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1250955_0 | The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum has won the right, and the financial backing of the city, to build a curvilinear outpost on the East River, officials at City Hall said late yesterday, calling the museum's $678 million proposal crucial to an effort to revitalize a large swath of Lower Manhattan. The new 40-story museum, designed by the Los Angeles architect Frank O. Gehry, would rise above three East River piers at the foot of Wall Street on land that would be conveyed to the Guggenheim by the city, officials said. The 550,000-square-foot museum would be twice as large as the free-form complex Mr. Gehry built for the Guggenheim in Bilbao, Spain, and 10 times the size of the museum's Upper East Side headquarters, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. Much work remains before construction can begin, including a major fund-raising campaign and a comprehensive land use, environmental and zoning review. The project will be subject to the approval of the City Planning Commission, the City Council and other government entities. If the museum proceeds as envisioned, it will include new departments of architecture, design, media and technology; exhibition and office space; a 1,200-seat performing arts center; shops; and four restaurants. It would ultimately become the museum's headquarters, employing about 400 people and attracting an estimated 2 million to 3 million visitors a year. Outside, there would be a skating rink, a riverfront promenade, a sculpture garden and a park. ''It's a real breakthrough for us,'' said Thomas Krens, the director of the Guggenheim. ''The architecture required a spacious site, and New York City is not exactly full of spacious sites.'' The city would provide the land and a ''sizable'' contribution to the project, somewhere along the lines of the 10 percent dedicated to the Museum of Modern Art expansion about to get under way in Midtown, although city officials last night would not be specific about the city's intended contribution to the Guggenheim project. Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani has scheduled an appearance this morning at the Guggenheim's headquarters to announce the city's intended role in the project and, in effect, to promote the ongoing fund-raising, city officials said. They said that without the land and the city's financial help, the project would essentially have been impossible. ''This is the critical first step in making this project a reality,'' Deputy Mayor Anthony P. Coles said. ''This will do for downtown Manhattan what | Guggenheim Gets Backing for New Museum |
1250813_4 | on four later flights focused on crystallizing extracts of an enzyme involved in Chagas' disease and on the development of compounds that might be useful in treating it. One strategy is to find a substance that will bind with a protein made by the parasite and keep it from multiplying. With that hope, Earth University is concentrating on a protein from a rain forest tree, Bursera simaruba, also known as gumbo-limbo. The effort was supported by the Exposition Foundation in Atlanta, in addition to NASA and the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Dr. Zaglul is seeking additional contributions for the effort, which since 1991 has cost Latin American countries $300 million for control of the parasite carrier and to combat blood transfusion transmissions. As part of the collaboration, scientists from Latin America and the United States have conducted numerous exchange visits, and students from Earth University have interned at the Johnson Space Center, producing an atlas of space shuttle photography of Costa Rica that will be used by educators and agriculturists. ''We have combined indigenous knowledge and space technology in a way that utilizes each party's strengths to do together what we could not do individually before,'' Dr. Zaglul said. ''I am sure that the potential of finding a cure for AIDS, malaria, cancer and other diseases are here in the biodiversity of the rain forest.'' He went on, ''I've been asked by some, 'Why should we help Latin America? Why don't you solve your disease problems yourself,' which are fair questions. But if we all pull together as one race, and help each other, we will be much more positive about how we perceive others. There will be a time when Latin America can help others.'' Dr. Chang-Diaz sees another potential benefit. ''There is a great connection between the rain forest, biodiversity and space,'' he said. ''Earth University is developing revolutionary techniques for agriculture that take advantage of environmental conditions to grow crops in the framework of environmental wholeness. That's exactly what we must do on long-term duration space missions. ''Manned missions to Mars and beyond, for example, will require crews to grow their own food, recycle oxygen and maintain other environmental life support systems on a ship that must be self-sustaining. Jose moved heaven and earth to bring Earth's resources to the Chagas project. Imagine how much we could do if the whole world worked together like this.'' | From Jungle to Space in Pursuit of New Drugs |
1250830_1 | whose Alchemy Partners came close to buying Rover Cars of Britain from BMW of Germany earlier this year, Mr. Moulton said. With its banks of soft toys, model trains, Barbies and radio-controlled cars, Hamleys has long been seen as the acme of British toy stores, known among children for its wide range of offerings and, among parents, for its top-end prices. But, as Britain's children have turned to designer-name clothes and mobile phones as their gifts of choice, the 240-year-old company has experienced dwindling sales, while out-of-town shoppers have turned to outlets like Toys ''R'' Us. At the same time, Britain's toy market has been shifting. ''It's been very striking how kids have changed,'' said Richard Hyman, chairman of the retail consulting firm Verdict Research Ltd. ''They are much more grown up, much sooner. They are much more demanding, and the notion of a toy shop has changed because the notion of toys has changed.'' The Regent Street store is part of the circuit for tourists, who account for about 40 percent of sales. But the strength of the pound against the euro has kept some visitors away. ''Hamleys has been trading on its reputation as the biggest toy store in the world, but it hasn't really delivered,'' Mr. Hyman said. ''Hamleys is in a state of flux. It's got a new management. There's a new approach. They are looking to be more competitive on price. They are looking to make the shopping experience more inspiring. They are going in the right direction, but they have a way to go.'' Additionally, the Regent Street store has been undergoing refurbishment this year, reducing sales. The company has maintained a smaller outlet in Covent Garden but has sought to reduce costs by closing a store at the Eurotunnel rail terminal in Kent and ending its House of Toys concession at department stores owned by Debenhams P.L.C. In figures released Nov. 1, Hamleys said net income for the 26 weeks ended Sept. 23 totaled $8,700, in contrast to a loss of $2.38 million in the 26 weeks to July 31. Sales totaled $23.2 million, held back by fuel shortages in Britain in September that affected Hamley's Toystack chain. At the time, Mr. Burke, the chairman, acknowledged that the company faced a ''significant challenge'' as the holiday season approached because there was no huge-selling toy on the scale of the Furby-mania two years ago. | British Toy Store Is Offering New Holiday Sale Item: Itself |
1250840_2 | and 'my Brazilian wife,' or 'my Brazilian kids' and 'my Colombian kids.' '' As for the local governments, their relationship is perhaps best described as symbiotic. Official talks are under way to build a binational sewage and garbage disposal system, but over the years the authorities have informally devised any number of mechanisms to deal with problems arising from the lack of financial support from ministries back in their respective capitals. ''We have a fire department and they don't, so we send our trucks over to help them when they need it,'' explained Carlos Romero, secretary of the municipal government here. ''They, in turn, provide our population with the containers of gas that are employed for cooking and other home uses.'' Such cooperation is more essential than ever now that the outside world is finally arriving, and in a form not welcomed by residents or the local police. The isolation of the Three Frontiers area and a weak government presence has made the region increasingly attractive as a route for trafficking in drugs and the precursor chemicals needed to manufacture them. ''Leticia is as isolated from Bogota as Tabatinga is from Brasilia, but out of mutual difficulty grows camaraderie,'' said Mauro Sposito, a Brazilian federal police official in Tabatinga. ''When I'm running short on gasoline, I know that I can call my colleagues on the other side to borrow some, and vice versa. That's called solidarity.'' The relationship between the Colombian and Brazilian communities and Peru is more complicated. Though the Brazilian authorities in particular blame an influx of some 6,000 Peruvian immigrants in recent years for most of the crime and strain on public services in Tabatinga, the immigrants themselves say they are merely poor people trying to survive. ''Life here is more tranquil, and you can actually earn a living,'' said Patricia Reategui Gonzalez, 33, a Peruvian who runs a small shop at the boat landing in Tabatinga and recently gave birth to a child who has Brazilian nationality. ''Peru's politics are completely messed up, and everywhere you go looking for a job there they tell you, 'We're not hiring.' '' Brazil's appeal to its neighbors may grow now that the government is reactivating an old project called the Northern Channel. Put off for many years because of a budget squeeze, the plan calls for investment in schools, hospitals, roads, docks, power stations and airstrips in remote communities | Leticia Journal; Dancing Across an Imaginary Line in the Jungle |
1246139_0 | Congestion at La Guardia Airport is more than an inconvenience to local travelers. It has become an unacceptable bottleneck in the nation's air traffic system, accounting for a quarter of all flight delays in September. Before it gets worse, the Federal Aviation Administration has rightly stepped in to alleviate the situation. In what it views as a short-term measure to ease congestion, the F.A.A. will reduce the number of flights at La Guardia, set a cap on the number of new flights through next September and hold a lottery for these slots. This remedy, though necessary, is far from ideal. In the long term, a market-based solution to La Guardia's congestion -- charging more for prime-time landing slots -- would be preferable, and we are encouraged that the F.A.A. has indicated it will consider such an approach. The F.A.A. move comes in reaction to an explosion in airlines' demand for new flights at La Guardia following an act of Congress to lift a longstanding curb on further growth at the airport. The legislation sought to bring in new competitors and to provide New Yorkers with flights to previously underserved markets on a new generation of regional jets. Airlines have filed applications for 600 new flights a day at the airport, and have started flying more than 200 of them. This has boosted the airport's operations by 26 percent in the past six months, from 1,064 flights a day in April to 1,344 in November. The effect of such growth on an already strained capacity has been dramatic, as anyone with a La Guardia horror story can confirm. The number of flight delays for September, more than 9,000, was three times higher than a year earlier. That month the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, the airport's operator, called for a moratorium on new flights at peak travel hours. The authority proposed the lottery to the F.A.A. and will help administer it later this month. Under the F.A.A.'s plan, airlines will participate in a drawing for 150 daily landing and takeoff slots. Some preference will be given to new entrants and new destinations. The goal is to end up with what the F.A.A. feels is the number of flights that corresponds to the airport's true maximum capacity, roughly halfway between the number of flights last April and the number today. To be sure, the cutback will entail headaches for | Clearing the Runway |
1246117_2 | culture's primacy and uniqueness, have tried to leapfrog the slow, disorderly march of science. Project researchers resolutely deny anyone told them what to find, but critics say they have forced an illusion of consensus in some cases. ''There's a chauvinistic desire to push the historical record back into the third millennium B.C., putting China on a par with Egypt,'' said Edward L. Shaughnessy, a historian at the University of Chicago. ''It's much more a political and a nationalistic urge than a scholarly one.'' Several Chinese historians and archaeologists have argued with the project leaders or refused to take part, said one scholar, who spoke on condition of anonymity. But today Mr. Li and others were adamant about the conclusions' having been drawn fairly and cautiously, through a form of ''academic democracy.'' The research enterprise was begun in 1995 by Song Jian, a senior official overseeing China's science policies. ''A history without chronology is no history at all,'' Mr. Song wrote in a newspaper article this fall. ''It can only be called rumor or myth.'' Li Tieying, a member of the Communist Party Politburo as well as president of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, has said: ''The project is an important scientific study and also has major political and cultural significance. Explicating Chinese civilization will necessarily strengthen our national cohesiveness and raise our national self-confidence and pride.'' From the outset, the scholars acknowledged that they were unlikely to stretch history all the way back to the fabled Yellow Emperor. Instead they set out to enrich knowledge of three dynasties that they say reigned from about 2070 B.C., the beginning of the reputed Xia Dynasty, to 771 B.C., when the Zhou Dynasty fell. All are believed to have been agricultural societies with elaborate rituals of divination and sacrifice. Evidence for the very existence of a Xia Dynasty remains slender. Though it is mentioned in history books centuries later, the name does not appear on archaeological finds from the period, or even in inscriptions from the centuries that followed its supposed demise. Some Western scholars feel it remains more legend than fact. Still, the project takes as already proven the existence of the Xia as a precursor empire to the better-established Shang, pointing to a site uncovered at Erlitou, Henan Province, in 1959 as the probable capital. Today the presumed palace walls at Erlitou lie under farmland. After the site was excavated | In China, Ancient History Kindles Modern Doubts |
1245832_0 | A federal court has forced a major shift in hydroelectric power operations along the Missouri River, in a ruling intended to provide at least temporary safeguards for Indian graves that are being exposed by record-low water levels. The ruling, issued on Monday night, requires the Army Corps of Engineers to maintain the current water level at a sprawling South Dakota reservoir that is a big source of hydroelectric power. That in turn means a power deficit, made only temporary because the corps will make up for it by increasing flows from dams farther upriver. Despite that effort, the corps says, the federal government stands to lose some $3 million in forgone energy. The order, issued by Charles B. Kornmann, a federal district judge in Aberdeen, S.D., is the most significant step yet in an escalating dispute between tribes and the corps over the fate of Indian graves along what were once the Missouri's banks. Before it built large dams along the Missouri decades ago, the federal government promised to move the graves out of harm's way. But the record-low water levels, caused by drought, have uncovered coffins and artifacts, evidence that the promise was broken. More than 100 graves were discovered this way along Lake Oahe near Wakpala, S.D., in August, and Indians have responded by posting guards to protect them from looters. At immediate issue before Judge Kornmann is a lawsuit filed against the corps by the Standing Rock Sioux. The tribe seeks a permanent freeze in the water level of Lake Oahe in order to prevent the exposing of any more graves and halt the constant rise and fall that over the longer term contributes to bank erosion. The plaintiffs also want the government to build protective walls around graves already exposed. A trial date is expected to be set later this month. But on Monday night, Judge Kornmann issued a temporary restraining order that granted the tribe a water-level freeze for now. Corps officials have said the best remedy for all concerned would be for the graves to be moved, a solution that would allow power generation to continue unaffected. But in negotiations in recent weeks, tribal leaders have expressed wariness about risking damage to what in some cases they regard as sacred relics. Even the temporary restrictions, corps officials said today, will force a major reallocation of water along much of the upper Missouri's enormous dam | Indian-Graves Fight Forces Change in Missouri River Power |
1244291_0 | ''I say this whole picture of striving toward something needs to be criticized,'' said Jonathan Lear. Mr. Lear is talking about nothing less than death and happiness. That may not seem odd for a philosophy professor. Still, at a time when departments are dominated by Kantian abstractions and the narrow logical constructions of analytic philosophy, Mr. Lear is someone who isn't afraid to ask big questions. This small, impassioned man of 52, who speaks almost breathlessly in his enthusiasm, is trying to make philosophy relevant to moral and political issues, to questions like, why are human beings on this earth? And to do that, Mr. Lear, who teaches philosophy at the University of Chicago, has turned to psychoanalysis. In an era when Sigmund Freud's methods are losing ground to psychotropic drugs and biological theories of behavior, Mr. Lear, who is also a trained analyst, is trying to resurrect Freud as a philosopher. In his 1990 book ''Love and Its Place in Nature'' (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), Mr. Lear argued that Freud's concept of eros was essentially the same as Plato's: psychoanalysis, he said, provides a philosophical framework to explain the purpose of life as the drive toward understanding and individuation. It is a drive fueled by love, be it the love of the mother for her child or the search for self-knowledge through psychoanalysis. Five years ago, when the Library of Congress postponed an exhibition on Freud after some scholars protested that it would be too adulatory, Mr. Lear leaped to Freud's defense in an article in the New Republic, arguing that psychoanalysis was essential to democracy. ''It is a technique that allows dark meanings and irrational motivations to rise to the surface of conscious awareness,'' Mr. Lear wrote. ''They can be taken into account; they can be influenced by other considerations; and they become less liable to disrupt human life in violent and incomprehensible ways.'' During the impeachment battle in 1998, Mr. Lear tried to psychoanalyze attacks on President Clinton in terms of Oedipal rage, as the sons' unconscious attempt to murder an idealized father. ''I was trying to apply Freud's ideas to current societal problems,'' Mr. Lear said in an interview in his sparsely furnished apartment in New Haven, where he lives part of the year so that he can be close to his daughter, Sophia, 14. (Mr. Lear is divorced from Sophia's mother, Cynthia Farrar). The crisis | Returning to Freud for Help With the Riddles of Philosophy |
1244306_4 | Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain in March that seemed to question patents on genes knocked $100 billion in market value from the biotechnology industry in a day. Some big drug companies, primarily users of genetic information, have joined in consortiums to help prevent some raw genetic data from being patented. The biotechnology industry might also want to see more sweeping changes in the Food and Drug Administration than established drug companies and is facing a crucial issue on how easily generic biotechnology drugs should be allowed on the market. The issue in agricultural biotechnology is similar. Here, too, the brunt of the controversy and the wrath of the opponents of bioengineered foods has been borne by big companies like Monsanto, Novartis and, recently, Aventis, which are the companies with genetically engineered crops on the market. These companies, along with BIO, have said they will invest up to $50 million on TV commercials and other steps to persuade consumers their products are safe. But executives at some of the smaller companies now developing future genetically modified crops find themselves in the uncomfortable position of having their futures depend on how these big companies handle the public reaction. And so far, some of them say, the big companies have botched it. Andrew M. Baum, president of SemBioSys Genetics in Calgary, Alberta, said the big companies had been in the ''reactive mode'' and had not been aggressive enough in defending the technology. The big companies have other businesses, like conventional seeds and agricultural chemicals, that they can rely on, making them less dependent on biotechnology than the start-ups that base their entire business on genetic engineering. The big companies, since they sell pesticides, might also be reluctant to push aggressively one potential advantage of genetically modified crops that make their own insecticides: the reduction in use of chemical sprays. Small companies could lend a hand. One advantage they would have is that they are not large multinationals. Some opposition to genetically modified crops is based not so much on the technology as on fears that big corporations are using it to take over agriculture. Still, while executives agreed that it was desirable to join the battle, many small companies are not in a position to do so. ''Your top priority for the first couple of years is staying alive to have a third year,'' said John A. Ryals, chief executive of Paradigm | Protecting a Favorable Image; Biotechnology Concerns in Quandary Over Drug Giants |
1249991_1 | related to issues of sexual ethics had prompted some Episcopalians to seek support from Anglicans abroad, which in turn has fostered a ''skewed perspective'' overseas about what the church is really like. This year, some heads of church provinces in the Southern Hemisphere have provided ample evidence that they take a critical view of the church, often citing the fact that some Episcopal bishops have ordained openly gay men and lesbians, and that the church, at its General Convention, has discussed allowing the blessing of same-sex unions. Last January, Anglican Church leaders from Rwanda and Southeast Asia consecrated two American priests as bishops, and sent them back to the United States to minister to conservative parishes, a direct challenge to local bishops' authority. In August, three heads of church provinces met in the Bahamas with conservative Episcopal groups, to declare that a ''pastoral emergency'' existed in the United States, necessitating some new arrangement to nurture ''traditional Anglicans.'' ''Concern has been increasing gradually over the years,'' said Presiding Bishop Maurice Sinclair of the Anglican Province of the Southern Cone, who attended the Bahamas meeting and is among the group coming to Good Shepherd. The Episcopal Church has ''innovated in a number of areas,'' Bishop Sinclair said, developments that ''exceed the limits of Anglican diversity.'' Bishop Sinclair, whose jurisdiction includes 40,000 parishioners in six South American countries, said ''an immediate pastoral need'' prompted his visit to Good Shepherd. ''There are young people who need to be confirmed,'' he said in a telephone interview from Argentina. Confirmation is a local responsibility, belonging in this case to Bishop Charles E. Bennison Jr., whose offices are in Philadelphia. But among the 162 parishes in his diocese, the Church of the Good Shepherd, along with four others, does not recognize Bishop Bennison's authority, said the church's rector, the Rev. David L. Moyer. Father Moyer heads Forward in Faith, North America, affiliated with an organization in London that opposes women's ordination (a practice in the Episcopal Church since 1977 and in the Church of England since 1992) as contrary to Christian tradition. It regards acceptance of homosexuality as a threat to marriage. Conservative Episcopalians were heartened two years ago when the world's Anglican bishops at the Lambeth Conference declared homosexual activity ''incompatible with Scripture.'' Opposed by many American bishops, the statement received overwhelming support from prelates in Africa and Asia, where Anglican churches have been growing. The | Bishops' Visit Shows Rift Over Episcopal Leadership |
1249128_0 | In a quiet village on the outskirts of Zurich, a genetically engineered strain of rice that its creator says could save millions of children's lives is locked up in a grenade-proof greenhouse as if it were the Frankenstein monster that some critics contend it is. Unlike any other rice on earth, this so-called golden rice produces beta carotene in its seeds, thanks to genetic instructions that scientists added to the rice from a daffodil, pea, bacterium and virus. Beta carotene is an important source of vitamin A, which is crucial for healthy vision and resistance to disease. The body breaks beta carotene molecules into two vitamin A molecules, also known as retinol. People get beta carotene from fresh vegetables, like carrots, and get vitamin A directly from milk, butter, cheese, liver and cod liver oil. But the World Health Organization estimates that 124 million children do not get enough vitamin A. Most of these children live in parts of the world where rice is not only the main staple but is often the only food available during the dry season, and infants are often weaned on rice gruel alone. Vitamin A deficiency causes about half a million children to go blind every year and makes many more vulnerable to diseases that cause diarrhea. One million to two million children die each year for lack of vitamin A. Like a latter-day Johnny Appleseed, Dr. Ingo Potrykus, the German inventor of golden rice, would like to send his seeds to poor people around the world at no charge. ''I would like to send a year ago,'' he said, holding out a handful of seeds stored in a locked refrigerator at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. ''There are 3,500 children dying every day. I think we should not delay one day.'' But golden rice has remained under lock and key since it was created more than a year ago. Meanwhile, Dr. Potrykus has struggled to free it from a complicated web of more than 70 patents and legal agreements covering items as diverse as DNA sequences and the techniques he and his colleagues used to insert new genes in the rice. He is also racing against an effort to pass legislation that could prohibit the export of genetically modified organisms from Switzerland. Dr. Potrykus hopes to be able to send out the seeds before the end of this year under | SCIENTIST AT WORK: Ingo Potrykus; Golden Rice in a Grenade-Proof Greenhouse |
1249237_0 | Federal officials are in the final stages of studying whether to open a formal investigation into the safety of Goodyear tires on large pickup trucks, sport utility vehicles and vans, a person close to the study said tonight. Goodyear said recently that it had received reports of 15 deaths in crashes attributed to the tires. The reports have drawn attention because they come during the recall of 14.4 million Firestone light truck tires that have been blamed for 119 deaths over the last decade. Goodyear began putting an extra layer of nylon in the tires in 1996 after discovering that some of the tires were prone to failure at high speeds and at high temperatures. But Goodyear did not recall the tires that it had produced before then, contending that the overall failure rate for the tires without the nylon cap was very low. Personal injury lawyers contend that this is unacceptable, particularly because the tires are used on large vans that sometimes carry a lot of people. ''One bad tire can take out a lot of people,'' said Christine Spagnoli, one of the lawyers who is suing Goodyear. Goodyear maintains that it is being punished with litigation for having improved the tires four years ago. Charles Sinclair, a Goodyear spokesman, said that the tire-related deaths had been spread among 10 different sizes and types of Goodyear Load Range E truck tires. The crashes have also not been concentrated on a single vehicle, unlike the recalled Firestone ATX and Wilderness tires of the P235/75R15 size, which have mostly caused fatal crashes of Ford Explorer sport utility vehicles. But Ms. Spagnoli said that all of the Load Range E tires used the same basic construction and therefore should be treated as a group. After the pattern of lawsuits was reported a month ago by The Daily Journal, a California legal publication, and then by The Los Angeles Times, Goodyear gave the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration extensive information on the tires. But the company has declined so far to make public any detailed statistics on how many tires were made, saying only that it has made 27 million of the tires over the years, some with nylon layers and some without. This has made it hard for lawyers and others to calculate whether the tires are linked to an above-average rate of fatal crashes. | U.S. Nears Decision on Investigation of Goodyear Tire Safety |
1249127_1 | place a $50,000 mobile clinic that was being built to be placed aboard a ship. Advance publicity has already generated the kind of controversy and open discussion she is seeking. In Malta, where abortion is strictly illegal, news of the proposed ship set off protests but also drew out the unexpected voices of abortion rights advocates. ''There were articles -- and it's the first time ever there was this debate in Malta -- where you had women telling journalists their stories about how they went to England to obtain their services,'' Dr. Gomperts said. So far, her reception among American abortion rights advocates has been warm but cautious. Concerns include the safety of patients traveling to and from the ship, follow-up care to avoid infection, and whether Women on Waves would even be allowed to anchor in some ports to offer training, contraceptives and information, as Dr. Gomperts also hopes to do. Another concern raised here has been how outsiders can defend the patients' individual rights without seeming to meddle in the native countries' prevailing culture and inadvertently causing a backlash. ''I think her idea and her motivation are superb,'' said Dr. Allan Rosenfield, dean of the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia. ''Whether it's practical is the issue, and that's what I'm not sure of.'' Essential to the ship's success will be its prior contact with local women's groups and whether a particular country already has a groundswell of support for legalized abortion, said Cynthia Pearson, executive director of the National Women's Health Network, based in Washington. Ms. Pearson and Dr. Rosenfield said they had met with Dr. Gomperts. A spokeswoman for the National Right to Life Committee in Washington, Laura Echevarria, raised similar concerns for the safety of the women who would be treated aboard the ship. ''These woman are almost being treated as guinea pigs in the pursuit of making a political statement,'' she said. ''We feel very saddened for the women who might suffer as a result.'' Kathleen Murphy, a lawyer for the committee's chapter in Manhattan, called the idea an unethical attempt at ''population control in third world countries.'' What is clear is that abortion remains a deeply divisive issue throughout the world while the numbers of women suffering complications and even death from unsafe procedures is widely viewed as a major public health problem. ''There are women in almost all societies who are | Doctor Plans Off-Shore Clinic for Abortions |
1249281_1 | that Peru's long roller-coaster of a political crisis may be coming to an end was summed up by the simple banner headline in today's Liberacion newspaper: ''Finally!'' But Mr. Fujimori's resignation, following months of corruption scandals and turmoil in his own ranks, left many questions unanswered, and his country's stability in doubt. The Congress will begin Tuesday what promises to be raucous proceedings to decide who will take over the government until a new elected president can be inaugurated in July. Mr. Paniagua, a veteran centrist legislator, is considered the favorite. But First Vice President Francisco Tudela, who resigned last month, was said to be considering to offer himself for the job. Mr. Fujimori's shadowy former intelligence chief, Vladimiro Montesinos, apparently remains at large somewhere hidden in Peru while prosecutors investigate charges against him involving money-laundering, gun-running and death squads. Alejandro Toledo, the main opposition leader who always appears to be abroad at the worst moments, rushed home from Madrid, but not before suggesting that Mr. Montesinos might have already been killed to keep all his secrets and embarrassing videotapes from coming to light. The government appeared in a shambles tonight, with no one acting as president. Only three members of Mr. Fujimori's cabinet showed up for work today, and at least five Fujimori allies in Congress announced that they were deserting his coalition. Opposition leaders huddled through the day with congressional allies of Mr. Fujimori and two senior Clinton administration officials who arrived in Lima today. The opposition's efforts to pressure Mr. Marquez to resign appeared to gain Washington's support, and Mr. Marquez was quick to remove himself from the government after taking charge for less than 48 hours. ''What the country deserves is political stability,'' Mr. Marquez told reporters at the presidential palace tonight. Looking tired and disheveled, he added, ''Many political leaders have called on me to resign and I have decided to do that for the good of the stability of the country.'' The power vacuum emerged when Mr. Fujimori, 62, telephoned top aides on Sunday to tell them that he would resign and not return to Peru anytime soon. In a statement released early today, Mr. Fujimori said he made his decision after the opposition took control of the Congress last week -- timing suggesting that he was concerned that the opposition would use its power under the Constitution to remove him by voting that | Fujimori Resignation Sets Off Succession Scramble in Peru |
1249151_0 | To the Editor: ''No Longer Eager to Say, 'My Son, the Priest'; Religious Careers Lose Luster for Catholic Parents'' (news article, Nov. 19), about the trouble that the Roman Catholic Church is having attracting men to the priesthood, focuses on the lack of financial incentive, the availability of other professions and the reluctance of some parents to encourage a son to enter a profession that excludes their daughters. Only briefly mentioned is a major impediment: the mandatory chastity vow and ban on marriage. Does the Episcopal Church have a similar problem attracting priests? If not, could it be partly attributable to the fact that Episcopal priests may marry and have children? I predict that if Roman Catholics accepted married priests or allowed those already ordained to marry, there would be an increase in interest. Lifting the marriage ban (which has not been in effect for the entire history of the church) would attract not only more priests, but also better ones. MAUREEN ARRIGO Redlands, Calif., Nov. 19, 2000 | Let Priests Marry |
1248787_3 | to display and preserve their cultural heritage. ''Most Uighurs are not very religious, its just that this is the only way they are allowed to express themselves.'' Although Uighurs often accuse the Chinese of actively trying to erase their culture, and for many years the Beijing government transferred state employees into the region, today many Chinese from poor surrounding areas come on their own, lured by what for them is a relatively good local job market. ''I think relations have deteriorated and become more polarized than they used to be and that has to do with the market economy,'' Professor Gladney said. ''There has been a large in-migration of Han Chinese,'' he said, adding, ''That has meant that the Uighurs are more marginalized.'' He and other experts say that government spending cuts throughout China have only increased the Uighurs' sense of isolation; there is now less money for state television to make Uighur language programming, for example, and for documents to be translated into Uighur. The net effect is that Uighur culture has receded in much of Xinjiang Province. Many local news programs now uses Mandarin rather than Uighur. More signs are in Chinese characters -- with Uighur script in tiny letters underneath. Urumqi, the provincial capital, has almost lost it ethnic Uighur feel, becoming just another medium-sized Chinese city of white tile office buildings. Education cutbacks have meant that young Uighurs are not learning functional Chinese, as highly paid native Chinese speakers have been replaced by cheaper local teachers. ''My sense is that language ability has dropped a lot in the last 10 years,'' Professor Gladney said. Without the language, the Uighurs are less able to find jobs in an economy increasingly dominated by Chinese companies. The changes have been unsettling, pushing many Uighurs into poverty and to the fringes of cities where they once formed the heart and soul. The Uighur businessman, a successful middle-aged man who has lived outside of Xinjiang for more than a decade, said he was shocked at the level of alienation and disaffection he found on a recent trip to Urumqi, which he said stemmed mostly from economic hardship and massive unemployment. Even college graduates have serious trouble finding jobs, experts say, since the larger companies are mostly Chinese-owned and tend to hire Chinese. Idle time has contributed to a very serious drug problem in the provincial capital. As Uighur influence has faded | Defiant Chinese Muslims Keep Their Own Time |
1248519_7 | with county park pass and $7 without, but collected in summer months only. Rockefeller State Park Preserve, Pocantico Hills How kind of the Rockefeller family to let the rest of us traipse around their backyard. The extensive network of trails was originally developed for carriage use. Horses still share the gorgeous paths with people, but there is plenty of beauty to go around. Because I like to climb, I usually head over to the Eagle Hill Trail. From there you can see panoramic views of Kykuit, the Rockefeller home, as well as the Hudson River and farm fields. But the options on this 740-acre property are plentiful. There is an easy, flat walk around Swan Lake. The Overlook Trail gives you a pretty view of the lake and surrounding hills. ''The most underrated area in Westchester is Rockefeller State Park,'' Mr. Ligouri said. ''There is so much wilderness there right in your backyard. If you learn the terrain and you went every other weekend, you could go on different hikes all season.'' Be warned that the trails here are not well marked, and it is easy to get lost. Carry a trail map. The park entrance is off Route 117 in Pocantico Hills. Information at (914) 631-1470. Parking fees vary by season: from Nov. 1 to March 31 it is $5 a vehicle on weekends and holidays; from April 1 through Oct. 31, $5 per vehicle, Wednesdays through Sundays 9 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Holders of the New York State Empire Passport enter free. Mianus River Gorge, North Castle Mr. Meskin describes the Mianus River Gorge as a ''mini-Colorado.'' I wouldn't go that far, but the Mianus River did carve out a gorge from the rushing waters of a glacier between 10,000 and 15,000 years ago, and it makes for stunning hiking. The 719-acre preserve is the pioneer land project of the Nature Conservancy, a nonprofit organization based in Arlington, Va. It is run by local trustees. While the trail head is in North Castle, the preserve itself is in Bedford, North Castle, Pound Ridge, Stamford and Greenwich. For the best view of the river, start on the red trail and then take the green trail, which runs along the riverbanks. You'll reconnect with the red trail, which will take you almost directly to the shoreline. The round trip is five miles, most of it relatively flat. There are a | Hiking: A Prescription for Tranquillity |
1248400_1 | for inter-airline connections. And if something like a cancellation requires the passenger to be put aboard another airline, the original airline must convert the electronic record into a paper ticket and endorse it over to the second airline. Kathie Lia, Trans World Airlines' director of distribution planning, said that the crush created by e-tickets in flight cancellations was a concern shared by all the airlines. The problem holds top priority in an e-ticket working group where experts from many airlines meet regularly, she said. ''It would be so much easier to tell the passengers on a canceled flight just to walk over to Gate 23 and go aboard the Continental flight,'' she said. ''Everyone wants it.'' Instead, as veterans know, everyone stands in line. And stands. And stands. In making electronic tickets available only for the issuing airline's trips, the companies ''took the low-hanging fruit,'' in the words of Mike Muller, assistant director of passenger services at the International Air Transport Association in Geneva. ''This takes care of the majority of their passengers,'' Mr. Muller said. Going even one step further, to enable two lines to deal with each other's e-tickets, is slow because electronic passenger data are proprietary information that a line must keep secure. But if a passenger is being switched to another airline, Mr. Muller said, the new airline needs real-time access to the data, and such computer-programming is complicated. The access for the other airline must not allow secure data to be divulged. Richard Burdette, manager of e-process development for United, said that although United was set up internally for e-tickets with connections, and had been handling such arrangements with Air Canada since June, not many lines that it wanted to cooperate with were ready. The airlines, working through the International Air Transport Association, the worldwide airline trade group, have drafted a manual for electronic crossing of commercial barriers, a process they call interlining. For all major airlines to carry this out will take three to five years, Mr. Muller said, noting that few airlines abroad have significant levels of electronic ticketing. Two by Two Like international pacts, interline agreements must be negotiated pair by pair, with adjustments for each airline's computer programs. One reason for the slowness is the amount of resources that had been focused on potential Y2K problems. The Continental-Northwest interlining agreement allows transfers in cancellations as well as trips with connections between | Practical Traveler; Air Tickets Shred a Barrier |
1248785_2 | band would play a make-up show at a later date. Decades passed. But soon after Survival dragged anchor and was damaged on the reef, Kelly procured a fax number for Jagger -- the singer owns an estate on the island of Mustique -- and sent a letter asking him to make good on his promise. ''I want to get all the other old blues singers together, too, for one last show, so I can make sure Survival will survive,'' Kelly said. ''Who else is doing something really good to protect the oceans? There is nobody.'' Kelly's life changed in 1972, when he made his first visit to the Amazon rain forest. There, he met Raoni, who became not only his friend but also his spiritual mentor. ''I'd been rich and I'd learned how the excesses of life are fatal,'' he said. ''Raoni taught me how to be a person of the forest and not of the capitalistic system. Through him I learned to survive.'' In the ensuing years, Kelly returned often and spent long periods living in the forest. Then, in 1977, he returned via the water. ''I decided that with what little money I had, I'd build a boat and go back and make films to document the wild life, and the Indians, and the living things in the sea,'' he said. ''I figured that would be a way to protect them.'' He spent much of the next two decades voyaging to the Caribbean, Colombia, Brazil, Venezuela and as far south as Uruguay. He staged public protests against dynamite fishing, Jet Skis, mercury poisoning and the dumping of oil by Amazon-bound tugboats. At one point, in Brazil, he says he was placed under house arrest aboard his boat for eight months. He also put on exhibitions, spoke to schoolchildren, and appeared on local television. With feathered earrings, a reed necklace, a torso covered in tattoos, and a bandana, he always attracted an audience. ''You have to be different to be noticed, especially if your message is real and truthful,'' he said. Now, on his futon on the floor by the sea, maneuvering by way of a rope rigged overhead, Kelly is far from the sounds of his past, from the bombs, the blues and the jungle nights. Except for the squawking birds, the Caribbean afternoons are still. Mick Jagger hasn't called, and the St. Katherine Docks are still an | An Amazon Chief Paves Captain's Way |
1248807_0 | IF construction on the mammoth Three Gorges Dam project in central China is completed as scheduled three years from now, a 390-mile reservoir will drive the world's largest hydroelectric plant, providing energy and flood control to a country desperate for both. But the project will also have displaced more than one million people, flooded hundreds of towns and villages and, critics argue, destroyed innumerable cultural heritage sites along the Yangtze River. But the Three Gorges project is just one of nearly 800,000 dams worldwide, and one of 45,000 large dams (defined as those over 50 feet high or having a reservoir volume greater than four million cubic yards) that have been built over the last century, according to a report released last week by the World Commission on Dams. Few of these projects, particularly in recent years, have escaped an embittered debate over who wins and who loses each time another of the world's waterways is tapped, stopped, rerouted or drained. The commission itself was formed two years ago in an attempt to provide the most comprehensive cost-benefit analysis of dams ever undertaken, and to seek some common ground among the builders and governments and advocacy groups whose competing interests have made dam-building an ever more contentious enterprise. To the extent that the World Bank and many other traditional funders began tapering their support for dams in the 1990's, and advocacy groups grew in strength and number, the report merely codifies what these parties already knew: that past building standards have largely overlooked the adverse social and environmental impact of dams. The complete report is available at www.damsreport.org. What follows is an overview of dams, the issues they raise and a look at some of the more controversial projects. | Ideas & Trends; Ebb and Flow of Opinion: Big Dam Projects |
1248376_0 | The Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, a symbol of a unified Germany, disappeared under scaffolding early this month for a 16-month face lift. The project is aimed at shoring up the monument's unstable 18th-century foundations and using laser technology to strip years of grime from its neo-Classical stonework. The cost of the restoration is estimated at $4.39 million. Throughout the current renovation, the monument will be draped with a full-scale image of the archway. Cleaning the Brandenburg Gate required corporate sponsorship. Deutsche Telekom, a major contributor, has won exclusive advertising rights on the upper part of the tarpaulin that covers the work area. Telekom's slogan ''Die Welt ruckt naher'' (''The World moves closer'') is apt since the trompe l'oeil tarpaulin draped over the monument features St. Basil's domes in Moscow, the Eiffel Tower and the Arc de Triomphe between the Brandenburg arches. This is not the first time that the Brandenburg Gate, Berlin's last remaining city gate, has been hidden from sight. From 1961 to 1989, it remained in view but in a closed-off area within the wall zone that was inaccessible from either East or West Berlin. In 1990 and 1991, it was enclosed in scaffolding while an unsuccessful effort was made to clean it by using traditional chemical methods. Built between 1789 and 1791 and modeled after the Propylaea archway at the Acropolis, the Brandenburg Gate stands 66 feet high and 215 feet wide. It is crowned by the famous Quadriga statue depicting the winged goddess Nike in a four-horse chariot. In 1806, Napoleon's victorious army carried the Quadriga to France where it remained until its triumphal return to Berlin in 1814. In the post-wall period, the Brandenburg Gate, on the east side of Pariser Platz at the end of Unter den Linden, has once again become a popular gathering place for parades, concerts and ceremonies. CORINNE LaBALME TRAVEL ADVISORY | The Brandenburg Gate: Undercover Again |
1245311_1 | group, Friends of the Earth, said yesterday that tests that it commissioned had detected a bioengineered corn variety called Roundup Ready, made by Monsanto, in four brands of tortilla chips sold in Britain and Denmark. The corn, made to be resistant to Monsanto's Roundup herbicide, has been approved for consumption in the United States, Canada and Japan, but not in Europe, where the opposition to genetically modified foods has been more intense. Monsanto called the European report yesterday ''unproven activist allegations,'' but said it would work with regulators and food companies to investigate the claim. Adrian Bebb, a campaigner at Friends of the Earth in Britain, said he believed that this was the first instance of unauthorized genetically modified food being found in Europe. But there have been incidents in which unauthorized genetically modified crops were grown in Europe because of seed mix-ups. If the corn is found to have come from the United States, which is the only country in which it is legally grown, it could discourage Europeans from importing American corn, although such imports are already extraordinarily low. Such questions were already raised by the reported discovery of another variety of genetically modified corn, called StarLink, in several brands of taco shells and other corn products in the United States and in a baking product in Japan. StarLink, developed by Aventis S.A., was approved in the United States for use in animal feed but not for human consumption because of concerns it could cause allergic reactions. It is not approved for any use in Japan. Hugh Grant, Monsanto's chief operating officer, said Monsanto had a program to make sure that varieties of genetically engineered corn that are not approved in Europe found domestic markets in the United States. Because of difficulties ensuring that unapproved varieties are not exported, shipments to Europe of American corn have shrunk to extremely low levels in the last few years, said Susan Keith, senior director for public policy of the National Corn Growers Association. Friends of the Earth, the same group that found the StarLink in the taco shells, commissioned tests of 31 products, mainly tortilla chips, taco shells, polenta and corn flakes. It said that in Britain the Monsanto corn was detected in Phileas Fogg brand tortilla chips and the house brand chips of the Safeway and Asda supermarket chains. It was also found in the Kims Zapatas brand in Denmark. | Group Reports Genetic Corn in European Food |
1245246_0 | ''Is that a cell phone you're taking out of your pocket? Well, then, I'm glad to see you!'' That, it seems, is the fondly imagined fantasy of the ambitious young lads of Liverpool, who, a new study shows, regard their mobile phones less as practical business tools than as handy little mate lures. Observing patrons at an upscale pub frequented by lawyers, entrepeneurs and other single professionals, researchers from the University of Liverpool discovered that men had a markedly different relationship to their cell phones than did women. Not only did significantly more men than women appear to own cell phones, but they clearly wanted everybody else to know they owned them, too. Whereas the women in the pub generally kept their phones in their purses and retrieved them only as needed, the men would take their phones out of their jacket pockets or briefcases upon sitting down and place them on the bar counter or table for all to see. Lest they be overlooked, the men fiddled with them often, picking them up, moving them here or there, checking to be sure the battery was charged. As the researchers see it, the men are using their mobile phones as peacocks use their immobilizing feathers and male bullfrogs use their immoderate croaks: to advertise to females their worth, status and desirability. The study, which appears in the current issue of the journal Human Nature, shows how new technology subserves primal impulses -- specifically, the impulse to strut. It also suggests that the breathless evolution of today's technology is driven, not merely by scientific innovations or the demand for heightened worker productivity, but by the social need of people to find novel ornaments and status symbols that distinguish them from the pack. Pulling no punches, John E. Lycett and Robin I. M. Dunbar of the Center for Economic Learning and Social Evolution, entitle their report, ''Mobile Phones as Lekking Devices Among Human Males.'' In nature, a lek is a communal mating area where males gather to engage in flamboyant courtship displays, and females stroll by to judge the performers and presumably choose the fittest, most resourceful or most amusing of the lot. Hammer-head bats, sage grouse, bowerbirds, walruses, Ugandan kob and fallow deer are among the species that engage in a lekking-style courtship system. And so, too, it seems, do some humans, at least in the pubs of Liverpool. ''This is | Cell Phone or Pheromone? New Props for the Mating Game |
1245339_4 | jolting three-hour ride on rough roads to reach Chengdu, the provincial capital. ''For anyone who wants to come to West China, infrastructure is the biggest challenge,'' said the company's Asia-Pacific chief, Henry Leung. Another challenge, he said, is keeping good people. Few educated young Chinese want to live in remote Sichuan Province, where On's joint venture partner, a radio factory, was set up in the days when Mao Zedong was moving strategic industries into the mountainous interior to protect them from a potential American invasion. Many of the Han Chinese who live in the west went there during the earlier western development drive of the late 1950's and early 1960's. Most of them were stuck there even after travel restrictions were lifted in the 1980's because of China's household registration system, which requires that people stay put to receive education and other welfare benefits. Now, the brightest of those people's children are filtering back east. Despite the government's urging, few are likely to choose to move the other way. Mr. Murray of the development bank and other development experts say China's central government would do best to spend its own money on roads and telephone lines, health care and education to grease the wheels of commerce in western China and strip the red tape from business deals so the market can do its magic. He fears the government will use a heavier hand, nudging the country's state banks to make loans as a matter of government policy, for example, at a time when they are struggling to purge their balance sheets of bad loans made to Rust- Belt-type industries in the 1980's and 1990's. Already, China's central bank governor, Dai Xianglong, has asked the state banks to support the government's western development program, and one of the largest, the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, has responded by saying it will increase the proportion of its loans to western provinces. ''The government should not use moral suasion, subsidized interest rates or similar policies to force banks to lend for projects in western China,'' Mr. Murray said, warning that such moves would lead only to a larger bank bailout later on. Even if the government does start pouring money into the west, many people doubt that it can keep track of all the money. The huge Three Gorges Dam being built across the Yangtze River has been plagued by corruption scandals | Taming the Chinese Hinterland; Beijing Tries to Lift Economic Standards in Its West |
1250126_4 | happiness' for what would have been a crass reference to property.'' This is, to say the least, a controversial assertion for which Diggins does not provide any evidence. At other places, however, Diggins suggests that Lincoln was reinterpreting the Declaration in the way that some modern Supreme Court justices have reinterpreted the Constitution. Diggins writes that in ''reading into the Declaration the primacy of labor,'' Lincoln gave the Declaration ''a conscience, a moral quality lacking in Jefferson's notion of happiness.'' And he admits that ''the foundations I write about . . . are not the political foundations founded by our founders.'' Diggins could still argue that Lincoln succeeded in describing what the average 18th-century American believed, but I don't think he wants to try to make this difficult case. The fact is that if you acknowledge that Lincoln's full-blown philosophy of labor was not part of the Declaration's underlying philosophy, then you must admit that it is not the American consensus but rather Lincoln's own redefinition for his time of what the Declaration said about equality. As for the present, Diggins insists that Lincoln's true system continues to be at the center of American conviction and dismisses arguments by radical historians to the contrary. But they are right, and he is wrong. By the late 19th century, American capitalism had changed fundamentally. The system of small-scale proprietorships was replaced by a system based on corporate capitalism, and the desire to rise came to mean rising within the diverse wage-laborer classes. The dream of the true system lingered on -- many Americans still aspire to own their own businesses -- but it has had to share billing with other dreams of self-fulfillment and freedom. If Diggins wants to defend the consensus historians, he will have to make a more finely tuned argument. America has a common culture, but it does not follow from certain unchallengeable axioms. Just as Lincoln reshaped Jefferson's ideas to the purposes of his time, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Martin Luther King reshaped Lincoln's. Diggins's exposition of Lincoln is interesting, but it does not sustain a theory of American history or provide a sufficient platform from which to refute competing contemporary theories. And I write this as someone who shares Diggins's discomfort with many of these theories. John B. Judis, a senior editor of The New Republic, is the author, most recently, of ''The Paradox of American Democracy.'' | President at the Re-Creation |
1250235_0 | A Sort-of Leaning Tower Q. I'm curious about the steeple of Grace Church at Broadway and East 10th Street, which appears to lean slightly to one side when viewed from Broadway. Has it always been like this, or is there concern it might be getting worse? A. ''It's not an optical illusion,'' said Robert C. Bates, an architect with the firm of Walter B. Melvin who has worked on the church restoration since 1993. ''But the masonry is very well pointed and the mortar isn't cracked or dislodged. It's stable.'' Grace Church, among the oldest Gothic Revival structures in the city, was designed by James Renwick Jr. and built in 1846 for what was then the city's wealthiest Episcopal parish. The site, where Broadway veers west, is especially prominent, and the narrow, lacey steeple was long a dominant feature on the city's northern skyline. The orientation of the church and the low height of the surrounding buildings allow the marble steeple more than ample exposure to the sun, which shines right up Broadway in winter. According to Mr. Bates, the lean is due to the exaggerated heat gain on the southwestern face of the spire, which absorbs enough sunlight to increase its length significantly. ''Believe it or not,'' he said, ''on a typical winter day, the southern face can be about 100 degrees warmer than the northern face, which is in shade. ''It can grow about five inches in height, and since there are no relieving joints to accept the expansion, it creates this sort of banana shape.'' The spire was built of wood, which led to rumors that the church foundations were not strong enough to support one of marble. The building committee later admitted that the church simply lacked the funds, and the marble spire was built in 1888. ''For the first 60 feet the steeple is hollow and open to the air, which creates a moderating effect,'' Mr. Bates said. ''The tilt is most pronounced at the top of the spire, which is solid masonry.'' The mortar joints in the tower are soft, old lime, which help allow the steeple to lean. The temperature differential between the faces of the spire diminishes in the summertime, and the lean is less pronounced, he said. Angle on the Seasons Q. I understand that the shiny triangular sculpture in the sunken plaza in front of the McGraw-Hill Building functions as | F.Y.I. |
1250119_4 | the keyboard. It could be altered on the screen -- details added or highlighted, scale and perspective changed and then printed out. Someone sitting at the computer screen could generate a custom-made map in the time it must have taken early chartmakers to draw a single rhumb line as a bearing for mariners navigating a wide sea. Ralph E. Ehrenberg, who was then chief of the map division, said that he had seen many radical changes in cartography since he was a young man converting aerial photographs into maps, the cutting-edge technology in the middle of the 20th century. Speaking in soft librarian tones, he mused: ''Today, you can put in one of our floppy disks and, with each image that comes on the screen, you are creating a new map. To me that's revolutionary.'' When my book was first published in 1981, I anticipated some of the new uses of computers and space-age remote sensing in expanding what could be mapped and expediting the making of maps. But, like people in the field, I never imagined the pace and magnitude of change that is now occurring. Electronic technology is changing everything about maps today. So much of the mapping data is no longer collected by foot-slogging surveyors but by satellites. They take detailed pictures and detect variations in the land with sensors that see beyond the range of human vision. They bounce radar signals to measure the contours of cloud-covered or forested terrain and to penetrate the soil to archaeological remains hidden beneath. Other sensors plumb ocean depths and detect the reflected-light signatures of vegetation, snow cover and soil moisture. All this information is transmitted in electronic bytes, which computers then process into maps. Navigation satellites give cartographers the longitude, latitude and elevation of just about any place on earth. Portable global positioning devices, drawing on the satellite signals, have been called the most important development in the history of surveying. In little more than an instant, surveyors can use the instruments to fix a position with pinpoint precision, something that not long ago would have taken hours or days of celestial sightings and ground measurements. Data for the content of maps and information about where exactly it belongs come together in computer-stored archives. Every shoreline and boundary, every highway and street, everything from the ocean floor to the top of Mount Everest, has been recorded as so many | Bookend; Fold -- No, Click -- Here |
1250426_1 | to the grocery store to see how people shop,'' said Tim O'Day, a longtime friend and an executive at the Leo Burnett Company, Kellogg's advertising agency. ''He wants to know what's happening in stores, what people are responding to.'' Indeed, Wall Street analysts say Mr. Gutierrez, 47, has brought a fresh and open approach to Kellogg that had been lacking at the company. ''During the 1990's, Kellogg may have been the worst-managed packaged foods company I followed,'' said John McMillin, who studies the food industry for Prudential Securities. ''I think Gutierrez is a major uptick from past management.'' Friends and colleagues, who describe Mr. Gutierrez as quiet and reflective, said his management style was to soothe rather than to scold. He is unpretentious, they say. During an interview at his office a few weeks ago, Mr. Gutierrez was dressed casually and spoke in even tones about returning to Cuba someday, about one of his corporate heroes (the late Robert C. Goizueta, the Coca-Cola chief and another Cuban refugee) and about the future of Kellogg. Calling the Keebler deal ''transformational,'' he discussed plans for innovative new products like Snack 'Ums, cereal-flavored snacks in canisters, and efforts to use the Internet to promote more traditional brands, like Frosted Flakes, Raisin Bran and Pop Tarts. Mr. Gutierrez was born into a wealthy Havana family. In the 1950's, his father owned a flourishing pineapple export company. But in 1960, after Fidel Castro came to power, everything changed. His father was jailed after arguing with Che Guevara, Mr. Castro's minister of industries. ''I recall the day he was taken,'' Mr. Gutierrez said. ''I'll never forget the olive-green uniforms coming to the door and taking my father to the car.'' Several hours later, after his father had been released, the family was ordered out of Cuba. They fled with $8,000 and 25 suitcases for Miami Beach, where, Mr. Gutierrez said, he began to learn English from a hotel bellhop. ''At the time, my father thought it would be over in a matter of weeks,'' he said. But the Gutierrez family never returned to Cuba. His father steered the family through Florida, New York, Mexico and Florida again, all by the time Carlos was 17. ''My father worked for 20 to 25 years trying to recreate Cuba and recreate his business there, and he was never able to do it,'' Mr. Gutierrez said. In the early 1970's, | Bittersweet Tasks in Cereal City |
1250297_4 | in the middle of the past century: 650 nuns this year compared with 733 in 1946. But the doors swing in far more frequently now: about 250 sisters live at Maryknoll full-time, back from their work overseas. The convent sees one or two women profess vows each year, yet buries an average of 25 annually. The woman who founded Maryknoll, Mary Josephine Mollie Rogers, was a Smith College zoology graduate who was almost as committed to the idea that women were equal to men as she was to the belief in propagating the Catholic faith overseas. The sisters' mission statement reads in part: ''Their focus is women's empowerment, community building and action for justice and peace.'' The nuns insist they were not early feminists -- they were soldiers of faith. The Maryknoll sisters who were killed in El Salvador particularly took this to heart, rushing there when Sister Madeline sent out a call for help. ''We have a vision that they were martyrs, that they went to El Salvador willingly,'' Sister Nancy said. ''That consoled me. We cried and we mourned, but we also had this faith and hope. God needed their deaths so this continent could know what was going on in El Salvador. Only God knows what God is doing.'' Memories of the women abound, and the Maryknoll congregation works hard to keep those memories alive. Books have been written on them; archival materials are overflowing. The center holds a small tribute every year during Advent. The churchwomen are remembered in other ways as well: schools and clinics in the United States and Central America, a skills-training center in Brooklyn, and other institutions have been named in their honor. Starting in the fall, when the anniversary of their deaths nears, the phone rings constantly at Maryknoll, with individuals from throughout the world requesting information on their lives. ''People call for information about them all the time,'' said Sister Therese, who is now the communications director at Maryknoll. ''This isn't just Catholics. It's catholic in the lowercase of the word -- it's universal. People across the board in religious groups are inspired by their lives and their sacrifice. As far as I'm concerned, this is a very strong indication of resurrection. They live.'' More information on the Maryknoll commemoration may be obtained by calling (914) 941-7575 or on the Internet at www.maryknoll.org. Registration is required to attend. LOOKING BACK | For Maryknoll Sisters, Some Memories Don't Fade |
1820729_6 | support claims that probiotics could ward off cancer, allergies, high blood pressure and other diseases. ''It's early in terms of the research,'' he said. Mr. Schardt, the nutritionist with the Center for Science in the Public Interest, said the claims of many probiotic foods and supplements were not backed by scientific research. For instance, Kashi Vive cereal promises to ''care for your digestive system and enhance your joie de vivre,'' but there is no published research that shows that the probiotic strain in Vive has any health benefits, he said. Kashi, which is owned by the Kellogg Company, declined to comment other than to say the strain it uses in Kashi Vive is proprietary. Similarly, Mr. Schardt said that a study supporting DanActive's claim for strengthening the body's defenses showed that it did not prevent colds or infections, though it did reduce the duration of colds by a day and a half. Dannon officials said that Mr. Schardt's analysis was full of errors and that other studies showed that DanActive strengthens the body's defenses. As for Activia, the company does not claim that it reduces the risk of specific medical conditions like constipation. Rather, Dannon says, it ''can help regulate your digestive system by helping reduce long intestinal transit time.'' The success of Group Danone's probiotic products has helped boost its stock by more than 50 percent over the last year. Mark Lynch, an analyst with Goldman Sachs in London, said that Danone's growth in dairy had been due mostly to growth in new markets combined with the introduction of innovative products in existing markets. Besides Activia and Actimel (the European equivalent of DanActive), Danone has introduced a yogurt called Danacol in Europe that contains plant sterols that the company says lower cholesterol. Another Danone yogurt is on the way that claims to improve skin quality. As word circulates among consumers about probiotics, not all shoppers are sold. At a Giant Eagle grocery store in Cleveland, Amanda Ross, a 31-year-old grant writer, said she had tried Kashi Vive and concluded that it tasted like cardboard. ''It didn't make my mouth feel good,'' she said. ''And I'm a big granola and cereal person.'' As for Activia, Ms. Ross said she had bought it on sale and liked the taste, but did not notice any digestive changes. ''When it went up to its regular price, I didn't buy any more,'' she said. | In Live Bacteria, Food Makers See A New Bonanza |
1820753_0 | Gerard Grandinetti, the federal official in charge of overseeing and hiring 1,100 airport screeners at Newark Liberty International Airport, has resigned. Ann Davis, a spokeswoman for the Transportation Security Administration, confirmed yesterday that Mr. Grandinetti resigned on Friday, citing personal reasons. Last week The Newark Star-Ledger reported allegations that some job candidates for senior management posts had received questions in advance that were on a test for prospective employees. After the allegations, officials canceled the test and started an internal investigation. Mr. Grandinetti could not be reached for comment. ANTHONY RAMIREZ | Metro Briefing | New Jersey: Newark: Airport Security Official Resigns |
1822208_1 | employees believe that the office is the most convenient or effective place to do a job search. And people who are unhappy with their jobs sometimes believe that they are entitled to use the workplace to find something better. There are no statistics on the extent of the practice, but according to workplace experts and employees, it is widespread. The problem is that such activity is often against company policy and may even lead to dismissal. ''It's something that should be avoided, particularly when company employment policies specifically forbid resources and communication devices for any personal use, much less for a job search,'' said Ben Dattner, principal of Dattner Consulting, a Manhattan-based firm with large and small corporate and nonprofit clients. ''It's important to abide by the terms of one's employment and not to burn bridges.'' The chances of being caught, Mr. Dattner added, have climbed as more companies monitor computer use and e-mail. He said that instead of using company time and property for a job search, employees could conduct the hunt on their own time with their home computers and cellphones. And it is not difficult to go to a nearby print center at lunchtime to make copies, he noted. Noah Pickus, interim director for ethics at the Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University, recommends that job seekers use common sense in their pursuit of new employment while at the office. That means not spending hours job-searching while neglecting work duties or putting the office phone number on your résumé. ''There is an important distinction between an occasional e-mail and spending half a day looking for another job,'' Mr. Pickus said. ''The most difficult ethical dilemmas are often between two rights. It's right to look out for yourself and your family and it's right that you have an obligation to your current employer.'' John A. Challenger of Challenger, Gray & Christmas, the placement firm based in Chicago, says that most employees, especially those under 40, see themselves as ''free agents'' who will search for jobs from their offices as a matter of course. Employees working 50- or 60-hour weeks, he said, are often too exhausted to look for jobs when they are outside the office. He says he does believe that job-hunting from the office crosses an ethical line when employees begin using office supplies for résumés and cover letters. It can also be dangerous. Mr. Challenger | The Pluses and Pitfalls Of Job-Seeking at Work |
1822209_5 | need people who can help them get the technology to work.'' Another high-growth area is energy, said Nariman Behravesh, chief economist at Global Insight, a consulting firm. Refinery and drilling jobs have increased, he said, as have jobs in alternative and synthetic fuels. While the overall number of added jobs may be small when compared with other sectors, he said, the growth has been significant. Doors are also opening for executives, said Chris Ohlendorf, a senior partner at the McKinley Group, an executive search firm based in Minneapolis. ''What's been missing over the past few years is the ability for managers and others in leadership positions to have a productive job search,'' Mr. Ohlendorf said. ''Everybody was filling soldier roles.'' But recently, companies have been looking for people to manage those workers. ''Hiring is much more aggressive, much more real,'' he said. The hottest areas for executive jobs, according to McKinley, are sales, engineering and accounting and finance (particularly for those familiar with accounting changes in the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 or with compliance reporting to the Securities and Exchange Commission) with strong growth in marketing and information technology. Mr. Ohlendorf said that in information technology, there was particularly strong demand for senior-level project managers, professionals with experience in software quality assurance and Microsoft's .Net technology. FOR college graduates in general, the job outlook is also good, according to the National Association of Colleges and Employers, an organization of college career advisers and staffing professionals. A recent survey found that employers hope to hire 17.4 percent more graduates in 2007 than in 2006. Employers in the service sector predicted the largest increase, 19.8 percent, with manufacturers planning to increase hiring of graduates by 9.5 percent. For government and nonprofit employers, the projected gain was 9 percent. But that doesn't mean finding a job is effortless. Jonathan G. Sugar, who later this year will be graduating from a master's program in mechanical engineering at the University of California, Los Angeles, said that pounding the pavement or, perhaps more aptly in 2007, hitting the job boards, was still crucial for graduating college students. A recent visit to a job fair that included many of themajor military contractors was little more than a meet-and-greet, he said. ''All the big companies just tell you to go online and apply,'' he said. ''I just go to the job fairs for the free pens.'' OFFICE SPACE | From Tech Workers to Nurses, an Employee's Market |
1822086_4 | to reach a confidential settlement; it allows certain laboratories to continue collecting royalties but lets institutions, doctors and scientists use the patented gene sequences without paying. There are many other examples of life patents causing public concern. One of the most important examples involves patents on food crops and cloned animals. These patents have a growing potential to cede control of the world's food supply to biotech patent holders. Important questions must also be answered about who can legitimately ''own'' or control our personal genetic information. And no one has yet been able to address economic, social and legal questions raised by the patenting of genetic resources taken from developing countries. This month, for example, Peruvian farmers protested against the biotech giant Syngenta, which genetically modified a common potato variety so that the potatoes are sterile unless a chemical is applied. Risk concerns aside, farmers say they want to know why the company can charge a premium for adding a few new genes to a potato variety -- yet they cannot, in turn, demand a royalty from Syngenta for using the ''property'' that they and their ancestors have been ''genetically modifying,'' by traditional means, for centuries. Biotech companies are also amassing huge patent portfolios by tapping the genetic diversity found in volcanoes, rain forests and deep sea hydrothermal vents. They collect DNA from micro-organisms they find, patent it, and sell access to the gene sequences to pharmaceutical, agricultural, chemical and industrial companies. Only rarely do such companies voluntarily work with indigenous communities to come to mutually agreeable terms for these kinds of activities. There has been much international protest as a result, but very little concrete action to change the situation. These concerns may sound like the nattering of nabobs to those who believe the present system of protecting intellectual property is acceptable. But like it or not, a large and powerful infrastructure has declared that patents are crucial for getting discoveries out of the lab and into the market, and it will not change on its own. NEVERTHELESS, that does not change the larger reality that Professor Hilgartner describes: that decisions about intellectual property are about much more than simply finding ways to stimulate and reward innovation. They directly affect what technologies make it to the marketplace. They determine who is accountable for biotech products and processes, under what circumstances, and how they affect everyone. Shifting the terms of | Someone (Other Than You) May Own Your Genes |
1822060_0 | THEY pour into your e-mail in-box, as explicit as they are relentless, with subject lines too shameful to share with colleagues. Enlarge your penis! Shrink your waistline! Enhance your sex life! Delete, delete, delete. But they reappear, as relentless as they are explicit, with pop-up pictures embarrassing for the boss to see. Enlarge your penis! Shrink your waistline! Enhance your sex life! All before lunch. The spewing of spam over the digital transom has long been derided as an annoyance and provoked concerns about the insecurity of computer networks. But now some e-mailers and experts on psychology and technology worry that it is also having a more pernicious effect: insecurity for the recipient. With worldwide volumes having doubled in the past year, and ever-more sophisticated spammers singling out computer users with particular interests or problems, it can serve as a constant reminder of what is lacking for those with fragile egos -- whether a sinuous body or an eight-cylinder sex drive. ''How do they know I need to (fill in the blank)?'' the recipient wonders. Delete, delete, delete. ''It can affect your emotions and your level of stress,'' said Jeffrey T. Parsons, a psychology professor at Hunter College, who has conducted research on sexuality and the Internet. ''Once you get in a spam loop, you can get bombarded with these things four or five times a day, and that can definitely trigger insecurities and exacerbate ones that already exist.'' Pam Fitzgerald, managing partner of a marketing company in Virginia who struggles with her weight, bristles at the diet-plan spam, wondering ''who knows how much I weigh.'' And her heart aches for one of her young employees, the only one in the small firm not to have finished college, who seems to be a magnet for spam pushing Johnny-come-lately bachelor's degree programs. ''It's rubbing him raw day in and day out,'' she said. Worsening the psychic toll is the increasingly focused tailoring of spam of all stripes. Legitimate retailers buy contact lists of e-mail addresses, while underground computer hacks trade -- or steal -- them. Spammers often steal e-mail addresses from topic-oriented and corporate Web sites with scores of registered users, and also corral highjacked networks of personal computers called botnets to glean specific information from other computers' hard drives, like e-mail address books. So junk e-mail arrives looking as if it came from a personal friend, or it will seem | Raining E-Blows On Egos |
1817876_0 | A new effort to revitalize Iraqi factories that make vegetable oil, fertilizer, road signs and sulfuric acid -- among the world's most outdated and decrepit -- is expected to be at the center of the plan for the nation that President Bush will present Wednesday. But even before the measures are announced, Iraqi political and business leaders have been expressing skepticism that any effort to transform a system of state-owned enterprises that has fallen so far into dysfunction could become an engine for job creation in Iraq. The administration describes the steps as a way to employ more Iraqis and to keep them away from more destructive pursuits such as joining the insurgency or fighting in a militia. Among the economic measures under consideration is new support for a program that allows local American military commanders to finance small reconstruction projects. But recent statements by administration officials suggest that the plan is also likely to include an effort to revive parts of what was a vast Iraqi military and industrial base before it was destroyed by war, sanctions and looting. That plan would involve pumping expertise and money for reconstruction into enterprises still owned by the Iraqi government, or privatizing some or all of the companies to force them to become more competitive. Either way, Iraqi political and business leaders were dubious about the prospects for success. ''I doubt it very much in view of the current challenges and dangers facing the country,'' said Mehdi Hafedh, a member of Parliament and a former planning minister. The state-owned enterprises are already a huge drain on Iraq's budget, Mr. Hafedh said, and most of them produce little or nothing. Many are filled with no-show jobs. ''The Americans should have made some consultations because this is ridiculous, frankly,'' Mr. Hafedh said. ''What Iraq needs to do is reduce the number of employees in the state sector.'' The focus on jobs and reconstruction is in many ways a return to the earliest days of the occupation, when the top American administrator here, L. Paul Bremer III, pressed the idea that economic initiatives were as important as military action in stabilizing the country and convincing ordinary Iraqis that the invasion would have tangible benefits for them. That philosophy led to a reconstruction program financed by $30 billion in American taxpayer money that had a marginal impact on the quality of life here, attracted ceaseless attacks | Bush to Propose Restoring Iraqi Factories to Create Jobs |
1822800_0 | The maximum federal grant for middle- and low-income students to attend college would increase for the first time in four years under a catchall spending bill that House and Senate Democrats agreed to on Tuesday. The measure would complete budget issues left over from 2006. The increase, announced by the chairmen of the House and Senate Appropriations Committees, would raise the maximum grants, under the Pell program, to $4,310 a year from $4,050. The last substantial increase in the grants was in 2001. Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts and chairman of the Senate education committee, called the increase ''an important down payment by Democrats on our commitment to help families with high college costs.'' The move follows a vote by the House, under the Democrats' agenda in the new Congress, to cut interest rates on some subsidized loans for middle- and lower-income students. Although the rate cut passed with overwhelming bipartisan support, that bill was criticized by House Republicans and the Bush administration as benefiting just college graduates faced with repaying loans, rather than broadening access to college for low-income students. With the announcement on Tuesday, days before President Bush is to release his 2008 budget, Democrats appeared to answer that criticism, part of a broader effort to claim the issue of college affordability. Even if the president asks for an increase in Pell Grants, as the White House has indicated is likely, Democrats will have already acted to increase the grants. Republicans generally appeared to support increasing the grants. Each year, 5.3 million students with family incomes less than $40,000 a year receive the grants. Although the grants have remained steady, the cost of attending college has outpaced inflation, lowering the buying power of the grants. The budget bill would increase federal grant money by $615.4 million, to $13.6 billion for this year. An advocate for the U.S. Public Interest Research Group Higher Education Project, Luke Swarthout, said the increase was significant, though students had hoped for a much larger increase. | Accord on Increasing Pell Grants |
1822791_1 | parents wanted to make Ashley's body continue to match her mental age. But that treats her as an object to be ''designed,'' not as a natural person to be respected whatever her state. This is where human dignity comes in. The two radically opposed versions are intrinsic human dignity (we have dignity just because we are human); and extrinsic human dignity (Peter Singer's version), dignity conferred on us by others. Ashley ''is precious not so much for what she is, but because her parents and siblings love her and care about her.'' Extrinsic human dignity says that below a certain level of mental or physical functioning, we don't merit dignity and its protections. A society's ''ethical tone'' is set not by how it treats its most powerful citizens, but by how it treats its weakest and most vulnerable -- its Ashleys. Margaret A. Somerville Montreal, Jan. 30, 2007 The writer is founding director of the Center for Medicine, Ethics and Law at McGill University. To the Editor: Peter Singer, a highly controversial ethicist, argues for the ''best interest'' principle and against the notion that Ashley has dignity. ''Benevolence,'' ''best intentions'' and ''for their own good'' have often had disastrous consequences for people with disabilities. For decades, parents, families and disability advocates have been fighting for the principle that personal and physical autonomy of all people with disabilities is sacrosanct and for community-based services for children and adults. Their advocacy led to enactment of laws that establish rights to full personhood for people with disabilities. Social service and health care systems should be strengthened so that people can receive help at home and appropriate equipment. To the extent that it remains difficult to provide community services for individuals and families, then it is all our duty to change the system so that it works rather than to modify people so that they will more easily ''fit'' a flawed system. The United Nations recently adopted the Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Rights and Dignity of Persons With Disabilities. Article 17 reads in part, ''Every person with disabilities has a right to respect for his or her physical and mental integrity on an equal basis with others.'' Ashley has been denied her basic human rights through draconian interventions to her person. Julia Epstein Berkeley, Calif., Jan. 26, 2007 The writer is director of communications, Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund. | The Human Rights Of a Disabled Child |
1817575_0 | MISHANDLED BAGS -- Customer complaints in November about bags mishandled by domestic airlines rose to 6.32 percent per 1,000 passengers, from 5.04 percent in November 2005, the Transportation Department said. Of 20 airlines in the report, the five with the fewest complaints per thousand passengers were Aloha, Hawaiian, AirTran, Continental and JetBlue. The five with the most complaints were Mesa, SkyWest, American Eagle, Comair and Atlantic Southeast. A mishandled bag is one that was reported lost, delayed, damaged or subject to pilfering. REGISTERED TRAVELER -- Another international airline, Air France, said it would join the nascent Registered Traveler program, teaming up with Verified Identity Pass Inc. to open a lane next month at Kennedy International Airport Terminal 1, where Air France operates. The program, which costs $99.95 a year, is currently operated by Verified Identity under the brand name Clear at Orlando International Airport. Clear is about to open a lane in partnership with British Airways at Terminal 7 of Kennedy and has plans to open lanes at three other domestic airports, starting this month. Competitors of Verified Identity, among them Unisys, have said they plan to start their own versions of the service at various airports this month. Registered Traveler members pay an annual fee, undergo a federal background check, receive a biometrically encoded identity card and are then entitled to use dedicated security lanes that will employ new technology to speed passage, including machines that scan shoes without the need to remove them. NEW AVIATION ERA -- Eclipse Aviation delivered the first so-called very-light jet to a customer on Dec. 31. The delivery of the jet, with a current price tag of $1.52 million, starts a new era in which 5,000 of the inexpensive little jets, produced by several manufacturers and able to land at about 5,000 airports, are expected to be in the skies within 10 years. The Cessna Aircraft Company, meanwhile, has delivered the first of its bigger new $2.7 million Citation Mustang business jets, which it refers to as the newest ''entry level'' jet in its popular Citation line. The Mustang was delivered in late November to the Mustang Management Group in Fresno, Calif., which will allow Cessna to lease the aircraft for 10 months as a demonstration plane and then to use it in its Scott Aviation subsidiary for flight training. The first delivery to a customer that will put a Mustang into regular | MEMO PAD |
1817599_5 | quickly. A Japanese project in Bhutan was recently destroyed this way. ''The villagers shrugged and said, 'Nobody asked us, we knew every third year there would be a flood,' '' Ms. Mongia, the United Nations energy expert, said. Wind energy has found few applications in rural villages, because the turbines, even though far more capable than in the past, are still too expensive. China has tried another approach: supplementing an expansion of electricity from coal-fired power plants with cheap rooftop solar water heaters that channel water through thin pipes crisscrossing a shiny surface. Close to 5,000 small Chinese companies sell these simple water heaters, and together they have made China the world's largest market for solar water heaters, with 60 percent of the global market and more than 30 million households using the systems, said Eric Martinot, an expert on renewable energy at Tsinghua University in Beijing. Wang Youyun, a 27-year-old lettuce farmer in Wangjiaying, a village of 3,000 people in southwestern China's Yunnan Province, bought one such hot water system a year ago for $360 and installed it on his family'sroof next to a spot where ears of corn dry in the sunshine. The village now has electricity, and some residents use it for water heaters, but Mr. Wang calculates that the solar system will pay for itself in two years. There is so much competition that even without government subsidies, the same size model now costs $330 and the price is still falling, he said. The water heaters can be installed only on a sturdy, flat concrete roof, however, and not on the beautiful but fragile tile roofs that still adorn many of the houses in the village. The systems pose another drawback as well, Mr. Wang acknowledged: ''If there is no sun for two or three days then there's no hot water.'' Big conventional power plants, even those that burn coal, are often cleaner, safer and more efficient than crude household stoves and other small systems. So many economists say that the first step in developing countries should be the construction of power lines connecting as many villagers to national grids as possible. Cooperation across national borders can help make this happen. Vietnam has made electricity available to 84 percent of its households, up from 50 percent in the early 1990s, partly by building a high-power line from China across Vietnam's impoverished northern highlands. But power plants | Clean Air or TV: Paying in Pollution For Energy Hunger; India and China Explore Alternatives, but Too Often The Diesel Generator Rules |
1816131_6 | tailings in Baia Mare, or Great Mine, roughly 80 miles north of Rosia Montana. Like Gabriel Resources, the company promised a state-of-the-art, self-contained project that would not pose risks to the environment. But less than a year later, the dam holding back a lake of cyanide-laced water burst, sending 100,000 cubic meters of contaminated water downstream to the Danube, killing more than 1,200 tons of fish in Hungary. Gabriel Resources says it would build in safeguards that were missing at Baia Mare. It has promised to convert most of the cyanide into a nontoxic compound before discharging it into the mine's tailing pond. It also promises to clean up pollution left by past mining operations and spend $70 million to do as much as possible to repair the altered landscape after its project is done. ''Arsenic, cadmium, nickel, lead,'' said Catalin Hosu, a public relations official for Gabriel Resources, ticking off just a few of the heavy metals that leach from ancient mines to give this valley its name; Rosia Montana means red mountain. ''We help the biodiversity; we help the environment,'' said Yani Roditis, Gabriel Resources' chief operating officer. That's difficult for many people here to believe. The new project will grind down several hills, leaving four deep pits in their place, and slowly fill an entire valley with wastewater and tailings that will take years to solidify. Robert E. Moran, a mining expert hired by the opposition to evaluate the impact of Gabriel Resources' plans, said that the mine, despite detoxification, would inevitably produce other toxic byproducts damaging to the environment, including heavy metals. The controversy, meanwhile, has splintered the town, its buildings divided between those with signs that read, ''Property of Rosia Montana Gold Corp.'' and others that say, ''This Property Is Not For Sale.'' ''I was born here, so why should I leave?'' said Gabriela Jorka, 38, who runs a small general store in Rosia Montana. ''I'd rather kill myself.'' Eugen Bobar, 60, the school principal, says that the dispute is pitting parents against children, husbands against wives. But only about 40 percent of the families to be relocated remain, and Mr. Bobar predicts that most of them will leave. ''Most of the people who talk about the environment are just making an excuse,'' Mr. Bobar said, sitting in the school's office late one night. ''They will leave for a good price.'' Mr. David, however, insists | Fighting Over Gold In the Land of Dracula |
1816141_3 | the document, which includes printed text, handwriting and spreadsheets, The News drew the conclusion that Mr. Giuliani appeared torn between seeking the White House and continuing his business endeavors, which include consulting on leadership and security issues, a law practice and an investment concern. One page in the document, according to The News, says Mr. Giuliani might ''drop out'' of the race as a result of ''insurmountable'' personal and political concerns. On that page was a list of bullet points that seem to highlight those concerns: Mr. Giuliani's consulting practice; his former police commissioner, Mr. Kerik, who has struggled with personal and professional controversies; Ms. Hanover, with whom he had a stormy breakup; his third and current wife, Judith Nathan Giuliani; and ''social issues'' -- apparently a reference to his support for abortion rights, gay civil unions, and gun control, some or all of which are opposed by many Republican voters. ''All will come out -- in worst light,'' the document stated. ''$100 million against us on this stuff,'' it continued, apparently a reference to likely efforts by Giuliani opponents to draw public attention to his liabilities. It also suggests that Mr. Giuliani would categorize and honor his donors with terms from baseball. While President Bush referred to his best financial supporters as ''Rangers'' and ''Pioneers,'' Mr. Giuliani would call them ''Team Captains,'' ''MVPs,'' ''All-Stars,'' and ''Sluggers.'' He would focus his fund-raising operations in New York, Washington, and California, the document indicates. Ms. Mindel called the document ''very outdated,'' but at least some of the ideas reflect current strategy discussions in the Giuliani camp, according to Republican Party figures who are familiar with the discussions and who spoke to The New York Times recently on condition of anonymity. Specifically, these Republicans say, Giuliani advisers believe that he is broadly popular enough to be able to raise money quickly for a presidential bid, and that he would need more than $100 million by the end of 2007. According to Giuliani advisers, the document was a notebook compiled by one staff member whose luggage was not immediately located after a private plane flight last fall. They said it was not an official dossier that all Giuliani political aides shared. ''Voters are sick and tired of dirty tricks,'' Ms. Mindel said. Referring to the document, she added: ''It's about as relevant today as a grocery list written in early October -- in pencil.'' | Political Paper Stolen, Giuliani Camp Says |
1816064_8 | consultant, predicted that the fascination with what she called the green identifiers will last about five years longer. Then, she said, green-elite food consumers will push companies for even more information about environmental impact, labor practices and community involvement, and mass market consumers will start reading labels instead of just searching out easy identifiers. Food manufacturers might begin to copy the new nutrition-style labels that Timberland is putting on its shoe boxes. Each one lists the amount of energy it took to make the shoes, how much of that was renewable, whether child labor was used and how many hours per pair Timberland dedicated to community service. ''As soon as the mass market starts to understand these issues more,'' Ms. Talerman predicted, ''we'll get away from the fields and the giant vegetables and get back to better design.'' It's More or Less Natural, And It's Getting Bigger by the Day EACH year grocery manufacturers roll out tens of thousands of products, ever hopeful that a new box of crackers or a frozen entree will be a hit with consumers. In 2006, 17,779 food products were introduced, according to Mintel International, a market research company. That's a jump of almost 2,000 items over the previous year. Of those products, 3,761 either were organic or had an all-natural claim on the label. ''It seems now that everybody is getting into organics,'' said Lynn Dornblaser, a new-products industry analyst at Mintel. She predicted that in 2007, a shakedown will occur in the organic industry as its products become accessible to larger numbers of people. One key indicator of this shift is that Wal-Mart is selling organic products for less money than many competitors. Other fast-growing categories last year were baby food, with 116 new products, and ready-to-eat meals or meal-replacement products, with 1,125 items, up from 791 in 2005. Desserts, ice cream and candy came out at a healthy clip, but fruits and vegetables were not so lucky. The number of new products in that category dropped by 13 percent. ''We're also seeing more of a focus on authentically ethnic foods,'' Ms. Dornblaser said. ''It's not just pasta sauce: it's pasta sauce from Tuscany.'' Indian food, in particular, is beginning to catch on. Although the numbers are small -- only 143 new Indian food items appeared last year -- the figure is almost double the number brought out the year before. KIM SEVERSON | Be It Ever So Homespun, There's Nothing Like Spin |
1816344_2 | that the weight he gained while on Zyprexa caused his heart attack. Zyprexa, taken by about two million people worldwide last year, is approved to treat schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. Besides causing severe weight gain, it increases blood sugar and cholesterol in many people who take it, all risk factors for heart disease. In a statement responding to questions for this article, Lilly said it had reported the death of Mr. Kauffman to federal regulators, as it is legally required to do. The company said it could not comment on the specific causes of his death but noted that the report it submitted to regulators showed that he had ''a complicated medical history that may have led to this unfortunate outcome.'' ''Zyprexa,'' Lilly's statement said, ''is a lifesaving drug and it has helped millions of people worldwide with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder regain control of their lives.'' Documents provided to The Times by a lawyer who represents mentally ill patients show that Eli Lilly, which makes Zyprexa, has sought for a decade to play down those side effects -- even though its own clinical trials show the drug causes 16 percent of the patients who take Zyprexa to gain more than 66 pounds after a year. Eli Lilly now faces federal and state investigations about the way it marketed Zyprexa. Last week -- after articles in The Times about the Zyprexa documents -- Australian drug regulators ordered Lilly to provide more information about what it knew, and when, about Zyprexa's side effects. Lilly says side effects from Zyprexa must be measured against the potentially devastating consequences of uncontrolled mental illness. But some leading psychiatrists say that because of its physical side effects Zyprexa should be used only by patients who are acutely psychotic and that patients should take other medicines for long-term treatment. ''Lilly always downplayed the side effects,'' said Dr. S. Nassir Ghaemi, a specialist on bipolar disorder at Emory University in Atlanta. ''They've tended to admit weight gain, but in various ways they've minimized its relevance.'' Dr. Ghaemi said Lilly had also encouraged an overly positive view of its studies on the effectiveness of Zyprexa as a long-term treatment for bipolar disorder. There is more data to support the use of older and far cheaper drugs like lithium, he said. Last year, Lilly paid $700 million to settle 8,000 lawsuits from people who said they had developed diabetes | Mother Wonders If Psychosis Drug Helped Kill Son |
1819398_4 | The commission's vice chairman, Pablo E. Vengoechea, an urban planning expert, said the height of the tower ''just overwhelms the Parke-Bernet building.'' Another commissioner, the architect Stephen F. Byrns, argued that ''Madison Avenue must maintain its low scale, with the Carlyle tower's prominence undiminished.'' One commissioner, the Rev. Thomas F. Pike, called the addition ''breathtakingly beautiful'' but said, ''I'm afraid that this marriage makes me nervous.'' Another commissioner, Elizabeth S. Ryan, a real estate broker, said the tower's reflective glass surfaces were ''at severe odds'' with the existing building. In arguing that the Foster addition was eligible for the special waiver, Mr. Rosen said the project would actually advance the purpose of preservation because it would restore the building's facade, remove the fifth floor and put back the roof garden. The commission was unmoved. Margery H. Perlmutter, a lawyer, an architect and a commissioner, said the waiver provision was not intended to allow huge additions to historic structures. The only commissioner to support the addition was Jan Hird Pokorny, an architect, who said that adding a vertical tower on or near a horizontal base ''has been done in history many times.'' Drawing laughter, he handed out copies of a German print depicting the Leaning Tower of Pisa, begun in 1173, next to the Dome of Pisa, begun a century earlier. ''The marriage that has been proposed was very carefully thought out,'' Mr. Pokorny said. ''I think that we would quickly get used to having those two entirely different buildings next to each other, doing their thing, doing it well.'' A leading opponent of the project, William M. Kahn, who lives in the Carlyle Residences, part of the hotel complex, said he was satisfied with the outcome but vowed to fight any effort to build a substantial addition atop the building. Fredric M. Bell, executive director of the New York chapter of the American Institute of Architects, which endorsed the project, said he hoped the meeting was ''not so much a decision but a postponement,'' but said he was disappointed. ''New York is a city where scale, juxtaposition, don't destroy the quality of the streetscape,'' he said. In a telephone interview, Mr. Wolfe said he was ''surprised and relieved'' by the decision, ''not so much because it looks as if they're not going to accept any building that big, but because they showed some backbone.'' ''They should be commended,'' he said. | Preservation Commission Turns Down Proposal for Upper East Side Tower |
1819543_4 | The commission's vice chairman, Pablo E. Vengoechea, an urban planning expert, said the height of the tower ''just overwhelms the Parke-Bernet building.'' Another commissioner, the architect Stephen F. Byrns, argued that ''Madison Avenue must maintain its low scale, with the Carlyle tower's prominence undiminished.'' One commissioner, the Rev. Thomas F. Pike, called the addition ''breathtakingly beautiful'' but said, ''I'm afraid that this marriage makes me nervous.'' Another commissioner, Elizabeth S. Ryan, a real estate broker, said the tower's reflective glass surfaces were ''at severe odds'' with the existing building. In arguing that the Foster addition was eligible for the special waiver, Mr. Rosen said the project would actually advance the purpose of preservation because it would restore the building's facade, remove the fifth floor and put back the roof garden. The commission was unmoved. Margery H. Perlmutter, a lawyer, an architect and a commissioner, said the waiver provision was not intended to allow huge additions to historic structures. The only commissioner to support the addition was Jan Hird Pokorny, an architect, who said that adding a vertical tower on or near a horizontal base ''has been done in history many times.'' Drawing laughter, he handed out copies of a German print depicting the Leaning Tower of Pisa, begun in 1173, next to the Dome of Pisa, begun a century earlier. ''The marriage that has been proposed was very carefully thought out,'' Mr. Pokorny said. ''I think that we would quickly get used to having those two entirely different buildings next to each other, doing their thing, doing it well.'' A leading opponent of the project, William M. Kahn, who lives in the Carlyle Residences, part of the hotel complex, said he was satisfied with the outcome but vowed to fight any effort to build a substantial addition atop the building. Fredric M. Bell, executive director of the New York chapter of the American Institute of Architects, which endorsed the project, said he hoped the meeting was ''not so much a decision but a postponement,'' but said he was disappointed. ''New York is a city where scale, juxtaposition, don't destroy the quality of the streetscape,'' he said. In a telephone interview, Mr. Wolfe said he was ''surprised and relieved'' by the decision, ''not so much because it looks as if they're not going to accept any building that big, but because they showed some backbone.'' ''They should be commended,'' he said. | Preservation Commission Turns Down Proposal for Upper East Side Tower |
1819401_1 | are very strict as to the shape and uniformity of Florida tomatoes that can go to other states during the season, from Oct. 10 to June 15. Flavor is not a factor because, in the committee's view, it is too subjective. An exemption granted to the UglyRipe by the committee for three years for the purpose of seeing whether there was a market for these tomatoes was withdrawn in 2003 and not reinstated. So last year, Procacci Brothers petitioned the federal government for an amendment to the marketing order, regarding the shape of this particular tomato. After a proposal for the rule change was published last July in the Federal Register, 88 comments were received. In his letter of comment opposing the change, Reginald L. Brown, manager of the Florida Tomato Committee, said his committee had not reinstated the exemption because ''UglyRipe was a direct competitor with traditional Florida tomatoes that meet the standards.'' This was one of nine negative comments. Another, from the Florida governor, Jeb Bush, opposed the change on the grounds that it would give an unfair advantage to the grower of UglyRipes. ''Every grower has some percentage of its crops that is flat, elongated, ridged, etc., yet they are still required to adhere to the minimum grade requirements,'' the governor's letter said. But the difference, when it comes to UglyRipes, is that their deviation from the norm is not accidental, but the result of breeding. They were developed from a French heirloom called Maramondo that was cross-bred with non-heirlooms to make it more disease resistant and to strengthen the stem. The favorable comments all had to do with taste, often comparing UglyRipes to homegrown tomatoes. The tomato committee, which guarantees the consistency of Florida tomatoes, said that the new ruling could create a precedent that might allow inferior tomatoes to get to market. But the rule change applies only to UglyRipes, whose authenticity must be verified from seed to distribution under a new Agriculture Department heirloom program. Procacci Brothers plans to begin shipping the tomatoes, including some that are grown organically, tomorrow. They will carry the brand name Santa Sweets and each will be nestled in a stretchy white netting to protect the ripe fruit. Among the markets in the New York area that plan to sell them are Pathmark, ShopRite, Waldbaum's and Whole Foods. The tomatoes will carry a premium price, around $3 a pound. | Even for a Tomato, Looks Aren't Everything |
1820481_0 | 34,000 DEATHS The News -- More than 34,000 Iraqi civilians were killed in violence last year, according to a United Nations report released on Tuesday. Behind the News -- The first comprehensive annual count of civilian deaths provided a vivid measure of the chaos there. The Iraqi government called the figure exaggerated; the United Nations says it relied on official sources. If anything, the figure of 34,452 deaths -- about 94 a day -- may be lower than the true number, since it did not include the December totals from all provinces. And some deaths go unreported. 830,000 BIRTHS The News -- France announced that 830,000 babies were born there last year, the most in a quarter century. Behind the News -- French officials said the rising birth rate was a victory for government policies promoting inexpensive day care and generous parental leave. The baby boom coincides with a continuing decline in the number of French marriages as couples opt to form civil unions. The increase also comes as other European countries, worried about economic growth, look to reverse a decades-long decline in fertility rates. A glass of red wine, perhaps? $50 A BARREL The News -- Oil prices dropped briefly below $50 a barrel for the first time since May 2005 after the United States reported larger-than-expected oil and gas reserves. Behind the News -- The drop in prices has been gaining speed since the beginning of the year. Supplies are ample, warm weather in the Northeast has kept down demand and producing countries can't agree on production cuts. The government's energy forecasters say the price of regular gasoline could drop to close to $2 a gallon. Others expect oil prices to rise, pulling up gasoline prices. Might want to fill 'er up now. $1 MILLION CAP The News -- Democrats in the United States Senate took aim at the multimillion-dollar pay packages awarded to corporate executives. Behind the News -- $213 million. $210 million. $95 million. Those are some of the recent exit packages for departing executives. The deals often include millions paid out over time to limit the tax hit. Now Democrats want to limit deferred compensation to $1 million -- which could raise $800 million in taxes over 10 years. The Senate Finance Committee approved the limit last week. THE NEW NO.2 The News -- The Yorkshire terrier has passed the German shepherd and golden retriever | Numbers | Jan. 14-20 |
1820497_3 | opinion polls and surveys of Cuban-Americans conducted recently in South Florida and North Jersey show that a declining percentage of the diaspora still dreams of reclaiming houses. This is especially true among the younger generation, whose members never lived in Cuba. Still, some exiles did sneak out deeds and have fished them out of strongboxes since Fidel became sick. While some undoubtedly will try to reclaim former residences, most want factories, mills and other commercial properties. ''Cubans are not going to fight over the last few crumbling homes,'' said Nicolas J. Gutiérrez Jr., a 42-year-old Cuban-American lawyer in Miami who represents many business claimants and for himself seeks the return of two sugar mills, 15 cattle ranches, a food distribution center and more. ''Out of the hundreds of people I represent and the thousands I talk to I've never met anyone who says he's going to go back there and kick people out. On a base level, that would be immoral.'' Even so, the fear held by people like Marielena and Francisco matters, having been planted by the regime and nurtured by a controlled press that issues regular warnings about ignoble gusanos and what they might try in a moment of crisis. This dense cloud of uncertainty has been hanging over Cuba since the summer, when Mr. Castro, who is 80, ceded power to his brother, Raúl, who is 75. For most Cubans, the fear of the future has little to do with who eventually replaces ''El Commandante.'' Rather, most are consumed by the contradiction between longing for change and fearing that change will come. All but the most strident military families and pampered government officials hate the current economic system. They have had it with ration books and wartime restrictions -- one tasteless roll a day, and every month eight eggs, a few pounds of chicken and a half-pound of something called ''ground-up texturized soy'' among other basics. But they also can't imagine life without such subsidized guarantees. They also resent a two-tier currency system that makes many consumer goods available to tourists, but out of reach for Cubans. And capitalism itself seems brutal and forbiddingly unequal, a system they can glimpse only when it rubs shoulders with shabby Castro-style Communism in hotels they cannot enter and restaurants that let them in only if they are on the arm of a foreigner. So engulfed have they been in the | THE WORLD: After Castro; What Was Once Theirs |
1820489_3 | weapons.'' But Theresa Hitchens, a critic of the administration's space arms research who is director of the Center for Defense Information, a private group in Washington that tracks military programs, said that China's antisatellite test might be ''a shot across the bow'' meant to prod the Bush administration into serious negotiations. In the test, a Chinese missile pulverized an aging Chinese weather satellite more than 500 miles above Earth on Jan. 11. Ms. Hitchens warned that an arms race in space could easily spin out of control, noting that India has been ''rattling its sword'' and some experts in that country are openly calling for antisatellite arms. A global competition that produced armadas of space weapons, she added, could raise the risk of accidental nuclear war if, for instance, a whirling piece of space junk knocked out a spy satellite. ''How do you know it's not a precursor to a nuclear attack?'' she asked. ''Do you have an itchy trigger finger? If you've got a lot of satellites out there, you probably do.'' The Bush administration has conducted secret research that critics say could produce a powerful ground-based laser meant to shatter enemy satellites. The project, parts of which were made public through Air Force budget documents submitted to Congress last year, appears to be part of a wide-ranging administration effort to develop space weapons, both defensive and offensive. John E. Pike, who is the director of GlobalSecurity.org, a group in Washington that conducts research on military and space topics, said that treaties and defensive measures were the smart, cheap way to counter antisatellite threats, and that the star warriors in the wake of the Chinese tests were playing a false card. ''They're trying to piggyback on a totally unrelated topic,'' he said. ''This says nothing about space-based weapons, star wars or any of that.'' But a report, ''Missile Defense, the Space Relationship and the 21st Century,'' researched by a group of organizations that focus on national security issues and published late last year by the Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis, called the military development of the high frontier vital to the nation's protection from a wide variety of threats -- including Chinese arms. ''Without the means to dissuade, deter and defeat the growing number of strategic adversaries now arrayed against it,'' the group warned, ''the United States will be unable to maintain its status of global leadership.'' THE WORLD | Look Up! It's No Meteor, It's an Arms Race |
1820207_1 | person for an inside cabin or $239 a person for an ocean-view room. Prices are typically 10 percent less than they were last year for three- and four-night Caribbean cruises, according to Expedia, with a few as much as 30 percent off. And because many cruise lines have been introducing new ships or refurbishing aging vessels, ''you're getting a better selection at better prices,'' said Mark Kammerer, Expedia's cruise expert. The weak demand and subsequent discounts are being driven, in part, by reductions in disposable income for some less affluent cruise passengers and by lingering confusion over new passport rules that take effect this week. Prices for summer cruises to Alaska and Europe are about the same as last year's. ''It's a bit of a dichotomy,'' said Tim Conder, a leisure analyst at A. G. Edwards & Sons. The Caribbean cruise market, he said, consists mostly of first-time cruise passengers, who typically have lower incomes than the more experienced travelers who tend to sail outside the Caribbean. The more affluent customers have generally felt less impact from rising interest rates on adjustable mortgages and home equity loans, while many Caribbean cruise passengers are being pinched. ''They don't have as much left over in their wallets,'' Mr. Conder said. On Tuesday, new security rules go into effect that require Americans returning by plane from Mexico, Panama, the Caribbean and Canada to carry passports. An early draft of the rules would have required Caribbean cruise passengers to carry passports too, but after heavy lobbying by the travel industry, Congress voted to postpone the deadline for travel by sea. Before that decision was made, however, many would-be travelers who didn't have passports made other plans. An increase in outbreaks of gastrointestinal illness -- including two recent occurrences during Caribbean sailings on the world's largest cruise ship, Royal Caribbean's Freedom of the Seas -- hasn't helped demand, either. There were 33 outbreaks aboard cruise ships last year, more than in any other year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which tracks outbreaks that affect 3 percent or more of either passengers or crew members. And norovirus, the highly contagious group of viruses that can cause a miserable one- or two-day bout of vomiting, diarrhea and cramping, was either confirmed or suspected in nearly every case. Though often associated with cruise ships because it thrives in close quarters and because cruise lines | Low Prices Abound on the High Seas |
1820502_1 | pipeline leaks and the collapse of an offshore drilling platform in other parts of the country have damaged Petrobras's reputation, and there was initially strong resistance to the pipeline from local people, environmental and indigenous groups and archaeologists. Some of them preferred that the gas be transported to Manaus by tankers from a terminal north of here, already connected by a pipeline, while others argued it would be cheaper and safer to buy the excess electricity generated by the Guri Dam in Venezuela. Rather than steamrolling the opponents and skeptics, however, as often happens in Brazil, the company chose to woo them. The two million residents of Amazonas State have been promised economic benefits that have contributed to the project's $1.15 billion price, and scientists and environmentalists were consulted about how to minimize damage to the jungle that blankets the state, which is larger than Britain, France, Germany and Italy combined. ''They have really tried to minimize the impact, and the outcome is not as bad as we had feared,'' said Paulo Adário, director of Greenpeace's Amazon campaign. ''Since they are taking oil and gas out of the heart of the Amazon, creating a model for what will be done in the future, that concern is quite understandable and necessary.'' A second pipeline, which would head south to Porto Velho, a city more than 300 miles away, is a far more complicated matter. That project still faces challenges from advocates for the environment and rights of indigenous people because it will cross rivers and Indian lands, and is competing with two large dams for government money. Farther west, near the Jurua River, Petrobras also has plans to develop oil and gas deposits first discovered in 1978. Company officials said they hoped to begin production in 2010, after construction of a pipeline that would run through dense and remote jungle to a refinery here. Recent changes in energy policy in neighboring countries have added to the importance of the planned network of Amazon pipelines. For example, President Evo Morales of Bolivia, which has substantial reserves of gas that supply Brazil, has nationalized oil fields and refineries there, shutting out Petrobras, and has suggested quadrupling the price of some of the natural gas his country supplies to Brazil's industrialized south. ''All the research indicates that we are certain to find more gas in the Amazon,'' Eduardo Braga, the governor of Amazonas, said | Vast Pipelines in Amazon Face Challenges Over Protecting Rights and Rivers |
1820502_3 | in an interview in Manaus, the state capital. ''Brazil is going to need that gas over the next 30 years, so it is imperative that we develop those deposits. This is a strategic issue, not just for the Amazon but for all of Brazil.'' The challenges Petrobras has had to confront also raise questions about the viability of the grand plan of Venezuela's president, Hugo Chávez, to build a 5,000-mile gas pipeline from Caracas to Buenos Aires, a cornerstone of his campaign to bring South America's economies together. Initial estimates of the cost of that project, which would be longer than the Great Wall of China, run as high as $24 billion. ''The pipeline should be the locomotive of a new process of integration whose objective will be to defeat poverty and exclusion,'' Mr. Chávez said during a visit to São Paulo, Brazil's industrial capital, last year. ''Unity is our only path.'' [On Thursday, Brazil and Venezuela signed an agreement that calls for studies to begin this year on construction of a pipeline to cut through the northern Amazon to Manaus and then split in two directions.] But environmental groups have complained that Mr. Chávez is trying to rush or even bypass the hearings and studies that are normally required and that his plan would worsen problems of deforestation and population migration. ''Just imagine the rivers and vast areas of forest they would have to cross,'' Mr. Adário said. ''This is just something that just leaped out of Chávez's head. I don't know of a single technical expert or scientist who has done a serious analysis of the impacts that would have.'' In the past, the construction of large energy projects in the Amazon, such as the mammoth Tucuruí dam, typically led to the migration of thousands of peasants seeking work and the creation of slum settlements in the jungle. When a project is finished, the workers will often remain, with no jobs, swelling social and environmental problems that are already intractable. Small jungle settlements along the path of transmission lines have also complained that no provision is made for them to be supplied electricity. That alienates local residents and has even provoked some incidents of sabotage. Urucu, however, is being built with a requirement that two-thirds of the labor force be hired from the population already in the region. That has created about 10,000 jobs, a significant advance in | Vast Pipelines in Amazon Face Challenges Over Protecting Rights and Rivers |
1820483_0 | You don't have to be a space or climate expert to recognize that this country's ability to track climate and environmental changes from space is heading in the wrong direction. At a time when concerns about global warming are rising, the Bush administration is sharply reducing the number of satellites that can measure the impact of rising temperatures and a host of other environmental trends. The administration's hypocrisy is stunning. For years, the president and top officials have justified their refusal to grapple seriously with global warming by insisting that more research is needed. Now, after pledging that such research would be the centerpiece of a new climate change strategy, the administration is underfinancing some of the most important efforts to gather data. A report issued last week by the National Academy of Sciences projected an alarming decline in vital studies and monitoring. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration currently has a sizable number of Earth-observing satellites and instruments in orbit, but since 2000 its budget for earth sciences has decreased over 30 percent when adjusted for inflation. By 2010, the number of operating sensors and instruments on NASA satellites that observe the Earth is likely to drop by 40 percent as old equipment fails and is not promptly replaced. Meanwhile, at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, huge cost overruns and technical problems have delayed planned launchings of key climate and weather-monitoring satellites and forced the elimination of instruments essential for climate science. The setbacks are bound to hobble efforts to understand whether hurricanes and heat waves are becoming more frequent and intense, whether ice sheets will collapse and drive sea levels dangerously high, and how fish stocks, deforestation, drinking water supplies and air pollution are affected as populations grow and economies take off. We clearly need more data in coming years, not less. The academy's panel estimates that some $7.5 billion in new money is needed through 2020, mostly at NASA, to conduct high-priority observational missions. NASA's resources are already grievously overextended. It must finish building the international space station, keep flying the rickety shuttle fleet and start developing a follow-on spacecraft to explore the Moon and get ready to travel to Mars. With little new money to carry out these costly tasks, the agency has been forced to rein in other parts of its budget, including earth science studies. Unless Congress gives NASA more funds, the agency | Blinding Ourselves in Space |
1819802_0 | The Setai, New York WHAT -- Metropolitan residential building. WHERE -- Lower Manhattan. AMENITIES -- A rooftop lounge area and a full-service spa, among others. PRICES -- Residences range from $650,000 to $6.75 million. STATUS -- Expected to open this summer. DEVELOPERS -- Zamir Equities and the Setai Group. CONTACT -- (212) 968-8880 or www.setainy.com. DETAILS -- On Broad Street in the Financial District of Lower Manhattan, this project, which is headed in part by the owners of the well-known Setai hotel and residential development in the South Beach area of Miami Beach, will create 167 condominiums in a 30-story former office building. The residences will range from pied-à-terre-size, 475-square-foot studios to 3,424-square-foot, three-bedroom apartments. According to Jonathan Breene, a founder of the Setai Group, many buyers are expected to use their units as second or vacation homes, as is the case with the group's South Beach residences. The units are available furnished for an extra charge. The top five floors and some units on lower floors will have glass walls. A private club in the building, open to few nonresidents, will include the spa, a restaurant with a large wine selection, a fitness center with private trainers, a whirlpool, a library, a lounge and a screening room; wine storage will be offered to residents. A second, smaller fitness center, also with trainers, will be available only to residents. The roof will have a glass-enclosed area with a fireplace as well as an outdoor whirlpool and cabanas. Room service, maid service and butlers will be available; charges will apply for these and for the spa services. Trump Ocean Resort Baja, Mexico WHAT -- Oceanfront resort and residential development. WHERE -- On the northern end of the Baja Peninsula about half an hour south of San Diego. AMENITIES -- Beach access, swimming pools and restaurants, among others. PRICES -- Residences range from around $250,000 to about $3 million. STATUS -- Construction is planned to begin around the end of this month. The first residences are scheduled to be completed in late 2008, and the overall project should be finished in three to four years. DEVELOPERS -- The Trump Organization and Irongate Development. CONTACT -- (866) 858-8736 or www.trump-baja.com. DETAILS -- This 17-acre project on the Pacific coast of the Baja Peninsula just outside the center of Tijuana is planned to include 526 studio to three-bedroom condominiums in three towers. Size will | BREAKING GROUND |
1819840_1 | Last week, Mr. Stimson expressed his ''shock'' that major American law firms would represent terrorism suspects, hinted that they were paid by unsavory characters and suggested that companies should reconsider doing business with them. On Wednesday, Mr. Stimson said he apologized and regretted that his comments ''left the impression'' that he was attacking the integrity of those lawyers. It was not just an impression. It was exactly what he did. Mr. Stimson actually read out a list of law firms during an interview with a radio station friendly to the Bush administration. Mr. Stimson clearly had no regard for his position as a public official who helps set policy on the detainees, never mind the small matter of people's basic right to representation. He connected the detainees to the 9/11 attacks, even though he certainly knows that the very few detainees who have a connection to 9/11 don't have legal representation. President Bush and Defense Secretary Robert Gates should have fired him. Their silence was deafening, although hardly surprising given the administration's record of trampling on people's rights in the name of fighting terror. But Attorney General Alberto Gonzales was not silent. In an interview with The Associated Press, Mr. Gonzales actually expanded the attack on lawyers, claiming that it has taken as long as five years to bring detainees to trial because of delays caused by their lawyers. There's no truth to that. The cause of the delay in bringing any Guantánamo detainee to trial is Mr. Bush himself. He refused to hold trials at first, then refused to work with Congress on the issue and claimed the power to devise his own slanted court system. Mr. Bush went to Congress only when the Supreme Court struck those courts down. The result was a bill establishing military tribunals for detainees that is a mockery of American justice. Mr. Stimson's appalling behavior should not be overlooked by the relevant bar disciplinary committee. Existing rules for lawyers deem it professional misconduct to do things that are prejudicial to the administration of justice. Even if the administration does not, the legal profession imposes a higher duty on those holding public office to obey proper standards of behavior. Editorial Correction: January 23, 2007, Tuesday In last Friday's editorial about the administration official who urged corporations to punish lawyers for representing Guantánamo detainees: Charles Stimson is a deputy assistant secretary of defense, not state. | Apology Not Accepted |
1818404_0 | Martin D. Kruskal, a mathematician whose wide-ranging research touched on astrophysics, nuclear fusion and the soliton, a unique form of wave that he helped describe in the 1960s, died Dec. 26 in Princeton, N.J. He was 81. The cause was a stroke, his family said. Working on a phenomenon that had been observed in the 19th century, Dr. Kruskal and a fellow researcher, Norman J. Zabusky, studied the behavior of a nonlinear wave that is able to pass through an opposing wave of the same type without affecting the energy or direction of either wave. They coined the term ''soliton.'' Such waves have been found traveling in water, gases and other matter. Scientists in subsequent studies have found that solitons pass through fiber-optic cables and have important applications in telecommunications. Robert M. Miura, a professor of mathematical sciences at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, said Dr. Kruskal and Dr. Zabusky helped explain a ''striking phenomenon'' by formulating numerical simulations and putting them on a computer, ''to find the waves actually do go through each other unchanged.'' Earlier, Dr. Kruskal, who was affiliated with Princeton University from 1951 to 1989, worked on a classified project to develop a process for controlled nuclear fusion in a Princeton laboratory. He applied theoretical mathematics to aspects of science and, with George Szekeres, developed a system for describing black holes in space, known as Kruskal-Szekeres coordinates. Late in his career, Dr. Kruskal became interested in surreal numbers -- a concept that includes numbers infinitely large or correspondingly small -- and helped extend the work of the originator of the concept, the British mathematician John Conway. In a less formal but no less serious pursuit, Dr. Kruskal developed a card trick in which he used probability to find a reliable way of identifying a playing card picked at random from a given deck. The result often baffled audiences, and the trick has been adopted by performers, who named it the Kruskal Count. Martin David Kruskal was born in New York City. He attended the University of Chicago and received his doctorate in mathematics from New York University in 1952. At Princeton, Dr. Kruskal was named a professor of astrophysical sciences in 1961. He was a former chairman of the university's program in applied mathematics and retired as a professor of mathematics in 1989. He then moved to Rutgers, where he was appointed a professor of | Martin D. Kruskal Dies; Mathematician Was 81 |
1818465_1 | restraining tuition increases, complained Friday of being shut out of the process of writing the new bill and said they would offer amendments before Wednesday's vote. ''I'm hopeful we can work in a bipartisan way to build upon it, including with reforms that actually make college more affordable and more accessible for low- and middle-income students,'' said Representative Howard P. McKeon of California, the ranking Republican on Mr. Miller's committee. That theme was echoed at the White House. Blain Rethmeier, a spokesman, said the Bush administration would support efforts in Congress to ease students' burden, but added that ''colleges have the central role to play in ensuring access to affordable higher education.'' Student debt has grown exponentially in recent years, in tandem with college costs that routinely outpace inflation. The average college student now graduates with nearly $18,000 in debt. The Democratic proposal would benefit many such students: the 5.5 million a year who receive subsidized Stafford loans. The measure unveiled Friday would make good only in part on Democrats' campaign promise to halve the interest rates on student loans. Democrats had never said that the cut would not fully take effect until 2012 or that the pledge applied only to subsidized Stafford loans. Unlike Pell grants, which go to students with family incomes under $40,000, Stafford loans are also tapped by middle-income students. Some 75 percent of students holding Stafford loans come from families with household incomes under $67,000, just above the median income for a family of four, which is $65,000, said Luke Swarthout, advocate for the U.S. Public Interest Research Group Higher Education Project. The bill would cut the interest rates on subsidized Stafford loans for undergraduates -- loans to graduate students would not be affected -- to 3.4 percent from the current rate of 6.8 percent, in stages. The first reductions would affect new loans made after July 1. According to the Project on Student Debt, a nonprofit group, the bill would save a student who graduates from college with $20,000 in debt about $4,000 over the 10-year life of a loan. Under the program of subsidized Stafford loans, the government guarantees lenders a rate of return that can be higher than the interest rate paid by the student. In trying to finance their proposal, House Democrats decided that for the largest lenders, the bill would lower that rate by 0.1 percentage point. It would also | House Democrats Propose Cut in Student Loan Rates |
1816905_21 | Testing Service is exploring a test that students wouldn't be able to fake.) ''What this is about is building character,'' Seligman says. Currently, the biggest project on positive psychology's drawing board is at the Geelong School. ''As a school, we would like to know how to make all students more resilient, how to turn depressing thoughts into positive ones,'' Charles Scudamore, the head of the project at what Seligman calls ''Australia's Eton,'' wrote in an e-mail message. That there is a need for a curriculum to promote engagement and happiness among teenagers is obvious, and Geelong is the first school to give positive psychologists a chance to show that they can really change teaching. According to Scudamore, ''When we adopt a positive-psychology approach, it will be seen and practiced in all that we do.'' The Australians ''have had a lot of depression in kids, that's half the reason they want it,'' said Ed Diener, the professor of psychology at the University of Illinois. What the psychologists have in mind for Geelong is very much the sort of intervention Kashdan was teaching at George Mason. The draft proposal by which they secured Geelong's support included gratitude exercises, exercises in the ''three pathways of happiness,'' ''the four ways to promote savoring'' and ''the five ways to overcome'' adversity. To teach savoring, the teacher would explain mindfulness and show the students how to taste their food more thoroughly and then instruct them to try ''savoring with a friend.'' The students would have journals to record their emotions, their ''grudges and gratitudes.'' They would mentor a younger student too. Scudamore says he hopes that even the teachers will feel ''their well-being'' and their teaching skills enhanced. Seligman and his family are scheduled to make a six-month visit. An American-trained positive-psychology instructor will be in residence to provide training and real-time feedback. This endeavor outstrips the ongoing Strath Haven experiment. The effort there, financed by a $2.8 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education, is limited to the ninth-grade language-arts program. At the school last year, the positive psychologists interwove their teachings with the literature classes. The idea was to buffer the lessons from bleak books like ''Lord of the Flies'' and ''Romeo and Juliet'' with some reassuring thoughts -- or at least a more positive framework for understanding human behavior than the classics offer. Thus, according to Mark Linkins, now coordinator of the | Happiness 101 |
1816905_22 | pathways of happiness,'' ''the four ways to promote savoring'' and ''the five ways to overcome'' adversity. To teach savoring, the teacher would explain mindfulness and show the students how to taste their food more thoroughly and then instruct them to try ''savoring with a friend.'' The students would have journals to record their emotions, their ''grudges and gratitudes.'' They would mentor a younger student too. Scudamore says he hopes that even the teachers will feel ''their well-being'' and their teaching skills enhanced. Seligman and his family are scheduled to make a six-month visit. An American-trained positive-psychology instructor will be in residence to provide training and real-time feedback. This endeavor outstrips the ongoing Strath Haven experiment. The effort there, financed by a $2.8 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education, is limited to the ninth-grade language-arts program. At the school last year, the positive psychologists interwove their teachings with the literature classes. The idea was to buffer the lessons from bleak books like ''Lord of the Flies'' and ''Romeo and Juliet'' with some reassuring thoughts -- or at least a more positive framework for understanding human behavior than the classics offer. Thus, according to Mark Linkins, now coordinator of the Swarthmore school district's curriculum, who helped teach the classes, the animalistic and murderous Jack in ''Lord of the Flies'' shows ''what happens when someone is lacking in signature strengths.'' And when reading ''The Odyssey,'' students were asked: ''What are the signature strengths that Odysseus lived and breathed? What are the things he might have improved on to make things go better?'' It is too soon to know the effect of these stratagems on the school's students, since part of the protocol agreed to with the Department of Education requires that they be followed for four years. The results will be compared with a control group that received the standard curriculum. (For his part, Seligman home-schools the children he had with his second wife. He says he likes to balance the standard high-school fare he gives the older ones with ''books in which notions of virtue and nobility do not end in humiliation and death,'' like Harper Lee's ''To Kill a Mockingbird'' and Arthur C. Clarke's ''Childhood's End.'') Not all positive psychologists are sure educational interventions are a good idea. Lyubormisky, for instance, turned down a similar request from the Compton school system in California. ''I did not think the science | Happiness 101 |
1816858_2 | from the above, is a degree at the Fashion Institute of Technology in jewelry making, repair, gemology, etc. The goal would then be to start a business. Carol Tannenbaum, Passaic, N.J. ATTENDING grad school full time is never easy, but there are almost always financial options short of turning to a life of crime. First, though: financial advisers caution against taking on too much debt so close to traditional retirement age, even if embarking on a new career. Graduate students can get much the same financial aid as undergraduates -- work-study, federal Stafford loans, merit grants -- but no Pell grants or PLUS loans. And they can borrow a lot more with a Stafford loan than undergraduates can, up to $18,500. Jacqueline E. King, director of the Center for Policy Analysis at the American Council on Education in Washington, warns that graduate programs in professions like social work and fashion tend not to give as much grant money. Academic programs are more generous; they can raise research money, and graduate students offer teaching assistance to large pools of undergraduates. Dr. King advises to look broadly. For example, the Manufacturing Jewelers and Suppliers of America in Rhode Island offers scholarship money to those working or studying in the field. For your social work goal, if you're willing to work in a critical-need area, the federal government and many states, including New York and New Jersey, offer loan forgiveness programs. For information: www.socialworkers.org. And though you don't yet qualify, many state schools offer deals for older students. Rutgers allows anyone who is 62 and retired to audit for free an unlimited number of most courses. While you don't get credit, knowledge alone may help you break into a new field. You even get free parking and a school e-mail account. Have questions on education? Send them to edlife@nytimes.com or to Education Life, The New York Times, 229 West 43rd Street, New York, N.Y. 10036. Help Correction: January 14, 2007, Sunday An article in the special Education Life section last Sunday about the large percentage of Asian students at the University of California, Berkeley, attributed an erroneous distinction to the state. Hawaii -- not California -- was the first state without a racial majority. Also, an article about financial aid for graduate students misstated eligibility for federal PLUS loans. Graduate students may indeed apply for the loans; they became eligible in July 2006. | HELP |
1817240_1 | percent growth in vehicular emissions in Europe since 1990 has ''offset'' the effect of cleaner factories, according to a recent report by the European Environment Agency. The growth has occurred despite the invention of far more environmentally friendly fuels and cars. ''What we gain by hybrid cars and ethanol buses, we more than lose because of sheer numbers of vehicles,'' said Ronan Uhel, a senior scientist with the European Environment Agency, which is based in Copenhagen. Vehicles, mostly cars, create more than one-fifth of the greenhouse-gas emissions in Europe, where the problem has been extensively studied. The few places that have aggressively sought to fight the trend have taken sometimes draconian measures. Denmark, for example, treats cars the way it treats yachts -- as luxury items -- imposing purchase taxes that are sometimes 200 percent of the cost of the vehicle. A simple Czech-made Skoda car that costs $18,400 in Italy or Sweden costs more than $34,000 in Denmark. The number of bicycles on Danish streets has increased in recent years, and few people under the age of 30 own cars. Many families have turned to elaborate three-wheeled contraptions. (Beijing, meanwhile, has restricted the use of traditional three-wheeled bikes.) On a recent morning in Copenhagen -- which is flat, and has bike lanes -- Cristian Eskelund, 35, a government lobbyist, hopped on a clunky bicycle with a big wooden cart attached to the front. The day before, he had used the vehicle, a local contraption called a Christiania bike, to carry a Christmas tree he had bought. This day, he was taking his two children to school, then heading to the hospital, where his wife was in labor. ''How many children do I have?'' Mr. Eskelund said. ''Two, perhaps three.'' There are high-end options, too. At $2,800, a three-wheeled Nihola bike costs as much as a used car, but many people insist it is far more practical. Sleek, lightweight, with a streamlined enclosed bubble in front, it is good for transporting groceries and children. High taxes on cars or gasoline of the type levied in Copenhagen are effective in curbing traffic, experts say, but they scare voters, making even environmentalist politicians unlikely to propose them. When Britain's chancellor of the exchequer, Gordon Brown, revealed his ''green'' budget proposal, it included an increase in gas taxes of less than two and a half cents per quart. Other cities have tried variations | Car Boom Puts Europe on Road to a Smoggy Future |
1817290_5 | because they were discussing internal deliberations about a plan that Mr. Bush had not yet announced. The most immediate element of the new jobs program would amount to a major expansion of what is known in the military as the Commander's Emergency Response Program, which provides money to local officers to put civilians to work as a way of reducing resistance to the American presence in neighborhoods. While the effort has had some successes, they have largely been temporary. As a senior White House official noted in an interview recently, ''You'd go into a neighborhood, clear it, try to hold it, and come back later and discover that it's all been shattered.'' The new effort, officials said, would cost between a half billion and a billion dollars, some of which would be spent on other efforts to achieve stability and train Iraqis for more permanent jobs. The State Department and the Treasury Department have been brought into that effort. The plan also calls for a more than doubling of the ''Provincial Reconstruction Teams,'' relatively small groups of State Department officials empowered to coordinate local reconstruction efforts, chiefly hiring Iraqi companies. For much of the first half of 2006, the State Department was engaged in a bureaucratic dispute with the Defense Department about how these teams would be protected, including exploration of a plan to hire private protective forces that a White House official said ''was too expensive.'' Now those teams will be expanded and embedded with combat brigades, officials said, in what would amount to the latest effort to demonstrate to Iraqis that the American forces in their midst were not simply occupiers. Much of the plan described by officials seemed to be consistent with views supported by Lt. Gen. David H. Petraeus, who will soon take over as the commander of ground forces in Iraq and who has been a strong advocate of an everyday American troop presence in neighborhoods. Mr. Bush's speech is widely expected to make the case that Americans needed to commit to greater national sacrifice as part of what Bush administration officials acknowledge amounted to a last-ditch effort to salvage the mission in Iraq. But almost as soon as his speech is done, a series of hearings will begin on Capitol Hill that Democrats intend to use to pick apart the details of the plan, with lawmakers questioning administration officials about whether a troop increase | Bush Plan for Iraq Requests More Troops and More Jobs |
1816839_0 | Nonfiction Chronicle | |
1818922_0 | A Brazilian government plan set to go into effect this year will bring large-scale logging deep into the heart of the Amazon rain forest for the first time, in a calculated gamble that new monitoring efforts can offset any danger of increased devastation. The government of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, in an attempt to create Brazil's first coherent, effective forest policy, is to begin auctioning off timber rights to large tracts of the rain forest. The winning bidders will not have title to the land or the right to exploit resources other than timber, and the government says they will be closely monitored and will pay a royalty on their activities. The architects of the plan say it will also help reduce tensions over land ownership in the Amazon, the world's largest tropical forest, which loses an area the size of New Jersey every year to clear-cutting and timbering. In theory, 70 percent of the jungle is public land, but miners, ranchers and especially loggers have felt free to establish themselves in unpoliced areas, strip the land of valuable resources and then move on, mostly in the so-called arc of destruction on the eastern and southern fringes of the jungle. But the called-for monitoring of the loggers allowed into the rain forest's largely untouched center will come from a new, untested Forest Service with only 150 employees and from state and municipal governments. That concerns environmental and civic groups because local officials are more vulnerable to the pressures of powerful economic interests and to corruption. Further, the new system assumes that the world community will also play a part and buy timber only from merchants who are properly licensed and will avoid unscrupulous dealers. The plan ''can be a good idea in places where the situation is already chaotic,'' said Philip Fearnside, a researcher at the National Institute for Amazon Research in Manaus who recently visited this remote area. ''But it's a different story in areas where hardly any logging or deforestation has taken place, where you are actually going to be encouraging the introduction of predatory forces that don't exist there now.'' On paper and in principle, said Stephan Schwartzman, an Amazon specialist at Environmental Defense in Washington, ''I think everyone agrees that this system is an improvement over the current situation, which is totally out of control.'' But in the end, he added, ''everything is going | Brazil Gambles on Monitoring As Loggers Advance in Amazon |
1818897_2 | one. I just thought, there but for the sake of God go I,'' she said. The Closes run a consulting company for diabetics, health care providers and others affected by the disease. They set up a matching gift program for the Neediest Cases, inviting their six full-time employees to donate, and have raised $600, she said. ''It's such a good reminder: take care of the people around you and do what you can to take care of other people,'' she said. ''I often think that Americans are such believers in merit and personal responsibility that they forget that luck plays a big part in life. Every year, the Times Neediest Cases stories are a reminder of just how much bad luck there is in the world, and how much relatively small amounts of help can do for people who are fighting it.'' Ruth Scodel, Ann Arbor, Mich. ''I'm not from New York, but I have a sort of an emotional connection to New York,'' said Ruth Scodel, 54, who teaches Greek and Latin at the University of Michigan. ''I think of New York as quintessentially America.'' Professor Scodel said she gave money to a variety of nonprofit groups, including her synagogue, local and regional cultural institutions, and humanist and environmental causes. This year, she gave $100 to the Neediest Cases as part of her year-end donations. Although she lives far from the people she reads about in the Neediest Cases, she said she viewed them as part of her community. Professor Scodel teaches Greek tragedy, and in the daily Neediest Cases articles she hears echoes of Greek philosophies. ''That's sort of what these stories bring out, vicissitude,'' she said. ''Things go well, and sometimes they don't; stuff just happens in the world.'' When Money Is Just a First Step ''I read a story in the Neediest Cases, I think it was in January of 2003, about a little boy who had been born without arms and he needed a wheelchair. So I said to my husband, 'He needs a wheelchair. How much could a wheelchair be?' Of course, it turned out he needed a big wheelchair, and a very complicated one, because he had to work it with his shoulders. It took a long time. It went on and on, and finally I said, 'I want to meet him.' '' Kathy Greenberg, Manhattan For Kathy and Alan Greenberg, donating to | The Neediest Cases; Opening Hearts and Checkbooks to Ease the Woes of Strangers |
1818851_5 | researchers asked, was the incidence of heart disease so low among the Inuit of Greenland when they consumed a generally fatty diet? One obvious factor was the fatty fish that the Inuit regularly ate. Subsequent studies demonstrated a link between omega-3 fatty acids and a lower incidence of heart disease. ''People can function without adequate amounts of DHA but not as ideally or optimally,'' said James H. Flatt, the head of research at Martek. ''We also believe it can help a person avoid diseases later in life.'' Health food stores have long carried fish oil capsules, but what Martek's scientists call ''the burp factor'' -- the pills caused some to emit fishy after-burps -- prompted researchers to look at the algae eaten by fish as an alternative DHA source. Concern over possible effects of mercury and other toxins in some fish was another motivator. (When distilled and treated, fish oil producers say, their product is free of contaminants.) Martek was founded in 1985, after it was spun off from Martin Marietta, the military contractor that is now part of Lockheed Martin. A few years earlier, NASA had asked Martin Marietta to explore algae as a potential source of fresh food and oxygen on long space missions. The space agency dropped the idea, but the half-dozen or so scientists behind the project believed that they might be on to something, and they sought venture capital so they could continue their research. When it was founded, the company saw ocean-born algae as a potential source for industrial-strength lubricants and diagnostic markers. But it did not take researchers long to discover what Henry Linsert Jr., then the company's chief executive, described in a 1990 newspaper interview as ''our first blockbuster product'' -- a form of DHA, which is naturally present in mother's milk, that could be safely added to infant formula (along with arachidonic acid, or ARA, another nutrient found in breast milk that Martek buys from a third party). The company signed its first infant-formula licensing agreement in 1992 and went public the next year. When Martek executives are confronted with skepticism about the potential of DHA as a food additive, they invariably talk about the how the company needed more than 10 years to build its infant-formula business. At first, infant-formula makers, dubious about the benefits and the extra costs involved, proved to be one challenge; the Food and Drug Administration | Magical or Overrated? A Food Additive in a Swirl |
1821493_1 | which tend to be large in her family, will make her more comfortable whether lying down or strapped across the chest in her wheelchair. All this is plausible, even if it is also true that the line between improving Ashley's life and making it easier for her parents to handle her scarcely exists, because anything that makes it possible for Ashley's parents to involve her in family life is in her interest. The objections to Ashley's treatment take three forms familiar to anyone working in bioethics. First, some say Ashley's treatment is ''unnatural'' -- a complaint that usually means little more than ''Yuck!'' One could equally well object that all medical treatment is unnatural, for it enables us to live longer, and in better health, than we naturally would. During most of human existence, children like Ashley were abandoned to become prey to wolves and jackals. Abandonment may be a ''natural'' fate for a severely disabled baby, but it is no better for that reason. Second, some see acceptance of Ashley's treatment as the first step down a slippery slope leading to widespread medical modification of children for the convenience of their parents. But the ethics committee that approved Ashley's treatment was convinced that the procedures were in her best interest. Those of us who have not heard the evidence presented to the committee are in a weak position to contest its judgment. In any case, the ''best interest'' principle is the right test to use, and there is no reason that other parents of children with intellectual disabilities as profound as Ashley's should not have access to similar treatments, if they will also be in the interest of their children. If there is a slippery slope here, the much more widespread use of drugs in ''problem'' children who are diagnosed as having attention deficit hyperactivity disorder poses a far greater risk than attenuating growth in a small number of profoundly disabled children. Finally, there is the issue of treating Ashley with dignity. A Los Angeles Times report on Ashley's treatment began: ''This is about Ashley's dignity. Everybody examining her case seems to agree at least about that.'' Her parents write in their blog that Ashley will have more dignity in a body that is healthier and more suited to her state of development, while their critics see her treatment as a violation of her dignity. But we should reject | A Convenient Truth |
1821554_1 | may have been a nearby driver who had subscribed to Sirius, which carries Mr. Stern's show, and had been listening in his or her car -- using an adapter that would have transmitted the show from a portable satellite device onto the car's radio via an unused frequency (typically at the low end of the dial, at or near 88.1). Last year, the F.C.C. received complaints that drivers within close proximity to other cars were picking up satellite radio signals, because the adapters, known as modulators, were so powerful. Since then, Sirius and its main rival, XM, have worked with their manufacturers to, in effect, tone down those transmitters. Patrick Reilly, a Sirius spokesman, said yesterday, ''All satellite radios need to be approved by and in compliance with applicable F.C.C. rules, and all of our radios are compliant.'' Still, some of the older, more powerful transmitters probably remain in use. Another possibility would involve a pirate radio station, broadcasting a bootleg version of Mr. Stern's show without permission. Last January, not long after Mr. Stern arrived on Sirius, The Daily News said the show was being heard on otherwise unused frequencies in Brooklyn and New Jersey. Sirius later sought to stop those transmissions by complaining to the F.C.C., though it is possible that they or others could have resurfaced. One potential suspect that would seem to have been ruled out yesterday is a tiny Long Island station that broadcasts adult contemporary music on the frequency 88.1, under the call letters WXBA. It is operated by the public high school in Brentwood, in Suffolk County. Its signal can, typically, be heard for only a few miles -- making it unlikely to come anywhere close to the Bronx. Regardless, Russell Skadl, the station's faculty adviser, seemed to have an airtight alibi. At about 10:15 yesterday, he said, listeners would have heard it playing Christopher Cross's ''Ride Like the Wind'' followed by Carly Simon's ''You're So Vain.'' Asked if his students might have been playing some prank, Mr. Skadl said, ''I was the only one here at the time.'' Still, Mr. Skadl provided an account that could further deepen the mystery. While driving to work yesterday, east on Sunrise Highway, Mr. Skadl said that he suddenly had difficulty hearing his own station's signal. Instead, he said, he clearly heard Mr. Stern's voice, though, after several minutes, it disappeared when he exited the highway. | A Mystery On the Radio: Stern's Show Is Heard Free |
1821588_6 | candidates to selective private universities. ''We know from colleagues in Texas and California that if we can't take race into account, we're at a competitive disadvantage,'' said Julie Peterson, a spokeswoman for the University of Michigan, where two-thirds of the applicants are from out of state. Since most of Michigan is overwhelmingly white, said Mary Sue Coleman, the university's president, a plan guaranteeing admission to a percentage of top high school graduates would have little impact, and nothing short of affirmative action will maintain the university's racial diversity. ''Of course, you want to look at family income, and being the first in the family to attend college and those kinds of factors, of course we do that, but it doesn't get us to a racially diverse student body,'' Dr. Coleman said. At the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, a program guaranteeing that low-income students can graduate debt-free helped to increase the percentage of blacks in the freshman class to 12 percent, and to increase both economic diversity and the enrollment of underrepresented minority students. Other states have started similar programs. In Detroit, Wayne State University Law School recently adopted a new admissions policy. Jonathan Weinberg, the professor assigned last year to draft a contingency policy, looked at other states with race-blind admissions and found that instead of race, they look to ''a set of broader diversity concerns that go to socioeconomic status.'' Last month, the faculty adopted his policy, eliminating any mention of race, but broadening the factors the admissions office may consider. Those include being the first in the family to go to college or graduate school; having overcome substantial obstacles, including prejudice and discrimination; being multilingual; and residence abroad, in Detroit or on an Indian reservation. Frank Wu, the law school's dean, said Wayne State's effort to comply with the law could bring a legal challenge. ''There's a new fight building,'' Mr. Wu said, ''and that's going to be whether the mere fact that you're striving for diversity means you're somehow trying to get around the ban and find proxies, or pretexts, for race, and that that's impermissible. It's ironic, but in some quarters our effort to adopt a new policy to comply with Prop 2 has been interpreted as an effort to circumvent it.'' Roger Clegg, president of the Council for Equal Opportunity, which opposes racial preferences, said policies like Wayne State's do raise questions. ''I | Colleges Regroup After Voters Ban Race Preferences |
1819228_1 | unquestionably good for the natural environment, new scientific studies are concluding that preservation and restoration of forests outside the tropics will do little or nothing to help slow climate change. And some projects intended to slow the heating of the planet may be accelerating it instead. Trees don't just absorb carbon dioxide -- they soak up the sun's heating rays, too. Forests tend to be darker than farms and pastures and therefore tend to absorb more sunlight. This has a warming influence that appears to cancel, on average, the cooling influence of the forest's carbon storage. This effect is most pronounced in snowy areas -- snow on bare ground reflects far more sunlight back to space than does a snowed-in forest -- so forests in areas with seasonal snow cover can be strongly warming. In contrast, tropical forests appear to be doubly valuable to the earth's climate system. Not only do they store copious amounts of carbon, the roots of tropical trees reach down deep, drawing up water that they evaporate through their leaves. In the atmosphere, this water may form clouds that reflect sunlight back to space, helping to cool the earth. These findings have important policy implications. It has been suggested that agreements to limit climate change should consider carbon stored in forests. If so, they would need to consider the direct climate effects of forests so as to avoid perverse incentives to plant warming forests in places like the United States, Canada, Europe and the former Soviet Union. However, tropical forests, which are generally found in developing countries, may be due a double climate credit -- one for their carbon storage and another for their cooling clouds. What does this mean for local reforestation efforts? Consider Pacific Gas and Electric's surcharge plan. While the carbon soaked up by California's forests reduces atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations everywhere, cooling Crete, Cancún and Calcutta, the sunlight they absorb warms the state and the surrounding region. So, it might even cool us if we were to cut down those dark forests. Lumber interests might look gleefully upon the prospect. Clear-cutting mountains to slow climate change is, of course, nuts. The broadest goal is neither to slow the growth of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere nor to slow climate change, but rather to preserve the irreplaceable natural balance that sustains life as we know it on this planet. We want to avoid | When Being Green Raises the Heat |
1819323_0 | For the first time in the New York area, starting today some passengers will be able to pay to bypass an airport security screening line through a program that has come to Kennedy International Airport. But for now, they will still have to take off their shoes. Clear Registered Traveler, a private service that prescreens travelers for a $100 annual fee, will open a kiosk at Terminal 7 today, making Kennedy the second American airport -- after Orlando International Airport in Florida -- to provide an express lane through security, said Steven Brill, the chief executive of Clear. The kiosk at Kennedy is equipped with a device that scans travelers' shoes on their feet, but so far the Transportation Security Administration has not given final approval for its use at Kennedy, Mr. Brill said. PATRICK McGEEHAN | Metro Briefing | New York: Queens: Shortcut Through Airport Screening |
1819186_2 | Bush's science adviser and director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, acknowledged that there were many challenges to maintaining and improving Earth-observing systems, but said the administration was committed to keeping them a ''top science priority.'' The report, ''Earth Science and Applications From Space: National Imperatives for the Next Decade and Beyond,'' proposed spending roughly $3 billion a year in constant 2006 dollars on new instruments and satellite missions through 2020, saying that would satisfy various scientific and societal priorities while holding annual costs around what they were, as a percentage of the economy, in 2000. ''We're trying to present a balanced, affordable program that spans all the earth sciences,'' said Richard A. Anthes, the co-chairman of the committee that wrote the report and the new president of the American Meteorological Society. The report is the latest in a string of findings from such panels pointing to dangers from recent disinvestment in the long-term monitoring of a fast-changing planet. ''This is the most critical time in human history, with the population never before so big and with stresses growing on the Earth,'' Dr. Anthes said. ''We just want to get back to the United States being a leader instead of someone you can't count on.'' Satellite-borne instruments, using radar, lasers and other technology, have revolutionized earth and climate science, allowing researchers to accurately and efficiently track parameters like sea level and tiny motions of the Earth from earthquakes, the amount of rain in a cyclone and moisture in air, and the average temperature of various layers of the atmosphere. The committee identified significant gaps in instrumentation or plans for satellites orbiting over the poles, around the Equator, and positioned so that they remain stationary over spots on the rotating Earth. One of the most important aspects of such monitoring is launching new satellites before old ones fail. Without this overlap, it is hard to assemble meaningful long-term records that are sufficiently precise to uncover trends, the report's authors said. The report went beyond discussing ailing hardware and said the White House science policy office should do more to ensure that society and science were benefiting fully from the reams of data flowing from orbiting instruments. Senior officials at NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration welcomed the report and said it would be considered as they sought to sustain Earth observations in a time of tight budgets. | Scientists Warn of Diminished Earth Studies From Space |
1821125_0 | China's top population official said that a worsening gender imbalance had been complicated by population control efforts and that it would take 15 years to redress. The official, Zhang Weiqing, head of the National Population and Family Planning Commission, said 118 boys were born for every 100 girls in China in 2005, largely because of a preference for male offspring, which has driven many families to abort female fetuses under the one-child policy. HOWARD W. FRENCH | World Briefing | Asia: China: One-Child Policy Spurred Gender Gap |
1816609_0 | Prime Minister Tony Blair cut short a vacation in Miami and returned to London a day early as a new escalation of political hostilities between Northern Ireland's main Protestant and Roman Catholic political parties threatened a timetable for power sharing in the province by March 26. There was no immediate sign of a breakthrough to end the standoff. ALAN COWELL | World Briefing | Europe: Northern Ireland: Blair Cuts Vacation For Talks |
1816589_1 | always remember to turn off the lights or adjust the thermostat when they leave. They don't get the electric bill. Hard-wiring an existing house with these capabilities would be an electrician's dream. It would cost tens of thousands of dollars. But with these new wireless systems it ran about $4,000 to set up. But more importantly, it gives me peace of mind. The house still has old hurricane shutters that have to be put up the old-fashioned way, but early this year new models that attach to the house and can be operated over a computer should be out. As told to Amy Gunderson Information on properties was supplied by the listing companies. WHERE -- Coronado, Calif. WHAT -- 4-bedroom house HOW MUCH -- $4.1 million This three-level, 4,000-square-foot house is wired so the heat, air-conditioning and rooftop hot tub can be controlled remotely from a computer. A central system in the house controls the thermostat, lighting and security. The house has four and a half bathrooms, granite counters and an elevator. It has 40 feet of waterfront and a dock that can accommodate two 60-foot boats. Coronado is about five miles southwest of San Diego. Agents: Kathy Pounds and Lisa Storey, Prudential California Realty, (619) 423-1558; www.kathypounds.com. WHERE -- Ocean View, Del. WHAT -- 3-bedroom house HOW MUCH -- $789,900 Built in 2001, this house has a smart system that allows the heat and air-conditioning to be controlled from a remote location. There are two living rooms, two and a half bathrooms and an attached two-car garage. The house has views of the first hole of a 36-hole golf course. Ocean View is near Bethany Beach on the Delaware coast. Agent: Beth Evans, ReMax by the Sea, (302) 249-5200; www.bethany-rehoboth.com. WHERE: Destin, Fla. WHAT: 5-bedroom house HOW MUCH: $4,989,000 The lighting, security, heating and air-conditioning systems in this bay-front house can be controlled remotely via the Internet. It is also wired for surround sound. Located in a gated community, this house has 12-foot-high ceilings, marble floors, five full and two half bathrooms, a formal dining room and a breakfast nook. It also has two garages, a swimming pool, 140 feet of water frontage and a deep-water dock large enough for a 65-foot boat. Agents: Janette Klein and Cindy Blanton, ResortQuest, (850) 654-7785; www.jkdestin.com. WHERE: Waterville Valley, N.H. WHAT: 4-bedroom town house HOW MUCH: $669,000 This 2,750-square-foot house has a | LIVING HERE | Smart Houses; An Online Getaway |
1822644_0 | Scientists from across the world gathered Monday to hammer out the final details of an authoritative report on climate change that is expected to project centuries of rising temperatures and sea levels unless there are curbs in emissions of carbon dioxide and other gases that trap heat in the atmosphere. Scientists involved in writing or reviewing the report say it is nearly certain to conclude that there is at least a 90 percent chance that human-caused emissions are the main factor in warming since 1950. The report is the fourth since 1990 from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which is overseen by the United Nations. The report, several of the authors said, will describe a growing body of evidence that warming is likely to cause a profound transformation of the planet. Three large sections of the report will be forthcoming during the year. The first will be a summary for policy makers and information on basic climate science, which is expected to be issued on Friday. Among the findings in recent drafts: The Arctic Ocean could largely be devoid of sea ice during summer later in the century. Europe's Mediterranean shores could become barely habitable in summers, while the Alps could shift from snowy winter destinations to summer havens from the heat. Growing seasons in temperate regions will expand, while droughts are likely to ravage further the semiarid regions of Africa and southern Asia. ''Concerns about climate change and public awareness on the subject are at an all-time high,'' the chairman of the panel, Rajendra Pachauri, told delegates on Monday. But scientists involved in the effort warned that squabbling among teams and government representatives from more than 100 countries -- over how to portray the probable amount of sea-level rise during the 21st century -- could distract from the basic finding that a warming world will be one in which shrinking coastlines are the new normal for centuries to come. Jerry Mahlman, an emeritus researcher at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., who was a reviewer of the report's single-spaced, 1,644-page summary of climate science, said most of the leaks to the news media so far were from people eager to find elements that were the most frightening or the most reassuring. He added in an interview that such efforts distracted from the basic, undisputed findings, saying that those point to trends that are very disturbing. | World Scientists Near Consensus on Warming |
1822568_3 | farther north along the Hudson -- far from the point where it turns from saltwater to freshwater -- they have to treat their water only for chemicals. Rockland County residents currently use groundwater, but the supply is quickly dwindling. The county's population is rising, having increased to 293,000 in 2005 from 286,000 in 2000, and more than 90 percent of its land has been developed, local officials said. The Hudson River plan was developed last year after United Water proposed a rate increase in Rockland County and, in turn, was ordered by the State Public Service Commission to create a long-term solution for the county's growing water demands. The proposal must be vetted by public officials, local environmental groups and, eventually, the public. That could be a problem, considering that the Hudson conjures an unfavorable image for many New Yorkers, said John Waldman, a professor of biology at Queens College and the author of a book on New York Harbor, ''Heartbeats in the Muck.'' ''I still meet people who tell me they're surprised that the Hudson has fish,'' he said. ''The river may be a lot cleaner nowadays, but there's a lag in public perception.'' Alex Matthiessen, executive director of Riverkeeper, an environmental group that grew out of a movement in the 1960s to protect the Hudson River, said that instead of building the desalination plant, the focus should be on curbing growth and conserving water. ''Rockland County is on the verge of being overbuilt and no longer has the capacity for all this burgeoning population growth,'' Mr. Matthiessen said. ''We're running out of room on the Tappan Zee Bridge, at our schools, at the Rockland County sewage treatment plant, on our roads, and all signs point toward a more serious issue. It's a large issue facing not just Rockland County but the entire Hudson Valley.'' But Mr. Vanderhoef, the county executive, said the county has enforced conservation measures in the past. In Rockland, the per capita usage of water is about 60 gallons a day, compared with roughly 90 gallons a day nationwide, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. Conservation alone, Mr. Vanderhoef said, is no longer a viable solution. The county has already reached the point where providing water day to day is a struggle, he said. ''What we're fighting for now,'' he said, ''is enough water just to feed the current population, and we need a plan.'' | Looking to the Hudson for Rockland's Water Needs |
1822516_4 | wide variety of berries available in the fall, and those near the coast have spawning salmon in the rivers. But when winter looms in Yellowstone, ''the whitebark pines are about it'' on the bear menu, Dr. Mattson says. The Wind River Pines Because of the close relationship between the pines and the bears, Dr. Logan has taken up advocacy for the bears as a means of bringing attention to the overall ecosystem in the Wind River Range in Wyoming. The range is high, broad, relatively far from the moderating effect of the Pacific Ocean and exposed to arctic blasts off the plains. They therefore are colder than nearby ranges. Dr. Logan's computer models show them resisting a warming climate longer than other mountains and remaining a refuge for the pines and the bears. Earlier analyses that Dr. Logan conducted correctly predicted beetle movements. In the 1990s, his analyses predicted a northward invasion by mountain pine beetles from near the Washington-Canada border deep into the lodgepole forest of the British Columbia interior. Rising temperatures were revving up the beetles' metabolisms, and he surmised that they would soon complete a full cycle of reproduction in one year. Eventually their reproduction would get in pace with the calendar well north of their usual range, a condition called adaptive seasonality. It means millions of adults emerging simultaneously from infested trees. Like an army roaring out of the trenches, they overwhelm their next round of piney prey, emitting pheromones that draw more attackers to individual trees. Forest managers say defenses -- quarantines, burning and other methods -- are ineffective over large areas. The result in Canada turned out as bad or worse than Dr. Logan feared. It may be the largest forest insect blight ever seen in North America, and it seems nowhere near its peak. It covers a patch running about 400 miles north-south and 150 miles across. Officials expect 80 percent of British Columbia's mature lodgepoles to be dead by 2014. Loggers are frantically cutting lifeless trees for lumber before they rot. Funguses carried by beetles stain the wood a blotchy blue. Lumber mills promote it as stylish ''denim wood.'' In 2002, high winds carried the beetles through the Rockies and into the Alberta plain. They appear poised to sweep east to the Atlantic through Canada's jackpine boreal forest. In 2001, Dr. Logan set up an observing station at a broad stand of | In the Rockies, Pines Die and Bears Feel It |
1822563_1 | and pay an annual fee to receive biometrically encoded I.D. cards and access to a special lane for expedited passage through the security checkpoint. Mr. Zmuda cited early snags with shoe-scanning technology being tested in Orlando by Verified Identity Pass, which already operates a Registered Traveler program called Clear at Orlando and four other airports. The Clear shoe-scanning technology, developed by General Electric Security, was intended to detect traces of explosives and suspicious metal, and to allow most travelers to pass through Clear lanes without having to remove their shoes. But the scanner rejected an unexpectedly high number of travelers' shoes in Orlando, requiring members to remove their shoes just as they would at regular checkpoints. Mr. Zmuda said Unisys, which plans to be operating in 6 to 10 airports within a year, will probably offer only a special lane for the I.D. cards in Reno while the company continues to study options that will provide more benefits. Steven Brill, the founder of Verified Identity, has said that not having to remove shoes is the biggest potential benefit sought by customers. But Mr. Zmuda said that ''all of our survey data'' show that not having to remove laptops from cases is the biggest benefit sought by potential members. BRITISH AIR STRIKE AVERTED -- British Airways said it reached an agreement with the union for its cabin crews that would avert planned strikes today and tomorrow and for two 72-hour periods next month. The airline had already adjusted schedules in expectation of a strike and the agreement ''has come too late to prevent disruption to the travel plans of tens of thousands of our customers,'' said Willie Walsh, the airline's chief executive. HOTEL BOOM -- The number of domestic hotel rooms under construction or in active development was 23 percent higher in the fourth quarter of 2006 than in the period in 2005, according to Lodging Econometrics. One of the biggest growth areas is in upscale hotels, with 207 of them totaling 23,274 rooms scheduled to open this year, a 35 percent increase over 2006, the hotel industry forecasting company said. A FREQUENT-FLIER CHANGE -- United Airlines has changed its Mileage Plus frequent-flier program. Miles in accounts that have been inactive for 18 months will automatically expire, the airline said, adding that the new rule will enable more frequent travelers to ''compete with fewer people for reward seats.'' JOE SHARKEY ITINERARIES | MEMO PAD |
1822534_1 | are eroding here. Such things are changing faster, perhaps, than the political differences that still divide the two nations. What Greeks say they are learning in this glasnost of food, fashion and travel is that, for good and bad, much still unites the two countries -- one at the edge of Europe, the other at the edge of Asia. Both share a fascination for baklava and the stuffed leaves known as dolmades. And then there is kokoretsi (if you are Greek) or kokorec (if you are Turkish). Both nations claim this dish -- lamb intestines, heart, liver and lungs or kidneys, or both. The Turkish version is on the menu at Tike, an upscale chain restaurant popular in Turkey, and now doing well in Greece, too. ''Turkish food is very close to our tradition,'' said Alexandros Louvaris, 37, a prominent Greek businessman who opened the restaurant in northern Athens two years ago with Turkish partners and 11 imported Turkish chefs and other employees. ''O.K., so we had the Turks here for 400 years. Some things stayed.'' With memories still bitter about Ottoman rule -- and offenses fresher over the population transfers after World War I and other unsettled issues like Cyprus -- Mr. Louvaris said that reaction to his restaurant was not uniformly positive in the beginning. ''Many people said to me, 'Shame on you, you brought the Turks,' '' he recalled. ''I said, 'I can't help what happened 400 years ago. I am looking at the future. You have a problem with the Turks. Why didn't you care when the Germans fixed the airport?' '' But the restaurant is now packed every night, making Mr. Louvaris emblematic of a new mood here. He started doing business in Turkey in 2001. Last year he married an Iranian who grew up partly in Istanbul, and gossip magazines tagged it ''the wedding of the year'' there. Indeed, the elites on both sides are at the edge of the cross-border trend. More rich Greeks are marrying in Istanbul, the symbolic seat of the Greek Orthodox Church, and more rich Turks vacation on Greek islands. But the changes are broader. They began in many ways in 1999, when a pair of earthquakes -- one in Turkey, one in Greece -- spurred mutual rescue teams and sympathy. The ''earthquake diplomacy'' was followed by a rise in tourism: 540,000 Greeks visited Turkey in 2005, up from | Pursuing Happiness, Greeks and Turks Find One Another |
1822437_0 | The energetic, young children scampered along a bumpy dirt infield, chased baseballs around an outfield that was missing almost as much grass as it contained and sidestepped a leaning light tower that was a miniature Tower of Pisa. Still, to them, this tattered field in Vega Alta, P.R., is hallowed ground. Actually, Jesus Rivera Park is sacred to little ones and not-so-little ones because it is a place where three neighborhood legends once played. It is a field where the Molina brothers -- Bengie, José and Yadier, all catchers -- rumbled through the divots as they developed into major leaguers. From the time they sip their morning coffee until hours after they have eaten dinner, the people who hang around the park can boast that the Molinas stand apart from the 18 other families that have sent at least three brothers to the major leagues. The three DiMaggio brothers had superb careers and featured one of the most famous Joes to ever hit or throw a ball. The three Alou brothers combined for strong careers during a collective 47 seasons. But only the three Molinas all ended up behind the plate and only they, of all those 18 other groups of brothers, can each claim a World Series championship. ''To see your other two brothers in the major leagues with you, it's an amazing feeling,'' Bengie Molina said. ''It's unbelievable. It's something you can't put into words.'' As scruffy as Rivera Park is now, Bengie said it was a totally distressed piece of land before his family and other residents turned it into a relative haven. And for the kids who play there these days, the tale of the Molinas is inspirational. ''They're out of this world,'' said Roberto Sanchez, a 14-year-old pitcher and shortstop who was sweating after spearing grounders during a hectic day at the field earlier this month. ''If they did it, it makes you think you can, too.'' Watching the hustle and bustle from across the street was Gladys Matta de Molina, the spirited mother of the Molinas. The Molina home and Rivera Park are so close that one of the Molina brothers could roll a ball from the white security gates outside the family's yellow brick dwelling and, in a few seconds, it would touch the backstop. When visitors enter the Molina home that Gladys shares with her husband, Benjamin Sr., the most prominent picture | 3 Weeks to Pitchers and Molinas |
1822373_2 | to Britain. A Protestant-Catholic local government, set forth in the Good Friday peace accord of 1998, last met in 2002 before it fell apart amid widespread distrust between the rival political groups. The Irish Republican Army, an ally of Sinn Fein, fought the Northern Ireland police and the British Army in a military campaign to unite Ireland until an I.R.A. cease-fire in 1994. Four years later, the Good Friday peace accord mostly ended the kind of politically motivated killings that marked the previous three decades. The conflict killed more than 3,600 people, including 300 police officers. Under that 1998 agreement, Catholic representation on the police force is to increase to about 42 percent, the percentage of Catholics living in the province. The British-Irish accord proposes elections for a Belfast-based assembly on March 7 and the establishment of a Protestant-Catholic provincial government on March 26. To meet those deadlines, the support of Mr. Paisley, who has opposed sharing power with Catholic republicans in the past, will be needed. Senior politicians in the Democratic Unionist Party have said in recent months that they oppose sharing power with Sinn Fein under any circumstances. In a speech to Sinn Fein delegates on Sunday, Mr. McGuinness made it clear that after his party's ''historic'' vote, he expected Mr. Blair to put pressure on Mr. Paisley's Democratic Unionists to agree to share power. Speaking to reporters after the vote, Mr. McGuinness said he hoped that ''the spirit of generosity shown today'' by his party would be matched by the Democratic Unionists. In the weeks leading up to the vote, Sinn Fein leaders worked to ease any dissent among their members by holding a series of public meetings to explain that their support for the police force would allow them to re-enter a Belfast government. The gathering on Sunday, attended by 2,500 delegates and supporters, was larger than those Sinn Fein had held to win support for the Good Friday accord. Many speakers mentioned the publication last week of a report by the police ombudsman of Northern Ireland that accused members of the province's police force of collusion with at least one loyalist Protestant gang in a number of killings, attacks and drug crimes in the decade that ended in 2003. Party leaders had feared that the report would jeopardize the vote on the police force, but most delegates spoke strongly in favor of endorsing the force. | Sinn Fein Endorses Plan for Protestant-Catholic Police Force |
1820871_0 | ACCORDING to a State Department report released this week, American citizens adopted 6,493 children from China in 2006, a decline of 18 percent from the previous year's total of 7,906. And yet, just over a month ago, this newspaper reported that China had prepared strict new criteria for foreign adoption applications because the country claimed it lacked ''available'' babies to meet the ''spike'' in demand. China has always limited foreign adoptions, and it does not publish reliable statistics on the number of children in its orphanages. So how is one to know whether the decrease in adoptions reflects a lack of supply or a lack of demand? In the week following the report on the new guidelines, more than one bewildered person said to me, ''But I thought there were lots of babies in orphanages in China!'' My response was to helplessly reply, ''So did I.'' My understanding of this was based not on conjecture, but on having been to China twice to adopt, having seen orphanages with my own eyes, and on research and other eyewitness accounts. Many hundreds and perhaps thousands of orphanages operate in China, most of them full of girls. According to a February 2005 report in The Weekend Standard, a Chinese business newspaper, demographers in China found a ratio of 117 boys per 100 girls under the age of 5 in the 2000 census. Thanks to China's one-child policy, put into effect in 1979 in order to curb population growth, and a strong cultural preference for male children, this gender gap could result in as many as 60 million ''missing'' girls from the population by the end of the decade, enough to alarm even Chinese officials. And what happened to these girls? According to the International Planned Parenthood Federation (a term that takes on a whole new meaning when referring to China), there are about seven million abortions in China per year, 70 percent of which are estimated to be of females. That adds up to around five million per year, or 50 million by the end of the decade; so where are the other 10 million girls? If even 10 percent end up in orphanages well, you do the math. A few months ago, in a conversation with my friend Patrick Mason, executive director of the International Adoption Center at INOVA Fairfax Hospital in Virginia, I confessed a growing fear: that China, the country | The Mystery of the Chinese Baby Shortage |
1820833_0 | Northern Ireland's police ombudsman, in a report on Monday, accused the province's police force of collusion with at least one loyalist Protestant gang in a number of killings and attempted killings and serious drug crimes. In the 160-page report, Nuala O'Loan, the ombudsman, indicated that police handlers had turned a blind eye to tips from informants in an outlawed pro-British loyalist gang about at least 10 killings and 10 attempted killings. The gang, part of the Ulster Volunteer Force, saw itself as part of a war to maintain the link with Britain against a campaign to unite Ireland by Sinn Fein republicans and the Irish Republican Army. The outlawed group operated for more than a decade, until 2003, from North Belfast despite being riddled with police informants, Ms. O'Loan said. She said Monday that the most shocking aspect of her findings was that there seemed to be an intentional lack of supervision by the department of the Special Branch police officers dealing with the informants and that documentation had either been avoided or destroyed in many cases. The police department's failure to act probably extended the gang's killing rampage, she said, presenting the report at a news conference. Despite the ombudsman's findings of collusion, police officers are unlikely to face charges because of the lack of sufficient documentation to proceed with prosecution, she said. Her report was issued at a crucial moment for the leaders of Sinn Fein, the main Catholic party in Northern Ireland. They want their party members, at a conference this weekend, to set aside long-held objections to the operations of the Protestant-dominated Northern Ireland police so the group can move ahead to enter a power-sharing government with the main Protestant party, the Democratic Unionists. The Democratic Unionist Party has said it will not even consider the so-called St. Andrews Agreement proposals, sponsored by Britain and Ireland, for a Protestant-Catholic local government to be set up in Belfast on March 26 unless Sinn Fein first indicates support for the police. | Report Accuses Belfast Police Of Collusion In Gang Killings |
1818097_0 | BACK DOOR FOR CORPORATE E-MAIL -- A growing number of Internet-savvy workers are forwarding their office e-mail to free, Web-accessible personal accounts offered by Google, Yahoo and other companies. Employers, who fearfully envision corporate secrets leaking through the back door of otherwise well-protected computer networks, are not pleased. [Page A1.] CALLS FOR GENERIC INSULIN -- As they examine their state health care budgets, 11 of the nation's governors are asking why there is no cheaper generic version of insulin, a drug that has been used since the 1920s. [A1.] A SECOND SUITOR FOR DELTA -- Even as US Airways increased its hostile bid for Delta Air Lines by about 20 percent to $10.3 billion, Northwest emerged as another potential suitor. Delta is said to be hoping to fend off US Airways, and has been in talks with Northwest for weeks. [C1.] G.M. TAKES AIM AT CHINA -- How General Motors will fare as Toyota passes it in market share may depend on how it performs in China, its second-largest market after the United States. [C1.] DIGITAL BILLBOARDS AHEAD -- Billboard companies are adopting digital technology that rotates advertiser images every six or eight seconds -- the better to catch the eye. [C1.] COURT TACKLES UNION FEES -- A case argued before the Supreme Court about how labor unions must handle the fees paid by nonmembers could turn out to be little more than a footnote to a long line of decisions about the respective rights of labor unions and dissident employees. [A24.] HOUSE APPROVES WAGE BILL -- The House overwhelmingly approved a $2.10 increase in the federal minimum wage in a vote that Democrats hailed as an overdue raise for low-income workers and a symbol of new leadership on Capitol Hill. [A28.] BUSH OPPOSES STEM CELL BILL -- The White House jumped back into the debate surrounding embryonic stem cell research, urging lawmakers to vote against House legislation to expand such research. [A28.] CANADIAN CABLE DEAL -- CanWest Global Communications, a Canadian broadcaster and newspaper publisher, joined Goldman Sachs to buy Alliance Atlantis Communications, owner of 13 cable channels. [C9.] APPLE SUED OVER TRADEMARK -- The computer networking giant Cisco Systems filed a trademark infringement lawsuit against Apple, claiming rights to the iPhone brand. [C13.] KODAK SELLS MEDICAL UNIT -- Eastman Kodak, as part of its struggle with the digital conversion in photography, said that it would sell its X-ray | TODAY IN BUSINESS |
1817988_0 | Gov. Eliot Spitzer made his name, in part, on indiscreet e-mail messages, as any number of executives who were pursued by the attorney general's office in recent years can attest. Now his administration has sent out an indiscreet e-mail message of its own: An e-mail response to people seeking jobs as spokesmen included the e-mail addresses of 227 other job applicants, including reporters and local and city government employees. ''My initial reaction was to laugh -- they sent it out to a bunch of reporters,'' said one applicant, who, along with several others, was granted anonymity so as not to get them in trouble with their current bosses or to scotch their chances of being hired. ''My next reaction was that it was kind of unprofessional.'' The e-mail response was sent out Tuesday night to people who had applied to become public information officers through a Web site that the transition team set up. ''Thank you again for your interest in becoming a part of New York's future,'' it tells the job seekers. Many of their names and employers could be easily inferred from their e-mail addresses. In interviews, several applicants said that they were worried that the job seekers could find themselves in trouble with their current bosses, who might view job-hunting as disloyal. Others, who have public affairs experience, spoke about the technical aspects -- and the importance of configuring an Internet mailing list to shield the other e-mail recipients. ''They need to be prepared for some blowback if they included everybody's address,'' one said. The aspirants came from different sections of the state. Some are journalists, others work in public relations, some work in business, and others work in branches of city, state or local government. Christine Anderson, Governor Spitzer's press secretary, called the mailing ''an inadvertent and unfortunate mistake'' and apologized to those who were inconvenienced. Mr. Spitzer, of course, was successful at using internal e-mail messages to build cases against Merrill Lynch and others when he was the state's attorney general. He subpoenaed boxloads of printed e-mail in his investigations. His biography, ''Spoiling for a Fight,'' by Brooke A. Masters (Times Books, 2006), quotes him as saying at the beginning of one inquiry: ''Get me the damn e-mails! All of them.'' Not everyone who hopes to work for the Spitzer administration was dismayed at the disclosure. One applicant saw it as a positive, saying that | E-Mail Gaffe Publicizes Job Seekers In Albany |
1817998_0 | Thanks to cellphones, friends and relations can find you anywhere in the world. But can you find yourself? You can if you have the Pharos G.P.S. Phone 600, which has some advanced location-tracking features. This $700 phone comes with Pharos's Ostia navigation software, which calculates directions, calls out turns on the road and displays a three-dimensional map of your location on the 2.8-inch color touch screen. It also has a two-megapixel camera and FM radio receiver inside. The Pharos phone is an unlocked G.S.M. cellphone, which means a SIM card from a wireless carrier must be inserted to make calls. You can get one by signing up with T-Mobile or Cingular in the United States, but the phone will also work with almost any European or Asian carrier. The phone runs Windows Mobile 5.0 and can handle most Windows Mobile applications, including Media Player 10 Mobile for music and video playback. The Pharos phone has 128 megabytes of internal storage and a MiniSD card slot for expansion. It will be available online and in retail stores next month, bringing relief to serious travelers and the habitually lost. JOHN BIGGS CIRCUITS | Wonder Where You Wander? This Mobile Phone Can Tell You |
1818121_0 | Companies spend millions on systems to keep corporate e-mail safe. If only their employees were as paranoid. A growing number of Internet-literate workers are forwarding their office e-mail to free Web-accessible personal accounts offered by Google, Yahoo and other companies. Their employers, who envision corporate secrets leaking through the back door of otherwise well-protected computer networks, are not pleased. ''It's a hole you can drive an 18-wheeler through,'' said Paul D. Myer, president of the security firm 8E6 Technologies in Orange, Calif. It is a battle of best intentions: productivity and convenience pitted against security and more than a little anxiety. Corporate techies -- who, after all, are paid to worry -- want strict control over internal company communications and fear that forwarding e-mail might expose proprietary secrets to prying eyes. Employees just want to get to their mail quickly, wherever they are, without leaping through too many security hoops. Corporate networks, which typically have several layers of defenses against hackers, can require special software and multiple passwords for access. Some companies use systems that give employees a security code that changes every 60 seconds; this must be read from the display screen of a small card and typed quickly. That is too much for some employees, especially when their computers can store the passwords for their Web-based mail, allowing them to get right down to business. So far, no major corporate disasters caused by this kind of e-mail forwarding have come to light. But security experts say the risks are real. For example, the flimsier security defenses of Web mail systems could allow viruses or spyware to get through, and employees could unwittingly download them at the office and infect the corporate network. Also, because messages sent from Web-based accounts do not pass through the corporate mail system, companies could run afoul of federal laws that require them to archive corporate mail and turn it over during litigation. Lawyers in particular wring their hands over employees using outside e-mail services. They encourage companies to keep messages for as long as necessary and then erase them to keep them out of the reach of legal foes. Companies have no control over the life span of e-mail messages in employees' Web accounts. ''If employees are just forwarding to their Web e-mail, we have no way to know what they are doing on the other end,'' said Joe Fantuzzi, chief executive of | Companies Fret as Office E-Mail Is Detoured Past Security Walls |
1819029_5 | slightly more absurd side to all this is that attempting to stop the documents from spreading is, by now, a Sisyphean task. ''The court is trying to get the genie back into the bottle until it can sort out what's going on through the course of litigation, which takes place at non-Internet speed,'' said Jonathan Zittrain, a professor of Internet governance and regulation at Oxford and a founder of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School. ''Perhaps the court thinks that whoever is adding to the wiki is among the parties to the original case,'' Professor Zittrain said. ''That's understandable, but it puts the court in a no-win situation. It's left issuing an order that sounds like no one in the world is allowed to post the documents.'' For its part, even The Times, which often posts original documents for its readers, tried to put the things online when Mr. Berenson wrote his first article, but the raw pages -- more than 350 individual image files weighing in at over 500 megabytes -- proved unwieldy. George H. Freeman, vice president and general counsel for The Times, said, ''The Times fulfilled its role by doing a lot of research and then highlighting and including the most important issues and documents in a series of well-placed news articles.'' For now, copies of the Lilly documents sit defiantly on servers in Sweden, and under a domain registered at Christmas Island, the Australian dot in the ocean 224 miles off the coast of Java. ''Proudly served from outside the United States,'' the site declares. There are surely others. On his TortsProf blog (snipurl.com/Torts), William G. Childs, an assistant professor at Western New England School of Law in Springfield, Mass., put it this way in a headline: ''Judge Tries to Unring Bell Hanging Around Neck of Horse Already Out of Barn Being Carried on Ship That Has Sailed.'' LINK BY LINK Correction: January 23, 2007, Tuesday The Link by Link column in Business Day on Jan. 15 about a court hearing on an injunction over access to documents from Eli Lilly, the pharmaceutical giant, on its antipsychotic drug, Zyprexa, misstated the title of George H. Freeman, a lawyer for The New York Times, who discussed the newspaper's approach to disseminating information contained in the documents. He is an assistant general counsel, not general counsel. (Kenneth A. Richieri is the general counsel.) | Documents Borne by Winds of Free Speech |
1821816_6 | was broken,'' Ms. Udow said. The youth boards later issued 15 recommendations for improving the system and lobbied the governor and legislators. Some suggestions were accepted, including making sure that all foster children get a certified copy of their birth certificate and a Social Security card and help obtaining driver's licenses. Other suggestions would be more costly and remain under discussion, including offering free college tuition, giving former foster children cars being auctioned by the state and giving all the option to remain in care to 21. But the youths also made it clear they believed that the problems start when the state removes children from their parents -- sometimes too readily -- and moves them away from relatives, friends and familiar schools. Their first recommendation was that foster youths should have a say whenever changes in their status were considered. Their second was to provide them help maintaining ties with their birth families and hometown friends. The state created a task force with youths on every panel. One top recommendation, the automatic extension of Medicaid coverage to age 21, has just been put into effect. The State Housing Development Authority has also allocated $3 million for rent subsidies, whose recipients will also be eligible for regular mental health and other services. At the same time, Ms. Udow said, the state is working to reduce the frequency with which children are removed from their parents and trying to keep more children with relatives and in the same schools. The state is in settlement talks with the advocacy group Children's Rights, which brought a suit accusing Michigan of providing inadequate protection and support to children in its care. For the hundreds who have joined, the youth boards, with their weekly meetings and election of officers, have offered personal breakthroughs as much as a way to influence policy. ''When we come together it's like family,'' said Alice Harris, a 22-year-old mother of three children who lived in a home for unwed mothers when she entered foster care, then ran away at 16 and survived on the streets for more than a year. More recently Ms. Harris has lived with a boyfriend, received welfare and become certified as a nurse's assistant. She has become heavily involved with her local youth board in central Detroit, getting elected as an officer and lobbying in the state capital. When she attended her first board meeting two | For Former Foster Care Youths, Help to Make It on Their Own |
1821748_0 | Depending on the day at her Methodist seminary, Jennifer Wilsford wants to be either a parish minister or a professor. Her seminary, for its part, has tweaked its curriculum, brings in speakers and tries to hold her hand through the logistics of ordination -- all designed to nudge Ms. Wilsford and other seminarians toward the pulpit. Jason Miller entered the rabbinic seminary with the notion that he wanted a pulpit job, but leading a congregation out of school was daunting. He said that to help him prepare for the calling -- and not be tempted to leave it before he graduated -- he became ''the guinea pig'' in a new program, attending classes in one state, living and working as an assistant rabbi in another and serving as the primary rabbi in a third. ''We need to lead the horses to water, as it were,'' Dr. James Hudnut-Beumler, the dean of the divinity school at Vanderbilt University, said of what has become a common effort across faiths and denominations for seminaries to lean on their students -- ever so slightly -- to consider a pulpit job. While a seminarian taking a pulpit job was a near given in the past, there are far more options available now, like chaplaincy or work in nonprofit organizations and even in businesses that are finding use for those with divinity degrees. From 2000 to 2006, the number of students about to earn a master's degree in divinity who intended to enter parish ministry fell about 15 percent, according to a survey by the Association of Theological Schools in the United States and Canada. Equally troublesome, the number of seminary students nearing graduation and unsure what they want to do -- about 9 percent of the group in 2000 -- nearly doubled for men and tripled for women. As a result, seminaries are trying hard to ensure that a good number of their students decide on church ministry. Vanderbilt offers a number of programs, including a new full-time, two-year internship that is required after the second year of three years of study. Students leave classes altogether to serve in a church, in the hope that they develop a comfort level at a time when they have some training -- but before they make their ultimate decision. ''You have to learn how to share deep things about life with one person, while another is asking you | Trying to Keep Divinity Students on a Path to the Pulpit |
1816710_5 | feet as they swing through the trees. Yet I am somewhat melancholy. The fragile forests that make orangutan life possible are fast disappearing. Where, I wonder, are the billionaire philanthropists and the international policies that will prevent orangutans -- and all great apes -- from going extinct? Indonesia is a vast, densely populated country where millions live in or near poverty. The temptation to exploit natural resources to feed people today, never mind tomorrow, and to expand the economy, is great. And the plantations are but one example. Surface-mining of gold in the alluvial fans of white sand has been practiced for two decades, leaving virtual moonscapes near the National Park where I work. Now zircon mining has entrenched itself all over Central Kalimantan, with each zircon mine obliterating 1,000 acres of rain forest. Two years ago nobody, myself included, even knew what zircon was. The international community must recognize that it has some responsibility for what happens to the great rain forests of Indonesian Borneo. Foreign investment in local development programs needs to be expanded. Village level projects, like the one financed by the United States Agency for International Development and run by Boston-based World Education near where I work, have empowered farmers, strengthened village economies and employed local people, giving them a stake in preserving the forest. We need more of these programs. Indonesia could also impose a special tax on companies that profit from rain forest destruction, with the revenues dedicated to forest and orangutan conservation. Proper labeling of palm oil content could allow a consumer boycott of soap, crackers, cookies and other products that contain it. Finally, Indonesia needs to be more vigorous in enforcing the excellent laws it already has to protect its forests. When I arrived in 1971, Borneo was almost a Garden of Eden, the most remote place on earth. Now it has been drawn into the global economy, one government decision, one business plan at a time. But the destruction of Borneo's forests and the extinction of the orangutans are not inevitable. It is possible to protect our ancient heritage and closest of kin -- one orangutan, one national park, one piece of irreplaceable forest at a time. We only need to decide to do it. Op-Ed Contributor Birute Mary Galdikas is president and co-founder of Orangutan Foundation International in Los Angeles and a professor at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia. | The Vanishing Man of the Forest |
1816680_0 | In a scathing attack of the American-led war in Iraq, President Jacques Chirac said Friday that his predictions that the war would spread chaos and more terrorism had come true. ''As France had foreseen and feared, the war in Iraq has sparked upheavals that have yet to show their full effects,'' Mr. Chirac said in his New Year's address at Élysée Palace to the foreign diplomatic corps. ''This adventure has worsened the divisions among communities and threatened the very integrity of Iraq,'' he said. ''It has undermined the stability of the entire region, where every country now fears for its security and its independence. It has offered terrorism a new field for expansion.'' As President Bush prepares to unveil next week a new military strategy in Iraq, Mr. Chirac added that ''the priority, more than ever, is to restore full sovereignty to the Iraqi people.'' The single paragraph on Iraq in a speech that addressed many crises and problems around the world was one of Mr. Chirac's most pointed justifications for France's decision to oppose the invasion of Iraq in 2003. In a sense, the attack was surprising. France's opposition to the war set off a crisis in French-American relations that has since eased, thanks to close cooperation between the United States and France to resolve the summer's Israeli-Hezbollah war and to curb Iran's nuclear program. As the violence and chaos in Iraq steadily worsened, despite the presence of American troops, the 74-year-old French president tended to avoid reminding the United States of its failures there. After Mr. Bush's re-election, for example, Mr. Chirac sent him a handwritten ''Cher George'' letter of congratulations. He also gave a speech expressing hope that 2005 would be a year of ''trust'' with Mr. Bush, and congratulated him again after elections took place in Iraq. In Mr. Chirac's last speech to the foreign diplomatic corps, a year ago, he expressed hope that Iraqi elections would help unify Iraqis. But as Mr. Chirac seems unlikely to run for a third term in presidential elections this spring, he may feel he has little to lose in being blunt in defending what some French political analysts call the high point of his foreign policy in his 12-year presidency. In Friday's speech, Mr. Chirac also attacked ''the pitfalls of unilateralism,'' a veiled criticism of the Bush administration for going to war in Iraq without the backing of the | Chirac Says Time Proves France Was Right to Resist War |
1816656_1 | around the corner. Just three months old, the $1 million globe, made of 88 chunks of Brazilian quartzite and adorned with raised bronze signifying land masses, lies disintegrated at the university, in Kennesaw, Ga., outside a new academic building praised for its eco-friendly attributes. A bronze statue of David Brower, a conservationist who was the first executive director of the Sierra Club, had stood atop the 15-foot globe and is now partly crushed. A steel time capsule intended to be opened in 3006 is exposed amid the rubble. Eino flew to the site from his home in Pahrump, Nev., the day after the collapse and said he saw ''very clear evidence'' of vandalism. Steel beams that held together parts of the globe's seven layers of stone had been bent, he said, adding that the adhesive used is the same as that used by most large-scale sculptors, although he would not name the manufacturer. ''The craftsmanship wasn't the cause,'' said Eino, whose Web site called ''Spaceship Earth'' his ''most ambitious project yet.'' One of his sculptures is in the Library of Congress; another adorned a venue for the Athens Olympics in 2004. But a university spokeswoman, Arlethia Perry-Johnson, said yesterday that the Cobb County police have said they do not think vandalism caused the collapse. ''The first phase was to identify if there were any signs of criminal activity, and we have completed that process,'' Ms. Perry-Johnson said. ''The next phase of emphasis will focus on the potential structural causes.'' The sculpture was commissioned by Brian Maxwell, who created the PowerBar energy snack and donated it to Kennesaw. ''When I first heard about it and saw it, I was in disbelief,'' said Birgit Wassmuth, chairwoman of the department of communication whose office in the new building will overlook the sculpture site. ''I've never seen a sculpture disintegrate like that. When you see the pattern how it fell apart, it was just like magic, it just disintegrated.'' Eino said he had plans to return to the campus to rebuild his work and ideas about how to make it stronger. But some see the destruction as symbolic of the need to care for the fragile earth. Professor Wassmuth, in fact, said it might be interesting to leave the sculpture as it is as a reminder ''that if we don't take care of this planet soon, it's going to fall apart, just like this.'' | Monument to the Planet Suffers a Hard Fall to Earth |
1815814_3 | 2006 To the Editor: Saddam Hussein may have deserved it, but we didn't. By we, I mean the American people, who were forced into being accomplices in the show trial and barbaric execution of Saddam Hussein. Most civilized countries denounced this execution, and even Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain had voiced misgivings. Paul E. Harmeier Darien, Conn., Dec. 30, 2006 To the Editor: Saddam Hussein has finally received his reward for crimes committed as a dictator, and all it has cost the United States (so far) is nearly 3,000 military deaths, tens of thousands of Americans wounded, hundreds of billions of dollars and international credibility. This tally, when added to the staggering Iraqi death toll from collateral damage and sectarian violence, might provoke a reasonable person to ask whether there is a price that is too high to pay for planting a seed of democracy in a very resistant soil. Buck Rutledge Knoxville, Tenn., Dec. 30, 2006 To the Editor: As a person who strongly objects to the death penalty, I cannot understand why we were subjected to the vivid portrayal of the hanging of Saddam Hussein. I feel for the young people who saw such images in their fresh and untainted minds. This execution by hanging reminiscent of the Middle Ages is not helping them consider other kinds of punishment. What do we say to young people: ''Saddam Hussein killed a lot of people in his country so we're punishing him by hanging''? Don't we stoop to the level of the criminals when we want retribution? Life is God's creation; so with death. It's not for men to do. Priscilla V. Dizon Seattle, Dec. 30, 2006 To the Editor: The hanging of Saddam Hussein is a watershed in modern Arab history and Arab-American relations. Two things about it will be remembered by all: It would have been impossible without the American invasion, conquest and occupation of Iraq; and it was achieved by and through the following chain of events: Saddam Hussein's being captured and held by American occupation forces; being tried by a court of controversial, if not dubious, legitimacy appointed and approved by the American authorities; and being executed by American encouragement, prodding and certain approval. The act and the events that eventually led to the execution were undertaken and met with the approval of the majority of Arab officialdom and the rejection and disapproval of the | What Did Hussein's Execution Accomplish? |
1815764_2 | McLennan Companies, the big New York insurance broker, is planning to sell its troubled mutual fund business, Putnam Investments, to a Canadian company, the Power Corporation of Canada for about $3.9 billion. [C2.] FUROR OVER A WHEAT BOARD -- Plans by the Canadian government to strip the Canadian Wheat Board of its monopoly control over most of the country's wheat and barley exports have provoked a fight that is pitting farmer against farmer and the agency against the government. [C3.] SHOPLIFTERS' MUST-HAVE LIST -- Meat and analgesics were the items most likely to be shoplifted in 2005, bumping cosmetics and health care products down to No. 3, according to a report on supermarket theft recently issued by a trade group. [C3.] READING ON THE BOUNDING MAIN -- Book It to Bermuda, a five-day literary-themed cruise out of Boston, is the latest example of a growing genre of cruises that could be called Ship Lit. Often sponsored by publishers, the cruises, aboard commercial liners, feature popular authors who give readings and seminars -- even knitting lessons -- to boatfuls of book lovers. [C4.] BEST-LAID PLANS GO AWRY -- The Wall Street Journal is introducing its new design -- and smaller size -- tomorrow. But Wall Street is shutting down for the day in official mourning for former President Gerald R. Ford, a tradition dating from the burial of Ulysses S. Grant in 1885. [C4.] DEADLY YEAR FOR NEWS MEDIA -- The year 2006 was the deadliest for journalists and media workers worldwide, with at least 155 killings and unexplained deaths, the International Federation of Journalists announced. Another group, Reporters Without Borders, using more restrictive criteria, counted 81 journalists and 32 media assistants killed, the most since the Rwandan genocide in 1994. [C4.] GIFT LAPTOPS STIR CRITICISM -- In an effort to reach out to bloggers, Microsoft recently gave away some expensive laptops loaded with a new software system. But the gifts generated more controversy than good will: many bloggers accused the company of bribery and the bloggers who received them of unethical behavior. [C4.] DIGITAL SCRAPBOOKS, FOR A FEE -- Smilebox.com, a start-up based in Redmond, Wash., is offering its customers the opportunity to build online scrapbooks with animation, music and artwork. And in a market cluttered with free services that have struggled to produce profits, Smilebox is actually attracting paying customers, according to its chief executive, Andrew Wright, above. [C6.] | TODAY IN BUSINESS |
1819656_0 | When a lion achieves alpha male status, one of his first acts is to kill all unrelated cubs in the pride. Is that a bad thing? As biologists have long realized, the question makes little sense. In the bitterly competitive environments in which lions evolved, the dominant male's behavior was favored by natural selection because it brought females into heat more quickly, thus accelerating the transmission of his genes into the next generation. His behavior appears brutal to human onlookers and surely makes life less palatable for lions as a group. In the Darwinian framework, however, it is a simple fact of existence, neither good nor bad. In any event, such judgments have little practical significance, since moral outrage alone cannot prevent a dominant lion from killing cubs. In contrast, when humans prey on weaker members of the community, others are quick to condemn them. More important, such denunciations often matter. Because complex networks of voluntary association underlie almost every human transaction, the bad opinion of others can threaten the survival of even the most powerful individuals and organizations. But the supply of moral outrage is limited. To maximize its usefulness, it must be employed sparingly. The essential first step is to identify those who are responsible for bad outcomes. This is often harder than it appears. Failure at this stage steers anger toward people or groups whose behavior is, like the alpha lion's, an unavoidable consequence of environmental forces. In such instances, moral outrage would be better directed at those who enact the rules under which ostensibly bad actors operate. A case in point is the outrage currently directed at lenders who extend credit at extremely high rates of interest to economically disadvantaged groups. Among these lenders, so-called payday loan shops have come under particularly heavy fire of late. This industry, which didn't exist in the early 1990s, now has approximately 10,000 retail outlets nationwide (more in some states than either McDonald's or Burger King). Industry revenue, less than $1 billion in 1998, reached $28 billion last year. Concentrated in low-income neighborhoods, payday lenders typically offer short-duration loans of several hundred dollars secured only by a post-dated personal check from the borrower. Fees on a two-week loan often exceed $20 per $100 borrowed, which translates into an annual interest rate of more than 500 percent. Occasional borrowing on such terms can make sense, because it sidesteps the cumbersome process | Payday Loans Are a Scourge, but Should Wrath Be Aimed at the Lenders? |
1819714_1 | back where it's needed.'' The measure, which will halve the interest rate over the next five years, is estimated to cost $6 billion, which would be financed by increasing fees that lenders pay to the government and by reducing the 30 or so largest lenders' government-guaranteed profits on student loans. In a statement opposing the bill issued on Wednesday morning, well before the vote, the White House said the measure did nothing to improve access to college, because it only helped ease the burden of repayment for graduates. Instead, the White House called for increased grant aid to lower-income students. The White House statement also said access to higher education should be improved by containing costs. The responsibility for helping families, the statement said, ''must be shared with colleges, which also have a central role in making higher education affordable.'' The White House did not threaten a veto, but the size of Wednesday's majority indicated that Democrats would have the strength to override one. The afternoon's debate gave little hint of the broad bipartisan support the measure would garner. Republicans derided the bill as a gimmick -- ''bait and switch,'' in the words of Representative Tom Price of Georgia, who said it would take full effect only five years from now, and then for only six months, barring further Congressional action. But ultimately the issue's appeal for many Republicans was too strong. Representative Michael N. Castle, Republican of Delaware, voted for the bill, describing it as ''a step towards assisting college students pay for the soaring costs of higher education.'' Mr. Castle added, however, that the bill ''barely skims the surface of the true problem of how we can help increase access and affordability for all students.'' The bill comes as tuition increases at public and private institutions routinely outpace inflation, putting college out of reach for many students, and increasing the debt they carry upon graduation. The average student graduates college carrying more than $18,000 in debt. ''No one wants to be on the receiving end of a campaign ad attacking an incumbent for siding with bank lenders over middle-class voters,'' said Sarah Binder, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. According to the U.S. Public Interest Research Group, the bill would save the average student who starts college next year about $2,300 in interest payments over the life of a 15-year loan. Representative Tom Latham, Republican of Iowa, | House Backs a Cut in Interest on College Loans |
1819713_4 | nudge Mr. Bush toward their cap-and-trade model. The White House says that would shift jobs, and emissions from one country to another without slowing worldwide growth in emissions. The president' s opposition to mandatory caps retains strong support on Capitol Hill. Jim Owen, a spokesman for the Edison Electric Institute, the trade group of the utility industry, said Wednesday: ''Everything is different, but it's also the same in some ways. You still need 60 votes to get something big done in the Senate. And there are still many complex, thorny issues that stand in the way of enactment.'' The Democratic bills announced in the last two weeks cover a broad range. A proposal by Senator Jeff Bingaman, the New Mexico Democrat who is chairman of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, would decrease the rate of emissions growth before capping emissions and would build in a ''safety valve,'' freeing industries from the caps in certain circumstances. Groups like Environmental Defense say the safety valve would undermine market mechanisms. In an interview, Mr. Bingaman said, ''The way I look at it it's a question of what we can get agreement on.'' Less draconian than that proposal is the Lieberman-McCain approach. It would tighten controls more gradually and include subsidies for nuclear power. An emissions cap for just utilities is the centerpiece of yet another bill, by Ms. Feinstein. Some scientists and economists have expressed concern in recent weeks that the discussions here is overly focused on emissions caps, with too little attention on what they say is an essential need, greatly expanded government-financed research on nonpolluting energy technologies. Richard G. Richels, a climate expert and an economist at the Electric Power Research Institute, an organization in Palo Alto, Calif., that conducts energy studies for the utility industry, said a carbon dioxide cap would mainly prompt industry to deploy existing cleaner technologies that provide gains, but fail to come close to solving the climate problem. Mr. Richels added that it would not spur long-term investments seeking breakthroughs like new ways to store intermittent power from windmills. THE 110TH CONGRESS Correction: January 23, 2007, Tuesday Because of an editing error, an article on Thursday about efforts in Congress to pass legislation to curb carbon dioxide emissions misstated a comparison of the two measures. A bill introduced by Senators John McCain, Republican of Arizona, and Joseph I. Lieberman, independent of Connecticut, which would tighten | Measures on Global Warming Move to Spotlight in the New Congress |
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