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1217960_2 | cancer. Still, a few studies have linked cell phone use to the risk of brain cancer in laboratory animals. One study at the University of Adelaide in Australia showed that mice genetically predisposed to a type of cancer developed twice as many such cancers when exposed to cell phone radiation. The study was published in the journal Radiation Research in 1997. Not surprisingly, all sides in the debate have called for additional research. The industry association recently said it would spend $25 million to study possible cancer risks from cell phones. In light of recent rulings against tobacco companies, phone manufacturers may be able to shield themselves from the possibility of future legal action if they can show that they have tried to make users aware of any information related to radiation levels and cell phones. ''It is simply smart for the companies to show they've done everything possible to ensure their devices are safe,'' said Mitchell Lazarus, a lawyer at Fletcher, Heald & Hindreth in Arlington, Va., which specializes in telecommunications law. There are skeptics regarding the safety of cell phones. Most of these people point to the need to conduct long-term research, since cell phones have been available on a widespread basis only since the 1980's. ''On numerous occasions, microwave radiation from sources similar to cellular phones has been showed to increase the chances of cancer,'' said C. Ross Adey, a former professor of physiology at the Loma Linda School of Medicine. ''It is far too early in the game to say that cell phones are the harmless little objects the industry makes them out to be.'' Anyone concerned with the potential health risks can take several steps to lessen the possibility of cancer, however distant it may be. Earphones keep the phone away from the brain, although a different part of the body could be exposed to radiation. Or cell phone users could simply opt to have shorter conversations, which would lower their exposure to radio waves. There are also a increasing number of shields being sold that are designed to protect the user from radiation, although some critics say the shields might actually increase exposure because some phones may need more radio-frequency energy to communicate with nearby towers. As for comparing the radiation levels of each phone, manufacturers and scientists seem to agree that this is somewhat of a useless exercise since the amount of radiation | As Cell Phone Use Explodes, Debate Over Health Risk Grows |
1217954_2 | incoming and outgoing messages for legal and in-house security reasons. Employers generally have the legal right to read any employee mail that passes through the corporate mail servers, so you may want to keep that in mind. In general, it is wise to avoid sending personal information like your credit card or Social Security number by e-mail, and you might want to keep deeply private messages out of the office mail servers. One simple way to shield your personal mail from most potential prying eyes is to encrypt it before you send it. Most encryption programs will translate your message into gibberish and require the same program and a password to decipher the text on the other end. You can purchase commercial encryption software to work with your e-mail program or download a copy of the freeware version of the Pretty Good Privacy program from the link at www.pgp.com. There are PGP versions available for the Windows, DOS, Macintosh and Linux systems. Q. What makes my e-mail program decide to start displaying the messages in my In box out of chronological order? A. There are at least a few things in your e-mail program of choice that you might want to look at that might reveal why your messages are out of order. Many e-mail programs give you the option to display the incoming messages according to your time zone or that of the sender. If the setting is selected for the sender's time zone and you have a lot of international correspondents in addition to your local ones, the messages may sort out of order because of the mixture of time zones. Some e-mail programs will let you sort your messages by different criteria besides the time they were sent, like Priority settings, size, subject or sender. In many e-mail programs, like Eudora Pro, simply clicking at the top of each column in the In box window will re-sort the mail according to the designation of that column. For example, if you have accidentally clicked in the Subject column of the In box, you may find your mail is sorting alphabetically according to the subject lines. Clicking on the Date column should restore your chronological sorting. If only one or two of your correspondents aren't sorting properly, their messages might simply be coming from a computer with the incorrect system date and time. J. D. BIERSDORFER Q & A | Privacy Can Be Elusive In the World of E-Mail |
1217974_0 | To the Editor: Re ''Food Companies Urged to End Use of Biotechnology Products'' (Business Day, July 20): The biotechnology industry fully supports food product labeling that is accurate, informative and not misleading. A rigorous labeling policy for biotech foods is in place today and enforced by the Food and Drug Administration. Labels identify ingredients and tell the consumer when products have undergone substantial changes in composition, nutrition or safety. Crops and foods improved through biotechnology are routinely analyzed for their environmental performance and food safety. Each and every food allowed on the market has been found to be at least as safe as the foods already available to consumers. MICHAEL J. PHILLIPS Washington, July 21, 2000 The writer is executive director for food and agriculture, Biotechnology Industry Organization. | Biotech Foods Are Safe |
1217990_1 | calls, for example, that go through AT&T. But new technology is making it possible for agencies like the F.B.I. to scan, read and record millions of pieces of e-mail on the network of an Internet service provider. Until now, this kind of power and its potential for abuse were not so readily available. Current wiretapping laws were not drafted with this technology in mind and need to be updated. Various statutes now set different legal standards for the secret interception of domestic communications by law enforcement agencies, depending on whether the communication is by telephone, e-mail or cable modem. The Clinton administration is proposing to eliminate these inconsistencies. Its plan would bring the standards used for intercepting e-mail messages up to the stricter, more protective level now applied to telephone wiretaps. Illegal interception of e-mail would result in suppression of the evidence, as is the case now with illegal interception of phone calls. The proposal would also enforce the same legal standards that apply to phone calls for interception of e-mails sent by cable modems, which have a greater degree of privacy protection under a law that governs cable systems. The administration is also calling for greater authority for courts to review law enforcement requests to use devices that record the phone numbers of incoming and outgoing calls and to track the origins and destinations of e-mail messages. These changes are clearly needed. But Congress also needs to provide new safeguards against the government's wrongful use of ever more powerful surveillance technology against law-abiding citizens. Serious concerns have been raised about Carnivore, the new online wiretap system used by the F.B.I. to track the communications of individuals suspected of criminal activity. The F.B.I. says the technology can isolate the e-mail of the target of an investigation. But the system, when hooked up to the network of the Internet service provider, gives the F.B.I. unlimited access to the e-mail of all other subscribers on the network. While a court order is still required to intercept the content of messages, the secret technology controlled exclusively by law enforcement raises fears of improper monitoring. Until now, routine government surveillance of private conversations was limited as much by practicality as by legal constraints. Now that it is feasible to eavesdrop electronically on an unlimited scale, the laws have to be strengthened to prevent monitoring of all online communications simply because technology makes it easy. | Wiretapping in Cyberspace |
1217948_2 | Usenet system of Internet newsgroups. But Dr. Rubin said that Publius is more advanced because messages on Usenet can expire, and messages put on newsgroups cannot later be reliably deleted from all servers by the author. As more people go online, protecting speech on the Internet is becoming an increasingly popular notion. With free tools, one can surf the Internet anonymously, sending e-mail messages and posting messages on bulletin boards with little concern about being identified as the author. Messages can also be sent privately, using readily available encryption tools that prevent others from reading a message. Those tools can be used in tandem with Publius, allowing, for instance, a dissident living under an authoritarian government to spread an anonymous message across many servers or to send an undeletable message to a limited constituency. Dr. Rubin said he hoped that political dissidents and others would use Publius to spread messages that otherwise would run the risk of being censored by autocratic governments or powerful organizations. In a paper about Publius, for example, Dr. Rubin and his co-authors, Dr. Lorrie Faith Cranor, a senior researcher at AT&T, and Marc Waldman, a doctoral student at New York University, wrote that the Church of Scientology tried to censor information about itself that it considered secret. ''The Church has used copyright and trademark law, intimidation and illegal searches and seizures in an attempt to suppress the publication of Church documents,'' they wrote. In addition to countering censorship, Publius may also prove valuable to businesses that want a reliable way to keep information available on the Web during hacking assaults like the denial-of-service attacks that brought down the Web sites of several major companies earlier this year. Information distributed with Publius would be available even if many servers were taken down. AT&T is giving away Publius software and service free. Dr. Rubin said he hoped that Publius would become a success and might be incorporated into Web browsers. But dissidents and businesses might not be the only ones to find Publius useful. The technology could also be used to spread child pornography or copyrighted music. Dr. Rubin said he had taken steps to prevent abuse of Publius but added that ugly or unwanted speech could not be prevented. ''One of the tenets of free speech is that it allows for uncomfortable speech,'' Dr. Rubin said. ''It would be a tragedy if we let the potential | Divided Data Can Elude the Censor |
1214872_4 | government recently reversed its policy of preventing local residents from entering the forest. ''They designated a certain number of weeks in which people could come in and collect grasses and plants they use for baskets and as building materials, as long as they use traditional and nonmechanized means for doing so,'' he said. ''It resulted in a kind of festival of harvesting, and those people became the greatest protectors of the resouces of the park. It became theirs, and they were very vigilant about outsiders going into the park.'' Mr. Colchester agrees that environmental groups have become better about recognizing the rights of local people. But he said that the problem was that, in many places, ''this has yet to translate into change on the ground; national governments have not kept pace with the international guidelines.'' Recently, he went on, in defiance of the international organizations that financed the project, the government of Guyana extinguished the rights of local residents in extending the boundaries of Kaietur National Park. Some environmentalists think this kind of pressure smacks of the same neocolonalism that the anthropologists see in others. ''If the federal government of Brazil decides it's strategically important to set aside millions of acres for protection, isn't it neocolonial if groups from outside tell them they shouldn't?'' asked Mr. Melnick. Indeed, the question of who has final say about land -- the people who have traditionally lived on it, the regional and national governments in the surrounding area, or international groups who see the environment as a world heritage -- is extremely complex. Ultimately, both environmentalists and anthropologists agree, at least in theory, that they are working on two sides of the same problem. Conservation groups have estimated that 60 percent of the world's biodiversity is contained in less than 5 percent of the world's land mass. At the same time, the indigenous peoples who generally inhabit those tropical biodiversity ''hot spots'' account for as much as 60 percent of the world's 6,000 spoken languages, according to the British ethnolinguist Suzanne Romaine of Oxford University. ''The interests of forest people and the interests of the environmental people are similar,'' says Richard H. Grove, a professor at the Institute of Advanced Studies at the University of Canberra in Australia and the author of ''Green Imperialism.'' He explains: ''The same environmental threats that are wiping out species are wiping out indigeneous cultures as well.'' | In the 'Greened' World, It Isn't Easy to Be Human |
1214279_3 | the fraud examiners' group. ''It makes it easier to rationalize fraudulent behavior.'' Then there is the widening gap between executive and worker compensation. Edward Wolff, an economics professor at New York University, says corporate chief executives made an average 400 times what their average employees did in 1998, up from a ratio of just 40 a decade earlier. The disparity in pay has fueled discontent and eroded loyalty to such a degree that stealing on the job is often seen as acceptable behavior, fraud investigators say. ''It used to be extremely rare that anyone would acknowledge theft taking place,'' said Jim Baker, founder and president of Baker Technologies Inc. in Rowlett, Tex., who has been investigating fraud for 30 years. ''Now it's rare that we don't hear of someone knowing about it. People have a cavalier attitude. There's no shame attached to theft.'' One consequence of the growth in such theft has been a large gain in the number of fraud investigators. Membership in the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners, the principal professional group, has increased to about 25,000 from about 8,200 in 1992. ''They see it as a growth industry,'' Mr. Warren, the general counsel, said. Stealing often starts in the mailroom, a favorite haunt of unscrupulous employees, investigators say. ''When you get a new employee, where do you stick them? The mailroom,'' said Patrick Casey, a federal postal inspector and spokesman for the postal police. ''That's often the lowest-paying job in the corporation, yet a lot of the company's money goes through there. Criminals sometimes seek out those jobs because they realize they will have access to the ingoing and the outbound checks.'' But workplace theft is costliest when committed by high-ranking employees, who tend to have the most access to funds. According to the fraud examiners' association, the median loss from crimes by managers is $250,000, four times that of crimes by employees. And the median loss from owners and executives is $1 million, 16 times that of their employees. In some ways, workplace thieves have become easier to catch. Technology has expanded the arsenal of video cameras, decoys and other tools used by fraud investigators. But computers, modems and the Internet also offer employees new ways of tampering with financial records, transferring funds and covering their tracks. ''It's a double-edged sword,'' said Bill Olsen, the mid-Atlantic director for business fraud and investigation at Arthur Andersen. ''With | MANAGEMENT: Taking at the Office Reaches New Heights; Employee Larceny Is Bigger and Bolder |
1214355_2 | Sicilia, commander of the Bias Investigating Unit. ''Then, boom, they are getting slashed and they are getting hit.'' Councilwoman Christine Quinn, former executive director of the New York City Gay and Lesbian Anti-Violence Project, said that representatives from her office planned to meet with police investigators and community leaders in Brooklyn to discuss the attacks. Three of the four park victims are black. Gary English, executive director of People of Color in Crisis, an alliance of black gay men, said his group would be canvassing the park with fliers, warning visitors about the attacks. ''It's very scary,'' Mr. English said. ''Historically, black gay men have been victims of attacks in the park. This is something that black gay men should be up in arms about.'' The police said that the first attack occurred just after midnight on June 28. The victim, 33, said that a man wielding a wooden stick hit him and yelled, ''I'm going to kill you.'' The second assault took place on the Fourth of July around 1:15 a.m. The attacker slashed the victim, 47, across the face, wrist, knee, ankle and back, the police said. The third attack, the police said, occurred around 2 a.m. last Friday near the zoo entrance. A man, 36, was walking on Flatbush Avenue when he was slashed across the face by a man who then fled. Within an hour, a 43-year-old man near the Vale of Cashmere was slashed on his head, neck, hands and arms. While the scope of the police investigation is centered on the four reported attacks at Prospect Park, Councilwoman Quinn worries that other assaults against gay men may have gone unreported by their victims, some of whom might not be openly gay, and others who simply might fear the publicity that could surround such a case. ''There's a particular amount of shame involved with a victim of a bias crime,'' she explained. And because there is such a stigma, she said, ''Whatever has been reported is always the tip of the iceberg.'' At the park yesterday, David Franklin, 28, said that the attacks were surprising, given the reputation for tolerance of nearby neighborhoods like Park Slope. But he noted that two weeks ago, a few blocks from the park, a young man called him an offensive name, mistakenly believing him to be gay. ''I can't say it surprises me completely,'' he said of the attacks. | Police Hunt Masked Slasher Of Four Men in Prospect Park |
1214296_3 | on in-flight aircraft because of some concerns that they could interfere with aircraft navigation systems. The prohibition, which is enforced on aircraft by the Federal Aviation Administration, was instituted by the Federal Communications Commission in landmark 1981 regulations that reallocated certain radio frequencies to encourage growth and competition in the fledgling cellular industry. Concerns about the potential for interference were important factors in the cell phone prohibition, said William F. Adler, a former chief of the F.C.C. mobile services division who helped to draft the regulations. But the main thrust of the regulations was to divide up the cellular broadcast band in a way that let competing cellular providers in nonadjacent areas across the country use the same frequencies without overlapping signals, said Mr. Adler, who is now general counsel at Globalstar, a provider of mobile and satellite telephone services based in San Jose, Calif. The same frequencies can be used simultaneously in different areas because a cell phone signal from the ground does not wander much beyond its intended receiving station. But from an airplane six miles high, cell phone signals reach the earth in a wide cone that covers a big chunk of geography. ''The radio traffic-management system gets completely undermined,'' Mr. Adler said. ''Potentially, with cellular calls from airplanes, you'd have dozens and dozens of base stations receiving your signal and getting confused.'' Among other things, billing for calls would become chaotic. On-board cellular-call service, which British Telecommunications is now marketing to other airlines besides Virgin, is just the most recent technological leap in a rapidly changing new era in which airline passengers will ultimately have not only personal cell phone service but also e-mail and broadband Internet access. But technology does not address the problem of bad cell phone manners. Mr. Adler speculated that Americans in general are less accustomed than Europeans to ambient public noise and therefore more likely to speak unnecessarily loudly into a cell phone. He says the cellular industry should consider mounting a publicity campaign to promote the simple idea that it is not necessary to bellow into a cell phone. Ms. Pomerantz at Virgin, meanwhile, has faith that on-board cellular calls will not become just one more annoyance in air travel. ''Hopefully, people won't be shouting on the phones,'' she said. ''You have to assume that your passengers are polite.'' Business Travel appears each Wednesday. Joe Sharkey's e-mail address is jsharkey@nytimes.com. | Business Travel; Oh joyous day! Virgin Atlantic makes it possible for passengers to use cell phones on flights. |
1214216_3 | not the hotel's central reservations number. If you are one adult going to Mexico but you are taking a child, even your own, expect to be asked at the airline gate for a notarized letter saying you have sole custody, permission for the trip or that the other parent is dead. If you are traveling with someone else's child, take documentation from both parents. No joke; this is an antikidnapping effort. For trips to places where medical care may be uncertain, or is two airline connections away, buy good trip insurance when you put a deposit on a tour. Read the caveats before you pay. Forget flight insurance: get a good magazine with the money instead. Adventurous trips should be preceded by a visit to a travel medicine clinic; searchable clinic lists are at www.istm.org or www.astmh.org. Clinics will give you prescriptions for malaria prophylaxis if your destination warrants it; more vital, the clinics will boost your tetanus shots. On an adventure trip, avoid swimming in fresh water unless you can smell the chlorine from a standing position. Beautiful Lake Malawi, and many oases, are rife with schistosomiasis and other dreadful diseases that everyone, including travel agents, wish would disappear. Salt water is generally better, but if you see something that resembles a sewer outflow, you may want to retreat to a pool. If you get into difficulty overseas, the United States consulate should be called. But neither it nor an embassy will lay out cash for your ticket home or for your bail; nor will either one undertake anything that contravenes the country's laws. If the police said that you were going 120 kilometers in a 100-kilometer zone and did not appear sober, you must cope, honeymoon or not. Look up ''extraterritoriality'' -- local laws prevail. On the other hand, if someone at home has money to wire to you, the consulate will tell you how to arrange it. The State Department issues travel warnings and less dire advisories on many countries. You can read them at www.travel .state.gov/warnings. Perhaps you do a lot of things your mother might disapprove of, so make up your own mind in regard to an endurable level of hazard. When asked to summarize a lifetime of travel counseling, Dr. Hans Lobel, a malaria authority at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, replied, ''Take your condoms and buckle your seat belt.'' | Don't Forget the Tetanus Booster |
1214391_2 | perquisites include paid housing and travel costs, and a car and driver. But some of the candidates who are pastors at large, influential churches already live with such perks. The A.M.E. Church was founded when a group of black worshipers were forced from their knees while praying at a segregated church in Philadelphia in 1787. It is now an international organization, with more than 8,000 congregations and 2.5 million members. More than 10,000 church members from the United States, Africa, the Caribbean, Britain and Canada today filled rows of chairs on the floor of the Cincinnati Convention Center, which could hold one and a half football fields, for the vote. Among them were 1,800 voting delegates who registered their choices on electronic keypads, the first time the group has voted without paper ballots at its general conferences, which are held every four years to elect officials and make decisions on everything from budgets to missionary priorities. The election was hotly contested and highly political, with candidates making their way through the convention center shaking hands and waving, like members of Congress at a county fair. Supporters dressed in matching T-shirts and caps paraded through the convention center chanting and singing and carrying signs with pictures of their favorites. Candidates hand out pencils and water bottles, hair gel and even tubes of toothpaste imprinted with their names. Ms. McKenzie's campaign set up a television screen just inside the doors of the convention center to play over and over a video promoting her accomplishments. According to church tradition, as the spouse of a bishop, Ms. McKenzie's husband, Stan McKenzie, who once played in the National Basketball Association, would be expected to serve as an episcopal superviser in the Women's Missionary Society. As with this election, any other arrangement would be unprecedented. The election of bishops was delayed by a day, in part because of a controversy over how many bishops would retire. Bishops in the A.M.E. church are supposed to retire at 75, but lawyers were called in to resolve disputes over the birth dates of several long-serving bishops. The conflict came to a head late Monday night when Bishop Hamel Hartford Brookins resisted a vote by the delegates in favor of his retirement. Angry shouting erupted from the convention floor and the bishops on the dais, and there was a brief attempt to evict reporters. Eventually, Bishop Brookins, who in the | After 213 Years, A.M.E. Church Elects First Woman as a Bishop |
1215933_0 | What kind of news are people really interested in? The National Science Foundation, always trying to reassure itself about the public's enthusiasm for taxing itself to support scientific research, has commissioned biennial surveys since 1979. Intended to gauge the level of public interest in science, with other issues thrown in as benchmarks, the surveys show some interesting patterns. Working from the bottom up, the subject that least interests the public is agriculture and farm issues with a score of 47 (on a scale where 0 means not interested and 100 corresponds to very interested.). Next come space exploration (51), international and foreign policy issues (53), nuclear energy (55), military and defense policy (64), economic issues and business conditions (65), the use of new inventions and technologies (65) and issues about new scientific discoveries (67). Local school issues and environmental pollution tied for second place at 71, and the clear winner was new medical discoveries at 82. A somewhat different spectrum of interests was seen among the most educated section of the public, those with graduate or professional degrees. Their interest in foreign news rose to 76 on the scale, behind only new medical discoveries (86) and new scientific discoveries (83). Interest in military and foreign affairs peaked in 1990, presumably because of the Persian Gulf war, the National Science Foundation's report says. Enthusiasm has also waned in recent years for articles about environmental pollution and nuclear energy. The surveys were conducted by a variety of polling organizations under contract to the National Science Foundation, a federal agency. This year's findings appear in its report Science and Engineering Indicators 2000. NICHOLAS WADE | So, How About Those Viruses? |
1216270_0 | A coalition of consumer and environmental groups announced yesterday what they hope will be the biggest and best-organized effort yet in the United States to pressure food companies to abandon the use of genetically modified crops. Starting with the Campbell Soup Company, the coalition said it would target well-known food companies and try to generate thousands of consumer letters, phone calls and signatures on petitions urging them to stop using genetically modified foods until more testing was done. The group also wants all companies to label products that contain such ingredients. In Europe, food companies have largely abandoned the use of such ingredients because of consumer opposition fanned by aggressive campaigns. But in the United States, consumers have expressed little concern about genetically modified foods and many are not even aware that such foods are being sold. ''This is going to be the first sort of sustained effort on the European model,'' said Philip E. Clapp, president of the National Environmental Trust, one of the groups in the coalition, the Genetically Engineered Food Alert. The coalition could spend $1 million, or more, he said. That is still considerably below the $50 million a group of agricultural biotechnology companies committed in April to spend over several years on television advertising and other measures to defend their products. The group has named no other targets yet than Campbell. But Jean Halloran of Consumers Union, which is cooperating with the coalition though not a member, said the coalition would choose ''corporations that have food products that Americans really regard as staples of their kitchen, that they feed to their kids.'' Besides soup, Campbell makes Pepperidge Farm cookies, V8 juice, Prego pasta sauce and Godiva chocolates. John Faulkner, a Campbell's spokesman, said the company saw no need to eliminate genetically engineered ingredients because they were as ''equally nutritious and equally safe'' as nonmodified ones. He said that fewer than one-tenth of 1 percent of calls to the Campbell's consumer hotline concerned genetic engineering. And even if Campbell wanted to eliminate such ingredients, he said, it could not, because a large percentage of the corn and soybeans grown in the United States is genetically altered. ''We don't control the supply chain,'' he said. Gene Grabowski, a spokesman for the Grocery Manufacturers of America, a trade group representing food companies, said the companies were following federal guidelines that do not require labeling genetically modified ingredients. ''If | Food Companies Urged to End Use of Biotechnology Products |
1216326_3 | searches. More than a third of professional, managerial and technical unemployed workers used the Internet to search for work, compared with 5 percent of manual workers. Surprisingly, although the Internet allows for faster and cheaper job searches, this might not lower unemployment. If workers can search for jobs more easily, they may become choosier and may require a higher salary before they will accept a job. Likewise, employers may become choosier and search until they find a more productive employee. Implications for worker turnover are also ambiguous. On the one hand, many workers will be induced to enter the job market and switch jobs more often. On the other hand, if workers and employers invest more in learning about each other, presumably the quality of worker-job matches will improve, and resignations and firings will decline. Because many job boards are aimed at passive job seekers -- those who are not sure they want to move and who are not actively looking -- the former effect is likely to dominate. One prediction is unambiguous: Productivity should increase as a result of lower search costs. This is good news because the labor market is dynamic, with more than 30 million workers and jobs turning over each year. The increased productivity would be divided by employees and employers in the form of higher pay and profit. Although average pay is expected to rise, not all paychecks are expected to rise equally. Workers who settled for jobs paying less than they could get elsewhere should get a raise. Also, greater access to salary information over the Web should lead to more uniformity in pay. But Daron Acemoglu, an economics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, expects that a wider electronic job market will enable employers to replace less skilled workers who previously were hired because it was too costly to search for more qualified workers. Professor Kuhn raises another concern: lower search costs could reduce the prevalence of long-term implicit contracts, which tend to spread risks and reduce wage dispersion. Perhaps most important, those who lack access to the Internet job bazaar will suffer restricted job opportunities. The digital divide has been hard to bridge, and efforts to provide Internet access and search assistance are increasingly critical. One new effort that may play a valuable role is America's One-Stop Career Center System, the central focus of the Labor Department's employment and training network. | Economic Scene; The Internet is lowering the cost of advertising and searching for jobs. |
1216361_0 | INTERNATIONAL A3-14 Mideast Peace Talks To Continue Without Clinton President Clinton announced that the Israeli Prime Minister, Ehud Barak, and the Palestinian leader, Yasir Arafat, decided to remain at Camp David while he flew off to Japan to continue searching for a solution for peace with Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright. A1 President Between Summits President Clinton has yet to be briefed on his role at a meeting in Okinawa of leaders of the world's seven leading industrial nations and Russia. The meeting begins on Friday. A6 Proposal on Digital Divide A task force established by the World Economic Forum urged the leading industrial nations and Russia to take action to erase a growing digital divide resulting from the economic chasm separating the developed and developing worlds. A6 North Korean Missile Offer President Vladmir V. Putin of Russia said North Korea had offered to abandon its missile program if other nations would provide it with rockets to launch satellites into space. Mr. Putin announced the offer following a meeting with the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-il. A6 Path Clear for Putin's Plan Russia's lower house of Parliament cleared the way for President Putin to strengthen central control over the country's far-flung regions by giving him the right to disband local legislatures and fire regional governors who break the law. A7 Another Leak From Blair Camp For the second time this week, a damaging memorandum from the inner circle of Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain has been leaked to major newspapers and has caused embarrassment to his government as it struggles to keep its once-high popular appeal from continuing its present swoon. A10 Guerrilla Attacks in Colombia Colombia's largest guerrilla group has carried out attacks on towns and police headquarters, killing more than 200 people, in an apparent response to the passage in the United States Congress of $1.3 billion in aid for Colombia's armed forces. A8 World Briefing A12 NATIONAL A16-23 U.S. Delays Dam Breaching Intended to Aid Salmon The Clinton administration will postpone by at least five years a plan that could have led to the breaching of four major Snake River dams for the benefit of wild salmon in the Pacific Northwest. Officials will propose smaller steps to protect the fish. A16 Loyalty as Bush's Top Criterion Gov. George W. Bush and his presidential campaign advisers have made clear that one of the litmus tests of | NEWS SUMMARY |
1211564_1 | fishermen from a separate capsized boat -- their lives saved, perhaps, because of the loss of the Cahaya Bahari. Officials said strong currents might have swept the foundering vessel or its passengers out toward the mouth of the Pacific Ocean in stormy seas where the waves reached nine feet in height. They said the waters were thick with sharks. The Associated Press reported that at the small port of Manado, the vessel's destination and the capital of the province of North Sulawesi, hundreds of relatives -- many of them also refugees from a long-running religious conflict in the Maluku islands -- clustered at the waterfront, sobbing and whispering. ''All we can do is pray and hope,'' said Ferry Potoboda, who said he had 20 relatives on the missing vessel, including wounded victims and children. The massacre on May 19 at the village of Duma on Halmahera Island was one of the worst incidents in a conflict between Christians and Muslims that has taken the lives of more than 2,500 people since it erupted 18 months ago. It involved an attack by Muslim gangs -- apparently including fighters who had traveled to the region on interisland ferries -- in what they described as revenge for a wave of killings by Christians on the island last December. More than 90 percent of Indonesia's 210 million people are Muslim, but in the Maluku islands, Muslims and Christians are evenly divided. This has made the area fertile ground for agitators seeking to create unrest in the hope of weakening the central government in Jakarta. The fighting first erupted in January 1999, in a marketplace fight in Ambon that witnesses said appeared to be part of a planned provocation to touch off a local war. Today in Ambon, the small, pretty city that is the capital of the Maluku islands, residents reported that there was some easing of violence four days after President Abdurrahman Wahid declared a state of emergency. But it was not clear why the violence might have lessened. The military is already in control of Ambon but has lost much of its peacekeeping function as soldiers have turned against each other according to their religions, arming, aiding and sometimes apparently leading the local fighters. ''Soldiers have broken ranks and joined the fighting as partisans, and, as a result, Indonesian troops right now have virtually no credibility in areas where a neutral force | Killings Drive Indonesians Into Risky Boats and Dangerous Seas |
1211578_0 | Jealousy drives even great nations to do petty things. France offered an embarrassing demonstration of this truth earlier this week when it alone, of more than a 100 countries attending a conference on democracy held in Warsaw, refused to sign a final declaration of agreed principles. France helped launch the worldwide democracy movement with its 1789 Revolution against monarchy and feudal privilege. The ideas of freedom that drove that upheaval found expression in a charter of basic liberties issued the same year, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen. The document asserted the equality of all citizens and their right to governments of their own choosing, proclaimed the liberty of opinion and expression, and demanded adherence to the rule of law. Its resonant claims inspired democrats throughout the late-18th-century world and reinforced the ideas of America's own, earlier revolution. The Warsaw declaration that France refused to sign on Tuesday reaffirms some of these very same principles for the 21st-century world. It provides that the basis of all government is ''the will of the people,'' that every person is entitled ''to equal protection of the law'' and ''freedom of thought, conscience and religion.'' If some of the fervor and purity of 1789 is missing, something perhaps even more valuable has been added. The governments of well over half the world's countries, including some whose democratic performance leaves something to be desired, have now committed themselves to a set of principles defining democratic society. France says that it could not join this list because it feels that designs for democracy cannot be imposed by well-meaning outsiders. But France's real problem seems to be the leading role played by Secretary of State Madeleine Albright in convening the Warsaw democracy conference. Washington's prominence at Warsaw proved more than French pride could bear. | French Pique |
1211593_1 | The Beijing Morning News, in one of many articles that have appeared recently about the American fruit. ''Once China joins the W.T.O., the story about the boy crying wolf will soon become a reality.'' Indeed, Western companies are drooling at the prospect of China's potentially huge market, aggressively promoting their products. At the annual Food China 2000 Exhibition last week in Beijing, American producers of chicken, ice cream and fruit juice -- to name a few -- turned out in stands decorated with red, white and blue bunting to give buyers from Chinese restaurants, supermarkets and hotels a taste of the future. There was even a booth promoting American pork, to a country where a surplus of pigs has driven pork prices to near record lows this year. But it was the citrus booth -- with its free fruit slices and drinks -- that commanded the longest lines. ''This will certainly open up new business opportunities for me,'' said Ding Yong, a food distributor for cafeterias. ''The juices are great.'' Price, of course, is something of an issue. Imported oranges are about three times the price of Chinese products. Grapefruits here cost about $1.50 each, compared with about 10 cents for somewhat similar Chinese fruits, called youzi (pronounced yo-zuh) and huyou (pronounced hoo-yo). These price differentials will narrow somewhat when China enters the W.T.O., since the fruits now carry an average import tariff of 40 percent. But even as tariffs are cut, imported fruit is likely to remain quite a bit more expensive. And other hurdles are likely to remain for a long time, as China's slow-moving bureaucracy adjusts to the realities of more imports. The Florida grapefruits that arrived in China on April 20, for example, were stuck in quarantine for the next four weeks, their release blocked by a series of logistical problems. First, the inspection documents provided by the Florida producers were considered invalid by Chinese customs authorities. Then the quarantine inspectors sealed the warehouse after noticing that some cases contained dead insects. The inspectors ultimately cleared the fruits, but not before Chinese distributors had paid them thousands of dollars in storage fees. ''I have met with so many troubles from these fruits, and I still have many grapefruits in the ports waiting to be inspected,'' said Zhang Zhimin, the sales manager for the China Cereal Import and Export Company, which is handling the citrus imports. ''Although | INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS: Are a Billion Chinese Grapefruit Compliant?; U.S. Citrus Growers Are Early Winners In Two-Way Agricultural Trade Accord |
1211655_0 | In a close vote, the top policy-making body of the Presbyterian Church (USA) approved an amendment to the church's constitution tonight forbidding ministers from conducting same-sex unions. The decision, which will take effect next June if it is ratified by two-thirds of the church's regional jurisdictions, came after an emotional debate on an issue that has been quite contentious among other Protestant denominations. Within the last year, for example, two ministers within the larger United Methodist Church have been brought to trial for violating a law of their denomination forbidding same-sex unions. Both were convicted and one was defrocked, while the other was suspended from his duties. The Presbyterian amendment's approval came on a 268-to-251 vote, among the final items of business at the denomination's General Assembly, which has been meeting in this southern California port city since last Saturday. In the debate, supporters of the amendment described it as upholding a traditional Christian view of marriage. One church elder, Paula Metherell, a member of the local presbytery here in Long Beach, said ''the duty of the church'' is to serve as ''a moral beacon,'' calling people to a life of holiness. But opponents of the measure, like George McCall of Missouri, argued that the amendment, if approved, would limit the ability of pastors to minister effectively to all members of their congregation. ''Do not bind our conscience and tie our hands as pastors,'' Mr. McCall said. Prior to the vote, the assembly narrowly defeated an alternative proposal that would have called for a ''spirit of dialogue'' to prevail among Presbyterians and for the church to honor ''the discretion of pastors'' in providing care to their congregations. The denomination, with 2.6 million members in 11,400 congregations spread coast to coast, represents one of the most historically influential streams of Protestantism in the United States. Presbyterians have been heavily represented in American politics, most prominently counting Woodrow Wilson, Dwight Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan among their ranks. The denomination's governing structure has significant parallels to that of the United States, with the Presbyterian assembly playing a role similar to that of Congress in passing constitutional amendments, which then must be ratified by the presbyteries, the regional jurisdictions, that play a role in that process similar to the states. But in recent years, the denomination has become increasingly riled by issues centering on what rights are due its gay members. And division over | Presbyterians Vote to Ban Clergy From Conducting Unions of Gays |
1211627_0 | INTERNATIONAL A3-6 U.S. Sees New Threat in Iraq Missile Program Iraq has restarted its missile program and held flight tests for a short-range ballistic missile 18 months after American and British warplanes badly damaged its missile factories, officials said. A1 At Least 8 Killed at Concert Fans rushing the stage during a Pearl Jam concert near Copenhagen crushed to death at least eight people, the police said. A5 Trial for Defiant Frenchman Millau, a quiet French town in a region known for its Roquefort cheese, was overrun with thousands of demonstrators who took to the streets to support Jose Bove, a sheep farmer on trial for ransacking a McDonald's restaurant last year. A1 'Morning After' Pill Ruling France's highest administrative court reversed a decision that had allowed nurses in high school health centers to hand out a pill to prevent pregnancies. A6 Pinochet-Era Disclosures The Central Intelligence Agency released previously classified documents on the deaths of three Americans in Chile during Gen. Augusto Pinochet's dictatorship. A6 No Trace of Indonesian Ship Officials said strong currents might have swept away a ship with nearly 500 villagers fleeing a massacre in the Maluku islands of Indonesia. A4 Support for Uganda President Early results of a referendum on Uganda's political future showed that more than 80 percent of those voting want to continue with the current ''no party'' system advocated by the president. But opponents of President Yoweri Museveni said the turnout was far too low for him to claim a strong mandate. A6 Korean Family Reunion Deal Red Cross officials from North and South Korea signed an agreement to begin reuniting families separated by more than 50 years of conflict on the Korean peninsula. A5 Senate Nod to Colombia Money The Senate approved an $11.2 billion emergency spending bill whose centerpiece is an aid package to equip and train Colombia's security forces, who are battling drug traffickers and their rebel allies. The bill also includes about $2 billion to finance the Pentagon's peacekeeping mission in Kosovo. A6 World Briefing A5 NATIONAL A7-10, 14 Presbyterian Leaders Bar Same-Sex Ceremonies In a close vote, the top policy-making body of the Presbyterian Church (USA) approved an amendment to the church's constitution forbidding ministers from conducting same-sex unions. A1 Doctors Turn to Senate Doctors, elated by a big victory in the House, opened a campaign in the Senate to gain an exemption from antitrust laws so | NEWS SUMMARY |
1213697_3 | are problems with the technology, then it won't come out. But we're following all the rules, taking all the precautions.'' Scotts, which is best known for its lawn fertilizer, Ortho pesticides and Miracle Gro plant food, is far ahead of its competitors in the race to create the raw material for perfect lawns. ''That's how we make money, beautifying the world; trying to generate more beauty with less maintenance,'' Charles M. Berger, the company's chief executive, said. ''And we'll use every tool in the toolbox. Biotech, that's just another tool in the toolbox.'' While a company in Australia has been trying to create a blue rose through the use of biotechnology, scientists at Scotts have already developed genetically altered petunias and geraniums in laboratories in St. Louis. Scotts says it will develop an even larger arsenal of ''smart'' plants with longer lasting blooms, different colors, and in some cases built-in pesticide. Genetically altered grass, however, may be the first bioengineered lawn product to reach the market. Scientists at Monsanto and Rutgers have been working with Scotts for several years now to develop the new grass strains. The first grass likely to be available is creeping bent grass, a strain that is used on golf courses around the world. Despite its name, it is a sturdy grass even when it is clipped as short as a quarter of an inch to form putting greens. But creeping bent grass is expensive to maintain and prone to infestation by weeds. David Bishop, a spokesman for the Golf Course Superintendents Association of America, says that is why genetically altered turf would be welcome on greens and fairways throughout the nation. ''Grasses on golf courses are maintained at the very edge of their tolerance,'' he said. ''If you could produce a grass more tolerant at an eighth of an inch, that's less likely to go into stress and may require less water, that would be great.'' Scotts executives say the first creeping bent grass could be Roundup Ready Grass, which is grass genetically modified to survive spraying of Roundup, the popular weed killer developed by Monsanto. The new grass could drastically reduce costs and maintenance at golf courses, and a drought-tolerant variety could reduce the amount of water needed to keep the turf healthy, Scotts executives say. But activists are already sabotaging test plots in protest. Last month, a group calling itself the Anarchist Golfing | Suburban Genetics: Scientists Searching For a Perfect Lawn |
1213694_1 | women bishops, he said. The United Methodist Church became the first American denomination to elect a woman as bishop in 1981, and the Episcopal Church consecrated its first woman bishop in 1989. The A.M.E. Church traces its history to 1787, when black churchgoers protesting segregated worship walked out of a Methodist Episcopal church in Philadelphia. It now has more than 8,000 churches and about 2.3 million members, including 1.5 million in the United States. The A.M.E. Church has 20 bishops, and at least two are retiring this year. Among the 41 candidates for those seats are the Rev. Vashti Murphy McKenzie, pastor of Payne Memorial A.M.E. Church in Baltimore, and the Rev. Carolyn Tyler Guidry, who as a presiding elder supervises 19 A.M.E. churches in Los Angeles. ''We have a stained-glass ceiling in this church, and a lot of it has to do with sexism,'' Ms. McKenzie said in a telephone interview. ''But our church is now recognizing that the women have the talent, the skills, the degrees, the experience.'' Ms. Guidry, who ran for bishop four years ago and lost, said she believed that the church was finally ready for a woman to be bishop. Until recently, she said by telephone, ''Women had not been in the positions of presiding elder, or pastors of major churches, and so had not made a major impact in our denomination. That has changed in the last 10 years, and Dr. McKenzie and I have become major players in the church.'' The A.M.E. Church began ordaining women as deacons in 1948 and as ministers in 1960. But it is only in recent years that bishops began appointing women ministers to the large, prominent congregations that have traditionally been the stepping-stones to bishops' seats, Bishop DeVeaux said. A resolution to set aside one bishop's seat for a woman was proposed on Friday, while some delegates on the convention floor cheered and chanted, ''It's about time.'' The resolution was referred to the Episcopal Committee. Jamye Coleman Williams, one of the sponsors of the resolution and a retired church officer, said: ''In our church, the majority of members and the majority of seminary enrollees are women. So it is not fair to deny them full inclusion. It's sort of like the civil rights battle, where nobody wants to give up power. People just don't want to relinquish power without a fight.'' Correction: July 13, 2000, Thursday | A.M.E. Church May Elect Its First Woman as Bishop |
1213657_0 | A COUPLE of weekends ago, Low Rider magazine's ''Boulevard'' tour set down at Old Bridge Raceway near Englishtown, N.J. There, owners showed off their sporty compact cars, customized in color schemes that ran from bright yellows and greens to lilacs, aubergines and salmons. But the color coordination sometimes went beyond the body panels, dashboards, seats, engines and hoses. On some cars, even the tire treads got into the act. Now everyday car owners, not just car enthusiasts, can take the color-coordination process one step further, too. Rick Shafer, marketing manager for BFGoodrich's passenger performance tires, is the executive behind the colorful Scorcher T/A, which combines ''red-hot looks,'' he said, with ''unmatched performance capabilities.'' The tires are priced at $193 to $325 each, depending on the size. Last year, BFGoodrich, a part of Michelin North America, introduced the Scorcher T/A with a choice of red, blue or yellow bands in the tread. (The colors are not on the sidewall.) Now, when buyers go online to www.bfgoodrichtires.com, they can choose two tones, from a palette of eight, and decide where they want each applied in the tread. The choices are blue, light green, orange, orchid, purple, red, teal and yellow. The company says many buyers leave their tires turned outward when they park their cars, just so passers-by can see the distinctive stripes. Ordering the tires takes about five minutes; delivery, to the local tire store or the buyer's home, takes four to six weeks -- a wait that the company hopes to shorten to as little as two weeks. ''It is the ultimate finishing touch for anyone who wants to bring a unique look to their vehicle,'' Mr. Shafer said. And a long way from whitewalls. PHIL PATTON RESPONSIBLE PARTY: RICK SHAFER | Colorfully Reinventing The Wheel |
1213584_4 | Center in Atlanta. Among chimpanzees, he said, adult males often strut around intimidating others, shaking branches in the air or dropping them from trees, swinging from vines and hooting, dislodging stones and rolling them into the river. If the chimpanzees in one community greatly outnumber those of a neighboring tribe, the males of the more populous group may rile each other up enough to go on a rampage. ''The males function more or less as a unit in seeking out both males and females from the neighboring community who are on their own and unprotected,'' said Dr. Smuts. ''That's when the most severe, murderous aggression can occur.'' Kinship groups are often the deadliest of all, and that includes groups of females as well as males. Among African wild dogs, for example, an alpha female and her sisters may kill the pups of more distantly related females in the group, the better to ensure that all females devote themselves unstintingly to the alpha's offspring. As for primates, the vast majority of species live in gynocentric societies, with the members of one matriline protecting one another against competing members of other matrilines. Hence, a female's worst nightmare may be not a roving band of males, but a clan of resident, ever-Machiavellian females. KIM WALLEN, a primatologist at Emory University who studies rhesus monkeys, said the deadliest moments in rhesus life occur during times of social instability, when a ruling matriline for some reason becomes weakened by the aging or death of a few key members, and a subordinate matriline spies its chance to rule. ''When we've had one of these overthrows, we've had multiple deaths in a short period of time,'' he said. ''Seven or eight females will chase one female around and around until she drops of exhaustion, and then she's finished.'' As a rule, though, the advantages of group living outweigh the dangers. Groups can be brutal, but they also offer protection against predators, aggressive neighbors and even sexual stalkers. Dr. Smuts points out that the only female primates to share with women the dubious distinction of being at risk of forced copulation -- a k a rape -- are orangutans. Female orangutans, unlike other apes and monkeys, are solitary, traveling alone or with dependent offspring. Should a female orangutan encounter a young male, he may well try to force himself on her, and being bigger, he often succeeds. Without | Ideas & Trends; In the Crowd's Frenzy, Echoes of the Wild Kingdom |
1212338_0 | Casey Fowler San Carlos Charter Learning Center It's hard enough to weather sixth grade under ideal circumstances, let alone hobbled by cerebral palsy. What consoles Casey Fowler, 13, whose twisted gait draws occasional titters from his classmates, is that he was not supposed to make it to school at all -- but he has become a strong student at the San Carlos Charter Learning Center, a 60's-tinged experimental public school 25 miles south of San Francisco. Born 12 weeks early, at 2 pounds 4 ounces, Casey was given little prospect of a normal life, because his brain had been deprived of oxygen during birth. ''We were told when he was a year old that he was seriously retarded,'' said his mother, Debbie. ''That the only job he'd get would be stacking boxes at Macy's.'' But Mrs. Fowler quit her nursing job to work full time on physical and musical therapy with Casey to ease the symptoms of his condition, which causes slow muscle development and muddled speech. Not only did Casey's mind blossom -- by age 2 he had the concentration to watch ''The Wizard of Oz'' in its entirety -- but he pushed himself to ride a bike and skate. Though he has the running ability of a 5-year-old, Casey played basketball in the Redwood City Police Athletic League this year on a team that was coached by his father, Ray. ''I haven't made a shot yet,'' he said. ''I get close. It bounced off the rim two times.'' Still, Casey's shaky gait and hands make him an easy target for teasing. ''I've been called a retard,'' Casey told a visitor. But an 11-year-old classmate cut him off. ''We've already been through this a million times before, in class,'' the boy said. Casey just looked away. With an encyclopedic knowledge of movies and strong grades in English, Casey hopes to attend U.C.L.A. film school to train as a director or screenwriter or producer. ''I'm lucky,'' Casey said. ''Other people have it worse.'' JACQUES STEINBERG | Students'-Eye Views From the Classroom |
1212279_3 | who is coordinating work at the site. ''In Turkey we only employ staff archaeologists.'' The authorities have, however, accepted a $5 million grant from a California-based foundation, the Packard Humanities Institute. Louise Schofield, who represents the foundation here, said it might donate more money in the future. ''Our work is going to be in three phases,'' she said. ''First is the rescue excavation of the area that will be covered by water after Oct. 4. Then there will be a very large conservation program in cooperation with the Turkish team. And then, in the long term, there is a plan to turn this site into a major archaeological park.'' With at least 10 more dams scheduled to be built in southeastern Turkey in the coming decades, conflict between advocates of economic development and historical preservation may grow. The next focus of this conflict is likely to be Hasankeyf, a historical town 260 miles east of here that is to be inundated in a few years. A British company has won the contract to build the dam at Hasankeyf, but opponents are waging a vocal campaign in Britain. When they invited the mayor of Hasankeyf to attend one of their protest rallies in London, the Turkish authorities advised him not to go, and he canceled his trip. ''We're hoping to defuse this sense of confrontation,'' said Richard Hodges, a British archaeologist who is helping to direct the Zeugma excavation. ''I'm interested in preserving culture, but I also like to drink water and use electricity. If we can make this project work, it can be a model for Turkey's future.'' But some Turkish preservationists reject the idea of such compromises. ''The appropriate lessons should be drawn from this and newly planned dam projects should be halted,'' said Asket Tibet, general secretary of the Archaeologists' Association. That call was echoed by the general secretary of the History Association, Orhan Silier. ''The world's leading historians are trying to reinterpret history by using findings from these regions,'' Mr. Silier said. ''Yet we leave them under water.'' It is still unclear, and may be for years, how much of Zeugma is being lost. Some specialists believe it may be less than 10 percent. Others say there is no way of being sure, since an unknown portion of the city is already under water and no one is certain how much remains buried beneath the adjacent hills. | A Race to Save Roman Splendors From Drowning |
1212350_4 | to be deterred. On April 7, to a hero's send-off and much news media attention, the Bat'kivshchyna set sail from Kiev, the first boat of the season to test the ice-clogged Dnieper River. The next day, Captain Biriukovich's house was burglarized. On Day 7, the boat slammed aground when the helmsman fell asleep at the wheel. Minus a piece of its keel, Bat'kivshchyna soldiered on. ''It looks not so pretty,'' a crew member, Sergei Sklonchak, said of the black-hulled gaff-rigged boat, ''but it is very strong. It has big, heavy metal body. Like a tank.'' The mishaps continued. There was a near-international incident in Turkey, after the Ukrainian Coast Guard sank a Turkish fishing ship it said had been poaching in Ukraine waters, and the Turks vowed revenge. Keen to avoid Turkish gunfire, the Bat'kivshchyna slipped through the Bosporus in the dead of night. There were storms in the Mediterranean so severe that a crew member jumped ship in Cadiz, Spain. Now the communication problems began. The ship's satellite phone stopped working after the phone company was sold and the customers were not automatically switched over. And on May 13, shortly after the ship transmitted a position 250 miles west of the Canary Islands, the radio went dead. The seafaring community feared the worst. The Coast Guard sent search planes clear to Africa. The first in a series of OpSail events opened in San Juan, Puerto Rico, without the Bat'kivshchyna. In the mid-Atlantic, Captain Biriukovich, cut off from the world, made a decision. The seas were freakishly calm, and he was running low on fuel. He would skip Puerto Rico and Miami and make a beeline for Norfolk. At least that was the official story. Several crew members said that in fact, someone on board had set the Global Positioning System to take a reading off a European satellite rather than off an American satellite, with disorienting results. ''We thought we went to the south,'' said Katya Dvornichenko, 21, the only woman in the crew other than the captain's wife, Nina. ''When we met another ship and we took coordinates from him, he told us that we were 1,000 miles north. There was some joking that we will go to Greenlandia and that we will see some icebergs.'' There was disappointment. ''We missed Puerto Rico, which was my dream,'' said Gena Vovk, 24, who runs the souvenir concession. ''We missed | Overdue, and Broke, Ukraine's Ship Comes In |
1219074_1 | Food Challenged A report by the ABC correspondent John Stossel on ''20/20'' in February cited research that showed organic food seemed more likely than conventional food to be contaminated by E. coli bacteria. He also said that conventional produce did not necessarily have more pesticide residue than organic produce. But the researchers who were hired to do the testing said they never tested for pesticide residue. And ABC executives are looking into whether the statement about produce was made without any basis in fact. [C11.] A Glimpse of the Graphic Future At the Siggraph convention, the most important annual gathering for computer graphics and interactive technologies, the biggest names in the industry and many start-up companies introduce their newest products. The gathering also allows researchers to share prototypes from emerging technologies. [C5.] New Landscape for Bay Area Papers With approval to complete its deals to buy The San Francisco Chronicle and sell The San Francisco Examiner, the Hearst Corporation did both within 26 hours, transforming the newspaper landscape in the Bay Area. [C11.] Lack of Data in Deal for Seagram Since Vivendi announced that it was buying Seagram for $34 billion, many analysts are still trying to figure out what Vivendi is up to with Seagram. And their puzzlement has made them reluctant to offer investors guidance, which has translated into a listless Seagram share price. Market Place. [C12.] ING Barings to Buy Charterhouse ING Barings agreed to buy Charterhouse Securities of London for $192.2 million to extend its European equity business. [C14.] Gerstner on Early Days at I.B.M. In a long interview, Louis V. Gerstner Jr., the chairman of I.B.M., candidly described his early, uncertain days at the company -- when he arrived as an outsider suddenly in charge of a corporation that was both an American icon and in deep trouble. Mr. Gerstner, who took over in 1993, ran the company for more than a year in a style he called ''survival mode'' as a benevolent dictator. [C5.] Dot-Com Recruiting Woes: Part 2 For dot-com companies, the number of available workers has grown, but as employees jump off sinking ships or swim away from ones already capsized, they are being much more selective about where they dock next. Instead of stock options and promises of revolution, employees now want two things from prospective employers: a good salary and good prospects for corporate longevity. Bob Tedeschi: E-Commerce Report. [C10.] | BUSINESS DIGEST |
1213846_0 | To the Editor: Re ''As U.S. Debate Intensifies, Pay for Teachers Rises 3%'' (news article, July 5): While the difference in earnings between teaching and other professions may seem sufficient to explain America's teacher shortage, a number of other factors contribute to the problem. We need a stronger national effort encouraging college students to enter teaching for its nonfinancial benefits. Americorps and similar programs fill this void to some extent, but more active endorsement of the teaching profession is required. Young pre-career students are often idealistic. However, teaching is infrequently considered as a profession not only because of the low pay but also because college students do not gain proper exposure to teaching as a career while still in school. IMRAN G. CHOWDURY New York, July 5, 2000 | Teaching as a Career |
1213862_1 | digital nationwide wireless coverage, because that's where many people are betting the future is at.'' Sprint PCS, the company's wireless subsidiary, operates the largest all-digital wireless network in the country, covering an area reaching more than 70 percent of the population. Aided by revenue from wireless Internet services that were recently introduced, Sprint PCS's average monthly revenue per user is $54, which is 30 percent higher than the industry average. Although in terms of subscribers, Sprint's wireless network ranks fourth behind those of Verizon Wireless, SBC/BellSouth and AT&T Wireless, the company has led the wireless industry in subscriber growth for six consecutive quarters. With its own retail stores, and an aggressive distribution effort involving more than 12,000 third-party retail outlets that include Tandy's Radio Shack chain and Best Buy, Sprint signed up an additional 876,000 customers during the first quarter of this year, an 18 percent increase from the comparable period a year earlier. Analysts expect such subscriber growth to continue, with Sprint signing up as many as four million customers this year, accounting for about 20 percent of the industry's growth in the United States. ''Because it's built a wireless network that has a lot of buzz around it with such high-visibility growth, Sprint's an obvious takeover play if WorldCom exits the scene,'' said Steve Shook, a telecommunications analyst at Wachovia Securities. Last year, Sprint, based in Westwood, Kan., received merger overtures from BellSouth, which was eventually outbid by WorldCom. But the interest of BellSouth, based in Atlanta, could be rekindled by the possibility of assembling a seamless network that would theoretically allow a caller to use the same mobile phone from coast to coast. And the interest of the German communications giant, Deutsche Telekom, has been more than explicit. The possibility of a German bid for Sprint has already elicited a reaction from Senate leaders, who oppose such a deal on the grounds that it might violate a law preventing the Federal Communications Commission from transferring radio licenses to companies that are more than 25 percent owned by foreign governments. Cellular operators use radio waves under license from the F.C.C. Some analysts said that opposition to such a deal might wilt if the German government were to reiterate its stated intent to reduce its stake in Deutsche Telekom, Europe's largest telecommunications company. ''It flies in the face of everything the United States stands for in promoting free markets | Wireless Unit Makes Sprint A Likely Takeover Target |
1213887_1 | an hour after the blocked march as religious leaders offered up prayer and political invective. Despite pouring rain, hundreds of supporters remained at the scene after the rally. Later, the crowd grew again, to about 1,000 demonstrators, who clashed with the soldiers, throwing bottles and stones and trying to break through the barricade. ''We are here this morning with one aim: to have our civil and religious liberties restored,'' said the Portadown Orangemen's leader, Harold Gracey, who called for province-wide protests on Monday. Protestant parades throughout July commemorate ancient victories over Catholics. The most famous is the Battle of the Boyne, where King William IV of England defeated the forces of the Catholic King James II in 1690. It is celebrated on July 12. Protestants were blocked from marching through the Catholic neighborhood two years ago, leading to an extended sit-in at Drumcree. Meanwhile, a power-sharing home-rule government including both Protestants and Catholics has begun functioning in Northern Ireland. This year's period of tension before the so-called marching season included bonfires, carjackings and confrontations with the police by people who said they were supporting the Drumcree cause. The actions began in Belfast last Sunday and continued through the week. Britain's Northern Ireland secretary, Peter Mandelson, accused Protestant paramilitary organizations of hijacking the Portadown Orange Order's cause for their own ends. ''The time for legitimate protest is behind us,'' he said. Johnny Adair, a Protestant paramilitary leader who was recently released from prison, appeared at the Drumcree parish church of the Church of Ireland on Tuesday, contributing to fears of further violence. He showed up again today. In two incidents early today, an Orange Order hall in nearby Cookstown was burned in an attack attributed to arson, and a car bomb in nearby Stewartstown shattered windows in homes. Chief Constable Ronnie Flanagan of the Royal Ulster Constabulary, the Northern Irish police force, said the car bomb was probably the work of a dissident republican group called the Real I.R.A. At the rally today, Mr. Gracey refused to distance himself from the week's disturbances. ''I'm not in the business of condemning violence,'' he said. The protests did not go uncriticized by Protestants, though. The Church of Ireland's primate, Robin Eames, archbishop of Armagh, condemned the standoff, saying, ''I see nothing of Jesus Christ in the nightly actions on Drumcree Hill or in the roads and streets of Northern Ireland night by night.'' | Protestant Protests in Ulster Begin Peacefully but Turn Violent |
1216690_0 | Successive House and Senate votes on Thursday night to ease restrictions on American travel and certain sales to Cuba are the latest evidence of a gradual but seismic shift toward normalizing ties with the Marxist-run island, according to lawmakers and experts on Cuba. Republicans defected by the score from their party's traditional pro-embargo stance and this week handed a dual victory to the coalition of farming interests, business groups and Democrats trying to lift American sanctions. Both chambers of Congress approved the sale of food and medicine to Cuba. And the House went one step further, seeking to allow American tourism to the island by barring money to the federal agencies that enforce against it. None of the provisions are expected to win final approval before September, if ever. But they signal an important change in how American decision-makers view Cuba, possibly the most momentous shift since 1994, when the Clinton administration first decided to intercept Cuban refugees at sea and send them home. And, the experts and lawmakers say, the change raises the likelihood that the next president and Congress will feel freer to remove the remaining restrictions on ties with Havana. ''Clearly the barriers are coming down,'' said Peter Hakim, president of the Inter-American Dialogue, a hemispheric forum in Washington. ''The people who want to hold onto the structure of the embargo are slowly losing the game.'' An administration official predicted the trade ban would likely be eliminated after the November elections, no matter who controlled Congress or the White House. The embargo-easing amendments in the House on Thursday night, sponsored by Representatives Mark Sanford of South Carolina and Jerry Moran of Kansas, both conservative Republicans, passed with votes of 232 to 186 in favor of the travel provision and 301 to 116 supporting food and medical sales. Within an hour, the Senate overwhelmingly approved -- 79 to 13 -- an agriculture bill that also approved food and medicine sales but barred American credits to facilitate the trade. The votes are likely to strengthen the prospects for a separate measure by Representative George Nethercutt, Republican of Washington, to allow food and medical sales, which moves into a conference committee in September. Republican leaders and Cuban-American lawmakers who have sought to stymie the Nethercutt proposal will have to rethink their stance, said John S. Kavulich II, president of the U.S.-Cuba Trade and Economic Council, a clearinghouse for American businesses | Chipping Away at Embargo Reflects a New Vision of Cuba |
1216711_3 | year is also widely attributed to a backlash from young women against their support for hard-line social restrictions. ''I don't think the conservatives as a whole have begun to really understand what the impact will be of having so many educated young women graduating from our universities,'' said Mohammad Javad Larijani, a veteran hard-line parliamentarian who lost his seat in the reformist wave, in an interview after the elections. ''These women are going to demand that society give value to their skills and their degrees.'' Women have long been underrepresented in politics and the professions in Iran. They make up just 14 percent of the labor force, according to a recent United Nations report on human development in Iran. When they do find jobs, it is in government, where they hold 23 percent of the public sector posts, and in farming. They are overrepresented in comparison to men -- by a factor of 2 to 1 -- only in the unemployment rolls. ''Many trained and skilled women and girls must stay at home because of social and traditional obstacles from their families,'' said Dr. Koulai. ''Many men in our society don't want their wives working outside the home. But this is going to change. The process is unstoppable.'' Those obstacles have not deterred many families from breaking tradition and pushing their daughters to get a university degree at any cost. ''If our daughters don't study, they won't have anything in life,'' said Ashraf Juyandeh, a 49-year-old cafeteria worker in the city of Shiraz who is trying to get her two daughters into the local university. ''I myself only finished sixth grade,'' she added. ''Back then, the rich could afford to send their daughters to school, but traditional families considered it a bad thing. My mother was never allowed to go to university and my father could never have afforded it.'' Mrs. Juyandeh was married at 14 and widowed at 39. She says she will get as many jobs as she can to earn enough money to send both her daughters to a university -- anywhere. In a country where religious traditions and the conservative clergy still dictate a subservient role for women in many families, the movement of young women out of their hometowns in search of education and work has already brought about changes in attitudes. ''The experience I am having -- and other girls are having -- is | In Iran, More Women Leaving Nest for University |
1217533_1 | than even the low end of previous estimates, which ranged from about $49 to $1,089. It is also far lower than the rain forest's global worth (which, while seemingly priceless, does have some estimates attached to it, in the range of $1,700 per hectare per year). ''Unless rural people are paid for the nonlocal values of rain forests,'' the researchers wrote, ''they may be easily persuaded to deforest.'' E. Coli's Sickly Embrace Not all strains of E. coli bacteria cause sickness, but those that do can get a strong grip on a person, particularly the young and elderly, killing through dehydration or kidney failure. And it is literally a strong grip: the bacteria function by attaching themselves to cells on the intestinal walls. Now, using X-ray crystallography, researchers from the University of British Columbia have shown what happens at a molecular level when the bacteria bind to intestinal cells. E. coli's outer membrane contains a protein, called intimin, that serves as the glue. But first, the bacterium must insert a different protein, called a receptor, into the intestinal cell. The two proteins then bind. The protein-receptor complex was difficult to analyze whole, so the researchers broke it down into functional crystal fragments, which were then analyzed through crystallography (in which the pattern of X-ray diffraction through a crystal is analyzed to determine structure). Their work was reported in Nature. Knowing how two proteins bind in this way is a step toward designing a drug that will inhibit the binding. The researchers suggested that their work might eventually help in the development of a vaccine against E. coli infection. Boon for Astronomers Astronomers face constant battles against light and radio frequency pollution, so delegates to the World Radiocommunication Conference in Istanbul this spring provided some welcome news. The conference, which allocates parts of the radio spectrum for various uses, approved measures to protect a significant swath of high frequencies, above about 70 gigahertz, for astronomy. Radio astronomers are increasingly using this part of the radio spectrum, known as the millimeter wave region, to detect the spectral lines of molecules in space. But commercial satellite projects under development also plan to use frequencies in the same range. The new measures make sure that future satellite transmitters operating in the range stay away from those frequencies that are useful to astronomers. Without such protection, the faint signals from space would be easily overwhelmed. | OBSERVATORY |
1217522_2 | Filiatrault, a professor of structural engineering at San Diego and the project's principal investigator. For the last six months, a consortium of universities has been building, shaking and rebuilding a house atop a hydraulic ''shake table'' that simulates earthquake movements. In the July 11 test, the shake table faithfully reproduced 20 seconds of ground movements recorded during the Northridge earthquake 10 miles from the epicenter. Inside the fully furnished two-story, 600-square-foot test house, appliances toppled and shelves that had not been anchored to the floor or a wall fell. The structure, built in accordance with the latest construction codes, came through with just a few small cracks. One of the lessons learned appears to be the power of stucco. Like most houses in Southern California, the test house's exterior wall is a layer of stucco mounted onto a wire mesh attached outside the plywood sheathing. Stucco is stiff, adding strength, but brittle. Before the test, most of the engineers expected the shaking to break the stucco apart. In an earlier test, without the stucco and drywall interior walls, the top of the house swayed back and forth five inches relative to the bottom. In the latest test, the top swayed only one inch. ''Those materials have the potential of providing a lot of earthquake resistance,'' Dr. Hall said. ''The building was quite a bit stronger than when we previously tested it.'' The revised 1997 building code downgraded stucco's effectiveness rating in resisting the shaking of an earthquake because in the Northridge quake, the outer stucco layer literally peeled off many homes, perhaps because of poor construction. There was ''a lot of evidence'' in the real quake that it didn't do well and that more testing needed to be done, said Nicolino Delli Quadri, assistant chief of the engineering bureau in the Los Angeles Department of Building and Safety. The simple box shape of the test house may have also made it more durable. The tests, financed with $5 million from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, will shape guidelines to help insurance companies determine when, for example, a crack in the stucco is cosmetic and when it signals structural damage. Patching stucco costs a few hundred dollars; replacing it costs tens of thousands. ''The insurance agencies in California are very interested in this second question of what extent repairs are necessary to repair structures to their original condition,'' Dr. Hall said. | 2 Flrs, Furn., Nice Vu (But a Little Shaky) |
1217576_1 | is already monitoring what goes out over the Internet and identifying where messages come from. Ask Huang Qi, if you can: authorities have detained him since June 3 for operating a Web site about human-rights abuses. Or ask Lin Hai, who served prison time for sending some 30,000 Chinese e-mail addresses to a dissident information service. Even those who only read dissident sites, rather than contributing to them, cannot be sure of safety. Surfing the Internet appears untraceable on the surface, but users unwittingly leave behind detailed footprints, as evidenced by privacy concerns among Internet users in this country. Chinese computer experts have plenty of tools and techniques at their disposal to follow these footprints. Then there is blocking and filtering technology. A user can't get a single bit of digital information from the Internet without connecting his computer to it, and services that provide the connections can interpose equipment or software that blocks certain types of traffic or keeps users from reaching certain Web sites. The Chinese government has already blocked disagreeable Western sites like The Washington Post and Amnesty International, but the censors have had difficulty identifying offending sites fast enough to block them all. It could solve that problem by adopting a strategy used by a number of American-based systems, like America Online's AOL@School service: Block access to any Internet services not on a pre-approved list. Business trends within China could also end up limiting the Internet's power there as a liberalizing force. Analysts of the industry think many Chinese will eventually connect to the Internet not with personal computers, as Americans typically do, but through devices like set-top boxes and mobile phones, which have cumbersome keyboards. Chinese going online this way could shop or get government messages, but might find it difficult to send e-mail or post opinions to a Web bulletin board. As Western companies work to protect copyrights and enhance the security of information they collect, new techniques for control of Internet communication are being developed every day. Even if American companies do not sell their innovations to China directly, the Chinese will be able to develop them on their own or buy them from other nations. The Internet won't be free in China until other influences force the country to lift its most insidious trade barrier: the ban on ideas that threaten Communist Party rule. James C. Luh writes frequently about Internet technology. | The Internet Can't Free China |
1217615_8 | person. The Republican strengths, according to those polled, are keeping the military potent and preserving family values. The two political parties that have not fared well are the Reform Party and Green Party. Both are seen negatively by most people. While poll respondents said they had a pretty good sense now of the parties and the candidates, several acknowledged that their views might change. Duane Taff, 33, a radio station music director in Grand Rapids, Mich., said he was leaning toward Mr. Gore. ''If there is an issue between now and November that I feel passionate about, I might go the other way,'' Mr. Taff said. ''Two months ago, an issue like that would have been gas prices, but that's starting to stabilize. Something like that might come up a week before the election. And if one of the candidates makes an effort, and I like his idea on it, I could easily go either way.'' How the Poll Was Conducted The latest New York Times/CBS News Poll is based on telephone interviews conducted Thursday through Sunday with 953 adults throughout the United States. Of these, 743 said they were registered to vote. The sample of telephone exchanges called was randomly selected by a computer from a complete list of more than 42,000 active residential exchanges across the country. Within each exchange, random digits were added to form a complete telephone number, thus permitting access to both listed and unlisted numbers. Within each household, one adult was designated by a random procedure to be the respondent for the survey. The results have been weighted to account for household size and number of telephone lines into the residence and to adjust for variations in the sample relating to geographic region, sex, race, age and education. In theory, in 19 out of 20 cases, the results based on such samples will differ by no more than three percentage points in either direction from what would have been obtained by seeking out all American adults. For smaller subgroups, the margin of sampling error is larger. For registered voters, for example, it is plus or minus four percentage points. In addition to sampling error, the practical difficulties of conducting any survey of public opinion may introduce other sources of error into the poll. Variations in the wording and order of questions, for instance, may lead to somewhat different results. THE 2000 CAMPAIGN: THE POLL | POLL FINDS VOTERS RELYING ON ISSUES TO SHAPE THE RACE |
1217530_0 | To the Editor: Re ''Cell Phones and Safety'' (editorial, July 19): It appears that using a cell phone while driving may not be a good practice. However, before any legislation is passed prohibiting the use of a cell phone while driving, the consequence of such legislation needs to be considered. For example, would one be permitted while driving to have a soft drink, eat a sandwich, smoke, listen to the radio, change radio stations, use a speaker phone, talk to passengers, switch eyeglasses to sunglasses, look at a map and so on? These kinds of practices must be resolved before passing any new legislation. By the way, a few years ago I was rear-ended because the driver was changing radio stations. IRWIN MORTMAN Cincinnati, July 19, 2000 | Distracted at the Wheel |
1212533_0 | The European Union plans to ask the World Trade Organization to set up a panel to resolve a dispute with the United States over the use of the Havana Club rum trademark. The union is contesting a 1998 American law requiring foreign companies seeking to register trademarks that once belonged to companies expropriated by the Cuban communist authorities to get the original owner's permission. A United States appeals court invoked the law against a French-Cuban joint venture when it tried to defend the Havana Club trade name against the Bermuda-based Bacardi Ltd. Elizabeth Olson (NYT) WORLD BUSINESS BRIEFING: WORLD TRADE | TRADE FIGHT OVER RUM TRADEMARK |
1212454_1 | new law came after 46 states and many foreign countries had adopted laws encouraging online deal-making, and many online businesses have already incorporated such capabilities. So it may be hard to calculate the immediate financial impact of the federal law on the major companies supplying such technology. ''It validates the market but it won't really add to their revenue in the near term,'' said Mark Fernandes of Merrill Lynch, who follows companies that provide the software and support services needed for electronic business. Moreover, because the law is careful not to favor any particular technology for signing contracts electronically, it does nothing to alter the scramble for dominance in the new field. The core of the business for now belongs to a group of companies, including VeriSign, Entrust Technologies, RSA and Baltimore Technologies, that provide ways for those doing business online to use coded messages and electronic ''certificates'' to complete their transactions. All of them rely on public key encryption, a technology invented in the 1970's but not widely used until the e-commerce wave hit the Internet. Such systems use a combination of public and private keys, or snippets of numbers, to pass secure messages through a trusted third party, or certification authority. The system not only allows a recipient to be assured the message came from the party that claims to have sent it but also that it has not been tampered with. The digital signature such systems produce looks nothing like a scrawled John Hancock -- in fact, it is invisible. As a result, many entrepreneurs are betting that other systems will be used instead of public key encryption, or in addition to it, to complete e-commerce deals. President Clinton signed the bill into law on Friday with a smart card -- a credit card-sized device programmed to work in combination with a password furnished by the user. Such systems are already widely used in Europe. One company hoping to benefit is Signature-mail.com, based in Greenwich, Conn., which allows users to attach a picture of their actual signature to e-mail. The company's founders figure such a device may well be unacceptable as a legal e-signature since anyone could hit the computer key to send it and hackers might easily forge it. Still, says Michael Lloyd, a Signature-mail co-founder, such a feature might be attractive to companies like VeriSign as an added element to make their encryption products more | E-Signing Law Seen as a Boon To E-Business |
1216026_0 | There was a lot of debate about the safety implications of car radios when they were developed over 70 years ago. A similar debate is under way now about the use of hand-held cell phones in cars. On the face of it, cell phones are a much bigger potential distraction than radios. They require more concentration by the driver and tie up one hand that ought to be on the steering wheel. A few small American municipalities, most recently Marlboro, N.J., have banned the use of hand-held cell phones by drivers. While the matter may require more research, our instinct is that Marlboro and the other communities are on the right track. We would go so far as to recommend state legislation to guarantee uniformity. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration began public hearings yesterday on cell phone use in cars. There are 91 million mobile phone subscribers, and 85 percent of them say they occasionally talk on their phones while driving. The potential for distraction, even disaster, is obvious. A 1997 Canadian study published in the New England Journal of Medicine found that the risk of an accident increases fourfold if the driver is on a cell phone. But it cautioned that the findings suggest an association, not a causal relationship. Few state or local governments tabulate statistics on cell phone use as a factor in traffic accidents. They should start doing so. A statistical analysis persuaded Japanese government officials that cell phones were in fact responsible for traffic violations and accidents and ultimately led to a ban. Congress could usefully underwrite similar studies in this country. One technological answer could be hands-free or voice-activated cell phones, which are growing in popularity. But the Canadian study suggested that these phones do not confer a safety advantage over hand-held units. So far 13 countries, including Britain, Italy and Australia, have banned cell phone use while driving. That is not reason enough to ban them here. But common sense suggests that the matter deserves, at the very least, serious and comprehensive study, aimed not at delaying action but promoting a sensible response. | Cell Phones and Safety |
1216038_4 | Angell said. ''They'll be allowed to go on fishing expeditions.'' It is not yet clear how much the measure will cost. The government has put aside 20 million pounds, or $30 million, to help businesses set up the new technology, but as it stands now, Internet service providers themselves would bear most of the costs of the ''black boxes'' themselves. This provision is roughly akin to asking ''manufacturers to pay for the police cars the Home Office provides to the police,'' said William Roebuck, an executive on the legal advisory group at the E-Center, a trade association that studies standards and practices in e-commerce. The London School of Economics report estimated that the measure would cost British business some 640 million pounds, or $960 million, over the next five years, a figure that could rise to 46 billion, or $69 billion, when opportunity costs and losses from the economy are included. But Mr. Roebuck said it was impossible to tell what the final figure would be. ''If Internet service providers are made to take on board the costs, then the costs will be put through to the consumer,'' he said. ''What's going to happen is that companies are going to reroute everything away from the U.K. and take their business abroad.'' Among the companies that have already said the measure would make them reluctant to do business here is Poptel, one of Britain's oldest Internet service providers. Poptel serves the noncommercial sector -- charities, trade unions, lobbying organizations and the like -- and many of its members have serious concerns about the bill's implications. ''There are a number of our users who come into quite legitimate conflict with the government,'' said Shaun Fensom, Poptel's chairman, who said he might transfer some of the company's operations offshore. ''They are concerned that the government could classify some of their legitimate activity as being snoopable. My feeling is that they will want access to at least some kind of secure e-mail facility.'' Some critics are charging that the measure has been sloppily and hastily drawn up to give the government as broad latitude as possible. ''What this does is contravene a large number of fundamental rights in the European convention on human rights and other international standards, which include the right to privacy, the right to liberty, the right to freedom of expression and the right to freedom of association,'' said Halya Gowan, | British Authorities May Get Wide Power to Decode E-Mail |
1216103_7 | Commission, which has spent the last several months conducting hearings. The commission has ordered a report, due in September, to examine the potential environmental impact of any hand-over. In the Legislature, one leading Democrat, Fred Keeley, has introduced a bill that would postpone the process, by authorizing the state to purchase the utility's land and other assets and retain them for up to six years while deciding whether to transfer individual parcels to public agencies or to sell them to private bidders. As one potential model for the kind of agreement that might be built into any sale, some advocates point to an accord struck last summer between the P. G. & E. Corporation and state and federal agencies to share the $50 million cost of removing five small hydropower dams on Battle Creek, a tributary of the Trinity River. Those dams had been widely recognized as an impediment to salmon and steelhead populations, and the announcement of the deal was made jointly by the utility, Gov. Gray Davis of California, and Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt. Even if no other dams are to be razed, groups like Environmental Defense have said that any transfer of ownership should be prefaced at least by a deal that would restore water flows by a factor of 10 or 20 in rivers like the Mokelumne, in order to help restore fish habitats. A report issued by the organization in California this week estimated that such a move would result in only a 10 percent to 20 percent decrease in hydropower generation. Mr. Graff, the regional director, said the price tag for an acceptable package of environmental repair would be about $400 million. At their San Francisco headquarters, P. G. & E. Corporation officials said they were preparing a proposal that they said would balance the need for power generation and environmental protection on condition, again, that the dams and other assets remain in the hands of the company. They also warned that it would be foolhardy to move too drastically to reign in hydropower, particularly now, at a time when surging demand has been testing California's capacity to generate electricity, and when alternative means of power generation carry environmental consequences of their own. ''It all comes down to the fact that the state needs electric power, and this is a clean way to provide it,'' said Jon Tremayne, a Pacific Gas and Electric spokesman. | Freeing a Hydroelectric Giant, California Frets About Control |
1216020_1 | overloading the circuits. ''They wouldn't tell us what was going on, which really annoyed me,'' Mr. Canady said. He was flying on Continental Airlines, but his complaint about not being able to get adequate information was echoed by other travelers on other carriers. Most scoffed when asked if their airlines had kept them informed. Providing credible, timely information on delays is a major component of a vaunted voluntary passengers-rights code that the airlines drafted last year to head off the threat of federal regulations. ''When we asked what was going on, the airline's people looked at us like we were crazy,'' Mr. Canady said. ''We were like, 'Hey, we're just trying to find out when we're going to be where you're supposed to take us.' '' He added: ''Some people were getting in shouting matches with the flight attendants, but what good does that do? You might as well make the best of it.'' Making the best of it is good advice for business travelers this summer, as a three-year crisis of delayed domestic flights threatens to grow in the heaviest travel months of July and August. According to the F.A.A., June was the worth month ever for delays. Coincidentally, last Friday afternoon, as serial delays were once again staggering the traveling public, the F.A.A. and the airline industry were trying to spin some good news. The F.A.A. said that an agreement had been reached with airline pilots' groups in a recent dispute involving a decades-old landing procedure that some pilots believe can create potentially unsafe conditions as runway traffic increases. New rules to address the pilots' concerns are expected to be issued in mid-August. In the procedure, called ''land and hold short,'' the tower asks a pilot to land normally and then pause at an intersecting runway to allow another plane to take off before continuing on to the terminal. Pilots balking at these maneuvers were responsible for about 10 percent of the recent delays at O'Hare International Airport in Chicago and about a quarter of the delays at Logan International Airport in Boston, according to industry estimates. But those numbers do not begin to account for the 49,000 flight delays the airlines racked up in June or the ones piling up this month. Pilots aren't causing this crisis. The great majority of delays are attributed to bad weather; huge, growing volume; and the inability of the air-traffic control | Business Travel; The air-traffic system approached gridlock over the weekend, with delays of up to eight hours. |
1216049_0 | Moving to ease concern over possible health risks from mobile phones, the largest manufacturers of cellular telephones are planning to disclose on their packages the radiation levels emitted from the devices they sell. Under a proposal submitted by the Cellular Telephone Industry Association, which represents several hundred wireless carriers and manufacturers, cell phone manufacturers will begin on Aug. 1 to seek the trade group's certification. According to guidelines established in 1996, cell phone manufacturers already disclose the information to the Federal Communications Commission, but it is not easily available to consumers when they buy the devices. Concern over the radiation levels of cell phones has grown as the devices have increased in popularity, with the number of cellular subscribers in the United States nearly tripling over five years. While no link has been established between cell-phone use and cancer, the move is seen as protecting manufacturers from the type of legal action that has recently shaken the tobacco industry. ''This is a smart, proactive move on their part,'' said Mitchell Lazarus, a lawyer at Fletcher, Heald & Hindreth, a law firm based in Arlington, Va., that specializes in the telecommunications industry. Companies like Nokia of Finland, Ericsson of Sweden and Motorola of Schaumberg, Ill., the three largest cell phone manufacturers, will disclose the information, which is expected to appear on new devices the next three to six months. TECHNOLOGY Correction: July 21, 2000, Friday An article in Business Day on Wednesday about a plan by manufacturers to disclose the levels of radiation emitted by cellular telephones misstated the placement of the notices. They will not be on the packages but on pamphlets inside. | Cellular Phones to Carry Radiation Level Label |
1214574_0 | The bishops of the Episcopal Church, acting on the most contentious issue facing their denomination's General Convention, voted late today to reject a proposal that church officials develop rites to bless relationships between couples living together outside marriage, rituals that would probably be particularly applied to gay relationships. The vote, with 85 bishops against the proposal and 63 supporting it, came after more than three hours of debate, during which several of the prelates gathered here warned that were the proposal to pass, it could threaten the unity of the 2.4 million-member denomination, so severe are divisions among Episcopalians over what recognition to extend to gay and lesbian parishioners. Bishop Ed Little of the Diocese of Northern Indiana said he did not support the proposal ''because it will deepen our divisions.'' But another prelate, Catherine Roskam, a suffragan or auxiliary bishop of New York, called for supporting the development of the rites, saying, ''We have been pioneers in the ordination of women and we can be pioneers in this.'' The bishops' vote was the second time in two days that church leaders have rejected the proposal that an Episcopalian commission develop rites to be considered and voted upon at the next convention, which will be held in 2003. The convention, held every three years, is the church's top policy-making body, divided into two separate chambers, one composed of bishops, the other of clergy and lay people who are called ''deputies.'' On Tuesday, at the meeting at the Denver Convention Center, the House of Deputies voted against the proposal, but by a narrow margin. The proposal for the rites originally appeared as the eighth paragraph in an unusual resolution on sexuality that has been under consideration at the convention. After the deputies deleted that controversial paragraph, they overwhelmingly approved the resolution and sent it on to the bishops to consider. The resolution states that the church officially acknowledges that among the people in its pews are unmarried couples living in long-term relationships. It adds that although such relationships depart from traditional Christian teaching on sexuality, the church should give the couples involved its pastoral care and ''prayerful support.'' The statement makes no distinction between heterosexual and homosexual relationships -- and so implicitly includes both. The bishops have yet to vote on the resolution itself, although in their debate many expressed support for it, without the controversial eighth paragraph. The resolution is | Episcopal Bishops Bar Rites Outside Marriage |
1214464_0 | IT is time for the ''S.M.S. Dating Game'' on Radio X3M. Romance is in the airwaves and Cupid carries a cell phone. Thumbs ready? In 160 characters or less, use the keypad on your mobile phone to type a description of yourself and your interests, and send it to the disc jockey's phone using the wildly popular Short Messaging Service. In minutes, if your description catches the fancy of another mobile phone user -- and the odds are good, considering that most Finns over age 15 carry a wireless phone -- the phone will chirp, warble, vibrate or beep out a riff from a popular rock song, signaling that you have a text reply waiting on your phone. ''Apparently it's more fun than actually talking to the other person,'' said Richard Nordgren, head of programming for Radio X3M. But that is nothing compared with what is going on in Sweden, where a company is developing a mobile Internet dating service that tracks the location of the phone. When two seemingly compatible people come into range of each other, the dating service will alert them by phone, enabling them to arrange a rendezvous. Although it is indisputably the business leader in personal computer and Internet technologies, the United States is Old World when it comes to what many analysts and entrepreneurs see as the next big wave of technology: wireless Internet communications. Market researchers are nearly unanimous in predicting that in three years more people around the world will gain access to the Internet through mobile devices than through personal computers. But to preview this transformation, which some call the ''mobile lifestyle,'' one has to leave the United States. ''You're just starting to see it in the U.S., but here it is everywhere,'' said Rolf Skoglund, a venture capitalist in Stockholm. According to the market research company International Data Corporation, Sweden has passed the United States and is now the world's dominant ''information economy,'' measured in terms of the percentage of citizens who have access to computers, the Internet, wireless phones and other information technologies. Finland, Norway and Denmark round out the top five. The Nordic countries are digital Valhalla, the forefront of the new information economy based on wireless communications. As a result, American technology companies and venture capitalists are rushing to set up or expand their offices in the growing high-tech centers near Helsinki and Stockholm. Microsoft opened a | Wireless Valhalla: Hints of the Cellular Future |
1214516_0 | The summer parade season in Northern Ireland is always a time of volatility, and this year is no different. But even the recent disturbances have been overshadowed by a common desire among Protestants and Catholics to strengthen a still-fragile peace. This year's marchers, who commemorate Protestant victories long ago, are fewer in number and less violent than in the past. They are also more marginalized, criticized even by their traditional allies for their intransigence. There are other signs of progress. Last month the Irish Republican Army allowed two international envoys to visit a weapons dump and certify that the contents could be monitored -- a measure that should be followed by real I.R.A. disarmament later. Home rule has been revived and is working well. The ministers in Northern Ireland's cabinet belong to parties ranging from Sinn Fein, the political wing of the I.R.A., to the Democratic Unionists, who reject the entire peace process. They are proving to be effective and surprisingly collegial. Britain can help reinforce the peace by reforming the Royal Ulster Constabulary, Northern Ireland's police force. The R.U.C., which is 93 percent Protestant, is viewed by many Catholics as an alien body. The composition, law enforcement practices and even the name of the force should be changed so that it can fairly serve the interests of all citizens. The British government has recently revised an earlier reform plan that fell well short of the changes that are needed. The version voted out of the House of Commons on Tuesday improves efforts to recruit Catholics into the police and strengthens the powers of a new civilian oversight board. But serious flaws remain that must be remedied. The bill gives too much power to the British secretary for Northern Ireland to impede or block investigations of police misconduct by the civilian board. A new ombudsman would be barred from looking at past events except under extraordinary circumstances. But the most controversial provision is the name. Under the bill, the police force would be called the Police Service of Northern Ireland for all operational purposes. But the group's formal documents would use ''Royal Ulster Constabulary'' in its name as well. Even symbolic continuity with the R.U.C. may persuade Catholics to continue rejecting the police, which undermines the inclusiveness that is crucial to peace. It could also give the I.R.A. an excuse to stall on disarmament. Northern Ireland's moderate Catholic party also | Building Peace in Ulster |
1214478_3 | world to learn how similar problems are solved depending on geographic region.'' The Internet has also provided a wealth of information for the schools, which have few traditional library resources. Tiffany Southworth, an eighth grader at Pago Pago Elementary, said her class used the Internet to learn about protecting the ocean. ''We talked to researchers, and we got to ask questions about the ocean,'' Tiffany said, ''how to protect the ocean and save the animals and plants.'' The school also has a ukulele band that performs for schools in the United States via the Internet as part of their social studies projects. Perhaps just as important as the doors the Internet has opened for students are the opportunities it offers teachers, many of whom are not certified. With the reliable high-speed line, they can more easily participate in online continuing education programs through universities in Hawaii and California. At Taputapu elementary in a remote spot on the island of Tutuila, the principal, Donna Gurr, said children often stay after school to use the computers to communicate with friends and relatives in the States. And sometimes they bring in their parents, few of whom have computers at home. Before the high-speed line was connected, she said, the school had only one computer. And because of the island's poor phone service, connections were difficult. Still, for all the benefits the program has brought, the principals and teachers face the same challenges as educators around the United States who are trying to incorporate technology into their curriculum. Ms. Bowles-Weilenman this spring lost her computer laboratory teacher to the island's new library. And Ms. Gurr's computer teacher left for a job at the Department of Education. ''To date, there is no curriculum or lesson plan teachers can follow,'' Ms. Bowles-Weilenman said. ''This to me is our greatest weakness. Often times, computer instructors rely on games, though educational ones, which rely solely on students' interaction, not creativity or production.'' But Ms. Bowles-Weilenman -- who is the daughter of one of the first teachers on the island who participated in another federally financed experiment, bringing certified teachers to village schools via television -- said she and others are working to overcome that problem. She has conducted several Internet workshops for principals and teachers on the island, she said. And she and a group of teachers are developing lesson plans that can be used at various grade | With Project Expanding Net's Reach, There Are No Strangers in Paradise |
1214526_4 | religion makes me go pop.'' Lord Runcie was later to describe their marriage as a ''union of duty with delight.'' He is survived by her and the couple's two children, James and Rebecca. In 1962 he became principal of a theological college near Oxford and in 1970 was consecrated bishop of St. Albans. He made himself an expert on the Anglican Church's relations with Orthodox churches and traveled widely in Eastern Europe, but he was a relative unknown and a great surprise as the choice to succeed the retiring Donald Coggan. His enthronement speech at Canterbury Cathedral as the 102nd archbishop set out his agenda. The church, he said, must give a firm lead ''against rigid thinking'' and counter ''the disposition to over-simplify difficult and complex problems.'' In a speech soon after, he said ''the Christian voice must be loud and clear on the great political issues of the time -- race relations, unemployment, disarmament and the proper distribution of the world's resources.'' Months later he began pursuing another goal, a drawing together of Anglicans and Catholics, when he met the Pope in Ghana. In 1982 the pope visited Britain, and Lord Runcie welcomed him to Canterbury Cathedral. In a deeply symbolic moment the two men knelt in prayer at the site where Thomas a Becket was murdered in 1170. In September 1989, Lord Runcie visited Rome for four days of talks with the pope, but despite warm personal relationships between the two men, the pope did not respond to the Anglican's pleas for greater unity between the churches. In a final statement, they acknowledged that the issue of whether to have women as priests stood in the way. He was made a life peer by Prime Minister John Major, with whom he had a better relationship than with Mrs. Thatcher. A common love of cricket was said to be the bond. But even in retirement he continued to roil church waters, warning of an overly ''management'' style at Lambeth Palace, an apparent rebuke of his more buttoned-up successor George Carey. While acknowledging that Dr. Carey's reforms would lead to a better organization of finances, he warned that the church was losing influence and respect among decision-makers. Throughout his career, he tried to disarm critics with self-deprecating humor, and he held to that habit in his last formal interview, published in The Daily Telegraph in April. Asked about the prospect | Lord Runcie, Outspoken Anglican Leader, Is Dead at 78 |
1214468_0 | MANY people have fallen for the lure of high-speed Internet access only to find it hard to get. Now Boeing is promising to make it available to people traveling 500 miles per hour at 30,000 feet. Airplanes stopped being a refuge for business travelers when satellite telephones were installed. On many planes, passengers can make calls or send and receive e-mail messages. The next step, according to a partnership led by the Boeing Company, is to develop full Internet access. ''We're looking at this major piece of time that could and should be more productively used,'' said Kenneth Medlin, vice president and general manager of Boeing Commercial Information Systems, a unit of the Boeing Space and Communications Group. This broadband access, expected to become available on some domestic flights late next year, will let people surf the Web and send e-mail messages and other files at an impressive speed: messages will be uploaded at 1.5 megabits per second -- about the same speed provided by a T-1 line, found in many offices -- and Web pages will be downloaded at 5 megabits per second, the rate of a smooth-functioning cable modem link. Of course, in a world where maintaining a reliable link to the Internet from even a fixed desk is sometimes a challenge, trying to do the same thing in an airplane is particularly daunting. Even though some planes allow passengers to make calls and send and receive e-mail, such service is spotty and slow, limited on some systems to 64 kilobits per second. The key to the increased capacity of the Boeing system is the antenna, Mr. Medlin said. A system like this, he said, must rely on the use of satellites to relay signals. Communications satellites have large coverage areas, and transmissions from airplanes would generally be unobstructed. To achieve the speed needed for high-bandwidth connections, the Boeing system will rely on high-frequency satellites, which are now primarily used by television networks to beam broadcasts to local stations and cable companies, as well as by telephone companies for moving large numbers of long-distance calls. But there is a catch. Satellites, unlike most ground-based radio systems, can send and receive signals only through relatively narrow, focused radio waves. To make things simple for customers on the ground, most communications satellites are placed in geostationary orbits. That is, they match Earth's rotation, so they stay above the same spot. | High-Bandwidth Web Connections Will Let Passengers Surf as They Fly |
1214468_2 | Because of that, ground-based satellite users aim their dishes at a single, fixed point in the sky. Airliners, of course, are anything but stationary, so a geostationary satellite becomes a moving target. Space shuttles avoid the problem by communicating with ground-based satellite dishes that move mechanically to follow their flight. But designing a conventional dish that is light enough to install on aircraft but can respond to every twist and turn is impractical. Instead Boeing and its partners are using an antenna technology that can electronically steer its radio beams. Called the Connexion system, it has 1,000 small antenna modules, each shaped more like a jumbo pizza box than an antenna dish, are joined into a single grid. Boeing began developing these phased-array antennas 16 years ago. A computer on the aircraft directs the beam by altering the synchronization of the individual radio waves generated by the antenna modules. The signals from the individual modules ultimately combine into a single beam in much the same way that a pianist combines several notes to create a chord. The antenna's computer alters the beam's direction by changing the pattern that joins the signals into the final beam. The antenna computer's work does not stop there. Just as a cell phone switches from one transmitter's territory to another's, the antenna computer must be able to jump from one satellite to another as the aircraft moves. A link between the system and the aircraft's flight control systems allows it to monitor the airplane's motion, adjusting the signal to compensate for turns and altitude changes. A prototype of the Connexion system is being tested, and the final version is expected to consist of two phase-array antennas, each about 18 inches long, 15 inches wide and 2 1/2 inches thick, on the top of the fuselage. One is for receiving, the other for transmitting. A cable connects the antenna to the computer inside the aircraft, and the computer is linked to a conventional Web and e-mail server. All of that will be invisible to passengers. What they will see, Mr. Medlin said, are two jacks on back of the seat in front of them. One will be for users with conventional modems in their laptop computers. Their Web surfing will be limited to the maximum speeds of their modems. The other jack will be a standard Ethernet connection, like those commonly found in offices. People with | High-Bandwidth Web Connections Will Let Passengers Surf as They Fly |
1217714_0 | To the Editor: In ''Cell Phones and Safety'' (editorial, July 19) you mention the debate 70 years ago about safety implications of car radios. Let this reader tell you that the only time he ran off the road was just five years ago -- while changing stations on the car radio. Recently in downtown Greenwich, Conn., I watched an apparently healthy young man in business dress talking on his cell phone as he began to cross the street against the policeman's dictate to wait. Unhearing at first, he got the message 10 feet into the street and backed up still talking. Then, when the officer waved him across, he was further distracted by his conversation and had to wait again until traffic cycled through before he finally made it. If walking is that difficult when using a cell phone, then its use when driving must certainly be outlawed. JOHN P. TIERNAN Bedford, N.Y., July 20, 2000 | Cell Phone Hazards |
1214805_3 | licensed architect or engineer. The inspector can be the same architect or engineer who drew up the plans. He said that no city inspectors visited the building before the plans submitted this week were approved. The younger Mr. Blum is known as a pioneer in the field of architectural salvage, and he has provided antique fixtures for many movies and shows, including ''Sophie's Choice'' and ''Sex and the City.'' ''It's ironic,'' said Ralph Stevens, a cousin. ''Evan spends his whole life saving items from buildings that were going to be demolished.'' Kathleen Mahoney, a friend, said Mr. Blum scored a coup early in his career by rescuing the roof cornices from New York's Commodore Hotel when it was stripped in the late 70's to make way for the Grand Hyatt. She said he would never be able to replace what he lost. ''You can't get a collection together like this now because of landmark preservation,'' she said. Evan Blum returned from a buying trip in Massachusetts in time to watch the demolition crew dislodge bricks from the edges of the hole using a crane. He said the city was acting too quickly. ''They are overreacting. I think the building can be shored up,'' he said. John Simoni, his lawyer, said, ''We begged and pleaded with the building department to see if we could at least get some of the contents out.'' But officials said the building was too dangerous to enter. Because the south wall was a load-bearing wall, the damage started what was essentially a slow-motion collapse. The north wall of the building was listing a half-inch to the south and gaps had opened in the mortar of the elevator shaft, Mr. Visconti said. George J. Wasielke, an insurance adjuster representing Walter Blum, estimated that the 1865 building was worth more than $1 million. Mr. Stevens watched a firefighter in a bucket try to coax two cats out of the building. Delicate panes of stained glass were visible through the front windows. ''That's a Tiffany window!'' he shouted, and rushed over to beseech the firefighters to save the building. To no avail. Workers used a crane with a giant clamshell to remove gargoyles and a cast-iron lamppost from the roof and put them in the courtyard. By 8 p.m., the clamshell was chewing on chunks of roof and brick, widening the hole in the building while a crowd cheered. | Collapse Dooms Building and Its Treasures |
1214722_1 | on Tuesday, is recovering, under police protection, at a local hospital. James Brooke (NYT) HAITI: U.S. WARNING -- The United States warned Haiti that it risked losing international aid if it did not quickly correct the flaws of its recent elections. Haiti held parliamentary and municipal elections on May 21 in which observers said tainted results in Senate races had favored Lavalas, the political party of former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Turnout was very low in a second round of voting on Sunday. (Reuters) EUROPE NORTHERN IRELAND: ORANGEMEN URGE PROTEST -- Portadown Orangemen called for renewed province-wide protests against the decision denying them the right to parade through a Catholic neighborhood near Drumcree church despite widespread criticism from fellow Protestants of their earlier request to ''take to the streets'' and the nights of violence that followed. The Royal Ulster Constabulary issued figures showing that over 10 days there were 329 attacks on the police and army, leaving 81 officers and 6 soldiers injured, 305 firebomb incidents, 105 vehicles hijacked and 404 others burned, and 174 buildings damaged. Warren Hoge (NYT) CORSICA: WARNING FROM PARIS -- French officials have warned Corsican politicians that they may be asking for too much in their negotiations for more independence from Paris. The Corsican legislature rejected an offer from Prime Minister Lionel Jospin, who offered the island unprecedented rights, including limited powers to modify laws voted in Paris. ''I hope that the Corsican representatives will be wise enough not to go beyond what the Republic can do today,'' said France's agriculture minister, Jean Glavany, who has close dealings with Corsica. Suzanne Daley (NYT) TURKEY: HEAT WAVE HEALTH RISKS -- Government offices across Turkey were ordered shut down for two days by the health ministry in response to a record heat wave across the country. The offices were closed to reduce health risks and lessen demands on power supplies as temperatures topped 100 degrees in many areas and were reported up to 114 degrees in the southeast in a second week of blistering temperatures. In Istanbul, authorities cautioned people to remain indoors from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Douglas Frantz (NYT) GERMANY: SYNAGOGUE BOMBERS JAILED -- Two teenagers who threw gasoline bombs at a synagogue in eastern Germany on Hitler's birthday were convicted and sentenced to prison, a verdict meant to show that Germany takes combating far-right violence seriously. Andreas John, 18, drew a three-year term and | World Briefing |
1214751_1 | relationships, but the church leaders focused almost entirely on its use in acknowledging long-term relationships among gay and lesbian Episcopalians. The resolution, approved by the church's bishops in a lopsided vote of 119 to 19, with 4 bishops abstaining, said the church expects long-term relationships among unmarried couples to be monogamous and characterized by ''mutual affection and respect.'' It condemns promiscuity and notes the church's traditional teaching on the sanctity of marriage. Earlier this week the resolution was approved by clergy and lay representatives at the denomination's General Convention, its top policy-making body, whose meeting at the Denver Convention Center ends on Friday. The convention, which meets every three years, is divided into two chambers, a House of Deputies, with clergy and lay people, and a House of Bishops. For any measure to become church law or policy, it must be approved by both houses. But even as the bishops approved the resolution on sexuality, a new debate erupted among the clergy and lay people concerning an older issue, the ordination of women as priests. The topic specifically addressed the reluctance of two of the church's 106 dioceses, its regional jurisdictions, to perform such ordinations. Episcopalians began ordaining women in the 1970's, but some dioceses did not do so for years. In the mid-1990's, impatient with the slowness of a few holdouts, the convention approved a law that no diocese could refuse to ordain a candidate for the priesthood on the basis of sex. Still, the dioceses of Fort Worth and Quincy, Ill., have not ordained women, prompting a majority of clergy and lay representatives at the convention today to pass a resolution that would set up a task force to ''assist'' the two dioceses -- as well as the diocese of San Joaquin, Calif., which only recently began ordaining women -- in complying with the church law. Afterward, the Rev. Charles Hough III of Fort Worth said he objected to the resolution's intention on the ground that opponents of women's ordination were ''being asked to deny what we believe.'' But Katie Sherrod, a Fort Worth resident and member of the Episcopal Women's Caucus, a group that supports women's ordination, said the reluctance of the diocese to embrace woman as priests had led some families not to have their daughters confirmed in the Episcopal Church. ''I do feel we need the ministry of female priests in our diocese,'' she said. | Episcopalians In Agreement On Sexuality |
1212952_8 | the Empire State Building. This 26-story tower rose atop the earlier three-story Colonnade Building by William Welles Bosworth, seemingly supported by its mammoth, trunklike Ionic columns. They now frame the windows of Coliseum Books. With a series of setbacks, this powerfully spare composition recalled the mesas of the Southwest -- if mesas had been topped by electric General Motors signs. The building is now home to Newsweek, and the sign now advertises the A&E ''Biography'' series. In 1977, the Hearst Corporation acquired the Argonaut Building, where it had been a tenant for many years. Cosmopolitan, Cosmo Girl, Country Living, Popular Mechanics and Redbook are among the Hearst magazines based there today. Hearst has operated on and around Columbus Circle since 1895, when William Randolph Hearst bought the Virginia Hotel at 59th Street and turned it into the office of The New York Journal. Today, Hearst's Esquire magazine is in the former Automobile Club annex on 55th Street, and its Classic American Homes and Marie Claire magazines are in the former United States Rubber Building. (Its corporate headquarters, at Eighth Avenue and 57th Street, are only a block from Automobile Row.) A Monument to Tires The 20-story tower built in 1912 for United States Rubber, the forerunner of Uniroyal, is the cynosure of Automobile Row. Clad in Vermont marble and crowned with a broad copper cornice, it meets the oblique intersection of Broadway and 58th Street with a rounded prow, resembling a 275-foot stack of tires, and hovers over Columbus Circle like an alabaster version of the Flatiron Building. Carrere & Hastings, the architects of the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue, designed the building. They specified rubber-tile floors and marble trim for the ground-floor United States Tire showroom. Altered beyond recognition in 1959, this space is now a branch of the HSBC Bank. The ornate elevator lobby was reclaimed in 1986 after an associate in the architectural firm of Beyer Blinder Belle discovered rosettes and a frieze above the modern dropped ceiling. Ms. Raab, the chairwoman of the landmarks commission, said the building was likely to be designated this fall. The owners are not opposed, said their lawyer, Mark A. Levine of Herrick, Feinstein, and are even planning to light the tower at night to show off its architectural features. End of the Road Next door, at 1780 Broadway, is another potential landmark, the 12-story former B. F. Goodrich | Street of Automotive Dreams |
1212987_0 | To the Editor: ''French Pique'' (editorial, July 1) ignores the main issues raised by the French foreign minister, Hubert Vedrine, when France declined to sign the Warsaw declaration of democratic principles. Mr. Vedrine's statement spoke about the need for democracy to grow from within a country and not be forced upon it from the outside. It referred to different forms of democracy, noting that each case has circumstances making it unique. There is no need for a declaration on democracy at this moment, other than for the United States to try to gain praise for something it has done little to promote worldwide except through force or the providing of arms. Why not work with existing institutions like the United Nations? Why create a new forum? It is disingenuous to call France's action a rejection of American leadership, because the French took a more nuanced position about the multihued nature of democracy. SUJATHA BYRAVAN Brooklyn, July 1, 2000 | France and Democracy |
1247670_2 | Ecuador. The measure is intended to control trafficking of contraband weapons back into Brazil, which has contributed to a rising crime rate. It does not apply to the United States, the main market for Brazilian weapons. Larry Rohter (NYT) ARGENTINA: BEEF BAN LIFTED The United States has lifted a ban on Argentine beef after a three-month suspension of imports, the government reported. The ban went into effect after reports that cows exposed to foot and mouth disease had been smuggled in from Paraguay. Clifford Krauss (NYT) ASIA PHILIPPINES: IMPEACHMENT PROCEDURES A Senate committee approved proposed procedures for the impeachment trial of President Joseph Estrada, which is expected to begin next month. The draft procedures now go to the full Senate for approval. Seth Mydans (NYT) MYANMAR: ACTIVIST SUED BY BROTHER Daw Aung Suu Kyi, the pro-democracy leader of the former Burma, has been sued by her brother for half-ownership of the home that has sometimes been her refuge and sometimes her prison for the past 12 years. Supporters said she had been summoned to appear in court next week in the suit by her brother, U Aung San Oo. Seth Mydans (NYT) EAST TIMOR: U.N. PANEL VISITS A delegation from the United Nations Security Council visited refugee camps in Indonesian West Timor and renewed an international demand that the government crack down on the militias that continue to terrorize some 100,000 refugees from East Timor. The delegation laid flowers at the site where the militias killed three United Nations workers in September. Seth Mydans (NYT) JAPAN: PROTEST AT U.S. EMBASSY Angry consumers wearing skull masks and black capes demonstrated outside the United States Embassy to demand a halt to exports of American corn to Japan after traces of a genetically modified grain were found in food in Japan last month. Japan does not approve the import of the grain for either animal or human consumption and its discovery shocked consumers. Stephanie Strom (NYT) AFRICA CONGO: CIVILIANS ON RUN More than 600,000 civilians have been displaced by an upsurge in fighting in rebel-held parts of Congo, a senior United Nations official, Charles Petrie, said. The new figure brings the estimated number of displaced people in the north and east alone to 1.6 million. (Reuters) PACIFIC FIJI: CONSTITUTION RULING A judge ruled that the 1997 Constitution, scrapped by the military after a May 19 coup, remains in force. The military-installed interim government | WORLD BRIEFING |
1247611_0 | Call them outsider rugs. At the News Gallery in SoHo, there is an exhibition of 33 hand-hooked, mostly wool rugs made by people who are mentally, physically or emotionally handicapped. The artists are from the Creative Growth Art Center in Oakland, Calif., a day school for adults started in 1973. Some of them paint, some draw and others turn those images into rugs. The show includes Donald Patterson's ''U.S. Greenback,'' top left, and William Tyler's ''The Imposter Chicken Took the Eggs to the Movies.'' ''The artists have disabilities ranging from autism to Down syndrome,'' said Kim Hastreiter, the editor of Paper magazine and the curator of the exhibition. The rugs, which run about 2 feet by 3 feet, sell for $500 to $1,200 and can be ordered from the gallery at 495 Broadway, fifth floor, near Broome Street. Information: (212) 925-9700. The show runs through Dec. 22. CURRENTS: RUGS | For People With Disabilities, Self-Expression in the Wool |
1247617_0 | BECKY BREWER never used the Sharp Wizard electronic organizer she bought in 1999, yet in August she spent $250 for a more elaborate hand-held device, a Handspring Visor Deluxe. ''I thought the new look and feel would help me organize my life,'' said Ms. Brewer, a project manager for Matrix Group International, a northern Virginia technology company. But so far, the new Visor is collecting more dust than addresses and appointments. She could add it to her pile of other nifty gadgets that she hardly ever uses: a Game Boy Color, two digital cameras, a scanner and a Zip drive. She sold her hardly used I.B.M. laptop at a loss, after hundreds of dollars' worth of upgrades, on eBay. ''I'm kind of like a kid who gets new a toy, uses it a few weeks and then gets tired of it,'' Ms. Brewer said. In the rapidly evolving world of technology, people like Ms. Brewer are a marketer's dream: consumers who purchase the latest high-tech toys but frequently do not need them or know how to use them. They buy mobile phones for emergencies but rarely carry them, forget their numbers or have no idea how to set up the voice mail. They purchase Palms or other hand-held computers when paper planners would do. Or they buy the latest, fastest computer just to surf the Web or send e-mail. It raises the question: Does anybody really need all this stuff? ''Do people need sports scores delivered to their cell phones on an instantaneous basis?'' asked Dr. Dan Cook, an assistant professor of leisure studies and sociology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. ''All I could think of are the bookies.'' Dr. Cook suggests that many technology purchases are a case of keeping up with the Joneses. But the Joneses no longer just live next door -- they also work and socialize with us. ''If you don't have a cell phone, people can't reach you and you stand out,'' Dr. Cook said. ''People feel like they're missing out on something. This is a new revolution. Palm Pilots and cell phones are not just new products -- they're new mediums. It's not like getting a new pair of Nike sneakers or a new car.'' Of course, all those new high-tech gizmos on the market come with unfamiliar features and controls that are sometimes hard to understand and set up. Computer message | But Does Anybody Really Use This Stuff? |
1249795_0 | Nocturnal Wildlife | |
1249788_1 | speed of 60 m.p.h., and travel 120 miles on compressed air alone before needing a recharge from a home air compressor (four hours) or a service-station unit (three minutes). The air would be stored in carbon-fiber or fiberglass tanks at very high pressure (4,351 pounds per square inch), then combined with warmer outside air in the cylinder to move a piston. Mr. Negre has said that his car would actually scrub the ambient air with on-board carbon filters. Shiva Vencat, who heads M.D.I.'s operation in the United States through Zero Pollution Motors, an entity he solely owns, said the air car would be an ''urban vehicle'' sold mainly to fleet operators. At 55 m.p.h., he said, the range drops to less than 60 miles. The company is considering adding a small engine solely to heat the air, which, Mr. Vencat said, would potentially double the range. Compressed-air vehicles are not a new idea. Steam engines work on a similar principle. Around 1900, compressed-air trams plied the streets of Paris, and in his recently discovered 1863 novel, ''Paris in the 20th Century,'' Jules Verne imagined compressed air as the wave of the future on the rails. But the trams made only short trips, and attempts to run cars or trucks on compressed air have foundered on the weight of the air tanks needed to obtain a minimally acceptable range of 100 miles or more. The range problem also bedevils battery-powered electric cars. Glenn Bower, a professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Wisconsin, who with his students has designed hybrid-power vehicles, said he thought that compressed air compared unfavorably with batteries as a medium for storing energy. ''Compressed air is probably 5 to 10 times less efficient than a battery electric system,'' Professor Bower said. Prof. Andrew Frank, who designs hybrid cars and trucks at the Future Automotive Technology and Engineering Center of the University of California at Davis, said that air compressors were inherently inefficient, losing at least half their generated energy as waste heat. ''It's a losing game because the efficiency is just not there,'' he said. And Dave Hermance, executive engineer at the Toyota Technical Center in Gardena, Calif., said that a commercially acceptable, safety-certified vehicle running on compressed air alone would probably have a range of only 10 miles. Accepting the new claims for the energy potential of compressed air would require ''a complete rethink of | Pneumatic Car: Environmental Bonanza or a Lot of Hot Air? |
1249824_0 | It might take weeks to figure out how the insect-killing trait in genetically altered StarLink corn migrated into a variety of corn that was not supposed to be genetically modified, according to the Garst Seed Company, the producer of the corn. Garst, which announced on Tuesday that it had encountered the biological mystery while testing samples of corn seed marketed as early as 1998, said it might also take weeks to sort out how widespread the problem was and whether any of the corn had made it into the food chain. Garst's announcement was just the latest twist in a biotechnology controversy that began in September with the discovery that small amounts of corn from StarLink crops, which were supposed to be sold only for animal feed or industrial use, had shown up in taco shells and other food products. StarLink corn, which was invented by Aventis CropScience, the agricultural division of the Aventis Corporation, contains a gene that produces a protein called Cry9c, which is toxic to corn borers and related insects. StarLink has no known health effects on humans, and similar toxins are widely used in agriculture. But the Environmental Protection Agency decided in 1997 that Aventis's technology should be kept out of human food because laboratory tests indicated that the protein might cause food allergies. Biotechnology critics jumped on the unauthorized spread this year of StarLink into the food chain as proof of how hard genetically engineered traits are to segregate once they are in the agricultural marketplace. Many critics argue that much of the technology should be banned until stricter controls and better assessments of any potential long-range effects are in place. Garst's announcement this week opened up a new front in the battle by suggesting that breakdowns in segregation can come even before the seed reaches the farmer. ''This blows a lot of assumptions out of the water,'' said Margaret Mellon, senior scientist with the Union of Concerned Scientists in Washington. ''How do you regulate risks that manifest themselves even before the product is out there?'' The new controversy involves a strain of corn called 8481 that Garst bred for growing conditions in the heart of the Midwest. One version of the corn sold in 1998 had the StarLink trait but the other, known as 8481IT, did not. Or so Garst thought. After a few farmers complained that tests showed their supposedly unmodified 8481 carried | Company Says Tracing Problem Corn May Take Weeks |
1244810_0 | BUTTING OUT Under the auspices of the World Health Organization, representatives of 150 countries got together in Geneva last month for the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control. Aiming toward an international antismoking treaty by 2003, the conference represents an unprecedented effort to limit the use of a drug that kills four million people a year. But it's going to be an uphill battle. LOOK WHO'S SMOKING All around the world, cigarettes remain extremely popular. Globally, according to the W.H.O., 47 percent of men and 12 percent of women are smokers, a gender disparity that is a result of social taboos and financial inequality. The leader, by far, is China, with 300 to 340 million smokers. And not only do a lot of Chinese smoke; they smoke a lot too -- an average of 1,791 cigarettes a year. In the United States, 27.6 percent of men and 22.1 percent of women smoke, consuming an average of 2,146 cigarettes a year. In Haiti, down near the bottom of the list, only 10.7 percent of men and 8.6 percent of women smoke, and on average each Haitian consumes a scant 172 cigarettes a year. THE CRUSADE IN THE AMERICAS As sneering Europeans -- and anyone who has ever had to stand in freezing rain just to suck down some nicotine -- know, America has some of the strictest antismoking laws in the world. Including a new generation of ads that portray smokers as hapless dupes of industry propaganda, the effort seems to be working: since the mid-1960's, the habit has been waning. But most other countries aren't exactly racing to catch up. The number of countries that set strict limits on tobacco advertising, for example, has fallen to 18, down from 27 a decade ago. ''In some places halfhearted attempts are being made,'' says Mohammad Akhter, executive director of the American Public Health Association, ''but most markets are absolutely open to tobacco.'' THE CONTINENTAL DIVIDE Antismoking efforts on the Continent range from extreme to extremely lax. The Scandinavian countries have banned tobacco advertisements and heaped so many taxes on the product that in Norway a pack of cigarettes costs $7.28. In England, nonsmoking offices are becoming commonplace. Spain offers vague warnings like ''Smoking can harm health.'' But in most former Eastern bloc countries, where smoking was one of the few indulgences readily available under Communist rule, there are almost no obstacles to lighting | The Way We Live Now: 11-05-00: Salient Facts: Antismoking Campaigns; Blowing Smoke |
1244804_1 | food and medicine, only Cuba will be barred from paying for them with United States government credits or loans from private United States banks. That prohibition and the codification of the travel restrictions were added at the urging of Cuban-American members of Congress from Florida. And with that state widely regarded as pivotal in the presidential election, few members of Congress from either party wanted to risk alienating the sizeable Cuban-American voting bloc by opposing the restrictions. Still, that may not be the end of the matter. Officials of both parties have vowed to try to remove the travel ban in the next session of Congress. And a recent poll of 1,975 Cuban-Americans in Miami-Dade County, conducted by researchers at Florida International University in Miami, found that while 62.4 percent of respondents still favored retaining the economic embargo, 52.8 percent wanted unrestricted travel to Cuba. Moreover, American hotel companies, airlines and the many cruise lines registered abroad but headquartered in the United States are eager to compete with the Canadian and European companies that already operate or own hotels and nightclubs in Cuba. Also, tour operators think that Cuba will be a big attraction for American tourists. ''New ports are always exciting to people who like to cruise,'' said Tom Hicks, owner of Kruger Travel, a tour operator in Little rock, Ark. ''I have a feeling many of our customers would like to take a cruise to Cuba. I'd like to see it myself.'' Tammy Selee, marketing director of Harmon Tours in Boise, Idaho, also thinks that lifting restrictions would create an initial flurry of interest. ''But they may find that it'll look more like a third world nation than that romantic isle we're used to seeing in old movies.'' Other tour operators have similar reservations. Barbara Osman, president of 4 Seasons Tours and Travel in Wilmington, Del., said, ''Before I'd send a group there I'd have to go myself to sample the food and see if the accommodations and infrastructure would live up to their expectations.'' Despite the formalizing of the ban, few travel officials expect the number of American visitors to Cuba to decline. In fact, the law calls for creation of a new travel category that will allow Americans to visit to sell food and other agricultural products. Cuba's Tourism Ministry said some 165,000 Americans visited the island last year. That included about 100,000 naturalized Americans born | Traveling to Cuba Is as Tricky as Ever |
1244962_1 | for all disabled students, special education has become one of the most pressing issues in schools today. With the broadening of the federal law, the number of eligible children has also crept upward, and the pressure on special education administrators has intensified proportionately. Yet to Diana Autin, executive director of Statewide Parent Advocacy Network, known as SPAN, a nonprofit group that advises and informs parents and professionals of educational rights and programs for children with disabilities, the directors of the state's special education programs are ''a very mixed bag.'' Indeed, many parents contend that a major problem with special education programs throughout the state is that the directors are not qualified to hold such a difficult and sensitive position. Ida Graham, director for the Office of Licensing and Credentials for the state Department of Education, said that to qualify as a director, a person must pass a national test to get a school administrator's license. In addition, Ms. Graham said, potential directors must have a master's degree that includes course work in management. But districts can -- and some do -- skirt the requirement by not calling the person a director. Many work their way up from the team of personnel that draws up a student's Individualized Educational Program, or I.E.P. Or, they can be school psychologists, though there is no specific training set out by state or federal law. As most superintendents tell it, a good special education administrator is hard to find, and even more difficult to keep, even though most of them earn from $80,000 to $120,000 a year -- about the same as public high school principals. ''I spent most of my time dealing with issues of litigation, issues of law and issues of paper,'' said Dr. Rotter. ''Most of us went into this because we like children. I wanted to do curriculum and teacher training. This took me away from that front. You become a financial manager.'' Moreover, in this more litigious era, parents are more inclined to try to recover attorney's fees in court should they decide to fight their school districts. Services like occupational therapy and physical therapy that might once have been financed by insurance companies are now expected to be provided in schools. Disabilities among classified children range from those who need speech therapy to those with multiple handicaps who need a myriad of health care professionals to accompany them through | From the Classroom To the Trenches |
1244670_3 | in one caretaker couple living in a log cabin often heard porcupines gnawing and ''would grab her gun and shoot them while still in bed.'' In 1917, the Hunter tower was replaced by a porcupine-proof, 60-foot-high steel model, with the steel hauled up by horse and wagon. Eventually 23 towers were scattered in and around the Catskills, most built by 1927. In the 1980's, though, with aerial surveillance deemed more effective, the state began phasing out the towers' use, with the last observer climbing down from the Red Hill tower, in Claryville, in 1990. The towers, neglected, deteriorated rapidly. Most were dismantled, with the remaining five closed for safety reasons. But just as those five also seemed headed for the scrap heap, enough people popped up who cared about them -- their views and their history (four are on the National Register of Historic Places) -- that a movement was born to save them. In early 1997, with community support, the Catskill Fire Tower Restoration Project was started. It has raised more than $60,000, some from the state, some from the sale of T-shirts and the like, and the rest from bake sales, raffles, fund-raising concerts and private donations. While Ms. Budrock scoured for cash, Mr. Profous ''did all the technical stuff, getting the contractors up there, ordering bolts,'' Ms. Budrock said. ''I did the fund-raising. George made it happen.'' Making it happen involved getting heavy materials to each site, and this time horse and wagon gave way to helicopter airlifts and all-terrain vehicles. The Hunter tower was the fourth to reopen, following Red Hill, Balsam and Overlook, not far from Woodstock. And one recent Sunday, with an early snow swirling, volunteers struggled to install windows on the last of the five, at Mount Tremper, before giving in to the icy winds. The tower, with windows, will open officially in the spring. The next goal is to have ''summit stewards'' -- volunteers to stay at the towers in summer and tell of the mountains' wonders. Ms. Budrock sees the towers as a way ''to boost ecotourism'' and as a boon for nearby communities. One hurdle will be maintenance. Any leftover cash will be the seed money for a preservation fund, Mr. Profous said. ''We're hoping that in the future no one will consider letting them fall apart again. That's what happened last time, and in 20 years they became useless.'' | Phoenicia Journal; Great Views, and a Peek Into the Past |
1251296_1 | and is a former Air Force officer, started doing publicity three years ago for the Picton Castle, a 180-foot bark that sails out of Lunenburg, Nova Scotia. In researching his task, Mr. Cerchione noticed barnacles on many of the 700-odd tall-ship Web sites he found. ''They weren't pulling a lot of hits,'' he said. Like a convoy organizer, Mr. Cerchione gave his fleet safety in numbers by offering each ship a berth at his Web site. Ships are indexed according to 36 services offered, from ''adventure travel,'' ''ambassadorial'' and ''at-risk youth'' to ''theatrical,'' ''trading,'' ''winter'' and ''workshops.'' Users can search not only by ship's name, but also by country, state, province and home port. That lets a parent, for example, find out what ships offering sail training and eco-tours will be sailing next June from New England ports. Many of the tall ships are represented on the site by a half-dozen or more Web links, with specifications, histories, newspaper or magazine articles, itineraries and pictures. The pictures are hypnotic. There is the 295-foot bark Eagle, which was built for Nazi Germany and seized as a war prize and is now a training vessel for Coast Guard cadets (and the only square-rigger in United States government service). The Lord Nelson, named for Britain's most famous disabled sailor -- no disrespect to Long John Silver -- has been thoroughly outfitted with special equipment that allows it to be sailed by the physically disabled. The entries on the replica of the schooner Amistad offer a minicourse on American slavery and the nascent abolitionist movement, and those on the Niagara do the same thing for the War of 1812. Then there is the Rose, believed to be the world's largest active wooden sailing vessel, and the Columbus Fleet Sailing School in Corpus Christi, Tex. Mr. Cerchione runs his Web enterprise from Deep Gap, N.C., about 320 miles from the coast, but he talks about his ships with the enthusiasm of a Hornblower. ''If you sat down in a bar with these captains, they will tell you stories -- you think you're back somewhere with Ahab,'' he said, relishing the romance. ''But they don't know how to tell those stories to the media.'' He explained to the seabound experts that they should open up their sites to all manner of explorers. So on the site for the Picton Castle, for example, the captain's updated weekly | For All the Tall Ships, A Single Virtual Port |
1251341_0 | What would Mr. Phelps, the leader of the Mission: Impossible team from the 1960's TV series, need to guarantee that his secrets are safe today? How about self-destructing e-mail? With SafeMessage from AbsoluteFuture, the sender chooses how long an e-mail will hang around before it is automatically deleted from the sender's and recipient's computers -- that period could be Mission: Impossible's 5-second standard or as long as 14 days. The e-mail is completely erased from the hard drives, which are overwritten. The company says its product is more secure because the messages are transmitted point-to-point via a server run by AbsoluteFuture, not by Internet mail servers, which leave a traceable record. The message itself cannot be printed, copied, cut-and-pasted or forwarded by the recipient. ''This is not meant to replace e-mail,'' said Graham Andrews, the president and chief executive of AbsoluteFuture. ''This is for private personal business, like that between you and your lawyer or accountant.'' SafeMessage costs $99 for a one-year subscription to set up a two-person line of communication. There are also commercial versions. The system uses both public key encryption and symmetric key encryption to transmit messages between computers. A message does not leave the sender's computer until it has gone through a three-layer encryption process. It remains encrypted until it is opened on the recipient's screen. The user also needs a password to open the SafeMessage window to read the message. SHELLY FREIERMAN NEWS WATCH | Self-Destructing E-Mail Offers Additional Security |
1243866_1 | troops skirmished just a week ago. Mr. Bakir said he hoped to complete his hotel by April, but a Bolivian bank cut off negotiations for a $2 million loan during the recent road blockades by coca growers hoping to protect their last illicit crops. Now the project is at a standstill. ''No country can prosper without peace,'' sighed Mr. Bakir, who otherwise is known for his Panglossian optimism. But with the possibility that the recent protests are the final sparks of a dying coca farmer movement, dreamers like Mr. Bakir are cropping up all over the tropical Chapare region. An area the size of New Jersey in central Bolivia, the Chapare is rich with magnificent waterfalls, rare orchids, splendid butterflies, jungles full of toucans and parrots, and roadside restaurants that cook up wild boar and catfish with zesty local sauces heavy on the garlic. Coca growers who have had their fields eradicated are starting over by building their own botanical gardens and amusement parks cut out of the jungles in their backyards. The mayor of Villa Tunari is building a $40,000 ''welcome arch'' across the highway that cuts through town in hopes of encouraging tourists to stop. Two German biologists have built a small ''ethno-ecology'' museum complete with local tarantula and snake specimens and a restaurant in the back that specializes in bouillabaisse and German pancakes. Despite the occasional gunshots and whiffs of tear gas, a few tourists do come. Some are fishermen. Some are botanists. And then there are the curious. ''In Sweden you hear about the jungle, but here you can actually see the monkeys and small alligators on the rivers,'' said Jorgen Wrengbro, 51, a Swedish police officer and Evangelist missionary who stopped by the museum. ''And of course you can see the coca plants.'' Naturally, most tourists would avoid a region known for drug traffickers and unrest. And it will take a long time to overcome years of bad publicity, like a line in the Lonely Planet Bolivia travel guide that warns of the dangers of hiking through remote stretches of the Isiboro-Secure National Park ''unless you have all the proper letters of recommendation from people higher up in the coca growers' association.'' But local guides say a bad reputation for some is a magnetic mystique for others. ''The tourists always ask about the coca,'' said Jose del Gadillo, a 38-year-old guide. ''And many ask where | Shinahota Journal; Where the Coca Trade Withers, Tourism Sprouts |
1245495_3 | some simple bookings like New York to London, but for ''the complex international reservations, or the reservations to third world or difficult areas, live agents are probably always going to be involved'' because people feel more secure dealing with a professional. Incidentally, besides the State Department site, here are two other government sites with useful information for international travelers: www.odci.gov/cia/publications/factbook, containing an annual factbook with basic geopolitical information about world nations, and www.cdc.gov/travel, which has information on things like immunizations, disease outbreaks around the world, and cruise-ship health and safety violations. On another note, more than a dozen readers reacted with skepticism to an item in this space a couple of weeks ago about the CNN Airport Network. The item quoted an official at the network, which broadcasts CNN airport programming on televisions in departure lounges, as saying that CNN goes to great lengths to ensure that those passengers who don't want to have a television blasting at them while they wait for their planes are provided with quiet zones where the bellow of the beast can't be heard. ''May I challenge them to provide locations in, say, the Denver or Chicago United terminals where the terminal is quiet?'' wrote one reader, Gary Cohen of Sacramento, Calif. Come to think of it, I was involuntarily subjected to 45 minutes of too-loud, in-your-face CNN just two weeks ago while waiting in the invincibly sluggish Continental Airlines baggage-claim area at Newark International Airport. Marea Battle, a spokeswoman for CNN Airport Network, said that about 10 times a day the network puts on a programming announcement encouraging viewers to forward questions or comments via e-mail to airport.network@cnn.com. Viewer feedback is also solicited on the network's Web site, www.CNN.com/airport. When major news is happening (last night's election returns, for example), the CNN service is of course wildly popular in airport lounges. But in slower times, some passengers just want to get away from a television and read or think in peace, and the network says that it designs its monitor installation in departure lounges to ensure that there are quiet, TV-free zones. The spokeswoman said the network had technicians in airports to maintain ''quality control standards'' that include making sure the sound isn't too loud. ''It is our objective to provide an informative, entertaining and free passenger service that is discretionary to passengers,'' she said. The Business Travel column appears each Wednesday. E-mail: jsharkey@nytimes.com. | Business Travel; Get as much information as possible before heading to potential trouble spots. |
1245493_0 | Andy and Rachel Berliner founded Amy's Kitchen, named for their newborn daughter, in 1988. Shocked by how much work caring for a baby could be, they decided there must be other people like them craving quick, convenient meals made from natural ingredients. They came up with products like frozen vegetable pot pie -- comfort food, Mr. Berliner calls it -- and pizza, as well as lasagna and shepherd's pie. Since then, despite minimal advertising and no marketing support, their company, based in Santa Rosa, Calif., has grown to $90 million in annual sales, much of that in high-quality grocery stores like the Florida-based Publix chain and D'Agostino in New York. Amy's Kitchen is dwarfed by big food companies like Kraft, a unit of Philip Morris, and ConAgra, with their billions of dollars in annual sales. Still, some of the largest food makers seem to believe that the formula Amy's Kitchen has adopted -- creating foods that are both healthy and convenient -- is a winner. ''The intersection of health and convenience is a very strong area of future growth for the entire food industry,'' said David Owens, senior vice president for strategy at Kraft North America. But while several big food companies are starting to offer more healthy convenience foods, change is coming slowly. A stroll through the typical supermarket today turns up relatively few packaged products that meet both criteria. Apart from the produce aisle, where items like prewashed lettuce and cut-up canteloupe are both healthy and convenient, traditional food makers have long made convenience the pivotal priority, judging by the fat, salt and sugar content spelled out on the food packages themselves, from canned soup to TV dinners, gravy mix, cold cereal and child-friendly yogurt. A package of Oscar Mayer Lean Turkey Breast Lunchables contains 360 calories, 9 grams of saturated fat -- 45 percent of the recommended daily amount -- and 1,470 milligrams of sodium. Shoppers say they are eager for a bigger choice in health-oriented convenience foods. Eleni Malatou, a full-time student and mother of a 16-month-old, buys ready-made pizza dough to make her own pizzas. ''It's not the best, I know, but it's convenient,'' she said, pushing her grocery cart through a Midtown Manhattan Food Emporium earlier this month. ''They could improve the ingredients, like the flour they use or the yeast they use, and I would feel better.'' But the companies are reluctant to | Can Healthier Foods Help the Bottom Line?; Companies Find Gains in Your Loss |
1245485_0 | To the Editor: Richard Rothstein is correct: while more Americans should attend college, a higher education alone will not solve the growing problems of economic equality (Lessons column, Nov. 1). The increasing demand for workers with precise technical skills has actually led to a growing number of options for high school graduates. Borough of Manhattan Community College and Cisco Systems offer qualified high school graduates in northern Manhattan the opportunity to become certified networking specialists during a six-month training program. We are now placing people in entry-level jobs with average starting salaries of $49,000. I am not suggesting that short-term courses like ours serve as an alternative to college. At the same time, institutions of higher education must ensure that their programs keep pace with the changing demands of the work force. ANTONIO PEREZ President, Borough of Manhattan Community College, CUNY New York, Nov. 2, 2000 | Paths to Learning |
1251218_0 | To the Editor: Al Gore is right to fight (front page, Nov. 28). When the desire to wield power supplants the right of a voter to be heard -- especially when that vote may change the direction of the country -- then democracy itself is imperiled. The fact that a majority of citizens seem willing to ignore this truth because they grow weary of the news coverage or having their television programming interrupted signifies that this is a political system in decline. Such apathy is an insult not only to our founding fathers, but also to the many people in the world who have no choice in their form of government. JACK SLADE Knoxville, Tenn., Nov. 28, 2000 | Who Is Winning the Fight for America's Heart?; Democracy Imperiled |
1249679_1 | affairs, Frank E. Loy, had just begun defending the American stance in the talks, which has been criticized by European officials and environmental groups as too weak, when a woman jumped from her seat and threw the pie in his face. Wiping whipped cream from his lip, Mr. Loy cut short his talk and later issued a statement that said: ''On the eve of Thanksgiving, pumpkin pie would have been a more traditional choice, but what I really want is a strong agreement to fight global warming. I'm headed back to the negotiating table right now with that aim.'' Environmental groups that are lobbying delegations and observing discussions disavowed the attack. ''Many are frustrated by the slow pace of negotiations and the lack of domestic action against global warming,'' said a letter issued by several dozen environmental groups. ''However, we believe there are more constructive ways to achieve our goals of preventing dangerous climate change.'' The Kyoto Protocol calls for industrialized nations to reduce their combined greenhouse-gas releases by 2012 to a level at least 5 percent below emissions in 1990. Earlier today, negotiators said, some progress had been made on several important sticking points, including the roles of nuclear power and the situation in Russia, where emissions have plunged because of economic decline. That has produced a windfall of pollution credits that Russia might eventually sell to countries that are unwilling or unable to reduce emissions. Nuclear power has been a pivotal issue for the European Union and many environmental groups, which have pressed to have it excluded from a list of technologies that wealthy countries could export to poor countries to help them avoid future emissions of carbon dioxide. But Canada, China and the United States oppose such a ban. And France, despite its outward opposition, relies heavily on nuclear plants for its electricity. Tonight, it appeared that language was evolving that would give strong preference under the treaty to less controversial nonpolluting options like wind turbines, but would not explicitly banish nuclear plants. Separately, Russia proposed that any income it received from selling pollution credits would go into a ''green fund'' that would be used to pay only for energy-efficiency projects. Bill Hare, the chief representative of Greenpeace International and a longtime critic of Russia's selling its pollution credits, said the proposal was a move in the right direction. ''This looks like a positive initiative,'' he said. | Protests Are Stepped Up at Hague Talks on Greenhouse Gases |
1249570_0 | COMPUTER components have changed over the years, but a PC today is typically 40 percent steel, 30 percent to 40 percent plastic, 10 percent aluminum and 10 percent other metals, including copper, gold, silver, cadmium and platinum. A monitor adds glass and lead to the components. If a computer cannot be resold or donated, recycling companies take apart the machine -- by hand or with shredders -- and separate the materials. Scrap steel is shipped to mills to be melted down for use in cars and construction beams, among other things. Aluminum can be made into cans and foil. Precious metals are refined and sold to jewelers, dentists and chip makers. Refined copper can be reused in wiring, pipes and computer circuitry. Recycled lead finds its way into car batteries and film. Glass and plastic are more complicated. Leaded glass, used in monitors, cannot be easily recycled, so it is often crushed and used as an industrial abrasive or to make asphalt. Nonleaded glass can be crushed and turned into usable glass. Plastics from older computers often have paint and metallic coatings that can contaminate the waste stream. But even when computer plastic can be separated into pure streams, there are not many markets for it. DMC Electronics Recycling Company, based in Newfields, N.H., sends three million pounds of plastic each year to be recycled into pothole filler. ''We pay a vendor 5 cents a pound to take it away and recycle it,'' said Richard Campbell, director of corporate relations for the company. ''We would rather pay than see it all end up in a landfill.'' The potential is there for greater recycling. I.B.M.'s IntelliStation E Pro computer has eight major parts made of 100 percent recycled plastic, and the covers of its RS/6000 server contain 25 percent recycled plastic from several sources, including old computers. The success of plastic recycling depends on finding enough volume to make it cost effective. Hand separation of the items is expensive, said Mike Biddle, chief executive of MBA Polymers Inc., in Richland, Calif. ''If we have enough of it,'' Mr. Biddle said, ''with our automated process, we can sell it for less than virgin plastic.'' A fire at the processing center last month set the company back, Mr. Biddle said, but ''we'll be back on track soon, and were looking forward to the day when more plastic becomes available.'' | Where It Goes; Breaking Down All Those Computers: Glass Over Here, Plastic There |
1249591_1 | nowhere to go. It has also raised questions about who is responsible for the expensive collection, transportation, dismantling and recycling of old computers. Last year, the National Recycling Coalition, an industry group, conducted the first large-scale survey of America's electronic recycling efforts. The results were staggering. Between now and 2007, the survey found, 500 million personal computers will become obsolete. In 1998 alone, 20 million computers were taken out of service; only 2.3 million were recycled. The remaining are assumed to be languishing in attics, basements and office storage closets. Or they have been thrown in the garbage. Once in a landfill, a computer monitor can be toxic: each cathode-ray tube, or C.R.T., contains four to six pounds of lead. But with the right systems in place, all obsolete computers can be reused or recycled. If a PC is no more than five years old and is still in good condition, it can be resold or donated. Computers beyond their useful life can be disassembled and sold for parts, or their raw materials -- steel, plastic, aluminum, gold, silver, copper and glass -- can be recycled into a different consumer product. Only a handful of state and municipal governments are experimenting with ways to keep computers out of the waste stream. (In April, Massachusetts became the first state to ban cathode-ray tubes in landfills.) The high cost of operating an electronics recycling program often forces them to look outside the government for help. Increasingly, they are turning to the computer manufacturers themselves. ''There ought to be a shared responsibility,'' said Michael Shapiro, deputy assistant administrator for solid waste and emergency response at the United States Environmental Protection Agency. ''We see roles for state and local governments, consumers, and an important and key role for the manufacturers.'' Out of necessity, many large computer manufacturers have long had extensive internal recycling programs in place. Hewlett-Packard, for example, recycles 3.5 million pounds of electronic equipment a month and has its own recycling center. Several companies are starting to reach out to consumers and small-business owners, as well. Sony, for example, is introducing a cooperative take-back program with the state of Minnesota. By year's end, Minnesota residents will be able to bring their old Sony products to designated drop-off sites, free of charge. Sony will then subsidize the cost of transporting the equipment to recycling centers. ''Were not looking to make money on this | All Used Up With Someplace to Go |
1249657_0 | On the rapid-transit train to Hartsfield Atlanta International Airport, at 4:15 p.m. yesterday, Michael K. McNeil sat calmly with a large suitcase and a rolling carry-on, thinking maybe he should have packed a little lighter for his 5:35 flight to Rome, where he hoped to spend Thanksgiving with his in-laws in nearby Peruggia -- if he made the flight. ''I'm cutting it a bit fine,'' he said. Mr. McNeil, an Australian who has lived in Atlanta for 20 years, is familiar with the airport and its reputation as the busiest in the world by some reckonings. ''I didn't watch the news last night,'' he said, ''because when I glanced at the TV, they showed on I-85 a sea of lights and said that 295,000 people would pass through the airport today and tomorrow.'' This is, nearly everyone in the nation knows, the busiest holiday of the year for traveling. Millions of Americans take to the roads, the air and the railroads to get home to family and friends. Traffic jams, overbooked flights, cranky passenger, lost luggage and crowded airports are all too familiar scenesthis time of year. And yesterday, in Atlanta, Chicago, New York and Los Angeles; in other cities big and small; and on interstates and in the airports, congestion was expected to rule. William Lindsey was on the same train, headed to a 5:25 p.m. flight to Memphis, his home ''I allowed extra time,'' he said. Well, not much, because the train was still 15 minutes from the airport. The scene in the train station at the airport was chaotic. Transit workers shouted and directed traffic through the bottlenecks created by turnstiles. But inside the airport terminal, the mass of people and their luggage moved briskly. Sarah Porceng, waiting to check in for her Air-Tran flight home to Boston, said she traveled often and this was one of the best days she had ever seen at the Atlanta airport. ''This is just amazing,'' she said, ''better than most days.'' She said she had allowed herself extra hours to make her 10 p.m. flight, and had chosen Air-Tran because its concourses are usually not as mobbed as Delta's. ''Look at this,'' she said. ''I'm going to try to do the standby thing.'' In Chicago, Sheri Faffl's train car streamed past a car-clogged expressway. ''Boy, am I glad I took the train and followed these warnings,'' she said. She was | Luckiest Holiday Travelers Are Happy Non-Campers |
1246320_3 | have not been asked to help although they have assisted other road projects, for instance repairing the current north-south route, Highway 1. Vietnamese leaders say the four-year, $680 million project will give a badly needed lift to its transportation system and will help develop the Central Highlands. And they are using it as a propaganda rallying point, evoking heroic wartime images as they call for a mass mobilization of labor. But the project has also become the focus of unusual opposition within the country. Its cost and its threat to nature preserves and endangered wildlife are causing concern, as is its potential disruption of the traditional way of life of the hill-tribe minorities that populate the mountains. In a rare sign of opposition, The Saigon Times reported in 1997: ''Most deputies of Ho Chi Minh City, Haiphong and Quang Ninh expressed their concern over the feasibility. Some even voiced their doubts about the economic efficiency of this proposed artery route.'' They reportedly suggested that the existing highway and railroad be upgraded. Planners say the project will involve 60 million working days, and one proposed way to find workers, apparently modified this month in the face of bad publicity, has been particularly controversial: mobilizing unpaid labor on a grand Communist scale reminiscent of Soviet and Chinese projects. Vietnam itself has a history of mass labor projects for irrigation, flood control and national defense. Some 300,000 volunteers like Mr. Du worked on the original Ho Chi Minh Trail. This time, according to the official press, as many as a million people living along the route would be drafted to contribute 10 days each of free labor, or would pay a fee to be exempted. ''A far-reaching movement must be begun to carry on the great mettle of the nation with which we will march toward a new peak,'' said Prime Minister Vo Van Kiet three years ago, employing the grandiose language of Communist exhortation. ''This will be a great construction site with the work of millions of people.'' But he was apparently aware of the darker images he might be invoking, and asserted that no intellectuals or professionals would be drafted to wield picks and shovels. Still, Vietnam is changing. Private enterprise is growing; there is no longer a war to unify the people, and the idea of volunteer labor is highly unpopular. With the project just getting under way this fall, | Making Economic Lifeline of a Wartime Trail |
1246300_3 | When she vanished, investigators said they could not be sure whether Mrs. Durst had become the victim of violence or had chosen to flee a failing marriage. But her friends said Mrs. Durst would not have run away. ''I maintain that Kathy would not have left prior to graduation,'' said Gilberta Najamy, a close friend. ''She was determined to finish medical school and planned to open a children's clinic.'' Mr. Durst, who put up a reward for information about his wife's disappearance and hired a private investigator to help find her, has never been identified by the police as a suspect in the case. But Mrs. Durst's relatives have long said they believe Mr. Durst knew more about the circumstances of his wife's disappearance than he said. They formally made the allegation in a 1983 court proceeding in which Mrs. Durst's mother asked a Surrogate Court judge to appoint her the temporary administrator of her daughter's estate. Mr. Durst's lawyers at the time described the allegation as unfounded. Yesterday, in response to inquiries, Mr. Durst's brother, Douglas, issued a statement denying that his brother played any part in Mrs. Durst's disappearance. ''Robert Durst continues to maintain his innocence,'' the statement said. Mrs. Durst's brother, James McCormack, would not describe his family's feelings toward Mr. Durst. But he said the family was looking forward to anything that might resolve the case. ''We are hopeful that after 18 years this thing can be brought to a resolution,'' he said. ''It's been very painful and much of the pain has been suppressed, but it does not go away.'' Mr. McCormack said that investigators had called him several months ago to alert him that there were potential new leads in the case, but he would not comment further. According to accounts given at the time, Mrs. Durst had attended a dinner party at the home of Ms. Najamy, a friend from college, in Newtown, Conn., on Sunday, Jan. 31, 1982, leaving in the evening to drive her maroon Mercedes home to the Durst weekend retreat in South Salem. Mr. Durst told the police that after arriving in South Salem, his wife decided to travel home to Manhattan because she had classes the next day. He drove her to the Katonah train station, where she boarded the 9:17 p.m. train to New York, according to his account. Mr. Durst told the police that he never | Disappearance Under Scrutiny After 18 Years |
1250714_2 | against Cornell Cooperative Extension of Washington County and six other defendants. Two people died and hundreds were sickened after being exposed to the O157:H7 strain of E. coli, which had contaminated a well supplying food and drink vendors. An investigation determined that a Cooperative Extension 4-H dorm on the fairgrounds, where about 80 children stayed during the weeklong fair, had a sewage pit about 36 feet away from an unchlorinated fairgrounds well. The plaintiffs are seeking $10 million in damages. (AP) POUGHKEEPSIE: SHOPRITE STORES CLOSING Seven ShopRite stores will be closing as their owner, Big V Supermarkets, seeks to cut costs after filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy last week. The company said it would close four stores in Orange County and three stores in Dutchess County. Big V owns 39 ShopRite stores in New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania. The remaining 32 stores will be renamed Big V Supermarkets. (AP) NEW JERSEY TRENTON: PROFILING REPORT RELEASE More than 90,000 pages of New Jersey state police records dealing with racial profiling will be released today, the state attorney general's office said. The documents will be made available for the public to read and photocopy in an office in the state justice complex, said Roger Shatzkin, a spokesman for the attorney general, John J. Farmer Jr. They will also be sold as a set of 17 CD-ROM's for $1,000, Mr. Shatzkin said. Andy Newman (NYT) HACKENSACK: MINORITY GRADUATION LAGS The number of black and Hispanic students enrolled at New Jersey colleges is on the rise, but their graduation rates still lag behind those of white students. Although about 60 percent of white students in New Jersey graduate from college within six years after they enroll, only about 40 percent of black and Hispanic students do. College administrators point to financial troubles, social isolation and lack of resources in public schools many students attended. The New Jersey Commission on Higher Education said one way to narrow the graduation gap is to increase spending for the Educational Opportunity Fund, which provides money for non-tuition expenses of low-income students. (AP) HAMILTON TOWNSHIP: WELFARE CUTOFF The state Division of Family Development is scheduled to announce a plan today to help welfare recipients find jobs before a mandatory cutoff of benefits in 2002. Almost 11,000 families have been on welfare for three years or more and will be cut off after a cumulative five years of welfare | METRO BRIEFING |
1245076_1 | e-mail -- the cost is zero but the impact is exponential.'' In hundreds of campaigns, e-mail has replaced telephones as a way of lining up volunteers for Election Day. Daily e-mail alerts are being sent to voters, announcing last-minute rallies, rebutting attacks, heralding the latest newspaper endorsement and even helping people to register to vote online. Many campaigns -- especially the presidential one -- are providing Web-based tool kits to help supporters write their own e-mail messages. Supporters then forward these messages in what amounts to a political chain letter. ''This is all happening under the radar screen,'' said Christopher Hunter, a research fellow at the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania. ''E-mail is becoming one of the most important tools in campaigning.'' In the presidential race, the Gore campaign is circulating an e-mail message imploring voters to ''PASS THIS E-MAIL ALONG AND HELP AL GORE WIN THE FIGHT!'' The message contains links to the Gore campaign Web site and to a list of Gore endorsements and asks supporters to take 10 others to the polls on Election Day. For the more Web-savvy, the message connects recipients to a spot on the Web site where they can design their own pro-Gore sites and then distribute them, via e-mail, to others. Meanwhile, the Bush effort, called an ''e-train,'' sends supporters daily e-mail messages on subjects the supporter has selected. Like the Gore's, the Bush campaign urges supporters to forward the messages. Larry Purpuro, the Bush campaign's deputy chief of staff, said that over the last 10 days of the campaign, more than 150 different e-mail messages would be sent out to nearly one million voters. ''We believe electronic word-of-mouth is the best form of voter contact,'' Mr. Purpuro said. ''It's personalized, it's targeted and it works with lightning speed.'' And it doesn't cost very much, which is why it appeals to grass-roots supporters like J. R. Badian, a New York advertising executive who is waging an e-mail effort on behalf of Mr. Gore. He is sending an e-mail message to friends and encouraging them to mail it to five others and ask them, in turn, to pass it on. In advertising, this is called viral marketing, and it is a technique Mr. Badian has also used for his corporate clients. ''If I send it to 20 people and they each send it to five people, after a while | E-Mail Part of the Effort To Turn Out the Voters |
1245080_1 | which advertised the e-tailers' goods in exchange for commissions. But e-tailers must cede control of their brands to their affiliates, and when a visitor clicks away to browse the e-tailer's site, the affiliate loses the visitor. But that is changing as companies create miniature, portable stores online. Through these kiosks, e-tailers can ensure better treatment of their brands while allowing the affiliates to keep visitors. Bob Tedeschi: E-Commerce Report. [C16.] Winners and Losers in Chrysler Pick The Madison Avenue version of Election Day came four days before the real thing when the Chrysler Group ended a closely fought battle for its huge consolidated account by choosing the Omnicom Group over True North Communications. The decision creates what is probably the world's biggest single automotive assignment. Stuart Elliott: Advertising. [C24.] Another Format in the E-Book Field The competition to set a standard for electronic publishing is about to become even more confusing. Reciprocal, a small company that provides Random House, Time Warner and other publishers with digital distribution services for the three existing and incompatible formats is introducing a fourth, the first one for both personal computers and the popular Palm series of digital organizers. [C20.] A Mini-Size Harper's Bazaar With its March issue, Harper's Bazaar will introduce a digest-size version of the magazine. The mini-Bazaar will be published twice next year, in March and September, as a draw for advertisers. It will be about half the size of the original and carry identical advertising and content. Hearst Magazines will print 100,000 copies of the miniature, which will be distributed in airports, Barnes & Noble bookstores and high-end newsstands in key markets. [C20.] E-Mail Used to Mobilize Voters While much has been made of the role the Internet has -- or has not -- played in the election, campaigns nationwide say e-mail is turning into a powerful way to mobilize supporters and, they hope, get them to the polls. [C6.] Legacy of Cray Supercomputers SRC Computers, the company that Seymour R. Cray founded just months before his death in 1996, plans this week to introduce its first machine since the death of the man known widely as the father of supercomputing. [C8.] At Microsoft, a Wireless Pioneer At Microsoft, Dick Brass is pursuing his personal mission of introducing the world to a fully powered Windows ''tablet,'' unfettered by keyboard or cables, that would always be wirelessly connected to the Internet. [C22.] | BUSINESS DIGEST |
1243628_1 | ''You make fast friendships, find what you have in common quickly,'' said Sonja Ericson, who arrived here with Dennis Russell a few months ago aboard the Golondrina to take a breather from the third year of an anticipated 10-year sailing adventure. ''Because you're always saying goodbye, you learn to appreciate the friendships.'' While nature had blessed this area for centuries, the civil war kept the cruisers away for years. About 10 years ago, with the war winding down, they were able to make their way back. Now, about half a dozen marinas have opened along the river, each with clusters of boats huddled together, their lights twinkling at night and music echoing through the air. Although there was a killing (so far unsolved) of a cruiser last year, the worst crimes this year have been a rash of thefts from boats. The cruisers range from adventurous young couples to wealthy retirees. They are not easy to categorize, considering that it takes more than a touch of individualism to uproot oneself and go sailing around the world. They do tend to choose certain marinas, like certain neighborhoods, according to reputation and convenience. ''We're known as the geriatric marina because we tend to have older groups of cruisers,'' joked Daphne Hartley, who runs Mario's Marina. ''We like that. We're not into the big, heavy bar scene.'' The bars attract the one group that can be categorized: the ''single-handers'' -- lone sailors who congregate further downriver near the town of Fronteras. ''They end up living here and are usually oddballs,'' Ms. Hartley said. ''They go for the night life and the girls. A lot of them are heavy drinkers and a little difficult to get along with.'' But Fronteras residents welcome the cruisers and the dollars they spend and the jobs they create. It has been a boon for the town, where a good portion of the jobs have shifted from fishing to tourism and boat repair. The cruisers stay in touch through a radio network that broadcasts arrivals, departures and other events. They also use radio connections to receive e-mails and faxes, allowing them to stay connected with relatives and friends and, more important, to find out about wind conditions or approaching storms. For newly arrived cruisers, there is a certain shock to see just how popular the Rio Dulce has become. ''I thought the Rio Dulce was going to be like | Rio Dulce Journal; A Guatemalan Harbor, Away From Life's Storms |
1243679_3 | than similar nonunion workers. In 1997, only 21 percent of male workers with no education beyond high school were union members, down from 38 percent in 1978. Other economic changes have also played a role in the growth of the wage disparity. For example, high school graduates were more likely to work in manufacturing 20 years ago than they are now, and more likely to work in service industries today. Service industry wages are generally lower than manufacturing wages for similarly skilled workers with only a high school education. A small part of the growth in the college wage premium does result from a recent increase in college graduates' earnings, but even this does not reflect the conventional image: supply of college-educated workers outstripped by technology-driven demand. Most of the recent increase in wages of college graduates stems from soaring compensation for business managers and sales workers (like stockbrokers), not from the much smaller (or nonexistent) growth in wages for scientists, engineers or other professionals. In 1978, the chief executive officers of major American corporations earned about 29 times the pay of average workers in their companies. By 1999, this multiple had grown to 107 times. Managerial employees have also benefited from salary increases that outpace those typically received by college graduates as a whole. These compensation trends for managers and investment professionals do not result from shortages of college graduates to enter these fields. More likely, they stem from an attitudinal change that makes great inequities more acceptable in American society. Certainly the economy is slowly shifting to more jobs requiring college education. But this shift is no more rapid than the growth in the number of college graduates. In 1979, about 18 percent of young people got bachelor's degrees. By 1999, this had grown to about 27 percent. Demand for graduates is probably not growing faster than this, so supply and demand factors cannot explain much, if any, of the growing college wage premium. As more young people conclude that they should go to college, the wage premium will narrow. But the cause will be a growing oversupply of college graduates, leading to falling wages in their fields. Of course, more Americans should attend and complete college; education has value beyond its labor market consequences. But we err if we hope to rely on education, and education alone, to solve growing problems of economic inequality. LESSONS E-mail: Rrothstein@nytimes.com. | Supply, Demand, Wages and Myth |
1243625_1 | who operate the baggage scanners and metal detectors that we all trudge through -- are honest, low-paid working stiffs who tend to encounter the general population in less than ideal circumstances. Given the stress and tension that cling to any airport like clammy weather, hostilities sometimes ensue at the gates. Regularly, we read of entertainers and other worthies who get into hissy fits when treated with insufficient deference at security gates. In September, an entire delegation of indignant North Korean officials en route to New York pulled out of a United Nations summit meeting after what they said was ''rude and provocative'' treatment by security agents working for AMR's American Airlines at the Frankfurt airport. AHL Services, which employs about 24,000 screeners and other airport security workers through its Argenbright Holdings Ltd. subsidiary, said that it fired three supervisors at its Philadelphia office and cooperated fully with federal investigators after the allegations were first made. The company also said that it was ''deeply embarrassed'' by the situation. ''We isolated the three people in Philadelphia,'' Celeste Bottorff, the vice president for marketing of AHL Services, said yesterday. After the Philadelphia incident, the company said it conducted new background checks and retrained all of its screeners in Philadelphia and increased management oversight of airport screening operations nationwide. The Philadelphia incident fueled efforts by the airline industry to ask that the government take more responsibility for certification of vendors and training and background checking of contract security workers at airports. Since the early 1970's, airlines themselves have been responsible for certifying the companies they hire to provide airport security. But the airlines want the Federal Aviation Administration and the F.B.I. to become more involved in security. ''The industry and the Congress both felt it would help improve the process greatly if the F.A.A. moved toward certifying the screening companies directly in order for them to do business with air carriers,'' said Richard J. Doubrava, the managing director of security for the Air Transport Association, an airline industry trade group. Under proposed legislation, the F.A.A. would oversee training and performance of security contractors, he said, and the F.B.I. would do thorough background checks, relieving the industry of that responsibility. The Philadelphia matter aside, Ms. Bottorff of AHL Services said that her company made a serious effort to try to hire and train qualified screeners who could perform a crucial aviation safety job without alienating | Business Travel; It's easy to make wisecracks about airport gate screeners, but security is serious business. |
1248931_0 | LEE DAVENPORT, a recent graduate of the University of Texas, was headed for a business career. But Mr. Davenport thought he would first do a stint in the National Civilian Community Corps, a unit of AmeriCorps, a government-sponsored program based in Washington that focuses on community service. In the late 1990's, when his classmates were entering the nation's strongest job market in decades, Mr. Davenport signed on for a stipend of about $4,000 a year, plus room and board, and a chance to help Americans in crisis. Now a team leader, he talks about fighting wildfires in Southern California and assisting Florida flood victims and homeless Vietnam War veterans. ''I've become really excited leading volunteers and seeing the energy and enthusiasm of people who want to give of themselves,'' he said, adding that he has ditched plans for an M.B.A. in favor of public interest work. He is one of many. ''We're hearing from everywhere that there is a significant increase in young people deciding they want to work in the nonprofit sector,'' said Sara E. Melendez, the president and chief executive of Independent Sector, a coalition of nonprofit organizations in Washington. Those reports coincide with increased rates of volunteering. A 1999 Independent Sector survey showed high levels among 18- to 24-year-olds. When considering all age groups, the study reflected record participation. ''The rate of volunteering is the highest we've ever picked up,'' said Keith Hume, a research associate at Independent Sector, who noted that the surveys have been conducted since 1988. Despite the strong job market, record salaries for new graduates and high student loan and credit card debt, the shift toward volunteerism appears to be filtering down to college and university campuses. Career placement officers are reporting robust demand among college students and recent college graduates for public interest work. Nonprofit experts, placement officers and a recent Harvard survey say that while students express apathy and disillusionment with the government and the political process, their enthusiasm for community public interest work is extremely high. And some companies are tapping that interest to strengthen their own employee recruiting and retention efforts. ''This stuff is sweeping America,'' said Reynold Levy, the president and chief executive of the International Rescue Committee, an organization based in New York devoted to helping people who have been uprooted by persecution, war or violence. ''So a company would have to be very dumb to ignore | More Students Are Saying That a Big Paycheck Can Wait |
1248950_2 | in the form of hard copy, but welcomes proposals by e-mail. In New York, the Russell Sage Foundation, which finances and publishes research in the social sciences, allows grant applicants to submit their proposals by e-mail attachments. ''It saves paper and it's far quicker,'' said Jennifer Nespole, a program associate. Ms. DuBose predicts that within three years most corporate foundations will have Web-based procedures. ''There are dozens of corporations that call me all the time,'' she said. But while the vision of e-grant-making seems like heaven in paper-bound foundationland, it is also raising concerns regarding the exclusion of those without computer access or Internet skills. ''Verizon's policy is definitely exclusionary,'' said Ryan Turner, who directs nonprofit technology policy projects at O.M.B. Watch, a nonprofit research and advocacy group in Washington that works on behalf of community groups nationwide. ''It puts even more of a wall between poor groups that do not use even e-mail and everyone else.'' Donna House, an advocate for the Navajo Nation in Alcalde, N.M., said that ''50 percent of the Navajo Nation doesn't have a phone; the rest have party lines.'' Access to the Internet, she said, is nil. Greg Malhoit, a lawyer and the executive director of the North Carolina Justice and Community Development Center in Raleigh, which focuses on social and economic justice for low-income residents, said, ''Many community nonprofits I'm familiar with in North Carolina still do not have access to basic technology.'' And those who do may not be comfortable, let alone facile, with the Internet. ''I'm glad Verizon is doing this,'' said Jamal LeBlanc, a policy associate at the Benton Foundation in Washington, which promotes the use of communications media by nonprofits. ''But for some people unfamiliar with computers, it is going to be a disincentive.'' Executives at the Verizon Foundation acknowledge the problem. Ms. DuBose's response, she said, is to point to the computers available at public libraries, community centers and outreach groups. She noted that the foundation's role was to provide basic technology to local community groups. ''Our strategy has been to build the not-for-profit centers, providing facilities so that local community users can get access in that way,'' Ms. DuBose said. The foundation is working with the Native American Indian Council and with the National Indian Telecom Institute, for example, to create access to digital technologies. The foundation has also tried to make the electronic application process user-friendly, | More Than a Name Change: A Foundation Goes Digital |
1246553_4 | how to complete the project,'' they wrote. ''We have become accountable for our children's learning. To whom, then is the school itself accountable?'' LOREN Pope, who advises families on a college placement, is known as a guru who helps students with B's and C's find the right colleges. He has now expanded a book on that subject to include advice for learning disabled students on how to get into their colleges of choice. The book, ''Colleges That Cahnge Lives: 40 Schools You should Know About Even if You're Not a Straight-A Student,'' (Penguin; 2000, 304 pages), was first published in 1996 and has proven popular among B and C students, as well as A students. Mr. Pope suggests some lesser-known colleges, like Allegheny, in Meadville, Pa., and Whitman College in Walla Walla, Wash., that in his words produce, ''a higher proportion of scientists, scholars and people in Who's Who'' than most Ivy League schools. Some of the advice he has for the learning disabled students is not to try to hide their problemss. It can prove disastrous, he says. He suggests a call to the admissions office to ask what help the college offers and how students with learning problems fare at that school. He says admissions officials will not only welcome a student's call, but most likely will offer some reassuring information. Increasingly, learning-disabled students are joining the ranks of students at two- and four-year colleges. He argues that the stigma of having a learning disability is slowly being removed, and many of these students are being viewed rather as gifted learners. Dyslexics and those with attention deficit disorder, known to have trouble with words, are high-order thinkers and need to be dealt with as such, he says. Some traits of these disabilities are difficulty with handwriting; a general lack of organization; indifference to schedules; excessive daydreaming, and difficulty with arithemtic (but not geometry, statistics or higher mathematics). Mr. Pope also takes a brief look at the growing popularity of home schooling, which has resulted from increasing dissatisfaction with public schools. While students schooled at home are not the run-of-the-mill college applicants - and their transcripts are not likely to have been written by the most objective teachers - admissions officers still encourage these students to apply, Mr. Pope says. ''Every admission officer I talked to was enthusiastic about his or her experience with home schoolers,'' he writes. ENDPAPER | Disrupter of Families? A Book Questions Homework |
1246748_0 | Polar bears, their white coats tinged with yellow after a summer of fasting on the tundra, are gathering here on the western shores of the Hudson Bay, waiting for sea ice that once again will free them from land, allowing them to hunt seals. Almost imperceptibly, this timeless tableau on treeless salt marshes is changing: the ''Lords of the Arctic,'' North America's largest land carnivores, are 10 percent thinner and have 10 percent fewer cubs than they did 20 years ago. The culprit, scientists and residents here said, is climate change. Today, on average, ice melts off the Hudson Bay three weeks earlier than 25 years ago. That means three weeks less each year for the polar bears to capture and gorge on seal pups. And so the bay's 1,200 polar bears, the world's southernmost polar bear population, are fast becoming worldwide symbols of climate change. In mid-November, when the first adolescent male bears gingerly test the new ice here, protesters in The Hague are to dress in sad-faced polar bear costumes and stage ''die-ins'' at opening sessions of negotiations over the Kyoto Protocol, a three-year-old international treaty intended to cut greenhouse gases. ''The polar bear is coming to symbolize the disappearing north, the end of the kind of climate we all grew up with,'' said Peter Tabuns, executive director of Greenpeace Canada, which has 120,000 members. ''The habitat that polar bears depend on is being wiped out. That is pretty strong stuff, emotionally and intellectually.'' Ursus maritimus, or bear of the sea, is the kind of charismatic mammal favored for promoting environmental causes. Fascinated by these ''gentle giants,'' 10,000 tourists from around the world trek every fall to this northern village of 1,100 residents, reachable only by train or plane. On the main street, where one not-so-gentle giant killed a local man in 1984, affluent visitors flock to the Lazy Bear Lodge and Cafe, the Bear Country Inn and the Great White Bear Gift Shop. Bristling with cameras, tourists roll out daily in tundra buggies, heated, elevated, bear-proof viewing mobiles, or lift off in sleek helicopters, with bears painted on the noses. Every spring, bears prowl ice floes, smashing open snow lairs that seals create over breathing holes. Gorging on pups, a 1,200-pound adult male bear can pack as much as 150 pounds of seal meat into his stomach. ''It's the big bear pigout,'' said Jane Waterman, a University | Canada's 'Gentle Giants' Await Vanishing Winter |
1246796_5 | would wander around the neighborhood, his mother locked him in his room for long periods without food or water. ''When the poor kid got thirsty,'' his sister said, ''she'd make him drink his'' urine ''out of the toilet.'' Ms. Gonzales added that as a child she had also seen her mother force Johnny, then a toddler, to eat his own feces. Mr. Hon, the Polk County prosecutor, said he did not believe the accounts of the boy's abuse because he thought family members were not telling the truth. Mr. Hon cited their testimony that Johnny had been scalded in a bath by his mother. The prosecutor said that Mrs. Penry had testified she left Johnny in the sink near a hot water heater, and that he had grabbed a hose line from the water heater and sprayed himself. Mr. Hon said he believed Mrs. Penry, who is now dead, adding, ''Self-mutilation, even at that early age, would not surprise me.'' When Mr. Penry was 9, his I.Q. was 56, according to a state psychologists' report. ''John seems so seriously impaired that he is incapable of intellectually functioning at anything like an age-appropriate level,'' the psychologists wrote. At 12, Johnny was institutionalized at the Mexia State School for the Mentally Retarded. When staff members gave him a haircut, according to a school report, they noticed many small scars on Johnny's head. When he was asked about them, the report stated, Johnny said, ''They were from cuts made by a large belt buckle which his mother used when whipping him.'' At 15, he was given a reading test at Mexia, which required him to match drawings with the corresponding words. He identified a door as a dress, a chicken as a drum, a hat as a flag, according to the test. When he was 22, Mr. Penry was convicted of rape. A state psychiatrist found that he was still a bed-wetter, that his judgment was ''severely impaired'' and that he had little regard for others or even himself. Mr. Penry said he had meant no harm to the woman he had raped, the psychiatrist wrote in his report, but that ''he had never had a woman before and he wanted to see what it would be like.'' Mr. Penry is not unaware that people say he is mentally retarded. ''They say I have a mentality of a kid, but I don't know | Mentally Retarded Man Facing Texas Execution Draws Wide Attention |
1248118_1 | e-mail the employees had believed to be private. At a conference on privacy at the New School University last month, the titles of sessions told the story: ''The Rise and Fall of Privacy,'' ''Invasions of Privacy,'' and ''Is Privacy Now Possible?'' As Scott McNealy, the chief executive of Sun Microsystems, recently proclaimed: ''You already have zero privacy. Get used to it.'' There is, then, a contradictory mixture of attitudes toward privacy: on one hand, it is eagerly trashed; on the other, it is anxiously defended. At their best, these conflicting attitudes might seem to be signs of political sensitivity. The expansion of the public realm, for example, might be said to have occurred because of a new awareness of the importance of once-suppressed private events like date rape. And concerns about protection of privacy might be defended as necessary and legitimate. But once date rape becomes a focus of aggressive attention, the entire realm of private sexual relations is opened to legal examination, creating more conflicts; public examination of the private becomes commonplace. Similarly, technological concerns can be pushed to nearly apocalyptic extremes (as sometimes happened at the New School conference), without the recognition that the very same technology that makes privacy relatively vulnerable can also make it relatively invulnerable. Contemporary attitudes toward privacy, in fact, seem to have little to do with such arguments. They seem knit into the fabric of contemporary culture. At least some of this was predicted by Edmund Burke, who suggested that democracies tend toward ''shamelessness'' in social life, partly because all hierarchies and rigid obligations are dissolved. Before whom is one to feel shamed? Why should anything be kept private? But there are also other forces at work. The categories of public and private are fairly new. At the New School conference, Joseph Rykwert, emeritus professor of architecture at the University of Pennsylvania, recalled that in the ancient classical world, distinctions were quite different. He cited Hannah Arendt on ancient Rome: ''A man who lived only a private life -- who, like the slave, was not permitted to enter the public realm -- was not fully human.'' Privacy was literally a privation, a closing off of the most important realm of human life: the public. But the ownership of property, which made private life possible, was also required for participation in the public arena. Now, the balance is different. The citizen who lives only | Turning Private And Public Inside Out |
1248118_3 | a public life and has no private life seems not fully human. But the citizen whose private life is not fully public also has something to complain about. ''In the modern world,'' Arendt wrote in ''The Human Condition'' (1958), ''the two realms indeed constantly flow into each other.'' How has this come to pass? Consider, for example, theocracies -- societies that govern themselves according to what they believe is divine law. In theocracies, privacy just isn't an important category. The primary distinction is not private-public but sacred-profane. Still, the sacred incorporates modern ideas of the public and private. It is like the private because it is meant to be inviolate, free from trespass by the profane; it is also like the public because the sacred creates a community of faith. This changes in the modern state. The secular public is not constructed by a set of beliefs; rights and obligations are enumerated, and laws have limited reach. In such a society, how does the believer render unto Caesar what is Caesar's? By what right does Caesar trespass on the realm of the sacred? In a relatively homogeneous society, the sacred is incorporated into public life as a state religion. Otherwise, the sacred becomes increasingly identified with a realm free from public interference, the world of the self that proclaims, ''Don't tread on me.'' This may be a source of modern notions of privacy; we link the private to the sacred. Since the Enlightenment, these relationships have become still more contentious as state power has grown and religious claims have shrunk. Romanticism associated many aspects of religion -- the attentiveness to the inner life, the notion of a higher immaterial calling, the sense of a mission demanding sacrifice -- with the secular religion of art. By the end of the 18th century, the sacral musings of the individual creator -- a Blake or a Wordsworth -- could rival any claims made by public authorities. Out of such beliefs grew the idea of the private as a source of authenticity and integrity. Thus the state began to seem like an obstacle to the private, while the private began to seem like a threat to the public. Out of such struggles modern culture took shape. Culture, in the broadest sense, mediates between the public and the private, bringing the claims of the private into public view, translating demands of the public for private | Turning Private And Public Inside Out |
1249428_1 | a consumer scare over mad cow disease. The largest farmers' union called the amount ''clearly insufficient.'' The European Union has agreed to expand testing, but not to ban ground-up carcasses in animal feed, a move adopted by France last week. Donald G. McNeil Jr. (NYT) VATICAN: ROLE OF MARRIAGE -- The Vatican criticized efforts to give partners, heterosexual and gay, the same legal rights as married couples, calling such arrangements ''a conception of love detached from any responsibility.'' The 76-page document did not alter the teachings of the Catholic Church, but was aimed at attempts to legitimize unmarried couples, including gay ones. The Vatican denounced homosexual partnerships as ''deplorable'' and said it was a ''grave error'' to allow gay couples to adopt. Alessandra Stanley (NYT) TURKEY: KURDISH EMERGENCY EXTENDED -- Parliament extended a 13-year-old state of emergency in four mainly Kurdish provinces. Emergency rule will continue for four more months in the southeastern provinces of Diyarbakir, Hakkari and Sirnak as well as Tunceli in the east, starting Nov. 30. The European Commission listed the lifting of emergency rule as an objective for Turkey on Nov. 8. (Agence France-Presse) THE AMERICAS VENEZUELA: CHAVEZ DENOUNCED -- Five former foreign ministers have issued a statement condemning what they call ''the increasing authoritarianism of the current government,'' led by President Hugo Chavez. The former officials, representing Venezuela's two traditional political parties, said Mr. Chavez, a former army colonel, was leading a dangerous ''militarization'' of the government and had tried to intimidate or undermine independent institutions. Larry Rohter (NYT) CANADA: CHILD POVERTY -- The number of Canada's children living in poverty increased by 43 percent in the last decade, to 1.3 million in 1998, according to an anti-poverty coalition's analysis of figures from Statistics Canada, a government agency. According to the coalition, Campaign 2000, the number of poor children was 936,000 in 1989, peaked at 1.5 million in 1996, then decreased. James Brooke (NYT) ASIA CHINA: FALUN GONG TRIAL -- A 37-year-old acupuncturist who lives in New York is to be tried this week for ''illegal activities'' related to the banned Falun Gong spiritual movement, according to a human rights group based in Hong Kong. The trial of the acupunturist, Tang Chunyan, who has a Chinese passport and an American residence permit, is to start tomorrow. Ms. Tang, a member of Falun Gong, entered China in March to gather information on persecution of the group's | WORLD BRIEFING |
1249446_4 | more like visiting a Web site, with all the attendant privacy risks. But for many Internet users, such risks may seem more acceptable on the Web than they do in their ''in'' box. Sophisticated Internet users know that when they click on a Web advertisement they are probably exposing themselves to scrutiny, and that it is possible to reject the files that record such behavior. But few are aware of the tracking capability of HTML mail. And while some e-mail programs, like Microsoft Outlook and Eudora, give users the option of screening images out, others, like America Online 6.0 and Web-based Hotmail do not. Some recipients of e-mail newsletters say they do not mind if the sender knows when they open a message, particularly if the aim is to alert them to a sale or a new product. But others argue that it violates their right to communicate, or not, without being observed. And particularly in a country where postal mailboxes are protected by federal law, the notion that reading e-mail messages is no longer a private act may prove disconcerting. ''We would shudder if regular letters were implanted with secret signals that alerted their senders when they were opened,'' said Jeffrey Rosen, author of ''The Unwanted Gaze: The Destruction of Privacy in America'' (Random House, 2000). ''It seems to invade both the privacy of the home and in some sense the privacy of the mind.'' Still, the practice is becoming more common. About 60 percent of e-mail users have software that can read HTML mail, according to the online research firm Jupiter Media Metrix, a number expected to grow significantly as America Online users install version 6.0, the first update to include the feature, released last month. As advertising on Web sites proves increasingly ineffective, many companies like Eddie Bauer and Borders are relying more heavily on e-mail solicitations whose value lies in part in the ability to track recipient response. How many subscribers actually open e-mail has also become an important measurement by which e-mail newsletter companies like Lifeminders sell advertising. Companies that send unsolicited bulk e-mail use tracking to increase the value of their address lists by weeding out those who never open their messages. And individuals can use Postel Services, the Korean company whose service Mr. Bell used to learn the fate of his job applications. Messages routed through its servers have tiny graphic files appended | Software That Tracks E-Mail Is Raising Privacy Concerns |
1249425_1 | replaced 160,000 tires on Lincoln Navigator sport utility vehicles and been widely criticized for not having provided more information to regulators during a 1993 inquiry of tires on Ford Bronco II sport utility vehicles. Regulators have been reviewing safety data on tires made by the Cooper Tire and Rubber Company. And some personal-injury lawyers have revived criticisms of Michelin sport utility vehicle tires, which were investigated five years ago by regulators, who found no defects. Goodyear said that no deaths had been linked to its tires until 1995 and that the recent deaths might partly reflect the repeal that year of the national speed limit of 55 miles an hour. Most states have raised their speed limits since then, and higher speeds put extra strain on a tire and make it more likely that a motorist will die in an accident if the tire comes apart. But a computer analysis by The New York Times of a federal database on all fatal crashes nationwide found that the frequency of crash deaths involving tires fell in the 1990's instead of rising. The rate of tire-related deaths plunged from 3.8 per million registered vehicles in 1991 to a low of 2.7 per million registered vehicles in 1996, the analysis found. The death rate has edged back up since then, to 3.1 last year, mainly because of deaths in Ford Explorers equipped with Firestone tires. While tire-related crashes killed 500 to 700 Americans a year from 1991 to 1999, tire problems also represent a gradually dwindling share of all traffic deaths. But while tire problems were a factor in only 1.8 percent of all traffic deaths in vehicles last year, they are still a bigger danger to travelers than, for example, airplane crashes. There are about 3 tire-related deaths per 10 billion miles driven, the data analysis showed. By contrast, airline passengers die half as often, or about 1.5 per 10 billion miles flown on United States carriers, according to data from the National Transportation Safety Board. The overall death rate in traffic crashes is far higher at 160 per 10 billion miles driven. ''There are more dangers in the car than riding in an airplane, yet many people are afraid to ride in an airplane but they're not afraid to drive in a car,'' said Arnold I. Barnett, a professor of operations research and statistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Yet | U.S. Safety Panel Begins Inquiry on Goodyear Tires |
1249449_0 | The Aventis Corporation said yesterday that a genetically altered protein unapproved for human consumption had been discovered in a variety of corn that could be headed toward the nation's food supply. The announcement came just two months after Aventis acknowledged that StarLink, a variety of corn that contained the same genetically altered protein, had turned up in taco shells on grocery store shelves. That discovery led Kraft Foods, a division of Philip Morris, to recall millions of taco shells and led to a number of smaller recalls and serious disruptions in the nation's grain supply system. Aventis, the biotechnology giant that produced the protein, and the Garst Seed Company, which markets the seeds, said yesterday that they did not know why traces of the genetically altered protein had been found in a traditional variety of corn sold by Garst. The companies also said they did not know whether corn made from those seeds had reached consumers. But the discovery of the protein in a traditional variety of corn is certain to heighten concerns about the safety of genetically altered crops and the agriculture industry's ability to track the complicated mix of traditional and biotechnology crops from the field to the grocery store. The protein at issue, Cry9c, was approved only for corn seed sold by Garst under the StarLink label. Corn grown with those seeds was supposed to be used only as animal feed because of concerns that it might cause allergic reactions in humans. But somehow the corn reached large food makers, which used it to make a number of products, including taco shells and corn flakes. In the wake of the crisis over StarLink corn, thousands of farmers and food companies have begun to test their crops. Yesterday, Aventis CropScience, based in Research Triangle Park, N.C., said it had recently tested for the Starlink protein after farmers complained about finding it in their crops, even though they had not bought Starlink corn. In a statement, Aventis Crop Science said it had notified federal regulators of its findings. The company also said it had no evidence that the protein would cause allergic reactions in humans. But Aventis said it expected any corn with the Cry9c protein to be shipped to animal feed operators. A spokesman for Garst, which is based in Slater, Iowa, said the company was trying to determine how a traditional variety of corn it sold had | Aventis Says More Genetically Altered Corn Has Been Found |
1250876_0 | In wake of the latest incident of genetic crop contamination, American seed companies are renewing a push to establish standards that would allow a small amount of genetically engineered material in bags of seeds and still have those seeds considered free of modification. The American Seed Trade Association maintains that with genetically modified crops now widely grown, it is virtually impossible to ensure that a bag of non-modified seeds does not have a few genetically modified ones mixed in. Insisting on absolute purity, it says, would bog down the world seed trade. ''Ultimately, we're looking to prevent potential disruption in seed trade as a result of the presence of genetically enhanced material,'' Angela Dansby, a spokeswoman for the trade group, which represents seed producers and distributors, said today. The trade group urged the establishment of such a so-called tolerance at a meeting held here today at the Department of Agriculture in response to last week's discovery that the telltale protein from genetically modified StarLink corn was also found in some seed corn not sold as StarLink. The seed contamination meant that some farmers who thought they were growing another variety would find that their crop tested positive for StarLink, which has been approved for animal use but not human consumption because of concerns it could cause allergic reactions. While the reason for that contamination is not known, one possibility is there could have been a mix-up in seed handling at the Garst Seed Company, which produced both StarLink seeds and the seed containing the StarLink protein. Cross-pollination of one crop by the other is another possibility. Aventis CropScience, the company that developed StarLink, said at today's meeting that it would send a letter to all corn seed companies urging them to screen their products for the StarLink protein and offering to help in the process, according to Agriculture Department officials who attended the meeting, which was closed to the news media. That means that seed companies will join the grain elevators, flour mills and food companies that are now testing and retesting their supplies for StarLink, which showed up in taco shells and other food products earlier this year. A person close to Aventis confirmed the letter would be sent but said the company had no knowledge of any other cases of contamination besides the one at Garst. The issue of ''tolerance'' for seeds is separate from the question of | Companies Seek Looser Rules on Labeling Genetically Altered Seed |
1250876_1 | has been approved for animal use but not human consumption because of concerns it could cause allergic reactions. While the reason for that contamination is not known, one possibility is there could have been a mix-up in seed handling at the Garst Seed Company, which produced both StarLink seeds and the seed containing the StarLink protein. Cross-pollination of one crop by the other is another possibility. Aventis CropScience, the company that developed StarLink, said at today's meeting that it would send a letter to all corn seed companies urging them to screen their products for the StarLink protein and offering to help in the process, according to Agriculture Department officials who attended the meeting, which was closed to the news media. That means that seed companies will join the grain elevators, flour mills and food companies that are now testing and retesting their supplies for StarLink, which showed up in taco shells and other food products earlier this year. A person close to Aventis confirmed the letter would be sent but said the company had no knowledge of any other cases of contamination besides the one at Garst. The issue of ''tolerance'' for seeds is separate from the question of the threshold level that would require labeling of foods in grocery stores in countries that require such labeling. The European Union requires labeling of a food ingredient as genetically modified if at least 1 percent of that ingredient is genetically modified. But there is no similar standard specifying what percent of seeds in a bag of nonmodified seeds can be genetically engineered without requiring the whole bag to be rejected. The American Seed Trade Association wants that level set at 1 percent. It and counterparts in several other countries like Canada, Australia and Argentina, hope to test out this level in an experiment, Ms. Dansby said. But the European Union has been pushing for a lower, stricter standard closer to 0.5 percent. Europe has been shaken by some cases this year in which genetically modified seeds were planted by farmers who thought they were growing nonmodified crops. The Department of Agriculture representatives at today's meeting were noncommittal on the seed industry proposal, officials said. On Tuesday, a scientific advisory panel to the Environmental Protection Agency will hold a hearing to consider whether to temporarily approve StarLink for human consumption. That would allow this year's crop of StarLink corn to pass | Companies Seek Looser Rules on Labeling Genetically Altered Seed |
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