''So far, the Japanese have only asked us for information,'' Mr. Richardson said in an interview. ''But I've spoken to our Russian counterparts, and my department and Russia's Ministry of Atomic Energy both stand ready to send a joint team almost immediately to help Japan with this tragedy.''] The Japanese television network NHK said early this morning that after repeated failed attempts to drain the tank by remote control, emergency workers broke pipes leading to the purification chamber, allowing it to cool. Workers were attempting to insert hoses into the contaminated area to drench it with chemicals to absorb the radiation. In an indication that the accident was being brought under control, Japanese television said that at 6:30 A.M. today, the Science and Technology Agency reported that no radiation could be detected at 14 monitoring sites around the plant. According to the Japanese Atomic Energy Research Institute, measurements |
1141907_0 | NEWS SUMMARY | INTERNATIONAL A3-13 Accident at Nuclear Plant Spews Radiation in Japan An out-of-control chain reaction at a nuclear fuel plant near Tokyo released high levels of radiation into the air. Thirty-five people were exposed, three of them seriously injured, and 300,000 residents were ordered to stay indoors. Officials said the reaction was set off when workers accidentally poured more uranium than usual into a tank containing nitric acid. A1 Test Treaty May Go to a Vote The Senate majority leader, Trent Lott, offered to schedule a vote on a treaty banning nuclear testing, expressing confidence that Republicans had the votes to defeat one of President Clinton's top foreign policy goals. Democrats have long demanded that Mr. Lott allow a floor vote. A8 U.S. to Review Korea Report The Secretary of Defense ordered the Army to undertake a thorough review of reports that American soldiers killed Korean civilians near No Gun Ri during the Korean War. A3 Russia Moves on Chechnya Russian ground troops entered Chechnya and took positions on strategic heights near the border, reportedly advancing as far as six miles into the breakaway republic. A5 Computer Dispute Settled The United States and Russia have quietly resolved a dispute over the illegal sale of I.B.M. computers to Russia's leading nuclear weapons lab, American officials said. A9 German Pressure on C.I.A. The C.I.A. withdrew three officers from Germany, but American officials played down the incident, saying it resulted from friction with the German internal security service. A5 Nobel to German Writer Gunter Grass, whose epic first novel, ''The Tin Drum,'' tackled Germany's agonized identity, which he has examined from various angles throughout his life, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. A13 More Clashes in Serbia Riot police stopped a march of anti-Government demonstrators for the second consecutive night, clubbing opposition leaders without provocation and stampeding people back toward the center of Belgrade. A3 Rebels Enter Timor Capital The first elements of the pro-independence guerrilla army known as Falintil arrived in Dili. They met with officers from the peacekeeping force and handed over weapons they said they had taken from militia groups armed by Indonesia. A4 Palestinian's Homecoming A leading Palestinian radical, Mustafa Zubari, known as Abu Ali Mustafa, a renegade who remained committed to armed struggle against Israel, returned home to the West Bank from Damascus. His public welcome by officials of the Palestinian Authority also ended years of estrangement from |
1141871_0 | Coke in Move Against Bias Suit | Lawyers for the Coca-Cola Company asked a Federal judge yesterday to punish the lawyers for four black employees who filed a racial discrimination lawsuit against the company, saying the plaintiffs' lawyers had falsely accused the company of shredding documents related to the case. The plaintiffs' lawyers submitted a motion two weeks ago in which they cited testimony from several employees who said important documents were being destroyed by the company. The lawsuit was filed on April 22 in Federal District Court in Atlanta by four past and current employees ranging from a security guard to a former executive who earned nearly $100,000 a year. They said that Coca-Cola, on average, paid its black employees nearly $27,000 a year less than it paid white employees. In asking for sanctions, Coca-Cola's lawyers said the people who contended that they took part in discussions about shredders in Room 7 at the Learning Center in the company's Atlanta headquarters never had the conversations they said took place. The filing said that there were no shredders installed in the room, where Coca-Cola's defense in the lawsuit was being assembled, although bins for ''confidential refuse'' were put there. The filing concluded, ''Plaintiffs have filed this motion for one reason -- to coerce the Coca-Cola Company into settling this case by smearing the company's reputation.'' Cyrus Mehri, the lead lawyer for the plaintiffs, responded, ''Their position is the equivalent of Clinton saying, 'I smoked, but I did not inhale.' '' He said that once the lawsuit was filed, the record would show that the company tried to get rid of relevant documents. |
1142962_1 | Editorial Observer; In Describing Health Care Plans, Less is More | coverage voluntarily. The estimate may be unrealistically low, but it is not daffy. The Clinton staff estimated that it could raise coverage from about 85 percent of the population to the low 90's with tax credits and other carrots. But in the giddy first months of his Administration, Mr. Clinton refused to settle for anything short of universal coverage. His experts told him that persuading the last remnants of the population to join health plans would require huge subsidies. So Mr. Clinton turned instead to mandates -- everyone would be required to buy coverage. That required many pages of rules. With mandates would come opposition, from small business, large business, the self-employed. In anticipation, the Clinton plan built in huge subsidies for Detroit auto makers and others. Add more pages. Then the plan imposed elaborate rules to prevent waste and abuse of the subsidies. That took more pages still. Next, Mr. Clinton proposed to redesign every corner of the health care industry, from the number of doctors that hospitals would train each year to the tiniest detail of the insurance policy everyone in American would be required to buy. Add dozens more pages of complex regulations. Mr. Bradley's plan skipped much of this mess by making a second simplifying decision. Instead of redesigning health care, he piggybacked coverage of the uninsured onto an existing health-insurance system, the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program, warts and all. There are warts. The Federal program provides too little incentive for enrollees to choose inexpensive plans and imposes unintended penalties on plans that do a good job catering to the sickest, most-expensive-to-treat patients. Yet the Federal program works reasonably well, and that is good enough for Mr. Bradley. Besides, there is a clever incentive system built into his plan. By tying the uninsured to Congress's own plan, Mr. Bradley insures that the uninsured will be treated well indeed. Will Mr. Bradley's plan cut the rising rolls of the uninsured? The issue took on poignancy this week as the Government released data showing that the percentage of the population without coverage rose slightly last year despite a booming economy. Mr. Bradley's subsidies, which he estimates will cost up to $65 billion a year but which some experts fear could reach several times that amount, might be too small to achieve voluntary compliance. But if the subsidies are raised too high, they could trigger a destructive reaction. |
1142949_1 | WORLD BRIEFING | ASYLUM -- A court in Rome granted the Kurdish rebel leader Abdullah Ocalan political asylum. But Mr. Ocalan, who made the request in November, is now in a Turkish prison appealing a death sentence on terrorism charges. Bowing to intense pressure from Turkey and the United States, Italy asked Mr. Ocalan to leave last January, and the Turkish police later captured him in Nairobi. Alessandra Stanley (NYT) IRELAND: WEAPONS FOUND -- The Irish police made what they called a ''very significant'' discovery of explosives, guns, ammunition and a rocket launcher buried in a field near Dublin. The discovery came during a security operation aimed at forestalling violence by dissident republican guerrillas opposed to the Northern Ireland peace agreement. Warren Hoge (NYT) ASIA PHILIPPINES: MUSLIMS QUIT PEACE TALKS -- Muslim separatist guerrillas have pulled out of peace talks with the Government planned for later this month, accusing the army of attacking rebel camps. The talks, to end the 21-year war for a separate Muslim state in Mindanao, were to open on Oct. 25. (Agence France-Presse) MALAYSIA: EX-MINISTER OUT OF HOSPITAL -- The former Finance Minister Anwar Ibrahim was moved from the hospital where he spent three weeks for tests for arsenic poisoning back to Sungai Buloh prison, where he is serving a six-year term for corruption. Mr. Anwar, who is also standing trial on a sodomy charge, was taken to the hospital on Sept. 10 after saying he had been poisoned. His assertion, dismissed by the Government as a political ploy, set off the biggest anti-Government protests in nearly a year. The arsenic test results were ambiguous, Mr. Anwar's lawyer said. (Reuters) AFGHANISTAN: REFUGEE CRISIS -- A human disaster threatens tens of thousands of Afghan refugees who have fled the civil war, a United Nations spokeswoman said in Islamabad, Pakistan. An estimated 80,000 to 85,000 refugees are living in mosques and schools or in the open in the opposition-held Panjshir valley, said the spokeswoman, Stephanie Bunker. About 200,000 villagers fled the fertile Shamali Plains, north of Kabul, after the Islamic Taliban militia began an offensive on July 28. (Agence France-Presse) KASHMIR: TEAR GAS AT DEMONSTRATION -- Pakistani authorities fired tear gas to disperse hundreds of demonstrators demanding independence from India who were planning to march from Pakistan-held Kashmir into the Indian-held portion. The demonstrators, several of whom were injured, are with the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front. India termed the planned |
1143003_0 | Lessons to Apply In Mosquito War | To the Editor: Re ''Mosquito Virus Exposes a Hole in the Safety Net'' (front page, Oct. 4): Stagnant water in discarded tires provides an ideal breeding environment for mosquitoes. A couple of years ago the New York City Department of Sanitation ceased curbside tire collection and announced that tires would have to be delivered to district sanitation garages or self-help stations. The result? Fewer than 8,000 tires gathered weekly, with thousands more littering streets, alleys and vacant lots. A comprehensive program to eliminate encephalitis-bearing mosquitoes should include restoration of curbside tire collection. ALVIN M. BERK Brooklyn, Oct. 4, 1999 |
1142893_0 | Will Dam-Busting Save Salmon? Maybe Not | The big hydroelectric dam sits deep in a valley framed by softly rounded, grass-covered mountains that look from a distance as if they have been sanded down and then covered with beige and blond velvet. Great expanses of sun-dappled blue water, more reservoir or lake than river, stretch above and below the concrete-and-earth barrier. That is part of the problem. The once fast-flowing Snake River is now so slow, and Lower Granite Dam so much of an impediment, that salmon -- totem fish of the Pacific Northwest and the focus of a landmark political, economic and environmental struggle -- cannot migrate up and down the Snake without the help of an elaborate man-made Rube Goldberg-like system. So it was on a recent day as a state fisheries biologist, Fred Mensik, plucked a silvery, six-inch fish from water speeding through a trough. ''Chinook,'' Mr. Mensik said, identifying it as a member of the heftiest of the salmon species. If it lives long enough, the juvenile smolt, as it is called, could grow to 3 or 4 feet and 40 pounds or more. Mr. Mensik measured the fish, entered the information into a laptop computer and returned the fish to the trough, where it joined other smolts and migrating young steelhead (sea-run rainbow trout) on their way to a tank truck parked outside. The truck would transport the juvenile fish nearly 250 miles downriver, past seven other dams in the Columbia River system, of which the Snake is a part. There the fish were released to resume a trip to the Pacific Ocean. While Mr. Mensik and his co-workers were shepherding the fish downstream, adult salmon and steelhead -- big, powerful veterans of years at sea -- were climbing a fish ladder a few feet away, heading upstream to spawn and die. But there are so few going upstream that all these fish, along with all other salmon and steelhead that spawn in the Snake River, are listed as imperiled under the Endangered Species Act. Will the elaborate, two-decade-old system for moving fish around the dams prove inadequate to save the salmon? The question is at the heart of a tense debate over whether to continue to rely on the transportation system or junk it and remove the earthen portions of Lower Granite and three other hydroelectric dams on the lower Snake. Breaching those dams would help restore the natural flow along |
1143012_2 | MONSANTO TO BAR A CLASS OF SEEDS | consensus in favor of it. Yesterday's announcement closing the door more firmly came in a letter from Robert B. Shapiro, Monsanto's chairman, to Gordon Conway, president of the Rockefeller Foundation, a leading sponsor of agricultural research in developing nations, where opposition to the Terminator technology has been intense. The technology is many years from being ready for market; some experts doubt that it could ever be. ''Seed sterility involves a complex of genes and presents a nightmare of technical hurdles irrespective of public opinion,'' said Charles Arntzen, president of the Boyce Thompson Institute for Plant Research at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y. Monsanto and other major biotechnology companies have all maintained that seed sterility has not been the focus of their research despite the patent claims. Most worry privately that the publicity surrounding Terminator is a public relations disaster in an industry already under attack on other, more serious fronts, like demands to label products containing genetically engineered foods and restrictions in Europe on growing or importing genetically engineered crops and food products. The Terminator nickname, recalling a robotic killer played by Arnold Schwarzenegger, was first applied to a method developed by the Department of Agriculture and Delta and Pine Land, the Oxford, Miss., company Monsanto has sought to buy since the spring of 1998. That deal has been held up by antitrust reviews. The Agriculture Department-Delta project, under Dr. Melvin Oliver, a department researcher in Lubbock, Tex., involves a tricky balance of suppressing and releasing key genes. The last step causes the plant to make a protein that sterilizes a seed after the plant is mature and every marketable element in the seed, such as vegetable oil, is fully developed. Dr. Oliver is several weeks away from harvesting the first seeds believed to have been sterilized with the technology. The laboratory's test crop is tobacco, which is widely used in research because its genes are relatively easy to manipulate. The second target crop, cotton, is much further behind. ''This may be the right decision for Monsanto, but I think abandoning the technology is a mistake,'' Dr. Oliver said yesterday. In particular, he said, seed sterility could be an important tool for assuring that other genetically engineered traits like herbicide resistance do not escape into wild plants. If such traits could be linked, any weed that picked up the gene for herbicide resistance would also be unable to pass on |
1145564_2 | The Mentor Conservatives Turn to for Inspiration; A Gadfly and Confessor To a Harvard Lineage | political philosophy relate to practical political issues today.'' Even Sean Wilentz, a liberal Princeton University historian who drew harsh criticism from Mr. Mansfield for his defense of President Clinton during impeachment proceedings, admitted, ''Some of us would give essential body parts for that kind of influence.'' On a recent day, Mr. Mansfield sat serenely in his book-lined office, surrounded by portraits of Dead White Males like John Locke, Thomas More and the subject of decades of his scrutiny, Machiavelli. Mr. Mansfield has produced translations of three works by the Renaissance figure, including ''The Prince,'' in addition to three books on the man himself. ''I think he is even more evil than he appears to be and he had a plan to change our way of thinking, to make us realistic, more willing to do dirty and nasty things for the sake of some good,'' he said of Machiavelli. ''It's with reason that he is considered the first modern thinker, even the founder of modern thinking.'' Mr. Mansfield, who is trimly built and looks 20 years younger than his age, is soft-spoken, even a bit shy in person. Machiavelli is his speciality, but it is his exposition of the ideas of the American philosopher Leo Strauss that has resonated in current policy debates. Mr. Strauss, an unabashed elitist, was harshly critical of modern political thinkers, arguing that they were unable to make value judgments. He fervently celebrated the ancient Greek philosophers, believing they should be treated not as historical figures but as sources of wisdom today. ''He runs one of the intellectual factories that has kept Leo Strauss's work alive,'' said Mr. Dionne. Mr. Mansfield says his provocative style is part of his appeal. ''People come to me because there are very few academic conservatives and also because I answer,'' he said, confessing to enjoying the center stage. ''If you're going to go out on the limb, you might as well say, 'Everybody look at me.' '' Gary Rosen, who once served as Mr. Mansfield's teaching assistant, says that he is purposely ''naughty'': ''He wants to kind of shake the humorless orthodoxy of the other side and encourage discussion.'' Mr. Keyes, a staunchly conservative radio talk show host, agrees: ''He does not compromise so that it will sound better to your ear. He will present it in such a way so that your mind is forced to deal with it.'' But |
1145581_0 | What Causes Brutality? The People Nurturing It | When what was formerly commonplace fades to rarity, we come to think it bizarre. Whose mother still steps behind the house to throttle a chicken for Sunday dinner? Who has seen a goiter or a face ruined by smallpox? Serious private violence used to be routine, a way people settled disputes in the ages before access to courts of law and police protection brought such violence under social control. Today, because many of us never experience such violence directly even once in our lives, its origins seem inexplicable. Yet theories abound. Sociologists often say that criminal aggressiveness originates in exposure to the mass media, though homicide rates declined across the centuries when children joined eager crowds at public executions. Psychiatrists often say that violent acts erupt unbidden from pathological mental states, though the progressive decline of violence in the West as social control increased and the disparity of violence rates between Europe and the United States today implicate social experience rather than individual psychology. I have personal experience of violence. For two years as a child, I was beaten, starved and physically and psychologically tortured by a stepmother whose amused malevolence authenticated the wicked stepmothers of folklore. My older brother Stanley, a brave 13-year-old, saved us by going to the police wearing the fresh welts of a beating. I gained 30 pounds in three months at the beneficent private boys' home where we recovered. For people like me, violence is the minotaur; we spend our lives wandering its maze, looking for the exit. Before microorganisms were shown to cause most diseases, experts imagined that diseases arose from multiple external causes -- mists and stinks, the influence of the stars -- or signaled imbalances of bodily humors. Even though unsupported conjecture similarly obscures violence prevention today, I believe the cause of violent criminality has been authoritatively identified. The explanation had been sitting on the shelf for half a decade when I encountered it in 1997. An American criminologist, Dr. Lonnie Athens, had extensively interviewed several hundred violent criminals -- men and women of varied ages, ethnic and social backgrounds, classified as sane or mentally ill -- and isolated the distinctive pattern of noxious social development common to them all. In his 1992 book ''The Creation of Dangerous Violent Criminals,'' he called this four-stage process of social development ''violentization.'' They had all been brutalized -- had been violently dominated, had witnessed intimates |
1147724_0 | Refining the Financing For Special Education | I agree with Jane Goldblatt that all children are entitled to ''an equal opportunity to get a good education'' [letter, Oct. 17]. All children should receive an education that will allow them to function independently to the best of their ability. The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act states that all children are entitled to a free and appropriate education in the least restrictive environment. It does not provide unlimited financing to children with disabilities. It does, however, guarantee their right to an education that will enable them to attain the skills necessary to function as independently as possible in the environment. The financing for special education does not deny any child ''an equal opportunity to get a good education.'' DONNA M. CONK Huntington |
1147635_3 | Q&A/Dr. Mandana Nakhai; Professor Sees Changes in Native Iran | taught at the University of Teheran, and it was a wonderful experience. Q. How hard is it for you to go from the American society, which is generally free for women to navigate, to Iran? A. It was very difficult, of course. Here in the United States we take this freedom for granted -- the freedom to say what we want, to be direct and honest. Even though whenever I think of home I think of warmth and an embracing place, yet at the same time I did not feel completely secure. And there were, in fact, things there that made me angry. The situation of women, especially. The revolution of 1979 supposedly realized every citizen's dream -- and I say every citizen's dream -- of democracy. And now two decades after the revolution, sexually discriminating laws still prevail in Iran. Our new president, Khatami, has said frequently and firmly that he stressed the word of God, the rule of law. The challenge for Iranian women now is to reconcile the Islamic code as understood and interpreted by Muslim theologians with their quest for identity and self-respect. There are really gross incongruities between this ideal of equality and the rights of women in Iran. Q. What are some examples? A. Women still, as you know, cannot be seen in public without covering themselves from head to toe. If a woman chooses to go outside wearing the hijab (or veiling), that's fine to me. It should be her choice. When the father of our former Shah came to Iran, he forced women to take off their hijab, and I think that was wrong also. Another thing: a woman can't travel outside the country without her husband's consent. Here I am an educated woman, but every time I want to go somewhere I have to get my husband's consent on paper because I'm not an American citizen. Also, a man today is allowed to have up to four wives and several concubines at the same time. When I spoke to some people among the clergy they explained to me that nowadays they have added a little article to this law that it should be with the consent of the wife. But you see, it's very, very easy to get around this. A man can threaten his wife that he will take away the children from her and make her consent to the |
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1147822_1 | The World; Victoria Would Not Be Amazed by Chile Today | seeking annulment at all, since it is expensive and usually requires lying in court. They simply separate and then match up with new, common-law partners. The practice helps explain why almost half of the couples who live together in this overwhelmingly Catholic country are not married and almost half of the children born here are born out of wedlock. Then there is the matter of abortion. Due to a 1989 decree by Gen. Augusto Pinochet just before he left power, Chile is one of only four countries -- El Salvador, Malta and Andorra are the others -- that prohibit the procedure under any conditions, even in cases involving rape or the life of the mother. A handful of women go to jail every year after they are caught recuperating in hospitals from the effects of botched abortions. Still, clandestine abortions are so common that health experts estimate that the abortion rate in Chile is among the highest in Latin America. In an attempt to stop the clandestine abortions, conservatives in the Senate proposed a law last year to increase the length of jail terms for doctors, midwives and others convicted of performing abortions. The conservatives lost by a single vote, and promise to fight on. Pregnant teen-agers are legally forbidden to seek abortions, of course, and are given few other options. Moralistic high school principals force many to quit their studies, at least until they give birth, and girls who are showing are asked not to attend graduation. In just one of many double standards, young fathers study on and graduate without sanction. And sex education is almost nonexistent. ''The public discourse is one thing, and the way people live is another,'' said Mariana Aylwin, a former Christian Democratic Congresswoman and senior official in the Education Ministry. ''Our social elite is very conservative, but I don't know a city in the world with more motels and infidelity. This is a very hypocritical country.'' Alfredo Jocelyn-Holt Letelier, an historian at the Santiago de Chile University, calls double standards ''the Chilean solution.'' ''Chile is traditional, but it is not an orthodox conservative country,'' he added. ''It is a morally flexible country. If there is a gay person in the family you accept it without ever talking about it.'' Victorian-like values also creep into the realm of public expression. More than 50 films and 700 videos have been banned by Government censors in |
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1147889_0 | U.S. Mediator Extends Effort To Rescue Ulster Accord | George J. Mitchell, the former United States Senator turned mediator, extended his attempt to rescue the faltering Northern Ireland peace agreement past its expected end tonight, saying more time was needed ''in view of the gravity of what is at stake.'' In a statement issued after daylong talks with Ulster's feuding politicians, Mr. Mitchell warned that ''there should be no false optimism -- significant differences remain.'' But he said conversations in the last few days of his formal review, now seven weeks old, had persuaded him that ''the parties are making a sincere and serious effort to bridge those differences.'' Peter Mandelson, the new British Secretary for Northern Ireland, said the exchanges between the rival politicians had become more promising. ''They trust each other more now than they have before,'' he told reporters outside the Stormont Castle Buildings, scene of the talks. ''The politicians are talking more seriously and in a more mature way than ever before.'' The main difference that continues to deadlock progress in putting into place the April 1998 peace accord centers on the refusal of the province's largest party, the Ulster Unionists, to permit Sinn Fein, the political ally of the Irish Republican Army, into government without a beginning to I.R.A. disarmament. Sinn Fein argues that no such condition was included in the agreement and that it cannot compel the paramilitaries to turn over weapons. The I.R.A. has resisted increasing calls to signal its willingness to disarm or to declare an end to its war, including one this week in a long editorial in the Dublin-based Irish Times. At the same time, many Ulster Unionists have toughened their stance on the issue, warning their leader, David Trimble, not to give any ground. Distrust and polarization had appeared to be deepening in the last week, producing gloom where 18 months before there had been euphoria and provoking pessimistic statements about the outlook for any success in Mr. Mitchell's review. All the parties fear being identified as the cause of the breakdown of an arrangement that has rid Ulster of most political violence for more than two years after three decades in which more than 3,300 people died. Mr. Mitchell was the chairman of the original talks and began the current review on Sept. 6 at the request of the British and Irish Prime Ministers. He returned to the United States overnight but said he would be back |
1149041_0 | WORLD BRIEFING | EUROPE BRITAIN: COURT BACKS HOMOSEXUALS -- England's top court made a major ruling in favor of gay rights, saying a man was entitled to stay in the apartment of his late partner, the tenancy right granted to heterosexual spouses. The Law Lords' ruling, which overturned two court decisions, means Martin Fitzpatrick can stay in the London apartment where his partner had been listed as the tenant. The court held that Mr. Fitzpatrick should be regarded as a member of his late partner's family. (Reuters) NORTHERN IRELAND: UNITY ON ATTACKS -- The Ulster Unionist leader David Trimble and Sinn Fein's President, Gerry Adams, condemned two attacks on Catholic families by Protestant hard-liners aimed at destroying the Northern Ireland peace accord. They spoke separately outside the talks, now in their eighth week, run by former Senator George J. Mitchell, that seek to restore progress to the pact. Warren Hoge (NYT) IRELAND: NURSES END STRIKE -- Hospital services returned to normal after the suspension of a nine-day old strike by 27,500 nurses, the largest work stoppage in Ireland's history. Nurses will be voting on a new pay offer recommended by their union. Warren Hoge (NYT) ITALY: DELAY ON PIUS XII -- Leading Jews said they were told by Vatican officials that Pope John XXIII would be beatified next year, but that Pius XII, who was Pope during World War II, would not be beatified in 2000. Many Jewish groups oppose Pius XII's beatification, saying he remained shamefully silent during the Holocaust. Vatican officials said Pius XII would not be beatified only because the paperwork was not completed. Alessandra Stanley (NYT) TURKEY: RELAXATION ON KURDS -- The military-dominated National Security Council recommended that the southeast province of Siirt, which is mostly Kurdish, no longer be governed under emergency rule. The recommendation was a step in what some Turks see as a loosening of Government control over Kurdish regions, a move urged by foreign powers. Stephen Kinzer (NYT) RUSSIA: PLEA TO YELTSIN -- Former Prime Minister Yevgeny M. Primakov and other political leaders called on President Boris N. Yeltsin to emerge from his self-imposed ''political isolation'' and fire members of his staff who they said were openly interfering with coming parliamentary elections. The leaders said Mr. Yeltsin's inner circle was abusing its power and putting pressure on the news media and state authorities for their own political purposes. Celestine Bohlen (NYT) AFRICA IVORY COAST: RULED |
1144528_5 | Seizing the Initiative on Privacy; On-Line Industry Presses Its Case for Self-Regulation | is failing. They note, for example, that the 1999 Georgetown survey also found that only 10 percent of Web sites included the four touchstones of what the F.T.C. calls ''fair information practices'': notifying users of the sites' data collection practices; giving users a choice of opting out; giving them access to personal data, and assuring them that their personal data were secure. The same four principles also serve as the basis for the Online Privacy Alliance's voluntary guidelines, but critics say the principles are too vaguely worded, giving companies too much leeway, to protect consumers. ''And those policies are just window-dressing unless they are backed up by a credible system of enforcement,'' said Deborah Hurley, director of Harvard University's Information Infrastructure Project. The industry has financed independent privacy monitoring organizations, like eTrust and BBB Online. Even so, enforcement remains an issue for privacy groups and in negotiations between the United States and Europe. To date, much of the development of privacy practices on line has been by the marketplace, responding to complaints, often by the thousands. In 1997, for example, when word spread that America Online planned to pass along customers' telephone numbers to telemarketers and other direct-sales merchants, the big Internet service provider heard a consumer outcry -- and quickly dropped the plan. Likewise Amazon.com, the big on-line bookstore, ran into a backlash last month when it posted ''purchase circles,'' which showed the book buying habits of users from selected companies and universities. Some users found this a breach of privacy without consent and asked to be removed. After asking employees for their reaction, Louis V. Gerstner Jr., chairman of the International Business Machines Corporation, received 5,000 E-mail responses within hours. More than 90 percent objected to having their book-buying habits as a group disclosed on line. I.B.M. was removed from the book-purchase circles. Later, Mr. Gerstner wrote to Jeff Bezos, chief executive of Amazon.com, saying, ''I'm certainly not going to tell you how to run your business, but I do urge you to view this as an enormously important issue.'' Some on-line privacy issues have surfaced case by case. Last year, for example, a customer service representative at America Online told a Navy investigator the real name of a naval officer who had identified himself by the screen name ''Tim'' and listed his marital status as ''gay.'' Later, America Online reached an out-of-court settlement with the officer and |
1144584_0 | On Treaty, Chirac Is Hypocritical | To the Editor: Re ''A Treaty We All Need'' by Jacques Chirac, Tony Blair and Gerhard Schroder (Op-Ed, Oct. 8): I am very much in favor of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and agree with these European heads of state that nuclear testing and proliferation remain a large threat to world security. But Mr. Chirac, the President of France, destroyed all his potential credibility on this issue, as well as his right even to participate in this discussion, when his Government exploded a series of real nuclear devices at atolls in the South Pacific Ocean in 1995. The world begged him and his countrymen not to poison our oceans and air with radiation, but he and his Government proceeded. His disingenuousness now is infuriating. How dare he try to influence our legislation when he exploded actual nuclear devices long after the United States had ceased to do so? W. STEVEN WARD New Brunswick, N.J., Oct. 8, 1999 |
1144531_0 | A.F.L.-C.I.O. Members to Get On-Line Access And Discounts | The nation's labor movement, long a laggard on high-technology matters, is taking a leap into cyberspace with a new A.F.L.-C.I.O. program that will offer heavily discounted computers and on-line service to 13 million union members. The plan, announced over the weekend, aims not only to make on-line service more affordable for millions of union members, but also to tie unions more closely to their members and to make it easier to mobilize the rank and file in labor's struggles. Union leaders say this new on-line plan could create huge political waves because it will enable union presidents, with the click of a button, to send E-mail messages to hundreds of thousands of their members, urging them in turn to E-mail members of Congress, asking that they initiate, pass or defeat legislation, among other things. Morton Bahr, president of the Communications Workers of America, said, ''Can you imagine being able to instantly ask millions of union members to refuse to buy a product or to bombard elected officials with E-mail in protest?'' Under the new program, the A.F.L.-C.I.O. is working with iBelong, a start-up based in Waltham, Mass., to offer union members computers for less than $700 and monthly on-line service for less than $14.95. Labor federation officials say they hope that at least a million members will subscribe to the on-line service, which will cost roughly 30 percent less than what many on-line services now charge. John J. Sweeney, the A.F.L.-C.I.O.'s president, said the new program aims in part to bridge a digital division with wealth as its demarcation. According to a recent Commerce Department report, families with annual incomes of more than $75,000 are 20 times more likely to have Internet access than the lowest-income families. ''We're helping bridge the gap between the technological haves and have-nots,'' Mr. Sweeney said. ''We're also giving working families new ways to connect with one another and to make their voices heard.'' Shikhar Ghosh, chief executive of iBelong, which specializes in customized Web entryways, said his company had a different focus from most other on-line services, which create virtual communities made up of strangers. Instead, he said, iBelong was designing this on-line service, called Workingfamilies.com, to tie people closer together who already form a community by sharing occupations or belonging to the same union. ''The Web is creating pseudo-communities where you meet people you don't know,'' he said. ''We're looking to build communities |
1149237_0 | Ex-Teamster Official Is Charged With Graft | A board of Federal monitors yesterday charged a top lieutenant of Ron Carey, the former teamsters' union president, with embezzling more than $12,500 and with breaching his fiduciary duty to union members. The board, called the Independent Review Board, asked the union's president, James P. Hoffa, to pursue disciplinary proceedings that could lead to a fine against the official, Joseph A. Padellaro. Mr. Padellaro resigned from the union in May and so cannot be suspended or expelled. For years, Mr. Carey relied heavily on Mr. Padellaro to clean up locals that had been placed into trusteeship because of corrupt leadership. The review board accused Mr. Padellaro of repeated double-dipping, specifically of having bought airplane tickets that were paid for by the parent union and then asking various locals to reimburse him for the trips. Mr. Padellaro's lawyer, James Roth, denied all the accusations. He said he was waiting to see the board's exhibits, detailing the reimbursements to Mr. Padellaro, before he would comment further. |
1149236_0 | WORLD BRIEFING | EUROPE NORTHERN IRELAND: LIFE FOR KILLING 3 BROTHERS -- A 24-year-old farm machinery salesman, Garfield Gilmour, was sentenced to three life terms in Belfast Crown Court for the murders of three Catholic brothers who died after their home in a largely Protestant housing estate in Ballymoney was firebombed in July 1998. Lord Justice McCollum called the sectarian killings of Richard, Mark and Jason Quinn, aged 10, 9 and 8, a ''shameful outrage.'' Warren Hoge (NYT) NORTHERN IRELAND: MITCHELL WINDING DOWN -- Former Senator George J. Mitchell was expected to wind up his eight-week-old mission today to unblock the stalemate over guerrilla disarmament that has stalled progress over the April 1998 peace accord. The effort has thawed relations between the Ulster Unionist and Sinn Fein parties but has so far failed to produce a breakthrough. Warren Hoge (NYT) LITHUANIA: NEW PREMIER PICKED -- President Valdas Adamkus named the deputy parliamentary speaker, Andrius Kubilius, left, to head a new Government after Prime Minister Rolandas Paksas resigned. Mr. Kubilius, 42, a member of the Conservative Party, will replace Mr. Paksas, whose Cabinet collapsed after it voted for a major oil deal Mr. Paksas had opposed. (AP) GERMANY: SLAVE SETTLEMENT ROADBLOCK -- A dispute over how much money wartime slave laborers should receive as compensation from German corporations deepened as a mediator, Otto Lambsdorff, said the next round of talks, on Nov. 16, might be postponed. An offer of about $3.3 billion has been dismissed as insulting. Mr. Lambsdorff said there would be no point in holding the Nov. 16 meeting unless other companies willing to add to the fund could be found. Roger Cohen (NYT) SPAIN: BASQUE TERMS REJECTED -- The Government rejected the tougher demands by the Basque separatist group E.T.A. to resume the stalled peace talks but said it was willing to negotiate a permanent peace with the rebels, who have observed a cease-fire for 13 months, in exchange for possible leniency for hundreds of Basque prisoners. Al Goodman (NYT) TURKEY: 2D KURDISH GROUP SURRENDERS -- A second group of eight Kurdish guerrillas gave themselves up in Istanbul in what they said was a gesture intended to help the search for peace. They were taken into custody. This month another group of eight Kurds also surrendered, but they were detained and face possible prison sentences of up to 20 years. (Reuters) ASIA CHINA: U.S. AIDE OPTIMISTIC -- Under Secretary of State |
1143724_0 | Clinton Plans Move To Preserve Forests | President Clinton has asked the United States Forest Service to draw up a plan to protect up to 40 million acres of national forests around the country from commercial development, a White House official said. The plan would take effect in the form a Presidential directive. A move to keep forests away from loggers and builders is sure to foment spirited debates between environment advocates and business interests and over Washington's right to tell states how to treat land within their borders. Article, page A14. |
1143620_0 | A Treaty We All Need | During the 1990's, the United States has made a vital contribution to arms control and nonproliferation. Thanks to the common resolve of the world's powers, we have achieved a substantial reduction in nuclear arsenals, the banning of chemical weapons, the indefinite and unconditional extension of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and, in 1996, the conclusion of negotiations on the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. South Africa, Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Belarus have renounced nuclear weapons in the same spirit. The decisions we take now will help determine, for generations to come, the safety of the world we bequeath to our children. As we look to the next century, our greatest concern is proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, and chiefly nuclear proliferation. We have to face the stark truth that nuclear proliferation remains the major threat to world safety. Failure to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty will be a failure in our struggle against proliferation. The stabilizing effect of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, extended in 1995, would be undermined. Disarmament negotiations would suffer. Over half the countries that must ratify the new treaty to bring it into force have now done so. Britain, France and Germany ratified last year. All the political parties in our countries recognize that the treaty is strongly in our interests, whether we are nuclear powers or not. It enhances our security and is verifiable. The treaty is an additional barrier against proliferation of nuclear weapons. Unless proliferators are able to test their devices, they can never be sure that any new weapon they design or build is safe and will work. Congress realized this in 1992 when it compelled the United States Presidential Administration to seek the conclusion of a Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty by 1996. It was a welcome move for the world's strongest power to show the way. The treaty is effectively verifiable. We need have no fear of the risk of cheating. We will not be relying on the good will of a rogue state to allow inspectors onto its territory. Under the treaty, a global network of stations is being set up, using four different technologies to identify nuclear tests. The system is already being put in place. We know it will work. Opponents of the treaty claim that, without testing, it will not be possible to guarantee the continuing safety and reliability of nuclear weapons. All nuclear powers, including the United States, Britain |
1143654_2 | Across the U.S., Universities Are Fueling High-Tech Economic Booms | like the comparative study issued this summer by the independent Milken Institute, in Santa Monica, Calif. That study found that the fast-growing high-tech sector was increasingly ''determining which metropolitan areas are succeeding or failing.'' In Milken's analysis, high-tech activity could explain 65 percent of the difference in economic growth among various metropolitan regions during the 1990's. And, it found, ''research centers and institutions are undisputedly the most important factor in incubating high-tech industries.'' The institutions, experts say, provide nearby companies streams of cutting-edge knowledge as well as streams of smart labor. Of course, universities have long churned out graduates and ideas that have turned into companies, and have created jobs simply by being huge institutional consumers. But in the knowledge economy, where ideas and information become lucrative products, these cultivators of knowledge are becoming more important than ever, some experts say, not only because of the new economic logic but also because of changes in academia itself. The incentives for universities to think commercially are manifold, from their share of licensing payments, to the jobs created for graduates, to industry grants for research and even the ability to recruit professors who want a chance to get rich outside the classroom. Some universities have for years been emphasizing the economic energy they provide and promoting a commercial orientation. In 1997, M.I.T. issued a report, ''The Impact of Innovation,'' describing the impressive economic benefits flowing from the university, including the creation of 14,000 jobs in Cambridge alone at companies founded by its faculty and graduates. Similarly, in 1995, the University of California distributed a report called ''U.C. Means Business,'' which pointed out that, among other things, some 80 companies had been spun out of the university's San Diego campus, providing more than 7,000 jobs to the region, largely in biotech and biomedical companies. Every one of the nine University of California campuses has a high-technology cluster near it, said Robert N. Shelton, the system's vice provost for research. And it is Silicon Valley's tale of genesis that it all began with garage-based start-ups and vision that came out of Stanford. Other universities are just now joining in this promotion of a commercial emphasis. Last week Harvard, not exactly known as a dirty-fingernails kind of place, detailed for the first time the overall lift it gives the local economy. Neil L. Rudenstine, the university's president, underscored in a speech to the Boston Chamber |
1141987_0 | World Briefing | EUROPE FRANCE: BEEF BAN STANDS -- The Food Safety Agency recommended that the Government maintain its embargo on imports of British beef because of continuing risks of mad-cow disease. European Union officials, who ruled that the three-year old ban be lifted, said they might take legal action if Paris persists in its ban. France's action has infuriated the British authorities. Marlise Simons (NYT) FRANCE: BRETONS HELD -- The French police detained two Breton nationalists suspected of having helped Basque separatists steal eight tons of dynamite in western France. After recovering part of the stolen explosives near the Spanish border and arresting three Basques, the police said, they had found a second lot in an abandoned truck in Brittany. Marlise Simons (NYT) BRITAIN: TORIES PICK ARCHER FOR MAYOR -- The millionaire novelist and member of the House of Lords, Jeffrey Archer, 59, won in a postal ballot of party members as the Conservative candidate to be London's first elected mayor. His Labor opponent in the May vote 4 is still to be chosen from a field that includes the former actress Glenda Jackson, who is now a Member of Parliament. Warren Hoge (NYT) IRELAND: 6 ARRESTED -- Six hard-line republicans were arrested for questioning in two counties south of Dublin amid reports from the police in Ireland and Northern Ireland that dissident guerrillas were planning acts of violence in the North to disrupt peace talks. The renegades oppose the cease-fire adopted by the Irish Republican Army two years ago. Warren Hoge (NYT) VATICAN: 3 NEW PATRON SAINTS -- Pope John Paul II announced three new patron saints for Europe: two 14th-century nuns and Edith Stein, a Jewish philosopher who became a nun and was killed at Auschwitz in 1944. Until now, Europe had only male patron saints. The Pope explained that he picked them ''to underline the great role women have played in the civil and ecclesiastic history of the Continent.'' Alessandra Stanley (NYT) TURKEY: RAIDS ON KURDS CONTINUE -- Turkish troops kept up their offensive against Abdullah Ocalan's Kurdish guerrillas on both sides of the Iraqi border, despite the rebels' promises to sue for peace. Officials said there was no word on casualties from the five-day incursion into Iraq, loudly condemned by Baghdad as a violation of sovereignty. The Iraqi Government lost control of northern Iraq after the 1991 gulf war. (Reuters) THE AMERICAS COLOMBIA: LEGISLATOR AN EXILE -- Citing |
1142043_0 | NEWS SUMMARY | INTERNATIONAL A3-7 Iran's Chief Cleric Acts To Heal Rift With President Iran's supreme religious leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, left, moved decisively to head off a fresh confrontation with the reformist President, Mohammad Khatami, instructing hard-line clerics and their loyalists in the police not to ''take matters into their own hands'' in a potentially explosive dispute involving students. A1 Korean Protests Against U.S. Protesters in Seoul expressed the sentiments of many South Koreans, who criticized the United States for ignoring claims of an attack by American soldiers on hundreds of civilians early in the Korean War. A6 China Displays Military Might A procession of troops, tanks, missiles and jets set the tone for the Beijing parade commemorating 50 years of Communism in China. A6 Timor Peacekeepers Expand International forces opened a new phase in the campaign to secure East Timor, sending troops for the first time into the western region, where militias that oppose them have a strong presence. The operation met no initial resistance. A6 Indonesia's new national Assembly convened, and booed when President B. J. Habibie arrived. Members also decided that the presidential selection should be conducted this month instead of in November. A6 U.S. Nuclear Review Ordered President Clinton told the Energy Department and the Pentagon to review the safety of civilian nuclear fuel processing, but experts said the Energy Department itself owns the plants most vulnerable to an accident like the one in Japan. A7 Senate Moves on Nuclear Pact Senate leaders agreed to begin debate next Friday on a treaty banning nuclear testing. Defense Secretary William S. Cohen cut short by a day his trip to Asia to return to Washington and prepare strategy. A7 Moscow Ends Chechnya Ties Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin of Russia cut Moscow's last links with the elected government of the breakaway republic of Chechnya, in a move that could intensify the conflict in the northern Caucasus. A3 World Briefing A4 NATIONAL A8-11, 16 Gun Makers and Cities In Talks Sparked by Suits Leading gun manufacturers, in their first major meeting with officials from cities that are suing the firearms industry, agreed to begin negotiations to improve gun safety, crack down on corrupt retailers and reduce the flow of guns to criminals, in hopes of ending the suits. A1 Bush at Christian Coalition Gov. George W. Bush of Texas gave a speech that barely mentioned abortion, school prayer, gay rights or |
1142039_4 | Nuclear Peril Is Over but Japanese Anger Isn't | in the minority though, because officials were able to convince people that accidents like Chernobyl and Three Mile Island could never happen here. Japan's safety precautions were in fact perfect, they said.'' In Tokyo today, independent nuclear experts and civic groups ridiculed the Government's contention that the uncontrolled reaction, in a privately owned uranium-reprocessing plant, did not reflect on the overall safety of Japan's huge nuclear energy industry. Even one senior official, the Minister of International Trade and Industry, Kaoru Yosano, took exception to the prevailing official line, saying he was more concerned about ''psychological damage'' to the public than any economic impact. ''I am worried that the unthinkable critical accident may throw cold water on the public trust in nuclear facilities,'' he said. One the most critical stances, though, came from Greenpeace Japan, which said it was starting a campaign to force the Government to phase out the nuclear industry. Others may have stopped short of a demand like that, which has little prospect of being realized, but insisted on sweeping changes and were no less scathing in their dismissal of Government explanations of the crisis. Asked about the Government's reassurances that the incident did not reflect on the country's entire nuclear industry, Kiyoshi Sakurai, a former researcher at the state-run Atomic Energy Research Institute said: ''Nonsense. Safety management or operational management of other nuclear facilities has a lot in common with this plant -- that is, the system is designed in ways that allow workers to intervene easily in the process.'' According to most accounts of the accident, a flash of blue light and a chain reaction of nuclear fission were produced when workers inside the plant put more than five times the amount of uranium in an acid solution-filled processing container than is normally allowed. Three of those workers are among the critically injured, altogether 49 people were exposed to radiation. The reaction was eventually contained when emergency workers managed to break a drainage pipe for the container holding the fissionable material. Later, emergency crews doused the contaminated site with radiation-absorbing chemicals. ''Many in the public say that this accident must have been caused by a procedural infractions, but I do not buy that,'' said Keiji Koyabashi, a scientist at the Research Reactor Institute of Kyoto University. ''In nuclear power matters, there should always be fail-safes,'' he said. ''Even if a mistake occurs, safety must be assured.'' |
1131989_2 | 2,800 Years Old And Still Relevant | is one of his main themes: Odysseus ''saw the cities of many men and understood the way they thought.'' When I first started teaching, 35 years ago, I talked a lot about the archetypal journey of the hero. Twenty years ago, I concentrated on plot development -- on how Odysseus's newfound knowledge of others helps him realize that he must return home in disguise and discover who his friends are before he can reveal his true identity. In the past few years I have begun to discuss how long it takes Odysseus to imagine how he might look to other people. As our society has become increasingly diverse, I have learned to question my own assumptions about other people's attitudes and thoughts. Like Odysseus, I have not always found it easy to look outside of myself. Now I look at Odysseus also from the point of view of the peoples he encounters or intrudes upon, and whose lives he interrupts or destroys altogether. I point out that in the end his desire for revenge is so extreme that the gods must intervene directly to bring an end to it. The gods protect him, but only so long as he serves as an agent of their justice. And others also have rights that must be upheld. Athena is goddess of war, yet she demands, ''Stop your cruel fighting and separate, now, without further bloodshed.'' The ancient Greeks needed to understand the world around them in order to survive. They needed to trade and to emigrate. They drew maps; they catalogued rivers, even beyond the Istros, which we know as the Danube. Those who left their homeland and came to live among strange peoples taught them their customs but also recorded and adopted some customs of those they had come to live among. What will people be teaching about Odysseus 20 years from now? Probably not what I'm emphasizing now. New experiences in their lifetimes will help them find new meanings in these same texts. That's why we don't always need to revise our reading lists, particularly when they're composed of the so-called classics. No one in the course of a semester or even of a lifetime can completely grasp everything these books have to tell us. We will always be surprised and enlightened by what our own lives have taught us about how to see. Mary Lefkowitz is a professor of |
1130271_0 | The Costs of Staying Connected; Too Much Information | To the Editor: I completely agree with Thomas L. Friedman (column, Aug. 10): We are way too connected with each other. I don't want cell phone calls, I want messages. I don't want E-mail, I want real mail. Too much information is, well, too much! Today, on my way to work on the bus, a man was on his cell phone calling his office to say that he was on his way in and would be there in the next five minutes. Whatever happened to ''I'll be in when I'm in'' ? PETER CHAN New York, Aug. 10, 1999 |
1130283_0 | Colombian Quagmire; Success in Peru | To the Editor: In a July 31 editorial you suggest that Bolivia and Peru have had some success with a ''mixed strategy'' of fumigation of coca crops ''combined with help to bring roads and electricity to coca areas, so peasants have alternatives.'' The Peruvian Government does not spray coca fields or use any chemicals to reduce production. Our policy is to eradicate coca manually, pulling the plants out of the ground. Peru has reduced the area of coca cultivation by 56 percent since 1995. Progress was due to a strategy that combined interdiction and alternative development to provide incentives to the farmers to shift to legal crops. But since last year, traffickers have resorted to new routes and methods to smuggle drugs out of Peru, and coca prices have increased, jeopardizing the strategy. To reverse this situation, Peru needs more cooperation from the United States and the international community. ALFONSO RIVERO Ambassador of Peru Washington, Aug. 10, 1999 |
1131649_0 | Peru's Drug Successes Erode as Traffickers Adapt | The days when drug dealers flew freely in and out of this little tropical town in the Apurimac Valley with thick wads of cash ended four years ago, right after President Alberto K. Fujimori ordered the armed forces to shoot down planes suspected of trafficking. Once the ''air bridge'' was broken, the demand for coca leaf plummeted, and the price dropped by more than 60 percent between April 1995 and August 1995. Farmers began abandoning coca growing, giving American and Peruvian officials the chance to teach them how to grow legitimate crops like premium coffee and cacao and build roads to take their new produce to market. But the price of coca leaf has shot back up over the last year -- two-thirds of the way to its 1995 highs. The reason, officials say, is that traffickers have found ways to reopen some air routes and to replace others with river, road and sea channels, making coca profitable once again. The change underscores the cyclical nature of a drug war in Peru that is unavoidably tied to the appetite for cocaine in America and Europe and to the impossibility of choking off all the trafficking routes through South America. Developments in nearby countries have opened the way for a resurgence of trafficking in Peru, with smugglers testing the limits of the resources that the United States and regional governments can deploy in a vast shell game that spans the continent. Four years after Peru had seemingly demolished its reputation as the world's biggest producer of coca leaf, the hillsides here are again teeming with newly pruned coca fields and with workers -- as young as 5 -- picking them within sight of the Peruvian police. Local authorities now speak of Peruvian, Colombian and Brazilian traffickers plying rivers and traveling jungle paths on mules to avoid the police. ''In Peru, the drug control situation is deteriorating,'' Gen. Barry R. McCaffrey, director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, told a House subcommittee on Aug. 6. ''Peruvian coca prices have been rising since March 1998, making alternative development and eradication more difficult. Some farmers are returning to abandoned fields and the central growing areas are rejuvenating.'' ''Clearly,'' he said, ''rebounding cultivation in Peru would be a setback to U.S. interests.'' General McCaffrey's remarks received little notice in the United States, buried as they were within long testimony on the worsening drug |
1131611_8 | Too Many Phones, Too Little Service | expanded wireless data services on the horizon, mobile phone use will only increase. Will a time come when the digital wireless network fills up entirely? ''The potential for that exists, but it's not any kind of a reality at this point,'' said Mark Desautels, managing director of the Wireless Data Forum, a Washington-based trade organization. The Federal Communications Commission, he said, ''has the ability to shift spectrum and allot additional bandwidth should that become necessary.'' And despite the current coverage problems, experts believe that the carriers will be able to build themselves out of it. ''The good news is that this, too, shall pass,'' said Tom Wheeler, president and chief executive of the Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association. ''It took 75 years before wire line phone service had the same kind of coverage that the wireless carriers have achieved in a much shorter period. It's not where it should be, but it's moving at lightning speed and improving every day.'' Too Much Static? Staying Loud and Clear Here are some steps you can take to improve your wireless service: * Study and compare various carriers' coverage areas, which are viewable on maps in cell phone stores and on carriers' Web sites. Or talk to wireless phone users who use the different services available in your area. ''For most people, usage tends to be fairly predictable, so it's possible to do a little research and to subscribe to a carrier with the strongest signals in your area,'' said Sam Simon, chairman of the Telecommunications Research and Action Center, a Washington-based consumer group. Sign up with a carrier that offers a 30-day trial period so you can switch carriers if you have service problems. * If your phone has an extendable antenna, pull it out. Like the antenna on a transistor radio, it will improve the reception. If you experience coverage problems indoors, move close to a window or, if possible, go outside to improve the signal. * Consider buying a car antenna if you make a lot of calls while driving. They are available for under $100 at electronics stores and at Internet-based wireless phone dealers like those at www.point .com and www.cellwest.com. Because they are mounted to the exterior of your car, the antennas can prevent the signal interference sometimes caused when making calls from inside. Most car antennas connect to your phone by a cable, which is unplugged when exiting |
1128808_1 | Religion Journal; Lutherans to Vote Again on Link to Episcopalians | on Aug. 19. Although less than a merger, an agreement to enter into full communion binds churches closely. They agree to recognize one another's sacraments and clergy members and to collaborate in missionary work and social service projects. One effect, cited by supporters of the current proposal, is to allow churches to exchange clergy members, which would mean, for example, that a small Episcopal church that could not afford a full-time priest could share the services of a pastor from a nearby, better-off Lutheran church. But whether to forge such ties with the Episcopal Church is controversial for many Lutherans. The 1997 Churchwide Assembly, meeting in Philadelphia, approved a full communion agreement with three churches in Protestantism's Reformed tradition -- the Presbyterian Church (USA), the United Church of Christ and the Reformed Church in America -- by a 4-to-1 ratio. Yet that morning, the proposed Concordat of Agreement with the Episcopalians fell short of the two-thirds majority it needed. The vote was close. The proposal failed over concern among Lutherans that Episcopalians vest too much authority in their bishops, who are elected for life and considered part of the ''historic episcopate,'' an unbroken chain of spiritual leadership reaching back to Christianity's earliest days. Lutheran bishops are elected for six-year terms and return, when that service is over, to being pastors. After the proposal was defeated, a committee was created to revise aspects of the full communion plan. Nonetheless, opposition remains very much alive. ''I think what riles us most is the required inclusion of the historic episcopate,'' said the Rev. Kent S. (Tony) Stoutenburg, spokesman for an Internet site created by opponents of the full communion proposal. Pastor Stoutenburg, who serves churches in Chinook and Naselle, Wash., said ecumenical cooperation could function well without such formal ties as a full communion agreement. He cited instances in his area in which clergy members across a broad spectrum of faiths had worked together to provide meals for the needy. ''To me, ecumenism is not about institutions,'' he said. Full communion has been far less controversial among Episcopalians, who voted for it by a 9-to-1 ratio two years ago. The church's leaders are supportive of the revised proposal that the Lutherans will consider, although for it to go into effect, Episcopalians would have to vote on it again when their policy-making body meets next year, an event also scheduled for Denver. ''In terms |
1128826_0 | I.R.A. Denies Role in 2 Gun Cases Delaying Progress on Ulster | The Irish Republican Army said today that it was not responsible for two incidents that have led Protestant officials in Ulster to call for the expulsion of Sinn Fein, the I.R.A. political wing, from the Northern Ireland Assembly. The two issues involved a gun-running operation between the United States and Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic, and the brutal killing of a Roman Catholic man in Belfast last week. The I.R.A. has observed a cease-fire for two years. But the political work of the Assembly has been blocked for more than a year in a dispute over disarming the guerrillas and the participation of Sinn Fein in a new Ulster Cabinet intended to give Catholics additional political power in the predominantly Protestant British province. In the spring of 1998, Sinn Fein was temporarily excluded from the peace talks after the Irish and British Governments had concluded that the I.R.A. had killed two civilians in Belfast. Sinn Fein insisted, as it always has, that it is separate from the I.R.A., a position that few people believe. After Sinn Fein had returned to the talks, a new peace agreement was reached in April 1998 and approved in referendums in the North and in the overwhelmingly Catholic Irish Republic. In a statement read to Irish national radio this afternoon, the I.R.A. said that there had been ''no breaches of the I.R.A. cessation, which remains intact,'' adding, ''The army council has not sanctioned any arms-importation operation.'' Last week in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., the police charged four people, three Britons and an Irishman, in connection with an attempt to export to Ireland more than 40 handguns and several hundred rounds of rifle ammunition. In Dublin, a woman from western Ireland was charged with illegal possession of six handguns and ammunition. The suspects were later indicted. Some experts and officials in Belfast said acquiring new weapons may be an attempt by the guerrilla command to show hard-liners opposed to peace talks that it was preparing to resume the sectarian warfare if the peace effort failed or if it were required to get rid of some of its weapons as part of the negotiations. The I.R.A. denial today seemed to be partly in response to a front-page article in The Irish Times on Thursday that reported that security officials and some republican insiders had said that the guerrilla command was responsible for the handcuffing, blindfolding and point-blank |
1128805_0 | THE MARKETS: COMMODITIES | SUGAR SLIPS. Sugar fell after a London trading house raised its estimate of the global market surplus because of higher-than-expected production in Brazil. Sugar for October delivery fell 0.21 cent, to 5.99 cents a pound. |
1130411_5 | For the Discontented, A Message of Hope; Appeal of Buddhism Grows in U.S., Where Dalai Lama Attracts Crowds | In the early 1980's, when he appeared in his monk's robes, passers-by looked at him askance, he said. ''Walking around 14 years ago in these robes and walking around today is a totally different experience,'' he said. ''I feel people support me.'' But when asked about Buddhism's growing popularity here, the Dalai Lama struck no note of triumphalism. Buddhism as a path toward wisdom and inner calm, founded in the 2,500-year-old teachings of Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha, has attracted people seeking to deepen capacities for compassion and forgiveness, he said. ''To some people, the Buddhist way of approach is a more analytical way, more rational'' approach to that end, he said. But others may be drawn to it because human nature loves novelty, he said. ''And, of course, there might be some who have maybe wrong impressions of Buddhism,'' thinking meditation can quickly lead to ''instant enlightenment,'' he said. ''That's wrong.'' The Dalai Lama also quoted from the late Basil Cardinal Hume, the Roman Catholic Archbishop in Britain, that an interest in spirituality is rising in the West. ''Similarly,'' the Dalai Lama added, ''the interest toward inner values is increasing.'' People have lots of material goods, but are not happy, he said. ''People begin to realize that material facility alone is not the full answer for life. That's my impression.'' For some, Buddhism offers a practical prescription for living, a spirituality based on obtaining peace and purpose, rather than expectation of an afterlife. In elaborating the Four Noble Truths, the Buddha taught that life contains suffering, but that there is a way out, that wisdom and peace can be achieved through a change of attitude and behavior. The actor Richard Gere, who has known the Dalai Lama for two decades, said that after previously studying Zen Buddhism, he found in Tibetan Buddhism a more intellectual approach to attaining spiritual wisdom and also a greater emphasis on achieving compassion. On the question of Tibet, the Dalai Lama advocates what he calls the ''middle way'' seeking self-government within China that would preserve Tibet's spiritual heritage and permit respect for human rights and democratic freedoms. He has called for protection of Tibet's natural environment and for an end to the ''transfer'' of large numbers of Chinese into Tibet, through which Tibetans have become a minority in their own land. But these are grim times. As of last fall, he said, the Chinese Government |
1133234_3 | Mending America's Acropolis | dome, for safety's sake. But about a decade ago, it became clear that the site that former Gov. Pete Wilson of California called the American Acropolis could not survive without a major effort. Mr. Miller arrived in 1992 to help the nonprofit organization that runs the mission figure out how to repay an earlier $3 million bank loan used for seismic retrofitting of the mission's intact cloister and restoration of the Serra Chapel, which had survived only because a 19th-century secular owner used it to store hay and so kept its roof in good repair. The Roman Catholic Church still owns the land under the mission but gives it no financial support, concentrating instead on ministering to parishioners' social needs. ''I said I might be here three to six months,'' Mr. Miller, who courted his wife, Elizabeth, in the mission ruins years ago, said the other day as he escorted a visitor over every square foot of the work in progress. ''So here I am, six and a half years later. It became to me like a tar baby.'' This week, financed by $600,000 in private contributions, work began on the most daunting job yet: stabilization of the great sanctuary dome, one of seven that once topped the big church but that is now riddled with cracks. The dome lists down toward the ruins of the nave below, and the scaffolding that has laced inside it for nearly a decade deters even the faithful swallows from nesting. In the 1890's, an early group of mission preservationists known as the Landmarks Club buttressed the church's surviving structures with poured concrete cornerstones and metal rods called turnbuckles that held the remaining walls together like a house of cards. But those efforts have outlived their time; the threads on the turnbuckles are stripped, and walls, some made of locally fired bricks that never quite finished baking inside, are crumbling from within. And stones are weakened by creeping vines that have left massive root balls the size of a six-foot man. So the conservation team of John C. Loomis, an architect from Newport Beach, and Nels Roselund, a structural engineer in South San Gabriel, near Pasadena, have been forced to devise new and creative approaches, all intended not to rebuild the structure, but to preserve it as the ghostly ruin it is. ''It's been a particular challenge,'' said Mr. Roselund, who has also helped |
1133243_0 | Basic E-Mail Service, Cheap and Lightweight | If millions of Americans are spending thousands of dollars for computers primarily for E-mail, will they spend less than $100 just for E-mail? It sounds like a shaky premise, but several companies are banking on it and producing E-mail-only devices. The latest company is Vtech Industries, the manufacturer of electronic learning toys and cordless telephones. Next week, the company's United States division will introduce two lightweight and simple-to-use devices that, once connected to a telephone line through a local or toll-free call, aim to be the E-mail machines of the mass market. A slew of new wireless devices, including some pagers and telephones, can also send and receive E-mail, but they usually limit the length of messages and can be expensive. The Vtech machines cost less than $100. Each looks like a keyboard with a small L.C.D. screen. The Vtech E-mail Postbox, the larger of the two at just over two pounds, has full-size keys and displays eight lines at a time. It can send and receive messages of up to 5,000 characters (larger messages are broken up) to or from any E-mail address. It can also store an average of 400 moderate-size messages at a time. Among its features is an address book, a calendar and stock phrases like ''good to hear from you'' for less-nimble typists. The E-mail Express, a handheld device that weighs about seven ounces, packs similar features plus games. It operates on two AA batteries (the Postbox uses two C batteries or an AC adaptor). Both machines link to an E-mail service that costs about $10 a month. (The Vtech machines cannot get access to E-mail accounts like Hotmail but can receive and send messages to and from them.) The user need not bother with access numbers, said Jude Dieterman, vice president of Vtech. With the touch of a yellow button, the device dials an embedded access number ; the user is only required to input the telephone number from which the call is being made. ''You don't need to be a rocket scientist to use them,'' Mr. Dieterman said. The Vtech machines go on sale Sept. 1 on the company's site, www.vtechworld.com or by telephone at (888) 468-8324. ''Our goal is to make this technology easy.'' MICHEL MARRIOTT NEWS WATCH |
1133663_2 | Religion Journal; Georgetown U. Names First Muslim Chaplain | criteria the committee looked for in a candidate, Father Bunnell said, was someone who would ''fit into Georgetown's interfaith climate,'' while also being ''respectful of the Catholic tradition.'' Mr. Hendi, who was born in the West Bank city of Nablus, has a bachelor's degree in Islamic law and theology from the University of Jordan in Amman and a master's degree in comparative religions from Hartford Seminary in Connecticut. Mr. Hendi, who is also a doctoral student in philosophy and comparative religions at Temple University in Philadelphia, said that while studying for his master's degree he ''developed an interest in interfaith work and really began to see its value.'' He described the Muslim population at Georgetown as ''very different in terms of their ethnic backgrounds and their academic interests.'' With that in mind, he said, his first order of business will be to establish a weekly discussion session for students and staff members on the life of Mohammed, the founder of the Moslem religion. Mr. Hendi said that he looked forward to interfaith discussions on campus, too, and that perhaps something could be done around the religious holidays at the year's end, where students would have an opportunity to talk about their own faith and its meaning to them. ''To me, the month of December can really be utilized to bring about some understanding,'' he said. New Orthodox Archbishop On the subject of appointments, one that reverberated among Greek-Americans recently was that of Metropolitan Demetrios, the Greek theologian, as the next head of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America. His appointment, by the Orthodox Ecumenical Patriarchate in Istanbul, came after an increasing restlessness among Greek Orthodox leaders in the United States angry with Patriarch Bartholomew's choice of Archbishop Spyridon as head of the archdiocese in 1996. Lay people, priests and, eventually, the metropolitans, or regional leaders of the archdiocese, petitioned Patriarch Bartholomew to remove Archbishop Spyridon. The Archbishop resigned on Aug. 19; the Patriarch transferred him to a jurisdiction in Turkey and announced that Metropolitan Demetrios would come to the United States. This week the Archdiocese said the new Archbishop, who is 71 and studied and taught in the United States in the 1970's and 80's, will arrive in New York on Sept. 15. Three days later he will be enthroned in his new office, in a ceremony to be held at the Cathedral of the Holy Trinity in New York. |
1133724_0 | 'Don't Ask' Violates Free-Speech Rights | To the Editor: An Aug. 24 news article reports that bishops representing the Anglican Communion, which includes the Episcopal Church, passed a resolution in August of last year strongly critical of homosexuality. This report does not reflect the attitudes prevalent among the laity and clergy in the Episcopal Church in the United States. The primary support for the statement came from bishops representing Africa and Asia, where secular mores and other faiths strongly disapprove of homosexuality. Attitudes on homosexuality, on ordination of homosexuals and on same-sex marriages vary widely among individual Episcopalians, Episcopal parishes and dioceses. But open discussion of these issues is increasing and movement toward acceptance and openness is evident. LESLIE Y. POUNDS Atlanta, Aug. 24, 1999 |
1132203_6 | Exploring 'Place' Can Be Tricky When the Place Is Someone Else's | make environmental concerns part of her examination of the meaning of place is ''Map,'' a 25-by-48-foot arrangement of clear marbles by the Beirut-born artist Mona Hatoum; in the shape of the world, it dominates the floor of the main hall. The loosely situated marbles are easily disturbed by the vibrations set off by people walking nearby -- a metaphor, Ms. Martinez said, for the fragility of the earth. The Iranian photographer Shirin Neshat's video ''Rapture,'' examining male and female space in the Islamic world, emerges as one of the biennial's strongest works. Two black and white projections face each other: on one side are Iranian women wearing chadors, on the other are the men. It is impossible to watch both at the same time, and the viewer is forced, with each turn of the head, to remain in the middle. The Argentine artist Sergio Vega contributes a diorama examining the idea of paradise. It is a continuation of work that Mr. Vega, who lives in New York, began with a show in March at Basilico Fine Arts in Soho. It is not surprising that one of the most successful of the off-site installations -- a piece that takes the area head-on and encourages spectators to explore its contextual landscape and social setting -- comes from the one artist who lives in New Mexico. Charlene Teters, a Spokane Indian who is on the faculty of the Institute of American Indian Art in Santa Fe, plays off the monument in the center of the city's plaza and notoriously dedicated to ''the heroes who died in various battles with savage Indians.'' At the height of the American Indian Movement in the 1970's, someone climbed over the fence surrounding the obelisk and chipped out the word ''savage.'' Teter's obelisk of adobe bricks, which sits in front of the New Mexico State Capitol Building, bears a single word: ''Savage.'' Ms. Martinez said she was satisfied with the results of the biennial, even though two of the works had been taken down almost as soon as the show opened. ''If we cannot see this snake in the lake of San Ildefonso Pueblo for six months, we will see it in the documentation,'' she said. ''The miracle has happened.'' Installation work, of course, is by its very nature ephemeral, never created to last. ''It may have been a little bit more ephemeral than expected,'' she said. ART |
1132154_8 | Vancouver's Lush Landscapes | the cool Sino-Himalayan region -- birches, camellias and rhododendrons. Tucked away near the entrance to this well-tended forest is a small Chinese medicinal garden featuring 55 herbs that form the basis of Chinese pharmacology. As for the cross-pollination, it's everywhere -- in the arrangement of dwarf conifers seeking their own reflection at the end of Heron Lake, in the Japanese zigzag bridge that affords fine views of a feathery bald cypress grove, in the striking juxta position of swaying bamboo canes and the perfectly straight, perfectly serene sequoias rising together from a smooth flat lawn. It's fitting to end at the top -- the geodesic dome of the Bloedel Conservatory that crowns the 500-foot summit of Queen Elizabeth Park, the highest point in Vancouver. Built in 1969 with funds from the timber magnate Prentice Bloedel, the squat Plexiglas bubble (the second largest domed conservatory in the world) encases a humid, fragrant, bird-filled wedge of the tropics -- or rather three different wedges: a tropical rain forest, a subtropical jungle and a patch of South and Central American desert. The layout is a bit like New York's Guggenheim Museum in reverse: you start at street level and wind your way down to the sunken basalt floor from which huge specimens of plantain banana, fiddleleaf fig, butterfly palm and Mexican horncone soar to the ceiling. Assuming that the bird song echoing through the air was piped in to enhance the tropical illusion, I was startled when I nearly tripped over a family of Japanese quail scurrying across the path. As it turns out, some 60 species of tropical birds live here -- zebra finches, Hoami thrushes, Brazilian cardinals, a Moluccan cockatoo and a pair of Amazon parrots named Casey and Joey -- all of them free to flit and feed and comment on the biped invaders. In this luxuriant dome, pleasure takes precedence over instruction. Florist plants and showy annuals like foxtail lilies and gerbera daisies grow beside the tropical species, not necessarily because they reflect the biome but because they're pretty. If there's a heaven for all the sensitive house plants you've ever struggled to keep alive, this is it. The Bloedel Conservatory is a good antidote to the monotonous damp gray that hangs over Vancouver much of the year. And, if you happen to come on a nice day, you can picnic afterward on a parapet overlooking the formal quarry |
1132440_2 | Ideas & Trends; A Back Door View Of Airline Safety | Mary Lou McHugh, Assistant Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Transportation Policy, and uniformly applying those standards, derived from F.A.A. rules, ''has impact for travelers worldwide.'' The six carriers will review crew training, cockpit procedures, maintenance systems, procedures for calculating a plane's weight and fuel requirements, among dozens of other areas. In addition, the Transportation Department, which oversees the F.A.A., will decide in the next few weeks whether to order the American carriers to do rigorous audits on the foreign carriers. Right now, American supervision of those carriers that fly to this country is minimal. After another KAL plane, a Boeing 747, crashed on approach to Guam in August 1997, F.A.A. inspectors testified at an investigative hearing that they do not check foreign planes except for occasional visits to those visiting American airports to see if pilots have their licenses with them and if the airplanes have American-required gear like aisle lighting. The Department rule could require the six American carriers to turn over their audit results, which would make them Government property and subject to disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act. The proposed system will result in a kind of extra-territoriality for American flight safety rules, extending the F.A.A.'s reach to carriers over which it has little or no control. At the International Air Transport Association, David M. O'Connor, the trade group's regional director for the United States, said that the idea of code-share partners auditing each other was long established, but that public release of such information was not. Mr. O'Connor's group was trying to establish an audit system that airlines would have to apply to join his organization. Travelers worldwide will reap the benefits. When the Defense Department places a foreign carrier in ''non-use,'' it notifies the State Department, which includes the information in its Consular Information Sheets. Travelers can get them on the Web at http:/ /travel.state.gov/travel--warnings.html or by automated fax, at 202-647-3000 or by calling 202-647-5225. They can also get it directly from the Pentagon at 703-697-2788. The American airlines say they are confident of their ability to advise and evaluate. H. Clayton Foushee, vice president of flight operations at Northwest Airlines, compared his company's inspections of its code-share partners to large-scale ''white glove'' inspections that the F.A.A. occasionally conducts on American carriers. Northwest is a partner with KLM, Alitalia and Air China, which is a mainland Chinese carrier. ''There are things we can |
1132237_0 | PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL | |
1132339_0 | Special Services Head | The Southern Westchester Board of Cooperative Educational Services has named Frank L. Owens -- himself a former special education student who suffered from a speech impairment -- as director of special services. Mr. Owens, 42, began his career as a school psychologist at the New York School for the Deaf in Greenburgh, where he completed psychological assessments for students up to 21 years old. He was also a coordinator of special education services for the Yonkers School District. Although not deaf, Mr. Owens is fluent in American Sign Language and holds a certificate of advanced graduate studies in school psychology and a master's degree in childhood development from Gallaudet University in Washington. He said he intends to encourage parents of special education students to become more involved in their children's schooling. He also said he would try to help students with multiple handicaps enter the mainstream. As director of special services, Mr. Owens is in charge of 800 students with physical, social and mental handicaps. He oversees a staff of 500. IN BRIEF |
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1129620_2 | Beijing Journal; A Glorious Ruin and a Face-Lift Furor | The portion salvaged in a public park includes tacky carnival games, a dismal zoo and an island given over to a ''Primitive People's Totem Park.'' The only overt reminder of former glory is the sector of the Western-style palaces, built of stone that survived the conflagration. There, amid chaotic rubble, some walls have been partly saved or restored, providing the standard backdrop for the photographs of visitors -- mostly Chinese who, as they climb through the ruins, often shake their heads, muttering phrases like ''What a terrible thing they did'' or ''It was so beautiful, and they destroyed it.'' The decades-old debate over the future of the estate has flared anew with the proposal by a well-connected developer and fast-food king to re-create many of the palaces and landscapes on a for-profit basis. The developer, Chen Liqun, 44, insists that the past would be honored by restoring the grounds to their original splendor. He says he would add a selection of ethnic restaurants and other ''appropriate'' activities. To help bring in tourists he might also, he said, want to use part of the original estate for an ''Eastern Disneyland.'' ''I'm convinced that the Old Summer Palace will be reborn and once again shine in the eyes of the world,'' Mr. Chen said at the Beijing headquarters he built for his company, Million Land House Group -- a melange of ornate European styles with a large statue of a sword-wielding knight in shining armor out front, meant to symbolize the entrepreneur. ''By rebuilding what was once lost,'' Mr. Chen said, ''we can also stimulate domestic demand and economic development.'' He figures that much of the original estate could be re-created for about $250 million, part of which he would put up, while the rest he would raise by selling shares to ethnic Chinese the world over. He says he would concentrate on the former Chinese palaces and landscapes, leaving the European-style stone ruins alone for now. Mr. Chen's proposal is certainly in keeping with tradition in China, which betrays a mania for building replicas or totally restoring historical sites like the Great Wall. Wu Hung, a Chinese-born art historian at the University of Chicago, notes that the Chinese have generally not shared the passion of Westerners for architectural ruins as esthetically and historically meaningful. But Mr. Chen's and other, similar proposals have infuriated a range of cultural historians, archeologists and architects |
1129593_6 | Pain at Work: Startling Images and New Hope | in the small of his back started to slip down on another. Doctors told him he had better stop lifting heavy things and consider changing jobs. ''But I didn't listen,'' he said. ''The lesson from me is that if somebody tells you not to lift things, don't lift things.'' Four years ago, when the pain became unbearable, Mr. Kingsley finally quit his job. Two operations to insert pins in his back, readjusting the position of the vertebrae, did not help. And heavy doses of painkillers brought little relief. Mr. Kingsley's doctors said they are at a loss to know why he suffers so much. Many other people with the same or similar conditions do not approach his level of pain, they said. They suggested that he might want to join the first group of patients being studied at the Syracuse center. Inside the laboratory, the M.R.I. machine is sending radio waves into Mr. Kingsley's brain, while he lies positioned within the machine's strong magnetic field. The waves interact with the nuclei of hydrogen atoms in the cerebral cortex, in places where the pain is registered. The nuclei, in turn, emit their own, smaller radio signals, detected by the antenna in Mr. Kingsley's headrest, and translated into images that change slightly as his pain worsens or lessens. Sean Huckins, a doctoral student in brain mapping, instructs Mr. Kingsley to use a set of hand signals to indicate to the team, watching from the glassed-in control room, the level of pain he is feeling as the technician raises his legs. After each trial, he is allowed to rest for a few minutes. When Mr. Kingsley signals 9 1/2 the trial is halted. It will take weeks to analyze the data from his trial, Dr. Apkarian said, but the patterns generated by his brain seem, in preliminary analysis, to resemble those of the five other back-pain patients he has examined. They differ markedly, though, from those of six patients with chronic hand pain and two patients with spinal disorders. ''We've never had brain pictures of chronic pain before,'' Dr. Apkarian said, ''and they show that pain from different types of causes involved very different areas of the brain. And this seems to mean they should be treated differently. Just how will have to be subjected to much more investigation.'' After the session, Mr. Kingsley, clearly exhausted, says, ''It hurt like hell. But I'm |
1129646_1 | Foreign Affairs; The Y2K Social Disease | is spreading daily, and it has no known cure. I was recently in a restaurant with my daughter and found myself seated between two families, both of whose fathers were speaking loudly into cell phones, as if they were in their offices. I wanted to scream: ''Look, I'm on vacation. I'm trying to get away from my office. I don't want to be in your office. Turn off that phone!'' More and more I find myself reacting to people with cell phones the same way I react to people smoking cigars at the dinner table next to me -- violently. I call it Y2K rage. I can't wait for the day when they have soundproof, glass-enclosed cell-phone sections in restaurants. ''Cell phone or no cell phone?'' the maitre d' will ask. I also can't wait for the day that Motorola comes out with a device that enables you to jam all the cell phones around you as easily as opening your garage door. Zap -- no more dial tone. So sorry. It is not surprising that overconnectedness is the disease of the Internet age. Because as the Internet and globalization shrink both time and distance, it's great for business, but it's becoming socially claustrophobic. Time and distance provide buffers and breathing space in our lives, and when you eliminate both you eliminate some very important cushions. The New Yorker carried a cartoon a few weeks ago of a man escorting his date back to her apartment door after dinner. She squeezes his hands and says, ''I'd love to ask you in, Howard, but they start trading in Hong Kong in ten minutes.'' A friend who works on Madison Avenue said to me that before cell phones and beepers, when someone called his office and he was out, his secretary would simply say, ''Alan is out.'' Now when someone calls and the secretary says he's out, the next thing the caller says is, ''Well, connect me to his cell phone or beep him.'' The presumption now is that he's always reachable -- that he's never out. Out is over. Now, you're always in. And when you're always in, you're always on. And when you're always on, you're just like a computer server. You can never stop and relax. When was the last time you heard someone say, ''Well, let me sleep on that''? Good luck. A Wall Street exec I know |
1134456_1 | World Briefing | jail Mr. Zibben for 26 years, one year for each victim. Sentencing was deferred until later this year. (Reuters) IRAQ: CONGRESSIONAL VISIT -- Aides to five United States members of Congress are in Iraq to try to assess the effect of nine years of international sanctions on civilians. The delegation, drawn from the staffs of four Democrats, Sam Gedjenson of Connecticut, Cynthia McKinney of Georgia, Earl Hilliard of Alabama and Danny K. Davis of Illinois, and one independent, Bernard Sanders of Vermont, were taken on a tour of Baghdad hospitals and a bomb shelter in which Iraq says 403 people died in allied bombing during the Persian Gulf war. Barbara Crossette (NYT) EUROPE NORTHERN IRELAND: 2 MORE EXPULSIONS -- Two more Catholic teen-agers have been ordered to leave Northern Ireland or face death by men who say they represent the Irish Republican Army. One is 15; the other, an unidentified 19-year-old, was beaten before receiving the expulsion order. Four young men left the province over the weekend after receiving similar threats. Protestant politicians contend that the actions undermine claims that the I.R.A.'s two-year-old cease-fire is holding and make Sinn Fein, the group's political ally, unfit to take part in peace talks that are set to resume next week. Warren Hoge (NYT) CZECH REPUBLIC: GYPSY WALL HALTED -- Authorities have halted the construction of a six-foot wall that would have separated Gypsy families from other residents in the northern town of Usti nad Labem, Czech Television reported. A local council approved the wall last year after residents complained of noise and the unsightly state of apartment blocks inhabited by Gypsy families. Construction was to begin this week, but the plan drew protests from President Vaclav Havel, human rights campaigners and Western governments. (Reuters) EUROPEAN UNION: COMMISSION HEARINGS -- Legislators of the European Parliament began seven days of grueling questioning of 19 nominees to Romano Prodi's new European Commission, seeking guarantees that the new executive will respect high ethical standards after the fraud scandal that brought down the previous team in March. The first member on the stand, Loyola de Palacio, was quizzed repeatedly in a three-hour hearing about fraud allegations dating back to her days as Spain's farm minister. She pledged to resign if ever implicated in fraud but denied any wrongdoing. (Reuters) RUSSIA: DAGESTAN FIGHTING GOES ON -- Government troops battled to wipe out a stronghold of Islamic militants in |
1134508_3 | Editorial Observer; Helping Embattled Children in America's Cities | high schools, there has been a trained mental health counselor, with a master's degree or doctorate in psychology, and with a private office, a computer and a phone. And each week a psychiatrist, able to review the case files and prescribe medications, visits each school. What they have found, says Gayle Porter, the Johns Hopkins medical school psychologist who administers the program, is broad-scale depression and hostility, what therapists call oppositional/defiant disorder. Almost half the children in those schools need counseling, she says, more than a third of them long-term. What the therapists offer is counseling for them and their families, and workshops for the teachers. They can see any child once without parental permission. Almost half the therapists are white, and one is from Ireland, but time has shown, Dr. Porter says, that the children are receptive to help across cultural lines. There is drug abuse in perhaps 70 percent of the families of the children they see. Most of those children do not see their fathers regularly. Many, bouncing from foster home to foster home, do not see their mothers. In one high school a group of children asked the counselor if they could have a group meeting on Mother's Day. Other children had mothers, and they wanted someone themselves. Two years ago, the counselor in an elementary school noticed that the signatures looked identical on five of the second-graders' parental permission slips. She called the children in to ask why, and they began to snuffle, and confess. They wanted counseling, but their mothers wouldn't sign or weren't around, so the 7-year-olds had hired a third-grader who could write in longhand to sign the forms. In 25 to 30 percent of the cases in which parents are drug abusers, the parents are persuaded to come in for counseling, Dr. Porter says, and in about half those cases they are persuaded to seek treatment. But it is the effect of the counseling on the children that excites her. This last school year, for the first time, they checked the report cards of a sample of 130 elementary students who had been in counseling for 60 days or more, after beginning the year with unsatisfactory marks in conduct, math and reading. By the third quarter, she said, 50 percent of them were achieving at a satisfactory level. That is a gain that could hold promise for children and educators everywhere. |
1134457_0 | THE MARKETS: COMMODITIES | SUGAR SOARS. Sugar rose almost 9 percent after a warehouse fire at a Brazilian port destroyed 15,000 metric tons of sugar waiting for export. In New York, sugar for October delivery rose 0.54 cent, to 6.7 cents a pound. |
1134514_0 | Microsoft Shuts Security Breach in E-Mail System | The Microsoft Corporation scrambled today to close a security breach that had left tens of millions of personal E-mail accounts freely accessible through Web sites that were created to exploit the vulnerability. It was not clear how much private information might have been compromised and for what length of time. And while Microsoft said it had solved the problem, after shutting down the service for several hours, it was not clear whether other vulnerabilities in the E-mail service, known as Hotmail, might still exist. ''We can't go into specifics'' about Hotmail security issues ''because we don't want to enable people to do this all the time,'' said Rob Bennett, director of marketing for MSN, Microsoft's on-line division, which includes Hotmail. Hotmail is a free service that allows any Internet user to create an account and send and receive E-mail from any location with Internet access. Microsoft says 40 million people worldwide have signed up for the service, but it is not clear how many use it. Although it was clear from messages circulating on the Internet today that unauthorized users had gained access to E-mail accounts, Microsoft said it had received no reports of tampering with E-mail content. Microsoft said it was alerted to the problem at 2 A.M., Pacific time, by a Swedish newspaper that ran an article about it. The company responded by immediately shutting down the Hotmail service. Microsoft said it restored service after about eight hours, but a cat-and-mouse game ensued as new instructions were circulated on the Internet routing would-be intruders around the initial fix and Microsoft scrambled to block them. By 2 P.M., Pacific time, Mr. Bennett declared the problem solved. ''We're going manually now from server to server to make sure the fix has been propagated, but we're quite confident that it has been,'' he said. The HotMail servers, the computers that operate the service, are scattered around the world, but the ones initially attacked were in San Jose, Calif. Richard Smith, a computer security expert, said the program that allowed illicit access to Hotmail appeared to be derived from the work of a programmer named Michael Nobilio, whose Internet postings say the software was intended to allow users to store their Hotmail login information as a convenience so it would not have to be entered each time they used the service. Mr. Nobilio made his program available through an Internet discussion group |
1128011_2 | Wondering About a Wonder Drug Susan Love, a breast surgeon, is the author of ''Dr. Susan Love's Breast Book.'' | women with breast cancer. It was known that many cancers were sensitive to estrogen, and he hypothesized that an antiestrogen agent might help. Indeed it did. Doctors then proved that it worked in women with advanced breast cancer, and then in women with newly diagnosed breast cancer. As its use increased in the early 90's, clinicians were surprised again by this ''antiestrogen,'' which they had assumed blocked estrogen throughout the body. They found that it blocked estrogen in the breast and brain but amazingly seemed to act like estrogen in the bones, liver and uterus. This observation led them to identify a new category of drugs called selective estrogen receptor modulators. Researchers then set out to design a drug that would be even better than tamoxifen: one that would not cause uterine cancer but would prevent osteoporosis and heart disease as well as breast cancer. The first of these designer selective estrogen receptor modulators, raloxifene, is undergoing clinical trials. In a study of more than 13,000 women financed by the National Cancer Institute and concluded last year, tamoxifen was shown to decrease the incidence of breast cancer by 49 percent in high-risk healthy women. But the number of women in the study who got cancer was relatively small: 4.3 percent of women developed breast cancer in the placebo group, while 2.2 percent developed it in the tamoxifen group. This means that 95.7 percent of these high-risk women took tamoxifen with no immediate or short-term benefit and risked side effects, including a small increase in uterine cancer in postmenopausal women and, more important, a small but real increase in deaths from lung clots. More important, perhaps, the women in this study who had had biopsies showing atypical hyperplasia (precancerous changes in the cells lining the milk ducts) and who took tamoxifen reduced their risk of developing breast cancer by 86 percent. If it were easy to identify which women will develop these changes we could select which women are most likely to benefit from tamoxifen. But as of now there is no equivalent of a Pap smear for breast cancer. Or, if we had a way to monitor women on tamoxifen, we might be able to detect when the cells are beginning to become resistant before they have a chance to do damage. Researchers are studying a device to do just this. Let's hope this is the next piece of progress. |
1129503_2 | Streams Dry. Berries Dead. What's a Black Bear to Do? | will be reduced.'' In the Shawangunks, the bear migration has changed life for Mr. Bradley and his six tenants on the Awosting Reserve, his private tract. Mr. Bradley has spotted seven bears near the houses in the last month. The last time he saw a bear below the mountain range -- just one -- was during the severe drought of 1964. The bear Mr. Rockwell spotted had worked its way to the home of another tenant, a Wall Street executive, by the time Mr. Bradley arrived. A cub about the size of a golden retriever, it was eating from a bird feeder. ''When I approached, it got up and walked directly through his front door,'' Mr. Bradley said. ''I'm yelling, when it exits and leaps over the side of the porch.'' Two weeks ago, the sound of knocking brought Mr. Bradley, in the buff, from his swimming pool. In his driveway, a mature bear was lifting the lid of the shed for his emergency generator. Mr. Bradley grabbed dirty socks and got ready for the ''drop and run.'' The bear scooted eight feet up a tree and made off over a fence. The bears are less like ravaging Huns, and more like thoughtless guests who turn weekend visits into sabbaticals. They returned repeatedly to the cabin of the Wall Street executive, rustling through his garbage, licking the grease off his barbecue grill and munching from his bird feeder -- as he lay in a nearby hammock. ''I finally drew myself up to my full height and told them to scram,'' said the executive, who insisted on anonymity. Richard Henry, a big-game biologist in the New Paltz office of the Department of Environmental Conservation, says that the rock ridge above the Awosting Reserve is part of a ''travel corridor'' for bears extending from New Jersey to Pennsylvania. While there are about 5,000 bears in New York State, no one has been hurt by them in 40 years. But Mr. Rockwell's tenants, Daniel Sullivan and Alysa Wishingrad, said on Saturday that they felt no pity for the hairy and disfranchised. They had survived the ultimate encounter: a mature black bear had charged at them full-tilt, dust rising behind its paws. They were up by Awosting Lake, a shady area blessed with rare surviving berries, when two bucks bolted out of the forest, making a sound like a speeding train. ''The deer are |
1129528_0 | Children Who Are Disabled, or Just Immature? | To the Editor: Re ''Reforming Special Education'' (editorial, Aug. 4): My son is one of the youngest in his class. Last year he was slow to adapt to kindergarten. He'd wander away from meetings. Midway through the year he scribbled indecipherably and seemed to waffle about which hand to use when writing. His teacher, energetic but inexperienced, suggested that we enroll him in special education so he could get occupational therapy. At a meeting with the school psychologist, we were told that in order to get him help with his writing, he'd have to be examined with a menu of tests. When we sat down with another adviser, I got the sense we were on a runaway train. She wanted to know everything about my son's background. I imagined a tag and thick stack of forms following him through his public school life. We declined the class, deciding that what our son's teacher called a disability was really just immaturity. It's a key distinction -- one that's at the root of the labeling epidemic I think we're seeing with children. SHAUN ASSAEL New York, Aug. 5, 1999 |
1129456_4 | TECHNOLOGY: E-Commerce Report; For Internet retailers, personalized E-mail advertising offers relatively low costs and a high response rate. | E-mail messages to specific client segments -- unless the companies want to risk alienating recipients with misguided recommendations. For that reason, companies that conduct E-mail promotions on behalf of Internet retailers have reported brisk demand for their services in recent months. These companies, like Messagemedia and Digital Impact, take opt-in E-mail lists compiled by clients and run the mailings on their behalf, analyzing results and refining the pitches as the campaign proceeds. The companies maintain what they say are strict policies regarding the privacy of consumers' personal information, and offer plenty of opportunities to be removed from the mailing list. Clients typically pay these firms 2 cents to 4 cents each E-mail delivered, while maintaining complete ownership of the customers' data. Notably, these companies often use technology that can recognize the sophistication of the recipient's E-mail software. As a result, users who can receive more sophisticated E-mail messages -- which essentially look like a Web page -- are sent messages that include rich graphics and photos of merchandise. When recipients click on these images, they are immediately sent to a Web page where they can buy the product. According to Forrester, such capabilities can double the response rate of a mailing, though many Internet users can't receive such messages. Internet businesses can also rely on opt-in mailing lists generated by third parties like Netcreations, which solicits E-mail addresses on numerous Web sites, including Alta Vista, the Internet search service. By asking visitors if they would like to receive E-mail about various topics and products, Netcreations has gleaned close to three million E-mail addresses, said Rosalind Resnick, the company's president. Netcreations then sends E-mail offers to segments of that list on behalf of clients like Dell Computer and Microsoft, Ms. Resnick said. Netcreations does not disclose the recipients' names or personal information to those companies, she added. No matter who sends them, E-mail marketing messages will have to become more refined, analysts agree -- given the number of E-commerce sites already using E-mail to maintain relationships with customers and the growing number of companies planning to do so. ''Most of the sites I look at understand that you have to approach the customer as a valuable asset, and you have to give them something of value,'' said Mr. Anderson of Macy's.com. ''E-mailing them just to say the sky is blue, and reminding them that Macy's is out there is a problem.'' |
1128257_0 | Pediatricians Suggest Limits On TV Viewing by Children | Children under 2 years old should not watch television, older children should not have television sets in their bedrooms and pediatricians should have parents fill out a ''media history,'' along with a medical history, on office visits, according to recommendations by the American Academy of Pediatrics. Saying television viewing can affect the mental, social and physical health of young people, the academy for the first time has laid out a plan for how pediatricians and parents can better manage children's use of television. ''As pediatricians,'' said Dr. Marjorie Hogan, the lead author of the report, ''we are taking all the research concerns into account and trying to raise the bar a bit, as suggestions for optimal parenting.'' The report appears in the August issue of Pediatrics magazine, published on Monday. No reliable research has been done on how television viewing affects children younger than 2, Dr. Hogan said. But the academy based its recommendations for such children on knowledge of what babies need for proper brain development -- notably close-up interaction with older people -- and the common-sense notion that if they are watching television, babies are not getting those other essential stimuli. Violence in movies and television has been linked to aggressive behavior in young people in studies by the American Medical Association, the American Psychological Association, the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and the National Institute of Mental Health. So while the academy may appear to be venturing into sociological territory with little direct connection to medical health issues, the study's authors say the influence of mass media is a public health concern. ''For example, media violence,'' said Dr. Miriam Bar-on, chairwoman of the academy's committee on public education, which wrote the policy. ''A bullet in the body is a physical health issue. Children who spend a lot of time in front of the TV set tend to gain weight; obesity is a physical health issue.'' The academy is distributing to its members a sample ''media history'' checklist for their young patients. It includes questions about movies, video and computer games, music videos and the Internet, as well as about the radio and books. Also available to the 55,000 members are brochures with suggestions about how to guide families toward positive uses of media, including critical discussion of what they watch. The academy suggests that televisions and computers not be kept in children's bedrooms but in |
1128234_1 | Experts Unsure of Effects of a Type of Contaminant | and their possible influences in people. ''This field is rife with uncertainty,'' said Dr. Ernst Knobil, who was chairman of the panel. Dr. Knobil, a professor in the medical school at the University of Texas-Houston Health Science Center, added, ''It's an exceedingly complex environmental issue and there are no easy answers.'' Concerns about endocrine disrupters have been growing for nearly a decade based on a series of observations and deductions. Certain pesticides, like DDT and PCB's and chemicals in plastics, mimic the hormone estrogen. Wildlife that had been exposed to the chemicals in high concentrations were harmed. And women whose mothers had taken high doses of the synthetic estrogen diethylstilbesterol when they were pregnant -- in the hope of preventing miscarriages -- developed vaginal cancers. The fear was that as use of these chemicals rose, people were being harmed in subtle and not-so-subtle ways. The panel's report was requested four years ago by Congress, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of the Interior and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Congress has directed the Environmental Protection Agency to screen compounds for hormonal effects, and today the agency praised the council's report, especially its endorsement of screening and its call for additional research. ''It's a very important report,'' said J. Charles Fox, who is an assistant administrator at the E.P.A. ''It is very consistent with the research agenda we have developed and in fact the report endorses many of the recommendations that we have developed to deal with the potential threat to health and the environment.'' The report elicited mixed reactions from scientists, ranging from praise by those who were concerned about the compounds to withering criticism from skeptics of the endocrine disrupter hypothesis. ''I'm amazed and I'm pleased,'' said Dr. Theo Colborn, a senior program scientist at the World Wildlife Fund, whose book, ''Our Stolen Future'' (Penguin U.S.A., 1997), helped stimulate national discussion on endocrine disrupters. She said she was delighted that the expert panel agreed with her that at high doses, the chemicals could injure people and animals. With the evidence at hand, she said, it is wise to follow the precautionary principle: limit exposure as much as possible while research continues. ''This is a growing field,'' Dr. Colborn said. ''Just because we don't have the evidence does not mean there are no effects.'' By contrast, Dr. Elizabeth M. Whelan, president of the American Council on Science and |
1128221_1 | U.S. Undercuts Arms Control Efforts, Global Panel Finds | way reward the nation, which wants a permanent Security Council seat and which, the study says, ''considers the possession of nuclear weapons an attribute of great-power status.'' The southern Asian tests tempt others to break restraints against nuclear development, the experts added in a sweeping survey of worldwide developments. One of those asked to prepare the report in response to Japan's concern over the Indian and Pakistani nuclear tests, Michael Krepon, president of the Henry L. Stimson Center in Washington, a group that researches arms and international security, said the scope of the report had initially been much narrower. ''But the longer we worked on this, the broader it became,'' Mr. Krepon said in an interview today. ''We saw a deteriorating situation on just about every front. It was a very sobering view.'' Nobuo Matsunaga, vice chairman of the Japan Institute of International Affairs in Tokyo and a co-chairman of the expert panel, said in an interview here today that since the South Asian nuclear tests, troubling developments on the Korean Peninsula, in China, in Kosovo and in the Middle East, where peace efforts seemed to be faltering, ''led us to consider that this nuclear problem is not only confined to the South Asian region.'' Mr. Matsunaga and his co-chairman, Yasushi Akashi, a former United Nations Under Secretary General and president of the Hiroshima Peace Institute, which organized the panel, are in New York to turn over their report to Secretary General Kofi Annan for distribution to United Nations member countries. The Clinton Administration signed the nuclear test-ban treaty in 1996 but has not made ratification a public issue or fought strenuously for it in Congress, where they expect opposition from Jesse Helms, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Last week, a group of leading American nuclear scientists wrote to the Senate urging ratification, if only as a way to block Chinese nuclear espionage. The treaty has been signed by 152 nations but ratified by only 41, among them Britain, France, Japan and Canada. India's unexpected tests in May 1998, which prompted neighboring Pakistan to follow suit, caused considerable alarm across Asia, including in China. In Japan, the only country to have experienced a nuclear attack, the tests led Ryutaro Hashimoto, then Prime Minister, and Keizo Obuchi, his Foreign Minister and now Prime Minister, to call together about 24 arms control experts to study the situation. ''The timing of |
1128203_0 | Reforming Special Education | The United States Department of Education threatened earlier this summer to withhold more than $300 million in aid unless New York State changed a funding formula that encouraged school districts to dump as many children as possible into special education classes. The formula gave districts extra money for putting children in special education. But the dumping that resulted violated Federal law. The New York State Legislature has now changed the formula, giving districts a financial incentive to begin mainstreaming the disabled by putting them in general classes. This is a useful first step. But more needs to be done to overhaul a special education system that is both discriminatory and educationally unsound. First, in addition to incentives, Albany should devise penalties for districts that persist in over-classifying children as disabled. Second, the state should insure that the additional funds are aimed at helping children with special needs who are returned to the mainstream, and not diverted to other education purposes. The State Education Commissioner, Richard Mills, proposed changes in the formula three years ago. The proposals went nowhere at first, partly because legislators and school districts had a heavy vested interest in the system as it stood, and partly because parents feared that disabled children would suddenly be routed into general classrooms without the necessary support services. The Federal Government ended the impasse by demonstrating statistically that New York was putting too many disabled students in special education classes, and then threatening to withhold funding until the problem was solved. The new formula should move more students into mainstream classrooms. But it does not address Federal reservations about racial discrimination. Federal officials have already accused New York City of shunting disproportionate numbers of black and Latino children into special-education classes. Washington is also scrutinizing the practice in some suburbs, where as many as one in three black students are confined to dead-end classes that are often held in separate buildings. Albany needs to identify where these discriminatory assignment patterns exist, and take action before the Federal Government returns with new sanctions. The new funding formula is a solid improvement. But so far, the measure is all carrot and no stick. |
1131198_5 | Choosing to Test for Cancer's Genetic Link | ovaries for more than 10 years. I am still awaiting the results of the test. But I have already decided that if I test positive for a BRCA mutation, I will have my ovaries removed. At age 58, they are not doing me much good anyway, and I have just learned that the surgery can now be done through a laparoscope, with two tiny incisions and no overnight hospital stay. I will not, however, have my breasts removed, since I have already had breast cancer and know that in a postmenopausal woman it can be detected early and treated effectively with proper surveillance. Also, I am now taking tamoxifen, an anti-estrogen shown last year to cut a woman's breast cancer risk in half, though it is still not known if this protection extends to women with mutated BRCA genes. I was surprised to learn that it would be wise to pay more attention to my colon, which at my age I should be doing anyway. And, if I have a mutated gene, my brother might also have inherited it, and at age 54 should have annual prostate examinations. In tracing my family's medical history in preparation for my counseling session, I learned that my mother's father died at 60 of prostate cancer and that a maternal uncle also had the disease. These cancers increase the likelihood that a mutated gene runs in the family. Some Words of Caution But before any woman found to have a mutated gene undergoes prophylactic surgery, the gene test should be repeated. Mistakes have been made by commercial laboratories, and even the best laboratories can be wrong some of the time. Also, keep in mind that the gene test is not perfect. Even if both BRCA genes are fully tested, some women may have an abnormal gene that is not detected by the current test. Finally, beware of false reassurance. Even if you are not found to have inherited a mutated gene, you can still get breast cancer and you should continue with regular checkups. Keep in mind that more than 90 percent of breast cancers are not hereditary. And if you do choose to have prophylactic surgery, that too will not offer perfect protection: it will reduce the risk of breast and ovarian cancer by more than 90 percent, but it cannot totally eliminate that risk. Regular checkups are still in order. PERSONAL HEALTH |
1130843_4 | Phone Fee for School Internet Service Seems to Be Too Popular to Overturn | part of American life early in this century, some telephone users have subsidized others. Businesses have subsidized residential users. Urban customers have subsidized those in rural areas. The affluent have paid more so that poor people could afford telephones. The theory has been that everyone benefits from universal access to telephones, just as everyone benefits from a national highway system and mail service that reaches everywhere in the country. Reed E. Hundt, who was Mr. Gore's prep-school classmate and the F.C.C. chairman from 1994 to 1997, saw the communications law as the path toward the Administration's goal of wiring classrooms and libraries. Under the policy that he developed and that has been followed by his successor, Mr. Kennard, long-distance companies pay a fee of slightly less than 1 percent of their revenue into a universal service fund. Two-thirds of the money raised by the fee is spent on telephone service for rural communities and poor people. The other third, $2.25 billion a year, is earmarked for the E-rate program. This covers 20 percent to 90 percent of the cost of wiring and paying the monthly bills from Internet service providers. The poorer the schools' students or the libraries' neighborhood, the higher the percentage of the cost that is covered. The companies pass along the cost of the fee to their customers. AT&T, for instance, charges residential accounts 99 cents a month. MCI Worldcom charges customers 7.2 percent of their long-distance bill. Sprint charges 6.3 percent. One-third of this fee pays for the E-rate. The cost of the E-rate program to most consumers is 30 to 40 cents a month -- about the cost of a postage stamp, Mr. Kennard frequently says. The program had a rocky start. Faced with criticism in Congress and a report of poor management by Government auditors, Mr. Kennard cut back the financing last year to $1.7 billion from the original $2.25 billion. But across the country, from the biggest cities to the most remote communities, the response from schools and libraries has been enthusiastic. Complaints from long-distance customers who are footing the bill have dwindled. Joseph Salvati, coordinator of the E-rate program for New York City public schools, said 7 to 12 classrooms in every school in the city would be wired for high-speed Internet service when school opens for the new year. The city received about $70 million for the program through last June |
1130870_3 | Basque Separatists Trade In Weapons for Words | a harsh critic of the central Government in Madrid, said in an interview at his party's headquarters here, ''I think the E.T.A. has decided to stop the armed fight, but that doesn't mean it couldn't act again in situations it considers provocations.'' Whether the guerrillas have moved closer to the moderate nationalist movement or Mr. Arzalluz's nationalists have moved closer to the guerrillas is a question politicians of other parties here sometimes ask, but they also agree that the tide has turned against violence. ''I think every passing day makes it harder for the E.T.A. to return to violence,'' said Nicolas Redondo Terreros, leader of the opposition Socialist Party in the Basque region. Leopoldo Calvo-Sotelo Ibanez-Martin, a member of Prime Minister Aznar's Conservative Party and an official of Spain's Interior Ministry, said of the guerrillas: ''They realized they were down a blind alley. They were fighting a losing battle on the terrorist side.'' ''It paid off politically,'' Mr. Calvo-Sotelo conceded, with nationalist gains in the regional elections last fall, followed by Mr. Aznar's announcement in November that he had authorized his Government to talk with people close to the guerrillas to see how sincere their pledge to forswear violence really was. ''It's hard to go back to violence when you do well in political terms,'' Mr. Calvo-Sotelo said, but he added that what the Government really wanted was ''not only a renunciation of violence, but a condemnation of it.'' Like the Irish Republican Army, the Basque guerrillas did not agree to disarm at the start of the peace process. And, as in Ireland, agreeing to talks was easier than the talks themselves. The first and so far only encounter took place over four hours in May -- in Switzerland, according to Mr. Arzalluz; Mr. Calvo-Sotelo, whose immediate superior in the Interior Ministry, Ricardo Marti Fluxa, was one of the participants, said he could not talk about the details. Mr. Arzalluz said the Government delegation was led by Javier Zarzalejos, a top aide to Mr. Aznar, and also included the Prime Minister's pollster, Pedro Arriola. One of the new, younger guerrilla leaders, Mikel Albizu -- who uses Antza as his nom de guerre and is the son of a founder of the movement -- spoke for their side, said Mr. Arzalluz, with one of the veterans, a woman whose name he said he could not remember, backing up her younger colleague. |
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1130826_0 | A Higher (Tech) Calling | New graduates of the Harvard Business School, traditionally able to pick and choose in the job market, are increasingly drawn to technology and the Internet. Not that the old ways are gone. Consulting, the top career choice for the school's new graduates since 1988, kept its place this year. But only 22 percent chose it, compared with 38 percent in 1995. And the new No. 2, superseding investment banking, was high technology, up to 20 percent from 8 percent in 1995. Many who chose it, according to the Aug. 2 issue of The Harbus, the school's student newspaper, picked Internet-based businesses. In 1995, no graduate went to such a company; this year, 12 percent of the class did. One incentive is a new way of doing things, according to Tracy Lawrence, a 1999 graduate who, with her classmate, Sasha Novakovich, is setting up Shopforservice.com, which will help consumers choose communications services. ''At a very young age,'' Ms. Lawrence said, ''you have the opportunity to build or help shape a company from the ground up, to revolutionize an industry or process.'' And there is another lure in a field known for twenty-something millionaires -- ''a huge potential financial upside,'' Ms. Lawrence said. BARBARA IRELAND PERSONAL BUSINESS: DIARY |
1130958_0 | Poetic Politics | DISOWNED BY MEMORY Wordsworth's Poetry of the 1790s. By David Bromwich. 186 pp. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. $25. OVER a hundred years ago, in Lahore, which was then at the edge of the English-speaking world, the poet and critic Altaf Husain Hali set himself the task of reforming Urdu poetry. Hali's project was Wordsworthian: an implied politics lay behind his efforts, a politics concerned with reinvigorating the culture that had sustained Urdu poetry and that had been overwhelmed by the British. His prescription was Wordsworthian also: a poetry of surpassing urbanity, whose roots extended back to pre-Islamic Arabia, was now to be turned to an ''examination of nature.'' Hali probably hadn't even read Wordsworth, but that only confirms how global the Wordsworthian idea had become. As the Urdu scholar Frances Pritchett puts it, he was ''haunted by the invisible presence of Wordsworth and his poetics.'' We are haunted, too. The great Wordsworthian dictums -- about a poetry that employs the ''language really used by men,'' for example, or the poetic priority of ''beautiful and permanent forms of nature'' -- and the philosophy of self that informs them are like an honor guard leading a procession made up not only of poets from Emerson and Whitman down to contemporaries as different from one another as Richard Wilbur, John Ashbery and Frank Bidart but also, arguably, of the members of the Sierra Club (''Walden'' would have been unthinkable without Wordsworth) and Ella Fitzgerald (with her ''natural'' vocal style). David Bromwich has stated for the record that he subscribes to the ''great man'' theory of history. The distinction of his meditation on Wordsworth's crucial years -- the 1790's, when the poet was synthesizing his many influences -- stems in part, though, from the fact that he avoids Wordsworth's size and concentrates on his peculiarities. The peculiarities Bromwich is interested in aren't the interpersonal ones that so much has been made of in contemporary Wordsworth studies -- the affair with Annette Vallon, the Frenchwoman with whom Wordsworth had an illegitimate child in 1792, for example. Connections like these, with their psychological and sexual complexities, are for Bromwich avenues leading to what grabs him the most -- the profound moral conundrum that Wordsworth, a radical republican in his early 20's and a partisan of the French Revolution (''Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive''), was faced with when the Revolution turned |
1130873_0 | As Protestants March, Police And Catholics Clash in Ulster | Officers of the Royal Ulster Constabulary clashed in cities across Northern Ireland today with Roman Catholics protesting Protestant parades through their neighborhoods. There were at least five arrests and scores of injuries, most of them slight, as protesters confronted policemen seeking to clear them from the parades. The demonstrators shouted abuse at the marchers, who were celebrating the 310th anniversary of the defeat of a Catholic King, James II, in Londonderry. The demonstrations over the parades, which many Catholics consider insulting, occurred in Belfast, Lurgan and Londonderry. They came as the people of Omagh, in the center of the predominantly Protestant British province, prepared to commemorate the first anniversary of a bombing by a splinter group of the Irish Republican Army that killed 29 people. Sinn Fein, the political wing of the I.R.A., accused the police of brutality, which the police denied. In the past, Gerry Adams, the Sinn Fein president, has acknowledged that Catholic protests over the Protestant parades were a part of the republican strategy to advance Sinn Fein's position in the northern peace effort. The negotiations have been stalled for more than a year in a dispute over the disarmament of the I.R.A. and over Cabinet posts for Sinn Fein in the Northern Ireland Assembly. The assembly was created under the 1998 peace agreement to give the minority Catholics more power. Many officials, including mainstream Catholic politicians, said Sinn Fein was using the protests to satisfy hard-line members of the I.R.A. who are restless with Mr. Adams's policy of trying to negotiate with the Protestant unionist majority. Today's demonstrations, they said, also had the effect of counterbalancing the plan for the memorial here in Omagh on Sunday for the victims of last year's bombing by the splinter group, which called itself the Real I.R.A. The main I.R.A. has observed a cease-fire for two years, but has refused to disarm. In Belfast this morning, the police said that 19 officers and several civilians were injured during clashes on the Lower Ormeau Road as about 20 members of the Protestant Apprentice Boys of Derry marched through the area. There were no arrests. Television tonight showed policemen dragging sitting protesters off the Lower Ormeau Road. They responded by kicking. The police then clubbed the protesters' legs. The marchers then boarded a bus for Londonderry, for ceremonies honoring the young apprentices who in 1689 locked the gates of the city against |
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1133498_1 | Britain Rules For the I.R.A. On Truce, Inciting Furor | is sufficient basis to conclude that the I.R.A. cease-fire has broken down,'' she said. ''Nor do I believe that it is disintegrating or that these recent events represent a decision by the organization to return to violence.'' Nonetheless, Ms. Mowlam said, ''we are very close to the edge'' of a breakdown in the peace effort. The I.R.A. declared a cease-fire in July 1997, paving the way for the so-called Good Friday peace agreement last year. Under the terms of the deal Britain has released around 280 paramilitary prisoners and 200 more are scheduled to be freed by next May if the peace effort remains intact. Before Ms. Mowlam's decision, Northern Ireland's largely Protestant unionists, who want continued ties with Britain, pressed her to declare the cease-fire over and to suspend the release of I.R.A. prisoners. But Sinn Fein dropped broad hints that it would withdraw from next month's peace review if the prisoner releases ceased. On Wednesday, Sir Ronnie Flanagan, head of the Royal Ulster Constabulary, accused the I.R.A. of involvement in the slaying on July 30 of Charles Bennett, a 22-year-old cab driver, who was killed by a gunshot wound to the head. The slaying has been depicted as the vengeance murder of a suspected police informer. Ms. Mowlam said she accepted Mr. Flanagan's version of events, calling the killing ''savage and disgraceful.'' She said ''information is also clear'' about I.R.A. links to illicit arms deals with suppliers in the United States that has led to arrests in Ireland and the United States. But she maintained these developments did not constitute a formal decision by the I.R.A. to break the cease-fire. ''There is no example of organized violence,'' she said. The decision drew protests from leading unionists, including David Trimble, the province's First Minister, who called the ruling ''deeply disappointing, deeply flawed.'' Other unionists demanded Ms. Mowlam's resignation, but Mr. Trimble did not go that far, saying only that Ms. Mowlam had been unable to ''tell people the simple truth.'' ''It is quite clear that the I.R.A. is not keeping what we would recognize as a cease-fire,'' Mr. Trimble said. ''She appears to be accepting the I.R.A. definition of events.'' He added that her assessment had done serious damage to public confidence in Northern Ireland. Other unionists went further, saying, in the words of Jeffrey Donaldson, a hard-line unionist, that Ms. Mowlam's decision was ''a sick joke.'' ''She has |
1133588_0 | Commercials in Class | To the Editor: Genetically modified food comes from organisms that are artificially constructed by transferring genes from an otherwise genetically incompatible organism (news article, Aug. 23). These organisms are not synonymous with hybrids. Second, genetically modified organisms are patented. With patenting, the traditional practice of saving seed for the next generation of planting is illegal. New seed must be purchased each time. Added to that, some genetically modified organisms require application of chemical triggers produced by the same company that is selling the organism. Lastly, there are numerous environmental concerns: loss of biodiversity, pollution of wild species and buildup of resistance in the pests and weeds. MARGARET WEBER Detroit, Aug. 23, 1999 |
1128655_1 | Accord on Developing Land Beside the Grand Canyon | which the United States Forest Service is expected to endorse. Spokeswomen for Grand Canyon National Park and the Forest Service said details of the project would be revealed at a news conference on Friday morning in Flagstaff, Ariz. But Mr. Simon, other environmentalists and associates of the development group's general partner, Thomas DePaolo of Scottsdale, all said today that the Forest Service had agreed on a plan that was supported by at least nine leading environmental groups, Arizona's Indian tribes and various state agencies. The village will be built with private money. Forest Service approval is only necessary because the land designated for development was obtained through a swap of nearby Federal forest land. While the final plan includes more development than some of the other eight originally under consideration, environmentalists were won over by the water program and other ecological concessions that they contend would protect Grand Canyon. Under terms of the proposal expected to be endorsed on Friday, water into Canyon Forest Village would be brought by rail and pipeline. In a runner-up proposal, water would have been used from wells and springs inside the canyon. The environmental groups also prevailed in pressing for the use of more efficient energy systems and for recycling programs rather than landfills for waste management. ''We were blessed to find representatives of national environmental groups who recognized the challenges, and they were willing to negotiate from the beginning,'' Mr. DePaolo said in an interview, acknowleding the unusual collaboration. He praised the environmental groups who helped shape the final proposal calling them ''as much a developer of this project as we are.'' Federal officials began contemplating the need for an expanded gateway community at the canyon's busiest entrance more than a decade ago. By last year, more than 4.5 million people visited the canyon, making it the country's second-most-popular national park or preservation area after the Great Smoky Mountains in North Carolina and Tennessee. About 80 percent of visitors to the canyon enter from Tusayan. But Tusayan, an unincorporated town of fewer than 1,000 year-round residents in the Kaibab National Forest, could accommodate neither the growing number of visitors to the canyon nor the park's own pressing needs of 500 housing units for its expanding work force and concessionaires. As a result, park officials drew up a management plan in 1995 that sought to eliminate problems through the expansion of Tusayan and construction |
1128654_0 | Study Finds That Rare Cancer in Amoco Employees Is Probably Work Related, Company Says | After a three- year study, medical investigators working for the BP Amoco Corporation said today that an unusually high incidence of a rare brain cancer among some employees at a research center near here was most likely work related. The investigators, who were hired from the University of Alabama and Johns Hopkins University, said that although the findings were preliminary and did not pinpoint a cause the statistical evidence suggested that ''occupational exposure'' might have affected six chemical researchers who in the last decade were found to have a rare and often deadly form of brain cancer called glioma. At the same time, the investigators said they had found no evidence that about 13 other cases of nonglioma brain tumors were work related. Lawyers representing a large group of current and former employees in lawsuits against the company criticized the conclusions today, saying that the Amoco study was neither thorough nor independent. ''This study was bought and paid for by Amoco; it's hardly an independent study,'' said Tilden Katz, a spokesman for Corboy & Demetrio, a law firm in Chicago that is representing nonglioma cancer victims. ''We have clients who had brain tumors who were never contacted by Amoco,'' Mr. Katz said. Since 1989, about 19 people who had worked at the Amoco Research Center in Naperville, Ill., a Chicago suburb, were found to have brain tumors. Officials of Amoco, the giant oil company, say they have been working vigorously to find a cause, but even medical experts say that the major difficulty in resolving the case is that science has not found a definitive cause of brain cancer in humans. ''It's frustrating to spend three years studying something and not to have a definitive answer,'' said Jim D. Lowry, the chairman of BP Amoco's health investigation task force. ''We are hopeful that the clues the investigators have uncovered will in some way help health scientists in their efforts to identify the causes of brain cancer.'' Of the 19 brain tumor victims who have been identified by Amoco, investigators say they have only found a pattern that would suggest work-related causes among the six glioma victims, all of whom were long-term chemical researchers often working on similar projects with similar chemicals and in the same building. Amoco officials said the investigators do not believe the other brain tumors were work related. There was no unusual pattern of workplace, time or |
1127293_2 | Please Don't Eat the Doctor | folksy and conversational as he champions the cause of the W.C.S. He is not deeply introspective. All mountains are lush, all plains are grassy and all his fellow conservationists are unique and special. What draws you in are his stories of the animals. His most vivid descriptions are saved for them. Peccaries, wild pigs with bristly hair and chisel-like tusks, smash through the woods of South America ''like a brigade of natural vacuum cleaners, snorting and grunting as they go.'' Bright-colored macaws, raised at a breeding station in Peru, come back for a visit and act ''like a miniature urban street gang.'' The bellies of caimans, South American crocodiles, are ''kind of pudgy -- you can push them in like the Pillsbury Doughboy.'' And baby seals, ''with their thick soft fur and huge dark brown eyes . . . look and feel like living plush toys.'' Karesh never goes out to do fieldwork without his pantyhose in hand. The nylon material makes a nifty indestructible basket for suspending blood-sample tubes in liquid nitrogen. Karesh was possibly destined for his position. As a boy growing up in Charleston, S.C., he was famous locally for rescuing baby blue jays and raising orphaned raccoons at his home near the Ashley River. After obtaining a degree in veterinary medicine, he graduated to caring for bigger game, first at zoos and now around the world. His book offers the opportunity to get a feel for his workaday life as he reports on his experiences during expeditions to Congo, Bolivia, Cameroon, Peru and Borneo over the last few years. Each trip had a different objective. Some of these journeys are simply interesting, others more arresting, such as the search for a forest elephant in the heart of tropical Africa. His assignment was to attach seven-foot-long radio collars to some elephants, so researchers could use satellites to track their roaming patterns. Forest elephants have thin, straight tusks and are smaller, and far less studied, than their grassland cousins. Finding one is not easy. Karesh and his companions spent three long weeks tramping through the rain-soaked foliage of Cameroon, machetes chopping away, before they spotted their first candidate. After Karesh shot off his tranquilizing dart, the elephant charged. Fortunately, Karesh found refuge behind a tree. It was my favorite episode. ''If it hadn't been so dangerous, it would have been like a scene from a Keystone Kops comedy,'' |
1127723_0 | July 25-31; New Reporting Rules For Shipboard Crimes | Facing rising concerns in Congress and elsewhere about crime on ships, the cruise-ship industry adopted a uniform standard for dealing with the investigation and reporting of crimes. The International Council of Cruise Lines, which represents 90 percent of the cruise business in the United States, said its members agreed to report all allegations of onboard crime to the Federal Bureau of Investigation and other appropriate law enforcement authorities. In the past, the cruise ships let victims decide whether to report crimes, and some victims and their lawyers complained that there was pressure to cover up assaults. Carnival Cruise lines said there were 108 accusations of improper sexual conduct by crew members in a recent 5-year period. DOUGLAS FRANTZ |
1127640_0 | An Eye on Your E-Mail | To the Editor: Re: ''You've Got Mail. You're Being Watched.'' (The Right Thing, July 18), which looked at company monitoring of workers' E-mail: Employees should have the first line of responsibility for doing something about offensive E-mail messages. In fact, in accepting the use of company E-mail, employees should agree that they won't sue the company over any message, unless they have first complained to management in writing and given the company time to investigate. Thereafter, management should be held responsible for making prompt, diligent and reasonable attempts to correct the problem. JACQUES WERTH Dresher, Pa., July 18 The writer is the president of High Probability Selling, a sales training firm. |
1127619_1 | The Worker's Just Reward | growing international trade, the loss of the work ethic and assorted other factors, is now narrowing. Lower rates of unemployment and rising wages may also be contributing to declining crime rates. It is well documented that as unemployment rates have fallen in inner cities recently, so has the incidence of crime. The country as a whole is surely more confident as well. Generosity seems to be on the rise. Survey after survey suggests that despite Congressional determination to cut taxes, most Americans would rather spend any Federal budget surplus on social programs and education. Low rates of unemployment will also help the economy over time. It is nice to hear that some New York restaurants are taking such ''radical'' steps as giving their staffs the benefit of formal training. Rising wages in other industries are also inducing more thought about, and capital investment in, innovative ways to use employees better, including upgrading plants and machinery. Many economic historians have argued that American productivity grew rapidly in its earlier years for just such reasons. Businesses had to pay high wages for scarce labor as far back as the early 19th century, so they invested aggressively in the latest equipment to raise the output per worker. As incomes rise for all American workers, new, more vibrant markets are created for entrepreneurs. Wall Street should keep in mind that the booms in the auto and housing markets are in part supported by growing demand among middle-income Americans whose incomes generally lagged behind those of their better-off peers until recently. As these workers earn more, they can also afford to train and educate themselves, sensing perhaps that they have a stake in the nation's future again. But before we get too carried away with the benefits to workers in the current economy, let's remember that wage growth has been extraordinarily slow in the 1990's, even when including the gains of the last few years. Median family income, adjusted for inflation, is only 2 percent higher than it was in 1989. Workers have kept up by having spouses work and borrowing on credit cards and against the house. In fact, despite stories about signing bonuses at fast-food restaurants, wages for lower-paid male workers and for women in general fell in the second quarter. The willingness of Americans to work long and hard has been one of the foundations of economic growth in the 1990's. A |
1127706_0 | Youth Camp Is Ordered Closed After Mistreatment Is Charged | Connecticut authorities have suspended the license of a youth camp in East Haddam after substantiating five instances of what they are calling the neglect or abuse of campers, who are mentally retarded or have other special needs. Officials of the Connecticut Department of Public Health, which regulates youth camps, began calling parents and guardians of the 79 campers on Friday, and by last night all but one of the campers had been picked up, said William C. Gerrish, a spokesman for the department. The camp, Shadybrook Camp and Learning Center, was providing 24-hour care for the campers, who came from at least 10 states. A suspension order for the camp was issued Friday, and it requires the camp to close by Tuesday. A hearing on the charges is scheduled for Aug. 18 at the Department of Public Health. Mr. Gerrish said the public health officials suspended the license after officials of the Department of Children and Families documented ''incidents of physical abuse and/or neglect of the campers,'' and ''reports of conditions which are unsafe and unsanitary.'' He said he could not be more specific, citing confidentiality statutes. He said the investigation resulted from a complaint early last week. A man who answered the phone at the camp identified himself as Norman Rivkees, an employee, and said the director was not immediately available. ''There is a lot to be decided,'' the man said. ''We care an awful lot about the campers. We care an awful lot about the staff.'' He added, ''There is a due process, and I cannot discuss anything with you.'' The camp is in the Moodus section of East Haddam, on the Connecticut River. The camp is described on its Web site at www.shadybrook.com as ''a rewarding and fun-filled summer experience for campers with special needs,'' including those who are ''developmental, learning, or speech/ language challenged.'' Some of the campers receive help communicating and some are autistic, state officials said. State Police investigators went to the camp, but Mr. Gerrish said he did not know whether criminal charges would be brought. He said professionals from the Department of Public Health went to the camp to monitor the distribution of medicine and the interaction of the staff and campers, and to be sure ''there is no imminent danger posed to the campers.'' |
1127319_9 | Who's Afraid of China? | hope for, Mao realized, would be one stinging shot back at its foe. China's nuclear doctrine has certainly advanced since then, but with a no-first-use policy and adherence to the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, China is not (nor has it ever been) the nuclear rogue that Presidents Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon once feared. China has never resorted to nuclear blackmail in its international relations; nor has it activated its nuclear forces in any military crisis. Every year, a large gathering of specialists on the chinese military meets at a leafy resort to debate the intentions and capabilities of the Chinese military. Last year, the conclave took place at a venue more closely associated with the Middle East than with China: the Wye Plantation in Maryland. Gathered on the shores of the Chesapeake were experts from the intelligence, defense, diplomatic and academic communities, including John Culver, the C.I.A.'s top student of the People's Liberation Army, Michael D. Swaine of the Rand Corporation, Paul Godwin of the National Defense University and James R. Lilley, a former Ambassador to China. The debate in Wye's plush conference rooms was contentious, but the consensus was clear: China is a backward military power that is gradually modernizing the portion of its military responsible for safeguarding its own backyard, including Tibet, Taiwan and whatever dominion China eventually negotiates for itself in the South China Sea. Looking out over the next two decades, experts like Culver concede that China could seek to leapfrog its antiquated military technologies and develop modern weapons that would be more threatening to American interests and to U.S. forces in the Pacific. But today the evidence suggests that while China is working to master state-of-the-art technologies in its laboratories, it has little expertise and few resources to build the industrial base necessary to become a modern military power. The Chinese Air Force is a case in point, with neither the factories nor the skilled work force to develop modern warplanes or keep them flying. For example, it was long rumored that China was on the verge of deploying a supersonic fighter: the F-10. But Chinese engineers could never get one to fly out of the barn. Eventually, in 1992, the air force gave up and purchased a few squadrons of Russian SU-27's at bargain-basement prices. In short, the B-2 Stealth bomber is not in China's future. The Chinese Navy is in similar shape, hampered |
1127685_5 | IN ECLIPSE -- A special report.; Empty Isles Are Signs Japan's Sun Might Dim | chickens and ducks, and I'm so healthy here.'' ''I just hope young people come back,'' she continued. ''When I was a kid, there was a store over there,'' she said, pointing to a collapsed building peeking from the thick brush. ''And over there. And there. And down by the cemetery as well. And now they're all gone.'' In another world, the bustle of downtown Tokyo, Kaoru Yosano is Minister of International Trade and Industry and is thus charged with maintaining Japan's future international competitiveness. Sitting at a conference table in his vast office, the size of a typical Japanese apartment for a family of five, Mr. Yosano sips his tea and admits that he is struggling for solutions to the population problem -- in vain. ''There is no easy answer,'' Mr. Yosano said bleakly. ''My mother was one of 8 children. My father was one of 11. My wife and I were each one of 5 children, and we ourselves have 2 children. When we look further ahead at the next generation, well, I don't hear much from my sons about having babies.'' (Mr. Yosano's two sons, both married, one with one child and the other without any, both declined to be interviewed.) ''Former Primer Minister Takeshita once told me that in the year 2500, Japan's population will be down to one person,'' Mr. Yosano said with a glum smile. ''When that happens, I suppose Japan's global influence inevitably will have declined.'' Japan is not, of course, the only country facing low birth rates. Japanese women give birth to an average of 1.4 children, while World Bank figures show Spain, Bulgaria and Latvia tied for the lowest ''total fertility rate'' in the world, at 1.1. Even the United States will grow primarily because of immigration, because its total fertility rate, of 2.0, is slightly below the level needed for a self-sustaining population (which is 2.1, to account for such factors as babies who die before adulthood). So what sets Japan apart is not so much that its women are having fewer babies, but rather the combination it represents: the world's second-largest economy is now one of the world's least fertile and fastest-aging societies. Latvia's fertility crisis will affect Lithuania; Japan's will shape the global economy. The essence of the challenge is a shrinking work force. The Government predicts that the working-age population of Japan will drop by about 650,000 a |
1127570_0 | PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL | |
1127641_0 | An Eye on Your E-Mail | To the Editor: Have we become so politically correct that we have lost our sense of humor and found a new issue for possible lawsuits? I can't see firing someone -- in whom you have invested time, money and training -- over an E-mail. As I gather from the example, someone in a workplace found a message offensive, but no one was touched, groped or whispered to. It would be more cost-effective for a company to suspend someone over this, rather than cut off the nose to spite the face. LARRY KIRKPATRICK Buffalo, Wyo., July 18 |
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