id stringlengths 5 10 | title stringlengths 0 2.44k | text stringlengths 0 2.9k |
|---|---|---|
598356_1 | Out in the Hinterlands, Moscow's Din Is Muted | have become increasingly irrelevant. To some extent, this trend is a result of ongoing decentralization, a process blessed by Mr. Yeltsin. A year ago, a new federal treaty that grants greater rights and responsibilities to regional governments went into effect, signed by all but two of the 88 regions, provinces and independent cities in the federation. Bashkortostan, which owes its autonomous status to the indigenous Bashkirs, a Muslim Turkic people who make up only 22 percent of the population of 4 million, signed the treaty. But in recent months, decentralization in Russia has come to resemble a free fall, as the local authorities assume the power that has been dispersed by the feud between Mr. Yeltsin and his parliamentary opponents. Congress Has Its Uses "It is not a question of the Congress undercutting Yeltsin's authority, or Yeltsin undercutting the Congress's authority," said Rafis F. Kadyrov, 37, chairman of the Vostok Bank and a charismatic figure in the republic's politics. "What is happening is that together they are wrecking the authority of the Kremlin." At the top of the Bashkortostan Parliament, sympathy in the current struggle lies mostly with the Congress, where the republic has 26 deputies. Before the Congress's last session, Bashkortostan joined the other republics in opposing a national referendum on changes in the Russian constitution. "The essence of the conflict is that Yeltsin thinks everything should be done his way, whereas the authority of the Congress is more collegial," said Mr. Dyomin. Already, in many spheres, Bashkortostan has adopted policies that diverge from Moscow's drive toward a free-market economy. Meat, milk and bread are cheaper here, thanks to more generous farm-support policies. Unlike in Russia, citizens here are still guaranteed Soviet-era benefits like cheap kindergartens, while also enjoying more innovative approaches like state-supported health insurance. (A similar project proposed for Russia has been bogged down in the Moscow bureaucracy.) Led by a Parliament dominated by members of the old Communist nomenklatura and captains of state-owned industries, Bashkortostan has taken a more cautious and restrictive approach toward privatization than the federation has. The private kiosks, restaurants and gaudy nightclubs that have sprouted up in Moscow are in rare in Ufa, a city of 1.2 million where shops, restaurants and hotels are still run very much in the old way, with no attempt to attract or please customers. As a major center of Russia's petrochemical industry, with oil fields of |
598531_1 | For Hard Times, Masters of Many Skills | the Tuition Designed to fit the schedules of those who work full time, the two-year master's program meets on Fridays and Saturdays for seven alternate weekends in the fall and spring over four years. In addition to the 12 courses, students conduct an in-depth supervisory research project of interest to their companies. The tuition fee for the two years is $30,000, which includes textbooks and four meals each weekend that sessions are held. "Tuition for about 90 percent of our students is paid for by their companies," Mr. Rasmussen said. "However, we've had a few consultants who own their own companies who pay for themselves. As one said, 'Your course has raised my level of professionalism as a consultant.' " And since reduction in size has become the operative mode of the 90's, Mr. Rasmussen said the university recently decided to conduct a survey of its master's-program graduates to assess the value of their degrees on their careers in a competitive economic climate. "Their feedback is important to give us fresh information on what we can possibly do to strengthen the program," Mr. Rasmussen said. "We were able to track down 250 of our 300 alumni and out of that number about 30 percent responded. Most of their comments were very positive. All the respondents are currently employed. Many have been promoted within their companies since they received their degrees. Others said they felt the degree helped them to survive layoffs in their companies and let them keep their jobs during restructurings." Weekend Commuters Participating To date, more than 70 companies, government agencies and nonprofit organizations have sponsored masters students in the two programs. Some of the Westchester companies that have consistently financed advanced degrees for their employees are Nynex, A.T.&T., International Business Machines, Pepsico, Avon and M.C.I. Some students who were enrolled in the course, Mr. Rasmussen added, are weekend commuters who stay at motels and come from as far away as Buffalo. Bud Van Heyn, 40, who graduated in 1990, is an A.T.&T. technical specialist in data communications in the White Plains office. "I was formerly in sales and I had some technical experience, but the program certainly helped me advance in my career," Mr. Van Heyn said. "It rounded me out and helped me develop managerial skills. I'm a network architect, which means that when we build a computer network for a client, for example one that |
598493_0 | Yes, We Have No Tomatoes, Yet | IT'S time to start those scrumptious heat-loving tomatoes indoors, if you want some varieties a bit more unusual than Big Boy or Early Girl (both favorites of mine). It's really not that difficult to start plants indoors, as the accompanying tips show, especially if you control yourself and plant just a few seeds. But "few" is not a word in most gardeners' vocabularies, especially when they start talking tomatoes. "I was just sitting here this very minute, trying to figure out which 300 out of a collection of 3,000 kinds of tomatoes I'd grow this year," said David Cavagnaro, who manages Heritage Farm, a five-acre garden owned by Seed Savers Exchange, in Decorah, Iowa. Through its gardener members, the nonprofit organization maintains 8,000 rare or endangered vegetable varieties. Mr. Cavagnaro returned recently from a tomato taste test in Australia, where it's harvest time. And one thing was clear: taste is completely idiosyncratic. "About 40 people tasted 30 varieties, and there was almost no semblance of agreement," he said. "One person's favorite was another person's worst. The only unanimous agreement was about the one off the supermarket shelf: it rated the lowest." Of course. And preconceptions flavor opinons, too. "The seed company people all chose the round red ones," Mr. Cavagnaro said. "And some couldn't give a green tomato a chance; others said the green-fleshed tomatoes, like Green Zebra, had the best flavor. Some chose the little wild tomatoes as top in flavor; others couldn't accept that anything a quarter inch in diameter could even be called a tomato." Mr. Cavagnaro's favorites change according to his mood. "If I'm looking for a big slicing tomato, or a thirst-quenching meaty tomato on a summer day, I'll go for a big oxheart or a beefsteak like Big Rainbow," he said. Big Rainbow, which got back into commerce through the Southern Exposure Seed Exchange in Virginia, is a large, golden yellow tomato with a red core. As it ripens, it turns red on the bottom and orange in the middle, and it keeps its green shoulders until totally ripe. And unlike many heirlooms -- seeds passed down from generation to generation -- it's resistant to disease. Mr. Cavagnaro also likes Verna Orange, an oxheart -- so called because it is shaped like the heart of an ox -- that can weigh 1 to 2 pounds. Verna is a fleshy, firm tomato without a lot |
598350_0 | Papa Bear | THIS WEEK |
595694_1 | Tech Notes; For Those Lost at Sea, a Beacon to Rescuers | locating device can be used only at sea. The reason is that it operates in conjunction with a global satellite system that uses the 406.025 megahertz frequency designated for distress signals, and the Federal Communications Commission has not approved use of the signal over land for fear of saturating the frequency. F.C.C. approval of using the device on land is at least a year away, said Larry Ball, assistant general manager of the Litton Industries' special devices division in Springfield, Pa., which makes the beacons. But the division, which is oriented toward military work, sees a huge marine market for the device for commercial and pleasure boats and as standard equipment on life rafts. The device, run by lithium batteries with a 12-year life (but Litton suggests changing them every six years), sends a precoded digital signal upon activation to internationally sponsored satellites and back to ground stations where it is forwarded to a mission control center for relay to rescue services. The signal, which is transmitted for a minimum of 48 hours after being activated, contains the ship's identification number, ownership and size of crew. The system is accurate within a three-mile radius. There are many makes and models of Epirb's. A nine-inch, three-pound, manually deployable device for recreational craft from Litton retails for $900. A bigger, automatically deployed device for commercial fishing boats costs about $1,200. The devices, mandatory on United States and Canadian fishing vessels, begin transmitting when the unit falls three to 12 feet under water. A small new Litton model, the Micro B, to be available in April, is slightly larger than a pack of cigarettes, weighs 12 ounces and will cost about $300. This model transmits on different frequencies, the two international distress frequencies, 121.5 and 243 MHz, which combine earth and space monitoring of the signal to provide speedy rescue deployment. Unlike the bigger models, it does not transmit the encoded data that can identify whose signal is being sent. One essential requirement is that each Epirb owner file a registration card with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that allows confirmation of the information sent out by the beacon. Mike Plant, the yachtsman who was lost at sea last fall on a solo transAtlantic crossing, had a foreign-made Epirb, but had failed to register it, so that his signal could not be identified, a slip-up that may have cost him his life. |
595713_0 | Additional Services For the Disabled | As the executive director of an agency serving 1,200 children and adults with disabilities, I was pleased to see The New York Times concerning itself with the state of medical and dental services for this population [ "Clinics Try to Close Gaps in Health Care for Disabled," Feb. 21 ] . While it is important to draw public attention to difficulties experienced by persons with disabilities in obtaining medical care, it would be equally helpful to balance the equation with a fuller description of what is available. For instance we have been operating a treatment and rehabilitation center, with an Article 28 license, for many years. With the opening of our Max and Clara Fortunoff Outpatient Rehabilitation Center last year we have even expanded our services to include evening and Saturday hours. Our organization has an international reputation for excellence and offers a comprehensive range of services on site at our Roosevelt location at 380 Washington Avenue. These include speech, physical and occupation therapies, a communications laboratory, dental services, medical and diagnostic services, podiatry, audiology and more. GERALD RUDNET Executive Director United Cerebral Palsy Association Of Nassau County Inc. Roosevelt |
596030_9 | The Last Days of Castro's Cuba | a degree in civil engineering. Since then, he has worked as a civil engineer on several projects, including the stadium for the 1991 Pan American Games. "I am one of those who doesn't want to leave," he says. "I have a position that's both open and moral, and I will never go. I am a patriot. I'm against the Americans. I'm against the United States blockade against the Cubans." What he wants is a chance to ask questions and a chance to disagree with the Government. He also wants a better future. "The Soviet Union helped us," he says. "So what happened? We didn't use the money to build a future. We became a country that created images -- in sports, in art, in conscience, in internationalism, in a series of things that are crazy in a country so underdeveloped. Now we don't even have toilet paper. And why don't we have it? Why? Whose fault is it? How is it possible that today we have nothing?" BY WAY OF AN ANSWER, THE Government is pointing to its sugar harvest. Under the old arrangement with the Soviet Union, Cuba was able to barter sugar for all the oil it needed, on terms so favorable that the surplus sugar, along with nickel and other exports like rum and cigars, paid for a vast array of imports, from buses and wheat to cooking oil and paper. The Cubans have agreed to sell this year's sugar crop to the Russians, but the deal is at market prices and it will take almost the entire crop just to buy oil. "Time is on our side," Castro tells a group of cane cutters in a national telecast just before the start of this winter's harvest. "We need time." Although sugar is the lifeblood of Cuba, there have been no fertilizers for two years, no herbicides, no fuel for irrigation. Now there is less fuel to help the workers bring the cane in. "Offer our nation the time it needs to go forward and be victorious," Castro urges. Meanwhile, the critical issue is food. Nothing makes Government officials flare up more quickly than the suggestion that Cubans are hungry. "No one is hungry," they insist. The last time I was in Cuba, farmers could sell surplus food at free markets. But prices were high, and some of those involved got very rich. Others were suspected of |
595828_4 | A Zeus for the 90's | had disappeared from Sidon while gathering flowers with other girls of her age. Zeus had taken her to Crete, and from there she gave her name to the whole continent of Europe. As Mr. Calasso sees it, Cadmus' marriage marks the beginning of the cycle of the myths that laid out the basic patterns for later European fiction. This conscious choice of a frame to his narrative suggests that Mr. Calasso has written a work designed explicitly for the culture of the 1990's. Other myth books, even Ovid's, begin with an account of the origins of the world, the birth of Earth from the Void and Earth's marriage with Heaven. But Mr. Calasso is writing for an audience that is more interested in the interaction of gods with men and (especially) women than in rehashings of the origins of gods who in its opinion never really existed. As a result of this disbelief, Mr. Calasso's gods seem more like powerful human beings than the slow but relentless enforcers of justice in whom the ancient Greeks for centuries believed. But along with the absence of morality in Mr. Calasso's narrative comes a refreshing absence of moralizing that modern readers are certain to appreciate. Instead, he pauses to explain how the stories are connected with the lands and the natural world in which they are set. Like Ovid, he is not particularly interested in the connection of these myths with actual religious practice, and like most ancient writers of mythology he assumes that the way in which the stories were told did not change over time. Occasionally he offers some very general reflections on the meaning of the myths, which do not so much challenge his readers to think hard about what they have been reading as reassure them that they have without real effort experienced something deeply significant. This desire to remain at a respectful distance from the ancient world keeps Mr. Calasso's book, for all its real learning, from being a work of scholarship. But neither was Ovid's "Metamorphoses." Rather, it was a serious entertainment, meant to be enjoyed in the process, but to leave the reader with some lingering sense that what seemed remote and forgotten is in some way part of his own very different world. Mary Lefkowitz is the Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities at Wellesley College and the author of "Women in Greek Myth." |
595810_5 | Yarns Spun, Souls Blessed By Old Salt on City Turf | throwing her arm around his shoulders. "Without the sailor, I'd be dead." But there was a dark side to his character, she added, and when it surfaced he could be moody and irascible. "I wish I had a bag of dope for every time he's thrown me out of here," she said. She stood up and announced that she's going out to panhandle to buy some more wine. "I won't hear it," the sailor snapped, and handed her $2. The young woman staggered out the door. One of 18 Children The sailor said he was raised in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., one of 18 children. His mother died while she was carrying her 19th child, he said, after being struck by a bus. His father worked in the coal mines and to make ends meet ran a speakeasy in the basement of their home. Mr. O'Donnell said he and his brothers began stealing as children to help support the family. "We'd steal coal, food, anything we could get our hands on then," he said. "You had to. Times were hard." At 16 he was sent to a reformatory school for stealing. For months, he said, he was assigned to work in the field with two plow horses until one day he led them to a trough, wrote a note to his guardian that read, "see you later," and ran away to Philadelphia. It was 1939. He joined the merchant marine and for the next 30 years sailed around the world dozens of times, usually during eight-month shifts. He towed every cargo imaginable, he said, and during World War II worked on patrol boats and carried munitions, food and supplies to operations in the Atlantic and Pacific. He also sailed on the Liberty ships, which were considered the workhorses of the seas. "There's nothing more wicked than sailing the North Atlantic," he said. "For weeks afterwards you'd be walking sideways." While he was landbound he stayed in seamen's homes until he was called out to sea. He moved to New Haven in the mid-1960's. Rob Them and Leave Them He had a daughter and a son from his first marriage, both of whom are now in their late 30's. His daughter, he said, drove a municipal bus in New Haven. Over the years, other women showed an interest in him, but he rarely reciprocated the feelings. "I'd promise them, rob them, then leave |
596023_5 | Technology; A Versatile Sponge Made From Oats | chemically synthesized by Advanced Polymer Systems of Redwood City, Calif. These, too, offer sustained release of various substances and are already on the market in products like Every Step, a foot powder; Exact, an acne treatment, and Baby Fresh with Ultraguard, baby wipes from Scott Paper. Microsponge formulations of Prozone, a sunscreen using melanin, and Retin-A, Johnson & Johnson's acne treatment, are in clinical trials. Dr. Potter said that Nurture's advantages are that it is a natural material that produces a silky feel not possible with plastics. A spokeswoman for Advanced Polymer said that she was unfamiliar with Nurture, but that the manmade product had the advantages of slower degradation and the ability to tailor its absorption and release properties specifically for different materials. Discussing the agricultural pesticide area, John Dougherty, director of licenses and business alliances for Monsanto, said, "To the extent that we can find natural biological products that perform some of the same surfactant and emulsifying functions" as oil-based carriers, "then we can develop formulations that are more acceptable from a regulatory and environmental standpoint, as well as for the end user." Most pesticide carriers are petroleum-based and sometimes more toxic than the pesticide itself. So, the Environmental Protection Agency wants to limit their use. Monsanto has several substances in trials with Nurture "with some very encouraging results," Mr. Dougherty said. LIKEWISE, the detergents currently used to disperse oil spills are often as toxic as the oil, and ultimately break down and rerelease the oil to the sea. Nurture particles would absorb the oil and then sink, to decompose slowly and be consumed by bacteria. A British laboratory has been authorized to perform in-sea trials of Nurture later this year. Because both Nurture particles and the oat oil that is a byproduct have potent anti-oxidant properties, they are also being tried as food additives to retard spoilage. Finally, Nurture is beginning to look at making microparticles from other grains, primarily barley. In nearly all cases, modest-sized Nurture will depend on partners to market products made with Nurture. "There are so many applications for the product that it is an impossibility for us to get into those with our own product," Dr. Wochuk said. "So we get in by selling to these large manufacturers. We would like to build a Nutrasweet-like franchise." But the company may eventually sell some very expensive cosmetics under its own name, he added. |
594373_7 | When Art Takes Wing, The Owners Cross Their Fingers | a work into what you consider a better climate, with stable humidity, that may not be good, because the works get used to seasonal changes over many years. Paintings, for instance, hang in freezing churches in good condition; when heating is added, the rhythm of the climate changes, and the effect can be devastating. In other words, our supposedly ideal condition is artificial." Often paintings are cleaned in preparation for traveling exhibitions. But some conservators think that many such cosmetic efforts are unnecessary, even harmful. And despite all the recent advances in conservation, conservators acknowledge that they still have a lot to learn about one crucial matter -- damage that only makes itself apparent months or even years after a work has traveled. A problem may show up in a panel long after an exhibition; a painting that has been bumped may develop surface cracks much later. "A lot of speculation is currently based on this issue of delayed consequences," Mr. von Sonnenburg says. Do such worries seem, in the end, exaggerated? Considering that many treasures of the Louvre survived the trek across the Alps on the backs of Napoleon's troops, today's concerns about climate control can seem precious. On the other hand, so is the art. There's no question that for every incidence of damage or vandalism or theft involving a loan exhibition, many more problems occur involving works that never leave home. A vase is knocked over by a visitor to the permanent galleries; a painting topples over as it is being moved from a conservator's studio. Michelangelo's "Pieta" was vandalized in the Vatican; Picasso's "Guernica" was spray-painted in the Modern; more recently, Veronese's "Marriage at Cana" was ripped as it fell during conservation in the Louvre, and at the Stedelijk in Amsterdam, a Barnett Newman painting was slashed and several works by Ellsworth Kelly suffered water damage. Mr. Stone of the Metropolitan compares the risks involved with loan shows to rattlesnake bites, and the everyday risks in museums to cigarette smoking. The former are more spectacular, but the latter is vastly more commonplace. Still, as Mr. Coddington says, "The reason you worry about rattlesnake bites is because they are lethal." Museum officials are quick to stress that no catastrophe involving a masterpiece on loan to an exhibition has occurred. But they concede that the odds of a disaster increase as the number of loans multiplies. Someday a |
594722_1 | Public & Private; It's A Girlcott | for other conditions, would be more difficult and less tolerated. And RU486 might meet a certain comfort level in this area of public psychic discomfort. While a surgical abortion usually cannot be performed until at least the seventh week of pregnancy, RU486 can be used earlier, when there has been little embryonic development. An early hormonal shift that empties the womb may seem less disturbing to some than a later surgical intervention. Less disturbing is not what anti-abortion activists want. They have countered by saying that the pill will make abortion casual, an omnipresent charge that is an insult to women. And they call RU486 "chemical warfare," an ironic choice of words since some of them have waged chemical warfare on clinics this year with acid attacks. They intend to wage corporate warfare against the drug. The parent company of Roussel-Uclaf, the French pharmaceutical company that developed RU486, is Hoechst, a huge German conglomerate. In 1988 a Roussel-Uclaf shareholders' meeting was picketed by demonstrators shouting "You are turning the uterus into crematory ovens." Corporations will go a long way to avoid that sort of scene, and soon the company changed its mind about marketing the drug. But the French Minister of Health demanded the company go ahead with its plans to distribute it, saying RU486 was "the moral property of women," a lead that should now be followed by his American equivalent, the Secretary of Health and Human Services. There are promising signs that the company is finally willing to make the drug available in the United States, chief among them a recent meeting between the head of the Food and Drug Administration and the president of Roussel-Uclaf. The company says it does not want to distribute the drug itself, but would be willing to reach an agreement with someone else to do so. Anti-abortion activists say they will boycott the companies that market RU486; supporters of legal abortion should pledge to support those companies. Pharmaceutical companies are concerned that if they sell RU486 their other products will be boycotted by Catholic hospitals; clinics, family planning organizations and other groups should counter with the promise to purchase substantially from the company that provides the drug. RU486 is not the answer for everyone, especially for women who do not discover they are pregnant until its rather narrow window of opportunity has passed. But it should be available for the many who |
597293_2 | Figuring What It Would Take to Take Down a Tower | by 3 feet 6 inches. The result, engineers say, was a tough structural element presenting only a small face to the blast. The concrete decking, in contrast, acted like a sail, catching the full force of the blast, with a pressure of hundreds of pounds a square foot adding up over many square feet, until it failed. The deck served a structural purpose also, holding the columns rigid, but the damage was not extensive enough to cause the columns to bend. Against the Wind Above ground, the strength of the World Trade Center's frame was not calculated with bombs in mind. The largest challenge it was built to face was wind. And, say experts, the wind problem is why the taller the building, the stronger it has to be. Height alone requires strength, and greater height increases strength requirements arithmetically. A 100-floor building has to carry twice the weight of a 50-floor building. But stresses from the wind increase geometrically. As Mr. Robertson explains it, a 100-floor building must be at least four times as strong as a 50-floor building, because the lever formed by the tower extends farther into the sky. The World Trade Center's towers were also built to withstand the impact of a Boeing 707 jet, the largest flying at the time of the center's design. The plane was assumed to be fresh out of Kennedy International Airport, fully loaded and carrying full tanks of fuel. While such a crash would cause great damage to the building, the design is such that the building would not topple. Mr. Fasullo of the Port Authority said that while the trade center was not designed to withstand a bomb, a six-story parking garage at Kennedy Airport, completed about two years ago, was built with that in mind. The goal, he said, was not to make it bomb-proof but to assure that a bomb would not lead to "progressive failure" of the structure. In progressive failure, the structural elements not damaged by the bomb also fail because they cannot bear the weight of the building. Anything's Possible Designing buildings with bombs in mind is rare. Paul F. Mlakar, an architect in Vicksburg, Miss., said he was once asked by a client to design an urban office tower that would be resistant to structural damage from bombs. He found that in most cases it was the wind-loading considerations that controlled the design. |
597345_2 | Growing Up in the Shadow of the AIDS Virus | and Prevention say most children infected from birth now survive beyond age 5. "Most people still have this picture in their minds of extremely sick, scrawny kids who succumb at age 2," said Dr. Stephen M. Arpadi, director of the H.I.V. Program for Children and Families at St. Luke's-Roosevelt Hospital Center in Manhattan. "What we can say now is that, yes, this happens to some kids, but there are a lot of kids who are going to be school-age and are mildly symptomatic and growing well into their first decade, and many deteriorate in their teens." Still, many questions surrounding children of H.I.V.-positive mothers persist: Why do some get the virus, while others escape infection? At what point, during pregnancy or birth, does infection occur? Why do some of the infected children become sick immediately, while others live well for years? As researchers seek answers, meanwhile, parents, doctors and social workers struggle with how to handle the older children. They debate issues like when to tell them about the illness and what to tell them about sex and about their future. Life With the Virus Emotional Ordeals Join Physical Ones Even some of the children who are living longest have lives punctuated with crisis. Johnny, Marie and Donna have suffered repeated bouts of serious illness -- pneumonia, severe sinus inflammation, collapsed lungs. They have taken AZT and DDI, the two antiviral drugs approved to treat AIDS. They have been in the hospital so often they are hard-pressed to remember how many times. "Like 2,000," said Marie. All three have experienced developmental delays or mental impairments attributed to H.I.V. Johnny and Donna are small; they look more like 8-year-olds. Marie has suffered memory loss and neurological problems. But the physical ordeals are now accompanied by emotional ones. The children, who first met as pre-schoolers in day care, now get together weekly in a support group led by social workers at the Children's Evaluation and Rehabilitation Center of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine's Rose Kennedy Center in the Bronx. Fear of Being Judged Bad There, talking in spurts and bouncing from one subject to the next, they touch on most aspects of the epidemic's legacy -- the death of a mother to AIDS, a desire to keep their infection secret at school for fear of being judged a bad person, the risk -- though minimal -- they might pose to others |
597135_8 | America's Newest Industrial Belt | 3,000 people to produce radios and other car components. It is assigning 700 people to the production of dashboard gauges, replacing 400 workers in Michigan by 1995. The alternative would be to automate in Michigan. "When you automate, you get rid of direct labor, but you add indirect labor costs for very skilled people to maintain the more complicated equipment," said Thomas E. Davis, Altec's controller. Mario M. Okubo, Altec's manager, put it more simply. "We brought the production here and saved the business," he said. Getting the Skills The pressure to be more skilled also touches young women like Magdalena Munoz, a 19-year-old operator in an automated assembly process at the Zenith plant, which like most of the 60 maquiladoras in Chihuahua is evolving into a higher-tech factory. Young women seated at long tables in one area of the warehouse-like building still function in traditional maquiladora fashion, repetitively placing plastic and wire prongs into slots. These are the larger parts of a circuit board, and the labor-intensive work that these women do, for $1 an hour, originally prompted Zenith to shift production to Chihuahua from factories in the Midwest. But technology has miniaturized other circuit board components, so that many tasks can no longer be done with precision by hand. And not far from the women seated at their tables, Zenith has installed computer-controlled machines to stamp or glue these tiny parts onto circuit boards. Ms. Munoz has been trained to operate one of these machines. As the boards emerge, she scans a computerized readout to make certain the parts have been properly placed; if they haven't, she adjusts the machine or tries to fix the problem by hand. If she can't, she calls over a technician or engineer. Ms. Munoz's pay is 137 pesos, or $45, for a 45-hour week, the same as the wage for the women assigned to hand assembly. A dollar an hour is the standard factory wage in Chihuahua, although the most modern factories -- like the Ford engine plant -- start production employees higher, at $1.25 or $1.50 an hour. These factories employ mostly young men, while the maquiladoras hire mostly young women. Ms. Munoz's wage might rise with more training, if she stays. Worker turnover at maquiladoras is often more than 20 percent a year. That is a new problem for companies increasingly in need of retaining experienced workers to operate automated |
597233_0 | Health Task Force Moving in Right Direction; Physician Scorecards | To the Editor: "Opening Up on Health Care" (editorial, March 7) lists "freedom of choice" in doctors as the first of the "gritty questions" to be answered by the Clinton health proposal. It is important to understand that informed choice is the only useful choice, and that objective criteria and the necessary information to choose a physician are very difficult to obtain. I introduced a bill 15 years ago in the Florida Senate that required surgeons to post the results of their elective surgery in the previous six months on the walls of their waiting rooms. In a preamble to the statute I pointed out that you could learn far more about a horse in The Racing Form than you could ever know about your doctor. Until we have categorized treatments and know what works best, we are making a very blind bet on very subjective criteria. Remember, half the doctors practicing today finished in the bottom half of their class in medical school. People should realize that there's no discernible difference between doctors and therefore not make freedom of choice an issue in the health debate. JACK D. GORDON President, Hospice Foundation Miami, March 9, 1993 |
597010_11 | The French Funk | from German occupation to be treated as a victorious ally in 1945. It sold itself as a friend of poor nations and learned to display its independence -- mar quer la difference -- by piquing Washington. More crucially, West Germany bowed to French leadership inside the European Community. And, with Britain ambivalent as ever about its place in Europe, France could believe it was, if not a superpower, at least a great power. The crumbling of Communism, then, has badly shaken France's image of itself. The emergence of a single superpower has limited its room for maneuver in the third world. And in Europe, German unification has changed the balance of power to France's disadvantage. Paris has tried to compensate, participating in United Nations peace missions in Yugoslavia, Somalia and Cambodia as a way of demonstrating that it is still the only European nation with global reach. Yet it remains unsure of its status. And it hasn't helped that its past is coming under critical scrutiny. The long-nurtured myths about French resistance to German occupation during World War II have been challenged by new information about the role played by the collaborationist Vichy Government in deporting Jews to Nazi death camps. France's defeat in Indochina in 1954 and its flight from Algeria in 1962 are being looked at afresh. Even France's success in controlling many of its former African colonies is now being viewed as a distasteful policy of supporting dictatorships. In normal times, ordinary French might care little. Yet today, nervousness about a shrinking world role adds to deeper worries about France's very identity. "The French have always believed they should have a very important function in the world," says Daniel Cohn-Bendit, a German intellectual who was a leader of the antigovernment student movement that rocked Paris in May 1968. "So it is difficult for them to accept anything less." Indeed, if France could not match the nuclear might of Washington or Moscow, the French could at least claim cultural supremacy. Yet even its main cultural vehicle, its language, is retreating. French is no longer the language of diplomacy, nor even the lingua franca of European elites. In fact, such is the infiltration of English in France that a sentence was added to the French Constitution last year: "The language of the republic is French." Silly? Perhaps. Yet whether in cuisine or movies or fashion or philosophy, l'es prit |
597110_0 | The Hoodwink Aspect of Engine Tech | IT is rare when I admit that I don't know something, when I confess to having missed the point or being just generally benighted. But this is one of those times. Color me chagrined. For years, I have wondered silently about the fact that cars seem to perform perfectly well despite horsepower that has been consistently eviscerated in the quest for ever-better fuel economy. Like all of us, I know there has been a raft of down-sizing. That bodies don't have nearly the heft that they did, and that major improvements have been made in tires and aerodynamic design. But none of that has seemed to be an entirely satisfactory explanation. The horsepower of Cadillac Eldorados, for instance, plummeted to 235 in 1972 from 365 the previous year. And other paradigms of muscularity have pared their power in similar whopping fashion. Part of the reduction had to do with lower-octane unleaded gas, which did indeed cut horsepower -- but not as much as all that. Still, I stayed quietly puzzled about continued performance in the face of weaker engines. Until now. Now I know what happened. A videotape for owners of the '93 Corvette unsacked the cat when it pointed out that, in 1971, Detroit simply changed the way it reported on horsepower, going from a "gross" measurement to a "net" rating. Instead of recording the raw horses on a test stand (sans mufflers, accessories and all the rest), the new system told us what the installed horsepower really was! Which means, of course, that today's cars are actually about a third more powerful than some of us thought. I checked auto magazines of the era, and it makes me feel a bit better to know that nobody else seemed to have noticed the change. That is probably not too surprising, since Detroit was playing it coy. The problem back in the early 70's was a growing Government concern over exhaust emissions, the reluctance of insurance companies to offer policies on high-performance "muscle" cars and a hunger among customers for smaller and thriftier engines. But whether the manufacturers were pulling a fast one or making a genuine effort at truth in advertising, the discipline imposed by the need for more efficient powerplants has been a good thing. And necessity, as always, has fostered invention. Smaller automobiles dictated different engine configurations to create more passenger room, and front-wheel drive was the |
604958_2 | Patents; Attacking Corn's Big Enemy | functions -- a volatile halogenated hydrocarbon solvent. In the past, that halogenated solvent was typically trichloro ethane, "which has been shown to deplete the ozone layer," said Chiou C. Yau, a program chemist at Gillette. As a result, Gillette has substituted a non-halogenated chemical called cyclohexane as a carrying agent in its new correction fluid. Its patent is 5,199,976. At 12, He's Building A Better Milk Jug Three teams of inventors sat on a Washington dais earlier this month, waiting to be honored by the Intellectual Property Owners Association as Inventors of the Year. A beaming group of executives from the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company was being honored for a new tire. Next to them, proud scientists from Merck & Company were getting an award for a new prostrate drug. At the end of the table, the last inventor waited in a blue suit and tie, his hair slicked down. He was probably the most grateful to be there because he got the day off from school. He was 12. In front of Akhil Rastogi was his invention -- a plastic milk jug with a crudely shaped clay spout. The basic jug had a familiar look -- it was exactly the kind of grocery-store milk container that had exasperated him at age 7 and had made him think "there has to be a better way to do this." "My mother had a wrist injury and she couldn't pour the milk," said Akhil, recalling how he discovered that the plastic gallon jugs with the center lid were "too heavy for me, and I'd spill the milk as I poured it." So the boy took some clay and a plastic jug and begin molding a tear-drop-shaped spout to make the milk flow straight into his glass. "I took the jug neck and poked a hole in the clay so it would be the exact size," he said, "and then I raised the walls of the spout and lowered the middle so the milk would flow down the center." He dubbed the creation "E-Z Gallon," and, with his father's help, applied for a patent. He was 10 at the time. Akhil, a sixth grader from Fairfax, Va., is now looking for a backer to finance a plastic prototype of the spout. His design patent is 329,810. Patents are available by number for $3 from the Patent and Trademark Office, Washington, D.C. 20231. |
604921_1 | As States Rush Into Gambling, Experts See Risks | nation, dropping requirements that boats actually have to set sail or have betting limits or even be true boats with engines. Converted barges are serving as casinos too, tapping into some of the growing national action in legalized card, dice and slot games that have enabled small-town America to exploit what are for now rich, casino-free markets from Chicago to New Orleans. Cannibalizing Profits But those two cities are considering huge land casino and hotel projects. These waterfront redoubts against the revenue-trawling boats could turn current easy profits into sudden deficits for communities that have floated bonds and budget obligations along with their casino boats. "The tragic thing is governments aren't cooperating and are cannibalizing each other. They will have to go through a few budget cycles to realize that gambling isn't going to do it for all of them," cautioned William N. Thompson, a gambling and public administration expert at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. He says that either interstate compacts or Federal controls will eventually be needed to settle the competitive chaos. Gambling boats, which operated outside the law in the frontier era, are being resurrected from turn-of-the-century prohibition by economically hard-pressed state and local governments. The boats offer politicians an off-shore way to raise revenue while obeying the dictate of "no new taxes" at a time when gambling and drinking have been overshadowed by issues like abortion as the main target of moralistic politicking. Since Iowa opened the modern era of riverboat gambling, Illinois, Missouri, Mississippi and Louisiana have joined the legalization and a dozen other state legislatures are considering dockside or water cruising casinos. The very first riverboat casino opened only two years ago in Fort Madison, Iowa, a community of 12,000 on the Mississippi that saw its emporium, the Emerald Lady, jilt Iowans last summer for the more go-go market in Biloxi. "Iowa needed to appear to retain some moral qualifications," Professor Rose explained, referring to state mandates for real cruising and $5 maximum bets and $200 maximum losses per bettor. The limits, he said, crimped the lucrative industry phenomenon known as Gamblers' Ruin: with enough time and betting leeway, a casino will win all gamblers' stakes but still leave them relatively satisfied with the memory of occasional winnings. Taxes and Lost Jobs The pioneer Iowa town, left in Emerald Lady's wake with 350 lost gambling jobs, had to approve an emergency property tax |
604871_0 | World Economies | |
602164_0 | Auto Makers In Joint Patent | The Big Three auto makers said today that their research consortium had been awarded its first patent. The patent covers technology that one day may permit auto makers to substitute parts made of lighter-weight plastic composite materials for parts made of steel, thus improving fuel economy. The United States Council for Automotive Research, which was started by General Motors, Ford and Chrysler last year, said the patent represented the first time the auto makers together had produced an original technology. But it could be years before the technology is applied to auto making, they said. Although engineers can use the technology to build a part made of composite material in the laboratory, currently "we can't make one every two minutes," said John Fillion, an engineer for the Chrysler Corporation. Composite materials, which are a mix of plastics, are used in place of metal. Composite parts generally must be shaped around a foam core. The new technology permits composite parts to be formed around a hollow mold without a core, thus reducing their weight 10 percent or more. BUSINESS TECHNOLOGY |
602158_5 | Recycling Answer Sought for Computer Junk | team has worked on recycling the plastics used in I.B.M. personal computers. Plastics in old machines are coded by polymer type and, starting this summer, Mr. Kirby plans to begin making housings and parts with a blend of recycled plastic and fresh resin. "The goal we're working toward is to keep all I.B.M. products out of landfills," Mr. Kirby said. 'It's Cost Avoidance' Recycled plastic is cheaper than virgin resin, as long as collecting, sorting and rendering the old plastic can be done economically, Mr. Kirby notes. Another incentive for recycling, he says, is the prospect that companies are going to be held responsible for their old machines. "It's cost avoidance," he said. "Either you do something with it, or you're going to have to pay to take it away." Starting next year, computer companies in Germany will be forced to reclaim their old machines when consumers no longer want them. The rule is part of the German "take back" law that applies this year to packaging of all types of products, and next year will cover all electronics products, from hair dryers to mainframe computers. There are several dozen computer-recycling companies in Germany, but it remains unclear whether there will be an efficient market for the machine dismantling, metals marketing and parts reselling that will result from the new law, according to German computer executives. If not, they say, the effect will be to increase costs to producers, who will then have to pass them along to consumers through higher prices. "The German system relies on compulsion, while the U.S. is trying to let market forces and innovation do it," said Joachim Tabler, a Munich-based environmental specialist for the Apple Computer Corporation. Giving Them to Others Alex Randall is one man who believes that dismantling, recycling and melting down old computers is misguided nonsense. He is president of the East-West Education Development Foundation, a Boston-based charity, that refurbishes second-hand computers and gives them to groups deemed worthy in 130 countries. The foundation's computers are used for everything from monitoring elections in the Ivory Coast to running municipal governments in Romania. Less than 3 percent of the world's population has ever touched a computer, Mr. Randall notes. "Ninety-seven percent of the people on the planet would regard an outdated I.B.M. PC as a ride on a rocket ship," he said. "Melting the thing down is not its highest and best |
600555_0 | NEWS SUMMARY | International A3-15 FRENCH FILES ON WAR INTERNMENT A 72-year-old Frenchman smuggled out of the Toulouse office of France's National Archives thousands of files detailing French involvement in the internment and deportation of Jews and non-Jews in World War II. The files illustrate how the French administration routinely went about carrying out arrests, seizing the property of detainees and, when necessary, selecting them for deportation to death camps or labor camps in Germany or Poland. A1 EGYPTIAN PLAN REJECTED President Clinton rejected a suggestion from President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt that the United States ask Israel to further accelerate the return of 400 Palestinians deported from Israel to Lebanon last December. A10 CAUCASUS REFUGEE CRISIS GROWS In the southern Caucasus, Armenian forces conquered the contested Nagorno-Karabakh province over the weekend, forcing thousands to flee and creating a refugee crisis of huge proportions. Nagorno-Karabakh, under the rule of Azerbaijan but populated mostly by ethnic Armenians, has been the prize in a five-year undeclared war that has claimed more than 2,500 lives. A3 U.S. rebuked Armenia for seizing Azerbaijan region. A3 NUCLEAR ACCIDENT IN RUSSIA A tank of uranium waste exploded and caused a fire at a plutonium separating factory near the Siberian city of Tomsk, exposing firefighters to significant doses of radiation, Russian officials said. A5 Amid rancor, French Socialists change leader. A3 U.N. TALKS IN BOSNIA FALTER The United Nations failed in an attempt to consolidate the fragile cease-fire in the Bosnian war when face-to-face talks among commanders of the three warring armies ran into a deadlock over continuing Serbian nationalist attacks on the besieged Muslim enclave at Srebrenica. Instead of achieving steps leading to peace, the talks quickly degenerated into an exchange of recriminations. A14 U.S. seeking tougher Yugoslav sanctions. A15 CHALLENGE FOR U.N. COMMISSIONER When Sadako Ogata became the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees two years ago, she may have anticipated an uncontroversial tenure. But she was plunged immediately into bitter disputes as fighting in the former Yugoslavia displaced more than two million Muslims, Croats and Serbs. Along the way, she has been challenged to defend her actions at almost every turn. A14 Diplomatic efforts to settle Haitian crisis reached impasse. A11 Seoul Journal: Church in Korea trying to win the peace. A4 National A16-21, D24 RUSSIA TO AID SPACE STATION NASA announced that would work with Russia on its space station, under orders of President Clinton to |
600572_0 | Circuit City Is Trying New Thing: Used Cars | Would you buy a used car from this retailer? Circuit City Stores Inc., the giant home electronics chain, startled Wall Street, auto dealers and much of the retail world yesterday with an announcement that it was going into the used-car business. The news, tucked near the end of a news release detailing the company's financial results, overshadowed a 38 percent increase in profits in Circuit City's fiscal fourth quarter. Strong Reactions "I was a little surprised that the media picked up on that when we announced earnings that were above expectations and described our key markets and plans for expansion, all of which will have a big impact on our business," said Ann Collier, Circuit City's spokeswoman. She stressed that the venture was only a test and would have no impact on the company's bottom line. Initially, the announcement was greeted with laughter on Wall Street. But when the guffaws subsided, analysts pronounced the concept "exciting," "innovative," even "wacky" -- strong language for a crowd that generally speaks in ratios and percentages. Auto dealers were somewhat less enthusiastic. "What do they know about the car business?" said Ted Orme, spokesman for the National Automobile Dealers Association. "Next thing you know, Safeway will be selling television sets." But a retail consultant heralded it as a breath of fresh air in an industry notorious for recycling old ideas. "Keep one thing in mind: In retailing, the old tried-and-tested formulas are weakening and real creativity is what is going to drive business in the future," said Kurt Barnard, president of Barnard's Retail Marketing Report. Ms. Collier said that although Circuit City had plenty of room left to grow for the rest of the decade, it had been looking for expansion opportunities to carry it into the 21st century. "We were looking at related businesses, and this seemed like a business where we could use our skills in customer service, operating controls and professional management." Similar Techniques Although Circuit City has released scant details about its new venture, it plans to apply to used cars the techniques it has used selling radios, televisions, dishwashers and air-conditioners. In much the same way that Toys "R" Us has put smaller, less-efficient competitors out of business to gain more than 25 percent of the toy market, Circuit City has pushed into consumer electronics retailing in the Southeast, Midwest and West, sending many regional chains and mom-and-pop stores |
603334_0 | World Economies | |
603453_0 | Scallopers See a Livelihood Imperiled | Like the 19th-century whalers who lived and labored here before them, scallopers say they fear they may become the next fallen icons of New England, remembered only in museums, books and the tall barroom tales of fishermen. Dwindling stocks of sea scallops, foreign competition and increased enforcement of Federal fishing regulations have turned their once-pleasant trade into an ordeal that threatens their way of life, say the men and women who work the seas. Situated on Buzzard's Bay, New Bedford and the neighboring town of Fairhaven share a port that brings in a $200 million catch each year, the largest in the nation. Memorialized by Herman Melville as a whaling port in "Moby Dick," the Buzzard Bay area has long attracted fishing families from Portugal and Norway. An estimated 300 vessels, 120 of them scallopers, compose the commercial fishing fleet, which in large part fuels the economy of this poor, working-class community. Unemployment here was 15.2 percent in February, compared with 7.7 percent nationally. Raids Spark Tension Tensions soared last month when Federal agents raided 22 scalloping vessels in the Port of New Bedford, seizing $126,220 worth of scallops. The agents, armed and wearing bulletproof vests, charged six boat owners with catching undersized, or baby, scallops and a seventh with unloading a catch outside the 5 A.M.-to-5 P.M. "window" set by Federal officials. Scallopers, their families and many others in this closely intertwined community of about 116,000 said they were outraged by what they considered overzealous enforcement of rules they say are complex and leave scant room for error in judging the maturity of scallops. Fines for such violations can be as much as $100,000. "We're not drug runners; we're not murderers; we're not rapists," said Bobby Bruno, a 52-year-old scalloper who started as a deckhand 33 years ago and now owns the Alpha & Omega II, a 96-foot scalloping ship. "We're just fishermen, and we go out and we work hard so we can come home and be with our families and be happy." Federal agents acknowledged that tensions were high during the seizures, but they said that part of the tension had been caused by numerous death threats against agents and their families. A Federal investigation of the threats is under way, said John McCarthy, special agent in charge of the Northeast region for the National Marine Fisheries Service, a branch of the Commerce Department that regulates the |
603488_1 | Tattoo and Sketch Only Clues to an Identity | victims. It is a criminal practice that greatly increases the difficulty of identifying anonymous victims and so of taking the first big step toward identifying the killer. "We're getting so much more dumping on the interstates because the interstates system is a continuous, highly anonymous corridor that gives a killer a convenient avenue to get a body out of the area where he killed it," said Lieut. Robert Scott, supervisor of the Major Crimes Unit for the New Jersey State Police, in explaining why the big roads have become today's equivalent of the back alley of a half-century ago. "A killer can drive for four or five hours and go through several states, and because of the lack of communication between state police agencies, if a New Jersey person is murdered and dumped in a pull-off in Pennsylvania, it could be days before we realize that that's our body they've got there," he said. "By then the killer could be anywhere in the country." Witnesses are also quickly scattered on the interstates, Lieutenant Scott added, and besides, he asked, who pays attention to other people on an interstate? "It's not like you're on your own street or even in your own town," he said. "When people get on an interstate, they just want to get to where they're going, and nobody gives a damn about what's going on around them." Tiger Lady is the third body to be found along Interstate 80 in the last six years, according to state police and county prosecutors. The bodies of at least five women, presumed to have been prostitutes, have been left along the New Jersey Turnpike in recent years, Lieutenant Scott said. Last summer, the dismembered body of a Massachusetts businessman, Thomas Mulcahy, was dumped along the Garden State Parkway after he was murdered in New York City. Tattoo Leads Nowhere The police say that when a body like Tiger Lady's is found, it is either identified fairly quickly, principally by matching it with a missing-persons report, or else the victim remains unknown to the police for years as is the case with "Baby Hope," a girl whose body was found in 1991 in a picnic cooler along the Henry Hudson Parkway in northern Manhattan. At first, investigators for the Warren County prosecutor, John J. O'Reilly, assumed that Tiger Lady, who is about 20 years old, would be quickly identified because of |
603446_0 | NUCLEAR DUMP SITE REPORTED IN TIBET | A Tibetan organization today accused China of conducting nuclear-weapons research on the Tibetan plateau and dumping radioactive waste there. At least 50 Tibetans living near research sites and uranium mines have died, said the report, written by the Washington-based International Campaign for Tibet. While there have been periodic assertions of nuclear programs in Tibet, today's report -- which the organization said had taken a year to prepare and involved visits to some of the sites -- offered unusual details. It described a nuclear research site called the Northwest Nuclear Weapons Research and Design Academy, also referred to as the Ninth Academy. Situated in Qinghai Province, the research site disposed of nuclear waste in a "roughshod and haphazard manner" throughout the 1960's and 1970's, the report said. Eating Contaminated Meat The report cited cases of cancer in children living near the Ninth Academy and added that poor Tibetans sometimes ate local meat that was banned by the Chinese authorities because of possible radioactive contamination. Urnanium mining in the northwestern province of Gansu and the release of poisonous waste into the water apparently caused the 50 Tibetan deaths, the report said, naming 24 of those who died. China is highly secretive about its nuclear research programs, and information appears in the news only occasionally. But there has been growing concern here and abroad that safety precautions are dangerously lax. It is impossible to independently confirm some of the report's assertions. China criticizes the International Campaign for Tibet as a group of exiles who are out of touch with their homeland and determined to turn Tibet into an independent country. Even Chinese news reports have warned recently about loose controls at nuclear sites. This month, a Chinese legal daily reported that ordinary people regularly entered an area where a nuclear test was conducted a few years ago. The article, carried in a newspaper called Selected Legal System News, did not say where the site is located. It said the land is posted with signs warning people to keep out. But it added that 30 peasants were recently given a 30-year Government contract to raise 400 sheep and 70 camels on part of the land. The article said people often entered and pilfered parts from planes, tanks and artillery pieces. One person even stole an artillery shell to use to make a saddle, said the newspaper, which is run by the official Legal Daily. |
603489_0 | CHRONICLE | This year's winners of the Goldman Environmental Prize, which has been called the Nobel Prize of the Environment, will be honored today at a ceremony at Herbst Hall in San Francisco. Seven environmentalists from around the world will receive awards totaling $360,000 from the Goldman Environmental Foundation. On Wednesday, they they will be in New York City at a reception where the host will be ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR. "We hope these awards will encourage more people at the grass-roots level to become active in support of the environment," said RICHARD GOLDMAN, Chief of Protocol of San Francisco. Mr. Goldman, chairman of an independent insurance brokerage firm, and his wife, RHODA, established the awards in 1989. The 1993 award recipients are: DAI QING, 51, a Chinese journalist and outspoken critic of the Three Gorges dam project on the Yangtze River; SVIATOSLAV IGOREVICH ZABELIN, 42, a founder of the Socio-Ecological Union, a network of 250 environmental organizations in the former Soviet Union, who is now drafting environmental legislation for Russia; JOANN TALL, a 40-year-old Lakota woman from South Dakota, who has been a leader of the fight against nuclear weapons testing and toxic waste dumping on Indian lands; GARTH OWEN-SMITH, 49, and MARGARET JACOBSOHN, 42, a husband and wife team, who have developed a community-based approach to fighting poaching in Namibia; JUAN MAYR, 40, a Colombian photographer, who forged an alliance between peasants, guerrillas and natives, to save the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta; JOHN SINCLAIR, an Australian who led a 22-year fight to protect Fraser Island, a sand island, designated a World Heritage site last year. |
601821_0 | Hormone Imbalance Linked to Behavior | CASTING a slender ray of light on a mystifying behavioral syndrome, researchers have linked an inherited defect in the body's thyroid hormone system to attention-deficit disorder, a common psychological problem in children. The work is the first to identify a specific gene associated with attention deficit difficulties, and it suggests that a fraction of children with the problem may in fact have an undiagnosed thyroid disorder. Child psychiatrists and other experts on the behavioral problem, however, emphasized that the finding was preliminary and that it was likely to be of relevance to only a small number of the millions of children who have the attention-deficit disorder. Many researchers insisted that much work remained to be done before they would recommend that all children with an attention deficit diagnosis have their thyroid hormone levels checked. Possible Clue to Other Ills Nevertheless, they said that any possible insight into the cause and physiology of the ailment was welcome and that an understanding of how thyroid metabolism shapes brain development may yield clues to other neurological defects underlying other types of attention-deficit problems. "Attention deficit is almost surely a heterogeneous disease, with a variety of causes," said Dr. Peter Hauser of the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases in Bethesda, Md., the main author on the new study. "But finding this gene could lead to a conceptual change in thinking about the disorder." The report appears in the current issue of The New England Journal of Medicine. About 4 percent of school-age children are thought to suffer from attention-deficit disorder, sometimes called attention deficit-hyperactivity disorder. Though symptoms vary, children with the disorder often are extremely restless, impulsive, unable to concentrate, disruptive in class and unpopular with their peers and may end up failing their schoolwork. For reasons that remain unclear, boys are eight times as likely to have the disorder as girls. The usual treatment is a low dose of Ritalin or similar amphetamine, sometimes combined with behavioral therapy. But amphetamines do not cure the disease, and many people continue to suffer all their lives. In the new work, Dr. Hauser, his supervisor Dr. Bruce D. Weintraub and their co-workers discovered that children suffering from a rare familial disease, generalized resistance to thyroid hormone, also exhibit a very high rate of the attention-deficit disorder, suggesting an association. Researchers believe that thyroid resistance is caused by an inherited defect in the |
601830_3 | Chemists Learn Why Vegetables Are Good for You | be useful, not only as a dietary measure to prevent cancer, but in a concentrated form to treat tumors already in progress. "This is a fascinating report," said Dr. Judah Folkmann of Harvard Medical School, who has worked out many of the details of how tumors become vascularized as they grow. "It's a novel finding. Nobody has ever suggested before that you could find in the urine certain dietary factors that inhibit the proliferation of blood vessels, and I think this work will get wide attention." Therapy With Few Side Effects Dr. Folkmann and others view blocking angiogenesis as an ideal sort of therapy, one that would attack the malignancy while leaving normal tissue intact. Apart from the sinister demands of tumors, new blood vessels grow in the adult body only after fairly rare events like extreme injury, heart attack or the implantation of an embryo in the uterus, and thus any compound that blocked angiogenesis would have few side effects. Four such blockers are now being tested against conditions like Kaposi's sarcoma, a highly vascularized tumor common in AIDS patients. Genistein would be the first compound isolated from food to be added to the list. Encouraged as they are by the findings of anti-carcinogens in foods, researchers admit that the field of food analysis is in its infancy. Food is chemically daunting, with every stalk of broccoli or slice of melon composed of hundreds or thousands of individual yet interacting chemicals. Some plant products may contain chemicals that promote cancer along with compounds that inhibit the disease, and it can be difficult to sort out which class of chemicals predominates in a given food. Beyond its inherent difficulties, nutrition has been viewedas an area prone to faddishness and charlatanism, another reason traditional researchers have tended to avoid it.. "Serious scientists have stayed away from the field because it gets tied up with all the supplementation people and the anti-aging crowd," said Dr. Barry Halliwell of the University of California at Davis, who studies antioxidant chemistry. "All the hype has made good scientists wary." Nor has there been much encouragement for studies aimed at the prevention of cancer rather than its treatment. On average only about 5 percent of the approximately $1.8 billion annual budget of the National Cancer Institute has been earmarked for disease prevention, with far more going toward expensive and high-profile studies like those on gene therapy, |
601830_7 | Chemists Learn Why Vegetables Are Good for You | levels of the 16 type in their blood, and researchers have determined that tissue from breast tumors contains more of the 16-hydroxylated form than does surrounding, noncancerous breast tissue. By contrast, the 2-hydrolyxated form is relatively inert and has been found to be elevated in women who are vigorous athletes -- exercise is believed to reduce the risk of breast cancer -- and in those who eat many cruciferous vegetables like broccoli, brussels sprouts and cabbage. Isolating ingredients from these leafy green vegetables, Dr. Bradlow and his colleagues have shown that one chemical in particular, indole-3-carbinol, will induce estradiol to follow the harmless metabolic route toward 2-hydroxylation. A study is now underway in which 60 women are taking daily capsules of 400 milligrams of indole carbinol, equivalent to the amount in half a head of cabbage. Within several weeks, their levels of the harmless 2-hydroxylated estrogen had risen to concentrations seen in marathon runners, and the levels have stayed elevated throughout the months of the ongoing trial. The researchers will now be testing lower doses of the compound on larger groups of women, but whether or not the difference in estrogen metabolism affects breast cancer rates will take years to sort out. Protective Enzymes Dr. Paul Talalay and his co-workers at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, who last year reported on the detection in broccoli of a robust anti-cancer ingredient called sulforaphane, continue to focus on this class of protective compounds. Sulforaphane and other so-called isocyothionates, found in cruciferous vegetables, mustard, horseradish and many other plants, seem to guard against cancer by stimulating the production of protective enzymes in the body. Such enzymes, also called phase 2 enzymes, detoxify carcinogens and swiftly flush them out of the body. The scientists have been able to identify other enzyme inducers in foods through a simple system that relies on cultured mouse liver cells and scans for a spike in phase 2 enzyme activity. Applying the screening method not only to different vegetables, but to diverse varieties of the same vegetable, they have found that the amount of inducer ingredients varies tremendously from one sample to the next, either because of natural genetic variations among strains, or because of differences in how the vegetables were cultivated. "It's all well and good to say eat more vegetables, but the data are extraordinarily soft on what we mean by that," Dr. Talalay said. "We're |
601839_2 | U.S. Cracks Door to World Forest Agreement | tropical countries could pledge themselves to a policy of harvesting timber while preserving forests. This goal of sustainable cutting of trees would be achieved by the end of this decade under proposals for revising the timber agreement. "We could agree to those kinds of principles," said one Administration official, who added that the United States would acknowledge in Geneva that some complaints by tropical countries about a double standard were valid. But how any agreement on principles gets translated into specific provisions is critical, and it is far from clear that the United States can ultimately agree with tropical countries on the details. Further, it is unclear how an effective agreement applying sustainable harvesting principles to temperate countries would affect forestry practices in the United States itself. The Administration is wrestling now, for instance, with how to reconcile economic and ecological interests in the Pacific Northwest, and the outcome of that dispute is far from assured. Shift Would Be Significant No conclusions are likely to be reached in four days of meetings this week in Geneva, said a State Department official involved in the talks who characterized this first round as exploratory. A second round of talks is to take place in late June. The United States has been the spokesman for the temperate countries' caucus in preliminary meetings leading up to the timber talks, and any shift in its position would carry great weight. Its new stance is therefore "very, very encouraging," said Bill Mankin, the coordinator of the Global Forest Policy Project of the National Wildlife Federation, Sierra Club and Friends of the Earth. "It's the first opening, the first break" in the temperate-tropical impasse on forests, Mr. Mankin said. The rebuff to the Bush Administration on forests at the Earth Summit was accompanied by an outcry over its standing alone among major countries in refusing to sign the global biodiversity treaty designed to help protect the world's array of biological species. It was also widely criticized for winning weaker controls than other countries wanted on emissions of heat-trapping gases that could cause global warming. The Clinton Administration has been engaged in a reassessment of international environmental issues.The Administration is reviewing the biodiversity treaty and is widely expected to reverse the Bush policy and sign the pact. It has also signaled to a meeting of countries that negotiated the global-warming treaty signed in Rio that the Administration was |
603809_1 | Women's Group Recasts Religion in Its Own Image | reshaping of Christian tradition and what others would call distinctly "post-Christian." Most of the women who came to Albuquerque from 48 states and at least six other countries were simply seeking a spiritual space of their own, and a brief time of renewal before returning to religious institutions that they feel are dominated by men. The vast majority were Roman Catholic in background. Quite a few were nuns, and gray hair predominated. But for a growing group, that spiritual space of their own is becoming a church of their own. No one suggests that the Women-Church movement, with several hundred affiliated local groups around the country, threatens to become a rival to the established Christian churches. It is only one strand of a larger movement of religious feminism, and one that even some feminist religious leaders dismiss as on the fringes. But the same dynamics that shaped this meeting -- the push of exclusion from church leadership, the pull to include all women of like minds -- operate in the larger movement as well. The forces represented by Women-Church are likely to arise independently in other religious congregations and organizations. Women-Church may also pose a challenge to religious feminism itself. Before the conference, some of its own members worried that it might siphon away energy from changing the existing churches. Feminists of more traditional beliefs may have to spell out more clearly what distinguishes their own views. In Albuquerque, the major speakers and panelists addressed topics from spirituality to domestic violence and healing with only glancing references to the existing Christian churches, their teachings and religious resources. Despite the large Catholic participation, there was little talk about ordination of women. "This group has moved beyond the institutional church," said Neil Kluepfel, the publisher of Twenty-Third Publications in Mystic, Conn., as he stood in the exhibit hall, gazing over tables of unsold books mainly dealing with Catholic doctrine or parish life. 'So Much Bigger Than We Are' Mary E. Hunt, a theologian who is a leader in the coalition of Catholic feminist groups that organized the conference, said the Women-Church movement had become "so much bigger than we are." Dr. Hunt identifies herself as a Catholic, but she also drew laughter from the audience on Saturday when she said "the church I come from -- and I emphasize from -- is the Roman Catholic church." In an interview, she said, "We |
604554_1 | America's Cup to Scuttle Spy Tactics for 1995 | and Pact 95, led by Kevin Mahaney, of Bangor, Me., are also considering the stricter rules. If the challengers and defenders agree to the same conditions, the restrictions might become enforceable retroactively to March 1, 1993. The new rules would continue to apply through the last race of the America's Cup match, scheduled for mid-May 1995. A violation of the rules could meet with disqualification from the cup series altogether, either in the trial races or the cup match itself. Plan Should Be Total, Not Piecemeal "It's my belief that we have to make a total plan rather than doing it on a piecemeal basis," said Chuck Nichols, president of America's Cup '95 who is in charge of organizing the next event for the San Diego Yacht Club, the current guardian of the America's Cup. "We want to put together a tapestry that we are all pleased with." Ernie Taylor, the challengers' representative in San Diego, said last week that the rules being considered amount to "good, sensible stuff." Most syndicates kept a close eye on their opponents during the 1992 races. Support boats, usually small inflatable craft, were used by numerous syndicates to follow their adversaries and film action on the race course. At times, the support crews were abusive, deliberately ramming one another during heated encounters. But none stirred animosity more than William Koch's team, America , which went on to successfully defend the America's Cup against Italy, 4-1. 'Rude on the Race Course' "They were particularly rude on the race course," said Taylor, noting that Koch used more sophisticated technology than anyone else to track his opponents. While it was not illegal to spy on others, several syndicates questioned whether it was ethical. The America syndicate, including Koch, dismissed the Darth Vader image its support boat had acquired during the 1992 races. Koch labeled his spy tactics as largely a spoof. But those who have sailed against the team still think otherwise. America hired helicopters and cameramen to follow her rivals, and apparently used frogmen to take underwater photos of opponents' boats. Koch contended that other syndicates took the same advantage of America , and of each other. At the very least, his team's acknowledged charade in behaving like spies created a psychological edge for America in the 1992 races. Koch maintains he is undecided about whether to enter a 1995 defense bid. But after the 1992 |
604513_0 | Technology; Toting Computers Without Tethers | THE telecommunications industry's oft-whispered promise is that soon, very soon, it will unite telephones, television and computers into a single wireless go-anywhere device. But the industry must first figure out how to send electronic mail, spreadsheets and other data through the air as easily as through phone wires. Companies have been making determined, if shambling, progress in this field, which is known as wireless data transfer. The idea is to use radio waves to free traveling executives and other people on the go from having to plug laptop computers and other data devices into telephone lines. The first small, easy-to-use and affordable devices for such data transfer are now reaching the market. One of the newest and cheapest is Nokia's $700 cellular modem, which snaps into a notebook computer and allows data files to be sent over cellular telephone networks. But such devices send data by the "analog" method of electrical signals that mirror sound waves, rather than the cleaner, faster digital format that uses the ones and zeros of computer code. Industry standards are being hammered out for a format called cellular digital packet data, which would let companies make equipment for sending digital signals over much of the current cellular network. The standard, which may be completed later this year, is expected to result in network services in the next few years with nationwide coverage and a carrying capacity of 19,200 bits of information per second. Such a capacity would allow a file containing a page and a half of text to be sent in less than one second. A limited form of wireless data transfer is available today over an analog network operated by Ardis and a digital network operated by RAM Mobile Data, which both use systems separate from the cellular phone networks, although they operate in the same general radio-frequency range. But users of these networks can send only small data bursts, like a sales order or a repair estimate. Compared with the emerging digital-cellular standard, the networks are relatively slow: Ardis operates at 4,800 bits per second; RAM Mobile Data, at 8,000 bits. But prices are low: a page and a half of text can be sent for about the cost of a local phone call. The price of terminals, $1,000 or more a few years ago, is falling sharply. On the streets of Manhattan, deputies in the New York County Sheriff's department use |
604578_0 | Possible Other Causes Of Breast Cancer | "Officials Heed Call on Breast Cancer" [ April 4 ] prompts me to point out that one important additional possible cause was not mentioned, and that was radon. Although radon in soil-gas leaking into homes causes 20,000 to 40,000 deaths annually in the United States, about the same number as AIDS, it is not generally realized that radon in drinking water has also been implicated by one research worker, Prof. Douglas G. Mose of George Mason University, as being a possible cause of breast cancer. Unlike electromagnetic fields, radon is a Class A carcinogen, that is, an agent known to cause cancer. Long Island is not very different in residential atmospheric-radon risk from most other places in New York, but the question of radon in Long Island water supplies, especially household water taken from individual wells, has not been addressed. Professor Mose's research suggests that we should look into this on Long Island. The reporter's mention of the possible carcinogenic effect of pesticides and herbicides used on lawns in Long Island is also important. To these I would add fertilizers, as it has been found through research that some components of fertilizer are radioactive and carry radium, the source of radon. Thus, I would suggest that in the investigation of breast-cancer "clusters" or "hot spots" in Long Island fertilizer, soil and drinking-water radioactivity also be considered. DR. GARMAN HARBOTTLE Setauket The writer is a radiochemist. |
604681_0 | EIGHT TONS OF AID SAILS OFF TO CUBA | In an effort to ease the worsening shortages of food and other necessities in Cuba, the first of a dozen boats set out for Havana today loaded with eight tons of vitamins, food and hospital supplies. Food rationing and the resulting nutritional problems have become severe in Cuba since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the loss of $5 billion in annual Soviet subsidies. Early this month, the Cuban Health Ministry announced that there was an epidemic of a blinding eye disease caused, in part, by the lack of Vitamin B in the daily Cuban diet. The flotilla shipment includes 32 boxes of Vitamin B complex pills. "They are our neighbors down there," said the flotilla organizer, John J. Young of Key West, who calls his group Basta, which is Spanish for "enough." "What we're concerned about is getting medicines and as much as we can down there." 9 to 12 Boats to Go to Cuba Still, the gesture has divided this small resort island 90 miles from Cuba, with some Cuban-Americans saying the shipment will fall into the hands of President Fidel Castro. Depending on the weather, 9 to 12 boats are expected to make the trip this weekend. Mr. Young said the group planned to arrive in Cuba by Sunday afternoon. A ceremony is planned for Monday at Havana Children's Hospital for the donation of the over-the-counter drugs, bed linens, reading glasses and other items. The Commerce Department granted the license for the shipment on the condition that the goods be given to a group other than the Cuban Government. Mr. Young said the shipment would go to the Cuban Red Cross, the Ecumenical Council and the Baptist Convention. But with the Cuban Government organizing the transport of the aid once it arrives in Cuba, some Cuban-Americans have their doubts. "I worry that that help will go to the Cuban Government," said Alfredo Aguero of Key West, who formed a protest group called Basta de Basta, or Enough of Enough. On April 10, Basta de Basta organized a motorcade of about 50 cars that drove through Key West with signs and flags protesting any aid to Cuba. The protesters said the aid would go to the Cuban Army, Cuban political leaders or foreign tourists. Debate Over Aid to Cuba On Thursday, a small fire was set at the warehouse where the supplies were stored, but |
604491_5 | Who Foots the Bill For Recycling? | its recycling operations, while constituting just 3 percent by weight of the material collected. There are hundreds of plastic resins in use, but as a practical matter only two, polyethylene terephthalate (PET), used in large soda bottles, and high-density polyethylene (HDPE), used in milk jugs, are recycled in quantity. Still, plastics producers have been imprinting the recycling symbol on resins that are not being recycled to any practical extent, raising some hackles. Resa Dimino, a solid waste specialist at Environmental Action in Takoma Park, Md., said customers in a pilot plastic recycling program in San Diego last year were confused by the symbol and put incompatible plastics in the same bins as the ones to be recovered. "Recyclers had to reject the contaminated loads, which frustrated a lot of consumers," she said. ALTHOUGH Wellman has made money recycling PET bottles collected in states with bottle bills, others -- even industry giants -- have found the going rougher. In 1990, Waste Management and Du Pont announced, with great fanfare, a joint venture to recycle PET and HDPE bottles. But Jane G. Witheridge, a vice president of Waste Management, said the company discovered to its horror that it was costing as much as $1,500 a ton to collect and process plastics with a market value of $80 to $100 a ton. Waste Management dropped out of the venture in 1991 and Du Pont, last June. "We could not see our way clear to a reasonable financial return," said Frank Aronhalt, director of environmental affairs for Du Pont. He said Du Pont does not produce HDPE, and the PET it makes is different from plastic used in soda bottles, so it had no internal markets and prices in external markets were weak. Mr. Aronhalt said the company was continuing to investigate chemical, rather than mechanical, methods of recycling plastic. The plastics industry has good reason to fear state and local legislation on the disposal of packaging. According to the American Plastic Council, 165 state-level bills banning or taxing the use of plastic were introduced last year, although only a few passed. The industry is mounting an $18 million television and print ad campaign with the tag line "take another look at plastic" that draws attention to its ability to be recycled. John Ruston, an analyst with the Environmental Defense Fund in New York, said the money could be better spent. Prices for materials |
604632_1 | China's Crackdown on Births: A Stunning, and Harsh, Success | has lowered fertility to by far its lowest level ever here. The statistics for 1992 -- showing many fewer babies even than during the harsh crackdowns of the early 1980's -- amazed population experts, for the family planners achieved targets that they had not expected to reach until the year 2010. Problem for Clinton Ms. Li's persecutors had a reason for going to such extremes to enforce population quotas: they were protecting themselves under a new "responsibility system" that the Government has introduced as the mechanism for the crackdown. Under this system, central leaders hold local officials personally responsible for reducing births in their jurisdictions, and punish them for failing to do so. The evidence of a far-reaching crackdown presents a direct challenge to the Clinton Administration. President Reagan had cut off United States financing of the United Nations Population Fund because of concerns that its work was intertwined with a coercive family planning program in China, but President Clinton announced last month that he would end the boycott. Now the new evidence of a crackdown is likely to embarrass Mr. Clinton as he tries to restore funds to the United Nations program. Moreover, criticisms in the United States about forced sterilization in China are likely in turn to inflame Chinese sensitivities and could create new tensions in Chinese-American relations. To be sure, some Chinese -- particularly city-dwellers -- support a tough family planning policy. They say the drop in fertility is helping to produce a historic economic boom and a rise in the nation's education and health standards. By restricting couples to one or two children each, they say, the Government is helping to lead China out of poverty and into a modern, industrialized future. They note that one reason why China's long-term development prospects may be better than Bangladesh's or Kenya's is that Beijing appears to have defused its population bomb. Peng Peiyun, the 64-year-old minister of the State Family Planning Commission, acknowledged in a rare news conference on Wednesday that it was mainly Government efforts that had brought down the birth rate. "Why did fertility drop so drastically?" asked Ms. Peng, who two years ago persuaded the Politburo to order the crackdown. "Above all because party and Government officials at all levels paid greater attention to family planning and adopted more effective measures." The indications of a drop in fertility come in a raft of statistics announced |
604633_0 | NEWS SUMMARY | International 3-21 CHINA CRACKS DOWN ON BIRTHS A major crackdown by China's family planning authorities to reduce the number of births appears to have lowered fertility to its lowest level ever. The harsh methods include punishing local officials for failing to meet quotas and forcing mothers to accept abortions. 1 BELGRADE SHOWING STRAIN A year after international sanctions were imposed on Serbia, almost anything can still be had for the right price in Belgrade, but there are signs the economy is on its knees. 1 BOSNIAN SERB REJECTS CORRIDOR The leader of the Bosnian Serbs called a proposal to link Serbian enclaves with a demilitarized corridor was "absolutely anti-Serb." 20 Fear of a wider war dominates talks in the U.S. on military action. 20 A U.N. headquarters team surveyed the awfulness of war in Bosnia. 21 HIGH TURNOUT PREDICTED IN RUSSIA A voter turnout as high as 75 percent was expected for Sunday's referendum on President Yeltsin. The vote may not settle his dispute with the Congress but could embolden Mr. Yeltsin and his ministers. 3 SOLDIER OF FORTUNE, RET. France's most famous soldier of fortune says he was vindicated by receiving a suspended sentence on charges stemming from his role in an abortive coup in Benin. 18 DRUGS COMPLICATE HAITI TALKS Largely unaddressed in discussions about restoring democracy in Haiti is how to wean the Army from the proceeds of drug trafficking. 9 PAKISTAN AND TERRORISM The Administration is debating whether to add Pakistan to its list of nations that support terrorism. 7 CHOOSING ITALY'S FUTURE News analysis: President Oscar Luigi Scalfaro of Italy has the difficult job of finding people to lead the Government from a scandal-tainted past into an uncharted future. 19 Emperor Akihito visited Okinawa to a less-than-warm welcome. 14 National 22-40 WHITE HOUSE PEP RALLY President Clinton and his staff used black humor and a hint of paranoia to try to pull themselves out of their first big slump. 1 Clinton sees gains in his first 100 days. 28 AMERICA'S FAVORITE NOSH The bagel, long a staple in New York, is taking over the country. But some fans complain that the integrity of the bagel has been undermined. 1 SETTING STAGE FOR GAY MARCH Thousands of gay Americans descended on Washington, demanding more spending on AIDS, honoring their military dead and planning for a march. 22 A new study raises questions about the number of |
602809_1 | Lowering the Passions Over Trade | Mr. Clinton labeled the deficit unacceptable and warned that it jeopardized cooperation between the two economic superpowers. Also turning up the heat on the trade dispute are powerful industrialists threatened by Japanese exports; U.S. automobile manufacturers took out a full-page newspaper ad yesterday calling the trade deficit with Japan "priority number one." Though the two leaders were polite during a press conference following their talks, belligerence was close to the surface. That's too bad, because the trade deficit is a poor reason to drive a wedge between important allies. The U.S. trade deficit reflects a home-grown problem that can be solved with home-grown remedies. Americans buy more goods than they produce; the difference is imported from abroad. If Americans spent less -- saved more -- the trade deficit would disappear. Japan, which saves four times more than the U.S., runs persistent trade surpluses. Japan does block some U.S. exports. So there is reason for Mr. Clinton to pry open Japanese markets. If Japan imported more supercomputers, medical technology and semiconductors, American workers could concentrate in high-wage jobs -- a marginal but welcome boost to living standards. But America's economic malaise cannot be cured by bashing Japan. The remedy is to raise savings -- most easily by cutting the Federal budget deficit -- and to raise public and private investment. That, of course, is the core of Mr. Clinton's domestic plan. The danger is that Mr. Clinton will accept the advice of those urging him to wipe out the trade deficit by fiat: Tell the Japanese how many more U.S. semiconductors and supercomputers they must buy and how many fewer cars they will be allowed to sell. But Tokyo could enforce such edicts only by replacing market decisions with bureaucratic controls -- an odd message from a country that's lecturing Russia to do the opposite. Besides, trade-by-fiat would prove contagious; Europe, with which the U.S. runs a trade surplus, wouldn't take long to limit U.S. exports. In the end, trade would be stunted and middle-class consumers would face higher prices. Judging from their remarks, the two leaders tried to turn down the flames heating up trade resentment. They agreed to focus future negotiations on opening up sectors where exports are blocked -- holding each country to rules of fair trade. But if enforcing fair rules slips into enforcing strict quantitative results, the two countries will reignite destructive political and economic passions. |
600114_0 | THE QUIZ | As humans turned to agriculture, they converted large tracts of woodland and jungle into farmland and grazing areas. Soon trees were being harvested for fuel and building materials, and later to produce pulp for paper and other print products. Most of us, however, know little about the forests and jungles that cover 37 percent of Earth's land surface. Check your forest knowledge quotient here. (Answers on Page 12.) 1. The concept of forest conservation originated in the United States in the early 20th century. True or False? 2. In 1944 the United States Forest Service instituted a publicity campaign to prevent forest fires that featured what animal? 3. Most forest fires are caused by humans. What is the next-largest cause of forest fires? 4. What is the difference between a surface forest fire and a crown fire? 5. Is it in the interest of conservation to fight all forest fires? 6. During the growing season, typically spring and summer, the amount of water that evaporates from the leaves of an acre of birch and maple forest per day is (a) 250 gallons; (b) 8,000 gallons; (c) 10,000 gallons. 7. What is a conifer? 8. In what way do deciduous trees benefit by losing their leaves? 9. The following trees, with the exception of one, belong to the same family. What is the name of the family and which tree is the exception? Redwood, cypress, oak, cedar, hemlock. 10. Which of the following describe the ecological benefits of forests? (a) They absorb carbon dioxide and release oxygen into the atmosphere; (b) They prevent soil erosion and subsequent flooding from unchecked runoff of rainwater; (c) Rainwater is filtered in the soil, providing a fresh source of ground water for streams, lakes and wells. 11. Where are tropical rain forests found? 12. Silviculture is (a) the study of forestry; (b) the study of the effects of forests on human culture; (c) tree farming. 13. Describe the major differences between a jungle and a rain forest. 14. What estimated percentage of Earth's plant and animal species is found in rain forests? (a) 14 percent; (b) 50 percent; (c) 75 percent. 15. Match the following trees with the type of forest in which they are found: teak, oak, Douglas fir, cypress; temperate Northern Hemisphere forest, tropical rain forest, temperate deciduous broad-leafed forest, Southern coniferous forest. 16. Heliotropism is (a) the storing of carbon in a |
600004_4 | With Europe in Flux, No More Politics as Usual | in Germany today to the Nazi SA paramilitaries, drew a strong protest vote in the first round of the two-stage French elections. "I voted Le Pen in the first round because no other party came out and said what's really rotten in France today," said Francois Barbey, an unemployed real-estate salesman in Fontenay-sous-Bois. "France is losing its cultural and national identity under a tide of foreign immigrants. The whole hill in back of my house is full of welfare housing projects, and foreigners have most of the apartments." No Seats at the Edges Mr. Le Pen's party won no seats in the French Legislature in the second runoff round on March 28, and neither did the coalition of environmental parties that represented the other side of the spectrum of what many had hoped or feared would turn out to be a new politics to replace the old. Brice Lalonde, a former environment minister who lost his seat in the elections, explained the defeat as a rejection of socialist policies. "A lot of French people don't know what it means to be French anymore," he said. Mr. Bourgois was worried that many voters would still feel disenfranchised. "Farmers and fishermen have already taken to the streets, and there could be a lot of violence ahead if things don't go well," he said. The farmers and fishermen have been protesting against European Community policies they blame for costing them their livelihoods. [ A wave of strikes and demonstrations on Friday from Britain to Italy brought a million people into the streets, with many protesting the community's inability to do anything about the rise in unemployment. ] But the community itself has been largely paralyzed for more than a year by the difficulty of ratifying the treaty on monetary and political union on which its leaders agreed in Maastricht, the Netherlands, in late 1991. More Votes on Treaty Danish voters rejected it last June but will vote again on May 18. Depending on what happens, Britain's Parliament will vote on the treaty in the fall. Rejection by any one of the 12 member countries would leave it dead. In both France and Germany, a revival of French-German cooperation is seen as the best way of reinjecting vigor into the European Community, and almost the first thing Mr. Balladur did after being named was to announce plans to see Mr. Kohl. The new French |
599863_0 | MARCH 28 - APRIL 3: Ireland; A Cry of Protest Against Violence | Officials in both Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic agree adamantly on one point: that, although they have been unable to end the civil war that has killed more than 3,000 people in the predominantly Protestant North since 1969, this does not mean there is an officially acceptable level of killing. But to many Irish women and men, especially those who have lost loved ones in the violence of the mostly Catholic Irish Republican Army or the Protestant paramilitaries, the official inability to end the murder is de facto acceptance. Last week, after I.R.A. bombs had killed two children in England, the usual public resignation yielded to anger and condemnation in the overwhelmingly Catholic Irish Republic. About 20,000 people demonstrated in Dublin and a new peace movement seemed to be born. Other Irish peace movements have withered, and this one was immediately tangled in disputes over whether the I.R.A.'s political wing, Sinn Fein, should be allowed to join, to protest violence by the British troops and police. At the same time, despite calls by moderates for contacts in pursuit of a cease-fire, Britain and Ireland continue to insist that they will not talk to Sinn Fein until it denounces the I.R.A. policy of violence. The question, again, was whether this stance amounted to an acceptance of the level of killing. |
601216_0 | Sant'Angelo Journal; Corrupt Quake Aid Effort Is Disaster Italian Style | It might seem a curious question to ask: What do a derelict potato-processing plant and an empty highway have in common? The answer, equally curious, is that they both form part of a web of fraud that turned one of Italy's saddest catastrophes into a vast pork barrel. Since an earthquake struck the Irpinia region, inland from Naples, in November 1980, killing more than 2,700 people and leaving 265,000 homeless, the authorities in Rome have sent roughly $35 billion to rebuild villages like Sant'Angelo and to restart industry. Still Waiting But some people still live in the "temporary" prefabricated matchboxes they were assigned after the quake. Scores of new factories lie still, built by entrepreneurs who took the grants but who never actually got around to managing the plants. Government money has been spent on the gentrification of villages barely touched by the quake. Roads were built that went nowhere: an eight-mile stretch of smooth and deserted highway below this village cuts through a bucolic valley, curves in a graceful concrete parabola and ends abruptly at a stout tree. "This is Italian politics," said Antonio Compitillano, a 70-year-old retired blacksmith who has lived in a prefabricated home in this village for 12 years, awaiting new housing. His wife, Candida Chiusano, elaborated on the role of the country's politicians: "They give themselves money and then eat it themselves." As Italy's broader bribery and corruption scandal moves southward into Naples and beyond, the projects born in corruption prickling the landscape seems one more indictment of the politicians, who carved up power and patronage across the land. The Kickback Capital Long known as a city where kickbacks were the norm, Naples is increasingly being drawn into the nationwide scandal that started in Milan last year and has uncovered a system in which politicians took bribes worth millions of dollars in return for public-works contracts. But even before that investigation -- known as mani pulite, or clean hands -- began a process that has led to hundreds of arrests, a parliamentary commission had begun to unravel the misdeeds associated with the earthquake relief. And the trail they uncovered has led them to the same centers of power in Rome. Michele de Mita, brother of a high-ranking Christian Democrat and former Prime Minister, Ciriaco de Mita, has been arrested, and Ciriaco de Mita has been forced to resign as head of a panel considering political |
604045_0 | Economic Scene; The U.S. could regret getting its way on trade with Japan. | ANYONE for Japan-bashing? It has long been a riskless sport in Washington. Labor approved, as did most big businesses. And Japanese leaders, loath to tamper with the alliance, have carefully confined their contemptuous ripostes to domestic audiences. But the tone of the relationship is changing. While President Clinton and Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa agreed to disagree, no one familiar with the bland diplomatic rhetoric that the Japanese have honed to an art form could interpret last week's exchange on trade as business-as-usual. Mr. Miyazawa's reluctance to assume the traditional position of little brother does not mark the beginning of a cold economic war. The American connection is simply too important to Japan to be allowed to rupture over the details of rice quotas and imported auto parts. Indeed, to many economists dismayed by the Clinton Administration's campaign to guarantee American companies a minimum share of the Japanese market, the biggest worry is that the gods may punish Mr. Clinton by giving him much of what he wants. Stripped to essentials, Washington's beef is twofold. First, American products have been discriminated against by Japan's clubby corporate system in which back-scratching matters more than quality or price. As important, Japan has locked itself into an export-or-stagnate mode in which growth can come only at the expense of foreign competitors and domestic consumers. But in the view of many economists, this conventional political wisdom is at odds with the facts. Gary Saxonhouse, an economist at the University of Michigan, concedes that Japan is guilty of trade protectionism. But he points out that America has been an equal sinner, notably in clothing, steel, dairy products, sugar and autos. What's more, Japan has walked many a mile to mollify Americans in recent years, transplanting much of its export capacity to American shores. "Since 1985," Mr. Saxonhouse notes, "our exports to Japan have grown more rapidly than our exports to Europe, while our imports have grown more slowly." The only reason the trade gap between the two countries has recently widened, he argues, is because Japan is heading into a recession while America is already out. Jagdish Bhagwati, an economist at Columbia University, worries less about the nature of the American trade complaint than the proposed fix. The President, Mr. Bhagwati points out, is taken with "managed trade" -- the trade equivalent of affirmative action. Mr. Clinton is not asking the Japanese to plead guilty to |
603954_0 | Saved by April Fool's | To The Home Section: I'm glad your article on Helen Gurley Brown and her survival guide for women over 50 appeared on April 1; otherwise, I might have thought we were to take seriously her instructions to spend our remaining years in a relentless pursuit of thinness and sex, not for any inherent pleasure, but to stay young, young, young. Dear Mrs. Brown: You look tired. Give it up. Try instead to deepen your friendship with women, to appreciate your own success, to enjoy sex as part of a richer communion and to share your fears and vulnerability. And ask yourself what gives your life meaning, the discovery of which allows us to approach life's end with some measure of grace and inner peace. A survival guide? Only if we hold on to the past. How about a discovery map for an unexplored territory, filled with rich experiences and surprising new life? MAIDA ROGERSON Sherman Oaks, Calif. |
601718_1 | Patents | are put down to indicate the boundary of the brain's language areas. But it can take from half an hour to 40 minutes, lengthening already delicate and complicated surgery. With Mr. Salb's patent, the patient still has to talk or move a finger to stimulate his brain, but the electrodes and pieces of paper are replaced with a video camera and a microcomputer that do the job within minutes. "When an area of the brain becomes active, the blood supply to that area dramatically increases," he explained. "If you take a chemical, any chemical, it will absorb different colors of light differently. Hemoglobin absorbs green light and reflects red light." Highlighting Blood Flow So Mr. Salb's invention flashes colored lights on the exposed brain while the patient talks. The blood flow is highlighted by the colored lights and photographed by the video camera. The computer interprets the video pictures to create a brain map. "By applying a mathematical formula, the computer can determine the blood concentration in each pixel, or each dot, on the video screen," Mr. Salb said. "The results show on a video display as a color-coded image of the brain." Mr. Salb has formed a company to market his invention, which has been tested on rodents. He hopes clinical trials on humans will begin this year. He received patent 5,198,977. Motorola's Pager Links Systems Business travelers who want to get messages on a beeper as they cross the country may soon be able to choose a new pager invented by Motorola that will automatically link regional paging systems. Nationwide paging systems exist, but they are expensive and the message traffic must fit on one radio frequency that can be received across the country. Regional systems are cheaper and can carry more message traffic because they use different frequencies. But that means they also have different identification codes. If a traveler wants to link them, he has to switch his pager manually from one frequency to another and must have an identification code for each one. Motorola's new pager will automatically link the local systems by adjusting its receiver to each system's frequency and identification code. First the pager decodes the local identification signal and compares it with a memory bank of system codes and frequencies. When it finds a match, it automatically switches into that system. Multiple Codes "The identification tells the pager which system to look |
603205_0 | Unwelcome Aboard | THE GOLDEN THIRTEEN Recollections of the First Black Naval Officers. Edited by Paul Stillwell. Foreword by Colin L. Powell. Illustrated. 304 pp. Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press. $21.95. IN 1943 the Secretary of the Navy, Frank Knox, sniffed at the idea of having blacks serve as naval officers. They are perfectly happy being cooks, steward's mates and mess attendants, he said. But pressure from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, from Eleanor Roosevelt and from Adlai Stevenson, then one of Knox's young assistants, persuaded the Secretary to allow 13 young men to become the first black American naval officers. None of them saw combat. Only one made a career of the Navy. But together they made history. In "The Golden Thirteen," Paul Stillwell, the director of the history division of the United States Naval Institute, has stitched together a fascinating and moving collection of oral histories from the eight survivors of the group. The book also includes recollections from three of the white officers who trained and supervised the black men; they heighten the differing perceptions of various participants. The Navy of World War II, like virtually all American social institutions of the time, was a reflection of the racist society that produced it. One of the 13, James E. Hair, recalled having witnessed the lynching of his brother-in-law in 1935 in Fort Pierce, Fla. The society that could countenance that horror didn't evaporate when 13 young black men were made naval officers. After their commissioning, they encountered white sailors who haughtily refused to salute them, and others who were blithely insulting. And they were given low-grade assignments that precluded winning honors for valor or distinguished service. But the men also met whites who went out of their way to be supportive. For example, Graham E. Martin, one of the black officers, tells how he was spared a career disaster while an officer candidate at the Great Lakes Naval Training Station near Chicago. A white chief petty officer whom he was assisting at an inspection found a cigarette in the jumper pocket of a black recruit. That was against regulations. The chief petty officer told Mr. Martin to make the recruit eat it. Mr. Martin, a graduate of Indiana University, refused on the ground that it would be harmful to the recruit's health. Vindictively, the chief petty officer filed a report. Mr. Martin thought he was washed |
603224_12 | A Reader's Guide to the Balkans | the book is more relevant now than ever. In one of many telling observations, Holden noted that "fashionable Greeks . . . still unconsciously acknowledge their Eastern heritage by saying they are off to 'Europe' when they visit Rome, Paris or London." Holden's unstated premise was one I share: that the 20th century has been a disappointing one for Greece, owing to the loss of Greek colonies in Asia Minor in the 1920's, the civil war in the 40's, the disastrous right-wing dictatorship in the 60's and 70's, and massively corrupt left-wing populist rule in the 80's. Greece is still struggling to rejoin the very world it once invented -- that of the West. Its obsession with Macedonia may further complicate this pursuit. The false image of Greece entertained in the West is a principal theme of modern Greek poetry. "What I Love," by Odysseas Elytis (translated by Olga Broumas), the "Collected Poems" of George Seferis (translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard) and the "Greek Poems" of C. P. Cavafy (translated by Memas Kolaitis) all provide poignant references to what it means to be a modern Greek. Cavafy in particular saw the Greek Orthodox Church -- not the Parthenon -- as the Greek symbol, one that recalls "the greatness of our old Byzantine days." The most intractable -- and to me, the most fascinating -- culture in the Balkans is not Greek but Romanian: a blend of Latin sexuality and flair, Eastern Orthodox mysticism and superstition, and Byzantine intrigue. Not surprisingly, Romania has been responsible for some of the most inspired writing on the Balkans. "Athene Palace" (1942), by R. G. Waldeck, a German-Jewish magazine writer, is a textured miniature painting in words of Romanian manners, as seen from the lobby of the Athene Palace Hotel in Bucharest during the fascist revolution of 1940-41. Had correspondents who covered the revolution of 1989 that deposed President Nicolae Ceausescu read Waldeck's book, they would have realized that far from being unique, the 1989 revolution was a natural extension of what had occurred in the same streets almost half a century earlier: a fascist-style monarch was being overthrown by a usually docile population, which every few decades explodes in a bout of orgiastic fury. Yet things in Romania are never as bad as they seem. Conquered and abused throughout history, Romanians, Waldeck noted, have learned to "fall artfully, soft and loose in |
603160_0 | A Rain Forest Grows in Texas | A 40,000-square-foot rain forest housed within a 10-story glass pyramid opened late last month in Galveston, Tex. The Rain Forest Pyramid is part of Moody Gardens, a 142-acre complex whose other attractions include elaborate gardens and nature trails, a petting zoo, an IMAX theater showing nature films on a huge screen, and a white-sand beach on a lushly landscaped outlet of the Gulf of Mexico. Inside the pyramid, more than 1,000 species of plants indigenous to Costa Rica, Mexico, Panama, the Philippines, Peru, Puerto Rico and Hawaii grow alongside pools of tropical fish and perched and wading birds, including macaws, ibises, hummingbirds and spoonbills. A gentle rain, created by periodic mistings evokes the atmosphere of a rain forest. The forest is divided into three sections. In the African rain forest there are still pools, tall palms, shade trees and an underwater window for viewing fish. In the South American rain forest, visitors will find a Mayan colonnade, thick green liana vines, and spice plants, including vanilla, cinnamon and nutmeg. A side path leads past orchids, bromeliads and other epiphytes. A bridge takes visitors into an Asian bamboo forest. Proceeds from the rain forest benefit Hope Therapy, a program that uses horseback riding, horticultural and vocational therapy to rehabilitate people with physical disabilities. Moody Gardens, which is nonprofit, includes educational and therapeutic facilities for people with physical disabilities. Admission to the rain forest is $6. Other attractions are priced separately. Entrance to the gardens and nature trails is free. Moody Gardens, 1 Hope Boulevard, (800) 582-4673, is on the west end of Galveston Island off 81st Street; open daily from 10 A.M. to 10 P.M. TRAVEL ADVISORY |
599241_4 | A Challenge to Cellular's Foothold | of dollars from the public and venture capitalists to buy numerous licenses in big cities. Each license provided enough radio signal for only a few hundred subscribers, but by buying scores of them, Fleet Call amassed enough radio signal capacity for a few thousand subscribers. In 1991, it successfully lobbied the F.C.C. to use the digital techniques to expand capacity of the radio spectrum. A recent merger agreement will make Fleet Call by far the dominant mobile radio carrier and give it coverage in cities and towns with a population of 95 million. Later this spring, Fleet Call, the No. 2 company in the mobile-radio industry, is set to complete the acquisition of Dispatch Communications, the No. 3 carrier, for about $320 million. Fleet Call will add Dispatch's 48,000 customers to its 146,000 customers. A merger agreement earlier this week for $50 million will add even more potential subscribers from the Florida territories of American Mobile Systems Inc. Wall Street is taking notice, mainly because Fleet Call's acquisition costs, or the right to offer service, works out to as little as $4 for each potential subscriber, compared with up to $200 for cellular purchases in recent years. Even assuming significant management mistakes, Fleet Call could still make money because its costs are so low, analysts say. Fleet Call is worth much more than its stock price, based on cash flow and other factors, according to Mr. Bauer of Prudential. He estimates Fleet Call's asset value per share at $47, and assigns it a 12-month target price of $33 a share. Fleet Call gained $1.375 in Nasdaq trading yesterday, closing at $26.375. In the year ended March 31, 1992, Fleet Call posted revenue of $52.5 million but had a loss of $28.4 million because of start-up costs and one-time accounting charges. It is likely to have continuing losses or scant profits for the near future because of acquisitions and special charges. All forms of wireless phone service depend on radio signals. A typical two-way radio broadcast, as in a walkie-talkie conversation, occupies an entire channel, in much the same way a television program occupies an entire television channel. In specialized mobile radio, a single powerful transmission tower broadcasts to a fleet of moving radio receivers, like those in cabs, delivery trucks and police cars. In building its network, Fleet Call plans to use time-division multiple access. The technique resembles broadcasting a |
599397_0 | Boulogne Journal; For Unhappy French Fishermen, the Seas Go Dry | The fish of the sea, it could be argued, have no particular nationality, but the 200 angry fishermen who stormed the Unipeche warehouse here on the night of March 14 had no doubt that their slippery foe was foreign. Under the lights of a television crew that had been tipped off, they broke windows, knocked over desks, smashed computers and, finally making contact with their adversaries, they spilled tons of hake, cod, sole and haddock from boxes and splashed them with red, white and blue paint. That Unipeche's owner, Jacques Wattez, is himself as French as they come was not considered relevant. His crime was collaboration with the enemy: along with several dozen other concerns here, he imports large quantities of fish. And the attack on Unipeche was intended as a warning to all of them. "We had to do something dramatic to be heard by the authorities," Andre Ramet said as he watched herring being unloaded from his 62-foot trawler, Glorieuse Vierge Marie. "So I can't condemn what happened. I was at sea at the time but, as a result of the action, we were noticed." 800 Attack Market Boulogne's fishermen are not the only ones up in arms. Just weeks earlier, the main wholesale fish market at Rungis outside Paris was attacked by 800 fishermen, while the battle against imported fish has also been carried to Brittany, to Bayonne in the southwest and along the Mediterranean. [ On March 28, French fishermen abducted three members of a British Navy fisheries protection boat who had boarded their trawler after it was suspected of illegal fishing. The three men were later released in Cherbourg, where, in a separate incident, other French fishermen took over a British patrol boat and burned one of her flags, prompting Britain to file a diplomatic protest. ] In reality, more than cheap imports are responsible for the falling incomes of France's 31,500 fishermen. After bad weather in the second half of 1992, they have suddenly had record catches this year. And with oversupply coinciding with weakening consumer demand in France, wholesale prices have tumbled. But in looking for a scapegoat, French fishermen are blaming imported fish. And in resorting to violence, some are following the example of the country's farmers, who regularly block highways, dump produce in town squares and pelt ministers with fruit to press their demand for protection against foreign competition. "Fishermen saw |
599218_0 | U.S. Trade Survey Calls Japan Most Restrictive | In a survey of unfair trading practices, the Clinton Administration charged today that 44 countries had established significant tariffs and other barriers, and it identified Japan as the biggest offender. The Administration said Tokyo ran a $49.4 billion trade surplus with the United States last year at a time its imports fell $362 million. The survey, issued by the Office of the United States Trade Representative, said that the 12-nation European Community was the second-worst offender. The charges were included in the Government's eighth annual compilation of foreign trade barriers, an exercise required by law and often used by the White House, regardless of administration, to proclaim progress and to identify areas likely to be given future investigative priority. During the campaign, Bill Clinton contended that President George Bush had been insufficiently vigorous in fighting trade barriers. Today's 275-page report, though characterized as an "inventory," was accompanied by indications of greater aggressiveness. 'Market-Opening Measures' Mickey Kantor, the trade representative, said in a statement issued from Europe, where he was traveling, that the findings would "facilitate the achievement of the Administration's overall trade policy objective, which is to expand trade through market-opening measures backed by rigorous enforcement of U.S. laws." Unlike last year, when seven Latin American and European countries were added to the survey, there were few shifts on the list, and these mainly reflected geopolitical changes, like the breakup of Yugoslavia and the emergence of Russia and the other newly independent states of the former Soviet Union. South Africa was added because of its greater activity in world trade. But the 27-page section dealing with Japan included nearly twice the information provided last year, as the Clinton team focused heavily on insurance and other financial services, as well as motorcycles, coal, wine and certain metals, most for the first time. "We tried to be more comprehensive," said Ira Wolf, head of the agency's Japan and China desk. Hondas Sold Themselves Among other things, the report noted that imports accounted for less than 4 percent of Japan's demand for telecommunications gear in 1992 and that only 37,085 American cars were imported, nearly half of those from the Honda plant in Ohio. Domestic sales in Japan totaled 4,454,012 cars. Trade barriers are broadly defined in the report as "laws, regulations, policies or practices that either protect domestic products from foreign competition or artificially stimulate exports of particular domestic products." Examples are |
599384_1 | Clinton Seeks to Restore Aid For Family Planning Abroad | Wirth, the former Colorado Senator, who has been nominated Counselor of the State Department, where he would direct population policy. "There is an awareness in the Administration that if the United States does not aggressively re-enter the population battle to try to level off the world's population, and doesn't do it now, the chances of having the world's population stop between 9 billion and 10 billion people are zero, and we will move rapidly toward 12 billion to 15 billion." Present population is nearly 5.5 billion and is growing by a billion people every 11 years. The Mexico City Declaration President Clinton signaled the change on Jan. 22 when he signed an executive order scuttling the policy instituted by the Reagan Administration at a conference in Mexico City in 1984. The Mexico City Declaration, as the policy became known, denied funds to any private organizations that "support or actively promote abortion as a method of family planning." Thus, the International Planned Parenthood Federation and similar groups could not get money from Washington if they provided abortion counseling, even if that counseling was paid for by other governments. A year later, Congress passed the Kemp-Kasten amendment, which prohibited funds for any program or organization that "supports or participates in management of a program of coercive abortion or involuntary sterilization." This ended Washington's support for the United Nations population agency because of its affiliation with programs in China that reportedly forced women to have abortions. The Weight of Washington The United States had covered 25 percent of the budget for International Planned Parenthood, according to Mark Laskins, the assistant secretary general. Nafis Sadik, the head of the United Nations agency, said her organization had to cut back on family planning programs, particularly in Africa. But officials from both organizations say European countries, particularly the Netherlands, Norway and Sweden, increased their contributions to make up for the loss. Although Mr. Clinton's executive order in January did not overturn Kemp-Kasten, Dr. Sadik was invited to the signing ceremony as a signal of the President's thinking. Already reeling from reports that the Administration intends to overturn the ban on Federal funding for abortions, groups opposed to abortion promise a court fight over the new policy. Court Challenge Is Promised "The facts haven't changed," said Douglas Johnson, legislative director of the National Right to Life Committee. "There is still abundant evidence from diplomatic, journalistic and academic |
600501_0 | New Brain Scanning Technique Can Show Strokes in Progress | STROKES are responsible for killing or disabling half a million Americans every year and are the third leading cause of death in this country. Until now, doctors have had neither a really safe and reliable method of diagnosing stroke, other than clinical observation, nor any way to treat the disabling effects. Now neurologists and radiologists have discovered a new experimental way to see a stroke in progress, observing brain tissue that has died and surrounding tissue that is merely stunned but may be revived with treatment. Though the visualization of a stroke is unlikely to help individual patients anytime soon, the technique should make it a lot more possible to develop drugs for protecting injured brain tissue. "We're really on the verge of a new era," said Dr. Steven Warach, a neurologist at Beth Israel Hospital in Boston. "In the past, all we had to offer was emotional support." The new research is forcing a philosophical change among neurologists. "It has always been a dogma of neurology that once there is an injury to an adult brain, no recovery can be expected," Dr. Warach said. But now that tenet is being overturned. The researchers cautioned that the studies were still in progress and that the new imaging machines and drugs were available at just a handful of medical centers. But that situation could change, they say, if the new methods bear out their current promise. A stroke usually occurs when an obstruction in an artery cuts off the supply of oxygen to brain cells. When this happens, nerve cells in a central core area die almost immediately. But surrounding that dead area is a halo of cells that are injured but could still be saved. By using the new methods to detect where a stroke is in the brain, how big it is and how much tissue could be preserved, neurologists say, they can decide whether, and how, to treat it. Using experimental magnetic resonance imaging machines, scientists can obtain scans of the brain that allow them to see a stroke within minutes of its onset. Standard magnetic resonance imaging techniques cannot detect a stroke until hours after it has begun, by which time it is too late to intervene. Neurologists say the first hour or so seems to be critical, since it is in that time the stunned cells either die or are revived. At the same time the |
605013_1 | Bombed Again by I.R.A., London Goes to Work Undaunted | video film from security cameras that showed the street where the truck containing the bomb was abandoned. The bomb, made from nitrate-based fertilizers and hidden inside a construction truck, killed one man -- a newspaper photographer sent to the area after the police reported receiving bomb threats -- and wounded more than 40 other people. Damage is expected to be on a scale of that from a nearly identical bomb that devastated the same part of the City of London, the capital's oldest district, a year ago. That explosion killed three people, caused $1.25 billion worth of damage, and forced the Government to propose a plan to underwrite insurance coverage for mainland businesses crippled by terrorist bombs. Determined to drive the British out of Northern Ireland, in favor of the unification of Ireland, the I.R.A. has been waging a 21-year-old campaign of violence and harassment against the British, both in Northern Ireland and on the mainland. Bombings have claimed an estimated 120 deaths on the mainland since 1972, and the specter of the I.R.A. has become a constant presence in the lives of millions of British commuters, shoppers and travelers, if only as a recurrent source of delays and disruptions because of bombs and bomb threats. While command for tracking down the I.R.A. was switched last year from Scotland Yard to M.I.5, the counterespionage agency, David Mellor, a former Government minister, said on Sunday, "The fact of the matter is that we are still not getting results." Other members of Parliament said it was time the Government got tougher, suggesting everything from national identity cards to tighter security, including outright bans on trucks in inner London to regular police roadblocks, similar to the security precautions now routine near Belfast. The sheer magnitude of the explosion on Saturday underscored the I.R.A.'s continuing ability to strike with both impunity and devastating consequences. While Government officials and business people tried to suggest it was business as usual for banks and financial markets, more than a half-square-mile area of the City of London was cordoned off. There was some speculation in London newspapers that the bombing reflected a shift in I.R.A. strategy, refocusing on major economic targets and away from attacks like the Warrington incident. In recent months, the police did make a few well-publicized breakthroughs, foiling four planned bombings when they happened on trucks filled with explosives in central London, and arresting two |
602367_0 | Satellite Finds Growing Threat to Ozone | Satellite measurements indicate an abundance of ozone-destroying chemicals remained in the atmosphere over the Northern Hemisphere much longer this winter than last, researchers said today. They said the finding could portend even greater ozone loss over highly populated parts of the world than in the past. Data from the spacecraft, the Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite, also showed that atmospheric ozone levels above parts of Canada, Scandinavia, Russia and Europe were down 10 percent on average from last winter. This is more than twice the usual year-to-year variation, the researchers said. Researchers from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., and Edinburgh University in Scotland, said concentrations of a particularly destructive form of ozone-degrading chlorine were unusually high above Arctic areas. This level of chlorine monoxide, as the chlorine compound is known, together with colder atmospheric temperatures that persisted a month longer than last year, combined to push levels of protective ozone down by as much as 20 percent in some areas. Daily Decreases Recorded "Ozone concentrations in the Arctic in a layer about 12 miles high, where most chlorine monoxide was located, decreased by 0.7 percent per day from mid-February through early March 1993," said Dr. Joe Waters, the chief NASA researcher on the project. Levels of ozone in this part of the atmosphere normally increase during this time of the year, he said. In a report in the April 18 issue of the scientific journal Nature, the researchers said the spacecraft had found that chlorine from the lower stratosphere had been almost completely converted to destructive chlorine monoxide in the circulating vortexes of cold air that form over the North and South Poles each winter. These chemicals, along with sunlight and the cold temperatures and ice crystals of the vortex, contribute to chemical reactions that destroy ozone, researchers said. Ozone is one type of oxygen molecule. In the stratosphere, it protects the Earth from the sun's dangerous ultraviolet rays. Scientists believe the ozone layer is decaying because of man-made pollutants like chlorine compounds and possibly because of volcanic eruptions. Many scientists believe this could lead to an increase in cancer and other health problems. The research satellite's findings on decreased levels of Northern Hemisphere ozone were similar to those of a report last month by the World Meteorological Organization and Canada's national environmental agency. Using measurements from ground-based instruments and other satellites, they found |
602319_0 | Population Control Doesn't Cure Poverty | To the Editor: "Birth Control 'for All People' " (editorial, April 2) draws attention to the opinions of two Republican Presidents on international population control programs. Dwight D. Eisenhower, you remind us, favored such programs on the ground that without them "the expectation of future generations" would be limited "to abject poverty and suffering." Ronald Reagan denied them funds on the ground that population growth was a "natural phenomenon" that could stimulate economic growth. Neither state ment enables us to reach any conclusion on population control. They are opinions, not arguments. You offer no compelling arguments for population control. You state that "at least 500,000 pregnant women, most of them in poor countries, die every year." This is an appalling statistic. Undoubtedly, if more women availed themselves of birth control there would be fewer deaths attributable to pregnancy, but only because there would be fewer pregnancies. Death rates for pregnant women would remain the same because the acute problems that ultimately cause those deaths -- drought, unrelievable heat, lack of medical and hygiene facilities, and primitive agricultural technology -- remain unsolved in the third world. Financing population control programs does not address the health concerns of poor women. Advocates of such programs assume "overpopulation" causes poverty. In "The Economy of Cities" (New York, 1969), Jane Jacobs points to Ireland's experience as evidence that what is taken as axiomatic by "population experts" is at the least open to question. Before the 19th-century potato famine, Ireland had nine million people, not a large population for a country of its size. Nevertheless, the Irish were very poor. "From starvation, disease and emigration, they were swiftly reduced to less than three million," she writes. "The fewer poor people were still poor. Their marriage and birth rates became the lowest in the world, but this did not make Ireland well off." "One wonders," Jane Jacobs concludes, "how much a population is supposed to be reduced before prosperity comes." EAMON HALPIN Baton Rouge, La., April 6, 1993 |
601479_0 | F.A.A. Bars 3 Foreign Lines | Budget-conscious air travelers have long coveted seats on foreign airlines that offered fares and travel packages at prices far below those available from the major domestic airlines. Many of those travelers may have assumed that any foreign airline that flew into American airports met the Federal Aviation Administration's safety standards. In reality, those airlines need only meet the more relaxed standards for such categories as aircraft maintenance and pilot training set by the International Civil Aviation Organization, an agency of the United Nations. This month the F.A.A. indicated that some of those airlines, particularly those based in Africa, the Caribbean and Central and South America, have serious safety flaws, and has barred three carriers -- Air Belize, Regal Air of Antigua and Central America Air Lines of Nicaragua -- from American airports. The F.A.A. cited not only grievous safety problems, but also lack of oversight by their governments. In the aftermath of the 1990 crash of a Colombian jetliner that had run out of fuel while waiting to land at Kennedy International Airport, the F.A.A. began an investigation of all 475 foreign carriers based in 90 countries that made a total of 328,000 takeoffs and landings at American airports last year. The agency has thus far investigated 24 of those airlines, and found 14 of them failed to meet minimal safety standards. TRAVEL ADVISORY |
601585_2 | Fighting the Odds, and the F.C.C., He Got His FM Station | station in 1939, a time when AM radio was America's dominant broadcast medium. But the F.C.C. has never granted Bergen its own full-time commercial FM-dial allocation; listeners rely on stations in New York and other New Jersey counties for their community news. "Bergen County has never truly been served by the New York radio stations," said Assemblywoman Charlotte Vandervalk, Republican of Montvale, who had intervened with the F.C.C. on Mr. Turro's behalf. News About Disasters "The only time they focus on county news is when there is a major disaster," she said. "Even then, they tend to report on the event long after its occurrence. Besides, with 840,000 residents spread over 70 communities, why shouldn't Bergen County have its own FM radio station?" Bergen County's only commercial radio station, WWDJ, is a Hackensack AM station that plays primarily religious programming. On the FM band, WFDU, run by Fairleigh Dickenson University, and WRPR, operated by Ramapo College of New Jersey, are part-time educational stations. There are some who contend that the service gap does not exist. Debbie Sheehan is the director of news and community affairs at WPAT-FM, which has opposed Mr. Turro's efforts. "While our signal covers four states," she said, "we do cover Bergen County news, weather and traffic. We even air a weekly show produced by Bergen Community College." 'Lost Dogs and All of That' Her station, which is based in Paterson, has a different mission from that of WJUX, she acknowledges. "As a noncommercial station," she said, "he can be much more local, looking for lost dogs and all of that." A half-century after the original Alpine radio experiments, FM's superior sound has stolen the march from AM radio. With that shift, the price of acquiring an FM radio license in the New York metropolitan area has risen into the tens of millions of dollars. With licenses hard to come by, Mr. Turro reached back to his college days for a way to shoehorn a new station onto the crowded radio dial. As a student at Montclair State College in the 1970's, Mr. Turro had learned that even a low-power FM station could cover a respectable distance if its tower were placed at a high enough spot. He began a tutorial in radio engineering under Lee Martin, who had been hired to build and run WMSC-FM, the college's low-power educational station. Mr. Martin, 49 -- now WJUX's |
601502_1 | Over the Sea to Skye | the old song "The Skye Boat Song." For all that, Skye's isolation is more perceived than real. When Dr. Samuel Johnson, the author, wit and compiler of the first English dictionary, left London for the Highlands in 1773, he came as a traveler, not a tourist. The journey from Edinburgh took him three weeks and both he and his companion, James Boswell, saw fit to write books on their experiences. Today Skye is five hours from Edinburgh by car, a mere two from Inverness along Loch Ness, and the strait that separates the island from the mainland, brooked by the ferry in less than 10 minutes, is only a glacial valley that happened to get filled with sea. On Skye, after all, you'll find all the trappings of modern life, like doctors, and computers, and direct dialing -- and yet this doctor, for instance, has abandoned his practice for the summer to go fishing in the lochs (he'll sell his catch to a hotel); and that bank of computers is not devoted to accounts, but to publishing textbooks in Gaelic, the ancient language of the Celts; and when you reach London or New York on the phone, you find yourself shouting as if the line were very bad, and satellites did not exist. Skye is weirdly shaped, something between an amoeba and a starfish, gouged into a series of lumpy peninsulas by the sea: you are never more than five miles from the coast, and the sea figures in almost every view you take, whether across Loch Scavaig from Elgol toward the jagged Cuilins, or from Uig out to Vaternish Point. Skye is the kind of place that turns the most unlikely visitors into amateur geologists in an effort to comprehend what on earth made Skye. It will make a hill walker of a couch potato, too. Broadly speaking, the south of the island is softer and greener than the north; the road into Sleat, for instance, is flanked by rhododendrons that have escaped from grandees' gardens and taken hold, whereas Trotternish in the north is bare and windswept, craggy and treeless. BETWEEN the northern moorland and the southern woods and fields lie the Cuillins, a prehistoric range of ridge-backed mountains that rise two-thirds of a mile from the sea, and whose jagged tops are often lost in a swirling skein of cloud. They offer some of the best climbing |
601403_0 | John M. Morris, Who Developed a Birth-Control Pill, Dead at 78 | Dr. John McLean Morris, a leading gynecologic researcher who discovered the "morning after" birth-control pill and made important contributions to cancer treatment, died on Thursday at his home in Woodbridge, Conn. He was 78. The cause was prostate cancer, his family said. For 35 years Dr. Morris was a professor and chief of gynecology at Yale University School of Medicine and Yale-New Haven Medical Center and twice was the school's acting chairman of obstetrics and gynecology. He was also a practicing surgeon, an author and a leader in medical societies and population-control efforts. He officially retired six years ago but remained active in his field. Grew Up in China His career in medicine, women's health and birth control stemmed from the human misery he witnessed while growing up in China, where his father was a Presbyterian missionary. Decades later in an interview, Dr. Morris recalled people stepping over the bodies of the dead and dying in the streets. He also spoke of widespread infanticide of baby girls. "Unwanted female infants were disposed of by throwing them through a small hole in one of the dozens of stone huts erected for the purpose around the countryside," he said. Dr. Morris established his scientific reputation in his late 30's by identifying a rare sexual disorder, testicular feminization. That condition, also called Morris's Syndrome, causes people born with normal male chromosomes to develop as females because of an insensitivity to testosterone. The discovery gave insight into normal as well as abnormal sexual development. The Morning-After Pill His best known achievement was the morning-after pill, developed in the 1960's with Dr. Gertrude Van Wagenen in experiments on monkeys. The pill's estrogen compounds prevent a fertilized egg's implantation in the womb if the pill is used within three days of conception. The pill was hailed as breakthrough as the first method of birth-control, other than abortion, for use after intercourse. Europe readily adopted this new use of estrogen, a hormone already available in other medications. But no pharmaceutical company sought to license, publicize or market estrogen as a morning-after pill in the United States. The pill's use has largely been limited to college students in this country. In 1982 the French developed RU-486, whose progesterone-blocking action expels a fertilized egg even several weeks after conception. Dr. Morris also designed new versions of the intrauterine contraceptive device. A proponent of population control, he said in 1970, |
601475_0 | Electronics Use Aboard Planes Debated in U.S. | As passengers carry more and more electronic devices onto airplanes, the airlines and the Government are debating measures to restrict their use for safety reasons. While there is no known instance of a crash caused by a passenger's radio or other device, many pilots have reported that they believed their planes' controls had been impaired by interference from consumer electronics. Adding to the concerns is the increasing use of computerized controls on the planes themselves, which might make any possible interference more dangerous. The existing Federal rules date to the early 1960's, long before the laptop computer, the cellular phone and the digital game became as common as peanuts on airplanes. Those rules forbid the use of battery-powered devices in flight, but excepted some items, including electric shavers, pacemakers, hearing aids, tape recorders and, in the biggest loophole of all, "any other portable electronic device that the operator of the aircraft has determined will not cause interference with the navigation or communications of the aircraft." Under this system, computers, for instance, have not been prohibited, even though the cables attached to peripherals such as printers and disk drives could, according to technical experts who advise the Government and the industry, act as antennas and broadcast unintended signals. Northwest Airlines, for one, is not waiting for the Government to make changes. Last month the airline announced that it would prohibit passengers from using a wide variety of electronic devices, such as CD players and video games, during landings and takeoffs. Passengers would be free to use the devices when the plane is above 10,000 feet, because at higher altitudes minor disturbances to a plane's instruments would not pose significant risks. But other airlines have different policies, and in an attempt to eliminate confusion and enhance enforcement, the airlines have jointly asked the Federal Aviation Administration to set a common standard, which would establish three classes of equipment: * No restriction: Hearing aids, pace makers and other implanted medical devices and electronic watches. * Prohibited during takeoff, landing and when pilot deems necessary: Audio or video recorders, electronic games, calculators and computers without printers and disk drives. * Prohibited at all times: Cellular phones, radio transmitters, remote control devices, FM radio receivers, television receivers and electric shavers. The F.A.A.'s latest advisory circular on the subject, however, would leave most decisions up to the airlines, but it would require prohibiting the use of |
601475_1 | Electronics Use Aboard Planes Debated in U.S. | While there is no known instance of a crash caused by a passenger's radio or other device, many pilots have reported that they believed their planes' controls had been impaired by interference from consumer electronics. Adding to the concerns is the increasing use of computerized controls on the planes themselves, which might make any possible interference more dangerous. The existing Federal rules date to the early 1960's, long before the laptop computer, the cellular phone and the digital game became as common as peanuts on airplanes. Those rules forbid the use of battery-powered devices in flight, but excepted some items, including electric shavers, pacemakers, hearing aids, tape recorders and, in the biggest loophole of all, "any other portable electronic device that the operator of the aircraft has determined will not cause interference with the navigation or communications of the aircraft." Under this system, computers, for instance, have not been prohibited, even though the cables attached to peripherals such as printers and disk drives could, according to technical experts who advise the Government and the industry, act as antennas and broadcast unintended signals. Northwest Airlines, for one, is not waiting for the Government to make changes. Last month the airline announced that it would prohibit passengers from using a wide variety of electronic devices, such as CD players and video games, during landings and takeoffs. Passengers would be free to use the devices when the plane is above 10,000 feet, because at higher altitudes minor disturbances to a plane's instruments would not pose significant risks. But other airlines have different policies, and in an attempt to eliminate confusion and enhance enforcement, the airlines have jointly asked the Federal Aviation Administration to set a common standard, which would establish three classes of equipment: * No restriction: Hearing aids, pace makers and other implanted medical devices and electronic watches. * Prohibited during takeoff, landing and when pilot deems necessary: Audio or video recorders, electronic games, calculators and computers without printers and disk drives. * Prohibited at all times: Cellular phones, radio transmitters, remote control devices, FM radio receivers, television receivers and electric shavers. The F.A.A.'s latest advisory circular on the subject, however, would leave most decisions up to the airlines, but it would require prohibiting the use of cellular phones -- which transmit especially strong signals -- on planes when they are taxiing before taking off and during the takeoff itself. TRAVEL ADVISORY |
601501_1 | Over the Sea to Skye | the old song "The Skye Boat Song." For all that, Skye's isolation is more perceived than real. When Dr. Samuel Johnson, the author, wit and compiler of the first English dictionary, left London for the Highlands in 1773, he came as a traveler, not a tourist. The journey from Edinburgh took him three weeks and both he and his companion, James Boswell, saw fit to write books on their experiences. Today Skye is five hours from Edinburgh by car, a mere two from Inverness along Loch Ness, and the strait that separates the island from the mainland, brooked by the ferry in less than 10 minutes, is only a glacial valley that happened to get filled with sea. On Skye, after all, you'll find all the trappings of modern life, like doctors, and computers, and direct dialing -- and yet this doctor, for instance, has abandoned his practice for the summer to go fishing in the lochs (he'll sell his catch to a hotel); and that bank of computers is not devoted to accounts, but to publishing textbooks in Gaelic, the ancient language of the Celts; and when you reach London or New York on the phone, you find yourself shouting as if the line were very bad, and satellites did not exist. Skye is weirdly shaped, something between an amoeba and a starfish, gouged into a series of lumpy peninsulas by the sea: you are never more than five miles from the coast, and the sea figures in almost every view you take, whether across Loch Scavaig from Elgol toward the jagged Cuilins, or from Uig out to Vaternish Point. Skye is the kind of place that turns the most unlikely visitors into amateur geologists in an effort to comprehend what on earth made Skye. It will make a hill walker of a couch potato, too. Broadly speaking, the south of the island is softer and greener than the north; the road into Sleat, for instance, is flanked by rhododendrons that have escaped from grandees' gardens and taken hold, whereas Trotternish in the north is bare and windswept, craggy and treeless. BETWEEN the northern moorland and the southern woods and fields lie the Cuillins, a prehistoric range of ridge-backed mountains that rise two-thirds of a mile from the sea, and whose jagged tops are often lost in a swirling skein of cloud. They offer some of the best climbing |
601587_1 | Over the Sea to Skye | the old song "The Skye Boat Song." For all that, Skye's isolation is more perceived than real. When Dr. Samuel Johnson, the author, wit and compiler of the first English dictionary, left London for the Highlands in 1773, he came as a traveler, not a tourist. The journey from Edinburgh took him three weeks and both he and his companion, James Boswell, saw fit to write books on their experiences. Today Skye is five hours from Edinburgh by car, a mere two from Inverness along Loch Ness, and the strait that separates the island from the mainland, brooked by the ferry in less than 10 minutes, is only a glacial valley that happened to get filled with sea. On Skye, after all, you'll find all the trappings of modern life, like doctors, and computers, and direct dialing -- and yet this doctor, for instance, has abandoned his practice for the summer to go fishing in the lochs (he'll sell his catch to a hotel); and that bank of computers is not devoted to accounts, but to publishing textbooks in Gaelic, the ancient language of the Celts; and when you reach London or New York on the phone, you find yourself shouting as if the line were very bad, and satellites did not exist. Skye is weirdly shaped, something between an amoeba and a starfish, gouged into a series of lumpy peninsulas by the sea: you are never more than five miles from the coast, and the sea figures in almost every view you take, whether across Loch Scavaig from Elgol toward the jagged Cuilins, or from Uig out to Vaternish Point. Skye is the kind of place that turns the most unlikely visitors into amateur geologists in an effort to comprehend what on earth made Skye. It will make a hill walker of a couch potato, too. Broadly speaking, the south of the island is softer and greener than the north; the road into Sleat, for instance, is flanked by rhododendrons that have escaped from grandees' gardens and taken hold, whereas Trotternish in the north is bare and windswept, craggy and treeless. BETWEEN the northern moorland and the southern woods and fields lie the Cuillins, a prehistoric range of ridge-backed mountains that rise two-thirds of a mile from the sea, and whose jagged tops are often lost in a swirling skein of cloud. They offer some of the best climbing |
605378_2 | Study Says a Blood Fat Alone Rarely Hurts Heart | to the simpler carbohydrates in their diets, like sugars and alcohol, and tend to develop high triglycerides when they consume these foods. Triglyceride levels can also be raised by estrogen-containing medications, steroid drugs, pregnancy and poorly controlled diabetes. Unlike high blood levels of cholesterol, which remains essentially unchallenged as a factor in heart disease, the importance of elevated triglycerides has long been a source of debate among cardiologists and confusion among patients. While many studies have found an unmistakable link between high triglycerides and an increased risk of heart disease, other research has questioned whether this risk occurs independently of the other risk factors that tend to occur hand-in-hand with high triglyceride levels. When Is a Count Too High? There is no general agreement on what is a high triglyceride level. The National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute suggests a cutoff of 250 milligrams per deciliter of blood serum, but others, including the researchers in the current study, suggest that levels half that or less could be considered high. In the new study, researchers examined the relationship between blood levels of triglycerides and deaths from heart disease among 4,129 men and 3,376 women, more than 40 percent of whom had high levels of various blood fats when they enrolled in the study from 1972 to 1976. In looking for a relationship between triglycerides and coronary deaths, the researchers took into account nearly all the factors known to be associated with both blood triglyceride levels and coronary heart disease: blood levels of protective HDL cholesterol and artery-damaging LDL cholesterol, smoking, high blood pressure, excessive weight, blood glucose level and, for the women, use of postmenopausal estrogens. After 12 years of follow-up, the findings showed that in men triglyceride levels above 131 milligrams were associated with an increased risk of coronary death. In women, the risk began to rise at levels above 83 milligrams. But when the other factors were considered, the increase in risk for the overall group studied became statistically insignificant. Nonetheless, a real increase in risk was found among a subgroup of individuals: those younger than 70 with low levels of HDL cholesterol (below 35 milligrams in men and below 45 milligrams in women) and low levels of LDL cholesterol (below 160 milligrams in men and women). Having high triglycerides increased the risk of coronary death among the men by 20 percent and among the women by 60 percent. |
605451_0 | Books of The Times; Putting In a Word for Homer, Herodotus, Plato, Etc. | The Oldest Dead White European Males And Other Reflections on the Classics By Bernard Knox 144 pages. W. W. Norton & Company The title of Bernard Knox's stimulating new book, "The Oldest Dead White European Males: And Other Reflections on the Classics," is a bit of a tease. Since its author is a classicist and the director emeritus of Harvard's Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington, the reader expects an aggressive defense of ancient Greek culture against the multiculturalists and feminists who argue, not incorrectly, that the classical Greek polis, having been a sort of men's club supported by slavery, appears today, in Mr. Knox's own words, an emblem of "reactionary conservatism" and of "enforced conformity." Mr. Knox does mount such a defense, to be sure, particularly in the first of his three pieces, the title essay, "The Oldest Dead White European Males." But he is hardly combative about the issue. In fact, at moments he even clowns a little, translating Shelley's 1822 remark "We are all Greeks" into the modern advertising slogan "Greeks 'R' Us." And in illustrating how classical Greek expresses certain universal emotions like "better him than me" that English has never found a single word to express, he gives us the Greek version of the German word schadenfreude, or epichairekakia, meaning "rejoicing over calamities." Yet even in this essay, Mr. Knox also stresses the otherness of ancient Greek civilization, quoting from Louis MacNeice's poem "Autumn Journal": And how one can imagine oneself among them I do not know; It was all so unimaginably different And all so long ago. And in the book's two other essays, he moves on to different, if related, concerns. In "The Walls of Thebes" he defines that most amorphous of concepts "the humanities" as a bundle of disciplines whose "typical medium of expression is the written word" and that have in common an emphasis on the past. Having accomplished that much, he then traces the growth of the humanities in ancient Greece and shows that "they were on the defensive then as they are now, that, then as now, they were vulnerable to the accusation that they posed questions but gave no definitive answers, that their effect was often unsettling, if not subversive, that they made their devotees unfit for real life -- 'a mind unfinished,' said Pindar, 'and fed with scraps of a thousand virtues.' " And in "The Continuity |
599477_0 | New Hostilities Threaten Azerbaijan Peace Talks | Fresh fighting between Azerbaijan and Armenia over ethnic enclaves is imperiling international negotiations on a cease-fire, Administration officials said today. The dispute began in 1988 when ethnic Armenians, complaining of persecution in the Azerbaijan enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh, asserted the right to secede and to join their territory to Armenia. Now the ethnic Armenians say they have created an independent republic in the territory, which is the size of Rhode Island. After seesaw battles last year in which as many as 7,000 people were killed, Armenian forces gained control of virtually all of the enclave, with its population of about 200,000, and of a corridor linking it to Armenia. The latest fighting is occurring in northwestern Azerbaijan, well outside Nagorno-Karabakh. Armenian forces have encircled the town of Kelbajar and cut the roads to the north and south, isolating some 60,000 people, government information officials in both Armenia and Azerbaijan agree. But they tell different stories about the nature of the fighting and about whether Armenian troops are involved. The two nations contradict each other on who started the current clashes. Azerbaijan has asked Secretary of State Warren Christopher and the United Nations Secretary General, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, to intervene. "The fighting is extremely disruptive to the peace process," said an Administration official concerned with the issue. He was referring to talks begun last year in Minsk and continued in March in Rome and Geneva. In Rome, the Armenians and Azerbaijanis agreed on the terms for negotiating a cease-fire and on international monitors. "They made progress in Geneva," the official said of meetings on March 18 and 19. More talks are scheduled for Friday in Geneva. The United States is participating along with other governments in the negotiating effort under the auspices of the 52-member Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe. "Our role is that of honest broker," the official said. Azerbaijan has blocked landlocked Armenia's main rail and road supply lines for more than a year, while Armenia has blocked access to Nakhichevan, an Azerbaijani enclave in the southwest of the Transcaucasus region. Armenian artillery has also shelled settlements in Nakhichevan. The origin and scale of the latest fighting has been impossible for the Clinton Administration to gauge. The Azerbaijani ambassador here, Hafiz M. Pashayev, asserts that "Armenian regular forces" have invaded his country and joined up with forces crossing into Kalbajar from Nagorno-Karabakh. The Armenian ambassador, Rouben Sugarian, flatly denied |
599503_2 | German Labor Police Round Up Illegal Workers | legally allowed to. But there are also tens of thousands more workers from East Europe who come here ostensibly as tourists -- but who end up painting ceilings, repairing washing machines, and doing carpentry, charging far less money than German workers because they do not pay health or social security benefits. Workers' Markets There are a workers' markets in many German cities. Here in Frankfurt, it is under a railroad bridge just past the wholesale food market, on the eastern fringes of the city near the Main River. Mr. Gorg and his colleagues passed it on their way to the housing construction site -- a group of about 30 young men in jeans, waiting for people in cars to stop and hire them at four to six marks ($2.50 to $3.75) an hour, cash, to do gardening or repair jobs that would cost twice as much if anyone could find Germans willing to do the work. According to the city authorities in Frankfurt, many of them are Poles. But Mr. Gorg was not concerned with them. His assignment was to check out the construction site. "We know there are Romanian subcontractors on this job, and we just want to check the working papers of their employees to make sure they have employment permits," he said. Raid by Job Police At the construction site on Konstanzer Strasse, a mile or two down the road from the Poles, Mr. Gorg and his colleagues donned plastic helmets and walked toward a group of men in blue overalls cleaning up debris. "Frankfurt labor office," he addressed one of the men. "May we see your papers?" None spoke German. Mr. Gorg went in search of the office of the German contractor in charge of the project. Shortly after, Mr. Kundid came in. The only identification he could produce was a Croatian passport with no visa or work permit in it. "Where is your work permit?" Mr. Gorg asked. "Where do you live?" Mr. Kundid did not speak German, either. His supervisor, another Croat, did. Which subcontractor did Mr. Kundid work for? No clear answer emerged. Where does he live? The supervisor gave his own address, and said Mr. Kundid lived with him. Police Make Arrest Two German policemen in green uniforms arrived and searched Mr. Kundid. They found a little over 100 marks (about $60) and took him away. "He won't be under arrest for |
599443_1 | On My Mind; Clinton's Bank Account | help for it. I lived in India for four years. On my desk is a book I bought in New Delhi long ago -- Murray's Handbook. It tells me the population when I first saw India in 1954 -- about 360 million. All over the world people knew then that India was being choked by its people. I returned often, drawn by affection for a country that has never surrendered either to despair or despotism. During a visit last month I asked for the projected figure for 1993. It is 844 million. Can I even grasp this? Just in the years of my own interest in India, it has grown by twice the present population of the United States. My God. Between Bombay's airport and the city, the bouncy commercial capital of India, I drove along a carpet miles long -- collections of burlap rags in which hundreds of thousands of human beings live. Not fit for dogs. In their villages there are too many people to feed, no chance of work. On the pavements they can at least hope that somewhere in the huge city there will be something for them, some food, some labor. Perhaps we can grasp India now. But can our minds encompass a vision of the streets of Bombay, or of scores of exploding cities around the world, in another few decades? I do not think we can; nobody has ever seen such dreadful things as those streets will be. With decent birth control, India could still be a reachable dream of economic and political dignity. Without it, all the sweat and talent will not fulfill that hope. There is an almost unspeakable sorrow in that thought -- the knowledge that all the drive and effort that Indians and Mexicans and Nigerians and Egyptians, and so many others, have put into strengthening their countries may add up to nothing but unending misery. In India, as in other countries that have failed at birth control, the fault is not America's. Their own leaders bear the responsibility for not doing enough in education, health care and the spread of birth control devices and techniques. And American aid to many population control groups continued during the Reagan-Bush anti-abortion ban. But the order did more than wipe out aid directly or through the U.N. to groups that would not obey Washington's order to shut their mouths and brains about |
599440_1 | Birth Control 'for All People' | right-wing supporters, promulgated the so-called Mexico City policy in 1984, which banned Federal aid to any family planning agencies that so much as mentioned abortion. When population experts protested that such a ban held poor countries' efforts hostage to America's abortion controversy, Mr. Reagan's advisers had a blithe answer. Population growth, they said, was a "natural phenomenon" that could stimulate economic growth. More people, they argued, meant more ideas, more productivity and more consumers. If the abortion rule constricted population programs, it would do the world a favor. Try telling that to a woman in, say, Bangladesh, for whom childbearing often begins with puberty and ends with menopause -- assuming that she lives till menopause. At least 500,000 pregnant women, most of them in poor countries, die every year. A quarter of the deaths that occur before term are the results of illegal abortions. Try telling it to the African women living in those 18 countries in which, because of the Mexico City policy, International Planned Parenthood had to cancel programs. And try telling it to the Chinese, who are desperately in need of population planning. Yes, there have been reports of coerced abortions, especially in rural areas; and some Americans don't believe China's denials. Still, what better way to discourage abortion than to encourage and facilitate humane family planning? That's what the U.N. Population Fund has been doing in China for a long time, but without American aid since Mexico City. In the time since Eisenhower spoke of "this right for all people," an extraordinary number of the world's citizens have won that right. Thirty years ago, for instance, fewer than 10 percent of couples in developing countries used some kind of birth control. Now more than half do. And in Africa, where the fertility rate is highest and contraceptive use lowest, births are starting to decline. Even so, the rate of population expansion remains awesome, threatening to impoverish the planet. We have already seen what drought, poor land use and overpopulation did to Ethiopia. Runaway pregnancy rates are no route to progress. In asking Congress to renew financing for International Planned Parenthood and the U.N. Population Fund, Mr. Clinton is calling on the United States to pick up the standard it dropped in Mexico City. Once more, America has a chance to make a profound impact on the future of international family planning -- and on history's judgment. |
599488_1 | Market Place; Calgene gets the regulations it wants, but takes a hit anyway. | disallow a trial if it finds cause. Former Vice President Dan Quayle's Council on Competitiveness had called for eliminating the advance notification, essentially deregulating the process altogether. "The worst thing that ever happened to agricultural biotech was the Council on Competitiveness," Roger Salquist, Calgene's president and chief executive, said in a telephone interview from company headquarters in Davis, Calif. "The industry has always said it wanted credible Federal oversight; the American people want oversight." He said the 30-day notification period allows for that oversight but does not unnecessarily burden the process for reviewing crops that are known to be safe. "I have spent 90 percent of my time the past three months pounding on the floor, trying to get these exact rules passed," Mr. Salquist said. "This is absolutely the right thing." Asked why his stock fell anyway, he noted some published reports carried a negative slant, suggesting the new regulations were a setback for the industry, and said, "Just because somebody says they're an analyst doesn't mean they have any brains." Another change in the regulations removes language suggesting that researchers could determine for themselves whether they needed a Agriculture Department permit. "No one liked that except a few academic scientists," said Rebecca Goldberg, a biotechnology analyst for the Environmental Defense Fund. "Changes were put in place by the Council on Competitiveness that they thought were ideologically correct, but which in fact did not serve industry, environmentalists or the states' interests." Changes won by environmentalists included strengthening Government prohibitions against the spread of genetically engineered crops into fields of natural plants, and requiring Agriculture Department permits for genetically engineered plants containing pharmaceuticals. "This in no way hurts Calgene; it in some ways helps them," Ms. Goldberg said. Indeed, none of the changes will be onerous for the industry, said James McCamant, editor of the Ag Biotech Stock Letter. "Calgene's stock got clobbered and it was totally unwarranted," he said. Noting that the one company whose shares suffered was the very one lobbying for the changes, he added, "People have gotten confused." The new regulations deal only with field trials, and not with genetically engineered plants once they are commercialized, which falls outside the Agriculture Department's purview. But the preamble to the rules states that they should be viewed as interim, and the Clinton Administration will further review the commercialization of agri-biotech products. "The ballgame's just begun," Ms. Goldberg said. |
600758_0 | Morada Nova Journal; In Brazil, Too, the Withered Land Cries for Rain | Standing in the doorway of her mud-and-wattle farmhouse, Maria de Lourdes Oliveira Lima surveyed rows of bean plants wilting under the noonday equatorial sun. "Those clouds don't carry rain," said the 42-year-old sharecropper and mother of seven children, casting a practiced eye up toward a few frivolous tufts in a robin's-egg-blue sky. "It hasn't rained here in 22 days. All our neighbors are talking of leaving." Drought is once again reaching across Brazil's northeastern bulge, turning this fragile, densely populated region into Latin America's dust bowl. As the northeast enters its fourth year of meager and irregular rains, dammed ponds are drying up, crops are failing and millions of people are relying on water trucks as a tenuous lifeline. Across the rural interior, the drought now affects 10.5 million people in the northeast -- roughly the combined population of Nicaragua, El Salvador and Panama. With many of this year's crops expected to fail, the region's drama is only expected to deepen. Always, 'Is It Raining?' "I wake up at 3 A.M. and think, 'Is it raining?' " the Governor of Ceara State, Ciro Gomes, said in an interview in his office in Fortaleza, the capital. Visibly distracted, he repeatedly glanced at a television weather monitor as he talked. "I wake up at 4 A.M. and think, 'Is it raining?' " In the past, northeasterners suffered through their droughts largely in silence. The unemployed went south to factories in Sao Paulo or west to gold mines in the Amazon. But Brazil's prolonged recession has raised Sao Paulo's unemployment to 15 percent, and reports of slave labor and mercury poisoning have made people here wary of the Amazon mines. With these traditional safety valves closed, the region's worst drought in more than a decade is setting off a revolt. In March, famished peasants sacked more than 100 rural markets and food warehouses. On March 16, 500 unionized farm workers occupied the headquarters of Sudene, the federal development agency. In the first such seizure in the agency's 35-year history, the workers consented to release the director only after President Itamar Franco agreed to hear their grievances. Emergency Aid Awaited "We had to wake up the Brazilian Government and society to the extremely grave situation created by the drought," a sit-in leader, Francisco Miguel de Lucena, president of the Ceara Federation of Farm Workers, said in Fortaleza. [ On March 29, 1,000 sugar cane |
600342_2 | Good News Garage Leads to Radio Laurels | a lot like a truck running over vowels. Usually, at least 10 of their 60 minutes of air time are given over to their unrestrained delight in their own humor, maniacal laughter that is often just as funny as their jokes. The format of "Car Talk" varies little from week to week. The show usually begins with a short, scripted spiel. Sometime toward the middle comes the puzzle. The rest of the program is taken up answering -- or at least toying with -- real questions posed by real car owners. The questions are screened by the show's staff at WBUR, a Boston public radio station, to get the right mix of automotive concerns. But the Magliozzi brothers are not told in advance what they will be. "We realized a long time ago it wouldn't make any difference if we knew what the questions were," Ray explained. "We don't even know what the answers are." A Case Study Fortunately, there appears to be no shortage of callers willing to play the straight man in return for the chance to save a few hundred dollars on auto repairs. Often callers receive practical advice on replacing a brake caliper, for example, or checking the electrical circuits. But it takes a while to get there. This recent exchange with Judy from Arkansas is typical "Car Talk" fare: Judy has a 1983 Oldsmobile wagon that is doing these "little strange things," and sometimes, she points out, when a woman takes a car to mechanics, "they don't believe her." When she accelerates after a full stop, the car feels as if it is towing something "really, really heavy." Tom: "Exactly when does this happen? I'm working on a theory." Judy: "Generally when it's cold, always when I take off from a stop." Ray: "Does it improve as the engine warms up?" Judy: "Yes." Ray: "So it's that first takeoff from a dead stop that you really feel it, that lag, and then all of a sudden, whump, it takes off." Judy: "Yeah, exactly." Ray: "I think you're making this up, Judy." Opinionated Talkers The origin of "Car Talk" can be traced back to a chance invitation the brothers received in 1977. At that time, the two, both graduates of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, were operating an auto repair shop, the Good News Garage, in Cambridge. (Ray still runs the garage; Tom teaches business at Suffolk |
600185_0 | World Economies | |
600227_3 | Military Cuts: A Millstone for Ex-Workers | the Clinton Administration's preferred antidote, training in new skills, pays slim rewards. Industries requiring the new skills are hard to find. Where jobs are available, the workers discover that they have to compete with kids who have learned the same skills. Like the kids, they must start on the bottom rung, at kids' wages. The dynamics of conversion play out in a one-story, former McDonnell Douglas office building here. Using a Department of Labor grant of $3.4 million, the State of Missouri and St. Louis Community College operate a Worker Re-Entry Program for McDonnell Douglas's castoffs. Job-seekers learn resume writing and interview techniques and consult lists of job openings that counselors cajole from area employers. The workers with appointments for job interviews here arrive at the center in suits. Most days, just one or two suits show up. Jane A. Boyle, the center coordinator, said that about 3,000 laid-off workers had enrolled over the last two years and that 100 to 200 came in each day, some every day. Most are white, middle-age men who had earned $20,000 to $150,000 a year and now collect Missouri's unemployment benefit of $175 a week, or $9,100 a year. Job-seekers here say they feel devalued, like the crazed former military worker in the film "Falling Down." "I helped to build America," the character, played by Michael Douglas, says. "You should get rewarded for that." Donald R. Earney, 51, earned about $30,000 helping run the internal telephone system that connects the company's acres of plants and offices bordering the city's airport. He began at 19. 'You Do Feel You Failed' He was laid off in September. At the end of March, he found work helping a Prudential Securities stock broker. He works 20 hours a week for less than $10 an hour, without benefits. "In 32 years at McDonnell Douglas," Mr. Earney said, "I never missed a working day. You do feel you failed." People with all levels of skill and experience come through the center. J. Robert Caldwell, 62, shows up wearing blazers and plaid button-down-collar shirts. He was "director, international business development, McDonnell Douglas Missiles Systems Company," his business card says. He earned more than $100,000 a year. The ax fell on Mr. Caldwell without warning in November, ending a 37-year career at the company. He said he spent nearly all those years at the cutting edge of missile technology. "I went |
600229_3 | A Forbidden Fruit in Europe: Latin Bananas Face Hurdles | percent. "If Ecuador does not cut production quickly and sharply, there will be a price war," John M. McMillin, a food industry analyst for Prudential Securities Inc., predicted in a telephone interview from New York. "Everyone is wondering: what's going to happen to the millions of excess bananas that can't go into Europe on July 1? U.S. companies should lobby in Brussels, should cut production growth and should pray for a hurricane in Ecuador." In one effort to avoid the European restrictions against Latin American bananas, the Del Monte Fresh Produce Company began in the 1990's to supply bananas to Europe from two former European colonies in Africa -- Cameroon and the Ivory Coast. "We have had our strategy to keep flexible about what happens in Europe," said Brian Haycox, president of the Mexican-owned company, which is based in Florida. "But after July 1, there will still be more fruit around than we will like to see." In the last six years, the consumption of bananas from European nations' tropical islands and former colonies leveled off while Europe's consumption of Latin American bananas doubled. Last year, Europeans ate 2.7 million tons of bananas from Latin America. Under the new system, Europe will import only up to 1.35 million tons of Latin American bananas with a 20 percent duty. Any Latin imports over that level will be hit with a punitive duty of roughly 180 percent. Old Colonial Ties Although a World Bank report last year described the plan as "grossly inefficient," Europe's goal is to restrict the number of bananas and pump up prices paid to growers in areas that have the greatest influence in Brussels, the headquarters of the 12-member European Community. These are the banana growers tending the small hilly plots of Europe's tropical islands, like the Greek island of Crete, the Portuguese archipelago of Madeira and the Canary Islands of Spain, and former Caribbean colonies, like Dominica and St. Lucia, once controlled by Britain, and Martinique and Guadaloupe, French islands in the Caribbean. Under Lome Convention rules first negotiated in the 1960's, Europe's former colonial powers give trade preference to 66 former 20th-century colonies in Africa, the Caribbean and the Pacific. Latin American growers, with their low labor costs and large expanses of flat tropical land near port cities, grow bananas at half the cost of growers favored by the European Community. "It's absurd to take measures |
600197_2 | Ireland's Troubled Sleep | rush to "modernize" has largely been an effort to replace its past with the anesthetic sameness of European capitalism. History, to misquote Joyce, is the nightmare from which Ireland is pretending to awaken. In the American media's presentation, the rally bore none of this agonized complexity. Instead, the rally and the bomb attack that killed two English children last month have been used to support a particular political view of the conflict: Those who oppose British rule are fanatics rejected by their own people. And British policy in Northern Ireland is inherently reasonable. For years, this has been the general tone of American newspaper editorials and foreign policy, which has adhered to an uncritical special relationship with Britain. Appropriate noises are often made about ending anti-Catholic discrimination in Northern Ireland, but evidence of British injustice and human rights violations are treated as anomalies, never as symptoms of widespread and systematic abuse. Protests in Dublin in response to the killing of unarmed I.R.A. suspects by British forces, for instance, haven't made the front pages of U.S. newspapers. The media's bias stems more from ignorance and hazy Anglophilia than from conspiratorial intent. The result is nonetheless to promote an agenda that has less to do with furthering peace in Northern Ireland than with salving wounded British pride. Rational British policy would dictate jettisoning Northern Ireland. But nations rarely act on a rational basis alone. Perhaps abandoning the final lump of empire is too bitter a pill for the British Establishment to swallow. Instead, Britain attempts to keep violence at "acceptable" levels and presides over a "peace process" in which the principal antagonist -- the I.R.A. -- is not invited. When such peace talks inevitably fail, Britain throws up its hands and hints at the ancient notion that the Irish cannot govern themselves. This perennial impasse has motivated the I.R.A. -- never known for its strategic thinking -- to launch a counterproductive campaign on the mainland, which has only stiffened British resolve to stay the course, undefinable though that may be. Irish indignation at I.R.A. atrocities is heartfelt. And Ireland must face its history of violence and victimhood if Catholic-Protestant peace is ever to be possible. But that process must not obscure a central fact: British policy created and feeds the cycle of hatred and killing in which the Irish and British remain trapped. Andrew O'Hehir is senior editor of San Francisco Weekly. |
600206_0 | Data for Discussions | To the Editor: A March 29 news article labels the 1993 Kids Count Data Book "an example of the many public campaigns now selling a vision of activist government beneath the face of a child," adding: "The movement's thesis is that American children as a whole are imperiled and in need of special help, especially Federal help." Kids Count has never been the instrument of any movement, ideology, antipoverty strategy or partisan agenda. It is designed to provide citizens and policy makers with objective, trackable and reliable data on the status and condition of children in the United States. The intent is to provide a common base of information for local, state and national discussions on how to secure the futures we want for all of our children. You describe the findings of this year's data book fairly, but the implication that Kids Count is a bait and switch marketing strategy using children to promote antipoverty policies is not true, and you offer no evidence to support it. DOUGLAS W. NELSON Executive Director Annie E. Casey Foundation Greenwich, Conn., March 30, 1993 |
602416_0 | As Catholic Feminists Meet, Some Question Their Faith | Five months ago, Roman Catholic feminists formed a united front and succeeded in helping to persuade the church's bishops to set aside a pastoral letter upholding traditional limits on church roles for women. But as Catholic feminists gather for a meeting today in Albuquerque, N.M., many are questioning the direction of their movement, and even asking whether it is on the verge of ceasing to be Catholic. The meeting, known as the third national Women-Church conference, will offer more than 30 varieties of Sunday morning services, including goddess worship, an Indian pipe ceremony, Sufi dancing, a Holocaust remembrance, a Quaker meeting and a "feminist eucharist." Not among the events, however, is a Catholic mass celebrated by a male priest. 2,000 Women to Attend The conference, organized by a coalition of 35 Catholic feminist groups, will take up topics like the exclusion of women from the ministry, domestic violence and sexual abuse by members of the clergy. The conference, which will run through Sunday, is expected to draw about 2,000 women. A coordinator of the conference told the National Catholic Reporter, a weekly newspaper, that a proposal to include a traditional mass to make mainstream Catholic women feel more comfortable was rejected by planners in January. Even before that issue arose, Sister Jeannine Gramick, a prominent figure in ministry for gay and lesbian Catholics, publicly questioned whether the conference and the Catholic feminist groups planning it were "moving away from a Catholic identity." Writing in the newsletter of the National Coalition of American Nuns, a feminist group based in Chicago, Sister Gramick expressed concern that Catholic feminists might lose their focus on changing the church. She called for continued attention to essential Christian beliefs and to traditional Catholic understandings of the eucharist and other sacraments. Catholic feminism includes many different shades of opinion, ranging from those of theologians proposing revisions of ancient doctrines about God to those of lay people who favor inclusive language in prayers. The Women-Church coalition, which held conferences in 1983 and again in 1987, represents the more radical wing of Catholic feminism. Asked about its influence this week, some women familiar with feminist currents in the church called the coalition marginal. But others, pointing to widely recognized scholars participating in the conference as well as in past events, insisted that it had an influence far beyond its own ranks. And like other radical movements, the Women-Church conference |
602451_2 | Dr. Denis Burkitt Is Dead at 82; Thesis Changed Diets of Millions | to discover what is now known as the Epstein-Barr virus. It has been linked to Burkitt's lymphoma, infectious mononucleosis and cancer of the nose and mouth. Dr. Burkitt received the highest scientific honors in many countries, including the Lasker Award in the United States. Friends described him as a modest and deeply religious man with an infectious sense of humor. When he lectured, he held an audience spellbound, often drawing on anecdotes from his experiences in Africa. Denis Parsons Burkitt was born on Feb. 28, 1911, in Enniskillen, Northern Ireland, where his father was a surveyor and naturalist. The senior Burkitt is credited with pioneering the ringing of birds to map out their territories and movements. Answering 'God's Call' Denis Burkitt considered becoming an engineer when he enrolled at Trinity College in Dublin. But he settled on medicine after conquering chemistry, a subject for which he had little aptitude. As a medical student he attended evangelistic rallies and developed what would be a persuasive speaking style. In 1938, after training as a surgeon, Dr. Burkitt spent five months on a cargo ship bound for Manchuria, reading and planning his future as a surgeon and missionary. But his application for the Colonial Services in West Africa was rejected. The official reason was his glass right eye. Dr. Burkitt suspected it was because of his religious zeal. So he joined the British Army. In 1943 he married the former Olive Rogers on a 48-hour pass. He was sent to Kenya and decided to stay in Africa. After the war, the Colonial Medical Service decided that loss of an eye was not a handicap and appointed Dr. Burkitt government surgeon in Uganda. "I didn't go out to Africa for science but because what I believed to be God's call, and I've had no complaints," Dr. Burkitt told a medical historian, Elmer Bendiner, for an article he wrote in Hospital Practice, a medical journal published in New York. "I gave a spoonful and got back a shovelful." From 1946 to 1964, Dr. Burkitt often worked in remote areas in small hospitals that had no X-ray facilities, and he taught surgery at Makerere University Medical School in Kampala. He ministered to his patients' spiritual as well as physical needs. On a home leave in Britain, Dr. Burkitt took courses to learn orthopedic surgery and rehabilitation medicine and devised ways to make cheap artificial limbs. When |
602421_0 | Robertson Trying Again To Put Prayer in Schools | At Blue Ridge High School in Farmer City, Ill., 63 of the 66 members of the Class of 1993 recently voted to say prayers during their graduation ceremony next month. School officials in the tiny farming community turned them down. But Pat Robertson, the television evangelist, is hoping to use Farmer City, 90 miles southeast of Peoria, as a test case in his campaign for prayer in public schools, an effort that has put the issue back on the agenda of school officials around the country as they plan for spring graduation ceremonies. No matter what they decide, many schools might be drawn into an expensive legal battle. The advocates for prayer in schools, led by Mr. Robertson, are threatening to sue boards that ban prayer at graduation ceremonies. Mr. Robertson is seeking a showdown over an apparent inconsistency in recent Federal court decisions on the issue. Moment of Silence Urged Opposing them are civil libertarians, led by the American Civil Liberties Union. "We're really stuck in the middle," said Gwendolyn H. Gregory, deputy general counsel of the National School Boards Association in Washington. What are school officials to do? Ms. Gregory's organization, which represents nearly all school districts, has advised members that the best way to avoid expensive litigation would be to allocate a moment of silence to "solemnize" the graduation ceremony. But Ms. Gregory said school officials must not suggest how people should use the time, as any reference to prayer would be unconstitutional. The legal tangle that gave Mr. Robertson his opening began last June, when the United States Supreme Court ruled, in Lee v. Weisman, that a public school could not have a member of the clergy offer a school-approved prayer at a graduation. That, the Court ruled in a 5-to-4 decision, amounted to an unconstitutional endorsement of religion by the state. Conflicting Appellate Decision As part of that decision, the High Court vacated an appellate court ruling in a Texas case, Jones v. Clear Creek, that had permitted "non-sectarian, non-proselytizing" prayers initiated by students and led by students. The Supreme Court sent that case back to the appellate court for reconsideration. But the lower court, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, in New Orleans, stood by its ruling. The panel of three judges ruled unanimously last November that student-led prayer, unlike clergy-led prayer that the Supreme Court had banned, was constitutional. |
657260_0 | World Economies | |
657206_1 | Prize for School Project Bridges Old Gender Gap | of Public School 147, comprised of the five girls until June, when they graduated from the elementary school, at 325 Bushwick Avenue in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, and moved on to intermediate school. Their winning entry was a six-foot-long suspension bridge with a span of about four feet, an impressive creation considering that the longest girder in the kit is about a foot long. The idea for the arch that bears much of the weight came from a book the girls got from a teacher on how to build a bridge from toothpicks. From there they improvised. They added vertical load-bearing girders and then a second arch of girders under the roadway. They were vague, perhaps deliberately, about precisely who did what in the design and construction. "We don't really remember," said Jean Ng, the class valedictorian. "Everyone put in ideas, and we used all the ideas." "One person cannot take credit for the whole big bridge," Melissa said. No Boys Allowed The engineering club has no boys for a reason, said Norman Scott, adviser to the club, which meets every Friday from 3 to 5 P.M. "The minute boys are around, the boy-girl thing starts, and the performance of girls drops drastically," he said. Mr. Scott, who has been at P.S. 147 for 23 years and taught sixth grade for most of that time, said that when boys are present, girls start deferring to them. But a bigger problem, he said, is that when boys are around, girls tend to intimidate other girls who act assertively. Recent research has shown that girls often perform worse on standardized tests for math and science, subjects in which boys tend to dominate classroom discussion. In response, three California schools are segregating girls in some classes to try to improve their performance in these areas. The girls offered their own explanations for their approaches to these subjects, saying that they have attributes the boys do not. "Some boys, they can be so lazy," said Bonnie Resto. "You think the boys would stand up long enough to build this?" she asked, pointing to the arch. The arch involved some trial and error, Mr. Scott said. He told them to stretch it apart until it began to sag, and then to build the rest under it. Last year, Mr. Scott and another teacher at the school, Mary Hoffman, received a $500 grant from the Fund for New |
655410_1 | Religion Case May Broaden Disabilities Law | a Federal law, the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act, which guarantees a free and appropriate public education for all children with disabilities. Under the law, such children have a right to a state-financed special education program. No similar Federal law, or even the Constitution itself, guarantees other children the right to a public education. Therefore, the question before the Court is narrower than your article implies: whether the establishment of a separate school for the special-needs children of a religious group is an appropriate means of reconciling the children's statutory right to an appropriate education and their constitutional right to the free exercise of religion. In June the Supreme Court, in a case called Zobrest v. Catalina Foothills School District, determined that a deaf student who chose to attend a Christian religious high school was entitled to a state-financed sign language interpreter in all his classes, even though religious content was present throughout the curriculum. If the child had been in a public school, the state-financed interpreter would have been a required "auxiliary service"; the state's responsibility for this service did not cease because the youngster chose to attend a religious school at the family's expense. While these cases involve issues of separation between church and state, they also signal an important development in disability law. Earlier this month, in Florence County School District Four v. Carter, the Supreme Court recognized a school district's responsibility to reimburse parents for private school tuition when the school district has refused to provide an appropriate education for a disabled child. To have three Supreme Court cases on the rights of children with disabilities to public education under the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act indicates the Court's new focus on the rights of people with disabilities. People with disabilities have often been excluded from participation in our society. The disabilities education law was enacted in 1975 because, a generation after Brown v. Board of Education opened the schoolhouse to children of color, school districts were still legally excluding children with disabilities on the grounds they would "disgust" or "frighten" teachers or other children. I find it more than a little ironic that now, a generation after the act became law, both the law and the children it protects are still invisible, even when their story makes your front page. ELAINE ANDERSSON Visiting Professor, Golden Gate University School of Law San Francisco, Dec. 3, 1993 |
655573_6 | NASA Success in Hubble Mission Gives Space Station Plan a Boost | its planners, "gives us experience, and experience gives us ideas on how to design for the future." One lesson, engineers said, is the value of building space equipment in modules that are accessible for repairs or installing new instruments. The Hubble telescope was the first large spacecraft designed this way, and engineers attributed much of the mission's success to modular construction. But they have already seen things that need to be changed. The astronauts had trouble closing and latching doors to the gyroscope compartment. The metal was apparently too flexible, Mr. Ledbetter said, and was subject to contractions and expansions in the harsh temperature changes in space. Engineers are developing new navigation procedures and abilities to enable shuttles to maneuver more safely and precisely at close range to large structures in orbit like a space station. The importance of this work was emphasized when engineers saw a plume of shuttle exhaust shake a solar-power panel that had just been jettisoned. Although the space suits appeared to give the astronauts no problems, engineers will be studying changes to make them more flexible. One plan is to provide a self-rescue unit, an addition to the back-pack with small jets to let astronauts propel themselves back to the shuttle in emergencies. The station will also include robot arms and carts on rails to assist in construction and servicing. "The station is a big bite technologically, much more complex than Hubble," said James E. Oberg, an engineer and space historian here. "But Hubble exercised and enhanced the skills required for station. It gives us a lot of confidence, and confidence had been shaken in recent years." Randy Stone, assistant director for space shuttle operations, said an effort would be made to add training for astronauts outside the shuttle on at least two flights each year to "build a cadre of people who have experience." All four astronauts who conducted the Hubble repairs benefited by previous experience, he said. Of the 108 active American astronauts, only 14 now have such experience. One member of the Endeavour crew, Lieut. Col. Tom Akers of the Air Force, holds the American record, with 29 hours and 40 minutes of work outside in space. Several Russian astronauts have considerably more experience, and the record-holder, Sergei Krikalev, is training here to be the first Russian to fly aboard an American shuttle, on the next mission planned for late next month. |
655634_4 | Zaire Is in Turmoil After the Currency Collapses | 1991, Zaire Army soldiers mutinied because they had not been paid. A week of looting and violence spread throughout the country, eliminating most of what remained of the modern productive sector, outside of mining. In the Kinshasa area alone, 90,000 jobs were lost and at least 240 people were killed. The rioting also led to the evacuation of virtually all foreign workers -- about 20,000 people, mostly from Belgium, France and the United States. They included most of the country's university professors, teaching staff at hospitals and geologists in the vital mining industry. Rioting erupted again last February when soldiers discovered that the new five-million-zaire bank notes used to pay them were impossible to spend. They seized control of the Parliament building and held several hundred lawmakers hostage, demanding that they order local merchants to accept the new bank notes. Hundreds, including the French Ambassador, were killed. Nonetheless, in yet another effort to prop up the economy artificially, on Oct. 22 President Mobutu introduced yet another new currency, with each note supposed to be worth three of the old bills, and set at an official rate of three to the dollar. Traders Are Arrested But traders on Kinshasa's Wall Street, a narrow alley across the road from the United States Embassy here, quickly devalued the old money. The Government first responded by raiding Wall Street, arresting traders and seizing banknotes. But the money changers soon returned. Oto Nbongo, a spokesman for the dealers, told Zaire television that they had come back "because among the money changers there are fathers and mothers of families who depend on this practice." Left unsaid, many Zairians say, is that many of the Wall Street traders are relatives of senior Government officials and soldiers who depend on the market for their main source of income. More ominously, the new notes have already caused scattered rioting. In late November, soldiers went on a looting rampage in the central Zaire town of Kananga where opposition parties have been leading a boycott of the currency. Three Roman Catholic priests were reportedly killed in the rampage. In any event, Etienne Tshisekedi, Zaire's main opposition leader, who despite being dismissed by President Mobutu last year still considers himself Prime Minister, has called the new notes a "criminal swindle." "This operation is pure piracy," Mr. Tshisekedi told reporters at a news conference, "The people will agree with me in the end." |
655413_0 | Recent Job Gains Conceal a Harsh Truth | To the Editor: Your description of recent hiring trends (Business Day, Dec. 2) requires an important caveat. As you note, job gains have been concentrated among managers and administrators, a category that experienced heavy layoffs in this "white-collar recession." But accumulating evidence indicates that the people being hired are not the same people who were let go. Among white-collar workers, layoffs have centered on older men, and to a lesser extent, older women. So far, these men do not appear to have benefited comparably from new job openings. The sharpest piece of evidence comes from the Census Bureau report on annual earnings. In 1989, 45-54-year-old men with four years of college had average earnings of $42,590, the equivalent today of $47,507. In 1992, similar men averaged $41,898. The 1992 statistics, the latest available, fail to capture changes of the last nine months. Because the statistics are drawn from national samples, they may contain random error. But they describe a decline in purchasing power -- 12 percent in three years' time -- that is both absolutely large and is far larger than earnings declines among younger, college-educated men and women. Many recessions in the last half-century were temporary interludes in which the economy before and after the recession looked the same. That is obviously not the case today. While the economy is now replacing many of the white-collar jobs it recently shed, the holders of those jobs appear to be quite different. FRANK LEVY RICHARD MURNANE Cambridge, Mass., Dec. 2, 1993 The writers are, respectively, professor of urban economics at M.I.T. and professor of education, Harvard U. |
655340_0 | A Rain Forest Comes to Colorado | Colorado is hardly rain forest country, but the calls of jungle animals can now be heard amid lush tropical growth in Denver -- in the Denver Zoo, to be specific Tropical Discovery, a 22,000-square-foot structure that houses 240 tropical animal species and about 150 types of plants. In addition to a jungle inhabited by venomous snakes, howler monkeys, crocodiles and giant water monitor lizards, the exhibit, which opened last month, recreates the habitats of a mountain cave, mangrove and cyprus swamps, a forest clearing and an offshore coral reef. Rather than using pesticides to protect the plants -- many of them endangered species -- the zoo has released 9,500 predator insects. The temperature in the exhibit, which is topped with two glass pyramids, is maintained at 78 to 80 degrees and the humidity at a minimum of 60 percent. Conditions vary to mimic the seasons in a rain forest so the plants and animals will go through authentic life cycles. Tropical Discovery, which doubles the number of animals and animal species shown in the zoo, is meant to illustrate the need to preserve tropical habitats. Visitors are given information on how to help with conservation efforts. The Denver Zoo, (303) 331-4110, is in City Park. The main entrance is on 23d Avenue between Colorado Boulevard and York Street. The zoo is open daily from 10 A.M. to 5 P.M. (to 6 P.M. in the summer); Tropical Discovery can be visited only until 4:30 P.M. year round. Zoo admission is $6; $3 for those aged 4 to 12 or 62 and older. TRAVEL ADVISORY |
655341_0 | Resort on St. John Uses Sun and Wind Power | Called the world's first luxury resort to use sun and wind power exclusively, Harmony at the Maho Bay Campground on St. John in the United States Virgin Islands is scheduled to open to the public this Wednesday. The resort is being constructed primarily of such recycled materials as plastic bottles, crushed glass, newsprint, old tires and scrap lumber, and it will serve as a laboratory for researchers who study alternative energy systems. All heat and electricity are to be provided by the sun and the wind, using solar panels, a windmill and storage batteries, and computers will monitor and adjust Harmony's daily energy use in accordance with prevailing conditions. Harmony was developed by Maho Bay Camps, the same company that runs Maho Bay Campground, a collection of 114 tent cottages on the north side of St. John. Harmony is situated in the hills around the campground, and is within walking distance of the camp's facilities. Cooperating in the project is the Virgin Islands Energy Office, the United States Park Service and Sandia Laboratories of Albuquerque, N.M. Initially, eight guest houses will be available, but a total of 32 units are planned. Each unit will have a combination living room and sleeping area, bathroom, kitchen or kitchenette and private porch. Rates for two people range from $1,050 to $1,190 a week and linens are provided. For reservations, contact: (212) 472-9453 or (800) 392-9004. TRAVEL ADVISORY |
655638_0 | NATIONS MOBILIZE TO LIMIT DESERTS | Africa's recurrent cycle of drought and famine is driving an international effort to halt the accelerating spread of deserts, a complex environmental phenomenon that is destroying agriculturally productive regions in drylands around the world. The process, known as desertification, left indelible memories in the United States beginning in the 1930's, when a combination of overplanting, excessive grazing, drought and windstorms transformed millions of acres of prairie into the environmental disaster area known as the Dust Bowl. But the global dimensions of the current problem are more daunting. Studies by the United Nations Environment Program estimate that worldwide, an area equivalent to North and South America -- about 8 billion acres of grazing land, irrigated zones and rain-sustained cropland -- is in jeopardy. If current trends continue, these and other surveys show, the livelihoods of 1.2 billion of the world's 5.5 billion people could be threatened by the end of the century. Treaty Is Proposed Alarmed by such data, diplomats are to open a crucial round of negotiations at the United Nations next month on a proposed treaty "to combat drought and/or desertification, particularly in Africa." Scientists say the process typically begins with normal but notoriously unpredictable cycles of rainfall and drought, but accelerates because of human activity, mainly poor management and conservation practices by herdsmen, farmers, woodcutters and others who live off the land. It involves regions that are arid or semi-arid, but nonetheless useful for grazing and cultivating certain kinds of hardy crops. "All regions of the world suffer from desertification and drought," Canada's Ambassador for Environment and Sustainable Development, Arthur Campeau, told the General Assembly last month. "But the African nations are the most vulnerable and the least able to combat these problems without concerted national action." Although many details remain to be negotiated, the broad aim of the treaty is to draw the wealthy industrialized nations into a cooperative aid effort, while encouraging people on the local level to adopt environmentally sustainable agricultural practices, preferably based on traditional methods. Experts from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization also argue that desertification is a problem not simply of environment, but of poverty and underdevelopment, and should be addressed as part of an integrated attack on the quality of life in impoverished rural areas. "Drought and desertification are fundamental, elusive problems in the process of sustainable development in Africa today," said an envoy from the Organization of African |
655667_5 | The Executive Computer; A Growing Internet Is Trying to Take Care of Business | and as increasingly powerful computers and software make it possible to hide the Internet's Unix command system behind graphical, point-and-shoot interfaces like Mosaic (a free software program developed with Federal financing by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications) or even Microsoft Windows. The catch is that one cannot use such easy graphical tools with a simple Internet gateway, like Compuserve or MCI Mail. It requires a direct Internet link through a SLIP or PPP service, which adheres to the special Internet communications rules, or a dedicated high-speed phone line that can cost hundreds of dollars a month. The graphical interfaces are still quite new and rare, and users should plan to learn some Unix commands and terms like TCP/IP, Gopher, Veronica and Archie. Even simple Internet addresses can seem as if they are written in Martian, for example, bigk9@avm1.hq.umars.edu. Adding to the confusion is the historical aversion among some Internet veterans to conducting commerce on "their" system. This philosophy, born in the early years of the Internet when the Government subsidized the network, essentially holds that the Internet is a pure pool of information that should not be polluted by business opportunism. Times have changed. In 1991, the first commercial Internet connection services appeared, and suddenly the system was opened to anyone, not just the community of academics and computer gurus. As millions of new users linked themselves to the Internet, they viewed the Internet as a service, not as a sort of electronic commune. There is still a strong aversion to crass commercialism; anyone using the system for the electronic equivalent of junk-mail marketing can expect to be pilloried on the electronic commons and pelted with indignant e-mail responses, called "flames." But there appears to be a growing acceptance of noninvasive marketing and advertising, even as debates rage on the Internet as to how such advertising should be handled. Happily, the popularity of the Internet has spawned many newsletters, books and periodicals geared to business users. Besides Dr. Cronin's excellent book, other recommended sources include: * The Internet Business Journal, a monthly newsletter ($149 a year) published by Strangelove Press, Ottawa. * The Internet Letter, a monthly newsletter ($249 a year) published by Net Week Inc., Washington, (800) 638-9335. * "The Internet Guide for New Users" by Daniel P. Dern ($27.95, McGraw-Hill). * Internet World, a magazine ($29 a year) published by the Meckler Corporation, Westport, Conn., (800) 632-5537. |
655404_2 | Shopping for Ideas | 'The Scarlet Letter' provides less commentary on the nature of moral transgression or social indiscretion, depending upon one's own point of view, than upon the grimly nonmoralistic interpretation of an offense or act like Hester's as a psychologically traumatizing experience for participant or, even, unobservant bystander." Whatever their style, the reports are not meant to be submitted as course work, the research firms say. "We have taken every step we can to make sure it is not an issue," said Diane M. Shaw, president of the Academic Research Group. "If you've read our literature, you've seen it's replete with references to the fact that if we know that's what's happening, we don't do it." Laws in some states, including New York and New Jersey, prohibit the sale of papers to be submitted to meet course or degree requirements. Academic Research Group clients are asked to sign a disclaimer stating that they do not intend to submit their purchases to an academic institution. Catalogue reports are stamped on each page with the notation, "Prepared by The Academic Research Group Inc. For research and reference use only." But still there's nothing to stop a determined student from recopying a report and handing it in, conceded Bart Lowe, owner of Research Assistance, a Los Angeles company. "Nothing more than stops them from going to the library and copying out of a book or copying out of Time magazine," he said. "If someone's inclined to cheat, they're going to do it. However, I would say with my clientele, that's pretty much of a rarity." CRITICS in the higher-education community say that students' use of research companies continues to grow. "The problem has been mushrooming for the past two decades," said Sheldon E. Steinbach, general counsel to the American Council on Education in Washington. "And now with the advent of fax and other methods of rapid transmittal, I'm sure that although not quantifiable, it could be reaching epidemic proportions." The graduate student who was writing about China said that although the Academic Research catalogue lacked an up-to-date report on the specific topic of her paper, she bought an 18-page report titled "The Outlook for Sales and Direct Investment in China." "It tells me all about China," she said. "I'll have to make a lot of changes, but it gives me their economy. It gives me everything that's going on." To her, the report was worth |
656706_0 | Tears Enough in Northern Ireland | Much of what Northern Ireland calls "the Troubles" is rooted in words. The search for the right phrases is what delayed the welcome joint declaration agreed upon Wednesday by the British and Irish Governments. Its principles are not new, but in proposing a framework for peace, the declaration breaks fresh ground. Words alone won't end a 25-year conflict that has taken 3,000 lives. But now they can make the mutual slaughter harder to justify. The Irish Republican Army has for years inveighed against British reluctance to use the words "self-determination" or to acknowledge that both parts of Ireland deserve a voice in any settlement. Prime Minister John Major's formulation speaks reasonably to both objections: "The British Government agrees that it is for the people of the island of Ireland alone, by agreement between the two parts respectively, to exercise their right of self-determination on the basis of consent, freely and concurrently given, North and South, to bring about a united Ireland, if that is their wish." To be sure, this does not resolve the abiding conundrum of conflicting claims to the right of self-determination. Northern Ireland's 950,000 Protestants have historically resisted the unification with the Irish Republic that a majority of the province's 650,000 Roman Catholics are presumed to favor. But the door to conciliation and persuasion has been opened, and slamming it shut with a loud "No!" would be morally and politically indefensible -- and that goes for both the North's Protestants and the I.R.A. Hard-liners on all sides protest loudly that they haven't been consulted. Then let them respond to the invitation of Ireland's Prime Minister, Albert Reynolds. Dublin is ready to talk about all paths to a comprehensive settlement, one element being the removal of a territorial claim to the North in the Irish Constitution, a source of bitter contention. A seat at these talks is available to the Sinn Fein and Protestant paramilitary groups within three months, once violence has clearly stopped. Past failures caution against optimism, but both Prime Ministers sense an opportunity in near-universal revulsion over recent bloodlettings. The temperate response of the North's mainstream Unionist party to the declaration suggests that it has correctly read a changing mood among the North's Protestants. The gunmen have not been silenced, but they have been weakened. Mr. Reynolds put the case movingly: "Violence in Northern Ireland has led to walls of wilted flowers and an eternity |
653273_0 | Hormone Clue to Breast Cancer Risk | RESEARCHERS at the Strang-Cornell Breast Center in New York have found that the varying ways estrogen is processed in different women's breast tissue may be an indication of their relative risk of developing breast cancer. The preliminary finding, published in today's issue of The Journal of the National Cancer Institute, may one day lead to a test for breast cancer risk that could be applied to all women. Currently, only a quarter of the 182,000 breast cancers that are diagnosed each year arise in women with known risk factors, like a strong family history of the disease or the presence of benign proliferative breast disease. In the study, Dr. Michael P. Osborne and his colleagues showed that the noncancerous breast tissue of women with breast cancer had much higher levels of a metabolite of the natural estrogen 17-beta estradiol than did comparable tissue from women who did not have cancer. The metabolite, a hormone called 16-alpha-hydroxyestrone, appears in pinhead size organelles called terminal duct lobular units, where most if not all breast cancers are believed to originate. This metabolite has previously been shown to damage genetic material and promote abnormal cell growth. Dr. Osborne, who heads the breast center in New York City, emphasized that the finding was a long way from being clinically useful. But in an editorial in the same issue of the journal, Dr. Daniel W. Nebert of the University of Cincinnati Medical Center suggested that the finding might also one day lead to preventive treatments that could block the action of the culprit hormone. |
653272_4 | Personal Health | points out that one postmenopausal woman in three is developing or already has severe bone loss, a silent, preventable $10-billion-a-year problem that results in 1.3 million fractures and thousands of deaths each year. The most rapid bone loss occurs in the first five years of menopause, and close attention to preventive measures is urged, particularly for those at highest risk: thin white women, women who smoke or drink excessively and those who have a family history of osteoporosis, as well as women who enter menopause with thin bones or whose menopause occurs early, in their 30's or early 40's, perhaps as a result of surgery or chemotherapy. Menopause can be accompanied by a loss of muscle tone in the pelvic region, resulting in stress incontinence (urine leakage when one coughs, sneezes, laughs or exercises vigorously) and a discomforting drop of pelvic organs. Skin thins out and becomes more lax and wrinkled when estrogen production declines, and the relative increase in testosterone (also produced in the ovaries) may result in growth of facial hair and thinning of scalp hair. Coping Effectively Dr. Reichman says the most important approach to menopause is to take action: assess your personal and family medical history for health problems that are related to menopause, stop health-damaging habits like smoking and abusing alcohol and overconsuming caffeine and adopt health-promoting habits like regular weight-bearing exercise and a low-fat diet rich in vegetables, fruits and grains and calcium-rich foods. Then there is the option of hormone replacement. The pendulum, which has swung back and forth about estrogen supplements in recent decades, is now clearly on the side of taking them, at least for most women. Only 15 to 20 percent of menopausal women are now on estrogen. Some are against what has been called "the medicalization of menopause" and question the wisdom of monkeying with nature. Others have health concerns, like a history of breast cancer, that preclude its use. Still others are afraid that menopausal hormones might increase their risk of getting cancer. Before making a decision, it pays to weigh the existing evidence. "Straight Talk on Menopause" will be shown on Channel 13 in the New York area on Sunday, Dec. 5, from 5 P.M. to 8 P.M. and will be repeated the next Sunday, from noon to 3 P.M. For times in other areas, check your local public television listings. Next week: Deciding about hormone replacement. |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.