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1225820_0 | As some Security Council members, led by Russia and the United States, move toward increasing sanctions on the militant Islamic government of Afghanistan, a report by the United Nations' relief coordinator there says that the existing economic embargo is having ''a tangible negative effect'' on efforts to help the Afghan people. A survey in mid-August by relief officials found that sanctions imposed in 1999 are stifling what international trade was left in a country still shattered by more than 20 years of civil war, severe drought and the frequently self-defeating economic strictures of the Taliban, the strict Islamic movement that seized power four years ago. The embargo is also further isolating Afghans and making it more difficult for the outside world to deal with their leaders, the report found. The findings, issued this week in New York, have added to a debate about the unintended consequences of embargoes in the Security Council, which has ordered a study on the effects of sanctions and open-ended embargoes as a policy tool. Sanctions were imposed on the Taliban largely at the behest of the United States, which wants Afghanistan to hand over Osama bin Laden, the Saudi-born financier who lives in Afghanistan and has been accused of financing international terrorism. Russia, which fears the spread of Islamic militancy on its southern borders, and Iran, which supports a faction of the armed opposition, have called for even harsher measures. An embargo on arms sales is being discussed. United Nations officials and Afghans agree that an arms embargo will have widespread support among the Afghan population, which has seen arms flow in from Pakistan, Iran, Central Asia and Russia, diplomats said. In human terms, the report said, ''A significant impact of sanctions is the extent to which ordinary Afghans feel isolated and victimized.'' | U.N. Reports Afghan Curbs Hurt Populace |
1225666_2 | car with a Firestone tire.'' There are people just scared stiff of the name Firestone, which is unfortunate. I've always had good experience with Firestone. I'm driving an Explorer Sport Trac with Firestones. Of the 200 [vehicles] we checked, we changed about 36 sets, or 144 tires. I had to change ones that didn't have the defective code, too. I had one elderly lady whose Firestone tires were not that code who said: ''I am not going to drive the car. I'm going to park the car right here.'' So I took the Goodyear tires off another car and put them on hers. Q. Is this the biggest crisis you have seen with Ford? A. I've had callbacks my whole life. It is probably a scarier callback than most of them, but we've had callbacks where the car can catch fire because the fuel line was not routed properly, callbacks where a bolt was not tempered properly and the front end can fall off. But this will go down in the top 10 percent. Q. How long do you expect the clamoring to last? A. Today was one-fifth of yesterday. It's tapering off. It could take three or four weeks. It might take some time to convince people that if you've got a Firestone and it's not one of the bad ones, you're O.K. If you can get people to believe that, you're over the last hurdle. It's costing me money, between $5,000 and $20,000, but I never worry about what it costs me to satisfy a customer. Obviously I don't want to go bankrupt. But I've been with Ford for 57 1/2 years. It's too late to get divorced now. Q. Will the recall frighten people away from Explorers and sport utility vehicles? A. I sold nine Explorers the day before yesterday -- that's the biggest Explorer day I've had all year. I changed the tires for Goodyears on two of them. But the people like S.U.V.'s. Sure, they're worried about safety, but we know how to make them safer, we know how to make them more economical, and if that's what the market wants, we'll do it. We're going to see a lot more S.U.V.'s, but they'll be a different type S.U.V.'s. We've got an Explorer, an Expedition and an Excursion -- I don't think we need them all. You'll see the biggest ones trimmed down in size. | FIVE QUESTIONS: for BOB TASCA Sr.; On the Front Lines of the Tire Recall |
1225654_0 | To the Editor: Recently Russian leaders chose to ignore the pleas of their people to accept help on a sunken submarine. I'd like to think we are not like that in New Jersey. However, our state's leaders, namely Governor Whitman and Jack Collins, the speaker of the Assembly, appear to be following suit. By ignoring the plethora of requests from state residents, they are consciously killing the Black Bear Protection Bill. This is conveniently occurring before Sept. 18, the day a black bear hunt is scheduled. To date, 20 North Jersey towns and environmental committees have passed resolutions to ban the bear hunt. In an independent survey, 61 percent of New Jersey residents did not want a bear hunt. Twenty-four organizations with memberships totaling more than 230,000 oppose the hunt. The Senate version of the bear protection bill passed overwhelmingly. The people of New Jersey are simply asking for a stay of execution for the bears until the bill is released from committee and voted on in the Assembly. SUZANNE DRAGAN New Brunswick | A Stay of Execution For the State's Black Bears |
1225642_0 | To the Editor: I was deeply disturbed to read the article ''Cell Tower Plans Stir Neighbors'' on July 23 and more deeply disturbed to read a response advocating a ''wireless master plan'' for Westchester [Letters, July 30]. I am one of many persons suffering ill health from the effects of electromagnetic radiation. There are too many people with their heads in the sand denying the ever-growing evidence that EM radiation is dangerous to our health. When we focus on the aesthetics of cell phone towers and the ''advantage'' of wireless technology, we are missing the point, and we are allowing the telecommunication industry to profit enormously at a significant cost to the public's health. CLAUDIA SAMOWITZ Eastchester | Electromagnetic Radiation Is Causing Ill Health |
1225760_0 | IT seemed so clear a decade ago. Hormone replacement therapy would protect women's hearts after menopause. After all, their risk of heart disease rises in middle age, around the time their ovaries stop making estrogen. And there was indirect evidence that the drug was working: women who chose to take it lived longer and had less heart disease than those who did not. There even was a biological reason. Estrogen makes a woman's total cholesterol level drop; it reduces the levels of LDL cholesterol, the bad actor, while raising levels of HDL cholesterol, which protects against heart disease. ''All the elements were in place for estrogen to protect against heart disease,'' said Dr. Deborah Grady, a professor of medicine and epidemiology at the University of California in San Francisco. She and other experts were so persuaded that they wrote a set of widely adopted guidelines for the American College of Physicians recommending that women at high risk of heart disease take estrogen after menopause. But new data show that even the best-intentioned analysis can go astray relying on indirect evidence. Last week, the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine published a report of a study on whether estrogen taken alone or combined with the hormone methoxyprogesterone can retard heart disease in women whose arteries were already narrowing. It was one of the first truly rigorous studies of the estrogen hypothesis. The women in the study were randomly assigned to take hormone replacement therapy or go without; they were followed for three years. Such studies avoid a pitfall of those that simply observe who chooses to take or go without a drug. Often, those who take a drug differ significantly from those who do not. Women who take estrogen are better educated, wealthier and more concerned about their health, all associated with less heart disease. As it turned out, no estrogen effect ever emerged. The study participants' arteries narrowed by the same amount whether they took a placebo, estrogen or estrogen plus methoxyprogesterone. The study was the second blow to the estrogen hypothesis. Recently another similarly randomized study concluded that women with heart disease who were assigned the hormone had the same rate of heart attacks, including fatalities, as those women with heart disease who took placebos. For the millions of women reaching menopause, the real question is: what happens if you don't have heart disease yet? Will estrogen offer protection | Ideas & Trends: Like a Placebo; How Estrogen Gained A Healthy Skepticism |
1220290_3 | big cruise vessel sometimes may. Old Ships vs. New Mr. Beatty and others note that market forces have brought improved accessibility, mainly on new vessels, built with an awareness that future customers are to be found among graying baby boomers. Elevators, selected cabins with extra-wide entrance and toilet doors, roll-in showers and closets with pull-down rods are found on new ships. Older ships are hard to fix, and as the A.D.A. unfolded in the 90's, retrofitting proved the most difficult. The Oceanic, built in 1965, is an older ship, with 604 cabins. In her complaint, Ms. Stevens said she saw an ad for a three-night cruise aboard the Oceanic and decided to buy a cruise for her mother, herself and two other family members for Mother's Day. She said in an interview she was told there were four ''handicapped cabins,'' one of them wheelchair accessible, and it was booked for Mother's Day. Ms. Stevens, who is a development officer for the Jacksonville Zoo, shifted her date to get the cabin, and said she had to pay more than the advertised starting price of $349 for it. The accessibility was limited to a ramp over the ledge on the bathroom door, she said, but the toilet was so close to the door that she could not get to it in her wheelchair. She was forced to use a bucket or have her guests lift her onto the commode, she said, and bathe from a bucket or be lifted into and out of the shower. Ms. Stevens's lawyers, Jennifer L. Augspurger and Arlene Karin Kline of Boca Raton, initially sued for deceptive practices under Florida law and for an injunction under the federal disability law. The Department of Justice supported a revised complaint. Officials there and advocates for the disabled consider the facts in the case appropriate for a court test of the applicability of the law. The 1998 complaint identified Premier as a Canadian corporation, but Mr. Davidson said that the line was a Cayman Islands corporation then, and is now a Bermuda corporation. The Big Red Boat I continues to list itself as Bahamian, one of the more popular ''flags of convenience'' used by virtually all oceangoing cruise vessels visiting the United States. Premier has been discussing the case with other companies and the International Council of Cruise Lines, an association representing 17 lines that operate 95 vessels in the | Cruise Ships and The Disabled |
1220289_2 | Canada,'' I said to the person at TWA's 800 number. ''Ontario, California,'' she said. ''It's an airport 46 miles from Los Angeles.'' I kept telephoning but TWA steadfastly declined to put me on a flight to San Francisco, where I had four interviews in four days. I also had an interview in central Los Angeles on July 11. TWA would let we fly out to Ontario on July 6 and then home on July 12 from Orange County Airport, 36 miles from Los Angeles International Airport. After 57 phone calls, I persuaded a person at TWA's 800 number to let me fly home from LAX, although not at a convenient hour -- I would have a three-hour layover in St. Louis instead of the hour layover available to paying passengers. But the basic arrangement would work. I bought a United round-trip ticket with a flight from Ontario to San Francisco on July 7 and one from San Francisco to LAX three days later, for just over $100. Flying TWA to Ontario through St. Louis was fine, and a night at the Super 8 Motel in Ontario was more than fine. Some months earlier, I had discovered the charms of Super 8's -- firm beds, free Continental breakfasts and reasonable prices. In small towns like Le Mars, Iowa, there are no upscale hotel chains. I arrived at Ontario Airport at 9 a.m. on July 7 for my 10 a.m. United flight to San Francisco. An agent could be heard telling another passenger that the 10 a.m. flight had been canceled because of fog in San Francisco. ''My boyfriend says there's no fog in San Francisco,'' a woman waving a cell phone shouted to the agent. ''Well, if there's no fog, then there are high clouds over San Francisco,'' the agent retorted. We were to be put on the 12:30 p.m. flight, but upon further questioning were told United would have no flight leaving Ontario for northern California until 4 p.m. I asked a skycap if any other airline flew to the San Francisco area. Southwest did, he said. I sprinted a quarter-mile with my luggage to the Southwest terminal, bought a $100 one-way ticket to Oakland, and was there by noon. I didn't see any fog or high clouds over either Oakland or San Francisco. I later learned that a slowdown by United pilots had been disrupting flight schedules. Three-hour layovers | A Taste for Frequent-Flier Miles |
1219421_0 | To the Editor: Re ''Court Ruling on Spanish Frigates Foils Modern-Day Treasure Hunt'' (front page, July 31): Spain has every right to lay claim to its sunken ships, but the Spanish are not the legitimate owners of the treasures -- gold, silver, emeralds, diamonds and other precious stones -- that these ships were carrying. The native people of Mexico, Peru, Colombia and other Latin American countries are the true owners. We must not forget that the Spanish came to the New World to take as much in gold, silver and precious stones as they could. They robbed and pillaged and in the process destroyed cultures that often surpassed their own. It is time to correct past injustices and violations of human rights committed many centuries ago. Give the ship hulls and cannons to Spain, but return the treasures to the legitimate native owners. MONICA MADARIAGA Hartsdale, N.Y., July 31, 2000 | Conquistadors' Loot, in a Watery Grave |
1219560_1 | allowed H.I.V. to transform from an fairly rare condition among intravenous drug users in 1990, to a rapidly growing problem that now affects an estimated 600,000 Chinese, the scientists say. And in another 10 years, they warn, China could have one of the world's largest populations of H.I.V. carriers, unless the government takes action. ''The spread of AIDS is accelerating rapidly and we face the prospect of remaining inert against the threat,'' states an extraordinarily blunt report by a committee of eminent Chinese experts that was sent to China's leaders earlier this year. It adds: ''Owing to government indifference, AIDS prevention and control is gravely ineffective.'' Although Chinese doctors have now started a number of research and education projects, there has been no nationally coordinated effort to determine the prevalence of H.I.V. so that the government has only a vague idea of how and where the disease is spreading, for example. The total budget for AIDS prevention last year was only a few million dollars -- far less than that of much smaller countries like Vietnam and Thailand. Local officials often resist efforts to test people in their jurisdiction for the virus, for fear high rates will reflect badly on them. In many cities, billboards promoting AIDS awareness or prevention through condoms have lasted only days before they were declared ''indecent'' and destroyed. ''We've reached the point that if we don't wake up, it will be a national disaster,'' said Zeng Yi, a leading AIDS researcher who was on the committee. The battle over how China should handle AIDS generally pits government scientists concerned with a simmering epidemic against socially conservative propaganda, education and health officials, guardians of China's image and its moral values. The scientists protest that the conservatives have stymied their efforts to confront the disease, preventing frank discussions of sex and drug addiction, for example, and have even attempted to camouflage China's H.I.V. problem. ''The central government doesn't seem to realize how serious this is,'' said Qiu Renzong, a bioethicist at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, with clear exasperation. ''We have not yet had an effective risk reduction strategy, because some departments are very conservative. They think chastity is more important than condom use. They say that the only way to prevent H.I.V. transmission is to rely on China's traditional values!'' Committee members like Professor Qiu say they intended their report to be a jarring wake-up | Scientists Warn of Inaction As AIDS Spreads in China |
1221008_1 | of America, the most powerful advocacy group for the learning disabled, nervous. It is concerned that children with learning disabilities will not get the services they need if they are redefined under the broader term learning differences. What's more, the group is worried that the federal financing for which it has fought for years will decline or even disappear if ''learning differences'' comes into favor with legislators. ''The danger, and where the controversy comes from, is that there are some parents who would not like to have their child called disabled,'' said Ann Kornblet, executive director of the Learning Disabilities Association of America. ''The reality is that a true learning disability is a handicapping condition. Without understanding that, you're not prepared to help them prepare for a life of advocating for themselves.'' The Individuals with Disabilities in Education Act of 1975 uses the term ''learning disability'' to classify children with ''a disorder in one or more of the basic psychological processes involved in understanding or in using language, spoken or written.'' A learning disability may show up as an imperfect ability to listen, think, speak, read, write, spell or do mathematical calculations, according to the federal definition. Education officials say that 12 percent of all school-age children are now classified as learning disabled. Mr. Schwab is not alone in his opposition to the term. An increasing number of parents seem to be referring to their learning disabled children as learning different and teachers are starting to use the term in the classroom. He and his wife founded the Charles and Helen Schwab Foundation, now called the Schwab Foundation for Learning, in 1988 to address the needs of such families. Along with his own foundation, he is the co-chairman of All Kinds of Minds, an iconoclastic organization that looks at every child -- disabled or not -- in terms of strengths and weaknesses. ''Our model is one where we refuse to label anybody, so we have no 'learning disabilities,' '' said Mel Levine, co-chairman of the organization with Mr. Schwab. The group has already trained 5,000 teachers around the country to speak the language of learning differences at several regional training centers, including one program run by The Bank Street College of Education in Manhattan. Plans are in the works to open a chain of consultation centers where parents can take their children to be evaluated. Eventually, Dr. Levine hopes that | A Big Push for Learning 'Differences,' Not Disabilities |
1220943_0 | Doctors routinely overlook a serious sign of osteoporosis, the condition that leaves older people -- primarily women -- susceptible to repeated, often immobilizing bone breaks, according to a study being released today. The study, which looked at 1,162 postmenopausal women who had broken one or both their wrists, found that only a quarter had been evaluated or treated for the disease. The report was published in The Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery and was prepared by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania. A broken wrist, the researchers said, is often the first sign of osteoporosis in women over 55, suggesting decreased bone mineral density, thus making bones more fragile. A woman who breaks her wrist at this age may double her chance of breaking a hip, the study said. Yet after analyzing patient records and pharmacy claims in the six months after the wrists were broken, the researchers found a serious failure to diagnose and treat osteoporosis. Indeed, for the oldest patients, those most at risk, the level of treatment was even lower. Only 9.1 percent of the women ages 85 to 89 in the study were being treated for osteoporosis; 4.2 percent of those 90 to 94; and 4.7 percent of those over 95. This compares with a rate of 36 percent in the women ages 55 to 59. The author of the study, Dr. Kevin B. Freedman, said the findings suggested that doctors needed to be diligent about making sure that postmenopausal patients being treated for wrist breaks received good follow-up evaluations. ''Even in older patients,'' he said, ''treatment for osteoporosis does work to maintain or increase bone density and prevent fractures.'' Osteoporosis is commonly treated with hormone replacement therapy or drugs that restore the mineral levels in the bones. VITAL SIGNS: AGING | Ignoring the Message of Brittle Bones |
1221037_1 | extra $13 for each of the nearly one million tons that are to be recycled instead of buried. The city's recycling program was begun in 1993 with the expectation of saving money. The City Council formally declared recycling to be ''economically desirable'' and even issued a five-year plan mandating precisely how many tons were to be recycled annually. But the budget savings projected by the sanitation department were replaced by ''incremental costs,'' as the sanitation department noted in several studies during the 1990's computing how much extra it was spending per year to recycle material rather than bury it. The added annual expense ranged from $70 million to $127 million. That means that if New Yorkers had simply thrown away all their garbage instead of sorting paper and washing out bottles and cans during the last seven years, the city would have saved at least $500 million. The savings would have been enough to build a dozen new public schools or to put $15,000 worth of computers in each existing classroom. It might have been used to increase the parks department's operating budget by about 50 percent each year. City officials now acknowledge that past projections were too optimistic, but they expect recycling to become more cost-efficient as more New Yorkers sort their garbage. ''The gap is narrowing between recycling and landfilling,'' said Robert Lange, director of the sanitation department's Bureau of Waste Prevention, Reuse and Recycling. ''Within the next decade it will be cheaper to recycle.'' Perhaps this time the optimistic projections will be correct, but there are still reasons for doubt. The planners are assuming that New Yorkers, who now recycle 20 percent of their trash, will raise that rate to 25 percent by 2002 and then go still higher. MAYBE they will, but maybe they'll just tire of working as unpaid garbage sorters, especially if they realize how little the end product is worth. Recycling becomes hopelessly uneconomical if, unlike the department's planners, you account for the time and space that New Yorkers are forced to donate to recycling. Paying for that labor and storage space would add at least $1,500 per ton to the cost of recycling, by my calculations. Even recycling's environmental justifications can be problematic, at least on the local level, since the program creates more truck traffic and therefore more air pollution. If there were no recycling program, the city would need fewer | The Big City; The Negatives Of Recycling In New York |
1226217_3 | rejected higher-pressure tires on a prototype of the Explorer because they tended to cause rollovers. Ford ended up choosing a different, lower-pressure tire and a different suspension. Ford says that rollovers are the main cause of crash deaths for occupants of all brands of midsize sport utility vehicles. Explorer occupants have a lower death rate in rollovers and over all than do occupants of other midsize sport utility models, according to Ford safety officials. In TV commercials that began showing tonight, Jacques Nasser, Ford's chief executive, emphasized that Ford had one of the best safety records, according to government data for the last 10 years. George Pipas, a Ford market analyst, said today that Ford's sales in the United States in August would be roughly equal to last year's levels and only slightly below the company's early projections, a shortfall that he said might reflect response to the tire recall but also a somewhat slower economy and a highly competetive market. Mr. Harmon said that Ford had not found protective nylon layers in 71 percent of the 15-inch tires from Venezuela that it cut open, nor in 55 percent of the 16-inch tires. Automakers commonly specify that tire makers include nylon for vehicles to be sold in South America because of the poor roads and because drivers frequently go extremely fast in the absence of enforced speed limits, Mr. Harmon said. The tires also failed before reaching 112 miles an hour on a dynanometer, a speed they were supposed to be able to withstand, particularly because the Explorer's engine has a computer that limits speed to 99 miles an hour, he added. Ford has been criticized by plaintiffs' lawyers for not having Firestone include the nylon layers on Explorer tires for the United States market. Because of the good roads in the United States, manufacturers rarely use the layers except for very high-speed models like the Chevrolet Corvette sports car. Bridgestone hinted in a letter today to the Venezuelan consumer agency that Ford might not have asked for nylon layers until recently. The letter said that Ford had specified in 1999 that the nylon be included and that nylon had been included since then. The tires in question have been produced since 1996, and the Bridgestone letter did not say whether the earlier tires had the nylon, nor were officials willing to elaborate. Mr. Harmon said that Ford had always | Bridgestone Asks Venezuelan Dealers to Return Some Tires |
1226107_4 | focused new attention on the collection and analysis of more data about polar ice conditions. The end of the cold war, for instance, has brought to light important sonar measurements of Arctic ice collected by United States Navy submarines. They are being analyzed by Dr. Drew Rothrock at the Applied Physics Laboratory of the University of Washington in Seattle. By comparing measurements of ice thickness between 1958 and 1976 with data from 1993 and 1997, he determined that the thickness had decreased from 10.2 feet in the early period to 5.9 feet in the 1990's. ''This is not a case of thicker ice appearing in one region simultaneously with thinner ice appearing in another, induced perhaps by a change in surface winds or other transient conditions,'' Dr. Rothrock said, noting that the decrease was widespread in the central Arctic Ocean, and most pronounced in the eastern Arctic. Researchers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory are analyzing images from the Canadian Radarsat spacecraft, which has made the most detailed satellite observations of the expanse of the Arctic Ocean. Passing over at an altitude of about 400 miles, the spacecraft bounces mapping radar signals off the polar region to produce a complete image every three days. This permits researchers to track the short-term dynamics of the sea ice, watching cracks open up and grow wider, sometimes more than 1,200 miles long, and seeing thin ice eventually covering some of the openings. ''If the ice is thinning due to warming, we'll expect to see more of these long cracks over the Arctic Ocean,'' said Dr. Ronald Kwok, a senior research scientist at the Pasadena laboratory. But Radarsat has been returning data for only four years, not long enough for researchers to recognize any meaningful patterns in Arctic climate. While cautioning against jumping to dire conclusions based on the sighting of open polar water, Dr. Serreze of the ice data center is the principal author of a review article, published this summer in the Dutch journal Climate Change, on Arctic environmental change over decades and centuries. Many of the changes, he said, appeared to be partly a result of human activity. In reporting that parts of Alaska and northern Eurasia had warmed by nearly 11 degrees in winter months the past 30 years, Dr. Serreze observed, ''We have climate evidence from the past four centuries gleaned from ice cores, lake cores and tree rings that | Open Water at Pole Is Not Surprising, Experts Say |
1226168_4 | pulling tight an elastic cord, and they make it both taut and flexible in the wind. Engineers said the structure was built to withstand the damage it endured, but government officials also said it would cost hundreds of millions of dollars to repair it -- money this nation can ill afford. Eduard Sagalayev, the president of Russia's National Association of Television and Radio Broadcasters, slipped into a eulogy today when talking about the fire, telling Echo Moskvy radio that the tower ''was a unique structure.'' ''Let us not speak in the past tense,'' an interviewer said. ''It gives you a funny feeling.'' But Mr. Sagalayev replied: ''Unfortunately, one has to speak in the past tense. If it does not collapse, I doubt that it will be able to perform its functions.'' Mr. Putin, who was criticized for a lackadaisical response to the Kursk disaster, wasted no time today, ordering engineers to restore television and other communications to Moscow within a week. By day's end, brainstormers were proposing to mount transmitters everywhere from beneath helium balloons to atop the roofs of Moscow's hilltop state university. The fire could have been much worse. It surprised the city on a brilliant Sunday afternoon, when throngs of sightseers had come to the Ostankino tower for the elevator ride to its 1,105-foot-high observation platform and a meal in the structure's Seventh Heaven restaurant. The fire began above them, in a section of the antenna used by a paging service, and tourists and workers were safely evacuated before it spread. As the fire sputtered out this afternoon, hundreds of onlookers and nearly as many journalists gathered several hundred yards from the tower -- as close as the police would allow -- to take pictures, gawk and speculate about whether the spire looked as if it was leaning. (It was not; workers for the city's geological agency monitored the tilt, and said it was within normal limits.) Most people here seemed to suffer the loss of entertainment good-naturedly. ''I watch MTV practically all the time,'' 12-year-old Ivan Lionov said as he stood along a cordoned-off street in north Moscow that provided a good view of the tower. ''But we'll live. Of course it's bad. But soon we'll be in school.'' And an elderly woman selling sunflower seeds and pistachios to the throngs of gawkers on the street had a contrarian view some Westerners might appreciate. ''You can | Russians Put Out the Fire In Gigantic Broadcast Tower |
1226093_4 | home without receiving bone density tests and without hearing any prevention strategies, even though they may be at risk for further bone loss and fractures, he said. Treatment of osteoporosis in men has also lagged behind that for women. ''Until the last few years, there haven't been data that actually demonstrate the usefulness of therapies for prevention or treatment of osteoporosis in men,'' Dr. Orwoll said. Doctors treat men with therapies that have been proven effective in women, but not yet in men. The two drugs that doctors typically prescribe, alendronate (brand name, Fosamax) and risedronate (Actonel), have been approved only for postmenopausal women or in a subgroup of men with osteoporosis that induced by steroids, which have a direct effect on bones and which reduce bone formation and testosterone levels. Doctors are legally allowed to prescribe the treatment to men in what is called off-label use, but studies are needed to test the safety, effectiveness and dosing of these drugs in men. Research, though, is beginning to emerge, as is a clearer understanding of how bone growth and bone loss differ between men and women. During adolescence, boys grow longer and thicker bones than girls, making their skeletons more robust and less prone to fractures. Men and women reach their peak bone mass in their late 20's. All the while, bone is continually replenishing itself as old bone is broken down or resorbed and new bone tissue is formed. In the 30's, bone resorption begins to outpace bone formation, causing a gradual loss of bone density. Estrogen and testosterone are believed to block bone resorption, so as women reach menopause and their estrogen level drops, resorption speeds up, leading to rapid bone loss for the next five to seven years. This period is largely responsible for the higher rates of osteoporosis in women. But by the age of 65 or 70, the rate of bone loss is roughly equal in both sexes because of several age-related factors including declining levels of sex hormones, among them testosterone; a change in the ability to absorb and use calcium; and a more sedentary lifestyle. In about 60 percent to 65 percent of men (and about half of women) with osteoporosis, the disease is linked to other causes. The three leading causes in men are alcoholism; hypogonadism, in which they produce low levels of testosterone; and the long-term use of glucocorticoids, which are | The 'Women's Disease' That Also Strikes Men |
1226176_1 | state's estimated 85,000 hunters have had little or no experience with bears. After the last hunt, the bear population was nearly extinct. Now, however, the population is robust, and in recent years there have been steadily increasing complaints about bears breaking into houses, intruding on campgrounds and picnic areas, and killing sheep and goats. In the weekend seminars, about 600 hunters were told about the animal's favorite foods in late summer: apples, berries, wild grapes, acorns, beechnuts, hickory nuts and walnuts. ''Hunters have to figure out where there's a good food supply,'' Mr. Eriksen said. They were also told about the best place to wound a bear mortally -- the heart and lung cavity. ''Shot placement is critical,'' Mr. Carr said. ''A well-placed shot kills quickly. We're emphasizing a quick, clean kill. We have respect for game that way, and less trailing,'' meaning, he said, that a bear shot in the heart or lung will most likely die on the spot and not run off into thickets before falling. Mr. Carr said the best chance of hitting the lung or heart requires a shot when the bear, walking on all fours, is broadside to the hunter or starting to walk away at an angle with a front leg forward. Shots directly into the chest are not usually fatal because of a bear's dense shoulder muscles and bones, he said. Head-on shots are discouraged because a bear's skull is too thick for an arrow or bullet to penetrate fatally. Hunters were also urged to hunt in groups because, officials said, a dead bear is too big for one person to haul from the woods. Adult male bears in New Jersey average nearly 400 pounds, he said. Mr. Carr rejected a suggestion that the seminars were a response to charges from a vocal antihunt coalition that the hunt will unleash dangerous numbers of reckless hunters and wounded bears in the forests of growing exurban communities in bear terrain in the state's northwestern corner. ''We scheduled these seminars long before the animal rights people were involved,'' he said. Lynda Smith, the head of the Bear Education and Resources Group, a coalition of 22 animal protection groups opposed to the hunt, said yesterday that the seminars distressed her. ''They're spending an awful lot of time, effort, and money teaching people how to kill bears when it could have been better invested teaching people how | New Jersey Offers Tips For Hunting Black Bears |
1224646_1 | called a plumcot and can be traced back more than 100 years to the famous botanist Luther Burbank. Pluots evolved out of that early hybrid, but most are about three-fifths plum and two-fifths apricot. The Pluot was developed and named by Zaiger's Genetics, a plant breeder near Modesto, Calif. Leith Zaiger, the company's general manager, said that Zaiger's had been developing Pluots for 35 years but that only in the last year or two had there been enough successful commercial planting to supply the domestic and export markets on a large scale. The Pluot has taken off because ''California growers are always interested in growing better fruit,'' said Bob Maxwell, the director of special projects for Kingsburg Apple Sales in Kingsburg, Calif., which packs and distributes its own Pluots and those grown by others. The fruit started turning up in produce stands in July and should be available until the end of September. Dinosaur and Dinosaur Egg are brand names established several years ago for Pluots grown by one California grower, Jackson Family Farm. They bear a tiny sticker showing a brontosaurus, but even without the label the fruit is easily recognizable. It is a hefty fistful, with pinkish-red skin dappled in gray and deep reddish flesh sometimes fading to ivory. As appealing as the color is, the flavor is better: deliciously sweet and meaty, with the merest hint of tartness. Although there are other Pluots available, just as large but in other colors, Dinosaurs appear to be chefs' favorites in New York. Tadashi Ono, at Sono in Midtown, uses them to make a compote to serve with foie gras because, he says, they have a denser, more peachlike texture. Paula Oland, the pastry chef at Balthazar Bakery in SoHo, uses Dinosaur Eggs, often with green Kelsey plums, on a galette with puff pastry and frangipani. For now, though, traditional plums dominate the market. Dale Janzen, a field agent with the California Fruit Commission, estimates that a total of 3 million boxes of Pluots, or 87 million pounds, will be sold this year, compared with 17 million boxes (476 million pounds) of plums. About 200 varieties of plums are grown in California. Most are in season for just a couple of weeks. But the consumer is rarely aware: most shops tend not to label them except by color, though you may spot names like Simka, Fortune, Friar or Catalina. Elephant | To Build a Better Plum, Start With an Apricot |
1224694_1 | ordered out of the car and told to lie on the ground before being driven to a prison outside the city. British officials depict the fighting between the loyalist paramilitaries as a narcotics-fueled turf war tied to what Peter Mandelson, the senior British official in the province, today called ''the dark side of Northern Ireland's society, the mafia culture created by decades of paramilitary conflict.'' Mr. Adair, who at the time of his release had served five and a half years of a 16-year sentence on terrorism charges, is a leading figure in the Ulster Defense Association, which has been locked in conflict with another loyalist group, the Ulster Volunteer Force. Ideologically, all of Northern Ireland's loyalist groups support continued British rule, but they are bitterly divided among themselves over personality and territorial disputes. The two men killed on Monday were said by the police to be members of Mr. Adair's organization. The police said the killers fired nine bullets into the men as they crossed a road to their car. There was speculation that Mr. Adair's arrest would increase pressure among his followers to retaliate. In September 1999, Mr. Adair was freed from the high-security Maze prison under terms in the peace deal enabling convicted terrorists to be released provided they refrained from violence. But the agreement also permits their so-called good behavior license to be revoked if they are thought to be fomenting violent actions. Explaining the arrest, Mr. Mandelson, Britain's Northern Ireland secretary, said: ''My priority is public safety and I cannot give freedom to an individual intent on abusing it. I am satisfied that this particular individual has breached the terms of his license.'' Earlier, he told reporters: ''We should be absolutely clear that what we are witnessing has nothing to do with the peace process. It's nothing more or less than squalid, murderous gang warfare.'' Before Monday's killings, at least 10 people were hurt and a number of buildings set ablaze. BBC television reported tonight that some residents of the Shankhill Road area were boarding up their homes and leaving in anticipation of further clashes. The Belfast police said on Monday that the army was returning to the city's streets today as ''a short-term measure.'' British soldiers withdrew from Belfast after the 1998 peace deal but troops returned briefly last month after the authorities banned a Protestant march through a Catholic area of the city. | British Arrest Protestant Militant After Violence in Belfast |
1221686_2 | about tires blowing out on the highway.'' The replacement program calls for most but not all of the replacement tires to be sent to authorized dealers in Southern and Western states, where the most serious accidents have occurred. As word of the recall spread, so did the rumors. Many vehicle owners with tires that were not a part of the recall were misinformed and showed up at dealerships yesterday. Concerned that the public was confused about which tires were being recalled, the Ford Motor Company said yesterday that it would take out full-page advertisements in many large newspapers to explain which vehicles typically had the tires as factory-installed equipment and which did not. Firestone and Ford did not identify the vehicles at their news conference on Wednesday, and this appeared to have backfired. Roberson Jeudy, 25, a New York City police officer whose Ford Expedition has Wilderness AT tires that need to be replaced, complained about how Firestone was handling the recall. ''I don't think it is fair,'' he said. ''California is not the only state they are serving.'' Mr. Spitzer, New York's attorney general, agreed, saying that ''a defective product is a defective product.'' ''It is simply not acceptable,'' he added, ''to acknowledge a serious safety hazard, offer immediate relief for some consumers while telling other consumers to wait up to 18 months until the problem is corrected.'' Mr. Spitzer sent a letter to Rosalyn G. Millman, a deputy director of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, requesting that the agency review Firestone's recall plans. But Ms. McCafserty, the Firestone spokeswoman, said the rationale behind starting in the Southern and Western states was that it appeared heat was a contributing factor to problems with the tires and all the serious accidents involving them occurred in the regions included in the first phase of the recall. The company plans to focus on getting new tires to customers based on where they are driving, even if it is not necessarily where they live, she added. The last major Firestone recall was in 1978, when the Firestone Tire and Rubber Company was fined $500,000 by federal regulators and forced to recall more than 14 million of its 500-series tires that were defective. Firestone nearly went bankrupt after that recall and was later bought by Bridgestone. About two-thirds of the tires in the current recall came new on sport utility vehicles and pickup | Tire Recall Brings Some Panic and a Large Need for Patience |
1221663_3 | and other materials. Most tires have high-tensile steel wires, called beads, that keep tires seated against the metal wheels. Each line of tires has a slightly different tread designed for hugging the road better in wet weather, but all of them operate loosely on the principle that the placement or depth of grooves on the tire can keep the tire from accumulating water and hydroplaning. Similarly, manufacturers tinker with the makeup of rubber compounds to increase traction, and redesign treads to give a quieter ride. Every tire represents tradeoffs. Put in a lot of carbon black to make the tire more resistant to cuts and it may have traction problems on wet pavements. Add silica to reduce resistance -- and thus increase fuel economy -- and there can be a static electricity buildup that causes a mild shock if you touch the car. In Europe, some tire manufacturers have added extra nylon reinforcement to make tires more durable. Joan Claybrook, director of Public Citizen, the consumer rights group, has frequently suggested that American tire manufacturers do the same. But most American tire experts say the nylon does not add anything to tire performance. But for the most part -- ad campaigns to the contrary -- tires are compatible, making it possible for consumers to replace one tire at a time with whatever brand they prefer. All tires are manufactured to specifications laid out by the Tire and Rim Association, a trade group that decides the minimum and maximum amount of air the tire should hold and the size of car or load it should carry. The ''DOT'' stamp that appears on tires is a Department of Transportation certification that the tires conform to the association's standards and have passed its tests for resistance to puncture, endurance, stability and such. ''Every manufacturer makes their tires compatible expressly so consumers can move between Brand A and Brand B and Brand C,'' said William M. Hopkins, Goodyear's vice president for technical planning. There have been cases of companies voluntarily recalling tires because the beads were cracking, or for other structural problems. But Marvin Bozarth, executive director of the International Tire and Rubber Association, says the vast majority of the recalls over the last 20 years were of tires that had been inadvertently mislabeled, not tires that had performed badly. ''There are small differences among tires, but there are no big differences,'' he said. | Tire Technology Has Bred Consistency and Compatibility |
1221668_0 | There are too few public facts to know for sure whether Bridgestone/Firestone or Ford Motor Company waited too long to recall tires that may have caused hundreds of accidents, 80 injuries and 46 deaths in the United States alone. But what is known is deeply troubling. Bridgestone/Firestone recalled about 6.5 million tires this week because they are prone to shedding their treads. The company says it does not know why the specific models of tires in question are plagued by problems. But it decided to recall the tires anyway in the wake of mounting complaints, a federal investigation and dozens of lawsuits. The recall is expected to cost more than $300 million, and that does not count the potentially huge liability costs. The complaints, however, are hardly news to either company. Both have settled lawsuits over tire problems, imposing a gag rule on plaintiffs as a condition for cash rewards, so that word of the cases never reached the public or federal safety officials. In the past year Ford has recalled tires in Saudi Arabia, Venezuela and several other countries in hot-climate zones, yet continued to install them on vehicles in the United States. Bridgestone/Firestone has provided replacement tires for customers whose tires failed during the warranty period, yet the company did nothing to protect its other customers until this week. Of course, any time that a product is recalled as defective it gives rise to the question ''why not earlier?'' Ford says that the tire failures abroad appeared to reflect unusual driving conditions -- high-speed travel in very hot climates in overloaded vehicles on underinflated tires -- unlike those in the United States. Bridgestone/Firestone says its complaint records did not reveal a disturbing pattern. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration launched an investigation only in May of this year because it received too few consumer complaints to establish an unusual trend of accidents. But before Bridgestone/Firestone or Ford can re-establish credibility with the public, they must provide reassuring answers to some critical questions. Was Ford's dismissal of the relevance of crashes abroad cavalier given that most of the accidents in this country seem to have occurred under hot driving conditions in the South that may have mirrored some of the conditions abroad? As for regulatory responsibilities, manufacturers are required to report defective products to the safety administration. Did Bridgestone/Firestone comb its warranty data and other records carefully for an | When Tires Start Blowing Apart |
1221639_1 | 27 percent since news of the tire troubles emerged on Aug. 1. On Wednesday, Bridgestone/Firestone, the American subsidiary, said that it was recalling 6.5 million tires that were the subject of a government investigation into 193 accidents that have caused 46 deaths in the United States since 1995. Bridgestone said that 80 percent of the accidents involved Ford Explorer sports utility vehicles outfitted with the Firestone tires. At least 50 lawsuits have been filed against Bridgestone and automakers like Ford Motor that installed the tires on their vehicles. Many of the suits cite failures of improperly inflated tires running at high speeds in hot climates. Bridgestone officials said the tire troubles were likely to cost the company far more than the $350 million reflected in the accounting charge, which does not include reserves to settle the lawsuits or cover the cost of recalls that are expected in other countries. Also today, Bridgestone Australia Ltd., which is 60 percent owned by Bridgestone, said that if required, it would replace Firestone tires in use in Australia that have been identified as the targets of the United States recall. The subsidiary said that Firestone four-wheel-drive tires were imported as on about 3,800 Ford Explorer vehicles in 1997 and that 4,500 more tires had been sold in the country as replacements. At the Tokyo news conference, Tadakazu Harada, Bridgestone's vice president, said that although the company's internal investigations so far had found no defects in the tire production process, Bridgestone's American subsidiary ''should have done more earlier to advise drivers to make sure their tires were inflated to the correct pressure.'' As a result of the Firestone recall, Standard & Poor's put Bridgestone and its United States subsidiary on its CreditWatch list with negative implications today, which means the company's credit rating might be downgraded. Kenichi Kitawaki, Bridgestone's public relations manager, said the parent company first learned of problems with the Firestone tires in May and that while not much concrete information was available then, the company immediately began an investigation and cooperated with United States regulators. ''In the past three months, the quantity and quality of information has increased dramatically, and we must say that our current understanding of the case today is drastically different from our perception back in May,'' Mr. Kitawaki said. He said Bridgestone hoped to rebuild public confidence in its tires by undertaking the recall and improving quality control. | Bridgestone To Register Record Charge |
1222971_1 | as they try to satisfy customers. For example, putting nylon coatings inside would help hold the tires together when the tread peels off, as has happened with the Firestone tires. But that produces a bouncier ride, which few drivers choose at showrooms, so automakers seldom request the nylon from tire makers, said Brook Lindbert, the General Motors engineering director for tire and wheel systems. Recommending a high inflation pressure for tires, which the Ford Motor Company did not do for the Explorer, reduces the likelihood of a tire failure. But more fully inflated tires produce a bumpier ride, said Tom Baughman, Ford's engineering director for North American trucks. If the recommended pressure is fairly low to begin with, there is less of a safety margin to protect against leaks that may cause tire pressure to fall to dangerously low levels, he acknowledged. Most sport utility vehicles still use the stiff suspensions of the pickup trucks on which they were based. These shared suspensions hold down the cost and improve performance on rough terrain, a feature many drivers cherish even if they never leave the asphalt. Balancing these often conflicting demands is difficult. The question now in court cases and for regulators is whether too much safety has been compromised, and whether automakers have set a balance too far in the direction of customer desires and too little in the interest of safety. Led by Ford, which installed most of the recalled Firestone tires on its Ford Explorer vehicles, automakers say that they have set an appropriate balance between customer satisfaction and safety. Even with the deaths attributed to Firestone tires, Explorers have a 22 percent lower death rate in rollovers than competitors' midsize sport utilities and a 24 percent lower death rate in crashes over all, said Ernie Grush, Ford's manager of safety data analysis. While sport utility occupants have high death rates in rollovers, their overall death rates are no higher than for car occupants. This is because sport utilities fare well in collisions with lower-riding cars, he said, adding that, ''Customers should look at and consider the overall accident rate in all types of circumstances.'' While the deaths now being attributed to tires might seem numerous to Explorer owners and are large for a recall of tires or auto parts, they represent a smaller problem by traffic safety standards. The tire-related deaths spread over the last several years | Tire Deaths Are Linked To Rollovers |
1224874_4 | to know you're stepping out of the normal bounds of behavior. On the Internet, the action is consistent with a million other actions you take in the course of a day. You click to sell stock, to transfer money, to e-mail a friend, to e-mail an enemy.'' Although many revenge sites emphasize that they are to be used only for entertainment, said Mr. Liotta, the designer of the virtual voodoo doll, ''no one respects that.'' ''They send it to the most fearful person they know,'' he said. ''That person freaks out, but there's nobody to yell at except us. Some people take it a lot more seriously than we anticipated.'' Despite frequent requests, Mr. Liotta refuses to allow senders to write their own messages. Nor can senders choose -- for technical reasons -- where on the doll to stick the pins. Another variation on anonymous revenge comes from a service that allows users to send e-mail messages that appear to be coming from someone else. One satisfied user of that service is Sam Downing of Chatsworth, Calif. ''I have always enjoyed practical jokes,'' Mr. Downing said. When a colleague showed off his brand-new Honda Accord a few months ago, Mr. Downing couldn't resist a trick. ''I sent him an e-mail from the dealership saying the car was being recalled,'' he said. ''It was the first car he had ever bought.'' The colleague, Jeffrey Tani, was so upset that co-workers, who were in on the joke, made Mr. Downing confess. Mr. Tani said, ''It looked authentic.'' A disclaimer at the site warns against using the service for abusive, offensive or illegal purposes. The disclaimer started out as a lighthearted admonition, but it grew increasingly severe because people abused the service, said Antony Robbins, a computer programmer in England who runs the service with his brother, Peter. Since the brothers started the site last year, they said, they have been queried about a half-dozen times by the F.B.I. and police departments, mostly, Mr. Robbins said, about teenagers harassing teachers. In many cases, the brothers can trace the sender. If a recipient complains, they will not send any more e-mail to that address. The service sends about 300 e-mail notes a day. Activity spiked a few months ago when it was mentioned on a syndicated radio show. Mr. Baumgartner said: ''The world is filled with miserable people. They all have the same theme.'' | Revenge Among the Nerds |
1225009_0 | To the Editor: The idea of capturing energy by having cars depress plates on the road, as suggested by a recent letter writer, would not work. But if someone could develop a technique to reuse the kinetic energy that is lost when a car stops at a light, that would be a different story. CARSTEN SAAGER New York | Quest for Free Energy |
1224859_2 | wow and gives them a reason to open their e-mail.'' That factor is what Michele Slack, a senior analyst with Jupiter Communications, based in New York, says will add to the proliferation of video e-mail. ''We're seeing more and more companies utilizing e-mail for marketing,'' Ms. Slack said. ''With more than 268 billion e-mail messages being delivered in a year by 2005, any type of e-mail that can stand out and break through the clutter is going to be increasingly powerful.'' But even with the wow factor, there are two potential problems with video e-mail. The first is the bandwidth required to view the videos. Today, more than 70 percent of consumers use a low-bandwidth, dial-up connection to the Web, according to Dataquest, a research firm in San Jose, Calif. Video e-mail, especially streaming e-mail, requires large chunks of bandwidth. High-quality video clips are often as large as 800 kilobytes. Trying to watch a video that large over a dial-up line can be difficult, if not impossible, depending on the speed of a connection. Although most Web-based video is optimized for people with high-speed connections, who are expected to be a minority for at least several years, Ms. Slack said, most people with dial-up connections will be willing to wait for videos to be downloaded, at least in the beginning. ''On the forefront of any new technology there is an increased factor of tolerance,'' she said. ''Customers are willing to experiment more, and they are willing to be more accepting.'' The companies that develop video e-mail -- like MindArrow Systems; RadicalMail; InChorus.com, in Santa Clara, Calif.; Media1st.com, in Atlanta; and helloNetwork in Las Vegas -- are trying to circumvent bandwidth limitations by pushing video only when a user opens a message. That helps advertisers avoid the possibility that large e-mail messages will be sent to people who do not want them. It also helps companies track when a video is viewed and for how long it is viewed, something that critics say could lead to privacy problems. Because companies can track who is watching, how long they stay with the message and to whom they forward the files, the companies can theoretically create databases containing preferences and personal information. Mr. Stevens, of Radical E-Mail, played down the threat of customer profiling, saying that most video e-mail companies send these messages only to consumers who ''opt in,'' or agree to accept | Video Dresses Up E-Mail Ads |
1224870_5 | all. How do programmers eat if they don't sell their software? In most cases, they are paid for the work their software performs rather than for the software itself. Many are programmers who use the software for their projects. The Apache Web server, for instance, is produced by a team of people who design Web sites. They charge for the service and share the basic software. In other cases, charging for the software is more trouble than its worth. Many open-source teams achieved success before the influx of capital and hype. They relied on the freedom to cooperate, and that's often much more valuable. The forces of openness have made surprising strides in the last 10 years. The work of a bunch of hobbyists, teenagers and programmers working in their spare time now often eclipses the work of the biggest companies and their proprietary software. I.B.M. tried for years to dethrone Microsoft with its OS/ 2 operating system. Now the company is backing Linux. This success scares the dinosaur companies that rely upon intellectual property laws to protect their earnings. If they can't deliver the best solutions to the people themselves, they're reaching to the courts to ensure that no one will supplant them. The lawsuit against the DVD-playing program, for instance, will do more to stop new companies that want to play legitimately purchased DVD movies than pirates. The lawsuits against Napster may be aimed at piracy, but they could also stomp out small record labels and unsigned artists who want their music to float freely through the world of Napster. But the big labels want to shut down the entire service. If the current laws are not strong enough, they want new laws that will stop people from making some kinds of open technology. They imagine a world where technology will control and limit people instead of liberating them. Historically, new technologies that appear to undermine old business models have not been as dangerous as they seemed at first. The photocopier was supposed to destroy the book market, but now the bookstores are bigger than before. The VCR was supposed to destroy network television, but now we have more networks than before. Ever since Gutenberg replaced the monks in the scriptorium, the new technology for copying has made artists and the companies that employ them richer than ever. The notion of opening the source code to the world | Whose Intellectual Property Is It, Anyway? The Open Source War |
1224995_0 | A new study finds that estrogen replacement therapy, which doctors have long hoped will prevent heart disease in postmenopausal women, does nothing to slow the disease's progression in those whose arteries have already been partly blocked by it. The study is being reported in today's issue of The New England Journal of Medicine. But another study, in the same issue, cites the hormone therapy as a factor -- along with beneficial diet, exercise and avoidance of tobacco -- in the decline of heart disease among women. An editorial accompanying the studies says women will not know whether hormone therapy protects the heart until larger studies are completed in several years. As many as 10 million American women take estrogen replacement therapy; Premarin, an estrogen made by Wyeth-Ayerst Laboratories, is the nation's best-selling prescription drug. The drug was approved for the treatment of menopausal symptoms, like hot flashes, and for the management of osteoporosis, but there has also been a widespread belief among doctors and women that it will protect against heart disease, the leading killer of American women. Heart disease is rare among premenopausal women, but its incidence begins rising in middle age. In one study being reported today, investigators injected women's coronary arteries with a dye and then examined the arteries with X-rays. They found that the women's arteries gradually narrowed as the three-year study progressed, whether or not they took estrogen. Dr. David M. Herrington, a cardiovascular epidemiologist at Wake Forest University School of Medicine, the lead author of the new artery study, said he began the work in hopes of confirming the belief that estrogen would help women with heart disease. A study reported previously, called HERS, had already shown discouraging results, but some researchers wondered whether the reason might be that the women in it took either a combination of estrogen and methoxyprogesterone, or a placebo. Some experts proposed that if the women took estrogen alone, the hormone would protect their hearts. So the 309 women in Dr. Herrington's study were randomly assigned to take estrogen alone, estrogen plus methoxyprogesterone, or a placebo. ''I was still hopeful that there would be an underlying effect on the progression of atherosclerosis,'' Dr. Herrington said. Now, he said, he thinks the question has been answered. ''I think this study, coupled with the HERS trial, is a pretty compelling combination of evidence showing that estrogen replacement therapy is not effective | Estrogen Heart Study Proves Discouraging |
1224969_0 | The Senate Commerce Committee is planning to hold hearings on the Firestone tires that were the subject of a safety recall, a Congressional aide said today. The committee, which oversees regulation of interstate commerce and highway safety, will convene hearings next month to examine the recent problems that caused Bridgestone/Firestone Inc. to recall around 6.5 million tires, the staff member said. Senator John McCain of Arizona, chairman of the committee, requested the hearings, the aide said. The safety problems have continued through the recall. Two more deaths were attributed to the faulty tires after an accident on Aug. 16 in Wyoming. Garry Lynn Meek, 56, of Farmersville, Calif., and his granddaughter, Amy Lynn Meek, 13, were killed when the left rear tire tread peeled off, causing their Ford Explorer to skid and roll over. The tire was a Firestone ATX 75R15, one of the brands that were recalled. Government data has indicated that virtually all the recent deaths linked to Firestone tires now being recalled occurred when sport utility vehicles, most of them Ford Explorers, rolled over after the tires failed. The committee will invite a number of representatives, possibly including federal transportation safety officials; Jacques A. Nassar, the president of the Ford Motor Company; and American executives of Firestone, although no invitations have been sent, the aide said. About two-thirds of the tires being recalled were put on S.U.V.'s and trucks made by Ford over the last decade. This month Firestone acknowledged that millions of tires made since 1991 were unusually prone to tread peeling, and it now faces 50 lawsuits and a federal investigation into accusations that 46 deaths and 80 injuries are linked to the tires. | Senate Panel Plans to Hold Tire Hearings |
1220097_0 | While sitting in a coffee shop the other day, I had an epiphany. Surrounded by men and women cuddling their cell phones, it struck me that these little metallic instruments are this millennium's cigarette. Just a few years ago my fellow coffee drinkers would have been smoking. Back then, too, Manhattanites would have strolled through the city holding cigarettes. Now they are clutching phones. Between courses, and at the end of a meal, folks used to light up. Now it is their little machines that light up. Before the cell phone, theatergoers rushed to the lobby during intermissions simply for a quick smoke. Now they hurry out to shout (the ''cell yell,'' it's called) into their indispensable gadgets. What is it that makes these tiny devices so irresistible? It may be that, like cigarettes, cell phones provide something to do with one's hands. Needless to say, like nicotine, the machines are addictive. There is also the unfortunate matter of pollution -- loud talk -- less lethal than second-hand smoke, but a toxic irritant nonetheless. (''Hell,'' Sartre famously wrote, ''is other people.'') And there are those periodic reports that the radiation the cell phones emit may be hazardous to your physical health as well. Since, however, wireless companies offer hundreds of free minutes, there is abundant motivation to go ahead and chatter away, whatever the risks. It is possible, of course, that these ubiquitous toys are a passing fad, like leisure suits, the macarena and cigar bars. Remember when kids used to inflict their boom boxes on bystanders in public places? Eventually a code of etiquette (coupled with city ordinances) caught up with the technology, and it is rare now for anyone not in a car to ''share'' his or her music. Perhaps at some point soon it will be generally acknowledged that rehearsing one's thoughts over the phone, like flossing one's teeth or clipping one's nails (or, some would maintain, blowing smoke), is more appropriately attended to in private. Such a humane development, at least to these aggravated ears, would ring a gloriously welcome bell. Joel Conarroe, a literary critic, is president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. | Addicted to Talking |
1220082_0 | To the Editor: Re ''Pupils Prosper From an Investment'' (news article, Aug. 2): Not to rain on Merrill Lynch's parade -- it ought to be lauded for making college a financially viable option for hundreds of students -- but isn't it a sad commentary on our society that it takes such extraordinary efforts to make college a reality for aspiring high school graduates? Economic barriers impede the paths of far too many qualified, motivated high school graduates. With an economy that increasingly demands a college degree for so many jobs, we cannot afford to limit college admission only to those from well-to-do families who can bear the costs of tuition or to the lucky few who receive generous scholarships. Whether through increased scholarship money, enhanced tax credits or other creative solutions, we must not cap the life opportunities of our young people, who so enthusiastically want, and so desperately need, a college education. ROBERT RUBIN Legal Director, Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights San Francisco, Aug. 3, 2000 | The Dream of College |
1235638_0 | Small wonder the American Society of Civil Engineers has endorsed ''Building Big,'' PBS's five-part documentary series about bridges, domes, skyscrapers, dams and tunnels. These terrific programs trumpet the scientific derring-do of the creators without ignoring their equally compelling quixotic foolhardiness. There's even more bravado and pathos here than in the just-finished Olympics. While this series, which begins tonight, is largely a testament to engineering and architectural ingenuity and ambition, the producers don't ignore monumental disasters or the practical and ethical issues raised by our penchant for always building bigger. They dutifully observe that workers, not designers, generally paid the highest costs, and that for many people progress has meant displacement, like the ancient Nubian village that had to make way for the Aswan Dam in Egypt. The many interviews include a conversation with the author and environmentalist Marc Reisner, who died in July. He declares: ''I would say that next to nuclear power, dams are the biggest Faustian bargain that mankind has struck with nature. They have allowed us to settle places that couldn't be settled otherwise. They've created an outstanding amount of wealth, of economic wealth. On the other hand they've had terrible environmental impacts.'' ''Building Big'' treats civilization's giant manmade structures ancient and modern as wellsprings of history, politics, religion and psychology. The programs are full of grand themes and exciting images of awesome edifices above and below ground, like the Hoover Dam, the Channel Tunnel connecting Britain and France, the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur. Yet it shows equal respect for the nuts and bolts, as well as stone and iron and suspension cables. In the third episode, about skyscrapers, we learn that by initially bolting together critical parts of the Citicorp Center instead of welding them, to save money, the builders put the 900-foot-tall structure in danger of being blown over by a strong storm. (Scarily, this was remedied at the architect's urging only after construction was completed.) On tonight's program, about bridges, we see the evolution from the stone arches built by the Romans to the thousands of pencil-thin wires wrapped together that hold up the Golden Gate Bridge. Don't worry if you can't define ''cantilever'' or distinguish a pylon from a pier. The series has the perfect guide, David Macaulay, author of ''The Way Things Work,'' whose calm voice and deceptively simple drawings can seduce vehement technophobes into minimal understanding of engineering concepts without | Why What Goes Up Doesn't Fall Down |
1235660_2 | the recall to have much impact. Of course, unlike Kraft's product, the Taco Bell shells did not test positive for the genetically altered corn known as StarLink, which has only been approved for animals. But that may be beside the point. Analysts say the restaurant's clientele, overwhelmingly male and usually between the ages of 16 and 29, is primarily worried about what the industry refers to as ''the deep discount'' -- and little else. ''If you're eating at Taco Bell, health consciousness is not high on your list of concerns,'' said John Ivankoe, an analyst for J. P. Morgan. ''I don't think this is going to change the eating habits of its customers.'' Even Tricon, which also owns KFC (the former Kentucky Fried Chicken) and Pizza Hut, admits that its customers generally come to Taco Bell for the array of ''indulgent craving foods,'' and has learned that tampering with the menu can be costly. While the rest of the industry is growing at roughly 3 percent, sales at Taco Bell have been particularly flat this year, and at times have dipped as much as 8 percent. Mitchell J. Speiser, a Lehman Brothers analyst, attributes the chain's sub-par performance to the introduction of higher-end foods, priced ''north of a dollar,'' that have alienated some of its cost-conscious constituency. ''Genetically modified products do increase yields and lower costs,'' Mr. Speiser said. ''So, if it were to lower prices, I think Taco Bell customers would be all for it.'' Many believe Taco Bell is somewhat insulated from any serious fallout because it has very little presence abroad, where consumers have heightened concerns about genetically engineered food. KFC is popular in Asia and Pizza Hut is prevalent in Europe, where the debate rages hottest, but fewer than 300 of Taco Bell's 7,000 restaurants are outside the United States. Environmental groups in this country worry about consumer apathy, and stress that as many as one in four people have food allergies and could have a reaction to proteins like the one found in StarLink. Yet, they say the F.D.A. has no process for testing ingredients before they come to market, leaving that responsibility to the food companies. ''The big concern is that this illegal corn is in the food supply,'' said Matt Rand, biotechnology campign manager for the National Environmental Trust. ''We're expecting that we're going to find more of it in other food products.'' | Taco Bell's Core Customers Seem Undaunted by Shell Scare |
1235651_4 | treatment being developed jointly by Genentech, Novartis and start-up Tanox Inc. In clinical trials, some asthmatic children using it have been able to reduce or eliminate steroids, which have undesirable side effects. Another is Imclone's C225 for colorectal cancer and head and neck cancer. ''I have patients who respond to it after they failed to respond or stopped responding to standard treatments,'' said Dr. Leonard B. Saltz of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in Manhattan, who is leading one test of the drug. While about half the antibodies in development are aimed at cancer, others are being tested against psoriasis, vision deterioration, bacterial infections, heart attacks, stroke and rejection of transplanted organs. One company is testing an antibacterial antibody to prevent tooth decay. Another is testing one to reduce the severity of allergic reactions to peanuts. And while most drugs use antibodies alone, drug companies are now also starting to combine antibodies with chemical toxins or radioactive isotopes to enhance their ability to kill cancer cells. The first antibody linked to a chemical toxin, Mylotarg from American Home Products Corporation's, for treatment of acute myeloid leukemia, was approved by the Food and Drug Administration in May. Zevalin, the drug used to treat Mr. Belmont's lymphoma, is expected to come up for approval next year, according to Idec Pharmaceuticals, its manufacturer. Zevalin is vying with Bexxar, made by Coulter Pharmaceutical Inc., to become the first approved antibody with a radioactive warhead. The technique for producing monoclonal antibodies was developed in 1975 by Dr. Cesar Milstein and Dr. Georges Kohler at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, England. A mouse is injected with the target protein causing the mouse to develop thousands of antibodies to it. B-cells, which are blood cells that produce antibodies, are removed from the mouse's spleen. Each B-cell makes only one type of antibody and a promising one can be chosen for making a drug. But because B-cells by themselves cannot survive long outside the body, they are fused to tumor cells that live indefinitely, forming cells known as hybridomas, which can produce the particular antibody nonstop. Since all the antibodies come from the clone of a single B-cell, they are uniform and called monoclonal. The accomplishment earned the two scientists the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1984. The specificity of the antibodies in seeking out a single protein made them immediately useful in diagnostics. One early use | The Birth, Death and Rebirth of a Novel Disease-Fighting Tool |
1235690_0 | The violence that has convulsed the Middle East since late last week has given Israelis and Palestinians alike a frightening replay of the bloodshed that scarred the region for so many years. The question now is whether the fighting will prove to be a temporary setback in the drive to make peace or a terminal point in negotiations. The recent experience of Northern Ireland suggests that violent outbursts need not upend a determined effort to settle a prolonged conflict, but heroic work will be required by Israeli, Palestinian and American leaders to save the Middle East peace talks. That can begin at the planned meeting in Paris on Wednesday of Prime Minister Ehud Barak of Israel, Yasir Arafat, the Palestinian leader, and Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. There must be a quick cessation of violence. Mr. Arafat and Mr. Barak should take urgent measures to halt the clashes that have left at least 48 dead and hundreds wounded. The precipitating incident was a provocative and irresponsible visit by the Likud leader, Ariel Sharon, last Thursday to Jerusalem's Temple Mount, the site of two of Islam's holiest mosques. But the fighting has now taken on a life of its own. Yesterday angry Palestinian militants attacked Israeli troops and civilians across Jerusalem, the West Bank, Gaza and Arab-inhabited areas of Israel with stones, firebombs and sniper fire. Israeli troops responded with automatic weapons and armor-piercing missiles. With most of the current violence being initiated by the Palestinians, Mr. Arafat bears the greater responsibility for urging restraint. But Mr. Barak must also take steps to damp down the conflict. Halting the bloodshed must take priority over apportioning blame. Mr. Arafat needs to call unambiguously on the Palestinian population to halt the violence and trust him to take its grievances to the negotiating table. Undoubtedly there is spontaneous anger among many Palestinians that Mr. Arafat will find difficult to calm. Television footage of a Palestinian fifth grader dying in his father's arms has fueled anti-Israeli sentiment. But if Mr. Arafat hopes to negotiate with Israel as the leader of Palestinian society, he must lead. In particular, he needs to enforce greater discipline on the armed Palestinian police force that has wavered between trying to hold back Palestinian crowds and exchanging fire with Israeli troops. He must also rein his youthful armed supporters, who have been at the center of the recent violence. Mr. Barak | Conflagration in the Middle East |
1237444_0 | For two years, Arthur L. Holden has led an unusual consortium of pharmaceutical companies aimed at finding genetic differences among individuals. Now, with that effort winding down, Mr. Holden is starting a new company aimed at helping people keep such genetic information private. The new company, First Genetic Trust Inc., bills itself as the first ''genetic bank.'' It will hold samples of people's DNA in secure accounts and give out the genetic information for medical research and diagnosis, but only with the person's permission. Mr. Holden, 47, has been the chairman and chief executive of the SNP Consortium, which has been searching for differences in the genetic code among individuals that determine traits such as eye color or susceptibility to certain diseases. SNP, pronounced ''snip,'' stands for single nucleotide polymorphism, a difference of one letter out of the 3.1 billion letters in the genetic code. Drug companies and research institutions are now trying to recruit thousands of people to donate DNA samples in efforts to determine which SNP's contribute to which diseases. But Mr. Holden said that people are reluctant to provide their DNA for research or diagnosis for fear that information about their susceptibility to a particular disease would not be kept private and could be used to deny them employment or insurance. ''Individuals are not participating in a way we would like them to participate in this research,'' he said. ''Without a doubt the top issue on individuals' minds is how these data are going to be handled.'' First Genetic Trust, he said, will act as an intermediary between researchers and patients. It will keep samples of individuals' DNA and provide the results of the analysis to the researchers, but not the individual genetic data. And patients in the future will not have to get their genes tested each time they need a drug prescription. The doctor, with the patient's permission, would be able to get the answers needed from the patient's DNA account. Whether this will allay patients' fears is unknown. It is also unclear yet whether companies, research institutions or health insurers will pay for such services, since First Genetic does not expect individuals to pay for their own accounts. First Genetic Trust, based in Chicago, is being co-founded by David Wang, previously head of genomics and bioinformatics at Motorola, and Andrea Califano, formerly director of the computational biology center at I.B.M., which will design First | New Venture Aims to Guard Genetic Data |
1237540_42 | 602-P. I'm going to actually tell you what it is. CLINTON -- I have no idea. KRAMER -- I'm going to tell you what it is. Under the bill that's now before Congress, the U.S. Postal Service would be able to bill e-mail users 5 cents for each e-mail they send, even though the post office provides no service. They want this to help recoup losses of about $230 million a year because of the proliferation of e-mails. But if you send just 10 e-mails a day, that would cost consumers an extra $180 a year. So I'm wondering if you would vote for this bill, and do you see the Internet as a source of revenue for the government in the years to come? CLINTON -- You know, based on your description Marcia, I wouldn't vote for that bill. It sounds burdensome and not justifiable. . . . I have been a supporter of the moratorium on taxation on the Internet. I think that we do have to let loose this extraordinary communication device and see how far it can go in connecting people up. And I'd like to monitor this closely and take a look at it in the time when the moratorium expires. But it is important that we do everything we can to build the infrastructure of New York to take advantage of the Internet. I have been all over this state, to all 62 counties, and I've been in countless schools. And some of them are the best in the world and the most highly wired, and others are not. If we're going to take advantage of the new information economy, then we have to be sure that all of our citizens and particularly our children are well prepared. That's why I have proposed high-tech infrastructure bonds as part of my economic plans that would enable us to provide low-cost Internet access and broadband access around the state. It's why I hope that we'll do a better job in providing the computers and Internet access to all of our children in all of our schools so that no child gets left behind. And it's why we need to close the digital divide throughout the state. . . . KRAMER -- Mr. Lazio, your rebuttal? LAZIO -- I am absolutely opposed to this. This is an example of the government's greedy hand and trying to take | CAMPAIGN 2000: The New York Senate Debate; Excerpts From Second Debate Between Mrs. Clinton and Lazio |
1237474_4 | physical toll, or to take home a piece of it if they can, as if it were a trophy.'' Indeed, the cord has been a source of conflict between church authorities and worshipers almost since it was first used in 1855 to pull the cart carrying the image of the Virgin out of the mud. In 1926, a new bishop here, offended by body contact between the sexes during the procession and hoping to modernize the observances, ordered the cord removed, but relented after street disturbances and political pressure. ''The Cirio is something that emerged independently of the church hierarchy, and there has always been a tension between the objectives of the authorities and those of the people,'' said Heraldo Maues, who teaches social anthropology at the Federal University of Para here. ''The religious and civic authorities try to control the ceremonies for their own ends of evangelization and the promotion of tourism, but the people always have their own ideas and usually win out.'' While the essence of the festival remains largely unchanged, the faithful have found new forms of expression that are quickly incorporated into ritual. Since the 1980's, for instance, the formal celebrations have begun on Saturday with a morning-long procession down the Amazon River that draws dozens of vessels decked out in balloons and bunting. Once the Sunday procession is over, it is also customary for the faithful to return home for a traditional meal of duck with yucca. Relatives and friends exchange gaily painted wooden toy versions of animals, boats, houses, cars and other objects, known collectively as miriti, after the palm tree from which they are carved. ''This is like Christmas for us, and just as important,'' said Maria da Conceicao Contente, 60, who comes here every year from a small town a day's boat ride away. ''It's not just an expression of faith and hope that you wait and work for all year, but also an occasion for families to get together.'' Such rituals and the intensity of religious fervor surrounding the Cirio are a reminder that ''the Middle Ages are still present among us and have not completely disappeared,'' Dr. Maues said. ''They can appear in practices, ideas and beliefs when least expected, and no matter who tries to contain such manifestations, I don't think they can, because the people continue to invent and create the legends and symbols they deem important.'' | Belem Journal; In Acts of Faith on Amazon, Middle Ages Live On |
1243397_1 | deepening relationship between the two countries. President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela said before the visit that ''we have no choice but to form an axis of power'' with Cuba and other like-minded countries that ''permits us to relate to the rest of the world.'' Mr. Chavez returned repeatedly to that theme after Mr. Castro's arrival. ''This is not just a matter of friendship,'' Mr. Chavez, 46, a former army colonel who describes himself as a revolutionary, said on Sunday on his weekly radio program with Mr. Castro, 74, sitting at his side. ''It is a geopolitical vision of the integration of our peoples.'' Today, he added, ''I think we have proven that our two peoples are one and the same.'' The oil accord is virtually identical to one that Venezuela signed this month with 12 other Caribbean and Central America countries. They have been given 15 years to repay, with a 2 percent interest rate and prices as low as $20 a barrel, compared with the current price of just over $30. As with the other countries, Cuba will be allowed to repay Venezuela with a mixture of money, goods and services. A supplementary agreement signed today talks of Cuba, whose reserves of hard currency are limited, exporting vaccines and sugar technology to Venezuela, along with doctors and up to 3,000 physical education teachers and sports coaches and trainers, who might be unemployed if they remained in Cuba. Since the 1980's, Venezuela and Mexico have been partners in an arrangement that supplies oil at special prices to the small nations of Central America and the Caribbean. But Latin American diplomats here said Mexico had rebuffed a Venezuelan initiative to let Cuba join the group, fearing that Cuba might not be able to pay. In addition, the diplomats said, Venezuela fears that the new conservative government of Vicente Fox that will take office on Dec. 1 in Mexico may be even less sympathetic to Mr. Castro. Those concerns, combined with Mr. Chavez's desire to use oil to make Venezuela a regional power, led to the initiatives. Venezuela is the third largest oil exporter. Its main customer is the United States, which buys 1.4 million barrels a day, or about half Venezuela's total production. In essence, the accord today lets Mr. Chavez use the increase in oil revenues earned in the United States to subsidize consumption in Cuba, a notion that is | Venezuela Will Sell Cuba Low-Priced Oil |
1243494_4 | 1999, when United States warships, for the first time in the decades since Yemen fell into chaos and civil war, began using Aden for brief refueling visits. Beyond that, the twin windows in the front of the flat, looking out from the sparse, felt-carpeted room that did double duty as a living space and bedroom, gave a view far across the harbor to the west. Straining their eyes, they could just about see the point on the horizon six miles away where, on a muddy inlet beside a bridge leading to the outlying district of Little Aden. That is where the suicide bombers were seen launching a small fiberglass boat into the water and disappearing out into the bay about 30 minutes before the bombing stopped the clocks on the Cole's bridge at 11:18 a.m. on Oct. 12. In effect, this gave the men a view of the entire route the bombing plan required, from the inlet across the Bay of Aden, over the open water to the point where the bombers skirted the end of a long man-made promontory that is the base for Aden's new container port, then onward down the flank of the container port to the point where the Cole was moored. From what Navy officials have disclosed, this meant that the bombers would have been able to watch, and time, at least half a dozen American warships that visited Aden for refueling between June and October, including an identical ship to the Cole, the Barry, which visited Aden in late August. From the visit to Rock Hill, and neighbors' descriptions of the two men who lived in the hideout, it seems possible, even highly probable, that the residents were the very men who carried out the suicide attack, after first renting the Rock Hill flat and the two safe houses in Little Aden where the fiberglass skiff used in the attack was mated to a huge homemade bomb. Whether there were others who helped conceive or carry out the plan, beyond a carpenter and a welder who have been arrested, and whether the bombers acted in an isolated cell or were part of a wider conspiracy, is something F.B.I. and Yemeni investigators are still struggling to determine, American officials say. Descriptions given by Rock Hill neighbors -- of Mr. Musawah and of his companion, who never gave a name that any of the neighbors could | Ship Attack Suspects Seemed Out of Place |
1243417_0 | Rod Autrey, a Republican city councilman here, is a supporter of the death penalty in a state where it has long been entrenched. But even in reiterating that support, Mr. Autrey urged the Council in September to approve a resolution favoring a moratorium on executions in North Carolina. The Council adopted the measure, which calls for a two-year halt while steps are taken to ensure that capital punishment is administered justly. ''It's apparent to me that those with little resources are not going to get the same treatment as others,'' Mr. Autrey said. With a statewide moratorium campaign being waged by clergy, civic leaders, lawyers and citizens' groups, Charlotte became the seventh municipality in North Carolina, and the largest, to pass such a resolution since mid-1999. The latest was Greensboro, where the City Council acted in early October with the support of three members who are death-penalty advocates. The North Carolina cities joined more than two dozen other municipalities, including Philadelphia, Atlanta, Baltimore and San Francisco, that have also adopted moratorium resolutions. None of the measures have the force of law: capital punishment is a matter for the state legislatures, not local governments, and no legislature is actively considering abolishing its death penalty. But the votes reflect an important shift in public attitudes, experts say. A quarter-century after the Supreme Court allowed reinstatement of the death penalty, vast numbers of people, including elected officials, are expressing doubt about how it is administered. Nearly two-thirds of Americans approve of capital punishment, according to polls. But that is the lowest level in 20 years and a significant decline from a high of about 75 percent in 1994. In addition, even the current figure drops further, to about 55 percent, when the polls offer life imprisonment without parole as an alternative. One recent national poll, conducted jointly by Republican and Democratic organizations, showed that when reminded about cases in which death row inmates had ultimately been released on the basis of DNA evidence, 64 percent of Americans favored a temporary halt to executions while steps are taken to ensure that the system works fairly. Statewide polls around the country show similar numbers. Even some of capital punishment's staunchest defenders concede that there is demand for reforms. One prominent death penalty advocate, Paul Cassell, a professor at the University of Utah College of Law, said that ''the public is obviously on board for fixing | Support for a Moratorium In Executions Gets Stronger |
1243450_1 | Bhaba Atomic Research Center in Bombay that the five nuclear weapons tests India conducted in 1998 were ''completely successful'' and gave India the ability ''to design and fabricate weapons from low yield to around 200 kilotons.'' Some experts in India and abroad have doubted the efficacy of the 1998 nuclear tests. Celia W. Dugger (NYT) SRI LANKA: RENEWED CURFEW -- The government reimposed a curfew in two of the country's central tea-growing districts as tensions between the majority Sinhalese population and the Tamil minority continued to run high. A Sinhalese mob massacred 27 detained Tamil rebels on Wednesday. Rioting broke out Sunday after the funeral of one of the Tamils. Celia W. Dugger (NYT) LAOS: REMAINS RETURNED TO U.S. -- The government announced that it had given the United States the remains of four Americans listed as missing in action during the Vietnam War. The remains were handed over to American officials in a weekend ceremony the Laotian capital, Vientiane, the KPL news agency reported. They will be taken to the Army's Central Identification Lab in Hawaii for forensic tests. (AP) PHILIPPINES: LEADERS' RIFT -- The vice president, Gloria Arroyo, who leads the opposition and is next in line for the presidency, rejected President Joseph Estrada's offer to head an economic panel to shore up investor confidence shattered by a bribery scandal. She also turned down Mr. Estrada's invitation to meet with the National Security Council to ease the political crisis. ''I cannot accept the position that he offered me,'' Ms. Arroyo said on television. ''It will not help restore credibility.'' (Agence France-Presse) EUROPE IRELAND: 'MAD COW' FEARS -- Residents of Galway, fearful of a contaminated water supply from ''mad cow'' disease, have dug up the carcass of an infected animal and returned it to its owner's farmyard. The opposition Labor Party environment spokesman, Eamon Gilmore, described the burial as ''effectively poisoning'' the water and said it went against advice on the disease given by a government scientific advisory panel last summer. The executive engineer in Galway County Council's environment department, John McMyler, has threatened to sue Ireland's Department of Agriculture under environmental pollution laws. (Agence France-Presse) TURKEY: INFLATED CENSUS? -- A week after Turks were confined to their homes for a daylong national census, government officials are trying to figure out how the count came up with five million more people than estimated. The population was supposed to be | World Briefing |
1237599_0 | Could it be that aging, like puberty and menopause, is a programmed life-cycle event set off by hormonal signals from the brain? A new study suggests that in the laboratory roundworm, and maybe people too, youthfulness is maintained by hormonal signals from the brain. When the neurons that transmit the signal suffer damage from the wear and tear of normal metabolism, the youthfulness signal fails, and the body's tissues all lapse into senescence at about the same time. The theory that aging is a programmed, hormonal event has been proposed before, but the new study, by Dr. Gary Ruvkun and colleagues at Harvard Medical School, seems to present the most detailed support of it so far. They focused on a gene that is well known for the curious fact that roundworms seem to be a lot better off without it, at least in the protected conditions of the laboratory. When biologists disable the gene, worms live up to three times as long as usual, the equivalent of a person's living to age 240. The gene's role is to specify a kind of protein known as a receptor; embedded in the membrane of cells, the receptor waits to be activated by the worm's equivalent of insulin and then transmits the hormone's message to the cell's metabolic machinery. The worms live longer when the receptor is dysfunctional because when cells are deaf to insulin signaling they burn less glucose and make fewer free radicals, a cell-damaging byproduct of glucose metabolism. Confirming the link between free radicals and life span, a research team at the University of Manchester in England and elsewhere reported last month that they could make worms live more than 40 percent longer by dosing them with a drug that mops up free radicals. The drug mimics and enhances the action of natural enzymes that dispose of free radicals. Though worms and people differ, they share many fundamental processes, and the link between glucose metabolism, free radicals and aging may be one of them. Caloric restriction -- a healthy and normal diet but with 30 percent fewer calories than usual -- is the one intervention that reliably extends the life span of laboratory rats and mice. Presumably burning fewer calories reduces free radicals and extends life span. It is not yet known if caloric restriction would increase people's life span but preliminary trials with monkeys look promising. But by what | Scientists Say Aging May Result From Brain's Hormonal Signals |
1237685_0 | NEW YORK BROOKLYN: MAN SHOOTS INTRUDERS Two would-be robbers were thwarted yesterday when the owner of a Brooklyn card shop drew a pistol and shot them both, the police said. The authorities said the owner, Ming Chen, 43, fired several shots at the men inside Joe's Card Store on Cortelyou Road after one pointed a semiautomatic pistol at him and demanded money. One of the men, James Baylor, was in critical condition at Kings County Hospital Center with four gunshot wounds. The other, Antoine Miles, was struck once in the abdomen and was in stable condition, the authorities said. Both men were charged with attempted robbery and criminal possession of a weapon. Mr. Chen, who the police said used a legally registered pistol, was not injured or charged. C. J. Chivers (NYT) GARDEN CITY: CURB OF COUNTY EXECUTIVE URGED A referendum on whether to restrict the Nassau County executive's ability to award certain contracts without competitive bidding will be placed before voters on Nov. 7. If adopted, the change would make what is now a governmental agreement into a matter of law: the County Legislature's Rules Committee can approve personal service contracts, like those with law or computer firms, which are often worth $25,000 or more. The same arrangement is now in effect as an an agreement between Judith A. Jacobs, the Legislature's presiding officer, and the county executive, Thomas S. Gulotta, above, said Darren Bloch, Ms. Jacobs's chief of staff. Al Baker (NYT) ALBANY: 25 MILLION ROTTING TIRES Legislation signed late last week by Gov. George E. Pataki is the state's latest attempt to solve a decades-old problem: what to do with 25 million tires rotting in illegal dumps. The problem has become more urgent because the dumps are also prime breeding grounds for mosquitoes. West Nile virus, which has sickened at least 17 people in New York City and New Jersey and killed one this year, is carried by mosquitoes. The dumps could become larger as a result of the recent nationwide recall of 6.5 million Firestone tires. The law creates the State Council on Scrap Tire Management, which will give grants to businesses to recycle dumped tires. (AP) NEW JERSEY WILDWOOD: REDEVELOPMENT PLAN For years preservationists have championed the pink flamingos and plastic palms of the 1950's motels in the struggling beach resort town of Wildwood. Yesterday, the city officially embraced its low-brow culture by presenting a | METRO BRIEFING |
1242404_8 | different areas of the students' brains would light up depending on what kind of dilemma they were asked to solve. Mr. Greene said he could not discuss the findings because the study was under consideration for publication in a major scientific journal, but he described them as promising. ''When a technology comes along that allows us not just to ask questions but to answer them, it's crazy not to use it,'' Mr. Greene said. ''If I'd known more about brain imagining, I might have gone into neuroscience instead of philosophy.'' In a Moral Quandary: Well, Is It Yes or No? Professors at Princeton University are using brain scans to try to figure out why people make what appear to be morally inconsistent choices. In one experiment they asked subjects to respond to a classic moral conundrum known as the Trolley Problem, which is explained below. In the first scenario, you are at the wheel of a runaway trolley quickly approaching a fork in the tracks. On the tracks extending to the left is a group of five railway workmen. On the tracks extending to the right is a single railway workman. If you do nothing, the trolley will proceed to the left, causing the deaths of the five workmen. The only way to avoid the deaths of these workmen is to hit a switch on your dashboard that will cause the trolley to proceed to the right, causing the death of the single workman. Is it appropriate for you to hit the switch to avert the deaths of the five workmen? In the second scenario, a runaway trolley is heading down the tracks toward five workmen who will be killed if the trolley proceeds on its present course. You are on a footbridge over the tracks, in between the approaching trolley and the five workmen. Next to you on this footbridge is a stranger who happens to be very large. The only way to save the lives of the five workmen is to push this stranger off the bridge and onto the tracks below, where his large body will stop the trolley. The stranger will die if you do this, but the workmen will be saved. Is it appropriate for you to push the stranger onto the tracks in order to save the five workmen? The majority of individuals respond ''yes'' to the first scenario and ''no'' to the second. | Looking for That Brain Wave Called Love; Humanities Experts Use M.R.I.'s to Scan the Mind for the Locus of the Finer Feelings |
1242426_0 | Novo Nordisk is designing better enzymes for detergents. Dow Chemical is trying to cut the cost of food processing. Pioneer Hi-Bred is aiming for better crops, and MedImmune a stronger version of its main drug. What these works-in-progress have in common is their reliance on a new version of a process that is as old as life itself -- evolution. The process, known as directed molecular evolution, aims to harness the principle of survival of the fittest -- but at a microscopic level in a test tube rather than in the jungle, and in weeks rather than in millenniums. The result, proponents say, could be a whole panoply of improved drugs and industrial chemicals, and the creation of a new business sector. Three companies that specialize in directed molecular evolution -- Maxygen, Diversa and Applied Molecular Evolution -- have gone public in the last year. So has Genencor International, an enzyme company that uses directed evolution as one of its tools. Directed evolution works by making numerous mutations in a gene that produces a particular protein. These mutated genes are put into bacteria to make the mutated proteins, which are then tested to see how well they perform a given task. The genes for the best proteins can be mutated again and again in hopes of evolving an even better protein. This is somewhat similar to the breeding of crops and livestock, but in this case it is molecules, not living things, that are bred. ''You can do better than nature,'' said James Young, executive vice president for research and development at Med Immune, a biotechnology company in Gaithersburg, Md. MedImmune is one company benefiting from directed evolution, which is also called molecular breeding. The company's two-year-old drug, Synagis, is an antibody used to prevent a serious infection in infants from respiratory syncytial virus. But treatment requires five injections over five months at a cost of $5,000, limiting Synagis's use to those most at risk -- mainly premature infants. If the drug could be made more potent, reducing the cost and number of injections, the market could be expanded to other infants. So MedImmune turned to Applied Molecular Evolution, which evolved several improved versions, the best of which is 30 times stronger than Synagis. MedImmune expects to begin clinical trials next year. For all its promise, however, directed evolution still remains largely unproved. Only three products -- all laundry detergent | Selling Evolution in Ways Darwin Never Imagined; If You Can Build a Better Gene, Investors May Come |
1242493_2 | harbor-front at the Cole's hull. Remarks like that one, from old and young, from men calloused from lifetimes spent stevedoring to unemployed youngsters playing at open-air pool tables, reflect a perception of something frequently debated in war colleges in the United States. A cause of sneaking pride in the developing world as much as it is a source of anguish in the West, it is called ''asymmetrical warfare,'' or simply the potential of small ideologically impassioned groups to surprise and overwhelm an enemy with far greater technology and firepower. It is an ancient concept, tracing its origins as far back as the Old Testament account of David's killing Goliath. Long before the Cole, the principle had forced its way back into the forefront of concern among American security and intelligence specialists after a decade of terrorist bombings of American targets that have caused widespread death and destruction. Sirah, overlooked by an ancient Arab fort, teems with lithe quick-eyed fishermen with boot-brush mustaches who go to sea in cotton skirts called futas, the villager's everyday dress. At dawn and dusk, they shuttle from their boats to a market, clutching the day's catch of tuna and snapper, as well as rarer species found in the tropical waters between Aden and the Horn of Africa. After haggling with fish traders, the boatmen settle down, cross-legged, for sugary tea and gossip at Al Sayaad, a fishermen's cafe. For a visitor at Sirah, a tentative deal to buy a 25-foot houri along with a 75-horsepower outboard was completed in the time needed to drink a single cup of tea. After hasty negotiations, the price was set at 925,000 rials, or $5,150. The seller, Muhammad Awad, seemed unconcerned about the buyer's identity or purpose. ''It'll be no problem,'' he said. ''You want the boat, you have it. You can be fishing in an hour.'' Not everything in the Cole attack can have been so simple. American officials here have said the attackers were well financed, with patience to prepare the bombing over weeks or months and enough help to rent or buy at least five safe houses, a four-wheel-drive vehicle and a boat trailer and mobile telephones. Building the bomb was not child's play, either. American officials have said it was a highly sophisticated ''shaped charge,'' housed in a heavy steel that directed the blast with sufficient power to penetrate the Cole's half-inch reinforced steel hull, | How a Mighty Power Was Humbled by a Little Skiff |
1240705_0 | To the Editor: My wife and I just completed a two-week trip to South Korea. I found security lapses at Kimpo Airport in Seoul troubling, however. On a Korean Air domestic flight from Seoul to Cheju Island, one person was able to obtain boarding passes for our group of four adults. At no time were any of us asked for identification. I checked two bags but was not asked for my passport or any other form of identification. I found this surprising in a country that appears to be so security conscious -- where else do you see armed guards on the approaches to bridges at major river crossings in the capital city? ROBERT ATKINS McGaheysville, Va. A spokeswoman for Korean Air responds: Since the change in government several years ago, added measures have been taken by the government to increase security at all airports. At domestic airports, procedures to guard against terrorism and other threats include X-ray screening of checked baggage and security screening of all passengers and their carry-on baggage by walk-through metal detectors and X-ray machines at main departure gates. Korean Air's policy is to check the identification of all passengers for international flights. In the near future, the line plans to ask the government to implement passenger identification for domestic flights. | Air Security |
1241005_0 | In an atmosphere of unexpected harmony, officials representing nearly 150 governments laid the groundwork this week for a new global treaty that aims to control tobacco use and stamp out adolescent smoking. The World Health Organization is pushing for a strong international accord with the goal of finalizing a treaty by 2003. The United Nations agency, which has made eradicating smoking the centerpiece of its global public health strategy, wants the treaty to ban multinational tobacco corporations from advertising and sponsoring sports events, increase taxes to make cigarettes more expensive, combat cigarette smuggling and introduce measures to stem the rise in adolescent smoking. At the end of the six-day negotiating session, the chairman of the talks, Celso Amorim of Brazil, a tobacco exporter, warned that working out the details to come up with a treaty in two years might be tougher than it appeared right now. For example, he noted that most governments went on record to oppose cigarette smuggling. But, Mr. Amorim said, there was no unanimity on how to combat the problem of cigarettes pouring across borders. ''Some link this with harmonizing tax systems, but others say different measures are needed,'' he said. Such details will have to be worked out over the next two years, although antismoking groups worried openly whether consensus in Geneva might be eroded once officials faced lobbying by well-funded tobacco forces. Tobacco use, according to W.H.O. statistics, kills four million people annually and threatens to claim a yearly toll of 10 million by 2030. During the six-day opening negotiations, nations were almost unanimous in calling for a ban on tobacco advertising and sponsorships. Countries as diverse as Sri Lanka, Trinidad, Thailand and Turkey, another tobacco grower, supported barring advertising. The American government was in the middle. ''We stop short of supporting a complete ban,'' said top American negotiator, Dr. Thomas Novotny, of the Department of Health and Human Services. Such a prohibition would run afoul of free speech guarantees. Even though a few countries, including Australia, already bar such advertising, a blanket ban is likely to raise free trade concerns. Earlier this month, the European Court of Justice ruled against the European Union's planned ban on grounds it blocked free movement of goods and services. Countries have yet to grapple with complicated questions like whether the treaty would ban indirect advertisements, which include ''branding'' clothing and other stores with symbols like a camel | 150 Nations Move to Curb Tobacco Use |
1241030_2 | From the tour, and from disclosures in Washington on Friday, a new picture emerged of how it was possible for the attackers to sneak up on one of the Navy's newest and most sophisticated warships and detonate an explosion that, in addition to killing 17 crew members, wounded 39 others and did extensive damage. The boat ramp, one of two beside the bridge linking the Little Aden peninsula to the mainland, appeared to have given the attackers a perfect launching point. It is in a relatively quiet area of residential neighborhoods, a power plant and an oil storage depot, miles from Aden's main waterfront, but with a clear view of the entry to the harbor from the open sea. Aden's main docks are busy throughout the day, and Yemeni soldiers in camouflage uniforms guard every harbor entry, mainly to prevent the smuggling that has denied the government of this impoverished country crucial tax revenues. It appears that the attackers would have been able to enter the bay largely unobserved and for most of their journey toward the Cole not enter into the area likely to have been most closely watched by lookouts aboard the destroyer. On Friday, officials in Washington disclosed that the attack boat, described as a skiff, circled the Cole's bow from the west then slowly skirted the ship's port side, with the two men aboard the skiff waving to armed sailors on the Navy ship and the sailors waving back. The new account indicated that the destroyer -- which would have been about 20 minutes away by small boat from the launching point -- had been moored for nearly two hours when it was struck. Yemeni and American officials have concluded that the two men aboard the boat, who were reported to have stood up just as the explosion detonated, were killed in the blast. An F.B.I. forensic laboratory set up on board one of the ships in a United States Navy flotilla in Aden harbor is said to be examining fragments of human remains, clothing and fiberglass shards from the attack craft. President Saleh has said that Yemeni investigators learned that the two men who used the safe houses spoke with Saudi Arabian accents. Yemeni officials said that could mean that they either came from Saudi Arabia or from a Yemeni province, Hadhramaut, that abuts Saudi Arabia. These facts have centered attention on Osama bin Laden, | Yemeni and U.S. Teams Focus On Boat Used to Attack Cole |
1240937_0 | NEIGHBORHOOD REPORT | Fighting Words |
1241076_0 | The Senate decisively approved legislation relaxing nearly 40 years of sanctions on the sale of food to Cuba. The measure, endorsed 86 to 8, now seems assured of becoming law, but anti-Communist opponents of Fidel Castro's regime were successful in winning prohibitions on United States government credit and private financing for any sales, which will make it difficult, if not impossible, for food shipments to be made to Cuba in the near future. Eric Schmitt OCTOBER 15-21 | The Beginning of the End For the Cuba Boycott |
1240950_1 | Now based in Boston, Lobby 7 has obtained venture capital from i-Group, an affiliate of Softbank, and is now working to raise its next round of financing. Greg Y. Tseng, 20, a senior at Harvard, started FlyingChickens.com, a price-comparison Web site, after finding that he could save $40 by buying a physics textbook online. With the motto ''fly the coop,'' challenging students to abandon the campus's main bookstore, the Harvard Coop, Mr. Tseng introduced his site during the summer after his sophomore year. The company has since merged with Limespot, a Web portal for college students that was founded by a student at Cornell University; Mr. Tseng is now chief operating officer of Limespot. Alastair Rampell, 19, is a junior at Harvard and the chief executive of Rampell Software, which provides a variety of software products and consulting services to consumers and corporate clients. Mr. Rampell began writing computer programs when he was in the fourth grade, and his program designed to ensure a lasting connection to America Online won him a significant following during notorious network overload problems in late 1996. Around a conference-room table with Amy Harmon and Kevin McKenna of The Times on a sunny fall morning, they explored their experiences of entrepreneurial precocity. Following are excerpts of that wide-ranging conversation. The Lure of E-Commerce Q. -- What is it about the Internet that leads so many more young people to start companies? RAMPELL -- People in general take me more seriously because of the Internet. On the Internet, everything is age-blind. It's ethnic-blind. It's religion-blind. If you send an e-mail to somebody, you just see a company; if they are going to do a good job, that's all that matters. I don't think I would have gotten hired to do some things that I did at age 13, had they known I was 4 foot 11. I had only been doing this for about a year and a half, but they didn't know that. GUT -- When I started CollegiateMall, I was faking being a big company. The first four or five months, I had fake e-mail accounts, and I had six fake ''employees'' that would send e-mails to other people at companies. What's so neat about the Internet is that you can really front things -- not to deceive people, but, for example, when people wanted customer service, they'd e-mail ''customer service,'' and ''customer service'' | When That Corner Office Is Also a Dorm Room |
1241081_0 | No, the Internet isn't everywhere, but it will be by next year. That's when when Verizon Communications, the corporate successor to Bell Atlantic, sends out its new phone books, in which people will be able to list e-mail and personal Web page addresses, along with their phone numbers. The annual cost is $36 for each listing. Verizon plans to make the service available throughout its territory -- New York, New England and the mid-Atlantic state. ''E-mail is how people are communicating now,'' said MaryBeth Masterson, product manager of white pages for Verizon. OCTOBER 15-21 | Another Kind of E-Book |
1240604_0 | HAPPINESS, DEATH, AND THE REMAINDER OF LIFE By Jonathan Lear. 189 pp. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. $24. Philosophy and psychoanalysis are related as fusion is to fission. Philosophers seek commonalities, psychoanalysts idiosyncrasies. Ever since Plato, philosophers have been trying to answer the question ''What is a good life for a human being?'' This question presupposes that one size fits all -- that we all have the same built-in mechanism (''reason,'' ''human nature'') that steers us toward the same goal. We are all here for the same purpose. Philosophy will help us understand what that purpose is. It will do so by turning us away from appearance toward reality -- from the way the world looks from some merely subjective point of view to the way it objectively is, and thus from what merely seems good to what truly is good. Jonathan Lear, who is both a professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago and a psychoanalyst, started out as a commentator on Plato and Aristotle, but soon became fascinated by Freud. Freud tells us that each of us is steered through life by a different mechanism, a unique set of quirky, largely unconscious fantasies. These fantasies were installed in us early on as a result of the interaction of our genes with our infantile experiences, our family circumstances and the like. They determine what each of us will count as a happy, fulfilling life. Lear has spent much of his intellectual career trying to cope with the tension between Plato and Aristotle's claim that some goals are natural to human beings and Freud's doubt that we can rank the lives of the foot fetishist, the gold-hoarding miser, the self-flagellating penitent, the pedophile, the Socratic lover of wisdom, the Romantic poet and the would-be ruler of the world in terms of greater or less naturalness. Freud can of course grant that society must step in to prevent the realization of some of these goals (the pedophile's and the would-be ruler's, for example). But apart from social utility, there is little room in Freud's thinking for an objective, neutral, fantasy-free point of view from which the pedophile's, the penitent's and the philosopher's goals can be hierarchically ordered. This deep difference between a Platonic or Aristotelian and a Freudian outlook is concealed by the fact that Freud had fantasies of being a hardheaded scientist seeking objective truth, and also by his | Freud KO's Plato |
1240686_11 | City, for example, the four towers are variously crowned with a pyramid, a ziggurat, a dome and a mastaba. Pelli's use of these symbols reflects the formalist idea that they have been cleansed of their original meanings by subsequent usage and can now be appreciated as abstract geometric shapes. I never bought this idea, and Pelli's design for Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur, based as it is on regional motifs, suggests that Pelli himself is prepared to abandon it when he chooses. In any case, the triumph of formalism was never so complete that viewers aren't free to locate meanings even where the architect chooses to deny them. For The Times proposal, Pelli selected the obelisk, that most ancient authoritarian symbol. Since its appearance in ancient Egypt, the obelisk has been recontextualized many times over. Its meaning has changed in each context. In Baroque Rome, it represents the triumph of the Christian church over pagan superstition. In Washington, it is a tribute to the symbolic founder of the first modern democracy. In New York, it is the archetypal skyscraper, a sign of material aspiration. But we are living in a time when our liveliest minds are engaged in challenging forms of authority and the codes that represent it. Hierarchy, paternalism, control: visual symbols cannot, after all, be detached from the power relationships that govern social behavior. Indeed, globalization, and its monocultural effects, have made it ever more urgent to reject the idea that symbols can be used as purely abstract forms. It is an assertion of social and artistic responsibility to insist that forms have meanings. One of the things we know about the monoculture is that it is protean. Its appearance constantly morphs. This mutability diverts attention from the fact that the underlying economic power relationships remain the same. Pelli's design, for example, draws from a recent avant-garde preoccupation with folded planes. This motif has appeared in the work of Peter Eisenman and others. A high-style French version of it materialized in New York last year in Christian de Portzamparc's glass facade for the LVMH Tower on 57th Street. PELLI has regularized the folded plane motif, and in doing so turned its meaning into the opposite of that intended by architects associated with this motif. Others have used the folded plane to challenge classical notions of hierachy. Pelli's obelisk affirms them. It is symmetrical. It is without scale. The | A Rare Opportunity For Real Architecture Where It's Needed |
1241669_1 | are deaf. His daughter, Heather, decides she wants an implant. He is opposed. Chris Artinian, Peter's brother, is not deaf, but he and his wife soon learn that their newborn son is. And they very much want him to have the implant surgery. The opposing viewpoints make for painful family confrontations. ''It's not intended for people to have a handicap,'' says the children's grandfather, who is not deaf, to his son, Peter. ''If I didn't know you, I would say you were an abusing parent.'' The complicating factor here is deaf culture, the emotional and social bond among nonhearing people who use American Sign Language and have come to cherish their silent world as special and worth preserving. The eagerness of loved ones to jump on the cochlear implant bandwagon comes as a betrayal to some. As Peter says to his mother during a backyard get-together, ''I didn't know that you didn't accept deafness until now.'' ''Sound and Fury'' is asking some big questions. In a socially aware culture, people profess to believe that no skin color, religion, sexual orientation, political ideology, chronological age or physical attribute is superior to another. They say that differences should be celebrated; thus the corporate buzzword of the moment, diversity. Are the deaf parents in this film calling the culture's bluff? Or is a physical disadvantage truly something that should be celebrated? Do parents have a right to keep their children at a remove from the hearing world just because, in their opinion and experience, deaf is beautiful? Have we gone so far in our fear of offending anyone that we now advocate disadvantages' being deliberately preserved? Or do the hearing-impaired have a right to rear their children within a somewhat separatist subculture? The Amish have been doing that for quite a while. The most telling event in the film is Nita Artinian's change of heart. In the beginning she supports her daughter Heather's request for the implant and, in fact, wants one herself. But after Nita learns that the implant will be far less helpful to her as an adult, she changes her mind. ''We're afraid that the cochlear implant will change her identity,'' says Nita after a visit to a preschool class of children with implants. Later, in a scene between mother and daughter, Nita uses the word ''we'' in discussing the decision. Heather corrects her with ''I thought you decided.'' Nita | In the World of the Deaf, Hearing Poses Dangers |
1241760_0 | Baseball isn't only about testosterone, of course. It can be about estrogen. A girlfriend of mine in New York decided to root for the Mets because she knows more cute guys she wants to date who are Mets fans. ''Some women pick their team based on the reproductive possibilities,'' she says. But on the subway to Yankee Stadium Sunday night there was an unbelievable whoosh of testosterone, as big, bristling guys piled on the D train and loudly discussed Piazza vs. Jeter, Ali vs. Foreman and other assorted v's. It was worth the trip to the World Series if only to see this gratifying gender-bender: a blocklong line slouching toward the men's room, and women streaming in and out of the ladies' room with no wait at all. Munching on some jumbo peanuts, I watched something I hadn't seen during a whole year covering presidential politics -- a moment of real, raw, electrifying ''Lay on, MacDuff'' testosterone: Roger Clemens throwing that jagged-edged bat, like a dagger, at Mike Piazza. I figured the cranky Yankee would get thrown out. But the pitcher who mistook a bat for a ball was only fined. I guess even when a player becomes totally unglued, it's hard to know how much testosterone is too much. The stuff, after all, is the fuel of sports, war and politics. Alan Dundes, a professor of anthropology at Berkeley, writes in his essay ''From Game to War'' that all games and sports are based on one theme that ''involves an all-male preserve in which one male demonstrates his virility, his masculinity, at the expense of a male opponent. One proves one's maleness by feminizing one's opponent. . . . No male wants to be considered a 'sissy' (from 'sister'). Thus males must aggressively seek to parry any such threatened thrusts.'' So the innocent victim, Mike Piazza, ended up sounding defensive in his New York Post diary headlined ''Selfish or Gutless?'' implying that he could have beat up Roger Clemens if he had wanted to. Seeing real raging hormones made it clear just how trompe l'oeil the campaign's raging hormones are. All year Al Gore, W. and Rick Lazio have been contriving, on the advice of consultants and focus groups, to elaborately stage gender moments, some meant to appeal to women, some to men -- a lot of estrogen for the Oprah-Rosie-soccer-mom crowd, a lot of testosterone for all the | Liberties; Boys Going Batty |
1241767_1 | and Lexington Avenue subway station, where the lighting is poor and flooding has caused structural damage. State Senator Roy M. Goodman and E. Virgil Conway, the chairman of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, said yesterday that the four-year project at the station, one of the busiest in the city with 64,000 passengers daily, is the first of 64 station renovations. Susan Saulny (NYT) QUEENS: MODIFIED FOOD CRITICIZED -- Environmental and consumer groups testified at a public hearing yesterday on a possible statewide ban on genetically modified foods. They cited last month's Taco Bell recall of products with modified corn that had been approved only for animal consumption. ''The Taco Bell scandal shows that the federal regulations aren't working and that's why we need the state to step in,'' Andy Zimmerman, a coordinator for the New York Biotech Action Network, said in an interview. Food companies say modification increases crop yields and poses no danger to humans. The State Assembly is considering a five-year ban on genetically modified crops. Tara Bahrampour (NYT) MANHATTAN: ALGERIAN TERROR TRIAL -- A judge ruled yesterday that statements to authorities made by an Algerian accused of helping smuggle explosives into the United States could be used at his trial because they had been given voluntarily. The ruling by Judge John F. Keenan of Federal District Court came after a hearing during which the Algerian, Abdel Ghani Meskini, 32, described his interviews with the authorities after he was arrested in Brooklyn on Dec. 30. Mr. Meskini and Mokhtar Haouari, another Algerian, who was arrested in Canada and brought to the United States for trial, are charged with conspiring since 1997 to support a terrorist group. (AP) MANHATTAN: CONNECTION TROUBLES -- Silicon Alley companies plan to tell the City Council tomorrow that slow installation of high-speed Internet connections and other infrastructure problems are hurting their ability to do business. Alice O'Rourke, the executive director of New York New Media Association, said technology companies based in New york wait six to eight weeks for the installation of high-speed connections at a time when the troubled Internet economy makes quick installation especially critical. (NYT) NEW JERSEY TRENTON: CASINO REGULATOR NAMED -- William Sommeling, 64, was named to the state agency that regulates and issues licenses to casinos in Atlantic City. Mr. Sommeling, an undersheriff in Ocean County since 1989, has begun a new five-year term. He fills the vacancy on the | METRO BRIEFING |
1241674_3 | trend. ''People don't operate today out of fear and trepidation,'' said Mordean Taylor-Archer, an associate provost at Kansas State University in Manhattan, Kan., who deals with career issues. ''They are more willing and open to talk about their needs -- their spouse, their kids.'' And their standard of living. The economy may be hot, but the dark side is a low savings rate and high levels of personal debt. Many families cannot afford even a temporary dip in their income. ''People can't survive long these days without the second income,'' said Patrick Lennahan, director of the career center at Roger Williams University in Bristol, R.I. Some companies are even plunging in with tips for spouses without being asked. Michael Honig, who moved to Seattle from Denver to start a job as a training specialist for Microsoft this month, said he thought the company was paying lip service to career of his wife, Emily, when it asked for her resume in his final job interviews. But Mrs. Honig, who worked in human resources for a Denver company, is being considered for two jobs at Microsoft and for an opening at another Seattle company, thanks to Microsoft's help, he said. While such employment assistance is becoming more prevalent, recruiting experts say, many companies are reluctant to talk about the practice, fearful of setting a precedent they will be unable to live up to for every new hire. In September, the University of Alabama in Birmingham started the Spouse/Partner Relocation Network, a consortium of local employers that helps match job openings at member organizations with the spouses of new university hires. ''It's a lot better than just looking at the Monster.com listings,'' said Connie McLernon, an administrative assistant for a Montgomery design firm, who is getting career help from the university's network. Her husband, Dennis, accepted a job as an acting instructor at the University of Alabama in August but he has been commuting from Montgomery until the couple sells their home and she finds a job. Whether a company has a formal policy or not, Damian Birkel, executive director and founder of the Professionals in Transition Support Group in Winston-Salem, N.C., suggested job seekers take the initiative and ask about partner help. But, he advised, wait until a potential employer is close to making a job offer. In any case, he added, ''You're not going to get it if you don't ask.'' | Job Seekers Are Looking Out for No. 2 |
1241608_6 | has listened to Internet-only radio. But radio stations have had 75 years to build a following; Internet-only stations have had less than three years. Three years is like three centuries for video game fans. After ''Totally Intense'' starts, the program's host, Pete Hallen, enters the fray on Eyada.com's game server, an Internet arena where the audience can play against the host and one another. Tonight's competition is Unreal Tournament, a popular first-person shooter game where contestants battle within a surreal, intricate three-dimensional landscape, using an arsenal of weapons. But at 8 p.m., Mr. Hallen can't catch up to the players who have been online since 6. As he is destroyed by a player named ''JennyMcCarthy-33.6,'' the audience watches through a video stream from the show's home page. Finally, Mr. Hallen flips the Webcast feed to another monitor, where he indulges in a few lazy rounds of Ms. Pac-Man and Galaxian, all to demonstrate Dreamcast's latest retro-game releases. ''The show's been going since August,'' Mr. Hallen says. ''The game server didn't go up until February. There's other multiplayer games online, but I've never seen anything like this.'' Appliances That Keep a Beat THERE are software developers who want to make Internet radio run on pagers, mobile phones and hand-held computers. They are using W.A.P., or wireless application protocol, a global standard for transferring data from the Internet to wireless devices. W.A.P.-enabled streaming audio is several years away, but a few wireless phones and personal digital assistants are playing MP3's and FM radio. Compaq sells a personal digital assistant, the iPaq, with an MP3 player, for $499. Other companies are betting on dedicated Internet radio appliances, a box that plays Internet radio. Sonicbox's iM remote tuner, which costs about $100, beams an Internet audio signal from a personal computer to a stereo system or portable receiver. The tuner can pick up an iM radio signal usually up to 100 feet from the PC. Audioramp.com's iRad stereo connects directly to the Internet without a personal computer and plays audio streams, MP3's and regular CD's. The company began taking orders for the $399 device at its Web site, www.audioramp.com, in July. 3Com is developing the Kerbango Internet radio, and RCA has licensed its technology to create its own such device. 3Com expects to begin selling the Kerbango in time for the holidays. SUE CUMMINGS ENTERTAINMENT Sue Cummings writes about music, radio and the Internet. | Internet Radio Offers a Wide Choice to a Slim Audience |
1241790_0 | The Consumers Union of Japan said today that it has found traces of a controversial genetically modified corn from the United States in snack foods and animal feed sold here. The results of the group's tests are likely to kick off a firestorm of protest here, where opposition to genetically modified foods is strong. Officials from the U.S. Department of Agriculture and two groups representing American grain producers are expected in Tokyo tomorrow to try to explain how the genetically modified corn, called StarLink, surfaced in Japan, according to one grain importer. The Japanese Ministry of Health and Welfare called an urgent meeting this morning to determine how it should respond to the consumer group's revelations. StarLink is not approved for import into Japan, although other genetically modified foods are allowed. StarLink, which is manufactured by Aventis, touched off widespread protests and product recalls in the United States, after it was found in taco shells. | Gene Modified Corn Is Found in Japan |
1241698_0 | Seeking to restore its reputation for safety and respond to high gasoline prices, the Ford Motor Company announced today a half-dozen high-technology approaches to improving traffic safety and gas mileage. Among the devices demonstrated at a news conference were tiny cameras that will send images from all around a vehicle to the dashboard as well as bumper-mounted air bags for the protection of pedestrians. Ford also showed off a six-speed automatic transmission and computer-controlled engine cylinders that are designed to help the company meet its pledge, made last July, to improve the average fuel economy of its sport utility vehicles by 25 percent by 2005. Ford executives and engineers refused to say when the safety gear would go into mass production, a common tactic among automakers for competitive reasons, and acknowledged that some of the equipment could be 5 or 10 years away. All the engine and transmission changes are scheduled for introduction by 2005, however. General Motors and other automakers are racing to develop similar safety and fuel-efficiency technologies, although Ford went further in disclosing the progress it had made. Priya Prasad, Ford's top safety engineer, said he began working on today's announcement half a year ago -- long before Firestone announced on Aug. 9 the recall of 6.5 million tires mounted mainly on Ford Explorer sport utility vehicles and blamed for more than 100 deaths. The tire problems nonetheless came up repeatedly during the news conference, particularly because many of the technologies previewed today were aimed at addressing problems created by the growing number of sport utilities on the roads. None of the technologies are designed to prevent tire failures or reduce the odds that a sport utility would roll over if the tires fail, the combination of events that has led to most of the deaths linked to Firestone tires. Ford said in August that it would begin offering optional, computer-controlled stability systems on all its sport utilities, and it said last January that it would start equipping sport utilities with ceiling-mounted air bags to reduce the odds that occupants would be thrown through side windows during rollovers. Helen Petrauskas, the company's vice president for safety and environmental technologies, said today that Ford, like other automakers, was also working on technology to monitor tire pressure or temperature continuously. Firestone has said that its tires failed partly because of underinflation, which can cause tires to overheat and come | Ford Shows Off Devices for Improved Safety and Mileage |
1239492_0 | The recent history of United States engagements in the Arab-Muslim lands is best told through the names of American battleships and destroyers. That history of sorrow and heartbreak telescopes easily. A generation ago, in 1984, it was the battleship New Jersey, off the coast of Lebanon, with its 16-inch guns shelling the hills, covering up a policy of bluster and failure. America had wandered unaware into another people's wars, and was drawn into feuds it never understood. Today it is the destroyer Cole in the waters of Aden, Yemen, attacked and crippled by two men in a small motorized boat. We control the sea lanes of the world; what lies ashore is an altogether different matter. A nemesis lay in wait for the men and women of the Cole as it docked for a refueling stop. Witnesses say that the men aboard the dinghy were standing erect at the moment of the blast, as if in some kind of salute. The terrorism ''experts'' will try to decipher the groups to which those men belonged; our officials will pledge that they will search for and punish the masterminds of this brutal, senseless deed. But if the past is any guide, the identities of these men in the small boat will remain in the world of shadows and conjecture. We had seen their likes before. There was the young boy in a Mercedes truck loaded with TNT who blew up the Marines' headquarters in Beirut on the morning of Oct. 23, 1983, killing 241 American marines and sailors. We still know nothing of him -- not even his name. What he left was the searing memory of the eerie cool with which he made his way around the bunkers, ignoring the rifle fire directed at him and smiling all the while. Then and now, there was willful innocence on the part of the outsider. In that earlier fight in Lebanon, we had become a party to a feud between a narrowly based regime and its rivals backed by Iran's revolutionary Islamic crusade. We had become but another militia in a country at war, while insisting that we were there to do order's work, and to keep radicalism in check. In this latest episode, the intention was more innocent, yet equally doomed. Our officials wanted to wean Yemen away from radicalism; we did not want Yemen to become a hub of terrorists, one | Where U.S. Power Is Beside the Point |
1239484_1 | huge Three Gorges Dam now under construction along the Yangtze, intended to produce power and reduce floods, the river diversion scheme will not require the resettlement of large populations. But its high cost and possible environmental effects have long been subjects of debate. The third, longer-term part of the plan would divert waters from the upper reaches of the Yangtze system, from mountain zones mainly in Qinghai and Sichuan provinces that have long been the domain of ethnic Tibetans. This part poses the trickiest engineering challenges and also may draw protests from advocates for Tibetan culture, who have already criticized plans to pipe energy resources out of the region. Mr. Zhu's support is a sign of the government's determination to press ahead, especially since he is regarded as skeptical of the benefits of the Three Gorges Dam project. An editorial endorsing the south-north diversion appeared today in People's Daily, the mouthpiece of the ruling Communist Party. It said that 94 percent of the water of the Yangtze River now flows into the sea unused, while river basins to the north, which include 63 percent of China's land, receive only 19 percent of the country's precipitation. With rapid urbanization and industrial development, as well as the spread of irrigated agriculture, water has become acutely scarce around several cities including Beijing, and conflicts have emerged between urban, industrial and farming needs. ''Many rivers have run dry, lakes have dried up and underground reservoirs have been overexploited,'' the editorial said. Concern about water scarcity has heightened because of a recent drought in northern regions, which some scientists fear is linked to global climate change. Critics of the diversion proposals, and some who support the idea as well, have argued that China must first take more aggressive measures to conserve water including higher water prices and more efficient irrigation methods. ''A precondition to the success of the project is that local water supplies must be properly used and stringent conservation measures must be put in place,'' said Liu Changming, a water resources expert at the Chinese Academy of Sciences. ''This project can only be a supplement to local water resources.'' As the project goes ahead, Mr. Liu said, a host of complex technical, economic and environmental issues will have to be resolved, including how to distribute the new supplies among competing regions and users. Mr. Zhu, as he endorsed the plan, called for strong | China Plans to Divert Rivers to Thirsty North |
1239494_0 | Concerned that consumers are not getting the word that Bridgestone/ Firestone would replace some 700,000 suspect tires outside of the 6.5 million it has recalled, several states issued public reminders of the offer today. Some of the states, including Michigan and New York, also said they had won a promise from the tire maker to stop requiring that consumers who accept the offer give up their right to sue. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration on Sept. 1 issued an advisory about the tires, saying they had a high rate of tread separation. The company said the tires were safe, but 11 days later offered to replace them under a ''consumer satisfaction program.'' That offer was not part of the 6.5 million-tire recall that was announced Aug. 9. Those tires were linked by the traffic safety administration to scores of deaths in the rollovers of Ford Explorers. The replacement offer was for 1.4 million 15-inch Wilderness, ATX and ATXII tires used in 1991 Chevrolet Blazers, 1991-1994 Nissan pickups and 1996-1996 Ford F150n pickups. Most were sold as replacements. Bridgestone/Firestone said that about half the tires were still on the road and that it was not tracking how many replacements had been made. Some four million of the recall tires have been turned in. Bridgestone issued press releases on Sept. 12 announcing the program. Jill Bratina, a spokeswoman for the tire maker in Nashville, said consumers could have learned of the offer from media reports, the company Web site and tire dealers. No letters were sent out because they are not required, as they are in a recall. | Reminders Issued on Firestone Tire Replacements |
1239490_0 | Some farmers who planted a variety of bioengineered corn unapproved for human consumption say they were not adequately warned about restrictions on how it was to be planted, stored and sold, despite suppliers' claims to have done so. Farmers in several Midwestern states have said they were not told that the corn, known as StarLink, must be kept separate from other crops until reports emerged last month that it had been detected in a brand of taco shells. And others said that while they were told last spring that the corn had not been approved by federal regulators for human consumption, they were also told that they need not worry because approval was expected shortly. Like a number of other genetically engineered crops, StarLink has been altered with a bacterial gene to make a protein that kills the corn borer caterpillar. But unlike the others, StarLink was limited to use in animal feed and industrial products pending further testing because the Environmental Protection Agency could not rule out a link between the StarLink protein and food allergies. ''The farmers calling in, to a man, said they had never been told it wasn't fit for human consumption,'' said Kenneth Root, host of ''Agritalk,'' a program carried on many rural radio stations. Callers also questioned how widely publicized the recommended planting restrictions for the crop had been. StarLink's inventor, Aventis Crop-Science, a subsidiary of Aventis S.A. of France, and the seed companies that sold StarLink varieties say they told farmers that the corn had not been approved for food use and that they should keep a 660-foot buffer strip to prevent StarLink from spreading its genes to other corn during pollination. Senior officials of Aventis and the Garst Seed Company, the largest StarLink vendor, did not respond yesterday to repeated requests for comment on the farmers' assertions of insufficient warning and on the companies' efforts to contain the StarLink crops. Last week, food and grain industry officials working to track down the StarLink corn said millions of bushels of possibly tainted grain might have found their way into food production channels. Just what farmers knew and when they knew it could end up playing a role in lawsuits growing out of the affair, according to lawyers who handle agriculture cases. Aventis and the seed companies might have a hard time fending off liability for the expenses of farmers, grain elevators, millers and | Farmers Cite Scarce Data In Corn Mixing |
1239474_2 | that affirmative action appointees perform badly or diminish the overall performance of the economy. Women hired under affirmative action, they say, largely match their male counterparts in credentials and performance. Blacks and Hispanics hired under affirmative action generally lag behind on credentials, such as education, but usually perform about as well as non-minority employees. In a separate study, Mr. Holzer and Mr. Neumark interviewed thousands of supervisors and showed that they ranked most affirmative-action hires roughly the same as ordinary hires. The authors find that companies undertaking affirmative action use extensive recruitment and training to bring workers who fall a notch below average on credentials up to the performance level of other workers. Critics have often pointed to the wide gap between SAT scores of black and white students admitted to selective universities as proof that they are lowering standards for minority students and putting them in settings they cannot handle. But the use of a test gap as a measure of reverse discrimination is misleading. Much of the gap would exist even if admissions were race-blind. Colleges pull applicants from a population that includes many more high-scoring whites than blacks. A discrimination-free procedure would start by tapping the pool, largely white, of high scorers and then turn to the pool of lower-scoring whites and blacks. The average test scores for whites admitted to the college would thus exceed that of the blacks admitted. To be sure, some selective universities add to the test gap by giving preference to minority applicants. But, the data shows, black students at elite colleges graduate at greater rates than blacks at less demanding colleges, disproving claims that affirmative action disserves minority students. The Holzer-Neumark survey shows that affirmative action in admissions has produced significant social benefits. For example, black doctors choose more often than their white medical school classmates to serve indigent or minority patients in inner cities and rural areas. Though favorable, these findings hardly end the debate on affirmative action. The critics who refuse to accept government-sanctioned racial or gender preferences no matter what the benefit will continue to object. Affirmative action can be misused, as when whites running a company create a fiction of black ownership to qualify for credits in seeking government contracts. But the evidence marshaled by the authors largely vindicates affirmative action and should provide the ammunition for rebutting those critics who refuse to take facts into account. | Editorial Observer; A Reassuring Scorecard for Affirmative Action |
1235890_0 | NEWS Time Travel What might it have been like to dine nearly 2,000 years ago in the great city that bestrode the trade routes between East and West in the Roman Empire? That city was Antioch, now Antakya in southern Turkey. Then the capital of ancient Syria, Antioch ranked with Rome, Carthage and Constantinople in the early Christian era. Home to more than half a million people by the fourth century, it was a city of palaces, public baths, a circus and an amphitheater, and a leader in art, philosophy and religion. By the sixth century, earthquakes, plague and famine made it prey to hordes from the East. Beginning on Sunday, in what is billed as the most ambitious exhibition in its 102-year history, the Worcester Art Museum in Worcester, Mass., will return to the heyday of Antioch with an exhibition of 160 treasures reunited for the first time since their discovery in the 1930's. Including a Roman dining room with mosaics from the Louvre and other major museums, ''Antioch: The Lost Ancient City'' continues through Feb. 4. In the Family It's father-daughter night at Carnegie Hall at 8 o'clock on Friday when the legendary sitarist, composer, teacher and writer Ravi Shankar will perform with his 19-year-old daughter, the sitarist Anoushka Shankar. The concert, titled ''Full Circle,'' is part of Mr. Shankar's 80th-birthday tour and is the first in Carnegie Hall's world music series. Medium and Master In the history of photography, Edward Steichen (1879-1973) holds the reputation of having transformed his medium into art. His portraiture was renowned for capturing both inner personality and outer individual. His classic studies of J. P. Morgan, Greta Garbo, Leslie Howard, Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich remain indelible, as do his magnificent photographs of structures like the Brooklyn Bridge and the Flatiron Building. Beginning tomorrow, the Whitney Museum of American Art will celebrate Steichen and his work in a retrospective. ''Edward Steichen,'' through Feb. 4, includes not only 200 vintage photographs but also examples of his work as painter, director and curator of exhibitions. It's 'Peanuts' Look! Over there, isn't that the World War I flying ace? You bet it is, if you visit ''Good Grief!,'' the exhibition that opens on Saturday at the Children's Museum of Manhattan, in the Tisch Building, 212 West 83rd Street. Snoopy, Charlie Brown, Lucy and Linus will be on hand in this interactive show and comic strip | FOOTLIGHTS |
1235960_0 | The county that could be considered Cell Phone Central -- home of the Hamptons and other enclaves where the phones are as popular on playgrounds as at poolside -- moved last night to curb the use of the phones in cars. In a 12-to-6 vote, the Suffolk County Legislature made driving with a hand-held cell phone a crime, carrying a $150 fine. Officials said that even if the county executive, Robert J. Gaffney, vetoed the bill, there were enough votes to override the veto. Suffolk is believed to be the nation's first county -- and its largest entity, with about 1.4 million inhabitants -- to adopt such a ban. Similar ordinances have been passed recently in Marlboro, N.J.; Brooklyn, Ohio; and three towns in Pennsylvania. A similar bill is under consideration in Westchester County, and at least 13 nations, including Britain, Israel, Italy and Australia, have bans. The laws have been prompted by a conviction among lawmakers that drivers using cell phones are distracted, and are more likely to harm themselves and others. The bill prohibits the use of a cell phone while driving unless it is equipped with an earpiece or can act like a speakerphone, leaving the driver's hands free. Emergency calls are exempted from the ban. People are allowed to dial while driving, and to hit a button to answer incoming calls, as long as they do not hold a phone. Gerard McCreight, an aide to the bill's sponsor, Jon Cooper, said the debate lasted two and a half hours last night. Mr. Cooper, a Democrat from Huntington, said, ''The goal is to prevent accidents and save lives, and I believe this bill will accomplish that.'' While acknowledging that conversing on a cell phone could be distracting, he said the public would not tolerate a total ban on cell phones in cars. Research on the dangers of cell phone use in cars is scant, as many law enforcement agencies do not yet collect data on whether use of a cell phone contributed to an accident. A 1997 Canadian study published in The New England Journal of Medicine, however, found that the risk of an accident increases fourfold if the driver is on a cell phone. Mr. McCreight said that calls from the public to Mr. Cooper's office had favored the bill by a ratio of 10 to 1. But the new law met with rolling eyes yesterday | Suffolk Votes to Ban Cell Phones on the Road |
1235952_1 | genetic engineering did not change food in a ''material'' way. The lawsuit, filed by the Alliance for Bio-Integrity and by some scientists and clergy members, said that lack of labeling and mandatory safety testing violated food safety laws. The suit also asserted that the F.D.A. had not allowed for proper public comment or filed an environmental impact statement on the new policy. And it said the lack of labeling violated the religious rights of people who did not want to eat such foods on moral grounds. But Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly of the United States District Court in Washington granted summary judgment to the F.D.A., ruling that the agency ''was not arbitrary and capricious in its finding that genetically modified foods need not be labeled because they do not differ 'materially' from nonmodified foods.'' The decision was issued Friday but the parties involved did not receive copies until late Monday. Judge Kollar-Kotelly also said that the government did not have to follow procedures for public notice and comment or file an environmental impact statement because the 1992 announcement was a policy statement, not a formal regulation. The plaintiffs snatched some measure of victory from that reasoning. ''It's a court ruling that there hasn't been any regulation on genetic engineering from the F.D.A.,'' said Joseph Mendelson III, a lawyer for the International Center for Technology Assessment, a Washington public interest group that was one of the plaintiffs. An F.D.A. spokeswoman said only that the agency was pleased by the decision. Mr. Mendelson said the plaintiffs would not appeal because the F.D.A. is now changing its regulations. Those new regulations, while tougher, do not go far enough and could be the subject of a new lawsuit, he said. In the taco shell incident, meanwhile, the F.D.A. said it had confirmed that StarLink corn was in the Taco Bell brand taco shells and had instituted a formal recall, although Kraft Foods, a unit of Philip Morris, which sold the shells, has already voluntarily recalled them. The F.D.A. also said it would now test other processed corn products. Wallace Wasson of Chicago stated in a lawsuit that he suffered a severe stomachache, diarrhea, headache and hives after eating the Kraft taco shells. Mr. Wasson joined a class-action suit yesterday that had been filed last week against Kraft and Azteca Milling, which made the corn flour used in the shells. StarLink was not approved for human | Judge Upholds F.D.A. Policy On Genetically Altered Foods |
1238392_0 | The Environmental Protection Agency effectively revoked the license yesterday for the genetically engineered corn that has now been linked to the nationwide recalls of two brands of taco shells. The agency said the developer of the corn, Aventis S.A., had agreed to voluntarily cancel its marketing license ''at the strong urging'' of the E.P.A. Stephen Johnson, a deputy assistant administrator of the E.P.A., said that the agency was planning to revoke the permit formally, but that a voluntary withdrawal was quicker. The corn, known as StarLink, was approved in 1998 for use as animal feed but not for human consumption because of concerns that it could cause allergic reactions. With yesterday's action, StarLink corn can no longer be planted for any agricultural purpose at all. The announcement came a day after Safeway Inc. said it would remove its house brand of taco shells from store shelves after a coalition of groups critical of biotechnology detected the StarLink corn in samples purchased from a Washington-area supermarket. In late September, Kraft Foods, a subsidiary of Philip Morris, voluntarily recalled its Taco Bell brand taco shells after they were found to contain the StarLink corn. At a news conference in Washington yesterday, the activist coalition Genetically Engineered Food Alert said that nearly three weeks after the Kraft recall, the taco shells were still being sold and that the group had purchased Kraft shells this week. The group showed a Safeway advertisement from The Washington Post on Sunday and a Giant supermarket ad from yesterday's Post, both advertising Taco Bell taco dinner kits for sale at reduced prices. ''There appears to be absolutely no oversight of the recall,'' said Philip E. Clapp, president of the National Environmental Trust, one of the groups in the coalition. Brian Dowling, a Safeway spokesman, said the company was investigating the matter and had issued an ''all points bulletin'' to its stores to make sure the Kraft products were removed. A Kraft spokesman said the advertising inserts were printed before the recall. He said that Kraft had visited Washington-area stores to make sure the products were no longer on shelves. The E.P.A. action represents the first time a license for a biotechnology crop has been effectively revoked, Mr. Johnson said. Dow Agrosciences and Novartis recently canceled their license to sell a genetically engineered corn after some experts questioned its effectiveness. But Mr. Johnson said the E.P.A. had not pressured | Aventis Gives Up License To Sell Bioengineered Corn |
1239938_4 | 550-1222. Still, there's a time lag that makes many people postpone ordering. The next Manhattan phone book, for example, does not come out until early fall of 2001. The e-mail address, which Verizon calls an ''e-dress,'' is by far the most popular feature offered, said Cedric Brown, the only operator currently assigned to the listings line. People also like to add a reference to a listing for a small business, like a tailor's or seamstress's shop, he said. Right now, with just a few dozen calls a day, Verizon isn't worried that fervid interest in e-mail listings will fatten its phone books. ''It's just starting, and people are just becoming aware of it,'' Ms. Masterson said. What's more, publicizing it has not been a priority, Ms. Leach said. Compared with business listings, the service generates little revenue. Even an ordinary Manhattan business listing costs $15.25 a month. Each extra line of type, like an e-mail or Web address, is an extra $13.75 each month. An e-mail listing will be a boon for those who want to be reached, Dr. Katz said. ''A lot of people hunger for contact -- look how often they check their e-mail. This promotes that kind of contact in a positive way. Sometimes people want to send a message but don't want to bother you.'' In some ways, paying for an e-mail listing is the flip side of the unlisted-number phenomenon, where people pay ($1.95 a month in New York) not to be listed. ''People in the phone book do get more telemarketing and obscene phone calls than those who are unlisted,'' Mr. Katz said. ''But a lot of people hope their long-lost friends or old flame will get in touch with them, and this increases the possibility of that.'' Though people might worry that listing an e-mail address is an open invitation to spammers, such a listing would be unlikely to generate more spam than even one visit to a chat room, Dr. Katz said. But just in case, he suggested using a Web-based e-mail address, like those offered by Hotmail or Yahoo, for a phone-book listing. ''Most people already have many e-mail addresses -- a real one they look at many times a day, and a 'public' one they don't check all that often,'' he said. What's more, a Web-based address will not become outdated if the user changes Internet service providers or moves. | New Media Meets An Old Medium In the Phone Book |
1239978_1 | has prompted Bridgestone/Firestone to undertake a broad reorganization, with Japanese executives taking control of key operations, the companies announced today. Ford's third-quarter profit from continuing operations dropped 16 percent, to $994 million, compared with $1.19 billion in the 1999 period. Ford estimated that the cost of closing assembly plants to divert tires to the replacement effort, combined with various administrative and legal costs, amounted to $500 million before taxes in the quarter. Primarily because of a complex recapitalization of the company that considerably increased the number of shares outstanding, Ford's per-share earnings including discontinued operations fell to 53 cents from 90 cents. The company's results met analysts' estimates, according to First Call/Thomson Financial.. Henry D. G. Wallace, Ford's chief financial officer, said that it would be fair to use a tax rate of 32 percent in calculating how the cost of the Firestone recall had affected after-tax profits. That would suggest that the after-tax effect was $340 million -- meaning that Ford would have set a record for third-quarter profit if the recall had not taken place. ''It was a difficult quarter because of the Firestone incident,'' he said. Including discontinued operations and one-time items, net income fell to $888 million from $1.11 billion. Ford shares rose 63 cents, to $25.06. Federal regulators are investigating 15-inch Firestone ATX and Wilderness AT tires, which are mounted mainly on Ford Explorer sport utility vehicles, after receiving complaints attributing more than 100 deaths to the tires. Bridgestone/Firestone, a unit of Bridgestone of Japan, separately announced that it was consolidating 21 operating units into 4, all of which will report to the subsidiary's recently appointed chairman and chief executive, John Lampe. Japanese executives will mainly run one of the four new units, encompassing tire design and manufacturing. Sanjay Govindjee, an outside expert appointed by Firestone to investigate the tire failures, said earlier this week that he was examining three possible sources: Firestone's design, Firestone's manufacturing and Ford's design of the Explorer. Isao Togashi, 58, who was named the vice chairman of Firestone last week, was chosen president of the company's new manufacturing and technology unit. Shigehisa Sano, 54, director of tire development for Bridgestone in Japan, was named an executive vice president of Firestone and president of the manufacturing and technology unit's product development division. Itsuo Miyake, 53, Bridgestone's general manager of tire material development, will become president of the Firestone unit's research division. | Ford Says 3rd-Quarter Results Fell Because of Tire Troubles |
1240060_2 | allow pharmacies and wholesalers to reimport cheaply priced American-made prescription drugs that had been exported, with certain restrictions. In addition to the provision on Cuba, the bill permits the sale of food and medicine to Iran, Sudan, Libya and North Korea, transactions that are in large part already permitted. Those countries may request United States government credits and private financing, conditional on a presidential waiver. Cuba may not ask for such a waiver, but farmers and agribusiness officials nonetheless described the bill as ''a crack in the door,'' in the words of Van Yeutter of Cargill Inc., a large commodities company. Advocates of more open trade with Cuba foresee returning to the issue next year when the tricky politics of the presidential campaign have passed. ''I don't think you'll have the political dynamic with Florida and the Cuban-American community and their basic impact,'' said Senator Pat Roberts, a Kansas Republican who strongly supports easing sanctions. ''You're talking about 7 percent of the electorate in a state that has very close elections for the House, the Senate and the presidency.'' The United States government first imposed a ban on trade with Cuba in 1962, after the Communist government seized more than 6,000 American-owned properties. While Cuba is a small market -- 11.2 million people -- its nearness to the United States and the fact it imports most of its food makes it an enticing market for American farmers. Choosing their words carefully, farmers -- along with most Democrats and some farm-state Republicans -- said they would have much preferred the Senate's original version of the bill. That version lifted sanctions on food and medicine outright and received a large bipartisan vote in the Senate. A similar bill also was initially approved by wide margins in the House. But House Republican leaders succeeded in weakening the final bill, drafted by Representative George Nethercutt, a Washington Republican, at the behest of two Republican Cuban-American lawmakers from Florida. The two lawmakers -- Representatives Lincoln Diaz-Balart and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen -- claimed victory on the issue. Under the compromise in Congress, Cuba would be barred from receiving United States government credit and private financing to buy food from American farmers. Instead, Cuba, a considerable credit risk, must either persuade a foreign bank to lend it money or pay cash. ''The fact of the matter is it's going to be a difficult road in putting together business,'' | SENATE APPROVES EASING SANCTIONS ON FOOD TO CUBA |
1239907_2 | of automobile owners indicated that they would probably subscribe to a digital satellite radio service in the next two to three years, according to Michael Reid, a Paragon Research senior vice president who conducted the study. With 200 million cars on the road and 4 million more added each year, just a 1 percent subscription rate for all cars would mean $250 million in revenue for digital radio. In another study, the Yankee Group found that 21 percent of consumers did not like today's radio offerings. Many of the dissatisfied listeners complained about a large number of commercials and a lack of programming variety, said a senior analyst, Michael Goodman. The digital radio companies hope that their programming will attract such subscribers. ''Improved sound quality alone would not have been enough for digital satellite radio to succeed,'' Mr. Goodman said. ''People don't buy satellite television just for improved reception, and they won't buy satellite radio solely for better sound.'' On the other hand, if digital satellite radio fails to take off, the number of businesses that feel the loss will be small. That is because XM and Sirius are the only ones authorized by the Federal Communications Commission to get into the business. Both will broadcast in the same ''S band'' two-gigahertz spectrum space, both will offer about 100 channels of programming, and both have created alliances with major automobile manufacturers to offer digital satellite radios in new cars next year. XM, which expects to begin broadcasts next May or June, will be available in General Motors cars and trucks. Sirius, which says it will begin broadcasting in January, has agreements with BMW, DaimlerChrysler and Ford (including Volvo and Jaguar), and Freightliner and Sterling trucks. Starting sometime next year, some 2001 model-year cars, including a Cadillac model, will be available with satellite radios, which will also be able to receive AM and FM stations, and more will be added in following years. At first, satellite radios for cars will be offered in expensive models. Satellite radio units, and add-on modules for older cars, will be manufactured by all the leading radio providers, including Pioneer, Alpine, Sharp and Sony. To pick up the digital radio signal, each car will be equipped with a stubby antenna, which will stick up from the rear windshield. A few inches tall, the antenna resembles a tiny fist with an upraised thumb. ''Between Sirius and XM,'' | Drive-Time Radio On 100 Channels; Digital Transmissions Could Transform Radio In the Car and at Home |
1239963_1 | their living here by climbing over lofty precipices and into thin air with buckets of soapy water in hand. Lean and leathery Zhai Xiang yang, taking a break from the facade of Shanghai's New World Department Store, said his ''heart was terrified'' the first time he stepped off the edge of a tall building. His palms sweated and his head spun, though he is accustomed to the vertigo now. ''To make a living,'' he said, ''I don't have a choice.'' Mr. Yang, too, takes his turn in the wind, sitting on a pine board seat secured by his own weight pulling on a horseshoe bolt that cinches the rope like a rappelling mountaineer's descender. Window washers usually hang a red plastic bucket beneath them and carry a squeegee on a pole. Some carry a suction cup on a string, which they use to anchor themselves to the window. Tales of equipment failures are tall but true in this business. The most gruesome involve men who ignore government regulations and do not attach themselves to a backup line. Their ropes occasionally snap from overuse and the corrosive effects of window-washing detergent. ''One of my co-workers fell from several stories up a couple of years ago,'' recalled Ji Shengjun, 28, a tall man with a mop of black hair who has survived 10 years in the business. ''He's a vegetable now.'' Still, Mr. Ji could be seen recently swinging, without a backup, down the side of a seven-story pile in Shanghai, even stepping on high-voltage electric lines running beside the building. ''They're insulated,'' he replied confidently when asked later if the wires posed a danger. He added that he used a backup rope if he was working really high. No one keeps track of how many men die to keep China's windows sparkling, though window washers in Shanghai say they hear of several rope breaks a year. Accident insurance is a luxury afforded by only the best companies, and liability lawsuits on behalf of poor, uneducated victims are rare. Even the backup rope doesn't help much unless a rope breaks very high above the ground. Window washers are attached to the rope by a short safety line and a ratchet, which is too weak to stop the dead weight of a falling man until he has already plunged 100 feet or more. A friend of Mr. Yang's who dropped from the 30th | Shanghai Journal; In This Job, the Suspense Might Really Be Killing |
1239923_3 | transporting nuclear weapons across a rope bridge. You have to be on your toes: funny but not obnoxious, charming yet not hammy, deep but not psychotic, all on the spot. An e-mail message, however, can go through multiple drafts; wording and tone can painstakingly be thought out, reviewed, edited and, if it's not quite right, sent back to committee. ''I always show my e-mails to friends before I send them out,'' said Drew Brooks, a 25-year-old in Manhattan. ''Involving other people is fun.'' Single people who follow up on chance encounters with e-mail are finding that the awkward first stages of a relationship can be made easier online. One reason relationships can move so far so fast over the Internet is the solitary nature of e-mail. ''When you're e-mailing, you can be at home, cozy, in your pajamas,'' Ms. Amatenstein said. ''It's so psychologically inviting, people say things they normally would not say.'' Ling, a 23-year-old student in Manhattan who is dating someone she met on the Asian Avenue Web site, found that to be the case. ''We just started talking, and pretty soon we were writing each other every day,'' she said. ''It's like a psychiatrist's office: you get in, and you feel like you can say anything. It was weird when we first talked to each other on the phone, because we already knew so much about each other.'' Mr. Brooks said that he and many of his friends find it easier to be themselves behind the veil of e-mail, saying whatever they want without the risk of a raised eyebrow, a nervous laugh or a dropped jaw. ''In e-mail, your needs and feelings are much more important and apparent,'' he said, ''because you're basically exchanging a series of monologues.'' E-mail is also enabling people to do a little cyberflirting at work off the radar screen of nosy co-workers. ''Although you speak on the phone, having a little light communication throughout the day can be a reinforcement,'' said Shalu Jaisinghani, 25, a financial consultant from Hoboken, N.J. ''You get that two-second rush, ego boost, when you see that new-message icon flash across the screen indicating the guy you dig is thinking about you in the middle of the day.'' Not all e-mail from a romantic interest, however, is an ego booster. Increasingly, people are finding that the distance of e-mail simplifies one of the potentially messier tasks in | In Modern E-Mail Romances 'Trash' Is Just a Click Away |
1240434_2 | littering Central Asia as a legacy of Soviet domination. Some are well known, like the former nuclear testing site at Semey in northern Kazakhstan, known as Semipalatinsk in Soviet times. Others are obscured by decades of secrecy. No one knows how many Soviet-era repositories of uranium waste and toxic chemicals are scattered throughout Kyrgyzstan. Eight radioactive dumps were found in a village outside Jalal-Abad in the southern region, and radioactive waste was discovered on the shore of Lake Issyk Kul, the huge mountain lake in the north. Experts say the worst site is at Maili Suu. Nearby mines provided raw material for the plant that produced weapons-grade uranium as the Soviets furiously developed an arsenal of atomic weapons for the cold war. The plant operated from 1948 to 1968, and its ruins stand not far from the river. Twenty-three heaps of waste and 13 mining dumps have been identified. The exact amount and composition of the waste are unknown, because the records were taken to Moscow after the plant closed and the Russians have so far rejected Kyrgyz requests for access to the documents. Radioactivity ranges from 10 to 50 times above normal levels in some areas, according to government officials in Maili Suu and Edward Taransenka, an environmental officer with the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, which has been studying the site. Prolonged exposure is dangerous, but the larger threat is that a natural disaster could send the waste into the river. Kyrgyzstan's Environment Ministry said three of the most radioactive sites are on particularly unstable ground. Despite the danger, no effort has been made to eliminate or mitigate the risks, though local officials have begged for new containment structures and for the moving of the most dangerous sites away from the river. Cost estimates range from $1 million to $3 million. Part of the reason for the inaction is that the Central Asian governments face more immediate troubles, ranging from incursions by Islamic rebels to rising poverty and weak economies. In addition, the problem requires a regional solution and the countries have refused to discuss it jointly, though Kyrgyzstan has pushed for talks. Foreign governments and international agencies have not stepped in to find a solution. American officials said privately that the responsibility belonged to the Central Asian countries. The United Nations has not given Maili Suu the priority necessary to provoke a coordinated response. ''People | Maili Suu Journal; Living at Ground Zero of Possible Atomic Disaster |
1240418_0 | Where are the manifestoes of yesteryear? There was a time when declarations of aesthetic commitment were commonplace. There was Futurism (as foreseen by its prophet, Filippo Marinetti, in 1909): ''Except in struggle, there is no more beauty.'' There was Cubism (as proclaimed by Apollinaire in 1913): ''We are moving toward an entirely new art which will stand, with respect to painting as envisaged heretofore, as music stands to literature.'' There was Dadaism (heralded by Tristan Tzara in 1918): ''Every man must shout: There is great destructive, negative work to be done.'' And there was Serialism, Surrealism, Neo-Classicism. Arching over them all was something that came to be called Modernism, a movement that wasn't really a movement, but that somehow combined all the isms under a single label, while also accommodating such odd couples as Pound and Brecht, Schoenberg and Stravinsky, Picasso and Duchamp. Today, the only label that claims our attention is postmodernism, and it does so in a peculiar fashion. While Modernism thrived on multiple manifestos, postmodernism's manifesto might be that no manifesto is possible: all doctrines are created equal. Postmodernism is almost impossible to pin down; like a blob of mercury, it slips away under the slightest pressure, only to pop up again in original form. Pomo, as it is affectionately called on college campuses, celebrates its own novelty and superiority, but it still can't help defining itself in opposition to Modernism, which may be as important to 21st-century culture as Greek civilization was to the Renaissance. Modernism is a source of myth; it provides a model to be imitated or rejected. But as we enter an era that could well be po-pomo, questions are increasingly being asked about just what Modernism was or even whether it was really anything at all. It is almost as if Modernism were now being recast in the image of pomo. Modernism, in these reinterpretations, is gnomic, ironic, wavering. A recent anthology of historical documents, ''Modernism,'' edited by Vassiliki Kolocotroni, Jane Goldman, and Olga Taxidou, proposes to reveal Modernism's ''contradictions and diversities,'' rejecting any coherent theory of its development. The art historian T. J. Clark, in ''Farewell to an Idea,'' is also interested in disrupting standard interpretations of Modernism by meticulously disclosing the uneasiness and discomfort latent in important paintings: ''The modernist past is a ruin, the logic of whose architecture we do not remotely grasp.'' In another book, ''Untwisting the Serpent: | Modern and Postmodern, the Bickering Twins |
1240496_4 | the officials said, raising questions about the crew's security procedures as the destroyer was refueling in a port considered dangerous. A senior Navy official said the ship's captain, Cmdr. Kirk S. Lippold, had reported by telephone to commanders in the region in the hours after the attack that the crew believed the skiff had been involved in mooring operation, suggesting the mooring was still under way. ''Now the question will be, why did they think that?'' the official said. In addition to the criminal investigation in Yemen, the Navy and the Department of Defense have begun their own inquiries into what happened. Questions about the security procedures aboard the Cole and in the port will be a primary focus, officials have said. The sequence of events outlined by officials today supports initial eyewitness accounts -- reported immediately after the blast -- that the skiff had approached the Cole alone and unchallenged, not as part of the mooring operation. That also supports reports by Yemeni authorities that the skiff had been launched from a trailer beneath a bridge in Little Aden, about six miles from where the Cole moored to the refueling station. However, Yemeni officials have repeatedly said the boat seen launched that morning was a rubber dinghy, while American officials say the boat carrying the bomb was made of fiberglass. Navy officials argued that the new details did not change the fundamental facts of the case, saying the Cole's sailors had no reason to suspect the skiff and could have done little to stop it. ''If a boat doesn't speed in and come right at you, how do you determine hostile intent?'' a senior officer said. The unthreatening behavior of the two men -- and the fact the skiff was not unlike other boats plying the harbor -- evidently put the Cole's guards at ease. Still, the skiff raised enough concern by its actions that, according to the officials, the sailors aboard closely tracked it as it made its way and watched as the two men stood moments before the blast. American warships entering any port -- especially one, like Aden, that is considered potentially dangerous -- have clear security guidelines. In this case, the officials said, the Cole was operating under a heightened state of alert, known as threat condition bravo, that required sailors armed with rifles and wearing body armor to watch all boats approaching the ship. | Skiff That Bombed U.S. Destroyer Now Said to Have Moved In Alone |
1240527_1 | Arafat, to agree. ''We are not yet certain whether or not normalcy will be restored,'' Mr. Annan said. ''We can only wait and hope. The next few days are vital.'' After the secretary general left, 47 speakers asked to address the emergency session, before the resolution was overwhelmingly adopted late tonight by a vote of 92 to 6, with 46 abstentions. The lopsided vote was anticipated, with only the United States, Israel and four Pacific Ocean nations -- Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Nauru and Tuvalu -- opposing the resolution. Ambassador Ahmed Aboul Gheit of Egypt, which was the first Arab country to recognize Israel and which was host of the negotiating meeting, expressed a view shared by many of the day's speakers that ''the situation is one of a shameful aggression by an occupying power on a defenseless people.'' Cuba's ambassador, Bruno Rodriguez Parrilla, criticized Israel more bluntly for what he called ''colonial occupation and massive flagrant violations of rights of Palestinian people.'' He said that ''it is hard to see how the peace process will survive the present crisis.'' But Russia's ambassador, Sergey V. Lavrov, said, ''Russia is convinced that there is no rational alternative to peace.'' The confrontation, he said, only highlighted the regional interdependence of Israelis and Palestinians. The United States and Western European countries did not join the other speakers. Israel's ambassador, Yehuda Lancry, who defended his country's actions from the podium on Wednesday, sat silently. But the United States ambassador, Richard C. Holbrooke, talking to journalists earlier, called the resolution ''one-sided, unbalanced'' and ''unhelpful to the peace process.'' The resolution underwent final revisions today after what diplomats said was a French-led effort to make it more moderate. It condemns ''acts of violence, especially the excessive use of force by the Israeli forces against Palestinian civilians.'' It describes Israeli settlements in the West Bank and Gaza Strip as ''illegal and an obstacle to peace'' and demands that ''illegal acts of violence by Israeli settlers'' be prevented. But it also supports a resumption of peace talks and calls for ''the speedy conclusion of the final settlement agreement between the two sides.'' It further affirms ''the right of security for all states in the region'' -- which would include Israel. General Assembly resolutions cannot be vetoed, and they carry no provision for enforcement, as Security Council resolutions usually do. Assembly resolutions have often been a vehicle for criticizing Israel. | U.N. Assembly Adopts Resolution Condemning Israel for an 'Excessive Use of Force' |
1242076_0 | To the Editor: As the principal of P.S. 287, I would like to add my voice to the discussion about the benefits of e-mail mentoring (''E-Mail Gives Students More Choices for Career Advice,'' Oct. 12). Our elementary school began an e-mail mentoring program with the employees of the Securities Industries Automation Corporation in 1993 to improve our young students' reading and writing skills. SIAC's volunteers serve as mentors and role models, and help students review math, social studies and other assignments. For primarily economic reasons, most of our students do not have access to computers outside school. The use of e-mail as the primary communications tool between mentor and ''mentee,'' as opposed to the traditional face-to-face relationship, gives our studens an early, non-threatening exposure to technology. And the supportive, personalized attention of an e-mail mentoring relationship provides students with the most important benefit of all: increased self-esteem. JOHN R. KHANI Brooklyn | E-Mail Bridges |
1242069_0 | To the Editor: Verizon's decision to let people list personal e-mail addresses in the phone directory is ill conceived (''New Media Meets Old Media in the Phone Book,'' Oct. 26). Anyone who has unfortunately listed an e-mail address in a newsgroup or other public forum has been the victim of people who troll for e-mail addresses and sell the lists. A day doesn't go by without my receiving multiple solicitations to invest in get-rich-quick schemes or to purchase these lists so I can spam others. Unlike regular junk mail, there is no cost to the sender. It would be foolhardy to invite junk e-mail by listing your address. BRUCE HELLER White Plains, N.Y. | Hold That Listing |
1241968_1 | of cutting population growth worldwide. Secretary General Kofi Annan, who announced the appointment at a news conference, also nominated Ruud Lubbers, a former prime minister of the Netherlands, as the new United Nations high commissioner for refugees. Mr. Lubbers's appointment goes to the General Assembly for approval, usually a routine step. The appointment of Ms. Obaid, a United Nations insider with 25 years of experience in women's issues and development, does not require Assembly approval. Ms. Obaid, 55, will replace Nafis Sadik of Pakistan, who retires later this year after presiding over a revolutionary decade in thinking about population at the United Nations, which has moved from basic family-planning programs into broad areas of reproductive health and freedom of choice. Mr. Annan said he had sought a woman from the developing world for the job. Other officials and leaders of nongovernmental women's organizations have been saying there was always the assumption that the appointee would be a Muslim able to work in Islamic nations, where women's rights are often curtailed. Ms. Obaid, head of the population fund's division for the Arab nations and Europe since 1998, has been part of two high-level missions to Afghanistan under the Taliban, where restrictions on women are extremely severe. ''Today, all the Saudi women are recognizing that you broke the ceiling one more time for Saudi women, and we thank you for that,'' Ms. Obaid said to Mr. Annan at the news conference. Asked about the poor record of Saudi Arabia on women's rights, she said the government there had recently recognized international agreements on the treatment of women and was always supportive of her work at the United Nations. Ms. Obaid, a Saudi who was born in Baghdad and went to an American school in Cairo as a child, has a B.A. from Mills College in California and an M.A. and Ph.D. in English literature and cultural anthropology from Wayne State University in Detroit. Mr. Lubbers, 61, prime minister of the Netherlands from 1982 to 1994, was recruited by Mr. Annan, who passed over a substantial body of candidates supported by various member nations. Among the leading names were Bernard Kouchner of France, the United Nations administrator in Kosovo, and Sergio Vieira de Mello, a Brazilian who is running East Timor during its transition to independence. Awkwardly for Mr. Lubbers, the Netherlands government was supporting another Dutch candidate, Jan Pronk, the environment minister. | Saudi to Direct U.N. Program Aimed at Controlling Population |
1242012_2 | consumer group released test results showing traces of StarLink in chicken feed. The tests on the cornmeal were conducted by Genetic ID Japan, an affiliate of the Iowa-based research lab that found StarLink in store-bought taco shells in the United States last month. Those tests were conducted on behalf of groups opposed to genetically modified foods. In the 1998-99 fiscal year, Japan imported 15.4 million tons of American corn, accounting for $1.5 billion of the $5 billion in total corn exports from the United States. Japan allows some varieties of genetically modified corn to be imported, although some foods made with such corn will have to be labeled starting April 1. But corn shipments could be rejected if they contain even a speck of StarLink. In an interview about the findings on the cornmeal, Mrs. Irisawa of the No G.M.O. Campaign said: ''We've been conducting these tests for some time because we are skeptical about the Japanese distribution system for food staples. We are also skeptical that the United States distribution system can detect whether foods are genetically modified or not.'' In the episode last spring involving chicken feed, which got little attention, the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries said the consumer group's test involved too small a sample and was statistically flawed, but it did not move to conduct its own tests of the feed immediately. Rather, it is including that feed among other varieties that it is testing one by one under a policy that started this year, said Yutaka Kunugi, an official in the feed distribution section of the Agriculture and Fisheries Ministry. Those tests are still under way, he said. The discovery of StarLink last month in taco shells manufactured by Kraft Foods using cornmeal supplied by a Texas mill touched off product recalls and other precautionary steps in the United States. With the reported discovery of StarLink in Japan, the controversy is fast becoming an international one. Two days ago, John Richardson, the deputy chief of mission for the European Union in Washington, said discussions with American officials had failed to persuade the Europeans that StarLink had not found its way to their grocery shelves. Unlike Japan, however, Europe is not a significant importer of American corn. The StarLink corn is engineered to insert a gene that produces a protein lethal to the corn borer, a common pest. Because it could not rule out the | Bioengineered Corn Reportedly Detected in Japan |
1242027_2 | those proposals, saying they did not go far enough. Although Mr. Clinton stopped short of attacking Mr. Arafat -- with whom he had what one American diplomat called ''an inconclusive'' telephone conversation on Tuesday -- he pointedly omitted the Palestinian leader this morning from his short list of those who seek to end the violence. ''We would like to see, and I think that the Israelis would like to see, a resumption of the peace process,'' Mr. Clinton said. ''But both parties have got to do what they said they'd do.'' Senior administration officials said Mr. Clinton, despite omitting Mr. Arafat's name, believed that the Palestinian leader wanted to restart the peace effort. But there remains a significant gap on how to accomplish that, the officials said. ''I do think Chairman Arafat can dramatically reduce the level of violence,'' Mr. Clinton said, and he made no criticism of how the Israeli military has responded with tank and helicopter fire to stonings, gunfire and other acts of violence from Palestinians. Hours after Mr. Clinton spoke, the House overwhelming passed a resolution to express support for Israel and condemn Palestinian leaders for the eruption of violence. The nonbinding measure passed, 365 to 30. It condemned Mr. Arafat and other Palestinian leaders for ''encouraging the violence and doing so little for so long to stop it, resulting in the senseless loss of life.'' White House officials were clearly concerned that the strength of the language would make it more difficult for Mr. Clinton to walk the line between supporting Israel and acting as what the president calls an ''honest broker.'' Mr. Arafat and Mr. Barak could both show up here next week for separate talks, administration officials said. ''We're still trying to work it out,'' one official said. The talks take on an urgent note because Mr. Clinton fears that without progress at the negotiating table, the fractured cease-fire agreed to last week in Egypt will completely collapse. If the talks here fail to come together next week, the calendar suggests that they will be difficult to arrange for weeks to come, with the election ahead and Mr. Clinton then traveling to Asia. Correction: October 30, 2000, Monday An article on Thursday about comments by President Clinton on the violence between Israelis and Palestinians misstated the month in which peace talks were held at Camp David this summer. It was July, not August. | Clinton Almost Blames Arafat for Not Controlling Violence |
1241978_0 | Aventis CropScience, the developer of StarLink corn, asked government regulators today to allow its use in food for four years, saying new studies demonstrated ''reasonable certainty'' that consumers would not be harmed. The request by the developer, a unit of Aventis, was made as a coalition of environmental groups announced that it had discovered StarLink in taco shells marketed by Western Family Foods of Tigard, Ore. The company said it had already told its wholesalers to stop selling the product on Oct. 12 after other brands of taco shells from its supplier, Mission Foods, were found to have been contaminated. The petition to the Environmental Protection Agency, backed by many food industry trade groups, is aimed at averting widespread disruptions in the food and grain industries because StarLink corn from this year's and last year's harvests is starting to show up in products. But Aventis said it would continue to try to remove this year's harvest of StarLink from the human food supply and would stick by its decision to stop selling StarLink seed, even for animal feed. Aventis said it would take four years for foods made with this year's crop to pass through supermarket shelves and consumer pantries. An E.P.A. official has said the agency will have to make an assessment based on science. It is expected the agency will allow public comment first. But opponents of genetically modified foods are already raising protests. A number of such groups sent a letter to President Clinton on Tuesday urging that he block approval. Today Aventis offered several new pieces of evidence for its case that the key protein in StarLink is not an allergen. It found that the protein, known as Cry9C, did not elicit reactions when tested on the blood of people particularly susceptible to food allergies, according to a person with knowledge of the petition. The company also presented data showing that the protein would be destroyed by stomach acids more quickly than had been thought. But even if the protein is a potential allergen, Aventis said, there is so little in the food supply that people would not be exposed to enough to cause reactions. About one-half of 1 percent of the American corn crop is StarLink, and Aventis estimated that at most 12 percent of this year's harvest would get into food because the rest had been tracked down. | Corn Developer Appeals to E.P.A. |
1241952_0 | Stung by torrents of criticism of the giant Three Gorges Dam being built on the Yangtze River, Chinese officials announced today that construction and population resettlement were proceeding smoothly, and that costs were well within budget. The dam, which will create the world's largest hydroelectric project and a huge new lake in central China, is to begin operation in 2003. By the time the reservoir reaches maximum height in 2008, more than 1.1 million people must be moved, according to government estimates restated today. The officially projected cost is $25 billion, but officials said today it may be lower thanks to stable prices. The project has been widely criticized for threatening the environment, inundating archaeological treasures and dislocating so many people, who are mostly being resettled in an already overcrowded area. But the government has pressed ahead, linking the success of the project to China's prestige, and today officials belittled the reports of serious problems. ''The project is progressing smoothly,'' said Guo Shuyan, deputy director of the State Council Three Gorges committee. Through August, the officials said, 253,200 people had been relocated. The officials called recent reports of popular protests ''exaggerated'' and dismissed concerns about the future market for electricity. The relocation program has also been plagued by corruption. Today, officials said misused funds through 1998 accounted for 8.8 percent of resettlement expenditures, but said some of this was not stolen but spent in violation of procedures. | China Says Huge Dam Project Is Going Smoothly |
1241972_0 | A panel of federal judges decided today to consolidate in Indianapolis the pretrial proceedings in all but one of the 64 federal lawsuits against Bridgestone/Firestone Inc. and the Ford Motor Company involving the failure of Firestone tires on Ford Explorer sport utility vehicles. The panel's decision is a victory for Firestone and Ford, which had feared that their executives and lawyers would have to give depositions in states across the nation. Lawyers who have filed the personal injury and class-action lawsuits had sought separate pretrial proceedings on the chance that discrepancies in depositions in one case could be used against the companies in others. After the pretrial proceedings, cases are likely to be sent back to the original courts for trial. Firestone and Ford had asked that the cases be consolidated in Chicago. The plaintiffs' lawyers had opposed consolidation but contended that if necessary, it should be done in the South, where most cases had been filed. The panel chose Chief Judge Sarah Evans Barker of the Southern District of Indiana, whose courtroom is in Indianapolis, citing her ability to handle complex litigation. The lawsuits being consolidated have been filed in 27 different federal districts. The only federal lawsuit not included in the consolidation involves a different kind of tire than the rest. Dozens of state lawsuits, involving numerous deaths and injuries, are not included in the consolidation. In a separate development, Safetyforum.com, a research group that works with lawyers, said that regulators had received many complaints about Firestone tire models not covered by the company's recall on Aug. 9. Firestone's recall covers 14.4 million of the 47 million tires under investigation by regulators. Firestone and Ford have replaced more than half of 6.5 million recalled tires still in use. Firestone has said repeatedly that all of the tires that have not been recalled have failure rates that are no higher than those of other tires on the road. But C. Tab Turner, a lawyer in Little Rock, Ark., who handles tire cases and works with Safetyforum, said that the research group's analysis showed a need for a broader recall. | Proceedings Are Consolidated In Federal Tire Recall Cases |
1238630_0 | The lead-paint control law that New York City enacted last year has been overturned by a judge who faulted the City Council for not making a required review of the law's environmental impact. The decision, by Justice Louis B. York of State Supreme Court in Manhattan, said that although state and city procedures require an environmental study, ''the Council's entire legislative review process was mostly perfunctory, only occasionally rising to the level of cursory, with the operative word being alacrity rather than analysis.'' The case was first reported yesterday in the New York Law Journal. The overturned law, which replaced a stricter statute, required landlords to visually inspect apartments built before 1960 when a child under 6 lived there, and specified that the city would take over repairs if a landlord failed to make them. But it allowed landlords to supervise and certify their own repairs, and made tenants responsible for reporting suspected hazards. Lead is highly toxic, especially for fetuses and young children. Exposure can cause severe and permanent physical, mental and emotional impairment. The Council speaker, Peter F. Vallone, a Democrat from Queens, issued a statement yesterday, saying: ''It is disappointing to learn that this law has been overturned. Since the Council passed this bill, the number of children the city tests has gone up, and the number of reported cases of lead poisoning is down.'' The city's lawyers said they would appeal Justice York's decision. The ruling, however, increased the pressure on the Council to again reopen the lead-paint issue, which has been debated for two decades. But Mr. Vallone did not say whether he would try to re-enact the law with proper environmental reviews, seek a new law or simply await the appeal. The original law the Council passed in 1982 was never fully enforced, but it set stricter work regulations for landlords during the removal of lead paint and required repairs to be made more quickly. The Council adopted the new law in June 1999 in an unusual split vote, over the protests of health, tenant, environmental and community groups that said it removed major protections. Some critics then challenged the law in court. Last month the federal Environmental Protection Agency told city officials that the new law was critically flawed and likely to result in more lead poisoning of children. The agency called on the city to close the loopholes. Environmental review is crucial, | Judge Overturns Lead-Paint Control Law, Citing 'Perfunctory' Review by City Council |
1238633_1 | the advisory panel examining StarLink concluded earlier this year that ''there is no evidence to indicate'' that the protein ''is or is not a potential food allergen.'' StarLink, made by Aventis SA, is one of several genetically modified corn strains known as BT corn, so named because they contain a gene from the Bacillus thuringiensis bacteria that causes the corn to produce a toxin that kills insects. BT toxins derived directly from the microbes have been used for decades as pesticidal sprays and are a favorite of organic farmers because they are natural. While there is at least one report of farm workers' developing antibodies to the toxin, these sprays have generally been given a clean bill of health for farm workers and consumers. And that is one reason the environmental agency has been willing to approve several types of crops -- corn, potatoes and cotton -- with BT genes. But the StarLink BT toxin, known as Cry9C, is from a different strain of bacteria than the others and has not been used in sprays. In some cases, allergenicity can be tested in advance. Several years ago, a seed company transplanted a gene from the Brazil nut into soybeans in order to make a more nutritious bean. But tests done on the blood of people with known allergies to Brazil nuts found that those people would have also suffered reactions to the genetically modified soy. That soybean was never marketed. But because Cry9C comes from a type of bacteria that has not been part of the human diet, there are no people with known allergies to the bacteria who could provide blood for allergy tests. And there are no validated animal tests that can predict human allergies. So scientists try to decide safety based on the physical and chemical characteristics of the protein. Many proteins that cause food allergies are not digested readily by the acids and enzymes in the stomach, are heat stable, have attached carbohydrates and are present in food in high levels, according to the agency's review documents. But none of these characteristics are absolute predictors of causing allergies, and there are proteins with one or more of these characteristics that are not allergens. The Cry9C has two of these characteristics. It does not break down quickly when exposed to an acid bath simulating stomach conditions and also can withstand heat treatment at 90 degrees Celsius for | Case Illustrates Risks of Altered Food |
1238649_0 | Efforts to trace shipments of a bioengineered corn unapproved for human consumption have raised concern among food and grain industry officials that the corn -- which has already been discovered in two brands of grocery products -- may have made its way more widely into production channels for the nation's food supply. Millions of bushels of the unapproved corn, known as StarLink, have been delivered to more than 350 grain elevators around the country. Government and industry officials, uncertain how much of the corn has been properly segregated and identified, are now pushing the operators to test their supplies for evidence of contamination. There is no evidence that the corn causes health problems in humans, but the discoveries have led to nationwide recalls of two brands of store-bought taco shells, a move that was extended yesterday to a larger group of brands and products. Food companies, many of which are now testing every shipment of corn for signs of the unapproved grain, have reacted with dismay to growing evidence of contamination, saying that it demonstrates a breakdown in the procedures intended to keep products grown from genetically modified seeds separate from conventional grains. ''This whole system has been self-policing by the seed industry,'' one food company executive said, speaking on condition of anonymity. ''And obviously it hasn't worked.'' The concern about StarLink has strained relations between the nation's grain companies and the developer of the corn, Aventis Crop Science, a subsidiary of Aventis S.A. of France. For example, according to a communication to the organization's members, the National Grain and Feed Association has demanded that the company reveal the names of the more than 2,000 farmers growing StarLink crops, information that would allow the industry to track potentially contaminated shipments more quickly. But those requests have been refused. The grain association has since filed a request with the Environmental Protection Agency under the Freedom of Information Act, seeking the names of those farmers. The StarLink corn is engineered to produce a protein toxic to a common pest, the corn borer. It was cleared for animal feed or industrial products in 1998, but the E.P.A. withheld approval for use in food meant for human consumption because tests showed properties indicating that it might cause allergies. On Sept. 29, shortly after the first detection of contaminated taco shells, Aventis CropScience said it had reached an agreement with three federal agencies to work | NEW CONCERNS RISE ON KEEPING TRACK OF MODIFIED CORN |
1238640_1 | war. ''But there is no magic bullet to solve the asymmetric method.'' Certainly, terrorist attacks are not a new phenomenon. A suicide bomber drove a car full of explosives into a Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983, killing 241 American troops. In 1996 a truck bomb attack at the Khobar Towers housing complex near Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, killed 19 United States servicemen. The next year, the American Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania were bombed, killing 224, of whom 12 were American. Still, the attack on the Cole crossed a new threshold in several respects. It was the first time that a modern American Navy ship had been the target of a successful terrorist attack. The attack also reflected a detailed understanding of American military operations. This was not a simple matter of crashing a truck bomb through a barricade. The terrorist group that attacked the Cole had advance knowledge of the ship's refueling stop in Aden and an intimate understanding of the refueling procedures. The group thoroughly penetrated the harbor security and the port refueling operation. And it prepared the explosive device to direct the force of the blast against the hull of the vessel. ''The bombing of the U.S. embassies in Africa and Khobar Towers were indirect types of attacks,'' General Neal said. ''This attack was a direct attack against a piece of U.S. war-fighting equipment. It really stands out.'' The destroyer Cole certainly was an inviting target. The length of a football field, it is equipped with a powerful radar system, long-range cruise missiles and air defense weapons. The vessel was designed during the cold war to protect aircraft carriers and Navy battle groups against enemy air and missile attack and thus maintain American dominance of the seas. But it proved to be a poor match against a single explosive-laden harbor boat. Adm. Stanley Arthur, the commander of the Navy forces during the Gulf war, noted that the Navy routinely trained to deal with small-boat attacks. But by infiltrating the Yemeni contractor that provided refueling services to the Cole, the terrorists caught the ship off guard. ''We were always worried about small-boat attacks,'' Admiral Arthur recalled. ''We had .25-caliber weapons on the deck and had rapid-fire weapons mounted on tripods. For what happened to the Cole appeared to be pretty well staged. They made it look like it was all routine. It was pretty clever.'' Defense Secretary William | Superpower Suddenly Finds Itself Threatened by Sophisticated Terrorists |
1236655_0 | To the Editor: Re ''Suffolk Votes to Ban Cell Phones on the Road'' (news article, Oct. 4): Perhaps Suffolk County's move to curb the use of cell phones while driving will be the breakthrough that will have a domino effect. I hope that we will follow the lead of other countries and make this a federal act. It is remarkable that anyone would be opposed. But it is disappointing that this ban and many others being entertained allow the use of cell phones with remote speakers. It is not only the hands' being occupied that takes a toll. Driving, especially with today's speeds and congestion, is an activity that should command our full attention. Chatting on the phone, a thought-occupying activity, with the potential that the message would be disturbing, further creates a risk to all. It is conceivable that the driver would then lose concentration, perhaps bring tears to his or her eyes or use the accelerator as a reaction to the conversation. Further ordinances should take this into consideration. DON SLOAN, M.D. New York, Oct. 4, 2000 | On the Phone, at the Wheel (Watch Out!) |
1236727_2 | world and set them working on seven broad areas. Genetic engineering was at the top of the list. Since then, the double helix has replaced the atom as the symbol of the modernization drive. Laboratories around the country are aiming their gene guns at pig and goat cells in hopes of developing pharmaceutical proteins and transplantable organs for humans or injecting pollen grains with DNA to produce virus-resistant papayas, potatoes, tobacco and tomatoes. One man is working on cloning the fast-disappearing panda. Among the people summoned by Mr. Deng was Chen Zhanliang, who was working in a Monsanto-financed laboratory at the University of St. Louis. He was put in charge of developing transgenic plants other than cotton. In that process, scientists transplant genes into the recipient plant's DNA. ''This is the biggest research grant in the history of Chinese molecular biology,'' Mr. Chen said. His panel gives money to more than 150 laboratories that are working on projects like drought-resistant rice and corn with high oil levels. China was the first in the world to grow genetically engineered crops commercially, starting with virus-resistant tobacco plants in northeastern Liaoning Province in 1988. Since 1997, Beijing has approved the release of more than 100 genetically altered crops, double the number released in the United States. Several, including slow-ripening tomatoes and virus-resistant green peppers, are in commercial production and have entered the food supply. ''Quality improvement is the first focus, because when you get rich you get picky,'' Mr. Chen said, noting that not only does the Chinese diet now include more grain-fed meat, but increasingly sophisticated palates are also demanding better-tasting grain. ''More and more people like to eat rice that's a little sticky, for example, and that's something controlled by a gene.'' Despite predictions in the mid-80's that the growing population would eventually overtake China's ability to feed itself, self-sufficiency is not much of a concern anymore. The country is sitting on mountains of surplus grain and can no longer buy all that its farmers grow. But because production costs are high and quality is poor, not much can be profitably exported. Much of it rots in temporary granaries. Inexpensive high-quality foreign grain, meanwhile, threatens to erode further the farmers' glutted home market. Though China is one of the biggest soybean growers, it buys American beans, because they are higher in protein and richer in oil than homegrown beans. Most imported | China Rushes to Adopt Genetically Modified Crops |
1236724_1 | other countries. The pressure to act was acute among farm state Republicans. But two Republican Cuban-American lawmakers from Florida, a major battleground in the November election, managed to win major concessions from Republican leaders on financing and on travel to Cuba. Mr. Clinton said today that he was not sure the bill would really help farmers. ''What I have been told,'' he said, ''is it looks like it eases the embargo on food and medicine, but it probably doesn't very much, because it doesn't provide any financing credits, which we give to other poor countries. ''It certainly restricts in, I think, a completely unwarranted way, the ability of the United States to make travel decisions on policy that I do not believe should be made, written in law, in stone by the Congress. I think it's wrong.'' Farmers stand to benefit most from exports of food and medicine to Iran, Sudan, Libya and North Korea. The president can, through waivers, permit American banks and the government to finance those exports. Mr. Clinton also said he was ''deeply disappointed'' by the Republican plan to permit the re-importing of prescription drugs. Though made in the United States, the drugs are cheaper in foreign countries because of overseas laws that limit their prices. Republicans and Democrats had been holding bipartisan meetings on the issue, but on Wednesday, Republicans broke away and wrote their own legislation, which they say addressed many Democratic concerns. The bill includes a five-year expiration date and language that Democrats say is too fuzzy and would give drug makers too much power. The bill, Mr. Clinton said, ''is more acceptable to the drug companies, all right,'' but does little to help the elderly and others who cannot afford drugs. While saying he was still reviewing the language, he urged Congress to ''work in a genuine spirit of bipartisanship.'' On a separate bill, Senator Pete V. Domenici, Republican of New Mexico, said the Senate would not try to override the president's expected veto of a $23.6 billion measure to finance energy and water projects. Mr. Clinton has objected to a provison in the bill forbidding the Army Corp of Engineers to study the possibility of increasing spring water flows on the Missouri River and decreasing them in the summer. The idea of changing the flows was to protect three threatened species: the piping plover, the least tern and the pallid sturgeon. | Clinton Demurs on Drug Imports and Cuba |
1236241_3 | establishment. The abortion is a two-step process. A woman first takes mifepristone tablets, which blocks the action of progesterone, a hormone required to maintain a pregnancy, and then 36 to 48 hours later takes a second drug, misoprostol, which makes the uterus contract, expelling the fetal tissue. Both sets of the pill must be taken in front of a doctor or a nurse in France, and after the second set of pills is swallowed, the woman is required to wait three or four hours at the doctor's office or in a health clinic until the tissue is expelled. There is no such requirement in the United States The regulation is designed to make sure that a woman is not alone during those hours. As in the United States, she must return for a checkup within two weeks. On a recent day at the Broussais clinic, where about 2,000 abortions are performed every year, 1,200 of them drug induced, two women chatted easily as they waited, regularly ducking into the hallway to have a cigarette. When a nurse checked up on them, they signaled they were feeling fine. One woman said she had taken painkillers home with her for the first two days, but had so far not needed them. The abortion pill was approved for use in France in 1988. Three years later, Britain followed and in 1992 so did Sweden. More recently, the pill has won much wider approval. In 1999, Austria, Belgium, Finland, Greece, Israel and Spain approved its use. The dosage and the protocol for use varies slightly from country to country. Some allow its use up to nine weeks after a woman's last menstrual cycle. Anne Weyman, the chief executive of the Family Planning Association of the United Kingdom, said that at a recent conference on the use of RU-486 in Europe, it was clear that availability varied widely from region to region, even within countries like France and England where it had been legal for years. Not all practitioners had embraced it, especially doctors in private practice. In France, too, a recent report to Parliament found that nonsurgical abortions were offered far less in private practices than in public clinics. The report said many private practitioners believed surgical abortions more convenient because they were quicker and required fewer return visits. ''There tends to be a conservatism,'' Ms. Weyman said. ''If you have been doing it | Europe Finds Abortion Pill Is No Magic Cure-All |
1241449_1 | Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf and the Far East. That meant that at least some of the staff at Al Mansoob's offices knew at least 48 hours in advance about the Cole's progress through the Suez Canal and into the Red Sea, that the ship was a guided-missile destroyer and that its arrival here would be the signal for a small flotilla of service boats, including at least two from Al Mansoob, to move around it like pilot fish. One of the two Mansoob boats was a barge sent to unload garbage. Another, according to Yemeni investigators, took at least one employee from Al Mansoob out to the ship, where he was when the bombing occurred that killed 17 sailors and 2 men on a skiff carrying the explosives. Thus Al Mansoob immediately became the focus of investigators after the Cole was attacked. Many of Al Mansoob's 35 employees, including the general manager, Ahmed al-Mansoob, and the man believed to have been aboard the Cole, Hussain Bakhateer, were detained by the Yemenis for questioning, although all but Mr. Bakhateer were later released. Now, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, working with Yemeni investigators, has determined that the bombers' skiff was not part of the service flotilla, having approached the Navy ship from a different direction, a remote boat ramp six miles to the west across the Bay of Aden. These discoveries appear to have prompted the investigators to review, if not abandon, earlier theories that the refueling operation was infiltrated by the bombers, perhaps with the connivance of the other service vessels, or part of some conspiracy in which the resupply operation was used as a decoy to allow the attack craft to slide alongside the Cole. But while the F.B.I. is following up a cascade of discoveries last week -- the boat ramp, an abandoned four-wheel-drive vehicle and a boat trailer believed to have been used by the bombers and five safe houses in Aden where the bombers may have prepared the boat and the bomb and tested an outboard motor -- Al Mansoob and its staff remain under the spotlight. Now, Yemeni investigators say, the focus is on determining whether the chandlering operation could have been used to gather intelligence about the Cole's docking plans or to time the attack so that it meshed unobtrusively with the service operation. Beyond that, longer-range inquiries by the F.B.I., the Navy and | Yemeni Supply Firm Emerges as a Focus of Inquiry Into Ship Attack |
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