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951030_6 | Drunken Drivers in the Emergency Room | treatment program with some kind of verification process. Q. But isn't it true that many doctors don't want to report people to the D.M.V.? A. There's a lot of resistance. They think it's not up to us to be making reports to a government agency about people's personal lives or medical histories. And I disagree with that. Q. How do you change them? A. I think you educate them, working with D.M.V. Medical Review Committee on a statewide campaign about this law and their individual responsibilities under this law. The D.M.V. is going to send me a monthly total of how many reports they receive and how many suspensions there were. And we're going to track the number of reports and see if they start going up as a result of this education. Q. Does it feel sometimes like an uphill battle? A. I just think it's a battle that needs some groundwork, and that's what we're doing now. We've already done one thing in our emergency medicine core curriculum, which is the list of all the specific items that have to be taught at least twice during the course of their residency. Substance abuse was never on there, and now it is. Within the next two or three years, we're going to have a sizable group within our specialty that believes this is a big issue and you can do something about it. Once that happens, then the legislative piece and the public education piece and so forth will take off. There's a need for legislation state by state that will at the very least make it a requirement for physicians of any specialty to report physically impaired drivers. I think if that happens there will be kind of a slow revolution that will identify a large number of people who currently are not being identified as chronically impaired drivers. That will force the states that license them to do something, because if they don't, that will be a big liability for the states. That I think is the key. Let's just take Connecticut. If every emergency physician and internist and family practitioner received minimal training in identifying physically impaired drivers, and routinely reported those people to the D.M.V., my guess is there would be at least a five or six-fold increase in reports to the D.M.V. -- and the roads would be safer. Connecticut Q&A: Dr. Philip Brewer |
951166_3 | Now, Worries About B.W.I. (Boating While Intoxicated) | be attributed to intoxication,'' said Trooper Bliss, who joined the Burlington City station 10 years ago and has had tours of duty in Atlantic City and Corson's Inlet in Wildwood. ''At the shore, I never saw as much intoxication because boaters tend to have bigger, more expensive boats docked there, and they're aware that anything you do that's reckless usually ends up damaging your boat or somebody else's. There might be a lot of drinking on board, but whoever's operating the boat is usually sober. On the Delaware, most of the boats are smaller and are towed in on trailers. The operators think they're camping out on the water and that as long as nobody finds out, whatever they do to themselves doesn't matter.'' Troopers ask to boaters showing signs of intoxication to recite the alphabet and demonstrate physical coordination. They also examine boaters' eyes for evidence of drug use. Those believed to be intoxicated are also given Breathalyzer tests. Those whose blood measures at or in excess of 0.10 percent alcohol are charged with operating while intoxicated. If convicted, a first offender faces a $500 fine, a three-month suspension of his driver's license and a one-year suspension of his boating license. Penalties double for second offenses. Despite these penalties, ''I see a lot of the same faces,'' Trooper Bliss said. ''I see people getting hurt and killed. For some reason, they're not getting the message.'' To get the message out, the Marine Police have made an anti-intoxication boating video, which they use during educational presentations before schoolchildren and civic groups. Colonel Williams said he was unaware of any action by the state Alcoholic Beverage Control Board against the New Jersey bars along the Delaware that might be serving boaters one too many drinks. He knew of no New Jersey bars near the Delaware that had been sued for boating-related damages under the state's dram shop law, which holds liquor licensees responsible for damages caused by intoxicated patrons. New Jersey, he added, has no influence on Pennsylvania bars. Sgt. Martin Higgins of the Burlington City Marine Police said that ''with what we've seen on July 4, we're expecting it to get pretty thick out there on Labor Day weekend.'' Trooper Bliss said he had seen so many injuries and fatalities related to drunken boating that he now takes his holidays ''as far from the water as possible.'' THE GREAT OUTDOORS |
951250_3 | Overseas, Smoking Is One Of Life's Small Pleasures | local grass-roots movements. But in many countries, individuals wouldn't consider suing a cigarette manufacturer for what they regard as their own choice to smoke -- or wouldn't need to sue, because national insurance covers their hospital bills. Government Monopolies Outside the United States, anti-smoking groups are often small, particularly in Asia, where citizen groups in general are weak and there is a traditional respect for central authority. That central authority, of course, can act to cut smoking. The most conspicuous example in Asia is Singapore, where the government, which regulates personal activities from chewing gum to owning cars, also imposes stiff fines for selling cigarettes to minors and breaking other anti-smoking laws. But in some nations, including Spain and Italy, the government owns the tobacco monopoly, giving it a financial stake in promoting smoking. Japan's government owns two thirds of Japan Tobacco, a former monopoly that still controls 80 percent of the market. In the past, when Japan's health ministry tried to warn about smoking, the wording was watered down by the more powerful Finance Ministry, Dr. Mochizuki-Kobayashi said. This year, embarrassed by its failure in another area, stemming the spread of AIDS in hemophiliacs, the ministry stood its ground. In general, smoking rates are falling in the developed world but rising in developing countries, the future market for American companies facing restrictions at home. In those countries, smoking has cachet, an association with an affluent, wide-open American life style. In Vietnam, an estimated 73 percent of men smoke. In China, already the world's leading consumer of cigarettes, the percentage is over 60 percent, and cigarettes are often offered to visitors along with tea. Social traditions have kept the smoking rate among women in many Asian countries below 10 percent. But that rate is starting to rise because women view smoking as a sign of liberation. One explanation for a lack of concern about smoking is that such nations tend to have more pressing health problems, like infectious diseases. Despite these obstacles and attitudes, anti-tobacco movements and laws are spreading. And the proposed settlement in the United States, which needs Government approval, is already proving influential. In Hong Kong, anti-tobacco legislation enacted in June was toughened to include some of the same restrictions on advertising that tobacco companies accepted in the proposed American settlement. Slovakia recently imposed restrictions on smoking in public places, and Turkey a ban on advertising. Even |
951118_0 | A Delicate Rebuilding Effort | On a warm June night last year, shortly after 11:30, Rafael Ortiz and his 3-year-old daughter were watching a Disney movie on television when Mr. Ortiz heard an odd, loud noise. It sounded, Mr. Ortiz thought, like somebody dropping planks of wood in the hallway, but when he looked outside his apartment door, he saw nothing. Then, it happened. The entire backside of the unoccupied five-story apartment building next door to Mr. Ortiz's building at 420 West 49th Street collapsed in less than a minute, leaving an eerie facade but nothing more. Rushing his wife and his daughter onto the fire escape, Mr. Ortiz, without shoes and wearing only shorts, dashed from apartment to apartment, getting tenants out of the building, which was still shaking from the collapse next door. City officials immediately evacuated the eight families, who stayed either with friends or at a city-run hotel for a month while the city reinforced the building. It was the second evacuation for tenants of the building in 10 years, and they fear that another may be coming soon because, they say, reconstruction of the collapsed building at 418 West 49th Street might weaken the structure of their building. The tenants say that they ought to be consulted on the project. Responding to a plea by the tenants at Mr. Ortiz's building, the Department of Buildings sent an inspector last week to 418 West 49th Street. The inspector found violations at the site and stopped work for two days. A Buildings Department spokeswoman said that the violations were minor and that the project might even bolster the structure of Mr. Ortiz's building. At issue is how work should proceed on two of three cheek-by-jowl buildings -- 416, 418 and 420 West 49th Street -- built at the turn of the century as tenement houses. The buildings were eventually bought by Michael Parpis, known in the neighborhood as the Hot Dog King of New York because he ran his hot-dog cart business from 420 and stored more than 100 hot-dog carts in the empty confines of 416 and 418. Last November, Mr. Parpis sold 416 and 418 to the Clinton 49 Corporation, which wants to renovate 416 and rebuild 418, for a total of 29 apartments renting for $600 or more. Mr. Parpis still owns 420, but since 1984, Nancy Kyriacou, a member of Housing Conservation Coordinators, a tenant advocacy group in |
953032_4 | Pope Concludes Rally With Display of Vigor | of France,'' he said. ''Christians did things which the Gospel condemns,'' he added, not offering an apology that would make the Church assume responsibility for the event but observing that ''acknowledging the weaknesses of the past is an act of honesty and courage which helps us to strengthen our faith.'' ''I am convinced that only forgiveness, offered and received, leads little by little to a fruitful dialogue, which will in turn insure a fully Christian reconciliation,'' he said. Though his voice often quavered with fatigue and he was visibly bent with age, the Pope's determination was as strong as ever. He insisted on visiting the grave of a friend and a leader of the anti-abortion movement in France, Prof. Jerome Lejeune, on Friday afternoon, but both the Pope and the church muted criticism by saying nothing about the visit in public. France's Socialist Party condemned the visit to the grave as an incitment to militant groups intolerant of abortion, which has been legal in France since 1975. This evening, as the thunderclouds that held off all week finally closed in, the Socialist Prime Minister, Lionel Jospin, bade the Pope farewell, but he did not mention the controversy in his public remarks. Instead, Mr. Jospin thanked the Pope for beatifying Frederic Ozanam, who founded the Society of St. Vincent de Paul and agitated for social justice in the face of the inequalities of 19th-century capitalism. The ceremony took place on Friday at Notre Dame Cathedral. Today's Mass, accompanied by a choir and an orchestra directed by Myung-Whun Chung, the former director of the Bastille Opera, unfurled with military precision, the pilgrims remaining in their assigned places inside the track even for the distribution of Communion by volunteers using bright blue parasols. Those farthest away were about a mile from the elevated creamy chalk tribunal where the Pope and assembled Church dignitaries sat. There were enough water and food, and portable toilets, for everyone, and the organizers proudly asserted that the $42 million budget for the event would be fully covered by corporate sponsorships and participation fees -- if everybody paid. ''If the people who haven't paid don't do so between now and the end of the week, the deficit will be several tens of millions of francs it will take us years to make up,'' said Bishop Michel Dubost, the chief French military chaplain and the head of the organizing committee. |
973774_1 | Trying to Use the Saw But Spare the Forests; 80 Years Later, Logging Rebounds | The re-emergence of logging has been driven in part by growing demand for maple and oak, partly because of changing tastes in places like Japan, where the blond wood is now favored over darker, tropical wood varieties, according to several forestry economists. New York and Connecticut have also seen a sharp rise in the harvest of softwood trees like pine, because of sharply reduced cutting on Federal lands in the Pacific Northwest. The trade means that wooded lots in the region -- if properly managed -- can represent a bonanza for property owners, providing steady income for decades. But it has also spurred some owners to do ''liquidation cuts,'' in which all the valuable trees are taken at once, with no thought to the ecology of the forest. State environmental officials in New York and Connecticut have created programs to encourage logging methods that keep the forests healthy. Nonetheless, unscrupulous logging crews occasionally cruise neighborhoods to dangle offers of big money, and leave ragged, muddy messes behind. In some cases, timber theft occurs when a cutting crew strays across a property line, lured by a prime specimen of cherry or oak. Many communities, concerned about the impact of such cutting, have enacted ordinances that limit, or even prohibit, logging. The moves to limit logging have also been driven by the widespread perception among suburbanites that all logging is akin to the destructive practices highlighted in films about the deforestation of the Amazon region or the Pacific Northwest, state environmental officials say. But state officials and many loggers say that predatory practices are the exception, and that local laws are stifling what could be a profitable and environmentally sound business. Unlike the clear-cutting in the rain forest, in most cases in the New York region only mature trees are taken, allowing smaller trees to soak up the sunlight flowing through the new gaps in the leafy canopy, and potentially providing another crop of wood 10 or 15 years down the line. ''People think logging is a lot of greed and mess, but if you do it right it helps the animals and the woods,'' said Michael Shultis, a logger who scours the Catskills for prime stands. He and other people in the industry say that logging a standing forest is far better than having it sold off to developers, who are increasingly subdividing the land. ''That is a one-way street, and |
975644_1 | Study Traces Key Role Of Caribbean Currents In Shaping Reefs' Life | But until now, scientists have had little hard scientific data to guide them in how and where to best set up such reserves. By tracking the movement of currents, researchers say they can begin designing networks of marine reserves to support one another and support reefs used for fishing and other harvests. ''Marine preserves are considered one of our strongest tools for bringing fisheries back and protecting resources,'' said Dr. Steve Palumbi, a marine population biologist at Harvard University. ''It's a great tool, we think, but we really don't know how to use it very well yet.'' Dr. Roberts collected data on ocean surface currents from the scientific literature and from researchers in the Caribbean who had mapped currents in local waters. He describes the methods for mapping currents as ''the equivalent of the sailor on a desert island throwing a message in a bottle into the water.'' Scientists release into the sea what are known as drift cards, which carry requests that they be sent back when found, or use satellites to track buoys as they drift. Dr. Roberts then used his current maps to determine how far an animal carried by those currents might travel. More than 80 percent of the ocean's creatures move away from their parents as juveniles, floating or swimming through the currents over a period of weeks or months. In his study, Dr. Roberts found that the 18 different reef sites he examined showed a wide range of potential for receiving and dispersing such young. For example, he found the Florida Keys were downstream of 15,000 square miles of ocean from which the keys could receive drifting young. The reef site in Barbados, by contrast, is downstream from very few coral reefs. The new work indicates that researchers might want to create larger reserves upstream and smaller reserves downstream. That way, more young carried away by currents would end up on other coral reefs and fewer would be lost to the open ocean. Researchers might also expect those sites that receive a lot of young from upstream reefs to be more resilient to harvest and damage than those with little input. Dr. Roberts said the study should also force researchers to rethink how many reserves should be created to protect a given region. ''In general, when people look at a map of the Caribbean, you think about having one reserve in Belize, one in |
975638_5 | Archeologists Unearth Treasure Buried by the Cold War | through the Greek, Roman and Byzantine eras. Each aspect of life here would be illustrated by a different monument or rural site. The farmlands are in many ways what interest the archeologists most. And by linking them to those in southern Italy, Dr. Carter and other archeologists hope to be able to learn more about the history of the colonies and of land distribution. ''From the eighth century B.C., the Greeks were looking for land beyond Athens that could sustain them,'' Dr. Carter said. ''By then the city was overpopulated and expansion was essential. People assume mistakenly that those who lived in the country were economically and socially inferior to those in the Greek cities. It wasn't true at all.'' Ancient Greece was the definitively urban society. The rich cultural heritage in Metaponto demonstrated convincingly for the first time, however, that rural life was just as important to the Greeks. There was almost no such thing as an intact rural heritage near Athens. But in Metaponto, and in Chersonesos, farm divisions have been so perfectly preserved over thousands of years that ancient fence lines still appear clearly in aerial photographs of the region. And this was the bread basket of the ancient Greek world. The soil around Athens was notoriously rocky and poor; here it is rich and fertile. By the third century B.C., it had become the major source of grain for Athens. ''The division of the countryside was really the basic division of Greek society,'' said Galina Nikolaenko, deputy director of the archeological museum here and the director of the dig in the agricultural territory. ''That was really the core of democracy. And this we never really realized until now.'' Many farmhouses were the sites of family cults. There might have been a single piece of sculpture in the house to be used in rural sacrificial rites. A mint, which may have served the city as well as the rural suburbs, has been discovered dating from the fourth century B.C., a time when the city probably had 10,000 to 20,000 residents. The site here overlooks the valley that is best entry into the area, and it was always a place of military significance. The Greeks used it as a fortress against the Scythians. Then the Romans built a fort here to repel the Goths and, more than 1,000 years later, so did the Byzantine against the Huns. (It |
975767_0 | Dubious Estrogen Claims | To the Editor: Re ''Language Barriers Are Hindering Health Care'' (front page, Nov. 23): I agree that using bilingual staff improves care for non-English-speaking patients but would caution that medical interpretation by nonclinician staff members may result in miscommunication of complex terminology and may subtract from the staff members' other responsibilities. Insuring adequate financial resources for professional medical interpretation is the best solution to improving language barriers, but this is only one aspect of culturally appropriate care. Providers must also consider patients' health beliefs, experiences with the United States health care system and economic resources. MARK DOESCHER, M.D. Seattle, Nov. 23, 1997 |
975766_0 | Dubious Estrogen Claims | To the Editor: Re ''F.D.A. Panel Endorses Drug That Fights Osteoporosis'' (news article, Nov. 21): The claim that estrogen helps ''keep women's hearts healthy'' is dubious. The studies that purport to show this were observational, not blinded and randomized: this means that the women who took estrogen could have been healthier in the first place. Indeed, most of the women who benefited from estrogen in such studies were thinner, exercised more frequently and didn't smoke. Even the package inserts for Prempro and Premphase, two estrogen-progesterone treatments, state that the benefits of estrogen for the heart have not yet been proved. The assertion that estrogen, with all its attendant risks, should be used to prevent heart disease when exercise, stress reduction and a low-fat diet can do the trick is a foolhardy one. TARA HERMAN Middletown, Conn., Nov. 22, 1997 |
975658_6 | Stuck in Traffic? Consult a Physicist | late Dr. Robert Herman, also an adviser to General Motors, who gained fame as a physicist by predicting in the 1940's that a microwave echo of the Big Bang would someday be found. (The echo was found in 1978 by Dr. Arno Penzias and Dr. Robert Wilson of Bell Laboratories. The two scientists shared the 1978 Nobel Prize in Physics for their discovery.) Dr. Prigogine and Dr. Herman developed a theory of traffic flow dependent on some of the differential equations used to describe fluids in motion. The theory improved understanding of traffic flow, but scientists realized that a really useful traffic theory would have to take all the fine details into account, not just the broad trends that can be described by equations. Dr. Steen Rasmussen, a physicist at the Los Alamos laboratory, praised Dr. Prigogine. ''His way of looking at nature and sociotechnical systems certainly shaped our thinking,'' Dr. Rasmussen said in an interview. ''But he lacked the tremendously powerful computers we have today, and he was brought up to think about science in a different way. In thinking about traffic, for example, the approach of Dr. Prigogine's generation was to assume that traffic flow is a continuum in which the role of each single vehicle is insignificant. By contrast, we include every vehicle and person in our models.'' If enormous numbers of vehicles are included, the results of such simulations closely resemble the solutions yielded by calculus equations, he said, but much greater precision and reliability result from detailed simulations. Even today, planners in New York City are using a detailed simulation of expected traffic patterns nearChelsea Piers, a riverside development project. The program allows engineers to visualize the results of even small perturbations, like illegally parked cars. Most of the simulations physicists use today depend on variants of mathematical objects called cellular automata, which can be represented on a computer screen as squares or hexagonal cells that change with respect to their neighboring cells according to some set of simple rules. Motivated by these rules alone, groups of cellular automata organize themselves and evolve complex patterns, sometimes resembling the spread of forest fires, the creation and evolution of new species, the birth of galaxies and the appearance of traffic jams, among many other things. A decade ago, a Danish physicist, Dr. Per Bak, proposed a theory of ''self-organized criticality,'' based partly on attacking complex problems in |
970470_1 | AIDS Surge Is Forecast for China, India and Eastern Europe | amount of additional funds for such programs. Governments have a fundamental responsibility to prevent H.I.V. infection among people who have multiple sex partners, inject drugs and share unsterile needles because prevention measures aimed at those groups ''will prevent the largest number of infections among all people -- even among people who do not take risks,'' the report said. ''Political leaders and government officials must take the necessary steps to confront the epidemic, even when these are politically controversial,'' said Joseph E. Stiglitz, the bank's chief economist. In developing countries, nearly half of the cases are among women, and AIDS is reversing decades of progress in improving the quality of life. In Africa, for example, AIDS has shortened life expectancy by 22 years in Zimbabwe and by 11 years in the Ivory Coast and Burkina Fasso, the bank said. The 353-page report identifies priorities for developing countries so governments can allocate scarce resources and find fair and cost-effective measures to deal with AIDS and their many other pressing problems. The report is intended to offer a framework for governments to decide on programs to control H.I.V. by ''pointing out the minimum set of activities that all governments should engage in to improve the efficiency and equity of prevention programs.'' Dr. Peter Piot, who heads the United Nations AIDS program in Geneva, said in an interview that the report would help him deal with heads of state about the disease because the World Bank ''is politically very important'' in third-world countries. The bank said the AIDS situation is not hopeless. More than two billion people live in areas of the world where AIDS is still relatively scarce, even among people most likely to contract and spread AIDS, Mr. Stiglitz said. However, China and India ''are set to have very large epidemics, and very strenuous action taken now can attenuate the magnitude of those epidemics but cannot prevent them completely,'' Dr. Feacham said. Governments can change people's behavior with education and condoms, the bank said. Ms. Ainsworth cited a program in Nairobi, Kenya, involving 500 sex workers. They were treated for sexually transmitted diseases, and with education their condom use was raised to 80 percent. The measures prevented 10,000 H.I.V. infections per year among the clients of the prostitutes, the clients' spouses and other partners of the sex workers. If 500 men chosen randomly from the community had achieved the same level of |
970364_7 | Computers Model World's Climate, but How Well? | of the models in predicting the climate decades ahead is that despite the growing speed of computers, they are unable to calculate climatic changes everywhere in the atmosphere. Instead, they make the calculations only at widely separated points. The points form a three-dimensional grid typically rising 10 or 12 miles above the earth. A typical spacing between grid points is about 150 miles horizontally and less than half a mile vertically. This ''resolution,'' as scientists call it, is about twice as fine as a decade ago. But it still misses many processes that happen between grid points -- cloud formation, for example. So modelers approximate these factors as best they can. Coarse resolution is also the major reason why the models are not very good at simulating climate at the regional scale. They simply miss too many small-scale climatic influences, like topography, vegetation and regional atmospheric churnings. Some modelers have developed techniques for overcoming this. For instance, they might model only part of the ocean-atmosphere system, using much more closely spaced grid points, to get a better fix on regional changes. That approach has been successfully employed, for instance, in predicting the comings and goings of El Nino, the vast pool of tropical Pacific water that disrupts weather around the world. In another technique, modelers take the general results of a global climate model and use them to construct a second model of higher resolution for a limited region. Researchers at Pennsylvania State University have so far successfully used this ''nesting'' technique to reproduce observed precipitation patterns in the Middle Atlantic region. As computers become more advanced, the resolution of models continues to improve. Researchers at a number of Federal laboratories are collaborating in the development of a next-generation model using several computers operating in parallel. The ocean part of the model has a horizontal grid spacing of less than 20 miles, which researchers believe is necessary to represent fine-scale ocean eddies and currents. It is only in the last few years that models have included deep-ocean processes, which are critical to the climate system's functioning. The ocean, for instance, absorbs both carbon dioxide and heat, transports heat from one part of the planet to the other and provides moisture to the atmosphere. An even bigger limitation of the models than coarse resolution is the incomplete knowledge of the atmosphere's functioning, Dr. Hansen says. Dr. Gates agrees, saying, ''How the |
970459_0 | Population Predictor | To the Editor: In ''How to Fix a Crowded World: Add People'' (Week in Review, Nov. 2), you give several reasons that fertility rates are declining but fail to mention that decades of research has identified one reason as clearly the most powerful. The strongest, most consistent predictor of fertility is the educational level of women. As a country's percentage of literate women increases, its fertility rate declines. The only way the world will achieve a stable or declining population is to provide every girl with a primary school education and every woman with a chance to learn how to read. Unfortunately, worldwide, almost 70 million school-age girls are not in school and 700 million women have never had a chance to learn to read. JOHN P. COMINGS Cambridge, Mass., Nov. 3, 1997 The writer is director of the National Center for the Study of Adult Learning and Literacy at Harvard. |
970228_4 | In Feverish Last Days, Whitman and McGreevey Appeal to Core Voters | their word. As Mr. Salmore noted, ''It's amazing that it's this close, because her record is not bad.'' Mrs. Whitman has received endorsements from the editorial boards of most newspapers around the state, and the Republican National Party has been able to spend much more money on generic advertising and party organizing than its Democratic counterpart has. Mr. McGreevey has received valuable endorsements from most major labor groups, which are aggressively working on his behalf. But Mrs. Whitman pulled an upset when she snatched the endorsement of a group of black clergy whose support both candidates had vigorously pursued. Mrs. Whitman, who was unopposed in the primary, was free of campaign pressure during the spring. But for Mr. McGreevey, who is also a State Senator, his primary race against Representative Robert E. Andrews and Michael Murphy gave him some much-needed exposure. While Mrs. Whitman was quietly waiting for an opponent to emerge, all three Democratic contenders were criticizing her. So she was forced into spending some of her campaign time defending several of her actions: the $2.75 billion bond issue to balance her budget and finance the state pension plan, her approval of $220 million in state money toward a road project in Atlantic City and her use of $175,000 to settle a sexual harassment lawsuit against the chairman of the State Republican Party. Still smarting from losing the endorsement of leaders of the Black Ministers Council of New Jersey, Mr. McGreevey convened a telephone conference call Saturday night between Vice President Al Gore and black clergy members whose support Mr. McGreevey has received. ''A victory in New Jersey is essential to keeping our momentum going into 1998,'' Mr. Gore said, urging the ministers to get their congregations out to the polls on Tuesday. Last-minute, undecided voters are often low-income minorities, and Mr. McGreevey has spent much of the last few days searching for votes in black and Hispanic urban areas. Mrs. Whitman, who has had trouble exciting the conservative wing of her party, has mined the suburbs, espousing an increasingly conservative tone and imploring politicians with rock-solid conservative credentials like Mr. Kasich and former Vice President Dan Quayle to stand beside her. ''In these last days, both sides are pursuing their base vote strategy,'' said Rick Thigpen, the executive director of the State Democratic Party. ''Getting your army together, that's what it's all about.'' THE 1997 ELECTIONS: THE OVERVIEW |
970195_0 | Patents; Checkout scanners may soon be ringing up fruits and vegetables based on their scent. | IN 1992, President George Bush made headlines when he discovered that he could buy groceries using a bar-code scanner at the supermarket checkout counter. The President apparently did not realize that ordinary Americans had been shopping that way for years. Mr. Bush may or may not have known that bar-code scanners work only if dense lines of code appear on a product. Ordinary shoppers are quite familiar with the pause that occurs when fruits or vegetables pass over the scanner, requiring the cashier to manually type the code for the produce into the cash register. Now everyone can look forward to a scanner that automatically rings up fruits and vegetables. The scanner, which won a patent last month, detects aromas to identify fruits and vegetables, creates a pattern for each scent and reads the pattern. At the checkout counter, fruits and vegetables are placed inside a small chamber adjacent to the cash register. The chamber has an air vent in the top and an array of internal sensors. Once the fruits or vegetables are inside the chamber, air pressure is reduced and outside air is drawn in through the vent and over the produce. The air drawn into the chamber picks up the scent of the food. The sensors then analyze the aroma and create a pattern based on elements detected in the odor. The sensor pattern is compared with a reference list of patterns. When a match is found, the scanner tells the cash register the name and price. The scanner was invented by Alan Gelperin, from Princeton, N.J. The NCR Corporation of Dayton, Ohio, owns the patent, 5,675,070. Favorite Channels Can Be Programmed Whether you have cable or satellite along with your direct broadcast television (or all three), you probably have too many channels to track. Surfing through the 65 to 100 channels on the average cable system is not a very efficient way to find out what is showing. Television manufacturers know this, and have begun including the ability to preprogram channel ''favorites'' in many new television sets. Taking that idea a step further, two inventors working for the Gemstar Development Corporation, in Pasadena, Calif., have patented a remote control that enables TV viewers to surf channels by theme. A viewer would first decide on a theme, or list of channels. The remote can store more than one theme, so a user could create multiple lists, one |
970193_1 | Increasingly, Electronic Cooks Are Being Used to Keep the Soup From Spoiling | cookies to potato chips were now prepared with electronic assistance. In part, technological improvements have driven the shift. The nettlesome defects that made electronic sensors and other devices unreliable sous-chefs a decade or more ago have largely been corrected. Economics was the impetus for change. Early in the 1990's, the makers and sellers of automation systems were eager to find a replacement for cyclical markets like the petroleum industry or shrinking markets like shipbuilding. The food industry's relative stability was attractive, so makers of automation equipment have put more effort into meeting the needs of food producers. ''After the recession in the oil industry, we started looking at the food business as a market because it's less volatile: No matter what happens, people have got to eat,'' said Robert E. Tarrant, assistant director of sales and marketing at the privately held Nametre Company of Metuchen, N.J., which is majority owned by Tytronics Inc., a manufacturer of automation equipment in Bedford, Mass. Nametre makes a viscosity sensor that was originally used to test the consistency of refined oil products but was modified in 1990 to monitor the thickness of frosting, pudding, salad dressing, whipped topping and the like. Nametre is one of hundreds of companies that have worked in the last decade to develop more accurate, easily integrated and durable electronic sensing devices that detect everything from the creaminess of sandwich cookie filling to the piquancy of pasta sauce. In Nametre's case, sales have risen to $2.5 million from $752,000 in the last eight years. Not that human taste tests are a thing of the past. It is just that much of the food being tried out on focus groups has been tried out on electronic sensors first. In part, the trend toward automation was slowed by the conviction that creating things culinary is a craft. Master bakers are still a fixture on some bread production lines, stretching hunks of dough between clenched fists to insure proper elasticity. But their time may be passing. ''To some extent, processors have become more open to technology lately because those kinds of craftsmen are starting to fade away,'' said Ted Labuza, professor of food engineering at the University of Minnesota. ''No one apprentices anymore to learn that kind of thing.'' This realization, coupled with a highly competitive marketplace in which profit margins are typically a slim 5 percent to 6 percent, has enouraged ''a |
971556_1 | New Danger Tripping Up Wheelchairs | have had similar experiences say the problem is coming from an unlikely source: cellular telephones. They say such phones, and the network of antennas needed to operate them, can make their chairs start and stop uncontrollably. And the more antennas, the greater the risk of accidents, people who use motorized wheelchairs say. Unlike the cell phones of just a few years ago, which needed a handful of transmitters around town, the latest generation of wireless phones, known as personal communications services, or P.C.S., require hundreds. In September, the city's Franchise and Concession Review Committee endorsed a plan, which is awaiting the Mayor's approval, to allow up to 9,000 new antennas on buildings, lampposts and signal lights. ''The wheelchair issue was not brought to the committee's attention,'' said Elaine Reiss, general counsel for the city's Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications. Cathie Ryan, 41, said that last month she was sitting in her $4,800 wheelchair waiting for the light to change at 86th Street and Broadway when she noticed a man nearby turn on his cellular phone. Suddenly, she said, her chair lurched forward and almost pushed the woman in front of her into oncoming traffic. Electromagnetic interference is ''not well understood,'' said Bangt Persson, quality manager for Permobil Inc. in Sundsvall, Sweden, which manufactured Sharon Brown's chair. The company's research showed ''nothing dramatic'' from cellular phones, he said. In theory, the portable phones and the transmitting stations that relay calls use so little power that at more than a few feet away they should have little or no effect on electronic devices like motorized wheelchairs. Still, in May 1994 the Food and Drug Administration recommended that wheelchair manufacturers improve shielding in the wiring of wheelchairs and add warnings about radio waves from cell phones and other electronic devices. Thomas K. Small, 32, who has used a motorized wheelchair most of his life, said that many disabled people do not want to trade in their pre-1994 wheelchairs ''because once you find a comfortable chair you stick with it.'' He said cell phones have not interfered with his new $10,000 chair, though he did have the problem with his older models. But Cathie Ryan and Sharon Brown said their wheelchairs were made after 1994. ''These chairs are our lives,'' Ms. Brown said. ''We just want to be able to make it to the corner.'' ANTHONY RAMIREZ NEIGHBORHOOD REPORT: NEW YORK UP CLOSE |
971725_0 | Slower Population Growth Won't Last Forever; Literacy and Fertility | To the Editor: I share the conviction of John P. Comings (letter, Nov. 4) that education is one of the most powerful ways of changing and improving our world. But his statement that ''the strongest, most consistent predictor of fertility is the educational level of women'' does not hold up to empirical analysis. Education and family size are correlated in countries with poor access to family planning (like the Philippines), but where people have unconstrained access to the means to control their family (like Thailand), educational differences in contraceptive use practically disappear. Education helps people jump over the hurdles society often places between them and birth-control technologies. By lowering family size in countries with high illiteracy (as is happening in Bangladesh), good family planning can help improve the quality of education. MALCOLM POTTS Berkeley, Calif., Nov. 4, 1997 The writer is a professor of population at the University of California. |
971935_4 | What's Really Needed To Help Students | said, often need extra help from specially trained teachers. In interviews, advocates for special education insisted that the numbers of students identified are not alarming, but reflect what studies show as the proportion of people with learning problems in the population. They said Connecticut has the fifth highest percentage of special education students in the country because of proficiency here at identifying such children. Special education advocates said that although some learning disabilities are caused by use of alcohol and drugs by pregnant women, most are genetic and can't be cured. So, they said, some learning disabled children appropriately need support throughout their education. But they said that some chldren who are diagnosed with learning disabilties at a young age and are given help, learn to compensate for them and can eventually succeed in the regular classroom. The suggestion in the report that a stigma is attached to being a special education student has triggered emotional reaction. Beryl F. Kaufman, executive director of the Connecticut Association for Children with Learning Disabilities, said before diagnosis, children with learning problems have been given other labels by classmates, parents, siblings and teachers. ''They're called dumb, retarded, stupid,'' she said, and added, ''Are they saying, if there were no special education, these kids would not have self-esteem problems?'' Mainstreaming isn't a clear-cut solution, the advocates say, pointing to studies showing that mentally retarded children succeed well in regular classrooms, but some learning disabled students need to be in less noisy settings. An educational psychology professor at the University of Connecticut, Miriam Cherkes-Julkowski, described the state report as ''anti-special education.'' It has prompted ''a terrible fear that special education will be lost completely, and then, what will happen to these children,'' she said. The fact that Federal law requires provision of special education has heartened advocates. Concerns about costs for special education have been expressed by officials of towns and school districts. Those costs include salaries for specialists like psychologists and speech and language therapists, legal fees when parents appeal for more services for their children, and residential placements made by such agencies as the State Department of Children and Families. The report states that special education represents 17.8 percent of local education spending. Municipalities want to see the state assume a greater share of these costs and will be asking the General Assembly to take action to do so in the 1998 session, said |
971724_0 | Slower Population Growth Won't Last Forever | To the Editor: In ''How to Fix a Crowded World: Add People'' (Week in Review, Nov. 2), you rightly point to recent rapid fertility declines as the key cause of slower population growth. However, you overstate the implications of declining fertility for future population growth. First, population growth does not stop as soon as fertility drops to the ''replacement level'' of 2.1 births per woman. Large new generations entering the childbearing years will insure that growth continues for decades. This is mainly why the United Nations projects that world population will reach 9.4 billion by 2050 and nearly 11 billion eventually. Second, the indicator you use to measure fertility does not accurately reflect the actual childbearing experiences of individual women. For example, in France women are bearing 2.1 children on average, but this is not evident in the measured total fertility rate, which has been well below replacement since the mid-1970's. This discrepancy is due to a delay in childbearing to older ages. Once women stop deferring births, the very low fertility rates observed in the developed world will rise closer to the two children most couples want, and large population declines will become unlikely. JOHN BONGAARTS V.P., Policy Research Division Population Council New York, Nov. 3, 1997 |
971632_4 | Europe Tire Test: Rainbow Hits the Road | he has not sold any, he says it is only because the size Vredestein sells in America is for small cars like the Toyota Corolla and Nissan Sentra, which he said find ''very limited use in the United States market.'' But he added, ''I do think there's a market for it, for people who want to spruce up their cars without spending.'' He sells the Axenta for $69 each, compared with $55 for Vredestein's blackwalls. Some of America's large tire makers are skeptical. Asked whether he thought the future would be painted in bright hues, Scott Baughman, a spokesman for Goodyear in Akron, Ohio, replied: ''The best people to ask are the consumers. Are they willing to pay money to have tires to complement the color of their cars?'' But Chuck Slaybaugh, an editor at Rubber and Plastics News, a trade publication, is upbeat. American car makers, he said, ''will want to get tires to match the colors of their automobiles.'' This dabbling in color was made possible when tire makers found a way to replace a key ingredient in tires. Instead of relying on carbon black, essentially a form of soot from a controlled combustion of petroleum, in their rubber-based recipe, they can now substitute substances like silica, which can take on any color. Still, because silica-based tires are more expensive to make, Michelin limited the use of color to the Coraldo's arrow-shaped tread pattern and a broad sidewall stripe. By contrast, Vredestein says it uses polymers to make the colored strip on its sidewall, which is welded to the rest of the tire during curing. Asked whether Michelin would try the Coraldo in the United States, he replied: ''For the moment, it's a European project. Of course, within the Michelin group, when one unit comes with an innovation, all may benefit from it.'' Before deciding about full production, he said, Michelin wants to ''have a look at who the consumers are and why they're buying them.'' In the meantime, other European tire makers are caught up in the fever to reinvent, if not the wheel, at least the tire. Pirelli, the big Italian tire maker, will soon begin selling designer truck tires. The winning tire, which goes on sale this fall, has a sidewall strewn with raised symbols resembling Egyptian hieroglyphics that tell the pictorial story of the use of the wheel from primitive times to the present. |
971853_2 | Temps, the New Wave in the Work Force | drive and success to her upbringing. Her father being in the Air Force, the family moved a lot, and ''When you move a lot when you're growing up, you tend to adapt to situations and to some degree are less reluctant to take risks,'' says Ms. Candland. Ms. Candland, armed with a degree in political science and set on a career in public policy, became disenchanted with her dream when she helped her Dad run for a Senate seat in Utah; he was unsuccessful. ''I started to look for other playing fields were you could make a difference without so many obstacles,'' she said. While living in the Washington, D.C., area, where she founded Advantage, Ms. Candland discovered an appreciation for finding temporary employment alternatives for people. ''It really combines my public policy motivation with being able to do something that's tangible for people as far as career development,'' she says. Advantage was one of the first temporary staffing firms to offer benefits -- health and dental plans, life insurance, 401(k) retirement plan, paid holidays, vacations, and free skills training -- to its associates as well as full-time employees. It also organized itself by practice groups (like financial services, consumer products), to better track industry trends, anticipate clients' needs and place associates in fields where they have experience. The firm boasts an associate retention rate 600 percent better than the industry average (nine months, compared to two to six weeks). Advantage, says Bruce Donatuti, director of employment and employee relations at Oxford Health Plans in Norwalk, ''focuses on customer service and seems to be able to find some of the best folks that are out there.'' When Mr. Donatuti recently reduced the number of temporary staffing firms he used from 20 to 3, Advantage remained on his list. He says companies like Oxford will continue to need temporary staffing services, despite what may look like added expense. ''We pay a fairly generous hourly rate to our temps,'' he explained, ''but if you control the use of temp staff carefully, if you just hire for what you need, like seasonal work or during peak hours, that's where you save money.'' Mr. Donatuti admits that the skill level of temps can vary, especially among recent college graduates whose ''reading, writing and arithmetic levels are lower than 20 or 30 years ago.'' But he likes hiring people who move into the temp field |
971778_1 | The Socratic Method | yet another life going astray. He collars Darryl, brings him back to his shack and orders him to pluck the bird. Watching the youth, he intuits that he has something to hide. And indeed he has -- he has been involved in the killing of a retarded boy. As the old Socrates starts to press at him, we pick up some of the rhythms of the original Socratic catechisms: ''What you gonna do, li'l brother?'' ''What?'' ''How you gonna make it right?'' ''Make what right? He dead. I cain't raise him back here.'' Patient, knowing, tapping a lifetime's inextinguishable rage as well as a long schooling in remorse -- he has several murders on his own conscience -- Socrates eventually gets Darryl to grasp the concept of atonement. Atonement -- giving something back -- is what Socrates has been occupied with since leaving prison eight years earlier. He has been trying to find the springs of his own honor and decency, even as he knows that there are old wrongs that cannot be righted. His quest is that of the Christian as well as that of the moral philosopher, but one would have to theorize a good deal to establish this. For ''Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned'' is a book of rough talk and strong gesture. And Socrates is no paragon. He must fight his violent impulses constantly; he lusts and boozes; he in no way loves all things. But his core goodness becomes more palpable for this very reason. Mosley models Socrates from all sides, many unflattering, yet he manages to leave us with the impression of a man whose soul is tuned to the pain of others. Socrates acts decently not because he hews to a code of right action, but because decency follows from this susceptibility. His decency is a force. Over time, and not always easily, Socrates brings Darryl around. He has searched out the wounded soul, not the felon, and the wounded soul eventually answers. But credibly -- Mosley has not appliqued his morality; he has located its deep coiled root and tracked it up to the surface. These variously angled tales show us Socrates reckoning with his ghosts -- memories of his dreadful deeds as well as of lost love -- and trying to make his way on the slick margins of his world. He exerts himself mightily to get and then hold a menial |
971684_0 | NEWS SUMMARY | INTERNATIONAL 3-8 House Continues Dealing On Clinton's Trade Power The wheeling and dealing on President Clinton's trade legislation began in earnest as the House of Representatives went into an unusual weekend session, trying to rewrite agriculture provisions to gain more votes. The measure would give the President the authority to negotiate trade pacts that Congress could vote up or down but could not amend. 1 Chinese Divert the Yangtze An army of workers and engineers in China diverted the Yangtze River from its natural course, clearing the way for construction to begin on the world's biggest dam. President Jiang Zemin attended the event, turning a feat of engineering into a major political celebration. 1 A Torturer's Tale As South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation commission continues its work, the brutality of the country's past is being itemized in the testimony of victims and apartheid functionaries, like Jeffrey Benzien, a paunchy police officer who acted as a professional torturer. 1 NATO's Anonymous Pitchman Javier Solana, NATO's most senior civilian official, commands little notice in the United States despite his emerging role as an important pitchman for why the world's biggest military alliance needs to get bigger. 3 Struggle for Spoils in Serbia Three top associates of President Slobodan Milosevic of Yugoslavia and about a dozen of their lieutenants have been killed in recent months, apparently as part of a struggle within the ruling elite for control of state-run industries and vast black-market rings. 13 NATIONAL 16-36 United Way, Facing Fewer Donors, Gives Away Less Five years after its former national president was found to be converting charity money to his own use, United Way is in crisis, abandoned by 4.5 million people -- 20 percent of its donors. And most of its 17.7 million remaining donors give less through payroll deduction, United Way's bread and butter. 1 Church Dinner Turns Deadly Nearly 1,400 people crowded into the meeting hall at Our Lady of the Wayside Parish in Captico, Md., for the annual fall dinner of stuffed ham, turkey and fried oysters. But in the days that followed, many grew sick with nausea, cramps, dehydration and fever, classic symptoms of salmonella poisoning. Two elderly people died and more than 100 visited a hospital emergency room 16 Assault on the J.F.K. Mystique In his new book, ''The Dark Side of Camelot,'' the investigative reporter Seymour M. Hersh portrays John F. Kennedy as an often |
971660_1 | Set to Build Dam, China Diverts Yangtze While Crowing About It | today described how the dam will control floods that have ravaged central China for centuries, these experts gushed even more about how the dam's tremendous scale -- 600 feet high and more than a mile wide -- represents the nation's contemporary greatness. By insisting on an enormous size, rather than building several smaller and safer dams nearby as some engineers have proposed, the Communist Party leadership is building not just a dam but a political monument to itself. To a leadership built on a combination of brute intimidation and troubling insecurity, a tremendous physical project like the Three Gorges Dam contributes to the Communist Party's mystique of omnipotence. Today's celebration of the dam, with exploding firecrackers and tooting boat horns that brought cheers from 5,000 onlookers, was clearly an effort to unite people behind a costly and controversial project by making it sound patriotic to do so. Even if the authorities exaggerated the significance of the day's event, the hundreds of millions watching on television were doubtless a willing audience when it came to waving the flag. Although the leadership billed it as a blocking of the river, for instance, what the workmen at the site actually did today was to complete a temporary dam that diverted the river flow to a side channel. Five years from now, when this next stage of the dam is complete, the river flow itself will be blocked and the water level on the upstream side will start to rise. However, today's ceremony also drew attention to the scope of the Three Gorges project, which is breathtaking. At a cost officially estimated at $25 billion, and likely to climb far higher, the dam will create a lake 350 miles long, forcing 1.2 million people to leave their homes and generating 18,200 megawatts of electricity, equivalent to what 50 million tons of coal could produce a year. China's leaders have fought off environmental concerns, so grave that the United States' Export-Import Bank declined to finance any part of the project, and have overridden objections from protectors of countless cultural relics and temples on the riverbanks that will be submerged in the coming years. Not even the widespread mourning for the eventual loss of the Three Gorges themselves, the strikingly beautiful ravines that are as famous in China as the Grand Canyon is in the United States, has stopped the leadership from forging ahead. All public |
971784_1 | The Socratic Method | yet another life going astray. He collars Darryl, brings him back to his shack and orders him to pluck the bird. Watching the youth, he intuits that he has something to hide. And indeed he has -- he has been involved in the killing of a retarded boy. As the old Socrates starts to press at him, we pick up some of the rhythms of the original Socratic catechisms: ''What you gonna do, li'l brother?'' ''What?'' ''How you gonna make it right?'' ''Make what right? He dead. I cain't raise him back here.'' Patient, knowing, tapping a lifetime's inextinguishable rage as well as a long schooling in remorse -- he has several murders on his own conscience -- Socrates eventually gets Darryl to grasp the concept of atonement. Atonement -- giving something back -- is what Socrates has been occupied with since leaving prison eight years earlier. He has been trying to find the springs of his own honor and decency, even as he knows that there are old wrongs that cannot be righted. His quest is that of the Christian as well as that of the moral philosopher, but one would have to theorize a good deal to establish this. For ''Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned'' is a book of rough talk and strong gesture. And Socrates is no paragon. He must fight his violent impulses constantly; he lusts and boozes; he in no way loves all things. But his core goodness becomes more palpable for this very reason. Mosley models Socrates from all sides, many unflattering, yet he manages to leave us with the impression of a man whose soul is tuned to the pain of others. Socrates acts decently not because he hews to a code of right action, but because decency follows from this susceptibility. His decency is a force. Over time, and not always easily, Socrates brings Darryl around. He has searched out the wounded soul, not the felon, and the wounded soul eventually answers. But credibly -- Mosley has not appliqued his morality; he has located its deep coiled root and tracked it up to the surface. These variously angled tales show us Socrates reckoning with his ghosts -- memories of his dreadful deeds as well as of lost love -- and trying to make his way on the slick margins of his world. He exerts himself mightily to get and then hold a menial |
971726_0 | Slower Population Growth Won't Last Forever; U.S. Undermines Itself | To the Editor: ''House Threat to Family Planning'' (editorial, Nov. 6) rightly criticizes proposed restrictions on international family planning money as harmful to women's health. But the legislation also contradicts United States foreign policy goals as well as international human rights treaties endorsed by the United States and more than 100 other countries. This legislation would deny financing to any organization that provides, with its own money, abortion services abroad or that advocates for laws to make abortion safer. By doing so, it defies a tenet of United States foreign policy to encourage nongovernmental organizations, and women in particular, to participate freely in their societies as a way to foster democracy. The bill also contradicts international human rights norms that guarantee women the right to reproductive self-determination. JANET BENSHOOF President, Center for Reproductive Law and Policy New York, Nov. 6, 1997 |
976316_0 | INSIDE | Action Sought on Climate As nations prepare to discuss a treaty on global warming, The New York Times Poll has found that the American people are more willing than their Government to take steps to counter the threat. Page A36. Airlines Tighten Bag Rules With airplanes nearly full and business fares at record levels, airlines are limiting the amount of carry-on baggage. But they are facing complaints from passengers. Page D1. Dinner in a Diner Single women, divorced fathers and young couples who refuse to cook find their Thanksgiving meal at a coffee shop that is also a microcosm of life in New York City. Page B1. |
976260_1 | Airlines Test Tighter Rules On Baggage | is acting now is economic. After losing $13 billion from 1990 to 1994, the industry is finally flush, with planes often nearly full and business fares at record levels. So now airlines are betting they can risk angering some of their lower-paying customers by tightening their carry-on regulations, with little fear of losing business. Moreover, the jammed overhead bins in airplane cabins have long been an irritant to the full-fare business traveler -- the airlines' most valued customer, who typically pays three to four times the fare of a leisure passenger on the same flight, and who together account for as much as 60 percent of an airline's revenue. In addition, the airlines have become more aggressive in dealing with delayed departures, which cost them millions of dollars a year. One source of those delays has been passengers jostling to find space for their carry-on items. For more than a decade, pilots and flight attendants have called, to little avail, for new restrictions limiting carry-on luggage to one item, saying that excess baggage posed a safety hazard to passengers and crew and disrupted on-time performance. But if carry-on luggage has long been a problem, by almost all accounts it is much worse today. Record passenger loads, smaller aircraft and the airlines' willingness for most of this decade to turn a blind eye to their own limits on carry-on luggage have created conditions that passengers as well as flight crews decry as intolerable. Adding to the overcrowding are the increasing number of seats put into coach class by most airlines, often so that they can expand their first-class and business-class cabins. The Consumer Reports Travel Letter recently noted that airlines stuff six seats into rows on single-aisle Boeing planes that are wide enough for only five passengers. Even on widebodies, including L-1011's, DC-10's or MD-11's, a few carriers put 10 seats into rows designed for 9. And more rows of seats have been added as well, cutting into legroom and the storage space beneath the seats. In the meantime, the number of available overbins has generally remained the same, or has even been reduced. As a result, on almost any given plane more passengers than before are competing for the increasingly scarce carry-on baggage space. The airlines, of course, are not indifferent to safety problems posed by jam-packed overhead bins -- not when more than 4,000 airline passengers were injured last |
974875_0 | Guerin and Devils Finally Agree to a Deal | Bill Guerin signed a multiyear contract with the Devils today, putting an end to his seasonlong holdout and a dispute with his general manager, Lou Lamoriello, that had broadened into a debate on whether Lamoriello would name Guerin to the United States Olympic team. Guerin, who was a restricted free agent without a contract, had been embroiled in tough contract negotiations with Lamoriello, the Devils' general manager and also the general manager of the United States team. Earlier this month, Lamoriello said that Guerin had not been selected among the first 17 National Hockey League players chosen for the team that will play in Nagano, Japan, in February because he was out of playing shape. However, some players around the league said they believed Lamoriello was using a berth on the Olympic team as leverage with Guerin in an attempt to get the player to sign for less money. Earlier this week, Brett Hull of the St. Louis Blues said that some players had talked of boycotting the United States team if Guerin was not named to it. Hull has since softened his stance, although players have rallied around Guerin as an Olympic candidate. Six spots remain on the United States Olympic team, with final rosters due by Dec. 1. ''It feels all right to be back,'' a bleary-eyed Guerin said today after an optional practice at South Mountain Arena. ''I just want to get back to playing hockey, that's it.'' Guerin, a 6-foot-2-inch, 210-pound power forward who earned $748,000 last season, won a Stanley Cup with New Jersey in 1995 and was an integral member of the United States team that won the World Cup international competition in September 1996. Higher-profile teammates from that squad, like Hull and Brian Leetch of the Rangers, said they believed Guerin should be selected to the Olympic team. ''It means everything to me, to have the respect and support of your peers,'' the 27-year-old Guerin said today while signing a few autographs after practice. ''It means a great deal.'' Asked if he had spoken directly with Lamoriello, Guerin said, ''Yes, of course I did -- I had to.'' But when asked specifically if Lamoriello had offered him an Olympic roster spot, the right wing quickly switched to defense. ''I'm not commenting on that,'' he said. Guerin, who scored a career-high 29 goals last season, is not certain when he will return to the |
972045_0 | Rebuild CUNY, but Fairly | After a decade of budget cuts and hiring slowdowns, the City University of New York is running with a stripped-down faculty and with poorly paid adjuncts who stand at the very margins of academic life carrying more than half the teaching load. The board of trustees wants to hire more senior, full-time faculty. Administrators throughout the 17-campus system applaud the effort. But some are troubled by a provision that would assign fewer faculty positions to campuses that have lower graduation rates. The discrepancies are relatively small at this point. But if doggedly pursued, the graduation-rate provision will divert resources from campuses that serve poorer students to campuses where students are better prepared and come from more privileged backgrounds. The emphasis on full-time faculty is long overdue. Since the late 1980's the teaching load of adjuncts has gone steadily upward, nearing 60 percent in the two-year colleges and 50 percent in four-year colleges as of 1996. The adjuncts are dedicated. But earning only about $3,000 a course, with few or no benefits, many of them end up dashing from one part-time job to another, leaving little time for student counseling or the administrative committee work that keeps the institution functioning. To stabilize the system, the trustees have set a goal of having at least 70 percent of the four-year college faculty consist of full-time teachers. The decision to award additional slots based on graduation rates is potentially troublesome. Colleges should certainly be held accountable and move as many students as possible toward degrees. But CUNY's mission -- as written into state law -- requires the system to accept a broad range of people, many of them new immigrants, non-English speakers and poorer students hobbled by exposure to the city's worst public schools. Campuses that serve the least-prepared students naturally have lower graduation rates and more dropouts. Even so, they move dramatic numbers of immigrants out of poverty and into the middle class. CUNY officials describe the provision as a modest incentive that will inspire campuses to do a better job. But critics worry that the measure could induce schools to turn away from CUNY's traditional mission of serving disadvantaged students. A few trustees and legislators have already expressed misgivings. They need to force a full and open debate before the new policy is written in stone. |
972821_1 | THE MEDIA BUSINESS: ADVERTISING ; A Canadian agency group hopes to persuade potential clients to take a look north of the border. | is indicative of the growing globalization of advertising as multinational marketers increasingly look at results rather than passports. ''Where ideas come from is not as important as whether or not they work,'' said Andy Krupski, chairman of the institute's business development committee, who is president and chief executive at the Grey Canada unit of Grey Advertising in Toronto. ''This is the first step in a continuing program to make sure the world is aware of the talent that's in Canada.'' The initiative offers a lengthy list of what the institute describes as the advantages of hiring Canadian agencies, from favorable exchange rates to efficient production facilities to experience in ethnic marketing. ''Our industry has to work in two official languages by law,'' Mr. Krupski said, referring to English and French, ''and in three or four by a market perspective. Because we have a lot of constituencies, we have to make ideas strong enough to work across cultural lines.'' ''And typically we do that with fewer dollars than may be afforded in the U.S.,'' he added, ''which may make us more agile and frugal.'' But persuading Americans that other countries can be capable of effective work is a challenge not unlike withstanding a Canadian winter without a warm coat. ''U.S. chauvinism'' is daunting, said Stan Sutter, editor of Marketing Magazine, a weekly trade publication in Toronto, who described the initiative as ''calling the bluff of all the companies that say they believe in globalization.'' ''If globalization is real,'' he asked, ''why not use an agency in Toronto, Vancouver or Montreal?'' Another reason the institute is prospecting for American clients, he said, is that ''since the recession of the early 1990's, it's been tough on the agency industry here.'' ''Accounts keep going south,'' he added. O. Burtch Drake, president and chief executive of the association of American agencies, echoed that. ''A lot of companies are handling Canada out of the United States,'' he said, ''which eventually leads to a consolidation of Canadian assignments -- handled by Canadian agencies or Canadian offices of U.S. agencies -- at U.S. agencies.'' ''I know the people up there quite well,'' he added, referring to the managers of Canadian agencies, ''and they're good, smart ad people. But there are some pretty good agencies here. The ultimate test is whether the work will be as good as they can get here.'' At least one advertiser has decided that |
971135_1 | Havana Journal; Castro's Cigar, a Namesake, and Smell of Trouble | includes tobacco grown in the Dominican Republic, Indonesia and Cameroon. ''It sounds like a real cocktail.'' Because of the 36-year-old American economic embargo against Cuba, Cohibas made here cannot be legally imported into the United States. But the strategy of both parties to the dispute suggests that they may be looking to the day when the embargo and the Helms-Burton Act, which last year tightened restrictions on Cuban commerce, are lifted and products made here can again be sold in the American market. General Cigar Holdings Inc., a New York-based company, says it began using the Cohiba name in the United States as early as 1978. But it was not until this year that lawyers for Habanos formally challenged that trademark, saying its property, which takes its name from an Indian word for tobacco, had been illegally expropriated. ''It is very disconcerting that a serious company would try to appropriate the name of one of the most famous and sought-after cigars in the world by taking advantage of the inability of Habanos to enter the U.S. market,'' said Ana Lopez, the Cuban company's marketing director. She described the rival Cohiba as ''a fraud'' that ''neither offers the superior characteristics of the Habanos Cohiba nor compares with the quality of any other Cuban brand.'' But A. Ross Wollen, a lawyer and senior vice president for General Cigar, said his company had acted entirely properly, and predicted that the United States Patent and Trademark Office would eventually reject the Cuban complaint, which is still pending. ''We registered the name Cohiba 20 years ago, but it has had limited distribution until now,'' Mr. Wollen said. ''Internationally, most people associate Cohiba with the Cuban cigar,'' he added, but ''we do not intend to sell our cigar internationally. We are happy to be selling it in the United States.'' Mr. Wollen also denied Cuban accusations that General Cigar was trying to deceive smokers. ''Our packaging is different from the Cuban Cohiba, so we don't think consumers are confused,'' he said. ''It is very clear in our advertisements and promotions that our cigar is made in the Dominican Republic.'' But because of what the Cohiba name signifies here and around the world, the dispute has overtones that are as much political as commercial. ''Cohiba is a fruit of the Cuban revolution, and as such our most precious jewel,'' said Francisco Linares Calvo, president of Habanos. In |
971158_5 | Isaiah Berlin, Philosopher And Pluralist, Is Dead at 88 | North: J. G. Hamann and the Origins of Modern Irrationalism'' (1993). This year, another collection edited by Mr. Hardy, ''The Sense of Reality,'' was published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in the United States. It will soon be followed by another book, ''The Proper Study of Mankind: An Anthology of Essays.'' Until the publication of the Hardy collections, Sir Isaiah had been known as a man who talked much but wrote little and had, in fact, been taken to task for not producing a major opus, a failing attributed to his reluctance to sit at a desk in front of a blank piece of paper. But Sir Isaiah said he gave no thought to leaving a legacy and insisted that he had no interest whatsoever either in his reputation or in what people would say about him after he died. Sitting in his London flat for an interview last year, he said: ''I really am very unambitious. I'm underambitious, if anything. I've never, never aimed at anything. I didn't shape my life. I did simply one thing after another. When opportunities arose I took them. It's an unplanned life essentially.'' When it was suggested that he was known as a man who took great pleasure in intellectual life, he said, ''I take pleasure in pleasure.'' A Deep Commitment To Ideas' Importance Among the opportunities he grasped that afforded him many pleasures were assignments in Washington during World War II, Moscow just after the war, and a long association with Oxford. But underlying whatever he did was his belief in the overriding importance of ideas. ''When ideas are neglected by those who ought to attend to them -- that is to say, those who have been trained to think critically about ideas -- they often acquire an unchecked momentum and an irresistible power over multitudes of men that may grow too violent to be affected by rational criticism,'' he wrote in ''Two Concepts of Liberty.'' He added, ''Over a hundred years ago, the German poet Heine warned the French not to underestimate the power of ideas: philosophical concepts nurtured in the stillness of a professor's study could destroy a civilization. . . . if professors can truly wield this fatal power, may it not be that only other professors, or, at least, other thinkers (and not governments or congressional committees) can alone disarm them? Our philosophers seem oddly unaware of these |
971113_2 | Asia Drop Sends Shivers Through Builders | Fluor as the largest American construction company, counts about 15 percent of its business there. But the Jacobs Engineering Group has little business in Asia. So far, non-American companies have taken the biggest hit. Hopewell Holdings, controlled by Gordon Wu of Hong Kong, took a $647 million charge against earnings after the collapse of a $3.2 billion mass-transit project in Thailand. ABB, based in Switzerland, took a $100 million charge after it lost the contract for the Bakun Dam hydroelectric power project in Malaysia, the largest project in the company's history. Nevertheless, ABB said last month that it planned retrenchments in Europe and would focus on the Asian market. Malaysia also delayed an airport, a highway and the KL Linear City, a 1.2-mile-long building, billed as the world's longest, that would have been built over a river in Kuala Lumpur. Indonesia postponed 14 power plants indefinitely and put 9 others under review. It also delayed two oil refineries, 29 toll roads and a bridge. Among the delayed Indonesian projects was a $525 million gas-fired plant that would be partly owned by the Enron Corporation of Houston. Among the partners in other postponed projects are Duke Energy, California Energy, Morrison-Knudsen and Unocal. Most companies were reluctant to discuss what projects they were bidding on and which were canceled or delayed. But it appears that scuttling of projects already under way is not the big issue -- it is delays or cancellations of future projects. ''We have not seen an impact on our current activities,'' said James O. Rollans, senior vice president of Fluor, based in Irvine, Calif. Fluor officials also contend that many projects are for private providers, not for governments, and will thus be insulated from some shocks. Perhaps Fluor's biggest project in the region is a $1.2 billion contract to build a power plant in Indonesia for Edison Mission Energy. But even private projects could suffer in a downturn. The power plants sell to state-owned utilities, and Indonesia is expected to try to lower the tariff it pays for electricity. Edward R. Muller, president of Mission Energy, said his company had had no such contact from the Indonesian Government. The Bechtel Group, based in San Francisco, had a petrochemical project in Thailand canceled and was actively bidding to become the contractor on one of the postponed Indonesian projects, industry executives say. Jennifer Gee, spokeswoman for Bechtel Asia-Pacific, said the |
974171_0 | Breeding Seeds of Discontent; Cotton Growers Say Strain Cuts Yields | One year ago, Rodney Garrison was a true believer in a breakthrough cotton strain that had been genetically engineered to resist spraying with the Monsanto Company's Roundup weed killer. ''Roundup Ready cotton is going to be as revolutionary to the cotton industry as the cotton picker,'' he proclaimed under a grinning photograph in a corporate brochure. Today, Mr. Garrison's ardor has turned to rancor. ''See this?'' he shouted over drumming rain on a recent tour of Roundup Ready fields that he had sprayed with Roundup, he held up a branch mottled with scars where closed green cotton bolls had withered and dropped. A single white tuft clung to the limb's end. ''Six positions,'' he said, counting out to the end of the shoot. ''Five are missing.'' Monsanto calls the genetically engineered cotton it developed with the Delta and Pine Land Company the most successful product introduction in farming history -- likely to make cotton the nation's first crop in which genetically altered varieties predominate. But in the Mississippi Delta, the revolution has produced enough casualties that officials are warning farmers to hold off until further testing proves the technology's reliability. Mr. Garrison's disillusionment, shared by dozens of other farmers here who are seeking perhaps millions of dollars in damages from the two companies, exposes the risks of speeding new technology to a market like agriculture where caution has ruled. In Texas, the companies face a lawsuit over the performance of another genetically altered variety. And last week, Pioneer Hi-Bred International Inc., the nation's largest producer of seed corn, announced its refusal to add Monsanto's Roundup Ready gene to its corn, saying Monsanto's proposed charges and restrictions outweigh the benefits for farmers, a point Monsanto disputes. These objections mark the strongest resistance yet from within the agricultural camp. Environmentalists have protested for years that bioengineering can have dangerous and unpredictable side effects; just last week, a Greenpeace ship blocked the unloading of Monsanto's genetically engineered soybeans in Amsterdam. Now, some who cheer corporate efforts to control genetic destiny are, for purely business reasons, drawing back. For Monsanto, the stakes could not be higher. The $9 billion company is transforming itself from a chemical company into a biotechnology and ''life sciences'' conglomerate, spending billions on research and acquisitions. Monsanto has spliced its Roundup Ready gene into soybeans as well as cotton, and has improved cotton with a gene that makes the plants |
974254_0 | CHRONICLE | JACKSON BROWNE, the folk-rock singer and composer, is concerned not only with the sounds produced by the guitars he plays, but also with the logging methods used to obtain the wood from which they are made. Tomorrow evening, Mr. Browne and others, including Roseanne Cash and Levon Helm, will play in a concert at the Oscar Hammerstein Ballroom on West 34th Street to benefit the Rainforest Alliance. He will be playing a guitar made by Gibson U.S.A. under a program called Smartwood, established in 1989 to help preserve forests. ''Everybody is familiar with the problem of the rain forest, but not with what we can do individually to save them,'' Mr. Browne said yesterday. ''The Rainforest Alliance is promoting a set of standards called Smartwood,'' he said, ''whereby companies agree to be certified so that you can be sure that their products don't come from the clear-cutting of rain forests or anything that hurts native people or species in the forests.'' Mr. Browne, who collects guitars, said, ''You can make a Smartwood guitar that is every bit as desirable, sounds as beautiful, plays as well as other instruments and the only difference is that these woods were harvested conscientiously not to harm the rain forest or hurt people living there.'' |
974153_3 | U.S. Appellate Panel Rules Ohio Ban on Late-Term Abortion Is Unconstitutional | on the constitutionality of this definition or the Federal legislation,'' the court said. Other than Ohio, the states that have banned the procedure have used the Congressional language. The majority opinion in the case, Women's Medical Professional Corp. v. Voinovich, was written by Judge Cornelia G. Kennedy with the concurrence of Judge Bailey Brown. In a dissenting opinion, Judge Danny J. Boggs said that although the Ohio legislature ''might have been wise'' to use language resembling the Federal legislation, the law was clear enough to ''give fair notice'' to what was prohibited. ''The plaintiffs are attempting to create ambiguity where there is none,'' Judge Boggs said, adding: ''Such is the genius of a vagueness challenge because, in the extreme, words can always be said to be ambiguous.'' He continued: ''I doubt that the lawyers and litigants will ever stop this game. Perhaps the Supreme Court will do so.'' In other sections of the majority opinion, the court struck down two other provisions of Ohio's abortion law. Both provisions were designed to restrict abortions after the point of fetal viability, which the law presumed to occur at 24 weeks of pregnancy. Under the Supreme Court's abortion precedents, states may prohibit abortions after viability ''except where it is necessary, in appropriate medical judgment, for the preservation of the life or health of the mother,'' as the Court said in its 1992 decision in Planned Parenthood v. Casey. The Ohio law defined a narrower exception: ''necessary to prevent the death of the pregnant woman or a serious risk of the substantial and irreversible impairment of a major bodily function of the pregnant woman.'' The appeals court majority today said the health exception also ''must encompass severe irreversible risks of mental and emotional harm'' as well as physical injury. Janet Benshoof, president of the Center for Reproductive Law and Policy, a Manhattan-based abortion rights organization that brought the Ohio challenge, said the decision today sent ''a critical message to policymakers across the nation that they cannot enact bans on specific abortion methods nor impose extreme restrictions on later abortions that jeopardize women's lives and health.'' Yet there was at least a suggestion in the opinion today that a precisely worded ban on a particular abortion method, even before fetal viability, might be acceptable if it defined the procedure with more care and avoided the vagueness problem the appeals court identified in the Ohio statute. |
974140_0 | United States of Excess? | To the Editor: On your Nov. 15 editorial page, you condemn the Chinese for building the Three Gorges Dam (''Gigantism on the Yangtze'') while Brent Staples tries to explain the American taste for huge, wasteful sport utility vehicles (''Loving and Hating Big Dream Machines,'' Editorial Observer). Whether we consider greenhouse gas emissions or massive dam projects, Americans expect other nations to choose a different, more responsible route to development than we have followed. However bad an idea I believe the Three Gorges Dam to be, I find American objections hypocritical and a fine example of too little, too late. Imagine a world in which everyone consumed the way Americans do. The Three Gorges Dam dwarfs even the Navigator, the latest sport utility vehicle, but the burden that American vehicles inflict on the earth's environment far exceeds that of any dam. MASON FRICHETTE Sequim, Wash., Nov. 17, 1997 |
975260_4 | Used Cars: Not Usually A Hard Sell These Days | people were also simply re-leasing their vehicles when their leases expired. ''They've got a car that's only two years old, and they come in, and then they realize that they can keep it and cut their lease payments,'' Mr. Di Feo said. It's still caveat emptor, to be sure, but there are more cream-puff cars and fewer lemons on the lots than ever before, largely because many dealers have joined certified used-car programs. General Motors' certification program puts cars that are less than four years old with no more than 60,000 miles through a 110-point inspection. Worn or broken parts are repaired or replaced. Then the cars are backed by extended factory warranties with the same coverage as if they were new. G.M. also includes a three-day, 150-mile, money-back guarantee. Buyers, though, should weigh the benefits of these certification programs; they can easily add up to $1,000 to the price of the car, an amount which may or may not be recouped in fewer repair bills. Used-car shoppers can also pay a small fee to car-buying services, like Auto Vantage of Stamford, Conn., or Auto Search of Bedford, Tex., to find the right car and price. The services, which charge a fee, often obtain the cars from a large fleet dealer, saving the buyer money and the difficulty of negotiating for a lower price. Consumers, of course, can also find a used car on the Internet. ''The used-car market has changed, as more late-model cars of good quality become available at prices that allow consumers to step up in desirability,'' said Ken Elias, the president of Carqwik Inc. of Santa Monica, Calif., an on-line used-car superstore that allows shoppers to search inventories of used-car dealers. CARQWIK'S listings include photographs of the vehicles and detailed information about options, engines and transmissions. ''With more consumers now shopping for better used cars, they need the tools to help them shop, and the Internet gives them a way to see a broad selection of availability and pricing and to compare against new-car pricing,'' Mr. Elias said. Margaret Schwartz, a vice president for marketing with Carfax, a provider of used-vehicle information on the Internet, added: ''Consumers now have powerful tools that help them make smarter decisions about used cars. And dealers know it, and they are responding. The days of relying on what a guy in a lavender leisure suit says are gone.'' SPENDING IT |
975339_0 | Carl G. Hempel Dies at 92; Applied Science to Philosophy | Carl G. Hempel, whose rigorously empirical approach to scientific logic was at the center of American scholarly writing on the philosophy of science for several decades, died on Nov. 9 at a nursing home near Princeton, N.J. He was 92. Dr. Hempel, called Peter, taught at Princeton University from 1955 to 1973, becoming the Stuart Professor of Philosophy. He was the last surviving member of the Vienna Circle, a group of philosophers who loathed the irrational and mystical thinking of late-19th-century Europe and, in reaction, advocated what they called ''logical positivism,'' which argued that whatever could not be verified by experience was meaningless. They sought to apply the methods of the natural sciences and mathematics to the work of philosophers, stirring heated controversy. Dr. Paul Benacerraf, a student of Dr. Hempel's who is now on the Princeton faculty, said Dr. Hempel contended that all the sciences could be understood under a single set of general laws. One scholar who often differed with Dr. Hempel, Dr. Willard Van Orman Quine, a professor emeritus of philosophy at Harvard University, called Dr. Hempel ''a moderate logical positivist.'' Dr. Quine said Dr. Hempel's views had been succeeded by ''relativism, doctrines that would make science a matter of fads,'' adding, ''These are anti-scientific views.'' Carl G. Hempel was born in Oranienburg, Germany, and studied mathematics, physics and philosophy at the Universities of Gottingen, Heidelberg, Vienna and Berlin, where he received a doctorate in 1934 for work on probability under Hans Reichenbach, a founder of the philosophy of logical empiricism. Dr. Hempel's empirical approach surfaced early, said his daughter, Miranda Tobyanne Hempel of Princeton. After he crashed his bicycle into a lamppost as a boy and suffered a concussion, he resolved never to drive a car. Dr. Hempel fled Nazism, moving to Belgium and, in 1938, to the United States. His writings were so influential that for decades almost any rival theory of scientific explanation took his work as a point of departure, said a former student, Adolf Grunbaum, the Andrew Mellon Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh. In 1948, Dr. Hempel produced his deductive-nomological theory, which holds that scientific conclusions are best deduced using logic and a larger law, or nomos in Greek. He built a precise mathematical foundation for explaining statistical, or probabilistic, answers. For example, if a patient asks a doctor about the chance of a cure, the doctor's explanation might |
975307_3 | Word for Word/Disaster Do's and Don'ts; From Bitter Experience, New Ways To Handle Aviation Calamities | from a timeliness-of-notification standpoint for the airline to notify family members in person, this fact does not preclude an in-person follow-up notification. This follow-up visit (if the family wants one) should be discussed with the family member during the phone call. Personal Effects To allow survivors and families to review the unassociated personal effects [jewelry and other items scattered by the crash that do not obviously belong to a particular victim], airlines should either provide a readily accessible visual display of the personal effects of the victims at the crash site, or provide a photograph album or video, allowing the families of the victims to view it at their convenience. Airlines should place the emotionally disturbing and/or graphic photographs toward the back of the catalog, set off from other photographs by a divider indicating the nature of the photos behind it. If a visual display of the personal effects is provided at the crash site, airlines should provide transportation and accommodations for the families. These items should be cleaned and made ''presentable.'' Passenger Lists The task force recommends that airlines have readily available for every flight, either in a passenger manifest or through the use of ''contact cards,'' the following data: the full name for each passenger, a contact phone number for each passenger, and a contact name for each passenger. This same requirement should extend to a travel agent or tour operator who books the flight. The task force as a whole agrees that, in conjunction with the passenger's [full first and last] name, a contact phone number would do the most to increase the speed with which notification is made to the families of the passengers. [Some task force members, however,] state that if an airline were required to request a contact name from each passenger, this would result in an increase in the processing time for each passenger. This increase in processing time translates to increased costs for the airlines. Lawyers The solicitation-prohibition clause in [the avia tion-disaster law] should be amended to include the solicitation by an attorney's agent, and to extend the solicitation-prohibition moratorium to 45 days. Jaunita Madole, aviation plaintiff attorney, testified that in the USAir 427 crash [near Pittsburgh in September 1994], over 60 families were called by an attorney's representative posing as a survivor of prior airline crashes and advocating the attorney's work. Currently [the law] prohibits unsolicited communication by plaintiff and |
976437_2 | Asian Pollution Is Widening Its Deadly Reach | Indonesia's forest fires have released as much greenhouse gas as all the cars and power plants throughout Europe will emit this entire year. Fundamentally, Asia is so huge and is industrializing so quickly and is so dependent on coal and oil -- prime sources of carbon emissions -- that its share of greenhouse gas emissions is almost certain to overtake that of the West. The Asian Development Bank calculates that by the year 2020, the emissions will increase two to five times, depending in part on whether curbs are instituted. The Smoke Students Can't See The Blackboard The forest fires of Indonesia demonstrate the difficulty of grappling with transborder pollution. Malaysia and Singapore were particularly hard-hit, and their relatively well-educated populations were more aware of the dangers of breathing the smoke. But they were in effect the hostages of Indonesians who saw the problems as an inconvenience rather than a health crisis. At a junior high school in the city of Jambi on Sumatra, a few hundred students in tan uniforms swarmed about the open square in the middle of the school, none wearing face masks. Some played tag -- an ideal game, because the blanket of smoke made it easy to hide -- and teachers dismissed the haze as nothing more than a bother. ''We have no health problems and no drop-off in attendance,'' Ratnajuwita, the matronly principal of a private school in Jambi, said in her office. ''Everyone is fine. The only problem is that we can't use the blackboards in the classrooms.'' Why? ''The smoke is so thick in the classrooms that students can't see what is written,'' Mrs. Ratnajuwita explained patiently. And then she smiled reassuringly and added, ''But there are no health problems.'' Officials at the Government hospital in Jambi largely echo that line, describing the smoke as more of a nuisance than a hazard. But that may reflect Government policy more than medical fact, for in other countries periods of severe haze have been associated with sharp increases in short-term death rates, as well as long-term increases that are harder to measure. Twenty miles from Jambi, in the riverside village of Kumpeh, a cluster of wooden houses on stilts inaccessible except by footpath, the farmers have not been informed of the official line. They say that many of the village's 1,496 people are sick, and that three have died after bouts of coughing and |
976437_6 | Asian Pollution Is Widening Its Deadly Reach | be on the countless millions of people who lived in the center of the ashtray for months, breathing in the smoke day after day. To hike through the villages of Sumatra is an eerie experience, the smoke hiding the tropical sun so that even mid-day feels like dusk. The woods are completely quiet, the birds refusing to chirp and even the monkeys sitting forlorn and silent in the trees. The Filth Local Pollution, Global Effects Asia's problems are so severe because pollution tends to reflect two fundamental forces: industrialization and increasing population density. The filthiest smoke and water arise in the early stages of industrialization, where most of Asia is now, and Asia's population is dense and growing rapidly. In that respect, the forest fires are an anomaly, for the worst problems tend to be in the new mega-cities, those with more than 10 million people. Asia has nine of the world's 14 mega-cities, including the biggest, Tokyo, and the fastest-growing, Dhaka, Bangladesh. If the image of Asia past is the timeless one of a peasant in a rice paddy, then the symbol of Asia in the coming decades may be of children playing in the rivulets of sewage that run through Dharavi, the gritty, smoky shantytown in Bombay, India, that is probably the biggest slum in the world. While the pollution in Dharavi will kill or harm primarily the people of Dharavi, some of the filth will reverberate around the world. The Kyoto conference underscores the attention being devoted to international concerns like global warming -- although, to be fair, Americans are the most profligate source of emissions, so that the people of New York threaten the citizens of Dharavi far more than the other way around. Some international environmental concerns are regional, like the air pollution particles and acid rain that originate in one country and then endanger people in neighboring countries. These are international but not quite global, for the air pollution from the Asian mainland is detectable in Hawaii but not in the continental United States. Then there are the genuinely global challenges, like global warming or the chlorofluorocarbon emissions that harm the ozone layer. China is now the largest source of those emissions, but it and all other countries are to halt production within a decade under an international treaty. A third challenge is the preservation of resources in the international ''commons,'' like oceans. And |
976588_1 | Cancun It's Not, but Cuba Welcomes More Visitors | Under the Trading With the Enemy Act, it has been illegal since 1963 for Americans, with a few exceptions, to spend any money in Cuba. Though the embargo would have to be lifted by the Federal Government to change this, visitors who look, sound and behave as if they are from the United States can increasingly be encountered in Cuba. Havana has sought to compensate for isolation from its closest and most natural market by courting Canadian, Latin American and especially European tourists (and, for Americans eager to avoid problems when they return home, by offering the option of not having a Cuban visa stamped into their passports when they arrive). For tourists of any nationality, combining a visit to Cuba with a stopover somewhere else in the region is becoming easier than ever. In the last year, for instance, nonstop air service between Havana and Montego Bay, Jamaica, and Guatemala City has begun, and Mexico's Aero Caribe line has announced plans to fly three times a week between Cancun and Varadero, Cuba's principal beach resort, 90 miles east of Havana. To accommodate the anticipated influx, Cuba has embarked on a major hotel construction and renovation effort. Only 27,000 rooms are deemed suitable for foreign tourism, but the Government hopes to double that figure in less than a decade through joint ventures and other collaborations with established European and Latin American hotel chains. On Oct. 4, for instance, the first Club Med in Cuba opened in Varadero. While numerous other hotels in the capital, Varadero and other popular resorts like Cayo Coco already meet international standards, the pickings remain much slimmer for visitors to provincial capitals like Santa Clara or Camaguey. There, the majority of hotels are still antiquated, service is lackadaisical and food both mediocre and limited. Nor can Cuba be considered a bargain destination. Although some tourists, Canadians and Mexicans in particular, have been quick to take advantage of prepaid package tours bought in their home countries, all transactions within Cuba -- or at least legal ones -- must take place in dollars or other hard currencies. The feeble Cuban peso trades at exchange houses open to Cubans only at the rate of 23 pesos to the dollar. In addition, the Government has recently imposed controversial new taxes on private rental lodgings in an apparent effort to discourage the residents of houses and apartments from letting out rooms |
976888_2 | Greenhouse Gas Issue: Haggling Over Fairness | including Dr. Mwandosya, to contain elements of a constructive approach. One good sign, the third-world countries say, is that they have already lessened the rates at which their emissions are increasing. A recent study by the World Resources Institute, a Washington-based research organization, found that many key third-world countries, have cut or eliminated energy subsidies and as a result are emitting less carbon dioxide than they otherwise would have. Cutting the subsidies has raised energy costs and thereby discouraged the burning of coal and oil. The pricing changes were undertaken for economic reasons, not environmental ones, the report said, but the effect on carbon emissions was the same. ''It appears,'' the study reported, ''that developing countries are already doing a great deal to limit emissions -- a fact largely overlooked in the current debate.'' Encouraging Signs In Third World Dr. Mwandosya said in a recent interview that he believed the reported reductions would be evident when third-world countries make their first official emissions inventories, over the next two years, as required by the 1992 Rio treaty. While the treaty does not impose on the poorer countries any targets and timetables for emissions cuts, it does require them in general to rein in emissions. The 1992 treaty required industrialized countries, on the other hand, to aim at a specific goal of reducing emissions to 1990 levels by 2000. Most countries, including the United States, will fail to meet this voluntary target. Two and a half years ago, the conference of the parties to the treaty agreed in Berlin that the original goal was inadequate and began the long negotiating process that is to conclude in Kyoto. The Berlin agreement specifically exempted third-world countries from having to do more more than what the treaty's general provisions specify. As a result, the poorer countries have resolutely refused to consider any new commitments in eight sessions of talks leading up to Kyoto. But the final round here will involve the full conference of the parties again, and the issue of new commitments for third-world countries could be taken up formally. In addition to whatever progress the poorer countries have made in reducing emissions, there is another reason for encouragement, in Dr. Mwandosya's view. He cited the ''natural phenomenon'' by which third-world countries have historically followed the rich nations' lead in economic and technological development. A variety of existing technologies, many experts say, could reduce |
976916_0 | To Bears in Yosemite, Cars Are Like Cookie Jars | There has never been a human fatality or serious mauling by a black bear in Yosemite, and this year only a few minor injuries. There have, however, been 600 car break-ins by bears this year, causing over $500,000 in damage, up from $300,000 last year. Steve Thompson, the park's wildlife biologist, has catalogued the damage but is quick to insist that the bears are not responsible. Rather, he said, the culprits are careless humans who leave food in their cars and drop cookie crumbs and other edibles on the ground nearby. ''Bears are smart, and some are very smart,'' Mr. Thompson said. ''My problems start when the smarter bears and the dumber visitors intersect.'' This year has been particularly troublesome because of a bumper crop of apples in an orchard on the edges of the parking lot at Curry Village, a gathering of permanent tents and cabins in the heart of Yosemite Valley. The bears, attracted by the scent of ripe apples, have only to walk a few steps from the trees to the parked cars, where some campers leave food on seats and in trunks. In the past two months, bears have been popping out windows at an alarming rate, crawling into as many as 15 cars a night and, if they smell food in the trunks, ripping through the rear seats. Hondas, Dodge Caravans and older Toyotas have been favorite targets, but one late-model BMW convertible sustained $5,000 in damage. The bears are not easily discouraged. Males at this time of year can weigh over 350 pounds, females 250 pounds; some can stand 6 feet tall on their hind legs. Rangers say there may be 350 to 550 bears in the park. About 20 of them are considered ''campground bears,'' virtually addicted to human food. Some bears have broken into cars that contained no food. Rangers speculate that the bears were drawn by leftover food smells, the scent of perfume or suntan lotion. Perhaps -- the most worrisome possibility -- the bears simply enjoyed it. This year, the park's bear management team of two permanent rangers, two seasonal rangers and one volunteer has taken steps to curb the problem at its source: humans. Federal law makes it a crime to store food in cars overnight in the park. A bulletin board of pictures showing bear-damaged cars greets visitors at the campsite, along with a realistic-looking model bear grappling |
976547_1 | Digital Dreams | faith in technological solutions, Dyson looks forward to a world of fulfilling communities in which creativity is rewarded, the powerless become powerful and governments, if not quite withering away, lose many of their teeth. Though an idealist, she is far from starry-eyed: she realizes that these things will not come about unless Internet users -- the growing hyper-community of E-mailers and Web-site browsers -- act responsibly and with foresight. However, as a firm believer in the power and beneficence of the free market, she opposes any attempt to control the Net by legislation (such as the ill-fated Communications Decency Act) and insists that self-regulation works best: rather than trying to squelch pornography by limiting free speech, we should exploit the wide range of content-rating systems that already exist (the chapter on content control gives a handy survey) and use blocking software to keep offensive material from the impressionable. Dyson surveys most of the legal and ethical issues that have surfaced during the past decade, and generally makes moderate and judicious suggestions. Should material posted on Web sites lie within the public domain? Yes, but it's crass to copy without permission. Should anonymous postings be allowed? On balance, yes, despite the admitted evils of electronic stalkers and slanderers -- whistle-blowers and political dissidents, among others, would suffer unjustly if anonymity were outlawed. In addition, she raises some less widely appreciated issues. Encrypting messages in (one hopes) unbreakable code is still frowned on by government agencies, because it's a potential cover for criminal activity. But soon, Dyson predicts, insurance companies will make all businesses routinely encrypt databanks and communications, to avoid the huge claims that would otherwise result from disgruntled customers and ex-employees trashing records, posting confidential data and carrying out similar acts of electronic sabotage. All this and more Dyson accomplishes with a minimum of the techie jargon that turns off so many potential users. On the whole she does an excellent job of explaining acronyms and Netspeak, although the neophyte may still puzzle over ''intranet,'' or ''groupware'' and ''E-cash.'' Indeed, one of her goals is to demystify the Net and thus disarm those who would demonize it. One telling anecdote involves the reaction of Hungarian police officers to a bomb explosion: instead of rounding up the usual suspects, they visited the local Internet provider and demanded a list of his clients. A system that lets people communicate globally, instantly and |
976726_4 | 'A Lifetime Dance With God' | take vows. In the late 1980's, she became the first co-director of the program, which now numbers 62 associates. Her connections to the order, a life of prayer and seeking spiritual direction led to the next logical step: seeking to return to the order as a nun. After three years of exploration, she made her return official. The order has decided she should stay where she is for now. She will live with two sisters from another order, sharing her possessions with her own order, and continue to work as a counselor, both in her own practice and in poor parishes. She is also a member of the new bishop's commission studying the role of women in the Wilmington diocese. Asked why she didn't just continue her ministry as an associate, she said that being a nun freed her of having to care for a home and gave her more time for her ministry while living with nuns with the same values. Sister Doris is the first person in the eastern province of her order to become a nun a second time, said Sister Mary Rattigan, the province leader. There about 800 women religious orders in the United States with 87,644 nuns today compared to 179,954 in the peak year, 1965, said Jeanean Merkel, director of communications for the Leadership Conference of Women Religious in Silver Spring, Md. Unlike the 1960's, when candidates were usually in their teens, most today are older, a mean age of 39.3 years, according to a yet-to-be-released survey by the conference. How many of these were married and had children is difficult to say. Sister Janet Mock, executive director of the Religious Formation Conference, a national organization that helps religious communities with new members, said that the percentage was not high. But, Sister Janet said, the formerly married candidates bring a ''rich pastoral experience'' to their orders. ''They understand what parents are going through in a way someone who has never been a mother does not know,'' Sister Janet said. It is possible that Sister Doris could meet with resentment among sisters who chose to stay in the order, but that is not likely, said Sister Ann Rutan, congregation leader of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Peace. (The order, which had about 900 members in 1956, has about half that number now.) ''She's well known to the sisters and highly respected,'' Sister Ann said. |
976913_0 | A Lush Park Woodland, the Way It Used to Be | In a shed in Prospect Park, Curtis Barnhart uses hand tools from another age -- a log peeler, chisels, planes -- to shape hard-as-stone white oak logs into the elements of a rustic bridge. A wood fire crackles in an iron stove. The man squints, then, ever so tentatively, begins to smile, straining to visualize a strategy for joining two gnarled logs. He is strikingly fastidious, carving a round hole in the end of each log -- a mortise. Then he chisels down the other log, leaving a peg, or tenon. The two must join perfectly. ''If the craftsman has done his job, you will see his love for his work in the piece,'' Mr. Barnhart said. In two weeks, Mr. Barnhart will start to install the first of two bridges he is building just a few steps from his shed in what is now a restricted area of the park. Then, in the spring, people will be allowed to enter the area on guided tours. They will walk on his bridge, see three restored waterfalls and look down a gorge that has been buried for years beneath silt and debris. They will see a project on which the city has already spent $6 million, and on which it may spend $2 million more. They will see 7,000 new shrubs, 12,000 new trees and 161,000 smaller plants. But they will not see the thicker woods that are being carefully nurtured as ''the last forest in Brooklyn.'' This area will remain closed for at least a decade more to allow the plants to grow tall. The goal is to restore the ''rich, dark, cool'' woodland envisioned by the park's designers, Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux. From rustic bridges to wild raspberry patches, planners of the Ravine, as the section is called, are striving for a verisimilitude so precise that every boulder is just where Olmsted and Vaux wanted it. But working drawings were destroyed in the 1930's. So the painstaking reconstruction has been accomplished by numbering each rock, then matching each with historical photographs. These were then enlarged and flipped in a variety of angles through computer imaging so details of craftsmanship and landscaping could be viewed. Further, landscape architects sharpened their focus using descriptions found in Prospect Park's annual reports from the 1870's. Finally, they used what they knew about the designers to make informed guesses. ''You essentially have |
976657_0 | 'The Piano Man' Becomes 'The Boat Man' | BILLY JOEL and his partner are in the midst of a million-dollar venture that is really taking off. No, it is not ''The Piano Man Tour'' with Elton John, although the two are planning an international tour for next year. The venture is building boats, thought up by Mr. Joel and Peter J. Needham, co-owner of the Coecles Harbor Marina and Boatyard on Shelter Island. Their Shelter Island runabout is a product of Mr. Joel's fascination with boating and the sea. ''The seed was planted in 1995,'' he said. ''I'm always looking to come up with new ideas for different kinds of boats that do different things on the waterways. This is a classic design. It harkens back to the 40's.'' Although the runabout may appear old fashioned at first, the twin Mercruiser 502 Magnum engines, each with 415 horsepower, apply to Mr. Joel's working axiom, ''Go fast and look good.'' In the first year of production, seven have been built, sold and shipped at prices starting around $300,000. The plans include introducing smaller and larger models. The current model is 38 feet 4 inches long, with a 10-foot beam. ''Its our special niche,'' Mr. Needham said. ''We have no plans to mass produce it or sub out labor. You start losing quality control.'' Mr. Joel turned his design into reality, he said, ''because part of living out here is being involved in the business community.'' ''I feel more connected now that we have this thing,'' he added. Having a celebrity partner has not hurt, Mr. Needham acknowledged, adding, ''He's helped get us publicity.'' One buyer, Mr. Needham said, ''wasn't sure who Billy was, but he thought he recognized the name.'' ''It gets a certain amount of attention because my name is on it,'' Mr. Joel said. ''But, I mean, I wouldn't buy a boat designed by the Sex Pistols.'' He seemed enthusiastic about the boat business but ambivalent about the rock business. He has been composing classical music lately. ''I don't know if anyone will record it,'' Mr. Joel said. ''In fact I can't even play some of it. I'm like a major league ballplayer. I've had an all-star career, and now it's time to slow down and give the younger guys a chance. I'm almost 50.'' Even on tour, the sea is never far from his thoughts. ''I'm in hotels with stacks of boating magazines and my charts, |
976920_1 | NEWS SUMMARY | challenge, in shootouts that killed as many as 18 people. 15 Germany's Melting Pot Almost 9 percent of Germany's population are foreigners, but Germany resists talk of a melting pot. 3 NATIONAL 20-43 Plans to Test Medicines In Children Draws Dissent Opposition has erupted over a proposal by President Clinton that would require drug companies to test their products in children before putting new medicines on the market. Mr. Clinton says such studies will improve health care for children, but drug companies say the proposal would needlessly put thousands of children at risk. 1 Who Gets Water in the West From the Colorado River to California's Central Valley, water from the subsidized farms and playgrounds created by Government irrigation is being diverted to nearly extinct wildlife, long-forgotten Indian tribes and cities that barely existed when the big dams and canals were built. 1 Trucks Favored by the Law If most sport utility vehicles, pickup trucks and mini-vans were classified as cars, they would violate Federal standards for pollution and gasoline consumption aimed at protecting the environment and conserving energy. Instead, lawmakers have granted special favors to makers and buyers of light trucks. 1 A Cookie Jar on Wheels There has never been a human fatality or serious mauling by a black bear in Yosemite National Park. There have been, however, 600 car break-ins this year, causing over $500,000 in damage, from bears drawn by careless campers who leave food on seats and in trunks. 20 Gay Foster Parent Debate A Texas child welfare supervisor's decision to remove a baby boy from the care of a foster parent who is a lesbian has focused attention on a 118-year-old state statute that makes homosexual activity a crime. 20 NEW YORK/REGION 45-50 Investment Fraud Spreads Investment fraud is spreading across the country, with New York at its center, according to law enforcement officials and securities regulators. The fraud involves the sale of marginal companies' low-priced stocks to amateur investors who are besieged by telephone sales calls. While the victims are usually told that the company in question is the next Microsoft or McDonald's, the shares they buy often turn out to be worthless. 1 Perilous Cyclists The sight of restaurant deliverymen on beat-up bicycles riding on sidewalks or going the wrong way on one-way streets is increasingly common. And the frequent near misses and occasional, harrowing accidents, like the death of a 68-year-old |
971381_1 | NEWS SUMMARY | several years have tried to promote the rights of indigenous peoples in the state. A3 French Strike Nears End A five-day siege of France's highways by striking truck drivers began to wind down as members of the largest union approved a wage accord with trucking companies providing a 6 percent raise and setting a minimum salary for experienced drivers. Other unions rejected the settlement and said their drivers would try to maintain the barricades, which have disrupted trade and left many French larders bare. Still, they praised the settlement as ''a significant advance.'' A4 Leader Emerges in Thailand An opposition leader favored by investors and executives said he had enough support in Parliament to form a new Government in Thailand. Chuan Leekpai, 59, has been Prime Minister before and has a reputation for honesty. His proposed Cabinet lineup reflects a coalition of several parties, which may hamper the fiscal reform necessary to stanch the country's damaged economy. Thailand was buffeted by a currency devaluation this summer that wrought havoc on Southeast Asian markets. A8 Torture Reported in Zambia Amnesty International charged that about 34 people detained after a bungled coup in Zambia last week had been tortured. They urged President Frederick Chiluba's government to stop the torture, which it said included the infliction of cigarette burns, beatings and electric shocks. Amnesty said the detainees, many of them military officers, had been denied food and water. (Reuters) NATIONAL A9-13, 16 German Scientologist Gets Asylum From Federal Judge A Federal immigration court judge granted asylum to a German member of the Church of Scientology who claimed that she would be subjected to religious persecution if required to return home, the woman's lawyer and a Scientology official said. A1 Clinton Creates Gulf Panel President Clinton has decided to create a special Federal oversight board to help direct the Pentagon's investigation of whether Iraqi chemical weapons might be responsible for some of the health problems reported by thousands of Persian Gulf war veterans, officials said. A11 Prayer Ruling Draws Protest Students in Alabama have held prayer protests, objecting to an injunction issued by a Federal judge against a 1993 state law allowing students to lead nonproselytizing, voluntary prayers in the public schools. Gov. Fob James Jr. has harshly criticized the judge and said he will do all he can to restore prayer to the schools. The state Attorney General, Bill Pryor, plans to appeal |
971372_0 | DIVIDING LINES: A special report.; Colleges Look for Answers To Racial Gaps in Testing | Universities around the country are facing an agonizing dilemma: If they retain their affirmative-action admissions' policies they face growing legal and political challenges, but if they move to greater reliance on standardized tests, the results will be a return to virtual racial segregation. Test scores by black and Hispanic students remain stubbornly below those of whites. This phenomenon, which cuts across all income groups, is only now being widely studied, with several scholarly reports offering new explanations for it. At the same time, longtime critics of standardized tests are finding wider sympathy for their argument that the tests are misguided. New data suggest that S.A.T. scores and their professional-school equivalents are weak predictors of academic and career success. Still, admission officials say that much as they would love to rely more on nuanced measures like essays and interviews, the pressures to use test scores are growing from the sheer volume of applicants, limited budgets for evaluating them and the rise of college ranking guides that emphasize test scores. Many officials agree with Donald M. Stewart, president of the College Board, who says that the risk of increased reliance on standardized tests is ''simply, the resegregation of higher education.'' ''We're looking at a potential wipeout that could take away an entire generation,'' Mr. Stewart said. ''The social cost of that would be too high. America can't stand that.'' Concerns over standardized tests are as old as the tests themselves. But with the nation's two most populous states, California and Texas, now forbidden to use race in university admissions, and with similar bans anticipated elsewhere, those concerns have become central to the searing national debate over race relations. In the past few months: *The Texas Legislature has ordered the University of Texas system to accept all students who graduate in the top 10 percent of their class irrespective of their S.A.T. scores. *The Mexican-American Legal Defense and Educational Fund has filed a lawsuit against the State of Texas, saying that its high school graduation examination, on which black and Mexican-American students fail at a much higher rate than non-Hispanic whites, is discriminatory. *The University of California has set up a commission to consider whether to drop or reduce the importance of S.A.T.'s and is increasing its budget to reach out to members of minorities. *The American Bar Association and the Law School Admission Council have begun a study intended to find ways |
970066_0 | NEWS SUMMARY | INTERNATIONAL 3-19 Jiang Ignores Protests During a Talk at Harvard President Jiang Zemin of China, basking in the prestige of Harvard University, ignored silent protests in the hall where he spoke and much louder demonstrations outside. He deflected tough questions about human rights, Tibet and the protesters with humor, earning applause from some of the Chinese-Americans and scholars in the room. 1 Polish Miners May Lose Jobs If Poland's new Government has the courage to carry out its stated program, more than 80,000 coal miners could lose their jobs. The mines of Silesia are a drag on the economy, but also represent a social time bomb. 1 Nazi Gold to Federal Reserve In 1950, the Federal Reserve melted down hundreds of swastika-imprinted gold bars, looted from the Netherlands and Belgium, and ''re-issued'' them as American gold. 15 Rain Forest at Risk Again Twenty years after the goal of rescuing the Amazon rain forest captured world attention, deforestation and the burning of vast territories are climbing sharply. Despite financial aid to maintain the forest, scientists say the rain forest may be reaching a critical level of dryness. 16 In Ulster, Converts to Peace Terrorists in Northern Ireland have been freed from prison to dedicate their lives to nonviolence, under a special program that is said to have spurred the peace process. 10 Rwanda Rebuilds Legal System Rwanda has made great efforts in the last year to rebuild a justice system shattered during the war and genocide. But it has not succeeded in reconciling ethnic groups. 3 NATIONAL 20-35 Campaign Rules in Shreds, Senate Inquiry Shows The Senate investigation into campaign finance abuses in the 1996 election has produced a tangled tale of intrigue and overzealous fund-raising. But beneath the cloudy surface, one clear picture has emerged: The post-Watergate laws that were passed to restrict the influence of special interests in politics have been shredded. A Political Memo. 1 Showtime Down on the Farm Over the past decade, that revered American institution, the small farm, has gradually taken on some of the characteristics of that all-American obsession: the theme park. Agritainment, also known as agritourism, is the latest gambit in small-farm survival tactics. 1 A Growth Industry in Prisons Increasingly, economically pressed communities are opening their doors to prison construction, none more so than Fremont County, Colo., where 18 percent of the population resides in one of 13 prisons. 20 Easy Path |
969998_3 | Rising Fires Renew Threat to Amazon | threats of cash fines and prison will open the way for corruption. For now, not surprisingly, the agency is usually ignored by the people it is supposed to monitor. While permits are required for burning, the agency has reportedly issued licenses to clear a total of only about 24,700 acres this year -- an area seemingly far smaller than what would produce the dense clouds of smoke that have appeared over several states. Mr. Martins disputed that permits were issued for only such an area, but his office declined to provide other figures. While even poorly enforced measures and licensing procedures are intended to deter deforestation, until recently other Government statutes deemed cleared forest to be ''an improvement on the land,'' which meant it was less likely to be considered unproductive and seized for agrarian reform. If the owner sold it for Government redistribution to peasants, burning and planting paid off in higher compensation. Mr. Martins said that is changing now. But the pace of destruction appears to be dictated more by the marketplace than by any Government measure. The demand in Europe and the United States for hardwoods like mahogany, used for furniture, has ushered in large illegal logging operations throughout the Amazon. A report by the Federal Secretary of Strategic Affairs, recently disclosed in the Brazilian press, said that 80 percent of all logging in the Amazon is illegal. The Government appears caught between largely international pressure to reduce the amount of burning and deforestation, and powerful domestic lobbies from the logging industry, farmers and large landholders. It is building several major roads that will cut into the Amazon, and a $1.2 billion state-of-the-art surveillance project will soon locate minerals, ores, and other natural resources hidden beneath the forest canopy. The Amazon surveillance project could also provide current information on deforestation, but ecologists are wary, for the Brazilian Government has been in no hurry to analyze the data it has already. After years of saying that deforestation was on the decline, last year the Government released deforestation figures for the first time in four years -- showing the 34 percent increase. The Government tried to diminish criticism by announcing measures to reverse the trend. It increased the share that each landowner in the rain forest was barred from burning from 50 to 80 percent, and announced a moratorium on new licenses for logging mahogany and another hardwood, virola. |
969624_7 | Father of the Sexual Revolution | in research financing today, is masterly and demonstrates what this biography might have been had his provincialism not obscured his view of Kinsey and his work. With the publication of ''Sexual Behavior in the Human Male,'' Kinsey found himself under relentless attack. The most vicious assaults came from the psychiatrists and psychoanalysts, who perceived a threat in his quantitative and tolerant view of sexual variation, and from intellectuals like Margaret Mead and Reinhold Niebuhr. Mead, Jones says, ''criticized Kinsey for upsetting the balance between ignorance and knowledge upon which social restraint depended,'' a curious position for a scientist to take. When ''Sexual Behavior in the Human Female'' was published, Niebuhr attacked the man who defended women as sexual and social equals for his ''abysmal ignorance of the complexities in the heights and depths of the human spirit.'' (''I am a great lover of music,'' Kinsey replied to a similar attack, ''but if I were a physicist studying sound, I would be resistant to the notion I had to write a treatise on the esthetics of music.'' ''It was not that he considered love unimportant,'' Jones writes. ''It was simply that science had not yet discovered a way to measure love.'') When Dean Rusk assumed the direction of the Rockefeller Foundation in 1952, Kinsey was soon cut off. Homophobic McCarthyism put the fear of God into the brave Eastern Establishment, but men of the ruling generation thought public discussion of sex beyond the pale in any case. Kinsey had dreamed of collecting 100,000 histories; his dream was not to be. Buckling under the stress of failing financing, he took to more extreme masochism, at some point even circumcising himself with a pocketknife without anesthesia. Heart disease flared. An embolism killed him in 1956, at the age of 62; his institute moved to a lower profile and barely survived, though Kinsey's successors were able in time to rescue it. Jones's biography, which was researched across a quarter of a century, improves as it goes. His final assessment of his subject is positive: ''He was a pioneer, an explorer who blazed the trail for those who followed. It was he who convinced most Americans that human sexual behavior could and should be studied scientifically and, just as important, that scientific data should help inform discussions of social policy.'' I wish Jones had reconsidered his earlier attacks on Kinsey's scientific integrity in the light |
969888_0 | Planning Boards And the Environment | In his environmental commentary (''The Environment: Worth Fighting For,'' Oct. 5), Robert F. Kennedy Jr. writes that sprawl is northern Westchester's most significant environmental issue of the day. All if not most county planning and local municipal officials involved with land-use decisions would agree with this assessment. All of us have grappled with this issue as we update our local comprehensive plans and their implementation. The County Planning Board in its 1995 long-range-plan document entitled ''Patterns for Westchester, the Land and the People'' identifies and deals with the issue of sprawl and uncontrolled development among other planning issues. Our local planning board and many other boards support the county's efforts through this document. I take issue with Mr. Kennedy's chastisement of the local planning boards for their failure to stand up to the outside developer. He opines that the local planning boards fail to follow their own rules and defer important issues to outside agencies. All of the boards, without exception, he feels, fail to properly use their powers under the State Environmental Quality Review Act. Mr. Kennedy is either uninformed of the workings of most northern Westchester planning boards or gets carried away with his own environmental hyperbole. The North Salem Planning Board -- and I'm sure most other boards -- routinely refer (not defer) applications to the Department of Environmental Protection, the Department of Environmental Conservation, the Westchester Soil and Water Conservation District, the Westchester County Planning Board and other agencies for their comments on drainage, septic and other issues under a coordinated quality review for both Type 1 and Unlisted actions. While we appreciate their expertise and advice in those technical areas, we make our own decisions. When warranted by the type of proposed application, we request a draft environmental impact statement that must deal with drainage, wetlands traffic, waste disposal and other environmental issues. The documents from an impact statement or a recent North Salem commercial-residential project were so voluminous that separate individual volumes were printed on storm-water drainage and traffic studies. Local planning boards have sometimes even requested an impact statement on small residential projects of a few lots when they felt the project was in a critical environmental area. As planning board members, we must balance our concern for the environment with our obligation to satisfy court and constitutionally mandated concerns such as affordable housing, multifamily housing and avoidance of inverse condemnation takings. New |
969977_0 | Big, if Not Quick, Rewards From College Internships | To the Editor: Re ''Glamorous Internships With a Catch: There's No Pay'' (Earning It, Oct. 19): There is no catch to engaging in a new and interesting learning experience without being paid. Call it delayed compensation if you must, but the payback from a well-chosen and properly managed internship is both immediate and long-term, a permanent enhancement of each student's life experience. In our society, most students pay for the privilege of learning -- in college, for example, or for music, dancing, tennis, judo or computer lessons. Internships provide similar learning opportunities free. How much the students benefit from such situations is largely up to them. Historically, young boys and girls competed for apprentice positions with skilled craftsmen who imparted their talents to the next generation and often provided the apprentices with a lifelong sinecure in a prominent guild of goldsmiths, shipbuilders, cabinetmakers or clock workers. Beyond acquiring a financially rewarding or secure skill, the apprentice acquired a sponsor (in today's language, a contact), a reputation (a network) and an opportunity to find personal expression through the individual creative process (gratification). All of these are important components of an appropriate internship today. Does exploitation exist? Probably, in a few instances, but the student always has the option of demanding more meaningful work or walking away from the job. Does the student receive more than he or she gives? From whose perspective? As the article notes, many companies might not hire these students after graduation if not for their internship experience. For students, almost any effort is worth the practical experience and a solid entry for a resume. Thousands of New York University students take advantage of internship opportunities in this city. Perhaps that explains why more than 98 percent of them get good jobs within their first year out of college. DR. MARCIA CANTARELLA Manhattan, Oct. 23 The writer is director of academic enhancement programs in the College of Arts and Science at New York University. |
969986_1 | Ulster Ex-Militants Press New Cause: Nonviolence | traditional leaders who remain wary of joining the current peace talks. Officials can point to only two cases of a return to political violence. ''In terms of energy, drive and commitment, it is the ex-prisoners who are driving the peace process forward the most vigorously,'' said Michael Ritchie, Information and Research Manager for the Northern Ireland Association for the Care and Resettlement of Offenders. ''They are turning out to be an enormous factor for good.'' In effect, the pursuit of a peaceful resolution to the sectarian strife is getting its greatest support from some of the conflict's most notoriously violent combatants. The former prisoners, Roman Catholics and Protestants who were once enemies, find that the common experience of having been in jail has enabled them to establish tentative channels of communication in the historically alienated atmosphere of Northern Ireland. ''I recognize their commitment to their cause and why they were led down the road to taking up the gun and the bomb the same way I did,'' said Martin Snodden, a convicted murderer for the Protestant cause, speaking of former prisoners from the Catholic side in a conversation at his office on the Shankill Road. ''It leads us to try to find an accommodation.'' Mr. Snodden, 42, was released from prison after serving 15 years and is now the project manager of the Ex-Prisoners Interpretative Center, which cares for Protestant former prisoners. A Place That Mixes Killers and Victims This stretch of the Shankill Road once housed clandestine meeting spots for Protestant paramilitaries planning terror attacks on Catholic neighborhoods and became a prime target of I.R.A. bombers and snipers. Today, every second storefront is a neighborhood regeneration project office run by former prisoners and financed by mixes of government money, European Community funds and money from private charities. The sectarian violence that has roiled Northern Ireland over the last 28 years has produced more than 20,000 people who have served time for actions taken in the name of politics. ''Northern Ireland is a society in which the victims and the perpetrators are all jumbled up,'' said Breidge Gadd, the province's chief probation officer. ''It is no stigma here at all to have gone to prison.'' She said the backgrounds of men who have committed offenses in service to a political cause offered promise for the future. ''They are very different from the clients I usually work with,'' she said. ''They |
969969_4 | The World; How to Fix A Crowded World: Add People | 1.87 by 1995. ''Socially and economically, Ireland has changed substantially in recent decades,'' say James McCarthy and Jo Murphy-Lawless, who prepared a study for the conference here. They cite higher Irish education levels, a new, less isolationist world view fostered by membership in the European Union, economic growth and the eroding influence of the Roman Catholic Church. In Italy, government officials foresee empty classrooms and thousands of unemployed teachers, with shortages of service industry workers and health-care personnel to care for older people. Politicians in a number of countries will have to factor in the numerical power and thus ballot-box clout of older citizens, who are often a conservative force. In the United States, older people heavily influence debates over the future of Social Security, Medicaid and the setting of other priorities in national budgets. Several European and Asian governments are taking steps to fight the low-fertility trend. Italy has parliamentary committees looking into ways to make it easier for women to have careers and children simultaneously. France, while no longer awarding medals for motherhood, does pay child allowances and provides a range of help for families willing to grow. Sweden, South Korea and Malaysia have created incentives also, and Singapore set up a bureaucracy to figure out ways to bring singles together. Ryuichi Kaneko of Japan's National Institute of Population and Social Security Research says Japan's economy will have to adapt to a smaller labor force. Japan faces not only a change in population structure but also its size. By the time its fertility rate levels off in 2007, Japanese society will be older on average than most European populations, and the nation's population will see a steady decline in numbers for the first time in its history. Worldwide, the number of countries with below-replacement fertility in 1970 was 19, almost all in Europe or North America. By 1995, there were 51 countries on the below-replacement chart, with new arrivals including nations of east and southeast Asia, the Caribbean and Eastern Europe. By 2015, demographers estimate, 88 of the world's more than 180 countries and territories will have replacement levels at or below 2.1 children per woman. Exceptions Exceptions to the trend are found in Africa, especially sub-Saharan Africa, some areas of the Middle East, South Asia and West Asia. Pakistan, for example, is likely to be the world's third most populous country by 2050 unless it can trim |
970008_0 | U.N. Finds Corruption Is Difficult To Root Out | Three years after the United Nations established an inspector general's office to combat waste and fraud, a clearer sense of the scope and style of corruption in the organization is beginning to emerge. So is an understanding of why it is often difficult to detect and stop. On Thursday, Under Secretary General Karl T. Paschke, the German foreign service officer who has directed the anti-corruption office since its founding, released his third annual report. It reveals a pattern of sloppy management in which contracts are awarded and money disbursed without reference to the organization's financial regulations or accepted rules of accounting. It describes a world of petty criminality, where cash sometimes seems to be sitting around for the taking. In this freewheeling atmosphere, diverting money is relatively easy, the report demonstrates. At a news conference on Thursday, Mr. Paschke emphasized that a major priority for his office's investigations is procurement. Contracts for catering, food purchases and air-charter services seem to be particularly prone to abuse, he said. Overseas, sweetheart deals involving friends and relatives abound. Individual acts of corruption in the United Nations system rarely involve large sums of money, despite what some critics of the organization charge. But collectively they add up. Mr. Paschke said his office had recouped about $30 million for the United Nations over the last year, in addition to the unknown amount it had saved by discouraging crimes through increased inspections. In his work, Mr. Paschke faces serious and entrenched problems. United Nations offices around the world, beginning with the organization's European headquarters in Geneva, often seem to think that New York rules do not apply to them. ''This is one area United Nations reform needs to address vigorously,'' he wrote in the report. There is almost never a paper trail in United Nations transactions. In many distant missions, account books are kept carelessly if at all. Memos are not filed; instructions are often unwritten. The kind of investigations that the United States Congress and Justice Department can carry out by studying documents would be virtually impossible in most cases here. Furthermore, national governments put pressure on United Nations officials to hire or promote -- but never dismiss -- citizens of their countries who then find ways to enhance their incomes by manipulating travel allowances or salary advances. United Nations employees -- who request anonymity because they fear that they will suffer more professional harm |
973400_1 | A Book on China Dam | journalist, the book, ''The River Dragon Has Come: The Three Gorges Dam and the Fate of China's Yangtze River and Its People'' is being published by M. E. Sharp Company, a small social sciences publisher in Armonk. Promoting the Three Gorges dam project in Hubei Province, Chinese officials will speak Thursday at the Waldorf-Astoria in Manhattan. Protesting the project, Dai Qing spoke before various groups in Washington last week. Ms. Qing will also speak at the Asian Pacific Economic Conference in Vancouver this week. ''Potential coffer dam failures, unusable navigation facilities and sedimentation problems threaten the safety and viability of the Three Gorges Dam project,'' wrote Owen Lammers, executive director of International Rivers Network, in a news release about the book. The organization is based in Berkeley, Calif., and dedicated to protecting rivers and watersheds around the world. ''This is merely the most recent evidence that science and engineering are taking a back seat to political agendas in order to erect this monument to China's hard-line regime,'' Mr. Lammers writes. More than 1.2 million people will be relocated because of the project, which will create a reservoir nearly 350 miles long, the distance from Manhattan to Montreal. Untold treasures will be buried as the project progresses. Archeologists estimate that nearly 10,000 sites will be lost once the river is dammed. Some above-ground treasures, like temples, will be relocated. But artifacts dating back 4,000 years will be lost. Unmatched in engineering annals since the Great Wall, the great dam will have eradicated about 1,400 rural towns and villages by its completion in 2009. Chinese officials hope the dam will solve China's projected energy crisis. Standing 607 feet high, the 1.3 mile-long dam will house 26 of the world's largest turbines. Among the essays and field reports in the book are warnings from engineers and scientists, who cite a series of dam collapses in China in 1975, in a period of great flooding. More than 100,000 died after 60 dams broke.A former missile technician and military intelligence agent, Ms. Qing was imprisoned after the violence at Tiananmen Square in 1989. A columnist at one of China's largest dailies. she was also named a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University and a fellow at the Freedom Forum at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism. The book lists for $39.95. The M. E. Sharp Company has published other works by Ms. Qing. ANNE C. FULLAM |
973662_2 | U.S. Mistakenly Cuts Benefits For Many Disabled Children | 236,586 children and cut off disability benefits for 60 percent of them, or 142,395. In addition, the Government has denied 225,578 new claims, or 68 percent of those filed since Mr. Clinton signed the law in August 1996. But data collected in Mr. Apfel's review show that children often prevail on appeal, winning in 57 percent of the 10,508 cases decided to date. Some of the children have multiple impairments, including severe mental retardation, diabetes, cerebral palsy and AIDS. Disability rights advocates say the high reversal rate shows pervasive problems in decision-making by the Government. But Social Security officials predict that a larger proportion of their decisions will be upheld in the future. Conservatives praise the Administration for the way it has carried out the law. Representative Jim McCrery, Republican of Louisiana, said Social Security officials had done ''an exemplary job'' of paring the rolls. Democrats and moderate Republicans have criticized Mr. Clinton's policies. Senator Kent Conrad, Democrat of North Dakota, said the Administration had increased the suffering of poor disabled children -- ''the most vulnerable in our society'' -- by adopting standards more stringent than Congress intended. In Illinois, Social Security officials terminated benefits for 8,625 children, or 70 percent of those reviewed through Nov. 8. But children have won back benefits in all 799 cases where the Government has ruled on appeals. Children have regained benefits in 100 percent of the appeals decided in Michigan, 92 percent in Louisiana, 89 percent in New York and 88 percent in New Jersey. After receiving notice that they no longer qualify, families have 60 days to appeal. They must file appeals in the first 10 days if they want to continue receiving checks while they wait for hearings on their cases. Hundreds of parents have told the Social Security Administration they missed the deadlines because they received misleading information from the Government or could not obtain the necessary forms. ''Social Security clerks are manhandling these people,'' said Dee McKinsey, a spokeswoman for the American Bar Association. ''We are seeing a definite pattern around the country. Parents get no information or misinformation about their right to appeal or to seek benefits pending appeals. They are told, 'Your child no longer qualifies for benefits, so it's stupid for you to appeal.' '' That is what Alison M. Lozano of Salt Lake City says happened to her. Ms. Lozano, the guardian of a mentally |
973343_1 | Disabled Find Jobs Through United Palsy | best way to train people for the work force is to put them in a real business environment,'' said David Ackerman, the coordinator of vocational services. ''The store is run along the lines of any other retail business. Wages are paid at the prevailing rate. But the size of staff and our payroll is outsized because our store serves a dual purpose. We try to cross-train as many people as possible, which means giving them all an opportunity to work every job in the store.'' The trainees, he said, assisted by the manager and a job coach, are responsible for the day-to-day operations of the business, which includes an advertsing and specialty service in addition to the thrift shop. Joseph F. Sganbellini, 36, works on the computer. ''I use the computer for a lot of things,'' he said, ''including writing thank-you notes to donors.'' Mr. Sganbellini, who lives with his parents in Yorktown Heights, said he hoped to work in an office one day. ''I'm really good with computers,'' he said. ''I even taught my parents.'' His mother, Jo Ann Sganbellini, agreed. ''Joe is a computer whiz,'' she said. ''He's on his third machine. He outgrows them fast. We just bought him an I.B.M., top of the line. I hope one day employers will notice how much talent he has and give him a chance. He needs more of an intellectual challenge.'' The primary focus of United Cerebral Palsy of Westchester is to provide assistance to assure that the disabled reach their full potential, said Tom Gabriel, the organization's director of development. ''The goal for the program is to assimilate people into the mainstream work force,'' he said. ''We direct our efforts toward helping people become independent, capable of living on a self-sustaining level.'' The various jobs in the store include operating the cash register, sorting clothing, tagging inventory and dealing with customers. Mark Giorgio, 33, has done them all. Mr. Giorgio, who was nattily dressed in a blue blazer, said he liked sorting the clothes. ''I'm interested in fashion so I like to see the new things coming in,'' said Mr. Giorgio, who lives in Scarsdale and is on the job five days a week from 9 A.M. to 2 P.M. ''I really enjoy working here.'' So do his co-workers Andrea Sellers and Efrain Revera. Ms. Sellers, 28, is an excellent cashier, the job coach, Migdalia Navarro, said. ''I |
975523_0 | San Antonio Journal; Symbol of Texas Liberty Faces a Relentless Siege | The graceful limestone mission has withstood one of the most fabled military sieges of all time, as well as subsequent decades of relative obscurity and neglect, to assume its modern identity as the shrine of Texas liberty. But esteemed as the Alamo is today, it remains under relentless attack: the enemy is water. Like four other missions in San Antonio and countless other buildings and monuments across the Southwest, the Alamo is susceptible to ''rising damp,'' in which moisture seeping into the structure spurs a chemical reaction that ultimately causes chips of stone to fall off. Compared with similar erosion ravaging much older monuments in other parts of the world -- such as the Sphinx near the Great Pyramids in Giza, Egypt, which lost 700 pounds of limestone when two chunks of its right shoulder fell off nine years ago -- the problem at the Alamo is hardly at crisis stage. But the regular flaking and chipping are clearly visible to visitors here, and a report by archeologists at the University of Texas at San Antonio last year warned, ''The church is slowly disintegrating.'' The problems have prompted the Daughters of the Republic of Texas, the Alamo's official custodians since early this century, to undertake a series of measures to protect the structure. These include a radical change in the landscaping around the church, a redesign of the roof, and even experimental installation of underground metal plates around the stone underpinnings. Despite pleas from some quarters, there has been no limit placed on the number of visitors, currently averaging about 3 million a year. The problem posed by people is that they happen to breathe, introducing no small amount of moisture inside the structure. To be sure, no one seems to be predicting the imminent fall of the Alamo (state officials in 1995 projected that the building would not collapse for two centuries or so without anti-erosion measures, and would survive 1,000 years or more with them). Nonetheless, many archeologists say, the slow wearing down of the structure does offer a reminder that while the United States may be a relatively young nation, it is not immune to the ravages of time. ''A lot of structures in our country are really coming of age,'' said John Stubbs, vice president for programs at the World Monuments Fund, a preservation group based in New York City. ''When you get down to the |
975458_0 | 'Improved' Plants Can Threaten Gene Pool | To the Editor: ''Breeding Seeds of Discontent; Cotton Growers Say Strain Cuts Yields'' (news article, Nov. 19) recounts the problems farmers have had with the Monsanto Company's genetically engineered cotton. Agricultural biotechnology companies need to be held to product-testing standards, as are drug companies. As the Monsanto story shows, rushing a product into production, shortcuts on scientific and regulatory oversight and enthusiasm to market the ''most successful product introduction in farming history'' can lead to disappointment, ruinous financial loss and possibly worse. The potential benefits of genetically engineered crops and medical products are enormous, but so are the risks. Just as we would not dream of introducing a medicine without years of testing, we shouldn't be sanguine about introducing bioengineered organisms and crops onto millions of acres. Genetically altered plants, once introduced, cannot simply be recalled. TIM SCHERBATSKOY Shelburne, Vt., Nov. 19, 1997 The writer is an assistant professor of natural resources, University of Vermont. |
975552_1 | Shaky Asia, New Shivers | out of economic success,'' one of Mr. Clinton's senior foreign policy advisers said as the President left for Vancouver to attend the annual meeting of the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation forum. ''If Korea is going to be under the strictures of the I.M.F. for the next few years and Japan is consumed with cleaning up its own act, we have a lot of thinking to do.'' One longtime veteran of the older dominoes, Donald Gregg, put it differently this weekend. Mr. Gregg, a former Ambassador to South Korea and for years one of the top Central Intelligence Agency operatives in Asia, said in an interview: ''The equation has definitely been changed. Clearly it's time for President Clinton to readjust. But it is very hard to say right now how long this will last, how far it will resonate around the world or which way it could go.'' Today President Clinton described Asia's problems as ''a few little glitches in the road'' rather than a full-blown crisis, apparently heeding the counsel of his economic aides that any deeper public ruminations about bailouts and bankruptcies could further unnerve investors around the world. Even in private, the President's advisers are determined to sound upbeat, talking about the opportunities the economic reckoning creates for the United States to help itself by helping its major trading partners. ''There's an understanding that economic growth is not a static process,'' Charlene Barshefsky, the United States trade representative, said today after meeting with Asian trade and foreign ministers. ''The fundamentals are there to return to very high levels of growth.'' Of course, economic fortunes and political influence rarely rise and fall in neatly synchronized patterns. Japan's emergence as an economic superpower in the 1980's, when it was buying Hollywood studios, the Seattle Mariners and New York skyscrapers, prompted endless debate of its impending political dominance. But Japan never made the leap from building car plants around the world to exercising diplomatic clout. Conversely, Britain and France retain a political heft in world affairs these days that far outweighs their economic impact in the world. But over time, economic strength counts. And the Korean Peninsula may be the first test of how money and political influence intersect. For most of this decade, Pentagon and State Department planners drawing up scenarios for responding to a potential collapse of North Korea assumed that South Korea and Japan would be standing by |
974403_3 | For Many Physicians, E-Mail Is the High-Tech House Call | of the home computer. And more than any other computer application, many doctors and patients say it is E-mail that has the potential to change the texture of their relationship. ''The whole concept of our practice is to take the edge off medicine, to get rid of the alcohol smell,'' said Dr. Rick Abbott, a pediatric neurologist at Beth Israel Medical Center who says he spends up to two hours a day talking with his patients on the computer. ''With E-mail, I can be a friend to my patients or their families, not just a doc with a needle.'' Dr. Abbott said that in recent years it had become clear to him how much the frantic pace of life and medicine had crept between patients and doctors. What's more, he said, the more technologically driven certain aspects of medicine became, the more alienated patients often felt. So it seemed to him an interesting paradox that while technology, on the one hand, made patients feel distant from their doctors, it has also, through the home computer, made them feel more connected. ''I find it's a very intimate communication mode, even more than the phone call,'' said Dr. Stephanie Seremtis, a hematologist and internist who directs the Women's Health Program at Mount Sinai Medical Center. Dr. Seremtis estimates she gets about 12 computer messages from patients every day, some brief, clinical updates, others more emotionally intense. ''And with a phone call, you can't refer back to it, savor it, file it. E-mail is more like a letter.'' Kimberly Wright, an administrator in the dean's office at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, says she chats regularly through electronic mail with Dr. Seremtis, her primary care doctor. ''I feel this freedom to contact my doctor whenever I want to,'' Ms. Wright said, ''and not to have to make this mental calculation of 'Is this worth calling about?' ''It makes me feel that she knows me better. I'd really like it if all doctors ended their appointment by saying, 'If you think of any other questions, send me an E-mail.' '' This new form of communication is not available to the large swaths of patients who cannot afford computers. But as the price of personal computers drops, health care experts say they expect electronic mail to play an even more significant role in the patient-doctor relationship. At the same time, some doctors have expressed |
973928_0 | Ice Shifts May Be Tied to Warming | WEATHER satellites operating over an 18-year period have revealed an increase in the ice covering Antarctic waters and a decrease in the extent of Arctic sea ice. This asymmetric trend, a team of scientists says, is consistent with one theory of what would happen if a gradual increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere were causing global warming. Results of the satellite investigation by Dr. Donald J. Cavalieri and his colleagues at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., were published recently in the journal Nature. The oceanic ice-cover data were produced by four satellites whose useful lives overlapped to yield an 18-year record. During the period from late 1978 through 1996, the team found, Arctic sea ice shrank at a rate of 2.9 percent per decade, while Antarctic sea ice increased by 1.3 percent per decade. Scientists participating in a project called Sheba, an acronym for Surface Heat Budget of the Arctic Ocean, have also observed a shrinkage of the ice covering the Arctic Ocean. Sheba is administered by the University of Washington. 'It's a very clear signal,'' Dr. Cavalieri said in an interview. But the significance of the discovery is less certain. Although one highly regarded mathematical model predicts just such an outcome, other mathematical models of carbon-dioxide-induced global warming predict a decrease in Antarctica's sea ice rather than an increase. Complicating the interpretation of the observed trend, Dr. Cavalieri said, is natural variability in ice cover and sea surface temperatures in the Arctic and Antarctica. These variations seem to be partly periodic; in the Arctic, the period of variation is about five years, while in Antarctica it is three or four years, he said. From space, clouds and ice look much the same in visible light, so the investigators relied instead on microwave scanners aboard the Nimbus 7 weather satellite and three Defense Department meteorological satellites. Computer programs were used to weed out false images of ice; ''we know, for example, that we should not be seeing ice off the coast of Spain,'' Dr. Cavalieri said. Because of the natural variability of oceanic ice and surface temperatures, Dr. Cavalieri cautioned ''not to read too much into these results.'' Nevertheless, he said, evidence is mounting that increasing levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere are causing a gradual increase in global temperatures. ''We certainly should be concerned,'' he said. Carbon dioxide is known to be a ''greenhouse |
973918_0 | Chemists Find Ways to Save Monuments From Pollution | WHAT if there was a way to rescue decomposed stone, particularly the marble and limestone that make up some of the world's best-loved monuments? Many of them, like the Parthenon, the Taj Mahal and even the Lincoln Memorial, have long been threatened by acid rain and other effects of airborne pollution. In fact, liquid chemical compounds that essentially glue weakened stone surfaces together have been around for years. By many measures, these consolidants are impressive, but they also have many drawbacks. So researchers in the United States and Europe are continually looking for ways to improve them. Some promising work at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, N.M., on ways to make consolidants adhere better to limestone and marble has recently received considerable attention. Meanwhile, other researchers are studying how consolidants work long term, a major area of concern. Last month, for example, Minnesota approved a three- to five-year study of the State Capitol in St. Paul, an important Cass Gilbert edifice opened in 1905, where consolidants were applied to the magnificent marble dome in 1989. Glenn Boornazian, an architectural conservator with Integrated Conservation Resources in Manhattan, said the tests would be among the first to involve extensive research specifically into the effects reapplication might have on the stone. Modern consolidants were developed in the 1960's, spurred by the widespread damage to stone buildings in Venice in a decade of flooding. Since then, these chemicals have been used as a last-ditch defense against surface loss in a range of architectural and artistic restoration projects, from the Washington Square Arch in Manhattan to the medieval sculptures of the Church of St. Trophime in Arles, France. 'You're asking a person not only to glue stone back together and stabilize it for the next 50 years, but you're telling them to do it so the stone still breathes,'' Mr. Boornazian said. ''It's a near-impossible feat, but this material comes very close to doing it.'' But consolidants, which chemists and conservators say are still far from being a magic potion, have many limitations. They are toxic and difficult to apply. Their preservative effects, particularly on calcium carbonate stones -- limestone and marble -- are only temporary, and they permanently alter the nature of the stone. Most important, their long-term effects are uncertain. For these reasons, their use is banned on the Acropolis in Athens. The difficulties have led some experts to conclude that efforts should |
973972_0 | U.S. Penalizes Israeli-Owned Company for Dealing With Cuba | The Clinton Administration said today that it would punish an Israeli-owned citrus company for doing business in Cuba on land expropriated from Americans. The announcement marks the third time that the Administration has invoked a law passed by Congress last year mandating penalties against foreign companies that invest in property confiscated from Americans in Cuba after Fidel Castro took power in 1959. The State Department said it sent letters to the company, the BM Group, on Thursday informing its executives that they and their immediate families would be barred from entering the United States unless they could provide evidence within 45 days that they were not in violation of the law. The United States has previously cited a Canadian mining company, Sherritt International, and a Mexican telephone company, Grupo Domos, under the law, the Helms-Burton Act of 1996. Washington's application of the law has drawn it into a bitter dispute with some of its biggest trading partners, including Canada and the European Union. The European Union has threatened to file a complaint with the World Trade Organization arguing that the United States has no right to impose sanctions on European companies and citizens for business activities that are proper under the laws of their own countries. But some Republicans in Congress have criticized the Administration for not being more aggressive in imposing the law, which President Clinton signed after Cuban warplanes shot down civilian aircraft flown by anti-Castro groups based in Florida. In citing an Israeli-owned company, the Administration went after a business from one of the few countries that has consistently backed the American position on Helms-Burton and on the general policy of trying to keep President Castro's Government economically isolated. Only Israel and Uzbekistan joined with the United States in voting against a resolution at the United Nations this month calling on the Administration to end its economic embargo of Cuba. The resolution won 143 votes in the General Assembly. ''Israel supports the policy of the American Government in regards to Cuba,'' an Israeli official said today. State Department officials did not make public the names of the executives from the BM Group who are to be barred from the United States. Israeli officials said that the BM Group had no operations in Israel but that some of its owners were Israeli citizens. The company is involved in citrus and sugar farming in Cuba and announced in September |
969557_0 | Tax-Free Accounts Imperil Public Colleges; Working Students | To the Editor: An Oct. 28 news article reports that new teaching positions are to be awarded to City University of New York colleges on the basis of graduation rates. As any educator in public higher education knows, our students are not upper-income children routed from private schools or middle-income children who have graduated from parochial schools. Half are from other countries -- some with excellent educations but learning English; others with educations as bad as those provided by the city's public schools. Our students are working at any jobs they can get to support themselves and their families. The slightest break in earnings knocks them out of school for a semester or a year. Our students are also as mobile as the rest of the country's workers and may transfer to the University of Texas or Florida without our knowledge. To reward public colleges with appointments on an incentive system for graduation rates rather than meeting their real needs is Alice in Wonderland logic. The economy determines graduation rates. New York has a 9.5 percent unemployment rate: test the correlation with student jobs. ED KENT New York, Oct. 28, 1997 The writer is an associate professor of philosophy at Brooklyn College. |
969492_1 | Hillary Clinton Sees Hope in Ulster, Too | sectarian violence, ran a center that brought Catholic and Protestant women together to promote peace. In a moving address, Mrs. Clinton spoke of the important role that women like Mrs. McCartan can play in helping to solve the world's most intractable problems. ''An extraordinary power is unleashed when women reach out to their neighbors and find common ground,'' Mrs. Clinton said. ''When women are empowered to make the most of their own potential, then their families will thrive. And when families thrive, communities and nations thrive as well.'' Holding up a teapot, a gift from Mrs. McCartan during that visit two years ago, Mrs. Clinton said that whenever she used it, she was reminded of Mrs. McCartan, who died last year at 67, and the work she did. ''Joyce McCartan deserves as her real legacy that the peace process will go forward,'' she said. ''She and all the brave women who for more than 20 years marched, baked, prayed and shouted for peace deserve to be heard.'' Mrs. Clinton spoke, too, of the singular problems of Northern Ireland, which has been racked for decades by violence and hatred as Catholics and Protestants struggle over the future of the British province. ''When people want peace,'' she said, ''it is the obligation of political leaders to find the common ground where it can thrive. That requires compromise and reconciliation.'' Mrs. Clinton arrived in Northern Ireland this morning, after spending last night in Dublin. This evening she flew to England, where she is to join Prime Minister Tony Blair and his wife, Cherie, at Chequers, their country estate. In Belfast she also had a chance to discuss another issue that has always been important to her: the role of young people. She met people in their late teens and early 20's at a youth conference, peppering them with questions about their concerns. She heard a 21-year-old student in a wheelchair speak about how hard it is to go shopping when store doors are not wide enough. She heard a young woman who grew up in a foster home talk about how hard it is to get a job. And she challenged them all to say more. ''It is important for us who are not of the Generation 2000 to give you more things to say 'yes' to,'' she told the conference. Adults, she added, should ''bite their tongues before passing on old prejudices.'' |
973026_1 | Gigantism on the Yangtze | to the vitality of the political system. The Three Gorges Dam, which will cost at least $25 billion, will be 600 feet high and more than a mile wide, creating a lake nearly 400 miles long. More than 1.2 million people will be forced to move. The project will generate 18,200 megawatts of electricity, supplying a tenth of the nation's energy output. But the promised benefits of abundant power and seasonal flood control could be better achieved by building several smaller dams on the tributaries of the Yangtze. President Jiang Zemin, an electrical engineer by training, proclaimed that the project ''vividly proves once again that Socialism is superior in organizing people to do big jobs.'' Prime Minister Li Peng, also an engineer and the dam's chief promoter, declared that diverting the Yangtze ''demonstrates the greatness of the achievement of China's development.'' Criticism of the dam is considered a crime. Debate has been banned, and critics have been imprisoned for writing about it. Chinese and international observers worry that heavy silting could compromise the dam's operation and increase the risk of a catastrophic collapse in a heavy flood. There are other potential problems, including water pollution from raw sewage that would be pumped into the reservoir, the loss of a magnificent stretch of the river, and the destruction of hundreds of cultural and archeological sites, some 6,000 years old. The environmental hazards are so great that the U.S. Export-Import Bank has refused to finance loans for the project, and the World Bank has declined to participate. But Beijing has managed to get private foreign financing for the dam through bonds issued by the State Development Bank of China. A coalition of 45 international groups, including the International Rivers Network and the Sierra Club, is calling on American financial institutions to stop underwriting those bonds. Public pressure in Japan led one investment house to back away from underwriting a second bond offering for the State Development Bank. The Three Gorges project faces major obstacles that could delay its completion. Official cost estimates have doubled in three years, and while the project remains a political symbol for China's leadership, the weight of its financial and technical problems is inescapable. Opposition from abroad that halts the flow of foreign financing could still have an impact that would be healthy for the global environment and, in the long run, for China's people and its economy. |
976143_0 | Non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma Is Treatable by a New Drug | The Food and Drug Administration today approved a new genetically engineered drug for the treatment of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. The drug, Rituxan, was approved for treating low-grade or follicular B-cell non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, a slow-growing but fatal and incurable cancer of the immune system. It will be made and marketed by Genentech Inc. of South San Francisco. In clinical trials, Rituxan was shown to be comparable to chemotherapy in slowing progression of the disease, but with fewer side effects. Rituxan is the first of a class of drugs called monoclonal antibodies to be approved for treating cancer, but F.D.A. officials said there are at least two dozen such drugs in various stages of clinical trials. Monoclonals, which are genetically engineered copies of powerful immune system proteins, were one of the first technologies pursued by the biotechnology industry, but have until recently failed in most applications. ''To me this is a milestone for monoclonal antibody technology for this field,'' said Dr. Kathryn Stein, director of monoclonal antibodies for the F.D.A. center for biologicals evaluation and research. Most impressive, Dr. Stein said, is that Rituxan is a ''naked'' antibody, meaning that it is not linked to a radioactive or chemical drug, but is itself an anticancer therapy. ''It really is a turning point,'' she said. Because monoclonal antibodies were initially produced in mice, they caused allergic reactions in human beings, which limited their effectiveness. The antibodies now advancing in the clinic have been genetically engineered to be either chimerized, about half human, or humanized, more than 90 percent human. Rituxan follows Reopro, from Centocor Inc., an antibody for the prevention of blood-clotting in heart patients, which was approved in 1996. ''Unquestionably, monoclonals are gathering momentum,'' said Viren Mehta, an analyst with Mehta & Isaly in New York. ''While it has clearly taken some time for the basic elements of the science to come together, we now have the second important monoclonal in a year, and this is just the beginning.'' The most common side effects of Rituxan were moderate flu-like symptoms that occurred in the majority of patients during the first infusion. And unlike the typical four- to six-month chemotherapy regimen or high-dose radiation treatment, Rituxan can be administered in four infusions on an outpatient basis over 22 days. ''Although it is not a cure, we finally have a cancer agent that can be effective with less serious side effects than with conventional chemotherapy,'' |
956757_0 | Protestants Criticize U.S. for Halting Deportation of 6 in I.R.A. | Protestant political leaders attacked the Clinton Administration today for its decision to suspend deportation action against six former Irish Republican Army convicts now living in the United States. The American decision was announced on Tuesday night within hours of the acceptance by Sinn Fein, the I.R.A. political wing, of principles committing Sinn Fein to nonviolence. The acceptance, at a meeting here presided over by the chairman of the Northern Ireland peace talks, the former Senator George J. Mitchell, qualified Sinn Fein for a place at the table when the talks resume next Monday. The Protestant leaders said they saw the decision by the Justice Department, made at the acknowledged request of the State Department, as a payoff to Sinn Fein for its first formal acceptance of nonviolence in its efforts to change the political status of this British province at the talks. Most Protestant leaders here see the Clinton Administration as favoring the Republican movement, which has energetic supporters in Washington and New York. The decision on the six reinforces that view, giving Protestants more reason to be wary of the American involvement in the peace effort. The six men had all served time in British prisons in the 1970's and 1980's for terrorist offenses such as the killing in Northern Ireland of police officers and gun running for the I.R.A. The residence of some of them in the United States is being challenged on the grounds that they allegedly entered the country after falsely denying they had been convicted of crimes and may now be deported under American anti-terrorist laws. Several neutral officials involved in the peace talks noted that while the Protestant leaders attacked the American decision, they did not say that they want the former I.R.A. guerrillas deported; if that happened, they could become residents of Northern Ireland again. The Justice Department announcement made it clear the suspended deportation proceedings could be resumed, presumably if the I.R.A. breaks the cease-fire it called on July 20. Sinn Fein was invited to the talks on the basis of the cease-fire, which has been judged to be genuine by the British Government. In a statement in Washington, the office of Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright indicated that the decision could help the peace effort. A Justice Department statement said the decision was ''neither an approval of any acts of terrorism in which these individuals may have been involved nor |
961286_1 | High-Technology Job Fair Is Now an Industry in Itself | is also getting cutthroat. Some job fair entrepreneurs seem to wait until a competitor has advertised a fair, then schedule theirs a day earlier. And corporate recruiters report that when they participate in one fair, they inevitably are offered a steep discount at competing ones. The ploy can work. Manpower Technical Services went to a recent Tech Expo fair because ''they cut us a very good deal,'' said Karl Muhlbauer Jr., a recruiter at Manpower. The concept of a job fair -- a place where job seekers and recruiters meet and greet in a trade-show-like atmosphere -- is nothing new. Universities use them to place graduates. Corporations hold them in collaboration with professional associations of women, minorities or other groups that are underrepresented in the work force. Many newspapers, The New York Times among them, now hold job fairs as a free service for major advertisers. But none of those fairs are held for profit, and few focus exclusively on technology jobs. Until recently, the for-profit segment of the market also catered primarily to companies looking for sales and office staff. Not anymore. One by one, longtime job fair companies like the Lendman Group in Virginia Beach, Va., which started holding sales and clerical fairs in 1964, and Tech Expo in New York, whose parent Job Expo International started with sales fairs in 1992, have branched into technology jobs. And myriad newcomers like Net Result have sprung up solely to match programmers, software engineers and such with new homes. The fairs generally cost less than $30,000 each to hold. Companies pay $2,000 to $4,500 to participate -- less than the cost of a prominent major-market newspaper ad. ''We don't find price resistance,'' said Ernest M. Lendman, chairman of the Lendman Group, which recently raised its rate by $500, to $4,250. Virtually no one knows how many job fair companies there are. But the ranks are clearly swelling. ''I cannot tell you how much correspondence and mail we get wanting us to attend fairs,'' said Jennie L. Mays, manager of experienced professional recruiting at I.B.M., which participates in 6 to 10 fairs a month. Clearly, the fairs meet a need. The New York Times used to get about 70 exhibitors at each of its four annual fairs. More than 100 companies showed up for its fair last Thursday. For applicants, the fairs provide a way to interact with dozens of potential |
961375_0 | Hearings Set on Bears | With the number of black bears and people -- in New Jersey continuing to grow, state environmental officials are holding a series of hearings this week on how to keep the two populations from colliding. The State Division of Fish, Game and Wildlife is considering a number of options, including permitting a limited hunting season or relocating some bears to the southern part of the state, according to Robert McDowell, the director of the division. The hunting of bears is barred in New Jersey, and several animals rights groups are expected to testify against lifting the ban at tonight's hearing at Rutgers University. The division uses irritant sprays and rubber buckshot to condition bears to stay away from people and conducts educational programs to teach people to stay away from bears. Officials estimate that there are roughly 500 black bears in the state's northern counties. NEW JERSEY DAILY BRIEFING |
961326_0 | U.S. Reshaping Cancer Strategy As Incidence in Children Rises | The rate of cancer among American children has been rising for decades. Although the reasons remain unclear, many experts suspect the increase may be partly the result of growing exposure to new chemicals in the environment. That suspicion, while still unproved, is beginning to shape Federal research priorities and environmental strategies. Depending on which types of cancer are counted, and in what age groups among the nation's youth, the rate of increase has amounted to nearly 1 percent a year, according to the National Cancer Institute. Over a few decades, that has meant striking double-digit increases. Childhood cancer is still far less common than cancer in adults, and its very rarity makes it especially hard to discern what might be causing the increase. Its creeping spread has also been masked by better news, as recent medical gains have made it much more likely that a child with cancer will survive. But childhood cancer, even when its young victims are cured, can inflict wrenching costs on children and their families, whether its toll is measured in financial, emotional or physical terms. Patients can suffer permanently from brain damage, stunted growth or secondary cancers later in life, partly as a result of radiation and chemical therapies. And today, according to experts in the field, a newborn child faces a risk of about 1 in 600 of contracting cancer by age 10. In the United States, cancer is diagnosed each year in an estimated 8,000 children below the age of 15. Cancer, although it kills fewer children than accidents do, is the most common form of fatal childhood disease, accounting for about 10 percent of all deaths in childhood. The increases surprise even people who are predisposed to think the worst about the ill effects of chemical pollution. ''I had not realized that the numbers were going up that way,'' said Karen Florini, a lawyer specializing in health issues at the Environmental Defense Fund. ''I think it indicates a very disturbing trend that we had better get to the bottom of.'' Acute lymphoblastic leukemia in boys and girls increased 27 percent between 1973 and 1990; since then, the rate in boys has declined, but it is still rising in girls. Brain cancer, or glioma, increased nearly 40 percent from 1973 to 1994. These two forms of cancer account for most of the disease in children. Other forms of cancer, such as the form |
959816_0 | The Ingredients of Peace | This is a bewildering moment for the cause of peace. In Northern Ireland, all-party talks are starting for the first time. But the current state of the Middle East peace process, now breathing only with the diplomatic equivalent of a heart-lung machine, shows how hard negotiations can be. Other than surrender, talk may be the only way the world knows to end a war. But some conflicts seem more susceptible to negotiation than others -- and some can be pushed in that direction. Leaders usually begin to talk peace only when violence is at a stalemate. They are generally led to negotiations by their peoples' demand for peace. It also helps if outside backers withdraw their political or financial support for war. Hence the spurt of negotiations after the Soviet Union's fall. In Northern Ireland's 30-year war, there was no visible end to violence by the Irish Republican Army or Protestant paramilitaries loyal to Britain. But there was a drop in citizen willingness to shield and support violent groups. For years, Northern Ireland's people have formed grass-roots groups seeking peace. What made the difference this year was Tony Blair's election as Britain's Prime Minister. His predecessor, John Major, needed Northern Ireland Protestants' votes in Parliament and could not press them to negotiate. The general public tends to believe that successful peace negotiations need a Nelson Mandela. If that were true, peace would almost never break out. Usually peace is made by less epochal leaders. No one would take the former Salvadoran President Alfredo Cristiani for a visionary, for example. Mr. Cristiani simply realized, with the encouragement of the Bush Administration, that peace was good for business. What is required are leaders who can persuade their own radicals of the need for peace without being dismissed as sellouts. Often the hardest line comes from ethnic groups outside the country. Some of the most intractable Israeli settlers are immigrants from Brooklyn. People in the diaspora often cling to extreme ethnic biases precisely because they have few other links to their heritage. The need to convince the fringes is one reason leaders often talk toughest right before entering peace talks. It also makes successful peacemakers of those who most vociferously resisted negotiation in the past. A Menachem Begin or an F. W. de Klerk, scion of one of apartheid's leading families, has special credibility to sell compromise. The more decentralized violence has been, |
959808_0 | Menopause Advantage | To the Editor: I read with interest your Sept. 16 Science Times article on the evolutionary advantages of menopause to society. Medical research, however, shows that there is no advantage of menopause to the individual. The latest mortality study, part of the 20-year Nurses' Health Study of 121,700 women between the ages of 36 and 61, and published in this August's New England Journal of Medicine, shows that treatment of menopause with hormones reduces women's risk of dying from coronary disease and stroke by an overall 37 percent. The reduced risk of dying varies from 49 percent to 11 percent, depending on various risk factors. On the other hand, the value of postmenopausal women may be increasing. I would never have been able to manage a heavy professional load without my children's grandmothers. MICHELLE P. WARREN, M.D. New York, Sept. 16, 1997 The writer is medical director, Center for Menopause, Hormonal Disorders and Women's Health, Columbia U. College of Physicians & Surgeons. |
954672_0 | Microwave Myth | To the Editor: Richard Rhodes (Op-Ed, Aug. 28) commits a cardinal sin when he says that ''gamma rays are similar to microwaves.'' An enormous gulf separates these two bands of the electromagnetic spectrum. He thus feeds the public's misperception that ionizing electromagnetic energy, like gamma rays, which are harmful to humans, and non-ionizing electromagnetic energy, like microwaves, which normally are not, have similar effects. Such misunderstandings have led to allegations like the one holding that cellular-phone use causes brain tumors. It took decades to undo the damage wrought by a similar statement linking Three Mile Island with microwave ovens. Mr. Rhodes should know better. ELEANOR R. ADAIR San Antonio, Aug. 28, 1997 The writer is a scientist who specializes in electromagnetic radiation effects. Irradiated Food Is Too Pure for Our Own Good |
954655_2 | Summer in Woods Hole: Sea, Science and Synergy | laureates, slouching about in shorts, T-shirts and boat shoes, say the informal atmosphere contributes to a flow of information across disciplines and ranks that serves as a further catalyst to learning and discovery. ''When I was a child in school,'' said Jurgen Theiss, a German doctoral candidate who spent the summer in the geophysical fluid dynamics program at the geophysical institute, ''I had this picture of Greek philosophers sitting around and talking to students, and I thought it was a fairy tale. But here it really was like ancient Greece.'' Mr. Theiss spent his summer among what are affectionately known here as the porch people, a collection of top experts in fields like applied mathematics and geophysics who hash out some of the knottier abstract problems of Earth's physical processes sitting on a porch or in the decrepit seminar room of the institution's 122-year-old Walsh Cottage. The intellectual atmosphere is so intense that once, recalled Edward Spiegel, an astronomy professor at Columbia University, ''one poor guy came to give a lecture and before he knew it, three guys were at the blackboard and none of them were him.'' The porch people delve into unusually abstract matters, but the liveliness of their debates is par for the course here. Lewis Thomas, who wrote lovingly about the Marine Biological Laboratory in ''The Lives of a Cell,'' described the sound of scientists confabulating on the beach or after one of the laboratory's famous Friday night science lectures like this: ''It is that most extraordinary noise, half-shout, half-song, made by confluent, simultaneously raised human voices, explaining things to each other.'' So much exchange of scientific information goes on here in the summer that ''there are more lectures than you can go to,'' said George Woodwell, founder of the Woods Hole Research Center, which focuses on global environmental problems. ''You can spend all your time in lectures and seminars.'' And there are parties virtually every night as well, scientists say. But this is not the Hamptons, they hasten to add: that fraternizing, whether at wine-and-cheese mixers or at picnic lunch tables or on street corners, often serves a purpose beyond the pleasure of relaxing between a long day in the laboratory and the long night in the lab that follows. ''People tell tons of anecdotal stories about bumping into A, B or C and getting an idea about X, Y or Z,'' said John Burris, |
956129_4 | Heavy Hand of Beijing Dampens a Panama Canal Fest | list of those attending, but have announced panels to discuss issues like ''Long-Range Canal Traffic Projections'' and ''Locks Modernization.'' Even after achieving its political objective, though, China has continued to threaten conference participants. On August 28, a Foreign Ministry spokesman in Beijing called on Panama to ''change its erroneous decision to invite Lee Teng-hui to attend this meeting'' and condemned Taiwan for conducting what he called ''activities aimed at splitting the motherland.'' A similar warning was also issued to the United States, which granted Mr. Lee a visa to stop over in Hawaii on his way to and from here. ''Don't let Lee Teng-hui use all kinds of opportunities to create two Chinas,'' the Chinese spokesman, Shen Guofang, cautioned Washington. In addition, the head of China's new economic and trade mission here, Ju Yijie, has been trying to undermine support for Taiwan in the large and prosperous local Chinese community since arriving here six months ago, leaders of that community say. Thanks to steady immigration and intermarriage, as much as 5 percent of Panama's population of 2.5 million people is estimated to have some degree of Chinese ancestry. Many of the new arrivals have stronger ties to the mainland than to Taiwan, and have challenged the traditional hostility of Chinese organizations here toward the Communists in Beijing. To prevent further erosion of its support, Taiwan has in recent months made generous donations to educational and other projects that benefit the local Chinese community. For its part, a grateful Taiwan may seek to soften the blow Panama has suffered with promises of increased investment and aid. According to reports by newspapers in Taipei, Mr. Lee, who is accompanied by a delegation of more than 100 officials and businessmen and about 150 journalists, may announce while he is here that Taiwan is willing to contribute as much as $400 million to help modernize the canal. But clearly the trip has already enhanced Taiwan's political and diplomatic capital in the region. Using his invitation here as a springboard, Mr. Lee will also visit Paraguay and El Salvador, where he is scheduled to meet with the Presidents of the six Central American nations that recognize his Government. ''Both China and Taiwan are happy, because they have ended up getting what they wanted,'' a Latin American diplomat here said. ''The only real loser in all of this is Panama, which had the most at stake.'' |
961613_0 | France Scoffs At U.S. Protest Over Iran Deal | Lionel Jospin, the French Prime Minister, said today that he rejoiced in a $2 billion contract signed between a leading French oil company and Iran to explore natural gas fields and rejected what he called American attempts to impose its laws on the world. ''Nobody accepts that the United States can pass a law on a global scale,'' said Mr. Jospin, a Socialist. ''American laws apply in the United States. They do not apply in France.'' Nevertheless, the United States indicated today that it would invoke the Iran-Libya sanctions act, passed by Congress last year, which authorizes the President to impose sanctions on any company investing more than $40 million in either country because of their ties with terrorism. At a time when the Clinton Administration has expressed concern at what it sees as Iran's efforts to build a nuclear arsenal, the French decision to pour money into Iran is particularly sensitive. Mr. Jospin said the Total Oil Group, which signed the contract on Sunday, was a private company and made its own decisions. But, he added, ''personally I rejoice in it.'' The disagreement appeared to open another stormy chapter in relations between the United States and France at a time when officials on both sides of the Atlantic have been trying to paper over the cracks. France, more than any other nation, has expressed alarm at American domination in what it calls a ''unilateral world'' and has expressed a determination to stand for a different economic model and a more multilateral global order. Officials said France was confronted last week with a formal American protest urging the Government to stop the contract, but ignored the plea, delivered to the French Foreign Minister, Hubert Vedrine, by the American Ambassador to France, Felix G. Rohatyn. Mr. Rohatyn's protest reflected the American view that the contract ''represents a terrible precedent and should be stopped,'' an official said. The French Government warned the United States today not to retaliate, but the Clinton Administration vowed to ''take whatever action is appropriate under the law.'' A spokesman for the European Union in Brussels said any American retaliation would be ''illegal and unacceptable.'' The exchanges underscored the marked divergence between Europe and the United States over how to approach Iran. They also revealed the recurrent French irritation -- intermittently shared by other European nations -- at what is sometimes seen as an American attempt to impose |
961479_4 | Personal Health | in women with osteoporosis who had not yet suffered spinal shortening. And at a recent meeting of the American Society for Bone and Mineral Research in Cincinnati, Dr. Steven R. Cummings reported that Fosamax reduced the risk of spinal fracture by 44 percent among 2,214 healthy women with thin bones. Dosing rules must be followed religiously to avoid serious erosion of the esophagus and digestive upset. It is taken daily upon awakening 30 to 60 minutes before eating, drinking or taking any medication. It should be swallowed with eight ounces of plain water (not mineral water, coffee, tea or juice), after which you must remain upright -- standing or sitting -- for at least 30 minutes. If you forget your morning dose, do not take it later in the day. Fosamax should not be taken if you have an esophageal disorder, advanced kidney disease or low levels of calcium in your blood or if you are pregnant or nursing or cannot remain upright for half an hour. A second option is a drug called calcitonin-salmon, administered as a nasal spray under the trade name Miacalcin. This drug was initially given by injection or rectal suppository, but is now available as a nasal spray administered daily in alternating nostrils. Miacalcin Nasal Spray is recommended for women five or more years past menopause who cannot or will not take estrogen. Calcitonin inhibits bone loss and can increase bone density when there are high levels of calcium in the blood. Those who use it should consume at least 1,000 milligrams of supplemental calcium and 400 international units of vitamin D each day. Its main side effect is nasal irritation, which is usually mild and temporary. Unlike Fosamax and Miacalcin, which slow bone breakdown, sodium fluoride, a treatment not yet approved for general use, stimulates the bone-forming osteoblasts. It is administered in a slow-release form, twice daily for 12 months, followed by a two-month hiatus before the drug is resumed. In a one-year study in postmenopausal women who had sustained vertebral fractures, sodium fluoride increased spinal bone density up to 5 percent and greatly reduced the fracture rate. Also awaiting approval from the Food and Drug Administration is the custom-designed synthetic estrogen raloxifene, which has been shown to stimulate bone formation but not cell growth in the breast or uterus, and thus should be free of the cancer risks associated with postmenopausal estrogen therapy. |
961557_0 | Editorial Notebook; Man and Beast in Botswana | While international alarms have sounded over the slaughter of elephants and rhinos by poachers and the killing of male lions by trophy hunters, wildlife in Botswana is facing a more subtle threat. An expanding cattle industry and hundreds of miles of new veterinary cordon fences are robbing some of the last free-roaming animals in southern Africa of the range and habitat they need to survive. This may seem an anomaly in Botswana, a lightly populated country the size of France, which has dedicated almost 40 percent of its territory to national parks and lesser wildlife areas. But these lands cannot by themselves sustain animal populations that must often migrate long distances across harsh and arid terrain to reach food and water. The animals move seasonally, concentrating near a handful of rivers and other water sources during the dry season, then moving out to tap fresh food supplies when the rains open new areas to grazing. If cattle fences, farms and human settlement block their way, the results can be devastating. In central and southern Botswana, the wildebeest population dropped 94 percent between 1979 and 1994, while the hartebeest population fell 83 percent, at least in part because of human disruption of migration patterns. One controversial barrier, the Kuke cordon fence that separates the Central Kalahari Game Reserve from better-watered areas to the north, has been blamed for causing hundreds of thousands of animal deaths over the past four decades by cutting wildlife off from water and scarce grazing during severe droughts. Witnesses have described thousands of desperate animals milling helplessly along the fences or trekking long distances to get around them, until finally they drop from exhaustion. Other animals get trapped against the fences by brush fires that sweep through the area. Now hundreds of miles of new fences, built in the past two years, seem likely to disrupt the wildlife in northern Botswana. The fences are designed to hold off a very real threat, a cattle lung disease that may have originated in Namibia and struck Botswana cattle starting in late 1995. Botswana quickly threw up three fences in its northwestern corner but none contained the outbreak, forcing authorities to slaughter some 300,000 head of cattle to stamp out the epidemic. To guard against a recurrence, Botswana recently completed a formidable barrier along part of its northern border with Namibia -- two parallel fences of steel wire that will |
955312_0 | Corrections | An article yesterday about a visit to Washington by the Irish republican leader Gerry Adams referred imprecisely to the history of contacts between the British Government and Sinn Fein, the political wing of the Irish Republican Army. Mr. Adams, the Sinn Fein leader, took part in secret talks with Britain that led to a brief I.R.A. cease-fire in 1972; the inclusion of Sinn Fein in a formal Northern Ireland peace conference scheduled to begin on Sept. 9 would not be its first participation in peace talks since 1921. |
960054_1 | At First Meeting, Ulster Unionist Leader Blasts Sinn Fein | Stormont area of Belfast, the Ulster Unionists asked the British and Irish Governments, sponsors of the talks, to expel Sinn Fein on the ground that the I.R.A. had not renounced violence and had been involved in the bombing of a police station last week in a town west of here. A Republican splinter group claimed responsibility for the bombing, which caused no casualties. Officials of the talks said it was virtually certain that the Governments would refuse the request and that Sinn Fein would remain at the table. What Mr. Trimble will do at the next session was not clear. He could seek to delay the talks on Wednesday by blocking the start of discussion of substantive issues when the Governments, as expected, place them on the agenda. But he and the leaders of two smaller Protestant parties allied with paramilitary groups are expected to stay. In the fifth-floor conference room this afternoon, Ken Maginnis, one of Mr. Trimble's deputies, attacked Sinn Fein and the British Government as Mr. Trimble sat silent. Mr. Maginnis said Mr. Adams and his deputy, Martin McGuinness, ''have for over 25 years been active within'' the I.R.A. ''as activists, commanders and presently as godfathers.'' Later, talking to reporters, Mr. Maginnis noted that Mr. Blair had said the I.R.A. and Sinn Fein were ''inextricably linked.'' He added, ''Today begins the trial of New Labor on the charge that it has diminished democracy, sacrificed the freedom of the people of Northern Ireland to the terrorist and elevated an evil mafia to a status that would shame any other country in Western Europe.'' He said he wondered whether the Government had ''any genuine commitment to democracy, or is just being gulled along.'' He also attacked Britain's Northern Ireland Secretary, Mo Mowlam, who is expected to rule to keep Sinn Fein in the talks. ''She better be careful what she says,'' Mr. Maginnis said, ''in case her words turn round and bite her.'' Neither the Prime Minister nor Ms. Mowlam responded. Since he took over the Government in May, Mr. Blair, with the help of Ms. Mowlam, has accelerated the peace effort by making concessions to Sinn Fein that resulted in the restoration, in July, of the I.R.A. cease-fire. Sinn Fein was then admitted to the talks on the basis of the cease-fire and the party's pledge to adhere to nonviolence principles. Mr. Trimble has said that the cease-fire |
960039_0 | Campus Journal; Final Volume of Study Documents a Central Role for Black Colleges | The number of black students taking the Scholastic Assessment Test increased by nearly a third from 1980 to 1996, according to the third and final reference book in a series of three devoted to African-Americans and their educational experiences. And, in a development that suggests the importance of historically black colleges and universities, most black students asked that their test scores be sent to those institutions. ''This study gives us a fact-based foundation from which we can develop strategies to improve African-American achievement levels in the future,'' said William H. Gray 3d, president of the United Negro College Fund, which raised $5 million to support the publications. The new book looks at education and employment. It is being issued today in Washington by the college fund's Frederick D. Patterson Research Institute. All three books compile decades of information from more than 40 archives. The study found that blacks tended to favor employment in the armed services. In 1996, blacks represented 27 percent of active-duty personnel in the Army, 17 percent in the Navy, 15.7 percent in the Marines, 14.7 percent in the Air force and 6.7 percent in the Coast Guard. Nevertheless, said Michael T. Nettles, a professor of education on leave from the University of Michigan who has worked on the project for a year, rank and pay distribution in the military is about equal for blacks and whites. That ''suggests a model for private sector employment,'' he said. Outside the military, Dr. Nettles said, blacks are taking longer than others to find jobs, and the jobs they find are not paying as much money. The first volume dealt with higher and adult education and was published in February; the second, about preschool through high school education, was published in June. Dr. Nettles said the final volume in the series reported that the number of blacks taking the S.A.T. had grown by nearly 28 percent from 1980 to 1996, rising to 106,573 from 83,321. He noted a corresponding increase in the number of students requesting that their scores be sent to historically black colleges. Dr. Nettles said that ''the rate of on-time graduation from high school has got to be raised,'' adding that ''we also have to work on improving the quality of education in secondary schools and on improving the scores on admissions tests.'' He termed the current level of college preparation of African-American ''unacceptable.'' WILLIAM H. HONAN |
958025_1 | Theorists See Evolutionary Advantages In Menopause | baobab and berries, Grandma who keeps them alive. She is not a sentiment, she is a requirement. As Dr. Hawkes, Dr. James O'Connell of the University of Utah and Dr. Nicholas Blurton Jones of the University of California at Los Angeles report in the latest issue of Current Anthropology, a nursing Hadza woman always has a postmenopausal helper. There are only about 750 Hadza, and they are contemporary hunter-gatherers, not pristine relics of prelapsarian humanity. Nevertheless, the centrality of elder women to their group's survival has thrown fresh kindling on the spirited debate over the origins and purpose of human menopause. As doctors and women thrash out the best way to ''treat'' menopause, pitting the benefits of estrogen therapy to the heart and bones against the risks the hormone poses to the breast and possibly the ovaries, evolutionary scientists address the menopause mystery from a more high-flown, though no less quarrel-prone, perspective. They ask whether menopause is an ancient adaptation or a contemporary artifact. Is it the well-wrought product of natural selection, or the incidental byproduct of an unnaturally prolonged life span? Proponents of the adaptationist camp generally see menopause as the thriftiest solution to the problem of exorbitant offspring. By this view, the ludicrous amount of time required for a mother to rear children to maturity led to the need for so-called premature reproductive senescence, an early retirement program for the ovaries. Through the mechanism of menopause, an ancestral woman theoretically was spared the risks of childbirth, and thus had a heightened chance of living long enough to see her existing children out the door. Dr. Jared Diamond, a physiologist at the University of California at Los Angeles Medical School has said that menopause, like big brains and upright posture, is ''among the biological traits essential for making us human.'' The artifactualists insist that prehistoric women almost never survived past the age of 30, let alone long enough to experience the thrill of hot flashes. By their reckoning, menopause is a modern luxury, the result of women now outlasting an egg supply that more than sufficed for the cameo appearances that their Stone Age foremothers called lives. ''For most of our existence, we simply didn't live very long,'' said Dr. Alison Galloway, an anthropologist at the University of California at Santa Cruz. ''Menopause happens because, through technology, we've extended our lives to the point where we run out of |
958048_3 | Researchers Find a Concentrated Anticancer Substance in Broccoli Sprouts | if sprinkled onto a salad or sandwich by themselves. Nevertheless, scientists admitted there is nothing wrong with the idea of people adding broccoli sprouts to an otherwise healthy diet. Unlike other products under development known variously as designer foods or so-called nutraceuticals, broccoli sprouts are in no way genetically manipulated or enhanced -- they are simply young plants that until now had not been thought to have much culinary appeal. Dr. Talalay and his colleagues said they hoped to have broccoli sprouts in supermarket shelves by 1998. But they admit they are scientists, not businessmen, and thus they have yet to figure out how the product might be distributed. People could cultivate the sprouts on their own, said Dr. Talalay, but the plants need a constant infusion of water to offset the enormous heat generated as seedlings rapidly sprout. The Talalay laboratory first got onto the broccoli beat in 1992, when they announced the isolation from broccoli of an isothiocyanate called sulforaphane and found in cell culture experiments that it was a major inducer of the body's so-called phase II enzymes. These enzymes operate in cells to break down and eliminate noxious compounds before they do damage to the cell's D.N.A. and set the stage for cancer. And unlike some other inducers of phase II activity that had been found in food, sulforaphane did not activate any of the cell's corresponding phase I enzymes, which perversely turn precancerous chemicals into carcinogens. In other words, sulforaphane looked like an unalloyed ''chemoprotectant,'' as the new buzz phrase has it, able to help gird against tumorigenesis. Within short order, health food stores were abrim with products like broccoli powder, marketed as containing that magic cancer-fighting ingredient, sulforaphane. Dr. Talalay and his colleagues, however, also discovered that different strains of broccoli varied widely in their concentrations of sulforaphane, and they started growing plants in their laboratory to see if they could create a more uniform crop. Upon testing the broccoli at the sprout stage, they realized they could stop right there. Not only did the sprouts contain surprisingly large doses of sulforaphane, they were also comparatively more consistent in their concentration of the chemical, a point that Dr. Talalay said was essential if the food item was to be useful as a source of chemoprotection. The researchers are also performing a variety of studies to see if sulforaphane works as well in humans as |
958049_4 | Tiniest Terror Plaguing Los Angeles | kill other desirable insects as well, and they require monthly applications at a cost of $25 to $35 each in the hot season. For the longer term, scientists are studying the possibility of using an exotic South American fly, part of a family known as phorids, which preys on Argentine ants in the wild. The flies are parasites, laying eggs in other insects like the ant. The same broad group of flies is being tested in Florida to try to control fire ants, ferocious insects that have spread throughout the South. Although scientists find the prospect of biological controls appealing, they warn that such measures must be tested carefully to avoid upsetting some other aspect of the local ecosystem inadvertently. Indeed, the whole science of studying the interlocking rhythms of nature is still emerging. ''We're definitely still in the steep part of the learning curve in terms of understanding the long-term effects of these sorts of things,'' said Allison Alberts, a staff ecologist at the San Diego Zoo who has studied the effects of human encroachment and non-native plants on the horned lizards' natural habitat. For the moment, how to handle the ants is a hot topic of household conversation, and everyone seems to have a personal remedy. Christine Watt of Irvine recently wrote to The Los Angeles Times to recommend scattering cotton balls dunked in peppermint oil. Dr. Alberts, who lives in an old house in San Diego and has ''a terrible problem with ants,'' uses Fantastik spray cleaner, which has the added benefit of obliterating the pheromone trails the ants leave behind as a guide for others. ''We spray Fantastik in the kitchen all the time anyway,'' she said. Professor Case recommends small plastic traps, like the Combat brand, filled with bait that the ants take back to their nest, poisoning the queens and destroying the colony. But he warned that this method should not be combined with spraying because that would kill the ants before they could carry the bait back home. The good news is that cooler weather will soon be here, making the ants less desperate for the dark corners of kitchen cabinets and more content outside. The bad news is that meteorologists are saying that California might get the worst winter rains in half a century thanks to the El Nino effect, and that would drive the ants back inside to escape soggy ground. |
958098_0 | Sinn Fein Joins Ulster Talks But Protestants Stay Away | For the first time since Ireland was divided in 1922 into the independent Irish Free State and the British province of Ulster, Sinn Fein, the political wing of the Irish Republican Army, entered formal, broad-based peace negotiations today. The talks are aimed at ending the sectarian violence that has killed 3,225 in Northern Ireland since 1969. Parties representing the province's Protestant majority stayed away from the opening session of the talks, which were attended by the British and Irish Governments and five other political groups. But David Trimble, head of the Ulster Unionist Party, the largest party in the province, said he expected to join the talks ''as soon as possible.'' Other, smaller Protestant parties are expected to follow him into the negotiations, being held on the fifth floor of Castle Buildings, in the Stormont section of Belfast. ''This could be the beginning of the end of conflict on this island,'' Gerry Adams, the president of Sinn Fein, said as he entered the drab office building where the talks convened. Monica McWilliams, head of the Women's Coalition, one of the parties taking part in the negotiations today, said of the conflict between Catholics and Protestants: ''We have had this scenario in Northern Ireland for hundreds of years. We have one more year to put this thing right. It's boys playing war and I'm angry about it.'' Mr. Adams parried reporters' questions about Sinn Fein's relationship with the I.R.A. and the I.R.A. statement last week that it did not consider itself bound by the principles of nonviolence that Mr. Adams had subscribed to for his party. Sinn Fein was admitted to the talks by the Irish and British Governments after it made the commitment to nonviolence and after a new cease-fire by the I.R.A., now in its ninth week, was judged genuine by Britain's Northern Ireland Secretary, Mo Mowlam. Sinn Fein's entry into the talks today was not the first time Mr. Adams had met British officials to discuss peace. In 1972 he was released from a British jail, where he was interned as a terrorist leader, and flown to London for secret talks, with no other political parties present. The talks produced a brief cease-fire. Since then, the two wings of the overwhelmingly Roman Catholic republican movement, Sinn Fein and the I.R.A., have pursued a two-pronged strategy, with Mr. Adams working politically and the outlawed guerrillas bombing and shooting here |
958047_0 | WebTV Introduces a System Linking Live TV and Internet | WebTV Networks, designers of set-top boxes that bring Internet services to the television screen, introduced an upgraded version yesterday that melds live television programming with related pages on the World Wide Web. For the last year, WebTV, a subsidiary of the Microsoft Corporation, has been selling boxes that allow users to browse the Web on their television sets, using a connection to a regular telephone line. The Sony Corporation and Philips Electronics make the devices. But the service had little if any relationship to the television programming that could also be seen on the set. Sales have been lackluster. After a year, WebTV has signed up 150,000 subscribers, who pay about $20 a month for the service. But with the upgrade, said Steve Perlman, president of the company, WebTV hopes to have 250,000 subscribers by the end of the year. With the new product, users will be able to watch a TV show and be alerted if the programmer has prepared special Web pages that offer more information about the show. In that case, if the viewer chooses, the TV show will become a window within a Web page that fills the screen. This new direction for WebTV is consistent with Microsoft's larger strategy of trying to make the Internet more closely associated with television to provide a larger market for Microsoft's products. With the new version of WebTV, viewers will be able to interact with the show or with advertisers by E-mail, participate in chat groups or order merchandise. The new boxes also offer television program guides that allow viewers to navigate through the offerings on their cable systems. The WebTV box calls a central computer each night and downloads the information, along with any E-mail the user might have received. The box also has a TV tuner, allowing close integration of the guide and the programming. In addition, the box has the ability to receive video E-mail that is sent by a correspondent using a video camera. A hard drive inside the WebTV box will hold video files and other information. The new boxes, to go on sale next month, will cost $299. A wireless keyboard will cost $49 more. The older boxes will be cut to $199 from $299, and WebTV is offering an additional $100 rebate. THE MEDIA BUSINESS |
958104_2 | Observer; The Poor Get Poorer | governments to ravage maybe 50 percent of their salaries. This means they have to earn about $54,000 before taxes just for tuition and board. That's for one child. For two, it's $108,000 a year. For three -- But let us draw the curtain. If you have tears you are probably shedding them now. What do colleges do for this kind of money? They certify. As the United States is now organized, people not certified by colleges don't have a lot to look forward to except that blessed happiness that cannot be bought with money. When seeking work, youth is asked by corporate interrogators, ''Are you certified?'' If not, alas! The essential certifying is done by colleges of what is called ''higher learning,'' the highest form of learning being that uncertified people don't go far. The indispensable certificates, called ''diplomas,'' certify that recipients are persons whose parents were willing to face financial ruin in order to have their children certified. In the past generation or two, too many people have been certified. The employment market is glutted with certified job applicants. Employers can afford to be picky. ''So you're certified, and who isn't these days?'' they yawn. They have developed new criteria for weighing individual worthiness within the certified masses. ''Being certified cuts no ice here, kid,'' they say. ''The big question is how much did the old folks pay to get the certifying done for you.'' So Moms and Dads now pray that their produce will be acceptable to colleges notorious for their bankruptive tuition costs. Ivy League colossuses and many flossy but small private colleges are now well over $20,000 per annum and, considering the bullishness of the college market, likely to hit $30,000 before today's seventh-graders need certifying. Applicants for admission to these top-dollar certifiers are so profuse that being accepted to one confers a singularity in a category with the Hope Diamond and the World Series victory of the St. Louis Browns. Parents pining for poverty dream of having just one precious child accepted by a college that rejects 999 of every 1,000 applications. These elegant academies, as might be expected, tend to breed killers -- corporation lawyers, merger-acquisition-and-downsizing wizards, Washington string-pullers, etc. The kind of people you don't mess with if you know what's good for you. Killers. No wonder. After paying those killer tuitions, their parents would probably kill them if they didn't become killers. |
956876_0 | I.R.A. Offers Support (of a Sort) for Nonviolence | The Irish Republican Army said today that it approved of the pledge by its political wing, Sinn Fein, to adhere to principles of nonviolence when Sinn Fein enters formal peace talks on Ulster next week. But, in a rare statement of the I.R.A.'s own intentions, a spokesman said the outlawed guerrilla organization ''would have problems'' with some of the pledges, which Sinn Fein subscribed to on Tuesday at preliminary talks presided over by the former Senator, George J. Mitchell. Mr. Mitchell first proposed the principles in January 1996. Sinn Fein qualified for the talks by declaring itself committed to nonviolence principles. In an interview with the weekly Republican News, which supports both the violent campaign of the I.R.A. and the peace efforts of Sinn Fein, the I.R.A. spokesman, who was not identified, said the guerrillas would not disarm except as part of an overall peace accord. Otherwise, disarmament ''would be tantamount to surrender,'' he said. The statement provoked indignant responses from both Protestant leaders in the North and Irish officials in Dublin. David Trimble, head of the Ulster Unionist Party, the largest political organization in the North, said that because Sinn Fein and the I.R.A. are one organization, the statement meant the Sinn Fein officials are ''trying to wriggle out'' of their pledge of nonviolence. In Dublin, the former Prime Minister, John Bruton, whose relations with Sinn Fein have always been cool, said, ''Given that the I.R.A. and Sinn Fein are the same organization in terms of their political direction, this an extremely disquieting.'' Mitchel McLaughlin, the Sinn Fein chairman, said that there are ''no organic links'' between his party and the guerrillas (though most ordinary citizens and officials believe they are virtually the same). It was not immediately clear what effect today's statement would have on the talks, which are to begin substantive discussions on Monday. The first issue is disarmament of paramilitary groups on both sides. Sinn Fein has said that while it adheres to nonviolence, it cannot order the I.R.A. to disarm as the talks progress, as the Protestants insist. |
956860_0 | AUTOS ON FRIDAY/Collecting; 100 Candles for Olds And Cars That Shine On | AS its 1998 models arrive in dealer showrooms, Oldsmobile begins its second hundred years. For those who love vintage autos, Olds is significant for more than being the oldest surviving American nameplate, and the first to celebrate its centennial. The General Motors division has built some merry and memorable cars, a handful of which are highly desirable today. Older Oldses are not particularly expensive, at least not like Ferraris and Duesenbergs, and they have an enthusiastic following. About two thousand Oldsmobiles, of nearly every vintage, showed up last month to form a caravan that encircled the brand's hometown of Lansing, Mich., to mark Olds's 100th birthday. Here are some Olds models with historical significance that are also prized by collectors: 1901-07 CURVED DASH The legendary Curved Dash Oldsmobile occupies an important place in automotive history. Inexpensive and durable, it became America's first high-volume motor car, with Ransom E. Olds producing some 11,000. Of those, 1,000 or so are still around, according to Gary Hoonsbeen of the Curved Dash Oldsmobile Club, based in Minneapolis. Prices range from $15,000 to $25,000. One reason so many survive, said Randy Mason, a Curved Dash owner and former transportation curator of the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Mich., ''is because they were everyone's first car.'' He mentions, too, that Curved Dashes were so cute and tiny that people tucked them into barns and garages, where collectors eventually found them. Curved Dash Oldses were also beautifully simple, particularly in runabout form; a runabout was an open two-seater with the driver and passenger perched atop the engine. The body was made of wood, with two longitudinal springs that tied the axles together. The one-cylinder engine could wheeze along, seemingly, forever. In 1908, Oldsmobile and Buick provided the twin pillars on which William C. Durant built General Motors. 1949-51 FUTURAMIC EIGHTY EIGHT Olds created the Futuramic by applying its own styling touches to Chevrolet's lightweight body and stuffing its new 135-horsepower, high-compression Rocket V8 under the hood. ''Rocket'' was no exaggeration; this car could fly. Olds dominated late-model stock-car racing in 1950, with Curtis Turner, Fonty Flock and Norm Nelson piloting Eighty Eights to Nascar and American Automobile Association victories before factory-supported Hudson Hornets took over. The most desirable of the early Eighty Eights are the '49 fastbacks, which now sell for about $6,000; the 1950 hardtop coupes, for $7,000, and the 1949-50 convertibles, for $18,000. 1953 NINETY |
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