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1228970_3 | recall is for 14.4 million tires, of which 6.5 million are still believed to be on the road, but the traffic safety agency wants the company to expand that by 1.4 million, of which fewer than half are thought to be still in use. Internal Ford documents continued to dribble out of the Congressional investigations today into what went wrong at Firestone and Ford. A memo to the automaker last May from a Ford dealership official in Saudi Arabia, and distributed today by investigators, raised another theory about why the tires failed: they were too close to the vehicle's exhaust. That theory has also gained currency among some American tire industry officials, who note that Ford voluntarily installed sophisticated exhaust systems on its sport utilities beginning with the 1999 model year, so as to make their tailpipe emissions as clean as cars'. Danny Hinchin, an official at Haji Husein Alireza, a Saudi Ford dealership, wrote in the memo that, ''In all cases I can recall, the tire that failed was the nearest to the exhaust, suggesting that the heat properties of the tire were close to critical anyway.'' According to Ford records, there were at least 19 rollovers in Saudi Arabia. But an analysis by The New York Times of complaints filed with regulators in the United States shows that while rear tires show up more frequently than front tires, the failures are fairly evenly distributed between the left and right rear tires. There were 457 complaints involving the rear left tire and 460 involving the rear right tire. Rollovers were somewhat more likely to be caused by the left rear tire than the right, 83 to 62, yet the exhaust is typically next to the right rear tire, not the left. Rear tire failures are especially critical in sport utilities, and perhaps more likely to be reported to regulators, because the vehicles are dependent on the traction of rear tires to avoid rollovers during braking. Brook Lindbert, the engineering director for wheels and tires at General Motors, said that a little heat from the catalytic converter and the engine radiated downward and was blown back over the rear wheels because of the vehicle's motion. The tailpipe gives off much less heat and poses little problem, he said, adding that for rear tires as well as front tires, the overall temperature outdoors is more important than heat from the vehicle. | Safety Agency Wants Increase In Authority |
1229011_3 | diplomats meandered through the lobby, the governor held a news conference on bears. She said that bears in the state had been nearly extinct in the early 1970's, but that the population had recovered to about 1,000. Some bears, she said, were becoming more and more accustomed to the growing number of people in the northwestern towns. ''People tend to think of them as 'Smokey the Bear,' '' Mrs. Whitman said. ''We've all had a teddy bear. People forget these are dangerous animals. The interaction and consequences can be fatal. We have to go after bears starting to feel at ease being around humans.'' Mrs. Whitman said she could not unilaterally suspend the hunt because the Fish and Game Council was an independent agency empowered to write the state's hunting rules. But she and aides in Trenton said they believed that the council would grant her request. If it does not, she said, she will ask the state's attorney general, John J. Farmer, to explore ways to get a court order blocking the hunt. The council is scheduled to meet Tuesday night and will take up the governor's request, state officials said. In June, when the hunt opponents' campaign was gathering momentum, the governor urged the council to reduce the number of bears to be killed this fall to 175 from 350, and the council unanimously approved her request. The state's Division of Fish and Wildlife proposed the hunt because the number of complaints had increased to 1,659 in 1999 from 285 in 1995. Among the reported problems were 29 bears breaking into homes, up from 3 in 1995, and 28 bears rummaging around campgrounds and parks, up from 5 in 1995. Attacks on livestock and pets also increased sharply in the last half of the 1990's. No attacks on people have been reported. Under Mrs. Whitman's new policy, the state will step up its actions against problem bears. Those that routinely meander through backyards or otherwise pose a nuisance will be tranquilized, tagged and removed to thick woodlands. If they return to populated areas, they will be killed. Mrs. Whitman's letter offered no specifics about money for additional wildlife agents or for educational seminars for police officers on the best ways to kill aggressive bears. ''That will be worked on in short order,'' said Amy Collings, a spokeswoman for the Department of Environmental Protection, which oversees the wildlife division. | Whitman Seeks New Policy on Bears After Protests About Hunt |
1228986_0 | Bears May Get Reprieve | |
1234255_0 | THINK the withdrawal of Scotchgard from the market means being forever careful eating that bowl of cereal in the den? Don't worry. Spill whatever you want -- coffee, ice cream, mustard. We did it on these techno fabrics, all of man-made materials like polyester and plastic, and found that a cloth and hot soapy water removed everything. Techno fabrics are washable, scrubbable, even water-repellant. And they have a cachet borrowed from the world of fashion, where designers like Helmut Lang and Jil Sander have used them. ''It's all about cross-marketing,'' said Michael Maharam, an owner of Maharam, a textile company in the forefront of innovative materials. ''But plastic fabric is definitely fashionable.'' Stylish plastic upholstery fabric? ''If the light is right you see rainbows in the plastic fabric on my new furniture,'' said Andree Putman. ''Plastic is not only fashionable now, it's also never tacky. In fact, it has a fantastic luster.'' Jhane Barnes, the men's clothing designer, has also developed her own line of upholstery fabric and furniture. Her newest computer-generated, brightly colored upholstery fabric, made in Japan, was originally created for cushioning the inside of running shoes. ''My fabric is so strong and durable that you are guaranteed to tire of your furniture before the fabric wears out,'' she said. She acknowledges that she would want only natural fibers for bedding. ''But for upholstery that my dog is going to jump all over, then I love synthetics,'' she said. Certain new materials fall between vinyl and fabric, said Kathryn Gabriel, vice president of marketing at Design Tex, another company experimenting with durable high-tech materials. Some woven plastics feel and look like the elegant stiff horsehair on Victorian settees, but, she says, others have a very ''soft hand,'' meaning a sensuous drape and feel. 1. Jhane Barnes's Spacer, originally used in automobile upholstery, is 100 percent polyester ($66 a yard). From (800) 922-0542 or www.jhanebarnestextiles.com. 2. Ms. Putman's Sitting on a Cloud armchair, in Xorel, is $2,000 at Pucci International, 44 West 18th Street. Xorel, a woven polyethylene, comes in many textures: the two on the bottom are called Structures, by Anne Beetz, a Belgian designer ($27 a yard). The orange swatch comes in 11 other solids ($20 a yard). Speedbump (top) is $27 a yard. From Carnegie Fabrics, (800) 727-6770 or www.carnegiefabrics.com. 3. Teflon-coated moleskin, a soft cotton and polyester chenille, repels everything; in 33 colors, $103 a | Techno Fabrics Suffer Red Wine Stylishly |
1234270_1 | did his online research, some sites asked him to fill out registration forms and disclose his e-mail and home addresses. ''Ever since I did that,'' he said, sounding annoyed, ''I've been getting an awful lot of mail about opportunities to join the Army, Navy and Air Force.'' Was this something he was interested in? ''No,'' he said without hesitation. College-bound students across the country, and in some cases around the world, are experiencing the same mix of euphoria and frustration. Many rave about how the Web is making the search for a college easier than ever. Using online software, students looking for a college can highlight preferences like location, cost or size on an online questionnaire and instantaneously receive lists of colleges tailored to their criteria. Of the several Web sites that offer search software -- including Embark.com, Collegeboard.com and CollegeQuest.com -- many even enable students to conduct side-by-side comparisons of college data, store that information in personalized online lockers and click on a few buttons to send e-mail requests to the colleges of their choice. On their Web sites, colleges often provide an in-depth look at academic departments and student clubs. Many offer e-mail chats with professors and students. College newspapers maintain their own Web sites with archives of stories about life on campus. Articles, rankings and virtual tours abound -- and all are free. No longer do students have to sit in a library flipping through college guidebooks (most of which are usually in the reference section, where they cannot be checked out). No longer are they dependent on their parents and guidance counselors to point them to a particular university. ''The power has shifted to the student when it comes to research,'' said Phil Dunkelberger, chief executive and president of Embark.com. But in coursing through the online terrain, students are also finding its pitfalls. In many cases, the Web sites are free because they are supported by advertising and e-commerce partners, companies that provide commissions to Web sites that help them sell products to students. And if free Web sites do not display much advertising, they make money another way: They collect contact information by using registration forms and then sell the students' addresses to colleges and sometimes to commercial entities like banks, long-distance companies and textbook shops. In most cases, the registration forms allow students to opt out of such marketing instead of allowing them to | The College Search Game, Spam Included |
1234282_3 | big leather phalluses. The point of the comedy was to shake people up. To expose what was normally hidden, to make fun of it, to take the important people down a peg or two and speak up for the ordinary man.'' For years college professors have shared the earthiness of these writers with their students, or at least challenged them to learn their Latin and Greek and figure it out for themselves. More precise English translations have been around for a while from other publishers, and the less-squeamish French were doing accurate translations as early as the 1920's. But the tidy Loeb volumes were the last bastion of Anglo-American restraint, and their conversion represents how the definition of what is mainstream has changed. ''It was a great relief because the previous translations have been so delicate about those things that they are really confusing,' said Emily Katz Anhalt, who teaches classics at Trinity College and gave last year's ''Greek Elegiac Poetry'' and ''Greek Iambic Poetry'' a favorable critique in the Bryn Mawr Classical Review. ''Most people don't read this material in the original Greek, so they are getting a skewed version.'' She points out that in the 1931 edition of ''Elegiac Poetry,'' a man is told ''All the young are concerned for your beauty.'' In the new version, the line becomes ''All the young men are obsessed with your looks.'' ''It's important for society to recognize that some of the norms that we take as given in terms of civilized behavior are a bit arbitrary,'' Ms. Anhalt added. ''Plato was a great espouser of homoerotic love,'' Mr. Henderson said. ''When he talks about men being in 'love' or 'lovers,' you shouldn't translate it as 'close friends -- wink, wink.' '' Not all the ancients were so explicit, but even their texts became silly in the hands of Victorian-era translators. ''They would take a perfectly harmless text like Homer and they would turn it into nearly incomprehensible English, because that to them represented high-style epic,'' said Richard P. Martin, a professor of classics at Stanford University. Trained on Milton and Spenser, the translators used an abundance of ''ye's'' and verbs ending in ''-eth'' that made the flowery texts read like Gilbert and Sullivan librettos. Those in the know used to trade snickering jokes about the particularly obvious gloss-overs, Mr. Martin said. ''It's one of those little games that classicists play,'' he | O Profligate Youth of Rome, Ye #*!, Ye @#! (See Footnote) |
1234375_0 | A federal district court judge here ruled today that the public should have access to extensive information on tire technology that Firestone was compelled to turn over during a lawsuit over a fatal accident. The company said that releasing the documents would amount to giving up trade secrets. Judicial secrecy has emerged as a major issue in Washington as Congress tries to draft new laws improving the ability of Government regulators to monitor safety trends. Officials at the Department of Transportation say the sealing of documents in settled lawsuits is one reason they did not spot the pattern of scores of rollover deaths in Ford Explorers equipped with Firestone tires that failed. In a biting ruling in favor of four news organizations that had sued for release of the documents, Judge Anthony A. Alaimo dismissed Firestone's assertion that the information would be valuable to its competitors. ''A competitor would not want to replicate the designs or processes used to make a tire that has now been recalled in countries around the world,'' he wrote. Still, the judge delayed release of the documents for a week to give Firestone time to appeal. Christine Karbowiak, a spokeswoman for Firestone, said in a telephone interview that even if the information was about tires being recalled, it could be valuable to competitors. ''It's traditional know-how that in many, many manufacturing contexts is know-how that should be protected,'' she said. In testimony before House and Senate committees this month, two vice presidents of Firestone, a unit of the Bridgestone Corporation of Japan, promised to drop secrecy provisions in lawsuits except as they concerned trade secrets. One proposal before Congress would make manufacturers tell the government if they had been sued three times over defects in the same product. The documents in the Georgia case, involving a 19-year-old's death in an Explorer, are being sought by lawyers for The Los Angeles Times, CBS News, The Chicago Tribune and The Washington Post. Separately, documents released today by Congressional investigators show that in the year before the Ford Motor Company stopped buying tires from Goodyear for Explorers, the automaker pressed Goodyear to cut its prices to match those charged by its rival Firestone. The Goodyear tires, which were used on half of Ford's 1996 and 1997 Explorers, have subsequently proved much more reliable, a distinction that has drawn the interest of Congress as it seeks explanations for the | Judge Tells Firestone to Release Technical Data on Tires |
1234415_0 | The House and Senate leadership today approved a deal to allow the sale of American food products to Cuba, clearing the way for the most significant rollback of United States sanctions against the island in four decades. The agreement on sales, which was brokered between farm-state and anti-Castro lawmakers, was eagerly sought by American farm groups and first proposed this spring by Representative George Nethercutt, Republican of Washington. It would allow cash sales to Cuba and financing through third countries but bar United States financing, lawmakers said. It would also add a new category to the designated groups of Americans who are allowed to travel to Cuba, despite restrictions on spending money there. United States exporters of grains and other food products would be authorized to visit the island to promote sales, just as scholars and journalists are currently allowed, the lawmakers said. The arrangement does not, however, allow for the sale of Cuban products in the United States. Washington first imposed a ban on trade with Cuba in 1962, after the revolutionary government of President Fidel Castro appropriated more than 6,000 American-owned properties without paying compensation. Representative Roy Blunt, Republican of Missouri, brokered the deal between Mr. Nethercutt and Representative Jo Ann Emerson, Republican of Missouri, on one hand, and Congress's two Cuban-American lawmakers from Florida, Representatives Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and Lincoln Diaz-Balart, both Republicans, on the other. Until now, the two Cuban-Americans have opposed any easing of sanctions against Cuba. Mr. Blunt, who said Republican leaders in Congress had approved the deal, said in a telephone interview that it would open Cuban markets to American exporters of rice, pork and other staples. Cuba has long sought to resume trade with the United States, arguing that the trade embargo had forced it to pay a premium in shipping costs. ''It provides a significant opening of that market to U.S. agricultural products,'' Mr. Blunt said. Negotiations in recent weeks between the farm-state and the anti-Castro lawmakers bogged down over the question of financing. The Cuban- American lawmakers prevailed by ruling out American credits for the sales, but those favoring sales scored a victory by winning an allowance for third-country financing. Cuba, which has been under an austerity program for a decade since the breakup of the Soviet Union, its former patron, relies on foreign banks for most of its imports. Once the new deal becomes law, it would in theory allow | Congressional Leaders Approve a Deal to Allow Food Sales to Cuba |
1232634_2 | profits squeezed. Slowing automobile production -- exacerbated by the Ford Motor Company's shutdown of several production lines to free up tires to replace 6.5 million Firestone tires that have been recalled -- has hit all of them hard. Other industries that are heavily dependent on oil for materials and Detroit for sales are having similar problems. ''We've had a number of chemical companies and auto parts companies warn in recent weeks, so it shouldn't be surprising that Goodyear is having earnings problems,'' said Charles L. Hill, director of research at First Call. In April, many tire makers announced price increases and Goodyear raised its prices by 3 percent to 5 percent across the board. But only Cooper Tire and Rubber followed through as well, and by July Goodyear was seeing ''significant volume decreases'' from lost market share, said Keith Price, a Goodyear spokesman. Goodyear never officially rolled back its prices, but it was forced to offer discounts and promotions to bolster sales. ''Considering the weak euro and high costs, the big surprise was that the tire companies weren't receptive to raising prices,'' said Efraim Levy, a tire analyst with S.& P. Equity Group, who says his estimates for Goodyear's 2001 earnings ''are under review, and the direction they'll probably go is obvious.'' Goodyear did sell more than a million extra tires this quarter as replacements for recalled Firestone tires. But that is a drop in the revenue bucket for a company that sold 109 million tires -- 71.8 million of them replacement tires -- in North America last year. ''Was there a benefit from the Firestone situation? Yes,'' Mr. Price said. ''But was it enough to offset higher costs and a weaker euro? No.'' Goodyear does expect to get more share from a clearly weakened Firestone, ''but that's next quarter, or next year,'' Mr. Price said. The company recently imported some high-power marketing talent that may help it gain that share. Robert J. Keegan, a longtime marketer from Procter & Gamble and, most recently, the Eastman Kodak Company, signed on last week as president. Correction: September 25, 2000, Monday An article in Business Day on Friday about a warning from Goodyear Tire and Rubber that it would not meet earnings forecasts cited an incorrect past employer for Robert J. Keegan, the company's new president. He spent most of his career at Eastman Kodak and never worked for Procter & Gamble. | Goodyear Is Unlikely to Post Any Profit for Third Quarter |
1232661_2 | to compel tire makers to send the agency information about safety-related lawsuits. ''Unfortunately, the public often does not know to contact N.H.T.S.A, but we're going to correct that,'' Ms. Bailey said. ''This is the kind of information that could be essential to us.'' In the current climate of concern, regulators and consumer advocates are pressing tire makers to release internal data on tread separations and serious accidents, particularly those involving light trucks, mini-vans and sport utility vehicles. A number of studies have concluded those vehicles are more prone than smaller passenger cars to roll over after a tread separation occurs at highway speed. Just this week, a Senate committee passed a bill to establish criminal penalties for companies that fail to notify the government about safety defects that result in death or serious injury. While the Firestone case is the only one in which regulators say they have discerned a pattern of dangerous defects, nearly every major tire maker is facing lawsuits over crashes linked to tread separations. Not counting the Bridgestone/Firestone cases, lawsuits in the United States claim that at least 100 deaths and serious injuries have resulted from such tire failures, according to court records. A large majority of the cases, several of which have been settled out of court, involve minivans, sport utility vehicles and light trucks of nearly every make. But, given the weakness of the system for data collection and analysis, there is considerable debate over when a collection of cases coalesces into a safety problem. Though some consumer advocates say that premature tread separations should almost never occur under normal conditions and that tire makers could easily solve the problem by adding nylon caps over the steel belts, tire makers say that tires often do fail because of unusual stresses, punctures and underinflation. ''We make 200 million tires a year and we're very comfortable with what our data suggests about the safety of the product,'' said Chuck Sinclair, a spokesman at the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company in Akron, Ohio. Other tire makers say similar things:, that tires regularly fail, that poor maintenance or road hazards often lead to failures and that they see no evidence of a troubling pattern. Cooper officials say the company has made more than 250 million tires since 1994 and few complaints have been filed with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. That agency said that it received just | Cooper Tire May Become Focus of a Safety Investigation |
1229177_4 | and every other living creature off the coast of New Jersey -- were wiped out in 1976 by a bout of anoxia, or lack of oxygen. While the clams came back by the early 1980's, with them came stricter regulations, which included a moratorium on any new clam licenses and a sharp reduction in the amount of clams that could be caught. At that time, the system was controlled by limiting the time a boat could be on the ocean, at one point dropping to one six-hour trip every two weeks. This forced clammers to add boats to their fleets to get more days at sea. It also created a situation in which captains were compelled to go out even in bad weather if it was a designated day. By the late 1980's, clammers were asking for a more equitable system and in 1990 the management council came up with the concept divided the total annual clam allocation among operating clamming vessels, based on their historical catches, and allowed boat owners to sell or rent their quotas to others if they weren't using them. The result was a rapid consolidation of the industry, with small-boat owners or those tired of the business selling or leasing their allocations to large fleet owners or processors. While there was some concern about giving away a natural resource, according to Dr. Hoff, the self-policing that resulted created what he called ''the best managed resource in the country.'' Some, however, questioned a system that left a valuable resource in the hands of very few people. Today, about 50 offshore clam boats operate on the East Coast, about 40 of which are owned by fewer than 10 people. With allocation rights being leased annually for $5 to $7 a bushel, or sold for about $65 a bushel, the quota system has made several clam boat owners millionaires. ''The allocations are like gold,'' said Bob Bondurant, plant manager at Point Pleasant Packaging, Atlantic Capes Fisheries' clam shucking operation. ''If you own 30 or 50,000 bushels, you can make yourself a nice piece of change just by leasing them.'' The high cost of buying or leasing clamming rights, combined with the $1 million price tag for the now highly mechanized clam boats, makes it virtually impossible for a newcomer to enter the business. Even for those who have been in the field for some time, like Jimmy Stock, | Call It the Gold Coast |
1229634_0 | Jack Hitt's article (Aug. 20) is a heart thumper, a wonderfully written crime tale. But how piracy relates to ''the inequities of the free-trade economy'' is opaque at best. Kerry Tremain Berkeley, Calif. | Bandits in the Global Shipping Lanes |
1229635_0 | Hitt writes that piracy is ''a troubling symptom of a new world order, one shaped by a fierce Darwinian struggle in the feral markets of modern international trade.'' In so doing, Hitt seeks to assign a rational, and moral, motivation to the acts of these pirates. He says, in effect, that since these people do not achieve their aims within the confines of capitalism, it is all right for them to resort to violence and theft to achieve their aims. This is absurd! Pirates are principally a product of cultures where force is an acceptable means of achieving one's aims and where the state has instituted or supported a morality that does not value the rights of the individual. Such cultures are the province of bullies and dictators and are ruled by the club, the fist and the gun. Unfortunately, our world is increasingly the home to such societies. Miles Arnone Hopkinton, Mass. | Bandits in the Global Shipping Lanes |
1229636_0 | As an ensign aboard the United States Navy supply ship Pollux (and sailing regularly to and from Manila, Cebu, Taiwan and Borneo), I had the distinction of being ordered to form a squad of heavily armed boatswain and gunners' mates to fight pirates. I still remember our training program, which started with the shrill of the boatswain's pipe and the announcement, ''This is a drill: now prepare to repel boarders, starboard side.'' Happily, we were never called upon to perform other than a drill. Over the years, when telling sea stories with other former Navy personnel and remembering this experience as a pirate fighter, I always wondered if there really were pirates in the South China Sea. Well, I have my answer. Theodore Goldberg North Bethesda, Md. | Bandits in the Global Shipping Lanes |
1229209_3 | a more in-depth investigation. Q. In one of your clients' drawings, there are two figures, one in total shadow and one facing forward with the eyes shaded over. What does that tell you? A. This is a self-initiated drawing. That means that he took charcoal and paper and just started drawing. It's interesting that he said to me when he finished the drawing that I'm the one on the right (the figure with the covered eyes), I have hope, I am going to be a basketball player. My friend (the shadowy figure) doesn't understand, so he is leaving. If you look closely at the drawing, you begin to notice the ominous grin -- the hidden hands -- and you ask yourself, Is he holding something? His body is cut off at the legs, indicating a lack of mobility. The covered eyes can be seen as denial -- not wanting to be seen. He's also drawn himself as a stocky, older, muscular white male when he is, in fact, a tall and slender 10-year-old African-American, which can also be seen as a form of denial. I also see the shadowy figure as his dark side; he's not facing us, he's hidden. Q. The painting of the girl and the floating, blacked-out diamond -- can you tell me a little more about that client? A. That little girl, who has painted herself nude, lost her twin sister. She was killed by her drug-addicted mother. Her nudity is an indication of her lack of defenses. Q. Your patients can't stay here forever. What happens when they leave? A. We have an excellent discharge-planning program, and we make sure that, when they leave, they are surrounded by people who will help and support them. With managed health care the way it is, sometimes the money runs out before they are ready to leave. If we believe they are not ready, then we give them free care until they are. We do not want them going back to an unsafe environment. The exhibition, ''The Art of Children With Special Emotional Needs,'' will be held at the Northern Westchester Center for the Arts. Quotations from the children and a clinical art therapist's assessment will accompany the art. The show opens on Sept. 15 with a reception from 6:30 to 8 p.m. More information about the exhibition can be obtained by calling the center at (914) 241-6922. | IN THE WORKSHOP WITH/Ker Berdimurat-Beckley; Helping Children in Need Talk It Out in Pictures |
1229637_0 | Only in Gilbert and Sullivan operas are people forced into a career of piracy. Richard H. Howarth Reston, Va. | Bandits in the Global Shipping Lanes |
1232149_1 | replacement tire market. Most of the deaths cited in complaints to regulators have occurred in Explorers, and almost all of them involved a rollover after a tire shed its tread during high-speed driving. As the inquiry continued, Continental A.G., Germany's leading tire maker, announced today that it would replace 160,000 tires mounted mostly on Lincoln Navigator sport utility vehicles, but would do so as part of a ''customer satisfaction program'' and not a safety recall. Bernd Frangenberg, the chief executive and president of Continental General Tire Inc., the American unit of Continental A.G., said that the company had received only one report of a tire-related injury, which he described as a ''minor injury'' in Florida two weeks ago that was still being reviewed. Continental announced the tire replacement program after meeting with regulators this morning at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which is part of the Transportation Department. Tim Hurd, a spokesman for the agency, confirmed that the agency had not required Continental to replace the tires as part of a safety recall. Mr. Frangenberg said that regulators had not actually ruled against a safety recall, however, and that regulators ''reserved the right to ask for more information.'' Safety recalls tend to hurt a company's legal standing if it is sued, although Continental said it was not in litigation as a result of the tires. Continental is replacing the first 160,000 ContiTrac AS tires it produced of the P245/75R16 size. About 20,000 of these tires were sold in the replacement market, while the Ford Motor Company installed the rest on 1998 and 1999 Navigators, Mr. Frangenberg said. A problem in some tires can cause the vehicles to vibrate and sometimes cause pieces of the tread to break off, but the entire tread does not peel off, he added. Treads that peel off entirely and without warning during highway driving have been blamed for dozens of deaths in Ford Explorers equipped with Firestone tires. A spokesman for Representative Billy Tauzin, the Louisiana Republican leading a House Commerce Committee inquiry on the Firestone problem, accused Firestone today of having known since 1996 about quality problems with the tires now being recalled. The spokesman, Ken Johnson, said that investigators poring through tire test data submitted by Firestone had found a high rate of test failures during routine quality control tests conducted in 1996, and a notation that a tire manufacturing process was | More Deaths Are Attributed To Faulty Firestone Tires |
1232034_0 | DAVE WOLFF now has a computer (sort of), which puts him ahead of where he was a year ago, when we followed his first steps into the world of e-commerce. With help from me, a high school friend and an avid but amateur Webmaster, Dave put his small-town Main Street coffee shop, The Fine Grind, online. He hoped to sell coffee and coffee-related items on the Web, research sources for supplies, lure customers to the cafe with promotions and increase a sense of community in the rural area around Bel Air, Md., 45 miles northeast of Baltimore. To say that this was done on the cheap understates the situation considerably. We built the Web page for nothing using Netscape Composer, a Web-page-construction program, and my personal computer, because Dave did not have one. We spent $70 to register a domain name, www.finegrind.net, and used a free virtual-domain hosting and forwarding company, MyDomain. We got a free e-mail account through Yahoo; a couple of times a day, Dave ran down the street to the Harford County public library to check and send e-mail messages. (Now he checks his e-mail once a day on his own computer, actually a collection of scrounged parts that usually works.) To say that it was a learning experience also understates the situation considerably. We started with all the Web production bells and whistles that we could cram onto the site -- moving images, a scrolling news ticker and a big printable coupon. What we learned is that each of these features slowed the loading of the page, so we eliminated all but the coolest moving image, a cup of swirling coffee with biscotti. We got rid of the events calendar, too, because updating it was incredibly time-consuming. We also dropped the menu changes and stopped the weekly coffee specials. We kept the links, which include local organizations, weather radar, traffic updates, store location map and e-mail to the shop. We moved the coupons to a separate page. We made a background of close-up pictures of coffee beans, which gave the site a professional look. These days, the site is low-maintenance and low-cost, which is a good thing, because the site has been a disappointment in terms of revenue. It turns out that people do not want to buy coffee online from Dave. ''They want to see and smell the beans grinding and hold the gift mugs,'' | He Still Doesn't Sell Beans, But the Page Keeps Perking |
1232113_2 | State Madeleine K. Albright, with whom he converses in French, by making France the only country of 107 attending nations to refuse to sign a declaration on democracy that she had organized in Warsaw. (''Democracy is not like instant coffee where you can just add water and stir,'' he says). In his book, ''France's Assets in the Era of Globalization,'' (to be published in English later this year by the Center on the United States and France at the Brookings Institution), Mr. Vedrine argues that France has much to offer the world and must find the self-confidence to work toward a ''multipolar world'' that would undo the ''uniformity and the unilateralism'' that results from American supremacy. He scolds his fellow Frenchmen, who, he says, have much to be proud of in their modern age, for being too attached to their past: ''We have to avoid giving the impression that all we're doing is trying to keep a fading star from burning out completely.'' To move Europe toward being the political and military powerhouse that France would like, the European Union has initiated a European defense plan. ''Many American officials are of two minds about this,'' said Mr. Vedrine. ''There's the usual complaint that Europe is not taking a big enough share of the burden. And then there is the other traditional reaction that whenever Europe does something, people say, 'Be careful, you're going to resuscitate American isolationism.' '' Despite reservations at the Pentagon about the new European plan, particularly because it could duplicate the work of NATO, President Clinton was in favor of it, he said. Anyway, he said, the plan to strengthen Europe's defense should not be interpreted as a threat. ''We're not talking about having a go at the hyperpower,'' he said. In his book, Mr. Vedrine said that while many Europeans were sympathetic to France's complaints, they also believed that if France were as powerful as the United States today, the French would be even more unbearable. ''France most of the time has a mythical approach to its history,'' he explained. ''I'm trying to tell them that there is no point in being nostalgic about when you were a great power. In France we're always talking about the voice of France, the universal mission of France. I'm trying to say that you're only well received if we come up with bright ideas that no one else has.'' | Suave Rival Has Words For the U.S.: 'En Garde' |
1232185_0 | The Board of Education is pushing ahead on a proposal to provide portable computers to most New York City students as well as Internet access over a new Web site that would include commercial advertising, all at a cost that has now been put at $900 million over the next 10 years. The new cost estimates, which would make the proposal perhaps the most expensive non-construction project ever undertaken by the board, are included in a new analysis by Andersen Consulting that is being circulated this week to board members and officials. The $900 million cost of the new technology could be entirely recouped, at no cost to the public, through advertising on one of two companion Board of Education Web sites that along with partnerships with technology companies would produce an estimated revenue of nearly $4 billion over 10 years, the Andersen report says. The possible use of advertising to pay for a new technology initiative was intensely criticized by parents, legislators and educators in April when a school board task force first outlined its recommendations to build a revenue-generating computer network in partnership with private industry, a proposal that was unanimously approved by the board. The plan is thought to be the first of its kind by a public school system in the United States. Under those recommendations, laptop computers would be distributed to all 750,000 students in grades 4 to 12. The board envisioned expanding the use of the Internet in the classroom by creating a central site, through which teachers could communicate with students, parents and school administrators. As originally recommended in April, students would be able to click on commercial logos on the school Web site to buy products. Part of each sale would go to the board. In response to the April recommendations, the new report outlines a system that would keep all commercial content on a separate Web site, away from the educational site that would be used in class and at home by students. In addition, parents would be able to limit their children's access to the commercial site and to objectionable parts of the Internet. The board will discuss the proposal next Wednesday, and education officials say that it is likely to agree to solicit proposals from technology companies on how to carry out parts of the proposal. One of the first requests, officials said, is likely to focus on providing | School Laptops Paid With Ads Called Feasible |
1231601_2 | the end of apartheid. General Pinochet's willingness to allow a plebiscite followed an attempted assassination (which left five of his bodyguards dead), and the discovery of a guerrilla group's arms cache in the desert. The Danes hid Jews and carried on shipyard strikes to slow the Nazi war effort, but also blew up factories and railroad tracks. The documentary is best when it examines specific tactics of these nonviolent protests, which required leaders to have media savvy and an ability to gauge the oppressor's tolerance for being publicly shamed (or, in the case of the Danish strikers, the oppressor's need for their services). It wasn't enough for the British police in India to attack Gandhi's volunteers with steel-tipped clubs. The action had political resonance when the horrible image was transmitted to the world by a United Press reporter, who described the ''sickening whacks of the clubs on unprotected skulls.'' It's impressive to watch black students from Fisk University in Nashville attend workshops in nonviolent action in 1960 intended to prepare them for the consequences of ordering lunch at segregated lunch counters. After grounding them in religious and Gandhian philosophy, their leader turns practical. He asks white volunteers to come into the classroom to curse at the black students and hit them, to instill the required stoicism. Without analyzing the phenomenon, the documentary shows that, as the century progressed, the manipulation of imagery -- especially on television -- became more and more important to pacifist movements. (It doesn't deal at all, however, with the ways in which marches have become a cliche and protest a performance art.) At Lech Walesa's first meeting with Poland's deputy prime minister in 1980, the documentary says, this 37-year-old union leader had little experience with microphones and cameras. A year later we see him as a seasoned on-camera persona, arguing angrily with the opposition on the telephone as he is being filmed. It's a canned intimate moment, and Mr. Walesa is going along as smoothly as a professional television personality. In Chile, before the vote in 1988 that led to General Pinochet's defeat, he allowed his opposition 15 minutes nightly of state-owned television time. That was his downfall. These broadcasts, some of them as bizarrely cheerful as fast-food commercials, dealt bluntly with issues of torture and poverty, and became required viewing in Santiago and beyond. Peter Ackerman and Jack DuVall, authors of a book being published | Six Events That Show a Brutal Century Wasn't All Bad |
1229995_1 | center of Brussels. A3 New Details on Mideast Talks Senior Clinton Administration officials provided details of a critical 90-minute meeting between the president and the Palestinian leader, Yasir Arafat, in Manhattan last week that was intended to aid the badly flagging Middle East peace talks. Yesterday, Mr. Arafat flew to Egypt for a 90-minute meeting with President Hosni Mubarak that appeared to confirm the generally gloomy forecasts for the new talks. A6 Russia's New Champion Russians glowed with pride over Marat Safin's victory at the United States Open, the first time that title has been held by a Russian. The acclaim comes even though he is an ethnic Tatar, a people often derided in Russia as Attila the Hun's henchmen, and even though he and his family left Russia four years ago to live in Spain. A6 New Yorker's Trial to Resume The civilian retrial of Lori Berenson, an American jailed in Peru on charges of collaborating with leftist guerrillas in a plot to attack Congress, will resume tomorrow, her new lawyer said. She was convicted by a military court in 1996. (Reuters) World Briefing A5 ARTS E1-8 Opera Going Hollywood Placido Domingo, the new artistic director of the Los Angeles Opera, said that George Lucas's special effects company, Industrial Light and Magic, would design a version of ''The Ring'' and that filmmakers would be asked to stage some operas. E1 NATIONAL A16-24 U.S. Says Young Are Target Of Violent Entertainment The Federal Trade Commission said the vast majority of the best-selling restricted movies, music and video games were deliberately marketed for children as young as 12. The commission chairman, Robert Pitofsky, was careful not to blame violent entertainment for the violence in society, though he allowed that exposure to violent materials ''does seem to correlate with aggressive attitudes, insensitivity to violence and an exaggerated view of how much violence occurs in the world.'' A1 Snag in Plea Agreement A last-minute dispute between prosecutors and defense lawyers over the terms of a plea agreement delayed until at least tomorrow the release of the former Los Alamos scientist Wen Ho Lee, who has agreed to plead guilty to a single count of improperly downloading secret information. A18 The plea agreement leaves unresolved an eight-year inquiry into how China obtained secret information on an advanced nuclear warhead. A1 U.S. Computer Security Flaws More than a quarter of the government's major agencies failed | NEWS SUMMARY |
1229874_4 | of added sugars also had the lowest intake of the five food groups (grains, fruits, vegetables, protein foods and dairy products), which are critical to normal growth and health maintenance. The caloric difference between the lowest and highest consumers of added sugars -- 190 calories a day -- can add up to a weight difference of about 20 pounds in a year's time. The Sugar Association would have a hard time convincing me that, soft drinks aside, calorie-rich sweets are not contributing to the inexorable expansion of the American waistline. Children and adults in this country are now fatter than ever. And as the weight of Americans has risen, so has the incidence of diabetes. The highest consumers of added sugars in Dr. Bowman's study consumed more than 10 times as many sugar-sweetened carbonated soft drinks and fruit drinks and punches as did the lowest consumers. The highest consumers of added sugars consumed the least milk, even though they also consumed the least amount of fruit juices containing natural sugars. Children, Dr. Bowman found, were more likely than adults to have a diet high in added sugars. About one-third of children ages 2 to 5 and one-half of children ages 6 to 11 were in the highest sugar-consuming group. Dietary Improvements Needed No one is suggesting a total avoidance of added sugars. It is the amount and frequency of their consumption that need curbing. But because most added sugars enter foods in the course of processing, not at the table or home kitchen, cutting back requires some knowledge of where they lurk. The Center for Science in the Public Interest, a consumer organization in Washington, last year petitioned the Food and Drug Administration to make it possible for consumers to know how much added sugars they are consuming in processed foods. On food labels, all sugars -- both those naturally present in foods and those added in processing -- are lumped together. So it would not be possible, when eating canned peaches packed in syrup for instance, to know how much of the sugar came from the peaches and how much was added by the canner. Furthermore, in listing ingredients, food processors can disguise the importance of added sugars by using several different sweeteners in a single product, each listed separately, making it appear that sugar was not a major ingredient. In its petition, the center asked the Food and | Added Sugars Are Taking a Toll on Health |
1229959_2 | gorillas, and a variety of monkeys. The last sightings of Miss Waldron's red colobus were in the 1970's, and a concerted seven-year effort to visit every last scrap of the swampy rain forests the monkey preferred ended late last month in the Ivory Coast without even a hint of its presence, said W. Scott McGraw, an anthropologist at Ohio State University who is a co-author of the paper. ''A healthy forest is loud, but this was like being in a deserted cathedral,'' Dr. McGraw said. ''You don't hear anything, you don't hear birds. You stumble over snares and shotgun shells.'' Dr. McGraw said he offered bounties to bush-meat hunters who could lead him to a red colobus -- $100 if he could hear the monkey's call or $200 for a sighting -- with no results. Satellite photographs were searched for any forgotten forest tracts. Many ecologists have projected that dozens of obscure species of plants and animals are becoming extinct each year as tropical forests are invaded by farmers, loggers and hunters. But these vanishings are all theoretical. What makes the apparent end of this monkey noteworthy, scientists say, is that it was a conspicuous, large mammal -- weighing up to 20 pounds -- and also because it was related, though distantly, to the scientists who studied it. ''People don't really worry about cockroaches or newts too much, but when you lose a large primate that's a culmination of lots of years of evolution and with which we share a lot of genes, the consequences to humans of that kind of loss -- both practical and emotional -- are much greater,'' said John G. Robinson, a primatologist and vice president of the Wildlife Conservation Society, which supported recent searches for the monkey. Miss Waldron's, Procolobus badius waldroni, is one of about a dozen variations of red colobus monkey, a group with distinctive long limbs and tails and a voracious appetite for the leaves of tropical treetops. The monkey was first described by scientists in 1936, based on eight specimens shot in 1933 by Willoughby P. Lowe, a collector for British museums. It was named for one Miss F. Waldron, who was described in various references as a traveling companion of Mr. Lowe. By the 1950's, deforestation and hunting were already threatening the monkey, although it remained common in a few places in southern Ghana. Echoing the authors of the paper, | A West African Monkey Is Extinct, Scientists Say |
1229886_1 | forest entirely removed. The researchers estimate that in 50 years, at the current rate of deforestation, nearly all the original forest will be similarly degraded. ''From what I've seen there year after year, I predicted it would be bad and getting worse,'' said Dr. Lincoln P. Brower, a monarch biologist at Sweet Briar College who was an author of the new study with colleagues at the National Autonomous University of Mexico and the World Wildlife Fund. ''But I didn't predict it would be this bad. The maps just floored me.'' The study, undertaken to assist in the Mexican government's review of the monarch's wintering areas, has not yet been submitted for publication but has been given to the government. In response in part to the findings, the Mexican government unveiled a proposal last Thursday for the creation of an expanded preserve -- already ardently contested by some local residents -- that would be more than three times the size of the current protected areas. Dr. Karen Oberhauser, a monarch ecologist at the University of Minnesota who was not involved in the study, praised the quality of the work, saying: ''It's the first study and a really important study. We didn't expect the change to be this great.'' Across the country now, monarchs are just beginning their fall migration, an annual trek that takes the butterflies from across the central and eastern United States and Canada down to the mountains of central Mexico. There they roost as they have for millenniums, clustered in wintering areas sprinkled throughout what were once dense, remote mountain forests. They remain there until spring, when they fly north once again to breed. In each area, the butterflies gather in huge roosting groups that thickly paper the fir trees in the orange and black of their wings. In order to study changes to the forests since the roosts were discovered 25 years ago, the researchers examined a series of aerial photographs taken in the 1970's, 1983 and 1999 of a 100,000-acre area that includes three of the most important wintering sites, each of which was designated as a preserve in 1986. What researchers found was that not only was forest disappearing both inside and outside the preserves, but it was being removed in such a way that what forest remained was highly fragmented. Much of the forest had been significantly thinned, a process leading not to regeneration | Monarch Butterflies Lose Much of Their Wintering Grounds |
1229941_2 | be regulated more like cars. Although the document does not provide tire speed ratings for vehicles in the United States, these tend to be fairly similar to the speed ratings for exported models, which are often produced in the same factories. The steps taken in Venezuela are significant because as Firestone proceeds with the recall of 6.5 million similar tires in the United States, Firestone and Ford have disagreed publicly over the recommended pressure for the recalled tires. Ford declined to comment on the document. Christine Karbowiak, a Firestone spokeswoman, said Firestone stopped supplying new Explorers with tires in Venezuela in September 1999, when Goodyear began supplying them. Higher pressure makes tires less likely to fail and allows them to carry more weight. But higher pressures also make the ride bumpier and can make a vehicle more likely to roll over even without a tire failure. Ever since the introduction of the Explorer in late 1990, Ford has recommended that owners inflate the tires to 26 pounds per square inch. That is a lower pressure than most automakers recommend for rival midsized sport utility vehicles. Firestone did not publicly question the pressure recommendation in the United States for 10 years, but did so when the recall was announced on Aug. 9, surprising Ford executives by suddenly suggesting that Explorer owners inflate their tires to a pressure of 30 pounds per square inch until they could find replacement tires. Ford officials subsequently recommended a range of pressures from 26 to 30 pounds. In Venezuela, Ford chose new tires with a recommended pressure of 30 pounds in 1999, according to the investigators' document, a one-page table dated June 6, 2000. The new tire was the same size as the tire being recalled in the United States and the new tire was certified as usable for the same top speed as in the United States, 112 miles per hour. Before the new tires were introduced, Ford had been using Firestone tires of the same size, but with a top speed of 106 miles per hour and a recommended pressure of 28 pounds. Computerized engine controls actually limit the Explorer's speed to 99 miles per hour in the United States. But Representative Billy Tauzin, the Louisiana Republican who is the chairman of the House Commerce Subcommittee on Consumer Protection, has emphasized tire pressure in his investigation while Ford has called it a ''red herring.'' | Table Shows Ford's Stance On Tire Limits |
1229997_0 | To the Editor: The recent article on hormone replacement therapy for menopausal and post-menopausal women discusses its perceived benefits and drawbacks (''Hormone Replacement Therapy: Why They Do It, or Avoid It,'' Sept. 5). Hardly mentioned, but important, is how H.R.T., either in pill or cream form, helps women regain sexual satisfaction. Public accounts tend to be discreet about this benefit. For many older women in loving partnerships, the spirit (for sex) is willing, even eager, but the flesh is weak; age-related vaginal dryness and thinning interfere with pleasure. When, as a woman in my 60's, I described this problem to my doctor, she knew just what I meant. She had heard this complaint from many other women and had the solution. A prescription for H.R.T. restored the resiliency of youth. Maybe couples should have his and her doctors' appointments -- his for Viagra and hers for H.R.T. NANCY C. ATWOOD Boston | A Hormone Therapy Benefit |
1229889_5 | aesthetic reasons, the gray-colored titanium is nickel-plated to bond an outer coating of 24-carat gold. Inside each enclosure is a thin, perforated aluminum document platform that stands about an inch high on three, snap-out posts. This platform is detachable so that it and the attached document can be removed from the enclosure if disassembled. The document is to rest on pieces of pure cellulose paper specially made at the University of Iowa, and both will be affixed to the platform with thin clips of clear polyester film that exert almost no pressure. Each piece of parchment has irregular, unique edges and both the platform and paper for each document will be cut in its shape so as not to be visible beneath. There have been a number of design changes in the enclosures since the first engineering model was completed last year, Mr. Judson said. For instance, engineers reduced the number of bolts to 70 from 80. They also added two covered instrument bays in the base, he said, one for valves used to fill and purge the cases with gases and the other for humidity and temperature sensors. The cases will be filled with inert argon gas instead of the helium used in the earlier enclosures because argon is a larger molecule that is less likely to escape. And conservators decided to keep the relative humidity inside the new cases at 40 percent, higher than planned for the earlier containers, to more closely match outside conditions in the event the enclosures must be opened. To help check conditions inside the enclosures if internal sensors fail, engineers decided to install an external monitoring system that measures water vapor and oxygen content based upon changes in the wavelengths of a special light beamed into the case. This required putting two small optical windows, each covered with a sapphire lens, in the base of the enclosure and a set of three mirrors in a box beneath the document platform inside the case. With this system, developed by Aerodyne Research Incorporated of Billerica, Mass., light from an argon discharge lamp goes into the enclosure, reflects off the mirrors and is measured coming out. Changes in wavelength of this light caused by water vapor or oxygen absorption should help conservators monitor the gaseous environment inside the encasements, said Andrew Freedman, who helped develop the system for Aerodyne. Opening the old cases also gives conservators | New Homes for the 'Charters of Freedom'; A Challenge for the Engineers: Protect the Documents but Display Them Too |
1226857_3 | camps -- the stresses are exacerbated,'' said Karen Freedman, executive director of Lawyers for Children, a nonprofit group that provides lawyers and social services for children who are voluntarily placed. ''A lot of what these parents are feeling is fear for their children.'' In Family Court, where despair competes daily with heartbreak, voluntary placement cases are among the saddest and most confounding. The adolescents are likely to end up in group homes rather than with foster families. If they need psychiatric care, the wait for a state-financed residential treatment center can sometimes be many months. Often, the youngsters simply run away from a group home, or wait until they become adults and leave the system. Occasionally, social workers and advocates for children successfully persuade parents not to relinquish the children. Margaret O'Marra, a Legal Aid social worker, says many of the children have suffered loss and trauma in early childhood. Others live with attention deficit disorder, depression or learning disabilities. ''A good percentage of these kids are kids who have not gotten proper treatment in time,'' Ms. O'Marra said. Mr. Abdul-Hakam's daughter was relatively lucky in that she was placed with foster parents, four families in two years. Mr. Abdul-Hakam wants her back home, he says, but not now. He wants first to move out of the one-bedroom Brooklyn apartment he shares with his wife and younger daughter, though for now, that seems out of reach. Mr. Abdul-Hakam, 49, supports his family on public assistance, he says, cleaning a beach in Queens three days a week for his welfare check. And though his relationship with his daughter has improved in the last two years, he remains out of touch with the ordinary details of her life. He is not sure which school she will attend this month. He is not sure of the mental health diagnosis that has been made, nor of the name of the medications she has been taking. When and whether she will return home remains a mystery. Lawyers who represent children like her say they tend to stay in care longer than others. Marta, a 15-year-old who had been shuttled among a series of caretakers before she landed in foster care last year, is no exception. When her mother was arrested on drug charges, Marta, who spoke on the condition that only her first name be used, was sent to her grandmother in Puerto Rico. When | Despondent Parents See Foster Care as Only Option |
1226779_0 | ''Titanic Town'' is by no means the first film to portray the profoundly disruptive effects on everyday life of the long-running troubles in Northern Ireland. But in its harshly realistic scenes of British Army tanks rolling across the lawns of a middle-class housing development in West Belfast, it stirs your blood. As helicopters hover overhead and armed gunmen dart from house to house to flush out Irish Republican Army guerrillas in the middle of the afternoon, the community appears to be a besieged enclave continually terrorized by a ruthless occupying army. It's not that simple, of course. In 1972, the year this beautifully acted film remembers with an acute eye and ear for period detail, the Andersontown section of West Belfast, in which ''Titanic Town'' is set, was an I.R.A. stronghold. But although ''Titanic Town,'' which opens today at the Loews State, aspires to be nonpartisan and on the side of peace, its portrayal of British officials as supercilious and conniving, and the Irish Catholic residents of Andersontown as victims, leaves little doubt as to where the movie's political sympathies lie. The film, directed by Roger Michell from a screenplay by Anne Devlin, is based on Mary Costello's autobiographical novel of her own adolescence in Andersontown in the early 1970's. No sooner have the McPhelimys, a family of six, moved to the area than they are horrified to find themselves trapped in a war zone where sporadic violence erupts at all hours of the day. The situation is so stressful that before long Aidan (Ciaran Hinds), the McPhelimys' pessimistic, sad-faced paterfamilias, develops a severe case of bleeding ulcers and has to be rushed to the hospital. His wife, Bernie (Julie Walters), however, is so outraged by the daytime skirmishes that she impulsively takes action and comes up with the faintly comical notion of requesting that both sides schedule their conflicts at hours that are less hazardous to children. The final straw that drives her to undertake what evolves into a full-scale peace movement is an I.R.A. gunman's accidental shooting of an innocent neighbor who is caught in crossfire. Refusing to acknowledge its mistake, the I.R.A. gleefully fans the flames of hatred by blaming the British. When Bernie naively accepts an invitation to speak at a meeting organized by local Protestant women, it is disrupted by an angry mob of her neighbors, who storm the meeting hall, screaming curses. She is | How an Irish Mother Became a Warrior for Peace |
1226804_0 | A French Protest Ends | |
1228334_1 | all but one of them members of the Nilotic tribe, well over 6 feet tall, with deep-black skins.'' The article described the bitterness among black Africans over the slave trade and their resentment of the Arabs of northern Sudan. It was the first article to appear in the United States press on what happened in the southern Sudan since the civil strife had begun there. From 1959 to 1962, Mr. Fellows was The Times's correspondent in Israel, covering the trial of Adolf Eichmann and violence in Cyprus. From 1962 to 1965, he was a Times correspondent in London, where he covered the scandal surrounding the war minister, John Profumo, who resigned after lying about his affair with a call girl, and returned to Cyprus to cover Greek-Turkish fighting. In January 1964, a letter addressed to the editor of The New York Times arrived in New York. It was from Odysseus Ulysses Tsangarides, owner of the Olympic Hotel in Nicosia, Cyprus, where Mr. Fellows had been staying. It said: ''I would like to express my profound gratitude for saving the life of a good cook and honest man, Mr. Costas Niarchou, held as 'prisoner/ hostage' by the Turks, thanks to the daring intervention of your correspondent in Cyprus, Mr. Lawrence Fellows, at a dangerous moment of tension, and who risked his own life trying to save and liberate the above-mentioned cook.'' It was the first that the foreign news desk had heard of Mr. Fellows's feat. Questioned by the desk, he said modestly that he had merely asked Turkish leaders whether they would try to find out whether the cook was alive and, if so, whether they could keep him alive and perhaps even return him. And they did. But he also told the foreign desk that, with the cook missing, he had noticed ''a drastic turn for the worse in the food.'' From 1969 to 1972, he was a Times correspondent in Bonn. In 1972, he covered the kidnapping and murder, by Arab terrorists, of nine Israeli athletes who were in Munich for the Olympic Games there. He was born in Detroit, grew up there and in Washington, served in the Navy on an aircraft carrier in World War II and received a bachelor of arts degree in 1948 from Ohio Wesleyan University. He then worked as a civilian for the United States Army in Berlin and for the State | Lawrence Fellows, 75, Foreign Correspondent for Times and Editor |
1228325_0 | To some ears, the Northwest Passage still sounds like an old-fashioned geographic fiction, an article of faith for which men died rather than a real path through real waters. Victorian England never showed its true colors more truly than in its fervent response to the disappearance of Sir John Franklin's last Arctic expedition, which sailed from England on May 18, 1845, in search of the Northwest Passage and whose fate remained essentially unknown for a dozen years afterward. Rescue missions were staged, poems written, funds raised, theories proposed and contested. The very duration of uncertainty about Franklin became an element of the region in which he and his crew perished. All this makes the recent voyage of the St. Roch II, a Royal Canadian Mounted Police boat, the more remarkable. It traversed the Northwest Passage in a month without running into any ice. Moreover, it was one of at least three vessels to cruise the Northwest Passage this summer. On its voyage, the St. Roch II also came across the bodies of six of Franklin's crew -- bodies found with the aid of an Inuk hunter who was relying on old tribal stories. There is an almost bewildering convergence of time scales here. The alarm at Franklin's silence was not seriously sounded until more than a year after he sailed, simply because there was no way that news of his fate, good or bad, could have returned to England sooner. Sgt. Ken Burton, the skipper of the St. Roch II, relied on maritime telephone for instantaneous communication. Louie Kamookak, the Inuk hunter, depended on ancestral lore reaching back more than a century and a half. The voyage of the St. Roch II raised the possibility of a northwestern thoroughfare for seagoing traffic, the very thing first sought by John Cabot half a millennium ago. What unsettled earlier ages was the thought of a frozen North, capable of defeating the will even of men as energetic and resourceful as Sir John Franklin. What unsettles us is the thought of an ice-free passage through an unfrozen North, a world whose ecological delicacy has been protected through the centuries mainly by its inaccessibility. | Where Time Lay Frozen |
1228332_0 | TO alleviate apparent shortages of computer programmers, President Clinton and Congress have agreed to raise a quota on H-1B's, the temporary visas for skilled foreigners. The annual limit will go to 200,000 next year, up from 65,000 only three years ago. The imported workers, most of whom come from India, are said to be needed because American schools do not graduate enough young people with science and math skills. Microsoft's chairman, William H. Gates, and Intel's chairman, Andrew S. Grove, told Congress in June that more visas were only a stopgap until education improved. But the crisis is a mirage. High-tech companies portray a shortage, yet it is our memories that are short: only yesterday there was a glut of science and math graduates. The computer industry took advantage of that glut by reducing wages. This discouraged youths from entering the field, creating the temporary shortages of today. Now, taking advantage of a public preconception that school failures have created the problem, industry finds a ready audience for its demands to import workers. This newspaper covered the earlier surplus extensively. In 1992, it reported that 1 in 5 college graduates had a job not requiring a college degree. A 1995 article headlined ''Supply Exceeds Demand for Ph.D.'s in Many Science Fields'' cited nationwide unemployment of engineers, mathematicians and scientists. ''Overproduction of Ph.D. degrees,'' it noted, ''seems to be highest in computer science.'' Michael S. Teitelbaum, a demographer who served as vice chairman of the Commission on Immigration Reform, said in 1996 that there was ''an employer's market'' for technology workers, partly because of post-cold-war downsizing in aerospace. In fields with real labor scarcity, wages rise. Yet despite accounts of dot-com entrepreneurs' becoming millionaires, trends in computer technology pay do not confirm a need to import legions of programmers. Salary offers to new college graduates in computer science averaged $39,000 in 1986 and had declined by 1994 to $33,000 (in constant dollars). The trend reversed only in the late 1990's. The West Coast median salary for experienced software engineers was $71,100 in 1999, up only 10 percent (in constant dollars) from 1990. This pay growth of about 1 percent a year suggests no labor shortage. Norman Matloff, a computer science professor at the University of California, contends that high-tech companies create artificial shortages by refusing to hire experienced programmers. Many with technology degrees no longer work in the field. By age | How to Create a Shortage In a Skilled-Labor Market |
1228355_0 | EUROPE VATICAN: CATHOLICISM'S ROLE -- The Vatican issued a strong statement seeking to affirm and ''clarify'' Roman Catholic teaching on the uniqueness of Christianity and the Catholic Church. The document, written by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, says that salvation is available only through Jesus Christ and that Christ's church ''continues to exist fully only in the Catholic Church.'' It also says Christ's church is ''present and operative'' in other churches provided that they share a Catholic understanding of the Eucharist and preserve an ecclesial structure in which bishops trace their authority to the Apostles. Gustav Niebuhr BRITAIN: TWINS CASE DELAYED -- Citing the complexities of the case, the Court of Appeal said it would be next week before it could decide whether a High Court judge was correct in giving doctors permission to proceed with an operation separating joined twins that would sacrifice the life of one to save the other. The parents, identified only as Catholics from a ''remote'' European community, said their faith compels them to let nature take its course even if it means the death of their children, born last month. Warren Hoge BRITAIN: DIANA GUARD'S NEW ROLE -- Trevor Rees-Jones, the bodyguard who survived the crash three years ago in Paris that killed Diana, Princess of Wales, her boyfriend Emad Mohamed al-Fayed, known as Dodi, and their driver, Henri Paul, has taken a job with the United Nations as a security officer working with peacekeeping troops in East Timor, Indonesia. ''He's just getting on with his life,'' his lawyer, Ian Lucas, said of Mr. Rees-Jones, 32, a former paratrooper. Warren Hoge FRANCE: OFFER TO EASE FUEL TAX -- The government and leaders of trucking unions agreed to reduce fuel taxes after two days of truck drivers' blockades of fuel depots led to widespread rationing. But the proposal still has to go before protesting union members, who have been calling for deeper cuts. (Agence France-Presse) THE AMERICAS ARGENTINA, CHILE: JOINT MANEUVERS -- The Argentine and Chilean navies, long suspicious rivals that almost went to war in 1978, conducted joint maneuvers in Argentine waters for the first time. After Chilean commanders aboard the Chilean frigate Condell were allowed to watch the Argentine Navy conduct antisubmarine maneuvers as well as precision artillery exercises, they and their Argentine colleagues pledged to build trust and friendship in the future. Clifford Krauss ASIA INDONESIA: WAHID INQUIRY -- | WORLD BRIEFING |
1228344_0 | The Bridgestone/Firestone tire defect now blamed for 88 deaths, mainly in Ford Explorers, eluded detection for so long because it occurred infrequently, even though it proved deadlier than many problems that occur more often in vehicles, Ford Motor and Congressional investigators said today. The deadliness of the tire problems, combined with a low rate of warranty claims for poor quality tires, is focusing attention on whether the design of the Explorer makes it especially vulnerable, the investigators said. The high death rate associated with a fairly small number of tire failures is striking because the nation's last big tire recall, in 1978, involved Firestone tires that failed frequently but were linked to less than half as many deaths. The investigators, who portray Ford and Firestone as both culpable in the crash deaths, also distributed copies today of an internal Ford memorandum from March 1999 that showed that Firestone opposed a tire recall in Saudi Arabia for fear that the tire maker would have to report it to United States regulators. Ford said it decided to recall Explorers in Saudi Arabia anyway, at its expense, to replace the tires. But Ford also said it did not tell United States regulators about the decision after Firestone assured it that the rate of accident claims on identical tires in the United States was average. House and Senate committees will conduct hearings on Wednesday to look into what Firestone, Ford and federal regulators knew about the tire problems, when they knew it and how they reacted. Congressional investigators and Ford disagreed today about the significance of the fact that Firestone customers turned in few of the millions of tires for replacement under warranty, yet Firestone received a high number of claims of property damage, personal injury and death. Representative Billy Tauzin, the Louisiana Republican who is chairman of one of the subcommittees holding hearings on Wednesday, said that the problem was ''a lethal combination of a somewhat unstable vehicle'' with tires prone to shed their treads at high speed. His own Ford Explorer, a green 1992 model, has been sitting in his garage for a month, he said, because he cannot find replacement tires for it. In 1978, Firestone replaced 17 percent of the 23 million tires in dispute to settle warranty claims even before that recall. Though Ford and Firestone have not provided warranty figures for the current recall, they have said that | Questions on Tire-Defect Data Arise as Hearings Draw Near |
1230662_2 | problems as resulting from customers' neglect of the tires. C. Tab Turner, a lawyer in Little Rock, Ark., who specializes in tire failure and vehicle rollover cases and who has filed some of the many lawsuits against Ford and Firestone, said that he had seen during litigation many of the Firestone test results that Mr. Tauzin is now demanding. The recalled tire models suffered tread separations -- the type of tire problem now blamed in dozens of fatal crashes -- in 600 to 700 of the roughly 1,000 tests that Firestone conducted over the last decade, he said. Many of the tests were designed to push the tires to their limit to determine when tread separation occurred, but the sheer number of tests shows that Firestone suspected a problem, he contended. Firestone officials did not return calls for comment today but have said repeatedly that the tire maker's safety staff only became aware of a problem at the beginning of August, just before the recall was announced on Aug. 9. But the company's financial records show that the company's accountants had identified a problem at least by 1998. Michael Vaughn, a Ford spokesman, said that the company had tested the tires at 26 pounds per square inch by driving Explorers with the tires at 100 miles per hour for a distance of 200 miles on a test track in Arizona in 1989. No problems were detected, he said. Ford proceeded with the buyback today despite concerns raised even by some Wall Street analysts that returning money to shareholders now might be viewed as insensitive given the nearly 100 deaths linked to the failure of Firestone tires. Henry D. G. Wallace, Ford's chief financial officer, said that the stock buyback represented a continuation of the company's plan, announced last April, to distribute to shareholders $10 billion of the automaker's cash reserves. The company set up a plan in April to give stockholders a choice of cash or additional shares, but so many chose the shares that the company ended up distributing only $5.3 billion of the planned $10 billion. Mr. Tauzin declined to comment on the buyback. Joan Claybrook, the president of Public Citizen, a consumer advocacy group, said that she was not concerned as long as the buyback did not affect the recall. Financial analysts applauded Ford's move even while noting the awkward timing. ''You can be a little surprised | Ford Chairman Speaks Out On Tires for the First Time |
1230695_6 | supervisors and newly hired employees were often called on to master highly skilled jobs to keep the plant running. When workers returned in May 1995, they said many problems lingered, partly because many seasoned workers retired. The company also started operating seven days a week. Employees began working 12-hour shifts, often alternating between days and nights -- a practice that was scrapped after numerous complaints. ''It made a difference in my workmanship,'' Mr. Newton said. ''My production went down during the last four hours.'' The basics of manufacturing tires, though, remained the same at Firestone's biggest and oldest American plant, which today produces more than 25,000 largely handmade tires a day. In giant red-brick buildings spread across 52 acres, rubber components are mixed in a machine invented in the 1890's; workers build tires piece by piece, with machines sifting and distributing rubber, nylon, steel belts and other components. The raw tire is still cooked -- or vulcanized -- in a steamy curing machine. This is the process that investigators are now focusing on. Firestone will not say what its experts have found. But tire consultants involved in lawsuits against Firestone say they have evidence that throughout the 1990's, Decatur was poorly managed and proper procedures were either not in place or not followed. ''The problem is bad housekeeping and bad material,'' a consultant, R. J. Grogan, said. ''It's a weak rubber, and they don't take care of it; they use stale stuff and freshen it up.'' Many experts say the critical bond between the steel and rubber, aided by the use of brass and other materials, may be flawed. Investigators are trying to determine what solvents were used to aid the adhesive process. Workers at Decatur say they commonly ''gassed,'' or sprayed, a chemical solvent on the rubber to make it tackier. Several workers say they were told to stop using the solvent in the last year. Others say that it is still regularly applied, and that its use has been common for decades. ''During the strike they were using it all the time,'' said Jared Thompson, a tire builder, ''because the quality of the material going from one department to another wasn't as good.'' Four former Decatur plant workers said in depositions that solvents were employed to make use of otherwise unusable rubber, that production quotas made thorough inspections nearly impossible, and that plant conditions made it possible for | Firestone Workers Cite Lax Quality Control |
1234054_1 | the federal government barely regulates dietary supplements. In July the General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress, said consumers may be buying potentially unsafe ingredients because the Food and Drug Administration has never issued safety standards for dietary supplements. A law passed by Congress in 1994 prevents it from doing so. If the current bill is passed it would also pre-empt states from passing any other food safety measures under consideration, like requiring the labeling of genetically modified foods, because the federal government does not believe such labeling is necessary. The recall last week of Kraft Taco Bell taco shells made with genetically modified corn not approved for human consumption has heightened interest in such labeling. Opponents of the new legislation say it would also void a New York State law requiring frozen food previously offered as fresh to be so labeled, as well as other local laws requiring warnings about the safe storage of eggs in the shell and the proper handling of smoked fish and raw shellfish. Proponents say that warning labels on raw shellfish would be exempt, but the bill's wording is unclear. The bill would allow states to petition the Food and Drug Administration to allow exemptions. Most important, the bill would void California's Proposition 65, passed in 1986, which requires warning labels on products containing ingredients that may cause cancer or birth defects. In two instances companies chose not to sell foods in California because they would have had to carry warnings. Proposition 65 was instrumental in forcing manufacturers to change their products to avoid the labels: taking lead-soldered food cans off the market, for example, as well as removing lead in dishware and drastically reducing the amount of lead in calcium supplements and antacids. The Grocery Manufacturers Association, which is leading the fight for the new bill, acknowledged that Proposition 65 had not resulted in label changes for any food sold in California. But Brian Folkerts, vice president of government affairs for the National Food Processors Association, said that ''if one state imposed a warning requirement not adopted by other states, there is pretty clear linkage that could lead to considerable confusion.'' Consumers might question the safety of certain products, Mr. Folkerts said. In addition to the 16 state attorneys general (including those of New York and Connecticut, but not of New Jersey), others strongly opposed to this legislation include the Association of | Congress Weighs Limiting State Food-Safety Measures |
1234087_0 | Moving to address safety concerns, agribusiness companies took steps yesterday to limit the chances that a strain of bioengineered corn not approved for human consumption could end up in food products. The corn, approved for use only in animal feed, was found last week in a sampling of taco shells sold in stores under the Taco Bell brand, prompting Kraft Foods to recall the more than 2.5 million boxes of the product believed to be in distribution. Yesterday, Aventis CropScience, which engineered the corn to make it more pest-resistant and marketed the technology under the StarLink name, told seed companies not to sell any of the corn for planting next year. Affirming a policy adopted Monday by the Biotechnology Industry Organization, a Washington-based trade group, Aventis also said it would no longer market bioengineered products for any use until they had been cleared for use in food. ''We agree that it's prudent,'' said David Witherspoon, president of the Garst Seed Company, Aventis's biggest licensee. Mr. Witherspoon said Garst, based in Slater, Iowa, would store StarLink corn seed harvested this year on the assumption that StarLink would eventually be cleared for food use. While it has not been established that the StarLink corn poses a risk to human health, tests have found it to carry a protein that has some characteristics of allergens. Mr. Witherspoon said Garst would direct farmers who want next year's crops engineered to fend off the corn borer, a common pest, to use corn strains based on Monsanto's YieldGuard technology, which has government clearance for food uses. Aventis said yesterday that the company and regulators were discussing the fate of the 315,000 acres planted with StarLink this year. Aventis said it was close to announcing new measures developed in consultation with farmers to confine the current crop to approved uses. Aventis said that containing this year's crop should not be a major challenge since it represented much less than one-half of 1 percent of the 73 million acres planted in corn this year. As Aventis moved to halt sales of the corn seed, the company that milled the corn in the taco shells moved yesterday to halt further shipments of yellow corn products from its mill in Plainview, Tex. The company, Azteca Mills of Dallas, said it was testing for evidence of the unapproved corn and expected to resume full production within a week. The Plainview mill | Companies Act to Keep Bioengineered Corn Out of Food |
1232893_5 | and they want Firestone to start recalling 16-inch Wilderness tires as well. Safetyforum.com, a research firm for personal injury lawyers, released today a review of all complaints to regulators about Firestone tires that can be mounted on Explorers. For those complaints in which the tire's size and place of manufacture could be identified, the majority involved tires that have not been recalled, the research firm said. ''By selling the fiction that the problem is in Decatur, they get by with using non-Decatur tires as replacements,'' said Ralph Hoar, the founder of Safetyforum.com. But the research firm was only able to identify the tire sizes and places of manufacture for 12 percent of the complaints. While Ford declined to comment on SafetyForum.com's work, Firestone seized on the limited sample size, contending in a statement this evening, ''That is much too small a universe of tires on which to base such conclusions and such serious allegations.'' The tire maker warned that ''consumers would be replacing good tires with good tires, delaying and adding confusion to the efforts to quickly replace the recalled tires.'' On the suspension issue, Ford officials disclsoed on Wednesday that the automaker and regulators had received complaints about possible defects in the Explorer's front sway bar. Ford and regulators say that they have not heard of any serious crashes related to the bar. But this is the suspension component that limits how much the vehicle tilts from side to side while going around curves, and it is one of the most important components in preventing rollovers. A computer analysis by The New York Times of a federal database of all fatal crashes across the country found that tire-related deaths in Explorers were somewhat more likely to involve rollovers than tire-related deaths in other sport utility vehicles. From 1994 through 1999, rollovers were a factor in 95 percent of the deaths that occurred in Explorers after a tire failed. During the same period, 80 percent of other sport utilities in fatal, tire-related crashes also rolled over, as did roughly 40 percent of cars. Since the overall rollover death rate for Explorers is low by sport utility vehicle standards -- although still high compared with cars -- the prevalence of rollovers in the Firestone tire cases is somewhat surprising. But the type of failure occurring on Firestone tires happens mainly at high speeds, and rollovers are especially likely at high speeds. | Ford Raises Recommended Tire Pressure |
1232844_2 | French gesture perplexed diplomats here and deepened divisions on the Security Council at a critical moment in its relations with the government of Mr. Hussein. France has considerable oil industry interests in Iraq, but French diplomats have always argued that those interests are not its motivation in seeking changes or new interpretations of the United Nations sanctions. In addition to the sanctions, Britain and the United States enforce no-flight zones over parts of Iraq, where Iraqi planes are not supposed to operate. Today, the Council heard from Hans Blix, the new chief arms inspector for Iraq, about Iraq's continuing refusal to allow monitoring to resume. The Council has no plan for how to meet this defiance, and diplomats do not expect the United States to push the issue during a presidential election campaign. After the meeting today, Mr. Blix told reporters that the Council seemed eager to get inspections started, although there has been no Council action. ''There seem to be many people who are guessing that not much might happen before the American elections,'' he said. ''I think that might be a good guess.'' Last week, Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright said the Clinton administration would not use force to make the Iraqis accept weapons inspectors. Next Tuesday, the Geneva-based commission awarding compensation to victims of Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in 1990 meets in an atmosphere of crisis because of attempts by France and Russia to block a reparations payment of $15.9 billion to the Kuwait Petroleum Corporation. The United States is now considering whether to force a vote on the claim, which would normally be approved by consensus. The commission's members are the same as the nations on the Security Council. More broadly, Russia, France, China and Tunisia, which holds a rotating Security Council seat, are pressing here to lower the percentage of Iraqi oil earnings set aside for compensation to 20 percent from 30 percent so more money can go to importing goods for Iraqi civilian needs. That demand will be a major focus of debate through the coming weeks and perhaps months. Iraq, now exporting oil at levels nearly as high as before the 1991 war in the Persian Gulf, and at very high prices, is expected to earn as much as $20 billion this year, the director of the oil-sales program told the council on Thursday. On flights into Baghdad, where President Hussein has | French Flight Tests Ban Against Iraq |
1232889_1 | Taco Bell Home Originals packages containing 12 shells and 18 shells as well as the Taco Bell Home Originals Taco Dinner, which contains 12 shells plus sauce and seasoning. Kraft, a subsidiary of Philip Morris, said consumers should return the product to where it was purchased for a full refund. Michael Mudd, vice president for corporate affairs at Kraft, said the Taco Bell product line, sold under license from the Taco Bell restaurant chain, a unit of Tricon Global Restaurants, accounts for more than $100 million in annual sales, but the shells themselves are about half of that. The company estimates there are about 2.5 million boxes in stores and homes. Kraft bought the shells from a factory in Mexicali, Mexico, owned by Sabritas, a subsidiary of PepsiCo. The corn flour came from a mill in Plainview, Tex., owned by Azteca Milling. The Taco Bell restaurants chain, which gets some of its shells from the same factory, said yesterday that it had told its suppliers to start buying flour from sources other than the two Texas mills operated by Azteca. Although it said it had not confirmed that its shells also had the bioengineered corn, it said all the shells in its 7,000 restaurants would be replaced by next week. The episode has given new ammunition to those calling for stricter safety testing and labeling of bioengineered foods. ''I view it as a very poignant cautionary tale that our regulatory system is not up to the task of preventing potential problems with genetically engineered food,'' said Joseph Mendelson III, legal director of the Center for Food Safety, a Washington advocacy group that is part of Genetically Engineered Food Alert. But officials of the Food and Drug Administration and in the biotechnology industry said this was a case of food contamination, not a problem with regulations, and noted that StarLink was the only biotechnology crop approved for use in animals but not people. In any case, the incident shows how difficult it can be to contain genes once they get into the field and how hard it can be to keep different varieties of crops from commingling. Europe has been shaken this year by several incidents in which crops were found to contain small amounts of genetically modified material that they were not supposed to. It is not known how the contamination occurred in this case. But pollen from genetically modified | Kraft Recalls Taco Shells With Bioengineered Corn |
1232800_0 | To the Editor: You report that the Senate voted overwhelmingly to give permanent trade benefits to China ''despite the State Department's recent conclusion that China's human rights violations have, if anything, grown more egregious this year'' (front page, Sept. 20). Isn't it time we recognized Cuba, a small nation with which we could trade, and perhaps improve the lives of people there, or don't we have the courage? ESTHER B. SIEGEL Southampton, N.Y., Sept. 20, 2000 | China and Cuba |
1232922_0 | A month after officials in Marlboro Township, N.J., approved the state's first ban on the use of handheld cellular phones while driving, Sprint PCS sued to challenge the ban -- and then withdrew the suit yesterday. Sprint filed the lawsuit in State Superior Court in Monmouth County on Aug. 25, seeking to overturn the ban on the grounds that only the State Legislature had the authority to regulate motor vehicles, said Larry McDonnell, a spokesman for Sprint, based in Kansas City, Mo. But Mr. McDonnell said the company dropped its suit yesterday after learning that the State Senate approved a measure on Monday to establish a task force on driver distractions and highway safety. The measure still awaits a decision by the Assembly. Because any state statute arising from the task force's recommendations would supersede Marlboro's ordinance, Mr. McDonnell said, the company decided to shift its focus to the State Legislature, and would testify before the task force if it was created. Marlboro's ban, which exempts emergency workers and does not apply to cellular phones with headsets, was approved by the Township Council on July 13. Marlboro became the only municipality in New Jersey, and one of only six in the country, to ban or limit the use of wireless phones while driving, citing research indicating that drivers using them are more likely to have accidents. The Municipal Council in Jersey City approved a similar ban on Sept. 13, but it was vetoed on Thursday by Mayor Bret Schundler, after city lawyers questioned the council's authority to impose such a restriction. Just when Marlboro's ban will take effect is unclear because the township is awaiting final approval from the State Department of Transportation for road signs informing drivers of the ban, said Stephanie Luftglass, a township spokeswoman. Barry Denkensohn, the councilman who proposed the ban, said he was pleased by Sprint's decision. The suit is the second Sprint has filed against Marlboro. In 1998, the company sued over a moratorium local officials had imposed on the construction of cellular phone towers, after Sprint sought to build a tower there. The suit was dismissed, and in January the company signed a contract to use Marlboro's municipal radio tower for its transmissions. But the company is still seeking a variance to build a tower in a residential zone. Mr. McDonnell said dropping the lawsuit had nothing to do with the pending application. | Sprint Ends Suit Over Limits On Car Phones |
1234608_0 | The federal Environmental Protection Agency has notified New York City officials that it believes changes made in the city's lead-paint law last year are critically flawed. It said the law is now likely to result in more lead poisoning of children and called on the city to close the loopholes. The agency acted after pleas from health experts and tenant groups who opposed the city's revisions as dangerous to children, who can suffer mental, physical and emotional impairment and sometimes even death from ingesting lead dust and paint chips. Under E.P.A. rules, work to remove lead paint completely in residences must be done by specially trained workers, and after its completion, a test must be conducted to ensure that no lead dust or other contamination remains. The city law, which deals with lead-control work other than full removal, does not require trained workers or follow-up tests. The federal agency's rules do not cover such work, although the agency is considering extending its regulations. The E.P.A.'s concerns were expressed in letters sent last week by Jeanne M. Fox, the agency's New York regional administrator, to Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani; Peter F. Vallone, the City Council speaker; and several other officials. ''While I applaud the law's intent and its clear movement in the right direction for protecting children, I believe that Local Law 38, as currently written, falls short of the protection that children deserve and need,'' Ms. Fox wrote. She said the city law omits the ''two critical additional steps'' of requiring qualified workers and follow-up tests. Without these steps, cleanup efforts would probably lead to greater lead hazards, a higher risk of lead poisoning in children and, in some cases, children with higher blood levels than before the cleanups, she said in the letter. ''But preventing this unintended consequence is clearly within the control of New York City.'' The Giuliani administration defended its policies but said it would confer with the federal agency. Mr. Vallone also praised the city's approach, but said he was open to making improvements. Ms. Fox said she planned to meet with city officials to urge that they adopt the changes. She said the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development had imposed similar rules for housing it subsidizes. Trained workers and contamination testing were among the major issues that split the usually unified Council, which last year passed the revision of the lead law 36 | E.P.A. Says Lead-Paint Law May Increase Risks to Children |
1234582_1 | have tripled during the last 18 months, was a production cutback agreement that Ali Rodriguez Araque, Venezuela's minister of energy and now the president of OPEC, negotiated early last year with Saudi Arabia and Mexico. But the Saudi statement suggested that the three nation's singleness of purpose may now be fraying. There were other indications today that the solidarity was weakening. Mexico's energy minister, Luis Tellez, whose country is a major oil exporter but not an OPEC member, called for world producers to cooperate to keep prices at what he called acceptable levels. Speaking in Mexico City, Mr. Tellez said he expected prices to stabilize eventually around $30 a barrel. Saudi Arabia's pledge contrasted with the tone of the OPEC summit meeting's host, President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, who has said the cartel is not to blame for the oil inflation that has caused alarm and protests in the main industrialized consumer countries. The Saudi pledge also overshadowed a call by the OPEC heads of state for a ''constructive dialogue'' with the industrialized countries to stabilize oil prices. ''OPEC is willing to dialogue at all levels'' of government and ''with all the countries and regions of the world,'' Mr. Chavez said in his closing speech this afternoon. But oil prices, he added later at a news conference, are ''only a small part of an infinite globality of themes that we need to discuss.'' Oil producers and consumer nations are already scheduled to meet in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, in mid-November to discuss ways to stabilize oil prices. But Mr. Chavez, citing a telephone conversation Wednesday with the prime minister of France, Lionel Jospin, said that an earlier meeting between OPEC heads of state and their counterparts from the rich industrialized nations or the European Union would be useful ''if they desire it.'' The 11 members of OPEC, who account for 75 percent of world oil reserves and 40 percent of total output, have agreed to increase production three times this year by a total of 3.2 million barrels a day in an effort to halt spiraling prices. But their efforts have met with little success, and President Clinton last week ordered the release of 30 million barrels from the United States strategic oil reserve in an attempt to drive prices down. The Saudis have traditionally been closer to the United States and more cautious than OPEC members like Iraq and Libya, | OPEC's Unity Is Undercut By the Saudis |
1229830_4 | government report on Firestone tire production by serial code, it can be calculated that less than four-tenths of a percent of the recalled tires were replaced under warranty in 1998 and 1999. By a comparison, 17 percent of the tires were replaced under warranty in 1978 before Firestone's last major recall, of model 500 car tires. The earlier recall involved a similar number of tires, but fewer than half the 88 deaths under review in the investigation in the United States. What Firestone appears to have missed is that sport utility vehicles require more reliable tires than cars, because they are more likely to roll over when they lose a tire, documents showed. The rollover issue goes virtually unmentioned in the Firestone documents, yet now the company cites it frequently, even noting that rollovers are an especially deadly kind of crash. Federal regulations do not suggest that Firestone should have paid closer attention to sport utility tires. Sport utility vehicles have been regulated as light trucks since the late 1960's and face more lenient rules than cars. A vehicle's ability to withstand crashes from the front, side and rear are regulated, because these are the main causes of deaths in cars. But a vehicle's tendency to roll over is not regulated by the government, though rollovers accounted for 62 percent of deaths in sport utility vehicles. Federal regulators are now reviewing the rules covering tires and, after 27 years of studying the rollover issue, announced plans last spring to start rating a vehicle's tendency to roll over. Automakers and their allies in Congress are trying to block the ratings. Among the documents distributed and then uncovered by Mr. Tauzin's investigators, the one that stands out as perhaps the most serious missed opportunity at Ford is a two-paragraph memorandum dated Sept. 15, 1999. Written by Carlos Mazzorin, Ford's group vice president for purchasing, it was addressed to Jacques Nasser, Ford's chief executive and president; Wayne Booker, vice chairman for international operations; and six vice presidents responsible for sales, manufacturing, quality control, vehicle engineering, Asian operations and public relations. The memorandum described a problem with some Explorers in Saudi Arabia, Oman, Qatar and Venezuela. The tread sometimes separated from the rest of the tire when the vehicle was driven for long periods at high speeds, Mr. Mazzorin wrote. This had caused 19 rollovers and some deaths in the Middle East, where Ford | Documents Portray Tire Debacle As a Story of Lost Opportunities |
1234798_1 | had been produced, when or where. Safety defect investigations by regulators are common, and many end with no finding of a defect. This is the 40th investigation regulators have opened this year. Bridgestone/Firestone Inc., a unit of Bridgestone of Japan, said that it had only learned today of the new investigation. The company said in a statement that it would be ''open and responsive.'' G.M. and Ford said they would cooperate with the investigation. A computer analysis by The New York Times of a federal database covering all fatal automobile crashes in the country from 1991 to 1999 found 26 tire-related deaths in Chevrolet Suburbans and 13 more in the similar GMC Suburbans. There was not one listed in an Excursion, which went on sale last year, or in the F250 and F350, but there were 14 in Ford light trucks for which no model was specified. By contrast, there were 93 tire-related deaths in Ford Explorers during this period. The numbers of each kind of vehicle in use is not clear, so the death rates by model are unknown. Ford sold 428,772 Explorers last year, while G.M. sold 183,863 Suburbans. Explorers have been sold since 1990 and Suburbans, in small numbers, since 1936. C. Tab Turner, a lawyer in Little Rock, Ark., who is handling many lawsuits against Firestone and Ford, said that Suburbans and Excursions were so much longer than Explorers that they were somewhat less likely to roll over when they lost a tire. It was not clear tonight how many motorists in other vehicles might have been hit by large light trucks having problems with Steeltex tires; regulators often hear less about deaths and injuries in vehicles other than the one in which the defect occurred. The Excursion is the world's largest sport utility, weighing as much as two Jeep Grand Cherokees. Ford has put Steeltex tires on 40 percent of its largest, latest pickups and vans and all of the 75,760 Excursions produced so far, said Michael Vaughn, a Ford spokesman. G.M. did not have comparable figures. Robert Knoll, an auto consultant who is the retired director of auto testing at Consumers Union, which publishes Consumer Reports magazine, said that people with Steeltex tires should check them promptly. Tires should be inflated to the pressure recommended by the automobile's manufacturer, and should not have any bumps that suggest they are coming apart inside. ''If you | A 2nd Front In the Inquiry Into Firestone |
1234757_0 | Machines have always seemed to possess imposing and threatening powers. Their clanking, humming energy and inhuman abilities have promised utopia -- a world of leisure and convenience and plenty. But they have also threatened apocalypse: a world in which their brutish, infernal mechanisms demolish everything we cherish. The Industrial Revolution gave us these machines; then 20th-century science amplified both their promise and their menace. But humanity, during the last century, has also tried to put machines in their place. What if these mechanical monsters were shrunk to a manageable size? What if their operations were mimicked and mocked? What if they were stripped of all possible use? What if, that is, they were humiliatingly turned into toys? These once-intimidating hulks would then be seen for the awkward creations they are: stilted imitations of the human, going through geared contortions to perform their appointed tasks. Machinery, shorn of its aura, becomes the object of satire. The Swiss sculptor Jean Tinguely, for example, once spent weeks building a machine whose sole function was to destroy itself. The cartoonist Rube Goldberg sketched implausible mechanisms constructed from spoons and string and other sundry materials whose needless complexity increased with the simplicity of the task to be performed. Now something different is taking place. Old-style machines, of course, have not disappeared. There are still countless factories with grinding gears, conveyor belts and chimneys belching smoke. But technological fears and hopes are focused less on machines with moving parts than on electronic objects that don't have any moving parts at all. Open a remote control, peek at a circuit board: nothing moves or changes; their powers seem due more to magic than to mechanism. And these are the objects that inspire contemporary nightmares: the computer villains of ''The Matrix'' or the fluid, self-replicating Exterminator. Meanwhile, machinery -- real, moving, mechanical machinery -- has come to seem almost amiably old-fashioned, less like something out of Charlie Chaplin's ''Modern Times'' and more like the fussy C-3PO of ''Star Wars.'' Machines now seem closer to the human world than the technological one. Such thoughts came to mind recently at an exhilarating exhibition of mechanical constructions by Steven Gerberich at the Berkshire Museum in Pittsfield, Mass., on view through Oct. 22. Push oversize red buttons and his contraptions begin to move. In one, a ''bowling pin factory,'' various robots constructed out of old office furniture and junk metal work other | Hear the One About the Goofy Robot? |
1228804_4 | yet of all fatalities in Explorers -- about 1 per hundred million miles. Among the limitations of the federal database, Mr. Grush and others noted, is that it records only vehicle type, not tire type. The data points to a problem with Firestone tires only because the vast majority of new Explorers were equipped with Firestone tires. Further supporting the conclusion is an analysis by The Times of the federal data on tire-related deaths in Explorers produced in 1996 and 1997. Explorers built at Ford's Louisville plant were equipped with Goodyear tires in 1996 and Firestones the next year. Ford's St. Louis plant did the opposite. The fatality database shows that Ford found that there were nine fatal accidents involving Explorers from the plants using Firestone tires and one from the plants using Goodyear tires. An analysis by Ford confirmed these findings. The federal data shows no tire-related fatalities involving Explorers from 1991 to 1993 and a steadily increasing number thereafter, which may reflect that tread separation becomes more common as tires age. The Explorer was introduced at the end of 1990, as a 1991 model. For the years 1995 through 1998, the federal database shows, there were 17.8 tire-related fatal accidents for every 1,000 such accidents involving Explorers. For all other sport utility vehicles, there were 6.4 tire-related fatal accidents per 1,000 accidents; the number for cars was 6.0 tire-related fatal accidents. Safety experts lament that there is only limited data on a category of crashes that is probably six to eight times the size of the one tracked by the Department of Transportation -- those that cause injuries but no deaths. A yet larger category is crashes with property damage but no injury. Trends could be obvious sooner by using larger databases, experts say. ''Fatals are investigated very thoroughly,'' said Stephanie Faul, a spokeswoman for the American Automobile Association Foundation for Traffic Safety. ''Property damage crashes are hardly investigated at all.'' One source for such data is insurance companies. State Farm, the nation's largest automobile insurer, contacted the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration several times last year about tire failures, according to Samuel Boyden, the company's associate research director, who testified at Wednesday's House hearing. But the agency did not follow up on the contacts. Representative Billy Tauzin, the Louisiana Republican who presided at the hearing, suggested that the government agency should make better use of insurance data. | Link Between Tires and Crashes Went Undetected in Federal Data |
1228869_0 | Hirschl & Adler 21 East 70th Street Manhattan Through next Friday Maybe there is an important exhibition to be done about the classical impulse in contemporary art. ''New York Classicism Now,'' inspired in part by the best-selling author and crusading anti-Modernist Tom Wolfe, is not it. This confusing mix of representational and abstract paintings, drawings and sculptures sheds little light on the nature of, or the need for, contemporary classicism. The bulk of the show equates classicism broadly with old-fashioned representational painting. Of the artists, 20 have studied (or, in one case, taught) at the New York Academy of Art, a school that specializes in teaching premodern modes of figurative representation. These artists are all competent but unexciting technicians. Their works include Graydon Parrish's absurdly solemn French Academy-style funeral allegory depicting beefy, grieving male nudes and a dead child on a fancy, antique raft; a glossy, Chardinesque picture of an old electric mixer by John Morra; and Mikel Glass's deft, Fairfield Porter-style portrait of a man in red long underwear. The show's best painters, however, are from other schools. Shoichi Akutsu paints delicate images of pieces of notebook paper taped to studio walls; Christopher Gallego presents three large studio interiors painted with intensely observant sensitivity; and William Kennon makes precise but atmospheric rooftop views from his studio window. While a definition of classicism that would convincingly embrace all the different styles of painting on view remains in doubt, the situation is further confused by the inclusion of artists who work abstractly or conceptually. There are confectionery color-field paintings by Jennifer Riley and an absorbingly complex geometric structure made of little wooden blocks by John Powers. Kathleen Gilje, a professional painting conservator, makes careful copies of old master paintings, adding incongruous modern elements like tattoos on Leonardo's ''Lady With Ermine,'' and James Drake shows drawn or photographic images based on sign language used by women in Texas prisons. A life-size sculpture of a man in an overcoat holding a shovel was cast in dirt by James Croak. Conscientious craftsmanship, disregard for ultrahip avant-gardism and rejection of extreme idiosyncrasy characterize most of the works in the show, but surely the idea of classicism should entail something more positively coherent -- morally as well as aesthetically -- than the puzzlingly eclectic conservativism on display here. KEN JOHNSON ART IN REVIEW | 'New York Classicism Now' |
1228787_1 | share. For this reason, he said, ''I'm not aware of any discussion that took place about the number of'' warranty claims. Mr. Lampe said that warranty claims, known as adjustments in the tire industry, had not risen in comparison with the number of tires in use. The Congressional investigators' documents include charts prepared for the sales staff's annual meeting in February that repeatedly and prominently mention the high cost of warranty claims for tread separation in light truck tires, but do not calculate a cost per tire in use. The label on one chart read ''Separations increasing'' in large underlined letters. The chart showed that the number of warranty ''adjustments,'' or claims, for tread separation had climbed to 4,694 in 1999 from 4,200 in 1998, an increase of 11.8 percent. The chart also described how the tires were coming apart and the rates at which each type of separation was increasing. Firestone's market share grew by eight-tenths of a percentage point in 1999 from 1998, according to Tire Business magazine, while the overall market for tires grew by 4.7 percent in terms of sales. The actual number of tires sold is an industry secret. Five more charts analyzed patterns in tread separations and emphasized tires for light trucks, a category that includes the Ford Explorer. One of those charts, labeled ''separations,'' showed that the number of separations involving Wilderness tires, on sale since 1996, had risen 194 percent in 1999 from the level a year earlier. A separate collection of charts, prepared for the same sales meeting in February and labeled ''Critical Performance Issues,'' also singled out light truck recreational tires of the sort installed on Explorers, with one chart stating in large letters: ''Wilderness AT needs improvement.'' Firestone recalled 6.5 million ATX, ATX II and Wilderness AT tires on Aug. 9 after Ford analyzed the tire maker's data on crash claims and found a pattern of property damage and injury claims dating back at least to 1997. Firestone officials said then and have said repeatedly since then that they missed the trend of crash claims because they were focusing on warranty data that did not show a problem. Gary Crigger, Firestone's executive vice president for business planning, testified before a Senate subcommittee on Wednesday that the company's safety program relied on warranty data, quality tests at factories and field research into the performance of tires in use. ''None of | Documents Show Firestone Knew of Rising Warranty Costs |
1228801_1 | the study and a professor of cancer epidemiology at the Netherlands Cancer Institute in Amsterdam. ''It's very important.'' But cancer experts from Holland and the United States disagree on whether healthy women at high risk for breast cancer should take tamoxifen for prevention. Tamoxifen has been used to treat breast cancer in the United States since 1977. In 1998 it was proved to prevent the disease as well in a study that was the first to show that any drug could reduce the risk of breast cancer, and women at high risk were urged to consult doctors about whether they should take it. The Food and Drug Administration has approved tamoxifen as a preventive for high-risk women. It is not known how many women are taking the drug for that reason. Dr. Lawrence Wickerham, associate chairman of the National Surgical Adjuvant Breast and Bowel Project, which has conducted extensive studies of tamoxifen in North America, said that the Dutch findings should stimulate further research but should not influence medical practice now. He and other researchers said that the type of study the Dutch team did, looking back at what patients did in the past, was not as convincing as a study in which patients are divided into groups, given different treatments and the results compared. Tamoxifen inhibits the growth of breast tumors by blocking the hormone estrogen, which can stimulate cell growth. Women are generally advised to take it for five years. But in the lining of the uterus, tamoxifen can speed up cell growth. Researchers have known since 1988 that the drug could increase the risk of endometrial cancer in postmenopausal women. But studies in the United States, including the 1998 prevention study, showed the endometrial tumors to be uncommon, easy to diagnose early and highly curable. The main symptom is abnormal vaginal bleeding, and women who experience it while taking tamoxifen are warned to see a doctor immediately. American studies showed that in 1,000 women over 60 who did not take tamoxifen, there would be one case of endometrial cancer per year. In those who did take the drug, there would be two cases. The risk was considered acceptable when compared with the benefits of the drug. The new study, however, found that some endometrial cancers in breast cancer patients taking tamoxifen for more than two years were more advanced and aggressive, and therefore more likely to be | Use of Breast Cancer Drug Questioned in Dutch Study |
1227277_3 | with Arizona officials, Firestone tried to satisfy all customers with concerns. Today's consumer advisory is the strongest action that the government can take if it has some indications of a problem but lacks the extensive body of engineering and statistical analysis needed to justify forcing a company to carry out a recall against its will. While the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration frequently issued such advisories in the 1970's, it has seldom done so since then except in a few cases involving child safety seats, said Clarence Ditlow, executive director of the Center for Auto Safety, a consumer group. The safety agency's staff and budget were cut in half at the beginning of the Reagan administration, as part of an effort to reduce the weight of government regulation on businesses, and the agency has never regained the size and influence it had in the Carter administration. Most of the replacement tires listed in today's advisory have the letters ''LT'' in their code. This means that they are light truck tires, often designed for off-road use, and are not passenger car tires, which have the designation ''P'' in their code. Light truck tires have been subject to different regulations from car tires since the 1960's. The light truck tires are designed to carry more weight but are not designed to be driven as fast as car tires. Stephen R. Kratzke, the safety agency's associate administrator, said in an interview two weeks ago that the government tested light truck tires at a top speed of 80 miles an hour, compared with 85 miles an hour in the car test. The government is considering a requirement that light truck tires meet the same standards as car tires, he said. All of the tires covered by the recall on Aug. 9 were passenger car tires, which can be used on sport utilities and pickups that are mostly driven on paved roads. Some tires listed in today's advisory were original equipment on sport utility vehicles. Regulators said these included some tires on 1991 Chevrolet Blazers, 1991 to 1994 Nissan pickup trucks and 1996 to 1998 Ford F-150 pickup trucks. G.M. said that fewer than 10,000 of the 211,450 Blazers it sold in the 1991 model year had the tires cited in the advisory. These tires have an excellent safety record, said Brook Lindbert, G.M.'s director of wheels and tires. Of more than 1,400 complaints regulators | Warning Issued On More Tires From Firestone |
1228142_0 | Chronic Flight Delays Tied to Deregulation Most experts now believe that delays in the nation's air traffic system, which have risen nearly 50 percent in the last five years, will get worse, not better. The Federal Aviation Administration, which runs the air traffic system, predicts that by 2010 the number of airline passengers will rise 59 percent, to 1 billion. About 70 percent of that increase will occur at the country's 28 largest airports. The story of how the nation's air travel system reached its current crisis can be traced back to one of the Government's most successful economic initiatives -- airline deregulation -- and to one of its longest and most expensive bureaucratic blunders: the F.A.A.'s ill-fated attempts to develop a new air traffic control system. [Page A1.] Israel to End Its Phone Monopoly The Israeli government announced that it was ending the state telephone company's monopoly on domestic telephone and Internet service, taking a long-resisted deregulatory move that sets the stage for the company's sale to private investors later this year. Bezeq, the state-owned telephone company, will now face competition for the first time in Israel's domestic telephone and high-speed Internet market, just months before the government plans to divest its majority stake. [C4.] Internet Initiative Planned I.B.M., Microsoft and Ariba, seeking to boost the rapid development of business-to-business electronic commerce, plan to announce a proposal tomorrow to create a vast set of online registries intended to help locate products and services and automate business transactions. Over 20 companies will initially endorse the proposal, and the backers said they eventually planned to turn the idea over to one of several Internet standards bodies in an effort to make it a broadly backed initiative. [C4.] Tire Recall for Venezuela Bridgestone/Firestone, facing the threat of criminal and civil actions in Venezuela, agreed to recall 62,000 tires that the Venezuelan government says had defects that appear to have played a role in the deaths of at least 60 people in automobile accidents. [C2.] McDonald's Olympic Games McDonald's, the fast-food chain, is turning more frequently to international promotional opportunities -- like the Summer Olympic Games. For the Games, each country in McDonald's realm has been encouraged to develop and advertise a locally appropriate campaign on its own. Advertising. [C10.] Euronext Weighs London Bid Euronext, a company to be formed from mergers of the Paris, Brussels and Amsterdam bourses, has held exploratory talks | BUSINESS DIGEST |
1228155_2 | CHINA: CHRISTIANS CHARGED -- Formal criminal charges were brought against 85 of the 130 evangelical Christians arrested during an illegal worship service two weeks ago in central China, a human rights monitor in Hong Kong said. The large-scale prosecutions could not be independently verified but, if they proceed, they would represent a stepping-up of the government's longtime struggle against defiant Christian groups. In recent years, while fines and temporary detention have been used to harass underground churches, relatively few leaders are known to have been formally charged and jailed. Erik Eckholm (NYT) MYANMAR: DISSIDENT UNDER WRAPS -- The opposition leader Daw Aung San Suu Kyi was kept confined to her home in the capital, Yangon, as the military government mounted a crackdown against its opponents. Diplomats said the gate to Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi's residence had been padlocked since she was forcibly returned Saturday after a nine-day stand-off with the authorities in her car outside Yangon. The government denied that she and other leaders of her party were under house arrest, but said they had been asked to stay home while it investigated reports that some opposition members were involved in ''terrorist activity.'' (Reuters) JAPAN, RUSSIA: NO TREATY SOON -- President Vladimir V. Putin, in Tokyo for talks with Prime Minister Yoshiro Mori, rejected the latest Japanese call for sovereignty over four disputed islands, dimming hope for a peace treaty this year. The islands, which are known to Russians as the southern Kurils and to Japanese as the Northern Territories and lie north of Japan near Russia's Far East, were occupied by Soviet troops toward the end of World War II. The two sides had agreed three years ago to write a treaty by the end of 2000, but progress has been stymied by the deadlock over the islands. (Agence France-Presse) INDIA: 'WEEPING' GODDESS -- Worshipers, hungry to witness a miracle, have been flocking to temples in the city of Hyderabad after reports that statues of the goddess Durga have been shedding tears. The crowds have snarled traffic in the capital of Andhra Pradesh, the scene of recent heavy flooding and political unrest. Barry Bearak (NYT) MIDDLE EAST IRAQ: SCHOOL FEES -- Iraq's government, which had formerly offered free education from kindergarten through university, has begun charging students to attend classes at public schools. The economy has been undermined by international sanctions imposed to punish Iraq for invading Kuwait | WORLD BRIEFING |
1228156_0 | Facing the threat of criminal and civil actions here, Bridgestone/Firestone agreed today to recall 62,000 tires that the Venezuelan government says had defects that appear to have played a role in the deaths of at least 60 people in automobile accidents. Samuel Ruh Rios, director of the Consumer Defense and Education Institute, a government agency, announced the measure at a news conference here and praised the company, which accounts for about half of all tires sold here, calling its action ''a good sign.'' But he made it clear that Venezuela intends to press ahead with its investigation into accusations that Bridgestone knew of defects in tires manufactured here and in the United States and tried to cover them up. ''This measure in no way exonerates Firestone from what we have been pointing out, which is the shared responsibility of Firestone and Ford in the design and selection of an inadequate tire,'' Mr. Ruh said. He added that the prosecutor general would determine what further action Venezuela's government would take. ''With this, the Venezuelan consumer has won a battle'' and been ''somewhat compensated,'' Mr. Ruh added. ''But the consumer and Indecu,'' the Spanish-language acronym by which the agency is known, ''are still on a war footing because we do not feel satisfied by this type of action.'' All but a handful of the fatal accidents being investigated by the consumer protection agency occurred when Ford Explorer sports utility vehicles with Firestone tires went out of control and flipped over on highways here after their tires shredded or exploded. For that reason, Mr. Ruh said today, Ford also has a moral and financial responsibility to Venezuelan consumers. ''We suggest to the Ford Motor Company that they study a series of measures to see if they too can aid in the search for the truth,'' he said. ''We don't blame the tire alone'' for the accidents, he added, saying that an appropriate response by Ford would be to ''withdraw this model, substitute them and pay owners'' some form of compensation. The two varieties of Wilderness AT tires to be replaced, at a cost estimated at $6.4 million, include, but are not limited to, those often used on Ford Explorers. Mr. Ruh said the tire replacement program would begin on Thursday and continue for about a month and that it would affect not only Ford Explorers and other sports utility vehicles but also some | Bridgestone Agrees to Recall 62,000 Tires in Venezuela |
1228090_1 | risk getting another one that you don't have and might otherwise never get?'' Mrs. DuMont wondered. She stopped her first hormone treatment because of a bad reaction but is considering a second. Estimates of the number of women who take or have taken hormones for the symptoms of menopause range from 10 percent to more than 40 percent, with factors as diverse as education and geography playing roles. One study published last year in The Annals of Internal Medicine found that college-educated women and those living in the South and West were significantly more likely to use hormones than those living in the Northeast and Midwest. But according to the American College of Preventive Medicine, only about a third of women who use hormones take them as prescribed, something that may reflect women's fears about the side effects of such medication. What is known is this: In the short-term, hormone replacement therapy controls the hot flashes, night sweats and vaginal dryness experienced by many women during menopause. In the long term it also decreases a woman's risk of osteoporosis, the brittle-bone disease that can lead to life-threatening fractures. Estrogen also appears to increase a woman's level of good cholesterol and reduce the bad, while promoting blood clotting. However, numerous studies have pointed to a link between a slightly higher risk of breast cancer and hormone use, and two reports published this year suggest the risk is greatest in women taking both estrogen and progestin, as opposed to estrogen alone. That came as a surprise to many researchers who had believed estrogen was the primary culprit in the breast cancer-hormone link. It also was demoralizing because progestin is given in combination with estrogen specifically to lower the risk of endometrial cancer, a risk that increases more than tenfold when a woman takes estrogen alone. Also this year, one of the most widely held assumptions about hormone replacement therapy -- that it helps prevent cardiovascular disease -- was called into question. Just two weeks ago, researchers reported that estrogen did nothing to slow the progression of heart disease in women whose arteries had already been partly blocked by it. Whether estrogen prevents heart disease remains unanswered. More definitive results will come in 2005, when results from the first large-scale, long-term study of hormone use become available. But that comes as small comfort to women now trying to decide whether to take, or | Hormone Replacement Therapy: Why They Do It, or Avoid It |
1228110_3 | up the sky over the Bowl when the city comes together every Fourth of July to celebrate. With all that in its past, ''we believe this is a very, very serious step to lose the shell that has defined the Bowl for 71 years,'' Mr. Bernstein said. In the last few days, the conservancy has had its first chance to study the philharmonic's environmental impact study on the demolition and its review of alternatives. Mr. Bernstein, for one, is impressed. ''At this point,'' he said, ''it does appear somewhat clearer it may be difficult to reconcile saving the shell with other needs.'' Still, Mr. Bernstein said, the group remains officially opposed to demolition, at least for now. ''This is a difficult issue,'' he said. ''It's a wonderful place to listen to music, and we're not disrespectful of the acoustical issues. But the shell is an icon.'' Patricia Mitchell, chief operating officer of the philharmonic, said the current shell was actually the Bowl's fourth since the first concert there, in 1922. The shell before this one was designed by Lloyd Wright, the eldest son of Frank Lloyd Wright; it was built in 1928 but lasted only one season before deterioration set in and it was demolished. The current shell, made of a cement-asbestos mixture on a steel frame, was erected in 1929 and, the Bowl's souvenir book says, has become ''an architectural icon as recognizable as the Eiffel Tower or the Statue of Liberty.'' But it is not the shell where musicians spent summer evenings helping their audiences forget economic depression or world war. Over the years, the shell has had several major face lifts, including the installation of a reflecting pool that remained for a time right in front. (''It didn't work,'' Ms. Mitchell said. ''The moisture from the water made it difficult for the instruments to keep tuned.'') Mr. Mauceri, who has conducted more than 200 performances at the shell in the last 10 years, said he agreed with the preservation movement that too much of old Los Angeles had been replaced by new, here-today-gone-tomorrow Los Angeles. ''I'm very sympathetic to preserving the cultural history of Los Angeles,'' he said. ''But I think this is a case of misplaced concern. At what point in its history do you preserve the shell? The 1970 version? The 1980 version? The 1949 version? This is not the shell that Lloyd Wright designed.'' | Los Angeles Journal; The Battle of the Hollywood Bowl |
1230880_6 | and DaimlerChrysler, too, although tires on these companies' models were subject to far fewer claims over all, he said. While the Explorer's gas tank is near the left rear tire and is heavy when full, Ford does not believe that the concentration of problems on the left rear tire reflects the weight distribution, Mr. Baughman said. Ford suspects that rear-wheel-drive vehicles put more strain left rear tires because these tires get energy from the engine during acceleration slightly more directly than the right rear tire. Mr. Baughman said that Ford also suspected that the center of a road radiates more heat on a hot day than the edges. Ford has been using infrared devices to measure this while driving Ford Explorers around a test track in Dearborn, Mich., in recent weeks, Mr. Baughman said. Mr. Lindbert of G.M. was skeptical of the rear-wheel-drive hypothesis and had not heard of road heat being a problem. G.M. has tested the strain on rear tires during acceleration and found no meaningful difference between the left and right, he said. Mr. Lindbert expressed surprise that many Ford Explorers were encountering problems with the left rear tire, explaining that it is more common for right rear tires to fail on other vehicles than left rear tires. Road debris, like nails, tends to end up by the side of the road -- roads are built highest in the middle so that rain can drain off. Vehicles' front right tires briefly tip the points of the debris up into the air and then the rear right tires hit the debris at the wrong angle, are punctured and begin losing air, Mr. Lindbert said. The high frequency of rollovers in Explorers that have lost tires has focused the tire industry's attention on how automakers have shifted from building cars to building sport utility vehicles. John Lampe, Firestone's executive vice president, admitted in testimony last Tuesday that the tire company had not understood until now that sport utilities were especially vulnerable to tire problems. But he also pointed out that federal regulators had not recognized the problem either, in leaving tire standards less stringent for sport utility tires than for car tires. The regulations, ''do not address this vehicle population, a population which has exploded in the past 10 years,'' he said. ''These issues have been difficult for us. We are not vehicle experts. And these issues may have | Questions Raised About Ford Explorer's Margin of Safety |
1230869_2 | few days at the peak of the conference. Some representatives of industrialized countries said they were determined to fight language that would provide payments to oil producers. OPEC members said they, too, were prepared to fight. Muhammad al-Sabban, head of the Saudi delegation and senior economic adviser to the Saudi Oil Ministry, said the movement toward a climate treaty was a clear sign that the world continued to accelerate its shift away from fossil fuels. ''We are assuming that only for another 15 years, maximum, will we have oil as a big share of the energy mix,'' he said. ''We are very concerned about this.'' For all its prosperity, he said, Saudi Arabia will still need help in developing new industries and job sources for its growing population. Mr. Sabban said a large coalition of developing countries was ready to reject the treaty language if industrialized nations rejected the idea of compensating countries whose economies were harmed. ''I'm surprised to see that developed countries expect they can get away with the things they want without giving equal treatment to what we want,'' he said in a telephone interview. The dispute over whether oil-rich countries should be compensated if the world weans itself off petroleum was just one of many sharp splits among participants. The group focused on refining language in the proposed treaty before foreign ministers convene in November in The Hague to negotiate final points. Participants and observers from some environmental groups said some progress had been made on streamlining language so that ministers would have fewer points to negotiate. But strong divisions persist over how to damp the greenhouse effect, with the United States, Russia and other large forested countries pressing recently to receive credit not just for cutting emissions of gases, but also for sopping them up by growing more trees or changing farming methods in ways that pull carbon dioxide from the air. Europe has opposed that strategy, instead seeking firm commitments to reduce the output of gases from smokestacks and tailpipes. Other points of contention include proposed mechanisms through which wealthy countries could lead poor countries to avoid sharp rises in emissions as their economies grow, and ways to create a fair system to measure cuts and enforce an agreement. Over all, many negotiators and observers at the conference said in telephone interviews that they felt confident that a meaningful document would emerge by November. | OPEC States Want to Be Paid if Pollution Curbs Cut Oil Sales |
1233059_4 | lean at an ominous, Pisa-like angle, but unlike the one in Pisa, their stability does not seem in question. Eight hundred years ago, there were more than 100 such towers peppering the Bologna skyline, like so many clunky red-brick reeds growing skyward. A few others still exist, scattered throughout the center, but only Asinelli, at 318 feet the tallest remaining one, can be climbed -- on rickety, well-worn wooden steps -- for a spectacular view of the city. Many of the buildings of the Piazza Maggiore look medieval, with pointed gothic arches and crenelated parapets. How odd, then, that one of the most authentic medieval buildings -- the 13th-century Palazzo di Re Enzo -- was essentially reconstructed in the early 20th century. Its transformation into a fairy tale castle was based on turn-of-the-century notions about the Middle Ages. Attached to it is the Palazzo del Podesta, a 15th-century reconstruction of the 13th-century original. After a lengthy restoration, its high Renaissance arches again provide a fitting backdrop for the piazza's better cafes. Along with the Palazzo di Re Enzo, also restored for Bologna 2000, it is used for exhibitions, conferences and congresses (Bologna is an important city for trade fairs -- showcasing everything from light gardening tools to antiterrorism devices). In the Middle Ages, security was handled differently, as a look at the impenetrably fortresslike Palazzo d'Accursio, will attest. One of the largest building complexes in Italy -- almost a small city within the city -- it has been since the 13th century a seat of power, both secular and papal. Today, the municipal government is gradually moving out of the palazzo, making room for new exhibition halls and expanded art galleries. The restored Sala d'Ercole -- so called for a gigantic statue of Hercules by Alfonso Lombardi (1519) that dominates the room -- is used for photography exhibitions and this month and next, a show on Pina Bausch, the contemporary German choreographer, by Francesco Carbone, is expected to draw large crowds. The impressive municipal art collections on the second floor of Palazzo d'Accursio have been reorganized and restored, and the last rooms will open by the end of the year. In June 1999, the Rusconi rooms -- named for the Marchesi Rusconi family, donors of the art displayed there -- were opened after a 10-year restoration. Paintings, sculptures and furniture are arranged to suggest an 18th-century private mansion, and the | In Bologna, A Grand Plaza Defines the City |
1233280_2 | through job-creation or education programs. ''Unless the local people are committed to it, it just isn't going to work,'' Mr. Seligmann said. ENVIRONMENTAL groups have had limited success with other approaches to protecting wilderness areas. While countries have created some national parks, the process of convincing governments to set aside the land -- and to ensure that it remains undisturbed -- can be slow. The World Bank has spent years trying to help Guyana create a system of national parks, but has only started making some progress. Groups like the Nature Conservancy have had success buying land in the United States but have had difficulty acquiring large wilderness areas elsewhere. In some countries, large sales to outsiders are viewed as threats to sovereignty, although the Nature Conservancy says it tries to prevent such problems by working with local environmental groups on purchases. Conservation International and the Nature Conservancy have also bought out private owners of timber rights in Bolivia, where they were able to add the land to the national park system. The idea of buying concessions directly from governments has ''great potential,'' said Elizabeth Losos, the director for the Center for Tropical Forest Science at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. ''There are far more lands slated for timber than for protected areas,'' she said. She cautioned, however, that no single approach was the answer to saving rain forests. ''Everyone is looking for the silver bullet,'' she said, adding that environmentalists were often quick to back away from ideas if they did not prove to be clear successes. In Guyana, which has encouraged timber cutting as a way to stimulate its struggling economy, the idea of encouraging conservation without sacrificing badly needed cash and jobs is appealing. ''If there is no economic benefit, there may be a populist sentiment that we should use it for other purposes,'' said Bharrat Jagdeo, the president of Guyana, the only English-speaking country in South America. He said that his country is committed to conservation and has established an environmental protection agency. But, he added, it needs the support and advice of international conservation groups. Guyana is also working with the Carter Center, created by former President Jimmy Carter, to create a foundation to explore alternatives to resource exploitation. Guyana recently approved a three-year exploratory lease for Conservation International; the term could be extended to 25 years once the parties have agreed to various terms, | Preserving the Forest By Leasing the Trees |
1233477_0 | The scandal over defective Firestone tires prompted Congress to approve money for rating vehicles' tendency to roll over. This follows evidence that most of the 103 deaths blamed on defective tires occurred in Ford Explorers that flipped over when their tires lost their treads. Meanwhile, another tire maker, Continental, recalled 160,000 tires mounted mostly on Ford's Lincoln Navigator sport utility vehicle, while regulators began studying whether an Explorer front suspension component was prone to defects. Ford said that neither the Continental tires nor the suspension component had caused any serious crashes. Keith Bradsher | Sept. 17-23; Now, the Navigator |
1233003_1 | his voice mail. As he does, his eye is caught by a digital display promising ''stock quotations on your pager, minute by minute'' and he tries to copy down the Web address before it disappears. He finds that he has three unplayed messages but can't retrieve them because the system is down. Suddenly, he's faced with a problem far more serious: he forgets who he is and where he is going. His briefcase might hold clues to his identity, but he has lost it. Paralyzed with fear, he rides until the police come for him; he has disrobed and is curled up in a fetal position, desperately clasping his cell phone. Fortunately for Chalmers, his memory returns in a day. He is left with tingling and numbness in his limbs as well as anxiety because he is hopelessly behind at work. He knows his company cares much more about his productivity than his health. ''>>> MAIL 50.02.04 Just when the reader's vicarious anxiety for Chalmers reaches an intolerable level, there is a radical shift in the story. Alexander has signed up for a ''really cool college course'' on the Internet on Plato. As he e-mails his dad: ''It costs $90, but yotu don;t have tot pay for the whole thing if you don't do the whole thing. . . . Mom saidd to ask you. I don't have anything else to do today.'' Alexander breaks the copy-protect lock and downloads the entire course and sends it to his father. So it is, in chapters interspersed between the main narrative, that we find ourselves in Athens in 399 B.C. as the city braces itself for the execution of Socrates. Anytus, a wealthy tanner fearful of Socrates' ideas and responsible for prosecuting him, is in a bind because Socrates refuses exile and instead insists on accepting the alternative: death by ingestion of hemlock. Anytus, who does not want this on his conscience, decides to hire an assassin, who is mysteriously murdered just when he is about to kill Socrates. Back in Boston, Chalmers visits a Dr. Petrov. In the waiting room another patient tells him: ''On my last visit, a month ago Tuesday, Dr. Petrov hinted to me that he might be ready to proceed to a provisional diagnosis, also called the diagnosis pro tem. But then, just when I was leaving his office, he ordered another group of tests. . . | Crashed |
1233348_5 | billion people still living on less than $1 a day, another 1.3 billion people on $2 -- and the diverse protests stirred by such numbers are now so vigorous that dialogue and compromise have become essential. ''If we do not succeed in making clear to citizens that globalization is to their benefit, we run a big political risk,'' said Caio Koch-Weser, a senior German economic official. ''There's a feeling in the population that nobody's in charge. People are afraid of losing jobs to the whims of multinationals. We need to bring Wall Street to Main Street.'' This sharpening of official concern reflects the fact that a decade of globalization has allowed a keener dissection of its characteristics. The wild denunciations of the inhuman scourge of rampaging global capital in the French author Viviane Forrestier's immensely popular ''The Economic Horror'' (one million copies sold worldwide, but unpublished in the United States), have given way to subtler analysis. Often this has concentrated on the way a global economy can prompt a ''race to the bottom,'' as the cheapest labor and lowest taxes are relentlessly sought out. The net effect has been described by the German sociologist Ernest Beck as ''the Brazilianization of the West'' -- the progressive recourse to uninsured, temporary workers -- and the slow dismantlement of the welfare state. John D. Clark, a development specialist on leave from the World Bank, has argued that globalization was always a highly selective thing. Advocates of free trade really wanted only an unrestrained market for capital. The result has been to maximize returns on capital, while minimizing returns to labor. ''The world over, gaps between rich and poor have widened as richer populations and countries raced ahead of poorer,'' Mr. Clark wrote recently. Many economists dispute that view. But officials seem convinced that beyond debt relief, an enormous effort must now be made to give more people the basic tools to benefit from a global economy: education, lifetime training, access to technology, encouragement for the stock ownership that alone will spread America's brand of popular capitalism, in which even blue-collar workers benefit from investing. Without such measures, the distorting effects of the wild premium placed by modern markets on talent and technology seem likely to grow, miring a third of humanity in abject poverty. The other new priority seems to be dialogue. Mr. Wolfensohn spent time Friday with non-governmental organizations including the Bolivian | The World: Movement; Growing Up and Getting Practical Since Seattle |
1212605_0 | UNTIL Congress enacted a special-education law in 1975, schools often ignored children with disabilities. Millions of special-needs children, in homes or quasi-medical institutions, got no schooling at all. Others, in schools, got only token help; many failed or dropped out. To end this scandal, federal law gave parents of such children extraordinary rights. But this led to a burgeoning bureaucratic system. Costs soared. Since the law's passage, nearly half of all new school spending has gone to special-education programs that serve 11 percent of children. Can this spending be brought under control without returning to earlier patterns of neglect? Can schools be trusted to serve the disabled if rigid rules are relaxed? Some states are experimenting, trying to restrain costs without diluting the quality of service. It's too early to call these reforms successful, but they hold promise. The need for change is clear when we consider how differently regular education and special education are financed. For regular programs, districts raise what money they can and then see what services they can afford -- how small to make classes or how much to pay teachers. But in special education, they first design services, then look for money to pay for them. Schools decide what a child needs: a specialist, medical attendant, aide, separate class or specialized private school. If districts do not pay for appropriate help, parents can sue and judges can order services. To pay for them, districts may have to curtail other programs or raise taxes. For each special-education child, the law requires a plan set by a committee of regular and specialized teachers, a psychologist, the principal, medical personnel and the child's parents or legal advocate. They must conduct an annual review and devise a new plan every three years. Cumbersome and costly it may be, but such formal planning is needed for pupils with serious problems like Down syndrome or severe autism. Parents need legal support to ensure that schools with competing demands don't ignore such children. But for milder problems, the rules create perverse incentives. Because schools get extra state and federal money for special-education students, they may needlessly refer borderline cases to the program. Some slow learners, for example, might be better served by extra help from regular teachers. But this earns no extra money, so districts may instead term such children learning-disabled to qualify for aid to hire specialists. To avoid this, states | Rethinking Special Needs Without Losing Ground |
1212584_1 | from life. This year, 30 of the 35 countries at the bottom of the index were in sub-Saharan Africa. In that region, where the spread of AIDS and other diseases has begun to shorten life spans after decades of slow improvement, people can no longer expect to live beyond their 40's or 50's. Fewer than half go to school and fewer than half -- sometimes 25 percent or less -- can read, the survey shows. It also shows that a large proportion of people -- as high as 66 percent in the case of Sierra Leone -- lack access to clean water, and that even larger majorities lack basic sanitation. Apart from Sierra Leone, which is ranked last, the other most disadvantaged nations, from the bottom up, are Niger, Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Burundi, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, Chad, the Central African Republic and Mali. At the other extreme, the countries with the highest human development indicators are, from the top, Canada, Norway, the United States, Australia, Iceland, Sweden, Belgium, the Netherlands, Japan and Britain. In the Western Hemisphere, only Haiti ranks in the bottom 35. Every year the report, produced by the United Nations Development Program, focuses on new themes that experts say should be factored into studying why some countries remain poor and others grow in economic and human terms. This year the report tried to connect human rights and political freedom with economic and social conditions, saying the two can no longer be separated. It challenges the view that people are not ''ready'' for democracy until there has been economic growth. ''Human rights are not, as has sometimes been argued, a reward of development,'' said Mark Malloch Brown, the development program's administrator, in an introduction to the report. ''Rather, they are critical to achieving it. Only with political freedoms -- the right for all men and women to participate equally in society -- can people genuinely take advantage of economic freedoms.'' In another departure, this year's report, which was issued last week, calls for the increased collection and more effective use of statistics to aid in promoting human rights by quantifying more effectively the conditions under which many people live. ''Statistical indicators are a powerful tool in the struggle for human rights,'' the report says. Among other benefits even the simple collection of information can provide, it adds, is help in monitoring the actions of government and in curbing corruption. | Misery Index Of U.N. Panel Finds Africa Is Worst Off |
1212627_0 | Tomorrow the World Bank's board of executive directors will consider how to proceed with a $40 million loan to China. The loan would underwrite a dam and irrigation projects in a remote part of western China and resettle 58,000 impoverished Chinese and Hui Muslim farmers in lands that have traditionally been home to Tibetans and Mongol herders. The plan would thus threaten a distinct Tibetan culture, and should be stopped. The project generated intense public criticism last year because of its environmental impacts and because the Tibetan population would be diluted by non-Tibetan settlers. The social impact is of great concern because China has in the past used similar strategies to weaken Tibetan claims of a separate culture. Dozens of environmental and human rights groups and the Clinton administration opposed financing the project. In response to the controversy, the directors delayed the loan until the bank's independent inspection panel could review various issues, including whether the bank had met its own standards for protecting the environment and indigenous peoples. The board refused to make the report public after the panel finished it. But it has since been leaked to the press and, not surprisingly, it is devastating. The panel found that the bank's management failed to consider alternatives to resettlement or other resettlement sites, and did not comply with other policy requirements, including the need to make a proper environmental analysis and create plans to preserve local cultures. The bank's president, James Wolfensohn, believes that these failures can be addressed by conducting more thorough studies on the project's impacts. But studies are not the answer. They may satisfy the bank's regulations, but they will do nothing to solve the social problems created by incursions into traditionally Tibetan lands. The bank directors would be wiser simply to reject this poorly designed project, and to invite China and the bank's management to present an alternative plan that would not require a large resettlement program in a culturally sensitive area. | A Misguided World Bank Project |
1212618_0 | Babies born weighing less than five and a half pounds are almost four times more likely not to graduate from high school by age 19 than their normal-birthweight siblings, according to a study in the June issue of the American Sociological Review. The findings of the study, apparently the first to follow low-birthweight children to age 19, are far more dramatic than the academic problems documented in previous studies tracking children for fewer years. And the extent of the educational gap came as a troubling surprise to some experts in the field. ''That's a huge effect, four times less likely to graduate from high school,'' said Greg J. Duncan of the Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern University. ''And it's a little puzzling, since most studies have shown that most effects of low birthweight fade out in the preschool years. But a sibling comparison is a very good way to look at it, since it gets around all kinds of variables that make it hard to compare low-birthweight children with normal-birthweight children from different families.'' In the families studied, 57.5 percent of the normal-birthweight siblings graduated from high school by the time they were 19, compared with 15.2 percent of the low-birthweight siblings. Timely high school graduation is an important indicator, sociologists said, because those who do not graduate on time are more likely to receive an equivalency diploma and less likely to go on to a four-year college than those who complete high school on time. The study did not examine the cause of the lag. ''It's going to be for some future researchers to investigate whether it's health problems, slowed cognitive development or other mechanisms,'' said Dalton Conley, a sociologist at New York University, who, with Neil G. Bennett of the Baruch School of Public Affairs, wrote the study. ''Our contribution was to follow these kids years longer than other studies. And as a policy matter, I think our findings argue that programs to help low-birthweight kids need to extend well beyond the early years.'' Mr. Conley's study is based on data from the University of Michigan's Panel Study of Income Dynamics, which has followed thousands of families since 1968. Previous research has found that low-birthweight children have an increased risk of academic difficulties in early childhood, but the gap was not as dramatic as the gaps found in the new study. In one study following 2,000 low-birthweight | Learning Problems of Low-Weight Infants Are Broader Than Once Thought, Study Finds |
1212581_2 | the strong economy has given them many alternatives. Law schools have managed to defy the demographics, though. Unlike many business schools, they accept students directly from college, before the students have employers who are desperate to keep them. The law schools also seem to be benefiting both from corporate America's willingness to hire lawyers for a broader range of jobs than in the past, deans say, and from a heightened interest in public-interest work after a long economic expansion. Nevertheless, the speed and the size of the turnaround for business and law schools defy easy explanation, administrators say. ''Nobody I've talked to has come up with a really good reason for this, and we're all concerned,'' said Mary Miller, the associate dean for admissions at the Stern School of Business at New York University, where the number of applicants fell by 15 percent this year. The flip-flop in the schools' fortunes is connected, graduate-school experts say, because both draw from the same pool: ambitious young adults who have decided against careers in specialties like medicine and engineering and opted instead for degrees that can be passports to wealth and success in just about any business field. Last summer, the first warning signs that M.B.A.'s were losing some luster came as applications fell at schools that traditionally attract people interested in technology, like Stanford and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. This year the bad news is widespread. In fact, the list of schools where applications dropped, and acceptance rates spiked, reads like a magazine ranking of the country's best programs: Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, M.I.T., Columbia, Michigan, Virginia, Northwestern, Duke. The declines are steepest among American applicants. Yale's business school appears to be the only big-name M.B.A. program with an overall increase each of the last two years. Officials at the schools themselves tend to be among those who blame the hot economy. ''Career prospects generally look so good now that a two-year investment in an M.B.A. may be hard for many to justify,'' said Richard L. Schmalensee, the dean of the Sloan School at M.I.T. Indeed, the combination of tuition costs and lost wages can easily exceed $200,000 over two years. George G. C. Parker, an associate dean at Stanford, added, ''There are a lot of people who feel things are moving so quickly that they don't want to stand on the sideline.'' It doesn't help that managers at | MANAGEMENT: Battle of the Graduate Schools; Law Gains Edge on Business, and No One Knows Why |
1212587_0 | EUROPE BRITAIN: CURBING HOOLIGANS The government proposed emergency laws to give the courts and the police power to restrict suspected soccer hooligans from attending domestic matches and prevent them from traveling to games outside England. With expected Conservative support, the bill should become law before the end of the month. More than 950 English fans were arrested in Belgium during the just-ended Euro 2000 tournament, and organizers threatened to evict England from the competition. Warren Hoge (NYT) BRITAIN: ROYAL FREEZE Queen Elizabeth II's taxpayer-supported income will be frozen at $12 million a year for the next decade thanks to cost-cutting by her family and low inflation, Prime Minister Tony Blair told Parliament. The payout, called the Civil List, is reviewed every 10 years. Warren Hoge (NYT) GREECE: WITNESS PROTECTION Witnesses to the June 8 terrorist attack against Britain's top military envoy to Athens, Brig. Stephen Saunders, left, will be given special protection, including third-country relocation, according to a government spokesman. Dimitris Reppas said the move ''will pave the way for a string of ad-hoc counterterrorism measures'' that Washington and the European Union have been urging Greece to adopt in its fight against terrorism. Anthee Carassava (NYT) AUSTRIA: SANCTIONS REFERENDUM Austria will hold a referendum in the fall on citizens' opinions of European Union sanctions. The curbs, more symbolic than financial, were imposed to punish Austria for letting the rightist Freedom Party into government. Citizens will be asked whether the government should push for an end to sanctions, which amount to a refusal by European ministers to meet their Austrian counterparts formally. Donald G. McNeil Jr. (NYT) LITHUANIA: UNFIT, BUT ON TRIAL Judges and prosecutors said the trial of a 93-year-old man indicted for aiding the Nazi killing of Jews could proceed despite a ruling that he was mentally unfit. A court said a medical commission had ruled that Kazys Gimzauskas, charged with aiding the NazI genocide during World War II, was unable to stand trial. The court said it would meet on Sept. 11 to rule on how to proceed. (Reuters) THE AMERICAS BRAZIL: PRIEST WARNED ON CONDOMS The Catholic church in Brasilia threatened to punish a priest for passing out condoms to prevent the spread of AIDS, highlighting an internal split among clergy in the world's most populous Catholic country over the Vatican ban. Warning of unspecified punishment, Archbishop Claudio Hummus condemned the priest's ''incompatible'' practice of passing out | World Briefing |
1212587_2 | condoms to the poor in Sao Paulo. (Reuters) ASIA SRI LANKA: CENSORSHIP BACK President Chandrika Kumaratunga, invoking an emergency decree, has reintroduced censorship on local and foreign news media three days after a landmark Supreme Court ruling that censorship was illegal. The decree will cover whatever the government considers to be against national interests or detrimental to the preservation of public order, officials said. Censorship of war-related news was imposed under emergency regulations in May, but removed from foreign reporters a month later. P. J. Anthony (NYT) KASHMIR: AUTONOMY REJECTED The Indian Cabinet rejected a greater autonomy resolution passed by Jammu-Kashmir state lawmakers last week. The resolution would have restored the state's pre-1953 status, under which it had its own president, prime minister and courts. The federal government would have had control of defense, foreign affairs and communications. Similar autonomy demands were made by Assam in 1940, Punjab in 1973 and Tamil Nadu in 1974. P. J. Anthony (NYT) JAPAN: CABINET SHUFFLE Yoshiro Mori was reconfirmed as prime minister, a week after his Liberal Democratic Party won a much narrower than predicted victory in legislative elections. In what many analysts saw as a confirmation of his weak position, he immediately picked a new cabinet in which the most powerful economic and foreign policy positions were holdovers from his previous administration. Howard W. French (NYT) MIDDLE EAST IRAQ: MISSILE REPORT RIDICULED Iraq ridiculed a report in The New York Times that Baghdad had restarted its missile program and flight-tested a short-range ballistic missile, but did not say whether or not it possessed the missile mentioned in the report. The Times, which attributed the report to administration and Pentagon officials, said Iraq had carried out eight tests of a missile, including one last Tuesday, involving a ballistic missile that could carry conventional explosives or chemical and biological weapons. The missile does not violate United Nations restrictions. (Reuters) AFRICA CHAD: HABRE CHARGES DROPPED A court in Senegal dismissed charges of torture against Hissene Habre, left, the former President of Chad who has lived in exile in Senegal since being ousted in 1990. Senegal's judiciary, which has been going through changes since a new president, Abdoulaye Wade, was elected in March, gave no reason for its decision. In February, Chadian and international rights groups took Mr. Habre to court. Norimitsu Onishi (NYT) IVORY COAST: MILITARY PROTEST Soldiers angry over pay took to the streets | World Briefing |
1217405_9 | recruits graduates of the University of North Florida, whose campus, with 12,000 students, is only three miles away. Recent graduates are among the 25 ''profilers'' stationed at Merrill's suburban campus. Merrill developed profiling at its Somerset, N.J., office, using the profilers to build a database of biographical information on new clients for use as a tool in selling more services. The expansion, seven months ago, was in Jacksonville and Denver. Here a profiler's starting wage of $26,000 is 10 to 20 percent less than in New Jersey, Mr. Bridy said. ''There is not the demand for New Jersey wages,'' he said, adding that if labor costs do rise, Jacksonville will become less attractive. That is beginning to happen in Denver. ''The problem you have there is turnover, which is higher than Jacksonville,'' Mr. Bridy said. Sometimes the corporate migration is only a few counties away. Pressed by the Big Three automakers to hold down prices, some parts manufacturers are shifting from the Detroit environs to Traverse City and other locations in upstate Michigan, where wages are lower. Principal Financial Group, which manages pension plans for thousands of companies, found that wages were rising in Des Moines, its headquarters city, for the counselors who field telephone calls from people seeking information about their plans or shifting investments. So work has been moved, through computer links, to offices in Waterloo and Ottumwa, Iowa, where wages for counselors with the same skills are 5 to 10 percent lower than in Des Moines. Burrelle's Information Services is a constant migrant. The company employs nearly 2,000 people who cull newspaper, magazine, video and Internet citations for corporate customers. As wages rose in Livingston, N.J., its headquarters, and business grew, the company added an office in Salt Lake City, then Presque Isle, Me., and most recently in Houlton, Me. -- all in a successful effort to keep the hourly wage of most of the employees below $10. ''The unemployment rate is a little higher in Houlton than in Presque Isle because it does not have an airport and tends to be bypassed by other companies,'' said Robert Waggoner, chief executive at Burrelle's. ''You have to be adventurous in finding new places.'' Vying for Better Jobs Towns Try to Draw The Better Wages While Maine, with an unemployment rate of 5 percent or more in many towns and cities, vies to attract lower-wage jobs -- or any | SHIFTING WORKPLACE/A special report.; Renewed Corporate Wanderlust Puts a Quiet Brake on Salaries |
1215422_0 | To the Editor: Re ''Northern Ireland Paralyzed by Unionist Demonstrations'' (news article, July 11): Radical elements in the Protestant communities of Ireland have again shown their unwillingness to compromise for the sake of peace. The ''marching season'' is an affront to Roman Catholic families, serving merely to fuel religious hatred and sectarianism. This is a far cry from the ''reconciliation, tolerance and mutual trust'' expounded in the Good Friday peace accords. International condemnation must find its way to all perpetrators of malice, not just the Irish Republican Army. BRIAN D. HANLEY Guatemala City, July 11, 2000 | Ulster Discord |
1215493_0 | A collective groan rose from the United Airlines check-in line at La Guardia Airport at 8 a.m. Monday as the announcement sounded from a loudspeaker. Because of heavy thunderstorms in Chicago, the disembodied voice intoned, flights to O'Hare International Airport would be delayed one to four hours. For Sharon Mantel, a drug saleswoman on her way to a meeting in Chicago, the day had already had a bad start. She hit a deer on her way to the airport from her home in Stamford, Conn., shattering her car's windshield. Ten days earlier, Jacqueline and Philip Clinton and their daughters, Caitlyn, 2, and Victoria, 3 months, had arrived four hours late -- without their luggage -- on their way to Long Island from their home in Spokane, Wash. Now, rescheduled onto an afternoon flight to Denver, they faced an even longer trip back. But for Cindy Miller, an advertising executive who has been flying at least once a week for four years, it was business as usual. ''It's just absolutely horrendous,'' she said. ''You just get used to it after a while. What can you do?'' Last summer was the worst on record for airline delays, prompting the airlines and the Federal Aviation Administration to swing into action to try to ease the burden on weary passengers. Yet despite those efforts, this summer is turning out to be even worse. Delays in June rose 16.5 percent from June 1999, according to the F.A.A.'s latest statistics. So far this year they are up 12.7 percent. And with air traffic continuing to expand at a time when few new airports or runways are on the drawing board, delays may be a fact of life for years to come, airline executives and government officials say. No group of passengers has suffered more of late than those flying United, the world's largest airline. Just under 57 percent of the carrier's flights arrived on time in May, far worse than the performance of its closest competitors, according to the latest figures compiled by the Transportation Department. Of the 33 routes on which flights were late more than 80 percent of the time in May, 27 were United's. And United canceled more flights in May -- nearly 9 percent of its schedule -- than any other airline. May was also the month that United agreed to buy U S Airways, the country's sixth-largest carrier, for $4.3 billion, | Despite Efforts, Airport Delays Are Worsening |
1215491_1 | have yet to emerge from laboratories in the developed world. Just 10 miles from the plush surroundings of the conference center, many South Africans live in squatter camps and earn meager incomes as migrant workers. As they have traveled seeking jobs in mines and other industries, they have brought H.I.V. home to their families to fuel what has become an explosive epidemic. Mr. Mandela cited two African countries, Uganda and Senegal. The first turned around a major epidemic of AIDS. The second prevented a small one from becoming larger. Those successes, using relatively inexpensive public health tools like education, suggest that other countries severely affected by H.I.V. might do as well, if they can only muster the political will to act. Mr. Mandela challenged the world to focus on what health workers know works in preventing AIDS. Though the use of drugs to prevent transmission of the virus from mothers to infants is mandatory in any H.I.V. control plan, Mr. Mandela said, ''Promoting abstinence, safe sex and the use of condoms and ensuring the early treatment of sexually transmitted diseases are some of the steps needed and about which there can be no dispute.'' These are steps that could be carried out immediately and at a relatively low cost. Throughout the conference, other participants stressed similar steps, the kind of old-fashioned public health work that has shown good, if not spectacular, results. For example, Dr. Hoosen M. Coovadia, a leading AIDS expert in Durban and the conference chairman, cited the way political and religious leaders from diverse parts of Uganda and Senegal spoke out about AIDS, both to reduce the stigma of the disease and to encourage counseling, testing and the aggressive promotion of condom use. The results have been encouraging. Uganda's infection rates have dropped to 8 percent from 14 percent in the early 1990's, according to United Nations statistics for the most recent years available. Rates in Senegal, where the country's then-president, Abdou Diouf, began speaking out forcefully more than a decade ago, have stayed below 2 percent. In a country where prostitution is legal, Senegalese health officials have set up free clinics to treat sexually transmitted infections, and have organized a vigorous education campaign on the virus. Mr. Mandela also pointed to Thailand, which acted relatively quickly to set up an aggressive program to offer condoms and treat sexually transmitted diseases, which enhance the spread of the | Africa's AIDS Crisis: Finding Common Ground |
1215310_0 | The Venus de Milo and the Parthenon are part of humanity's artistic heritage. But appreciating that heritage has been harder for the blind. Drew University is offering a class on ''The Art of Ancient Greece'' for blind and visually impaired students, from July 31 to Aug. 4 at Concordia House, part of the St. Joseph's School for the Blind in Jersey City. The students will be using art textbooks for the blind with raised line reproductions of ancient Greek sculpture, paintings and architecture along with nonvisual verbal descriptions. The students will also be studying Greek mythology and doing some art work of their own. Karen Chasen Spitzberg, an artist who wrote two of the chapters in the text, ''Art History Through Touch and Sound,'' will be teaching the course. ''Many blind people have long thought that art was out of their reach,'' she said, ''but it really isn't if you give them the right tools.'' Residency is available at Concordia House, (973) 408-3400. MARGO NASH JERSEY FOOTLIGHTS | Art Appreciation for the Blind |
1215429_3 | two longest-running conflicts since the second world war,'' said Mr. Beilin, who visited Belfast in January. ''In both cases we now seem close to a solution, but in Northern Ireland this week we saw the fragility of the process. Good Friday can be followed by Bad Sunday.'' In April, Mr. Beilin convened a workshop here where Israeli and Palestinian officials traded insights with Irish and British experts in the Ulster conflict. What struck him most forcefully, he said, is the need for peace agreements to reflect the power of ''symbols and rituals,'' along with more tangible things like political institutions and economic benefits. An example: Mr. Beilin believes Israel should let a Palestinian flag fly over the Dome of the Rock, the crowning monument of Jerusalem's Old City -- an image shocking to many Israelis, but to Palestinians a powerful statement of their national identity. Mr. Beilin particularly admires the artful blurring of sovereignty lines in the Good Friday accord. The Republic of Ireland now has a formal consultative role in the Northern Irish government, a concession that for many Protestant loyalists struck at the core of their British identity. Yet in return the Republic withdrew its historic claim on the province and formally recognized the United Kingdom's rule there for the first time. President Clinton has also repeatedly drawn comparisons. In speeches in Northern Ireland he pointed to the Oslo accord as a sign of the possibility of cooperation between once-bitter enemies, and when visiting Israel and the Palestinian territories, he cited the Good Friday accord as an example of what he hoped negotiators could achieve in final-status talks here. The most significant parallel is the critical mediation of President Clinton himself, said David Scannell, a veteran Irish diplomat, who worked on the Northern Ireland settlement before being sent to Israel as Dublin's ambassador four years ago. But when looking at the political backdrop to both negotiations, Mr. Scannell is discouraged about President Clinton's chances for securing a settlement here. Israeli polls still show a solid 40-percent-plus opposition to a peace accord, he noted. In the referendum approving the Good Friday pact, support was overwhelming in the Irish Republic -- it passed 94 percent to six percent -- and still resounding in the predominately Protestant North, where it carried by 71 percent to 29 percent. Mr. Benvenisti is similarly pessimistic, saying that in the critical ''emotional aspects of the | The World; Ulster and Israel Look In a Mirror at Each Other |
1215141_4 | the PBS series ''Great Performances'' at some future date. Then, in December 1999, Deutsche Grammophon suddenly pulled out. Mr. Venza and PBS quickly followed suit. The sticking point? ''Several changes impacted the potential marketing and related commercial viability of the record,'' Deutsche Grammophon announced in a prepared statement filled with bold pronouncements and curious inconsistencies. ''The project did not become a vehicle for Universal/DG artists, as had been suggested early on; other Universal artists (Renee Fleming and Luciano Pavarotti) did not materialize; no future life outside of the recording was planned, such as possible additional performances in other markets; a PBS broadcast didn't happen; a definitive recording of the 'Sweeney Todd' Broadway company already existed; and, ultimately, the N.Y. Philharmonic could not come up with a budget acceptable to Deutsche Grammophon.'' In his statement, Mr. Venza was more straightforward: ''It was just too expensive.'' Yet, nearly 15 years ago, when another Sondheim masterwork, ''Follies,'' was performed by the Philharmonic at Avery Fisher Hall, PBS broadcast the event and a major record label, RCA, released an accompanying recording. So what has changed since 1985? Certainly, the classical record business has changed. Corporate conglomeration, coupled with huge crossover successes like Andrea Bocelli and the Three Tenors, have virtually squeezed out more adventurous classical recording projects, leaving behind an industry that has largely lost its nerve. As Mr. Kaufman noted: ''The recording not happening can be chalked up to the general crisis in the industry. Yes, Bryn Terfel did leave the project, due to illness -- an ongoing back problem that finally required surgery. D.G., though, bowed out well before Bryn did. It didn't have anything to do with not having his marquee name; it had to do with D.G.'s own financial constraints. And that's across the board with record companies and classical music today. No one wants to spend any money.'' The world of public television has changed as well. Increasingly, PBS is more focused on a generation of younger viewers uninterested in either the Broadway of Sondheim or the orchestral music of the Philharmonic. What has not changed is old-fashioned greed and its power to rule out compromise. In that sense, it must be pointed out that the Philharmonic also played a role in derailing its own hopes for a recording agreement, as Mr. Kaufman indirectly acknowledged. ''The whole 'Follies' experience, which many people point to as a precedent, really wasn't | Losing the Present While Waiting For the Future |
1214059_2 | the volatility, Protestant paramilitaries are themselves at loggerheads, with one group, the Ulster Volunteer Force, accusing the Ulster Freedom Fighters of being behind gun attacks last week against officers of the province's police force, the Royal Ulster Constabulary. At highway junctures across Ulster, some of the 80,000 Orange Order members, their wives and children gathered in milling groups to shut down traffic. Roadblocks of hastily nailed-together wooden slats were thrown up on city corners during the declared 4 to 8 p.m. protest period and then set on fire once darkness fell. Demonstrators surged at police lines and shouted abuse at officers in various towns, but while daylight held, there were none of the car burnings and firebombings of recent nights. Police reported skirmishes with protesters in Portadown and Drumcree throwing rocks and bottles at officers who responded with water cannons. David Trimble, the First Minister of the new Northern Ireland Assembly and leader of the largest Protestant party, the Ulster Unionists, appealed for calm, saying that anyone resorting to violence would ''dishonor and disgrace the cause they profess to support.'' Mr. Trimble, once a Portadown Orange Order marcher himself, is a pariah with the organization now, since it is vehemently opposed to the new government he heads. The government was set up by the April, 1998 peace accord that was aimed at putting an end to three decades of sectarian struggles that have cost more than 3,600 lives. Mr. Trimble has barely kept his leadership of the Ulster Unionists in two recent votes that have exposed yet another fissure in the Protestant ranks between moderates and hard-liners. The Portadown Orangemen said they were staging their shutdown of the province to persuade the government-appointed Parades Commission to reverse its decision to bar them from marching down the Garvaghy Road, a thoroughfare into town lined on either side by Catholic housing blocks. But Peter Mandelson, Britain's Northern Ireland secretary, said that ''every stone, every missile, every petrol bomb will militate against'' that goal. Mr. Mandelson said he firmly backed the commission's declaration that the only way for the Portadown Orangemen to march down the Garvaghy Road was to enter into dialogue with the people living along it. The Portadown lodge members have refused to speak directly to the residents or to meet with members of the Parades Commission. This was the third straight year that the panel had ruled against the Portadown | Northern Ireland Paralyzed By Unionist Demonstrations |
1217135_0 | Because of an editing error, an article last week about comparisons between the Israeli-Palestinian and Northern Ireland conflicts misstated the date of the Good Friday peace agreement in Northern Ireland. It was 1998, not 1988. | Corrections |
1217259_0 | MISTER SOFTEE, 39th Street at Broadway, northwest corner The vanilla flavor is pronounced and fairly genuine. The ice cream has some weight to it and a silky texture. The pale yellow cone, embossed with the word Mellow, seems to be standard issue for all soft ice-cream trucks. It resembles thin particle board, has no flavor whatever and sucks the moisture out of your tongue on contact. The vendor has a deft wrist, producing an attractive ziggurat form topped by a perfect curled peak. He also wishes customers a hearty ''Have a great day'' on delivering the cone. Price, $1.50. Rating: Three cones (out of four) SOFT ICE CREAM 1, 39th Street at Fifth Avenue, southwest corner The ice cream, tasteless and a little grainy, suffers from poor presentation. The vendor, who has not mastered the art of simultaneously piling, pressing and twisting the ice cream, ends up with an unstable Leaning Tower of Pisa. The cone is offered grudgingly. Crude depiction of a vanilla cone on the side of the van shows a cherry on top. No cherry on actual cone. Price, $1.50. Rating: zero cones SOFT ICE CREAM 2, 45th Street at Seventh Avenue, northeast corner A mild, not overly artificial vanilla flavor and reasonably creamy texture make this a respectable, middle-of-the-road cone. The vendor, who has a supple wrist, gives his cones a slightly squashed form, with precise spirals, that recalls one of the onion towers on St. Basil's Cathedral. The manner is brisk but not unfriendly. Price, $1.50. Rating: two cones WILLIAM GRIMES TASTE TEST | A Hard Look At Soft Ice Cream |
1217175_1 | was interested in spiky jewelry that would be painful to wear and light switches with sharp edges. And Mr. Hannah sees the same extremism at work in young people's fashion. ''There are these big, black, chunky almost storm-trooper shoes and crisp trousers; there isn't the rumpled look of the 60's and 70's,'' he said. Some older designers complain that there is little on the market that they want to buy. Clyde Foles, the 56-year-old chairman of the industrial design department at the Center for Creative Studies, a design institute in Detroit, said he had been unable to find a radio for his summer cottage because the clean, rectangular, Bauhaus-style designs he was looking for had given way to alarming combinations of curves and sharp edges. The prevalent design these days, ''looks like Darth Vader's helmet,'' he said. Where this aggression is coming from is a mystery. Designers and market researchers most commonly cite video games, with their emphasis on violence and exotic yet menacing shapes for androids, space aliens and other threats. Others point to Jung's observation that people behave worse when times are better, and suggest that the end of the cold war and the nation's economic boom have left Americans freer to explore their deepest psychological feelings, including the fear of violence. Some designers single out the wealth of research showing that Americans remain very much afraid of crime, even though crime has actually fallen. Federal crime surveys show that violent crime dropped 22.7 percent between 1993 and 1998. Rates for other crimes have fallen even more sharply, including a 43.2 percent plunge in motor vehicle thefts. But Gallup polls since 1989 have consistently found that a majority of Americans believe that crime is worsening, although the size of that majority has shrunk over the last decade. The trend toward playing on fears of crime is most noticeable in transportation products, Mr. Stumpf said. Powerboats are now often low, lethal-looking craft influenced by the stealth fighter's design. Bicycles have studded, off-road tires instead of racing tires. Skateboards have images of fire-breathing dragons instead of racing stripes. And tall, large sport utility vehicles have replaced sleek, low sports cars as the favorite choice of image-conscious buyers. Archetype Discoveries Worldwide, which is based in Boca Raton, Fla., does psychological consumer researcher for many large clients, including Seagram, Procter & Gamble, DaimlerChrysler, Ford and General Motors. Dr. Clotaire Rapaille, the company's | Ideas & Trends; The Latest Fashion: Fear-of-Crime Design |
1217248_0 | A plan that could have led to the breaching of four dams on the Snake River in the Pacific Northwest has been postponed. The plan was aimed at easing the way for endangered species of salmon to return to spawning grounds. But the White House chose instead to embrace an alternative course. Trying to balance voters' support for the salmon with regional officials' opposition to any breach, it will propose smaller steps to help the species while deferring until at least 2005 any razing of the dams. DOUGLAS JEHL | July 16-22; Plan to Breach Dams Delayed |
1217062_1 | as president of Pro-Tec Mobile Communications, a wireless communications company in Casa Grande, Ariz., Catherine E. Sutter has heard a lot. Her supply of anecdotes about communications equipment doesn't stop with the one about the fellow who, while installing a two-way radio in a new John Deere tractor, drilled four perfect holes into a $900 fuel tank. Or the one about the installer who forgot to bolt down the front seat of a new truck after installing a radio underneath -- when the customer flipped the seat forward to store some papers, it went through the windshield. Ms. Sutter has this one to add: A married customer, partying with the boys, met a woman in a local bar. ''Knowing he needed to buy himself some more time as they drove off in his truck to the next bar, he proceeded to call his wife from the truck phone, using the hands-free speaker,'' Ms. Sutter writes. ''When the wife answered, he said he was still out with the boys, and everyone was heading out to eat dinner and he would be home later. Of course the wife complained, but she accepted his explanation. ''Because of his drinking, he forgot to push the 'end' button on the phone. He then started romancing the girlfriend, suggesting a hotel and complaining about his wife. ''For over 20 minutes, the wife listened to their conversation, never letting on that the hands-free speaker was still in the active mode. ''Needless to say, the great benefits of cellular service caused a divorce.'' A day after Jay Leno complained on ''The Tonight Show'' about the shouting of cell-phone users, Walter J. Hamilton, a retired General Electric sales representative in New Milford, N.J., went out to dinner with his wife, Barbara. In the restaurant, a cell phone rang, and a man answered and started talking loudly enough to disturb the chef in the kitchen. When the man completed his call, he said, ''Goodbye.'' Mr. Hamilton then said, ''Goodbye,'' too, and a chorus of other ''goodbyes'' sounded from around the restaurant. ''A wave of laughter followed,'' Mr. Hamilton writes, ''much to the discomfort of the cell-phone user.'' Ari Rosenberg, a sales director at Snowball.com, an Internet company in San Francisco, was sitting out a long delay at the Los Angeles International Airport by immersing himself in a book when a woman within 10 feet of him initiated a cell phone | Things That Go Beep In the Day and the Night |
1217020_0 | You work abstractly with sounds in your head on pieces you may never hear. The fruition of your art largely depends on others, for a cost you can barely afford. To make matters worse, no one is longing for your finished product -- indeed, your audience clings to masters of the past. You are a classical composer, swimming against the tide of popular culture. There are times, however, when it all seems worthwhile. For Binnette Lipper, a composer in White Plains, a highlight was the recent release of her first compact disc, ''Horizons.'' The recording of her chamber music by eight woodwind and string players, including four members of the New York Philharmonic, gives her something tangible to market in this most ephemeral of occupations. ''I've had many, many performances all over the world,'' she said in a recent phone interview, ''but there has been nothing easy to circulate to make my music known.'' The recording spanned two years as Ms. Lipper, a former piano teacher at Hoff-Barthelson Music School in Scarsdale who now serves on the school's board of directors, waited for the musicians' schedules to dovetail. Shortly before the first recording session, which was to take place in the recital hall of the Purchase College music building, there was disconcerting news. ''They were fixing the roof, but said it was O.K. for me to work there if I didn't mind some banging,'' she recalled. ''After losing my cool a bit, I was promised the big theater in the Performing Arts Center.'' Greg Squires of Squires Production in Elmsford was the recording engineer, and his company helped with production. Ms. Lipper took the cover picture of misty mountain ranges while on vacation in Jordan. ''Horizons'' is available for $10.95 by calling (888) 859-9229, or checking the Web site www.musiciansshowcase.com. FOOTLIGHTS E-mail address: westarts@nytimes.com | Now, a Permanent Record |
1217177_2 | replacing these illogical distinctions with a uniform, rational set of standards. Civil liberties and privacy groups support this idea in principle, but are highly critical of the administration for refusing to explain how broadly it intends to use Carnivore or to describe what safeguards are in place for preventing its abuse. Law enforcement officials say that computer systems like Carnivore are necessary because e-mail is becoming more frequently used for communication among criminals. And the officials note that these cybermonitors can actually be set to record communications much more selectively than a phone tap. Carnivore could, for instance, be programmed to pick up the e-mail from only one sender and a particular computer, while excluding such e-mail as messages to or from, say, the sender's lawyer or wife. Phone taps, on the other hand, pick up everything. At a news briefing on Friday, top F.B.I. officials also announced plans to submit Carnivore to analysis by independent academics, and noted that the system kept a log of what it was asked to pick up, which could be used by a court to spot any violations. In making their case, supporters of cybersurveillance say that the only way to track e-mail is by combing through all of the messages on a particular network, because e-mail consists of a series of digital packets that are broken apart at the sending end and transmitted along multiple electronic paths before being reconstituted by the recipient's computer. Nonetheless, privacy groups and some Internet service providers, or I.S.P.'s, say there remains a less intrusive alternative. The providers, like AOL or the Microsoft Network, could be ordered by a court to turn over specific material, rather than give the F.B.I. unlimited access to a network. That is precisely how telephone companies are treated; they cooperate with warrants for wiretaps and lists of telephone numbers called from a particular phone. ''The real question is who should be in control,'' said James X. Dempsey, staff attorney for the Center for Democracy and Technology, a civil liberties group in Washington. ''It upsets the balance among competing interests and privacy for law enforcement to, in essence, kick the companies out of the way, hook up a black box, and say, don't touch it.'' Other experts said that it was time for a reappraisal of all the standards used by the government to eavesdrop, particularly as the world moves into an era of | The Nation; Learning to Live With Big Brother |
1216832_0 | CUBA has been off-limits for American tourists for almost 40 years, or ever since President John F. Kennedy imposed an economic embargo on the island in 1962, and each of the next seven Presidents has maintained it in varying degrees. But unless President Clinton changes his mind, the ban on United States tourist travel to Cuba is likely to be tightened sometime this summer. The irony is that only a few months ago support for lifting the ban appeared to be growing, eroded by time and increasing exchange programs between doctors, musicians, farmers, religious delegations and athletes. In addition, American farmers are eager to export their products to Cuba, while airlines, hotel companies, tour operators and cruise ships want a share of the island's growing tourist business, which until now has gone mainly to Canada, Spain and Italy. Even the book industry signaled its belief that the ban would be lifted when within the past few weeks Fodor's, the Rough Guides and Michelin's new Neos imprint each published guidebooks to Cuba. In the wake of this apparent groundswell, bills were introduced in both the House and Senate to make it easier for U.S. citizens to travel to Cuba, including one bill that would have allowed unrestricted travel and ended Washington's authority to regulate financial transactions involving such travel. The latter provision was aimed at that portion of the existing Treasury Department regulation that does not formally prohibit American tourists from visiting Cuba but bars them from spending any money once there. But late last month the House of Representatives agreed to a compromise that would ease some restrictions on sales of food and medicine to Cuba, in return for writing into law the existing policy regulating travel to the island. President Clinton said he would be ''inclined'' to sign the bill. Meanwhile, travel from the United States to Cuba continues to increase. While an undetermined number of American tourists enter from Canada, Mexico, the Bahamas and other countries, others go as members of cultural, educational, humanitarian or religious groups, which are allowed in with few restrictions on regularly scheduled charter flights from New York, Miami and Los Angeles. According to Cuba's Tourism Ministry, the 1.6 million visitors to Cuba last year included 165,000 Americans, 100,000 of them naturalized Americans who were born in Cuba (still considered by Havana to be Cuban citizens). Canadian tourists accounted for 17 percent of the | As Travel to Cuba Grows, Limits Gain Support |
1217145_3 | longer sends that message to employers. Education has always raised incomes. For more than a century, the college educated have been at the top of the earnings pyramid, the masters of each new, complicated technology. High school prepared hundreds of millions of ordinary workers for the modern workplace and helped to lift their incomes, shrinking the gap between their pay and that of the college educated. But since 1980, that gap has widened again. The economic boom did narrow the earnings gap a bit in the mid-1990's, as employers competed to hire low-wage workers. But starting in 1997, the wages of college graduates pulled ahead, according to the Economic Policy Institute's latest figures. HIGHER-LEVEL jobs for the college educated are among the fastest growing, the Labor Department reports -- those for computer analysts, engineers, upper level executives and secondary-school teachers. But lower-paying jobs that require only high school training are also among the fastest growing -- jobs for retail sales people, cashiers, truck drivers, office clerks and home health care aides. Despite this demand, the wages of people with only a high school diploma -- rather solid in the days of unionized blue collar factory work -- have fallen steadily behind for 20 years, making college seem the only route to the $20.58 an hour that college graduates earned, on average, last year, according to the Economic Policy Institute. By comparison, the high school educated averaged only $11.83; adjusted for inflation, the earnings gap has risen nearly 70 percent since 1980. The gap has widened partly because union strength has declined, and with it many of the higher-paying jobs once available to high school graduates. And the minimum wage, adjusted for inflation, is not as high today as it was in the late 1960's. ''The deterioration of unions and the minimum wage probably explains up to one-third of the increase in the earnings gap in the past 20 years,'' Mr. Holzer said. These financial pressures have indeed pushed more Americans into college. College graduates now represent nearly 25 percent of all adults, up from 17 percent in 1980. The proportion of workers with only a high school diploma has correspondingly fallen to 34 percent from 39 percent in 1988. Yet if one-third of the population continues to balk at moving past high school, then one solution is to raise the quality of that education. More than 40 states are now | The Nation: The Classroom Ceiling; Making Sense of a Stubborn Education Gap |
1217237_0 | To the Editor: Bob Herbert (''Global Cooling,'' column, July 17) could have mentioned another way to reduce global warming: policies that slow tropical deforestation. The destruction of rain forests causes approximately 20 percent of greenhouse gas emissions worldwide. By helping interested countries conserve their forests, Americans can also maintain an ecosystem that, in some cases, removes gases already in the atmosphere. These forests also buffer equatorial solar radiation. Rain forests also protect genetic diversity that may be helpful in countering some of global warming's possible ills, like outbreaks of pests and viruses from the tropics. This is an affordable global insurance policy that enjoys international and bipartisan support but inadequate financing. JOHN O. NILES Stanford, Calif., July 17, 2000 The writer is a staff scientist at Stanford University's Center for Conservation Biology. | Lowering the Global Thermostat |
1212228_15 | the water supply on board from a panel on the front of the plane's wing. Then he moves on to the nose wheel. Taking a pin from his tool box he slips it into a joint on the gear, enabling the wheel to pivot freely. Now a tow bar and tug can be used to push the plane from the gate at departure. It takes two men to attach the tow bar, and the entire operation is complete is 30 seconds. Mr. Fizer checks his watch. It's 3:11, and the first of the luggage for flight 319 arrives. He reaches into the curtained container and begins tossing bags onto the conveyor belt receding into the cargo compartment. He checks the tag on every third or fourth suitcase saying: ''I don't want a Detroit bag on this flight. I don't want a Fort Lauderdale bag on this flight. I don't want a Paris bag on this flight. We're not going to Paris.'' At 3:25 the cargo doors are locked. Mr. Fizer checks his watch. ''Minutes are precious,'' he says. ''They can make or break a flight.'' At 3:31 a small suitcase is delivered to Mr. Fizer by a uniformed pilot. A minute later a stroller is sent down a circular metal chute and the cargo door is opened once again. The last-minute stowing of baggage is a regular occurrence these days as passengers strain the limits of the overhead storage bins. ''One hundred and fifty passengers all want to keep their luggage with them,'' Mr. Fizer said, shaking his head. ''Somebody's got to cough up a bag.'' As Mr. Fizer looks on, Flight 319 is pushed out to a position on the field where it will begin to move under its own power. But before the tug driver disconnects the bar from the nose gear, he takes one last, late-arriving suitcase and stashes it in the cargo area. One passenger complaint averted. Flight 319 is four minutes late out of Newark. POLICING THE AREA John Collis Patrols on Bike Pedaling his bicycle through the crowded international arrivals hall, Officer John Collis, 38, is blazing a trail. He wears a regulation blue jump suit and a saucy silver bike helmet as he patrols the terminals and parking lots. The bike also allows Mr. Collins to ride a fine line between the image of the traditional police officer and that of a somewhat | A Day in the Life Of Newark Airport |
1212018_0 | After weeks of negotiations, House Republican leaders agreed to language that would weaken the economic embargo against Cuba for the first time in four decades. The bill, pushed by Representative George W. Nethercutt Jr., a Washington Republican, would permit the direct sale of food to Cuba, similar to a policy allowing the sale of medicine. But the legislation, designed to benefit agribusiness and to shore up Mr. Nethercutt's re-election chances, is so loaded down with restrictions that it is more a symbolic step toward normalizing Cuban-American relations than it is a boon to farmers. LIZETTE ALVAREZ | June 25-July 1; Softening Cuban Embargo |
1211987_2 | for it to become part of the denomination's constitution. The question of how major religious organizations should relate to gay men and lesbians in their pews has become one of the most contentious issues they face. And the responses of religious bodies show how widely divided they are, one from another, on such questions as whether to permit their clergy to officiate at same-sex unions, or whether to ordain gays as clergy members. In March, the Central Conference of American Rabbis, which represents the spiritual leaders of more than 800 Reform synagogues in North America, became the largest religious organization in the nation to adopt a policy supporting its members if they choose to officiate at same-sex unions. But two months later, the United Methodist Church, the second-largest Protestant denomination in the country, voted to affirm a four-year-old policy that bars its ministers from conducting such unions, under penalties that include the loss of ministerial credentials. The intensity of the controversy within religious organizations over these issues reflects a larger debate in society over gay rights, a debate in which major institutions have taken different tacks. Earlier this year, the Vermont Legislature voted to extend legal recognition to civil unions between same-sex couples, breaking decisively with a trend in which many states have taken a nearly opposite approach, passing ''defense of marriage'' laws that carefully define a legal marriage as a contract between a man and a woman. In recent years, Presbyterians with a more conservative outlook have tended to have the upper hand in the church. Three years ago, they succeeded in passing an amendment that forbids the church from ordaining noncelibate gays as ministers, elders or deacons. An effort by that measure's opponents to soften its language failed in 1998. But more liberal Presbyterians said they had not given up. Mitzi Henderson, an elder who serves as co-moderator of More Light Presbyterians, an organization that supports gay rights, said, ''I don't think it's the end of the struggle.'' Correction: July 11, 2000, Tuesday An article in some copies on July 2 about a vote by the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) in favor of an amendment to the church constitution to bar ministers from officiating at same-sex unions misstated the purpose of an amendment ratified by the church in 1997. The 1997 amendment prohibits the ordination of anyone who is sexually active outside marriage, not just | Shift in Presbyterian Debate on Gay Unions |
1218912_6 | small plots, and to wash clothes. This is part of a government strategy to help people survive while they are forced to restore the steepest slopes to grasses or forest. According to the plan, families who give up farmland will be given small subsidies of money and grain for five years. The hope is that, eventually, production of fruits and medical herbs and controlled herding can restore some income. But there is little prospect, officials here admit, for other livelihoods to support the growing hillside population. Eventually, officials say, a share of the people must be moved elsewhere, though this will require large sums of money and a place for them to go. Illustrating the obstacles, a plan to relocate 58,000 people from hillsides not far from Dakutu provoked a global controversy when pro-Tibetan activists abroad argued that the plan would further dilute Tibetan culture and was conceived in haste. The furor caused the World Bank to withdraw from a plan to provide money for the project, which involves building an irrigation system in an arid, sparsely populated area of central Qinghai that is traditionally Tibetan. China says it will proceed with the resettlement anyway, using its own resources. Overcrowding with no easy solution is also a challenge on Qinghai's pasturelands, mainly inhabited by Tibetans. Since the early 1980's, when the communes created under Mao Zedong were disbanded and families were given title to their own livestock, the herds have grown precipitously, causing a classic ''tragedy of the commons'' on the range. In Gonghe County, for example, which includes Lagan, experts say the grasslands can safely carry 3.7 million sheep. But by the end of 1998 the land was trampled and nibbled by 5.5 million sheep. Seeking to salvage the depleted pastures, the authorities are fencing off the range and giving each family its own parcel, in hopes that this will give herders a direct incentive to nurture the grass and control the size of herds. Even if the plan works for now, a provincial grazing official said, the new range allotments cannot be subdivided again as the numerous children of today's herders come of age. So what will the next generation do? The only hope, the official said, is to develop alternatives in livestock processing or in service industries. But such industries do not exist right now, he said, and in this remote region, the economic possibilities remain unclear. | Chinese Farmers See a New Desert Erode Their Way of Life |
1218879_3 | of all the Iranian fans. Q. You played several years in the Bundesliga, one of the toughest leagues in the world. How would you compare the quality of play in M.L.S.? A. What surprised me the most is that the German league is very physical, but I believe that M.L.S. is more physical and hard. Naturally, in Europe they don't consider M.L.S. a top league, but I believe people think it is going in the right direction and that it is able to attract big stars. Q. We have heard that women in Iran are not permitted to attend soccer games. So what is your impression of the popularity of women's soccer in the United States? A. I have seen a few games of the American team and, obviously, they deserve to be No. 1 in the world. You can tell you have better youth programs here for girls than anywhere else in the world. In Iran, the reason that women are not allowed in the stadiums is because of the intense environment. It is not a pleasant environment for women to be in. Of course, that could be worked on. This is not a difference in culture; it is a religious thing in Iran. There is now a women's league in Iran, but you don't see men going to watch the women play like in the United States. Q. Before the World Cup finals in 1998, many Americans looked at the group that included the United States, Iran, Germany and Yugoslavia and believed that a victory and 3 points against Iran were a virtual certainty for them. A. That's exactly how we looked at it when we thought about playing the U.S. We knew it would be harder to get points from Germany and Yugoslavia. I know that the game was a big deal in America, but it was even more important for the people of Iran. Q. You were in Iran recently for a tournament. Did you notice any changes? A. The atmosphere in Iran is getting better every day, contrary to what many people have heard in the West. The young people follow what is happening in foreign countries. They want to and can visit foreign lands. Travel is not restricted. In my personal opinion, I think that people are more in tune with what is happening in the world than they were 10 years ago. BACKTALK | An Iranian Star at Home in Northern California |
1218590_3 | bedside with equipment emphasize this need for speed. Diversion of an airplane to the nearest airport may help in other cases, but takes way too long to help in cardiac arrest. Fifteen airlines carrying 85 percent of American domestic passengers contributed data to the one-year Government study; they submitted 188 usable ''medical event'' reports: 177 that occurred on board planes -- in flight, at the gate or in taxiing; 10 in the boarding ramp or the terminal, and 1 in a cab to the airport. Of the 177 events, 119 were thought to involve the heart; the average age of these passengers was 62. Sixty-four of the 119 died; 10 were known to have survived, and the other outcomes were unknown. While the study was going on, of course, airlines were phasing in defibrillators. In 14 on-board events and 3 on the ground, the devices were used, and four of the victims survived; the F.A.A. checked later and found these passengers still alive. For the on-board cardiac events, the report said, an A.E.D. was reported ''not available'' in 40 cases and ''not needed'' in 12. There were 74 aircraft diversions reported because of passenger medical emergencies; 52 involved cardiac events. American Airlines gathered data before and after the Government study. Dr. David McKenas of its corporate medical department, testifying in Congress, said that defibrillators saved 11 lives over three years. He said the results were ''spectacular'' in comparison with those that emergency medical services on the ground reported. Despite gaps in its data, the F.A.A. said it concluded that ''deaths occur on air carriers and certain medical interventions . . . may change the outcome for some.'' Projecting ''conservatively'' against a potential total of 7.58 billion passengers in the next 10 years, it concluded that 55 outcomes of future medical events might be changed by defibrillators. The draft rule also requires additions to the standard medical kit carried on board. It also carries a good Samaritan provision protecting those who help from random prosecution. The F.A.A. voiced some caution about its steps. ''The intent of the regulation is to provide options for treatment,'' it said, ''not to raise expectation in the passenger or physician community regarding the level of medical care available in flight.'' Comments on the draft regulation may be mailed in duplicate to Department of Transportation Dockets, Docket FAA-2000-7719, 400 Seventh Street SW, Room Plaza 401, Washington, D.C. | Defibrillators: Airline Update |
1212858_0 | A Field Guide | |
1212791_0 | National News Briefs; Episcopalians Gather for Convention |
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