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981714_3 | been that it will not use its scientific and technical expertise to build nuclear arms. The Republic of China on Taiwan was established by Chiang Kai-shek, the leader of the Chinese Nationalists, who fled with two million followers after Mao's Communist forces took control of the mainland in 1949. China regards Taiwan as a ''renegade province,'' and from time to time has threatened to attack if Taiwan develops a nuclear bomb. These tensions rise and fall; after China test-fired missiles into the waters off Taiwan's coast in 1995, Taiwan's President, Lee Teng-hui, told the National Assembly that Taiwan should consider reviving its nuclear weapons program. Days later, he said that Taiwan would ''definitely not'' resume work on a bomb. The article in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, written by David Albright, president of the Institute for Science and International Security in Washington, and Corey Gay, a policy analyst at the institute, is the most thorough study available on Taiwan's nuclear weapons program. The program dates back at least to China's first nuclear test in October 1964, though its roots may lie in the 1950's. When China developed the bomb, Taiwan wanted one, just as Pakistan went to work on building a weapon after its neighbor and archrival India tested one. Ownership of a nuclear weapon is a matter of national pride and status as much as a matter of national defense. After the Chinese test, President Chiang pressed the United States to attack China's nuclear installations, the study shows. Rebuffed, Taiwan went to work on developing the know-how, the technology and the techniques for building a bomb. Taiwan's work on the bomb took place at the Chungsan Institute of Science and Technology, a military installation, and the adjacent Institute for Nuclear Energy Research. The authors of the study say the energy institute, known as INER, was set up to produce plutonium metal, the desired form for the fissile material in a nuclear bomb. INER bought a 40-megawatt nuclear research reactor from Canada, the same model India used to produce the plutonium it used for its first nuclear test explosion. The institute also bought nuclear equipment, supplies and expertise from the United States, France, Germany, Norway and other nations. South Africa supplied 100 metric tons of uranium. The United States supplied a form of plutonium. All of this material was ostensibly for civilian research. But by 1974, a decade after | How a Spy Left Taiwan in the Cold |
981753_2 | did not learn of the danger at 540 Madison until Dec. 7, when a section of the wall collapsed. Mr. Macklowe said he had not decided whether to erect a new masonry wall, or to fasten an aluminum skin to the side of the tower; the east and north sides of the building are clad in glass. Mr. Macklowe said that engineers had inspected the west facade, which is also made of brick, and found it to be structurally sound. Public relations and marketing, as well as public safety, played a role in Mr. Macklowe's decision, said city officials and executives involved in the repairs. Engineers had initially planned to erect a steel grid on the side of the building to support the brickwork when it began crumbling, causing an intermittent shutdown of Madison. But the officials said Mr. Macklowe was concerned that a highly visible grid would be a stigma, hobbling his efforts to rent space at high prices. ''For a whole lot of reasons other than structural ones, it makes sense to take down all the brick,'' Buildings Commissioner Gaston Silva said. Engineers will spend the weekend bracing about eight sections of the south wall, between the 18th and 39th floors. Also yesterday, the first in what is expected to be a host of lawsuits stemming from the problems at 540 Madison was filed in State Supreme Court in Manhattan. The owners of Dino Baldini, a men's clothing store, Michel's Bags, which sells wallets and handbags, and 5th Avenue Chocolatiere brought a class action suit seeking damages against Mr. Macklowe for lost business, asserting that he had been negligent in buying and renovating the building. As a result, they say, bricks and mortar fell into the street, causing the closing of Madison Avenue and a sudden drop in the number of shoppers and sales. ''Absent natural disasters, the merchants of Madison Avenue don't think it's unreasonable to ask landlords prevent their building from crumbling into the streets, thereby making passage unsafe along the city's roadways,'' said Kenneth J. Ashman of Ashman & Griffin, a lawyer for the merchants. Mr. Macklowe has anticipated a flurry of suits and is considering several of his own, said one person close to the developer, including suits against the estate of a previous owner and Mr. Macklowe's title company. ''I'm sure there are going to be many lawsuits,'' Mr. Macklowe said. ''You can't | Owner to Dismantle Flawed Madison Ave. Facade |
981710_0 | When he stumbled on a simple way to make jigsaw puzzles in three dimensions, Paul E. Gallant knew he had a good idea. When he looked at the cost of developing that idea, though, he concluded that the Canadian market was just too small -- that his only hope of turning a profit would be to focus on exports. That is what he did, and while he might have made it even if he had been content to stay north of the border, the route he took transformed his small Quebec company into a global success story, and his simple idea has made its mark in the toy industry. Go near a toy display anywhere in North America this Christmas and there is a good chance of running into one or more versions of Mr. Gallant's good idea. His company, Wrebbit Inc., along with his new United States partner, Hasbro Inc., will turn out more than 10 million three-dimensional puzzles this year of buildings like the Taj Majal and the Tower of Pisa, as well as contemporary icons, like the Millennium Falcon from ''Star Wars.'' And all this started with a toy industry novice. Most of Mr. Gallant's prior career was devoted to marketing and distributing records. Even as a child, he did not particularly enjoy doing puzzles. In a high-tech age of electronic toys and whiz-bang video games, Wrebbit's Puzz 3D puzzles are resiliently old-fashioned, even if they are a true innovation. Jigsaw puzzles, developed in the 1700's, have had their ups and downs, with their appeal enhanced occasionally by, say, presenting a mystery whose solution is found by completing the puzzle. But the toy industry is as cutthroat as Captain Hook and more capricious than Miss Piggy. One season's hits may bring yawns a season later, so it could be tough keeping Puzz 3D puzzles from becoming next year's Cabbage Patch doll. ''We've seen a lot of one-hit wonders,'' said Frank Reysen Jr., editor of Playthings magazine. ''The shelf life of even the best toys is notoriously short-lived. The challenge for a manufacturer is figuring out how to keep a toy alive for two to three years.'' The other problem for a popular toy is a rash of lower-priced, typically lower-quality knock-offs. Wrebbit's busy legal department has already fought, and won, three patent infringement cases in Canada and the United States. ''Me-too products are very common in the | Newfangled Idea For Old-Fashioned Toy; These Next-Generation Jigsaw Puzzles Take Off in a Direction All Their Own |
981734_0 | With a major rift between Orthodox and non-Orthodox Jews developing in Israel and the United States, it is worth noting that internecine warfare among Jews is nearly as old as Judaism itself. Indeed, the festival of Hanukkah, which starts next week, celebrates a stunning military victory in which strictly observant Jewish forces crushed the Jews who favored assimilation into the larger secular culture and expelled them from the Temple in ancient Jerusalem. You would not know this from the Walt Disney version of Hanukkah that many Jewish children learn from sermons and religious schools. Hanukkah is widely taught as a story of the triumph of Judah Maccabee over the Greeks, culminating in his recapture of the Temple. The miracle in which one day's supply of lamp oil lasted for eight days is honored by the lighting of candles on the Hanukkah menorah. In fact, Judah Maccabee's victory followed as much from a civil conflict among Jews as from the battle with the Greeks or, more accurately, the Seleucid dynasty that had inherited part of Alexander the Great's empire in the Middle East. Alexander's domain, extending from India to Gaul, had inspired loyalty among many subjects, including many Jews. Wealthy, educated Jews were especially attracted to Greek culture, philosophy, sciences and athletics, including naked wrestling, which scandalized traditionalists. Even more shocking was the succession as high priests at the Temple by the so-called Hellenized Jews, who conspired with Antiochus IV of the Seleucid house to turn Jerusalem into a citadel of Greek culture. Disgusted by these developments, the Jewish masses turned against Antiochus and their own collaborationist high priests. The Seleucids retaliated by banning certain Jewish religious observances and desecrating the Temple in Jerusalem. These persecutions drove most Jews into the arms of the rebels, who recaptured the Temple in 164 B.C. In Israel you can still hear Orthodox Jews disdain Reform or Conservative Jews as ''Hellenized,'' an insult akin to ''Quisling.'' Today Hanukkah has taken on a tone of militancy and martyrdom, celebrating the first time in history that Jews rose up and fought for their religion. In Israel, Hanukkah celebrations are thus linked with nationalism and military prowess, whereas in the United States Hanukkah has the added significance of a winter holiday to compete with Christmas. But an additional lesson could be drawn from Hanukkah to the effect that in resolving the conflict today between observant and secularized Jews, | Editorial Observer; The Celebration of Hanukkah, Then and Now |
979704_1 | obviously highly symbolic, had afforded the two sides a discussion in which they really ''engaged.'' ''We certainly had the opportunity to put forward our view that all the hurt and grief and pain and division that has come from British involvement in Irish affairs has to end,'' he said. The meeting was not, he said, ''one where we put up our stock positions and Mr. Blair puts up his stock positions.'' A spokesman for Mr. Blair later agreed, saying that the session, which he called ''constructive and positive,'' had gone beyond ''people chanting mantras and slogans.'' He said the Prime Minister had sought and received from Mr. Adams a statement of his commitment to non-violence. ''It is important that I can look you in the eye and hear you say that you remain committed to peaceful means,'' the spokesman quoted Mr. Blair as saying. The Prime Minister told his visitors that if there was a return to violence, ''we waste the best possibility for peace that we have had for a generation.'' The I.R.A. renewed a lapsed cease-fire on July 20 and in September gained entry to the all-party peace talks now under way in Belfast. The party has obtained increasing recognition from Britain, a country that once so reviled Mr. Adams that his voice was not allowed to be broadcast here. In a step leading to today's meeting, Mr. Blair visited Belfast in October and greeted Mr. Adams for the first time. Besides the echo of history, there were also personal reminders to Mr. Adams today of the emotional freight attached to a meeting between a British Prime Minister and the leaders of a party that has until recently backed a violent struggle to oust the British from Northern Ireland. The father of a 12-year-old boy who died in an I.R.A. bombing of a busy shopping street in Warrington, Cheshire, in March 1993 called into a radio talk show to speak to Mr. Adams, and the mother of the last British soldier killed in Northern Ireland spoke to him from the curb of Downing Street before he went inside. Mr. Adams told the caller, Colin Parry, ''I know that you yourself and your family have suffered very much from conflict in my country.'' Rita Restorick, whose son Stephen was shot by an I.R.A. sniper on Feb. 12, said she told Mr. Adams that she hoped he would ''put an | I.R.A. Figure Meets Blair at No. 10 in 'Moment in History' |
979812_0 | To the Editor: George J. Borjas and Richard B. Freeman, in their Dec. 10 Op-Ed article on the economic impact of immigration, write as if the United States economy operated in isolation and American immigration policy could be constructed as if its major influences stemmed from within our borders. In fact, the United States must respond to global pressures. The skills, contacts and labor of immigrants help assure the viability of American companies, securing employment for both newcomers and native-born workers. Mr. Borjas and Mr. Freeman also exacerbate social tensions when they write, ''The critical issue is how much we care about the well-being of immigrants compared with that of the Americans who win and the Americans who lose.'' It is divisive and inaccurate to posit an inevitable competition between immigrants and Americans. Immigrants are part of the same families as natives and become part of our society. The businesses they create benefit us all. Only by falsely conceiving of them as outsiders can Mr. Borjas and Mr. Freeman focus on the problems rather than on the contributions they have made and will continue to make to this society. GARY E. RUBIN New York, Dec. 10, 1997 The writer is assistant executive vice president for public policy, New York Association for New Americans. | Don't Ignore Immigration's Benefits to the U.S. |
979786_0 | The White House, beginning the arduous task of selling an accord to reduce emissions of climate-altering gases, said today that it would not submit the proposed treaty for Senate ratification until developing countries agree to participate in the global environmental effort. But developing countries at the global climate-change conference that just ended in Kyoto, Japan, said they would not act until they see the rich countries succeed in cutting their own emissions. And many members of the Senate are already saying it has no chance of passage. The accord is dependent on Senate approval. At the insistence of China and other developing countries, the Kyoto conference imposed no requirements on newly industrialized countries and created only limited mechanisms for their inclusion in global efforts to curb so-called greenhouse gases. The developing countries delayed a compromise that would have allowed the United States and other major polluters to buy or trade emission credits from countries whose emissions are within acceptable levels, and therefore avoid making significant cuts in emissions in a compressed time period. With Senators denouncing the accord as not tough enough on developing countries, the stage was set for a yearlong political fight with the Clinton Administration, which has embraced the outlines of the deal. The developing countries' objections provide Mr. Clinton with additional time to muster his arguments in favor of the treaty and an opportunity to portray himself as a defender of the United States' interests. For the next year -- an election year -- he is in the risk-free position of being able to make a strong pro-environmental political pitch while not having to face a damaging vote in the Senate. President Clinton defended the agreement as ''environmentally strong and economically sound,'' even as Administration officials were admitting that its flaws made it unacceptable to the Senate. Mr. Clinton is likely to either win credit for tackling a difficult problem or pay a huge political cost for misjudging the public's appetite for sacrifice, even if doled out in small portions over many years. The outcome of the debate and the political impact on Mr. Clinton and Vice President Gore are yet to be seen. But it is certain that Congress and the American people will be subjected to millions of dollars worth of lobbying and advertising in the next months by powerful coalitions that support and oppose the proposed treaty. Already, both sides are making sweeping | CLINTON ADAMANT ON 3D WORLD ROLE IN CLIMATE ACCORD |
981348_3 | its costs so that its reimbursements could enhance profits in later years. At one Arkansas hospital, the records were ink-stamped: ''CONFIDENTIAL. Do not discuss or release to Medicare auditors.'' *Taken as a whole, the pattern of costs in Texas and Florida that Columbia reported to the Government raises a red flag. Alone, these figures do not prove fraud. But the results of the computer analysis are consistent with an effort to inflate expenses. *Misrepresentation of costs has occurred throughout the for-profit hospital industry. Hospitals now owned by Columbia distorted costs when they were owned by several other companies, including Healthtrust, Basic American Medical and the Hospital Corporation of America. For example, Southwest was with Basic American when it inflated its property taxes. But the liability now rests with Columbia, which has drawn by far the greatest scrutiny. After discussions with The Times over several weeks, Columbia chose not to comment on most of the issues raised from the confidential records, known as reserve cost reports, until after an audit by Deloitte & Touche -- which was recently hired to conduct an internal investigation. As for the computer analysis, executives said they thought other factors in Columbia's business might explain discrepancies between its hospitals and those of its rivals. Still, Columbia plans to turn over The Times's computer findings to Deloitte and will ask the accountants to review cost reports questioned by the paper, said Victor Campbell, a spokesman. Mr. Campbell added that the events in question predated the July appointment of the former head of H.C.A., Dr. Thomas Frist Jr., as Columbia's chairman and chief executive. Since then, Dr. Frist has stressed ''zero tolerance'' for wrongdoing, he said. For its part, KPMG said the firm was cooperating with the Government but was not a target of the inquiry. The Times investigation shows the ease of defrauding Medicare's cost-reporting system, which is widely criticized for an unpredictability that verges on capriciousness. Rules are vague, critics say, and worse, are enforced by outside companies that often turn to recent college graduates to conduct field audits. Unsurprisingly, they often divine conflicting rule interpretations. Moreover, with it taking years to catch problems and with penalties rarely imposed, the price for fraud has been negligible. ''It's a bizarre world,'' said James Plonsey, president of Medicare Training and Consulting, a cost-report specialist in Lansing, Ill. ''There is an incentive to abuse the system and wait for | HEALTH CARE'S GIANT: Artful Accounting -- A special report.; Hospital Chain Cheated U.S. On Expenses, Documents Show |
981355_3 | rolls in the first years of the Reagan Administration. The number of children on the disability rolls has tripled since 1989, and costs have quadrupled, to more than $5 billion a year. Enrollment grew because of court decisions, an increase in the childhood poverty rate and a loosening of eligibility rules that provided benefits to children with mental impairments. Mr. Apfel, who took office on Sept. 29, promised to do a ''top-to-bottom review'' of the program in his first 30 days on the job. The review took longer than he expected. Since the President signed the welfare law last year, Social Security officials have terminated disability benefits for more than 135,000 children. About 80 percent of them have mental disorders. Many of these families did not fully understand their appellate rights, Mr. Apfel said. ''I believe these families deserve a second chance,'' he added. ''I have directed the agency to send special notices to those families who were notified that a child had lost eligibility, but who did not file an appeal.'' These families will have 60 days to appeal, and can continue receiving benefits if they appeal in the first 10 days. They can also recover payments that they would have received since their benefits were halted. Families who appeal have a good chance of success. Children have won restoration of benefits in more than half of the appeals decided to date, with especially high rates of success in Illinois, Louisiana, Michigan, New Jersey and New York. Besides reviewing cases of mental retardation, Mr. Apfel said, Social Security officials will identify other types of cases ''with the greatest likelihood of error'' by the Government, and children with these impairments will be re-evaluated. In letters terminating benefits, Social Security officials have invited parents to call a toll-free telephone number with questions. Mr. Apfel said that he would give the phone operators a new script to make sure they did not mislead parents with incorrect answers. Jonathan M. Stein, general counsel of Community Legal Services of Philadelphia, who has represented thousands of people seeking disability benefits in the last 20 years, said Mr. Apfel ''has shown compassion and courage in trying to do the right thing.'' But Mr. Stein added, ''We are disappointed that Mr. Apfel has not addressed the inadequacy of the regulation'' issued by the Government in February to interpret the new eligibility criteria set by Congress last year. | Fearing Errors, U.S. Will Review Cutoff in Aid to Disabled Youths |
980699_0 | INTERNATIONAL A3-12 A Tone of Conciliation From Iran's President President Mohammed Khatami of Iran professed ''great respect'' for the United States and said he hoped that American politicians would ''understand their own time'' and stop trying to isolate his country. A1 Iranian and American diplomats have been exploring ways to end the civil war in Afghanistan. The meetings, held at the United Nations, began after the moderate Mr. Khatami became Iran's first popularly elected President in August. The talks are aimed at devising a power-sharing arrangement between the militant Taliban movement that controls most of Afghanistan and a loose coalition of resistance leaders in the north of the country. A12 Hutu Kill 272 in Rwanda Attack Hutu guerrillas killed 272 people and injured 227 others in a Tutsi refugee camp in Rwanda, leaving behind pamphlets preaching genocide. The attack was part of a campaign apparently aimed at making the country ungovernable. A1 Turkey Ends Europe Dialogue Prime Minister Mesut Yilmaz of Turkey said his Government would freeze its political contacts with the European Union and seek a ''strategic partnership'' with the United States. The move came after the European Union rejected talks on Turkey becoming a member, and after Islamic leaders at a conference in Iran voted to condemn Turkey for its military ties to Israel. The European Union has criticized Turkey's human rights record. A3 Clinton to Visit Troops in Bosnia President Clinton is planning to go to Bosnia next week to visit American troops before Christmas and to begin building a public case for keeping them there past the current deadline of June, Administration officials said last night. A8 Talks May Move Out of Belfast Prime Minister Bertie Ahern of Ireland said he and Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain would try to invigorate the sluggish Northern Ireland peace talks by moving some of the sessions early next year from Belfast, the northern capital, to Dublin and London. Mr. Ahern also confirmed that he and Mr. Blair were working on a detailed list of proposals for the Protestant and Roman Catholic delegates to the talks. A8 Yeltsin Makes Appearance President Boris N. Yeltsin of Russia appeared in public in an effort to allay growing doubts about his health. Mr. Yeltsin, 66, spoke at a polling place in a Moscow sanitarium, where he cast his ballot in municipal elections. He said he entered the sanitarium last week after catching | NEWS SUMMARY |
980679_1 | around his retirement community, Sun City Center, waving to his neighbors, some in Cadillacs, others relegated to electric golf carts. To have to give up driving is viewed as a step toward dependency, and even death. Yet that moment will come for more and more Americans as the ranks of the ''old old'' increase. The issue poses a dilemma for the children of the elderly, for whom the prospect of taking the car keys from their parents is a poignant reversal of roles. And experts say that a suburbanized America is not ready to cope with a population that can no longer take to the highway. But it is the elderly who will feel the most pain. In Richmond, Va., Deborah Perkins, a geriatric nurse practitioner, recently advised a woman in her 80's with severe memory impairment to stop driving. ''She burst into tears and said, 'You might as well shoot me,' '' Mrs. Perkins said in a telephone interview. ''It's like telling a patient they have a terminal illness.'' Experts say it is the lack of adequate mass transit that makes the nation unprepared for the rising number of older people who have to stop or limit their driving. ''We plan for retirement,'' said Donna Cohen, chairwoman of the Department of Aging and Mental Health at the University of South Florida, in Tampa. ''We don't plan for the day when people have to stop driving.'' Nowhere is this more vividly demonstrated than in sprawling Florida, which has lured millions of people to its suburban retirement communities, but not put in place the public transportation to support them when they reach their 80's and 90's and physical or cognitive impairments force many of them to give up their cars or use them less. ''You can't live down here without driving,'' Bentley Lipscomb, secretary of Florida's Department of Elder Affairs, said. ''You can't go to the grocery store, the doctor, the hospital. You can't go anywhere.'' With the soaring ranks of older drivers -- nationwide, there will be an estimated 40 million drivers over age 70 in the year 2,020, up from 24 million in 1995, according to census data -- experts are grappling with another problem: How to identify unsafe drivers, and get them off the roads without restricting those who are not at risk. Overall, older drivers, who spend far less time on the road than other drivers, have | An Aging Nation Ill-Equipped for Hanging Up the Car Keys |
980661_0 | Predictions that the world's population is growing more slowly than estimated a few years ago are leading experts to take a new look at the potential shortages of forests, water and other natural resources. Today, in one of the first published reassessments, the Washington-based research organization Population Action International will report that fresh water supplies may be less scarce in the middle of the next century in some places than scientists had feared. But the report, ''Sustaining Water. Easing Scarcity: A Second Update,'' also warns that although some areas of the world may be temporarily better off because of slower population growth, global water resources remain under serious threat. Moreover, the most serious crises will be faced by some regions already prone to conflict. By 2050, the report says, the fiercest competition over fresh water is likely to be in the Middle East and parts of Africa, where populations are continuing to grow and strain already short supplies. In the Euphrates River system, where Iraq, Syria and Turkey share one water source, there will be much greater demand for water for personal use, irrigation and industry. Populations there are expected to grow 50 percent in 30 years. In Africa, researchers see water crises looming in Kenya, Morocco, Rwanda, Somalia and South Africa, where existing water scarcities will also be worsened by rapid population growth. The Nile system is expected to be under even greater strain than it is now. On the other hand, India, Pakistan, Jordan, Sri Lanka and El Salvador may be spared water crises in the near future thanks to slowing population growth, according to Population Action International's analysis. The United States fares well under most population predictions. About 270 million Americans now enjoy up to eight times the natural water resources found in most European countries. | Water-Shy Earth: New Outlook |
980702_2 | the mother was jeopardized. But the Legislature rejected her plan. Abortion opponents said the exceptions would provide women and physicians with a loophole. Mrs. Whitman, a moderate Republican and a longtime supporter of abortion rights, infuriated members of her party last year when she publicly backed President Clinton's decision to veto Federal legislation imposing a similar ban. She rejected advice from some of her allies to sign the ban into law earlier this year to improve her chances for a spot on a future national ticket. That cost her some votes among conservative Republicans in New Jersey in her hard-fought re-election bid this fall. The debate over the so-called partial birth abortions in New Jersey is part of a national effort by abortion opponents to restrict abortion on demand. Abortion opponents have spent more than $1 million this year to wage campaigns in state legislatures to ban the procedure. President Clinton has vetoed for a second time legislation approved this year that would have imposed a Federal ban on the procedure, which was used in one-tenth of 1 percent of the 1.5 million abortions a year in the United States, according to the American Medical Association. In the last year alone, more than 35 states have considered imposing bans on so-called partial birth abortions, with 14 voting to impose such bans. Two other states had imposed similar bans before this year. Last month, the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit was the first appellate division to address one of the laws, ruling that Ohio's ban on specific abortion procedures was unconstitutional because it would ban most commonly accepted procedures performed ''in the vast majority of second-trimester abortions.'' Janet Benshoof, president of the Center for Reproductive Law and Policy, a Manhattan-based abortion rights organization, said the appellate division ruling should send a clear message to lawmakers in New Jersey and across the country that they cannot enact bans on specific abortion methods. ''State legislatures are ignoring the fact that it criminalizes doctors and imperils women,'' she said. ''So doctors and women are sacrificed for a political litmus test.'' In New Jersey, the Assembly first passed the ban with a veto-proof margin. When the State Senate approved the bill in June, its margin of victory was two votes short of the number needed for an override. Now, both opponents and supporters say there are enough votes in the Senate | Senate to Vote on Rejecting Whitman's Abortion Veto |
983281_0 | Margaret Thorsborne cannot forget the two stone-curlews -- their necks outstretched, their wings beating above the pitiless crunch of steel treads -- trying to chase away the bulldozer on the development site along the southern edges of town. ''Those poor birds,'' said the slight, white-haired Mrs. Thorsborne, the eminence of the movement to preserve the Cardwell shorefront. ''Their nest had been right there, just below the crest of beach. What a nightmare, this whole dreadful affair.'' Just across a channel from a United Nations-designated World Heritage site called Hinchinbrook Island, the Cardwell birds feed among threatened mangroves. The trees form a tangled scrim of tide-washed branches and roots, serving as a nursery for marine flora and fauna. That day three years ago, the bulldozer was cutting down some of the mangroves, preparing ground for a $100 million development of waterfront residences, shops, restaurants, a 210-berth marina and a hotel. Yet almost as fast as old mangroves were torn up, Mrs. Thorsborne, a 70-year-old widow, and legions of other conservationists were planting new ones, 12,000 seedlings in all. It is a testament to the intrepid trowel brigade, as well as to court challenges and any number of protests and demonstrations, that this development project, which has galvanized environmentalists throughout Australia, has made little progress in three years. Scars of the clearing remain. Some roads have been built on the site, dredging has started for the marina and glossy brochures have been printed. But although the developer has poured an estimated $12 million into the project, not one structure has risen and none of the blocks of real estate have been sold. The campaign to protect this stretch of Queensland coast from a project that would double the population of Cardwell, a fishing town of 1,200, has attracted support because of its proximity to one of the most environmentally fragile regions anywhere. Three miles across the Hinchinbrook Channel from Cardwell is Hinchinbrook Island, the world's largest island national park and a gateway to the Great Barrier Reef, which stretches 1,500 miles along the coast. The island, channel and reef are all listed under the World Heritage Convention of the United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organization as worthy of special recognition and protection for the extraordinary diversity of their animal and plant life. The curlews may find other beaches. But the marine mammals flourishing around Hinchinbrook Island, and easily visible during one | Cardwell Journal; Mammals on This Coast: The Rare Kind, for Now |
978127_2 | of the provocative books ''The End of Ideology'' and ''The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism.'' ''There is a great degree of specialization in academic life,'' he continued. ''People are involved in their own fields. '' The newsletter is sponsored by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in Cambridge, Mass., where Mr. Bell is a scholar in residence, the Suntory Foundation in Osaka, Japan, and the Institute of Advanced Studies in Berlin. Some 60 publications, ranging from better-known magazines like The Nation to more obscure scholarly periodicals like the Tocqueville Review, have agreed to participate. In the 17th century, the growth of an increasingly educated public hungry for reading material gave rise to idea journals, according to Alan Charles Kors, a history professor at the University of Pennsylvania who specializes in 17th- and 18th-century European intellectual life. With the explosion in book publishing, Mr. Kors explained, people turned to journals to keep up with current intellectual thought. ''The feeling was, you can't read it all but you've got to be able to talk about it,'' he said. ''Learned journals, by their reviews, let you talk as if you had read a book. They also let you know what was worth reading.'' In the United States, many academic journals grew out of scholarly associations like the American Economics Association, Mr. Bell said. Although several current publications cut across academic disciplines, they are often identified with specific scholarly movements. Founded 26 years ago and published by the Johns Hopkins University Press, for example, Diacritics became the home of deconstruction (the theory that no text can have a fixed, coherent meaning; for more, look it up) and was one of the first to publish articles about and by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida. The journal Representations, published by the University of California Press, has become known for promoting the New Historicism, a cultural approach to history that examines influences on everything from books, paintings and battles to kitchen tools. Mr. Greenblatt said he started the magazine in 1983 to make contact with a broader circle of people and ideas. ''I found that some of the most interesting conversations I was having were with people outside my own field,'' Mr. Greenblatt said. ''I began to realize that the group of people I talked to constituted a kind of intellectual community, though not a community that had taken shape as such.'' A recent article in Representations | A New Journal: A Digest That Feeds on Digests |
978157_0 | Prime Minister Bertie Ahern said today that the Irish Republic was prepared eventually to drop its constitutional claim to sovereignty in the British province of Northern Ireland. He said the change in the Constitution that would be required could be put to a referendum in the republic. But Mr. Ahern's remarks, in The Financial Times today, were criticized by leaders on both sides of the Northern Ireland peace talks under way in Belfast, the northern capital. The issue of sovereignty in the north is one of the central problems of the talks, and no peace settlement is likely to be reached unless it is resolved. Article 2 of the Irish Republic's Constitution says, ''The national territory consists of the whole island of Ireland, its islands and the territorial seas.'' Article 3 says the laws of the republic also apply in the British province. Northern Protestant leaders, who want the predominantly Protestant province to remain British, say Dublin's claim is an abomination, even though no Irish Government has ever tried, or threatened, to enforce it. The Protestants say the claim must be withdrawn before Britain can consider retracting its Government of Ireland Act of 1920, which formally established London's sovereignty over the six counties of the province. Before then, Ireland was under general British control for several centuries. The Catholic leaders of Sinn Fein, the political wing of the Irish Republican Army, are still arguing at the talks for a united Ireland, free of British control, run from the overwhelmingly Catholic Irish Republic. Mr. Ahern said in Dublin today at the Forum for Peace and Reconciliation that he wanted to ''get rid of absolute claims of sovereignty over Northern Ireland by both countries.'' His words drew fire from both David Trimble, the head of the Ulster Unionist Party, the largest Protestant political organization in the North, and Martin McGuinness, the No. 2 official of Sinn Fein and one of the party's negotiators at the Belfast talks. Mr. Trimble said the remarks were ''unhelpful and destabilizing, high on rhetoric, low on detail.'' Mr. McGuinness said Mr. Ahern's remarks were in effect irrelevant, that the ''conflict in the north did not happen because of the Irish Government's claim over part of our island,'' but was the fault of British ''inequality, discrimination, injustice and domination.'' | Dublin Says It Might Drop Claim to North in Future |
984012_2 | include Beethoven's ''Eroica Symphony,'' Wagner's ''Tristan und Isolde,'' Schoenberg's ''Erwartung,'' Debussy's ''Apres Midi d'un Faune.'' What is the most that we can ever say objectively about what those composers are discovering? -- PHILIP CAMPBELL Editor, Nature If ethnicity and the human use of biological cues (and cultural and linguistic cues) to indicate social identity are parts of our evolutionary legacy, it makes it that much harder to eradicate ethnocentrism and racism. Can we do it? -- RACHEL CASPARI Anthropologist, University of Michigan If Gordon Moore was correct in his prediction that the amount of information storable on semiconductor chips would double every 18 months, over time is time more or less valuable? -- LUYEN CHOU President, Learn Technologies Interactive What is information and where does it ultimately originate? -- PAUL DAVIES Physicist, University of Adelaide, Australia What might a second specimen of the phenomenon that we call life look like? -- RICHARD DAWKINS Evolutionary biologist, Oxford A crowd can empty a football stadium in minutes, solving what is an intractable computational problem and exhibiting large-scale adaptive intelligence in the absence of central direction. Why are decentralized processes ubiquitous throughout nature and society -- evolution, itself, is such a process -- and why do people remain so distrustful of them that they will sacrifice their autonomy and freedom for centralized solutions? -- ARTHUR DE VANY Behavioral scientist, University of California at Irvine How on earth does the brain manage its division of labor problem -- that is, how do the quite specialized bits manage to contribute something useful when they get ''recruited'' by their neighbors to assist in currently dominant tasks? -- DANIEL C. DENNETT Philosopher, Tufts University What do collapses of past societies teach us about our own future? -- JARED DIAMOND Biologist, University of California at Los Angeles Medical School Throughout its history, the scientific community has shown great integrity in resisting the onslaught of antirationalism. How can it now be persuaded to show the same integrity in regard to scientism? -- DAVID DEUTSCH Physicist, Oxford Is psychic phenomenon just wishful thinking and can we ever prove it exists or doesn't exist using scientific methodology? -- JOHN C. DVORAK Columnist for PC Magazine, PC/ Computing and Boardwatch What makes a soul? And if machines ever have souls, what will be the equivalent of psychoactive drugs? Of pain? Of the physical/ emotional high I get from having a clean office? | In an On-Line Salon, Scientists Sit Back and Ponder |
984009_1 | Irons, the movie is based on Vladimir Nabokov's novel of a middle-aged man's tragic sexual obsession with a young girl. The group, Kim Initiative, denounced the film as ''an attempt to promote pedophilia.'' ''Lolita'' is scheduled for release in Germany on New Year's Day. The film has encountered resistance in Europe from child-protection groups. Mr. Irons denounced the ''moral panic'' threatening its distribution in Britain. Upright Effort A new effort is in the works to correct the posture of the Leaning Tower of Pisa. First it was girdled in steel. Now plans call for the 180-foot monument to wear a pair of skinny steel suspenders to help it stand straighter. In the spring, engineers hope to begin attaching two 340-foot-long cables running from underground counterweights to the tower. The 2.4-inch-thick cables would connect to the tower's north side at a height of 72 feet and then run to the roofs of nearby buildings. The 12th-century tower was closed to tourists in 1990 for fear it might topple. No reopening date has been set. Damage Report First shaken, now flooded. That was the report yesterday on the basilica of St. Francis of Assisi. The structure, ravaged by September earthquakes, suffered new damage when a water pipe burst in the upper chamber. A spokesman for the Franciscan order attributed the incident to human error in an area where workers were repairing quake damage. But the leak did not affect the priceless 13th- and 14th-century frescoes by Giotto and Cimabue, in the upper church, which suffered the worst damage when part of the ceiling of the basilica collapsed. Less Hip A popular salsa group that was banned in Cuba after gyrating hips and general ''lewdness'' offended Cuban officials made its comeback over the weekend. The official daily Gramma reported yesterday that the group, La Charanga Habanera, played for the Union of Communist Youth ''with a revamped repertory and a commitment to offer people an art that defends and develops the values of popular Cuban music.'' After the group's appearance at an international youth festival in August, officials condemned La Charanga Habanera for bad taste and banned it from public performances for five months to give it ''time to re-evaluate its artistic image.'' LAWRENCE VAN GELDER INSIDE Love Story Network news stages a popularity contest for a fickle audience. Critic's Notebook, page 2. Then and Now Fyvush Finkel's Town Hall forum. Review, page 5. | Footlights |
977338_3 | the City of Stamford, described the current economy as a ''boom with angst.'' ''Even though it's a tight labor market, people don't necessarily feel all that secure,'' he said. ''People know they can still lose their jobs, even though there aren't enough workers to go around.'' Nonetheless, amid the anxiety there are increasing numbers of workers with good jobs, for whom the closing months of 1997 are like the reprise of a song that some thought might never be played in this region again. ''A lot of the things my husband and I have now -- a few years ago I wouldn't have thought were attainable,'' said Laura Kuck, a 26-year-old paralegal in Stamford who is benefiting from the competition among employers. Mrs. Kuck, who lives about 40 miles north of here in New Fairfield, has changed jobs several times in the last two years, and has seen her income climb by more than $10,000 as a result. Her husband, Eric, a warehouse manager, was recently lured to Stamford by a job offer as well. The lumpiness of the region's job story can be found within towns and even within companies. Mrs. Kuck's boss, Mark P. Santagata, a partner at the law firm of Cacace Tusch Santagata, said that he and his partners had been searching for a receptionist for six months, and that they had just hired an office manager after an exhaustive search. But if they wanted to hire another lawyer, they could have their pick. ''If I put an ad in the paper looking for an attorney, I'd have 50 resumes on my desk in a day,'' Mr. Santagata said. Similarly, some companies that have been having poor luck hiring new college graduates have been reaching out specifically for older workers, checking in at places like Senior Employment Services, a nonprofit agency that works primarily with people age 50 and over. But Karen Cornwell, the agency's director, said the calls from the newly jobless had not stopped, either. On one recent morning, for instance, a senior executive from Champion International stopped by. Champion, a paper products company with its headquarters here, said in October that it would eliminate about 30 percent of its jobs, and the executive, a woman in her early 40's who had worked for the company since college, was on the layoff list. She was scared and did not want to be identified. ''But | Tight but Quirky Job Market As the New York Area Revives |
977224_0 | To the Editor: You report (news article, Nov. 30) that bears in search of food are breaking into cars in Yosemite National Park and that park management ''has taken steps to curb the problem at its source: humans.'' Yet if the National Park Service continues to modify the environment to suit tourists, it is preserving access for them at the expense of the park and its natural inhabitants, the bears. The bear and her cubs you report were killed by park rangers on Nov. 17 were innocents, executed so that unthinking tourists could come and gawk at the scenery and wildlife. If tourists really appreciated Yosemite and its creatures, they would demand that their access be limited rather than have it plastic-wrapped for them. SAMUEL J. LOWE Syria, Va., Nov. 30, 1997 | Whose Yosemite Is It? |
977309_6 | comment, made to its American and British offices. But in the past, news reports have said that it, too, transferred work to its British office after sanctions were imposed. The primary contractor for the multi-billion dollar Great Man-Made River Project is Dong Ah, a South Korean construction conglomerate. South Korean Company Is Main Contractor Last year, the company and two employees, Je Han Lee and Glen Ainsworth, pleaded guilty before a federal court in Louisville, Ky., to charges of illegally exporting drilling equipment from the United States to Libya. The company paid a $3 million fine while the employees received probation and fines of $5,000 each. Dong Ah is currently under investigation in Texas, on charges of having violated the embargo by buying anti-corrosive pipe chemicals for the Libyan project, and of money-laundering, American law enforcement officials said. Companies that violate the embargo are subject to having their export licenses revoked by the Commerce Department. It is not clear why Dong Ah has not had sanctions imposed on it, and a Commerce Department spokesman said it would not comment on any investigations that ''may or may not be under way.'' Dong Ah did not respond to a fax with questions about the project, including how it was able to buy equipment from American companies. One of the engineers said that Dong Ah was currently bringing to Libya a piece of equipment made by Dowell Schlumberger which is used to pour cement into holes and that Mr. Ainsworth had arranged it. The engineers said the unit, which may be reconditioned, came via Hamburg, Germany. Mr. Ainsworth was in Libya, and could not be reached. A Schlumberger spokesman, who asked not to be identified, said that it was the company's ''policy in all parts of the world to adhere to all U.S. laws as well as all other applicable laws regarding such situations.'' The company, which is registered in the Netherlands Antilles and has its headquarters in Paris and New York, declined to comment further. A division of one of Schlumberger's competitors, Baker Hughes, has also been supplying the Great Man-Made River project, according to the engineers. Hughes Christensen, a division of the Baker Hughes in Belfast, offered to sell Dong Ah 20 rock bits, at $20,000 each, according to a fax provided to The New York Times. The offer was sent to Dong Ah's Je Han Lee, one of the men | Libya's Vast Desert Pipeline Could Be Conduit for Troops |
978870_0 | Not long ago a cotton crop failed in the Mississippi Delta. In some fields planted with a new, genetically altered strain called Roundup Ready cotton, most of the bolls, from which the fiber is harvested, simply dropped away. For the farmers, it was an economic disaster. For Monsanto and the Delta and Pine Land Company, the developers of Roundup Ready cotton, it was a local public relations disaster -- the result, they allege, of bad weather, insects and human error. Roundup Ready cotton incorporates a gene that is supposed to allow a cotton plant to withstand the effects of a widely used weed killer called Roundup -- Monsanto's brand of a glyphosate herbicide. Monsanto has also developed strains of Roundup Ready soybeans and corn. Nearly 14 million acres of cotton were planted in the United States this year, 3 million with Roundup Ready cotton. The failure of even a fragment of this country's genetically altered cotton is worrying because major agricultural corporations like Monsanto have committed themselves, and America's farmers, to the belief that biotechnology is the future of agriculture. This cotton failure, small as it is in national terms, dramatically demonstrates why that belief needs serious, continued scrutiny. For thousands of years, farmers have looked for better varieties of the crops they plant, and for all but the last half century or so, farmers have been the principal means of improving crops. My grandfather, who farmed in northwestern Iowa before World War II, is a good example. He set aside some of each autumn's corn harvest, tested the ears of corn he saved and planted seeds from the best ones the following spring. He and many thousands of farmers like him controlled the genetic material on which their livelihoods, as well as America's food supply, depended. It wasn't necessarily the most efficient means of crop improvement, but it had the virtue of being broadly based -- genetically and politically -- and locally controlled. Steady observation and experimentation by farmers, after all, is how we got from the ancestral form of maize -- a thumb-sized nubbin of seeds -- to a modern ear of corn, which is as big as a man's forearm. The genome of corn or soybeans or cotton is literally the common inheritance of humanity. Biotechnology manipulates that genome only fractionally -- inserting, say, a gene for pesticide resistance. But that is enough to allow a corporation | Editorial Observer; Biotechnology and the Future of Agriculture |
983919_0 | Political leaders and participants in the peace negotiations in Northern Ireland sought today to keep the talks on track after a weekend of violence in the province aimed at derailing them. A jailed Protestant militant was killed by Catholic inmates Saturday morning, and a Catholic man convicted of the murder of Protestants in the 1970's was shot dead in revenge outside a discotheque Saturday night. Responsibility for both killings was taken by breakaway groups that are opposed to the talks and disdainful of the cease-fires adopted by the paramilitary groups represented by the people around the table. ''Everyone has been well aware that there are splinter groups, from whatever side, that are a current threat to the peace process,'' said Mo Mowlam, the British Secretary for Northern Ireland. ''It's a dangerous time, and this is going to be the first of many testing times in the months ahead.'' She said she had spoken to all the groups involved in the talks and added, ''We are calling together for calm.'' The victim in the Saturday night killing was Seamus Dillon, 45, a doorman at a discotheque at a Catholic-owned hotel near Dungannon in County Tyrone. He was shot by men in a car that pulled up at the club's entrance and sped away after a burst of gunfire. Two other doormen were wounded, along with a 14-year-old youth inside the dance hall doing weekend work washing glasses. In a phone call to a Belfast newsroom, a representative of the breakaway Loyalist Volunteer Force said the attack was in reprisal for the killing earlier in the day of Billy Wright, 37, a notorious Protestant militant shot five times in the back by members of a dissident Catholic group, the Irish National Liberation Army, as he was being escorted to a visitors' area inside the high security Maze jail in a suburb of Belfast. A general police alert, warning of the threat to lives at Catholic-owned pubs and hotels as well as churches, was issued by the Royal Ulster Constabulary immediately after the killing of Mr. Wright. As a result, the police said, Mr. Dillon and the other doormen apparently sensed that the attack was coming and were trying to close the doors to the dance hall when they were gunned down. Mr. Wright, known widely as King Rat, had been expelled by the main Protestant guerrilla command after he objected to its | After Killings, Officials Try To Protect Irish Talks |
983933_5 | East Side of Manhattan, said he and his colleagues had been reduced to ''window dressing.'' Besides hiring, boards have lost control over district budgets, curriculum and textbooks. Although allowed to set school policy, that policy must be consistent with dictates from the central Board of Education and the Chancellor. As a result, many boards are virtually paralyzed by uncertainty about just what their role should be. ''You find some superintendents who see this as the second coming,'' said Dr. Arthur Greenberg, superintendent of District 25 in Flushing, Queens, and head of the citywide superintendents' association. ''Then there are other places, like my own, where the really strong team relationship that superintendents had with boards has been to a certain extent rent asunder.'' In September, Burton Sacks, head of community school district affairs for the Chancellor, put out a list of 29 questions and answers specifying what local boards can and cannot do do under the new law. Dr. Greenberg philosophically views the Sacks memorandum as part of a necessary effort to replace more than 20 years of experience under the old law with a new culture built around ''how to behave, what to do, what not to do and what the law means.'' It may not take another 20 years, he said, ''but it will take a few years to sort out.'' Seymour Fliegel, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a social policy and education think tank, asserts that by making the superintendents more beholden to the Chancellor, the law has made them less likely to rock the boat, to pursue their own vision, at the risk of offending whoever is in charge. ''So do I think you have a more courageous lot of superintendents today?'' he said. ''I doubt it. Now it's so clear that it's loyalty to the Chancellor that counts.'' Mr. Fliegel suggests that the shift in power may push parents and community groups to look for alternatives like charter schools, which would operate outside the Board of Education. Others, like Robert Riccobono, superintendent of District 19 in Brooklyn, say that far from stifling innovation, the new law has made educational performance a priority by restoring the system to professionals. Mr. Riccobono recalled how hot-button issues like condom distribution, teaching tolerance of homosexuality, conflict resolution and asbestos contamination dominated the debate among some school boards and even subverted chancellors in recent years. Such issues, he said, | Crew's Powers Go Untapped, Critics Assert |
982496_6 | author of a paper that appeared last year in the Hastings Center report about the Lakeberg twin case. Like Dr. Dreger, he was disturbed by the ease with which Amy Lakeberg's life was taken. ''I remember during all the debates how quickly people who wanted to intervene could move into the idea that one twin was like a parasite or an appendage -- language that makes one morally able to divide them.'' The conjoined twins conundrum is part of a larger tension now underlying America's attitude toward what might be called ''differency.'' On the one hand, antidiscrimination laws have had a real impact, allowing disabled people who might once have spent their lives in seclusion to work, take public transportation and just generally be visible. Moreover, several subcultures have arisen -- of people who were born deaf, or achondroplastic or intersexual -- who do not want to be regarded as handicapped and do not want to be ''repaired.'' At the same time, surgeons say that their techniques are better than ever, and that they can effectively correct many physical defects early enough that children will grow up never knowing they were outliers to begin with. And many doctors argue that the benefits of fitting in, while easy to pooh-pooh as adults, are hard to overstate for children and teen-agers. In addition, the number of children born with obvious disabilities is declining as the resolution of prenatal ultrasound and other fetal diagnostic procedures improves, allowing parents to abort abnormal fetuses. ''What we're seeing now with conjoined twins is a lot of termination of these pregnancies,'' said Dr. James A. O'Neill Jr., surgeon in chief at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine in Nashville. In sum, the dominant culture appears to be moving in two contradictory directions: more accommodating of disabilities in adults, but less tolerant of imperfections in children. ''I'm concerned that as more abnormal children are prevented through abortion and testing, we'll be less tolerant of abnormality,'' said Dr. Alan R. Fleischman, a bioethicist and senior vice president of the New York Academy of Medicine in Manhattan. ''We'll blame families if they knew there would be an abnormal child but chose not to abort.'' The Mystique From Roman God To Barnum Freaks Nobody knows what causes conjoining, but most experts assume it arises when a fertilized egg begins to split in two, as happens with identical twins, but then fails to | Joined for Life, and Living Life to the Full |
982501_1 | Caerphilly (pronounced CARE-fill-ee). ''Sexual activity seems to have a protective effect on men's health,'' Dr. George Davey-Smith's team concluded after analyzing death rates of nearly 1,000 men from 45 to 59. The researchers said they undertook the study because few findings existed on any link between patterns of sexual behavior and death, and they challenged epidemiologists elsewhere to conduct similar studies, particularly among women, for whom very little relevant data exist. Dr. Davey-Smith's team assessed the existence of heart disease in the men when they entered the study from 1979 to 1983. After explaining the purpose of their question, they asked the men about the frequency of sexual activity. The answers were put into categories ranging from ''never'' to ''daily.'' The question about male sexual activity was dropped midway through the enrollment period because local doctors suggested that many men did not like talking about sex, said Dr. Davey-Smith's team from the University of Bristol and Queen's University of Belfast. The participants' names were flagged in the British national health service's central registry and the researchers were automatically notified if they died. The death rate was analyzed 10 years after the participants entered the study. Men who said they had sex twice a week had a risk of dying half that of the less passionate participants who said they had sex once a month, Dr. Davey-Smith's team said. No other risk factor showed a statistically significant link to the frequency of orgasm. The authors said that they had tried to adjust the study's design to account for a factor that might explain the findings -- that healthier, fitter men with more healthy life styles engaged in more sex. Even so, they could not explain the differences in risk. Hormonal effects on the body resulting from frequent sex could be among other possible explanations for the findings, Dr. Davey-Smith said. If the findings are duplicated, Dr. Davey-Smith's team proposed a campaign to promote the benefits of an active sex life. They wrote, ''Intervention programs could be considered, perhaps based on the exciting 'at least five a day' campaign aimed at increasing fruit and vegetable consumption -- although the numerical imperative may have to be adjusted.'' But two scientists from King's College School of Medicine in London, Matthew Hotopf and Simon Wessely, criticized Dr. Davey-Smith's study, saying ''it would not take many cases of undetected heart disease to give'' the same results. | More Orgasms, More Years of Life? |
980855_0 | Ireland's Prime Minister, Bertie Ahern, said today that he hoped President Clinton would help push for a final agreement on a peace accord with Northern Ireland. Mr. Ahern said he expected participants ''to have the draft of a comprehensive agreement'' by mid-March when he returned to the United States for St. Patrick's Day festivities. But three or four issues are likely to remain unresolved, he said, and ''it will be very difficult for either of the two Governments'' to move anyone. ''At that point we're going to need the outside help,'' he told reporters at a lunchtime gathering, alluding to Mr. Clinton. He said the President's support would be ''crucial'' if a final agreement was to be reached by May, the deadline set by parties in the talks. ''We're working to a May deadline,'' he said. ''We could beat it, or we could go beyond it.'' Mr. Ahern said he expected negotiators in Belfast to agree Tuesday on which issues to discuss during an intensive 10 weeks of talks set to begin just after Christmas. He also said he expected the negotiators to agree on a format for those talks. He contended that the talks had already accomplished more than simply bringing the parties to the table in Belfast. ''An awful lot of issues that people said, 'Never an inch on these' are off the agenda,'' he said. Progress was made on transferring prisoners, for example, and on aid for a Catholic school in Belfast that had never before received government assistance. Negotiators also managed to sidetrack the issue of whether paramilitary groups should be required to surrender their weapons. He said much of the credit for putting aside the highly contentious arms issue should go to former Senator George J. Mitchell, the chairman of the talks. Mr. Mitchell diminished the arms issue ''almost without a beef,'' Mr. Ahern said. ''His role is immense.'' The cease-fire that is a condition of continued progress ''at this stage is holding far better than previous ones,'' he added. Citing British and Irish intelligence information, he said there had been a much lower incidence of planning for future attacks, military training and punishment beatings than in the early months of previous cease-fires. Mr. Ahern held the luncheon session after meeting with Mr. Clinton, who offered an upbeat message to reporters at the White House. ''I'm very impressed by what's been done, and very encouraged,'' | Ireland Premier Calls Support By Clinton Vital to Ulster Pact |
980864_1 | for Nature Indonesia Program. ''Actually,'' Mr. Manullang said, ''without the fires themselves the orangutans are already under severe pressure from loss of habitat. Now the situation is much more critical. This is, I guess, the worst situation for orangutan life in this century.'' ''Now they really need to escape from the fires and the heat and also the haze, very thick haze,'' he added, pointing out that the smoke had also stunted the growth of jungle fruits, which will lead animals to starvation in the year ahead. Until the haze and fires abated recently, other jungle animals like tigers, elephants, Malayan sun bears and flying foxes also fled, often to die at the hands of villagers. Most scientists estimate today's orangutan population at 20,000 to 30,000 in the wild, all of them on the Indonesian island of Sumatra and on Borneo, which is divided among Indonesia, Malaysia and Brunei. The greatest threat to their survival is the devastation of their habitat, which has accelerated sharply over the last decade as big logging companies have stripped the forests. The World Wide Fund for Nature estimates that their range has shrunk by more than 90 percent over the last half-century, along with a huge reduction in their numbers. The fires have only quickened the destruction. ''It's very scary,'' said Birute Galdikas, a Canadian who is a pioneer in orangutan research. She has worked with the animals here in Central Kalimantan Province for 26 years. ''We are looking at the demise of the orangutan as a species in the wild, which basically is what happened to American bison,'' she said. ''It's a terrible situation, and unfortunately it's not going to change. The illegal logging and the clearing of trees for plantations are absolutely demolishing the forests.'' Orangutans are a fragile species, breeding slowly and demanding a wide range to forage for food. The males roam the forests alone, devouring huge quantities of fruits; the females raise their young in more settled territories, giving birth just once every eight years or so, then spending several years raising their offspring. It is against the law to own an orangutan in Indonesia, but the laws are widely flouted. Young orangutans are utterly charming -- wide-eyed, playful and trusting -- and local people, particularly childless couples, often adopt them as members of the family. Pet orangutans are sometimes dressed in human clothes, given pillows for their beds | Tanjung Puting Journal; In Vast Forest Fires of Asia, Scant Mercy for Orangutans |
980818_1 | their furnishings over the next five years should yield insights into the interactions between the Inca and Chachapoya cultures. Only 5 of the 200 recovered mummies have been examined in detail, and 12 cave burial sites of more bodies have yet to be fully explored. The discoveries were made in northern Peru at a place called Laguna de los Condores, in mountains near the headwaters of the Amazon. The area, west of the modern town of Leymebamba, is almost abandoned now, but was thickly settled in the Chachapoya heyday. These people flourished more than 1,000 years ago, long before the Incas rose to power, and dominated the Amazon headwaters until their fall in 1470, followed by the Spanish conquest in the early 16th century. The mummies were found in six natural mausoleums set in the cliff some 300 feet above the lake. Considering the humidity of the cloud-shrouded forest, it was remarkable that any of the bodies survived, but they had been eviscerated, carefully mummified and wrapped in embroidered bundles. Most remained fully fleshed. ''This is a miracle of preservation,'' Dr. Guillen said, noting that most of the ancient mummies found in Peru -- and there have been hundreds in recent years -- came from the extremely dry desert in the south. She said the care with which the bodies were prepared, as well as the quality of the grave goods, suggested that this ''was an important group of the population, an elite.'' Looters had cut open the cotton and wool wrappings of some of the mummies and probably stolen necklaces, pottery and other materials. The National Culture Institute in Lima authorized Dr. Guillen to oversee the immediate rescue excavation of the site. She was accompanied by a film crew for the Discovery Channel, which is to televise some of the work at 9 P.M. on Friday. The National Geographic Society announced last week that the skeletal remains of another ancient Peruvian human sacrifice had been recovered near the icy summit of Mount Ampato, where the frozen and naturally mummified ''Ice Maiden'' was discovered two years ago. The new mummy, thought to be a young female as well, was found wrapped in Inca textiles and accompanied by plates, pots and a female figurine, made of shell, similar to the items found with the Ice Maiden. Archeologists concluded that maiden was taken up the mountain as part of an Inca ritual | Mummies May Be of Incan Elite, After Conquest of 'Cloud People' |
982690_0 | IT has to be cause for celebration when scientists discover that a food people love is also good for them. Unlike broccoli, whose detractors include a former President of the United States, tomatoes are beloved by just about everyone. And recent research indicates that a nutrient found in tomatoes, especially cooked tomatoes, is a strong antioxidant and may reduce the risk of heart disease and certain cancers. Tomatoes are the major dietary source of lycopene (pronounced LIKE-o-peen), the most potent of a group of nutrients called carotenoids, which include beta carotene. Like beta carotene, lycopene is converted in the body into vitamin A, which promotes healthy skin and good vision. Lycopene is also what makes tomatoes red, and the deeper the red, the more lycopene they have. That means those wishy-washy pale winter tomatoes have less of it and, unfortunately, yellow and green tomatoes have none. Tomatoes that ripen on the vine also have more lycopene than tomatoes that ripen after being picked. The tomatoes richest in lycopene are those grown specifically for use in canning or processed food. And now, scientists have genetically engineered a tomato with twice the normal level of lycopene. But before you go looking for lycopene in easy-to-pop pill form, remember what scientists learned about beta carotene supplements. Two studies that were designed to find out whether supplements could reduce the risk of cancer seemed to prove the opposite. Those in the study who had taken beta carotene had a higher rate of cancer than those who had taken a placebo. Scientists now realize that the nutrients in food work in concert to confer their benefits. It may be that some combination of lycopene and other nutrients in tomatoes -- like vitamin C, folic acid, potassium and beta carotene -- is what protects against heart disease or cancers of the prostate, colon and rectum. There have been large studies that strongly suggest a connection. One six-year study at Harvard Medical School of 48,000 male health professionals found a link between eating tomatoes, tomato sauce or pizza more than twice as week with a reduced risk of prostate cancer, compared with those who ate none of these tomato products at all. The risk was reduced by 21 percent to 34 percent, depending on the food. And among 1,379 men studied in Europe, those who consumed the most lycopene in food were half as likely to suffer | Eating Well; Can Pizza Prevent Cancer and Ketchup Cut Heart Risk? |
977992_0 | Pause in Abortion's Decline Since 1990, the number of women having abortions has steadily fallen, with a steep decline in 1995, but early reports show that the trend was reversing itself in 1996. Page A14. Boulder Mystery Endures As the murder of JonBenet Ramsey nears its one-year anniversary with no indictment, concerns are growing that Boulder's chummy legal culture may be at fault. Page A14. Koreans Angry Over Bailout Many are not grateful to the United States and Japan for helping rebuild South Korea's economy. They see the two as puppeteers behind the International Monetary Fund. Page D1. Tough Soccer Draw for U.S. As well as facing Germany in next year's World Cup, the United States soccer team faces formidable opponents on and off the field in Iran and Yugoslavia. SportsFriday, page C1. | INSIDE |
928008_2 | meet with Sinn Fein only when he is convinced that the I.R.A. violence has permanently ended. His actions depend on how strong he feels, and that will be determined in part by how well his party does in local elections on May 21. With Mr. Adams and his No. 2 colleague, Martin McGuinness, both elected to the British Parliament, Sinn Fein gained 16 percent of the total provincial vote, which makes the party the third-strongest in Northern Ireland, ahead of the hard-line Protestant Democratic Unionist Party of the Rev. Ian Paisley. For some Protestants, the Catholic victory portends the abomination of a Northern Ireland cut off from Britain and united with the overwhelmingly Catholic Irish Republic. In second place is the mainstream Catholic Social Democratic Labor Party, which is ready to sit with Sinn Fein right after a new cease-fire. But Mr. Adams has given no indication of his intentions, insisting daily that the election results give Sinn Fein a moral and political mandate to be at the talks, cease-fire or no cease-fire. Over the weekend he sounded almost belligerent, saying there would be no settlement until the release of all ''political prisoners,'' Sinn Fein's name for anyone convicted in British or Irish courts for bombings or killing troops. Experts including Paul Arthur, a politics professor at Ulster University, agree that it is unclear what the I.R.A. leadership and Mr. Adams will do. ''The gains put Sinn Fein in an awkward position,'' he said. The bolstered electoral power might strengthen the argument that political action is preferable to violence. But I.R.A. commanders could feel that the gains were achieved even as the I.R.A. was continuing its violence here and in England, and that the new Government in London should be kept in doubt about a possible next attack. This is consistent, experts say, with the I.R.A. core belief that history shows that violence works, that the founding fathers of most countries were once considered terrorists and that in fact I.R.A. violence has led to the current peace effort. ''If Adams and McGuinness can't produce a cease-fire,'' Mr. Arthur said, ''it will demonstrate that their influence counts for very little.'' Officials in both Ireland and Britain noted that after the British elections, President Clinton renewed his call for an I.R.A. cease-fire; they say privately that they are hoping he will also press Mr. Adams to persuade the I.R.A. to call one. | The Politics Of the I.R.A. |
932752_0 | Everyone is weary, but the culture wars rage on. On campuses and in concert halls, in art galleries and in libraries, in foundation offices and Government agencies, multiculturalists still lock horns with those who believe in the primacy of Western civilization. The fervor has decreased; the sense of resignation has increased; but differences remain despite claims of victory or suggestions of abdication. On one side are the Moderns, who hail a changing world, saying it brings greater opportunity and diversity, overturning aging standards and perspectives. On the other side are the Ancients, who caution that the new is ill equipped to replace the old and that something irretrievable is being lost. But as the debate continues, major transformations in American culture have already taken place, which is why Allan Bloom's 1987 book, ''The Closing of the American Mind'' (Simon & Schuster), is again looming large. This philosophical polemic has sold more than a million copies. In the midst of a highly personal interpretation of the history of philosophy, Bloom, a professor in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago who died in 1992, condemned the contemporary university for abdicating centuries of intellectual inquiry for the sake of pop pap. His claims still create a political divide. Just last fall, the historian Lawrence W. Levine wrote a book he hoped would be the strongest retaliation yet: ''The Opening of the American Mind'' (Beacon Press), which praises what Bloom condemned and condemns what he praised. Other recent books, ''The University in Ruins,'' by Bill Readings, and ''We Scholars,'' by David Damrosch (both Harvard University Press), reject Bloom's arguments while echoing some of his conclusions. And in a positive reconsideration in a recent issue of the magazine Lingua Franca, James Miller, the director of liberal studies at the New School, suggested ways in which Bloom should be seen not as a ''right-wing hit man'' but as someone who often hit the right targets. Earlier this month, Bloom's friends and colleagues gathered to review the case as well at the University of Chicago, which seems to proclaim its own defiance of American modernity with its century-old ersatz medieval buildings. For three days, there were invocations of the Greeks (with words like ''the good'' and ''logos''), of Western religion (''virtue'' and ''the soul'') and, with mostly less reverence, of the contemporary battlegrounds (with references to race, feminism, ideology, rock music and affirmative | As Culture Wars Go On, Battle Lines Blur a Bit |
932786_1 | crushed under $620 million in debt and declared insolvency. This year, Unimar, an operator of small bulk carriers, and Marcantonakis, an automobile transporter, are in financial straits, and the group led by Menis Karageorgis, a former head of the Union of Greek Ship Owners, is in a dispute with Swiss bankers over loan repayments. ''We're not talking a full-blooded shipping crisis yet,'' said Nigel Lowry, the local correspondent for the trade newspaper Lloyd's List, ''but a bit of a depressed scene.'' Depression, of course, is nothing new to Greek shipping, which has watched its fortunes ebb and flow over the years with the rise and fall of cargoes and available ships. Modern Greek shipping was born in the last century, uniting mainland Greece with the 2,000 or so Greek islands in the Aegean Sea, about 170 of which are inhabited. In recent years, while much of world shipping raced after the efficient container traffic routes, the Greeks excelled at ''taxi'' services, chartering cargo vessels by the day or the voyage. To judge the importance of shipping to the harried Greek economy, consider that while Greece has run up trade deficits in the $16 billion range in recent years, shipping revenue contributes roughly $2 billion a year to the economy, helping to pay for the buying spree. Traditionally, powerful Greek ship owners like Stavros Niarchos and Aristotle Onassis, or more recently George P. Livanos and John Latsis, stayed solvent by playing the ship market, buying used vessels when prices were down and selling when they revived. The result was a carousel of shipping families, and the Greek shipping industry awaits the list of the largest ship owners each spring like gamblers await a parimutuel listing. Not surprisingly, the present financial squeeze has brought movement into the market that experts say has been accelerated by the rise of a young generation of shippers trained at Western business schools and focused less on seafaring than on finance. Thus, to increase revenues, some tanker lines, like the Ceres Hellenic Shipping Enterprises line of Mr. Livanos, now run by his son Peter, are shedding an older generation of big tankers, those over 200,000 tons, in favor of smaller, more efficient vessels around 50,000 tons. And cargo lines, like Costamare, controlled by Vasilis Constantakopoulos, are entering the fiercely competitive container shipping business, once avoided by the Greeks. But what most upsets the shippers among all the | Rough Going for Greek Merchant Fleet |
930000_5 | this service so valuable,'' Matthew Lewis, a company spokesman, said. To extricate the Postal Service from its tightening financial noose, Mr. Runyon is asking Congress for greater pricing flexibility, notably the right to offer volume discounts on third-class mail. The Postal Service is also seeking to sell new products, including an electronic ''postmark'' to act as proof of delivery of E-mail. And it is expanding into such complementary businesses as packing services and delivery of unaddressed advertising. But this route, too, is circumscribed politically: Representative Duncan Hunter, a Republican from the San Diego area, and 15 colleagues have fired a warning shot, introducing legislation that would bar the Postal Service from competing with some 10,000 private stores (including San Diego-based Mail Boxes Etc.) that already offer ancillary postal services. Expansion plans are also viewed with suspicion by organized labor, which acknowledges the long-term strains on the current system but fears the consequences of change on their members' bargaining power and job security. ''We need to look at our core business and keep doing the very best we can,'' said Tom Fahey, a spokesman for the American Postal Workers Union, which represents the clerks and mail sorters. Nor is it clear that plunging a quasi-government agency into the sink-or-swim environment of the free market would succeed. A much-publicized effort to become a force in E-mail never got off the ground in the mid-1980's, and there is little evidence that the organization has the skills to succeed in other new, fiercely contested markets. ''The idea that the Postal Service is going to compete effectively with some of the most efficient and technologically sophisticated companies in the world is bizarre,'' scoffed Jim Rogers, a vice president at U.P.S. Gregory Sidek, an economist and lawyer at the American Enterprise Institute and co-author of ''Protecting Competition from the Postal Monopoly,'' would not even attempt to shore up the postal monopoly. He would abandon it, along with the system's obligation to provide six-day-a-week delivery to every mailbox at a common postal rate. Mr. Sidek doubts that the loss of what is widely seen as an entitlement would alter the lives of many customers. The vast majority, he argues, would get equivalent or better service from private companies that would respond to market incentives, much like deregulated long-distance phone carriers. Besides, household-to-household communication -- the ''Aunt Minnie mail'' that Washington zealously defends -- now represents less than | Competition at Every Turn Has Post Office on the Run |
929399_0 | According to recent Federal surveys, sexual activity among American teen-agers is down -- the first decline in nearly three decades -- and use of contraceptives is up. That is promising news as the nation with the highest teen pregnancy rate in the industrialized world tries for a 33 percent reduction in teen pregnancies by the year 2005. But no national effort can be successful without a focus on community-based solutions. Federal efforts to promote abstinence programs would be fine if the Government support did not carry with it a prohibition on the discussion of contraceptives. Abstinence programs can reduce teen pregnancies, but other educational activities are necessary as well. America's mixed messages about sex too often portray it as a desirable activity with few or no consequences. But nationwide, there are 112 pregnancies for every 1,000 young women aged 15 to 19, resulting in 61 births, 36 abortions and 15 miscarriages. The rate of births and abortions among teens has been declining, however, in the last few years. The latest survey by the Department of Health and Human Services suggests that the downward trend may continue. In 1995, 50 percent of young women 15 to 19 engaged in sexual activity, down from 55 percent in 1990. Among boys, the 1995 figure was 55 percent, down from 60 percent in 1988, the last year with a comparable survey. The National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy, an independent nonprofit effort launched in 1996, aims to reduce the number of pregnancies per 1,000 young women to 75 by 2005. Operating largely with private funds, the campaign, headed by former Gov. Thomas Kean of New Jersey and the economist Isabel Sawhill, hopes to avoid debates over abortion and contraception that have hindered several government attempts to address the issue. A provision of the welfare reform law offers $250 million to states, under a matching formula, for programs that teach only sexual abstinence. Many states are reluctant even to apply for the money, fearing that they would be unable to field questions on condoms or other contraceptives. In addition, a recent study of abstinence-only programs in public schools in California, the state with the highest teen pregnancy rate in the country, found many offered misleading and harmful information. Preaching abstinence can work, particularly with younger teens, but a variety of approaches are needed to persuade young people to delay sexual activity and to avoid pregnancy. | Battling Teen Pregnancy |
929387_0 | Prime Minister John Bruton, his integrity and his Northern Ireland policy under attack and his coalition Government slipping in the polls, said today that he would dissolve Parliament this week so a national election could be held in early June. Mr. Bruton, who became Prime Minister of Ireland in December 1994, said on national radio that he would go to President Mary Robinson, probably on Thursday, to dissolve Parliament, setting up an election, probably on June 6. The coalition of his own party, Fine Gael, and the Labor and Democratic Left parties, holds a 4-seat majority in the 166-seat Parliament. He will be opposed by an election coalition of Fianna Fail, the largest party in the country, headed by Bertie Ahern, and the Progressive Democrats, a fiscally conservative party headed by Mary Harney. In recent weeks, Mr. Ahern, a former Finance Minister, has pummeled Mr. Bruton on Northern Ireland, saying the Prime Minister had switched from a hard line to a softer one on the issue of dealing with Sinn Fein, the political wing of the Irish Republican Army. Other Fianna Fail officials have in recent weeks blamed Mr. Bruton for the stalemate in the peace effort. The stalled Northern Ireland peace talks are to resume in Belfast on June 3, and the Irish Government must approve any settlement the talks might produce. Sinn Fein has long considered Mr. Bruton cool, if not hostile, saying he favors the interests of the British province's Protestant majority. Fianna Fail has always been less critical of Sein Fein and the I.R.A. than has Fine Gael. Before Sinn Fein made its strongest showing ever in British Parliamentary elections in the North on May 1, Mr. Bruton said repeatedly that ''a vote for Sinn Fein is a vote for violence.'' After the election, in which Sinn Fein won two seats in the British Parliament and gained 16 percent of the vote, Mr. Bruton went to London to confer with the new British Prime Minister, Tony Blair. Sounding optimistic, Mr. Bruton said before the meeting that Sinn Fein could be allowed into the peace talks on June 3 if it first persuaded the I.R.A. to resume the cease-fire it ended 15 months ago. Mr. Blair made it clear that he thought June 3 was an unrealistic target. Mr. Ahern, indicating that Northern Ireland is to be a major campaign issue, then said that, unlike the Bruton | Ireland's Hard-Pressed Premier Seeks National Election in June |
929425_0 | Names and handshakes, it would seem, are simple matters of identification and etiquette. But the digital equivalents of names and handshakes are now subjects of fierce debate, international negotiations and accusations of corporate skulduggery. The bedrock issue is who will determine the commercial rules of the road on the Internet, as the global web of computer networks increasingly becomes a mainstream medium of communication and commerce. At stake, industry executives and Government officials say, is the future of the Internet, and what role large corporations, governments and international organizations will play. The current arm-wrestling centers on two seemingly arcane subjects: assigning ''domain names,'' or suffixes like ''.com'' in Internet addresses, and ''peering,'' in which Internet service companies exchange electronic-mail messages with each other free. Proposed changes in both practices have caused an uproar on the Internet in the last few weeks. Yet the particular disputes, Internet professionals agree, are the beginning of a host of thorny business and public policy issues that lie ahead, affecting not only companies but the price and availability of services in cyberspace. ''How these issues are resolved will determine how we do things and how we live with this new technology,'' said Don Heath, president of the Internet Society, a nonprofit organization in Reston, Va. The evolutionary path of the Internet as a whole may be uncertain, but two trends appear inevitable. First, the Federal Government will become increasingly involved in the affairs of the Internet, even if that role is more as a referee than as a regulator. Second, the business of supplying Internet access is headed for a shakeout, with big, well-financed corporations more and more supplying businesses and households with links to the Internet. The dispute over ''peering'' -- the digital handshake and swapping of messages between Internet companies -- illustrates both trends. The issue emerged in the last two weeks after Uunet Technologies Inc., a unit of Worldcom Inc. and a leading supplier of Internet ''backbone'' connections, informed 13 smaller Internet service providers that it would no longer exchange messages with them free and would start charging them fees. The move by Uunet brought an outcry from the smaller companies, which are typically regional suppliers of cyberspace connections to households and small businesses, and from some analysts, who called the tactic anti-competitive and discriminatory. One vocal critic, David Holub, lost his job as president of Whole Earth Networks in San Francisco | The Internet as Commerce: Who Pays, Under What Rules? |
929441_1 | very well.'' The dirty little secret of Ulster is that while it has become a metaphor for civil war, that war is actually confined to a few very small areas in Belfast and Derry, and the rest of Northern Ireland is downright beautiful. For those who know the secret, Ulster is now a metaphor for a ''great wee place'' to retire. Housing prices are cheap, golf is plentiful and public schools, social services, investment subsidies and roads are the best in Britain -- thanks to the money the British and the European Union pour in here. Unemployment is around 8 percent, far better than in France, Germany or Italy. And if per chance the I.R.A. does blow up your shop, the British will rebuild it free. That's why I wonder whether Northern Ireland's cure and its disease aren't the same thing: the same economic development that produced the cease-fire (and still limits its breakdown) also cushions the factions and reduces the pressure on them to make the tough compromises needed to get beyond the cease-fire and secure a lasting peace. There is an all too tolerable balance here now between violence and affluence. Lord knows I'm not rooting for Belfast to become Gaza or Soweto, but the fact is Rabin and Arafat, Mandela and de Klerk were produced in pressure cookers exerting great pain on their rank and file -- not by black-tie receptions and one-star Michelin restaurants (there are two in Belfast). In Belfast, political leaders can still afford to indulge their ideological fantasies. Gerry Adams, head of the I.R.A.'s Sinn Fein party, David Trimble, leader of the Protestant Ulster Unionist Party, and Tony Blair, Britain's Prime Minister, all did better than ever in the last elections -- without having to promise any courageous initiatives to get peace talks going. Successful peace talks would require Mr. Adams to take the risk of getting the I.R.A. to declare an open-ended cease-fire, without any guarantees about the timing and outcome of those talks. They would require Mr. Trimble to risk sitting down with Sinn Fein and negotiating a power-sharing arrangement with the Catholics. And they would require Mr. Blair's fracturing the bipartisan British consensus on Northern Ireland and negotiating with the I.R.A. before it turned in every weapon or gave ironclad assurances that the cease-fire wouldn't be broken again. All three would have to take these risks while their opponents denounced | A Great Wee Place |
930853_4 | of another 747, T.W.A. Flight 800 last July. The F.A.A.'s hopes are highest for the hardened container made of Spectra, a Kevlar-like material that forms an extremely strong fabric. Mixed with a resin, it becomes rigid and feels like hard plastic. It is made by the Jaycor Corporation, a San Diego company that uses Spectra and other composites to make structural components for military planes. In the Lockerbie crash, the British Air Accident Investigation Branch determined that shock waves from the bomb had rippled across the plane and recombined far from the site of the explosion, causing more damage in distant spots. After the test today, engineers will determine whether the containers translated the bomb blasts into shocks to the floor beams and, if so, whether they caused damage. Hardening the walls of luggage containers would be part of an overlapping net of precautions that would include machines that scan bags, dogs that detect explosives and other steps. British officials say planes often survive on-board explosions, especially ones in the passenger cabin. But Pan Am Flight 103, which blew up over Lockerbie in December 1988, was brought down by 12 to 14 ounces of explosive, according to unclassified documents. Today's old Air France 747 was by far the closest to a civilian model in flying condition. The test required precise simultaneous timing because of the threat of puncturing the skin and decompressing the plane. If the blasts had been done sequentially and the first had popped the balloon, the last three would have been much less valuable. The test, on a runway used by the Royal Air Force during World War II, is the culmination of years of planning. Developing hardened baggage containers was one of the major recommendations of British safety officials in their 1990 report on the Lockerbie crash, but progress has been slow. In the next few months, though, the Federal Aviation Administration hopes to provide the airlines with 10 to 50 containers for them to test, to see how they stand up to everyday use. But even if the container portion of today's test is judged successful from a technical standpoint, other considerations remain. The container that the F.A.A. is leaning toward, the all-composite model, costs about $20,000. The standard aluminum model is one-tenth that price. A 747 carries as many as 32 such containers, and the airlines are not eager to spend more for them. | Jetliner Is Bombed in Test to Counter Terrorism in the Air |
930962_11 | Initiative, a 12-year, $628 million study that is now in its fourth year, is expected to provide previously unknown details about the effects of nutrition and hormone-replacement therapy, for example, on osteoporosis and heart disease in women. The study will examine 164,000 women in 40 centers around the country -- including the center at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx -- in the hopes of coming up with answers about how to provide a better quality of life as women age, said Dr. Loretta P. Finnegan, director of the initiative. ''Women are now living a third of their lives after menopause,'' she said. ''So we're looking at what we can do to decrease their mortality, disability and frailty. To live to 90, but to have osteoporosis so you can't move out of a wheelchair, is not a good quality of life.'' What's more, the oldest baby boomers are now entering that age zone in which their medical needs are expected to balloon. A popular statistic bandied about conference rooms these days holds that every day for the next 20 years, 50,000 people will cross the over-50 threshold, creating a huge pool of potential maladies ranging from prostate cancer in men to breast cancer in women. In the meantime, diseases like heart attacks, depression and high blood pressure that afflict both men and women are soaring. Executives at companies that make drugs, surgical devices or anything else for this group, therefore, might be expected to be rubbing their hands together in financial glee. But certain analysts remain wary of the speculative nature of many of the new products. Take products relating to incontinence, a malady that afflicts, and embarrasses, millions of older people, but especially women, said Mr. Riley of T. Rowe Price. ''People look at the huge market for diapers and conclude there's a huge market for treatment of incontinence,'' he said. Treatments promoted by specialized companies so far include ''plugs'' as well as corrective devices that require surgery, but neither fully solves the problem. For those reasons, he is more pleased by the prospects of the Mentor Corporation, a diversified medical company in Santa Barbara, Calif. MENTOR makes silicone breast implants, mostly for women who have had mastectomies, and has ''a near monopoly'' on that market, Mr. Riley said. The company also makes various urological products for men and women, so it also gets a share | Women's Health Stocks Try to Be Darling Again |
930810_0 | In a severe blow to efforts to revive the Cuban economy, this year's sugar harvest, the country's largest source of much-needed foreign exchange, will fall considerably short of the Government's target, President Fidel Castro has acknowledged. ''In my opinion, the harvest will not reach the same quantity as last year,'' Mr. Castro said in remarks broadcast over the radio in Havana this month. The statement followed other reports in the state-controlled media pointing to machinery, labor and transport problems and difficulties in financing the harvest. The shortfall places the Cuban economy in a vulnerable position and promises continued hardship for the country's 11 million people. A 36 percent rise in sugar production last year helped fuel a reported economic growth rate of nearly 8 percent, the highest in Cuba since the collapse of the Soviet bloc in 1989 led to the imposition the next year of a so-called special period of austerity, which continues to this day. Last fall, Mr. Castro predicted an increase of nearly 20 percent over last year's harvest of 4.45 million tons. But more recently, unofficial forecasts have steadily whittled that target back to last year's yield. In the 1980's, Cuba harvested as much as 7.7 million tons of sugar. But once the Soviet Union could no longer provide credits and supplies on highly favorable terms, sugar production nose-dived, and the entire economy contracted by more than a third. Even before Mr. Castro spoke, Carlos Lage, the country's senior economic planner, and other officials were forecasting a reduced growth rate this year, between 4 percent and 5 percent. But that figure, diplomats in Cuba and economists here said, was based on a harvest that at least matched last year's. ''If this situation is not resolved quickly, the sugar sector could become a hindrance to the country's process of economic recovery,'' the newspaper Trabajadores, the official publication of the country's sole labor federation, warned last month. Such a situation, the newspaper continued, would inevitably ''damage the national capacity to resist the blockade and other imperialist aggressions,'' a reference to the 35-year American economic embargo. Even more crucially, it would also ''affect the efforts to continue improving the population's standard of living.'' Cuban agricultural officials, said Carmelo Mesa Lago, an expert on the Cuban economy at the University of Pittsburgh, ''were so desperate last year to get the biggest harvest possible that they worked into June, which meant | Cuba Sees a New Threat to Recovery: A Weak Sugar Harvest |
930834_3 | is positive because they tend to arrive as young workers and ''will help pay the public costs of the aging baby boom generation.'' Thus, it said, ''state and local investments in education pay off in higher tax payments later in life.'' Those revenues include Federal taxes for Social Security and Medicare. The report also made these observations: *Immigration will play ''the dominant role'' in the United States' population growth in the next half-century. If immigration continues at current levels, it will account for nearly two-thirds of the expected population growth. The nation's population is expected to rise by 124 million, to 387 million in 2050 from 263 million in 1995. If immigration continues at current levels, immigrants and their descendants will account for 80 million of the increase. *The gap between the wages of immigrants and the wages of native-born workers is widening. Many recent immigrants come from poorer countries where the average levels of education, wages and skills are far below those of the United States. *Immigration has contributed to an increase in the number of high school dropouts in the United States, and this increase has ''lowered the wages of high school dropouts by about 5 percent.'' That accounts for ''about 44 percent of the total decline in wages of high school dropouts'' from 1980 to 1994. New Jersey and California both have many immigrants, but the effects differ. Thomas J. Espenshade, a panel member who is a professor of sociology at Princeton University, said that in the 1990 census, immigrants had accounted for 13 percent of the population in New Jersey and 22 percent in California. He said the typical immigrant in New Jersey was better educated than the typical immigrant in California. In New Jersey, the panel said, the average household headed by an immigrant receives $1,484 a year more in state and local services than it pays in state and local taxes. In California, that figure is $3,463. On the average, the panel said, immigrant households have more school-age children and lower incomes, pay lower state and local taxes and receive more state-financed social services than households of native-born Americans. Describing the economic benefits of immigration, the panel said: ''Immigrants increase the supply of labor and help produce new goods and services. But since they are paid less than the total value of these new goods and services, domestic workers as a group must gain.'' | ACADEMY'S REPORT SAYS IMMIGRATION BENEFITS THE U.S. |
931173_0 | WHEN scientists wonder about the hidden depths of a moon or planet, they often look for signs of a magnetic field. On Earth, the lines of magnetic force that envelop the planet indicate the hot churning of a molten core. At the surface, geologic effects of this deep commotion help make Earth a habitable place, constantly shaping the land and sea, powering earthquakes and volcanoes, recycling the crust and keeping planetary ingredients in a stir beneficial to life. But what of other worlds? Scientists have searched for magnetic fields around rocky extraterrestrial bodies partly as a way to gauge the presence and prevalence of deep geologic activity, but until now the hunts have mostly been unsuccessful. Nothing substantial has been found around the Moon, or Mars, or Venus -- all of which have been written off as geologically dead or, at the very least, lost in deep slumber. And Earth, with its churning core, has seemed more and more unique. But now, the National Aeronautic and Space Administration's Galileo probe of Jupiter has found that three of the giant planet's large moons -- Io, Europa and Ganymede -- are pulsating with signs of magnetic fields, suggesting that layers of thick ice on those distant worlds hide interiors that are potentially alive geologically, and possibly alive biologically as well. The lines and ridges, furrows and fissures that deeply wrinkle the surfaces of these icy moons (and in the case of Io, the volcanoes) had already hinted at a kind of interior drama. But the magnetic clues now suggest the activity is widespread and going on now, rather than ages ago. Indications of magnetic fields around Io and Ganymede are analyzed in the current issue of the journal Science, and the Europa findings are to be announced in the journal on Friday. (Experts writing last week in the journal Nature declared that the fourth and most distant of the large Jovian moons, Callisto, was magnetically barren.) The positive findings about the three Jovian moons, scientists say, raise the odds that their depths may be habitable and may harbor alien life, perhaps swimming through dark seas. Such speculation is an increasingly popular topic among planetary scientists. Magnetic fields could be beneficial to life not only because they imply inner heat and geologic vitality, scientists add, but because they would help shield the moons and any alien creatures from cosmic rays, the streams of | Magnetic Fields on Distant Moons Hint at Hidden Life |
931174_1 | the direct connection of inflammation to Alzheimer's has not been demonstrated, this finding prompted a search for evidence that anti-inflammatory drugs might protect against Alzheimer's. And indeed, large long-term studies found that women who regularly took aspirin, ibuprofen or other anti-inflammatory drugs had a reduced risk of developing this devastating and costly disease. Dr. Finch has also pioneered the study of sex hormones in the processes of aging, and once again zeroed in on a factor, estrogen, that has become a major focus of research efforts both to prevent and to treat Alzheimer's disease. Women who take estrogen replacement hormones after menopause appear to have a reduced risk of developing the disease, and early studies have suggested that the hormone can ameliorate the symptoms and slow the progress of mental decline in those already afflicted. Dr. John W. Rowe, president of Mount Sinai Medical Center, who worked with Dr. Finch on the MacArthur Foundation's project on aging, described him as having three characteristics that made him into a catalyst of research: ''His vision. He can almost see around corners in terms of the direction in which aging research is going. ''His openness to new ideas. Scientists tend to have very closed channels in which they work. ''His remarkable capacity to translate basic science and evolutionary biology into the everyday life of an older person by linking basic research to clinical needs.'' Dr. Finch said in an interview that he was blessed with ''an excellent intellectual navigation system'' and a mother, now 90 and still physically and mentally active, who ''fostered my omnivorous appetite for bizarre knowledge.'' He specializes in taking disparate biomedical findings and integrating them into theories of aging. His most recent effort is a mathematical analysis done with his colleague Dr. Malcolm C. Pike that redefines ''a ripe old age.'' He and Dr. Pike have calculated that the so-called Gompertz mortality model, formulated by Benjamin Gompertz, a 19th-century British actuary, can be used to predict maximum life expectancies for various species, from laboratory mice to birds to Arabian horses. Based on the Gompertz model, others had calculated that the rate of human mortality doubles every eight years after puberty. But at the far reaches of life expectancy, say, at ages of 105 or 110, the rate of acceleration slows, raising the possibility that humans might live longer in the futurethan ever imagined, Dr. Finch said. At 57, gray-bearded | Explorer of Aging Process Is Lighting Candles in the Dark |
926742_1 | a woman's exposure to estrogens. The idea is that the more estrogen a woman is exposed to, the greater her risk for breast cancer. That may be why, for example, women who begin menstruating late are at a lower risk, as are those who enter menopause early. Exercise, researchers have found, reduces the amount of estrogen pumped out by a woman's ovaries. The study, being published today in The New England Journal of Medicine, comes at a time when women have become increasingly fatalistic about breast cancer. With the discovery of genetic mutations in a small minority of women that confer as much as a 90 percent risk of developing the disease, many women have decided that there is little that they can do -- either they are destined to get breast cancer or they are not. And researchers, searching for environmental or behavioral factors that may influence a woman's risk, have looked earlier and earlier in life, with some now saying that what matters is the hormonal environment before birth. The exercise finding indicates that there is at least one thing women can do as adults that may substantially reduce their chance of developing breast cancer. ''It's provocative,'' said Dr. Regina G. Ziegler, an epidemiologist at the nutritional epidemiology branch of the National Cancer Institute. ''The exciting thing is that we're talking about a risk factor for breast cancer that can be modified during adult life.'' Nonetheless, Dr. Ziegler and others said, the study is not ironclad proof that exercise prevents breast cancer. The women were not randomly assigned to exercise or not to exercise and then followed to see if those who exercise had less cancer. Instead, the researchers observed that women who happened to exercise had less cancer than those who did not exercise and when they took into account other factors that could have caused the difference between the two groups, the effect remained. But some factors, like the use of alcohol and smoking, were not taken into account. The researchers, led by Dr. Inger Thune at the Institute of Community Medicine of the University of Tromso in Norway, recruited 25,624 healthy women ages 20 to 54. They questioned them about their diets, weights, physical activity at work and in their leisure time, the age they began menstruating, the number of their children and the age when they had their first child. The risk of breast | Study Bolsters Idea That Exercise Cuts Breast Cancer Risk |
926637_1 | Agriculture Department, which stakes its very existence on keeping foreign insects outside the borders. But then, who ever said a jungle in a glasshouse was real? After being closed for four years for a $25 million restoration that ripped out the old leaky plumbing, blasted the lead off the iron frame and replaced 17,000 panes of glass, the old crystal palace reopens on Saturday. And visitors will journey to a world far different from the one traveled by the first visitors nearly a century ago. When the conservatory began opening in stages in 1900, people ogled plants from foreign lands as if they were windows into the wilderness. The palms, the ferns, the orchids were all stuffed in pots in separate pavilions, as collections of things much like the stuffed birds of Audubon's day. (Though a ring-tailed wildcat that escaped from the Bronx Zoo in 1916 was found in the tallest palm tree in the Palm House, so there must have been a whiff of the wild in those potted trees.) Today's visitors can wander through five distinct habitats: the steamy, lowland tropical forest, where bromeliads and orchids dangle from the fake branch of a kapok tree that has ''crashed'' across the path; the cool upland cloud forest, where tree ferns thrive in the mist; the American desert, where cactuses and agaves have learned to thrive in drought; the African desert, with its strikingly similar but different euphorbias and aloes (a mini-lesson in convergent evolution), and finally, the aromatic shrub lands of California, South Africa and Australia, where certain plants depend upon fire to release their seeds. The original collection was a jumble of 9,000 plants from the Old World and the New, everything from the 20-year-old West Indian palms that Helen Gould of Tarrytown donated because they threatened to lift the glass roof of her palm house to the tree ferns collected by the garden's first director, Nathaniel Lord Britton, in Puerto Rico. His wife, Elizabeth, had been so enchanted by the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew on their honeymoon in London that she said, ''Why can't we have a garden just like that?'' That was before eco-tours took well-heeled conservationists down the Amazon River to see medicinal plants in a shrinking rain forest. An excited journalist described the crowds that poured from the Third Avenue El as ''dripping with moisture for the sake of seeking out the famous | Green, and Mostly Real |
926671_1 | now has no seats in the British Parliament, and its candidates will not actually take the seats if elected because this involves an oath of loyalty to the British Crown, which they consider an illegal occupier of the province of Ulster. The Social Democratic Labor Party has four seats. The remaining 13 are held by Protestant unionists. Sinn Fein has been excluded from the stalled peace talks that began in Belfast last June until the I.R.A. restores the 17-month cease-fire it broke in February 1996 with a series of attacks in England and Northern Ireland. During the current parliamentary campaign, the I.R.A. has also severely disrupted transportation in England with bomb explosions and hoax threats of such action. Since the campaign began a month ago, the I.R.A. has been inactive in Northern Ireland, and this is seen as a tactic to help Mr. Adams. Campaigning in West Belfast, Mr. Adams has repeatedly indicated that, like most other politicians in the British province, he expects the new Government to be headed by Mr. Blair. ''Sinn Fein believes that this election provides a new opportunity to restore the peace process,'' he said. ''The election of Sinn Fein M.P.'s will send a resounding message to the incoming British government that inclusive dialague and honest negotiations based on equality are essential for the ending of conflict and the achievement of a negotiated peace settlement. Our canvass returns indicate a strong result for out party right across all the constituencies.'' Some experts feel that in addition to a victory for Mr. Adams, Sinn Fein could win in the Mid-Ulster district where Martin McGuinness, the party's No. 2 official, is a candidate. Mr. Adams hopes that Sinn Fein's candidates for Parliament will gain more than the 15 percent of the provincewide vote that the party won in elections last May for places in the Peace Forum, an adjunct of the formal peace talks. The vote total, the highest ever by Sinn Fein, represented about 40 percent of the Catholic vote. In the campaign, Sinn Fein has fought mainly against the candidates of the mainstream Catholic Social Democratic Labor Party of Dr. Hendron, and the party's leader, John Hume, a member of the British Parliament who is expected to be re-elected in the west of the province. Mr. Hume has often said that ''a vote for Sinn Fein in the present circumstances is a vote for I.R.A. | Gerry Adams Expected to Win Commons Seat |
927775_4 | Reason'' (Oxford University Press), a forthcoming book that challenges critical race theory, suggested in an interview that the movement was the result of increasing frustration among black intellectuals over the failure to eradicate racism. ''The problem with denying any objective reality,'' she said, ''is that there is no way of mediating among the competing perceptions of reality except power. And what they ultimately want is more power for their perceptions.'' Many critical race theorists say an important tool for members of minorities in overcoming their disadvantages is to tell stories, some of them from individual experience and some of them parables. Storytelling, Professor Crenshaw said, aims at ''challenging versions of reality put forward by the dominant white culture.'' Black men, for example, may tell stories about police brutality that are at odds with the official version of how common such behavior is. By putting forward an anecdotal version of reality, Professor Crenshaw said, the men assert the primacy of personal experience -- and no matter what society tells them, they trust their own personal experiences. Some critical race scholars also construct elaborate fables to illustrate their points. Their books typically eschew evidence to make a point, relying instead on fictionalized tales or dialogue. But for Professor Sherry, ''storytelling doesn't bear the slightest pressure once you start to examine it.'' Such storytelling, she said, starts with conclusions, ''and when you start with conclusions, it's all too easy to make arguments that won't withstand any scrutiny.'' Her co-author and colleague at the University of Minnesota, Daniel A. Farber, who, like Professor Sherry, is white, said another problem with storytelling, especially personal narratives like the one by Professor Banks, is that when someone challenges a story, ''you're not just criticizing someone's scholarship, but you're attacking their life, something that goes to the heart of their identity.'' Dr. Farber added, ''That can make a dialogue very difficult.'' In defense of storytelling, Prof. Alex M. Johnson Jr. of the University of Virginia has written that minority scholars have a distinct ''voice of color,'' which ''rejects narrow evidentiary concepts of relevance and credibility.'' Some theorists go so far as to say that what really happened in a particular incident may be no more important than what people feel or say happened. For example, some argue that even though Tawana Brawley, then a teen-ager, made up her account that a gang of white men, one with a | For Black Scholars Wedded to Prism of Race, New and Separate Goals |
927853_1 | gene that can cause breast cancer (and has patents pending for that gene, BRC-1, and a companion, BRCA-2) is working on a similar detection method for the skin cancer melanoma. Myriad Genetics has won a patent for the gene it says can cause melanoma and for a method of finding if a person carries the gene. ''What we have patented is the composition of matter on the mutation of the gene that predisposes individuals to melanoma,'' said Peter Meldrum, president of Myriad in Salt Lake City. Cancer is caused by the unchecked division of cells. Cell division is usually controlled by genes known as suppressors. When the body wants limited cell division, it switches off those genes. If a suppressor gene is damaged, it malfunctions; the body cannot turn it back on, cell division can run amok and tumors may result. Damage to the suppressor gene can be environmental or hereditary. Myriad's patent is for inherent mutations to a gene called the Multiple Tumor Suppressor 1 (MTS1). The mutated gene can be passed from parent to child. ''The gene is a homozygous deletion, meaning it is deleted on both chromosomes,'' Mr. Meldrum said, adding that the gene is a factor in 46 percent of most major cancers. ''But it is one of a series of genes in a cascade that leads to those cancers,'' he said. ''With melanoma, it initiates that cascade of events. If a person inherits one defective copy from one parent, it puts them at a much greater risk of melanoma.'' Mr. Meldrum said the threat of melanoma is about 1 percent. ''But if you have a damaged copy of the gene, you have a 25 percent risk of getting melanoma by age 50 and a 53 percent chance of getting melanoma by age 80,'' he said. About 40,000 Americans develop melanoma each year. Mr. Meldrum said his company will have an MTS1 detection test ready for public use in late 1998. Myriad already produces a test for the BRC-1 breast cancer gene, called BRACAnalysis. It is working on another test kit to isolate the gene that can cause salt-dependent hypertension. A University of Utah geneticist, Lisa Cannon-Albright, and two Myriad employees, Mark Skolnick, also a geneticist, and Alexander Kamb, a molecular biologist, are the inventors listed for patent 5,624,819. Patents are available by number for $3 from the Patent and Trademark Office, Washington, D.C. 20231. Patents | A company says it has a method of determining which people are more likely to get skin cancer. |
932023_7 | the two biggest job engines in the city's economy over the year -- both outperformed the national economy in percentage increase in employment, the Bureau of Labor Statistics said. Both industries also tend to recruit nationally and pay high salaries for high skills. By contrast, national growth outstripped New York's in many industries that tend to hire and recruit locally and pay less for fewer skills; from food stores to hotel employment, to government and in most manufacturing categories. One major question for the future is what a slowing national economy might mean for New York's unemployed. Some economists say the nation's unemployment rate would probably be even lower, and the city's even higher, if not for the 1.3 million residents of the region who moved to other parts of the country in the 1990's. They argue that the population exodus, as in other major urban centers like Los Angeles, which lost 1.3 million people, has acted like a pressure release valve for the national economy, redistributing labor to places where it is needed. Immigration from foreign countries, meanwhile, has kept New York's population from falling precipitously. Other experts say that the effect of population changes on unemployment levels is more complicated. Reputations about regions of the country are slow to grow and slow to change, and population flows are even slower to react, said James Brown, a labor market analyst with the State Department of Labor who follows the New York City economy. Mr. Brown said he did not think that the New Yorkers who left the region necessarily moved to places where job growth has been hotter, though some certainly did. They moved, he said, for the same reason others had for generations, from older, port-of-entry cities like New York to less established areas that have been growing faster for many years. Part of the explanation of the low unemployment rates in the old industrial belt of the Midwest and the Plains States, he said, is that those areas lost so much population over previous years of economic stagnation, and have not had it replaced, as cities like New York and Los Angeles have, through immigration. Labor markets, like cruise ships, do not turn on a dime. ''If a region stays hot over time, that does produce changes, like the oil patch in the 70's,'' Mr. Brown said. ''But it takes a while for word to get out.'' | Half Full or Half Empty? |
932057_0 | The staff of the Federal Communications Commission ruled yesterday that the 45-story radio tower that Fordham University wants to build on its Bronx campus would have an adverse effect on its immediate neighbor, the New York Botanical Garden, and it asked both sides in the three-year dispute to help work out an alternate plan. The ruling, which was preliminary, said that the tower would ''introduce an obtrusive visual element into the setting of the garden.'' Federal officials will now begin a formal mediation between the university and the Botanical Garden. Previous negotiations centered on moving or redesigning the tower. The decision does not end the intense jockeying that began when construction on the 480-foot-high tower began in 1994, nor does it guarantee that Fordham will be permanently blocked from completing the tower on its current site on the university's Rose Hill campus, directly across Southern Boulevard from the newly renovated Enid A. Haupt Conservatory, the garden's centerpiece. Construction was halted when the legal dispute began three years ago, with about 260 feet of the gray steel tower completed. But the ruling, contained in a letter sent by the chief of the F.C.C.'s audio service division to the university and the Botanical Garden, provided strong backing for the garden's contention that the tower would have a negative effect on its esthetic qualities, and it appeared to nudge both sides in the tangled dispute toward finding a middle ground. Fordham officials, in a statement issued last night, emphasized elements of the ruling that favored their side. They noted that the F.C.C. staff had concluded that the tower, to be used by Fordham's radio station, WFUV-FM, would not harm the Botanical Garden's standing as a historic landmark and that it would not affect the quality of research or educational programs at the garden. ''The ruling dismisses the exaggerated claims that the tower will undermine the character of the Botanical Garden and allows us to move ahead with the one outstanding issue to be resolved,'' Fordham's vice president for administration, Brian J. Byrne, said in the statement. ''We look forward to working with the F.C.C. to demonstrate that we are willing to take every reasonable step to reduce the visual impact of this very necessary radio tower,'' Dr. Byrne said. But officials of the Botanical Garden, which last month lost the most recent round of a prolonged court battle over the radio tower, viewed | F.C.C. Staff Says Tower Would Harm Bronx Garden |
932014_1 | with leading Swiss Catholics, Protestants and Jews, ''we could encourage them to take a more pro-active role in helping'' their nation take account of what it is learning about its history. Not that such a process will be easy. ''It goes against the ego of man to admit failure, or mistakes,'' Rabbi Schneier said. But without such an admission, he added, there is no healing. Repenting of wrong is an ancient religious concept, about which the biblical prophets had much to say. ''And what does the Lord require of you,'' states Micah (6:8), ''but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?'' Acknowledging transgressions, even from the distant past, carries a certain drama. When a group or a nation does it, people take notice. The moment is not soon forgotten. Two years ago, the Southern Baptist Convention, which was formed by southern churchmen who broke away from northern Baptists in a dispute over slavery in 1845, adopted a resolution repenting of racism and asking forgiveness from African-Americans. A year later, the United Methodist Church, which represents more than eight million people, apologized to two American Indian tribes, the Arapahoes and the Cheyennes, for the actions of a Methodist lay preacher, Col. John M. Chivington, who led a massacre of more than 200 men, women and children at Sand Creek, Colo., in 1864. Public expressions of contrition have not been limited to religious bodies. Last week, President Clinton apologized to the remaining survivors and relatives of 399 black men, who were long left untreated for syphilis in an infamous experiment begun by Government health officials in 1932. While the Government years ago paid an out-of-court settlement to the victims of the experiment and their heirs, it had never formally expressed regret. When Mr. Clinton did so, he said, ''What the United States did was shameful, and I am sorry.'' He also apologized to all black Americans for what he called a ''clearly racist'' experiment. In Switzerland, Mr. Anderson said, he and the other clergy members made it clear that they had not come to lecture anyone. '' 'We're not here to sit in judgment on you,' '' he said he told the Swiss with whom they met. Instead, he said that Americans had struggled with ''a whole series of issues'' involving questions about the morality of past actions. ''It is possible to repent,'' he said, | U.S. Clergy Counsel Swiss on Atoning for War Past |
930129_0 | The Greeks who fled to Europe, manuscripts in hand, after the fall of Constantinople in 1453 were impressively quick to take advantage of the new invention of printing. Emigre scholars and scribes, especially in Italy, became printers, type founders and book designers, imitating manuscript traditions and modeling delicately graceful Greek type on their own calligraphy. A small but stimulating exhibition at the Onassis Center for Hellenic Studies at New York University, with books lent by H. P. Kraus Inc., illustrates the evolution of their art, as well as their profound influence on Western intellectual life. The show at the center, at 58 West 10th Street in Greenwich Village, is called ''The Greek Book: An Exhibition of Greek Printing and the Book Arts From the 15th to the 20th Centuries.'' Among the 50 volumes on view here through May 31, many with elegant woodcuts or engravings, are John Cardinal Bessarion's personal copy of Apuleius, printed at Rome in 1469 on Italy's first press and containing some of the earliest Greek type; Demetrios Chalcondyles's monumental 1488 first edition of Homer, a masterpiece of Florentine printing, and Zacharias Kallierges's Greek Etymologicum, produced in Venice in 1499 and perhaps the most beautiful Greek book of the Renaissance. More recently, a first edition of Liddell and Scott's Greek-English Lexicon, published by Oxford University Press in 1843, offers an example of the often surprising ways in which the thread of Greek scholarship winds its way through European culture. One of the authors was Henry George Liddell, the Dean of Christ Church, whose daughter was the inspiration for Alice in Wonderland. | Western Thought, Bound By Greek Book Designers |
930159_0 | The eight men who stormed the bell tower in St. Mark's Square in Venice last week in support of secession for northern Italy appear simply to have put into action the program of the region's small but boisterous separatist movement. But the episode came as the separatist movement, with its improbable challenge to Italian unity, is clearly losing ground even among the few ordinary northerners who supported it. This has led some analysts to see a growing and dangerous split between the movement's leaders, with their verbal appeals for secession, and scattered groups keen on transforming these appeals into reality. ''Is it possible that, as they took off on their assault of St. Mark's bell tower, they had been misunderstanding for years the message they were getting?'' Gian Antonio Stella, a commentator for Corriere della Sera, the Milan daily, said of the eight men. Umberto Bossi, the leader of the Northern League, the main separatist party, denounced the men, declaring them agents of the Government in Rome sent to discredit his own followers. But at separatist rallies over the weekend across northeastern Italy, evidence emerged of a grass-roots split, as the followers of Mr. Bossi debated whether to follow his interpretation of the incident, or to show solidarity with the arrested men. In the early hours last Friday, the men hijacked a ferry, used it to transport two vehicles to St. Mark's Square, and then scaled the renowned bell tower there, where they unfurled a flag of the old Republic of Venice, which at its height ruled most of the Veneto region including the cities of Verona and Padua. Over the weekend, the police said they detained two more men. The Italian authorities announced this week that the eight men seized on Friday in Venice would be put on trial as early as next week. It was not clear when the other two men detained in connection with the assault would be tried. The eight face various charges, including the armed hijacking of the ferry and illegal entry into the bell tower, and if convicted face individual sentences of up to 30 years in prison. Soon after special police forces scaled the tower and, without firing a shot, arrested the men, messages began arriving at Italian news organizations from a group calling itself the Venetian Army of Liberation, demanding the release of the eight ''prisoners of war.'' In Rome, Government | Facing the Rubicon, Italy's Separatists Start to Test the Water |
930159_1 | his own followers. But at separatist rallies over the weekend across northeastern Italy, evidence emerged of a grass-roots split, as the followers of Mr. Bossi debated whether to follow his interpretation of the incident, or to show solidarity with the arrested men. In the early hours last Friday, the men hijacked a ferry, used it to transport two vehicles to St. Mark's Square, and then scaled the renowned bell tower there, where they unfurled a flag of the old Republic of Venice, which at its height ruled most of the Veneto region including the cities of Verona and Padua. Over the weekend, the police said they detained two more men. The Italian authorities announced this week that the eight men seized on Friday in Venice would be put on trial as early as next week. It was not clear when the other two men detained in connection with the assault would be tried. The eight face various charges, including the armed hijacking of the ferry and illegal entry into the bell tower, and if convicted face individual sentences of up to 30 years in prison. Soon after special police forces scaled the tower and, without firing a shot, arrested the men, messages began arriving at Italian news organizations from a group calling itself the Venetian Army of Liberation, demanding the release of the eight ''prisoners of war.'' In Rome, Government security officials said evidence had emerged in recent months of numerous cells of ''radical secessionists'' throughout northeastern Italy. And, indeed, the incident in Venice was only the latest in a recent string of assaults in the north on the authority of the central Government in Rome. In recent weeks, pirate transmitters have broken into the national television's news broadcasts, the Northern League established a shadow parliament and cabinet to govern the north, and in some areas there have been appeals not to pay taxes to Rome. This month the movement plans a referendum in the north, in which northern Italians will be asked whether they favor remaining part of Italy, or going their own way as a separate republic. After national elections last year, in which the Northern League won 10 percent of the popular vote -- and as much as 40 percent in some of the region wealthiest districts -- Mr. Bossi hardened the movement's goals, dropping his calls for greater regionalism in favor of outright appeals for secession. | Facing the Rubicon, Italy's Separatists Start to Test the Water |
929269_14 | ahead of time. In Dali we stayed at the Old Dali Inn, a pleasant hotel arranged around a traditional courtyard garden. We paid $3 for a simple three-man room, and there was hot water from 8 A.M. until 11 P.M. A basic double room cost $6, and singles were $4. The inn also had nicer doubles with television and private bath for $12 a night. In Lijiang we stayed at the Lijiang Hotel, where beds were $1 a night in a dormitory. More comfortable options include the Red Sun Hotel, where a double room is $7 a night, and the recently built Grand Lijiang Hotel, the city's luxury hotel, where double rooms cost $60 a night. In Zhongdian most travelers stay at the Yongsheng Hotel, which has dormitory beds for $2 and doubles for $10. The food is excellent in Dali and Lijiang. Both have traditional Chinese restaurants, noodle shops, and outdoor food stands, as well as backpacker cafes that offer both Chinese and Western dishes. The Yunnan Cafe in Dali has what may be the best pizza in China, and it is also known for its plum wine. A large dinner there costs less than $5. Things to Do There are many interesting day trips from each of these towns, especially for visitors interested in hiking, and most hotels offer bike rentals for $1 a day. In general, for information about excursions it's best to go to the backpacker cafes, where there are travelers' notebooks with advice and recommendations from previous visitors. Lijiang's orchestra performs every evening at 8 P.M., and admission is less than $3. At each performance Dr. Xuan speaks, in both Chinese and English, about the music and its origins. One of the best side trips is the two-day trek through the Tiger Leaping Gorge, a 10,000-foot Yangtze River gorge north of Lijiang. There are organized tours from Lijiang, but it's also easy to organize the trip yourself, as the entrance to the gorge is midway between Lijiang and Zhongdian, at a small town called Qiaotou. All buses between Lijiang and Zhongdian stop at Qiaotou, and there are very basic hotels there and along the way. Most travelers take the Lonely Planet Guide to China. ''Yunnan,'' by Patrick R. Booz (Passport Books, 4255 West Touhy Avenue, Lincolnwood, Ill. 60646), gives good background information about the history and culture of the province. Many tourist shops in Dali | Into the Past At China's Edge |
929227_17 | a proper and efficient political democracy. Only how do we talk about these spiritual or religious notions -- with what language or set of ideas? Havel was right to notice that the founders of American democracy knew how to speak about these things, in a duly 18th-century manner. In the 19th century, too, there was a grand language of poetry and philosophy that spoke about democracy and the cosmos. But the 18th- and 19th-century languages had faded into kitsch by the 20th century, or else were incorporated into Marxism-Leninism, which turned their meanings upside down. By our own time, to speak with any force and sincerity about democracy and its spiritual foundations had become next to impossible. We had seen poets of Marxism and of liberation movements of every kind -- poets by the dozen, and in every idiom. But who in the late 20th century was the poet of democracy? It was Havel. He put together his language of democracy out of found objects from Heidegger, Beckett, Kafka and several other writers, not to mention a couple of rock stars. He added a dash of hippie mysticism and Central European style, and he made everything he said resonate by living out his own precepts, which cost him plenty. The result was sometimes odd and cloudy, full of invocations of the transcendental. His style was cerebral, without lyricism. (Lyricism was communist, and he was against it.) Nothing Havel has ever written would be chanted by a crowd. But these ideas of his spoke to the main point. He pictured democracy as the triumph of life over ideology, of the broad view over the narrow, of authentic emotions over artificial ones, of personality over banality -- democracy as the individual's responsibility to himself and to the universe. Naturally he worked up these ideas by thinking about his own country, where problems of ideology, personality, artificiality and irresponsibility may be, for historical reasons, especially acute. In a period of less than 50 years the Czechs underwent a Nazi occupation, a Communist takeover and a Soviet invasion. They responded to these misfortunes by putting up relatively little popular resistance, compared with the citizens of some other geographically-vulnerable countries, which may have been wise, militarily speaking. By the time totalitarianism was finally overthrown, in 1989, Czech society had become a moral swamp, a place where almost everyone had been some sort of collaborator and | The Philosopher-King Is Mortal |
929316_2 | needs of Long Island businesses. We are using their expertise and connections in the community to give us a better understanding of what needs are strongest in Long Island. Q. Do you think Long Island businesses could best import or export with the Nafta countries? A. Actually, we're talking both imports and exports. If we can address the transportation costs effectively, then the additional distance between, say, Mexico and Long Island is not that much more of a barrier. We should be looking at both of those countries as trade partners. Q. Commuters on the Long Island Expressway have a hard enough time getting home during rush hour. How can Long Island companies expect to import and export to Canada and Mexico with such traffic constraints? A. There are discussions under way to provide additional access to the Island and I believe these have been going on for many years. Ferry service or a bridge link to Connecticut are all basically infrastructure approaches to some of the issues, but those are typically very expensive. This question goes to the heart of I.T.S., or Intelligent Transportation Systems, which is basically finding ways to use the infrastructure that you have more effectively. Can you do it by better planning? Can you understand the routes and what you're shipping and when you are shipping so that you can take advantage of periods of time in which there is less congestion? Can you use this information to speed up some of the interchanges that will take place? Can you develop intermodal facilities that can consolidate some of the shipments and manage those more effectively? Q. What are Intelligent Transportation Systems? A. Intelligent Transportation Systems is the program within the Federal Department of Transportation and the various State Departments of Transportation that attempt to introduce technology into transportation activities using transponders, information systems, electronic communications and the like to expedite the transportation process. Q. How does this improve the flow of commerce? A. One of the things that we can provide through the effective use of I.T.S. systems and the exchange of information associated with the movement of commodities is the ability to know when something is going to arrive. This is very important for North American trade because if you're concerned about the reliability of movement, then any time you have bottlenecks in the system, it's throwing a monkey wrench into your schedule. In | Easing the Flow of People and Products |
933152_0 | From the ruins of the ancient citadel that towers above this remote and dusty town, the plains of Mesopotamia stretch in every direction. Many great visionaries have reigned here, but perhaps none has had grander dreams than a 40-year-old engineer who stood atop the windswept bluff on a recent afternoon and surveyed his domain. The engineer, Olcay Unver, heads the Southeast Anatolia Project, one of the most ambitious development projects ever attempted. His goals are nothing less than to transform an arid tract of land the size of Austria into a fertile and prosperous garden, to break down a feudal social structure in which most of its 6 million residents live in poverty and to provide so much work and opportunity that people will flow into this region from other parts of Turkey rather than fleeing in despair. In his seventh year of running the project, Mr. Unver is beginning to succeed. Applying in part the lessons he learned while studying for his doctorate in engineering at the University of Texas and his experience as a water engineer for the Lower Colorado River Authority in Texas, he is slowly turning this backward and violent region into a model of rising expectations. The scale of the $32 billion project, which envisions the construction of 22 dams and 19 hydroelectric plants on the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, is vast enough to fulfill any engineer's fantasies. Three of the dams and adjacent power plants are completed, including the giant Ataturk Dam, the centerpiece of the project. Six more complexes are under construction, work on two others is about to begin, and the rest are being designed. Under Mr. Unver's direction, the project has broadened far beyond its original scope. It now includes forestry, fish farming and urban planning programs, rural health clinics, literacy classes, handicraft courses, schools for farmers and centers for the promotion of women's rights. Dozens of such programs and centers are already functioning and more are opening every month. ''A lot of people have the misconception that this is an irrigation project or an energy project,'' Mr. Unver said as he looked out over the blossoming Harran Plain. ''Actually it's an integrated socio-economic development project which aims to enhance the standard of living in this area. Maximum yield is not the goal. A good yield in an equitable social context is a better goal.'' The project has roots as far | Restoring the Fertile Crescent to Its Former Glory |
931817_1 | the continuing investigations of the failed firm, A. R. Baron & Company, which cleared its trades through Bear Stearns at the time of its collapse. The West Pittston facility and its contents were severely damaged in a spectacular two-day fire that began May 5. The cause of the fire is still under investigation. Since the collapse of Baron last summer, Bear Stearns has been asked to provide information to the offices of the New York County District Attorney and the New York State Attorney General, Federal and industry market regulators and lawyers for Baron's creditors. The requests have focused both on Baron's own operations, which drew a host of customer complaints and regulatory fines in the years prior to its collapse, and on Bear Stearns's relationship with Baron and its top executives. Indeed, the creditors' lawyers have been attempting since early this year to obtain a broad spectrum of records from Bear Stearns, without success. That dispute will continue at a hearing in Federal Bankruptcy Court in Newark on June 2, at which Bear Stearns will seek to have the creditors' subpoena quashed while the creditors, represented by Jerrold I. Langer, will ask that Bear Stearns be held in contempt of court for failing to comply with the request. Against that backdrop, news of the fire prompted some concern among investigators and lawyers. Police and fire officials present at the scene said that agents from the office of Robert M. Morgenthau, the Manhattan District Attorney, traveled to West Pittston to gather information about the fire. Mr. Morgenthau's office would not confirm the trip nor discuss its purpose. Mr. Lehman said that he did not yet have a full inventory of the lost records but that he believed that the fire would ''have no effect on our ability to produce relevant documents in the various investigations.'' Bear Stearns notified investigators about the fire as soon as it learned that some of its records were affected, people familiar with the case said. In those calls, the company indicated that it did not believe that any of the affected documents were covered by the demands for information. But Mr. Langer said he had not been notified of the fire, and was concerned about it, in light of his continuing dispute with Bear Stearns over precisely what records are relevant to his clients' case against the former owners and employees of A. R. Baron. | Stored Records Destroyed By Fire, Bear Stearns Says |
927032_0 | To the Editor: Marcia Angell's reasoning persuaded me to change my mind regarding in vitro fertilization for postmenopausal women (''Pregnant at 63? Why Not?'', Op-Ed, April 25). When I first glanced at the headline, I reacted with disapproval. My objection to postmenopausal pregnancy stemmed from a concern that it is unnatural. Yet Dr. Angell uncovers this supposed ''ethical concern'' for what it truly represents: thinly veiled age and sex discrimination. So if an older women is willing to accept the risks of pregnancy, why should society deny her the opportunity? SALVATORE J. CANNIZZO, M.D. New York, April 26, 1997 But Can a 77-Year-Old Raise a Teen-Ager? | Veiled Discrimination |
928491_1 | that he is going to come back Friday. I have also heard on the radio that the Americans say he is not coming back.'' The man was getting his hair cut, examining the barber at work in a mirror hanging on a towering palm tree; a piece of cloth from a large wholesale food bag protected his bright tie. The man, who did not want to give his name, said he thought there should be an election between Mr. Kabila and Mr. Mobutu. That brought jeers and loud shouts of ''No!'' from a dozen or so men who had gathered. A truckload of soldiers went by, the young men singing and waving their rifles. ''They are going to the front to die,'' said one of the men in the barbershop. It became a refrain, and it was clear that the men thought that was what the soldiers' fate should be. But there was a remarkable lack of fear of the soldiers. For the most part, this bustling capital does not have the look or feel of a city bracing for war, even though the rebel forces could be here within days. The city's traffic police, men and women in green uniforms with white helmets, struggle to keep battered, rusting vehicles moving on streets congested with pedestrians and vendors. But there are no police roadblocks or checkpoints. Gleaming new Mobil, Shell and Elf stations are open, and noticeably absent are the long lines of vehicles, the ominous signs of a population preparing to flee or worried about impending shortages brought on by war. At Camp Kokolo, one of the country's major military bases, in the southwestern part of the city, there is no evidence of any additional security at the front gate or along the perimeter. Indeed, there is no sign of any security, and soldiers were playing soccer late this afternoon in an open field without a gun in sight. Residents are not putting sandbags around their homes; businessmen are not taping their store windows to protect them from being shattered by the concussions of mortars or artillery. Many residents say they believe that the way to avoid a battle for the capital is for Mr. Mobutu to remain out of the country, in exile. ''If President Mobutu decides to give up power, there will be no fighting,'' said Eyala Eboyo, a history professor at the University of Kinshasa. He | Along Rutted Streets, Few Mourn Departure |
931054_3 | salaries of this year's M.B.A. graduates at investment banking firms jumped to $75,000, from $61,000 last year. *At Columbia University, companies that usually finish recruiting by January were still posting new jobs in May. Also showing up were some businesses that have not recruited in years: public relations, communications, advertising, city government and not-for-profit organizations. ''I've been here 30 years and without a doubt there's been more interviewing activity on campus, more job offers, and more companies than I can ever remember,'' said C. Randall Powell, assistant dean and director of placement at the University of Indiana School of Business here. ''In terms of getting a job, this is one of the premier years ever to have graduated from college.'' Ms. Hanigan said undergraduate hiring at Fortune 500 companies, which has been on the rise since 1992, will be up at least 20 percent this year over last year. For many liberal arts graduates, of course, the job prospects are not as glittering as for newly minted business graduates or M.B.A.'s. ''The philosophy or anthropology graduate doesn't necessarily have employers beating down at their doors,'' said Alan Goodman, director of career services at the Catholic University of America in Washington. ''They still have to work very hard to find positions that call for their skills and knowledge.'' But he said the spillover of the strong market will benefit those graduates as well. And liberal arts schools, like Williams College in Williamstown, Mass., Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., or St. John's College of Annapolis, Md., say students are getting jobs ranging from investment banking to the Peace Corps or the Americorps. Others, as always, opt for wholly unconventional jobs. One student at St. John's reports going to work as a ''groundskeeper/ grave digger/sausage maker/dog trainer'' at a monastery. The upbeat mood is hard to miss on this 1,860-acre Indiana campus of rolling hills, known for the volatile basketball coach Bobby Knight and the world's largest student union, where most students affect the well-scrubbed look of aspiring middle managers and where graduation speakers proudly pay homage to ''Hoosier values.'' Harry Jones, 26, an M.B.A. graduate, who will become an assistant product manager for the Kimberly-Clark Corporation, like most M.B.A. graduates went back to school after a few years in the work world. He knows boom times do not last forever, but he looks out to the future and sees mostly bright prospects. | ERA OF DOWNSIZING CREATES JOB BOOM FOR CLASS OF '97 |
931010_1 | The F.A.A. cited dozens of reports of interference with navigational, fuel and flight systems from laptop computers, electronic games, compact disk players and recorders, video cameras and cellular phones. The aviation industry is even more concerned about newer technologies like personal satellite communications, computers with built-in cell phones and satellite modems, and two-way pagers -- devices that are designed to transmit signals. Some airline passengers ignore instructions not to use electronic devices during takeoffs and landings. But most have no idea that their personal gadgets may actually act as radio transmitters. Mr. Nakata frequently flew on business, and he was amazed that flight attendants enforced the ban on electronic devices below 10,000 feet just by walking through the cabin. ''It's crazy that in this day and age that eyeballing is the way to monitor a recognized hazard,'' he said. Just two weeks before the recommendation last fall by the Radio Technical Commission for Aeronautics, Mr. Nakata won a patent for an electromagnetic interference detector. His sensor picks up emissions and can pinpoint which part of the plane they come from. ''It's a spectrum analyzer that would test for the electromagnetic component of all electronic equipment,'' he said. ''It has antennae located at various points within an aircraft cabin.'' Electromagnetic interference results from radio waves transmitted by electronic devices. If the devices operate in the same megahertz range as navigational and communications equipment, their signals can crowd the spectrum in a way that interferes with those avionics. ''It fills the air with stray signals,'' Mr. Nakata explained. He said any device operating from 100 to 300 megahertz ''is troubling.'' ''Emissions can enter avionics three ways,'' he added. ''Directly into a receiver, getting radiated out the window and then down or up into the antenna, or going into wires and getting conducted.'' Mr. Nakata's invention scans the entire spectrum, looking for emissions that are excessively high. Portable electronic devices come in two basic categories -- those that are transmitters like cellular phones and remote control toys, and those that are not, like laptop computers and CD players. But Mr. Nakata pointed out that a device like a laptop can become a transmitter if it is dropped or modified in a way that damages the protective barrier surrounding its electronic components. His detector won patent 5,543,779. Patents are available by number for $3 from the Patent and Trademark Office, Washington, D.C. 20231. Patents | A detector to let flight crews know if passenger 24C really turned off his computer for takeoff. |
931041_2 | the 860 graduates today's heroes and heroines. An additional 625 students received their degrees at a ceremony later in the day. Judge Bellacosa of the State Court of Appeals, a 1959 St. John's alumnus, used his commencement address to quote from sources ranging from the Roman philosopher Virgil to Lou Carnesecca, the former St. John's basketball coach. ''The significance of this day should not be lost on you,'' the judge said in his own words. ''Don't diminish its importance. Treat this degree as a precious seed to be nurtured, and that way you will be a success.'' Te-mika Warner, 20, a psychology major from Queens, delivered this year's student address, receiving a standing ovation for her message of ''no reservations, no retreats and no regrets.'' Judge Bellacosa paraphrased ''The Odyssey'' in wishing graduates success in the future. ''May your muses lead you to a wondrous journey,'' he said. Fairfield University Tom Brokaw, anchor of the ''NBC Nightly News,'' challenged the more than 800 graduates at Fairfield University in Connecticut yesterday to take advantage of the coming millennium to address society's problems. ''You are graduating at the dawn of a new century and millennium, and I truly envy you,'' said Mr. Brokaw, the keynote speaker. He noted that the graduates will face major challenges in the years ahead. ''All of the wisdom in this room cannot collectively foresee the outcome of the vexing questions of our time,'' he said. ''Therefore, for them and for so many other new challenges, we must begin a national dialogue on who we are and what is our destiny. We need to know where we're headed and how we can create a common pool of expectations and understandings, but also owe it to ourselves and our unique place in this universe, to engage the questions. ''It is, after all, a rare moment in history, where the world by and large is at peace, when the lessons of our two world wars remain fresh in our experience or memory, when we have the ability to share this dialogue with interested parties, friendly and not, instantaneously around the world.'' Larry Doby, who broke the color barrier in the American League 50 years ago by becoming the first black player in the league, received an honorary degree from Fairfield. Hofstra University Billy Joel was one of three people who were bestowed yesterday with honorary doctoral degrees by Hofstra University | For Adelphi, Graduation Follows Turbulent Year |
931109_0 | To the Editor: Thomas L. Friedman (column, May 12) paradoxically suggests that Belfast may be too cozy for peace. He asks whether Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain, Gerry Adams, the head of Sinn Fein, and David Trimble, leader of the Protestant Ulster Unionist Party, are willing to make tough compromises while affluence and violence remain in a comfortable balance. Life in Belfast's middle class neighborhoods may indeed be 85 percent normal. Middle-class Protestants and Roman Catholics have exchanged their communal loyalties and cultural identities for the modern norm of self-fulfillment. In the ''other'' Northern Ireland of working-class flats, small towns and family farms, sectarian violence is on the rise. This week, as reported by the Belfast Telegraph, in contrast to Mr. Friedman's benign description of violence tempered by affluence, the Primate of the Protestant Church of Ireland, Robin Eames, said he could not ''remember a more anxious and tense period.'' Sectarianism has placed Ulster on the edge of ''a new nightmare of suffering.'' Mr. Adams and Mr. Trimble may be expected to have some influence over their paramilitary allies. But their voices will be useless if sectarian fury again sweeps through towns and neighborhoods. The political leaders must act now for peace -- before they become irrelevant. JOSEPH FARRY Collegeville, Minn., May 14, 1997 The writer is a professor of political science at St. John's University. | Belfast Might Be Cozy, but Rest of Ulster Isn't |
929536_1 | by Dr. White. And no other large animals like elephants or gorillas appear to have suffered. But chimps, the animals most closely related to humans, are known to be highly jealous of territory, patrolling and defending borders constantly. Even without logging, violent clashes are known to erupt in which chimps kill each other with their bare hands and feet. In at least two documented cases, large communities of chimpanzees have systematically hunted down smaller ones and killed all members. What is happening in Gabon, Dr. White believes, is that as mechanized logging operations advance on a continuous front three to six miles wide, their approach frightens the chimpanzees, which are not used to humans and have never encountered anything like big, noisy machines. So they flee -- right into the territory of the next chimp community. When that happens, Dr. White said, ''you're essentially going to kick-start a chimpanzee war.'' The males from the invaded community attack the interlopers, and many die. Then the loggers keep coming. The invaded community itself is displaced onto the next community's territory. New warfare breaks out, Dr. White believes, ''and this process goes on and on and on and on as the loggers move through.'' Dr. White said he and his African colleagues ''have a scientific reluctance to shout about this effect,'' since they have not actually observed a chimpanzee war in progress. But all signs point in that direction, he said. First, he said, it is clear on the basis of sampling surveys of chimpanzee nests, scats and actual animals in Gabon's 2,000-square-mile Lope Reserve that the population of a given community falls by 80 percent immediately after the loggers go through. The surviving 20 percent, Dr. White postulates, filter back to their home range through undisturbed forest after the war. Second, Dr. White observed chimp behavior suggesting a war atmosphere. In one area where he was surveying the effects of logging, the chimpanzees were extremely agitated, drumming on trees, calling to each other and even rushing Dr. White himself. ''On a number of occasions they mobbed me,'' he said. ''I had whole chimpanzee communities charging to about five meters and screaming at me, and that's very unusual behavior.'' He interprets this as evidence of ''a very stressed chimpanzee community, which is exactly what we would expect if this sort of chimpanzee war was going on.'' Why are gorillas not affected in the | Logging Sets Off an Apparent Chimp War |
931384_0 | ALTHOUGH exercise is widely promoted as good for both body and mind, a new report casts doubt on one benefit that has been claimed for it. In a long-term study done by researchers at Johns Hopkins University, working up a sweat a few times a week did not prevent depression, a result that has surprised and puzzled some other scientists. The director of the study, Dr. Lisa Cooper-Patrick, an assistant professor of medicine, said she and her colleagues were also taken aback by their findings. ''I was pretty disappointed,'' she said. ''I'm one of these people who really advocates exercise and had this belief that physical activity improves mental status. I was hoping we would show some benefit. But you have to report what you find.'' The study results were published in the April issue of The American Journal of Public Health. She and her colleagues studied 973 doctors who graduated from Johns Hopkins medical school from 1948 through 1964. All were participants in the Precursors Study, a long-term project in which they fill out health questionnaires once a year. In 1978 and 1986, the doctors were asked how many times a week they exercised hard enough to work up a sweat. Years later, at midlife, they were asked if they had been found to have clinical depression. They also filled out a questionnaire designed to measure ''psychiatric distress,'' which includes feelings of sadness and anxiety that may be symptoms of depression but that do not necessarily add up to that diagnosis. When the researchers compared the incidence of depression and psychiatric distress in subjects who exercised versus those who did not, they could find no difference between the two groups. After 15 years of study, the rate of depression in both groups was 6.4 percent. Psychiatric distress was measured over a two-year period and was also found to occur at the same rate in both groups: 15 percent. Both rates are comparable with those found in the general population. Dr. Cooper-Patrick and her colleagues concluded that exercise either had no effect on the incidence of depression, or had an effect too small to be measured by their study. ''If there is any protective effect of exercise against depression,'' she said, ''it's probably very subtle and would have to be measured very carefully in a larger group of people with a long-term follow-up.'' But the study has limitations, she also | Exercise May Not Curb Depression |
931395_0 | To the Editor: Alfonso Fanjul and J. Pepe Fanjul, owners of a Florida sugar company, claim that ''there is no subsidy'' for American sugar growers (letter, May 14). This may come as a surprise to American consumers, who are forced by our Government to pay the Fanjuls almost twice the world price for their sugar. The program provides sugar processors with special loans, and limits fair competition with strict import quotas. The General Accounting Office says that as a result, the sugar program costs consumers $1.4 billion a year in higher food prices. Contrary to the Fanjuls' letter, the Department of Agriculture has endorsed the G.A.O. study, saying that it is ''a reasonable report with no major data problems.'' The Fanjuls' massive subsidies encourage and intensify production in South Florida, further degrading the Everglades and increasing the cost of restoration by $65 million to $120 million, according to the President's Council of Economic Advisers. Congress has ended welfare as we know it for poor Americans. It's time to do the same for the Fanjuls and for other corporations on the public dole. DAN MILLER Member of Congress, 13th Dist., Fla. Washington, May 15, 1997 | Time to Get Big Sugar Off the Public Dole |
931379_5 | that the company supports ''labeling of genetically engineered raw products when there is scientific evidence that requires it.'' How prevalent is transgenic food? This column asked Genetic ID, a company in Fairfield, Iowa, that tests food for genetically engineered ingredients, to test four soy-based baby formulas and eight other products made with soy or corn. The formulas -- Carnation Alsoy, Similac Neocare, Isomil and Enfamil Prosobee -- all tested positive. Eden Soy milk tested negative. Morningstar Farms Breakfast Links and Morningstar Farms Better 'n Burgers, Betty Crocker Bac-os Bacon Bits, all soy-based products, also tested positive. And so did three corn-based chips -- Fritos, Tostitos Crispy Rounds and Doritos Nacho Cheesier. Consumer advocates worry that treating infections could become more difficult because some genetic engineering introduces antibiotic-resistant genes into food. And critics have raised concerns about potential environmental problems, like the unintentional creation of weeds resistant to some herbicides and pests resistant to certain pesticides. For now the only way Americans can avoid genetically engineered food is to choose certified organic food. But even that might change. The Agriculture Department is expected to release national standards for organic foods this year, and there is concern among organic farmers and processors, consumer advocates and some scientists that the department will override the recommendations of the National Organic Standards Board, which voted to prohibit genetically engineered foods from being labeled organic. Biotechnology's Bounty Following is a list compiled by Genetic ID of Fairfield, Iowa, of genetically engineered foods that have been approved by the Federal Government, that await approval or that are under development. An asterisk marks foods that are already on the market. Abalone* Alfalfa Apples Asparagus Barley Beets Broccoli Canola (rapeseed oil)* Carrots Catfish* Cauliflower Cheesemaking en zymes (chymosin)* Chestnuts Chicory Corn* Cotton (cottonseed oil)* Cucumbers Flaxseed Grapes Kiwi fruit Lettuce Melons Papayas Peanuts Pepper Potatoes* Prawns* Raspberries Rice Salmon* Soybeans* Squash Strawberries Sugar cane Sunflowers Sweet potatoes Tomatoes* Walnuts Watermelons Wheat Eating Well Editor's Note: March 25, 1998, Wednesday The Eating Well column last May 21 reported on the presence of genetically engineered ingredients in some commercial food products, including three Frito-Lay snack foods and two baby formulas, from Similac and Carnation. Frito-Lay challenged the finding, which had been made for The Times in tests by Genetic ID, a company in Fairfield, Iowa. Genetic ID has since modified its testing, and reports that the products now test negative for | Eating Well |
932633_6 | be a selling point in a competitive market, are going after junk E-mailers in the courts. Earlier this month, Earthlink in Palo Alto, Calif., won an injunction against Cyber Promotions of Philadelphia, one of the biggest junk E-mailers. A Los Angeles Superior Court judge found that Cyber Promotions had trespassed upon Earthlink's electronic territory and prohibited the mass E-mailer from sending advertisements through Earthlink's computers without permission. Sanford Wallace, the president of Cyber Promotions, which has also been the target of legal action by the on-line services Compuserve and America Online, insists that he has done nothing illegal and that his company is providing small businesses with a valuable service. ''E-mail is a fraction of the cost of any other medium, and it goes at the speed of light,'' he said in an interview. Cyber Promotions and its Internet service provider, Apex Global Information Services, called Agis.net, in Dearborn, Mich. -- one of the few service providers that allow junk E-mailing -- have tried to fend off possible regulation and counter bad publicity by promising to develop a universal list of consumers who have asked not to receive junk E-mail. And Cyber Promotions is collecting names -- 38,000 so far -- of people who have told the company they want to receive E-mail advertisements. ''That's Plan B,'' Mr. Wallace said. ''When and if a law says we can't do Plan A -- sending unsolicited E-mail -- then we will be prepared.'' But many Internet users, who feel violated when they find any kind of advertisement injected into their computers, are leery of such promises. Not all of them are willing to wait for a legal remedy or industry self-regulation. Earlier this month, a group of Internet users tried to crash Cyber Promotions' computers by sending a barrage of electronic messages. That assault was fended off, but the next day a more sophisticated hacker attack knocked the company off the Internet. Cyber Promotions was barely fazed. The next day it was back on line churning out millions of messages a day for its customers and selling software to help freelancers send junk E-mail. One of the products, Webcollector, crawls through the World Wide Web and harvests E-mail addresses. In the interest of diversification, the company also sells E-filter, which consumers can use to block Cyber Promotions' junk E-mail from their computers. The offering for the software was sent by junk E-mail. | On the Information Highway, E-Mail Litter Problem Grows |
932701_0 | French voters gave a stinging rebuff today to President Jacques Chirac's call to renew the huge conservative majority in the legislature for another five years, voting heavily instead for the leftist opposition and protest parties. Mr. Chirac called the vote a year early to try to win a mandate for deficit-cutting policies he said were necessary for France to join a common European currency in 1999. Instead, he got a national outpouring of protest so powerful that if today's trend continues in runoff elections next Sunday, there is a chance of a Socialist-led leftist majority in the 577-seat Parliament. With 98 percent of districts counted, the huge conservative landslide of four years ago was nearly swept away, with the conservative coalition and its smaller allies winning 36.5 percent of the total vote, compared with well over 40 percent in 1993. The combined Socialist and Communist opposition and its allies won 43.1 percent of the vote, up from 26.9 percent in 1993, and the extreme-right National Front won about 15 percent, its best showing yet in a parliamentary election. The second round of voting, a feature of French elections that makes it difficult to predict the outcome in contests as close as this one, will determine the winners in hundreds of constituencies where no candidate won more than 50 percent today. The deeply unpopular conservative Prime Minister, Alain Juppe, urged supporters tonight to listen to the message that the voters had sent and mobilize this week to turn the result around in the runoff. ''The French people meant above all to say that they wanted a real change, profound change,'' said Mr. Juppe, who had a 464-seat majority before Mr. Chirac called the election. ''And we must listen to this message. To win the second round, the Presidential majority'' -- the Government parties -- ''must now mobilize all citizens who want true change.'' Mr. Chirac promised in his own campaign two years ago to bring ''profound change,'' but most voters, according to public opinion polls, are disappointed in him. Some conservatives, like Charles Pasqua, a wily former Interior Minister who has dismissed Mr. Juppe in the past as a mere chief of staff to Mr. Chirac, have suggested that the most obvious change would be a new Prime Minister. But neither Mr. Juppe nor Mr. Chirac, who watched the returns on television in his office in Elysee Palace, gave the least | VOTERS IN FRANCE, REBUFFING CHIRAC, SWING TO THE LEFT |
932624_4 | of life that calls for consistent and sincere hard work and fair play. And it is never done alone. We always need a team.'' UNIVERSITY OF PUGET SOUND FREEMAN DYSON Scientist/Writer ''I want science to do something to help the billions of poor people all over the earth. Too much of science today is making toys for the rich. So my mission is to help push science in a new direction; away from toys for the rich, toward necessities for the poor.'' SUNY AT ALBANY RICHARD G. LUGAR United States Senator/Indiana ''My generation knows that you can do better than we have in finding and articulating the truth. We know that you must do better in bringing confidence to governance based on honesty in human dialogue. We must support not only your dreams, but the opportunities for each of you to speak out with confidence.'' UNIVERSITY OF PORTLAND MARK SHIELDS News Commentator ''Abide in the wisdom of the writer Walker Percy, who advises, 'Do not become the kind of person who gets all A's -- but flunks ordinary living.' '' WAKE FOREST U. Louis V. GERSTNER JR. Chief Executive of IBM ''Computers are magnificent tools for the realization of our dreams, but they will never replace the dreamers. No machine can replace the human spark: Spirit, compassion, love and understanding.'' COLLEGE OF WILLIAM & MARY MARGARET THATCHER Former Prime Minister of Britain ''We need to be able to rely on the integrity of our fellow citizens. Values are never new. They are the legacy of faith and civilization. They bring order and peace to our lives, as the founding fathers knew well.'' COLORADO COLLEGE GARRY TRUDEAU Cartoonist ''College also means to be a place where society's cycles of pain are interrupted. It means to be a town square, a locus of passionate commitment to the common good -- noisy, cluttered with soap boxes, but a place where idealism and intellect are fused, and tribalism is shunned.'' UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH CAROLINA PAT CONROY Author ''I send you out into the world now, Class of 1997, with this admonition. You have graduated from a great university. Now make this university, this state, yourself and your family proud, and if you have a little luck -- if you have any luck at all -- if you do it right, there is a great possibility you can teach the whole world how to dance.'' | At Commencement, Insights and Asides |
929796_0 | Almost every school district has a story about the problems of disciplining children with disabilities -- the wild kindergartner who disrupts classes for everyone else but cannot legally be removed from class, or the gang of youngsters caught selling drugs in which all are expelled except the one diagnosed with a disability. In the Congressional debate over how best to deal with the 5.4 million students diagnosed with physical, mental, learning or emotional disabilities, no issue has been more knotty or more illustrative of the conflict between individual rights and group protections. The issue has become more pressing as the number of disabled schoolchildren has grown to 10 percent of the public school population, up markedly in recent years as the definition of disabled has widened to include areas like hyperactivity and chronic fatigue syndrome. The modifications to the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act now before Congress do not fully satisfy either advocates for the disabled, who want to make sure disabled students are given equal access to education, or some representatives of schools and teachers, who say that the needs of the few should not imperil the education and safety of the many. But most experts say that it is at least an attempt to deal with one of the most vexing problems schools face today. ''This is better than current law, but it's not going to solve all the problems that we see today,'' said Jane Meroney, associate director of legislation for the American Federation of Teachers. Albert Shanker, the former president of the group who died earlier this year, crusaded for years to make it easier to remove disruptive students from classrooms. ''This is not an issue that's going to go away,'' Ms. Meroney said. At issue is the current form of the landmark legislation first passed in 1975 to protect the interests of students diagnosed with disabilities. Along with educational and financing issues, a provision in the legislation said that students with physical, mental, emotional or learning disabilities could not be suspended from school for misconduct for more than 10 days, or under a subsequent modification, for more than 45 days for gun possession. To expel a student for a longer period, a committee including the child's parents must determine that the misconduct had nothing to do with the disability. Experts on both sides of the issue said the legislation was needed to keep districts from | Push for School Safety Led to New Rules on Discipline |
929740_0 | To the Editor: Your editorials on Florida's Everglades (April 20 and 27) perpetuate myths about the sugar industry. The ''sugar barons'' myth: Barons are granted land by a king; we lost ours at the hands of a dictator. In 1959 we fled Fidel Castro's Cuba for the United States, where we started from scratch. It was a modest start with profits guaranteed by no one, and risk, as with all farming, abundant. Today we're proud to employ more than 3,000 Floridians making an average of $31,000 a year. The ''subsidy'' myth: There is no subsidy. United States sugar policy prevents the dumping of foreign sugar, just as its trade policy prevents the dumping of foreign-subsidized cars. In addition, the General Accounting Office report that cites a hidden consumer cost has been discredited by the Department of Agriculture. Sugar is cheaper in the United States than in most other countries. Another myth is that sugar farmers are not cooperating with Everglades restoration efforts. Three years ago sugar farmers joined with the Federal Government on a plan to restore the Everglades. Even as the plan was showing good results, a state ballot issue was proposed, with a multibillion-dollar price tag. The scheme, which included additional sugar taxes, was rejected by Florida voters for good reasons: they wanted further evidence that the proposal was sound, and they thought that it unfairly singled out sugar farmers. Finally, there is the myth that there is a villain and an easy solution. It was the Army Corps of Engineers, acting with the best intentions, that helped divert the natural flow of water in the Everglades. It acted rashly. As a result, today five million people live on and impact what was once the Everglades. Fixing the Everglades is complex, and much restoration is under way. We should give it a chance while looking for better ways to proceed. Perhaps if everyone from growers to environmentalists looked more at reality than myths, progress would come more readily. ALFONSO FANJUL J. PEPE FANJUL Palm Beach, Fla., May 12, 1997 The writers are, respectively, chairman and president, Flo-Sun Inc. | Sugar Industry Isn't the Villain in Everglades |
929801_3 | it was considered under a procedure making all amendments out of order. In the Senate, Trent Lott, the majority leader, whose staff worked hard to negotiate widespread agreement on the bill, put heavy pressure on his troops not to vote for any amendments, including efforts to provide more money or to allow expulsion of disruptive disabled students. Even so, two Republicans pushed ahead with amendments. Senator Slade Gorton of Washington sought to provide that school districts could apply the same disciplinary rules to disabled students as to others. The bill makes it very hard to discipline students whose disruptive behavior derives from their disability, like students with Tourette's syndrome or attention deficit disorder. Senator Robert C. Smith of New Hampshire sought to win votes for an amendment to reduce lawyers' fees. He complained that when lawyers representing disabled students won fees from a Federal court, that money was taken out of funds that would otherwise go to educating ''decent'' children. Votes on these amendments, and on passing the bill, were postponed until Wednesday because a number of senators were absent to attend a funeral. Both the House and Senate bills would require states to offer voluntary mediation procedures so that parents could challenge decisions about their children without going to court, a device supporters said would provide cheaper and speedier settlement of disputes. The bills also tell the Department of Education to refer problems of noncompliance with the act to the Justice Department for action. Advocates for children with disabilities have complained that the Education Department did little to see that the act was followed. General agreement on the provisions was reached last week by senators and representatives from both parties. Senator Lott's chief of staff, J. David Hoppe, presided over months of meetings in which lobbyists, parents with disabled children and Congressional staff members sought a compromise among competing proposals that were tilted, in some cases, toward discipline, and in others, toward the disabled. In order to keep the agreement from coming unraveled, the bill was brought up in the House under suspension of the rules, a procedure that bars amendments, allows only 40 minutes of debate and requires a two-thirds vote for passage. No one who spoke in the House criticized the bill. The three Representatives who voted against the bill, all Republicans, were Herbert H. Bateman of Virginia, Ray LaHood of Illinois and Ron Paul of Texas. | HOUSE PASSES BILL ADDING RESOURCES TO TEACH DISABLED |
928135_3 | protect against breast cancer mainly by decreasing the amount of estrogen a woman produces in her lifetime. Exercise may delay menarche, reduce the frequency of ovulation, curb obesity in general and especially the accumulation of abdominal fat (which produces estrogen), reduce insulin levels and activate the immune system. Diet, Weight and Smoking As with exercise, the diet linked to a reduced risk of breast cancer can help protect against many other serious diseases. Vegetables and dietary fiber are protective, but meat may be a hazard. In a study of more than 600 women by Dr. Jo L. Freudenheim and colleagues at the State University of New York at Buffalo, premenopausal women who routinely ate the most vegetables had a 54 percent lower risk of developing breast cancer than women who ate the fewest. A study by Dr. Paolo Toniolo of New York University Medical Center linked frequent consumption of red meat to an increased risk of breast cancer. Other sources of protein had no effect on risk. A diet low in fat but rich in fiber, as found in unrefined carbohydrates, fruits and vegetables, also appears to protect by reducing the level of circulating estrogens, according to studies at the University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. Add to such a diet the frequent consumption of fermented dairy products (yogurt, cheese, buttermilk) and a study in the Netherlands found a 77 percent reduction in breast cancer risk. Researchers are still hotly debating the role of dietary fat in breast cancer, but the predominant evidence suggests that too much saturated fat (the kind found in meats and dairy products) is harmful and that polyunsaturated fats (in most vegetables oils and margarines) may be harmful. One recent study of more than 6,000 women directed by Dr. Celia Byrne of Harvard Medical School linked the consumption of full-fat salad dressings, chicken skin and regular -- as opposed to lean -- ground beef to increased rates of breast cancer. But there are suggestions from studies in Spain and Greece that frequent use of mono-unsaturated fats like olive oil and canola oil may be protective. Another question that is the subject of heated debates is the effect effect of alcohol on breast-cancer risk. Some researchers believe any amount of alcohol is harmful, but others say the increased risk associated with one drink a day is negligible, if it exists at all, and | Personal Health |
928581_1 | labor force in this country of 145,000 people is employed in the banana industry, either growing, processing or shipping the fruit. In contrast to Central America, where workers paid as little as $2 a day grow most of Chiquita's bananas, Caribbean banana workers are mostly independent growers who own the small plots they farm. ''We have avoided the strife and turmoil that has plagued Latin America precisely because we don't have a plantation economy and our distribution of income is better,'' said Rupert Gajadhar, who grows bananas on 15 acres and is the chairman of the St. Lucia Banana Growers Association. ''What do the Americans want to do -- reduce us to another Haiti?'' The Caribbean banana industry has long had special access to the European market, but the current dispute dates back to 1993, when the European Union adopted a system of preferences that guarantees banana producers in current or former British and French colonies a share of the European Union market, which has the highest per capita consumption of bananas in the world. In turn, a quota was placed on imports of bananas grown in Central and South America, where American producers like Chiquita and Dole Food have led the industry for a century. Those preferences are scheduled to expire by 2002, and are unlikely to be renewed even if the American attempt to eliminate the quotas for Central and South American bananas ultimately fails. But in a preliminary judgment in late March, the World Trade Organization largely endorsed Washington's position, which is that the quota system unfairly restricts the American companies' access to the European market. A formal ruling is expected soon. Thomas F. McLarty, Mr. Clinton's special adviser for Latin American and Caribbean affairs, said the Administration's policy was based on national interest and belief in free trade. The Clinton Administration recognizes there are ''very deeply felt concerns among those countries that produce bananas,'' but ''there are much better ways to solve this problem than just letting it ride.'' ''In terms of our primary goal of fair trade, you can't have discriminatory practices and not exercise your rights,'' Mr. McLarty said in a recent interview in Barbados. ''It gets to the very principle of how you conduct your business.'' American military officials who are directly involved in combating the flow of cocaine and marijuana through the islands of the eastern Caribbean have expressed concern that broader | Trade Storm Imperils Caribbean Banana Crops |
927111_2 | showing to argue that Sinn Fein should be invited to join the formal peace talks when they resume in Belfast on June 3 under the chairmanship of George J. Mitchell, a former United States Senate majority leader. The Irish and British Goverments have said that Sinn Fein should be excluded from the talks until the I.R.A. restores the 17-month cease-fire it broke in February 1996. Sinn Fein advocates a peaceful settlement of the conflict, but steadfastly refuses to condemn the I.R.A.'s campaign of violence. Today, Mr. Adams said, ''I want to see an end to all armed actions,'' but he said nothing about trying to persuade the I.R.A. to restore the cease-fire. His message for the Dublin and London Governments, he said, was that his party's victory meant it deserved ''equality'' and ''inclusive negotiations.'' The new British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, said little during his campaing about what his Northern Ireland policy would be. But in an article in The Irish Times in Dublin on Monday, he wrote: ''Perhaps Sinn Fein's ambivalence about violence reflects its small electoral base. But democracy requires that even the smallest party pursue its aims through methods that are exclusively peaceful. It is a lesson that Sinn Fein must learn before it will earn the right to sit and talk with other democratic parties in Northern Ireland.'' John Hume, the leader of the Social Democrats, who was re-elected from the western part of the province, said he hoped that the Labor Government would invite Sinn Fein when the peace talks resume. This implied, as Mr. Hume has repeatedly stated, that there would first be an I.R.A. cease-fire. ''Let's keep spilling our sweat and not our blood,'' he added. While Mr. Hume and Mr. Adams are enemies in elections, they were together in initiating the current peace effort in 1993 and have said that, with the elections over, they will again cooperate to move the stalled peace effort forward. Most experts say that, in effect, Mr. Hume's cooperation with Mr. Adams in the peace effort helped elect Mr. Adams over Mr. Hume's Social Democratic colleague, Dr. Joe Hendron. Mr. Adams had won the seat twice, in 1983 and 1987, before Dr. Hendron defeated him in 1992 by 589 votes. This time, Mr. Adams won by 7,000 votes. Mr. McGuinness won in the Mid-Ulster district, defeating the incumbent of the hard-line Democratic Unionists, the Rev. Willie McCrea. | In Best Tally Ever, Sinn Fein Wins 2 Seats in Westminster |
933574_1 | here as the Chutes des Wagenia -- have none of the drama of Niagara Falls in New York or Victoria Falls in Zimbabwe. They are really a series of rapids with drops of eight feet or so. Their historical importance is that they made the River Congo impassable, so the town of Stanleyville had to be built as a terminus for a short railroad that carries passengers and freight around the cataracts to the upstream boats and barges. In recent weeks, it has carried Hutu refugees out of the forest. Under their legendary chief, Lowao, the Wagenia built villages on both sides of the falls and the small islands in between. They are considered a separate tribe, and they say their name either means ''nomads'' or derives from the local word for speaking and means ''people who talk too much.'' They fish by building log scaffoldings over the falls and suspending rows of cone-shaped nets from them. Everything, including the ropes, is made of jungle vines and trees. But like the impossibly ordered cuteness of some restored New England whaling town, the painful authenticity here seems a bit fishy, since African villagers are usually remarkable at recycling 20th-century castoffs -- old cans into toys, old tires into sandals. Nylon rope would last longer. And, in fact, young boys who are not putting on a show for the tourists weave their hand nets out of nylon thread and weight them with bits of lead that they strip off underwater electric cables. But the authentic nets produce income from more than one source. ''The men want to know -- would you like to see how they fish?'' asked Jeff Ngazi N'sila Lissa, a villager who says he divides his time between tending his family's net and studying sociology at the University of Kisangani. ''They will show you, if you will give them something.'' Even though fetching scenes were unfolding free at the water's edge -- a man climbing out of his net with his catch stuck deep in his mouth, a woman washing her clothes, children dangerously deep in the rapids with hand nets -- the men seemed quite insistent. In the prewar days, when the local government was organized enough to staff the booth near the arch, money would be collected there and used, at least in part, for the general good of the village. But now that booth is a | By Hook or by Crook, a Fishing Village Gets By |
933558_2 | BUILDING bicycles in this corner of north Brooklyn is a sly protest against the trucks that rumble constantly down the side streets belching puffs of diesel smoke. The traffic streams from the factories and the many junkyards and waste transfer stations near the school. Some of those are burial ground for bikes dumped before the students could grab them. Karen Overton, who directs Recycle-A-Bicycle at five city sites, said that last year they prevented hundreds of bikes from ending up in dumps. ''Americans are very wasteful, when you look at our landfill problem,'' she said. ''New York City is going to have to spend millions to export our garbage to where, North Carolina? The kids here are always amazed when people give up bikes.'' THE Brooklyn bikers tinker with their machines after school and on weekends, learning the intricacies of gear alignment, wheel building and flat fixing from professionals and each other. Some, like Omar, have proven to be masters at reviving old wheels. ''You see kids growing because you allow them to grow,'' Mr. Perelson said. ''Even the less outgoing kids, they're at a loss in school but they're good with their hands and repairing things. In a class like this, you can value a lot of the skills they do have.'' Reginald Smith, a towering teen-ager, prides himself on making the most with the least, fixing bikes with the most limited of tools. ''I'm actually doing something productive,'' he said. ''Before I started here, I always used to cut out and hang outside. This takes up my time.'' And it takes them out. The group takes regular trips, including jaunts to the Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge, where they help cut down vines that strangle the trees. They have helped Transportation Alternatives, a bicycling advocacy group, chart traffic patterns as they research new bike paths. ''I practically visit the city every week because I want to be in shape,'' Omar said. ''The traffic is hard. Sometimes you go downhill and a cab opens his door or stops in front of you.'' Those street smarts will come in handy for the two Brooklyn dodgers -- of cabs and potholes -- when they depart on their cross-country trip. Omar, unfortunately, will join the group weeks into the trip, since he has to take his Regents exams, including one in writing. After that comes the real test in riding. About New York | Spinning on 2 Wheels of Fortune |
933622_0 | To the Editor: Gerald L. Zelizer (Op-Ed May 27) points to a contradiction for the clergy: prestige without respect. When I was a director of a national rabbinic organization, I learned that the best, most fulfilled rabbis were those who considered it a blessing to serve and who found the greatest satisfaction in even infinitesimal growth of people, in a poignant moment of joy, sorrow or learning. The Rev. William Sloane Coffin once said that gratitude is not a profound emotion but that the expectation of gratitude is. Also, Rabbi Zelizer relates a story, about Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver walking out on a wedding when asked to keep his comments short. This is not believable. A consummate rabbi and gentleman, Rabbi Silver's oratory at the United Nations clinched the vote that established the state of Israel; his wisdom and social conscience were well established in his lifetime and his personal integrity continues to be a model for scores of rabbis. (Rabbi) RICHARD A. DAVIS Yonkers, May 27, 1997 Bout of Malaise? Even Clergy Have to Get a Life | In Search of Gratitude |
933643_2 | students, fearing that their performance would bring down the average scores of their schools. Parents and politicians often view the tests as a barometer of a school's effectiveness. The Chancellor, underscoring an overhaul of special education that he started last fall, also agreed to intervene earlier in the educational lives of students who have fallen behind, so that their problems can be corrected without their ever entering a special-education classroom. And the board said it would do a better job of gathering statistics illustrating referral patterns in individual schools, so that problem schools can be flagged more easily. Phil Coltoff, who, as executive director of the Children's Aid Society, has been tracking the system's shortcomings for years, said he was hopeful that the Federal intervention would spur improvement. ''Everyone knew this wasn't right,'' Mr. Coltoff said. ''But they almost needed an outside force, an authority, to say, 'You've got to do it differently.' '' The city's special-education system has grown unchecked in the two decades since Congress passed a law in 1975 guaranteeing educational equality for the handicapped. The enrollment was 30,000 students in 1974, but has quadrupled since and now represents about 13 percent of the city's 1.1 million students. Nearly three-quarters of the students in the city's special education system are labeled either ''learning disabled'' or ''emotionally handicapped,'' broad classifications that critics say have been used to include some students who present little more than a disciplinary nuisance. Of the students in special-education programs in New York City's elementary schools, about 60 percent are segregated in separate classrooms or separate schools, and few return to regular classrooms or receive diplomas. In New York City, Federal officials made clear, too many of those referrals are students who are black and Hispanic, and of limited English proficiency, although the documents released last evening provide no supporting statistics. A spokesman for the Education Department, Rodger D. Murphey, did not immediately return a call seeking clarification. Invoking the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Federal education officials said they would closely monitor New York's efforts over the next three years. If, after that time, Federal officials find the board has not made sufficient progress, the Education Department has the option to join the Justice Department in suing the board to force it to act. If the board is still found to be out of compliance with the law, it could lose its Federal | Special Education Practices In New York Faulted by U.S. |
933636_0 | INTERNATIONAL 3-6 Far Right May Decide Winner of French Vote As France prepares to vote on Sunday, swing voters who support the far-right National Front are emerging as a force that could determine who governs France for the next five years. There are signs that the party's supporters, in their distaste for the establishment, may hand victory to the opposition Socialists. The party, which won 14.9 percent in the first round of voting, is in a unique position to influence the outcome, and its leader has expressed no enthusiasm for the governing center-right coalition, led by President Chirac. 1 Peru Congress Chastised Peru's Congress came under attack from Western diplomats, human rights groups and business and political leaders for its decision to oust three members of a constitutional court who ruled that President Fujimori could not seek a third consecutive term. The United States called the dismissals ''a step backwards in the consolidation of democracy in Peru,'' which is now emerging from years of guerrilla warfare and military dictatorship. 4 Pope Goes Home to Challenges Pope John Paul arrives in Poland on Saturday for an 11-day trip that may be his valedictory pilgrimage to his homeland. The 77-year-old Pope will find a church where a conservative faction appears to have the upper hand, and a political scene excited by parliamentary elections in September between the former Communists and a regrouped Solidarity, which is now in opposition. 5 Beheading Alarms Japan Japan is riveted by the beheading of an 11-year-old boy. The case has caused alarm and soul-searching in a nation that, while generally safe, has witnessed some spectacular killings in the last few years. The latest is perhaps the grisliest of all. 3 Uneasy Indonesian Victory With late vote counting, the Indonesian Government party consolidated what appeared to be a record margin of victory in elections. Still, important questions were raised, about the course of recent riots, the credibility of President Suharto, and whether the leadership will take steps to address sources of discontent, including corruption, economic disparities and overbearing Government institutions. 3 Evacuation in Sierra Leone United States marines landed in the capital of Sierra Leone and evacuated hundreds of foreigners fleeing from looting and violence that followed an armed coup. The marines began the operation before dawn, and over the day removed some 900 people, including 330 Americans. 4 New Envoy to Russia President Clinton nominated James Collins, | NEWS SUMMARY |
928743_0 | Britain's elections have given a lift to the possibility of peace in Northern Ireland. Six months ago the stalemate between the Irish Republican Army, the British Government and Northern Ireland's Protestant Unionists seemed overwhelming. Today the I.R.A. may be more inclined to declare another cease-fire. Britain's new Prime Minister, Tony Blair, ought to reward such a commitment by announcing that if the cease-fire holds, Sinn Fein, the I.R.A.'s political wing, will be welcome at the peace talks on a definite date, perhaps in late summer. That would mark the group's first presence in the negotiations. Although Britain's former Prime Minister, John Major, took the peace process far, he would not give the I.R.A. that assurance. It would have been risky in an election year, and his Conservative Party's parliamentary coalition included the Northern Ireland Unionists, who do not want the Republicans at the negotiating table. The moderate Unionists gained support in last week's election at the hard-liners' expense. With a large Labor majority in Parliament, Mr. Blair has a freer hand. The election also strengthened Gerry Adams, the leader of Sinn Fein. Mr. Adams, who ran on a peace platform, easily won a seat in the British Parliament. Many in the I.R.A. do not want a cease-fire and believe the British will listen only to force. Mr. Adams says he is not one of them, and has given every indication he favors a renewal of the cease-fire that ended early last year. He will now have more clout to persuade the I.R.A. Mr. Blair's Northern Ireland Secretary, Marjorie Mowlam, said early this spring that she would bring Sinn Fein to the peace talks if a cease-fire held, but that was before elections. Last weekend she spoke of the need to reform Northern Ireland's police and end job discrimination, two issues crucial to Northern Irish Catholics. Ms. Mowlam has also said the right thing about parades. Every year Northern Ireland's peace is jeopardized by Unionist parades through Catholic neighborhoods, which often end in brawls and riots. A commission this January recommended setting up an independent tribunal with authority to decide where the Unionists can march. Mr. Major put off acting on the recommendation. Ms. Mowlam says the new Government embraces it fully. That will not help with this summer's marches, though, and Ms. Mowlam must act quickly to insure that police do not use excessive force. Even if all-party talks commence, | A Fresh Start in Northern Ireland |
928783_4 | together, then he takes a brush and he goes, and it's got to be just right.'' Saroyan usually sat at the typewriter with just the story and the title in mind and wrote with no revisions or rewriting. Only some of his plays were rewritten and revised, the professor said. It remains an open question whether a Saroyan revival is of interest to today's readers. ''He's more popular than people give him credit for,''said Robert Setrakian, director of the William Saroyan Foundation and the executor of Saroyan's estate. ''Since he passed away in 1981 we have executed over 450 contracts for print that include novels, short stories, radio, television and two operas.'' Mr. McPherson said: ''I never thought of Saroyan in any way until I started looking at the archives. I began to see him as a serious writer, who on the other hand also wanted not to be bracketed as avant-garde and therefore pushed off to a small audience. He wanted to speak more broadly to the American people, and so he fought for artistic integrity. And his attempt to work through large publishers and MGM and the Broadway structure, to achieve that kind of popularity is a very interesting conflict. I think he's interesting for the object lesson of this sort of fate of art in modern and contemporary America.'' Professor Kouymjian argues that Saroyan's works have as much relevance today as they did at the height of his popularity. ''Anyone who reads Saroyan is immediately charmed by him,'' he said, ''because he can write an English line, an English paragraph so beautifully he can disarm you totally.'' In this age his philosophical explorations are of interest, the professor said. And ''he could also tell a tale like no one else could tell a tale.'' The works of Saroyan, who was of Armenian descent, are still in demand in other countries including France, Italy, Spain, Bulgaria, Poland, China and Japan. There is ample evidence of Saroyan's popularity during his lifetime. ''In a way the fan mail is what made me really begin to rethink Saroyan entirely,'' Mr. McPherson said. ''The thousands and thousands of fan letters is a gold mine for scholars because what you see there is an audience brought into being. These are people who were reading the book for the first time, which has moved and touched them in ways they've never been touched before.'' | Quarter for His Thoughts: Saroyan Memorabilia |
928766_1 | which amounted to a miniature invasion of Venice. Men in jumpsuits, their heads shrouded by ski masks, burst through the bronze doors of the Campanile, reappearing minutes later on the columned balcony near the top of the huge brick bell tower, where they unfurled the golden pennant with the lion of St. Mark, the symbol of former Venetian glory. The cafe patrons, escorted to safety by waiters, cowered behind iron shutters. The first inkling for Mr. Rossetti, a waiter in his 30's, of what was afoot came from the banner that flew above the ''armored car.'' It was then, he said, that he knew that the men were from the desperate radical fringe of northern Italy's separatist movement, whose shrillness in recent months has grown in proportion to the melting of its strength at the polls. ''What could they change?'' Mr. Rossetti said today with a shrug after the men had surrendered and the routine of swarming tourists, flocking pigeons and soft cafe music returned to the square. ''They succeeded at nothing. It's just not worth it. You cannot change anything.'' What the men attempted was also made clear by an extra edition of the local paper, La Nuova Venezia, whose half-page headline read, ''Assault on Venice.'' In recent weeks, pirate transmitters in the Venice region broke into the national television's news programs 14 times to stir northerners to secessionist fervor. Recent transmissions, some lasting 15 minutes, called for a march on Venice to mark the day 200 years ago when Napoleon's forces took control of the city, ending its more than thousand-year history as a Mediterranean power. Later today, the police confirmed that they had arrested eight men, including four who had scaled the Campanile: Andrea Viviani, 26, from a town near Verona, and Fausto Faccia, 30, Cristian Contin, 23, and his uncle, Flavio Contin, 55, all from towns near Padua. The men were detained only hours after the stunt began when police officers stormed the tower. But the audacity of the episode, and the report by the police that the men had carried an automatic weapon with two clips and 70 shots, as well as equipment for breaking into television transmissions, stirred the national debate. The protest movement is centered in the Northern League, a populist party that began in the late 1980's as a regional revolt against the corruption and inefficiency that for many northern Italians are | Police End Armed Protest for 'Free Venice' |
928789_1 | interrupted their game. ''We heard there was a hazard,'' said one golfer, Richard Sporn, with a smile. Two agents from the Environmental Conservation Department dangled the bear from a pulleylike scale and found that it weighed 195 pounds. They took its temperature, gave it a shot of penicillin to ward off infection and lifted it into a cylindrical cage, shaped like a corrugated water main, on the back of their pickup truck. After the bear, a male roughly 3 years old, is given time to recover from the trauma of its suburban adventure, it is to be released today in the Catskills, said Dave Cree, a senior wildlife technician. ''He looks fine,'' Mr. Cree said. Black bears, which are not usually dangerous unless cornered, are only the latest indication that the wilderness may be striking back at suburbia. Dr. Michael W. Klemens, a scientist for the Wildlife Conservation Society, which runs the Bronx Zoo, said that as farmland has been abandoned and replaced by thick woods, the populations of several wild species have multiplied in the last decade or two and been forced to disperse in search of habitat. Wild turkeys have been spotted at Orchard Beach, and coyotes in the parks of the northern Bronx. But a bear, the animal that according to legend tested the prowess of 3-year-old Davy Crockett, is a much more exotic and fearsome invader. ''I can't say what's making a bear do what it's doing,'' Dr. Klemens said. ''In some instances they're disoriented, but this bear may just be following a greenbelt and probably can't find its way back.'' The bear was first spotted on Monday by a deliveryman at Venetian Delight Pizza, less than a quarter of a mile from Barnes & Noble. The bear was foraging in a garbage bin. Startled pizza makers stopped flipping pies to see, and a waitress, Michelle Masick, was incredulous. ''I'm like, 'Stop lying.' I'm like telling him it's like probably a raccoon,'' Ms. Masick said. ''So then I went outside to take a look for myself. When I saw it was really a bear I screamed. Maybe I scared the bear. Because he just turned around and walked slowly away.'' The bear was seen three more times, including once in a backyard in Yonkers, across Central Avenue from a giant Caldor. At 2 A.M. today, the bear's scratching woke up Larry Liu of Hartsdale, a project | Furry Hazard: Bear Caught on Golf Course |
931689_1 | new cease-fire that would allow Sinn Fein to participate in peace talks. Britain's Northern Ireland Secretary, Mo Mowlam, and the head of the Sinn Finn delegation, Martin McGuinness, both doubted a cease-fire could be arranged by June 3, when formal talks resume. A9 New Party in South Africa Roelf Meyer announced that he was forming a new political movement in South Africa that would focus on matters of concern to both black and white voters: housing, health care, jobs and fighting crime. Mr. Meyer, a chief negotiator during the country's peaceful transition from white supremacist rule, was dismissed two weeks ago from a key post in former President F. W. de Klerk's National Party. A10 Journalist Held in West Bank Daoud Kuttab, a leading Palestinian journalist, was held without charges by the Palestinian police in the West Bank city of Ramallah. Mr. Kuttab, an American citizen, had irked the Palestinian leader, Yasir Arafat, with his live television broadcast of the Palestinian Legislation Council's angry questioning of the use of official funds by the Palestinian Authority and Mr. Arafat. A11 Burmese Regime Arrests 50 The military Government of Myanmar arrested about 50 members of the pro-democracy movement led by Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, according to reports confirmed by diplomats in Yangon. The wave of arrests coincided with the signing into law of an American ban on new investments in the country, formerly known as Burma. A13 NATIONAL A16-22, B10-13 The Prosecution Rests In Oklahoma Bomb Case The prosecution rested its case against Timothy J. McVeigh, calling as its last witness Dr. Frederick Jordan, the Oklahoma medical examiner, who gave the Federal jury a final tally of the 168 who died in the blast. The trial will resume today with witnesses and evidence presented by Mr. McVeigh's main lawyer. A1 Lawyers in the Forefront With talks under way to settle claims against the tobacco industry, private lawyers sit in important positions at the negotiating table where the nation's policy toward cigarette smoking may be decided for decades to come. States have periodically hired private lawyers to pursue claims on the public's behalf, but never have the stakes been so great, as 29 states seek tens of billions of dollars in Medicaid reimbursement. A1 Pilot Taken to Task The Secretary of the Air Force, Sheila E. Widnall, weighed whether to grant an honorable discharge to the country's first female B-52 pilot, who | NEWS SUMMARY |
931604_2 | Northern Ireland politicians and strategists on both sides in this Protestant-dominated province by inviting Sinn Fein to renew contacts with the British Government. ''The settlement train is leaving,'' he said in a speech here last Friday. ''I want you on that train.'' But he warned that if the I.R.A. violence continued, ''I will be implacable in pursuit of terrorism.'' Since that statement, Britain has clearly indicated that it is ready to make some concessions to Sinn Fein to persuade it to produce an I.R.A. cease-fire. The I.R.A. has been inactive in the North since April 10, when it admitted to the shooting and wounding of a policewoman in Londonderry. On Tuesday night Britain announced that it would move two I.R.A. prisoners from a prison in England to one in Northern Ireland. Sinn Fein has said this kind of action would help persuade the I.R.A. to restore the cease-fire it ended on Feb. 9, 1996. The meeting today between the British and Sinn Fein took place while voters were casting ballots in local elections. Politicians of the other parties grumbled that the television coverage given the event would gain votes for Sinn Fein. A Protestant unionist leader, Ken Maginnis, said the timing of the meeting was ''almost beyond belief'' and would gain 25,000 votes for Sinn Fein candidates. Under discussion at the Stormont meeting were Mr. Blair's insistence that an unequivocal and convincing I.R.A. cease-fire was needed before Sinn Fein could be allowed to take part in the formal peace talks. Ms. Mowlam said the ''unofficial cease-fire'' of recent weeks was ''a plus,'' but not enough to gain entry. Sinn Fein officials said they had emphasized several demands: that they be allowed into the talks almost immediately once there was a new cease-fire; that a time framework of six to nine months be set for the talks; that the talks not be stalled, as they were when they began last June, in arguments about the disarmament of the I.R.A. and Protestant paramilitary groups. Ms. Mowlam said that the chairman of the formal peace talks, George J. Mitchell, a former Senate majority leader, would return to Belfast soon to work on preventing the disarmament issue from hindering the negotiations. In February, when the talks recessed, Mr. Mitchell had been close to working out an agreement under which the parties would consider disarmament in a special committee while negotiations continued on other issues. | I.R.A. Wing And British Hold Meeting |
933053_0 | To The Living Section: Marian Burros's article on genetically engineered foods (Eating Well: ''Trying to Get Labels on Genetically Altered Food,'' May 21) should be a wake-up call to consumers to demand labeling of such foods. While agribusiness claims to be furthering productivity and nutrition, the reality is that the companies that are creating this technology are often insuring that growers must rely on the chemicals that the company sells. Monsanto's genetically engineered soybeans are a prime example. Marketed as ''Roundup Ready,'' these soybeans are engineered for resistance to Monsanto's patented herbicide glyphosate, sold as ''Roundup.'' Thus, a market for the herbicide is created with the introduction of the genetically altered bean. Unfortunately, profit from this cycle is the real motive driving the development of transgenic food. CHARLES MARGULIS Co-director Westchester People's Action Coalition White Plains | Label Engineered Foods |
933052_1 | Section: The article ''Trying to Get Labels on Genetically Altered Food'' by Marian Burros (Eating Well, May 21) misrepresents various aspects of the food labeling issue. The Food and Drug Administration has said that food labeling must be both accurate and ''material.'' The agency has emphasized that the genetic method used in the development of a new plant variety is not considered to be material, because there is no evidence that new biotech foods are less safe than other foods. This approach was upheld by the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, in Manhattan, which found in a 1996 decision that such labeling cannot be compelled just because some consumers may wish to have the information. ''Were consumer interest alone sufficient, there is no end to the information that states could require manufacturers to disclose about their production methods,'' the court wrote, in overturning a Vermont law in International Dairy Foods Association v. Amestoy. The F.D.A.'s approach is consistent with the scientific consensus, that the risks associated with biotechnology products are fundamentally the same as for other products. Dozens of new plant varieties modified with traditional genetic engineering techniques like hybridization enter the marketplace each year without labeling. Many are from ''wide crosses,'' in which genes have been moved from one species or genus to another to create new plant varieties that do not exist in nature. These genetically altered plants -- including wheat, corn, rice, oats, tomatoes and potatoes -- have been a major part of American and European diets for decades. New biotechnology does not introduce new risks to the food supply. The precision of new biotechnology tools enhances our ability to judge safety, because it enables breeders to introduce only one or a few well-characterized genes. Nevertheless, a few anti-technology advocacy groups (apparently joined by Ms. Burros) are pushing for labels that disclose the use of certain genetic engineering techniques. This would add significantly to the costs of processed foods made from fresh fruits and vegetables. If there is a public demand for ''nongenetically engineered'' foods, there is nothing to stop food producers from meeting that need and advertising and labeling their products. This would be similar to the certification of kosher foods, which meet the requirements of Jewish dietary laws. SUSANNE L. HUTTNER, Ph.D. Director University of California Systemwide Biotechnology Program Berkeley, Calif. HENRY I. MILLER, M.D. Hoover Institution Stanford University Stanford, Calif. | Genetically Altered Food |
932519_1 | to the Clinton Administration to help draw all parties into peace talks and reiterated calls for an I.R.A. cease-fire before Sinn Fein can be allowed to join the formal peace negotiations, the Associated Press reported. ''We need that cease-fire before progress can be made,'' she said. Sinn Fein and British officials met in Belfast on Wednesday in the first such meeting since the I.R.A. ended its cease-fire 15 months ago. After the meeting, Ms. Mowlam said it was too soon to know whether Mr. Blair's invitation for Sinn Fein to talk to the Government would result in a new cease-fire. She noted that Mr. Blair had told Sinn Fein ''the settlement train is leaving,'' and that it would leave without Sinn Fein if they did not procure a new cease-fire. Later, in a BBC television interview, she was asked what would happen if Sinn Fein qualified for the talks and thus provoked a walkout by the Ulster Unionist Party, the province's largest political organization. In that case, she said, the settlement train ''will leave without the unionists.'' This set off an uproar among unionist political leaders, who noted that no peace settlement was possible without unionists at the table. ''She has taken leave of her senses,'' said the Rev. Ian Paisley, leader of the Democratic Unionists. Other unionists echoed his words, and also castigated her for meeting Catholic and Protestant neighborhood leaders in an effort to prevent clashes this summer during Protestant patriotic parades through Catholic areas, the kind that led to widespread violence last July. The unionists were outraged that British officials were meeting with Sinn Fein officials and Ms. Mowlam was meeting with Catholic anti-parade organizers on the same day that local elections were being held, giving the Catholics television publicity while voters were still going to the polls. Unionists said this gave Sinn Fein an improper advantage. In the voting, Sinn Fein made the largest gains of any of the parties contending. On Thursday she acknowledged in an interview in London that she had made ''a small error'' about the train. She has also upset some Catholic politicians and other people on the parade issue. Before Labor's election victory, Ms. Mowlam gave the impression that the new Government would move swiftly to authorize an independent commission to decide which parades might be held, taking this power away from the police of the Royal Ulster Constabulary, which is | Blair's Undaunted Envoy to Ulster: Devil or Angel? |
932573_0 | To the Editor: A recent report by the National Academy of Sciences (front page, May 18) assessed the costs and benefits of immigration. It is useful to place immigration in the context of domestic population growth. The 1.5 million births resulting from unplanned pregnancies will have a greater population impact this year than the 916,000 legal immigrants who reach our shores. Unplanned pregnancy can impose real suffering on individuals and families. The costs to society are great as well. Sex education and contraceptive availability can do more to achieve population stabilization than any amount of tinkering with immigration levels. PETER H. KOSTMAYER Executive Director Zero Population Growth Washington, May 20, 1997 Report Oversells Immigration's Meager Benefits | Better Birth Control |
932498_3 | East will be over water, not politics,'' Mr. Boutros-Ghali said. Many of the world's great rivers flow across national frontiers, and over the centuries there have been disputes. These have only sharpened as environmental issues have compounded age-old conflicts over water-sharing. In a 1993 study, Population Action International, a Washington-based group, found that 20 countries faced chronic water shortages at the beginning of the 1990's. It predicted that the number would increase to nearly 60 by 2050. A Liquid Lifeline To a 'Poverty Sink' Of all the disputed rivers, none affects so many people as the Ganges. Rising in Nepal, it flows 1,400 miles through the north Indian states of Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and West Bengal before reaching Bangladesh and flowing into the Bay of Bengal. Indian studies have estimated that the river and its tributaries affect the lives of more than 500 million people. The figure is nearly half the 1.1 billion population of India, Bangladesh, Nepal and Bhutan, another small Himalayan nation whose rivers feed the Ganges. The region constitutes what one Indian expert who has studied the Ganges dispute, B. G. Verghese, has called ''a vast poverty sink'': Tens of millions of people living at the edge of subsistence, with some of the lowest per-capita incomes anywhere; illiteracy rates of 50 percent and more; birth rates that have nearly tripled populations in 50 years; falling agricultural productivity; endemic levels of disease, and in recent decades increasingly serious water shortages. The paradox is that the area is one of the most heavily watered anywhere. Some parts of northern India get more than three feet of rain between July and October. Historians have credited abundant monsoons with giving rise, more than 3,000 years ago, to Hindu civilization. But despite ancient waterworks along the Ganges that were one of the wonders of their age, modern governments have failed to harness the monsoons. Since Indian independence in 1947, proposals for dams in Nepal that could have doubled the Ganges's dry-season flows have repeatedly foundered because of environmental concerns and political enmities. From the 1950's, the Ganges dispute became entangled in the Hindu-Muslim antagonisms spawned by British India's partition. Indian hard-liners argued that India had the right to take as much water as it chose to help cope with its fast-rising population. Counterparts in Pakistan -- and in Bangladesh, after a 1971 civil war created the new nation out of East Pakistan | Sharing Ganges Waters, India and Bangladesh Test the Depth of Cooperation |
932128_3 | all night in my library. Machiavelli said some interesting things about the practical necessity of breaking promises, but I couldn't ignore what Socrates said about fidelity to your superiors. Finally at dawn I came across something in Kant's ''The Metaphysics of Morals'': ''A categorical imperative would be one which represented an action as objectively necessary in itself, without reference to any other purpose.'' I decided we had to investigate Paul's finances, no matter what. On the way to Sparks, John said he had always liked the categorical imperative and agreed something had to be done. But before we even got out of the car on East 46th Street, we heard shots, and then there was Paul lying in a pool of blood outside the steakhouse. ''Must have been a hit team from one of those radical environmental groups,'' John said as we drove away. I was stunned. I knew those guys took their recycling seriously, but. . . . March 8, 1988. John had doubts about being able to fill Paul's shoes, but today he proved what a great leader he is. One of our members, Louie Milito, was killed on the club's hunting expedition. John never even liked Louie, but he was so concerned about Louie's family that he personally arranged for the funeral upstate. I helped his guys load the body into the trunk for the private burial. Dec. 12, 1990. Dear diary! I never thought I'd be writing you from inside the Metropolitan Correctional Center. They indicted John and me for racketeering and obstruction of justice. They even say John planned the hit on Paul! I was proud when John stood up and pleaded innocent, but as I watched him in court, a strange thought occurred to me: How could a plumbing salesman afford that suit? May 5, 1991. John got mad in the jail library when he saw me reading Machiavelli. He reminded me of our oath -- and I was deeply moved. Still, doubts persist. What is honor? What is brotherhood? Why hadn't they invited me to go along on that hunting expedition? Oct. 9, 1991. The day began grimly with a visit from my lawyer. He says I'm looking at 50 years. Then, at long last -- a moment of ethical clarity! This afternoon I was reading ''Being and Nothingness'' and suddenly it was as if Sartre was speaking to me in my cell: | Mob Metaphysician |
932544_4 | said one of the first priorities would be legalizing political parties, which have been effectively outlawed since the revolution. ''Of course Mr. Khatami will not continue the present restrictions on the press and media,'' Mr. Borghani said. ''He will have an open policy toward them.'' Mr. Borghani also suggested that the new Government would seek to curb the police and religious militia whose members patrol streets and neighborhoods in search of people who are having parties, listening to forbidden music, watching imported videos or satellite television, playing cards or otherwise violating the social code. ''We have heard Mr. Khatami say that people should not investigate other people's private lives,'' Mr. Borghani said. ''If people want to listen to music, they should turn it down so it does not disturb their neighbors. Otherwise it is fine.'' In a document last week outlining his principles, Mr. Khatami said he was dedicated to ''countering superstition and fanaticism'' and ''assuring civil rights and freedoms of citizens.'' He pledged to curb censorship, to recognize the ''variety and diversity of attitudes'' and to combat the view ''that politics should be monopolized by a specific group.'' Young people formed the backbone of Mr. Khatami's political campaign. Throughout the country they volunteered with an enthusiasm many had never before shown for a political candidate. In a country where 70 percent of the population is said to be under the age of 25, they form a key constituency that does not feel bound by the ideology that brought the revolutionary Government to power when they were young or even before they were born. To satisfy them, Mr. Khatami will not only have to give them more personal freedom but also make economic changes that will cut the power of state-backed monopolies and end what he has called ''unfair economic concessions.'' The other group that gave especially strong support to Mr. Khatami was women. Because they played an important role in the 1979 revolutionary movement and because many of them supported the eight-year war with Iraq, women here have great political power. Although under Islamic law introduced following the revolution they must still cover themselves in public, they have more rights than women in some other Muslim countries. But many are assertive and unsatisfied, and complain about laws that discriminate against them. In addition to facing a possibly unhappy group of clerics who were dubious about his candidacy to begin | MODERATE LEADER IS ELECTED IN IRAN BY A WIDE MARGIN |
932209_0 | WOMEN in the church refer to it as ''the stained-glass ceiling.'' They are gaining acceptance as pastors, priests and spiritual leaders in many denominations, but women in religion cope with career barriers remarkably similar to those of their sisters in corporate America. Women now comprise between 40 percent and 50 percent of the student bodies at divinity schools and seminaries across the country. A growing number of churches are taking them seriously as candidates for pastorates and are becoming more accustomed to their preaching and administering the sacraments. But instead of moving into positions as senior pastors in larger churches, for example, women clergy tend to end up accepting pastorates at one small church after another, said the Rev. Jann Cather Weaver, associate dean for student life at Yale Divinity School. ''That's changing, but it's taking a lot of trailblazing,'' Ms. Weaver said. ''If serving small churches is a minister's choice, then that's wonderful. But the opportunity should be there for women, as well as men, to serve larger churches.'' Women preparing for positions in the Roman Catholic Church face an especially tough challenge. There was an influx of Catholic women at university-related divinity schools in the 1970's as hopes of a wider role for women blossomed, said Sister Margaret Farley, professor of Christian ethics at Yale. Now, she fears female enrollment may be on the decline as optimism about the church's acceptance of female priests wanes. Catholic women at Yale find positions in hospital chaplaincy, campus ministry or occasionally in diocesan offices. Some become parish administrators. But only priests may administer the sacraments. So the majority of women find positions in teaching or pursue advanced degrees in theology or biblical studies, Ms. Farley said. ''It's hard for them to have all that education and to know they can't be ordained,'' Sister Margaret said. ''It challenges their faith and commitment. The possibility of ordination is looking dimmer, but I'm still optimistic that someday it may be possible or even needed. Catholicism is the only denomination with a shortage of clergy.'' Lack of equity with men in the job market is one reason women clergy are expanding traditional assumptions about ordained ministry beyond the image of a full-time, lifelong pastor, according to a nationwide survey by Hartford Seminary. ''By taking jobs in new kinds of specialized ministries -- with AIDS patients, homeless people and battered women -- women are pushing the | Familiar Enough, in Religion It's the Stained-Glass Ceiling |
932571_0 | To the Editor: Anyone who reads beyond the first two paragraphs of ''Academy's Report Says Immigration Benefits the U.S.'' (front page, May 18) has to wonder, What benefits? The alleged benefit appears to be a $10 billion annual increase in gross national product in a $7 trillion economy. That is a one-seventh of 1 percent increase. The cost of that minimal boost is massive population growth, loss of wages among less-skilled Americans, an increase in the high school dropout rate, exacerbation of the wealth gap and substantial tax burdens for state and local governments. Is it really worth it? The other alleged benefit, according to the academy, is that immigrants will pay for the retirement of baby boomers. Low-wage immigrants, who are heavily dependent on social services, will finance the retirement of affluent retirees? The academy overlooks another obvious fact: Immigrants get old, too. Within a few years of the baby boomers' retirement, we'll have to figure out how to pay for Social Security for a lot of elderly immigrants. A better headline for this article might have been ''Academy's Report Says Immigration Benefits Some in the U.S., at Great Expense to Most.'' DAN STEIN Exec. Dir., Federation for American Immigration Reform Washington, May 19, 1997 | Report Oversells Immigration's Meager Benefits |
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