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1114688_3 | Researchers Shine a Night Light on a Possible Link to Cancer | the same effect as removing the pineal gland: The animals sprouted many malignant breast tumors. Now a soon-to-be-published study in the journal Cancer Letters provides the strongest support yet for a connection between nocturnal light exposure and cancer in animals. Dr. David Blask, an oncologist at Bassett Research Institute in Cooperstown, N.Y., exposed rats at night to dim light ''equivalent,'' he said, ''to a crack of light coming through a door in an otherwise pitch-black room.'' That weak level totally suppressed the animals' melatonin production. And when he transplanted malignant liver tumors to their bodies, the tumors grew significantly more rapidly than in similarly treated animals kept in darkness. In search of further proof that ''light pollution'' contributes to human cancer, circadian researchers are studying blind women. As Dr. Richard Stevens, a cancer epidemiologist at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Wash., explained, ''Women who are profoundly blind should be at lower risk of breast cancer, because they can't perceive light at night.'' Studies of blind women in the United States, Sweden and Finland appear to support the theory. A new analysis of the Finnish data, reported by Dr. Stevens and his colleagues in this month's British Journal of Cancer, showed a steplike decrease in breast cancer that coincided with the severity of the women's visual impairment. WOMEN completely insensitive to light had 60 percent fewer breast cancers than women with normal sight. As perception of light and form increased across the group, the margin steadily narrowed to 40 percent, 30 percent and 10 percent fewer breast cancers, respectively. But those women who only barely met the definition of legal blindness had breast cancer rates indistinguishable from those of their sighted counterparts. Despite the correlation, Dr. Stevens cautioned that profoundly blind women sometimes have irregular melatonin cycles. ''We still need more research,'' he said, ''to sort out whether nocturnal light is truly a significant cancer risk in the general population.'' What to do in the meantime? Researchers almost unanimously advise against taking daily melatonin supplements, whose long-term safety is still unknown. But they do recommend simple, practical steps for preserving the body's melatonin cycle. ''Get plenty of sleep, use thick blinds to block out stray light, and if you need to get up in the middle of the night for any reason, don't turn on a bright light,'' Dr. Reiter said. Kathleen McAuliffe is a contributing editor at More magazine. |
1114681_2 | When Medical Science Called, Why the Heck Did I Answer? | article, I participated for a day in a metabolic study conducted at the hospital, which is known for its metabolic research. Last year, my name apparently surfaced. Someone must have done the math and realized that I was just about the age (48) to be a candidate for a ''menopause transition'' project. I got a call and, without thinking much about it, said, ''Why not?'' In retrospect, it was an odd decision. I have never been much interested in following research on women's health. When I was pregnant, I studiously avoided all books on childbirth on the theory that it had been going on for centuries without the aid of how-to manuals. Likewise, I've never cracked any of the dozens of books about menopause. My sister, four years older than I, recently sailed through the ''transition'' without a hitch, and I figured I would, too. To be sure, the study sounds worthwhile. It is led by Dr. Eric T. Poehlman, whose previous research (see: ''Determinants of Decline in Resting Metabolic Rate in Aging Females,'' American Journal of Physiology, Volume 264, 1993) showed that as women age, they gain fat and lose muscle, that their sensitivity to insulin decreases, and that their cholesterol levels and blood pressure increase. These changes are associated with heart disease and diabetes. Based on those findings, Dr. Poehlman and Dr. Michael J. Toth, his co-investigator, decided to do an in-depth study to determine whether the menopause transition accelerates these age-related changes. The data will generate more studies, which will, Dr. Poehlman hopes, lead to recommendations for ''appropriate interventions,'' which might include hormone-replacement therapy, and guidelines for caloric intake and exercise. The National Institute on Aging approved, and handed over $2 million. Very impressive. Even more impressive, however, is that they found not only me, but also 59 other women, to volunteer. And even more astounding is that, given the hundreds of clinical research laboratories around the country, there are thousands of test subjects giving up their time and bodily fluids on any given day. Of course, there are the ''professionals,'' people like Robert Helms of Philadelphia, a 41-year-old former labor activist who earns $250 to $300 a day testing drugs. (He recently did stints on cardiac drugs, blood pressure medication and a synthetic protein that may be used to treat lupus.) Of the image of the professional guinea pig as a derelict, he says: ''That's simply |
1114676_0 | F.A.A. Gives Computers Bigger Role in Security | IT may not be obvious to passengers, but the Federal Aviation Administration is trying to close three weak spots in airline security: relying on human judgment to spot suspicious passengers, allowing checked bags to catch a connecting flight when the suspicious passenger doesn't, and permitting baggage screeners to grow complacent. But the remedies may still be at least two years away. On April 19, the F.A.A. published a proposed new security rule, which is open to public comment for 60 days, and the airlines' response was to ask to extend the comment period another 60 days. It would require that for all flights on planes with more than 60 seats, airlines use computers with profiling software to identify suspicious passengers instead of relying on airline personnel. The software was developed with a Federal subsidy, and most major airlines have been using it voluntarily since January 1998; the F.A.A. will not reveal most of the criteria used by the software, but one of them is whether the passenger paid cash for a ticket at the last minute. When this computer profiling began, civil-liberties groups and Arab American groups complained that it would be based on ethnicity or religion and thus violate some passengers' rights. But the Justice Department, privy to the criteria, ruled that the criteria were not discriminatory. Now the F.A.A. wants to make the automated profiling mandatory, it says, partly because it eliminates ''the potential perception of personal biases.'' Also, the F.A.A. says, the computer can juggle more factors than a ticket agent can, and if the criteria are computerized, they will be easier to keep secret. The airlines have generally accepted profiling, which is integrated into their reservations computers. On domestic flights, the bags of passengers who meet the profile are either scanned for explosives or are ''matched,'' meaning that they will not be carried on a flight unless the passenger boards as well. (On international flights, no bags are supposed to be carried unless the owner is on board.) There are loopholes, however. If the bag is checked through to a final domestic destination and the passenger is connecting on a different airline, the second airline may not continue with this ''bag match'' procedure. Even if the passenger is connecting on the same airline, the match may not occur on the second flight. The fear is that a terrorist might fly to a hub with a checked |
1114697_9 | In the Cook Islands, Ukuleles and Hymns | ''sinful'' music and dance, and tried to ban it -- fortunately, they didn't succeed. Like West Indians at a carnival ball, the Aitutakians at Ralphie's Bar know how to throw a world-class party. The next day things got even better. I'd booked a daylong lagoon cruise ($35, but it included snorkeling equipment and a huge lunch spread of fish and vegetables prepared on board), and the weather was perfect, the lagoon utterly smooth. Jumping off the boat into the warm water, I lost myself in a cloud of tiger fish and swirled for an hour through coral gardens with huge, long-limbed starfish. The boat stopped to allow us the option of a short walk into the jungle thicket of an uninhabited motu. Then we headed off to One Foot Island, a motu shaped like a footprint with a perfect swath of pink sand, for a swim to the reef. The versatile boat crew caught a giant octopus. Then they started to sing and play ukuleles. I was growing fond of ukuleles. On Sunday morning the slow, easy life of Aitutaki gets even slower; most of the islanders are Christian, and everyone goes to church. And so did I, ignoring the protests of the party gang back at the Maina Sunset, who'd arranged a boat for another lagoon cruise that day. And I am glad I did, for if I'd gone along with them I would have missed Aitutaki's greatest treasure: its hymn singing. I could hear the rise and fall of the voices as I approached the Aitutaki Christian Church on foot, my umbrella unfurled against the hot sun. When missionaries came in the 1800's, they taught their converts the English hymns of the day. The Maoris melded the words to their own style of singing, the singing that had lifted their spirits for centuries as they headed into dark, unknown waters in fragile canoes. Familiar to my ears, and yet laced with odd intervals and sudden modal changes, the music ringing the church's rafters was swooping, glorious, like a choral arrangement of a Stravinsky symphony. I'd never heard anything quite like this before, and my mouth dropped open in wonder. To my relief, nobody noticed; the church ladies in their fancy straw hats and the men in their Sunday suits sang on, heedless of my awe. It was just another Sunday service for them. But tomorrow I would board |
1115185_0 | Young Athletes With Old Bones | Six months ago the very thin ballet student limped into Dr. Jordan Metzl's office at the Hospital for Special Surgery in New York, complaining of pain in her left shin. ''She seemed healthy, except that she had never gotten her period,'' Dr. Metzl recalled. After diagnosing a stress fracture, he made a more serious discovery. At age 15, the dancer was in the earliest stage of osteoporosis, a bone-thinning disorder usually identified with post-menopausal women. The girl presented a classic case of the female athlete triad, a syndrome identified in the early 1990's that affects active women. It consists of disordered eating, which ranges from excessive dieting to anorexia; amenorrhea, the loss of, or failure to start, menstruation, and osteoporosis. The components are interrelated. Calorie restriction can lead to low estrogen and amenorrhea; the lack of estrogen, needed for bone formation, may cause osteoporosis. No one knows how common the syndrome is among adolescents, but it has probably grown along with girls' participation in sports, Dr. Metzl said. The highest-risk activites are those like dance, gymnastics, ice skating and long distance running, in which a slim figure is considered ideal. The triad is difficult to diagnose in adolescence, when erratic menstrual cycles are common, Dr. Metzl said. Stress fractures, an early sign, may not show in X-rays. For that reason, Dr. Metzl often orders more sensitive tests, like a bone scan. Signs of undereating may also be subtle. ''A girl can eat normally but have an energy deficit because she burns a lot of calories exercising,'' said Dr. Barbara Drinkwater, a former president of the American College of Sports Medicine in Indianapolis. One theory is that serious calorie shortfalls prompt the cessation of menstruation. Osteoporosis is especially harmful for adolescent girls. ''Bone development only happens until age 30; then bone mass is gradually lost,'' Dr. Metzl said. ''The lower your peak bone density value, the riskier your situation as you get older.'' Dr. Drinkwater said, ''Research among anorexics suggests that it is possible to recover some, but not all, of the bone mass with proper treatment.'' For the dancer who visited Dr. Metzl, that involved calcium supplements, estrogen-filled birth control pills and eating enough calories to gain six pounds. ''She says that her dancing ability improved when she put on a little more weight,'' said Dr. Metzl. NANCY STEDMAN CHECKUPS |
1114879_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 |
1116530_2 | Steal This Book: What the Bible and the Beats Have in Common | Dover Classics books, which sell for $1 or $2, are also popular. He says that art and travel books that can be sold on the street are stolen by professionals. At Powell's Book Store, in Portland, Ore., one of the largest chain stores, the general manager, Miriam Sontz, said that people who take books fall into two categories: those who steal on impulse and those who take books to sell for money. She said that people take books they would be ashamed to buy: books on cocaine cultivation, sex dysfunction or ''racy'' books for teen-agers. Bibles are also a favorite, she added, saying she does not know why. Karen Watkins, vice president and general manager of Vroman's Bookstore, which has been in Pasadena, Calif., for 105 years, said that drug dealers and the homeless steal salable books. She said she believed that those thieves are given lists by used-book stores specifying which titles are in demand. Art books, first editions and hardcover mysteries are hard to keep on the shelves, she added. The Strand Book Store in Manhattan seems to attract a more intellectual crowd. Although electronic detectors installed five years ago significantly cut down on theft, the owner, Fred Bass, said that before the heightened security, Greek and Latin classics, books on higher mathemathics, philosophy and Judaica as well as other scholarly and religious books were targets. These days, he said, art books are taken by professional thieves. At Green Apple Books and Music in San Francisco, the general manager, Pete Mulvihill, reports that current favorites for shoplifters included Bibles and books on philosophy. Across the bay, in Berkeley, Patrick Marks, buyer for Cody's Books, said that works by Toni Morrison and Bukowski were stolen before its security system was updated. The more persistent thieves are interested in monster books, language audio tapes, tarot cards and coins that come in game books, he said. In Tuscaloosa, Ala., the Book Cellar's manager, Edna Thomas, said that stealing was not a major problem, although occasionally rock-and-roll and computer-game magazines were taken. Not surprisingly, theft does not seem to be much of a problem in affluent Martha's Vineyard. Dana Anderson, an owner of Bickerton & Ripley in Edgartown, Mass., said that books on summer reading lists were stolen occasionally as were small gift books, but that nothing major had been shoplifted. Alex Comfort's ''Joy of Sex'' used to be a favorite of |
1116575_0 | Dingjiaergou Journal; Remains of a Day, Unearthed, Enrich Another | In Ding Yaohong's tiny sitting room, mud walls are etched with deep cracks and two tattered chairs vie for space with roosting chickens, signs of this remote region's desperate poverty. But the new centerpiece of the room, displacing a small, rotting table, is the valuable fossilized spine of an ancient spade-toothed elephant that Mr. Ding recently unearthed -- portending a more prosperous future. For years, the farmers here struggled to coax wheat and corn to grow on these arid, rocky hills, but the land gave little in return. ''Plant a handful of seed and you get a handful of crops,'' a local saying goes. But recently this barren, brown wasteland has yielded a lucrative new crop that stands to repay the village for its generations of suffering: a cache of nearly intact 15 million-year-old fossils, which the villagers plan to sell. ''We've been digging for fossils for more than 10 years, but this is the first time we've hit upon anything like this,'' Mr. Ding said. His home is now littered with valuable specimens excavated in the last two months, including ancient crocodiles, rhinos and pigs. ''When the experts come to buy, I hope it will be a very good harvest,'' he said. As China has moved toward a market economy, peasants all over rural China have had to devise ways to buy goods and services that were once provided for free by the state, like education and medicine. Where land is good they farm. Near cities, they turn to migrant labor. But Dingjiaergou, whose residents belong to China's Hui Muslim minority (and are mostly surnamed Ding), is 15 miles from the nearest paved road. The village is in a county with a per capita income of less than $100 a year, in one of China's poorest areas, the Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region. Villagers got electricity several years ago, but houses still lack running water, phones and heat, even though winter temperatures drop well below zero. So peasants here have turned to large-scale fossil excavation to make ends meet -- a unique if dangerous (and probably illegal) sideline. When not tending their crops, the men of Dingjiaergou can often be found tunneling like groundhogs 10 feet under the region's hills, in the hopes of finding ancient bones. Two months ago Mr. Ding and 17 other villagers hit gold burrowing their way into the underground cache. Now, the three-room mud-brick house |
1116588_0 | 3 Months of Family's Life In Gorge With 5,000 Others | For more than a mile, they line the hillsides of this narrow gorge in the heart of Kosovo: makeshift shelters put together from tree branches and plastic sheeting that gave shelter to more than 5,000 Albanians fleeing Serbian attacks during the last three months. Faik Thachi came here in late March with his wife and five children thinking that his stay would last just a few weeks. It would be uncomfortable and cold, but they would be safely out of range of Serbian artillery. They ended up staying three months. As the conflict wore on, life became a grinding waiting game in this crowded gorge clogged with mud, smoke and squalor. Food occasionally ran out. The children became ill with dehydrating diarrhea. Mr. Thachi passed his days dreading long-range rocket attacks and listening to the radio for the faintest sign of change. At one point, a rocket landed 700 yards from him and his daughter. At night, he and hundreds of other men searched desperately for food in abandoned villages. ''The most difficult moment was when I knew I didn't have any more food for my children,'' said Mr. Thachi, a bespectacled, soft-spoken man who is 41. ''There wasn't anything left.'' No one is certain how many Kosovo Albanians managed to hide themselves in the woods. But he and his family were among the thousands who managed to stay out of harm's way in this gorge. Most of them, according to initial reports, appear to have survived, though there are many cases of malnutrition. Some, like Lul Raka, a 30-year-old doctor from the town of Kacanik, practiced medicine in the woods of southern Kosovo for three months and grew to enjoy life in the wild. Others, like Asem Hasan, a 50-year-old bus driver from the village of Dumsic, lost their cat-and-mouse game and were driven from the hills by Yugoslav soldiers. For Mr. Thachi, his time in hiding proved far more arduous than expected. But he said he was always completely convinced that NATO would prevail. ''When most wars begin, people aren't sure what will happen, who will win,'' he said. ''But I knew from the first moment that the Serbs could never win.'' But early on, they did, sending Mr. Thachi and his family to the hills six days after NATO air strikes began. When Serbian soldiers rolled into his small hometown, Komorane in central Kosovo, he quickly loaded |
1115291_0 | Patents; Vegetable oil lubricant is biodegradable and said to be more efficient than petroleum-based oils. | EFFORTS to make cars more environmentally sound have centered on designing cleaner-running engines, and eliminating the need for gasoline in favor of electricity. But presumably any car will still have an engine made up of some moving metal parts, and that requires lubricants. Cars, like trains, lawn mowers or chain saws, rely on petroleum-based motor oils. And that brings those concerned about the environment right back to the drawing board. Even an electric car may produce toxic waste from motor oil. But James Lambert and Duane Johnson have developed an alternative. They have patented a vegetable oil lubricant. Their invention can be circulated in internal combustion engines, or sprayed in one-time applications like those necessary for lubricating train rails. The inventors, from Colorado Springs, plan for their lubricant to be ''a total replacement for current petroleum and vegetable-based additives to petroleum.'' Years ago, car owners who changed their own oil could just dump a pan of dirty black oil into the nearest sewer drain. Now that people understand how toxic oil waste can be to soil, water, plants, animals and people, used motor oil must be discarded carefully. But other petroleum-based lubricants are still regularly dumped in the open. Some lubricants are also used in what the inventors identify as ''total loss applications,'' in which oils are applied only once and then thrown away. Trains use such oils, spewing huge amounts of petroleum waste onto the ground. ''A train alone may consume five gallons of oil per 1,000 miles as the oil is sprayed on the track to lubricate the wheels,'' the inventors write in their patent. ''This amounts to a total of 300,000 gallons annually being discarded along railings within the U.S. alone.'' Since the oils used in cars and on train rails are petroleum based, they are not biodegradable. In addition, chemicals are usually added to improve the oil's consistency and performance. And of course, these oils are distilled from crude petroleum, a nonrenewable natural resource. Mr. Lambert and Mr. Johnson hope to eliminate concerns over motor oils altogether. Their patent covers a vegetable oil lubricant they say is biodegradable as well as more efficient at lubrication and heat transfer than petroleum-based oils. Their lubricant uses three elements: a base oil, an oil made up of hydroxy fatty acids and an oil made up of vegetable or animal waxes. The patent stipulates that the base oil come from |
1115325_0 | Wilmina Rowland Smith, 91, Guest Chaplain in Senate | Wilmina Rowland Smith, who in 1971 became the first woman to serve as a guest chaplain of the Senate, died on June 5 at a retirement home in St. Petersburg, Fla. She was 91. Billie Rowland, as she was known, was born in Augusta, Ga., on March 17, 1908, and received bachelor's degree from Wilson College in Chambersburg, Pa. She also earned master's degrees from Yale University and Union Theological Seminary in New York. After college she traveled widely, settling for a time in China to teach the children of American missionaries. She worked for World Student Relief in Geneva after World War II, and in 1957 became the sixth woman to be ordained by the Presbyterian Church USA. In the early 1960's, she was a staff member of the National Council of Churches in Greenville, Miss. She retired in 1973, two years after giving the opening prayer at a Senate session. Her husband, H. Maxcy Smith, died in 1985. |
1115373_0 | Playing With Our Food, Risking Our Future | To the Editor: John Micklethwait (Op-Ed, June 7) states that genetic modification ''has taken place in fields for centuries without any harm to human beings.'' True enough. This modification is a process that nature has followed for millions of years to nurture and challenge living species. The ones that adapt survive; others perish. Nature's motive is to bring out the best in the species. The motive of the merchants of genetically modified food is not altruism but higher profit for less work in a shorter time. In the case of produce, their objective is to make it look fresh and attractive and to make it last longer on the supermarket shelf. ARUN IYENGAR San Pedro, Calif., June 7, 1999 |
1115374_0 | Playing With Our Food, Risking Our Future | To the Editor: John Micklethwait (Op-Ed, June 7) asserts that there is no credible scientific evidence to support the concerns that Europeans have about the possible dangers of genetically modified food. Whether or not this is true, no one can predict the long-term effects of a diet consisting of genetically modified food. Monsanto, a pioneer in the field, is beginning experiments that may not yield results until 10 or 20 years from now, when scientists may find that the human body does not function optimally on such concoctions. The arrogance underlying Mr. Micklethwait's lack of concern about Monsanto's eagerness to use the United States as its laboratory tempts me to move to Europe, where the individual's right to a healthy body is protected more vigorously than in the United States. ELLIOTT ROBERTSON Jersey City, June 7, 1999 |
1113377_0 | Europe's Profound Fear of Food | For anybody from General Motors who is even slightly insecure about his or her position, a trip to London has become a distinctly Kafkaesque experience. Pick up a tabloid newspaper, flick on a television talk show, study the graffiti on street walls and you are greeted by a constant refrain: ''G.M. is evil.'' At Notting Hill dinner parties, people plot how to drive G.M. back to America; in Soho pubs people mutter that G.M. is ''dangerous'' and ''disgusting.'' Just about every titled person in London, from the Marchioness of Worcester to Prince Charles, wants to get poor G.M. In fact, the ''G.M.'' that has so enraged Britons stands for ''genetically modified,'' as in ''G.M. food'' (though opponents now seems to have stopped adding the word ''food,'' presumably out of fear that it will be contaminated by the deadly initials). According to one recent poll, only 1 Briton in 100 (a pollster's way of saying nobody) thinks that genetically modified products like herbicide-resistant soybeans and delayed-ripening tomatoes are good for society. Despite an expensive advertising campaign by the pioneer in the field, Monsanto, feelings run deep in most of Europe and even parts of Asia. In India activists working for Operation Cremation Monsanto have burned fields of genetically modified crops. From America, these odd noises coming across the Atlantic and the Pacific may seem like a slightly dottier, more global replay of Britain's mad cow farce. After all, in the United States, there are genetically modified foods in just about every supermarket, and biotechnology is something you buy shares in, not something you boycott. Nevertheless, the current fuss should alarm Americans. The furor in Britain, which dates back to February, began as a bit of routine political tit-for-tat. Britain's Conservative Party, which took a drubbing over mad cows, accused Tony Blair's Labor Government of ignoring health concerns about genetically altered food. Labor replied (correctly) that there was no credible scientific evidence that it was dangerous. But somehow the phrase ''Frankenstein Food'' got out, and soon Monsanto (which some public relations genius had rather creepily decided to rebrand as a ''life sciences'' company) was in the dock. Last week, an organic farmer from Gloucestershire named Charles Windsor (yes, the Prince himself) gave the anti-G.M. crusade a royal seal of approval, warning about ''an Orwellian future'' in The Daily Mail. Most arguments against the technique are more sentimental than logical. Genetic modification, albeit |
1112309_0 | Breast Cancer Study on Alternative Therapy | Women with breast cancer who seek alternative therapies like herbs or acupuncture in addition to standard treatment may be unusually worried and depressed and in need of extra help in coping with their fears about the disease, a study says. The findings suggest that doctors should ask patients whether they are using alternative treatments, and patients who say yes should also be questioned about anxiety and depression, said Dr. Jane C. Weeks and Dr. Harold J. Burstein, cancer specialists at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston. They said that although some distress was only natural when a person was given a diagnosis of cancer, patients who seem exceptionally troubled should be offered psychological counseling. The study, being published today in The New England Journal of Medicine, included 480 women with early-stage breast cancer, 28 percent of whom began using alternative therapies for the first time after their cancer surgery. The researchers found that women who began the alternative treatments, compared with women who did not, reported a lower quality of life, more depression, more fear of recurrence of cancer and less sexual satisfaction. They may have turned to alternative therapy for help in coping with their stress, the researchers suggested. ''We hope it will spark a dialogue and spur doctors to identify patients who might be more vulnerable and benefit from earlier interventions,'' Dr. Burstein said in a telephone interview. ''These are things patients and doctors have historically been somewhat reluctant to talk about.'' The 480 women in the study were treated from 1993 to 1995 in Massachusetts hospitals. Three months and 12 months after surgery, they filled out surveys that included questions about their emotional states before and after cancer was diagnosed and their use of alternative therapies like herbs, megavitamins, massage, homeopathy, special diets, relaxation techniques, self-help groups, spiritual healing and hypnosis. The women used those treatments in addition to standard therapy, and not as a substitute for it. But three months after surgery, those who had tried the alternative methods for the first time were more depressed and fearful than those who had not. A year after surgery, all felt better, but those who had used alternative therapy still reported less sexual satisfaction and more fear of recurrence. The results came as a surprise, contradicting earlier perceptions of patients who use alternative therapy, said Dr. Jimmie Holland, chairwoman of the department of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at |
1112209_0 | Listening To Sounds Of a Wave | AMERICANS bought more than 58 million radios for the home last year. In fact, the Consumer Electronics Manufacturers Association reports that most homes have at least eight of them. If car radios are included, that number rises to 9 or 10 per home, making radios easily the most ubiquitous consumer electronics device in the nation. The average price for the home radios purchased last year was about $17. So why on earth is the Bose Corporation selling a clock radio for $349 -- or $499 for the model with an integrated CD player? The answer, Bose says, is that it sounds better than other radios -- lots better. In fact, Bose calls it ''the world's best-sounding radio.'' It's hard to escape advertisements for the Bose Wave Radio, in magazines and newspapers and on local television -- and of course on the radio, where Paul Harvey, the pitchman, croons appreciatively about the wonders of this little device. The basic clock radio has been on sale since the summer of 1993; the new version with CD player has been available only since February. Curious about whether the Wave Radio sounds good enough to be worth an extra $332 (or an extra $482 for the CD model)? Bose more or less requires you to take it on faith, because for people who do not live near one of the 57 Bose company stores nationwide, the only way to buy a Wave Radio is by phone, mail or over the Internet -- direct from the company. ''You have to have confidence,'' acknowledged Steve Kingsbury, general manager of direct marketing for Bose. If you're not satisfied, the company allows you to send it back within 30 days. But buying direct from the company insures that the price will really be $349. No Fourth of July discounts, no special deals from mail-order houses. Amar Bose, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who is the founder and president of the company, said he chose to sell the radio directly because he was certain that high-end audio-video stores would see it as a threat. ''Who wants to show something like this -- a $300 hi-fi system?'' he asked. The sale of home radios actually increased by 5 percent last year, suggesting that Americans, by and large, were not convulsed with concern about the quality of the sound pouring forth from the little speakers. The explanation seems |
1112234_0 | THE MARKETS: COMMODITIES | SUGAR SOARS. Sugar prices rose to a two-month high as Russian importers accelerated purchases to avoid a tariff increase on Aug. 1. In New York, sugar for July delivery rose 0.25 cent a pound, or 4.8 percent, to 5.49 cents. |
1113852_0 | A Study Plays Down Estrogen Link to Breast Cancers | Whether to take estrogen or not is the dilemma faced by millions of women at menopause who want the hormone's protection against heart disease and osteoporosis, and yet fear that it may also increase their risk of breast cancer. A new study of 37,105 women offers some reassurance, finding little evidence to link hormone replacement with the most common types of breast cancer, known as ductal carcinoma in situ or invasive ductal or lobular cancer. Ductal and lobular tumors account for 85 percent to 90 percent of all invasive breast cancers. The researchers did find an increased risk of other, less common types of breast cancer in women who took estrogen. But they said that finding was not completely discouraging, because the types of cancer they found have a better outlook, respond well to treatment and are less likely to spread than the more common forms. The less risky types are called medullary, papillary, tubular and mucinous tumors. Some other researchers questioned the findings, and most agreed that the new study would not resolve the vexing questions for women. It adds one more page to a catalog of earlier studies that had mixed results, with most showing no link between hormone replacement and breast cancer, and a few finding a small increased risk. Dr. Thomas A. Sellers, an author of the study and a professor of epidemiology and associate director of the Mayo Clinic Cancer Center in Rochester, Minn., said the findings indicate that over all, the benefits of hormone treatment outweigh the risks. In addition to protecting against heart disease and brittle bones, estrogen prevents hot flashes and other symptoms of menopause, and may help preserve mental sharpness. The other authors of the study were Dr. Susan M. Gapstur and Dr. Monica Morrow of the Northwestern University Medical School. Their article is being published today in The Journal of the American Medical Association. Dr. Sellers emphasized that the study did not determine whether the benefits of treatment also outweighed risks for women who have a high risk of breast cancer because their mothers, sisters or many other relatives have the disease. Dr. Patricia Ganz, a cancer researcher and clinician at the Jonsson Cancer Center at the University of California at Los Angeles, said the study would not change the advice that doctors give to high-risk women or those who have already had breast cancer. Dr. Ganz said it was |
1113773_0 | A Time for Calm in Ireland and a New View of Friel | After 26 years of neglect, the Abbey Theater is enthusiastically reviving Brian Friel's most political play, ''The Freedom of the City,'' set in the sectarian warfare of contemporary Northern Ireland. The play has been well received by audiences and critics in a Friel festival at the Abbey and will move to the Lincoln Center Festival on July 7 for a brief run. Its long absence has been attributed to its bluntness at a time when violence was raging between majority Protestants and minority Roman Catholics in the British province and the Irish and British Governments were trying, and failing, to make peace. The play had brief runs in Dublin and London in 1973 and on Broadway in 1974. The Abbey, Ireland's heavily subsidized national theater, was reluctant to put on ''Freedom'' because it was perceived by some critics as an exercise in Britain-bashing and because Dublin audiences preferred not to dwell on the killing in Northern Ireland. Mr. Friel, 70, a Roman Catholic born in Northern Ireland, now lives in County Donegal near the border with Northern Ireland. He wrote ''Freedom'' in 1973, a year after the British Army shot and killed 14 Roman Catholics at a civil rights demonstration in Londonderry in what became known as Bloody Sunday. A British inquiry exonerated the soldiers and suggested that the demonstrators were terrorists linked to the Irish Republican Army. Decades later the British Government conceded that the demonstrators were innocent and had not attacked the army, but no action was taken against the soldiers. A new investigation is under way, partly as a result of the peace effort that is moving forward in Northern Ireland. Patrick Mason, 48, the Abbey's artistic director, and Conall Morrison, the director of ''Freedom,'' say that the play also reveals a neglected aspect of Mr. Friel, who is widely considered Ireland's best living playwright. For decades, they said in interviews, Mr. Friel has been favorably compared to Chekhov and Pirandello. ''But there's also a political Friel who knows how to use the theater as politically as Bertolt Brecht,'' said Mr. Mason, who is leaving his job at the Abbey at the end of the year. ''He has a range beyond his Chekhovian aspect.'' Mr. Morrison, 33, who grew up in a Roman Catholic family in Northern Ireland and is a candidate to succeed Mr. Mason, said that ''Freedom'' was ''not remotely'' an anti-British diatribe. ''It blows |
1113889_0 | INSIDE | Reassurance on Estrogen Women debating whether to take estrogen as they enter menopause received reassurance that the greater risk of breast cancer linked to the hormone involved types that respond well to treatment. PAGE A24 Serious About Sprawl Officials in the Portland, Ore., area have reached an agreement to grant tax breaks to the Intel Corporation to upgrade its plants, but the company will pay a penalty if it creates too many jobs. PAGE A18 Whitman Remakes Court The New Jersey Governor, saying she intended to make the state's highest court more diverse, nominated a 57-year-old woman to the Supreme Court. PAGE B1 Tony Fallout: Six Closings With poor showings at the box office and at the Tony Awards, four Broadway productions said that they would close on Sunday. Two other productions will end their runs later this month. THE ARTS, PAGE E1 |
1119292_0 | In Ulster, Hints of a Shift to Save Peace Effort | David Trimble, the First Minister of the Northern Ireland Assembly, said today that the stalled peace effort in Ulster could be saved by a simple statement from Sinn Fein, the political wing of the Irish Republican Army, that the I.R.A. is committed to disarming by May 2000. In a television interview this morning, Mr. Trimble, the leader of the Protestant Ulster Unionist Party, did not mention the position he has voiced repeatedly that the I.R.A. must start to disarm before Sinn Fein will be allowed to take ministerial posts in the Assembly. ''No guns, no government,'' he has said. Some politicians and analysts said this was a sign that Mr. Trimble was getting ready to compromise. In oblique reply, Sinn Fein's chief negotiator, Martin McGuinness, said on Irish national radio that his party would continue to try to persuade the I.R.A. to agree to disarm by May 2000, the deadline set in the 1998 peace agreement. The disarmament issue has stymied the peace effort for more than a year. Leaders of the Protestant majority and the Roman Catholic minority and the Prime Ministers of Britain and Ireland are to meet in Belfast on Monday, facing a Wednesday deadline for compromise on the dispute. Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain set the deadline for a settlement and the creation of a Cabinet, including two Sinn Fein ministers, that will be authorized to accept a transfer of power from the British Government, under terms of the 1998 agreement. The transfer of power would then coincide with the establishment of new powers for two other British provinces, Wales and Scotland. Mr. Blair has said the Wednesday deadline is absolute, but he has not said what he would do if negotiations collapsed this week. If the talks do fail, it could provoke sectarian tensions, and violence, in the Protestant Orange Order parade season, which accelerates in July. ''I want to see the leaders of the Republican movement across the table tell the rest of us that they accept that they have an obligation to decommission all paramilitary weapons by May 2000,'' Mr. Trimble said, referring to meetings in Belfast in the coming days. ''No ifs. No buts. No excuses. That is what is necessary to save this agreement.'' Mr. McGuinness, asked if he could persuade the I.R.A. to change its position that it has no plans to disarm, said he would use ''whatever influence |
1119355_0 | Are the Rights of the Disabled in Jeopardy?; Children Will Suffer | To the Editor: The Supreme Court's hard-line approach to those seeking employment who have correctable disabilities may have a devastating impact on the millions of children who may now be denied protection under the Americans With Disabilities Act in public and private schools (front page, June 23). Simply because a child may have a disability ''under control'' does not eliminate the discrimination he will have to deal with on a daily basis. Slamming the door in the faces of disabled children instead of accommodating them will only hinder their future employment opportunities, which the Court says are not protected under the law. NEAL J. TASLITZ Chicago, June 23, 1999 The writer is a lawyer. |
1119254_1 | TECHNOLOGY: E-Commerce Report | click on a button and communicate with a customer service representative via a one-on-one, text-based chat. If that doesn't suffice, customers will be able to speak to a representative through their computer, using Internet telephony technology. ''Especially as the Internet moves into the mainstream, consumers are looking for that comfort zone that ties into the world they're used to,'' said Chris McCann, senior vice president of 1-800-Flowers, which is implementing an Internet telephony package to provide customer service. ''Once users get used to shopping on the site, they won't use it as much, but we like to think of these things as training wheels for new users.'' Ms. Neuman declined to name the customer service vendor Eddie Bauer will use or the cost of the system -- although she did say the cost was ''substantial''and that the service would be available starting in October. To handle the rush of inquiries during the holidays, Ms. Neuman said the company would bolster its customer service staff from roughly 12 people to a maximum of 60. According to Ken Allard, an analyst with Jupiter Communications, companies that sell customer service applications have proliferated in recent months. Some, like Webline, offer a range of products, from software that sends out automated responses to E-mail inquiries to Internet telephony packages and chat software. Webline's customers include Cisco Systems, Hewlett-Packard, Mortgage.com and GTE, among others, and its comprehensive customer service system costs roughly $1,500 per representative to implement. Other companies address only part of the customer service equation. For instance, Liveperson offers chat-based customer service for roughly $250 a month per representative; its system is utilized by CBS Sportsline's on-line golf store, among other sites. Meanwhile, Net2phone Inc., a unit of the IDT Corporation offers an Internet telephony-based customer support package, which is currently being tested by 1-800-Flowers. The system costs between $500 and $5,000 a year per representative, depending on the size of the customer service team. Industry analysts and executives said the trend toward improved customer service on line began with a chorus of complaints after last year's holiday shopping season, when many sites were caught off guard by the tremendous influx of shoppers. Those sites often failed to deliver products on time, then failed to respond promptly to customers' E-mails. Meanwhile, because many E-commerce companies were founded on the assumption that customer service should be fully automated, the sites frequently lacked phone-based support |
1119310_2 | Morocco's King Loosens His Grip, and Holds On | $500-a-month compensation payments to families of prisoners who disappeared or died. With the leftist parties now co-opted into government, Islamic radicals who have a strong power base on college campuses and among millions of unemployed youths pose the most severe challenge. Restrictions Remain On Longtime Foes One aspect of the old political system that has not been reformed are the curbs on hard-line Islamists, who are forbidden by the King to form political parties or to contest elections. Many Moroccans fear that the Islamists could eventually cause an eruption that might overwhelm a less experienced political leader. Such concerns have led Moroccans to focus new attention on Prince Sidi Mohammed. The royal heir, like his father when he was the Crown Prince, had a reputation as a playboy, more interested in nightclubs, fast cars and other indulgences afforded by the royal family's vast wealth than in affairs of state. Recently, as he began representing his father on important state occasions, that reputation has begun to fade. But in a Muslim society that emphasizes family ties, the Crown Prince has remained unmarried past the age at which Moroccans start families. When King Hassan succeeded his father, King Mohammed V, who died unexpectedly during minor surgery in 1961, the new King, then 31, was regarded as ill-suited to the task of governing an ancient, often unruly kingdom that had gained independence only 5 years before, after 44 years as a French protectorate. His success in confounding his early detractors has encouraged court officials, who predict that the same will be true for Prince Sidi Mohammed. The monarchy has been sustained by Moroccans' reverence for the Alawite dynasty, which has provided the country's sultans since the mid-17th century. Like his predecessors, King Hassan bears several titles -- ''Commander of the Faithful,'' ''Saviour,'' and ''Shadow of the Prophet on Earth'' -- that reflect the dynasty's claim to be directly descended from the Muslim prophet, Mohammed. King Hassan has been careful to foster his image as spiritual leader, soliciting public donations to build a $500 million mosque bearing his name beside the Atlantic coastline in the heart of Casablanca, the country's main commercial center. Completed in 1990, the mosque features a powerful laser beam aimed at Mecca from atop its 700-foot minaret. The King regularly lectures the ulema, or Muslim clergy, on Islamic doctrine, and reminds the nation frequently that he is ''the person entrusted |
1117520_4 | Tri-fold Ailment Stalks Female Athletes | by shutting off systems that are not essential, like the reproductive system. ''In women who are training intensely, as many as 40 or 50 percent may be amenorrheic,'' said Dr. Anne B. Loucks, a professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at Ohio University. ''It may be even higher for cross-country runners and ballet dancers.'' In the general population, amenorrhea affects 2 percent to 5 percent of women who would be expected to have menstrual periods, Dr. Loucks said. Experts worry that many female athletes -- and a fair number of doctors -- hold the belief that amenorrhea is a natural side effect of high-level exercise. But, Dr. Loucks cautioned, ''This should not be considered a healthy part of training. It is a serious medical condition that requires treatment.'' The third component of the triad, loss of bone tissue, is quietly dangerous. When a young woman's body falls into a low-estrogen state, similar to a postmenopausal woman, she may experience decreased bone density, an early stage of osteoporosis. In runners especially, this may show up as a stress fracture. ''Though it's never too late to work on bone health,'' said Dr. Nattiv, who is also director of the Osteoporosis Center at U.C.L.A., ''bone loss may be irreversible. As these women get older and more frail they are going to be set up for a more serious problem like a hip fracture because of their low bone density. Although experts stress that any female athlete is at risk for the female athlete triad, those in certain sports are more likely to experience the problem. For example, women who compete in endurance sports like distance running -- in which low body weight can improve performance -- may be at high risk for the syndrome. Sports that are judged subjectively, like figure skating, diving, gymnastics, those with body-hugging uniforms, like swimming and gymnastics, and sports with weight categories, like martial arts, may also produce a disproportionate share of athletes with the syndrome. But some doctors and coaches believe that gymnasts may be at particular risk. In that sport, the best performers are often preadolescents -- or those with a preadolescent body type. Gymnasts who gain weight or those with larger body frames may try desperately to lose weight, which can spiral into the female athlete triad. Psychological reasons may also explain the prevalence of the triad among female gymnasts. ''The sport attracts athletes |
1114166_0 | Engineering Food, And Our Future | To the Editor: John Micklethwait's June 7 Op-Ed article on Europe's fear of genetically modified food suggests that this fear is unrealistic. However, genetically modified crops in the United States have been documented as producing herbicide-resistant ''superweeds'' in related plants; causing the death of monarch butterflies feeding on milkweed contaminated with pollen from genetically engineered corn, and causing the contamination of organic corn, also by genetically altered pollen. Moreover, scientists believe that genetically altered crops will result in the increased spraying of herbicides on ''herbicide-ready'' crops at a time when we are seeing headlines about the angers of chemical-spray residues to children eating food from sprayed crops. In light of these developments, one can only praise the Europeans' caution. LOUISE R. QUIGLEY Shorewood, Wis., June 8, 1999 |
1114138_0 | To Enter the World of E-Mail, Just Insert Batteries and Plug In | A simple and inexpensive device will now let the computerless get E-mail, too. That, at least, is the thinking behind the Mail Station, a $99 E-mail appliance, the size of a small laptop, from Cidco (www.cidco.com). Like the network computer desktops of old, the Mail Station is a stripped-down computer with a simplified operating system. At 2.2 pounds and 8 inches by 10 inches, it is the size of a laptop, but its unlit monochrome screen, measuring 6 inches by 2.2 inches, makes it look markedly different. To send and receive E-mail, you simply pop in some AA batteries (or use the AC adapter), plug the unit into a wall jack and start typing. A list of local-access phone numbers is provided. Cidco engineers threw in a 1,000-item address book that can capture and add addresses, a spell checker, a calendar and a 33.6-kilobit-per-second modem that can also send faxes. A 12-megahertz processor and 512 kilobytes of memory may not sound zippy, but E-mail without graphics requires no more. What the Mail Station can't do, of course, is surf the Web. The intended market is people without PC's who just want to push one button to get their mail. Mail can also be received at a Web site, handy for viewing messages with pictures attached that are too big for the system. The unit can also be attached to a printer, which will be handy because it can't save the same number of messages as desktop systems. It saves up to 400 E-mail messages. The device costs $99 when a buyer also pays $99 in advance for a year of E-mail service. If a buyer opts for an E-mail account at $9.95 monthly, the device costs $149. The device is currently available only from Cidco, bundled with an E-mail account. In the future, others may resell the device with other services. MARTY KATZ NEWS WATCH |
1116074_2 | Black Clergy Press Whitman Over State Police Nominee | 1995. Mr. Fedorko initially dismissed his remarks as an attempt at humor, but today he issued a formal apology. ''In retrospect and in viewing my remarks outside the window of that evening in 1995, I can understand that my statements could be viewed as inappropriate and potentially insensitive,'' he said. ''I regret the remarks of April 1995 and offer my sincere apology to any and all persons who might have found my remarks insensitive,'' he added. Mrs. Whitman, who is considering a run for the United States Senate next year, has been in a political bind over the choice of a new superintendent. If she chooses an outsider she faces both the potential of a backlash from conservative voters already angered by her dismissal of Colonel Williams and the prospect of turning the officers' union against her. If she turns to an insider, she risks alienating black voters, who overwhelmingly support Democratic candidates, and other liberal and moderate voters. Many black leaders say that only an outsider can change what they consider a racist culture within the department and end discriminatory practices against black and Hispanic citizens, including racial profiling. Mr. Jackson said Mrs. Whitman would not be the only politician his organization would hold accountable if her nominee is already connected with the state police. ''I believe that the Afro-American community in this state will be absolutely outraged if one side of the aisle did not support that nominee when the Afro-American community has been its most loyal and solid base,'' he said in a clear reference to Democrats. ''On the other side, I believe it would send a very, very, very clear message to the minority community in this state for a candidate who was qualified, experienced and received commendations from around the nation to be rejected by the other side.'' In the last year the New Jersey State Police has been under harsh attack over charges of racial profiling, a practice of systematically stopping drivers based solely on their race. Last month, New Jersey became the first state to be forced to avoid a civil rights lawsuit by entering into a consent agreement with the Federal Justice Department over the practices of its state police. The black ministers asked the Justice Department today that as part of that agreement, it either place an outside or independent monitor over the state police or ask that the court do |
1118317_2 | China to Get World Bank Loan Despite U.S. Objections | quell the dispute over the project. ''China didn't need our $40 million to resettle these farmers,'' he said, referring to the portion of the loan that would go to this move. ''But now they have agreed to a further study, and to allow foreign visitors into the area, unattended by Chinese officials, to assess what is happening. That is a big breakthrough.'' Mr. Wolfensohn's proposal for an independent inspection of the project by a three-member fact-finding body, appointed by the bank's board, was supported by the Chinese Government. But only hours earlier, Beijing had accused Washington of interfering in Chinese domestic affairs by seeking to block the project. A spokeswoman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry, Zhang Qiyue, said that the American concerns were politically motivated ''on the pretext that this will undermine the status of Tibetans.'' The compromise, however, apparently did not convince either pro-Tibetan groups or the United States. They said that the project had been rushed through the Bank's review process, largely because later this month China will lose its eligibility for the 40-year-long, no-interest loans provided to the world's poorest nations. Now classified as a richer country, China will have to compete for loans at interest rates closer to what commercial banks charge. The Clinton Administration insists that, in its haste, the Bank never conducted satisfactory environmental studies of the effects of moving the farmers. But the real objections centered on the concern that the Tibetan influence in the region would be watered down. ''We feel this project never should have gone to the board,'' said John L. Ackerley, the president of the International Campaign for Tibet. ''We don't think the bank has any business diluting ethnic populations.'' The bank argues that its poverty reduction program would benefit 1.7 million of China's poorest people. It was designed, the bank said, to help farmers escape eroded lands where malnourishment is common. It would also improve health, education and employment opportunities for people in some of the country's most inaccessible villages, bank officials said, by providing farmers with seeds and fertilizers, basic roads and clean drinking water. And, though the bank never says so, it also provides Western aid workers and observers with an outpost in a remote and politically sensitive corner of the country. ''These are some of the best projects in the bank,'' said Mr. Wolfensohn, an Australian-born former investment banker who was appointed to his post |
1112656_1 | Without Detail, China Curbs Foreign Transfers of Its Currency | to time. A currency devaluation could theoretically help China's economy by making its exports cheaper and more competitive. But a devaluation could also could set off another wave of financial instability in Asia, just as signs of recovery have started appearing in some countries whose economies were devastated. The new rules, effective next Thursday, suspend all yuan remittances into China from outside. They also abolish all yuan accounts in banks outside mainland China. Central bank officials said the new restrictions were intended to cut down on what they called illegal transactions, but they did not elaborate on the nature or extent of the problem. Apparently intended to curb the transfer of foreign currency out of the country, the move is expected to reduce demand for the yuan in markets such as Hong Kong, where limited trading of the yuan has been growing in recent years. International bankers familiar with China's banking system described the new rules as one of several steps Beijing has been taking since last year to improve control over its currency flows. Many Chinese companies had been finding ways to move foreign-currency holdings outside China and beyond official supervision. New measures are making it harder for Chinese companies to transfer cash in and out of the country. All foreign-currency transactions larger than $10,000, for instance, must now be approved by the Government. The yuan is not yet a freely tradable currency. Although China recently began allowing it to be exchanged for trade-related purposes, outdated rules technically ban anyone from taking yuan out of the country. In practice, however, yuan can be exchanged in Hong Kong, Macao and Thailand at banks and at international companies that do business in China. It is unclear how the new rules will affect such trading. But more than 3,000 financial institutions in Hong Kong have participated in yuan transactions. It has become apparent in the last year that Chinese companies eager to move foreign currency out of the country were finding ways to buy yuan in Hong Kong and then remit them back into China in exchange for American dollars and other currencies. Chinese bank regulators estimate that companies have found ways to move more than $100 billion in foreign currency in and out of China through improper channels in the last five years. The new rules, issued by the State Administration of Foreign Exchange, were not fully made public. INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS |
1112463_0 | Kosovo Peace Accord: 10 Steps to a Verifiable End of Violence | Following is the text of the international proposal to end the Kosovo conflict that was accepted today by President Slobodan Milosevic of Yugoslavia. The text was provided by the State Department. Agreement should be reached on the following principles to move toward a resolution of the Kosovo crisis: 1. Immediate and verifiable end of violence and repression in Kosovo. 2. Verifiable withdrawal from Kosovo of all military, police and paramilitary forces according to a rapid timetable. 3. Deployment in Kosovo under U.N. auspices of effective international civil and security presences, acting as may be decided under Chapter VII of the Charter, capable of guaranteeing the achievement of common objectives. 4. The international security presence with substantial NATO participation must be deployed under unified command and control and authorized to establish a safe environment of all people in Kosovo and to facilitate the safe return to their homes of all displaced persons and refugees. 5. Establishment of an interim administration of Kosovo as a part of the international civil presence under which the people of Kosovo can enjoy substantial autonomy within the F.R.Y. [Federal Republic of Yugoslavia] to be decided by the Security Council of the United Nations. Interim administration to provide transitional administration while establishing and overseeing the development of provisional democratic self-governing institutions to insure conditions for a peaceful and normal life for all inhabitants in Kosovo. 6. After withdrawal, an agreed number of Yugoslav and Serbian personnel will be permitted to return to perform the following functions: *Liaison with international civil mission and international security presence. *Marking/clearing minefields. *Maintaining a presence at Serb patrimonial sites. *Maintaining a presence at key border crossings. 7. Safe and free return of all refugees and displaced persons under the supervision of the U.N.H.C.R. and unimpeded access to Kosovo by humanitarian aid organizations. 8. A political process towards the establishment of an interim political framework agreement providing for a substantial self-government for Kosovo, taking full account of the Rambouillet accords and the principles of sovereignty and territorial integrity of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and the other countries of the region, and the demilitarization of the U.C.K. [Kosovo Liberation Army]. Negotiations between the parties for the settlement should not delay or disrupt the establishment of democratic self-governing institutions. 9. Comprehensive approach to the economic development and stabilization of the crisis region. This will include the implementation of a Stability Pact for South-Eastern Europe |
1112444_2 | U.S. and Canada Agree on a Plan to Restrict Catches of Endangered Salmon | but there are few signs that that process will be contentious. By itself, the agreement will not necessarily revive the nine different salmon runs declared threatened or endangered earlier this year under this country's Endangered Species Act. But it will be a major element of an overall plan to restore the salmon populations, which in many cases are at only a fraction of their peak populations earlier this century. A hundred years ago, a visiting biologist from the Smithsonian Institution, Richard Rathbun, found the fish to be so prevalent in the Northwest that he wrote, ''The quantities of salmon which frequent these waters is beyond calculation, and seems to be so great as to challenge human ingenuity to affect it in any way.'' But development, logging, irrigation for farming, dam-building, overfishing and countless other human activities have combined since then to hammer the salmon population. Gov. Gary Locke of Washington, a Democrat, hailed today's announcement as a landmark in which both countries had agreed to switch from a ''first-come'' fishing policy to a ''fish-first conservation approach.'' Much of the salmon eaten in this country is raised in domestic pens, and the availability and price of that fish is unlikely to be affected by today's agreement. But those who fancy the higher-priced wild fish could well find that its price rises, especially in years in which low measurements require significant cutbacks in the harvest. As one example in the network of new rules, the ceiling on catches of chinook salmon from southeast Alaska, now set at about 263,000 yearly, would be lowered to about 150,000 in years of what is defined as ''normal abundance,'' said Jeff Curtis, Western conservation director for Trout Unlimited, a group that has been lobbying strongly for a new treaty to protect salmon runs. But that number could fall to as low as about 60,000 or could be set even higher than current limits. ''The whole issue is incredibly complex,'' Mr. Curtis said. ''But what we have here is a pretty reasonable and innovative compromise.'' Other steps will clearly be needed to revive the salmon, and the listing under the endangered-species act has prompted local governments in the growing Seattle-Tacoma and Portland areas to outline possible measures, from raising water rates and curbing fertilizer and pesticide use to curbing new development. And another debate looms over once-unthinkable proposals to remove some dams in the West, which interfere |
1151241_8 | Go Form a Company, Mamet Said, So They Did | approach of the 1986 ''Practical Handbook.'' This difference raises the question: Does Mr. Mamet still approve of the acting technique passed on by this new generation of Atlantic instructors, now that it has, in both Mr. Pepe's and Ms. Hinckle's word, ''evolved''? Mary McCann, who from 1985 to 1986 was the company's first artistic director and has been the executive director of its school since 1990, said: ''Mamet says in the book, 'Leave your acting schools, don't go back,' and then he teaches here! He said that to us when we were at N.Y.U. And that was how we started the Atlantic. We said, 'We have nowhere else to go,' and he said, 'Well, I have nothing left to teach you.' '' But what of the charge that Practical Aesthetics promotes a certain performance style, maybe best suited for the plays of Mr. Mamet? ''Perhaps there is an 'Atlantic style,' '' Mr. Macy said. ''But in the best of all worlds there isn't one. The philosophy or technique is aimed at bringing the truth of the play to the stage, and that should include any era or any playwright. There is an economy in the style of acting.'' Not everyone agrees. In his review in The New York Times of the Atlantic's current production of ''The Water Engine,'' Ben Brantley wrote: ''There is a feeling that the talented actors (many of them Mamet veterans) are reciting their lines as though they were reading sheet music.'' He added: ''This may conform to Mr. Mamet's own published theories about acting, which are basically of the 'just-say-the-words' sort.'' But Donald Lyons, a theater critic for The New York Post, said in an interview: ''The results of the acting technique can be tremendous. I like the boldness, the stoicism and the simplicity that you often see in Mametian acting. It seems to be about power, desire and focus.'' Still, he noted that ''at times it seems like they choose plays to serve that technique, and I think the results are often uneven. ''Sometimes the work seems banal, while the acting technique gives it a false air of neurotic energy. But that's true of any system, like the Method of the 50's.'' Andre Bishop, the artistic director of Lincoln Center Theater, said he admired the company. ''It is hard to zero in on who or what they are, though,'' he added. ''If anything, they are |
1151299_1 | One Man's Trash Is Another's Museum | replica of a dinosaur, made of trash. The Trash-O-Saurus exhibit is intended to illustrate how solid waste can grow to monumental and unmanageable proportions. ''It's awesome how they used everyday garbage to make such a cool-looking dinosaur, and how they turned trash into art to send us a message that I won't forget,'' Nicholas Hernandez, 10, who was among the 50 fifth-graders from the Multi-Cultural Magnet School in Bridgeport. They recently visited the museum to learn about how recycling and proper garbage disposal helps to preserve the environment. The museum's message, that children and adults need to be more conscientious about recycling and trash removal, is also told through exhibits. One compares the natural resources needed to make an aluminum can versus the materials needed to make a can from recycled material. The exhibit shows how recycling uses far fewer resources. ''Our goal is to make all of this educational and fun at the same time,'' said Cheryl Burke, the museum's director. ''We've been able to add exhibits and expand programs through the years to make it even more of an adventure for children. Ms. Burke is also the director of a similar museum in Hartford, the visitor's center of the Connecticut Regional Recycling Center. ''It is important to recycle anywhere on Earth, but because Connecticut is a small state with a very high population density, we try to show through our exhibits and educational programs exactly what people can do here to reduce their trash output and recycle,'' she said. ''Most people don't know what happens to their garbage, so we show through out exhibits and programs how our landfills are full and why it is environmentally better to dispose of trash at one the state's five trash-to-energy plants.'' More than a dozen interactive exhibits are intended to teach children and adults about the growing problem of solid waste disposal and what can be done to control it. The Worm Tunnel exhibit allows students to crawl through a gigantic replica of a compost pile, filled with five-foot long worms, centipedes and other creatures. It shows how leaves and organic materials decompose into soil. The General Store exhibit, an old-fashioned country store counter, shows how much less packaging was used for household products during the 1830's. A giant wall sculpture touts the merits of an integrated approach to solid waste management as a solution to the garbage crisis of land |
1151383_3 | But Does It Work? | smaller class increased average test scores. Students did not score higher when their classes had teacher's aides; and the teacher's experience and whether he or she had an advanced degree were also irrelevant to scores. Two recent follow-up studies showed that students assigned to smaller classes were more likely to graduate from high school and apply to college. Although these results have made a case for reducing class size, leading to billions of dollars in additional federal, state and local spending, they shouldn't be the end of the story. The largest improvement occurred the first year. The gain remained about the same for four years, while the students were in smaller classes, but the advantage shrank when they returned to regular classes. Think of it as that first aspirin that makes a headache go away; the second and third keep it at bay, and when you're off the aspirin, it comes back, but not as badly. Further experiments might show that it isn't necessary to reduce class size for all grades -- an expensive proposition. One dose might suffice. And it may not be necessary to reduce them everywhere but to concentrate efforts in districts where the study found the most improvement -- areas with many low-income and minority students. Another reform sweeping the country is just beginning to be tested. In 1997, Mathematica, a nonprofit research company in Princeton, N.J., conducted a lottery to randomly select 1,300 low-income public schoolchildren in New York City to receive vouchers to attend private elementary schools. After the first year, the students scored, on average, only 2 percentile points higher on math and reading tests than those who remained in public schools -- a difference that was just barely discernible statistically. By comparison, the gain for low-income Tennessee students after one year of small classes was 7 percentile points. The voucher experiment is to continue for another two years, and it will be interesting to see if the private school students ultimately show meaningful gains. Naturally, experiments involving children raise a host of ethical dilemmas. Some fear that members of a control group are denied the advantages of a sound education. But without conducting a controlled study, it wouldn't be clear which students were harmed -- say, those who were given computers or those who weren't. And some students would be denied computers anyway, because they aren't being installed in all schools at |
1151155_0 | Assisi Church, Shattered by '97 Quake, to Reopen | On Nov. 28, a commemorative mass will reopen the Upper Church of the Basilica of St. Francis in Assisi, which was badly damaged in an earthquake just over two years ago. Extensive restorations have taken place during this time. The bell tower and the tympanum of the left transept were repaired, the main vault was reinforced with a carbon-fiber structure, and the frescoes lining the walls of the Upper Church were cleaned of the dust that settled on them when pieces of the vaulted ceiling fell into the nave during the quake. The damaged vault sections have all been rebuilt, but the only fallen frescoes that have been reattached are those representing the four saints on the entrance arch, widely attributed to the school of Giotto. The other frescoes, including Cimabue's St. Matthew and Giotto's St. Jerome, are still in the hands of restorers trying to reassemble the thousands of pieces into which they broke. Work is expected to take at least another two years. The basilica will be open daily 8:30 a.m. to 7 p.m. On Sunday, Nov. 28, it will be open to the public from 3 p.m. to 7 p.m.; the commemorative mass is for invited guests. For information, call (39-075) 819 001 (the general number). Next year, another number, (39-075) 819 0284, will be in service. ELISABETTA POVOLEDO TRAVEL ADVISORY |
1151463_1 | Order in the Court! A Revolution Is on Trial. | a confiscated mansion, beside an empty swimming pool, that the ruling clerics convened a trial that has become a tableau for the wider struggle going on across Iran. In the dock was Abdullah Nouri, himself a cleric and until recently a vice president of the Islamic republic. But it was hard not to notice a second trial as well: It could be called The People vs. The Clergy. Even as Mohammed Salimi, a white-turbaned cleric, starchily admonishes Mr. Nouri to show proper respect, millions of Iranians are judging the court itself, through the blanket press coverage Iranian newspapers are giving the trial. Mr. Nouri is a man who has helped to shape and lead a reform movement that aims at curbing the clergy's absolute power. He is charged before the Iranian equivalent of the Inquisition, the Special Court for the Clergy, with being an apostate. Not for nothing has Mr. Nouri, 50, been called the Martin Luther of Iran. Like Luther, Mr. Nouri nailed his principles where the clerical establishment could not ignore them -- in the pages of the country's most widely circulated reformist newspaper, Khordad, which Mr. Nouri controls. Among other things, he is charged with ''insulting the sanctities of Islam'' by advocating political reforms that would undermine the principle of clerical rule. In particular, he would establish the sovereign right of Iran's 65 million people to choose their governments, and he is urging the re-establishment of relations between Iran and the United States. In a 44-page indictment that reads like an encyclopedia of treachery, articles in Khordad are cited as proof that Mr. Nouri's conspiracy to subvert the revolution even extended to advocating clapping and cheering in public, a taboo under Islamic laws, and to ''propagating'' on behalf of Farah Diba, the shah's widow, by supporting another newspaper's decision to publish excerpts from her New Year's greeting to Iran's people. But after only a week of testimony, many Iranians, and clearly Mr. Nouri himself, have concluded that the trial's significance lies not in the verdict, but in how it has come to represent the chasm that has opened up within Iranian society. The trial is being conducted, bizarrely, in the lobby of the court building, with reporters perched on a winding staircase to the upper floors. IT may be years before the world will know which represents the ''real'' Iran -- the medieval process initiated by the |
1151508_1 | France Presses For a Power Independent Of the U.S. | missiles to keep its own nuclear forces from being marginalized. France, Germany and Britain all have strong reservations about amending the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty with Moscow to permit more anti-missile defenses, and Russia has said that changing the treaty could destabilize the global strategic balance. That is also the view of the European allies. ''President Chirac has told President Clinton that it could open a Pandora's box that is in none of the allies' interest,'' one French official said. In the view of French leaders since Charles de Gaulle in the early 1960's, the best insurance against both American isolationism and the capriciousness of heavy dependence on the United States has always been an independent French or European strategic power. Now Mr. Chirac and other French officials are capitalizing on the Senate's rejection last month of a global treaty banning nuclear tests to urge Europeans not to defer to American leadership but to go ahead and build something that Americans have long been calling for: stronger European defenses. The world needs ''responsible involvement'' by the United States in international affairs, Mr. Chirac said in his remarks, which were warmly received by many other Europeans present. ''He spoke for me and for all Europeans on that,'' said Karl Kaiser, a German foreign policy expert who was an adviser to Gerhard Schroder, the German chancellor. Mr. Chirac singled out the United States for only one moment of praise: ''I salute their impressive economic and technological dynamism,'' he said at a gathering organized by the French International Relations Institute. ''I deplore the present American diffidence in several major areas as a result of decisions by Congress. I wish the United States would once more take on all its responsibilities on the international scene, and as soon as possible. But the world is a fragile place. It won't wait.'' The Socialist ministers of defense and foreign affairs also took a strongly Gaullist line this week. ''For my part, I believe that since 1992 the word 'superpower' is no longer sufficient to describe the United States,'' Foreign Minister Hubert Vedrine told the same audience on Wednesday. ''That's why I use the term 'hyperpower,' which American media think is aggressive. ''Supposing Europeans really do want to become a power,'' Mr. Vedrine added, ''the willingness of the United States to accept with anybody, and particularly with Europe, partnership that is anything but momentary or limited, and |
1151385_10 | Financial Aid for the Bourgeoisie | comes to aid. If a given year's income is extraordinary, consultants recommend writing a letter of explanation to the college's financial aid office, and including a tax return from the previous year to demonstrate the point. ''You've got to hit them over the head with your special circumstance,'' Mr. Chany said. ''You have to be short and brief, because they are overworked. Tell them your income just went up, or it's about to go way down. You have to give them real numbers.'' Financial aid officers sympathize with big medical expenses. And if a special circumstance exists -- say, the parents are divorced, and the father has stopped making his child-support payments -- officers can consider that, too. Grades vs. Need No matter what the financial situation, the key to getting aid is being a good student. ''Grades, SAT's, the quality of the student and what they bring to the table is going to make a difference,'' Ms. Thomas said. ''The admissions office is going to be a heck of a lot more generous with a kid who has done really well than with Johnny over there, who is just a C student, even though need-for-need, they may be the same.'' Need Help? Higher education may be hopelessly expensive, but there's at least one source of aid that's often free: advice. The SLM Holding Corporation, better known as Sallie Mae, the nation's largest financer of student loans, offers the following options for angst-filled (and debt-ridden) parents. l College Answer Service, (800) 891-4599. Financial-aid counselors answer questions and provide details on grants, loans, scholarships, work-study programs and application procedures. You can also obtain a free guide, ''Paying for College.'' l Parent Answer Service, (800) 891-1410. Counselors discuss the federal Parent Loan for Undergraduate Students (PLUS); you can determine your eligibility and apply over the telephone. l The Web site www.salliemae.com offers information on financial aid as well as online loan applications, loan tips, a glossary of terms and interactive calculators to estimate Expected Family Contribution. l If all else fails, the commercial Web site www.ECollegebid.org gives parents a chance to bid for a tuition they're willing to pay. Participating colleges then decide if they're willing to accept the bid. The site, which becomes active this month, works much like Priceline.com, the electronic discount-travel service. COLLEGE & MONEY Andrew Ross Sorkin reports from London for the Business Day section of The Times. |
1151298_1 | Q&A/Charles Atkins; Exploring The Mind In Office And Word | harming oneself or others. He said recent studies show that about one in five high school students will consider suicide during the year, and eight percent will attempt suicide. ''This is mind blowing,'' he said. Last year, a Waterbury coalition including the hospital, was formed to address local youth problems. Dr. Atkins said these include: a juvenile arrest rate of eight to nine percent of the public school population; a high drop-out rate, and the suspension of nearly one in 10 students for fighting or assault in the 1997-98 school year. Here are some excerpts from the conversation. Q. What are the primary risk factors for youth violence? A. You can look at demographic risk factors such as low socioeconomic status, gender (male greater than female), disrupted families, high mobility. Other risk factors are negative life events such as: divorce, loss of a beloved relative, losing a pet, having a parent lose a job, and then you lose a home. Maybe it's having a friend who becomes sick and dies. An abusive situation in the home setting would be a very traumatic negative life event. Behavioral risk factors would be things like: using and selling drugs, poor school performance, dropping out of school, nonviolent felony offenses, as well as violent felony offenses. A child with one or two risk factors is at no greater risk than someone with no risk factors. But as you begin to pile up five or six, suddenly you reach a common end point. Q. Describe the case of a typical child or adolescent you might evaluate at the hospital for dangerous behavior. A. The typical complaint is they're out of control. They're sleeping around. They're doing drugs. They won't follow what we tell them to do, in the case of a parent. Maybe they've been arrested. As you begin to go backward with these kids, what you find are all of the risk factors. Q. What treatment would you suggest for a child at risk for violent behavior? A. Are they failing out? Does the parent know how to access special ed help? We're in the process of putting together a program called the Parent Training Leadership Institute, which is a national program that helps to train parent advocates. Is there so much strife in the household that this child is not able to feel somewhat safe? The goal of family therapy is to get |
1151242_14 | Those Were the Good Old Days, and So Are These | little alley downtown is not that relevant. When I look to the theater as an artist, I don't look to those definitions as much as I look to where can I go as a creator and have an exciting new vigorous connection with an audience? In the case of ''The Donkey Show,'' it is happening in a nightclub on 21st Street on the far West Side. We get listed in a variety of categories. I think in the future, theater is going to pop up in unexpected places, be it nightclubs, the street or a stadium. Off Broadway and Off Off Broadway were a reaction to Broadway in their inception 50 years ago. I want to go outside theater. I am obsessed with the meaning of ritual that theater has to the culture. Pop music has meaning to our culture. The 70's disco hits are hymnals, in a way, of their time. I find theater alive in many different arenas today, not necessarily in a theater space. Theater has its roots in ritual. In Greek civilization or Indian culture it was a significant part of one's life as a citizen. It had the power of transformation for the individual. You went to the temple or the amphitheater because you were seeking meaning to your life. Everybody participated. I am interested in returning theater to its role as a popular art form. We think if we want theater to be popular we have to pander to the lowest common denominator. But look at music -- people are passionate about it. When we look to the power of theater at the millennium, where there is television, film and the Internet, we have to give theater meaning in relation to all these other options for the audience. I'm very excited about the future. I think of myself as an entrepreneur as well as an artist. I have trouble with the word commercial. Here we have ''The Donkey Show.'' It's a commercial run. To make a show that is a viable business proposition is not evil. I'm from a generation that doesn't think about government funding. I wrote my senior thesis on the Living Theater and always wished I could have been older in the 60's and 70's. But I've moved through that nostalgia now and I'm much more interested in the future and how theater can resume its place in the wider culture. |
1151448_0 | For Employers, Pitfalls in Treating Workplace Depression | ASK an experienced manager about the ''reasonable accommodation'' that employers must provide under the Americans With Disabilities Act, and you are likely to hear about wheelchair ramps, Braille signs in the elevator and other physical changes to assist workers with physical handicaps. But what does ''accommodation'' mean for workers suffering from depression? The question nettles employers across the country. Depression, of course, is not simply the blues. It is a clinically defined mental disorder that is estimated to affect roughly 1 in 10 Americans over the age of 18, sapping their energy, impairing their concentration and making them prone to mood swings and unexplained absences. Add up the work time lost to the illness and the medical bills for treating it, and by some estimates depression costs American employers $36.2 billion a year. Yet in many a workplace, depression is regarded as a character flaw rather than a treatable illness, and some employers follow what amounts to a don't ask, don't tell policy, implicitly expecting workers to soldier on in silence or be stigmatized as ''not up to the job,'' said Thomas W. Croghan, a research physician with Eli Lilly & Company and an associate professor at Indiana University. Such attitudes are part of the reason that the government gets more disability-act complaints from workers with emotional or psychiatric impairments than from workers with any other kind of disability. In preliminary figures for the federal fiscal year ended Sept. 30, 2,681 of the 17,014 complaints filed with the Labor Department concerned emotional or psychiatric impairments, and almost half of those -- 1,278 -- involved depression. For managers, failure to grapple with the problems of depressed employees is economically shortsighted, experts say. Several academic and corporate studies have found that getting depressed workers into treatment is cost-effective because the workers' restored productivity, even if not 100 percent, still outweighs the cost of treatment. ''It'll probably cost you more if you don't address it,'' said Thomas J. O'Connor, director of PRS Disability Management, a Falls Church, Va., consulting firm that provides return-to-work assistance for professionals with depression. Daniel J. Conti, director of the employee assistance program at Bank One in Chicago, related an example at his company: An information systems manager whose job kept him on the road almost constantly went on disability leave because of depression. When he wanted to return to work, he was told by his doctor that he |
1153002_1 | 20/20 Hindsight | of the claim that the Internet will produce a new kind of participatory democracy is just as shrewd and sly: ''To call a train an 'iron horse,' as we once did, may be picturesque, but it obscures the most significant differences between a train and a horse-and-buggy.'' Postman provides another example of the abuse of language by technophiles: ''I have the impression that 'community' is now used to mean, simply, people with similar interests, a considerable change from an older meaning: a community is made up of people who may not have similar interests but who must negotiate and resolve their differences for the sake of social harmony.'' Postman's concern with the values of literacy and rationality lead him, in this book as in his previous ones, to discuss education. In two chapters about children (one of them, for no obvious reason, an appendix), Postman makes an interesting argument that the conception of ''childhood'' as a distinct stage of life was a product of print culture and the need to ensure widespread literacy: ''The modern school was a creation of the printing press with movable type, for it was to school that the young were taken to learn how to be literate, and therefore how to be an adult.'' Today, however, according to Postman: ''There are economic and political interests that would be better served by allowing the bulk of a semiliterate population to entertain itself with the magic of visual computer games, to use and be used by computers without understanding. In this way the computer would remain mysterious and under the control of a bureaucratic elite. However, were our schools to grasp that a computer is not a tool but a philosophy of knowledge, we would indeed have something to teach.'' When Postman turns from analyzing contemporary culture and education to the more ambitious project of defending the Enlightenment tradition, the results are less impressive. He has the unusual and annoying habit of asserting that apparently incompatible philosophies or religions can be harmonized on a higher level of abstraction. A few examples will have to serve: ''We may add to the list Confucius, Isaiah, Jesus, Muhammad, the Buddha, Shakespeare, Spinoza and many more. What they tell us is all the same: There is no escaping ourselves.'' Elsewhere he writes: ''We might fairly say that Friedrich Froebel, Johann Pestalozzi, Maria Montessori, Jean Piaget, Arnold Gesell and A. S. Neill |
1153013_1 | Are We There Yet? | technologically ingenious (they fix their own burner valves, pilot lights and navigational equipment, which are constantly on the blink) and meticulously civilized (they make a pact to tell each other when bad breath or body odor sets in). The two take turns as narrator, and the result isn't so much a ''Rashomon'' effect as a tag team dialogue, one that draws out their dueling sensibilities and gives a balanced, if slightly disengaged, picture of the giddiness, frustration and terror that erupt on board. Unfortunately, it takes quite a while (nearly four chapters) before we get inside the Breitling Orbiter 3, a boxy red Kevlar gondola attached to a propane-fueled balloon as tall as the Leaning Tower of Pisa. At the start, the captain of this particular enterprise, Piccard (whose grandfather Auguste was the first to balloon into the stratosphere and whose father, Jacques, was the first to reach the Mariana Trench, the ocean's deepest point), is obsessed with the urgency of their flight. After two earlier, botched attempts, this was the last balloon that the Breitling company would finance. Nipping at their heels are mercenary competitors, hungry for glory and for the $1 million prize set to be awarded to the first successful team. The book reveals the alternately fierce and polite but always insular world of ballooning (a few of Piccard's competitors are his former co-pilots), with inflated egos and rivalrous bickering to match climbing's most obnoxious peak baggers. But balloonists are slightly more idiosyncratic, in a twee sort of way, than your average adventure addict, and Piccard may be extreme even for a balloonist. At times, domestic life tens of thousands of feet above sea level resembles an episode of ''Frasier'': would a Crane brother dare go aloft without a similar stash of mango chutney and pte truffe? Their contrasting habits and preoccupations are telling and endearing: Piccard, the fussy one, sleeps in pajamas, Jones in the nude. Piccard scribbles homages in his journal to Antoine de Saint-Exupery, while Jones tosses off ribald limericks. Both men develop sophomoric crushes on female air traffic controllers. They sponge-bathe daily with baby wipes and listen to Elton John songs (presumably ''Rocket Man'') on CD. A LONG the way, we gain intimate knowledge of a third character, the Weather, whom you'll remember well from the Everest and sea disaster books. This is his most nuanced performance to date. Usually a notorious scenery |
1153354_2 | Returns to Senders; Snail Mail: It's Alive! And It's Mutating! | Already, according to Jupiter Communications, Americans are sending 122 billion e-mails annually, more than half the number of pieces of mail that the Postal Service handles each year. And that shift promises enormous changes for the largest civilian employer in the United States and one of the few institutions that every American comes into contact with every week. The Postal Service's rivals, by contrast, are watching their business grow, as U.P.S.'s record-setting day showed. With information shoving aside industry as the fastest-growing sector of the economy, the country today is far more reliant on small goods that can be shipped from point to point. ''A billion dollars of G.D.P. created by Microsoft weighs less than a billion dollars of G.D.P. created by Ford Motor Company,'' said Paul R. Schlesinger, an analyst at Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette. At the same time, electronic commerce causes more items to be shipped individually, rather than taken home from the store, and it leads to more returns. Thus the recent success of U.P.S. and Federal Express, and investors' confidence that the two will be making good profits in the decades to come. The picture isn't so rosy for the Postal Service. It relies on the sending and paying of bills for $17 billion, or almost 30 percent, of its revenue. These pieces of first-class mail, often sent short distances from, say, an electric company to a house in the same metropolitan area, help subsidize the organization's ability to charge just 33 cents for a letter that travels from Santa Fe to northern Vermont and costs more to transport. But that subsidy won't be around for long. Next year, Internet portals like Yahoo! and a number of large banks will begin allowing people to receive many of their bills over the World Wide Web, pay them with a credit card or directly out of their bank accounts and never lick an envelope. ''That's serious business,'' Bob Krause, the Postal Service's vice president for e-commerce, said, anticipating the loss. As a result, the volume of first-class mail is likely to decline for the first time in the Postal Service's history, starting in 2003, according to the General Accounting Office. ''The Postal Service may be nearing the end of an era,'' a G.A.O. report concluded last month. WITHOUT that $17 billion in revenue, or a substitute for it, the post office would have to raise its prices significantly |
1153029_10 | Cross-Country at Lake Tahoe | now $120). There is a two-night minimum on weekends, three or four nights during holiday periods and special events. The cafe serves breakfast, lunch and dinner seven days a week, although on Mondays and Tuesdays during the winter there is a limited dinner menu. Dinners run from $12 to $20, and the children's menu is $9.95. Cross-country rentals, sales, instruction and tours are handled by Hope Valley Cross Country, 14655 Highway 88, Hope Valley, Calif. 96120; (530) 694-2266. All-day rentals begin at $12 and group lessons are $22; rental-lesson packages run $30, $20 for children. Royal Gorge Royal Gorge is off the Soda Springs- Norden exit of Interstate 80; the closest airport is Reno Tahoe International, about 45 minutes to the east, and both Greyhound and Amtrak offer daily service to Soda Springs. Royal Gorge's mailing address is Post Office Box 1100, Soda Springs, Calif. 95728; (800) 500-3871; for Northern California: (800) 666-3871, (530) 426-3871, fax (530) 426-9221; e-mail info@royalgorge.com; Web site www.royalgorge.com. An all-day trail pass on weekends and holidays is $21.50, $16.50 for seniors, $8.50 for children 13 to 16; during the midweek in non-holiday periods, the adult pass drops to $17.50 and the senior pass to $13.50. All-day rentals are $17.50, $9.50 for children 16 and under. Group lessons and skating and telemark clinics run $20 midweek and $34 on weekends and holidays; the cost includes a day pass. Royal Gorge's Rainbow Lodge is off Interstate 80 at the Rainbow Road exit. Nightly rates for two people during the winter, including a full breakfast, are $89 for a room with sink only, $109 for a room with a shower and sink, and $129 for a room with a full bath; there is a two-night minimum on weekends and holidays during the winter. The lodge also offers a number of midweek ski packages beginning at $152 a person for two days' lodging, breakfast, group lessons and trail passes. Rainbow Lodge's Engadine Cafe is open for breakfast, lunch and dinner seven days a week, and dinner reservations are advised. Dinner runs between $25 and $35. Royal Gorge's Wilderness Lodge has bare-bones private sleeping rooms, shared baths and attractive common areas similar in feel to those at Rainbow Lodge. Rates begin at $129 a person (double occupancy), $85 per child; prices include a sleigh ride to the lodge, accommodations, French country meals, trail passes, lessons and tours. Two adjacent cabins |
1153444_5 | Finds in Egypt Date Alphabet In Earlier Era | of these signs just jump out at you, at anyone familiar with proto-Sinaitic material,'' said Dr. F. W. Dobbs-Allsopp, who teaches at the Princeton Theological Seminary in New Jersey and is a specialist in the languages and history of the Middle East. ''They look just like one would expect.'' The symbol for M in the inscriptions, for example, is a wavy line derived from the hieroglyphic sign for water and almost identical to the symbol for M in later Semitic writing. The meaning of some signs is less certain. The figure of a stick man, with arms raised, appears to have developed into an H in the alphabet, for reasons unknown. Scholars said they could identify shapes of letters that eventually evolved from the image of an ox head into A and from a house, which looks more like a 9 here, into the Semitic B, or bayt. The origins and transitions of A and B are particularly interesting because the Egyptian-influenced Semitic alphabet as further developed by the Phoenicians, latter-day Canaanites, was passed to the Greeks, probably as early as the 12th century B.C. and certainly by the 9th century B.C. From the Greeks the simplified writing system entered Western culture by the name alphabet, a combination word for the Greek A and B, alpha and beta. The only words in the inscriptions the researchers think they understand are, reading right to left, the title for a chief in the beginning and a reference to a god at the end. If the early date for the inscriptions is correct, this puts the origins of alphabetic writing well before the probable time of the biblical story of Joseph being delivered by his brothers into Egyptian bondage, the scholars said. The Semites involved in the alphabet invention would have been part of an earlier population of alien workers in Egypt. Although it is still possible that the Semites took the alphabet idea with them to Egypt, Dr. McCarter of Johns Hopkins said that the considerable evidence of Egyptian symbols and the absence of any contemporary writing of a similar nature anywhere in the Syria-Palestine lands made this unlikely. The other earliest primitive writing, the cuneiform developed by Sumerians in the Tigris and Euphrates Valley of present-day Iraq, remained entirely pictographic until about 1400 B.C. The Sumerians are generally credited with the first invention of writing, around 3200 B.C., but some recent |
1153081_0 | Q & A | Classes in Cuba Q. I am a Spanish teacher and would like to get information about travel to Cuba for language courses. -- Jim Rodgers, Philadelphia. A. You may see a few Cuban cigars and baseball pitchers around, but the 1963 embargo on trade and travel with Cuba is still in effect. So, travel by Americans to Cuba is limited and can be illegal. Still, there has been an increase in travel to the island by Americans in recent years. Some Americans circumvent the law by using foreign travel sources, but the regulations allow trips to Cuba for certain reasons, including education. According to Maria Ibanez, a spokeswoman for the Treasury Department, ''it's not that complicated'' for a teacher to gain a license to visit Cuba to take courses there. Essentially, you would have to write a letter to the Office of Foreign Assets Control, Department of the Treasury, Washington, D.C. 20220, confirming your position and stating the purpose of your visit. First, Ms. Ibanez suggested, check out the office's Web site, www.treas.gov/ofac, or call (202) 622-2520 for details. The policy is also summarized at a new site, www.state.gov/www/regions/wha/ cuba/index.html. There are also organized educational trips. The group Global Exchange has been leading trips to Cuba for about 10 years, said Roberto Leni, who runs its Cuban program. The trips, which leave from Cancun, Mexico, include two and four-week language courses at the University of Havana. These trips are licensed as ''fully hosted'' by a Cuban organization, Mr. Leni said, adding, ''We've never had a participant fined or jailed'' (fully hosted trips require that no American's money go to any Cuban entity; so, for example, a non-Cuban airline must be used). The students take classes four hours a day and join in other activities tailored to the interests of the group -- from bicycle outings to meetings with human rights advocates. The cost for two weeks is $1,200, and $1,750 for a month. This includes round-trip air fare from Cancun, double or triple accommodations in a guest house (hotels cost extra) and two meals a day. Contact Global Exchange at 2017 Mission Street, No. 303, San Francisco, Calif. 94110; (415) 255-7296, fax (415) 255-7498, or www.globalexchange.org. It is wise to ask any American organization running a trip to Cuba whether it has a license from the foreign assets office and whether you can see the license. Also ask whether the |
1153156_6 | Best Buys: $1 and Elbow Grease Give Old Buildings New Lives | tower has a very important place in the eyes of the village,'' said Les Arstark, president of the society. ''It's right smack in the middle of our historic district that includes more than 60 buildings on the national registry,'' he said. ''It is the most visible structure in the village, and has become such a symbol of the community that it is the logo on all official village stationery.'' Inside the 50-foot granite and limestone tower at Main Street and Broadway, 58 steps lead to a 2,500-pound bell and a weight-drawn mechanism that allows the clock to chime every hour on the hour. Every spring, about 250 Roslyn fourth graders take the climb to see the workings of the clock as part of the state's school curriculum on local history. Along with the gift has come the burden of paying for renovations. John Collins, a consultant to Roslyn's historic district board, said the restoration was ongoing. ''If you look quickly, the clock looks fine,'' he said. ''But on closer inspection, it needs serious work, from cracks in the limestone to water damage. The village raised about $40,000 from fund-raising efforts and private donations, but that only paid to replace bricks on two sides of the tower.'' This year, the village applied for a matching grant from the state to complete a $65,000 project to renovate the tower's two remaining sides, Mr. Collins said. News is expected next month on the status of the application, he said. Restoring Roslyn's historic buildings has created community spirit, said Marshall Ward, the great-great-nephew of Ellen Ward and the last living descendent of the Ward family in Roslyn. ''We take a special pride in our village,'' said Mr. Ward, who restores antiques, ''and we have a lot of fun working together to preserve our community.'' One of the most ambitious renovation projects on the North Shore is the result of a great buy by the group Landmark on Main Street from North Hempstead: the Main Street School, a three-story brick building that was built in 1909 as Port Washington's first high school. The complex that now occupies the 4.7-acre property comprises 59 units of low-income housing for the elderly and for developmentally disabled adults, a children's center, parent resource center, teen center, park and playground, meeting room and 500-seat theater. The complex is the culmination of work that began after the school closed in 1985. |
1153414_0 | Furor Rises In Canada Over Hunt For Grizzly | Harry McCowan, a grizzly-bear hunting guide, looked harassed. Boatloads of nature tourists were buzzing up and down this coastal rain forest waterway. Mr. McCowan's taciturn Austrian hunting client was emitting signals of impatience, and while a helper loaded rifles and supplies into a seaplane, a black bear started pawing through the camp. ''There are too many people here,'' grumbled the veteran guide, whose seaplane was stenciled: ''Selling the last frontier.'' While the helper sent the curious black bear bounding back into the woods, he continued: ''I used to have a grizzly quota of nine, now I have one. I used to kill three or four. Now, with luck, I will take one.'' But judging by the protests at Canada's overseas consulates and the petitions regularly dumped on the desk of the provincial minister of environment, Mr. McCowan may be fortunate to get even that. British Columbia, which in the 1880's marketed itself in Europe as the ''sportsman's Eden,'' is increasingly defensive about its status as the last Canadian province to allow a major grizzly bear hunt. From an average of 350 grizzlies killed each year through 1992, the annual ''harvest'' dropped last year to 207. Under pressure, the province is quietly restricting hunting of one what are among North America's largest land mammals. Under a lottery system introduced two years ago, only a quarter of the residents who apply get permits to hunt the bears. Areas along the border with the United States have been largely placed off-limits to hunting, following American complaints that a grizzly protected under the United States Endangered Species Act can be shot if it wanders across the border. Toronto's Globe and Mail, echoing the sentiment of many Canadians, wrote in a recent editorial about the grizzly, ''Given the scientific uncertainties about how many there are, the knowledge that the population is not large and the fact that the hunt serves no purpose, except giving hunters pleasure, why should it continue?'' Environmentalists agree. ''Trophy hunting of North America's slowest-reproducing mammal is just unacceptable,'' Wayne McCrory, a bear biologist, said over the mess table of a tourist sloop that rocked at anchor here one recent evening. ''We wiped them out from half of their range in Canada, and yet we continue to allow them to be hunted here.'' As nature tourism soars on Canada's Pacific Coast, grizzly bear hunting shrivels in economic importance. Last year, according to |
1156340_0 | PATENTING LIFE: A special report.; Biological Products Raise Genetic Ownership Issues | For generations, tribes in the Amazon rain forest have used secretions from the skin of a frog to make poison blow darts. Now Abbott Laboratories is developing a painkiller modeled on the active chemical in the frog secretion that seems as effective as morphine but without damaging side effects. This does not sit well with the government of Ecuador and local environmental groups. With the American drug company standing to make millions of dollars if the new drug is successful, they say the country that is the source of the frog and the indigenous people who discovered the secretions should get a share of the proceeds. Angry that they have not profited from the animal and plant life within their borders, Ecuador and many other developing countries have begun restricting the freedom of scientists to collect biological samples and demanding compensation in exchange for permits. Some scientists warn that scores of research projects that might lead to breakthroughs in medicine and agriculture, as well as to the study and preservation of endangered species, are being impeded or abandoned. ''Ultimately, things on certain species will never be done because they'll be extinct before the countries can do it themselves,'' said John Daly, the scientist at the National Institutes of Health who isolated the Ecuadoran frog chemical. He now has great difficulty getting permits. It took him three years to get clearance from Panama to collect frogs with a cardiac stimulant in their skin. He gave up on Venezuela. Projects around the world have been caught up in controversy, including a study of genes for longevity in China, a search for cancer fighting chemicals in Southeast Asian marine life, the breeding of new rice strains from South Asian varieties and the development of a powerful sweetener from a West African berry. Earlier this month, the United States Patent Office overturned a patent held by an American entrepreneur on a plant from the Amazon rain forest. Once considered the common heritage of mankind, wild animals, plants and crops were taken without asking or freely exchanged. Now wildlife is increasingly viewed as a ''genetic resource,'' the raw material of the biotechnology era, just as oil and iron were in the industrial age. The Convention on Biological Diversity, forged at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, established that nations have sovereignty over their genetic resources and are entitled to ''fair and equitable |
1156340_4 | PATENTING LIFE: A special report.; Biological Products Raise Genetic Ownership Issues | year, the government of China halted a project, partly financed by the National Institute of Health, that sought clues to longevity by studying the genes of 10,000 elderly Chinese. The project resumed after organizers promised that the samples would stay in China and local scientists would share in patents and publications. Jeremy Rifkin, an influential commentator on science and technology, said efforts by countries to restrict access to wildlife, however understandable, are pushing the world in the same direction as the biotechnology companies -- toward private ownership of genetic resources. ''You'll have gene wars in the 21st century if we begin to enclose the gene pool,'' he said. History's Lessons Paying the Price For Past Mistakes The countries controlling access say that their resources have been used without compensation, acts they call ''bio-colonialism'' or ''bio-piracy.'' They point to two cancer drugs, vincristine and vinblastine, developed by Eli Lilly & Company in the 1950's and 1960's from the rosy periwinkle of Madagascar. The drugs have helped significantly reduce deaths from testicular cancer and childhood leukemia and earned Lilly hundreds of millions of dollars. Madagascar did not share in the profits. Similarly, crossbreeding with barley collected from Ethiopia in the 1950's saved California's crop from the yellow dwarf virus. The modification resulted in hundreds of millions of dollars of increased output, without any return to Ethiopia. ''I'm not saying it was unfair,'' said Tewolde Berhan Gebre Egziabher, general manager of the Ethiopia Environmental Protection Authority. ''That was before fairness in this line became an issue.'' One factor behind the increased chauvinism about genetic resources is that the advent of genetic engineering is perceived by many countries as having increased the value of genes by making them easier to exploit. University of Wisconsin scientists, for instance, isolated a protein 2,000 times sweeter than sugar from a West African berry. The gene for that protein can now be inserted into other fruits to make them sweeter. And if a table sweetener is developed from the protein, it will probably be produced in genetically modified bacteria, eliminating the need for the berry itself. ''The West African plant has been replaced on the international market,'' said Joseph M. Gopo, director of Zimbabwe's national biotechnology laboratory. Another factor is the increased patenting of genetically modified plants and animals in the West. Some developing nations say that if a company takes a seed from a farmer's field, adds |
1156371_3 | Quake-Hit Assisi Basilica Restored, but the People Aren't | sites, approving blueprints and granting building permits. ''Italy is the land of paper,'' complained Giuliano Ricci, head of the Colfiorito reconstruction committee. ''Every time you try to present your building proposal, they ask you for your Social Security number 50 times.'' Nor has fraud been totally eliminated from the process. The police in Foligno announced this week that they had uncovered a scam by a phony construction company that bilked both suppliers and homeowners for more than $1 million. In September 1998, Mr. Bracalente confidently predicted that 4,500 dislocated families would be back in their own homes within 12 months. Now he concedes that it could take several more years. In contrast, the repair of the Basilica of St. Francis proved a model of speed and almost superhuman cooperation. Friars, government bureaucrats, art restorers, construction crews and hundreds of volunteers worked around the clock to bolster the structure against future quakes and to reconstruct the vault of the nave, famous for its brilliantly colored frescos by Giotto and Cimabue. The images of only two saints, St. Rufino and St. Vittorino, traditionally attributed to Giotto, were reconstituted by piecing together more than 3,000 tiny fragments like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. And even many of the people left homeless by the same disaster say the basilica deserved priority. ''It's St. Francis, and it is also the main draw for tourism around here -- they had to fix it first,'' said Giovanni Polveri, 21, who has spent the last two years in a container in Foligno with his parents and sister. He said his contractor had so many other commissions that his reconstruction permits had not yet been processed. ''There is nothing we can do, but we are very sick of living in this place,'' he said. The state has spent $39 million on the basilica and the Sacred Convent attached to it, but that expense is small compared with the $5 billion it has earmarked over the same time to reconstruct ruined homes, churches and historic buildings. By Italian standards, however, the pace is exemplary. It took three years for the first reconstruction sites to go up after an earthquake in Friuli in 1976, and 12 years to rehouse its 80,000 victims, a vast public works project that is considered a model compared with Irpinia. ''Certainly having these many families still in containers is a problem,'' Mr. Bracalente said. ''But in |
1156313_1 | WORLD BRIEFING | year will balloon to a record $367.6 billion, making it one of the most indebted nations. (AP) CHINA: FALUN GONG CRACKDOWN -- China has sent 12 members of the banned Falun Gong spiritual movement to labor camps as part of a crackdown, a Hong Kong-based rights group said. The Information Center of Human Rights and Democratic Movement in China said authorities in Heilongjiang Province sent four Falun Gong members to a camp for re-education. Another eight members, in Jilin Province, were given three years, it said. (Reuters) UNITED NATIONS UNESCO'S CHIEF PLEDGES REFORM -- Unesco's new director general, Koichiro Matsuura of Japan, warned that ''unpopular measures'' would be necessary to reinvigorate the troubled organization. Indirectly criticizing his Spanish predecessor, Federico Mayor Zaragoza, he acknowledged that accusations of ''rampant nepotism'' in Unesco were ''not baseless.'' He said he hoped his reforms would woo back the United States, which left Unesco in 1984 charging corruption. Alan Riding (NYT) EUROPE YUGOSLAVIA: FUEL DELIVERIES DELAYED -- Serbian customs officials continued to hold up 14 tankers of heating oil donated by the European Union in a pilot project to help local governments of Nis and Pirot, two opposition-led towns in southern Serbia. Customs had taken samples from the tankers and were awaiting results, Serbian officials said. Carlotta Gall (NYT) FRANCE: BOMBINGS IN CORSICA -- Two bombs exploded in Ajaccio, the capital, minutes after a warning from an anonymous caller. Thirteen people were slightly injured in the blasts at the Social Security offices and the headquarters of the Transport Department. Bomb attacks by separatists are not unusual in Corsica, but they usually happen overnight, sparing injuries. (AP) UKRAINE: CHERNOBYL PLANT TO REOPEN -- Thirteen years after the world's worst nuclear accident, the Chernobyl power plant was scheduled to reopen today. Under a 1995 agreement with the Group of 7 leading industrialized nations, Chernobyl was supposed to be closed before the year 2000. But Ukraine says it has not received the money promised to complete two new nuclear reactors and will keep Chernobyl running until next year. (AP) THE AMERICAS CHILE: PROTESTS FOR AND AGAINST PINOCHET -- Gen. Au-gusto Pinochet celebrated his 84th birthday, his second spent under arrest in Britain, with family, friends and a visiting delegation of high-ranking Chilean military men showing their support for his fight against extradition to Spain to stand trial on torture charges. In Chile, Reuters reported that his supporters staged |
1156313_2 | WORLD BRIEFING | samples from the tankers and were awaiting results, Serbian officials said. Carlotta Gall (NYT) FRANCE: BOMBINGS IN CORSICA -- Two bombs exploded in Ajaccio, the capital, minutes after a warning from an anonymous caller. Thirteen people were slightly injured in the blasts at the Social Security offices and the headquarters of the Transport Department. Bomb attacks by separatists are not unusual in Corsica, but they usually happen overnight, sparing injuries. (AP) UKRAINE: CHERNOBYL PLANT TO REOPEN -- Thirteen years after the world's worst nuclear accident, the Chernobyl power plant was scheduled to reopen today. Under a 1995 agreement with the Group of 7 leading industrialized nations, Chernobyl was supposed to be closed before the year 2000. But Ukraine says it has not received the money promised to complete two new nuclear reactors and will keep Chernobyl running until next year. (AP) THE AMERICAS CHILE: PROTESTS FOR AND AGAINST PINOCHET -- Gen. Au-gusto Pinochet celebrated his 84th birthday, his second spent under arrest in Britain, with family, friends and a visiting delegation of high-ranking Chilean military men showing their support for his fight against extradition to Spain to stand trial on torture charges. In Chile, Reuters reported that his supporters staged a peaceful protest, left, in Santiago, the capital city, while two dozen anti-Pinochet students threw rocks at riot policemen who used water cannon and tear gas to disperse the protesters. No arrests were made. Warren Hoge (NYT) MIDDLE EAST IRAN: ASSASSINATION PLOT -- The Intelligence Ministry said it had detained 20 members of a hard-line religious group, Mahdaviyat, on suspicion of planning to assassinate President Mohammad Khatami, his predecessor Hashemi Rafsanjani and the former chief of the judiciary, Mohammad Yazdi. It was not clear what link might exist between the supposed plot and the country's wider political struggle between reformers and Iran's ruling Muslim clerics. John F. Burns (NYT) ISRAEL: CONFLICT OVER A NEW ROAD --Israel will confiscate Arab land and destroy Arab homes built without permits so that it can build a road linking Jerusalem to the West Bank, Palestinian and Israeli officials said. The Palestinians accused Israel of trying to expand Jerusalem's municipal boundaries in an effort to cement its claim on the contested city. The road link will be made by building three tunnels through Arab East Jerusalem and the West Bank. (AP) AFRICA NIGERIA: TRIBAL VIOLENCE IN LAGOS -- President Olusegun Obasanjo issued shoot-on-sight orders after |
1155209_2 | Hidden Risk That Science Saw | is being compressed like a spring.'' When the spring finally breaks free of the snag, the region will suffer a subduction-zone earthquake, a more potentially destructive type than California usually experiences. Most quakes there occur along faults where the ground moves laterally, and severe damage is fairly localized. Subduction-zone quakes affect wider areas and can be much stronger, like the 9.2-magnitude quake that struck Alaska in 1964. The last major earthquake in the Cascade region occurred in 1700, and the average interval between such quakes seems to be about 600 years, but could be less, Mr. Goldfinger said. Other research has found that small crustal faults in the Portland hills, thought to be inactive, may be able to produce significant quakes. Reactions to these alarming reports have varied from fatalism to urgent concern. Demand for residential earthquake insurance has picked up somewhat, though not explosively. And some homeowners, including Portland's mayor, Vera Katz, have made alterations to their homes to make them safer in a quake. ''A lot of our community is in a denial stage, yet they are informed,'' Mayor Katz said. ''One of the first questions I asked as mayor was about the potential of an earthquake. There was a deadly silence in the room.'' Much of downtown Portland was built using methods and materials, like brick and terra cotta, that often fare poorly in earthquakes. The city government has begun a program to retrofit public buildings and bridges and to improve emergency plans. The state's urban building codes took little account of earthquake risk until a moderate 5.6-magnitude temblor near Salem, the state capital, did $30 million in damage in 1993. Since then, the codes have been tightened somewhat, but they are still less strict than those in coastal areas or in quake-prone California, and apply only to new construction, not existing buildings. State officials say they need more data from the latest studies before taking new action. In recent years, the Oregon legislature has been reluctant to appropriate money for seismic upgrades of the state's highways and bridges or for new maps of earthquake hazard zones. Without actual experience of a quake to go by, officials have trouble deciding how much preparation is needed. ''I'm so ambivalent about this,'' Mayor Katz said. ''If it's a very severe quake, I don't know if we've planned far enough. I don't know if any community can plan far enough.'' |
1155157_0 | Ms. Eidlin, Mr. McCarthy | Lisa Beth Eidlin, the daughter of Howard Eidlin of Forest Hills, Queens, and the late Marlene Eidlin, was married yesterday to Matthew Evan McCarthy, a son of Diane and Richard McCarthy of Bass River, Mass. Rabbi Roger Ross officiated at Troutbeck, an inn in Amenia, N.Y. The Rev. Neil O'Connell, a Roman Catholic priest, took part in the ceremony. The couple graduated from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Mrs. McCarthy, 31, is a keeper in the Wildlife Health Center, the animal hospital at the Bronx Zoo. She is studying for a master's degree in physical anthropology at Hunter College. Her father retired as a salesman at Vehicle Parts Warehouse in Ridgewood, Queens. Mr. McCarthy, also 31, is an associate product manager at Bestfoods Baking Company in Bay Shore, N.Y. He received an M.B.A. degree from Hofstra University. His parents own the Patriot Press, a commercial printing company in Hyannis, Mass. |
1155001_2 | Taking a Hike Around New Haven | a revolt to seize the ship. With sculptures designed by George Hamilton, the monument marks the spot where the Africans were tried for murder and piracy. The Africans were eventually acquitted, and then freed in 1841. I continued my walk through the back of City Hall to Federal Square, down Olive Street to Wooster Square, the center of the city's Italian heritage. The square is a lovely spot to sit and reflect and is surrounded by interesting architecture, but the real draw of the Wooster Street area is food. If it had been late afternoon, I would have stopped at Sally's or Pepe's for pizza, but since it was lunchtime, I hightailed it back to Chapel Street to Claire's Corner Copia. A vegetarian restaurant that's also kosher, Claire's has been offering soups, salads, sandwiches and hot entrees for more than two decades. A few doors away from Claire's is the British Art Center, one of New Haven's main attractions. Anne Tyler Calabresi, a founder of the annual International Festival of Arts and Ideas in New Haven, suggests a cultural tour of the city for those with a few hours to spend. ''The British Art Center has the best collection of English art outside of the Tate Gallery in London,'' said Ms. Calabresi, who lives in a farmhouse in Woodbridge, but spends a lot of time in New Haven. A Louis Kahn signature building, the museum has every aspect of British art from the Elizabethan period to the modern. It also has the largest collection of the works of George Stubbs, bequeathed by Paul Mellon. Be sure to see the painting ''Dort or Dordrecht: The Dort Packet-Boat From Rotterdam Becalmed'' by Joseph Turner on the fourth floor. Across the street, the Yale University Art Gallery, another Louis Kahn building, contains a comprehensive collection of European, Asian, African, and Egyptian art, modernist and Impressionist paintings as well as sculpture, photographs, and prints. The European collection has just been refurbished. For Bruce Barber, the WPLR radio personality, a perfect day in New Haven would begin and end around Chapel Street. ''I'd have lunch at Scoozi, then I'd go across the street to the Yale Art Gallery and look at the furniture,'' he said. ''Then I'd shop a little at the Wave Gallery, Atticus Books and the News Haven magazine place.'' Mr. Barber adds, ''Run, don't walk'' to Hot Tomato, an Italian restaurant in |
1155235_2 | Ideas & Trends: After the Baby Boom; For the Jobless Rate, The Forecast Is Hazy | improvement sticks, the result would be more job creation and downward pressure on unemployment rates with less risk of inflation -- what some analysts call the ''new economy.'' The problem now is that growth and unemployment are straining against the limits of what even the new economy would permit. ''You can have an overheated new economy just like you can have an overheated old economy,'' said Richard Herd, an economist at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the research group for the world's industrialized countries. In the long run, one of the biggest influences on the labor market is sure to be the immense demographic shift the United States is undergoing. Population growth is slowing, and as the baby boom generation ages, the nation is getting much older. One implication is clear: the working age population will be smaller, suggesting at first blush that very low unemployment might be the wave of the future. But predicting the effect of the demographic shifts on issues like unemployment is a hazardous business. For one thing, slower population growth does not necessarily mean that there will be fewer workers competing for each job. If population growth slows without an offsetting increase in productivity, economic growth could be expected to decline as well, and so would job creation. Moreover, the economy's cyclical ups and downs have proven more powerful so far in determining unemployment than the size of the labor pool. In Japan, for example, the working age population is beginning to shrink, yet the unemployment rate has been going up as the economy suffers through a long downturn. And while there is no obvious reason why the long economic expansion in the United States should end anytime soon, the business cycle is by no means dead. UNEMPLOYMENT and the size of the labor pool could also be tremendously influenced by any rise or fall in immigration, or by changes in the age at which workers choose to retire. A long trend toward earlier retirement now seems to be giving way to a willingness or need on the part of many older people to keep working at least part time. ''Simply knowing ahead of time the ratio of workers to non-workers takes you a little way toward answering questions like the implications for unemployment,'' said Gary Burtless, an economist at the Brookings Institution. ''But it doesn't take you terribly far, because that could |
1154913_0 | Who Needs Philosophy? | Back when she was the star of her high-school drama club, the philosopher Martha Nussbaum wasn't interested in playing Emily in ''Our Town.'' Her favorite role was Robespierre -- in a five-act, French-language production she wrote herself. Decades later, she still speaks fondly of the meandering walks she would take around the affluent Philadelphia suburb of Bryn Mawr, dreaming of the sacrifices the Frenchman made to advance his ideals. ''I was fascinated by his dilemma of wanting liberty for everyone, but having to figure out what to do with individuals who won't go along with your plan,'' she recalled recently. ''I still think about it all the time.'' Nussbaum also remembered the fun she had playing Joan of Arc, entranced as she was by the question of ''how far to sacrifice friendship and personal loyalty to an abstract cause.'' Although Nussbaum eventually traded the stage for the academy, she still takes these early inspirations to heart. Synthesizing the passion of the revolutionary with the zeal of the self-sacrificing saint, she has become, at 52, the most prominent female philosopher in America. In addition to producing a steady stream of books and articles from her perches at Harvard, Brown and now at the University of Chicago, she has cultivated a distinctive, even glamorous, public presence. Nussbaum has discussed Greek tragedy with Bill Moyers on PBS, presented Plato on the Discovery Channel and been photographed by Annie Leibovitz for her new book, ''Women.'' More important, as a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books and The New Republic, Nussbaum's essays have become required reading for those with a taste for intellectual combat. Prized for her writing's acerbic bite, she first attracted notice in 1987 with a devastating attack on Allan Bloom's conservative diatribe ''The Closing of the American Mind.'' Writing in The New York Review of Books, she denounced his proposal that universities dedicate themselves solely to educating the elite and savaged what she saw as Bloom's distorted reading of Greek philosophy. ''How good a philosopher, then, is Allan Bloom?'' she concluded. ''We are given no reason to think him one at all.'' Earlier this year, Nussbaum took aim at Judith Butler, the radical feminist philosopher who has attained cultlike status (through dense monographs like ''Gender Trouble'') for arguing, among other things, that society is built on artificial gender norms that can best be undermined with ''subversive'' symbolic behavior, like |
1154913_12 | Who Needs Philosophy? | a linguist she met in a class on Greek prose composition. But she was an eager convert. ''I had an intense desire to join the underdogs and to fight for justice in solidarity with them,'' she has written. For Nussbaum, Judaism offered a sense of community lacking in her own upbringing. ''I read Martin Buber and understood that virtually every relationship I had observed at Bryn Mawr had been an I-It relationship, involving no genuine acknowledgment of humanity,'' she wrote. Her marriage to Alan Nussbaum ended in 1987. Although Nussbaum thrived as a classics graduate student at Harvard, she felt embattled. When she became the first woman ever elected to the prestigious Society of Fellows (which guarantees a student three years of financing), the question of what to call her arose. ''Someone suggested that since the masculine for 'fellow' was 'hetairos,' I should be called a 'hetaira,' which I knew full well did not mean 'fellowess,' but was in fact Greek for 'prostitute,''' she says. ''I didn't like Harvard. I disapproved of the classicists. They were anti-Semites, racists and sexists and had a real thuggishness about them.'' The birth of her daughter, Rachel, only made Nussbaum more determined to prove her mettle in a male bastion. A photo of her in the maternity ward shows her proudly holding a copy of Aristotle's ''Politics.'' In the late 60's, the study of classical literature was largely a philological pursuit, and since Nussbaum was growing more interested in the ideas of Plato and Aristotle, she started to take classes in Harvard's philosophy department. Aside from being predominantly Jewish, the department was also more open to interdisciplinary inquiry. She wrote her classics dissertation on a treatise by Aristotle, but she also began writing articles on Henry James and Proust that drew on the full range of her literary and philosophical interests. Unfortunately, the very intellectual breadth that became Nussbaum's signature caused problems for her professionally. Although Harvard had originally appointed her jointly to teach classics and philosophy in 1975, Nussbaum was denied tenure by the classics department in 1982. The experience devastated her; she even considered bringing a sexual discrimination suit. Instead, she moved to Brown University, where she taught until she came to Chicago four years ago. On my last day in Chicago, I sat in on a class Nussbaum was teaching on John Rawls and political liberalism in one of the law |
1155089_0 | Man Against Nature, And Nature Is Winning | Man and nature are in a turf war. This is not a new concept. Now consider this. Humans took the territory through urbanization, but nature has sent in the ground troops in the form of skunks, squirrels, raccoons and bears to win through siege. All over the state, deer have taken to manicured lawns, golf courses and playing fields. Bears have begun to rummage through trash cans in the western part of the state, while coyotes and geese have take hold of the central and southern regions. Bats are terrorizing the people of the Pine Barrens. And squirrels and raccoons are invading interlopers -- otherwise known as humans -- everywhere. With the cold weather setting in, more animals are beginning to seek shelter in their new natural habitats -- houses. ''We don't have wildlife anymore in this state,'' said Jack Neary, known to fretful suburbanites in Monmouth and Ocean Counties as Muskrat Jack the pest control guru. ''What we've got is urban wildlife, forest animals that have been born and bred for more than one generation in an urban setting.'' Mr. Neary went on: ''Look around you kid; with urbanization there's nowhere for wildlife to go anymore. There used to be specific seasons when people called about specific animal nuisances. Now it's a year-round problem and boy, do people get crazy when an animal invades their home.'' Muskrat Jack Animal Control Service here receives an average of 100 calls a day year round from residents with animals invading their home or yard. Mr. Neary told of one woman who called, screaming that she had a ''giant snake'' in her backyard. ''The way she was carrying on you'd think it was an anaconda,'' he said with a chuckle. ''Turned out to be a 30-inch black garden snake.'' One animal that is sticking to a seasonal pattern is the deer, currently in rutting season. ''September through end of November the deer go nuts,'' Mr. Neary said. ''It's very common for them to just leap though people's plate glass windows in a frenzy. I'm getting calls from townships saying the deer are running down Main Street.'' In Oakhurst, John Tennant, a plumber, has taken to daily battles with a flock of geese that has taken over his neighborhood and claimed squawker's rights. Carrying a trash can lid as a combination shield, war drum and rain hat, he runs at the invaders, beating a |
1155361_0 | November 14-20; Movement Toward Peace In Northern Ireland | The politicians of Northern Ireland have never had problems talking. For five years they have been at it, in marathon negotiating sessions seeking a lasting peace plan. But this time the words were different -- conciliatory, accommodating and thought out -- where before they had always been obdurate, insulting and impulsive. First George J. Mitchell, the former United States Senator turned Ulster mediator, spoke, then John de Chastelain, a retired Canadian general who heads a panel on disarmament, then David Trimble, leader of the Ulster Unionists, and his rival party leader, Sinn Fein's Gerry Adams, and finally -- and most important -- the Irish Republican Army. The choreographed statements proposed a series of interlocking steps that would allow the start-up of a new Northern Ireland government and the simultaneous appointment of an I.R.A. officer as a representative to the disarmament panel. The formula seeks to get around a stalemate over guerrilla weapons that has stalled progress in putting the April 1998 peace settlement into operation. If Mr. Trimble can get backing for the deal at a party meeting in Belfast next weekend, the new Ulster home rule government, with its powers divided evenly between Protestants and Catholics, could be up and running just days later. WARREN HOGE |
1154920_0 | Galileo's Universe | I traveled to Italy the first time as a tourist, the second time attached to the unglamorous end of a documentary film crew and the third, fourth, fifth and sixth times in search of the ghost of Galileo. At work these past five years on a book about the legendary father of modern science, and naturally infatuated with him, I moved through cities where he'd lived, half expecting to catch sight of his fur-lined jacket ducking into a doorway or rounding a corner just ahead of me on the Via Maggio. Italy being Italy, this happened more than once -- because the past is ever present there. So that, for example, when I came upon the mustard-colored house on Pisa's Via Giuseppe Giusti, where Galileo was born in 1564, I had to look high up for the faded stone marker noting the building's historical significance. This was no museum or monument, this ''casa natale Galileo Galilei,'' but merely another multifamily dwelling along the narrow street, probably in constant use since the 13th century. A large, handwritten sign in a second-story window announced the availability of an apartment for sale. In the better-known part of Pisa, on the Campo dei Miracoli, or Field of Miracles, the Leaning Tower still leers inappropriately from behind the Duomo, as it has done since the Middle Ages. Having ascended its internal eight-story staircase on my first trip to Pisa in 1970, I was sad to see the steps closed to climbers now that the Tower tips more drastically than ever. One can only imagine what influence that landmark cast over the young Galileo, who spent his first 10 years in its shadow. Perhaps some perverse comedic sense led him back to the tower's tilted summit in adulthood, when, in 1589, he returned to Pisa from his family's new home in Florence as a professor of mathematics, and presently made his famous point about the relative speeds of falling objects. Historians to this day argue whether Galileo really staged his cannonball-dropping demonstration from atop the Leaning Tower (as opposed to some other campanile), and if so, whether anyone from the hidebound Pisan philosophy department turned out to watch his antics. My American guidebook to Italy, however, presents this story as acknowledged fact. Leaving his post in Pisa, where he was an unpopular iconoclast, Galileo moved to Padua to accept a better teaching position with higher pay, |
1154919_10 | Over the Top at Victoria Falls | is called ''high-siding.'' When a raft is pushed up by a wave, you jump on that high side and attempt to lower it, and quickly. Above our heads in this practice pool hung two bungeed women. As they were slowly winched back up to the bridge, I thought of how our own evangelical Jonathan Edwards (I attended Yale) had put it, in a different context, long ago, something about an angry God holding sinners over the pit of hell by a slender thread . . . Then the watery roller coaster began. Repeatedly, we were covered under ice-cream mountains of warm foam. ''Please, hold on tightly,'' I remember Mapulanga Apulanga, who was at the oars, saying before Stairway-to-Heaven. ''This is probably the biggest commercially run rapid in the world. We will enter left and attempt to correct right. And, please, enjoy the ride.'' The name of our boat was the Mukuni, for the chief of Mapulanga's Batoka village, which occupied the lands along the Zambian side of the gorge from Victoria Falls. I had had an audience with Chief Mukuni once. A thin, pleasant man with appraising eyes, wearing an open white shirt and black pants the morning we chatted, he had given up his job as head of British Petroleum-Zambia, in Lusaka, to return to his village, which was as large as a small town. We talked about why it might be a bad idea to dam the Zambezi in the middle of the gorge, as engineers in the arid capital of Harare have been threatening to do, off and on, for a century or so. Chief Mukuni's opposition is one of the things that keeps the Zambezi free-flowing, at least through the Batoka Gorge. On the drive back to the falls, after the interview, our Toyota truck experienced a flat tire. There was no jack, and it was a hot day. My driver disappeared. In 20 minutes, he returned with two men. The three of us held up the back of the truck long enough for the driver to install the spare. That's what I remember most from my meeting with the chief. I was glad we had a spare. Chief Mukuni had been among the very first to test the bungee jump off the bridge -- reluctantly. The commercial operators needed official Zambian support for the venture, since it was a public bridge, and Zambian officials let |
1154862_2 | Rational Explanation | a computer analogy: the tripling of human brain size over the last four million years resulted in an expanded hard disk, a more powerful central processing unit and an enhanced program provided by reason. Current neurological research is consistent with some of Calne's contentions. It is highly likely that reason developed in parallel with the evolution of the frontal lobes. For instance, the frontal lobes are important in the control of antisocial self-interest and mental agility while providing ''the scaffolding for reason.'' And damage to the frontal lobes can result in impairments in such operations relating to reason as decision making, mental agility and organization, as well as behavior. In an intriguing analogy he compares some consequences of frontal damage to psychopathic reasoning and behavior. ''Psychopaths . . . use reason for their own purposes,'' yet ''lie as a matter of course'' and ''flout the universal, rational, ethical edicts on how people should live together.'' While not all psychopaths have frontal lobe dysfunction, such disturbances are found often enough to suspect a subtle alteration. Commenting on the association within the psychopath of mendacity and ''charisma and ruthlessness,'' Calne relates a chilling observation from the German psychiatrist Ernst Kretchmer: ''It's a funny thing about psychopaths. In normal times we render expert opinions on them. In times of political unrest they rule us.'' But Calne wisely admits that it would be a mistake to envision reason as ''locked up'' in the frontal lobes, since other functions of the brain are required for the ''module of reason'' to operate. These include consciousness, memory and the ability to create and transform mental symbols. Thus reason does not apply only to ethics and morality but to language and speech, social behavior, commerce, government, art, science and the behavioral sciences. Calne explores each of these topics in discussions ranging from the behavior of kamikaze pilots to the physics of sound to the visions of St. Joan of Arc. He is sometimes rambling and unfocused. Nonetheless, he makes important points. He is critical of the concept of progress and suggests we modify our ''cultural prejudices'' and eliminate the ''dissonance'' between human and biological history. ''What we call human progress is the product of resolute, unrealistic optimism -- that our latest way of life is superior to anything that came before.'' He also cautions against unwarranted hubris in regard to the mind's capacity for coming up with an |
1155242_0 | Online, or Else | The latest advice on cyber-etiquette: unplug your old office equipment if you're dealing with people who make their living from the Web. Brewster Kahle, chief executive of Alexa Internet, which he recently sold to Amazon.com for nearly $300 million, recently told the New York Infotech Forum that he communicates with his lawyers and accountants over the Internet, thank you. ''If they fax us anything,'' he warned, ''we look for a new one.'' He's not kidding. E-mail addiction is a key test for lawyers or accountants wanting his business. ''Everyone says they have e-mail, but many do not live on it,'' Mr. Kahle said, in an exchange of e-mails. ''We only want to deal with those that cannot live without an e-mail fix no matter where they are or what they are doing.'' PRIVATE SECTOR |
1154883_1 | CHILDREN'S BOOKS: Books in Brief | therefore, utterly horrifying when Theo witnesses the execution of his brother by a Nazi firing squad. Now, alone in the world, Theo is taken in by the village priest and his wife, Patir Alex and Kyria Maria. These saintly people perform countless good deeds, from administering church rites to prescribing medicinal herbs to bathing and dressing the village simpleton. Active members of the resistance movement, they print and distribute an underground newspaper, smuggle arms to rebel fighters, engage in guerrilla warfare and help escort Jews to safety outside Greece. In this remote village, Theo begins a new life. He learns to press wine, make candles, keep bees and gather herbs. Continuing with his anti-Nazi guerrilla activities, he steals from the enemy, blows up a train and buries the dead. And of course he performs his inspirational puppet show, which brings his audience to its feet singing the Greek national anthem. But while he demonstrates outstanding courage so many times, Theo never seems satisfied with his own bravery. He takes comfort in owning a gun, but constantly struggles to know what is good and how to be brave. Theo's questions are pertinent today, especially for young people who have been exposed to too much violence and who may think that guns provide security. Harrison presents an unusual context and a powerful point of view that will help young readers think about virtue, violence, conscience and courage. The novel is chock-full of literary references. Soc's execution echoes that of Socrates in ''Phaedo,'' even to his last words about a chicken that is owed. Readers familiar with the life of Christ will understand why Patir Alex was killed with two other men on a hill called Golgotha. Those who have read ''Antigone'' will appreciate the importance of burial during wartime. And anyone who has read the ''Iliad'' will love the scene in which brave Greek warriors feast on wine and roasted meat. At times, however, ''Theo'' feels almost too heavily researched, and the sheer number of literary and historical references can be overwhelming. There is talk of ancient mythology, classical philosophy, Orthodox Christianity, Gypsy culture, Judaism, Greek history, traditional puppet theater, contemporary Greek folklore and agrarian village customs. There are lessons from Plato and Homer and Karl Marx, and songs from the Greek war of independence and from Mozart operas. Yet somehow it all works. Harrison manages to weave all the threads of |
1154537_0 | 2 Sides Square Off on Genetically Altered Food | The Food and Drug Administration, while maintaining that its policy regarding bioengineered foods is safe, opened the first of three public meetings on the subject today and was greeted with both heated criticism and staunch support of genetically engineered products. Scientists and biotechnology industry officials argued today that the science behind genetically engineered crops was sound and that federal regulators had done an exemplary job in approving as safe the introduction of such products in the United States. But opponents of genetically engineered crops, which have been endowed with abilities like producing higher yield or growing their own insecticidal toxin, contend that the federal approval process was inadequate and that the products had not been proved to be entirely safe and could pose a danger to both humans and the environment. ''Genetically engineered organisms released into the environment pose risks that are potentially irreversible, untraceable and uncontrollable,'' said Charles Margulis, a spokesman for the environmental group Greenpeace. Bioengineered crops have been the subject of ferocious debate for months in Europe, where public opposition to genetically modified foods led to calls for additional research, labeling and even the banning of such products altogether. Now environmental advocates in this country have mounted their own effort to turn public opinion against such products, putting the biotechnology industry on the defensive. Frustrated by what they consider a vicious public relations campaign by a small group of environmentalists, the biotechnology industry has been trying to mount its own campaign to shore up confidence in a technology they have spent billions of dollars to develop. Dr. Jane E. Henney, the commissioner of food and drugs, led the public meeting today but said the agency would not comment on the proceedings; it was in listening mode. And listen it did. After a series of panels about the safety of such products, the regulatory approval process and food labeling, the F.D.A. opened the floor to members of the public. Next came dozens of two-minute declarations for and against bioengineered products, delivered to a panel of F.D.A. officials. Some speakers accused the agency of being manipulated by giant biotechnology companies bent on reaping billions. Jane Alexander, an activist, dismissed the notion that traditional plant breeding was the near equivalent of genetic engineering. ''Shooting a cassette of genes into a plant is not like mating your best bull with your best cow,'' she said. But scientists, dietitians and industry officials |
1154512_0 | Food for the Future | C orn that is genetically modified to include a natural insecticide, cotton that has been engineered to tolerate herbicides -- if you've been reading about such new transgenic crops, you may be asking yourself, ''Why do we need this stuff?'' After all, American farmers already turn out plenty of high-quality food at low prices. Yes, it's true that most genetically modified crops now available are barely distinguishable from what they supplant, and so far they have not led to such promised advances as big reductions in the need for agricultural chemicals. And while there is no evidence that genetically engineered crops in the field have caused any harm to human health or done any damage to the environment, planting them obviously entails a risk of unwanted ecological effects. So shouldn't the genetic engineering of crops be stopped? That is what many critics, here and in Europe, are saying. And if the current generation of crops were all that the genetic engineering of agriculture would produce, that view would be correct, because the risks, while small, would outweigh the benefits. But the important thing to keep in mind is that the transgenic crops in the news today are just the first manifestations of a fundamental new idea. Much better versions are coming. Initially, many new ideas seem of modest value or even appear to be a step backward. The first cell phones seemed like a niche product for millionaires. The first heart-bypass operations, statistically speaking, seemed no more effective than if the patients had refused treatment. But the second and third generations of advances based on these ideas were spectacular. This is likely to be the pattern that genetically engineered crops will follow. The transgenic crops in the news today were conceived by researchers 10 to 20 years ago. The next advances may represent the difference between those suitcase-size ''portable'' computers of the early 1980's and the slim laptops of today. For example, the Rockefeller Foundation is sponsoring research on so-called golden rice, a crop designed to improve nutrition in the developing world. Breeders of golden rice are using genetics to build into the rice forms of vitamin A that the body can absorb; vitamin A deficiency is a common problem in poor countries. A second phase of the project will increase the iron content in rice to combat anemia, which is a widespread problem among women in underdeveloped countries. Golden |
1154449_6 | Cocktails Can Wait; Lectures Offer Mental Refreshments | transforming an existing culture. They admitted how little they knew of modern architecture before their travels. In one instance they were given a tight time limit to design and build a sports club before the season opened. As a solution they took their own house and expanded the plan to make it a public building. For old time's sake, I always make one trip a year up to Columbia, where I did my graduate work in French literature. This year the draw was a lecture at Barnard College by the French linguist, psychoanalyst and literary critic Julia Kristeva on ''Hannah Arendt: Forgiving and Promise.'' I heard Hannah Arendt defend herself in a talk when I was student, and it seemed strange to hear her discussed in the past. Barnard's president, Judith Shapiro, was in the front row, and there was a large student turnout. French lit students still look and dress the same, like existentialists in a Paris cafe. As Professor Kristeva developed her theme of whether forgiving is possible in light of 20th-century atrocities, the audience was riveted to her arguments and bombarded her with questions at the end. There were many more lectures during what I think of as the fall ''semester'' (because most sponsoring organizations plan their series for fall and spring). At the Metropolitan Museum of Art I heard Simon Schama dramatically defend Rembrandt's genius with a brilliant analysis of his ''Portrait of Jan Six.'' And at a Bard Graduate Center lecture, in which Gillian Darley gave a fine biographical sketch of the British architect Sir John Soane, it came to me how close in feeling his late-18th-century brick buildings are to those Roman ruins stripped of their marble that he saw on his Grand Tour. It has been heady season. But finally, as proof of the growing audience for lectures, the Architectural League moved this month's appearance by Frank Gehry to Town Hall because of an overwhelming demand for tickets. Outside, the audience was crowding the doors in an excited mood as if for a Broadway opening. This was lecture as theater. The last time I heard Mr. Gehry speak, it was pre-Bilbao, at a more subdued occasion sponsored by the American Academy in Rome. When he walked out on the Town Hall stage and took in the audience, which included notables like Charlie Rose, Mr. Gehry maintained his unspoiled demeanor, showed only one slide |
1154547_3 | Bill Expands Health Benefits for Disabled People Who Work | threatening to veto the underlying bill. Under another section of the bill, states could provide Medicaid to workers who are not actually disabled, but have physical or mental impairments that are ''reasonably expected'' to become severe disabilities in the absence of treatment. This could be a boon to people who have been infected with H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS, but have yet to develop symptoms of the disease. Medicaid would help them get protease inhibitors and other powerful drugs so they could fight off AIDS and continue working. The same section of the bill could help people with Parkinson's disease, multiple sclerosis and other chronic or degenerative conditions. States could also provide Medicaid to workers with potentially severe physical or mental impairments that could be traced to birth defects. Representative Rick A. Lazio, Republican of New York Republican and chief sponsor of the House bill, said: ''The bill sends a message to people with disabilities. If you go to work, you won't be punished, and you don't have to impoverish yourself just because you want to become a taxpayer.'' Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, and one of his aides, Connie Garner, found ways to rescue the bill when it appeared that it might sink under objections from conservative Republicans. The legislation would help disabled people in these ways: *People who lose eligibility for Social Security disability benefits because they return to work could keep their Medicare coverage for eight and a half years. That is four and a half years more than they get under current law. *People with disabilities could buy Medicaid coverage even if they took jobs and earned money that would otherwise disqualify them. They could be required to pay premiums to cover some of the costs. *States could allow disabled workers to buy Medicaid coverage, even if the workers lost eligibility for cash benefits because of improvements in their medical conditions. The bill would establish a way of providing employment and training to people with disabilities. The government would issue a voucher, or ticket to work, that could be used by a disabled person to buy such services from either a state agency or a private business. The cost of initiative would be offset by an assortment of cutbacks and minor changes in other programs, including the school lunch program, loans to college students and fees for lawyers who represent Social Security beneficiaries. |
1152883_0 | Both Sides Reminded of Stakes In 11th-Hour Effort in Ulster | With his mission to salvage the Northern Ireland peace settlement at a crisis point, George J. Mitchell abruptly adjourned talks this morning and urged negotiators to spend the weekend focusing on ''the gravity of what is at stake.'' The effort by Mr. Mitchell, the American mediator, was shaken Thursday night by word that the Ulster Unionist leader David Trimble was unable to gain the support of his party legislators in a secret ballot on the compromise thrashed out with the rival Sinn Fein party over the last 10 weeks. Talks, which Mr. Mitchell said were at their ''final and most critical phase,'' are to resume on Monday. Their purpose has been to end a deadlock over the Ulster Unionists' refusal to admit Sinn Fein to the Northern Ireland government established by the April 1998 peace accord before the Irish Republican Army starts disarming. The I.R.A. views disarmament as surrender, and Sinn Fein, its political representative, argues that no such condition for taking part in government is in the agreement. The complex formula that Mr. Trimble is using to try to break the impasse involves a series of incremental reciprocal steps by Sinn Fein and the Ulster Unionists rather than a single dramatic move. Elements include an I.R.A. statement condemning violence and pledging not to return to its war against British rule, and the appointment of a senior I.R.A. official as a go-between to the international disarmament panel headed by a retired Canadian general, John de Chastelain. But the plan does not promise the actual turnover of weapons, an insistent demand of the increasingly tough-minded Unionists, and the absence of any such pledge cost it the required support Thursday night. A Unionist spokesman, eager to free the party from the onus of appearing a deal wrecker, said that no final decision had been made. He explained that the Thursday night vote had merely been a ''straw poll'' to help Mr. Trimble decide whether to put the matter before the 900-member party council. The Mitchell review, conducted under a news blackout and on occasion away from Belfast, has produced a comfort level among lifelong enemies, establishing heretofore missing elements of trust and mutual understanding. But Mr. Trimble's willingness to deal directly with Sinn Fein has not pleased many in his party, and whatever effort he makes this weekend to push for acceptance of the rejected compromise could put his leadership at risk. |
1150556_0 | Women Make Rapid Gains in the Chase for Doctoral Degrees | The annual total of women receiving Ph.D.'s has increased by more than 50 percent in a decade, growing at over twice the rate of the number of men getting those degrees, a new study has found. As a result, a record 40.6 percent of more than 42,000 research doctorates awarded by United States universities in the 1996-97 academic year went to women, according to the annual study, by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago. The study measures only research degrees, not professional degrees in medicine and law. The percentage of research doctorates awarded to members of minorities was also a record, rising to 9 percent of all doctorates and 14.2 percent of those given to United States citizens. In the latter category, blacks accounted for 5 percent of doctorates, Hispanics for 3.8 percent, Asian-Americans for 4.9 percent and American Indians for 0.6 percent. The gains by women and members of minorities reflect not only more active recruitment of them by universities but also an increase in their numbers within doctoral programs as a result of normal cycles in the nation's economy, said Allen Sanderson, senior research scientist at the National Opinion Research Center and senior lecturer in economics at the University of Chicago. University enrollments generally run counter to economic cycles, rising in bad economic times and falling in better environments as jobs become plentiful. Most Ph.D. students in the study spent about seven years earning the degree, meaning that many entered their doctoral programs just as the economy was slipping into recession in mid-1990. Whatever the relative influence of these factors, the 17,322 Ph.D.'s awarded to women in 1997 were more than half again as many as the 11,432 given them in 1987. The rate of growth far surpassed that of men, who received 24,999 research doctorates in 1997, as against 20,938 10 years earlier. The most recent such gains achieved by women are in keeping with a long upward trend in their share of doctorates, which in turn followed a period of decline. Ph.D.'s awarded to women rose briefly above 20 percent in 1945, since World War II, with large numbers of men in the armed services, saw an increase in the proportion of female graduate students. After the advent of the G.I. Bill, though, that proportion decreased, and women received just 9.1 percent of the Ph.D.'s awarded in 1954, the lowest total since |
1150580_0 | Rejecting Some Taxes And Limits On Growth | In wide-ranging referendums around the United States, voters on Tuesday rejected the strictest antigrowth measures in the country, approved the nation's most sweeping antitax proposals, rejected proposals to allow murder convictions based on nonunanimous jury votes and to ban a type of late-term abortion and prohibited banks from imposing surcharges on automated teller machines. Voters in three Northern California cities rejected antigrowth measures that supporters said were necessary to stop the rapid spread of Silicon Valley development and that opponents warned would lead to epic traffic jams and higher taxes. Washington State voters approved an initiative that all but eliminates a motor-vehicle tax. The initiative also requires voter approval of any increases in state or local taxes, any government fee covering things like the prices of a school lunch and a building permit and any rate increase for a government-run utility. Oregonians rejected a measure that would have allowed defendants to be convicted of murder by a jury vote of 11 to 1, while a contentious battle was settled in Maine, where voters, by 55 percent to 45 percent, refused, for the third time in recent years, to outlaw the late-term abortion procedure that opponents call partial-birth abortion. Maine voters also passed the first medical marijuana law on the East Coast, the eighth in the country, deciding by 61 percent to 39 percent to allow doctor-prescribed marijuana for seriously ill patients. San Francisco voters overwhelmingly approved a ban on fees banks levy on A.T.M. users who are not bank customers, though the referendum faces a certain court challenge by the banking industry. The most closely watched referendums were in Northern California along the East Bay, where initiatives in Livermore, San Ramon and Pleasanton would have allowed voters to approve or reject any mid-size to large developments. In Pleasanton and San Ramon, any proposed development over 10 units would have required a public vote; in Livermore, the number would have been 20 units. The initiatives unleashed a fury of opposition from urban planners, developers and environmentalists -- the latter because they were concerned that the initiatives would force development into farm country and worsen sprawl. Voters in Livermore, a city best known for the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, rejected the measure by a wide margin. The vote was closer in Pleasanton and still closer in San Ramon. The three cities are part of the Tri-Valley, one of the fastest-growing parts of |
1150535_5 | The Computer as Post Office | costs $1.99 a month on top of the face-value cost of the postage, up to $25. A 15 percent service fee is assessed on the amount of postage bought that exceeds $25 a month, up to a maximum fee of $19.99. A variation on the personal plan replaces the $1.99 monthly service fee with a single yearly fee of $19.99, with the same surcharge for purchases that are more than $25 a month. Finally, there is a business plan for people who pay $40 or more for postage each month. The fee is 10 percent of the cost of all postage bought, with a minimum monthly fee of $3.99 and a maximum of $19.99. E-Stamp's fees are simpler, just 10 percent over the value of the postage, with a minimum fee of $4.99 and a maximum of $24.99 a month, no matter how much postage is used. But if you buy only $10 in postage a month, the $4.99 convenience fee is disproportionately steep. Both programs can draw recipients' names and addresses from contact management programs like Symantec's ACT! or Microsoft Outlook, or from popular word-processing programs like Corel WordPerfect or Microsoft Word. But E-Stamp works with more programs and peripherals, including Intuit's popular Quickbooks accounting package for small businesses. Another important thing: Conventional stamps are anonymous, while Information Based Indicia, as the name suggests, store even more unique information about you than your fingerprints. Both E-Stamp and Stamps.com require the user to apply to the Government for a postal license, a simple process that can take anywhere from a few minutes to 24 hours but forfeits anonymity. Every indicium is unique, and its two-dimensional bar code includes information about the sender (including bank or credit card information), the recipient and the time and date the stamp is created. The Postal Service can demand to see a list of all stamps printed by any user of the service, and thus can track all mail sent. Letters with indicia must by regulation be mailed within 24 hours, so one cannot print postage in advance for use later. It comes down to this: If you have a dedicated, always-on link to the Internet, Stamps.com gets the edge. If you connect to the Net through a regular modem and dial-up connection and don't mind the hassles of the dongle and CD, E-Stamp's off-line system is the way to go. More information on the |
1150507_5 | Van Gogh Print Or Original Oil: The Web Has It | of Christie's Internet Auctions. Most art e-commerce sites, including PaintingsDirect, belong to a middle category, offering lower-priced original works of art, most of it from unknown and emerging artists. The average price of art that has sold on PaintingsDirect is $600; the highest price was $3,800, but there are many paintings that sell for as little as $40. Ms. Bourron said the lower prices might be part of the reason 60 percent of the buyers at PaintingsDirect were purchasing original works of art for the first time in their lives. ''What's happening is a virtual Renaissance,'' said Leif Youngberg, who started JustOriginals.com, in Albuquerque, in May. He said the paintings at his site had sold for an average of $1,800. ''Like the Renaissance, when art was available everywhere,'' he said, ''with the virtual Renaissance, there will be art available all over the world to anybody in the world, instantaneously.'' The Internet will also widen opportunities for those making art, these entrepreneurs say. ''There are 190,000 professional artists in the United States,'' Ms. Bourron said. ''But only about 46,000 of them have art dealers because there are 4,600 art galleries in the United States, representing just 5 to 15 artists apiece.'' While there are plenty of artists to go around, the art e-sites already seem to be fighting over certain ones. Cheryl Gross, a Brooklyn artist who specializes in painting landscapes of run-down industrial sites, recalled getting a mysterious voice-mail message from a company called NextMonet. ''We'd like to represent you -- worldwide,'' the message said, and then there was a giggle. Ms. Gross did not know what the caller was talking about, but ''worldwide'' was something of a pun -- a reference to the World Wide Web. Soon after, Ms. Gross was sought out by Guild.com, a Wisconsin-based e-commerce company that sells original paintings but specializes in crafts. Ms. Gross decided to go with NextMonet, which started up in June and is based in San Francisco. She became one of 400 artists under contract to the site. In the few short months of the affiliation, Ms. Gross said, she has been happier with NextMonet than she has been with the various brick-and-mortar galleries that represent her. Both the galleries and NextMonet take 50 percent as their commission. But of NextMonet, Ms. Gross said: ''I get paid almost immediately. Sometimes with the galleries I have to go after the money.'' Choosing |
1154024_0 | Pledges by Ulster Rivals Break the Deadlock at Talks | Northern Ireland's rival parties exchanged unusually conciliatory statements and pledges today, raising expectations of an imminent break in the stalemate blocking progress in their peace agreement. In a long-conflicted corner of northern Europe where politics is normally articulated in snubs and taunts, the companion statements by leaders of Sinn Fein and the Ulster Unionist Party held out real promise of success for the 11-week effort by George J. Mitchell, the former United States senator, to mediate a power-sharing administration and civil peace for the province. Gerry Adams, president of Sinn Fein, the political ally of the Irish Republican Army, said his party ''wishes to work with, not against, the Unionists'' and addressed their main concern by saying that paramilitary disarmament would be a vital part of any political settlement. Violent conflict, he said, is ''now a thing of the past, over, done with and gone.'' In a statement passed out at the Stormont Castle buildings where the talks conducted by Mr. Mitchell are ending on a surge of optimism, Mr. Adams declared, ''I.R.A. guns are silent, and the Sinn Fein leadership is confident that the I.R.A. remains committed to the objective of a permanent peace.'' The outlawed underground force has maintained a cease-fire for more than two years. The Ulster Unionist leader, David Trimble, reading his deliberately worded statement from the steps of the office complex, said: ''We now have a chance to create a genuine partnership between Unionists and nationalists in a novel form of government. The U.U.P. is committed to the principles of inclusivity, equality and mutual respect.'' The Unionists are those, mostly Protestant, who favor keeping Northern Ireland within the United Kingdom while nationalists and republicans, who tend to be Catholics, favor eventual union with the Irish Republic. The conflict between them and the paramilitary violence it has spawned has cost more than 3,300 lives in the last three decades. The struggle Mr. Trimble now faces in persuading his increasingly hard-line party to adopt his formula for cultural compromise did not deter him from making a remarkable admission for a man practiced in the tribal politics of Northern Ireland. ''For too long,'' he said, ''much of the unrest in our community has been caused by a failure to accept the differing expressions of cultural identity.'' He spoke of the need for ''mutual respect and tolerance rather than division and alienation.'' The striking dialogue drew a comment filled |
1154006_1 | Thinning Sea Ice Stokes Debate on Climate | thickness made by upward-looking sonar aboard naval submarines operating under the ice sheet. The first period of data began in 1958 with the first nuclear submarine, the United States' Nautilus, and concluded with a cruise by H.M.S. Sovereign in 1976. The second data set was collected by American vessels from 1993 to 1997. Dr. Rothrock and two colleagues, Y. Yu and G. A. Maykut of the University of Washington, compared data from the two periods at 29 points where the courses of submarines in the 1990's intersected with the courses of those in the earlier period. There is substantial evidence that the climate of the Arctic and sub-Arctic region is warming, at least in some seasons. The area covered by sea ice has diminished and the duration of the cover has shortened in many places. Mountain glaciers in Alaska have shrunk, as has the Greenland ice cap. The average surface temperature of the earth has risen by about 1 degree Fahrenheit or a little more over the last century and by several times that amount in northern regions. Mainstream scientists expect that the global average will rise by about an additional 3.5 degrees by the year 2100 if emissions of heat-trapping gases like carbon dioxide continue to be produced by human activity at present levels. By comparison, the earth's surface temperature has risen by 5 to 9 degrees since the depths of the last ice age, 18,000 to 20,000 years ago. Dr. Rothrock believes that a shift in prevailing natural patterns of atmospheric circulation in the Arctic may be responsible for the warmer North and the thinning sea ice. Other scientists say that the shift in natural patterns may have been touched off or enhanced by global warming, and Dr. Rothrock agrees that it is possible a warming climate could be related in some way. The key is a seesaw sort of winter circulation pattern in which prevailing westerly winds in the Arctic, sub-Arctic and North Atlantic vary between two basic states, one stronger and one weaker. In this Arctic oscillation, as it is called, one pattern or another has been dominant for decades at a time before switching to the opposite mode. In one mode, which has been dominant since about the mid-1970's, stronger westerly winds blow surface water away from the Arctic and toward the southeast. This, said Dr. Rothrock, could carry cold surface water away from the |
1154059_2 | Foreign Affairs; Next, It's E-ducation | in the last six months hasn't said to himself: ''Oh my God! This Internet thing is real. Somebody call me an Internet doctor and wire me up.'' Once a C.E.O. understands that absorbing the Net into every aspect of his or her business ''is the only way they are going to survive,'' said Mr. Chambers, ''they are going to be spending big bucks on it. That's why I believe that Y2K will be short-lived, and after that we are going to see one of the best years the computer industry has ever seen.'' So now that commerce has moved to the Net, and the Net is moving into business, what comes after that? ''Education,'' said Mr. Chambers. ''The next big killer application for the Internet is going to be education. Education over the Internet is going to be so big it is going to make e-mail usage look like a rounding error'' in terms of the Internet capacity it will consume. What will drive it will be the demands on companies, in an intensely competitive global economy, to keep improving productivity. E-learning, insists Mr. Chambers, if done right, can provide faster learning, at lower costs, with more accountability, thereby enabling both companies and schools to keep up with changes in the global economy that now occur at Net speed. Schools and countries that ignore this, he says, will suffer the same fate as big department stores that thought e-commerce was overrated. If universities move properly, they will offer the ideal combination of online and instructor-led learning, argues Mr. Chambers. But if universities don't reinvent their curriculums and how they deliver them, for an increasingly Net-driven economy, many students, particularly in information technology fields, ''will go to schools online,'' he says. Many big firms -- Cisco, G.E., I.B.M., AT&T -- are starting online academies to train new employees and to constantly upgrade the skills of existing ones. ''Unlike in the industrial revolution when you had to be in the right country or city to participate, in this new era capital will flow to whichever countries and companies install the best Internet and educational capabilities,'' says Mr. Chambers. Governments and unions will be powerless to stop this capital flow, which will affect the global balance of economic power. Although the technology exists today, this revolution will take about 10 years to be fully in place. But, insists Mr. Chambers, ''it's coming next.'' |
1156104_1 | Storing Your Life in a Virtual Desktop; Web-Based Storage and Software Reinvents an Old Idea, the Network Computer | their convenience, but they take ''personal'' a step further: users have constant access to their files, their address books, their calendars. ''All the information you ever wanted to look at will be available at any time, anywhere,'' said Kevin Herrboldt, director of engineering for Cyrus InterSoft of Minneapolis, which is offering virtual desktop software called Speiros. ''You will no longer say, 'I have to go home and download that information from my computer.' '' So far, virtual-desktop services are mostly available in bits and pieces. Some companies offer online storage, while others provide Web-based calendars or photo albums. A few companies, like MyFamily.com and Bungo.com, have tried to put those services in one package. The newest services, which are still being tested, provide spreadsheet or word-processing programs. The programs do not need to be loaded onto a computer's hard drive. They can simply be borrowed or rented from companies like Cyrus InterSoft or Desktop.com, which keep the applications on servers and operate them over the Internet. So far, that concept seems to appeal mostly to users who have lightning-fast connections. But just as portals have not become essential for most computer users, virtual desktops may not live up to their promise either. How many people, for example, actually manage to keep the physical elements of their work and their private lives -- to-do lists, calendars, projects, phone numbers -- in one place? ''Companies are of the viewpoint: this is where you'll put your stuff, and that's what people will want to do,'' said Keith Dawson, editor of an e-mail newsletter, Tasty Bits from the Technology Front. ''It's not clear at all that that's what people want to do.'' Concerns about security, reliability and privacy, not to mention bandwidth, may keep some people from adopting the virtual desktop, Mr. Dawson said. ''I don't think it's the next big thing,'' he added. ''I think it's a small thing that may not work.'' Most people say they do not want to depend on just one computer. Many users, in fact, are already using an ad hoc version of the virtual desktop: They send documents to their home computer as e-mail attachments, then use e-mail to transfer them back to work. Or they set up roaming e-mail accounts, like Hotmail, that allow them to check their messages from any Web-connected computer, like those at airport kiosks. Still, it is sometimes difficult to maintain a |
1156192_0 | NEWS SUMMARY | INTERNATIONAL A3-16 Israel Allows Excerpts From Trial of Nuclear Spy The government allowed a newspaper to publish censored excerpts from the classified transcript of a treason trial 12 years ago. The excerpts, published by the daily Yediot Ahronot, contained no earth-shattering revelations, but their release signaled the government's increasing awareness that it could no longer maintain absolute silence about its nuclear program. A3 Beijing Warning on U.S. Shield China's chief of arms control warned that American plans for a national missile defense system, even one intended to stop attacks from countries like North Korea and Iraq, would set off a global arms race. A15 AIDS Drug Questioned in Africa Government officials in South Africa are stirring a furor among doctors and researchers who treat patients infected with the virus that causes AIDS. The officials question the safety of the standard AIDS drug AZT, saying they suspect it may be too dangerous to justify its use. A13 Serbians Stall Shipment of Oil Serbian customs officials held up the European Union's first effort to donate heating fuel to Serbian towns controlled by Serbia's political opposition, impounding the 14 fuel trucks overnight at a border town. A8 Croatian Succession Issue With its dominant political figure, President Franjo Tudjman, apparently on the brink of death, Parliament passed a constitutional amendment that would let the country be governed during his illness, with the speaker assuming some duties. A6 Czechs Tear Down a Wall A wall put up six weeks ago to separate Gypsies from their Czech neighbors in a town in northern Bohemia was torn down to the relief of an embarrassed Czech government and of foreigners who had suggested that racism might thwart the country's bid to join the European Union. A9 France May End Beef Feud The feud between the French and British over France's refusal to import British beef seemed to inch toward a finish. The French acknowledged that they had taken a set of recommendations to their national food safety agency to get approval for lifting the import ban. A12 World Briefing A6 NATIONAL A18-32 Clinton's Trade Policy Hampers Gore's Campaign The Clinton administration's trade agreement with China and its support for global trade talks in Seattle next week are complicating Vice President Al Gore's efforts to energize labor behind his presidential campaign. Unions are worried that the lowering of trade barriers -- a major goal of the Seattle talks -- |
1155560_0 | Altered Foods: Future Can Wait | To the Editor: Gregg Easterbrook (Op-Ed, Nov. 19) may be right that the real benefits of genetically engineered crops will probably come in later versions of transgenic crops. However, genetic engineering is not necessarily the solution to world hunger. The main reason for food scarcity is simple: governments, especially developing countries' governments, continue to protect agriculture. If farmers are given a subsidy to produce cotton for the domestic market, while they could produce, say, rice, and get a higher price for it in the global market, that harms farmers. Consumers lose, too: they have to pay for the cotton subsidy directly or indirectly and are also denied the lower rice price. Genetically engineered crops can be beneficial to society only if governments take the first step of removing subsidies and allowing farmers access to global markets. APURVA SANGHI Washington, Nov. 19, 1999 |
1155561_0 | Altered Foods: Future Can Wait | To the Editor: Gregg Easterbrook (Op-Ed, Nov. 19) missed an important point concerning genetically engineererd food. Human beings have an inalienable right to know what they put in their bodies. If genetically engineered food is so safe, why prevent the public from being able to exercise free will? The labeling of such altered foods would allow free will to be a part of the free market! RON M. SMILEY Fort Myers, Fla., Nov. 19, 1999 |
1155559_0 | Altered Foods: Future Can Wait | To the Editor: Gregg Easterbrook (Op-Ed, Nov. 19) sidesteps the more profound issues embedded in the debate over genetically modified food. How can he acknowledge the ''risk of unwanted ecological effects'' and then state that independent testing and federal oversight might safeguard against these risks? Is he suggesting that federal bureaucracy can guarantee safety and sound decisions in so complex and uncharted an enterprise as food modification? The increasing shelf space given over to natural foods at the supermarket suggests that growing numbers of Americans may be willing to be labeled Luddites so long as their food remains unengineered and natural. SUSAN KLINE Wallingford, Pa., Nov. 19, 1999 |
1155462_0 | Images of Mental Illness | To the Editor: A Nov. 15 front-page article on jobs and the mentally disabled notes a ''change in societal views of the mentally retarded.'' The change includes policies to foster mainstreaming and job preparation. Mental illness, however, is different from retardation, and so are society's expectations. Too often, policies for people with mental illness are motivated by fear rather than an affirmation of life. But the treatment success rate for severe mental illnesses is higher than for heart disease. A Boston University study showed that out of a group of 500 professionals and managers with severe mental illnesses, 84 percent were taking psychotropic medication and 64 percent had been hospitalized at least three times. Yet 73 percent were working full time, with more than 20 percent earning $50,000 or more. It is time to change our expectations, and to make a commitment to recoveries. LAURIE FLYNN Arlington, Va., Nov. 16, 1999 The writer is executive director, National Alliance for the Mentally Ill. |
1156842_2 | Having A Fit Over Carry-ons | -- generally dislike the idea of restrictions. Consumer advocates say the airlines created the problem by reducing storage space, cramming customers into planes, reducing connection times between flights and allowing checked-baggage service to deteriorate to the point where 1 out of every 200 passengers reports lost or delayed baggage. The issue is a touchy one in the fiercely competitive airline industry. In the last year or two, most major carriers have imposed stricter limits on both the number and size of carry-on baggage. But airlines are loathe to alienate their frequent flyers -- especially business travelers, who are their most profitable market. To the dismay of the flight attendants union, for example, Continental Airlines refit 150 of its aircraft last year with bigger overhead storage bins to accommodate more carry-ons. Flight attendants say it's actually a small percentage of passengers who cause the biggest problems. Among them are infrequent flyers, especially those bound for foreign countries to visit relatives, who trudge on board with live chickens, baskets of food and overflowing shopping bags. ''People bring on jugs of gasoline because it's cheaper to buy it here,'' said Henri Simonetti, a longtime flight attendant who, like Mr. Carey, did not want to identify the airline he works for. ''Not that they intend to pose a safety threat, but please -- you can't imagine a worse safety threat that a volatile fuel seeping from the overhead bin.'' Such passengers tend to be reasonable when the rules are explained, flight crew members say. More difficult to handle are hardened business passengers unable to find space for their carry-ons. These customers are often paying full fare, and traveling on a tight schedule that is vulnerable to the slightest delay and conducive to frayed tempers. Hard-core business-trip routes are considered to be the worst. ''Los Angeles to New York can be a very difficult trip,'' Mr. Simonetti said. ''You'll hear: 'I'm a member of your frequent flier club. I'm on your airline five times a week. Therefore, I should be able to bring my five pieces of carry-on luggage on board,' '' he said. Christopher J. Witkowski, the director of air safety and health at the attendants union, said the only solution is a federal law to reduce carry-on luggage by 50 percent and leave no wiggle room. ''We've got assaults that occur because passengers take out their frustrations on the flight attendants,'' he said. |
1156602_6 | Walking Wapping's Streets | of Thomas Jefferson was baptized, and 18th-century shipmasters repose beneath worn, elegant tombstones. Let us go back another stage in time. Fully 200 years before the docks began to be laid out, Wapping was a ramshackle village that was established on the marshy riverside meadows below the ''cliff'' of the Highway during the reign of the first Elizabeth. Open-air wooden wharves were thrown up and stairs were constructed: they were then the means by which all goods came and went from the Pool. Wapping was a sailors' settlement, with the usual complement of lodging houses, brothels and inns, some of them kept by ''Virginia widows'' whose husbands had gone off to seek their fortunes in the New World just opening on the other side of the Atlantic. There was also a landing stage used to execute men convicted of piracy. Traditionally they were left hanging till three tides had passed over them, and their tarred bodies were then displayed in gibbets. The most famous of these was the Boston settler Captain Kidd, who in 1701 was in the pay of the British Governor of New York and may not really have been a pirate at all. ''Execution dock'' was approximately where the small Underground station now stands, about two-thirds of the way along Wapping High Street going east. Kidd's name is commemorated in a public house nearby, which was not in fact a pub in his day but which occupies some of the few remaining authentically 18th-century buildings on the High Street. It is in the pubs of Wapping that we touch on the older layers of history. There are many fewer than in the past -- apparently 36 in the mid-18th century, one of them kept by the family whose daughter met there her future husband, the explorer Captain Cook. But the taverns that remain are genuine historical markers. The Prospect of Whitby, at the eastern corner of Wapping Wall, hanging right over the water by Pelican Stairs, is said to be the oldest in London. Here, drunk sailors would be robbed of their pay and pushed over the landing stage literally to sink or swim. These days the place is rather more sedate, and the landing stage pretty with benches and weeping willows. Though the present building is probably only 200 years old, an association with brewing and ale selling on that site goes back to medieval times. |
1156920_8 | M.B.A. Boom Fades as Candidates Seek Instead the Rewards of the Internet | concern,'' Ms. Spreen said. ''When you have a larger applicant pool, you're able to attract a higher-quality class.'' But business school can be a tough sell in the current, frenzied Internet environment. Many potential students hope to be among the early employees of a company, who typically receive a larger batch of stock options at a lower price than employees who join later. When Mr. Hyatt left his consulting job, at Mercer Management Consulting, for a summer stint at Winfire, which designs Internet software, it had 10 employees. It now has 40. Had he attended Stanford and joined after graduation, the company would have had 150 employees, he estimated. The influx of venture capital even allows some Internet start-ups to offer high salaries, in addition to options, noted Mr. Hyatt, who said he was making more than $100,000 as the director of product management at Winfire. The changing attitude toward the M.B.A. is particularly striking in Silicon Valley, a new center of American business and yet a place where business school has suddenly become less popular. Applications to Berkeley's program dropped by 11 percent last spring. At Stanford -- where school employees came up with the idea that led to the creation of Cisco Systems and whose graduates include top Internet executives like Scott McNealy of Sun Microsystems -- they fell 6 percent. These days, students worry that their chances of emulating such titans will decrease if they wait two years to start work. Many of the start-ups are also making a big push to keep employees who have been at their jobs for two to seven years, traditionally a period of high turnover, Jacques Leger, a human resources consultant with Watson Wyatt in San Francisco, said. ''Now, with two years of experience, you're considered a prime candidate with lots of experience,'' Mr. Leger said. Students notice the difference. ''The opportunity cost of going to school has gone up dramatically,'' said Cheryl Proctor, a second-year M.B.A. student at Berkeley, who watched some of her classmates quit this summer while many others work part-time jobs during the year to maintain contacts, she said. Ms. Proctor herself spent last summer at a small Internet company in San Francisco that asked her to stay when her internship ended. ''They made it really tempting,'' she said. But business school, she added, ''seems like a safe bet.'' Many school administrators predict that applications will start |
1156850_1 | Is the Sun Setting on Farmers? | Collins, chief economist at the Agriculture Department. With a new array of scientific and technological processes lifting crop yields and tailoring food products to individual companies and specific markets, farmers are producing more food on fewer acres in less time. And therein lies both the promise and the perils for the independent farmer. The nation's largest farms -- those with more than $250,000 in sales -- now account for more than 72 percent of all agricultural sales, up from 53 percent a decade ago. And after the elimination last year of many government regulations on production, farmers are being subjected to market forces they have not faced since before the New Deal. Many farmers are worried about being squeezed by giant agricultural companies. ''There's a fear this will turn into 14th-century feudalism,'' Agriculture Secretary Dan Glickman said. ''Those farmers will become serfs. We're not there yet, but it may be coming.'' Among farmers' worries is whether to plant seeds that have been bio-engineered to ward off pests. Bio-engineering has been hailed as a godsend to farmers looking for higher crop yields, but it also faces growing opposition. Although genetically modified seeds have been approved by federal regulators and were planted on more than 70 million acres of farmland in the United States in 1999, critics have repeatedly and volubly questioned whether genetically modified crops are safe for consumption and the environment. ''The issue for many farmers is not just about the current financial situation and their income,'' said Michael Boehlje, a professor of agricultural economics at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind. ''In the back of their minds, there's a set of concerns about the long term. They want to know how they are going to participate in the new agriculture.'' BUT the new agriculture involves far more than bio-engineering. Farmers have complained periodically that big corporations have gained dominance and unfair bargaining power, and now a host of economists, regulators and lawmakers are taking up the farmers' cause, arguing that the Darwinian pace has quickened. Though some economists caution that the downturn may be causing American farmers to search for scapegoats, a growing number of economists, regulators and lawmakers are worried about the shifting balance of power that favors a handful of agricultural giants over a shrinking number of independent farmers, confused and bedeviled by all the changes. On the Iowa plains, the new economics of agriculture is a |
1156862_5 | The World: Big Blur; Meet Your Government, Inc. | ban genetically modified foods, or the argument that we can't ban products made by child labor because it violates some trade agreement,'' said Mr. Nader, the longtime consumer advocate who years ago moved beyond auto safety to make the case that a global economic rule-setter like the W.T.O. is unsafe at any speed. ''People aren't buying the idea anymore that globalization is inevitable and their governments have to go with the flow of the market. That's what is unifying the protesters you are going to see.'' THE fight over genetically modified food is a prime example of the alliance of governments and corporations -- and the growing frictions over national standards. While American companies and regulators argue that these foods are safe, Europeans have banned many of them as threats to consumer safety and the environment. Washington responds that health is a phony argument to justify trade barriers. So far, it's winning its W.T.O. case and losing European consumers. Or consider the explosive issue of how to handle the concerns of labor. Unions will be in Seattle to argue that global trade agreements should protect the rights of workers, just as they have long protected intellectual property and investments abroad. They want the new trade agreement to include provisions that set minimum labor standards in factories around the world. They oppose imports from countries that ban unions, China included. In an election year in which Vice President Al Gore is desperate for deeper union support, they have more than a little political leverage. But developing nations like India and China say that such restrictions are simply a form of American protectionism. They insist that labor issues are a domestic concern unrelated to trade, and want any rulemaking relegated to the toothless International Labor Organization. The Clinton administration supported that position a few years ago, but now wants a study group within the W.T.O. to take up the issue. To the protesters on the street, a study doesn't go far enough. To the developing nations, it's far too much. All of this has opened up the new divide of globalization, the argument over who will make the rules, and on whose behalf. ''It's not going to be the W.T.O. with its closed-door, big-business policies,'' vows Mr. Nader. He could be right: The very fact that a W.T.O. negotiation is triggering screaming in the streets could mean that the pendulum is beginning |
1156698_2 | The Way We Live Now: 11-28-99: Expert Opinion; Parents Just Don't Understand | and emotional engagement. Children identify with the characters' strengths and weaknesses. They see the struggle. It feels like their own. Silverman: Harry Potter is extremely popular with adults, but I think children see something different. The books are about a child who is learning and gaining magical powers. He's a wizard. He has secret powers. It's a little reminiscent of ''The Cat in the Hat.'' The children who read it tend to see the gaining of magical power rather than the complexity of the plot, which is what adults appreciate. 'TOY STORY 2' Cross: Part of the attraction of the Toy Story movies is the ongoing fantasy of the toys coming to life, a theme that runs through ''Pinocchio'' and ''Winnie the Pooh.'' Of course, what's attractive about this image is the notion that a toy is loyal to you if you're loyal to the toy. And I think kids find it amusing that Buzz Lightyear doesn't know he's a toy, because it allows them to feel a certain superiority. Ellen Seiter: ''Toy Story'' was popular with kids in a way that it wasn't with adults because it presented highly stereotypical characters. Adults are looking for rounded, ambiguous characters, while kids delight in the simplicity of one-dimensional roles. Kids have a more postmodern, ironic view of these stereotypes than their parents do. And kids are far more sophisticated than their parents in their appreciation of animation. Lois Kuznets: The toys carry with them some sense of being in on what I call the secrets of the night, the world as it exists after children go to bed. ''Toy Story'' also suggests certain development themes of becoming real and alive and meeting your potential. 'STUART LITTLE' Leon Hoffman: I think this is more similar to Pokemon than anything else. Here you have a little creature who goes out and has all these adventures despite his size. It's the fantasy of having the freedom you don't have in real life. Adults forget what we look like to kids. To them we look like giants. So identifying with a mouse is not so strange, especially one who can do all sorts of things. Silverman: The fear of mice is an anxiety about our own murderousness, because mice symbolize our own weaknesses. But if the mouse can prevail, well, that's the embodiment of every child's dream. Millions of kids are physically and sexually abused |
1152258_0 | Corrections | An article yesterday about the resumption of direct flights from New York to Havana misstated the views of the U.S.-Cuba Trade and Economic Council on the American trade embargo on Cuba. The council takes no position; it does not advocate lifting the embargo. The article also misstated the council's statistics on United States citizens who travel to Cuba. The council's president, John S. Kavulich II, estimated that 140,000 U.S. citizens would travel to Cuba this year; he did not say that 140,000 U.S. citizens travel there every year. |
1152255_3 | Longtime I.M.F. Director Resigns in Midterm | right he can be tough,'' former Treasury Secretary Lloyd Bentsen once said of him, though he added, ''Sometimes you have to lean on him real hard to get things done.'' But when Washington appealed for help, Mr. Camdessus was almost always there -- particularly in 1995, when an early-morning telephone call from Treasury Secretary Robert E. Rubin with the news that Congress would not back a bailout of Mexico led him to take extraordinary action on his own. He committed $18 billion without the usual round of negotiations with the board that directs the fund. He later told them, ''Gentlemen, I don't ask your permission because you would have to speak with your ministers or governors, and you have no time for that.'' The bailout worked. Mr. Camdessus' critics, and they were legion, had many complaints. They viewed him as arrogant -- ''I am French,'' he once said in an interview during the Asian crisis, ''and what Frenchmen is not accused of that'' -- and far too quick to urge the devaluation of currencies and fiscal austerity. In fact, that is what the I.M.F. did when the Asian crisis started in Thailand and Indonesia, but within months it backed away, restoring subsidies for fuel and rice to contain widening street protests. In Congress, conservatives complained that the fund wasted billions, particularly with a $17 billion bailout of Russia last year that collapsed in months -- and which has led to continuing investigations into where I.M.F. money went. Mr. Camdessus repeated today that ''the charges are completely unsubstantiated,'' and said ''we must not loose sight of the fact that Russia is now a democracy and a market economy, even if it is blurred by corruption and cronyism, and mistakes in Chechnya.'' What undercut some of Mr. Camdessus' credibility on Capitol Hill, where financing for the I.M.F. seems always under attack, was his tendency to act as a public cheerleader for countries in trouble. Speaking of the capital flight from Russia in the spring of 1998, for example, he said: ''Contrary to what markets and commentators are imagining, this is not a crisis. This is not a major development.'' It became one quickly, leading to one of the fund's biggest and least successful stabilization efforts. Today, Mr. Camdessus said he had become resigned to the idea that Europeans and Asians viewed him as a lackey for the United States -- ''they call |
1152228_2 | Board Blocks Student Access To Web Sites | May, senior product manager for Symantec of Cupertino, Calif., said yesterday that the program has a setting that allows selected categories, from sports to pornography to stock trading, to be filtered. He said I-Gear has ''absolutely no preference of one group or another,'' like those favoring or opposing abortion. The filter is made so that an administrator can tailor it to schools, teams of students or even individual students. He said that used correctly, it is capable of distinguishing among phrases like ''chicken breast, breast cancer and big breasts.'' Norman Siegel, executive director of the civil liberties group, faxed a letter to Chancellor Rudy Crew yesterday, complaining that the board was engaging in ''broad censorship of Internet access,'' by blocking entire categories of Web sites based on forbidden words and phrases. ''The blocking program sweeps far too broadly,'' Mr. Siegel said in his letter. ''It significantly undermines teachers' ability to conduct their lessons and students' ability to complete their classroom assignments on the Internet.'' The board has the right, Mr. Siegel said in an interview, to exercise judgment about what information is available to students, but he said it made no sense to adopt ''a software company's one size fits all standard,'' regardless of educational considerations, for all students from kindergarten through high school. Pam McDonnell, a spokeswoman for Dr. Crew, said the Board of Education is drafting a policy on Internet access, which will allow schools to ''tweak'' the I-Gear filter. The policy, she said, will attempt to be sensitive to the concerns of parents and communities, and will be tailored to the ages of students. Until now, many schools had used their own servers, and officials in those schools or in the local districts decided what information to restrict. Some school officials said yesterday that the Board of Education had also made it difficult for children to use e-mail in class as a tool to exchange notes about homework, or to communicate with experts for class projects. Accounts can be set up in the names of teachers, but not students, they said, and must go through the Board of Education. Teachers who have tried to set up free e-mail addresses for their students, through Yahoo, for example, have found those services blocked, they said. Teachers said that even setting up a school Web site can be difficult, because parents must sign a release form before schools can display |
1152034_2 | A Mirage of Amazonian Size; Delusions of Economic Grandeur Deep in Brazil's Interior | his favorite shipyard in Japan and then towed 17,800 miles across the Indian and Atlantic Oceans. He also installed 3,000 miles of road, 37 miles of railway, a deep-water port and a company town that now has 9,500 inhabitants. More than 260,000 acres were planted with Burmese melina and Caribbean pine trees, which did not flourish in this harsh equatorial climate, and, eventually after much costly experimentation, eucalyptus, which did. ''I always wanted to plant rows of trees like corn,'' Mr. Ludwig, who died in 1992 at the age of 95, said in a rare interview, published in 1980 in National Geographic magazine. But the very scale of Mr. Ludwig's ambitions aroused suspicion among Brazilians, who have been distrustful of any foreign presence in the Amazon since the British destroyed Brazil's rubber industry a century ago by spiriting seeds away to Malaysia. Books with titles like ''Jari: The American Invasion,'' and press reports suggested that Mr. Ludwig was creating his own nation with its own armed forces, using slave labor, destroying the jungle and smuggling gold abroad. Though Brazilians are taught in school that the Amazon is a natural wonder, and can recite the names of the river's tributaries with ease, relatively few from the big cities 1,500 miles to the south have ever set foot in the region or have a desire to visit. This distance fuels nationalistic slogans like ''the Amazon is ours,'' but produces very little knowledge of or sympathy for the obstacles faced by any undertaking in the jungle. In part because Brazilians regard the Amazon as a place of quick and easy riches, ''the state has not played its proper role'' in the region, said Erton Sesquim Sanchez, Jari's current operations director. ''They have not come in to build schools and basic sewage systems, pave roads, install electric power. We're here 20 years, and we still have to confront ourselves those and other problems that are really the responsibility of the state.'' Despite the social role that companies like Jari are forced to play, calls for these companies to be expelled persist today. The October edition of Amazon Agenda, a monthly newsletter published by Lucio Flavio Pinto, author of a critical history of Jari and the region's best-known investigative reporter, describes Jari and projects like it as ''Trojan Horses in the Amazon'' that enrich foreigners at the expense of ordinary Brazilians. In Mr. Ludwig's case, |
1150313_2 | Business Travel; At least one airline is bucking the trend toward further restrictions for carry-on luggage. | the same time, flights became increasingly crowded, and flight attendants often found themselves unhappily adding baggage handling to their growing list of chores. Meanwhile, more passengers, especially business travelers, began carrying all of their luggage on board because they no longer trusted the checked-baggage service to provide reliability or promptness. While Continental is openly proclaiming its amenability toward carry-ons, another carrier with a good reputation among business travelers, Southwest Airlines, has actually managed to maintain good will while toughening up its policy. In 1998, after noticing that the growing volume of carry-ons was starting to slow down aircraft boarding, Southwest began a humorous ''don't be a bin hog'' campaign. It was designed to reduce excesses while allowing the accommodation of reasonable amounts of carry-ons. ''The appeal was mostly to customers' common sense,'' said Linda Rutherford, a Southwest spokeswoman. ''It really worked for us.'' ''As a short-hop carrier, we have always handled a greater amount of carry-on luggage than long-haul airlines,'' she said. Thus customers ''knew the drill,'' understood the problem, and saw the logic of reasonable restrictions, she continued. ''If you only bring two carry-ons and they're right size, there is room for everyone on board that aircraft to bring on their luggage,'' she added. In general, however, many airlines, echoing their flight attendants, have become downright grouchy about carry-ons. Paul Hudson, the executive director of the Aviation Consumer Action Project, an air-passenger advocacy group, said that airlines were trying to blame passengers for ''a problem that has been primarily caused by the airlines'' as they reduced storage space and cut back on service, both on board and at terminal checked-baggage operations. One in every 200 passengers, he said, experiences a problem with a lost, delayed or damaged bag. Given those odds, ''If you travel more than a little bit, the chances are you would have had one of these bad experiences. And you will be wanting to carry on as much as possible,'' he said. The irony, he added, is that ''the airlines for many years encouraged people to carry on bags because it meant less baggage for them to handle, which cost less money. Mr. Hudson's group has proposed increasing airline liability limits for lost or damaged bags, improving security at checked-baggage carousels, and starting a system in which passengers who volunteer to check their carry-ons when requested on a crowded flight will be given a coupon worth |
1150354_0 | Talks on Ulster Stop to Let Mediator Seek Counsel | George J. Mitchell today suspended his nine-week-old mission to unblock the deadlocked Northern Ireland peace accord, saying he needed to brief President Clinton and the British and Irish prime ministers, Tony Blair and Bertie Ahern, before reconvening talks in Belfast on Monday. Mr. Mitchell, a former United States senator turned mediator, left Belfast this evening for Dublin to see Mr. Ahern and said he would fly to London on Wednesday to meet with Mr. Blair. He will consult Mr. Clinton in Washington later in the week. In a statement issued by his office in the Stormont Castle Buildings, the scene of the talks, Mr. Mitchell said he is convinced that the rival parties in the province are ''sincere and acting in good faith'' in their desire to carry out the provisions of the April 1998 peace agreement and to disarm the paramilitary groups. ''The problem, of course, is that there are differences among the parties on how those objectives can be achieved,'' he said. The agreement created political structures to give the British province's Catholic minority a share of power, along with the Protestant majority, as a way of ending a cycle of systematic violence that has cost the lives of more than 3,300 people in the last three decades. Though Mr. Mitchell pledged at the outset that his review would not be ''open-ended,'' he extended it twice last month. He said today that after renewing his discussions with the parties in Belfast next Monday, ''I expect to have my report ready shortly thereafter.'' That language did not hold out the promise of the breakthrough needed to restore momentum to the negotiations. Progress toward putting in place the new government set up by the accord has stalled over the refusal of the Ulster Unionists, the province's largest party, to let Sinn Fein, the political ally of the Irish Republican Army, take its seats in the new cabinet until the I.R.A. begins dismantling its arsenal. The agreement states that all parties must use whatever influence they have to try to achieve disarmament by May 2000, but it does not call for an actual turning over of weapons. Sinn Fein has argued that the Ulster Unionist demand for the immediate surrender of I.R.A. weapons would establish a condition for the party's participation in government that is not in the agreement itself. |
1150491_6 | REDESIGNING NATURE: A special report.; Squash With Altered Genes Raises Fears of 'Superweeds' | the field and to abide by a number of safety procedures. If deregulated, the squash could be freely sold or planted anywhere in the United States. So in 1992, Dr. Quemada and Mr. Tricoli petitioned the Agriculture Department, the main government body overseeing genetically modified plants, requesting that the squash be deregulated. (The Environmental Protection Agency regulates plants engineered to produce pesticides; the Food and Drug Administration does not require engineered products to go through an approval process, but is available for consultations.) In its petition, Asgrow, then part of the Upjohn Company, stated that the plant presented no risk to the environment. Industry officials and environmental groups watched the case closely. The squash was the second plant to be considered for deregulation, after the Flavr Savr tomato, and the first to raise the possibility of significant ecological threats. ''It was a test case,'' said Dr. Margaret Mellon, director of the agriculture and biotechnology program at the Union of Concerned Scientists, a watchdog group. ''We were all testing the waters.'' Scientists were concerned that the squash might turn its relatives into virus-resistant weeds by interbreeding with them. The squash also posed the risk that its virus genes or the coat proteins they produced might interact with other viruses to produce new diseases. And, as with any genetically engineered crop, the squash posed the risk that its new genes might cause it to spread and become difficult to control. Still, after two months the Agriculture Department issued a proposed ruling approving the squash. Environmental groups and some state agriculture departments protested, prompting the federal agency to commission a report by Dr. Hugh Wilson, a squash expert at Texas A&M University. But instead of backing up Asgrow and the Agriculture Department, Dr. Wilson agreed with critics. In his report in July 1993, Dr. Wilson found there was insufficient scientific information to draw conclusions about safety and that studies ''point toward the clear presence of risk.'' Dr. Wilson's report revealed that Asgrow's petition contained crucial errors and omitted information that pointed toward risk. For example, Asgrow claimed that wild squash was unlikely to interbreed with genetically engineered squash, despite much scientific evidence to the contrary. Dr. Wilson's report also noted that the wild relatives of the new squash were already problematic weeds in parts of the country, suggesting it might take little to push them into the category of superweed, another fact omitted |
1150271_3 | Rewriting the Resume Rules of the Road | format eliminates many worries, like what typeface or kind of paper to use for a resume, the company says. The one-page paper resume is hardly on the brink of extinction, of course. Many job seekers now keep two versions on file: one for the Web, the other for actual interviews. Still, online resumes seem to be the wave of the future. And writing them does require linguistic skills, if of a new variety. In his resume, Enrique Ramirez, a 1998 graduate of Oberlin College, changed ''ran experiments'' to ''researched'' with the computer in mind. ''You have to word it just right,'' said Mr. Ramirez, 24, who landed a job with a health care company near Chicago. Similarly, Richard J. Carnoske, a software consultant in Tulsa, Okla., searches the Web to see how employers write job listings. When appropriate, he then uses their terms -- like ''e-commerce,'' which he added six months ago -- in his resume. The new science of wording means that verbs, for years seen as the hallmark of a good resume, can be less useful than nouns because recruiters more often search for nouns. Some job searchers even ponder the form of the nouns they are using, said Ben Bellimson, a senior vice president at CareerPath.com. ''Management,'' for example, can be dangerous because it would be missed by a recruiter who typed in ''manager.'' Job seekers who know about databases put down both words. Internet job hunting can bring on its own headaches. Bullet points and boldface, often lost in the translation between software programs, can produce garbled text. So plain text is becoming more popular. Still, Mr. Ramirez said, ''You really don't know how it looks to the person receiving it.'' There also is no guarantee that all that extra information will help. Many companies still take written applications more seriously than those submitted over the Internet because the written ones tend to indicate a higher level of interest, job search specialists said. And the size of some applicant pools has been vastly increased because the Internet has made the resume-writing process much less time-consuming. Andersen Consulting, for example, now receives an astonishing four million resumes each year. It uses computer searches to help determine which 350,000 candidates should be interviewed and which 15,000 should be hired. In other words, the statistical chances of landing a job at Andersen these days are about 1 in 250. |
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