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1074944_5 | Search for Missing Otters Turns Up a Few Surprises | at the university. Through statistical analysis, the researchers determined that the observed increase in attacks could not be attributed to chance alone. Then they compared otter population trends in two places on Adak Island where circumstances had by chance created experimental and control groups. In one place, Clam Lagoon, the entrance from the sea was too narrow and shallow for orcas to enter. In the other, Kuluk Bay, they could enter easily. There was virtually no movement of otters between the two areas. Almost two-thirds of the otters disappeared from the unsheltered bay in a year's time, while only 12 percent disappeared from the sheltered one. ''That made us perk up our years and think it really was the killer whales,'' Dr. Estes said. Finally, the researchers calculated what the likely rate of observed attacks would be if whales were responsible for the 90 percent reduction in the otter population. The rate was close to the number of attacks actually seen. But this conclusion only raised new questions. What made the whales attack the otters? The researchers have proposed the following chain of events, which begins in the open ocean: First, populations of the northern Pacific's most nutritious fish, like ocean perch and herring, declined. The reasons are uncertain, but several have been proposed. One is overfishing by commercial fishermen. Another is a sudden warming of the North Pacific climate that began in the late 1970's. A third is competition from a predator species of fish, the pollock, which is not as nutritious as the other, oilier species. The pollock population grew, according to one hypothesis, when whalers reduced the populations of whales that survive by filtering microscopic animals from the water. The tiny animals proliferated, and the pollock gorged on them. The decline in the most nutritious forage fish, according to the proposed story line, was mainly responsible for an ensuing crash in Alaskan populations of Steller sea lions and harbor seals, for which pollock did not provide sufficient nourishment. Numbers of these pinnipeds, as seals and sea lions are called, have declined sharply since the 1970's. According to a 1996 study by the National Research Council, the decline in forage fish was probably a major factor in the pinniped crash. Pinnipeds are the major food of orcas. Faced with a shortage, the Estes group believes, some killer whales turned to the next best thing: sea otters. Here the |
1074736_5 | Search for Missing Otters Turns Up a Few Surprises | at the university. Through statistical analysis, the researchers determined that the observed increase in attacks could not be attributed to chance alone. Then they compared otter population trends in two places on Adak Island where circumstances had by chance created experimental and control groups. In one place, Clam Lagoon, the entrance from the sea was too narrow and shallow for orcas to enter. In the other, Kuluk Bay, they could enter easily. There was virtually no movement of otters between the two areas. Almost two-thirds of the otters disappeared from the unsheltered bay in a year's time, while only 12 percent disappeared from the sheltered one. ''That made us perk up our years and think it really was the killer whales,'' Dr. Estes said. Finally, the researchers calculated what the likely rate of observed attacks would be if whales were responsible for the 90 percent reduction in the otter population. The rate was close to the number of attacks actually seen. But this conclusion only raised new questions. What made the whales attack the otters? The researchers have proposed the following chain of events, which begins in the open ocean: First, populations of the northern Pacific's most nutritious fish, like ocean perch and herring, declined. The reasons are uncertain, but several have been proposed. One is overfishing by commercial fishermen. Another is a sudden warming of the North Pacific climate that began in the late 1970's. A third is competition from a predator species of fish, the pollock, which is not as nutritious as the other, oilier species. The pollock population grew, according to one hypothesis, when whalers reduced the populations of whales that survive by filtering microscopic animals from the water. The tiny animals proliferated, and the pollock gorged on them. The decline in the most nutritious forage fish, according to the proposed story line, was mainly responsible for an ensuing crash in Alaskan populations of Steller sea lions and harbor seals, for which pollock did not provide sufficient nourishment. Numbers of these pinnipeds, as seals and sea lions are called, have declined sharply since the 1970's. According to a 1996 study by the National Research Council, the decline in forage fish was probably a major factor in the pinniped crash. Pinnipeds are the major food of orcas. Faced with a shortage, the Estes group believes, some killer whales turned to the next best thing: sea otters. Here the |
1074733_1 | Using Magnets on Corners of the Mind | in the body and heart disease. Universities and national laboratories throughout the United States have been experimenting with magnetic technology for more than a decade. Until now, though surgeons have been able to use images of the brain to locate a tumor with precision, they have generally had to push a rigid needle toward a tumor through whatever vital section lay in the pathway. The operation using magnets, classified by the Food and Drug Administration as a Phase I human trial, took place at Barnes-Jewish Hospital in St. Louis on Dec. 17 on a 31-year-old man to determine whether tumors in his brain were malignant and to help plot the course of treatment. He was the first of five patients with tumors in the upper front part of the brain to undergo the new procedure. With the aid of a series of M.R.I. images of the patient's brain, Dr. Dacey and his team mapped out the least invasive route to the tumor and created computerized instructions that would direct a sharp plastic surgical instrument to the right place. The team then placed the patient's head inside a titanium frame and within three sets of the superconducting magnets. Dr. Dacey drilled an opening about one-third of an inch wide through the patient's skull to the edge of the brain. Sitting at the computer console, he instructed the magnetic system to move a flexible plastic catheter, somewhat narrower than a straw, into the brain. A tiny magnet, attached to a guidewire, was inside the catheter. Preprogrammed electronic impulses from the computer set up a sequence of magnetic fields around the head to guide the tiny magnet on course to the tumor. Slowly, one millimeter at a time, Dr. Dacey allowed the catheter to advance through the soft matter of the brain, constantly stopping it to check its path, ready to adjust it if necessary. When the catheter reached the tumor, which took about five minutes, he gently pulled the guidewire, leaving the hollow catheter in place. Then, he moved the surgical tool in through the catheter to cut out tissue samples from the tumor and remove them. The researchers said the next step for magnetic surgery would be to seek F.D.A. approval to begin Phase II of human trials, after demonstrating that the first phase was safe and effective. They plan to expand number of patients in the next trials to 30. |
1077464_3 | The Granddaddies of All Hackers | widely available to everyone (though in some cases they could be customized). But before long another advantage of using such nonsecret codes, known as ''commercial'' codes, soon became clear -- to save money. By using a code that replaced several words with a single word, telegrams cost less to send. By 1875, the use of commercial codes was starting to get out of hand. Some codes involved weird words, like ''CHINESISKSLUTNINGSDON.'' Every move the telegraph companies made to try to reduce the use of codes was neutralized by the increasing cunning of code compilers. However, by this stage the drawbacks of such codes were becoming apparent to their users as well as the telegraph companies. Each code word meant so much that a single misplaced letter (or dot or dash) in transmission could dramatically change the meaning of a message. One particularly graphic example occurred in June 1887, when Frank J. Primrose, a wood dealer in Philadelphia, sent William B. Toland to Kansas to act as his agent and buy wool on his behalf. Using a widely available off-the-shelf commercial code, the two men passed several messages back and forth as they kept each other informed of their transactions. But things went horribly wrong when Primrose sent a message explaining that he had bought 500,000 pounds of wool. The words ''I HAVE BOUGHT'' were encoded by the word ''BAY'' in the commercial code, and the amount 500,000 pounds by the word ''QUO,'' so that ''I HAVE BOUGHT ALL KINDS, 500,000 POUNDS'' became ''BAY ALL KIND QUO.'' This message was incorrectly transmitted to Toland as ''BUY ALL KINDS QUO,'' possibly because the Morse code for ''A'' (dot dash) differs by only one dot from the Morse code for ''U'' (dot dot dash). As a result, Toland . . . duly started to buy half a million pounds of wool. By the time the mistake had been uncovered, the market had turned and Primrose ended up losing $20,000. He tried to sue Western Union, the telegraph company that had transmitted the fateful message, but he lost because he had failed to ask for the message to be verified -- an optional service that would have cost him a few cents extra. Eventually, after a lengthy legal battle, the Supreme Court ruled that he was entitled to a refund only on the cost of sending the original telegram, or just $1.15. THINK TANK |
1079957_2 | For Atlantic Clammers, Trying to Weather an Unusual Run of Tragedy | there, Jeffrey M. Wertz, added: ''There's so many things that can happen on boats. When you don't get a broadcast with some detailed description of what's going on on the boat, then it's left to the investigators to find out.'' The first boat to go down was the Beth Dee Bob, an 84-foot steel-hulled clam dredge that sank off the coast of Manasquan in the late afternoon of Jan. 6. The boat, which was in good condition, was loaded with clams, and the weather was turning bad, with swells approaching eight feet and the wind at 30 miles an hour, but clammers consider that manageable. Out of a crew of four, one body was recovered. On the night of Jan. 8, the Cape Fear, a 112-footer owned by a Cape May company, was returning to port in New Bedford, Mass. With bad weather moving in, it had cut short a trip to the rich clamming beds off Block Island, so it was not likely to be heavily loaded. Clammers and commercial divers who knew the boat say it was in excellent condition, and they said the crew was experienced. Seas were growing heavy, with swells from 6 to 10 feet, when the boat sent out a distress call, saying it was taking on water. Another clamming boat roared off to the rescue, but within 10 minutes the Cape Fear had gone down, and two of five crew members were lost. Early on Jan. 17, a fully loaded wood-hulled 60-footer called the Ellie B crashed into a jetty as it headed into the Manasquan Inlet. All three crew members survived. The captain, who was cited for not keeping a proper lookout, said the boat was on automatic pilot and the man at the helm, who had just relieved his predecessor, fell asleep for a few crucial minutes. In the most recent sinking, the Adriatic sent out a distress call about 3 P.M. Monday, which was received by the Coast Guard station at Barnegat Light. But the Coast Guard said the message was garbled, and only the next day did the Coast Guard station at Atlantic City decipher the name, long after the boat, with its crew of four, was reported missing. It, too, was fully loaded and in good condition; seas were less than four feet high at the time of the call, though the weather worsened rapidly. AT THE SHORE |
1079506_1 | The Study of Gene Machines, In Situ | species has been kept exclusively in the National Plant Germplasm System. The gene pool was gathered from ex situ collections, a sort of clinically clean environment. Now the researchers are finding that it is far more important to preserve a gene pool in situ, that is in the place where nature put it. One of the staff botanists, Diana Pavek, was on the trail of rock grape in situ last summer. A rather alarming part of her research revealed that of the 60 sites in 10 states where herbarium specimens were collected, only 24 populations of rock grapes were found in only 9 states as opposed to the original 10. When the in situ specimens were analyzed in the lab, she found significant differences in the physical structure of the plants. This same kind of information was underscored by researchers who are working on the potato, a staple for diets worldwide. It is recognized as the world's fourth most important food after rice, wheat and corn. Again in breeding potatoes, the researchers have found that the genetic pool of several Southwestern species have genes that could be helpful in their work. One of the researchers, John Bamberg, noted that these wild tubers, found in the Southwest, ''represent a veritable treasure chest of genetic diversity.'' Potatoes have a long history. The Incas relied on them not only as food but also as a clock. Time was measured by how long it took to cook a potato. Reseach on new and better potato crops, enriched by reasearch on the old, continues. Another problem occurred with onions. Wild onions were planted on research station plots for the purpose of gathering seed from the mature plants. But the onion growth was lackluster and no seed resulted. The whole project seemed to be headed for disaster. But then that magic concept occurred again. Why not let the plants themselves form the seed in situ, then gather it? So the wild onions are now being protected in situ and the research project can continue. It is hoped that more native species of onions can be preserved in this way. Currently there are about 500 species known but only 6 of these are native. Although preservation ex situ is still a valuable tool for plant breeders, researchers are finding that plant species gene makeup is not static. In fact, it is constantly changing. What was collected from |
1079574_0 | Despite Billions Spent, A History of Failures | After decades of neglect and deferred maintenance that left New York City schools crumbling, leaky, shabby and sometimes dangerous, the State Legislature created the School Construction Authority in 1988 with a mandate to resurrect the vast archipelago of 1,100 aging public school buildings by Jan. 1, 2000. Gov. Mario M. Cuomo went to a Harlem school, a Gothic 1901 pile of decrepit walls and broken windows, to sign the law that stripped the Board of Education of school construction tasks and assigned the authority to restore the system and build scores of new schools. Speakers portrayed the future in rosy terms: billions of dollars to come over the next decade, a new beginning for a million pupils. But 10 years and $7 billion later, critics say, the reality is still a bleak portrait of dilapidated, sometimes hazardous schools; of cost overruns and endless delays; of rapid turnover in the agency's leadership, and of waste, inefficiency and incompetence in hundreds of school projects. And yesterday, Gov. George E. Pataki -- citing systemic failures, horror stories of children lunching in cafeterias under umbrellas, and allegations of attendance records falsified by bureaucrats to inflate their budgets -- ordered a sweeping investigation of school construction in the city. For years, politicians, educators and parents have called for an overhaul of the school construction process, and with many projects coming in years late, millions over budget and poorly executed, they have had plenty of ammunition. Critics have pointed to many causes: unqualified contractors, poor site supervision, too little money, and policy decisions beyond the authority's control. In a 71,000-word report this month, the Board of Education pronounced the state of the city schools generally poor -- one-third needed major exterior work and another third had antiquated electrical wiring and ancient coal furnaces -- and said that, at best, the schools might be in fair condition after a five-year, $11 billion rebuilding effort that would require Federal, state and city help. The authority, whose three trustees are named by the governor, the mayor and the city schools chancellor, has had some successes, building 43 new schools and creating new classrooms for more than 70,000 students. By contrast, the Board of Education, starved by the city's financial crisis, built only two schools between 1975 and 1988. Moreover, by offering incentives for early completion of work and imposing penalties for poor performance, the authority said last year that |
1079796_0 | Why Eco-Tourists Are Shunning Brazil | BLESSED with a rain forest the size of Western Europe, wetlands where rivers magically swell from 300 yards to 37 miles in the rainy season, and a dazzling string of waterfalls in the south, Brazil would seem to be a natural magnet for ecologically driven travelers. In fact, it was not long ago that eco-tourism represented the great hope of Brazilian environmentalists and tour operators: they hoped to show business interests that doing the right thing by leaving rain forests and wilderness intact could pay. But nature travel in Brazil has failed to take off as once expected, say tourism experts here, and instead has declined steadily through the 1990's. While Costa Rica and other Latin American countries have captured the imagination of nature lovers, such travelers have been bypassing Brazil, where the accommodations, infrastructure and expertise come up short. Statistics are scarce, but Roberto Mourao, president of the Brazilian Ecotourism Association, estimates that over the last decade, eco-tourism has fallen by half, driven down by failures on the part of government and the tourism industry to build on the surging interest in the environment with well-prepared programs for tourists. A recent survey of environmental attractions by the Ecotourism Institute of Brazil found serious obstacles throughout the country, from lack of road signs to poor accommodations and ill-trained guides. ''The Amazon has a name that seduces people, so you don't have to position your product, but there are other problems,'' Mr. Mourao said. About 70 percent of tourists to the Amazon want to see wildlife, he said, but the Amazon is a dense forest where days or weeks may pass without any sightings of animals or rare birds. Guides may know less than amateur bird watchers or animal lovers who have traveled thousands of miles for a glimpse of a rare or beautiful creature. Brazil is laced with natural wonders. Its rain forest alone would cover half the continental United States. The Amazon contains 20 percent of the world's fresh water supply. Unspoiled, fauna and flora seem to spill over each other from every bit of soil and bark, and tropical parrots, toucans and other birds flit through the lush landscape. The string of waterfalls at Iguacu in the south was the backdrop for the 1986 movie ''The Mission.'' And the 80,000-square-mile Pantanal, the world's largest wetland, is prolific in wildlife. In a sense, the problem may have its roots |
1079507_1 | The Study of Gene Machines, In Situ | species has been kept exclusively in the National Plant Germplasm System. The gene pool was gathered from ex situ collections, a sort of clinically clean environment. Now the researchers are finding that it is far more important to preserve a gene pool in situ, that is in the place where nature put it. One of the staff botanists, Diana Pavek, was on the trail of rock grape in situ last summer. A rather alarming part of her research revealed that of the 60 sites in 10 states where herbarium specimens were collected, only 24 populations of rock grapes were found in only 9 states as opposed to the original 10. When the in situ specimens were analyzed in the lab, she found significant differences in the physical structure of the plants. This same kind of information was underscored by researchers who are working on the potato, a staple for diets worldwide. It is recognized as the world's fourth most important food after rice, wheat and corn. Again in breeding potatoes, the researchers have found that the genetic pool of several Southwestern species have genes that could be helpful in their work. One of the researchers, John Bamberg, noted that these wild tubers, found in the Southwest, ''represent a veritable treasure chest of genetic diversity.'' Potatoes have a long history. The Incas relied on them not only as food but also as a clock. Time was measured by how long it took to cook a potato. Reseach on new and better potato crops, enriched by reasearch on the old, continues. Another problem occurred with onions. Wild onions were planted on research station plots for the purpose of gathering seed from the mature plants. But the onion growth was lackluster and no seed resulted. The whole project seemed to be headed for disaster. But then that magic concept occurred again. Why not let the plants themselves form the seed in situ, then gather it? So the wild onions are now being protected in situ and the research project can continue. It is hoped that more native species of onions can be preserved in this way. Currently there are about 500 species known but only 6 of these are native. Although preservation ex situ is still a valuable tool for plant breeders, researchers are finding that plant species gene makeup is not static. In fact, it is constantly changing. What was collected from |
1079802_10 | GUATEMALA, ON THE VERTICAL | past year and have occurred in all parts of the country. Tourist vans have been a particularly susceptible target.'' It also says that it is dangerous to climb volcanoes because of the possibility of robbery or attack but that the ruins at Tikal are ''considered to be generally safe, provided that visitors fly to Flores and then travel by bus or tour van to the ruins.'' The full Consular Information Sheet may be seen on the Internet at travel.state.gov/guatemala.html, or heard by calling (202) 647-5225. Where to Stay Rates are for two people in a room. The 64-room Hotel Atitlan, Finca San Buenaventura, Panajachel; telephone and fax (502) 762-1416, has a pool, beach, bar, restaurant and adjacent nature preserve with a waterfall and monkey rescue center. Rate: about $100, depending on the season. Casa Santo Domingo, 3A Calle Oriente No. 28, Antigua; (502) 832-0140 fax 832-4155, has 96 rooms, running $85 plus 20 percent tax for a double this month; rates may be higher depending on the season and demand. Restaurant, bar and pool. Meson Panza Verde, 5A Avenida Sur No. 19, Antigua; telephone and fax (502) 832-2925. A small Colonial style inn as well as a restaurant, where a double room is $48. Meals run around $20 to $25 a person; a bottle of wine starts around $15. The Westin Camino Real, Avenida de la Reforma at 14 Calle, Zona 10, Guatemala City, (502) 333-4633, fax (502) 337-4313, has double rooms starting at $125 a night. Three restaurants, bar, two outdoor pools and fitness center. Sightseeing One-day Tikal excursions from Guatemala City are available through many travel agencies in Guatemala City; ours was arranged by Clark Tours, (502) 339-2757; (800) 223-6764 in the United States. Flights between Guatemala City and Flores, for Tikal, are available through Mayan World Airlines, (502) 339-1519, and Aviateca, (502) 334-7722 in Guatemala City and (800) 327-9832 in the United States. Tikal National Park is open from 6 A.M. to 6 P.M., and one-day admission costs about $6. Guides for climbing one of the volcanoes around Lake Atitlan can be arranged through the Hotel Atitlan or local travel agencies in Panajachel. The enormous, open-air market at Chichicastenango, about 45 minutes to an hour's drive from Panajachel, is held Sunday and Thursday morning, beginning around 7. It becomes crowded with tourists by about 10. FRANK BRUNI is a reporter in the Washington bureau of The Times. |
1079773_5 | The Will to Madness | did not particularly wish Nietzsche to set himself up as the philosophical spokesman on Wagnerian themes. Nor did Cosima care for either the person of Nietzsche or the intellectual ambition that drove him so painfully. She had sacrificed herself to Wagner, and she wanted Nietzsche to sacrifice himself to both of them -- a role in which he might be expected to shop for Wagner's underwear or to write attacks on the critics as Wagner and she decided. It was bound to end in tears, and it did. Indeed, there were tears throughout, and a final rupture by 1878, five years before Wagner's death. The end of the friendship was provoked by Nietzsche on the literary front and Wagner and Cosima on the personal. In 1876, Nietzsche published ''Richard Wagner in Bayreuth,'' a book that heaped praise on Wagner while simultaneously describing him as the seductive destroyer of all who came within his power, a Minotaur within a labyrinth. Most readers thought the praise more than made up for the eccentric and not entirely intelligible criticism; Wagner did not. Wagner and Cosima decided that Nietzsche's unhealthy and febrile views were caused by masturbation and the influence on him of Jewish friends, notably the scholar Paul Ree. This astonishing nonsense went on being repeated until the 1920's in the Wagnerian newsletter in Bayreuth. Thereafter, it was open warfare. Nietzsche passed up no chance to mock Wagner's sentimental return to the Christian faith, and Cosima tried to pretend that Nietzsche was dead. Nietzsche was the weaker party, ever more sick in mind and body, and unable to avoid hoping that Cosima would rescue him by turning against her husband and his memory. It was useless. As the Wagner cult became more intense after the Master's death, Cosima found her role as its high priestess. Nietzsche was at best an inconvenience, at worst a threat. Ariadne would neither deliver Theseus from the Minotaur nor accept this second Dionysus alongside her departed Dionysian lover. Intolerable as Cosima was, it is hard to see what she could in fact have done for Nietzsche; still, one flinches at the last words of this book: to his guardians at the German asylum, Nietzsche declared, ''It was my wife Cosima Wagner who brought me here.'' Alan Ryan is the Warden of New College, Oxford. His most recent book is ''John Dewey and the High Tide of American Liberalism.'' |
1079893_4 | Special Education: Mainstreaming to Surge | the state's Deputy Commissioner of Education, said financial incentives have been offered to help school districts that incorporate space for special-ed students. Robert Lupinskie, a member of the board of Nassau Boces, said the issue is not mainstreaming but moving the placement of the students from one building to another. ''Moving disabled students into a regular school doesn't guarantee that they will be integrated with non-disabled students,'' he said. ''Many of us see this as sharing the air in a building, but not really having anything to do with the educational value for special education children. This is not an education plan but a space plan.'' But not according to the state Education Department or the Federal Government. ''This is absolutely an educational plan,'' said Stephen Berman, supervisor of the Long Island office of special education for the state Education Department. ''This is all about insuring that students with disabilities have access to the greatest extent appropriate and possible, to their non-disabled peers and to the general education curriculum. If a child has a particular interest or talent in art or music, for example, he will be able to be mainstreamed with non-disabled kids to have the advantages of the curriculum in general education classes, as well as of extracurricular activities and other services. ''This plan expands options that have never existed, because it not only protects the most severely disabled, who will remain in center-based programs, but allow other kids to be educated in integrated settings.'' Disabilities that qualify a student for special education include a learning disability, emotional disturbance, autism, mental retardation and a variety of physical impairments. Each school district has a committee on special education that evaluates students' needs and determines what type of services they need. Special-education services range from support in a resource room for students who are mainstreamed in a regular classroom, to a 24-hour program in a residential setting. Under Federal requirements that were tightened in 1997, children with disabilities must be educated, to the maximum extent possible, in the ''least restrictive environment.'' Faced with statistics showing New York State among the highest in the country for percentage of students in segregated settings, the Federal Education Department told the state to fix the problem or face cuts in Federal funding. ''Our first step is to get the children back in the general-education buildings, Mr. Gloeckler said. ''At that time, educators can make |
1079475_1 | Editorial Observer; Washington Brags as Trade Deficit Sets a Record | if the current recovery was 19 months old when he was elected on a platform that emphasized just how badly the economy was doing under President George Bush. The stock market has been going up almost continuously since 1982, with the 1987 crash remembered as little more than a buying opportunity that was then seen -- wrongly -- as a sign of problems in the American economy. Americans, who a decade ago bristled at sanctimonious economic lectures from Japan, now specialize in making such speeches. If pride precedes a fall, watch out. The country's balance-of-payments deficit is nearing a record. Imports are up and exports are down as Americans spend all that they earn, and then some. The trade deficit -- the most important part of the balance-of-payments picture -- set an annual record in the first 11 months of 1998, and will grow larger this year. The risk is that some day there will be a balance-of-payments crisis that leads to a tumbling dollar and the need for the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates to defend the currency, no matter what the consequences are for the domestic economy. (That is, in fact, one way to explain what is happening in Brazil.) There is no American crisis now because foreigners are happy to invest their dollars in our economy. They see greater risk in other countries and are as enamored as anyone by rising American stock prices. The dollar remains the only reserve currency for many foreign central banks, which are happy to hold large dollar balances. If Washington were worried about the trade deficit, there might be talk about tax increases to restrain domestic demand and offset the expansionary monetary policy that the Federal Reserve adopted last year when it was worried about international collapse. Instead, the problem is all but ignored, and the only nod to it comes in the form of protectionist demands that Japan stop exporting so much steel to this country. As the Fed chairman, Alan Greenspan, said last week, protectionism is no solution and would likely make our problems worse. The dollar's popularity will not last indefinitely. The euro will erode its pre-eminent international position, and if Japan ever gets its economic act together, that country will attract more investment. If an American balance-of-payments crisis does develop, it is likely to come as a surprise and to be accompanied by a falling stock |
1079505_1 | The Study of Gene Machines, In Situ | species has been kept exclusively in the National Plant Germplasm System. The gene pool was gathered from ex situ collections, a sort of clinically clean environment. Now the researchers are finding that it is far more important to preserve a gene pool in situ, that is in the place where nature put it. One of the staff botanists, Diana Pavek, was on the trail of rock grape in situ last summer. A rather alarming part of her research revealed that of the 60 sites in 10 states where herbarium specimens were collected, only 24 populations of rock grapes were found in only 9 states as opposed to the original 10. When the in situ specimens were analyzed in the lab, she found significant differences in the physical structure of the plants. This same kind of information was underscored by researchers who are working on the potato, a staple for diets worldwide. It is recognized as the world's fourth most important food after rice, wheat and corn. Again in breeding potatoes, the researchers have found that the genetic pool of several Southwestern species have genes that could be helpful in their work. One of the researchers, John Bamberg, noted that these wild tubers, found in the Southwest, ''represent a veritable treasure chest of genetic diversity.'' Potatoes have a long history. The Incas relied on them not only as food but also as a clock. Time was measured by how long it took to cook a potato. Reseach on new and better potato crops, enriched by reasearch on the old, continues. Another problem occurred with onions. Wild onions were planted on research station plots for the purpose of gathering seed from the mature plants. But the onion growth was lackluster and no seed resulted. The whole project seemed to be headed for disaster. But then that magic concept occurred again. Why not let the plants themselves form the seed in situ, then gather it? So the wild onions are now being protected in situ and the research project can continue. It is hoped that more native species of onions can be preserved in this way. Currently there are about 500 species known but only 6 of these are native. Although preservation ex situ is still a valuable tool for plant breeders, researchers are finding that plant species gene makeup is not static. In fact, it is constantly changing. What was collected from |
1079837_4 | Partners Design Sites for On-Line Markets | that it could be easily updated to reflect holiday and seasonal themes throughout the year. ''It allows for the automated rotation of over 6,000 products from our nine catalogue titles,'' Mr. Hochberg said. ''And, it's designed so that the consumer can easily navigate through the site. One special feature is an on-line wish list that works like a department store's bridal registry. Users can decide what products they would like, and the wish list can then be E-mailed to friends and family.' In addition, Mr. Hochberg said, visitors to the Lillian Vernon site can get information on career opportunities, the location of outlet stores and financial data, and there is a section to write in about product ideas. ''Our site is designed to meet the needs of many different audiences,'' he added. ''We also have a wholesale division. To me, on-line shopping is where the future of retailing lies.'' For those who worry about using credit cards to buy products on-line, Ms. Harrison said: ''We have all sorts of alliances with top companies that do the credit checks. We assemble teams that provide credit card transaction checks.'' Digital Instincts uses a company called Cyber Cash in Reston, Va., to verify credit card authenticity, expiration date and financial data. Cyber Cash also transfers data to a merchant in a way that prevents others from gaining access to the credit card information. When another client, the Burke Rehabilitation Center in White Plains, wanted to update its Web site, selling products was not a concern. ''What we wanted was to make our site inviting, user friendly, capable of giving visitors easy access to information and services,'' said Claire G. Lamberti, director of community relations at Burke. Ms. Harrison said: ''Only when we understood what their goals were, and the audience they wanted to reach, did we proceed. Burke is a world-renowned hospital that conducts cutting-edge research in many medical fields that deal with serious traumas and diseases, and they wanted their site not only to describe the medical services available but also to do it sequentially. For instance, if people come to the site looking at brain injury, they are able to access very detailed information quickly.'' A growing demand for the services of Digital Instincts prompted a recent move to offices in Purchase. 'We're building up a full-time staff,'' Ms. Simes said, adding that she now has 25 consultants working in the |
1079544_1 | State Legislatures Across U.S. Plan to Take Up Internet Issues | unsolicited commercial E-mail, known as spam. But efforts to protect children from indecent material, and even measures involving spam E-mail, often raise constitutional questions regarding free speech. Another problem is that Federal and state laws are aimed at regulating a global medium. Civil libertarians have won virtually every court challenge to efforts to limit minors' access to the dark side of the Internet, including a lawsuit against the original Communications Decency Act, passed by Congress in 1996, and state laws passed in recent years in New Mexico and New York. A second Federal law, named the Child Online Protection Act, which was passed last year, is being challenged in Federal court in Philadelphia. ''I don't think, personally, that there is going to be much appetite for content-control legislation in state legislatures because they realize that is going to be a very difficult to accomplish,'' said Mark Q. Rhoads, legislative director of the Internet council, a coalition of Internet and high-tech companies formed in 1996 specifically to work on Internet legislation at the state level. Although Mr. Rhoads said he expected that several bills aimed at controlling content on the Internet would be proposed, he said lawmakers ''are more likely to move in the direction of trying to empower parents to more intelligently supervise their children's on-line time'' with filters and other new technology. A number of bills to curb unsolicited commercial E-mail are also expected. Last year, legislation seeking to control such E-mail was introduced in 17 states. Bills were passed in two states, Washington and California, bringing to three the number of states with such laws. Nevada was the first, passing a bill in 1997. While some argue that it seems futile for a state to try to regulate E-mail on a global network, proponents say such laws can help slow the barrage of unsolicited messages that often advertise get-rich-schemes and adult-oriented products. The Washington law prohibits companies from sending E-mail with a misleading subject line or false return address to Internet users in the state. California's law also requires that all unsolicited commercial E-Mail sent to users in that state contain the word ''advertisement'' in the subject line. California enacted a second law that allows owners of computer systems in the state to sue the senders of spam E-mail in an effort to recover losses caused by network clogs or computers crashes. Mr. Rhoads and Mr. Rusinoff said |
1081020_1 | World Briefing | also carrying a chemical that could be used to make the nerve gas sarin. (AP) POLAND: A DATE FOR NATO MEMBERSHIP -- Poland will become a full member of NATO in the first 10 days of March, Defense Minister Janusz Onyszkiewicz said on his return from a visit to the United States. The Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland were invited in July 1997 to join NATO, and were expected to do so by April. (Agence France-Presse) THE AMERICAS MEXICO: PROTEST AGAINST SALINAS SENTENCE -- The daughters of Jose Francisco Ruiz Massieu, for whose murder Raul Salinas de Gortari was sentenced to 50 years in jail, denounced his conviction. The women, Claudia and Daniela Ruiz Massieu Salinas, who are Mr. Salinas's nieces, said they were ''profoundly outraged'' by a ruling that a feud between the men led to the 1994 killing. The daughters said their father's murder was politically motivated. Julia Preston (NYT) ASIA INDIA: NUCLEAR TALKS WITH U.S. ENVOY -- External Affairs Minister Jaswant Singh and President Clinton's envoy, Strobe Talbott, are beginning their eighth round of talks on nuclear and military issues since India conducted nuclear tests in May. Washington wants India to stop what it fears could turn into a nuclear arms race with Pakistan. India says it must develop a credible deterrent. Celia W. Dugger (NYT) INDIA: RETAIL FOOD SUBSIDIES CUT -- In a move to cut the budget deficit, the Government has taken the politically risky step of raising prices of subsidized rice, wheat and sugar made available to the poor. Skyrocketing prices of vegetables led to the defeat of the governing Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party in recent state elections. Celia W. Dugger (NYT) BANGLADESH: INTERNATIONAL PROSTITUTION -- More than 200,000 Bangladeshi women, many of them minors, have been smuggled into Pakistan in the last decade, with most forced into prostitution, the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women said. The coalition, which covers the Asia-Pacific region, the Americas and the Caribbean, has called for stricter government intervention to end such trafficking. (Agence France-Presse) CAMBODIA: LESS POLITICS IN MILITARY -- Prime Minister Hun Sen, far left, with Gen. Ke Kim Yan, stepped down as commander in chief as part of his pledge to keep politics out of the military. Mr. Hun Sen said the handover, to General Ke Kim Yan, the former chief of staff, represented the first step in transforming the cumbersome military after the defeat |
1081043_0 | THE MARKETS: COMMODITIES | SUGAR RISES 4 PERCENT. Sugar futures jumped 4 percent on big purchases by Iran and Tunisia that bolstered demand. In New York, sugar for March delivery rose 0.27 cent, to 6.92 cents a pound. |
1076393_1 | Test by F.A.A. Uncovers Holes in Airline Security | any further action and the subject with the handgun in her waistband entered the sterile area,'' and was free to proceed toward the boarding gate, the F.A.A. reported. The documents also recount how an investigator strolled unchallenged into unguarded aircraft. In another instance, Federal employees sent to ticket counters with the assignment of drawing suspicion to themselves -- by paying cash for the next flight out, or refusing to show identification, for example -- provoked no special security precautions toward their bags. Others were never asked if they were carrying packages from strangers, or if they replied that they were carrying such packages, the airline did not examine the packages. The reports, a pile five and a half inches thick, were on USAir, now known as USAirways, and were given to The New York Times in response to a Freedom of Information Act request. The documents, requested in November 1996, were released last week. The Times requested the documents after the F.A.A. made a brief announcement in November 1996 that it would settle 84 charges against the airline for $450,000, but would give no details on the charges. Under the same request, the F.A.A. released documents on safety violations in April 1997. But 73 other alleged violations involved security. Cathal Flynn, the F.A.A.'s associate administrator for civil aviation security, said on Friday that the violations summarized in the documents were characteristic of those occurring now, and that USAirways's security record was about the same as all big airlines. But he added that these represented only the failures, and he pointed out that of the 10,000 tests conducted by the F.A.A. each year, the airlines pass most. Mr. Flynn said that the tests are getting tougher, forcing the airlines to detect smaller smuggled objects, for example, and that generally the airlines are improving. The security rules under which the airlines operate are secret, and many details of the violations were blacked out before the documents were released. Here, though, is a sampling. NOV. 6, 1995 An F.A.A. security agent posing as a passenger used a personal credit card at the ticket counter in Kansas City to buy a ticket to Des Moines on a flight leaving that morning. The airline representative asked if he had been given a package by anyone unknown to him. ''I replied that the night previous, I was in a pizza parlor in Parkville, Mo., with my |
1076388_4 | THE CASTRO DOLLAR: A special report; In Cuba's New Dual Economy, Have-Nots Far Exceed Haves | intended to allow some private employment without dropping the state's commitment to socialism: cradle-to-grave social security, free education and free health care. ''We are not going to convert to a market economy,'' he said. A vast majority of workers still receive low state salaries in pesos. Net profits from hotels and dollar shops go directly into the Central Bank, where they are available to help finance the Government, diplomats say. In return, every Cuban family gets rations of rice, peas, milk, and other staples at enormous discounts, and is expected to live from the state salaries. In general, the state discourages the private enterprises by taxing them heavily on expected earnings rather than on actual sales. ''One makes just enough to live, no more,'' said Victor Rodriguez, whose family runs a tiny restaurant in Havana, which the state limits to 12 seats and taxes $200 a month. ''It lets us live a little less smothered.'' Since Cuba's sugar industry has been in a steady decline for nearly a decade, the new economy is driven largely by a $1.4 billion tourist industry, $800,000 in remittances from Cubans abroad and hard currency tips from tourists. Cuban economists estimate that nearly half the country is now earning some income in dollars. ''We have two markets, segregated, in dollars and in pesos,'' said Antonio Romero, an economist at Havana University. ''We are in the presence of a dual economy, a dual economy that from my perspective is the most complex problem the Cuban economy has today. At the heart of this is without a doubt the measures the Government took in the context of the crisis.'' No Fresh Vegetables Or Meat at State Shop Elizabeth Noreiga, 50, stood sullenly in the state bodega known as Unidad 303-04 in Old Havana, waiting for a clerk to measure out her rations of rice, peas and sugar. On one wall was a listing the store's few items, their subsidized prices and how much each family is allowed. No meat or fresh vegetables were available, though tobacco was. The dingy shelves were virtually empty, save for forlorn boxes of cigarettes, matches, a bottle of rum and a few small packages of evaporated milk. The clerk measured out five pounds of rice for Ms. Noreiga's household of five people, and then two-and-a-half pounds of peas, marking them down in her soiled ration book in pencil. ''With five pounds of |
1076333_1 | U.S. Now Tells of Much Deeper Damage by Pollard Than Thought | he did not do real damage to American national security and should be pardoned or paroled. Monday is the deadline that Mr. Clinton gave American military, intelligence and law enforcement agencies last month for submitting their views on the question, a response to demands for Mr. Pollard's release made by Israel in October at the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations held at Wye Plantation in Maryland. Law enforcement and intelligence officials have said the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Central Intelligence Agency and the Defense Department will submit reports arguing against leniency. The State Department and Justice Department are also to give their views. Officials said Mr. Clinton and his aides were not likely to make a decision soon. Among the documents Mr. Pollard handed over to Israel, Mr. Hersh's article said, was a 10-volume directory of the frequencies and bandwidths of signals intercepted worldwide by the National Security Agency, which is the United States' primary electronic eavesdropping service and its biggest espionage entity. That set of data would afford a foreign intelligence service deep insights into American techniques for spying on the world. Mr. Pollard told the author that United States officials had ''consistently lied'' about the importance of the signal intelligence he gave the Israelis. Another set of documents divulged by Mr. Pollard, the article said, was a computerized information retrieval system containing intelligence reports filed by American spies, intelligence analysts, military attaches and citizens in the Middle East. A foreign intelligence service possessing that information could determine the identities of intelligence agents and informers. A third set of secrets handed over by Mr. Pollard was more than a year's worth of reports from a Navy surveillance station in Spain that monitored the Middle East and North Africa, the article said. It said a fourth set was the daily list of telecommunications interceptions undertaken by the National Security Agency. Such data could help a foreign intelligence service evade detection by the United States. The material handed over by Mr. Pollard showed how the United States spied on Israel, just as his arrest and conviction showed how Israel spied on the United States. But the magazine article strongly suggested that Mr. Pollard, whom it described as a cocaine abuser and an inveterate liar during the time of his espionage for Israel, had no idea of the value of what he handed over, and no concept of the damage it caused American intelligence. |
1081195_1 | The World Reintroduces Beauvoir to the French | fighting for equality in France today avoid calling themselves feminists for fear of being mocked. ''For years, we have had to preface our remarks with, 'I am not a feminist but . . .,' '' explained one French campaigner for women's rights. The conference's two organizers, Christine Delphy and Sylvie Chaperon, were reminded of French indifference to Beauvoir when they tried to raise money for the gathering. ''The Culture Ministry finally came up with some money, but at first we were treated with contempt,'' Ms. Delphy, a sociology researcher, said. ''Someone -- I won't say who -- said, 'Who cares about Beauvoir?' They said she was passe. They are probably unhappy the conference was a success.'' Still, the two organizers felt some progress had been made in drawing French attention to Beauvoir. ''We achieved some visibility, thanks to articles in Le Monde and Liberation,'' Ms. Delphy said. ''We also succeeded in getting everyone to stop talking about Beauvoir's private life and to focus on her work.'' Ms. Chaperon, a history professor, added: ''We wanted to show the French the extent of Beauvoir studies around the world.'' On that point, they certainly succeeded. No fewer than 140 scholars from 31 countries presented summaries of continuing research into Beauvoir and ''The Second Sex.'' American academics made up the largest national contingent, but participants also came from as far away as Australia and Japan, Brazil and Venezuela. And for these scholars, the great variety of topics addressed provided the evidence they wanted that Beauvoir lives. The themes of plenary sessions and workshops ranged from Beauvoir in the history of ideas to ''The Second Sex'' and Communists, to contemporary feminist debates, to lesbianism in ''The Second Sex,'' to the different national reactions to publication of the book (in France, its central idea, ''One is not born, but rather becomes a woman,'' was considered pure subversion, and in Iran the book is still banned). The approach was almost entirely academic, with far more debate about the philosophical roots of Beauvoir's work than about her impact on feminist politics. ''Women's studies are very much part of the academic world,'' explained Kate Fulbrook, who teaches at the University of the West of England in Bristol. ''They are not very linked to political activity.'' Margeret Simons, director of women's studies at Southern Illinois University at Edwardville, agreed. ''In America, the focus is more on Beauvoir's ethics than her |
1075520_3 | Watchdog for Abused Children Has Its Own Woes | to monitor New York City closely after a 6-year-old girl, Elisa Izquierdo, was killed by her mother while under the city's watch. Her death, coupled with the dismal results of state audits conducted in 1989 and 1994, made it painfully clear that the failure of city workers to visit Elisa, to identify warning signs of abuse, to properly assess her mother's mental state and to keep track of critical records were chronic problems, not isolated ones. ''We must restore accountability to insure that children are getting the help they need and deserve,'' Gov. George E. Pataki said then. But behind the elegant, granite facade of the state's regional office at 80 Maiden Lane in Manhattan, the field workers knew they could not enforce Mr. Pataki's mandate, according to depositions in the lawsuit, which, along with other documents, were provided to The Times by critics of the state office. The number of workers in the regional office responsible for monitoring the city had dwindled to 37 from 60. The workers most familiar with the city's problems, among the least senior in the department, had been transferred or laid off because of budget cuts in 1995, even though the audits showed the city's sloppy abuse investigations continued to leave children in danger, the records show. And as top state officials reiterated their public promises after another damning audit of city operations in 1996, state employees began anxiously discussing the widening gap between rhetoric and reality. Donald K. Smith, then a deputy commissioner of the state's Department of Social Services, which was dissolved to create the Office of Children and Family Services, wrote in a July 3, 1996, memo: ''We have been so irregular (a liberal characterization) in doing reviews of county operations, be they child protective, foster care, etc., that we almost need a primer on what our supervisory role means. ''We need to be in a position, it seems to me, where we are clearly the ones doing reviews on some schedule,'' continued Mr. Smith in his memo. ''We need to be the ones to monitor corrective action.'' But they never did, the documents show. Three times in the last three years, after child-abuse deaths and the 1996 audit, state officials demanded plans from the city's Administration for Children's Services outlining how it would correct its problems. In court depositions, however, the officials acknowledged that they never received satisfactory responses and |
1075529_0 | WORLD BRIEFING | EUROPE NORTHERN IRELAND: I.R.A. 'FRUSTRATED' BY DELAYS -- The Irish Republican Army said it was committed to the Northern Ireland peace settlement but felt ''growing frustration'' over delays in putting it into place. In a New Year's message to a nationalist newspaper, An Phoblacht, the I.R.A. complained that the opportunity offered by its 18-month-old truce was ''yet to be securely grasped'' and dismissed demands that it disarm as ''raising old preconditions.'' Warren Hoge (NYT) GERMANY: PLAN TO PAY SLAVE LABORERS -- Chancellor Gerhard Schroder's chief of staff, Bodo Hombach, will visit the United States and Israel this month to discuss compensating the Nazis' slave laborers, a spokeswoman said. Before taking office in October, Mr. Schroder's Government decided to establish a fund to settle wage claims and suits. (AP) ESTONIA: 300 OFFICERS OUSTED ON ETHNICITY -- Three hundred police officers, mostly ethnic Russians, have been discharged because they cannot speak Estonian and are not citizens, the Baltic News Service reported. The dismissals underline continuing tensions over ethnic Russians since Estonia became independent. (AP) TURKEY: ECEVIT IS CALLED AGAIN -- In what may be the last phase of a six-week crisis President Suleyman Demirel gave Bulent Ecevit, left, the task of forming a new Government. Mr. Ecevit, who was Prime Minister for three terms in the 1970's, failed to form a Government last month. But a change of heart by a power broker, Tansu Ciller, appeared to give him needed support. Stephen Kinzer (NYT) SERBIA: PROTEST OUTSIDE KOSOVO CAPITAL -- Hundreds of armed Serbian civilians blocked roads out of Pristina, the capital of Kosovo, to protest the killing of a Serb on Wednesday, which was Christmas Eve in the Eastern Orthodox calendar. The protests further strained the fragile truce reached in October and restored by international monitors last week. (Reuters) THE AMERICAS CHILE: ROLE SOUGHT IN PINOCHET HEARING -- Chile has asked to participate in a hearing by the British House of Lords on Gen. Augusto Pinochet, the former dictator. Officials at the House of Lords, which acts as the highest court in the land, said the Chilean Government's lawyers had asked to make its case before the Law Lords this month. (Reuters) ARGENTINA: AMNESTIES RULED OUT -- President Carlos Saul Menem ruled out amnesties and pardons for former military officers implicated in the theft of babies in the dictatorship from 1976 to 1983. Seven officers are in custody for their suspected |
1075529_3 | WORLD BRIEFING | lived in hiding since escaping their homeland. Ms. Kim's husband, a South Korean soldier captured in the Korean War, was forced to work in a North Korean coal mine until he died in 1997. (AP) CHINA: SEX IMBALANCE GROWS -- The sex imbalance in China's huge population is growing worse. Research from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences finds that the ratio of men to women was 120 to 100. A longstanding bias in favor of sons over daughters has taken a harsh toll when combined with Beijing's one-child policy. (Agence France-Presse) MALAYSIA: POLICE CHIEF QUITS -- Malaysia's top police official resigned, saying he was taking full responsibility for the beating of a former Deputy Prime Minister in police custody. The official, Inspector General of Police Abdul Rahim Noor, said he bore responsibility for the Sept. 20 beating of the former Deputy Prime Minister, Anwar Ibrahim, on the night of his arrest. Opposition leaders said he should have quit months ago. (AP) AFRICA SOUTH AFRICA: $6.6 BILLION PACT SIGNED -- Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain signed an agreement on a visit to South Africa that could mean $6.6 billion in British investment when the Government buys military equipment. Although Mr. Blair received a warm official reception, Afrikaner protesters in Pretoria demanded an apology for the women and children who died in British concentration camps in the Boer War. In Cape Town, Muslims protested Britain's role in the bombing of Iraq. Suzanne Daley (NYT) SOUTH AFRICA: 10% DECLINE IN ROAD DEATHS -- A campaign against speeding and drunken driving cut road deaths 10 percent this year, the country, the Minister of Transport, Mac Maharaj, said. South Africa has one of the world's highest per capita fatality rates, which peaks over the Christmas holidays. During this season 718 died, compared with 806 last year. Donald G. McNeil Jr. (NYT) ZIMBABWE: APPEAL TO I.M.F. FOR $53 MILLION LOAN -- Zimbabwe has asked the International Monetary Fund to release a $53 million loan and part of a $175 million credit line that the fund suspended. In talks in Harare, Zimbabwe contended that Congo and Angola were paying the $1 million-a-day cost of its 6,000 soldiers who are fighting in Congo. But the I.M.F. was reported to remain unhappy about President Robert Mugabe's plan to seize 841 farms, most owned by whites, without payments. Donald G. McNeil Jr. (NYT) Compiled by Christopher S. Wren |
1073987_0 | Parted Siblings In Foster Care | To the Editor: Your Dec. 29 front-page article ends with the image of a 4-year-old child silently coloring as adults decide his fate. The child's voice is glaringly absent in the story and the process. Yet custody decisions -- if truly to be in children's best interests -- must reflect the particular psychological needs of each child. The child's voice must be heard. Unless decisions about custody center on the particular child and his or her needs, as revealed through careful understanding of the child's internal world, government agencies merely perpetuate the basic flaw that brought the child to their attention: the parents' incapacity to meet the child's fundamental needs. ROBERT M. GALATZER-LEVY, M.D. Chicago, Dec. 29, 1998 The writer is a child and adolescent psychiatrist. |
1073907_0 | The Stoics Have a Stand on Everything, Even on Dinner Parties and Sex | After being off the best-seller list for nearly 2,000 years, the Stoic philosopher Epictetus has been revived, thanks to Tom Wolfe's new novel, ''A Man in Full'' (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). In prison, Conrad Hensley, one of Wolfe's main characters, requests ''The Stoics' Game,'' a new spy thriller, but receives a copy of Epictetus' ''The Stoics'' by accident. With no other book to read, Conrad browses through it. When he discovers that Epictetus spent time in prison as a young man, he can't stop reading. He begins to identify with Epictetus, who was tortured, enslaved and threatened with death. Conrad finds profound meaning in the philosopher's teachings, and Epictetus becomes his mentor and companion. Epictetus was born a Roman slave in about A.D. 50. He was given his freedom around 68, but later was exiled to Nicopolis in northwestern Greece, where he taught logic, physics and the ethics of Stoicism. Epictetus wanted each man to see that he alone was totally responsible for his deeds because he had acquiesced to the circumstances that produced them. The capacity to choose and refuse was of immense importance in his philosophy. Epictetus wrote nothing, but his teachings were set down by his disciple Flavius Arrian in the ''Discourses'' and the ''Encheiridion'' (''Manual''). Now you can see how your own New Year's resolutions stack up to Epictetus' principles for living. Joyce Jensen compiled these excerpts. Remember that you ought to behave in life as you would at a banquet. As something is being passed around, it comes to you; stretch out your hand and take a portion of it politely. It passes on; do not detain it. Or it has not come to you yet; do not project your desire to meet it, but wait until it comes in front of you. Be not elated at any excellence that is not your own. If the horse in his elation were to say, ''I am beautiful,'' it could be endured; but when you say in your elation, ''I have a beautiful horse,'' rest assured that you are elated at something good that belongs to a horse. Has someone been honored above you at a dinner-party or in salutation or in being called in to give advice? Now if these matters are good, you ought to be happy that he got them; but if evil, be not distressed because you did not get them. Now it |
1073903_0 | Stripping the Amazon | To the Editor: In a Dec. 26 editorial you paid tribute to Chico Mendes, the Brazilian rubber tapper who ''probably did more than any other person to preserve the Amazon.'' Unfortunately for the rubber tappers and indigenous people of the Brazilian Amazon, the greed and overconsumption that have threatened their way of life are growing. Exports of rain-forest woods from the area have increased as illegal loggers invade fresh areas for high-value species like mahogany and ipe, threatening the indigenous way of life. Ipe is used by the New York City Parks Department for boardwalks, benches and bridges. It is shameful that a city known for its stands for human rights is North America's largest municipal consumer of tropcal hardwood from the Brazilian Amazon. TIM KEATING Brooklyn, Dec. 30, 1998 The writer is executive director of Rainforest Relief. |
1073971_2 | In City of Castro's Triumph, Most Still Back Him | free education and health care, had been met. His son had become an engineer, something unthinkable for poor people 40 years ago. ''We can't lose faith,'' he said. ''We have problems, but we are going to conquer them.'' But others, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the country's economic fabric had been slowly unraveling since 1991, when Russia stopped subsidizing the economy with more than $4 billion in aid. Since then, Cuba has become a country where doctors make less than $30 a month and must moonlight as cab drivers for tourists to make ends meet and where some educated women with professional skills choose prostitution at resort hotels. The average monthly salary is 207 pesos, or about $10. It is also a country that more than 1 million people have fled since Mr. Castro took over. Just last year, more than 450,000 applied for visas to the United States. ''This is a sort of Titanic,'' said a one resident of Santiago, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he feared arrest. ''Everyone is trying to get a boat to leave.'' He added: ''The system doesn't work. At this moment money is the principle problem for everyone here. You need money to survive.'' After four decades of Mr. Castro's socialist experiment, Cuba has become a paradox. With free education and health care, it has the highest literacy rate and the lowest infant mortality rate in Latin America. The average life expectancy is now 75.3 years, far above the 60 years in 1959. The number of university graduates per capita has quadrupled, and Cuban doctors have broken new ground in biotechnology and vaccines. Yet Mr. Castro has failed to break the dependency on the sugar crop and tourism for hard-currency earnings -- twin factors that were blamed before the revolution for making Cuba an economic vassal of the United States. And the country is no more democratic than it was under Fulgencio Batista, the dictator who fled on Jan. 1, 1959. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, Mr. Castro has reluctantly undertaken some market-oriented reforms. He has legalized the dollar and allowed some small-scale private business. He has also decentralized some of the state-owned industries. But professionals like doctors, who continue to work are not doing it for the money. ''The living is not much, but we manage,'' said Dr. Juan Fernandez, a general practitioner, who says he makes |
1073952_0 | Bringing Cuba in From the Cold | Forty years after Fidel Castro seized power it is time for the United States to reorient its policy away from Fidel Castro and toward preparing for a democratic transition in Cuba. During the cold war, the United States sought to contain the spread of Cuban-supported Communism in this hemisphere. Today, the United States must nurture and strengthen the fragile civil society that is tentatively but persistently beginning to emerge in Cuba. Those are the recommendations of an independent task force composed of both liberals and conservatives that we have been chairmen of over the last four months. While not all members of the panel endorsed every recommendation, a broad, bipartisan consensus supported concrete steps to open up contacts between Cuban and American citizens and to enable Americans to support independent groups in Cuban society. Our group's recommendations would lift limits on the number of visits Cuban-Americans can make to Cuba and on the amount of money they can legally send family members. This would build human contacts while helping thousands of Cubans free themselves from economic dependence on the Castro Government. Elderly or disabled Cuban-Americans could retire to the island while continuing to collect Social Security and other Federal benefits. Like Mexican- and Canadian-Americans, Cuban-Americans should be able to claim tax exemptions for dependents living in Cuba. More generally, we favor lifting most restrictions on the sale of food and medicine and helping nonprofit organizations, religious groups and individuals to assist the Cuban people. We support opening Cuba up to group and individual travel for cultural, religious, educational, humanitarian and athletic purposes. Americans participating in qualified programs should not need Federal permission to visit Cuba and should be free to travel on regular commercial flights. We would also ease restrictions on Cuban academics, artists, athletes and many Government officials wishing to visit the United States. The report recommends initial steps to open up American commercial activity on the island. If investors observe current legal strictures against using property confiscated from American citizens, our recommendations would allow businesses that support Cuba's emerging private sector; distribution centers for food and medical products, and cultural enterprises to be licensed to operate in Cuba. There would be a stronger consensus in favor of substantial private investment when American businesses in Cuba can hire and pay workers directly, observe internationally recognized worker rights of free association, and provide their goods and services to Cuban citizens. |
1077253_0 | AUTOS ON FRIDAY /Technology; Cars and Natural Gas: A Better Fit | THE Dodge Charger design study, introduced by DaimlerChrysler last week at the North American International Auto Show here, looks like a modern rendition of the 1960's muscle car from which it got its name. Under its long hood, the Charger concept car, like its predecessor, has a powerful V8 -- in this case, a supercharged 4.7-liter engine producing 325 horsepower. But instead of the gas-guzzling, pollution-belching engines of Chargers in the late 60's and early 70's, the show car has a superclean engine that runs on compressed natural gas, known as C.N.G. If the Charger were put into production, it would qualify as an ultra-low-emission vehicle in California. With the Charger, DaimlerChrysler is not only resurrecting a popular name and making the point that alternative-fuel vehicles can be fun, it is showcasing a new technology to store compressed natural gas that could make the clean-burning fuel more practical for everyday use. The Charger's tank storage system was developed by the Applied Physics Laboratory at Johns Hopkins University, which primarily conducts research for the Federal departments of Defense and Energy. The tanks' compact size, reduced weight and ease of installation are comparable to the traits of gasoline tanks, John Wozniak, manager of the lab's advanced natural gas vehicle project, said in a recent interview. The Charger concept with the new storage tanks is designed to carry an amount of natural gas equivalent to 12 gallons of gasoline, providing a travel range of 300 to 350 miles. Typically, natural-gas vehicles, like a C.N.G. version of the Dodge Ram Van, can go only about 100 miles on a tank. Furthermore, the tanks give designers more flexibility, allowing them to reserve the car's trunk for cargo instead of for bulky tanks. With traditional C.N.G. tanks, the fuel is in cylinders that are individually wrapped in expensive carbon-fiber material, each with its own safety valve. The integrated storage system in the Charger concept car, and in a test fleet of Plymouth Breeze and Dodge Stratus sedans, combine the cylinders into a single-wrapped package that is placed in a solid housing that somewhat resembles an egg carton, with one safety valve for all. The design reduces the complexity, weight and use of expensive carbon fiber, and thus lowers the cost, Mr. Wozniak said. With a more versatile flat shape, the tank can be installed behind the back seat or underneath the vehicle, like a traditional gasoline |
1078613_0 | THE MARKETS: COMMODITIES | SUGAR FALLS 8.7 PERCENT. Raw sugar prices tumbled on expectations that Brazil will export more sugar because of its weakened currency. The March contract fell 0.73 cent, to 7.69 cents a pound, the lowest since Dec. 28. |
1078630_1 | Memo From Belfast; Ulsterspeak A to Z: Affronts Spoken With Zest | Annie was a voice in the crowd. Guillotine blades flashed. Macho men were wrecking the peace effort. If this kept up, the members would all lose their jobs and the paychecks they have been getting since the Assembly was created last year. Eventually, the Assembly, by a vote of 74 to 27, accepted a preliminary report from its Protestant and Catholic leaders that is to be put to a definitive vote, after amendment, on Feb. 15. The report recommends new structures of home-rule government that would pave the way for the British Government to return to Northern Irish officials the powers it has exercised directly from London since 1974. The local officials now control only garbage removal and burial of the dead. Under Assembly rules, the report was approved by a simple majority of all 108 members. But in the February vote, approval will require a majority of both Catholic and Protestant factions, which will probably make approval more difficult. Underlying the procedural vote was the rising fear among officials that the process would be interrupted, or collapsed, by failure to solve the main problem in the peace effort: the Irish Republican Army's refusal to disarm. The I.R.A.'s political wing, Sinn Fein, says that the I.R.A. will not disarm and that its current cease-fire, now 17 months old, is tantamount to disarmament. Protestants say there must be actual disarmament before Sinn Fein may take part fully in the new structures proposed in the report on Monday. The political subtleties were mixed with opponent-bashing again and again by 30 speakers. ''We're up against republican intransigence,'' said David Trimble, the Protestant leader and First Minister of the Assembly, who calls himself a unionist. ''It's a question of them not carrying out the agreement.'' Seamus Mallon, the Catholic who is Deputy First Minister and calls himself a nationalist, said it was like an airliner. ''Your approval,'' he said, ''will lock us on to a flight path for devolution by March 10,'' referring to the transfer of powers. ''There may be heavy clouds; there may be storms; there may be flak; there may even be hijackers on board. But we can see the lights on the runway ahead and we now know there is no going back.'' Mr. Mallon was interrupted by the Rev. Ian Paisley, the flamboyant anti-Catholic leader of the Democratic Unionist Party, who opposes the peace effort as a sell-out of |
1078241_1 | Sinn Fein Negotiator Predicts Success of Peace Talks for Ulster | then, he said, his party would have ministers taking part in the return of powers that Britain has exercised directly from London since 1974. Since then, Northern Irish officials have controlled only garbage removal and burial of the dead. In an interview on BBC radio, Mr. McGuinness did not, however, offer a specific solution to the problem of I.R.A. disarmament. That issue has impeded the enforcement of the Belfast agreement, approved last spring and aimed at giving the province's Catholic minority more power in northern affairs. The crux of the issue is that Sinn Fein insists that it is entitled to two ministers in the new cabinet-like executive that is to be formed in the new Northern Ireland Assembly. The Protestant unionist First Minister of the Assembly, David Trimble, insists that some I.R.A. disarmament must begin before Sinn Fein takes up the ministerial posts. But Gerry Adams, the Sinn Fein president, argues that the I.R.A. weapons have been effectively ''decommissioned'' since the group began a cease-fire 17 months ago. Officials here in the Irish Republic and in the North are hoping that the I.R.A. will find a way to make a gesture toward disarmament, not necessarily the actual surrender or destruction of weapons, that will allay Protestant fears that the I.R.A. has not permanently abandoned violence. But in its New Year's message, the I.R.A. stood by its refusal to disarm and hinted, in the view of many officials, that it could return to violence, as it did in February 1996 after a 17-month cease-fire, after it decided the British Government was delaying the peace negotiations. Further anxiety arose when the Northern Ireland police said last week that there was no sign that the I.R.A. was preparing to disarm and that I.R.A. splinter groups were expected to make new terrorist attacks, like the one that killed 29 people in August in the town of Omagh. Also disturbing was the attempted armed robbery in a Dublin suburb 13 days ago of an armored truck carrying about $2 million in cash. In Dublin today, an influential and respected Irish politician, Ruairi Quinn, head of the Labor Party and a former Finance Minister, seemed to reflect the view of many officials and experts. ''The law is on the side of Sinn Fein,'' he said, referring to the peace accord, which sets no deadline for disarmament. ''But morality is on the side of David Trimble.'' |
1076458_0 | The Dream of Eternal Flight Begins to Take Wing | Like giant feathers slowing rising on the winds to impossible heights, large gossamer wings made of wispy plastics and light composite materials are flying at altitudes where few airplanes have soared. Following a recent round of successful test flights, engineers are modifying an unmanned flying wing called Centurion for an attempt at becoming the first aircraft to achieve sustained level flight at 100,000 feet. Centurion is the latest in a line of solar-powered flying wings that have steadily pushed up altitude records for remote-controlled and propeller-driven aircraft. Last August, a predecessor aircraft named Pathfinder-Plus, using sunlight to generate power for its electric engines, set an unofficial world altitude record for propeller planes of 80,201 feet. The goal of these studies is to build a fleet of relatively inexpensive drone aircraft that can routinely operate at these extreme altitudes for scientific and commercial purposes. Centurion and similar drones are part of a program sponsored by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to develop remotely piloted aircraft that can loiter at the edge of the atmosphere, far above normal air traffic. ''We have made an enormous amount of progress in a relatively short period of time,'' said Jeffrey Bauer, deputy manager for NASA's Environmental Research Aircraft and Sensor Technology Program. ''We have identified the technologies that are needed and now have to figure out how to make them work together, but we don't see any large showstoppers.'' Several aircraft sponsored by the Erast program, which was established in 1994 and has an annual budget of about $20 million, each had a successful series of test flights last year, including the Centurion. ''We are close to making the transition from test vehicles to vehicles that are ready for scientific and commercial applications,'' Mr. Bauer said. Scientists hope that solar-powered versions of Centurion and its successors will revolutionize studies of the upper atmosphere, a crucial but difficult-to-sample region important to climate change. There, at altitudes from 12 to 20 miles above the Earth, engineers envision aircraft that will eventually be able to stay aloft for days or weeks at a time, performing jobs previously relegated to space satellites, but cheaper and better. Such planes could serve as communications outposts in the sky, relaying telephone or pager signals, or follow hurricanes and other adverse weather systems, constantly monitoring their progress and studying their behavior, as well as performing surveillance, experts say. These aircraft, carrying a |
1076471_2 | Sinus Surgery at Edge of the Brain Gets Safer | held in place by a curved headset outfitted with light-emitting diodes, or LED's, that transmit infrared rays that are captured by small cameras in a bar above the operating table. Dr. Metson's instruments, too, are outfitted with LED's. The Stealth Station tracks the placement of Dr. Metson's instruments with an .87-millimeter margin of error. A second monitor carries a magnified image transmitted by a tiny camera inside the instruments. ''I tell my kids I'm in here playing Nintendo all day,'' Dr. Metson said. The product, developed by Sofamor Danek, a company in Memphis, is now sold by Xomed Inc. in Jacksonville, Fla., under the name of LandmarX. It costs $160,000, and requires extensive training for surgeons already well versed in the use of endoscopes. But it can help offset the likelihood of complications in the most difficult cases. A similar machine, called the Insta-Trak, made by Visualization Technology Inc. in Wilmington, Mass., uses electromagnetic transmitters to track the surgeon's devices. It is in use in 125 hospitals nationwide. Mr. Reardon is among the 20 percent of cases serious enough to require surgery, and his history, which includes two failed procedures, made him a good candidate for using the technology, Dr. Metson said. Mr. Reardon is among 37 million Americans who suffer from chronic sinusitis, an inflammation or infection, which has become the nation's most common long-term disease. Defined roughly as having three or more sinus infections a year, chronic sinusitis costs the nation an estimated $2.4 billion a year in surgeries, office visits and medicines. In 1992, the National Center for Health Statistics showed that Americans missed 73 million workdays to sinusitis from 1990 to 1992, up from 50 million in 1986-1988. Intangible costs are just as great. A 1994 study showed that those with chronic sinusitis reported more pain, depression, and fatigue in their lives than did patients with angina, chronic heart failure and back pain. ''It's an epidemic with enormous impact in this country,'' said Dr. Metson, who studies the subject extensively. Like clusters of grapes, the sinuses surround the carotid arteries, as well as the optic and olfactory nerves. They are separated from the brain by a fragile bone called the lamina paprycia, thin enough to see through. The purpose of the sinuses is not fully understood. Experts dispute whether they exist to equalize barometric pressure, regulate air temperature going into the lungs, or whether they simply |
1076469_7 | Of Mice and Elephants: a Matter of Scale | until reproduction -- all are dependent on body size scaled to quarter-powers. ''As an ecologist you are used to dealing with complexity -- you're essentially embedded in it,'' Dr. Enquist said. ''But all these quarter-power scaling laws hinted that something very general and simple was going on.'' The examples Dr. Brown had given all involved mammals. ''Has anyone found similar laws with plants?'' Dr. Enquist asked. Dr. Brown said: ''I have no idea. Why don't you find out?'' After sifting through piles of data compiled over the years in agricultural and forestry reports, Dr. Enquist found that the same kinds of quarter-power scaling happened in the plant world. He even uncovered an equivalent to Kleiber's law. It was surprising enough that these laws held among all kinds of animals. That they seemed to apply to plants as well was astonishing. What was the common mechanism involved? ''I asked Jim whether or not we could figure it out,'' Dr. Enquist recalled. ''He kind of rubbed his head and said, 'Do you know how long this is going to take?' '' They assumed that Kleiber's law, and maybe the other scaling relationships, arose because of the mathematical nature of the networks both animals and trees used to transport nutrients to all their cells and carry away the wastes. A silhouette of the human circulatory system and of the roots and branches of a tree look remarkably similar. But they knew that precisely modeling the systems would require some very difficult mathematics and physics. And they wanted to talk to someone who was used to trafficking in the idea of general laws. ''Physicists tend to look for universals and invariants whereas biologists often get preoccupied with all the variations in nature,'' Dr. Brown said. He knew that the Santa Fe Institute had been established to encourage broad-ranging collaborations. He asked Mike Simmons, then an institute administrator, whether he knew of a physicist interested in tackling biological scaling laws. The Collaboration Learning to Speak New Languages Dr. West liked to joke that if Galileo had been a biologist, he would have written volumes cataloging how objects of different shapes fall from the Leaning Tower of Pisa at slightly different velocities. He would not have seen through the distracting details to the underlying truth: if you ignore air resistance, all objects fall at the same rate regardless of their weight. But at their first meeting |
1073800_1 | The Neediest Cases; For Disabled Children, A Respite in the Country | and I won,'' she exclaimed. It was the first time mother and child had been apart, except for hospitalizations. ''I was really scared when she left,'' Ms. Arroyo said. The Children's Aid Society founded Wagon Road Camp in 1956 to offer recreational and therapeutic activities to disabled low-income New York City children, like those at this week's session. The 52-acre camp is about a 40-minute drive from upper Manhattan, and has heated cabins, a horseback-riding corral and stable, and a swimming pool. The camp operates in the summer and on weekends and holiday weeks. Going to camp offers families a brief respite from the routine of doctors' visits and intensive parenting, said Lukas Weinstein, the camp director. It also gives the campers a chance to mix with their peers. For Sheena Walker, 11, the excitement of the reunion with her parents after camp ended was apparent in her big round eyes and the way she wiggled in her wheelchair and clapped her hands, said her mother, Sarah Adele. Sheena, who suffers from cerebral palsy, mental retardation, severe asthma and eczema, was abandoned at the hospital by her birth mother. Ms. Walker adopted her. ''I love this girl,'' she said. ''She is so beautiful.'' Michael Chambers Jr., 15, who has autism, was not wearing a hat despite the cold, which worried his father. Michael looks like many other teen-agers, with trendy clothes, a lean physique and a shaved head. But he does not speak much. He communicates by touch. His father said that Michael's mental state is like a 4-year-old's; that was too much for his mother, who left years ago. If autism were not enough to deal with, Michael's doctors told Mr. Chambers last year that his son had high blood pressure. ''It's so high sometimes, I think he's going to boil over,'' Mr. Chambers said. Mr. Chambers, a custodian with the Postal Service, relies on friends and family to get Michael to and from school and medical appointments. But when Michael is at Wagon Road Camp, he can truly relax. ''It's nice,'' he said. ''I needed a break.'' Speaking of his son, Mr. Chambers said: ''He's had a rough life. A lot of times I cry to myself, that why did he have to go through all that? I cry, I guess, because he's my heart. But I think God blessed me.'' HOW TO HELP Checks payable to The |
1073784_1 | Brazil Slashes Money for Project Aimed at Protecting Amazon | sustainable development, controlling deforestation and other objectives. In addition, the money would have helped pay for setting aside 10 percent of the rain forest, or 240,000 square miles, as national parks and ecologically protected areas. Amid much fanfare, Brazil's President, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, pledged to establish the protected areas on a visit to New York last April. Covering an area half as big as the continental United States, the Amazon is a lush laboratory of plants, animals and bacteria that contains more than 20 percent of the world's fresh water supply. Throughout much of the decade, as other countries criticized Brazil for failing to protect the rain forest, the Government insisted that wealthy nations pay to map it and to protect its resources. Officials also contended that the scale of the program was insufficient to the task. But environmentalists say that even that modest effort is now in jeopardy. Under pressure to rein in the budget deficit, Brazilian Government officials have slashed spending across the board. A recent agreement with the International Monetary Fund, which is heading a $41.3 billion standby loan for Brazil, reduces Government spending on environmental programs by two-thirds. Under the pilot program, the Brazilian Government provides matching funds and manpower to administer the Group of Seven grant. The Government's revised budget, made public in November, cuts the amount Brazil can expect to get from the group to $6.4 million from more than $61 million. ''It is arguably a far more irrational and perverse consequence of the I.M.F. agreement than even the harshest critics of the I.M.F. could have imagined,'' said Stephan Schwartzman, a senior scientist at the Washington-based Environmental Defense Fund. Acre in western Brazil, one of the nine states covered by the rain forest, had developed a three-year program counting on some $5 million of the Group of Seven money to survey and zone its forest. Ninety percent of the cost is being underwritten by the group. ''When it was all under way and ready to move forward -- boom -- the cuts came,'' said Maria Janet Santos, who is coordinating zoning for Acre's environmental protection agency. ''It really cuts into the credibility of what we're trying to do.'' Congress is expected to vote on the budget by Jan. 15. Senator Marina Silva of the opposition Workers' Party said the Government had not ruled out restoring the environmental money if other cuts could be found. |
1113157_3 | 1492: The Prequel | came in the early 1400's, when Admiral Zheng He sailed from China to conquer the world. Zheng He (pronounced jung huh) was an improbable commander of a great Chinese fleet, in that he was a Muslim from a rebel family and had been seized by the Chinese Army when he was still a boy. Like many other prisoners of the time, he was castrated -- his sexual organs completely hacked off, a process that killed many of those who suffered it. But he was a brilliant and tenacious boy who grew up to be physically imposing. A natural leader, he had the good fortune to be assigned, as a houseboy, to the household of a great prince, Zhu Di. In time, the prince and Zheng He grew close, and they conspired to overthrow the prince's nephew, the Emperor of China. With Zheng He as one of the prince's military commanders, the revolt succeeded and the prince became China's Yongle Emperor. One of the emperor's first acts (after torturing to death those who had opposed him) was to reward Zheng He with the command of a great fleet that was to sail off and assert China's pre-eminence in the world. Between 1405 and 1433, Zheng He led seven major expeditions, commanding the largest armada the world would see for the next five centuries. Not until World War I did the West mount anything comparable. Zheng He's fleet included 28,000 sailors on 300 ships, the longest of which were 400 feet. By comparison, Columbus in 1492 had 90 sailors on three ships, the biggest of which was 85 feet long. Zheng He's ships also had advanced design elements that would not be introduced in Europe for another 350 years, including balanced rudders and watertight bulwark compartments. The sophistication of Zheng He's fleet underscores just how far ahead of the West the East once was. Indeed, except for the period of the Roman Empire, China had been wealthier, more advanced and more cosmopolitan than any place in Europe for several thousand years. Hangzhou, for example, had a population in excess of a million during the time it was China's capital (in the 12th century), and records suggest that as early as the 7th century, the city of Guangzhou had 200,000 foreign residents: Arabs, Persians, Malays, Indians, Africans and Turks. By contrast, the largest city in Europe in 1400 was probably Paris, with a |
1113176_0 | Swept Away | GODFORSAKEN SEA Racing the World's Most Dangerous Waters. By Derek Lundy. Illustrated. 272 pp. Chapel Hill, N.C.: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill. $22.95. CLOSE TO THE WIND By Pete Goss. Illustrated. 273 pp. New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers. $25. MOST people can't truly understand what solo sailors routinely take for granted -- long passages at sea alone, unaided and uncomfortable. On the open ocean, the threat of towering waves, thrashing winds and crushing icebergs can destroy the resolve of the most salt-encrusted ocean racer. Or so it would seem. But it isn't exactly like that, according to these two books about the same single-handed sailboat race. Derek Lundy is an amateur yachtsman who makes his living as a writer in Toronto. Pete Goss is a former British marine turned professional skipper. And therein lies the difference between the books. In Lundy's account, you are swept up with his tale; in Goss's, you are immersed in his passion. In ''Godforsaken Sea,'' Lundy leads us eloquently through the minds of 16 intrepid sailors competing in the 1996-97 Vendee Globe, a nonstop, single-handed, around-the-world yacht race that begins and ends at Les Sables-d'Olonne, France. The record for monohull sailboats, set in the 1992-93 event, stood at 109 days. It was a mark that had raised the ante measurably from the first nonstop voyage recorded -- Robin Knox-Johnston's 313 days in 1969. Getting to know the sailors, and to look at the race from their perspectives, makes the 1996-97 Vendee competition appear almost reasonable. The Southern Ocean -- a vast sea linked by the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian oceans -- becomes the focal point for Lundy's tales of personal triumph and desperation. The contestants are like us, he seems to be saying, but in the extreme: ''It's dark, no moon in the usual low cloud cover, only the phosphorescent curl of the breaking waves, maybe rain or snow, perhaps a few bergs or growlers about, spray driving back right past the stern, solid water regularly sweeping the deck, the boat at a 45-degree angle down some of the bigger five- or six-story waves, the high-decibel noise. And in the middle of all that, the sailor crawls into one of the berths, wedges into it behind a canvas lee-cloth to avoid getting pitched across the cabin, and goes to sleep.'' It probably helped that Lundy personally experienced the open ocean during a 16-day voyage |
1113061_2 | CRISIS IN THE BALKANS: DOING THE DEAL -- A special report.; A Long Struggle That Led Serb Leader to Back Down | the ground. If the peace deal holds up, the curious war comes out this way: The bulky alliance won, but at a savage cost to the people who were supposed to be protected. Much of Kosovo has been razed, more than one million of its Albanian residents have been uprooted, and thousands of innocents have been killed. The West will have to spend many billions of dollars to rebuild what NATO bombs and the Serbs have destroyed. The dictator lost, but he stays on in his shrinking Yugoslavia. If his bad habits hold and if the Serbs do not depose him, he may well cause trouble another day. And just possibly a new lesson in war has been learned. Thanks to the wonders of high-techology weaponry, an overwhelmingly powerful alliance can crush a small nation's aggressive will without having to risk its own soldiers, if it is willing to spend enough money and if it can stomach mistakes that kill innocent civilians. In the end it was a 72-day campaign of violent accretion. As bombs did their work, diplomats from the United States, Western Europe and Russia ignored the West's oratory about Mr. Milosevic's being a latter-day Hitler and went about the delicate business of offering him an exit. As the bombs did their work, Mr. Milosevic's forces did what damage they could in Kosovo; then he prepared his people for another lost war. As soon as he was offered a way to stay in power while losing, he jumped on it. The Bombing Begins 'Lessons' of Bosnia Did Not Apply Generals and politicians often learn the wrong lessons from the last war. The wrong lesson that American officials took from dropping bombs to end the war in Bosnia in 1995 was that Mr. Milosevic would fold after a few days of air strikes. In a last-chance attempt to head off war in Kosovo on March 23, Richard C. Holbrooke, the United States special envoy to Yugoslavia, failed to scare Mr. Milosevic with the threat of imminent bombing. On his way out of the country, Mr. Holbrooke was asked if he feared that NATO's air attacks would push the Serbs into ever more vicious ''ethnic cleansing.'' ''That is our greatest fear by far, by far,'' he replied. Asked what NATO, operating only from the air, could do to prevent a catastrophe, Mr. Holbrooke went silent and shrugged. The bombing began |
1113153_14 | NOT Because it's There | never the issue. Mountains were, to them, metaphorical as much as they were physical. We, on the other hand, have come to view them as recreation -- and at a cost. They're now like glorified Stairmasters for the upwardly mobile. Jon Krakauer's ''Into Thin Air'' encapsulates our current state: even Everest retains its grandeur only as a stage set for absurdly perilous commercial escapades. For my part, the experience atop Ventoux was enjoyable but not sublime, and the reason may be that the ante has been raised. When climbing even the most remote mountains in the world becomes a package tour for rich hikers, then the experience of nature can have little of the mystery and divine terror that Kant talked about; it can be, at best, like a drug, the dose of which must be increased constantly to maintain the illusion of a feeling of profound emotion. Sport replaces art. Until the early 1970's there was actually an auto race to the top of Ventoux, and to this day the Tour de France occasionally includes a particularly nasty stage up the mountain. In the 60's a British bicyclist suffered a fatal heart attack trying to climb it. It is, I am sure, a heroic feat to reach the summit on a bicycle. But would you call it sublime? While Alan used his cell phone to call his wife in Paris and his son in London, assuring them that he was still alive, I wondered if anything has replaced the mountain as a new paradigm of sublimity. It almost seems odd to talk about the sublime today. We are programmed now to expect awe in certain circumstances, and are therefore doomed to be disappointed when, inevitably, we don't feel it. It is the disappointment that many tourists experience when they go to see the ''Mona Lisa.'' When nothing is truly strange or foreign any longer, everything having been predigested, we then demand to be shocked, because shock is an experience that still seems genuine to us. Thus we mistake shock for awe. Alan and I lingered briefly on top of Ventoux, I, at least, still hoping for an epiphany that never quite came. It was getting late. By a different route, we marched down the mountain as quickly as possible. The walk seemed increasingly harried, as darkness fell. Michael Kimmelman is the chief art critic for The New York Times. |
1113195_1 | DEALS AND DISCOUNTS | is 24-hour roadside assistance. Insurance is extra, and prices are based on a minimum seven-day stay; for first-class hotels, rates start at $85 a person. Call CIE at (800) 243-8687. NO SINGLE PENALTY -- Two Caribbean all-inclusive resorts, La Source on Grenada and Le Sport on St. Lucia, are waiving their single supplements -- which range from $65 to $75 a day -- through Oct. 16 (although Le Sport will be closed for remodeling until Aug. 16). Daily rates range from $220 to $280 at La Source and $225 to $315 at Le Sport. That covers all meals and drinks, use of sports equipment and instruction, fitness and stress-management classes, spa treatments, a personal trainer, airport transfers and taxes. Sports include scuba diving, water skiing, tennis, sailing and archery. Air fare is extra. Tropical Holidays: (800) 544-2883, fax (305) 672-5861. YANGTZE TOURS -- Travelers 50 or older can save about $400 over 1998 rates on Grand Circle Travel's 21-day cruising tours of the Yangtze River, which will be drastically changed in a few years with the completion of the Three Gorges Dam. Costs start at $3,995 a person, double occupancy, and that includes round-trip air fare from Los Angeles (Vancouver in 2000), 14 nights in superior and first-class hotels, 5 nights on a Regal China cruise ship, all breakfasts and most other meals, sightseeing, guide services, transit in China and baggage handling (one bag per person plus carry-on). There will be four nights in Beijing and three each in Shanghai and Hong Kong. A three-night extension in Bangkok, at the Marriott Royal Garden, begins at $275; (800) 248-3737. A SUMMER BREAK -- The Breakers, a resort in Palm Beach, Fla., is cutting its package rates for the summer (through Sept. 16). The Island Pleasures package, for example, provides two nights in a standard room, daily in-room breakfast, a 50-minute couple's massage, champagne and chocolate-covered strawberries, a dinner for two, two shirts and use of the spa for $1,026 a couple (winter rates were $1,426, spring and fall $1,182). Indulgence by the Sea, with three nights in a room with partial ocean view, restaurant breakfasts, five spa sessions, a half hour with a personal trainer and unlimited use of spa equipment, is $1,164 single, $1,758 double. In winter, it's $1,764 and $2,356; spring and fall, $1,398 and $1,990. Rates include tax and tip. Call (561) 655-6611, fax (561) 655-3577. JOSEPH SIANO |
1115594_0 | Debtor Countries Must Pay Up | To the Editor: A June 8 front-page article attributes Mexico's ''tremendous reduction in fertility'' both to a change in Mexican women's attitudes toward birth rates and the Mexican Government's efforts to reduce Mexico's population growth. What your article does not mention, however, is that for many women in Mexico, the decision to have fewer children has not been a voluntary one. For instance, a recent study regarding women's preferences for contraception was conducted in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, and published by the Alan Guttmacher Institute. In 9 of the study's 10 focus groups, women discussed personal and anecdotal experiences involving doctors who inserted IUD's after childbirth without their patients' consent. While a decline in Mexico's population growth could have positive social and economic effects in Mexico, forced population control is neither a humane nor an effective means to that end. STACEY M. SCHWARTZ New York, June 10, 1999 |
1115504_0 | Graduating Into Prosperity | As college graduation season draws to a close, it is evident that the gap between the experiences and expectations of the graduating class and their commencement speakers has never been greater. The speakers for the most part grew up in a world of economic highs and lows. They, or their parents, lived through the Great Depression, or at least a series of recessions, and learned to write on a typewriter. Today's graduates have not seen a recession since they were in junior high school and may never have touched a typewriter. Who could better capture the economic moment, past and present, than Alan Greenspan, the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board? He addressed the Harvard commencement last week, telling students there, and by extension across the country, that they would shape the future state of the world's ''cultural, legal and economic institutions.'' It seemed fitting that one of the architects of the longest period of peacetime prosperity in American history would address men and women entering the working world at a time of unimaginable opportunities as well as unparalleled challenges. The economy is booming. The labor market is the tightest it has been in 30 years and is unusually strong in all sectors. The unemployment rate for college graduates, ages 20 to 24, registered just 4.2 percent in May. The explosive growth of the computer industry has made the entry-level job market especially exciting and lucrative for this and recent graduating classes. The information-technology industry beckons the young. Growing up with computers and the Internet, they are well equipped to take advantage of the entrepreneurial possibilities such technology offers. Career-services offices at colleges report that increasing numbers of students are starting their own companies or joining newly created firms. Many believe they have nothing to lose and may soon join the expanding roster of young millionaires. Entrepreneurial programs at colleges across the country are expanding. Columbia University, for example, has more than doubled such course offerings for undergraduates in the last several years. The Columbia Business School administers an entrepreneurial initiative fund, which invests in the companies of budding businessmen, allowing them to get on their feet with minimal debt. Jobs in the information and technology sector, such as systems analysts, computer engineers and database administrators, are projected to more than double by 2006, and opportunities through the Internet seem limitless. The confidence and optimism are admirable, but the Class |
1115489_3 | Craft to Track Climate-Affecting Link of Sea and Wind | as was planned. Scatterometers are instruments that transmit high-frequency microwave pulses to the ocean surface and measure the ''backscattered,'' or echoed, pulses that bounce back to the originating satellite. These signals give an indirect measurement of the speed of wind near the water in clear or cloudy weather. By taking readings from pulses fired at slightly different angles, scientists can also use the backscattered signals to calculate the direction of the winds. Scatterometers of increasing sophistication have flown in space since the early 1970's. The first, demonstrating the feasibility of the instrument, flew aboard NASA's Skylab space station in 1973 and 1974. The European Remote Sensing Satellite, still operating since its launching in 1991, carries a radar instrument that works part time as a scatterometer and has provided limited but continuous sea-wind data for eight years. The most advanced instrument until now was the NASA Scatterometer, or Nscat, launched aboard the Japanese Midori satellite in August 1996. Nscat made more than 190,000 wind measurements daily as it mapped more than 90 percent of the world's oceans every two days. But the satellite suffered a solar power failure in June 1997, and scientists lost this critical stream of data. Dr. Michael Freilich of Oregon State University, the principal investigator of the Sea Winds instrument, said the Midori failure spurred the rapid development of Quikscat. ''We will pick up basically where Midori left off,'' Dr. Freilich said. ''We have a more advanced instrument that will make more refined measurements than before, seeing more small-scale wind variabilities than was previously possible.'' Quikscat will cover 90 percent of the earth's ice-free oceans each day, a job that took Nscat two days, and will cover a 1,120-mile swath during each orbit, one-third wider than its predecessor, Dr. Freilich said. To cover such a wide area, signals will be sent from the satellite using a dish antenna that rotates 18 times a minute to continuously sweep across the broad track. For winds moving at 7 to 45 miles per hour, the wind speed measurements are expected to be accurate within 4.5 m.p.h., and for winds of 45 to 70 m.p.h., the measurements are expected to be accurate within 10 percent. Ninety-nine percent of all ocean winds fall below these speeds, Dr. Freilich added. Scientists cannot accurately predict weather without good wind data, and lacking such information for the 70 percent of the world covered by water |
1115563_3 | Suspect in Loss of Nuclear Secrets Unlikely to Face Spying Charges | on to China any classified national security information. Although the evidence is apparently insufficient to prosecute Mr. Lee, the Federal Bureau of Investigation thought that the case against him was compelling enough to ask the Justice Department in 1997 for permission to eavesdrop on Mr. Lee under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The law lets the Government monitor subjects electronically, not to assemble evidence of a crime, but to gather intelligence in national security cases. The still classified F.B.I. application cited questions about Mr. Lee dating from the early 80's, when he contacted a scientist who had been ousted from a weapons lab in California after an inquiry into the theft of secrets about the neutron bomb. The application, made up of drafts of documents exchanged between the F.B.I. and the Justice Department, described how Chinese intelligence differed from espionage by the United States' traditional adversaries. The Chinese, the document said, usually seek information from overseas Chinese who are traveling in China through scientist-to-scientist contacts, a more elusive form of espionage because it does not rely on identifiable intelligence officers. The F.B.I. request said Mr. Lee had failed to disclose the identities of all the scientists whom he contacted in China on visits in 1986 and 1988. The Energy Department had approved the trips and authorized his meetings and discussions of nonclassified matters with Chinese officials. After the trips, Mr. Lee and his wife met American security officials and identified a number of Chinese scientists whom they had met. But counterintelligence officials apparently suspected that Mr. Lee might have held back some pertinent information about his activities during vacations taken after each trip. On the vacations, the officials said, Mr. Lee had undisclosed contacts with scientists, including one identified as Side Hu, a top official at an institute of engineering physics involved in nuclear weapons research. Other officials said the omissions might have been inadvertent, in light of the numerous contacts that Mr. Lee did report. In 1992, Mr. Hu led a delegation of Chinese officials on a tour of Los Alamos that the Energy Department had authorized, documents show. On the visit, Mr. Hu spoke privately with Mr. Lee and embraced him in a congratulatory manner. Later, counterintelligence agents surreptitiously analyzed Mr. Lee's spending and found what they thought might be another puzzle piece. They found two charges on a credit card at a travel agency while Mr. Lee |
1118728_4 | How to Succeed In Art | own conceptually driven style. Its invasion of the art world has been abetted by the commercial galleries, where an obsession with novelty and art-as-investment makes every recent graduate a potentially hot property. Many of the students at U.C.L.A. have already exhibited their work in New York or Los Angeles, and it is not unusual to find dealers trolling the school's halls in search of the next 20-something sensation. ''These dealers are like 16th-century Dutch traders,'' says Paul Schimmel, chief curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. ''They're ubiquitous.'' He is currently organizing an exhibition called ''The Art School and the Avant-Garde in the 1990's,'' the first museum show to track the influence that schools have had on contemporary art. U.C.L.A. is frequently described as the power art school of the late 90's; visiting the campus is like attending an opening of the Whitney Biennial. In addition to Burden, the first of the crop to be hired, you spot Charles Ray and Barbara Kruger, Nancy Rubins and Paul McCarthy, Lari Pittman and John Baldessari, a 68-year-old conceptual artist with flowing white hair and a matching beard. ''The way to get a good art school,'' he tells me with gentle irony, ''is to hire interesting faculty. Then they attract good students and the students teach themselves.'' Getting in isn't easy. This year, only 1 out of every 32 applicants was accepted, which makes U.C.L.A.'s graduate art department more competitive than such East Coast rivals as the Yale University School of Art (which accepted 1 out of every 15 applicants) or the Rhode Island School of Design (1 out of 8 got in). By contrast, Harvard Business School accepts 1 out of every 10 applicants. ''We've never had so many applications,'' says Mary Kelly, a well-known feminist artist who is chairwoman of the art department at U.C.L.A. She made her name with ''Post-Partum Document,'' a chronicle of motherhood that included her son's stained diapers displayed in Plexiglas boxes -- a symbol of his passage into a ''phallocentric'' culture. ''Theory can make you a better artist,'' she told me one afternoon in her office, where she was cheerfully finalizing the details of a symposium called ''Image Trauma.'' As I left, she handed me a stack of essays by Jacques Lacan and other favorites, not missing the chance to snag a potential convert. Can you teach someone to be an artist? Paul |
1119025_0 | The World: Fear of Feeding; Europe Loses Its Appetite for High Tech Food | THE beating of a butterfly's wings in one hemisphere, it turns out, really can cause a hurricane in the other. Last month, researchers at Cornell published findings that genetically altered corn, designed to produce pollen toxic to pests, could also kill caterpillars of the monarch butterflies, whose principal breeding range is the American corn belt. Americans heard this news with a momentary shrug of disapproval. But in the European Union, environmental officials are taking the news much more seriously. Under pressure from consumers fed up with what British newspapers call ''Frankenstein food,'' the union was tightening regulations that have already limited the number of genetically modified crops that can be marketed to 18. Now the butterfly-killing corn seems likely to be barred under a tacit moratorium on permitting any new items until the Europeans can agree on new rules. In America, where three-quarters of all genetically modified crops are grown, consumers seem hardly to care whether chemists have tinkered with the genes as long as the stuff looks and tastes normal. In Europe, demonstrators in southern France this month uprooted and burned part of a field of experimental modified rapeseed. Even in Britain, which grows and exports such things, Sainsbury supermarkets have had to pull everything made from genetically modified organisms off the shelves. So why are the Europeans so much more nervous than Americans? Part of the reason is agricultural protectionism. Europe resents the fact that many of the patents on genetically modified crops with bred-in high yields and resistance to parasites are held by American companies like Monsanto, DuPont and Dow. There's also a different attitude toward food in some places. The French don't like what they call ''industrial'' tomatoes, fruits and vegetables because they think these products just don't taste very good. But the biggest reason may be that Europeans are panicked these days about food safety. Americans might be nervous too, if the Food and Drug Administration had as dismal a record as Europe's bureaucracies have racked up recently in insuring the safety of food that comes to the table. Hardly had Europeans recovered from fears that mad cow disease could infect people who ate infected beef when a new scandal in Belgium last month caused fear that chicken, eggs, beef, pork, veal and maybe even milk and cheese could be contaminated with cancer-causing dioxin. At the root of both disasters was the same cause -- |
1118962_2 | FIVE QUESTIONS for RAY GOLDBERG; Under the Food Scares, A Credibility Problem | of its way to hide the information, so there wouldn't be a scare. But then the immediate reaction of other nations, when they find out about it, is that the problem must be worse than they say. And in the case of genetically modified foods, especially, Europe seems to be much more sensitive. It goes back to World War II and genetic experimentation by the Nazis. The word ''genetic'' is almost a red flag. The other thing is that, in Europe, they cannot get people to comply. In the middle of mad cow disease, there were people grinding up dead animals and putting that back into the food system. Even when they have good rules and regulations, they can't get people to comply. Q. Is there any hope that the recent wave of scares in Europe will lead to greater compliance? A. It is changing. The problem is so bad that is has to change. And they have got a whole new generation of men and women who are just fed up with the politics of the past and the mistakes of the past. I just came back from an agribusiness conference in Italy. And do you know what the theme was? Trust. We had business leaders and the heads of consumer organizations, and in every case they were reaching out to each other. Q. And they were sincere? A. Absolutely. I would say they were extremely sincere. Q. On the technology side, are there advances coming that might cut down on the frequency of food scares in the future, or help keep them from getting out of hand? A. Traceability is becoming much more important in our food system. In the not too distant future, we are going to be able to bar-code every product, from a grain of cereal to a loaf of bread. These huge multinational corporations that have huge plants throughout the world have to lead the way. Also, there are firms that basically have developed ways to test and protect the authenticity of products that are being sold. Just as you have knock-offs of designer jeans and luggage, you have knock-offs of food. So people are constantly testing to reassure themselves. And as consolidation grows in the food system, it will become safer, because the unethical parts of the system will try to cut corners, but they will find themselves left out of the system. |
1119111_0 | From World's Radio Astronomers, a Simple Plea: Shhh!!! | Scientists studying the heavens have long been bothered by the more mundane activities of other earthlings. They have fled to remote mountaintops to escape the light of the cities. They have adjusted their radio instruments to cope with the growing avalanche of television towers, cell phones, pagers, microwave ovens, garage-door openers and the many other ground-based gadgets that emit radio waves. But radio astronomers around the world say they cannot escape the overhead ''pollution'' beamed down nonstop from the growing fleet of communications satellites. At observatories like Nancay Radioastronomy Station in France and the famed Jodrell Bank in England, where pulsars were discovered, astronomers complain that the enormously powerful signals emitted by the low-orbit satellites are drowning out the faint whispers coming from the universe. And these manmade constellations, they complain, are increasingly invading the frequencies assigned to radioastronomy. The satellites are a boon to communications companies and customers, allowing people to make calls from mobile telephones, send faxes or transmit data from anywhere in the world. A fleet of 66 such American satellites went into full operation late last year. More will be launched by Europeans this year to provide high-speed Internet links and many others are planned. To radio astronomers, all satellite systems are a nuisance, but they say that the fast moving communications satellites, whizzing around at just 420 miles above the earth and blanketing the planet with their coverage, are threatening the survival of their field. At a meeting in Paris this week, science ministers discussed the creation of ''radio quiet zones'' where radio astronomers could work. The new zones of several hundred square miles would be like protected ''parks'' in different parts of the world where satellite emissions or other broadcasts would be restricted or banned at fixed times. Such quiet zones would be designated in remote parts of the world with few customers so that satellite operators could turn off their emissions and radio astronomers could set up their instruments there. ''Radio telescopes are extremely sensitive and search for the most subtle radio signals,'' said Stefan Michalowski, an American physicist who attended the meeting. ''What's going on now is like a neighbor turning on a boom box while you are listening for the sound of an insect.'' Among suitable candidates, which according to satellite records, are still reasonably ''radio quiet,'' are regions of Australia, China and South Africa. Harvey Butcher, director of the Netherlands |
1119024_0 | Insuring Women's Gains | To the Editor: Neither Arab ''honor killings'' (front page, June 20) nor resistance to women candidates for public office in Indonesia (news article, June 20) is a matter of religion, and certainly not solely of Islam. For instance, across Roman Catholic Latin America, until recently, laws exonerated men who murdered their wives in a jealous rage. Today, in several Latin American countries, sex offenders are not prosecuted if they marry their victims. Widespread violence against women is a matter of male dominance, not of religion. This week, final negotiations begin at the United Nations to agree on future actions to implement the program of action from the International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo in 1994. A few conservative government delegates -- predominantly men -- would curtail action. Yet women mobilizing across the world will prevail again, as in Cairo. ADRIENNE GERMAIN New York, June 22, 1999 The writer is president of the International Women's Health Coalition. |
1118735_3 | Beating the Lines At Crowded Airports | in the line for first class passengers even if you expect to be told that no seats are available. * Security gates. Standing and waiting to have yourself and your luggage screened can be especially frustrating as people unfamiliar with the process fumble with their gear. In Orlando, where long lines are frequent because of families with children on vacation, Ms. Fennell recommends looking for gates to the left when approaching lines of people at security checkpoints, since Americans tend to line up to the right. ''So look to the left. Maybe it is less crowded.'' Many airports have more than one security checkpoint, and knowing the secondary site can save time. The Delta-Northwest terminal at La Guardia Airport, for example, has its main security checkpoint on the right side of a gift shop. But a secondary site on the other side of the gift shop is often open with no waiting. Also, if you have no carry-ons, look for a metal detector beyond the X-ray machines. If there is one, then ignore the lines and go straight for that detector, Ms. Fennell said. * Boarding gates. If your boarding gate has a long line you may be able to get your boarding pass from another gate, or head for the customer-services desk that airlines usually have in each terminal. At San Francisco International Airport, United Airlines has two mobile re-accommodation desks that it can push to a gate to rebook passengers when a flight has been canceled. Joe Hopkins, a United spokesman, said the desks will be installed at 49 other airports. If your flight is canceled and no extra desk is opened to rebook passengers, consider going to a telephone and having a reservations agent rebook you, Mr. Hopkins said. While you will still have to stand in line to get a boarding pass, getting rebooked immediately cuts the chances that you will end up squeezed into a middle seat. * Airport clubs. The most expensive, but most effective, way to shorten waits is to join one or more airline clubs. Members can get boarding passes in the clubs. When flights are canceled, heading to the airport club is often the fastest way to get booked onto another flight. Clubs cost from $200 annually for TWA to $400 for United, with spouse memberships available at a discount, or you can pay with frequent-flier miles. TRAVEL ADVISORY: CORRESPONDENT'S REPORT |
1119141_0 | June 20-26; Loan to China Approved | It seemed like a no-brainer for the World Bank: Give China a loan to move 58,000 poor farmers -- volunteers only, please -- to more fertile land in western China. But there was a hitch: The land was partly settled by Tibetans. Congress and the Administration protested that the project would help China dilute the presence of ethnic Tibetans in the area. What followed was a remarkable fight between Washington and the bank, which ultimately decided to overrule its biggest shareholder and go ahead with the loan -- but only after another review to make sure the resettlement violates none of its own rules. DAVID E. SANGER |
1117201_0 | Planning Our Population | To the Editor: A June 13 editorial rightly salutes the family planning campaigns in Mexico and Colombia, which were aided by the Agency for International Development, the International Planned Parenthood Federation and the United Nations Population Fund. Not all Latin American countries are as fortunate. In Guatemala, where the Government is less supportive of family planning, only 27 percent of women use modern contraception (compared with 56 percent in Mexico), and the average woman has about five children. As a result, the population in Guatemala -- where land is already scarce -- is projected to double or triple in the next 50 years. To preserve human rights and regional stability, it would be wise and cost-effective for Congress to increase spending on international family planning and reproductive health. FREDERICK MEYERSON New Haven, June 15, 1999 The writer is project director at the Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy. |
1117109_4 | Grand Canyon Blazing Trail With Light Rail Line | Traver, the park's chief planner. At the rim's edge, where tour bus drivers now idle engines to keep air-conditioning running, a maximum of 4,200 people an hour will arrive by train, then shift to bicycle and pedestrian trails or to buses powered by electricity or natural gas. ''If we run diesel-belching monsters for buses, we are part of the problem,'' Mr. Traver said. Air pollution has cut visibility at the canyon to an average of 110 miles, from 140 miles at the start of the century. In another effort to reduce the mark of man, Interior Department officials support the Canyon Forest Village development, which would be built 8 miles from the canyon in the Kaibab National Forest. Under this plan, the Parks Service would demolish substandard worker housing in the park and build up to 500 housing units in the new development. Thomas A. De Paolo, the developer, believes that the parks high school and medical center can also be moved into the development. With a host of new hotel rooms at the park's edge, the Park Service will demolish two boxy, 1960's lodges on the south rim. Environmental groups like the proposal because it calls for importing water by train and pipeline from a section of the Colorado River on the Arizona-California line. Hotels in the gateway town of Tusayan now pump well water from an underground aquifer, which environmentalists argue robs water that is vital to the canyon's delicate ecology. ''Any project that relies on groundwater pumping is unacceptable,'' said Dave Simon of Albuquerque, regional director of one watchdog group, the National Parks and Conservation Association. ''We are going to have one master-plan development in one area that is already developed, instead of three or four developments that will smear the problem over a big area,'' he said. Three Indian tribes of the Colorado Plateau have endorsed the Canyon Forest plan, largely because the developers promise them jobs, market space for their wares and a museum that gives weight to Native American views of the Grand Canyon. Although tourism injects nearly $1 billion a year into the canyon area, the surrounding county, Coconino, ranks among the 10 poorest in the nation. Mr. Ack, one of the environmentalists, said from Flagstaff, ''For the first time, the tribes have been asked to be part of the economic engine of the Grand Canyon, other than selling trinkets by the roadside.'' |
1117018_1 | The Nation; Beyond the Trail Of Breadcrumbs | down 30,000 stolen cars. People also frequently ask about using LoJacks for an elderly relative who might be suffering from Alzheimer's disease or other disorienting ailments, said Mr. McMahon: ''Our answer is no, our technology is not appropriate for that.'' But why not, exactly? We're willing to put positioning devices on cars and cell phones, and we already put microchips inside our pets. In fact, more than 1.5 million American cats and dogs have been surgically implanted with tiny chips the size of a grain of rice, encoded with information about how to reunite them with their owners. So why not put chips inside the people we love the most? ''It's inevitable,'' said Arthur Caplan, director of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania. ''Why? Because there's a level of concern, some based in fact, some based in fear, about the loss of children, about kids being stolen in custody disputes, about terrorism, about kidnapping, that leads people to be frantic about wanting to know where other people they care about are.'' People are also likely to encode themselves with chips containing medical information, Professor Caplan said. The possibilities are both scary and humorous, and they are endless -- especially if the devices could be implanted, as the lower-tech pet chips are, painlessly and in seconds. (That may still be an issue; The LoJack device is actually the size of a chalkboard eraser.) As the technology advances, they could even be inserted surreptitiously. Wary spouses could either confirm or allay suspicions about their mates. Bosses could monitor their employees' whereabouts or, to turn the tables, workers could monitor whether the boss is nearby. Of course, it could all be done for more romantic reasons. Consider Professor Kevin Warwick, a cybernetics expert at Britain's Reading University, and his wife, Irena, who announced last year that they both planned to be fitted with computer chip implants in an experiment to see whether they could keep track of one another and even transmit emotions over great distances. The chip technology could work in much the same way a mobile phone takes spoken words and turns them into electronic signals, Professor Warwick said in a telephone interview last week. ''I think you could really do the same thing with emotions some day -- you could transmit them digitally.'' The professor described the technology as extremely useful, because he travels a lot and |
1117202_0 | Planning Our Population | To the Editor: Your June 13 editorial ''Latin America's Birth Surprise'' underscores the critical importance of family planning worldwide. Right now, about a billion people living in the developing world are in the prime childbearing years of ages 15 to 24. There are two billion more future parents right behind them. Reproductive health services are among the most cost-effective ways to stabilize the world's health and economy. But international powers, including the United States, are failing to give enough aid to developing countries for them to keep pace with the growing need for voluntary family planning services. The reproductive decisions that adolescents worldwide make will have a profound impact on the health of our planet, the availability of global resources and everyone's quality of life. We need to give all young people access to the information and services they need to make responsible choices about sex and reproduction. GLORIA FELDT President, Planned Parenthood Federation of America New York, June 14, 1999 |
1116762_2 | Q and A | ''the fairest city of men,'' and even after several decades of indiscriminate 20th-century urban planning, the hilltop Sicilian city and its nearby ruins merit more than a half day. But since your time is tight, start with the Valley of the Temples, about two miles from the city proper. There are remains of 10 temples here and they are among the finest examples of Doric architecture. Most of them date from the fifth century B.C., a period during which the principal settlements of Sicily were Greek. Only one temple is nearly intact, the Temple of Concord, one of the best preserved Greek temples outside of Greece. One section of the Valley of the Temples is free and is open daily 8 A.M. to 9 P.M. The area with the Temple of Jupiter and the Sanctuary of the Chthonic Divinities is open daily 8:30 A.M. to 6:30 P.M. and tickets cost $2. The nearby Regional Archeological Museum, has an extensive collection of Greek vases and other artifacts. Open Monday to Sunday 9 A.M. to 1 P.M., and Wednesday to Saturday from 2 to 6 P.M. Telephone (39-09) 2240-1565. Across from the museum are the remains of the Hellenistic and Roman quarter, which offer a glimpse of urban planning in the sixth century B.C. The area is open daily 9 A.M. to 6:30 P.M. A ticket to both the museum and this area costs $4. The Agrigento Tour Guide Association can arrange individual tours of the valley. A two-and-a-half-hour visit to the temples is $65. With the museum (a four-hour visit), the cost is $86; Telephone and fax (39-09) 2260-8908. Hemingway Key West Bash Q. Will there be events in Key West, Fla., to honor the centennial of Hemingway's birth? -- Carol Race, Portland, Me. A. Ernest Hemingway, who was born in Oak Park, Ill., on July 21, 1899, spent most of the 1930's in Key West, where he wrote ''A Farewell to Arms,'' ''For Whom the Bell Tolls'' and other novels. For nearly 20 years, Key West has been celebrating his stay with a series of generally raucous summer events: arm-wrestling, key lime pie-eating contests, late-night parties at Sloppy Joe's (a Hemingway watering hole) and, of course, Hemingway look-alike competitions. This year's 10-day festival, which begins on July 16, will adhere to this schedule, although there are a few new and expanded offerings. Organizers are expecting 25,000 Hemingway fans, and accommodations |
1116853_4 | Diocese Feels Shortage of Priests | Island Council of Churches, a Protestant umbrella group. ''The fact that the Protestant and Orthodox churches welcome married clergy is certainly a large part of why we don't have a shortage. And we are still benefiting from a large influx of women, many of whom are entering the ministry as a second career.'' Rabbi Bruce Ginsburg, the president of the Long Island Board of Rabbis, described Long Island as ''a magnet to the rabbinate.'' ''Long Island is a very attractive place for a rabbi to serve a congregation,'' he said. ''It is part of the greater New York area, and to be in the center of the North American Jewish community is a very exciting place to be.'' Women rabbis lead some reform synagogues. In Protestant churches, women serve as pastors in sects and denominations ranging from charismatic evangelical to Episcopal. In the Catholic church, where the requirement that priests be men is rooted in scriptural interpretation and tradition, Pope John Paul II has closed discussion on women in the priesthood. Church deacons, whose roles may expand as the number of priests declines, must also be men but may be married. Women serve as lay ministers in many parishes. Nancy Small, the national coordinator of Pax Christi, a Catholic peace group with headquarters in Erie, Pa., said women could do more. ''With priests becoming less and less in numbers, I think a natural response is to call forth the gifts of women in ways they have not yet been recognized,'' she said. The Rev. Thomas J. Harold, director of vocations for the Long Island diocese, said 35 seminarians were currently enrolled at the Seminary of the Immaculate Conception in Huntington, which trains seminarians for both the Rockville Centre diocese and the diocese of Brooklyn. Father Clerkin of St. Francis de Sales in Patchogue said that the decline of the number of children in Catholic schools and a youth culture that overemphasizes materialism and sexuality were factors in the decline in aspiring priests. But he said that the Island's growing number of Hispanic residents, including recent immigrants, may prove to be the seed for growth. Estimates based on the 1990 census show the Hispanic population, which is overwhelmingly Catholic, increased by 24.9 percent in Nassau and by 26.1 percent in Suffolk from 1990 to 1997, the largest percentage change for any group. The estimated population of Hispanics in 1997 was 96,654 |
1116364_5 | Coyotes, Turkeys And Bears, Oh My!; Suburbs' Spread Flushes Wildlife Into Populated Neighborhoods | Jersey's environmental department. ''They're cosmopolitan now.'' Normally, coyotes eat rabbits, squirrels and other small wild animals. But Mr. Eriksen and other experts cautioned that pet cats left out at night are becoming a favorite prey. Dr. Weber said that coyotes are starting to ''behave like wolves'' and form hunting packs on the edges of the suburbs. In recent years, deer have made it to urban areas like Elizabeth, N.J., and East Rutherford, near Giants Stadium. And black bears are not only reaching West Haven; some have also made it to downtown New Brunswick and Trenton. Last Friday, a bear was spotted in Morristown, N.J., near the busiest stores. Since 1979, calls about nuisance bears have increased from 15 to 330 a year in a seven-county region of southern New York just north of New York City, including Westchester, Rockland and Orange, said Dick Henry, a big-game biologist with the state's Department of Environmental Conservation. He estimates that there are 4,000 bears in the state. Glenn Cole, a wildlife biologist who is Mr. Henry's colleague, recalls a black bear that broke through the screen door of a house near Kingston and helped itself to a fresh apple pie and some cookies on a kitchen counter before fleeing. Connecticut's bear population is estimated at 30 to 60, double the estimate in 1994. Paul Rego, a state wildlife biologist, said that in the first five months of this year, the state received 70 calls of bear sightings, up from 25 in the same period last year. Since New Jersey banned bear hunting in 1971, the state's bear population has doubled to about 600, and some seem to be getting more aggressive toward other animals, said Dave Chanda, a state wildlife biologist. Earlier this year, he said, a bear killed a llama in an outdoor pen in Rockaway Township, and another killed two fawns born in a backyard in Sussex County. Three-quarters of the bear complaints in New York's seven-county region are about bears raiding bird feeders for the grain, Mr. Henry said. He advised leaving a bird feeder out only in the winter. Raising the bird feeder higher off the ground does not work. ''The bears will just hang around longer, trying to figure out how to get to it,' he said. People are increasingly gripped with ''bearanoia'' in southern New York, Mr. Henry said. ''Generally speaking, the people fear they'll eat the |
1116310_1 | China Resettlement Plan Starts Debate Over Tibetan Culture | that has been attacked by critics abroad as a threat to Tibetan culture, saying that many objections reflected misinformation. The plan, for which the World Bank proposes lending China $40 million, resettling 58,000 people from an overcrowded, eroded area in the northeastern corner of Qinghai Province to a sparsely populated region in the province 300 miles west. Qinghai is geographically part of the Tibetan Plateau and was historically settled by Tibetan and Mongolian people. But today a majority of its five million residents are ethnic Chinese. Critics say by moving a mix of ethnic groups into the new zone, the project will aid a Chinese policy of diluting Tibetan culture. Forty percent of the proposed settlers would be ethnic Chinese, along with Hui Muslims and others, including some ethnic Tibetans. The critics also say the project, involving a small dam and irrigation works, may threaten the environment. They add that two nearby prison camps could be aided, in violation of World Bank policy, and that the bank's assessment procedures have been violated. But in a briefing this afternoon, the bank's resident director here, Yukon Huang, an American, said the project was a sincere effort to aid some of China's most wretchedly poor. He said that environmental concerns had been taken into account, that the legal rights of minority groups would be protected and that any effects on Tibetan culture would be negligible. ''This involves moving people from an area of great ethnic diversity into an area that has relatively few Tibetans,'' said Mr. Huang, who just completed a six-day trip through the zone with agricultural and social experts to ''double check'' the wisdom of the proposal. The region around the proposed new irrigation area is mainly populated by Mongolians. The immediate site is barren and used only seasonally by 63 Mongolian herding families whose interests will be protected, he said. But the bank admits, though, that in the large county, including the settlement area, the proportion of Tibetans would decline, to 14 percent from 23. Opposing the project has become a major cause of pro-Tibetan groups in Europe and the United States. The critics have gained the ear of Western politicians, and American officials have expressed concern. The World Bank board of governors is to consider the project on Tuesday. China has called the criticism politically motivated, and an American vote against the project would inflame the already tense relations. |
1116304_0 | THE MARKETS: COMMODITIES | SUGAR RISES. Sugar prices climbed on expectations that increased buying by Russia and other importers would soak up some of the excess supply. In New York, sugar for July delivery rose 0.23 cent a pound, to 5.52 cents. |
1116395_0 | Resegregation in the Schools Hurts All Students | To the Editor: The federally mandated changes that would give school systems more money to return children to regular classrooms pose grave concerns (''Under Federal Threat, Albany Seeks to Overhaul Special Education,'' news article, June 12). My 4-year-old son has pervasive developmental delay, which falls under the autism spectrum for children with speech, social and learning delays. He attends a special program in Rockland County, where his placement is state financed and where children are making educational progress in small classes with a ratio of six children to one teacher and several aides. The proposed legislative changes would prevent these schools from adding additional classes for children who require one-on-one teaching from specialized educators and therapists to bring them to the point where they can be mainstreamed. NICOLA GODFREY Ardsley, N.Y., June 12, 1999 |
1114582_0 | Under Federal Threat, Albany Seeks to Overhaul Special Education | Legislative leaders are nearing an agreement on overhauling the state's special education program to discourage schools from placing disabled students in segregated classrooms, legislative aides from both parties said today. The state's special education program has come under increasing criticism in recent years for placing far too many children, a disproportionate number of them black and Hispanic boys in New York City, into separate classrooms, with little chance of graduating with a regular diploma. Lawmakers have argued for years over proposals for change, but are now facing a threat by Federal officials to cut off roughly $325 million in aid beginning as soon as next month if they fail to act. Federal officials said New York was the only state that still failed to comply with Federal rules for special education under the Americans With Disabilities Act. Under the current system, school districts receive additional state aid for each child placed in special education, which is for students with problems including severe physical disabilities, learning disabilities, emotional troubles and behavioral problems. The extra money is intended to finance additional attention to the severely handicapped, but critics say it has led educators to find disabilities in children who are simply troubled or underachieving. Under the new plan being considered, the state would give school systems more money to return disabled children to regular classrooms, where they could continue to receive extra help. The school systems would not be required to move the children back, but would receive more aid if they did than if they kept the children in special education classrooms, legislative aides said. But in a concession to lawmakers who were worried that their local school systems would lose money, the plan would not reduce aid to schools that fail to steer disabled students back into regular classes. ''It creates a financial incentive for schools to place disabled children into regular classrooms,'' said a participant in the negotiations. ''The schools have to do it in order to get the extra money.'' The exact amount of the incentive would vary by district, according to the state's complicated per-pupil aid formula. Legislative officials would provide no estimate for how much more the state would spend on special education, saying it depended on how aggressively local districts moved to take advantage of the new money. The proposal was welcomed by educators in New York City, where Schools Chancellor Rudy Crew has been |
1114584_4 | College Applicants Of '99 Are Facing Stiffest Competition | Hartford. Many other schools -- Vanderbilt in Tennessee, Pomona in California, Wabash in Indiana -- have had record years. ''I have been in this business for 30 years and I can't remember a time when there has been such a shift,'' said Carl Bewig, director of college counseling at Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass., one of the nation's most selective preparatory academies. College counselors and others who watch the admissions process say that early in this season they detected crowding at the top colleges, and figured it was because it is now so easy for students, aided by computers and the Internet, to apply to many colleges. Besides that, the thirst for brand names has never been greater, and top universities have greatly increased their financial aid as their endowments have risen with the stock market. The theory went that at less selective institutions there would be far less pressure. Each student might have submitted numerous applications but ultimately could choose only one college. Then the other places would open up. That has not turned out to be the case. Colleges that a decade ago worried about finding enough good students are now happily overwhelmed. An example is Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Pa., which had a record number of applicants for the fourth straight year. The college admitted 200 fewer students than last year to cut its acceptance rate to 55 percent and thus be considered more selective by many college guides. Muhlenberg feels it has improved its reputation through a building and marketing campaign. The college, like many others, has invested in a new athletics complex and student union, intending to make it a more attractive, and has recruited and advertised around the country. The fortunes of places like Muhlenberg are all the more remarkable when considering the growing number of alternatives to attending a private college, like on-line learning and for-profit universities, and the much cheaper alternative of state universities. Demographers call this generation of students the baby boomlet or the baby boom echo because they are the children of the generation that bulged after World War II. The population increase has also been fed by immigration from Latin America and Asia and is heaviest in the South, West and Northeast. Americans have moved in record numbers to the Sun Belt in the last generation. As a result, San Diego State University, with a 28 percent increase in |
1111778_0 | New Therapy Builds Bone Without Unpleasant Side Effects | A new study suggests that low-dose hormone replacement therapy combined with calcium and vitamin D supplements may increase bone mineral density in women over 65 by at least as much as the higher hormone doses now recommended but without unpleasant side effects. The study, conducted by researchers at Creighton University in Omaha, is of particular importance in osteoporosis research because it helps establish that increased levels of calcium and vitamin D can enhance the effectiveness of estrogen. Osteoporosis, which often goes unnoticed until a person suffers a debilitating fracture, is the most common bone disease in America, particularly among postmenopausal women. Many women avoid hormone replacement therapy, or H.R.T., which helps prevent osteoporosis, because of side effects and increased risk of more serious complications. As reported in The Annals of Internal Medicine this week, a study of 128 healthy women ages 65 to 91 and covering three and a half years found that those taking only 0.3 milligrams of estrogen daily showed as much as 5.2 percent increase in spinal bone mass density. Previously, the lowest dose effective for building bone density was considered to be 0.625 milligrams. Side effects like weight gain, breast tenderness and spotting were minimal initially and disappeared totally within six months, the study said. Dr. Joan McGowan, head of the muscular-skeletal diseases branch of the National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases, said she was surprised and delighted when she saw the paper several months ago. ''Estrogen is less investigated than people think it is,'' she said. ''It has never been adequately tested before, if giving a lower dose could be effective.'' Dr. Robert R. Recker and his colleagues at the Osteoporosis Research Center at Creighton's School of Medicine, initiated their study because they felt complications in hormone replacement therapy were dose-related and the role of vitamin D in increasing calcium absorption particularly unexplored. ''We gave a little less than half of what was previously thought of the lowest dose of estrogen to get the effect and boosted the calcium and vitamin D above levels anybody had ever dosed before,'' Dr. Recker explained. The study revealed that initially more than 75 percent of the women had daily calcium intakes under 1,000 milligrams. They received supplements to bring their calcium intakes above 1,200 milligrams and supplements for vitamin D. The results of the study, however, cannot be applied to younger women without additional research, |
1111830_2 | Editorial Observer; Why Should Day Traders Have All the Fun? | That is why medieval towns had market days. It is also why 24-hour trading has never caught on for professional money managers, even though it is available because major stocks trade in markets around the world. The pros know that they will get the best price if they trade when and where a lot of others are also trading. Individuals who trade at night are likely to find that with fewer people active in the market, the spreads will be wider between the prices buyers pay and those sellers get. Their loss will be a gain for brokerage firms that serve as middlemen, but some of those firms fear they will not make enough from the extra volume to offset the costs of hiring a night staff. The idea is that only the more active larger companies will be traded at the start. But you can bet that such barriers will soon fall. The night traders will crave the excitement of Internet stocks, and ways will be found to give it to them. Since the S.E.C. has decided not to try to stop nighttime trading, the least it can do is try to make sure the gamblers (sorry; investors) know the risks. Traders should be advised, on the screen where they trade, that markets may be more liquid the next morning, and be told that the order will be held for the next regular session unless they specifically direct it to be executed at night. While the idea of stock trading as a leisure-time activity may seem strange to many, it is not a new one. In the 1920's, as now, an exciting new technology made it far easier to trade stocks while also providing exciting speculative stocks that led a great bull market. That technology was radio. In the summer of 1929, trading on board ocean liners was all the rage. On the liner Berengaria, which was at sea when the 1929 crash started, one woman was said to have lost $160,000 on Oct. 24, but made back most of that through active trading the following day, when prices briefly rallied. Passengers filled the ship's brokerage office, where prices were put on a blackboard, and a large crowd gathered outside. It was a ''death watch,'' one passenger said. After the crash, the number of people trading stocks on ocean liners fell sharply. Bear markets just aren't as much fun. |
1111775_0 | In Time for the Beach, New Sunscreen Rules | The Food and Drug Administration recently issued new regulations for labeling, testing and manufacturing sun protection products. The rules do away with terms like ''sun block,'' ''waterproof'' and ''all-day protection.'' All over-the-counter sun protection products will be called ''sunscreen.'' Those that resist water will be classified either as ''water resistant'' or ''very water resistant'' on product packaging. The Federal agency also approved a list of active ingredients for over-the-counter sunscreens. In order to be considered ''active,'' ingredients have to ''absorb, reflect or scatter radiation in the UV range at wavelengths of 290 to 400 nanometers.'' UVB rays, which induce sunburn and skin cancer, fall into the 290 to 320 nanometer range, while UVA rays, which affect aging and cause skin cancer, range from 320 to 400. Some of the sunscreen-approved ingredients that the agency listed were zinc oxide, titanium dioxide, dioxybenzone and avobenzone. There were 18 in all. The agency also announced a new rating system in which sunscreen products would be ranked as ''minimum,'' ''moderate'' or ''high.'' High includes any products with an SPF, or sun protection factor, of 30 or greater, moderate is 12 to 29 and minimum is 2 to 11. SPF ratings are calculated by comparing the amount of time needed to produce a sunburn on protected skin to the amount of time needed for unprotected skin to burn. In other words, a person wearing sunscreen rated SPF 15, would take 15 times longer to burn, compared with someone not wearing sunscreen. The American Academy of Dermatology takes issue with some aspects of the new guidelines. Dr. Darrell S. Rigel, president of the academy, believes it is misleading to lump all products with SPF ratings of 30 or greater into one category. In the past, sunscreen products have been labeled as high as 60 in this country. ''Recent studies have indicated that people tend to underapply sunscreen and only get 20 to 50 percent of the rated SPF,'' Dr. Rigel said. ''If you're using a 30 the way studies have shown the average person uses it, you're only getting a 6 to 15, and that may not be sufficient. Besides, if you cap what manufacturers can claim is the highest SPF, there will be no incentive to make a better sunscreen.'' The agency counters that there are not adequate test measures to gauge the safety and effectiveness of products with SPF's of more than 30. This |
1111781_7 | For Good Health, It Helps To Be Rich and Important | whites: 28.4 percent of blacks fell below the poverty line in 1996, compared with 11.2 percent of whites, according to Government data. Death rates for African-Americans from all causes are 1.6 times higher than for white Americans, Dr. David R. Williams of the University of Michigan's Institute for Social Research, said at the Bethesda conference. Life expectancy for blacks and whites also varies. At age 45, a white man can expect to live five years longer than an African-American man, and white women can expect to live 3.7 years longer than their black counterparts. If socioeconomic status is taken into account, health differences between blacks and whites decrease substantially: Black men in the highest income brackets, for example, have a life expectancy 7.4 years longer than black men in the lowest brackets, Dr. Williams said. White men at top income levels live 6.6 years longer than their lowest-income counterparts. But race and to some extent sex still have an impact on health that is independent of social class. The gap in infant mortality rates between blacks and whites, for example, actually increases with higher social status. And being black or female discounts some of the advantages afforded by education: white men accrue health advantages with every additional year of schooling they receive. But black men and women, though they also show gains, show them only through high school, according to an analysis of Federal data by Dr. Adler and Dr. Burton Singer of Princeton University's Office of Population Research. White women, the researchers found, continue to gain in health status through college, but unlike white men, do not receive the gains in health bestowed by post-graduate education. Social exclusion, residential segregation and other expressions of institutional racism magnify the impact of socioeconomic status. Several studies, for example, have shown higher adult and infant mortality rates for people living in segregated areas. For both blacks and whites, living in a neighborhood where social bonds have eroded may have negative effects on health. Dr. Robert Putnam of Harvard University coined the term ''social capital'' to describe the elements that contribute to social cohesion. Dr. Ichiro Kawachi, director of the Harvard Center for Society and Health, has explored one aspect of social capital -- interpersonal trust -- and its relationship to national and community rates of illness and death. Dr. Kawachi and his colleagues correlated mortality rates in states with the percentage of |
1111790_4 | Steroid Use by Teen-Age Girls Is Rising | Pope Jr., chief of the Biological Psychiatry Laboratory of Harvard Medical School's McLean Hospital, and colleagues referred to a similar disorder in male weight lifters as ''reverse anorexia'' after it was observed in 1993. The researchers recently updated the work with a study of 32 women bodybuilders, 17 of whom showed signs of an emotional disorder called body dysmorphism, which is the excessive preoccupation with a trait or traits of the body viewed as ugly or defective whether they are or not. Several women in the study were so addicted to working out that they cut off job opportunities and close personal relationships. But Dr. Pope said too little research had been done on this emerging obsession among teen-age girls to draw specific conclusions about its complex causes. The case of one of the worst known adverse reactions to steroid use, reported by Dr. Goldberg, is that of a 19-year-old West Coast woman who was preparing to enter her first bodybuilding contest, lifting weights and eating a high-protein diet. She then switched to a drastically reduced intake of food and water. Obsessed with her goal, she began taking anabolic steroids and a diuretic. The steroid would add muscle and the diuretic would drain the body of fluid and make the muscle stand out more. She won the contest, but it will probably be her last. After she collected her trophy, she resumed drinking water and eating normally, and her weight shot up by 25 pounds in three days. It turned out that the diuretic had masked the actual amount of muscle she had built up, said Dr. Goldberg, who was one of a group of health experts who reviewed the case. When she drank more fluids, he said, her muscles pushed out to the full over-developed size and crushed blood vessels in her legs. Called compartment syndrome, the condition put her limbs, if not her life, in danger, and surgeons had to cut open both legs to protect her vascular system and remove significant amounts of the new muscle tissue. Dr. Goldberg and Dr. Diane L. Elliot hope to educate girls about the dangers of steroid use as they have done with boys. They recently completed a program, called Atlas, that is supported by the National Institute on Drug Abuse and is aimed at reducing steroid use among young male athletes. A main element of the program, involving 3,200 male |
1115750_0 | Drug Slashes Breast Cancer Risk, Study Shows | Final results of an international study reported yesterday show that a drug approved to fight the bone disease osteoporosis significantly decreased the risk of breast cancer among postmenopausal women. Women who took the drug, raloxifene, for three years reduced the risk of breast cancer by 76 percent compared with those who took a dummy pill in the study reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Preliminary findings from the study were reported at a scientific meeting last year. ''The results were quite dramatic, and we do not often see this amount of reduction in preventive medicine,'' the head of the study, Dr. Steven R. Cummings of the University of California at San Francisco, said in an interview. But it is premature to recommend raloxifene to lower the risk of developing breast cancer except in clinical trials, the American Society of Clinical Oncology said. For one thing, it remains to be seen whether the benefit is long-lasting. In treating breast cancer, doctors have long prescribed a related drug, tamoxifen, to block the action of the female hormone, estrogen, on breast tissue, where it can promote the growth of cancer. Last year the Food and Drug Administration approved tamoxifen as a cancer preventive for postmenopausal women at high risk of developing the disease. But tamoxifen has its own hazards, like increasing the risk of cancer of the uterus and formation of blood clots in leg veins that can be fatal if they travel to the lungs. Clots are also an unwanted effect of raloxifene, the new study found. Approval of raloxifene as a treatment to prevent breast cancer would probably increase sales of the drug, whose maker, Eli Lilly & Company, sells it under the name Evista. Lilly financed the study reported yesterday. Scientists believe that raloxifene prevents estrogen-related breast cancers by occupying the same molecular receptor sites as the estrogen molecule on the surface of cells. Raloxifene blocks estrogen's cancer promoting effects on breast and endometrial tissue, and scientists have tested raloxifene in the hope it will be safer than tamoxifen. The National Cancer Institute is sponsoring a head-to-head trial of tamoxifen and raloxifene as breast cancer preventions among 22,000 women in 400 medical centers in the United States and Canada. The study was originally designed mainly to determine whether a three-year course of raloxifene treatment reduces the risk of broken bones among postmenopausal women with osteoporosis. Dr. Cummings |
1118069_2 | Plotting Corporate Futures; Biotechnology Examines What Could Go Wrong | descriptions of how consumers and countries might react to oil shortages, for example, were better equipped than many of their competitors to deal with the shock of the oil crisis of 1973 and its aftermath. Biotechnology companies see plenty of reason to worry about unpredictable setbacks these days. While genetically engineered crops like soybeans and corn and a number of drugs have been commercial hits, critics are stepping up their efforts to portray the advances as fraught with threats to human health and the environment. Just last month, they seized on a report suggesting that the monarch butterfly caterpillars and some beneficial insects might be much more vulnerable to a natural pesticide produced by genetically engineered corn than the industry had acknowledged. And food scares in Europe over ''mad cow's disease,'' dioxin and Coke, though unrelated to biotechnology, have fanned consumer worries about food purity and given a boost to the organic-food movement. The result has been a crisis of confidence in the industry. The companies still believe in the promise of the technology but now wonder whether they will be able to convince regulators and the public that the benefits outweigh the risks. The meeting here was a follow-up to a session in April at Hoechst's headquarters in Frankfurt. Participants included not just biotechnology giants like Monsanto, DuPont and Novartis, but also newcomers like International Paper and Norsk Hydro, as well as Zurich Financial Group and Swiss Re from the insurance sector and the consumer products heavyweights Procter & Gamble and Unilever. The scenarios being developed will not be finished before the end of this summer. The job of polishing them into compelling narratives of about two pages has been handed to Betty S. Flowers, a University of Texas poetry and literature professor. Mrs. Flowers, who studied with the late Joseph Campbell, the noted authority on myths and stories, is highly sought after in scenario circles for her ability to shape the jargon of engineers and executives into crisp, easy-to-recall narratives that highlight turning points in each vision. The companies meeting here turned down a reporter's request to sit in on the discussions, but Mr. Goluke, Mrs. Flowers and several other participants shared some of their impressions afterward. Three basic stories are being developed, they said. In the first, none of the critics' warnings about health and environmental hazards prove warranted and biotechnology products gain widespread acceptance. It is |
1117839_0 | Loan for a Land Grab | The World Bank's board of executive directors ought to reject a loan package to China that would be used to relocate about 58,000 impoverished Chinese and Hui Muslim farmers to a remote area on the Tibetan plateau traditionally inhabited by Tibetans and Mongolians. In the past, China has used migration policies to tighten control over Tibetan areas and to diminish the viability of the distinct Tibetan culture. The World Bank should not be in the business of financing this destructive scheme. The Chinese Government has rejected criticism of the project and insists on going forward. But approving this loan may violate the bank's own guidelines for assessing the social and environmental impacts of its projects. Dozens of international environmental groups, Tibetan activists and 60 members of Congress have written to James Wolfensohn, president of the World Bank, to oppose the resettlement. The Clinton Administration also announced its opposition yesterday. The ostensible purpose of the project is to give desperately poor farmers in Western China a better life. But this plan would move them from badly eroded land to a barren high-altitude plain, currently used by nomads, that is itself environmentally fragile. Even though the project would involve construction of a dam and extensive irrigation works, it did not receive a full environmental assessment. Nor does it appear that the plan fully complies with World Bank policies designed to protect ethnic minorities and indigenous peoples from the adverse effects of development. The World Bank has worked hard to overcome its reputation for insensitivity to local cultural and ecological concerns. Approval of this loan would be a significant step backward. |
1117860_2 | HIGH COURT LIMITS WHO IS PROTECTED BY DISABILITY LAW | Corporation. The sisters flew as pilots for regional airlines and met Federal vision standards for airline pilots, but were turned down by United because they did not meet its standard for uncorrected vision of 20/40. Justice O'Connor said three provisions of the disability law led to the conclusion that people with remediable conditions were not disabled. First, she said, was the law's definition of disability as an impairment that ''substantially limits one or more of the major life activities,'' a definition that she noted was expressed in the ''present indicative verb form.'' ''We think the language is properly read as requiring that a person be presently -- not potentially or hypothetically -- substantially limited in order to demonstrate a disability,'' Justice O'Connor said, adding that ''a 'disability' exists only where an impairment 'substantially limits' a major life activity, not where it 'might,' 'could,' or 'would' be substantially limiting if mitigating measures were not taken.'' A person with a corrected impairment still has the impairment, she added, ''but if the impairment is corrected it does not 'substantially limit' a major life activity.'' Second, she said, the law requires that people be assessed on the basis of their individual conditions, not as members of a group that is usually affected in a particular way by an uncorrected impairment. Finally, Justice O'Connor said, the findings that Congress incorporated in the text of the law included the statement that ''some 43 million Americans have one or more physical or mental disabilities.'' She said that while the source of this figure was uncertain, Congress could not possibly have meant to include all the people who wear glasses or have some other correctable problem because the number in that case would be closer to 160 million. ''The 43 million figure reflects an understanding that those whose impairments are largely corrected by medication or other devices are not 'disabled' within the meaning'' of the disability act, she said. In the dissenting opinion in this case, Sutton v. United Airlines, No. 97-1943, Justice Stevens, joined by Justice Breyer, said that ''in order to be faithful to the remedial purpose of the act, we should give it a generous, rather than a miserly, construction.'' Congress's use of the 43 million figure may have been a form of ''legislative myopia,'' Justice Stevens said, that should not be invoked to determine the scope of the law. ''Since the purpose of the |
1117823_0 | States Limited on Institutionalization | Isolating people with disabilities in big state institutions when there is no medical reason for their confinement is a form of discrimination that violates Federal disabilities law, the Supreme Court ruled today. The 6-to-3 decision, in a case brought against the State of Georgia by two women with mental impairment, was a substantial victory for a disabilities rights movement that has looked to the Americans With Disabilities Act of 1990 as a tool for breaking down institutional walls that separate people with serious mental and physical problems from the larger community. The ruling affirmed, in most respects, a decision last year by the Federal appeals court in Atlanta, which held that states have a duty under the 1990 law to provide care in group homes when medically appropriate. In 1994, the Federal appeals court in Philadelphia, in the only other appellate decision on the subject, reached the same result. The Supreme Court's decision six months ago to hear Georgia's appeal in this case alarmed advocates for people with disabilities, who feared that the Court might steer the law in the opposite direction and reverse the nationwide trend toward deinstitutionalization. An unusually vigorous grass-roots campaign sprang up around the case, leading 15 of the 22 states that had originally supported Georgia to disavow the state's position in the Supreme Court. The case involved a 1995 lawsuit filed on behalf of Lois Curtis and Elaine Wilson, both of them mentally retarded and mentally ill, who sought state care outside the Georgia Regional Hospital, where they had lived off and on for years. Both remained in the hospital for several years after state doctors had concluded that they could be more appropriately cared for in small group homes. In some respects, the decision today was the Court's first rather than last word on the subject, and it may require more cases to clarify the full dimensions of the ruling. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg's majority opinion held that states' obligation to care for people in small, neighborhood-based settings was limited to some degree by available resources. States are not required to close their big hospitals -- which, the Court emphasized, may still be appropriate for some people -- or to create group home programs that they do not now have. (In fact, though, every state now has such a program.) The decision interpreted a regulation that requires states to make ''reasonable modifications'' in their |
1117788_0 | THE MARKETS: COMMODITIES | SUGAR RISES. Sugar prices rose as stronger-than-expected demand from Russia absorbed increased exports from Brazil, the world's biggest grower. In New York, sugar for July delivery rose 0.16 cent, to 5.98 cents a pound. |
1119489_2 | Ulster Foes Rebuff Call for Compromise as Deadline Nears | Clinton's intervention last year helped win approval for the peace agreement. The atmosphere around the talks, in the Stormont complex on the edge of Belfast, was further complicated, if not soured, by a decision of the Government-appointed Parades Commission to forbid Orange Order Protestants to march next Sunday through a Catholic area of Portadown, west of here. Both Mr. Blair and Mr. Trimble left the political talks this morning to try to work out a compromise on the parade from Drumcree church along the Garvaghy Road. Protestants say they have a right to march as citizens in a democracy. Catholics say the parade is insulting and triumphal. In recent years the conflict over this parade has been violent. Northern Ireland is now waiting to see whether the ban will lead to more violence this weekend. Mr. Trimble, according to politicians and analysts, needed a compromise on the parade that would permit the Protestant march. His apparent strategy was to compromise on the disarmament issue, making a concession to Sinn Fein, while showing that as a Protestant and an Orangeman, he was able to get the parade approved, something that has not happened since 1996. Having failed on the parade, Mr. Trimble may find it more difficult to accept a Sinn Fein promise to disarm -- rather than disarmament itself -- by May 2000, as stipulated in the 1998 peace accord. A shadow of violence disrupted the announcement of the Parades Commission's decision, at the Stormont Hotel, by its chairman, Alistair Graham. As he read a statement, alarm bells began to clang, and he smiled slightly, looked puzzled, then annoyed. The police said a Protestant guerrilla had phoned in a bomb threat, and the hotel was evacuated. Mr. Graham resumed his statement in a heavy rain in the parking lot. One of those in the audience was Steven McDonald, a New York City policeman who in 1986 was shot in Central Park and paralyzed from the neck down. He had just finished a talk in the hotel on the need for reconciliation between Catholics and Protestants. ''First we thought it was a practical joke,'' Mr. McDonald said of the alarm bells. ''Then people began to run all over the place. I thought: 'I'm in trouble.' '' But he was rushed out of the hotel in his wheelchair. He is to address the Assembly on Tuesday on the need for forgiving enemies. |
1119487_0 | World Briefing | EUROPE FRANCE: EQUALITY FOR WOMEN IN POLITICS -- Members of Parliament and senators, fewer than 10 percent of them women, approved a constitutional amendment stipulating that men and women should share elective jobs equally. The amendment to the 1958 Constitution says ''The law favors equal access by men and women to electoral mandates and elective functions,'' and obligates political parties to comply. The vote was 745 in favor, 43 against and 48 abstaining. Women, who make up 53 percent of the population, first got the vote in France in 1945. Craig R. Whitney (NYT) ITALY: HISTORIC DEFEAT FOR LEFT -- Bologna has elected a center-right mayor, the first time in 54 years that the left has lost an election in the traditionally Communist university town. The new mayor, Giorgio Guazzaloca, belongs to a coalition led by former Prime Minister Silvio Belusconi, a media tycoon. ''This is a painful, historic defeat,'' said Alessandro Ramazza, regional head of Democrats of the Left, the party of Prime Minister Massimo D'Alema. Alessandra Stanley (NYT) SCOTLAND: ANTI-ENGLISH BIAS GROWS -- The results of a poll by a Scottish newspaper show a growing bias against England. The Daily Record said 66 percent of the 800 people questioned agreed that many people in Scotland are anti-English. A newly elected Scottish Parliament, the first since union with England in 1707, opens in Edinburgh on Thursday. Warren Hoge (NYT) RUSSIA: JEHOVAH'S WITNESSES LOSE APPEAL -- A Moscow court rejected an appeal by Jehovah's Witnesses, supporting a judge's decision to allow a panel of experts to study the group's literature and recommend whether or not it should be banned. Prosecutors have been trying to outlaw the Moscow branch of the church under a provision in the law that gives courts the right to ban religious groups found guilty of inciting hatred or intolerant behavior. (AP) SWEDEN: STERILIZATION PAYMENTS STARTING -- Victims of a forced sterilization campaign can claim compensation from the Government from next Thursday, a spokeswoman from the Social Affairs Ministry said. The payments, of $20,780 a person, come two years after disclosures that nearly 63,000 people, mostly women, were sterilized between 1936 and 1976 because they were considered racially or socially inferior. (Reuters) ASIA UZBEKISTAN: DEATH FOR BOMB ATTACKS -- Six men were sentenced to death for a series of bomb attacks in February that President Islam Karimov, left, declared were an attempt by religious fanatics to assassinate |
1119473_0 | THE MARKETS: COMMODITIES | SUGAR FALLS. Sugar prices fell on signs that demand from Russia may be drying up at a time when growers in Brazil are harvesting a bumper crop. In New York, sugar for July delivery fell 0.14 cent, to 5.95 cents a pound. |
1114463_0 | Don't Blame Birth Control for Society's Ills | To the Editor: Francis Fukuyama omits a key point in his attempt to prove that the pill will unleash behaviors bound to destroy the Japanese family (Op-Ed, June 9). Japanese women are already trying to control their fertility, but with limited success. Rates of unintended pregnancy and abortion have been high for decades, showing that the limited number of contraceptive methods available are insufficient. Eighty-nine percent of married women say they want to postpone their next pregnancy or stop childbearing. Also, low-dose pills, which can reduce chances of developing ovarian cancer by up to 80 percent and endometrial cancer by up to 50 percent, could significantly improve women's health. ALEXANDER C. SANGER New York, June 9, 1999 The writer is president of Margaret Sanger Center International. |
1119733_0 | At Midnight in Belfast | The issue of disarmament has long been the most important obstacle to peace in Northern Ireland. The insistence of Protestants that the Irish Republican Army turn over its weapons, and the I.R.A.'s refusal, have wrecked previous chances at peace. The Good Friday peace agreement postpones the problem, simply committing all the parties -- most importantly, Sinn Fein, the I.R.A.'s political wing -- to doing what they can to get their allies to give up weapons. The question once again threatens the peace. David Trimble, the Protestant who is the Northern Ireland Assembly's First Minister, has demanded that the I.R.A. move on disarmament before Sinn Fein can take seats in his cabinet. Sinn Fein argues that this is not a requirement of the peace agreement, that it would not guarantee peace and that most of the region's political parties began as armed groups and never disarmed. Demanding disarmament risks a return to terror by I.R.A. extremists, who have so far supported peace. All this is true. But Mr. Trimble is also under real siege from hard-liners in his own party. Many Protestants feel their adversaries are trying to join the government while retaining the option of terror. The parties have gone into marathon negotiating sessions. The British and Irish Prime Ministers have been in Belfast this week. Both were central to the peace agreement, and well aware that if there is no compromise by midnight, Northern Ireland's self-rule will likely be postponed, which many fear could destroy the peace plan. Several compromises under discussion are still possible, even though the issue is complicated by the start of the often violent summer season of Protestant parades. Disarmament is an emotional issue, and both Mr. Trimble and Gerry Adams, the president of Sinn Fein, need something they can sell as a symbolic victory, or at least a stalemate, to their own extremists. The I.R.A. could pledge to disarm by next May, which is now what Mr. Trimble demands. Or it could make some token gesture of disarmament now. Mr. Trimble might decide that his side can live with a token disarmament by next year, if the I.R.A. behaves itself otherwise. The British Government might promise a faster winding down of its military presence, or other reforms Catholics demand. Those called the ''hard men'' on both sides have the power to take Northern Ireland back to war. Let us simply take note of the |
1119792_2 | Canada's Close Ties to Cuba Fraying Over Human Rights | a nationalist, and he decides what he thinks is best for Cuba.'' When Mr. Chretien visited Cuba in 1998, he presented a list of four political prisoners that he wanted Mr. Castro to release. But in March the four were convicted of ''counterrevolutionary activities'' and sentenced to up to five years in jail. Canada-Cuba relations then sank to their lowest point since foreign aid was suspended in the mid-1980's because of Cuba's military involvement in Angola. Foreign Affairs Minister Lloyd Axworthy ordered a review of contacts with Cuba and the policy of constructive engagement that has been the basis of Canada's approach throughout the period that Cuba has been ruled by Fidel Castro's Communist Government. While the United States imposed an economic embargo on Cuba, Canada moved in the opposite direction, believing that the best way to bring about real democratic reform in the country was to maintain strong ties. Canada also believed that it could use its influence to prod Cuba into doing more to protect human rights of its citizens, particularly political prisoners. After the policy review was completed in April, Canada decided to continue trading with and doing business in Cuba. That commerce came to $555 million in 1998. But because of the serious flaws in Cuba's human rights record, Canada's foreign ministry believed that a tougher approach was needed, at least until Cuba responded positively to Canadian concerns. Mr. Axworthy had demanded that all Cabinet ministers with programs in Cuba clear any official visits through him, and he has decided that planning for all visits should be suspended for now. That meant the indefinite postponement of trips by the International Trade Minister, Sergio Marchi, and the Minister of International Cooperation, Diane Marleau. Canada has given Cuba $24 million in foreign aid during the last five years. Officials say the funds have not been frozen completely but are subject to a case-by-case review. Several projects have already been suspended, including a plan to provide financial assistance to help Haiti cooperate in a medical development effort with Cuba. The Canadians fear that Cuba may use the medical research more for propaganda than humanitarian purposes. Canada has also backed away from a commitment to lobby for Cuba's integration into the hemisphere, particularly through participation in the Organization of American States, from which it was expelled in 1962. Canada will be the host of the organization's general assembly next June. |
1119828_0 | U.N. Meeting Splits Sharply On Limiting Population | With time running out, a 180-nation conference struggling to repair a shattered consensus on limiting world population growth was still divided today over issues ranging from abortion and family planning to sex education in schools. The conference is supposed to present an updated action plan to a special session of the United Nations General Assembly on Wednesday. But the talks adjourned late tonight with no agreement except that the parties would continue discussions in parallel with that General Assembly debate. Tonight a comparatively small group of conservative Roman Catholic and Muslim developing countries, with strong support from the Vatican, was blocking final agreement on several key aspects of the plan. Five years ago the countries meeting this week agreed in Cairo that the best way to curb population growth is not by setting numerical targets and mounting birth-control campaigns. Instead, they decided to try to improve the social status, education and health of young women and men in the belief that they will then limit the size of their families. This so-called Cairo strategy is intended to let the world's population rise from some 6 billion at present to 9.8 billion by 2050 and thereafter hold it at around that level. But difficulties arose last March when the nations who had first agreed on the Cairo strategy met here to draw up an action plan for completing it. Conservatives used this meeting to reopen key portions by inserting language playing down family planning, restricting abortion and asserting parental control over children's health and sex education. While the composition of this group varies from issue to issue, prominent members include Libya, Sudan, Morocco, Guatemala, Nicaragua and Argentina as well as the Vatican. Paying for the Cairo program is also problematic. Tonight the conference agreed to reaffirm earlier pledges on financing the program, which is expected to cost $17 billion in 2000, rising to $21.7 billion by 2017. The pledges commit developing countries to pay two-thirds of the total and the industrialized world the rest. But both are well behind on their obligations so far. Industrialized countries, which promised at Cairo to pay $5.7 billion a year, have contributed only $1.9 billion a year on average so far. Developing nations, which were supposed to pay $ 11.3 billion annually, have paid $7.8 billion a year on average, with most of that money being spent by China, India, Brazil, Mexico and Indonesia. Donors |
1119745_3 | A Glimmer of Hope in Ulster As Peace Deadline Looms | pledge. Mr. Blair has already put forward the notion, intended to reassure the Unionists, that Sinn Fein's participation in the Government would forcibly end if the I.R.A. failed to disarm in the allotted time. The de Chastelain report and the role it might play in reconciling the Catholic and Protestant sides emerged at a moment when all other efforts seemed to have failed and the possibility loomed that the carefully calibrated and much hailed agreement intended to end three decades of sectarian violence might collapse. ''I don't think anyone can underestimate the formidable difficulties we face,'' Mr. Blair said at the outset of the second day of talks, ''but we've been here before, we've done it before and we can do it again.'' Tensions were on the rise in the province after a decision on Monday by the Government-appointed Parades Commission to ban an annual Protestant march from Drumcree Church through a Catholic neighborhood in Portadown and the linking with the I.R.A. of bomb material captured by Irish police in a truck headed for Northern Ireland. The I.R.A. connection to the confiscated explosives became known when the two men arrested in the case requested admittance to the wing of the Irish jail housing members of the guerrilla group. Unionist politicians in Belfast argued unsuccessfully that the episode constituted a violation of the I.R.A.'s commitment to a cease-fire that underpinned Sinn Fein's participation in the peace effort and should result in expulsion of the party. In Portadown, Royal Ulster Constabulary police were putting up barricades and digging trenches at the rural parish that has been the scene of violent confrontations each July for the last five years, and leaders of the Orange Order, which sponsors the march, scheduled daily parades in the town leading up to this weekend's showdown. They also prepared to welcome an estimated 150 Orangemen and victims of I.R.A. violence who are crossing the province this week in a ''long march'' of solidarity with the Orangemen of Portadown. The Rev. Ian Paisley, the militant Protestant political figure, said Mr. Blair had assured him today, however, that he was still trying to find a way to settle the Drumcree standoff. David Jones, the spokesman for the Portadown Orangemen, said his people might now abandon their longtime refusal to meet with the residents of the protesting Catholic Garvaghy Road neighborhood if it would enable the men to parade this Sunday. |
1113645_2 | Smaller Families to Bring Big Change in Mexico | rates fell dramatically, the population has kept surging. For now, unemployment will remain high, since even when the economy is robust it cannot provide jobs for the 1.3 million new workers who enter the job market each year. Many of the jobless will continue to emigrate to the United States; during the next decade, some 3.5 million Mexicans are projected to travel to the United States to work and establish residence. When Emma Castro was born in 1940, Mexico's population was 19.6 million, little changed from what it had been in 1910, at the outset of the Mexican Revolution. She married at 15 after a one-day courtship, and bore her first son the following year. For the next 25 years she bore one child, on average, every 21 months. Her experience was typical. In 1956, the year Mrs. Castro bore her first son, an American anthropologist, Oscar Lewis, began collecting an oral history of a poor Mexico City family, later published as ''The Children of Sanchez.'' When Mr. Lewis first interviewed the patriarch, Jesus Sanchez, he had 4 children, but when Mexican reporters interviewed him 14 years later, Mr. Hernandez had 16 more. Government policy encouraged rapid growth, partly for historical reasons. Mexicans believed that the 19th century seizure of Mexican territories stretching from Texas to California by the United States would have been impossible had they not been so sparsely populated. But in the late 1960's, as Mexico's postwar economic boom began to slow, the sheer force of the population figures began to alarm experts. In 1970, Mexico's population hit 48 million, and in an influential study several prominent Mexican demographers warned that unless policies changed it would more than triple by the year 2000, to 148 million. Faced with the challenge to national stability those projections implied, President Luis Echeverria Alvarez in 1974 reversed course, establishing a National Population Council to control population growth and a network of Government clinics to help couples plan their families. The reversal came as women's attitudes about birth control were already changing; ignoring the Government and the Roman Catholic hierarchy, many women in the 1960's and early 1970's were buying contraceptives on the black market. As a result, the Government's new offer of family planning services began satisfying a repressed demand, and Mexican families began changing dramatically, almost overnight. ''We were determined to have just two,'' said Mrs. Castro's eldest daughter, Gloria, |
1111999_0 | Fruitless Search for Body of I.R.A. Victim Frustrates Family | The family of Jean McConville, a mother of 10 who was killed by the Irish Republican Army in 1972 because she comforted a dying British soldier, waited and hoped today that her remains would be found by Irish police. The police were excavating a beach in the Irish Republic near the Northern Ireland border. Seven other families of I.R.A. victims and scores of relatives were also waiting to see whether the police would find the remains of their loved ones, most of them Roman Catholics the I.R.A. said it executed as traitors. The Irish police were acting on information provided last week by the overwhelmingly Catholic I.R.A., which acknowledges the killings but has not apologized for them. The police are digging and dredging in four counties of the Irish Republic for the remains of eight persons killed in the 1970's and 80's, at the height of the sectarian violence between Northern Ireland's Protestant majority and the Catholic minority. The I.R.A. moved the bodies across the border to avoid the police in the north, the Royal Ulster Constabulary. The highly public search has become an emotional issue here in the Irish Republic and in Northern Ireland, further complicating the stalled peace effort in the north. Tonight, Irish national television reported that the I.R.A. said it had given all the information it had on the location of the bodies and that it hoped they would be found to ''end the anguish'' of the waiting families. But Seamus McKendry, a son-in-law of Mrs. McConville, said he wanted more details on how to find the bodies. ''If they want to end the anguish,'' Mr. McKendry said, ''let them do it. Or nobody's going to trust them as a political party.'' The I.R.A.'s disclosure was apparently intended to improve its image and to help Sinn Fein, its political wing, both in the peace effort and in local elections on June 11. The I.R.A. has observed a cease-fire for 22 months, but has refused to disarm. This has been cited by Protestant leaders as grounds for denying Sinn Fein Cabinet posts in the new Northern Ireland Assembly, created to carry out political changes approved last year in the Belfast peace agreement. The agreement is intended to give minority Catholics more power in the north, and to increase the influence in northern affairs of the overwhelmingly Catholic Irish Republic. On Friday, acting on information provided by the |
1112044_11 | POISON ISLAND: a special report; At Bleak Asian Site, Killer Germs Survive | the Administration is encouraging Uzbek and Kazakh officials to work on jointly with American experts. And all three countries have been pressing Russia to provide more information about what happened here. Milton Leitenberg, a professor and expert on Russia's unconventional weapons, said that in 1987 Moscow listed Aralsk -- but not the island -- among its germ-related sites, a listing required by the 1972 convention that banning germ warfare. In its 1992 declaration, Russia finally listed the island, but as a site where only defensive testing for vaccines and materials had been performed. ''The Russians,'' Professor Leitenberg concludes, ''have never come clean about these programs.'' The Neighbors The Poor and Sick Could Get Even Sicker The people who live near the island know all too well how little Russia cared for their safety and welfare. No region of Uzbekistan has been harder hit by the Soviet Union's economic policies or its relentless pursuit of unconventional weapons than Karakalpakstan, a semi-autonomous Uzbek republic of almost 5 million people with their own distinct traditions, language and culture. In Karakalpakstan, the home of the Aral Sea, the once thriving fishing industry has been devastated, the arable land ruined by overuse of fertilizers and pesticides and the ground water polluted. Yusup S. Kamalov, an Uzbek scientist who heads the Union for the Defense of the Aral Sea, an independent environmental group, called the situation ''next to hopeless.'' The sea, once the world's fourth largest lake, now ranks 10th, he said. Its surface water has shrunk by half, its volume reduced by 75 percent. ''The sea is dying,'' he said. Ian Small, the country manager of Doctors Without Borders, the volunteer physicians' group, says Karakalpaks are among the most ''chronically sick people in the former Soviet Union.'' Ninety eight percent of pregnant women are anemic. Infant mortality rates are comparable to those of sub-Saharan Africa. Two-thirds of the population suffer from some chronic illness, often tuberculosis, whose incidence is the highest in the former Soviet Union. ''We've seen an alarming increase in kidney disease and various cancers,'' he said. ''But because there has been no census since 1989 and health statistics are either nonexistent or unreliable, it's impossible to know whether what we are seeing is the result of the region's general poverty and environmental degradation or the past chemical and biological testing.'' While local and Uzbek officials try to provide decent health care, he |
1117431_2 | Panel Confirms No Major Illness Tied to Implants | issued last July by scientists in Britain who had been charged by the British minister of health with reviewing implant safety. Scientists appointed by Judge Robert E. Jones of Federal District Court in Oregon, reached a comparable conclusion. Meanwhile, Dow Corning, a subsidiary of the Dow Chemical Company, which filed for bankruptcy citing the burden of its breast implant litigation, has agreed to pay women $3.2 billion to settle their claims. Other implant manufacturers, Baxter International, Bristol-Myers Squibb, and 3M, have agreed to a total settlement estimated to be nearly $4 billion. In addition, thousands of women have settled their cases in private agreements with implant makers or gone to trial and won awards that reached millions of dollars. The Institute of Medicine committee estimated that about 1.5 million to 1.8 million American women have had silicone breast implants, about 70 percent for breast enlargement and the rest as reconstruction after mastectomy. Members of the committee, headed by Dr. Stuart Bondurant, a professor of medicine at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Dr. Virginia Ernster, a professor of epidemiology at the University of California at San Francisco, were prohibited from discussing the report until it was officially made public. Sybil Goldrich, founder of Command Trust Network, an information clearinghouse for women with silicone problems, said, ''I find it extremely difficult to accept what the Institute of Medicine says because those studies are paid for by the manufacturers. They have not convinced me that their review is correct. It is as simple as that.'' Tommy Jacks, a lawyer in Austin, Tex., whose firm has represented 425 women with implants, said he doubts that the report will be the last word on the matter. ''This report is simply a review of the literature by a committee that's reached some conclusion,'' he said. ''It is premature to conclude that reports like this are the last word that scientists and physicians will have about the safety of breast implants,'' he said. But medical experts informed of the committee's conclusions, applauded them. Dr. Shaun Ruddy, chairman of the rheumatology, allergy, and immunology division at Virginia Commonwealth University's Medical College of Virginia in Richmond, said the conclusions were ''very forthright and outspoken'' and he was glad the group was attempting to put the disease hypotheses to rest. Dr. Ruddy, a past president of the American College of Rheumatology, said he had had no |
1114687_3 | Scientists Now Envision Life Without Menopause | the ovary produces other beneficial hormones that stop after menopause. Despite those gaps in understanding, it is increasingly common for menopausal American women to take estrogen to replace what they lose. But such therapy has drawbacks, including a lack of effectiveness in some women and fears of increased cancer risk. If scientists can better understand what triggers bone loss and cardiovascular problems in menopausal women, ''We have some chance of intervening in a way that doesn't necessarily directly involve estrogen,'' said Dr. Frank Bellino, the endocrinology program administrator for the National Institute on Aging. Dr. Tilly said that because the mouse findings involve keeping ovaries viable and their eggs alive, they could also -- eventually, perhaps -- mean help for women who undergo premature menopause, or who become infertile because of chemotherapy. Better understanding of how eggs age would also probably help women over age 40 who find their chances of becoming pregnant greatly diminished because of their old eggs, he said. Mainly, however, the mouse findings cast light on the strange life of the ovary. It used to be thought that a woman had only a small number of eggs, and after releasing one each month from the ovary, she simply ran out, bringing on menopause. Now, it is known that she begins with millions of eggs, but they die relatively quickly and are never replaced, earning the ovaries their reputation as the fastest-aging organs in the body. Before a female fetus is born, she has up to seven million egg cells. By the time she is born, a baby girl has only one million or two million left, and their number dwindles until only about 400,000 or so are left at puberty, and virtually none by age 50. The overall goal of his research, Dr. Tilly said, ''is to understand why the ovary ages, and can we regulate the process for the benefit of women's health?'' A broader question is at issue as well, one that would interest all women: Does giving a woman's ovaries greater longevity mean she will live longer? If the aging of the ovary furthers the aging of the woman, doesn't it stand to reason that younger ovaries would mean, effectively, younger women? Maybe, Dr. Tilly said, but ''right now, we don't have conclusive proof that the animals will live longer; they're sitting in cages, hopefully aging well.'' His researchers also are awaiting results |
1115149_0 | For Poor Nations, Debt Is Bondage | To the Editor: Re ''Smaller Families to Bring Big Change in Mexico'' (front page, June 8): The decreasing size of Mexican families has occurred because the Government has made a long-term commitment to family planning education and services. Yet while Mexico is committed to its family planning program and population stabilization, United States policy in these areas has often been undermined by the far right. Right now, Congress is engaged in its annual debate on financing for the United Nations Population Fund, part of the State Department authorization bill. As usual, the far right is pushing to remove this financing or to attach restrictive language. It's time for the United States to assert leadership in support of the voluntary family planning programs that are endorsed by a majority of the world's women. CAROL FULLER Santa Cruz, Calif., June 8, 1999 |
1114833_0 | Choosing Colors By Historic Accuracy | FOR most homeowners, choosing the color for interior walls, ceilings and moldings is largely a matter of taste. The only considerations are whether a color may look good or where a particular hue might be used to create a desired effect. The decision is more complicated for homeowners who live in historic houses if they want to maintain the period accuracy of their homes. For them, it is important to know what colors were available when and how they were used by decorators. Styles and color preferences have changed considerably over the decades. Understanding the way colors and motifs have been used in the past can help to make period interiors more accurate. A general knowledge of color history can also be helpful to anyone interested in interior decoration, because it provides a source of inspiration for contemporary design. The first period in American architectural history is the Colonial period. During the early part of this period, functionalism took precedence over decoration. American interiors were dominated by the natural color of the building materials, mostly wood and stone. Plaster, sometimes used on walls or fireplaces had a beige or tan cast from the sand in its makeup. Colored fabrics, in the form of braided rugs and quilts, were used to break the monotony of the austere interiors. In the early part of the 18th century, homeowners became more affluent and sophisticated. They could afford to build larger homes and decorate them with paints and fabrics imported from abroad, particularly England. English influences introduced decorating schemes with chromatic color, that is colors other than black or white. Wood paneling was often painted gray, light blue or green, and sometimes with red-brown. Wood trim and molding around windows and doors was painted with colors that complemented the drapes or upholstery. Stenciled designs were used to relieve stark plaster walls. Wood floors that were not carpeted were painted, in solid colors or in patterns. The Federal and Greek Revival movement reflected the idea that classical Greek temples exemplified perfection in design. Builders and interior designers used figures and patterns derived from classical Greek motifs. Interior wall colors, gray, green and blue, were muted. Ceilings, trim and moldings were usually white or off-white with gilt accents. Floors were not painted but finished to show the natural grain of the wood, and they were often covered entirely, or in part, with carpets woven in floral |
1114756_4 | The Hermitage Sees The Future, and It Works | Coca-Cola and supporters in Japan and the Netherlands. It was Dutch money that paid for the recent renovations in the room housing the Hermitage's stunning Rembrandt collections, improving the lighting and fixing the ceilings. ''We sometimes joke that we should move the Rembrandts from room to room,'' Mr. Piotrosvky said with a laugh. ''What is good and bad about the donation system is that people only want to give to specific projects,'' he added. ''Nobody wants to give money for the sewage system.'' But even there, he said, the Hermitage has benefited from a Scandanivian consortium that is using the museum as a pilot project to help St. Petersburg better control its effluents into the Bay of Finland. Over the last years, the Hermitage has also carried on its regular maintenance, paying closer attention to security and atmosphere control. Here, oddly enough, the biggest concern is not the humidity that hangs over St. Petersburg's watery landscape but the dryness that comes from a central heating system installed in this century. In the meantime, fundraising has begun for the grand expansion plan. The effort has been aided by a handsome, spiral-bound brochure explaining the proposed restoration clearly and in detail, a rarity for Russian cultural projects. Mr. Piotrovsky understands that the best approach is to proceed one step at a time. By the end of the year, he hopes to complete the restoration of 10 exhibition rooms in the new building in time to house a show on the Empire style in France and Russia, titled ''In the Shadow of the Eagle.'' ''Donations or no donations, we will do it,'' he said. In Russia's close-knit cultural elite, many say that if anyone can do it, Mr. Piotrovsky can. ''He is a great communicator and intellectual,'' said Mihail Kamensky, deputy director of the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow. ''The Hermitage deserves the best,'' Mr. Kamensky said. ''Were it in New York or Washington, all the big millionaires would come together and invest all that is needed. What is problematic in Russia is that no matter how great the museum, and how valuable its cultural heritage, the state is not able to invest an adequate amount of money.'' And, he added, private benefactors cannot be enticed with tax deductions, as they are in the United States. ''We are only starting to come closer to the real techniques of fundraising,'' Mr. Kamensky |
1114790_0 | The Hurdles of Teaching the Deaf | SHANNON WEESE, a 17-year-old student at the New York School for the Deaf here, is studying journalism and drama at Woodlands High School in nearby Greenburgh. In turn, 12 Woodlands students are meeting their foreign language requirements by studying American Sign Language taught by an instructor from Shannon's school. At first glance, it appears to be a simple exchange program. But nothing is simple in the debate about how -- and whether -- the worlds of the deaf and the worlds of the hearing should intersect. Particularly complicated are questions about putting deaf students in traditional classrooms, a practice known as mainstreaming. ''We are rethinking some basic principles,'' said Albert T. Pimentel, headmaster of the state-supported private School for the Deaf, also known as the Fanwood School, which this year has 162 students in pre-school through 12th grade. After decades of trial and error there are examples of mainstreaming working, he said, and of occasions when it fails. ''Sometimes even though you make an effort to integrate a student in the physical sense in a normal classroom, he or she remains isolated emotionally,'' he said. Fanwood students can participate in activities and classes at Woodlands, but the program remains optional, in part because some students did not thrive when put in a full-time public school classroom have not thrived. Public schools ''often make a lot of assumptions in trying to get students to adjust to their world,'' he said. Students at Fanwood are sent there by their school districts, which must first decide that they are unable to meet a student's needs. The New York State Education Department requires that students have a hearing loss of at least 80 decibels in the better ear to be considered for admission to the school, which has students from more than 70 districts. Statewide tests aimed at setting stricter standards for all students have put new pressures on those who educate the deaf. According to state figures, about 0.17 percent of all students in the state in 1998 were deaf -- 1,922 out of 3.3 million in New York that year. Rita D. Levay, manager of special education policy for the state's Office of Vocational Education Service for Individuals With Disabilities, which provided the figures, explained that the state classifies deafness as a disability. Susan K. Murray, principal of the New York School for the Deaf, explained that while some educators were seeking |
1114880_0 | Enhancing a House Through Color | FOR most homeowners, choosing the color for interior walls, ceilings and moldings is largely a matter of taste. The only considerations are whether a color may look good or where a particular hue might be used to create a desired effect. The decision is more complicated for homeowners who live in historic houses if they want to maintain the period accuracy of their homes. For them, it is important to know what colors were available when and how they were used by decorators. A general knowledge of color history can also be helpful to anyone interested in interior decoration, because it provides a source of inspiration for contemporary design schemes. The first period in American architectural history is the colonial period. During the early part of this period, functionalism took precedence over decoration. American interiors were dominated by the natural color of the building materials, mostly wood and stone. Plaster, sometimes used on walls or fireplaces, was not white, but had a beige or tan cast from the sand in its makeup. Colored fabrics, in the form of braided rugs and quilts, were used to break the monotony of the austere interiors. In the early part of the 18th century, homeowners became more affluent and sophisticated. They could afford to build larger homes and decorate them with paints and fabrics imported from abroad, particularly England. English influences introduced decorating schemes with chromatic color, that is colors other than black or white. Wood paneling was often painted with hues of gray, light blue or green, and sometimes with red-brown. Wood trim and molding around windows and doors was painted with colors that complemented the drapes or upholstery. Stenciled designs were used to relieve stark plaster walls. Wood floors that were not carpeted were painted, in solid colors or in patterns. The Federal and Greek-Revival movement reflected the idea that classical Greek temples exemplified perfection in design. Builders and interior designers used figures and patterns derived from classical Greek motifs. Interior wall colors, gray, green and blue, were muted and restrained. Ceilings, trim and moldings were usually white or off-white with gilt accents. Floors were not painted but finished to show the natural grain of the wood, and they were often covered entirely, or in part, with carpets woven in floral or geometric designs. Drapes and upholstery provided strong decorative accents with hues of red, blue and green used in stripes or |
1114683_1 | Words of Caution About a Hot Potato | uterine cancer. Natural progesterone is widely perceived as safer than progestin, its synthetic cousin and a common ingredient in hormone replacement therapy. This conviction was bolstered by the debut last December of the first prescription natural progesterone for menopausal women. But do these products live up to the glowing testimony? And is the new oral prescription drug superior? Yam balms cannot supply the body with natural progesterone, said Gail Mahady, an authority on plant medicine at the University of Illinois in Chicago. ''Only a pharmaceutical laboratory can convert the compounds in yams into progesterone,'' Professor Mahady explained. Natural progesterone creams are not always what they seem to be, either. Aeron Life Cycles, a diagnostic testing company in San Leandro, Calif., screened 27 products and found that 15 of them contained no or little progesterone. The rest contained dosages that might be useful, but only if they were adequately absorbed -- a big ''if'' for many doctors. In fact, a report published last year in The Lancet, the British medical journal, concluded that Progest, a relatively high-dose cream that is a top seller in the United States, does not raise blood progesterone levels sufficiently to protect the uterus from the cancer-inducing effects of taking estrogen alone; currently, that is the only use for which progesterone has been clinically approved. Many doctors find this result disturbing, because some women are substituting creams like Progest for the progestin normally prescribed in hormone replacement therapy. There is also little or no evidence to support the use of progesterone cream by itself to fortify bones or douse hot flashes, menopause experts said. By contrast, the new prescription progesterone, a capsule sold under the brand name Prometrium, may offer genuine benefits to users of hormone replacement. While comparable to progestin in preventing estrogen's cancerous effects on the uterus, Prometrium is believed to offer better protection against heart disease. In clinical trials, it was better than progestin at preserving estrogen's positive effect on cholesterol levels. Some women may also tolerate Prometrium better than Provera and other synthetic progesterones. But even though Prometrium is identical to the body's own hormone, it causes dizziness, headaches, sore breasts and other adverse reactions in 9 percent to 16 percent of women. The drug is not cheap, either. A bottle of 100 capsules (roughly a seven-week supply) sells for $54, though most insurers will cover some or all of the cost. CHECKUPS |
1115038_0 | Latin America's Birth Surprise | Four months from now, the world's population is expected to hit six billion. Although it will continue to soar for decades to come, the population would be far higher if the last 30 years had not brought a significant drop in fertility in many regions. The drop is not surprising in rich countries and newly wealthy East Asian nations such as Taiwan and Singapore. More remarkable is the fertility drop in Latin America. A Times article last week detailed the change in Mexico, and similar gains have been made throughout the region. In the mid-1960's, Latin American women averaged more than 6 children. Today the average is 2.9. The benefits of smaller families are seen not only in a better life for children and their parents, but also in an increased savings rate and less cost to the state. Latin America today is not markedly wealthier than in 1965. But its women have much higher levels of education, access to health care and employment. Latin American nations must do more to reduce their birth rates, but they are ahead of South Asia and especially Africa. Even as those regions struggle to get richer, they could reap the benefits of smaller families by making contraception available and emphasizing women's basic well-being. Mexico's family-planning campaign is the major one initiated by a government. In 1974, Mexico established a network of clinics, and Government-sponsored billboards touting the benefits of small families are ubiquitous. In the rest of Latin America, governments reluctant to defy the Catholic Church have mainly left family planning to private groups, most of which got their start with financing from the United States Agency for International Development and the International Planned Parenthood Federation. Today, those groups are trying to become self-sufficient, as donors switch their focus to South Asia and Africa. They have also been hurt by hundreds of millions of dollars in cuts for overseas family planning engineered by Republicans in Congress. The acknowledged leader is Colombia's Profamilia, founded in 1965. Profamilia has been a pioneer in many now-common techniques -- the use of radio to promote family planning, a network of trained volunteers offering contraceptives and information door to door, mobile sterilization vans and now special clinics for men. The most remote Colombian village has a bodega stocking Profamilia's pills and condoms. Now Profamilia, with grants from the Dutch Government and the United Nations, is training others. Contraceptives |
1114994_1 | The World; The Spark of Hope In an Ancient Hate | in recent months, following the capture of the Kurdish guerrilla leader Abdullah Ocalan. Mr. Ocalan, who is reviled in Turkey as a terrorist responsible for thousands of deaths, was found to have been living under the protection of Greek diplomats in Kenya. Turkish leaders accused Greece of supporting a mass murderer in an effort to sow chaos in Turkey. Greek leaders shot back, calling Turkey a thinly disguised military dictatorship that brought the Kurdish problem on itself through discrimination and repression. If Turks are outraged by Greece's role in protecting Mr. Ocalan, Greece also has a new focus for its anger. Turkish leaders have begun asserting that there are political ''gray zones'' in the Aegean Sea, suggesting that Turkey has designs on islands that have long been considered Greek. Dozens of interviews in both countries suggest that the animosity between these neighbors is fed by a combination of prejudice and political competition. But they also revealed hope that a more positive relationship might emerge out of the current trouble. ''Whenever I am in Greece, what strikes me is how alike we are,'' said Orhan Taylan, a Turkish painter who is a member of a small Greek-Turkish friendship group. ''We have the same emotions, we tell the same jokes, we eat the same food, we listen to the same music, we look at the world the same way. That's what makes it so awful that this conflict just keeps dragging on.'' Studying the psychology of Greek-Turkish relations is a passion for the historian Hercules Millas, who was born to Greek parents in Istanbul and considers himself at home in both countries. ''Neither side has any empathy with the other or any doubt that it is 100 percent right,'' Mr. Millas said. ''The Turk you know personally may be good, but the Turkish nation as a whole is a brutal and warlike enemy. For Turks, Greeks are liars, full of intrigues and bad intentions, definitely not to be trusted.'' Turkey has nearly six times the population of Greece, a much more powerful army and a crucial location that makes it a highly desirable ally. Greece is more developed and widely considered more democratic, but Turkey has far greater strategic value. H ISTORY plays a great role in creating the suspicions that infect the Greek-Turkish relationship. These may be the only two countries in the world that fought their definitive wars of liberation |
1114878_0 | Enhancing a House Through Color | FOR most homeowners, choosing the color for interior walls, ceilings and moldings is largely a matter of taste. The only considerations are whether a color may look good or where a particular hue might be used to create a desired effect. The decision is more complicated for homeowners who live in historic houses if they want to maintain the period accuracy of their homes. For them, it is important to know what colors were available when and how they were used by decorators. A general knowledge of color history can also be helpful to anyone interested in interior decoration, because it provides a source of inspiration for contemporary design schemes. The first period in American architectural history is the colonial period. During the early part of this period, functionalism took precedence over decoration. American interiors were dominated by the natural color of the building materials, mostly wood and stone. Plaster, sometimes used on walls or fireplaces, was not white, but had a beige or tan cast from the sand in its makeup. Colored fabrics, in the form of braided rugs and quilts, were used to break the monotony of the austere interiors. In the early part of the 18th century, homeowners became more affluent and sophisticated. They could afford to build larger homes and decorate them with paints and fabrics imported from abroad, particularly England. English influences introduced decorating schemes with chromatic color, that is colors other than black or white. Wood paneling was often painted with hues of gray, light blue or green, and sometimes with red-brown. Wood trim and molding around windows and doors was painted with colors that complemented the drapes or upholstery. Stenciled designs were used to relieve stark plaster walls. Wood floors that were not carpeted were painted, in solid colors or in patterns. The Federal and Greek-Revival movement reflected the idea that classical Greek temples exemplified perfection in design. Builders and interior designers used figures and patterns derived from classical Greek motifs. Interior wall colors, gray, green and blue, were muted and restrained. Ceilings, trim and moldings were usually white or off-white with gilt accents. Floors were not painted but finished to show the natural grain of the wood, and they were often covered entirely, or in part, with carpets woven in floral or geometric designs. Drapes and upholstery provided strong decorative accents with hues of red, blue and green used in stripes or |
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