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1831439_1 | range as threatened under the Endangered Species Act because the warming climate is causing a summertime retreat of sea ice that the bears use as for seal hunting. Environmentalists are trying to use such a listing to force the United States to restrict heat-trapping gases that scientists have linked to global warming as a way of limiting risks to the 22,000 or so bears in the far north. It remains unclear whether such a listing will be issued. The Fish and Wildlife Service this week held the first of several hearings in Alaska and Washington on the question. Over the past week, biologists and wildlife officials received a cover note and two sample memorandums to be used as a guide in preparing travel requests. Under the heading ''Foreign Travel -- New Requirement -- Please Review and Comply, Importance: High,'' the cover note said: ''Please be advised that all foreign travel requests (SF 1175 requests) and any future travel requests involving or potentially involving climate change, sea ice and/or polar bears will also require a memorandum from the regional director to the director indicating who'll be the official spokesman on the trip and the one responding to questions on these issues, particularly polar bears.'' The sample memorandums, described as to be used in writing travel requests, indicate that the employee seeking permission to travel ''understands the administration's position on climate change, polar bears, and sea ice and will not be speaking on or responding to these issues.'' Electronic copies of the memorandums and cover note were forwarded to The New York Times by Deborah Williams, an environmental campaigner in Alaska and a former Interior Department official in the Clinton administration. ''This sure sounds like a Soviet-style directive to me,'' Ms. Williams said. A spokesman for the Fish and Wildlife Service in Alaska, Bruce Woods, confirmed the authenticity of the notes, but interpreted them differently. ''The cover memo makes it clear nobody is being told they can't talk about these issues,'' Mr. Woods said. ''What the administration wants to know is who is going to be spokesperson and do they understand administration policy? It's not saying you won't talk about it.'' Limits on government scientists' freedom to speak freely about climate change became a heated issue last year after news reports showed that political appointees at NASA had canceled journalists' interview requests with climate scientists and discouraged news releases on global warming. | Memos Tell Officials How to Discuss Climate |
1829924_4 | make videos of themselves trying on clothes. YouTube's deal with the BBC is to include specially created clips, blogs from celebrities, behind-the-scenes video, and popular shows like ''Fawlty Towers,'' ''Doctor Who'' and ''Life on Earth'' by David Attenborough. Still, many of the agreements that YouTube highlighted suggest that the relationships are tentative and that media owners are treating online video as an experiment. YouTube's agreement with the N.B.A., for instance, does not include the league's most-prized content, the recaps of the games, which will continue to be shown on NBA.com. And the agreement lasts only through the end of the current season. ''We want to see how this works out, and we will adjust and see whether it makes sense for us both,'' said Steve Grimes, vice president for interactive efforts at the N.B.A. Similarly, YouTube's partnership with the Sundance Channel lasts through this year. ''The digital media landscape is constantly evolving, so we want to make sure we have the ability to re-evaluate,'' said Christopher Barry, vice president for digital media and business strategy at Sundance. What's more, most of YouTube's deals are not exclusive. Ford Models, for instance, is making its content available on YouTube competitors like Revver and Veoh, and some of the Sundance Channel content is also on Yahoo Video. And YouTube's success in courting smaller media companies may not be unique. Jeremy Allaire, chief executive of Brightcove, a YouTube competitor that licenses and distributes content on behalf of media companies, said his company had signed up about 3,000 commercial video publishers. ''We are having success with small, medium and large companies,'' Mr. Allaire said. Still, some of those who have become partners with YouTube say they are pleased with early results. Mr. Barry of the Sundance Channel said there had been more than two million views of its content on YouTube in a little more than a month. ''We have had significant growth on our Web site as well, and some portion of that growth we attribute to our YouTube partnership,'' he said. Whether that kind of success persuades large media companies to collaborate more broadly with YouTube remains to be seen. In November, a month after starting a limited trial of its own channel on YouTube, CBS hailed the effort, saying that its more than 300 clips were among the most viewed on YouTube. Yet a broader deal between the companies has proved elusive. | Google Courts Small YouTube Deals, and Very Soon, a Larger One |
1834872_0 | Wildhorse Meadows WHAT -- Resort community at a ski destination. WHERE -- Steamboat Springs, Colo. AMENITIES -- Access to skiing and swimming pools, among others. PRICES -- Condominiums from nearly $400,000. Prices for other residences, including loft apartments and town houses, are not yet available. STATUS -- Expected to open beginning this fall. DEVELOPER -- Resort Ventures West. CONTACT -- (877) 886-7772 or www.wildhorsemeadows.com. DETAILS -- This is one of a handful of projects planned to remake an area between the town of Steamboat Springs, about a three-hour-drive from Denver, and its well-known ski area. Wildhorse Meadows, on 47 acres, includes a gondola that will connect to the base of the ski area. Residential options include 275 two- to three-bedroom town houses; 86 furnished, studio to four-bedroom condominiums in a central lodge building; 50 to 60 loft-style apartments; and 41 (sold out) homesites. A rental program will be available for all the residences, and 80 lower-priced studio to three-bedroom condos for local residents are included in the project. There are plans for a 200-room hotel to be added later. A communal building will house amenities like the swimming pool, grotto-style whirlpools, a fitness center and an area for children, and a separate grocery store will offer a coffee bar, prepared foods and a post office. A system of trails for walking and biking will link the project with the town, and there will be a barn with spaces for events and exhibitions. The Yampa Valley Regional Airport, with flights in winter from cities including New York, Chicago and Atlanta, is about 25 miles away. Meriwether Ranch WHAT -- Residential development aimed at outdoors enthusiasts. WHERE -- Melrose, Mont. AMENITIES -- An equestrian center, a swimming pool and a restaurant, among others. PRICES -- One-tenth shares of two-bedroom fractional residences are $148,000; four-bedroom fractional residences, sold in one-eighth shares, are $328,000; homesites from $625,000 to $685,000. STATUS -- The project will open this summer, and construction should be completed in about two years. DEVELOPER -- Meriwether Ranch Land & Cattle Company. CONTACT -- (877) 835-2207 or www.meriwetherranch.com. DETAILS -- The Big Hole River runs directly through this 724-acre project in southwestern Montana, about 30 miles south of the nearest airport in Butte. It will consist of 24 shared-ownership residences in 17 lodge-style buildings and 17 one-acre homesites. The two-bedroom units, about 2,000 square feet, will be in single-level buildings with two | BREAKING GROUND |
1832126_4 | on to. At the time, there were 26,000 people living in 20 state institutions for the retarded in New York and just 1,570 in state-financed group homes. Today there are 32,722 developmentally disabled New Yorkers in community residences, and fewer than a thousand -- the most severely disabled -- in a handful of institutions. In 1980, New Jersey had just 471 community beds; Connecticut had 963. Today New Jersey has 7,173, Connecticut 5,313. They are paid for by the states, and most are run by nonprofit agencies. In 1974, the Kingsleys started on what was then a new parenting approach for children with disabilities called early intervention, which today has become standard practice. The infant is exposed to high levels of stimulus and physical therapy. Ms. Kingsley did Jason's room in bright colors; she made a quilt for him with every patch a different material. ''We surrounded him with motion and music, and we'd talk and talk to him,'' she says. To ''wake up his senses,'' she filled a tub with Jell-O, and plopped him in. ''I had people tell me that he wouldn't be able to read,'' she recalled. ''He started reading at age 4. It was so exciting. Everything they said he wouldn't do, he was doing.'' Jason's parents would take him to Broadway musicals, and he would memorize all the songs. To this day, if Ms. Kingsley challenges her son to adapt a show tune for his roommates, he'll burst into a verse of ''Singing in the Raymond'' or ''Some Enchanted Yaniving.'' The Kingsleys lectured at medical schools about the untapped potential of children with Down syndrome. ''Doctors needed to see the old stereotypes didn't apply,'' she said. Ms. Kingsley is a veteran writer for ''Sesame Street'' -- she has won 17 Emmys -- and she pushed to have Jason on the air, so the public, too, would see. Jason appeared a dozen times, starting at 15 months (sitting on Buffy Sainte-Marie's lap as she sang). At age 6 he did skits with Ernie, at 8 with Forgetful Jones. Being pioneers, Ms. Kingsley and her husband (who died nine years ago) had no sense where the limits were, and it was hard when they learned. ''I thought he was so smart, I thought I had fixed it,'' she said. ''But between 6 and 8 all the typical kids caught up and passed by. Typical kids got sophisticated | They'll Do It Themselves, Thanks |
1832168_4 | on to. At the time, there were 26,000 people living in 20 state institutions for the retarded in New York and just 1,570 in state-financed group homes. Today there are 32,722 developmentally disabled New Yorkers in community residences, and fewer than a thousand -- the most severely disabled -- in a handful of institutions. In 1980, New Jersey had just 471 community beds; Connecticut had 963. Today New Jersey has 7,173, Connecticut 5,313. They are paid for by the states, and most are run by nonprofit agencies. In 1974, the Kingsleys started on what was then a new parenting approach for children with disabilities called early intervention, which today has become standard practice. The infant is exposed to high levels of stimulus and physical therapy. Ms. Kingsley did Jason's room in bright colors; she made a quilt for him with every patch a different material. ''We surrounded him with motion and music, and we'd talk and talk to him,'' she says. To ''wake up his senses,'' she filled a tub with Jell-O, and plopped him in. ''I had people tell me that he wouldn't be able to read,'' she recalled. ''He started reading at age 4. It was so exciting. Everything they said he wouldn't do, he was doing.'' Jason's parents would take him to Broadway musicals, and he would memorize all the songs. To this day, if Ms. Kingsley challenges her son to adapt a show tune for his roommates, he'll burst into a verse of ''Singing in the Raymond'' or ''Some Enchanted Yaniving.'' The Kingsleys lectured at medical schools about the untapped potential of children with Down syndrome. ''Doctors needed to see the old stereotypes didn't apply,'' she said. Ms. Kingsley is a veteran writer for ''Sesame Street'' -- she has won 17 Emmys -- and she pushed to have Jason on the air, so the public, too, would see. Jason appeared a dozen times, starting at 15 months (sitting on Buffy Sainte-Marie's lap as she sang). At age 6 he did skits with Ernie, at 8 with Forgetful Jones. Being pioneers, Ms. Kingsley and her husband (who died nine years ago) had no sense where the limits were, and it was hard when they learned. ''I thought he was so smart, I thought I had fixed it,'' she said. ''But between 6 and 8 all the typical kids caught up and passed by. Typical kids got sophisticated | They'll Do It Themselves, Thanks |
1832189_1 | Tom L. Chubb, the vice president for original equipment marketing for Michelin North America, which makes several types of run-flat tires. He sees that growing to 4 percent by 2011. Run-flat tires are most often found on luxury vehicles. BMW has been the most enthusiastic proponent among the leading automakers, and seems likely to make the tires standard on most models eventually. Run-flats are also showing up on less expensive cars like the Mini Cooper S. Run-flats have also reached upscale family vehicles including minivans like the all-wheel-drive Toyota Sienna and the Touring edition of the Honda Odyssey. Tire makers said that in the case of a blowout, a vehicle with run-flats was easier to control. Automakers like the tires because no spare is necessary. That means the space gained can be used to carry more cargo or make mechanical changes. For example, eliminating the spare tire in the 2004 Toyota Sienna allowed the company to turn a front-wheel-drive minivan into all-wheel drive by making room for a driveshaft. The suit filed on Monday is over the Michelin Energy LX4 PAX run-flat used on the 2005-7 Honda Odyssey Touring and as an option on the 2006-7 Acura RL. The suit doesn't dispute that the tires offer a safety advantage, but says buyers were deceived about replacement costs and repairs. The PAX, instead of having stronger sidewalls, has a supportive ring inside made of polyurethane. Michelin said the ring allowed a more comfortable ride and better fuel economy because the sidewalls did not need to be so stiff, yet the vehicle was still safe and easy to drive when a tire went flat. But it is that design that makes the PAX more difficult to repair. Michelin stores or car dealers must have special tire-changing equipment that can cost $3,000 to $15,000 depending on what the dealer already has, Chris Naughton, a Honda spokesman, said in an interview before the suit was filed. He said some dealers did not have the equipment yet, but that about 90 percent of Honda's roughly 1,000 dealers would have it by the end of this month. Mark F. Anderson of San Francisco, one of the lawyers who filed the suit, said it was ''ridiculous'' that repairing a PAX tire should be so complicated. Mr. Anderson also filed a class-action suit in 2005 against Toyota, Bridgestone and Dunlop over run-flats used on the 2004-6 Sienna with | Run-Flat Tires: Solving a Problem or Creating One? |
1832141_4 | on to. At the time, there were 26,000 people living in 20 state institutions for the retarded in New York and just 1,570 in state-financed group homes. Today there are 32,722 developmentally disabled New Yorkers in community residences, and fewer than a thousand -- the most severely disabled -- in a handful of institutions. In 1980, New Jersey had just 471 community beds; Connecticut had 963. Today New Jersey has 7,173, Connecticut 5,313. They are paid for by the states, and most are run by nonprofit agencies. In 1974, the Kingsleys started on what was then a new parenting approach for children with disabilities called early intervention, which today has become standard practice. The infant is exposed to high levels of stimulus and physical therapy. Ms. Kingsley did Jason's room in bright colors; she made a quilt for him with every patch a different material. ''We surrounded him with motion and music, and we'd talk and talk to him,'' she says. To ''wake up his senses,'' she filled a tub with Jell-O, and plopped him in. ''I had people tell me that he wouldn't be able to read,'' she recalled. ''He started reading at age 4. It was so exciting. Everything they said he wouldn't do, he was doing.'' Jason's parents would take him to Broadway musicals, and he would memorize all the songs. To this day, if Ms. Kingsley challenges her son to adapt a show tune for his roommates, he'll burst into a verse of ''Singing in the Raymond'' or ''Some Enchanted Yaniving.'' The Kingsleys lectured at medical schools about the untapped potential of children with Down syndrome. ''Doctors needed to see the old stereotypes didn't apply,'' she said. Ms. Kingsley is a veteran writer for ''Sesame Street'' -- she has won 17 Emmys -- and she pushed to have Jason on the air, so the public, too, would see. Jason appeared a dozen times, starting at 15 months (sitting on Buffy Sainte-Marie's lap as she sang). At age 6 he did skits with Ernie, at 8 with Forgetful Jones. Being pioneers, Ms. Kingsley and her husband (who died nine years ago) had no sense where the limits were, and it was hard when they learned. ''I thought he was so smart, I thought I had fixed it,'' she said. ''But between 6 and 8 all the typical kids caught up and passed by. Typical kids got sophisticated | They'll Do It Themselves, Thanks |
1831973_0 | When the lights came on at the Dolce & Gabbana spring show, the scene resembled a cattle call in Sparta. ''The classical Greek aesthetic is a strong influence in men's fashion,'' Domenico Dolce says. ''We were definitely inspired by the spirit of the ancient Olympics, of a healthy mind and body -- a mental and sensual freedom.'' Dolce and his partner, Stefano Gabbana, aren't the only ones going mental over muscles. After seasons of skinny-nerd ubiquity, the heroic hard bods at Dsquared, Jean Paul Gaultier and Y-3 suggest that the Greeks may soon be beating up on the geeks. If anyone embodied the neo-Hellenism that is muscling its way back into the fashion arena, it was Herb Ritts. More than any other photographer of his generation, Ritts, who died in 2002 at the age of 50, redefined masculine glamour with his traditionalist images of modern-day Adonises, whose hypertonic physiques -- Apollonian articulation made flesh -- he adoringly mythologized. In his shoots for fashion-forward European magazines like Per Lui and L'Uomo Vogue, in his advertising work for Calvin Klein underwear and for Valentino, and in his widely published celebrity portraiture, Ritts captured his often nude male sitters between nature and the sublime. As the last of the classicists, working in the stylized tradition of George Platt Lynes and Horst P. Horst, Ritts was essentially conservative. His most radical legacy is having seduced a heterosexual public with soft-core homoerotica. ''He made it palatable and artful,'' says Vince Aletti, a photography critic at the New Yorker, ''and he allowed people to see its direct connection to classical art, by which I mean shorthand for Greek and simple -- a beautiful body, a classic white background and a graphically elegant composition.'' Although at times he appeared to channel the entire pantheon of fashion photography, Ritts was in fact self-taught. He grew up in an upper-middle-class suburb of Los Angeles, near the Hollywood beau monde that he would later immortalize. (As a kid, his next-door neighbor was the Platonic tough guy Steve McQueen.) After studying economics at Bard College in New York, Ritts moved back to the West Coast; his break came in 1978 when he photographed his tenant, the proto male supermodel Matt Collins, for Italian Harper's Bazaar. From the beginning of the '80s, when he shot Olivia Newton-John for the cover of her ''Physical'' album, Ritts worshiped at the shrine of aerobicized California. | Muscle Man |
1832108_4 | on to. At the time, there were 26,000 people living in 20 state institutions for the retarded in New York and just 1,570 in state-financed group homes. Today there are 32,722 developmentally disabled New Yorkers in community residences, and fewer than a thousand -- the most severely disabled -- in a handful of institutions. In 1980, New Jersey had just 471 community beds; Connecticut had 963. Today New Jersey has 7,173, Connecticut 5,313. They are paid for by the states, and most are run by nonprofit agencies. In 1974, the Kingsleys started on what was then a new parenting approach for children with disabilities called early intervention, which today has become standard practice. The infant is exposed to high levels of stimulus and physical therapy. Ms. Kingsley did Jason's room in bright colors; she made a quilt for him with every patch a different material. ''We surrounded him with motion and music, and we'd talk and talk to him,'' she says. To ''wake up his senses,'' she filled a tub with Jell-O, and plopped him in. ''I had people tell me that he wouldn't be able to read,'' she recalled. ''He started reading at age 4. It was so exciting. Everything they said he wouldn't do, he was doing.'' Jason's parents would take him to Broadway musicals, and he would memorize all the songs. To this day, if Ms. Kingsley challenges her son to adapt a show tune for his roommates, he'll burst into a verse of ''Singing in the Raymond'' or ''Some Enchanted Yaniving.'' The Kingsleys lectured at medical schools about the untapped potential of children with Down syndrome. ''Doctors needed to see the old stereotypes didn't apply,'' she said. Ms. Kingsley is a veteran writer for ''Sesame Street'' -- she has won 17 Emmys -- and she pushed to have Jason on the air, so the public, too, would see. Jason appeared a dozen times, starting at 15 months (sitting on Buffy Sainte-Marie's lap as she sang). At age 6 he did skits with Ernie, at 8 with Forgetful Jones. Being pioneers, Ms. Kingsley and her husband (who died nine years ago) had no sense where the limits were, and it was hard when they learned. ''I thought he was so smart, I thought I had fixed it,'' she said. ''But between 6 and 8 all the typical kids caught up and passed by. Typical kids got sophisticated | They'll Do It Themselves, Thanks |
1832316_0 | The Career Couch column last Sunday, about the risks of office e-mail messages, referred incorrectly to Jefferson Wells, a firm that employs Don Ulsch, a lawyer who said that all information on a company's work computers normally belongs to the company. It is a consulting firm, not a law firm. | Corrections |
1832272_5 | in a novel, nano-structure -- the particles used were 100 times smaller than conventional oxides and eight orders of magnitude more conductive than conventional phosphates. The new combination offers high power, stability and longevity. Shifting to the new technology seems to have been a wise, if hard, decision. Today, A123Systems, a privately held venture, has raised more than $102 million in funding from a variety of investors including Sequoia Capital, Motorola and General Electric. It has 250 employees in China, Taiwan, South Korea and the United States. Apart from its developmental work with G.M., it manufactures the batteries that drive Black & Decker and DeWalt professional power tools. According to David Vieau, A123Systems' chief executive, the company enjoys ''hundreds of millions of dollars'' in contracts. The former commitment to self-assembly is preserved only in the company's nerdy name, derived from an equation called the ''Hamaker force constant,'' which is used to calculate attractive and repulsive forces at nano-dimensions, and which begins ''A123'' While A123Systems still hopes to return to self-assembling batteries one day, it remains focused for now on the future of transportation. In this, the company's founders and senior officers mix business acumen with a kind of millennial fervor: they sincerely believe that their rechargeable lithium batteries could reduce the carbon emissions that contribute to global warming. These plug-in hybrids ''will cut gasoline demand over 70 percent for most drivers, and carbon emissions by 50 percent, which will have a significant effect on the environment,'' Mr. Vieau said. Driving a plug-in hybrid powered by batteries from A123, most drivers would seldom use their gasoline engines. And while the electricity that charged the batteries would derive mostly from carbon dioxide-producing power plants, burning gasoline is the most polluting transportation energy of all, according to a 2005 study by the Argonne National Laboratory. A123Systems' ambition is to apply a new technology, born from original science, to solve a difficult problem. The company's chairman is Gururaj Deshpande, the entrepreneur who also is a co-founder and chairman of Sycamore Networks. As he explained: ''This company can play a role in reducing our dependence on oil and in cleaning up the environment. Any company that gets to contribute to those efforts in whatever measure would have done good in the world.'' SLIPSTREAM Jason Pontin is the editor in chief and publisher of Technology Review, a magazine and Web site owned by M.I.T. E-mail: pontin@nytimes.com. | A New Battery Takes Off In a Race to Electric Cars |
1832190_0 | AS automotive gimmicks go, few can stir the senses like Kumho's new scented tires. Kumho, a South Korean manufacturer that has been selling tires in the United States since 1966, said it hoped to build better brand recognition here by selling tires made with lavender-scented oil. The company said the smell of its Ecsta DX tires lasts for at least one year and is strongest from outside the car. Rick Brennan, director of brand management for Kumho Tire USA, said that the scented tires injected fun and fashion into the otherwise dull world of tire shopping When asked if Kumho would someday cooperate with a perfume company or try other scents, he said that anything was possible. ''If it makes business sense, we'll jump into it,'' he said. More than a year of development, along with feedback from focus groups around the United States, went into the creation of the tire, he said. During this research, Kumho discovered that men preferred outdoorsy odors (like pine), while women were partial to florals. A tire that smells like new leather is also under consideration, especially for use as a spare. (It would keep the trunk smelling fresh.) So does scented tire technology have true staying power, or will it fade away like a dab of perfume behind the ears? Mr. Brennan said Kumho was committed to the technology for the foreseeable future. Orange, jasmine and rosemary-scented tires are scheduled for production later this year. NICK KURCZEWSKI | Hey, Why Not Stop And Smell the Tires? |
1842240_1 | workplace rampages, big and small), forensic experts quickly and properly cautioned that no profile of a rampage killer exists. Most predatory killers score very highly on the most rigorously tested measure to predict violence, the so-called psychopathy checklist; but many who do not commit crimes also score high. Yet out in the world, no one uses questionnaires or diagnostic manuals to check out a stranger or an acquaintance. People read the other person's body language, tone of voice; they read between the lines of what is said. They absorb most of this information instantly, unconsciously, and often accurately, studies suggest. And they sometimes get the creeps -- for reasons they might not be able to explain right away. The evidence that this happened over the months and years before the shooting in Blacksburg is now abundant. After hearing Mr. Cho read one of his sinister poems in a creative-writing class, dozens of his classmates did not show up the next time the class met, so as to avoid the young man, according to the teacher. This is what most human social groups do, when they collectively register a threat: they move away, socially and often literally. The thousands of years that early humans lived in small, fragile kin groups helped shape their instinct for social distancing, anthropologists say. A person who steals, who lies or who incites fights is a direct threat not only to those lured into confrontations but also to the coherence and ultimate survival of the group itself. ''Social stigma is rooted in part in a concern for social predictability,'' said Robert Kurzban, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania. ''One thing that's crucial in groups, particularly small groups, is cooperation, and if someone is unpredictable, they don't cooperate or coordinate well and represent a group threat. So people look out for such individuals.'' To guard against a real threat, this instinct is naturally conservative. It flags as potentially threatening many people who aren't, as millions of people living with mental illness have experienced firsthand. In some ancient societies and religious communities, the rules that guided how to manage a person thought to be dangerous were very explicit, said David Sloan Wilson, an evolutionary biologist at the State University of New York at Binghamton and the author of ''Evolution for Everyone.'' Bad gossip, followed by a rebuke, then ostracism. Each stage sets in motion more isolation. This | When The Group Is Wise |
1842325_0 | Miguel Moshán Méndez's troubles have piled up over the past two years. Like other coffee growers here in the impoverished state of Chiapas, he suffered devastating losses when Hurricane Stan passed through 18 months ago, tearing coffee trees from hillsides. He lost half his trees, then borrowed money to get by. Now, he must find extra work as a laborer to pay his debt, which will make it harder to maintain his tiny farm. ''I have always fallen to the moneylender, God yes,'' he said, sitting in the office of his coffee-growing cooperative. One source of hope: the increasing number of programs that help growers get higher prices for their beans if they show that they are protecting the environment, investing in community projects and treating workers well. Most of the programs are run by nongovernmental organizations, or N.G.O.'s, intent on both improving the lot of farmers and the environment in the world's coffee-producing regions. The N.G.O.'s certify coffee that meets their standards, banking on the notion that consumers will pay higher prices for coffee produced with concern for workers and the environment. They believe that, in turn, will drive up the price that companies are willing to pay the farmers. Mr. Moshán Méndez's cooperative sells to Starbucks, which has a similar in-house program that pays higher prices to farmers who meet its standards. In this coffee region, known as Jaltenango, on the eastern slopes of the Sierra Madre, the programs appear to be making a difference, farmers say. Higher prices for certified beans have trickled down to some growers, and certification has had an environmental impact. In the past, the area has lost forest when poor farmers cut trees and switched to cattle ranching or growing corn to try to make more money than they did cultivating coffee beans. When the farmers earn enough money to stick with coffee instead, the forest is protected; coffee trees here are traditionally planted under a canopy of indigenous trees. The rush to certify coffee is now drawing an expanding list of players, including giant plantations and multinational traders, something that seemed unimaginable just a few years ago. ''We have sold the idea to producers that this is life insurance,'' said Santiago Arguello, who is in charge of certified coffee programs at Agroindustrias Unidas, or AMSA, the Mexican subsidiary of the giant trader ECOM Agroindustrial Corporation, based in Switzerland. ''If we don't learn | Certifying Coffee Aids Farmers and Forests in Chiapas |
1842297_0 | Miguel Moshán Méndez's troubles have piled up over the past two years. Like other coffee growers here in the impoverished state of Chiapas, he suffered devastating losses when Hurricane Stan passed through 18 months ago, tearing coffee trees from hillsides. He lost half his trees, then borrowed money to get by. Now, he must find extra work as a laborer to pay his debt, which will make it harder to maintain his tiny farm. ''I have always fallen to the moneylender, God yes,'' he said, sitting in the office of his coffee-growing cooperative. One source of hope: the increasing number of programs that help growers get higher prices for their beans if they show that they are protecting the environment, investing in community projects and treating workers well. Most of the programs are run by nongovernmental organizations, or N.G.O.'s, intent on both improving the lot of farmers and the environment in the world's coffee-producing regions. The N.G.O.'s certify coffee that meets their standards, banking on the notion that consumers will pay higher prices for coffee produced with concern for workers and the environment. They believe that, in turn, will drive up the price that companies are willing to pay the farmers. Mr. Moshán Méndez's cooperative sells to Starbucks, which has a similar in-house program that pays higher prices to farmers who meet its standards. In this coffee region, known as Jaltenango, on the eastern slopes of the Sierra Madre, the programs appear to be making a difference, farmers say. Higher prices for certified beans have trickled down to some growers, and certification has had an environmental impact. In the past, the area has lost forest when poor farmers cut trees and switched to cattle ranching or growing corn to try to make more money than they did cultivating coffee beans. When the farmers earn enough money to stick with coffee instead, the forest is protected; coffee trees here are traditionally planted under a canopy of indigenous trees. The rush to certify coffee is now drawing an expanding list of players, including giant plantations and multinational traders, something that seemed unimaginable just a few years ago. ''We have sold the idea to producers that this is life insurance,'' said Santiago Arguello, who is in charge of certified coffee programs at Agroindustrias Unidas, or AMSA, the Mexican subsidiary of the giant trader ECOM Agroindustrial Corporation, based in Switzerland. ''If we don't learn | Certifying Coffee Aids Farmers and Forests in Chiapas |
1842069_0 | When parents sit down to fill out their child's application for federal financial aid, they come across a page with a long list of questions about their income. In one box, they must write down the amount of money they received the previous year from the Earned Income Tax Credit. In another, they have to report income from overseas. There are also boxes for ''untaxed portions of I.R.A. distributions,'' ''veterans' noneducation benefits'' and ''credit for federal tax on special fuels.'' Many of the questions, like the one asking about Black Lung Benefits, apply to a tiny fraction of American families. It is a daunting and often confusing list, and it takes up only one of the eight pages on the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, known as the Fafsa. Yet there is a little secret about all those questions: they have almost no bearing on the amount of federal aid the overwhelming majority of students receive. For most families, a single line on the form -- adjusted gross income from the previous year -- determines whether they will receive a federal grant like a Pell or a subsidized loan like a Stafford or Perkins, as well as the size of the award. The unsubsidized Stafford loan, the other main form of federal aid, is available to applicants regardless of income and assets. The contrast between the simplicity of the federal aid formula and the complexity of the Fafsa has caused education experts in both Republican and Democratic policy circles to push for an overhaul. The process is so unwieldy, they say, that it discourages some low-income students from attending college. For other families, the cumbersome form can be a waste of time. ''The government is collecting way more information than is needed to calculate someone's aid,'' says Judith Scott-Clayton, a doctoral candidate at Harvard who is studying higher education. Earlier this month, the Department of Education took a small step toward making the process easier. Families can fill out an online tool known as the Fafsa4caster at any time, even years before a student applies to college, and receive an estimate of what college might cost them given their financial situation. Up until now, many students have had little idea how much aid they were likely to receive until the spring of their senior year in high school. The forecasting tool does not simplify the Fafsa, but it is | Too Much Information |
1843384_0 | Something in the silver Mercedes sport utility vehicle was potentially dangerous, at least if the police lieutenant's radiation detector was any guide. The device's alarm went off as the lieutenant, who works with the Police Department's counterterrorism unit, was driving to work yesterday around 8 a.m., heading west on the Belt Parkway in Brooklyn near Cropsey Avenue. The device, a RadEye Pager, sounds its alarm when it detects higher than normal levels of radiation nearby. The police have about 900 RadEye Pagers in use citywide, all for counterterrorism purposes. Yesterday, the lieutenant pointed his RadEye Pager this way and that, and determined that the radiation was coming from the silver Mercedes beside him. He alerted highway officers, who pulled the Mercedes over. The driver, Syed M. Haider, popped the trunk, and inside was a small rectangular device known as a Troxler Gauge. The gauge, a legal construction device, measures asphalt, concrete and soil density using low-level radioactive isotopes, which happened to set off the pager's alarm. To be legally transported, though, a Troxler must be inside a shielded container, and Mr. Haider's Troxler was not. In any event, his brother, Syed W. Haider, who owns Haider Engineering in Baldwin, in Nassau County, arrived soon with the proper container, and into it the Troxler went. The driver and the company were issued six summonses, a law enforcement official said. The official said the level of radioactivity was low and would not be a health risk. ''There isn't an alarm that does not have to be investigated,'' he said. The company's owner said that his brother had been in a rush yesterday and that properly packing the Troxler slipped his mind. ''It's a simple matter of forgetting,'' the brother said. ''We showed up with the container, and everything is O.K.'' | That Car in the Next Lane? It's Radioactive |
1843359_3 | do that by tallying the free money the school is offering. Do not include any form of loans in this category. Loans are money the student or parents must pay back. ''They mention them to seem like they are giving you more than they are,'' said Mark Kantrowitz, publisher of the FinAid.org and EduPASS.org Web sites and a student financial aid consultant. Subtract the total ''free money'' from the cost of attending to determine out-of-pocket expenses. But watch out for obfuscation in how the school calculates the total cost of attendance. It includes tuition, room and board and fees. Those are pretty hard to fudge. But the cost of books or transportation are also included in that sum, and it sometimes is not accurate. Mr. Kantrowitz has put a calculator on his Web site (www.finaid.org/calculators/awardletter.phtml) that allows three schools to be compared. It will take a little time to look up and fill in the information. Sallie Mae, which is in the business of selling loans to students, also has one, www.collegeanswer.com/deciding/award-comparison/ac--index.jsp. It requires registration and isn't much easier to use. ''The reason they are complicated is because the issue is complicated,'' Mr. Shireman said. Mr. Shireman recommended the Web site FinancialAidLetter.com for clues on how to decode the offers. The site was created by Kim Clark, a senior writer for U.S. News and World Report, while serving as a Kiplinger fellow at Ohio State University. (A disclosure: I hired Ms. Clark when I was an editor at the magazine.) The site has a glossary of all the terms colleges use in the award letters, but the highlight is the section called Letter Decoder. Ms. Clark has posted a number of actual letters and helpfully translates and grades them. She also includes explanations from the college and from other experts of the offers. ''A lot of the schools are doing themselves a disservice,'' she said. Indeed, she has found instances where colleges would look better if they had been clearer about scholarships versus loans. Any school's determination of a family's financial contribution will tend to be the same across the board, Mr. Kantrowitz said, because of the formulas based on the financial data submitted to the school. What does differ is the out-of-pocket cost, which is the cost of attendance, minus the gift aid. ''That reflects the discounted price of the institution,'' he said. (That's more akin to a car's | The A-B-C's Of Calculating Financial Aid |
1839272_4 | in sex diminished by a fear of interruption or being overheard by children or an elderly parent. It can take some effort -- and perhaps a lock on the bedroom door and background music -- to reduce the risk of distractions that blunt the flame of desire. Women may think that the decline in estrogen at menopause is responsible for their loss of interest in sex. But estrogen loss is only an indirect factor; it can result in vaginal tightness and dryness that renders intercourse painful rather than pleasurable. The use of lubricants and a dildo or more frequent sex can often counteract these effects. But for some women, the use of a vaginal estrogen cream or suppository is necessary to make sex comfortable and more desirable. The Testosterone Factor But the real libido hormone, for both men and women, is testosterone, which women produce in their ovaries and adrenal glands. As other ovarian hormone levels drop after menopause or surgical removal of the ovaries, so does the amount of desire-boosting testosterone. This has prompted some women to use testosterone replacement therapy to get their sex lives back on track. One drug commonly prescribed off-label is Estratest, a combination of small doses of estrogen and testosterone. Some doctors tailor-make low-dose testosterone preparations for women. A testosterone patch for women has not been approved by the Food and Drug Administration because of insufficient safety data. Women taking testosterone should be carefully monitored, because safe levels of the hormone for women have not been determined. Common side effects include unwanted hair growth and a deepening of the voice. Women who have had breast or uterine cancer or diseases of the liver or heart should avoid testosterone replacement. Sexual desire among men, too, can be squelched by low levels of testosterone. While there is no official recognition of male menopause, men experience declining levels of hormones as they age -- what some experts called andropause -- that can affect sexual desire and performance. Other symptoms of this deficiency may include enlarged breasts, loss of body or facial hair, and osteoporosis before age 65. Testosterone replacement is helpful in restoring the sex drive only of men who have low levels of the hormone. A test of testosterone levels should be done and other causes (besides age) should be ruled out before the hormone is prescribed. Risks include prostate enlargement and prostate cancer. PERSONAL HEALTH | A Lively Libido Isn't Reserved for the Young |
1839275_2 | making its way through clinical trials. The compound, called bremelanotide, is a synthetic version of a hormone involved in skin pigmentation, and it was initially developed by Palatin Technologies of New Jersey as a potential tanning agent to help prevent skin cancer. But when male college students participating in early safety tests began reporting that the drug sometimes gave them erections, the company began exploring bremelanotide's utility as a treatment for sexual disorders. Studies in rodents demonstrated that the drug not only gave male rats spontaneous erections, but also fomented sexual excitement in female rats, prompting them to wiggle their ears, hop excitedly, rub noses with males and otherwise display unmistakable hallmarks of rodent arousal. Importantly, the females responded to the drug only under laboratory conditions where they could maintain a sense of control over the mating game. Take away the female's opportunity to escape or proceed at her preferred pace, and no amount of bremelanotide would get those ears to wiggle. In other words, Annette M. Shadiack, director of biological research of Palatin, said, ''this doesn't look like a potential date-rape drug.'' Inspired by the rodent work, the company decided to give the drug a whirl on women. Results from a pilot study of 26 postmenopausal women with diagnoses of sexual arousal disorder suggest that bremelanotide may well have some mild aphrodisiacal properties. Responding to questionnaires after taking either the drug or a dummy pill, 73 percent of the women on bremelanotide reported feeling genitally aroused, compared with 23 percent given the placebo; and 43 percent of the bremelanotide group said the treatment augmented their sexual desire, against only 19 percent of those on dummy pills. Women in the treatment group also were slightly more likely to have sex with their partners during the course of the trial than were those in the control group, although who initiated the romps was not specified. Larger trials of the drug at some 20 clinical centers around the United States are now under way. Among other things, the researchers will try adjusting the dosage to see if more bremelanotide may provoke a more robust response with a minimum of unpleasant or embarrassing side effects. For example, researchers are as yet unsure whether sustained use of bremelanotide will end up doing what the drug was meant to do in the first place, and bestow on its beaming clients a truly healthy tan. DESIRE | Search for the Female Equivalent of Viagra Is Helping to Keep Lab Rats Smiling |
1839135_1 | to eat through the shiny surfaces of tree leaves, so the parasite can suck nutrients out of the inner parts. A gene-splicing company, DNA 2.0, has taken some of the DNA from that parasite and spliced it into an e. coli bacterium, to mass produce the enzyme. The e. coli was chosen because it reproduces more readily than the original parasite. Conversion begins with shredding the plastic. An office paper shredder will do, Dr. Gross said. Then the shreds are immersed in water with a small amount of the enzyme. In three days to five days, the process is complete, and the biodiesel floats to the top. To meet Environmental Protection Agency standards for road use in the United States, biofuel would have to go through additional chemical processing, but Darpa believes the resulting fuel can be poured directly into the fuel tank of a diesel generator to make electricity. A soldier generates on average more than seven pounds of packaging waste a day, according to Darpa, and simply getting rid of the trash requires ''personnel, fuel and critical transport equipment.'' Even if some of the energy was lost in reprocessing the plastics, the wastes could provide more than enough fuel to make the electricity that a military base would need, according to Darpa. The Pentagon calls it the Mobile Integrated Sustainable Energy Recovery program, or Miser. Jan Walker, a spokeswoman for Darpa, said that in the range of projects that her agency sponsors, this one was ''not real technical,'' although it was still in a preliminary stage. According to Dr. Gross, a gallon of soy oil will yield the same amount of biodiesel whether it is converted directly or goes through an intermediate stage as plastic. The trick, he said, is to take a class of chemicals in the oil called fatty acids, from soy oil or another crop source, and alter them so they have the chemical equivalent of a ''hook'' at one end. Then they can be linked into long chains, a building block of plastics. Add cross-links that run from chain to chain, and the plastic goes from a film to a rigid material. Converting the soy oil to fatty acid is also done with an enzyme. A gene-altered yeast does that job. Jeremy Minshull, the president of DNA 2.0, said yeast was chosen because that conversion takes energy, and the yeast will provide that when | A Plastic Wrapper Today Could Be Fuel Tomorrow |
1837680_2 | and do their job, as though innately aware that only the gametes can jump ship and live to tell about it. So what gives with metastases? What turns them into such oblivious, self-important, suicidal fools? Biologists know quite a bit about the steps that transform a normal cell into a cancer cell, a cell that lawlessly divides and gives rise to a primary tumor. They have identified genetic mutations and chromosomal aberrations that prompt cells to think they are being stimulated by growth hormones when they are not, that stifle safety signals meant to keep cell division in check, and that shore up the tips of chromosomes and so immortalize cells that otherwise would be slated to die. Researchers' grasp of metastasis, by contrast, remains relatively sketchy, one reason being that whereas the initial stages of malignant transformation can be analyzed in vitro, in the controlled setting of cultured cells, metastasis -- which is Greek for ''beyond static'' -- is a matter of cells on the move and ultimately must be studied in vivo, in the bewildering wilderness of the body. Nevertheless, researchers have some clues. They have learned that full-blown metastasis is an extremely challenging trade, and that the great majority of cancer cells are not up to the task. Even those malignant characters that manage to slither their way into the blood or lymph system usually fail to do anything further. In his newly published book, ''The Biology of Cancer'' (Garland Science), Dr. Robert A. Weinberg of the Whitehead Institute in Cambridge, Mass., points out that in experiments with mice carrying bulky tumors of a billion cells each, perhaps a million cancer cells are seeded into the rodents' circulation each day, ''yet the visible metastases formed in such animals may be counted on the fingers of one hand.'' The body's transportation networks are fraught with danger to unlicensed migrants, and not just from the body's defense system. Because most tumor cells lack the streamlined form of the blood and immune cells that are designed for cross-body trafficking, shear forces in the smaller vessels may rip the intruders apart. To survive the journey, malignant cells must reinvent themselves as parasites. A few manage to slim down to almost bacterial dimensions by pinching off unnecessary hanks of their cytoplasm. Others take on what Dr. Weinberg calls ''hitchhikers,'' attracting an entourage of platelets and red blood cells to their surface ''to | A Mutinous Group of Cells On a Greedy, Destructive Path |
1838019_0 | A new analysis of combined data from two parts of a large federal study of hormone therapy has found that women in their 50s do not appear to have an increased heart attack risk if they take the drugs. But it also found that women in their 60s and 70s who still had hot flashes and night sweats were at increased risk for heart attacks, even if they were not taking hormones. And if these women took hormone therapy, their risk was higher still. ''The main indication now for hormone therapy is hot flashes and night sweats,'' said Dr. Jacques Rossouw, a researcher for the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute who directed the federal study, the Women's Health Initiative. ''This says that if you are older than 60, you should not take it.'' That observation needs additional study to confirm and understand it, Dr. Rossouw said. ''It's quite new and unexpected,'' he added. Because this group of older women with menopausal symptoms was not specified before the studies began, the researchers described their analysis as exploratory rather than definitive. The new analysis was designed to answer persistent questions about hormone therapy that arose from the Women's Health Initiative. Its two studies included 27,347 women ages 50 to 79 who were randomly assigned to receive hormones or not. One study involved women who had not had hysterectomies. They took Prempro, a drug made by Wyeth that combines estrogen and progestins. The other involved women who had had a hysterectomy and who took estrogen alone. Estrogen alone can cause cancer of the uterine lining and should not be used by women with a uterus. The main objective of those studies was to ask whether hormone therapy could prevent heart attacks; many doctors had expected it would. Instead, Prempro increased the risk of heart attacks, strokes and breast cancer, and estrogen alone increased stroke and breast cancer risk. Those findings were a shock to many women and their doctors, who had thought the hormones were an unmitigated good and who had considered the drugs a sort of fountain of youth. Even the name the treatment was given, hormone replacement therapy, gave that impression -- replacing hormones lost to aging. Researchers and the Food and Drug Administration no longer use the term hormone replacement therapy, but it persists in popular use. And the studies were criticized by gynecologists, in particular, who pointed out | Health Risk to Older Women Is Seen in Hormone Therapy |
1837969_1 | extractive industries. You put all that together, and you've got the makings of trouble.'' One strategy is to reduce the birthrates and the mortality rates of infants and younger children, according to Population Action, which hopes its research will improve contraception programs, education for girls and health services for children and pregnant women. ''The budget realities are such that unless you can show how your programs help achieve larger ends -- security, development, poverty reduction, democracy -- traditional rationales for humanitarian assistance aren't enough,'' said Tod J. Preston, a senior adviser at the group. In a December 2005 report titled ''More Than Humanitarianism,'' a Council on Foreign Relations task force with bipartisan leadership called population a neglected area of American policy, one that could help lower the odds of conflict. Population Action's report, ''The Shape of Things to Come,'' features Nigeria, Africa's most populous country with 132 million people and a major supplier of oil to the United States, as an example of the strategic risks posed by youthful, volatile nations plagued by corruption, instability and poverty. Rebels there, enraged by the distribution of oil revenues, have attacked the industry, which is important to rich nations. In Nigeria, almost three quarters of the population is under 30. Birthrates are very high, at more than five children per woman. Less than half the women have attended school and fewer than one in 10 use modern contraception. A fifth of children die before they turn 5 -- a factor specialists say encourages couples to have more children to ensure that some survive. Almost a billion people live in countries where birthrates average at least four children per woman, among them, Nigeria, Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Somalia and Sudan. Those countries need help to improve infant and child survival and the educational status of women, to reduce population pressures and to become more stable, the report says. If nothing changes, the authors say, the populations of such countries will double in 35 years. Advocates at Population Action are critical of deep cuts in international family planning programs in the Bush administration's 2008 budget proposal, but a Democratic-controlled Congress is likely to reverse them, as the Republican-controlled Congress did last year. The advocates acknowledged that the administration's efforts to increase financing of programs to combat AIDS and malaria are likely to help prevent the deaths of many children -- another goal. The group's researchers found | Very Young Populations Contribute to Strife, Study Concludes |
1837874_2 | river cannot meet the demand for water, a prospect that some experts predict will occur in about five years. ''What you are hearing about global warming, explosive growth -- combine with a real push to set aside extra water for environmental purpose -- means you got a perfect situation for a major tug-of-war contest,'' said Sid Wilson, the general manager of the Central Arizona Project, which brings Colorado River water to the Phoenix area. New scientific evidence suggests that periodic long, severe droughts have become the norm in the Colorado River basin, undermining calculations of how much water the river can be expected to provide and intensifying pressures to find new solutions or sources. The effects of the drought can be seen at Lake Mead in Nevada, where a drop in the water level left docks hanging from newly formed cliffs, and a marina surrounded by dry land. Upriver at Lake Powell, which is at its lowest level since spring 1973, receding waters have exposed miles of mud in the side canyons leading to the Glen Canyon Dam. In California, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has sounded alarm bells by pushing for a ballot measure in 2008 that would allocate $4.5 billion in bonds for new water storage in the state. The water content in the Sierra Nevada snowpack has reached the lowest level in about two decades, state hydrologists have reported, putting additional pressure on the nation's most populous state to find and store more water. ''Scientists say that global warming will eliminate 25 percent of our snowpack by the half of this century,'' Mr. Schwarzenegger said recently in Fresno, Calif., ''which will mean less snow stored in the mountains, which will mean more flooding in the winter and less drinking water in the summer.'' In Montana, where about two-thirds of the Missouri River and half of the Columbia River have their headwaters, officials have embarked on a long-term project to validate old water-rights claims in an effort to legally shore up supplies the state now counts on. Under the West's water laws, claims are hierarchal. The oldest, first-filed claims, many dating to pioneer days, get water first, with newer claims at the bottom of the pecking order. Still, some of the sharpest tensions stem more from population growth than cautionary climate science, especially those between Nevada and Utah, states with booming desert economies and clout to fight for what they | No Longer Waiting for Rain, an Arid West Takes Action |
1838003_2 | Hewitt stores were filing too many fraudulent returns.'' Jackson Hewitt did not return repeated phone calls seeking comment. The company's shares plunged 18 percent yesterday, or $5.87, to $26.53. The I.R.S. and Justice Department typically increase their crackdown on fraudulent tax-return preparers close to the federal filing deadline, which is April 17 this year. But the concerted move against the franchises owned by Mr. Sohail, which the Justice Department described in a statement as having engaged in ''a pervasive and massive series of tax fraud schemes,'' is unusually large and sweeping. His outlets prepared over 105,000 returns last year, many of them fraudulent, the agency said. The Justice Department is seeking court orders to shut the stores under investigation. They are part of the Jackson Hewitt empire of 6,500 outlets, which prepared a total of 3.7 million tax returns last year. Founded in 1982, Jackson Hewitt was acquired by Cendant, the franchiser of Days Inn motels and Century 21 real estate office, in 1998 -- the year Mr. Sohail opened his first Jackson Hewitt franchise, in Detroit -- as Cendant was embroiled in a huge fraud. It became a publicly traded company in 2004 The lawsuits cite poor training, scant oversight and the ignoring of whistle-blowers at Mr. Sohail's stores. They also describe a factory-like atmosphere where employees were encouraged to churn out returns in exchange for bribes, to accept scant or false documents like W-2 forms and to falsify taxpayer data needed to receive the earned- income tax credit, a federal assistance program. In one Chicago store, a 14-year-old girl was hired as a ''recruiter'' to drum up business, according to the Illinois complaint. Also in a Chicago outlet, returns were filed for homeless customers with no income or withholdings and people with undocumented Social Security numbers, the Illinois complaint stated. A Chicago outlet also abused the fuel tax credit, in one case filing a 2004 federal return for a barber who earned $14,000 but claimed a $50,000 tax credit for 25,000 gallons of fuel. The customer ''would have driven 500,000 business miles during the year -- which comes to 1,370 miles each day, seven days a week, leaving little if any time to cut any hair,'' the Illinois complaint said. A Georgia outlet removed all photocopiers, preventing the copying and verification of documents like W-2s, as a cost-cutting measure. The complaints quoted Mr. Sohail as saying that his | U.S. Accuses Part of Tax Chain of Fraud |
1837990_1 | have promised the Iraqi people. In calling for a specific withdrawal date, the House and Senate versions of the supplemental spending bill send a clear message to the Iraqis (even if they do face a certain veto). The worst mistake now would be to provide money for the war without sending the Iraqis any message at all about their responsibility for reforms. Both the president and the Congress at the very least must make the Iraqi government understand that future financial and military support is going to depend on Baghdad's making substantial progress toward the milestones Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki has publicly committed to. Unfortunately, with a few exceptions, little progress has been made. Consider efforts toward stabilizing democracy and achieving national reconciliation: The Iraqis promised to achieve, by the end of 2006 or early 2007, the approval of a provincial election law (so far, no progress); approval of a law to regulate the oil industry and share revenues (while the Council of Ministers has approved a draft, it has yet to be approved by the Parliament); approval of the de-Baathification law to reintegrate officials of the former regime and Arab nationalists into public life (no progress); and approval of a law to rein in sectarian militias (no progress). By March, the government promised to hold a referendum on constitutional amendments (no progress). By May, the prime minister committed to putting in place the law controlling militias (no progress); the approval of the amnesty agreement (no progress); and the completion of all reconciliation efforts. By June, the Iraqi government promised to hold provincial elections (no date has been set). As for security issues, things are not going much better. The Iraqis have increased security spending over 2006 levels as promised, but they are falling behind on the number of battle-ready Army units. By April, the Iraqis want to take over total control of the Iraq Army (not likely based on current progress). By September, the Iraqis want to be given full civil control of all provinces (to date they control 3 of 18 provinces). By December, the Iraqis, with United States support, want to achieve total security self-reliance (too early to tell, but does anyone really find this likely?). Yes, there have been some notable successes. For example, the Baghdad government has made good on its promise to appreciate the Iraqi dinar to combat accelerating inflation, and has increased domestic | What About Those Other Iraq Deadlines? |
1840983_2 | was a useful thing in the environment natural selection designed it for: the hunter-gatherer landscape of clear communication. But the landscape of e-mail is full of noise and imagined signals. Serotonin can gyrate dysfunctionally. Hence the Prozac temptation: Just open that serotonin throttle and cruise through your in-box, unhampered by fancied slights, groundless anxieties and other impediments to bliss. (Your mileage may vary.) And, bliss aside: Imagine the efficiency! With the time you don't spend worrying about Joe, you can crank out e-mail to Jim, Sally and Sue. And efficiency is what e-mail is about, right? By ending the need to coordinate schedules, it lets us interact with lots of people -- and interact along such narrow channels that we skip the bother of getting to know an entire human being. It's an old story. Technological change makes society more efficient and less personal. We know more people more shallowly. The sociologist David Riesman's 1950 book about his era's part in this process was called ''The Lonely Crowd.'' To be sure, there are lots of to-be-sures I should throw into a column this full of blithe generalization, speculative fancy and jokey hyperbole. For example: Prozac is a serious drug, not to be taken lightly. Also: however much time people spend networking shallowly, they can find places for deeper contact. Some parts of the Internet foster that, and e-mail can enrich it. But that gets at the one point I'm not joking about. The reason we've always carved out a place for deep human contact is because we deeply need it. Some contours of the mind are so firm they lead us to selectively defy the imperative of growing efficiency. Ultimately, technological evolution has had to accommodate human nature. Until now. Now we enter the age of pharmacology and approach the age of genetic engineering. We can, in effect, change human nature to accommodate technological evolution. If the deft use of e-mail makes each of us more successful, we may, one by one, amend the structure of our selves until we are the optimal e-mail animals. And so, too, with the next empowering information technology: bend us, shape us, anyway it wants us. If we're indeed already entering this era, I can't say I'm especially enjoying it. Then again, I haven't tried Prozac. Yet. Guest Columnist Robert Wright, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation, runs the Web site Bloggingheads.tv. | E-Mail and Prozac |
1840999_4 | partly of sugars, but they are linked tightly in a more complicated chain. Breaking them up requires several enzymes. Most processes start with using steam and sulfuric acid on the feedstock, which can be corn stems and leaves, switch grass, wood chips -- or bagasse, the material left when sugar cane is processed and which is being used here in Jennings. Manufacturers rely on a variety of organisms to make the necessary enzymes. They are the product of gene splicing, turning out enzymes in quantities far greater than any natural organism would. Unlocking the sugar represents a gold mine. Mark Emalfarb, the president and chief executive of another competitor, Dyadic, said corn now makes up about half the price of corn ethanol, while some cellulosic materials are free, beyond the cost to haul them to a factory. But the enzymes needed to break corn starch into sugar are cheap, costing 3 to 5 cents a gallon of ethanol. His goal for the enzymes that work on cellulose is 10 cents a gallon, but it does not appear that anyone has gotten the cost anywhere near that low yet. ''Some people are still underestimating how difficult it is going to be,'' Mr. Emalfarb said. The Energy Department has set a goal of bringing down the overall cost to produce cellulosic ethanol to $1.07 a gallon by 2012. That is less than half the cost of producing it now and lower than the current cost of about $1.50 a gallon for corn-based ethanol. ''Anybody's number is just basically a guess,'' said Brent Erickson, executive vice president at the Biotechnology Industry Organization in Washington. ''Until we get these plants built, we aren't going to know what the cost is.'' The race to commercialize cellulosic ethanol has been helped by the recent flood of investment from public and private sources. The Energy Department has devoted $726 million for renewable energy projects this year, including wind and solar energy. It recently awarded grants totaling $385 million over four years to six companies working on cellulosic ethanol plants. The Agriculture Department is seeking to increase its bio-energy financing to $161 million from $122 million, which would include $21 million in loan guarantees for cellulosic plants. Venture capital firms, Wall Street banks and even oil companies have invested about $200 million in the last six months alone.''There is nothing in the last several decades that has generated | Chasing a Dream Made of Waste |
1840918_8 | honey with a long stick required the most effort and risk, with termite fishing having ''the highest element of success.'' Dr. Sanz, who has worked with her husband, David B. Morgan, on some of the research, described mother chimps' carefully withdrawing from a hole sticks swarming with black termites while their infants looked on. These social interactions, she said, passed on essential techniques and behaviors to the next generation. ''Socially transmitted adjustable behavior,'' Dr. de Waal said, is a hallmark of culture. Chimp behavior sometimes turns violent, particularly in territorial clashes. In Uganda, John Mitani of the University of Michigan observed chimp patrols regularly policing the forest boundaries of their communities. One patrol was seen assaulting an adult male, killing and emasculating him. Kristin Bonnie, another Emory primatologist, said the transmission of behavior could be benign and spontaneous, with the prospect of reward being secondary. ''It is the desire to act like others, an identification with certain others,'' she explained, citing as an example the way chimps usually clasp hands while grooming each other. At the symposium, researchers said the interest in learning more about chimps was not just a case of knowledge for the sake of knowledge. Their behavior and intelligence, scientists say, may offer insights into the abilities of early human ancestors like Australopithecus afarensis, the apelike ''Lucy'' species that thrived more than three million years ago. A more urgent motivation for the research, primatologists say, is that these are sentient beings and the closest living relatives of humans, and their survival is threatened. Elizabeth V. Lonsdorf, a primatologist at the Lincoln Park Zoo and a symposium organizer, said researchers needed ''to keep their eyes out for ways to improve the care of chimpanzees.'' Diseases like ebola and anthrax are taking their toll. Hunting chimps for ''bush meat'' is increasing. Many of the forest habitats of chimps in central Africa are being cut by loggers and land developers. As a result, Dr. Lonsdorf said, ''Groups of the animals are getting closer together, which increased the threat of chimp violence and territorial disputes.'' Dr. Goodall recalled that when she went to Africa nearly a half-century ago, at least a million chimps lived in the continent, and ''now there are perhaps only 150,000.'' In that time, they have impressed scientists with physical and emotional reminders of their kinship to humans and their occasional triumphs over them at a computer screen. | Almost Human, and Sometimes Smarter |
1842768_1 | in a decree signed by Prime Minister Wen Jiabao, were announced with fanfare on Tuesday but will not become effective until May 1, 2008. And the caveats suggest that the new regulations may represent only measured steps in fulfilling promises by top leaders to create a more transparent and accountable government. President Hu Jintao and Mr. Wen have declared corruption a major crisis within the Communist Party and have made improving governance a priority in their efforts to clean things up. Reformers have pushed for more openness and public oversight through access to official information. But conservatives have resisted loosening the grip of party control, including on official data. The new rules, as decided by China's cabinet, include a list of ''priorities'' detailing what information should be eligible for public release: government responses to emergencies; government spending and fees; and official investigations into environmental problems and public health concerns, as well as food and drug safety. In addition, the new rules would require local governments to publicize information about land acquisitions from farmers, as well as details on where those farmers would be relocated and how much compensation they would receive. At face value, these new rules would seem to create broad new public rights to once secret information. Farmers, for example, have routinely been denied access to official records in their efforts to fight illegal land seizures. Meanwhile, officials have regularly withheld vital information during crises like the outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, in 2003, as well as during the 2005 chemical spill that poisoned the Songhua River and forced the shutdown of public drinking water in the city of Harbin. Zhang Qiong, deputy director of the cabinet's Legislative Office, praised the new rules as a breakthrough for China in preventing abuses of power. ''It will also safeguard the public's right to know, the right to participate and the right to supervise,'' Mr. Zhang said at a news conference on Tuesday, according to Xinhua, China's official news agency. ''The regulation will help curb corruption at its source, largely reducing its occurrence.'' But, in fact, the new rules include exclusions that could allow officials substantial latitude in deciding what they choose to make public. The regulations said that local governments must ''steer clear'' of releasing any information defined as a ''state secret,'' a major exception given that China designates a wide range of information as state secrets. | China Sets Out To Cut Secrecy, But Laws Leave Big Loopholes |
1842717_1 | of beef, pork and chicken, who can respond to criticism of their practices by returning to kinder, preindustrial methods of raising cattle, pigs and chickens, foie gras producers have no such bucolic past to fall back on. Since the time of ancient Egyptians, making foie gras has involved doing something unnatural to ducks or geese: fattening their livers by force-feeding them, typically, nowadays, for the last 12 to 21 days of their lives. Opponents say the procedure using feeding tubes is painful and sickens the birds. Foie gras advocates say the birds do not mind because their gullets are naturally expandable, to let them gorge before migrating. Some foie gras makers have tried to take advantage of that gorging instinct and eliminate the feeding tubes. A Spanish company's canned pâté, made entirely from livers of geese that it said had not been force-fed, won the Coup de Coeur for innovation in October at the Paris International Food Salon, a culinary trade show. The company, Patería de Sousa, says it lets geese roam freely and gorge on grass, acorns, figs and lupines in the Extremadura region of Spain. It says it processes the birds once a year before natural migration, harvesting livers weighing 450 to 500 grams. (French law defines foie gras as fattened liver from a force-fed bird weighing at least 300 grams for ducks and 400 grams for geese.) But some in the industry doubt Patería's claims. Ariane Daguin, owner of D'Artagnan, a Newark company that was the first to sell fresh foie gras in the United States, said she was skeptical after visiting the company's booth at the food fair. ''I don't want to know their secrets, but there was no confirmation of their claims,'' Ms. Daguin said. ''If there is a secret diet, fine, but then show me something to confirm you are in the business.'' France's National Institute of Agronomic Research conducted experiments, in 2002 and between 2005 and 2006, controlling geese's and ducks' access to food for a set period and then granting unlimited access to encourage self-gorging. According to Daniel Guémené, the agency's director of research, the livers enlarge to two or three times the normal size, but in terms of fat content and weight ''we've been unsuccessful at getting a product that can be marketable as foie gras.'' He added: ''Concerning the Spanish story, I don't say he didn't succeed, but I want | Foie Gras Makers Struggle to Please Critics and Chefs |
1841750_1 | that you do not want to invest in a mutual fund that trades frequently, because each trade adds a commission, which is deducted from potential returns. That is one main reason that most financial experts recommend a buy-and-hold investment approach. ''But some overlooked research from the University of Maryland notes a surprising exception,'' Janet Paskin writes in Smart Money. ''Funds with the highest turnover, that is, managers who trade more than 150 percent of their portfolio a year, do better than their slowpoke peers by about two percentage points a year.'' These funds overcome the higher costs they incur by following specific strategies -- like momentum investing -- and make large sector bets. But in addition to higher trading costs, high-turnover funds have another drawback -- potentially higher tax bills for investors. One potential way around the problem is to keep these funds in an individual retirement account or another tax-advantaged account. GOING GREEN -- The commercial real estate sector is hot, but ''sustainable construction'' that is environmentally conscious is even hotter, Walecia Konrad writes in Fast Company. An estimated 5 percent of all new construction received certification from the U.S. Green Building Council last year, and within three years 10 percent of all new commercial construction is expected to be sustainable. The easiest way to invest in this phenomenon is, of course, through real estate investment trusts that are committed to buying new or renovated green buildings. But as Ms. Konrad notes, two of the greenest REITs have been acquired: Arden Realty by GE Real Estate and Equity Office Properties by the Blackstone Group. One REIT she singled out for investment is Liberty Property Trust, which is expected to increase the number of green properties it owns. GOING ORGANIC -- ''African-Americans are more likely to be dedicated buyers of organic foods than their white counterparts,'' Black Enterprise reports. Citing research by the Hartman Group, a health-and-wellness research and consulting firm, Brenda Porter writes that ''African-Americans are 24 percent more likely to be core organic consumers than members of the general population.'' She adds that ''the findings debunk the myth that only educated whites with high incomes are purchasing these pricier items.'' FINAL TAKE -- It is difficult to grasp a concept as complex as environmental degradation/protection. In anticipation of Earth Day, which is tomorrow, Glamour breaks the issue into bite-size pieces. The examples include: ''10 times as much energy | Getting Out of Hedge Funds |
1841792_0 | The trouble with modernity is how efficiently it obliterates the troves of age-old knowledge otherwise known as wisdom. The good news from Palau, a Pacific island nation near the Philippines, is that some wise old ways have reasserted themselves to the great benefit of that tiny republic's fish and reefs, and the people who depend on them. Under an ancient system of laws known throughout the South Pacific as tabu or kapu, rulers would forbid fishing in certain areas to let them recover from overuse. Their decisions relied on deep knowledge of seasons and of the habits of fish and plants, and were strictly obeyed by islanders, who understood that depletion of fisheries meant death. Overfishing by local fishermen, commercial boats and poachers using dynamite has been as much a problem in Palau as elsewhere in the Pacific. Then elders in Ngiwal, a state of Palau, banned fishing on a small section of reef in 1994. It took only a few years for fish to return. Palau now protects 460 square miles of reefs and lagoons, and its reputation for recreational diving is unmatched. In 2005, Palau's president, Tommy Remengesau Jr., issued the ''Micronesian challenge,'' calling on the region to conserve 30 percent of coastal waters and 20 percent of land by 2020. Fiji, the Solomon Islands and Vanuatu have created hundreds of ''no take'' zones. Meanwhile, nations in another sea are pursuing their own ''Caribbean challenge.'' The trend is encouraging, but there is still a lot of water to cover. It would help if the United States dove in. Hawaii's reefs and inshore waters are increasingly barren, depleted by pollution, invasive species and fishermen using things like brutally efficient gill nets to catch vast amounts of fish. Hawaii's House of Representatives, pushed by the commercial fishing industry, recently passed a deplorable ''Right to Fish'' bill that is fundamentally at odds with the spirit of Palau. It erects impossible barriers against the creation of no-take zones. It would stamp out the small but growing efforts of local communities and conservation groups to adopt their own sensible fishing restrictions. Native Hawaiians know all about kapu. What the lobbyists pushing the legislation are banking on is that Hawaiians will forget the usefulness of the old ways and bristle at the supposed paternalism. It would be a perverse victory for ''rights'' if such an attitude hastened the demise of a shared, precious and | Pacific Miracles |
1841333_2 | a quarter century. And it involved women age 50 and older, not younger women, and nearly all the decline was in the common type of breast cancer, fed by estrogen, the so-called estrogen-receptor-positive tumors. The hormone connection came because the Women's Health Initiative, a large federal study examining the health effects of Prempro, the most popular drug prescribed for menopause, was halted in July 2002. The study found that women taking Prempro had an increased risk of heart disease, rather than protection from it. And the presumed benefit of taking the drug was to prevent heart disease. In addition, there was more breast cancer among women taking Prempro than those taking a placebo for comparison. Immediately, sales of Prempro, made by Wyeth, plummeted, falling by 50 percent, and they continued to fall slightly in 2004. The drop in breast cancer followed immediately. ''Those are the facts,'' said Dr. Peter Ravdin, an oncologist and Dr. Berry's colleague. ''We think there is a likely connection between them.'' Even so, Dr. Ravdin said, hormone therapy does not cause most of breast cancer in the United States. Some cancers do not need estrogen to grow. Others that depend on estrogen grow whether or not a woman is taking Prempro or a similar drug; they are fueled by the estrogen in a woman's body. Dr. Ravdin added that he thought the current guidelines, advising women to use hormone therapy for as short a time as possible for the relief of menopause symptoms, were appropriate. Dr. Joseph Camardo, senior vice president for global medical affairs for Wyeth Pharmaceuticals, urged caution in interpreting the data. Just because one event follows another does not mean one event caused the other, he pointed out. ''I don't think anyone involved can say they have a specific alternative explanation,'' Dr. Camardo said, ''but I think other factors should be explored.'' For example, he said, mammogram use or changes in diet or other drug use might be contributing. But any alternative explanation must also take into account the fact that the drop in breast cancer rates was almost entirely estrogen-fed tumors, Dr. Ravdin said. Dr. Berry said the researchers were well aware of the limitations of their analysis and never said they proved that declining hormone use led to 10 percent less breast cancer. ''Of course, we're not sure. We never are,'' Dr. Berry said. ''But it fits. It's a smoking gun.'' | Sharp Drop in Rates of Breast Cancer Holds |
1839845_2 | at Sotheby's in New York. The proceeds will go toward the creation of the Barbara and Eugene Schwartz Contemporary Art Acquisition Endowment Fund. The auction house estimates that the painting will bring $6 million to $8 million. ''In the last 20 years we have worked with a really modest budget based on annual contributions but have still been able to build a contemporary art collection,'' said James Snyder, director of the Israel Museum. ''Each year we have added about 15 to 20, many of which have turned out to be seminal works. In the case of the Basquiat, we have two from the same moment, and so we decided to sell one to create an endowment just for contemporary art.'' Often donors become upset when institutions part with their gifts, but Mrs. Schwartz said she was thrilled. ''It's always been our philosophy to support young artists,'' she said. Betting that the market for works by Basquiat will be strong, Sotheby's has given the museum a guarantee -- an undisclosed minimum price regardless of a sale's outcome -- that experts in the art world with knowledge of the transaction say exceeds the current record price for a painting by Basquiat. While neither the museum nor the auction house would discuss the exact amount of the guarantee, those familiar with the negotiations say it is $8 million. (The current record for a Basquiat is $5.5 million, set at Christie's in 2002 when it sold the 1982 work ''Profit I.'') Meeting of the Mets The two Mets -- the Metropolitan Museum and the Metropolitan Opera -- are collaborating on a cross-marketing initiative, a first for the two institutions. It's a happy coincidence that this month the opera house is giving seven performances of Handel's ''Giulio Cesare,'' and the museum is opening its new Greek and Roman galleries. Operagoers can buy an orchestra ticket to ''Giulio Cesare'' for $137.50, which includes a V.I.P. pass to the galleries. (Normally an orchestra ticket costs $205.) The museum never charges for special exhibitions or galleries and has a suggested admission charge of $20 for adults. But museum visitors who take advantage of this promotion will get instant access to all the museum's galleries without having to stand in line. MoMA Gets a Gift (Eventually) The Museum of Modern Art has been promised archives from the Paul Rosenberg Gallery. Mr. Rosenberg, the legendary French dealer who ran one | Inside Art |
1839945_4 | not only applies in the Oval Office, but to the R.N.C. as well. There is absolutely no basis in law or fact for such a claim.'' Senator Charles E. Schumer, the New York Democrat who is spearheading the Senate inquiry into the prosecutors' dismissals, said the Fielding letter ''can be summed up in three words: 'We are stonewalling.' '' Mr. Waxman, meanwhile, spent Thursday pushing the committee to release the e-mail. According to the congressman's account of Thursday's meeting with Mr. Kelner, the R.N.C. lawyer, as well as an interview with a Republican official familiar with the committee's e-mail practices, the committee has a large cache of communications from White House officials. But there are none before 2005, when the committee ''began to treat Mr. Rove's e-mails in a special fashion,'' Mr. Waxman wrote. The committee appears to have changed its e-mail retention policies twice, possibly in response to the investigation by a special prosecutor, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, into the leak of the name of a C.I.A. officer. When that inquiry began, in early 2004, the committee's practice was to purge all e-mail from its servers after 30 days. But in August of that year, according to the Republican official, the committee decided that e-mail sent by White House officials would be kept on the server. Still, the change did not prevent White House officials from manually deleting their e-mail, and some, including Mr. Rove, apparently did. So in 2005, the committee took steps to prevent Mr. Rove from doing so. ''Mr. Kelner did not provide many details about why this special policy was adopted for Mr. Rove,'' Mr. Waxman wrote. ''But he did indicate that one factor was the presence of investigative or discovery requests or other legal concerns.'' Now the question is whether the missing e-mail can be recovered. Mr. Smith, the Internet security consultant, said e-mail ordinarily is initially stored in at least four places: in the ''sent'' file of the computer used to send the message; on the computer server of the sender's Internet service provider; on the computer server of the recipient's provider; and on the recipient's computer. Even if the message is deleted, it may be recoverable from a computer's hard drive. Eventually, however, the deleted file may be overwritten and lost, Mr. Smith said. ''If you keep sending e-mails, it will probably get overwritten pretty quickly, and then it's really gone,'' he said. | MISSING E-MAIL MAY BE RELATED TO PROSECUTORS |
1840057_0 | Reginald H. Fuller, a prominent British-born New Testament scholar who used his knowledge of Hebrew and Greek to hunt for the historical Jesus and his fluency in German to debate the nuances with theologians, died on April 4 in Richmond, Va. He was 92. The cause was complications of surgery for a broken hip, said the Very Rev. Martha J. Horne, dean and president of the Virginia Theological Seminary, where Dr. Fuller taught for many years. In addition to expounding on his biblical criticism in about 20 books, Dr. Fuller translated works by the German pastor and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was executed in a concentration camp in 1945, accused of having had a role in a plot to kill Hitler. Dr. Fuller helped translate the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible and wrote books on liturgical priorities and theology. He also was a practicing Anglican priest for most of his adult life. "I've tried to combine an honestly critical approach to the Bible and the New Testament with a firm commitment to the orthodox teachings of the church,'' he said in an interview with The Richmond Times-Dispatch in 2001. ''There's always a tension between these things, but one has to live in that tension.'' In his long scholarly career, Dr. Fuller dissected the Bible, which he saw as a series of books and teaching traditions with multifarious layers. His interest lay not in archaeology, psychology, philosophy and other disciplines that are now part of Bible scholarship, but in the sacred text itself. This emphasis grew out of the year he spent in Germany after graduating from Cambridge in 1937. He studied the critical analysis being done by German Bible scholars, who saw the Resurrection and biblical miracles as mythological. Dr. Fuller did not always read the Bible literally either, but he read it carefully. In an interview with The Los Angeles Times in 1988, he disputed the concept of an actual corporeal Resurrection. He said the Greek word ''appeared'' that Paul used to describe Jesus' visits after his crucifixion was the same word used elsewhere for visionary experiences. Dr. Fuller nonetheless differed with German theologians like Rudolf Bultmann, who dismissed the Resurrection as a myth concocted by the early church. His counterargument was that Jesus' actual message, the coming of the Kingdom, as uncovered by critical Bible study, was convincingly and accurately echoed by early Christians. This placed | Reginald H. Fuller, 92, New Testament Scholar |
1840122_1 | was entirely because of an increase in petroleum and food prices; elsewhere in the economy weakening demand appears to be taking pressure off prices. The more expensive food reflected the increasing price of corn, now that so much of the crop goes into ethanol production. Other than food and energy, there was no increase at all. ''That takes away a little of the sting from earlier readings on core inflation,'' said Edward McKelvey, senior United States economist at Goldman Sachs, ''and it is certainly consistent with a slowing economy.'' While the core Producer Price Index has risen at an average monthly rate of just 0.2 percent since October, it jumped by 0.4 percent in February. The trade deficit narrowed in February, to $58.4 billion from a revised $58.9 billion in January, the Commerce Department reported. That was the smallest monthly deficit since November. Exports and imports both fell, but imports more than exports, mainly because of a midwinter drop in oil prices. The export decline, although involving such basic items as aircraft and machinery, struck Brian A. Bethune, an economist at Global Insight, as ''anomalous, given that the fall in the value of the dollar makes a lot of our goods more competitive.'' Imports, which totaled $182.43 billion in February, continued to swamp exports at $124.99 billion that month. But over the most recent year, the dollar value of exports has risen nearly twice as much as the dollar value of imports. ''That is the key,'' Mr. Bethune said, citing in particular rising exports of aircraft and other capital goods at a moment when capital investment is shrinking in this country. Given the recent easing of the trade deficit, Mr. Bethune and other economists argue that trade is less likely to pull down the nation's economic growth rate, as it occasionally did last year. That is an important contribution, given that growth appears to be declining from a 2.5 percent annual rate in the fourth quarter of last year to less than 2 percent in the just-completed first quarter, according to many estimates. Even China offered some relief last month. The deficit with that country fell 13.3 percent, to $18.4 billion -- a bit of relief that in Mr. Paulsen's view will momentarily take some pressure off China to agree to demands for a faster devaluation of the yuan, among other measures. ''They can point to the February number as | Sales Abroad Propping Up The Economy |
1843083_0 | Major League Baseball officials are quietly preparing to re-establish a relationship with Cuba if the United States lifts its trade embargo. Fidel Castro, 80, has experienced serious health problems in recent years, and his brother Raúl is Cuba's interim president, a situation that has prompted speculation about the country's future. Baseball officials began discussions a year and a half ago about how to approach the possibility of normalizing relations with Cuba. Baseball is contemplating a strategy for teams to sign Cuban players in an effort to create an orderly system for acquiring talent from the island, according to three baseball officials and a scholar who was briefed on the plans. ''There may not be any significant changes with our relationship with Cuba in the near term, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't think about these things,'' Joe Garagiola Jr., the senior vice president for baseball operations, said in a telephone interview. ''We are thinking about them, and that is probably the extent of what we can say at this point.'' Garagiola, a former general manager of the Arizona Diamondbacks, is coordinating baseball's discussions on Cuba. Baseball is also considering moving a minor league team to Cuba and building training academies similar to those that nearly all teams have in the Dominican Republic, according to a report earlier this month by Fortune magazine. Major League Baseball has stepped up its efforts to expand internationally in the past year. In March 2005, baseball and the players union organized the first World Baseball Classic, a 16-team international tournament designed to broaden interest in the sport. Baseball began expansion initiatives in Asia and Africa this past off-season. But Cuba, which is 90 miles from Florida, has a rich baseball history and is considered a future source of players, fans and revenue. The first Cuban players arrived to play professional baseball in the United States in the early 1900s. In 1946, the Washington Senators established a minor league team in Cuba, and the Brooklyn Dodgers sporadically spent spring training there in the 1930s and '40s. Fidel Castro took power in 1959, and the United States imposed sanctions on Cuba in 1961. Some of the Cuban players who have since reached the majors have been defectors, like pitchers José Contreras of the Chicago White Sox, Orlando Hernández of the Mets and his half-brother Liván Hernández of the Diamondbacks. Over all, Cuba has produced 152 major league | Baseball Looks to Create A Possible Portal to Cuba |
1840794_0 | FREQUENT fliers are an adaptable bunch because they need to be. The evolving restrictions on what can and cannot be carried on airplanes -- particularly rules involving liquids, gels and aerosols -- have forced them to find new ways to take what they need to look and feel their best on business trips. As travelers on airlines know too well, airport authorities banned practically all liquids from being transported on board after an onboard bombing plot was uncovered in London last August. Since then, so-called 3-1-1 guidelines have been adopted in the United States, Europe and some corners of Asia. These rules let travelers carry on containers of liquids, gels or aerosols in bottles if they are three ounces or less. The containers must fit in a quart-size, clear zip-top bag, and travelers can carry on just one bag's worth, according to the Transportation Security Administration. ''The one-quart plastic bag limit has science behind it,'' said Ellen Howe, a spokeswoman for the agency. ''Given that there are three ounces or less per canister and a limited number you can put in one bag, it's implied that there's not enough in one bag to pose a significant risk to the aircraft.'' Most business travelers, of course, just want to get to their destinations without checking in their bags, not only because it saves time, but also because the number of lost bags has surged in recent months, the Department of Transportation says. To adapt to the new rules means taking less rather than doing without, say, a favorite after-shave lotion or hair gel. Marcy McKenzie, who works for a technology company and travels both within the United States and to Europe from her home in Minneapolis, has started asking dermatologists and dentists for one-ounce samples of creams, toothpaste and mouthwash. She has also collected empty prescription-drug containers from pharmacists that she refills with shampoo and hair gel. ''It's orange tinted and has a lock cap so it doesn't leak,'' she said. Genevieve Bos, the publisher of the business magazine Pink, is on the road every other week to Europe, the Caribbean and major American cities like Chicago and Los Angeles. She refills small bottles from Aveda, a cosmetics company, with her own shampoo, conditioner and gel or with Aveda products from bigger bottles. ''It's a total pain, but since most of my trips are two to three days, I can use | The Lengths We Go for Toiletries |
1840718_4 | Torrey, director of communications strategy and business development for New York magazine, which is considering adding ShopText's codes. Text-messaging is not the only way to use cellphones for purchases. MasterCard is testing mobile payment in New York with Nokia phones that can be used to shop at stores like CVS and McDonald's, using a radio technology called near-field communication. Other marketers are experimenting with other systems like Bluetooth, G.P.S. and bar codes. But text-messaging is already popular. About 35 percent of cellphone users send or receive text messages, according to Forrester Research, a technology consultancy. Text-messaging is even more popular among young people, with 76 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds using it. And people are growing more accustomed to sending text messages for reasons other than staying in touch with their friends. Every episode of the television show ''American Idol,'' for instance, encourages viewers to vote for contestants via text message. ''This is our audience's chosen device,'' said Jared Hoffman, president and chief executive of the Knitting Factory, which runs concert stages in New York City and Los Angeles. ''Our consumers have their cellphones out during the shows. People are capturing images with their friends, texting with their friends, arranging to meet afterwards.'' The Knitting Factory is selling tickets through text messages and is looking at other ways to use the feature, like encouraging audience members to text-message to join an online discussion about the concert that night. Starting this month the teenage country singer Taylor Swift will let her audience text to buy recordings of the concerts -- during the show. Mr. Kaplan of ShopText said this use of his company's technology might encourage more people to buy legal recordings rather than make bootleg copies. Tim McGraw, the country music singer, is not only selling his new CD ''Let It Go'' through ShopText, but will also solicit charitable donations to the Tug McGraw Foundation, a nonprofit named for his father, Tug McGraw, the former New York Mets pitcher who died of brain cancer. Text codes for the foundation will appear on signs during the New York Marathon this fall. And the company has received its copies of J. K. Rowling's last Harry Potter book: ''Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.'' Rather than waiting in line when the book is in stores in July, Harry Potter fans can order the book now with their phones. (Text ''Potter'' to 467467.) ADVERTISING | New Form of Impulse: Shopping via Text Message |
1840817_2 | they are on the shore, they are in danger of being killed,'' said Mr. Kochnev. Although the number of bears killed illegally here is unclear, given the clandestine nature of poaching, the government estimates that as many as 100 are killed each year. Mr. Kochnev said the number could be twice as high, an unsustainable blow to a regional population that roams from the northwestern coast of Alaska to the East Siberian Sea and has shrunk to as low as an estimated 2,000. (The worldwide population of polar bears is 20,000 to 25,000.) The ban in Russia, which was imposed in 1956 after the population of bears experienced a sharp decline, will be lifted only partly to allow subsistence hunting by villagers in Chukotka, an impoverished, sparsely populated region across the Bering Strait from Alaska. The hunt, officials here and in Moscow said, could resume as soon as this year or next, once a census is carried out and an annual quota that would not threaten the bears is set. In Alaska, the annual quota set by law has averaged roughly 40 a year. Polar bears live mostly on sea ice, which they use as a platform for hunting seals, their main prey. With the floating Arctic ice cap shrinking in the summer to its smallest in possibly a century, the bears have had to swim longer distances to reach the seals, which stay closer to land. Scientists say bears that come ashore in search of other food are also sometimes getting trapped there if the ice retreats farther offshore than before. One result has been more contacts with humans as the bears of the Chukchi Sea migrate along the region's northern coast until the winter ice freezes again. Last year that did not occur until early December. The warming climate has not only endangered bears, it has also affected the lives of those who live here much more immediately than it has people in most parts of the world. Since 2003 there have been at least three fatal bear attacks in Chukotka. In Vankarem, with 200 residents, most of them native Chukchi, the Arctic equivalent of a neighborhood watch program was created. The village has a patrol of hunters that monitors the bears' arrival in autumn and tries to keep them out. One attraction for the bears has been an increase in the number of walruses lingering onshore. A | Russia's Strategy: Save Polar Bears With Legal Hunt |
1840717_0 | Nicholas Fodor is about to dive into the patent wars that have tangled up the business of wireless e-mail. But his weapon of choice is not a lawsuit. It is a new e-mail service he is developing using the knowledge gained from years of experience with e-mail software. Mr. Fodor, 43, a French computer programmer, said that in the early 1990s he worked on ''push'' e-mail services that predated the filing of important patents in this area. He intends to test his claims as soon as next month by introducing Freedom Mail, a simple free service that he says will make it possible to view and respond to messages sent to almost any e-mail account on a cellphone or other mobile device. ''Freedom Mail will liberate wireless e-mail from expensive and spurious litigation driven by very few patent owners for the sole purpose of dominating global wireless e-mail communications,'' Mr. Fodor said in an e-mail message. The service, which he said would work with almost all cellphones that can connect to the Internet, will be supported by small advertisements appended to messages. Mr. Fodor said that in advanced phones, the service would match the capabilities of push e-mail services like that available on the BlackBerry from Research in Motion, where messages on the phone and on a personal computer are automatically synchronized. He acknowledged that he is an underdog in the wireless e-mail world, where heavyweights like Google, Yahoo and Microsoft are battling for market share. But he said that he would soon announce partnerships and was hoping to take advantage of grass-roots marketing online. And though he is not well known in the industry, an earlier version of his software has been used by SFR in France, owned by Vodafone and Vivendi, through a partnership of Mr. Fodor's company, SetNet, with Hewlett-Packard. If it works as promised, Freedom Mail will compete with highly profitable services like those provided by Research in Motion, and could also undermine the lucrative patent portfolios of NTP and Visto, two firms that have won hundreds of millions of dollars in court with claims that they invented the idea of wireless electronic mail and mail synchronization. ''Visto could have some real problems,'' said Gregory Aharonian, publisher of Internet Patent News Service, an industry newsletter, and an intellectual property consultant who has worked with Visto in the past. He said that once the service became widely | E-Mail Innovator Plans to Enlist in the Wireless Campaign of the Patent Wars |
1840734_0 | Five years after leaving a top post at CBS Radio, Dan Mason officially returns today to lead the unit again. He is likely to find that the headaches have worsened. Almost by default, this week promises to be a quieter one at CBS, which suspended and then ousted the talk-show host Don Imus from his longtime home station last week amid a firestorm over a racially offensive remark he made on his program. But Mr. Mason's arrival is unrelated to Mr. Imus's departure, and there are more profound problems facing Mr. Mason. In an industry suffering from sluggish advertising sales, CBS and other broadcasters have been laboring to cling to listeners -- many of whom are spending more time these days with their mobile phones, Internet radio and portable music players. Broadcast radio remains the dominant source of entertainment in cars, according to survey data released last year by Bridge Ratings, a radio research company. But while 94 percent of people in the survey said they listened to radio, a share that has been slowly declining, 15 percent said they used digital music players, more than triple the figure two years earlier. Mr. Mason, who will be president and chief executive of CBS Radio, said it would play to radio's strengths in delivering local news and entertainment. Part of that, though, will be making local content from CBS stations available on demand to a global audience through a new digital platform, he said. But first, Mr. Mason must stabilize CBS's businesses in major media markets, including New York, where Mr. Imus was considered a mainstay. One estimate last week, from Bear Stearns, said Mr. Imus's program accounted for $15 million to $17 million in revenue. By another account, it generated in excess of $20 million in annual revenue for CBS Radio and the flagship New York station WFAN. Combined with ad sales for affiliates, the figure was put closer to $50 million. The last time CBS was forced to replace a marquee talent, it struggled. In 2006, Howard Stern decamped to Sirius Satellite Radio and left CBS scrambling to replace the estimated $100 million in annual revenue he had generated. Mr. Mason, who was involved in the company's reaction to the escalating criticism of Mr. Imus, said ''it was a good decision'' to cancel the show, but added, ''I'm very sad about the whole situation.'' Mr. Mason -- who has | Amid Turbulence at CBS Radio, an Old Hand Is Back |
1842519_0 | There is no association between abortion and an increased risk for breast cancer, scientists reported yesterday in a large study. There has been considerable debate over whether abortion, induced or spontaneous, is linked to breast cancer -- a debate that may intensify with last week's 5-4 Supreme Court ruling, which suggested that an abortion procedure could be banned if it posed a risk to a woman's health. The possibility of such a link has been suggested by some retrospective studies -- that is, studies that looked for a history of abortion in women who had already been given a diagnosis of breast cancer. But such studies are subject to error caused by inaccurate reporting. Because of personal sensitivities and the stigma associated with the operation, healthy women may be reluctant to reveal that they have had an abortion, while those with breast cancer, seeking a cause for their illness, are more likely to report one. This study, published in The Archives of Internal Medicine, tracked women prospectively to see if those who reported having abortions were more likely to develop breast cancer in the future. They were not. ''There are still some states that require women to be informed about the risk of breast cancer if they get an abortion,'' said Karin Michels, the lead author and an associate professor of epidemiology at Harvard. ''I think that may not be justified based on the current evidence.'' Researchers studied 105,716 women enrolled in a study designed to examine associations between lifestyle and disease. The women were 29 to 46 years old at the beginning of the study in 1993, and 93 percent were premenopausal. Initially, the women responded to a questionnaire about abortion, with 16,118 saying that they had had one or more induced abortions and 21,753 reporting one or more spontaneous abortions. The researchers collected data on breast cancer risk factors beginning in 1989, updating them every other year through 2003. There were 1,458 newly diagnosed cases of breast cancer during the study period. The scientists found no difference in breast cancer incidence between the women who had had spontaneous or induced abortions and those who had not. Breast cancer incidence did not differ among women who had had an induced or spontaneous abortion before or after their first birth, or who had had no abortion at all. At the same time, the authors write, it is well established that | Breast Cancer Not Linked To Abortion, Study Says |
1838093_0 | Although the decades of violent conflict over Northern Ireland have ended, an official report issued here on Wednesday demonstrated how the past still haunts the landscape. The report addressed the deadliest day of the conflict -- May 17, 1974, when 33 adults and children were killed in coordinated bombings in Dublin and Monaghan, Ireland. After decades of dead-end investigations, the official Irish government commission of inquiry, consisting of a sole member, Patrick McEntee, a senior criminal prosecuting lawyer, was asked by the Irish government to find out why the Irish police had quickly wound down their inquiry into the bombings. In his report, he criticized the police for losing files and documentation, saying documentation had been handled in a way that was ''manifestly inappropriate.'' But he said it would be ''unfair and unjust'' to say the police were ''solely responsible for the shortcomings'' in the inquiry. The toll of 33 dead was the worst in three decades of violence between republicans, who wanted Northern Ireland to unite with Ireland, and unionists, who wanted it to remain a British province. More than 3,700 people were killed in the conflict, which ended with an accord in 1998. Representatives of the victims say the British authorities in Northern Ireland and the Irish police in Dublin quickly identified the presumed bombers and traced them to unionist areas of Northern Ireland. But within weeks of the bombings, the investigation in Dublin ended. None ever started in Belfast. ''It was shameful,'' said Dermot Walsh, a professor of law at the University of Limerick, who said he suspected that the Irish government had been frightened that any hint of British military collusion in the bombings would give a propaganda coup to the Irish Republican Army. At 5:30 p.m. on the day of the bombings, Bernadette McNally, 16, was waiting for the workday to end so she could leave her job selling shoes on Talbot Street in Dublin, she said Wednesday in an interview. ''A late customer came in looking for -- and I will always remember -- a pair of brown sandals,'' she said. ''There was then a big flash, and it was like a violent wind. I was thrown to the floor.'' The second of three car bombs in Dublin had gone off, killing 13 people, including the customer shopping for sandals and May McKenna, who lived upstairs. A fourth exploded in Monaghan, 75 miles away. | Irish Inquiry Faults Handling of Day of Attacks in 1974 |
1838095_0 | In the golden haze of dawn, Mohammed Salim Sheikh walked slowly through the paddies, so frail and thin that the lungi wrapped around his waist looked like a clown's oversize trousers. Carrying a treatment chart in one hand and a stainless steel water glass in the other, he crossed the threshold of a house. The housewife inside, Zahida Khatun Jharna, rose from her cooking fire, fetched his medication and filled his water glass. Then she ticked off his chart for the day and sent him home. The routine plays out in countless villages across this country every morning, and it represents a remarkably simple but apparently effective effort to tackle a stubborn and deadly epidemic: tuberculosis, a scourge that kills 1.6 million people worldwide each year. In a country plagued by years of corrupt and sluggish governance, Bangladesh has come up with a novel innovation to curb the disease. Private groups have stepped in to take charge of the national tuberculosis treatment program. The largest effort, run by the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee, or BRAC, deploys an army of unsung housewives like Ms. Jharna, one of nearly 70,000 women across the country. They conduct daily household surveys in their neighborhoods, hunt for patients like Mr. Sheikh who have been coughing for more than three weeks -- a standard measure of detecting potential patients -- coax them to get tested and, most important, administer a long and rigorous treatment. The enterprise has steadily borne fruit. The detection rate in Bangladesh inched up to more than 70 percent in 2006, according to the World Health Organization, and the cure rate to 89 percent. Among the 22 countries that are considered to be heavily burdened by tuberculosis, few have reached those levels, the health organization says. ''They are a doorstep away from whoever supervised the treatment,'' said Marijke Becx, until recently the tuberculosis adviser for the W.H.O. in Bangladesh. ''They don't need to walk for hours or spend money for buses or rickshaws in order to get their supervised treatment, and I am convinced that this largely contributes to the high cure rate.'' A survey by her office found that 80 percent of tuberculosis patients in Bangladesh now received treatment from community-based approaches like this one. Much of that success depends on keeping patients in treatment for six months. Patients the world over stop their medication too early once they start feeling better, | An Army of Housewives Battles TB in Bangladesh |
1838169_3 | Michael Dannenberg, director of education policy at the New America Foundation, a public policy institute in Washington. ''What we're finding out now is that some colleges and some financial aid administrators may not be so impartial.'' The 2003 government filings show that Lawrence W. Burt, associate vice president and director of student financial aid at the University of Texas, and Catherine Thomas, associate dean of admission and director of financial aid at the University of Southern California, also had investments in the Education Lending Group. Mr. Burt said yesterday that he had been invited to invest in the student loan company in 2001 at about $1 a share. Records show he sold 1,500 shares at about $10 a share two years later and held 500 options on additional shares. Ms. Thomas also sold 1,500 shares and held 500 options. She did not return a call yesterday, and it was not clear whether she had initially bought stock at the same price as Mr. Burt and Mr. Charlow. Mr. Burt said the University of Texas had not known that he owned stock in Student Loan Xpress. He said that Student Loan Xpress became a preferred lender at the university in the 2002-3 school year and that his ownership of stock in the company did not influence his decision about whether to place it on the list. He said he no longer held any stock in Student Loan Xpress. Mr. Burt said the university received no financial benefit from putting Student Loan Xpress on its lender list. ''We do not direct students to specifically choose one lender over another,'' he said. ''All the lenders on our lender list are only on our lender list because they provide good service and good borrower benefits.'' Juan C. Gonzalez, vice president for student affairs at the University of Texas, said in an e-mail message that the university would review how preferred lenders were selected. ''In addition, we will review if any individual at the university has any perceived or real 'conflict of interest' in this selection process,'' he said. Under the rules of the University of Texas System, a state employee ''may not have a direct or indirect interest, including financial and other interests, or engage in a business transaction or professional activity, or incur any obligation of any nature that is in substantial conflict with the proper discharge of the officer's or employee's duties | COLLEGE OFFICERS PROFITED BY SALE OF LENDER STOCK |
1838824_1 | their product innovations. On the other, suspicious citizens demand that regulators challenge that evidence. The side whose expertise is accepted as ''official'' calls the shots. So far, the business sector has tipped the scales in its favor. Despite science-based concerns voiced by farmers, environmentalists and even its own researchers, the United States Department of Agriculture has approved more than 100 applications to grow so-called biopharma crops of corn, soybeans, barley, rice, safflower and tobacco in the United States. Developers say these crops are the best way to achieve the economies of scale and cost savings that will let them meet rising demand for drugs like human insulin. They acknowledge that growing pharmaceutical crops is riskier than making drugs in factories. They know that the plants contain potentially toxic drugs and chemicals, and because they look like ordinary crops, they can be mistaken for food, both before and after harvest. The most important thing, then, is to keep biopharma plants, pollen and seeds confined to the fields where they are planted. Otherwise, they may contaminate other crops, wild relatives and the environment. Developers say they have worked with the Agriculture Department to develop containment procedures for biopharma crops. ''Under our system, the degree of oversight is commensurate with the risk of the crops,'' said John Turner, director of the policy coordination program for the agency's Biotechnology Regulatory Services. ''We take extraordinary measures to make sure these pharma and industrial crops are kept separate and confined.'' To this end, some developers use plants like rice and safflower that self-pollinate, reducing the risk of contaminating nonpharma plants by wind and insect pollination. They also provide regulators with data on the potential health and environmental effects of the special chemicals in their crops. For example, SemBioSys, a Canadian company, has applied to the U.S.D.A. for permits to grow safflower-based human insulin. It is already field-testing safflower crops in the United States and Chile that produce carp growth hormone for aquaculture feed, to bolster the weak immune systems of farmed shrimp. The company's chief executive, Andrew Baum, says ''categorically'' that the insulin derived from its plants has no biological effects while in plant form, and is activated only after processing. And the evidence his company has gathered indicates that its carp growth hormone affects only shrimp. The new methods, Mr. Baum said, can cut capital costs by 70 percent, and ''reach levels of scale easier | How to Confine the Plants of the Future? |
1838909_0 | The highest-ranking American official to set foot in Somalia in more than a decade returned from a trip there on Saturday conceding there were ''significant problems'' but saying ''we have to have faith in the people of Somalia.'' The official, Jendayi Frazer, assistant secretary of state for African affairs, spent five hours in Baidoa, Somalia, meeting with top officials of the Somali transitional government, which has been struggling to gain control of the country. For the past two weeks, government forces have been battling insurgents in intense urban combat that has killed or wounded more than 1,000 civilians and driven more than 100,000 people from their homes. Human rights groups have called it the worst fighting in Somalia in 15 years and accused Ethiopian troops, who are backing the Somali government, of indiscriminately shelling neighborhoods. Ms. Frazer said, ''Everybody used excessive force.'' An increasing number of Somalis seem to be violently opposed to the transitional government, saying it is as clan-based and corrupt as the 13 previous transitional governments that have failed. But Ms. Frazer remains optimistic. ''In Africa,'' she said at a news conference in Nairobi after her visit, ''you have to be.'' Ms. Frazer said that to reverse the deteriorating situation, Somalia's transitional leaders must establish a cease-fire, reconcile with clan elders, plan elections and eventually work themselves out of a job. She pledged $100 million in American aid to help. ''The Somali people have to realize this is just a transitional government, and it doesn't have to be perfect,'' she said. A shaky truce between insurgents and government forces seemed to be holding Saturday, and residents of Mogadishu, Somalia's reliably chaotic capital, said that for once there was no gunfire or artillery shelling. Also, pirates released two ships -- including one hired by the United Nations -- that they had recently hijacked off Somalia's long, unpatrolled coastline. The United Nations said all crew members were returning safely to shore, though they were cautious about celebrating too early. ''The threat of piracy,'' said Peter Goossens, an official for the United Nations World Food Program, ''is still very much alive in Somali waters.'' Somalia has been mired in chaos since 1991, when the central government collapsed and the country exploded into clan-based warfare. The United States tried to help, sending thousands of peacekeepers in 1992 to deliver food. But that mission was cut short after Somali militiamen shot down | U.S. Envoy Visits Somalia And Urges Truce for Capital |
1839017_10 | have indicated that the leading cause of dog abandonment is behavioral problems. A team of researchers for the National Council on Pet Population Study and Policy, headed by Dr. Mo Salman of the College of Veterinary Medicine and Biomedical Sciences at Colorado State University, surveyed nearly 4,000 dog owners at 12 shelters across the United States about their reasons for relinquishing their dogs. They repeatedly cited things like biting, overaggression, chewed-up furniture, repeated soiling: dogs literally and figuratively bouncing off our walls. And who can blame them, our walls now being just about all they have? With our full-scale shift from an agrarian to a service-based economy and society, the very nature of dog work and the tasks we ask of dogs have shifted as well. The hunters and sheepherders and the high-strung, ground-tearing terriers of yore -- born ferreters of rats and badgers -- are being increasingly disappointed from their intended earthly rounds, pulled skyward into high-rises, where there are only our ever-shifting moods, anthropomorphic projections and stuffed toys and couch pillows to alternately grasp, negotiate or tear through. We look to dogs now to be not only companions but also substitute children, emotional and psychological support in the wake of deaths, divorces and breakups. We are asking them to be, in essence, little people, animate worry beads and stress absorbers: to undertake jobs that, while they may engage -- to the point of exhaustion -- the canine species's long-heralded loyalty, exercise precious little else. The outcome has been an ever-growing number of incredibly messed-up, neurotic dogs, and with them a rise each year in the incidence of dog bites and other aggressive, antisocial behaviors -- all of which contribute, of course, to the huge number of abandoned dogs. Shelters in a number of states across the country are now employing a multifaceted, proactive approach, specifically to address these behavioral issues, taking their cues from surveys like Mo Salman's, or another, similar study done by The Journal of the American Veterinary Association back in 1996 that concluded that dogs whose owners reported having received helpful behavior advice were at a 94 percent lower risk for abandonment. A shelter in Denver known as the Dumb Friends League began a dog behavior program back in the mid-1990s, teaching ''shelter manners'' to their abandoned dogs to make them more adoptable and offering behavior-training classes for dog adopters and other dog owners in | New Tricks |
1838728_2 | agreed. ''The educated awareness that parents have about the developmental stages of children has increased,'' he said. But alternative explanations for the growth abound. For instance, state financing formulas create a potential incentive for classifying students in special education. Because the state gives districts a set payment for each child in special education, districts can get more money by increasing the numbers. Once they get the money, districts can spend it on anything. ''Let's say you've got a child who's taking a lot of class time,'' said Diana Autin, director of the Statewide Parent Advocacy Network of New Jersey, a federally financed group that helps parents of disabled children. ''There's a perception that the only way you can get funding for extra help for such children is to classify them.'' The districts, however, say they do not do this. ''There is no real incentive to classify because we're getting very little money from the state,'' said Janice Dime, the superintendent of Paramus Public Schools, where special education enrollment has increased to 13.9 percent this year from below 8.6 percent of students in 1999. Dr. Dime said she believed the increases were driven by a jump in autism diagnoses at early ages. A recent study by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta said New Jersey had the highest rate of autism among 8-year-olds in the 14 states it studied. ''Most of the increase has come among preschool handicapped youngsters, and that's consistent with the increased identification of kids with autism,'' Dr. Dime said. Ms. Autin suggested that districts could be classifying more students as needing special education in misguided attempts to meet the federal No Child Left Behind standards. Classifying borderline students for special education, the theory goes, helps ensure better passing rates among regular education students, Ms. Autin said. She also said the influx of immigrants over the last decade might be contributing. ''Studies have shown that students with limited English proficiency are more likely to be classified because of their difficulties in English as opposed to a real disability,'' Ms. Autin said. In 2005, the United States Supreme Court made it harder for parents in New Jersey to dispute school districts' special education plans, ruling that the burden lies with parents to prove that a district is not serving their children's needs. But Ms. Gantwerk of the State Education Department said the decision had probably | Special Education Enrollment Up Again in '06 |
1839038_0 | I am returning to the United States after a lengthy stay in Germany and wonder how best to transport the things I have acquired. Books, for example, are heavy, and last time Lufthansa made me take stuff out of my bags to meet the weight limit. But it's expensive to mail packages. Would it be cheaper to take these things as excess baggage? -- Louis Marvick, Lüneburg, Germany Probably not. New airline excess baggage charges can be punitive, as I have reported (Feb. 18), which means that shipping luggage can be a cost-effective alternative. Luggage Forward (luggageforward.com), a Boston-based baggage and sports equipment delivery service, for example, compares its charges for shipping a second or third extra bag with the new British Airways' charges of £120, or $240, for each excess bag on long-haul flights; Luggage Forward charges $187 for a ''small'' bag; $250 for a ''medium'' bag and $355 for a ''large'' bag for door-to-door shipment between the United States and Europe. Charges are based on size (and weight), distance and level of service. British Airways on its Web site (ba.com) recommends a partner, First Luggage (Firstluggage.com), a British-based company that offers an international door-to-door luggage collection and delivery service for passengers who wish to avoid extra charges for turning up with an extra bag, or one weighing more than the new 23-kilogram (51-pound) limit. First Luggage says it will ensure that your baggage is delivered to your destination before you arrive. Prices are charged per item, each with a maximum weight allowance. For example, the cost of shipping a 30-kilogram (66-pound) suitcase from France to the United States is £141.55, or $283.10. A golf bag weighing 15 kilograms (33 pounds) costs £113, and a 10-kilogram (22-pound) stroller costs £99.75. First Luggage offers a 5 percent discount if you book through British Airways. Excess Baggage (www.excessbaggage.com), based in Britain, ships bags from offices and homes all over the world, charging $4 to $10 per kilogram (2.2 pounds) for most destinations. The company has a network of agents that include Contour USA (www.contour-usa.com) for shipments from the United States, and Baltrans (www.bim.com.hk) for shipments from Hong Kong. It is also worth checking out the luggage courier services of Skycapinternational.com, Virtualbellhop.com and Luggage Express (www.usxpluggageexpress.com), all based in the United States. ROGER COLLIS Q & A | Q & A |
1839024_38 | diocese of Ferns, O'Gorman was repeatedly abused and raped by the local priest. In 1998, he filed a lawsuit against the diocese as a way to get the church to recognize the problem of pedophilic clergy. In 2003, the diocese agreed to pay $325,000 to settle the suit. Meanwhile, as attention built, the Irish government opened a formal inquiry and issued a damning report in 2005. O'Gorman is now a celebrity in Ireland and currently is running for Parliament. The United States is the country with by far the largest number of sex-abuse claims made against Catholic priests, but Ireland has that distinction in Europe, and in both countries the number of priests who have committed sexual crimes on minors has been estimated at 4 percent. O'Gorman told me the issue of sex abuse among the Catholic clergy, as big as it is in itself, gets at something even more elemental. Even after years of coverage in the U.S. and Europe, and hundreds of lawsuits and tales of woe, he said: ''The Vatican has never, ever accepted responsibility for clerical sexual abuse at all. Never. John Paul talked about his hurt. Benedict talked about his devastation. But the Vatican has never acknowledged that they've failed in their responsibility.'' While Benedict has said many things on the issue over the years, advocates for victims of abusive priests still rankle over his declaring in 2002 that ''I am personally convinced that the constant presence in the press of the sins of Catholic priests, especially in the United States, is a planned campaign.'' Regarding the longstanding policy of transferring abusive priests to other dioceses, O'Gorman said: ''This wasn't some passive benign failure. This was an active approach that was taken to these cases. In my view, there's a system at work in this, and the Vatican is at the heart of it.'' A 2005 survey found that 34 percent of Irish Catholics attend Mass weekly, one of the higher percentages in Europe. But in 1973 the figure was 91 percent, so the decline is actually among the steepest in Europe. As far as O'Gorman is concerned, the connection between the church's handling of the sex-abuse issue and the drop-off in Mass attendance is direct: ''For the church to criticize secular society while at the same time not looking in any way at itself -- for most people this is a reason they turn | Keeping the Faith |
1843911_0 | In a troubling sign for the American-financed rebuilding program in Iraq, inspectors for a federal oversight agency have found that in a sampling of eight projects that the United States had declared successes, seven were no longer operating as designed because of plumbing and electrical failures, lack of proper maintenance, apparent looting and expensive equipment that lay idle. The United States has previously admitted, sometimes under pressure from federal inspectors, that some of its reconstruction projects have been abandoned, delayed or poorly constructed. But this is the first time inspectors have found that projects officially declared a success -- in some cases, as little as six months before the latest inspections -- were no longer working properly. The inspections ranged geographically from northern to southern Iraq and covered projects as varied as a maternity hospital, barracks for an Iraqi special forces unit and a power station for Baghdad International Airport. At the airport, crucially important for the functioning of the country, inspectors found that while $11.8 million had been spent on new electrical generators, $8.6 million worth were no longer functioning. At the maternity hospital, a rehabilitation project in the northern city of Erbil, an expensive incinerator for medical waste was padlocked -- Iraqis at the hospital could not find the key when inspectors asked to see the equipment -- and partly as a result, medical waste including syringes, used bandages and empty drug vials were clogging the sewage system and probably contaminating the water system. The newly built water purification system was not functioning either. Officials at the oversight agency, the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, said they had made an effort to sample different regions and various types of projects, but that they were constrained from taking a true random sample in part because many projects were in areas too unsafe to visit. So, they said, the initial set of eight projects -- which cost a total of about $150 million -- cannot be seen as a true statistical measure of the thousands of projects in the roughly $30 billion American rebuilding program. But the officials said the initial findings raised serious new concerns about the effort. The reconstruction effort was originally designed as nearly equal to the military push to stabilize Iraq, allow the government to function and business to flourish, and promote good will toward the United States. ''These first inspections indicate | INSPECTORS FIND REBUILT PROJECTS CRUMBLING IN IRAQ |
1843801_2 | will remember you,'' Ms. Cohen said. Job boards can help you put feelers out broadly and see what jobs are in demand. Professional recruiters will probably be of little value, because they generally place executives with traditional work histories, said Lisa Kojis, a managing partner at PrincetonOne, an executive search firm based in Skillman, N.J. If you have been out of the work force for less than two years, you may be able to work with a recruiter who specializes in your area, said Ms. Kojis, especially if you are in a high-demand occupation, like accounting or nursing. And a growing number of firms, including On-Ramps, Mom Corps and Ivy Exec, specialize in placing those who have been out of the work force or want flexible hours. Q. How should you account for your employment gap on your résumé? A. Remove the dates and make it an accomplishments-oriented résumé, rather than a chronological one. You still have to address the gap in your work history, but do it in your cover letter and in the ''personal'' section, said Allison O'Kelly, chief executive and founder of Mom Corps in Atlanta. Remember to include any volunteer work you did while at home. You could include P.T.A. activities, church fund-raisers or work for your homeowners' association. Just make sure you highlight accomplishments that are transferable to the work world. ''For example, if you can say 'increased ad sales in the elementary school address book from 25 percent over last year,' it shows you have the ability to sell ads,'' Ms. O'Kelly said. Also important is a section covering what you have done to prepare to re-enter your career, Ms. Cohen said, like classes you have taken or notable conferences you have attended. Q. What is the best way to prepare for an interview if you are out of practice? A. Rehearse. The key to a successful interview is self-confidence. Start by just talking about your work plans to friends, family and others who won't be judgmental, Ms. Cohen advised. ''They will ask you what you want to do, and you'll have to figure out what to say,'' she said. Write down answers to typical interview questions and those that will focus on your employment gap. Then, conduct mock interviews with friends to make sure you sound ''crisp and experienced,'' Ms. Bennett said. ''Like a business person, not someone used to talking to a | Sizing Up Your Skills For a Return To Work |
1843944_3 | many factors affect cognitive function, and the kinds of cognitive problems associated with cancer treatment can be caused by many other things than chemotherapy,'' said Dr. Ahles, the director of neurocognitive research at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York. The new interest in chemo brain is, in effect, a testimony to enormous strides in the field. Patients who once would have died now live long enough to have cognitive side effects, just as survivors of childhood leukemia did many years ago, forcing new treatment protocols to avoid learning disabilities. ''A large number of people are living long and normal lives,'' said Dr. Patricia Ganz, an oncologist at U.C.L.A. who is one of the nation's first specialists in the late side effects of treatment. ''It's no longer enough to cure them. We have to acknowledge the potential consequences and address them early on.'' As researchers look for a cause, cancer survivors are trying to figure out how to get through the day by sharing their experiences, and by tapping expertise increasingly being offered online by Web sites like www.breastcancer.org and www.cancercare.org. There are ''ask the experts'' teleconferences, both live and archived, and fact sheets to download and show to a skeptical doctor. Message boards suggest sharpening the mind with Japanese sudoku puzzles or compensatory techniques devised to help victims of brain injury. There are even sweatshirts for sale saying ''I Have Chemo Brain. What's Your Excuse?'' Studies of cognitive effects have overwhelmingly been conducted among breast cancer patients because they represent, by far, the largest group of cancer survivors and because they tend to be sophisticated advocates, challenging doctors and volunteering for research. Most researchers studying cognitive deficits say they believe that those most inclined to notice even subtle changes are high-achieving women juggling careers and families who are used to succeeding at both. They point to one study that found that complaints of cognitive deficits often did not match the results of neuro-psychological tests, suggesting that chemo brain is a subjective experience. ''They say, 'I've lost my edge,' '' said Dr. Stewart Fleishman, director of cancer supportive services at Beth Israel and St. Luke's/Roosevelt hospitals in New York. ''If they can't push themselves to the limit, they feel impaired.'' Dr. Fleishman and others were pressed as to why a poor woman, working several jobs to feed her children, navigating the health care system and battling insurance companies, would not | Lingering Fog of Chemotherapy Is No Longer Ignored as Illusion |
1842426_3 | to stand pat. In one of Benedict's first moves, he issued a long-awaited policy stating that homosexual men cannot be ordained priests, even if they are able to live a chaste life. The action was cast as a response to the clergy sexual abuse crisis, based on the argument that the abuse was largely inflicted by a growing number of gay men in the priesthood. That was an empty rationale, most obviously because the number of abuse cases was dropping sharply in recent decades even as the percentage of gay priests was rising. Above all, the decision unjustly denigrated a group of people simply for who they are. And it was akin to hoisting the ladder after one is safely aboard ship given that there are already plenty of gay priests and bishops serving the church faithfully, many in the Vatican itself. In other moves, Benedict restricted the role of lay people at Mass in order to reinforce the separate, Christ-like action of the priest, and he is expected to announce soon that he will allow widespread use of the pre-Vatican II Latin Mass, in which the priest faces away from the congregation. That would come despite the strong opposition of many bishops in Europe, the United States, even inside the Roman curia -- and even though there are hardly any priests who can celebrate the old rite or worshipers who would understand what is happening. Predictably, Benedict has also renewed church stands against married clergy and the ban on divorced and remarried Catholics receiving communion. Changes in the role of women in the church or teachings on sexual behavior are of course out of the question. And Benedict has reinforced the primacy of the pope -- an issue his predecessor had opened for debate. Then, last month, the Vatican censured a renowned Jesuit proponent of liberation theology, the Rev. Jon Sobrino. A Spanish priest who has spent his life working with the poor in El Salvador, Father Sobrino narrowly escaped death in 1989 when six of his confreres were murdered by Salvadoran death squads. Such experiences helped hone the priest's theology, which focuses on the poor as the primary recipients of Christ's message. Despite that personal story, Benedict went ahead with the rebuke of Father Sobrino, whom the Vatican, with minimal explanation, accused of not sufficiently emphasizing the divinity of Jesus. It was a questionable judgment theologically, and smacked | His Own Pope Yet? |
1839487_3 | not receive the education they are mandated -- one of their most basic human rights -- it is a citywide and nationwide problem,'' she said. ''Entire generations of immigrant Americans are kept in a cycle of poverty. They do not have a means to move up in society, participate fully in society or fulfill their life's dreams.'' Ms. Meyer said that Sports Professions has been able to promote more than 90 percent of its English Language Learners students from grade to grade each year ''and that's the bottom line.'' Well, that is one bottom line. Another is what state regulations say. They stipulate a certain amount of E.S.L. instruction for eligible high school students -- three periods a day for those in the beginning level, two for intermediate and one for advanced. The city's Education Department, without being ironclad on the point, states in its manual for teaching immigrant pupils that most high schools should use separate E.S.L. classes for them rather than mixing them into regular English courses. The paper trail from Sports Professions shows something starkly at odds with those directives and recommendations. During second period last fall and winter, 14 immigrant children spread across the three levels of fluency were being put in a mainstream English class alongside 14 pupils who needed no extra instruction. During second period, 13 intermediate and advanced E.S.L. pupils were in class with the same number of non-E.S.L. classmates. The teacher of record in all of these classes was not a licensed E.S.L. instructor but one certified in English, Harriett Mahl. Ms. Mahl did not respond to an e-mail message requesting an interview. Ms. Singh, the E.S.L teacher, said she did ''push-ins'' for the eligible pupils in those classes, meaning that within one 45-minute period she had to try to explain unfamiliar vocabulary and cultural or historical references to more than a dozen teenagers at three varying levels of proficiency, even as Ms. Mahl's lesson proceeded. The physical and financial conditions at Sports Professions did not help. Opened in September 2004 in a former chocolate factory, the school, which offers some study of sports history in its college-prep curriculum, moved this academic year to five trailers set up on the playground of a middle school in the northeast Bronx. For the entire first semester, Ms. Singh said, the school did not buy her students either textbooks or the test-prep materials for the | School Records on Special English Classes Are Called Works of Fiction by Critics |
1840582_2 | literary criticism. Confident and exhilarated, evolutionary theorists believe they have a universal framework to explain human behavior. Creationists reject the whole business, but they're like the Greeks who still worshiped Athena while Plato and Aristotle practiced philosophy. The people who set the cultural tone today have coalesced around a shared understanding of humanity and its history that would have astonished people in earlier epochs. According to this view, human beings, like all other creatures, are machines for passing along genetic code. We are driven primarily by a desire to perpetuate ourselves and our species. The logic of evolution explains why people vie for status, form groups, fall in love and cherish their young. It holds that most everything that exists does so for a purpose. If some trait, like emotion, can cause big problems, then it must also provide bigger benefits, because nature will not expend energy on things that don't enhance the chance of survival. Human beings, in our current understanding, are jerry-built creatures, in which new, sophisticated faculties are piled on top of primitive earlier ones. Our genes were formed during the vast stretches when people were hunters and gatherers, and we are now only semi-adapted to the age of nuclear weapons and fast food. Furthermore, reason is not separate from emotion and the soul cannot be detached from the electrical and chemical pulses of the body. There isn't even a single seat of authority in the brain. The mind emerges (somehow) from a complex light show of neural firings without a center or executive. We are tools of mental processes we are not even aware of. The cosmologies of the societies represented in the Rockefeller Museum looked up toward the transcendent. Their descendants still fight over sacred spots like the Holy of Holies a short walk away. But the evolutionary society is built low to the ground. God may exist and may have set the process in motion, but he's not active. Evolution doesn't really lead to anything outside itself. Individuals are predisposed not by innate sinfulness or virtue, but by the epigenetic rules encoded in their cells. Looking at contemporary America from here in Jerusalem and from the ancient past, it's clear we're not a postmodern society anymore. We have a grand narrative that explains behavior and gives shape to history. We have a central cosmology to embrace, argue with or unconsciously submit to. Op-Ed Columnist | The Age Of Darwin |
1840302_4 | rain forest at the top of the island's volcano.'' The big lure of a jungle ecolodge is, of course, the jungle. The Amazon remains one of the world's most undisturbed wildernesses, and some of its most remote tracts are in southeastern Peru. The area is notoriously tough to reach, but the Inkaterra Reserva Amazonica Lodge is only about an hour in a boat down the Madre de Dios River from Puerto Maldonado. Inkaterra sits in the middle of a 40-square-mile private ecological reserve, which was founded as a scientific lodge in 1976 by José Koechlin, a Peruvian film producer who had worked with Werner Herzog on a film set in the rain forest. Since then, visiting biologists have conducted pivotal surveys there; in the last 20 years, 14 species new to science have been discovered, including orchids, frogs and a butterfly. In the 1980s, the lodge started welcoming the public and in recent years has become an upscale destination lodge with 35 cabanas, adding luxury suites and a trail network that crisscrosses the surrounding jungle. In 2005, it opened a stunning treetop canopy walkway -- a 1,135-foot-long complex of seven hanging bridges, six treetop observation platforms and two 95-foot-tall towers. Financed by the National Geographic Society and the World Bank, the walkway allows visitors access to the rare plant and animal species of the delicate treetop ecosystem. A new interpretation center discusses rain forest ecology and community projects spearheaded by Inkaterra's own nonprofit organization. Inkaterra continues to support ongoing research efforts in southeastern Peru, implementing a wildlife rehabilitation project, a new research facility and global warming studies of the Trans-Amazonica Highway. Cornell University Press has published a study of reptiles and amphibians based on 15 years of research at the property. ''We decided to learn about the environment here and work for it,'' said Mr. Koechlin, who is an emeritus director of Conservation International and whose company also owns a lodge in Macchu Picchu. ''What we have done with Reserva Amazonica is to bring along awareness to the local community, the scientific community and, increasingly, to the tourists.'' Taste of the Wild Cotton Tree Lodge, (866) 480-4534; www.cottontreelodge.com; from $198 a person, double occupancy, including all meals, activities and transfers. Ecolodge Rendez-Vous, (877) 416-3888; www.ecolodge-saba.com; double rooms start at $65. Inkaterra Reserva Amazonica, (800) 442-5042; www.inkaterra.com; from $153 a person, double occupancy, including all meals, activities and transfers. JOURNEYS: ECOLODGES | Local Culture as Part of the Green Experience |
1840270_0 | It is possible to get many things at the Four Seasons Hotel in Westlake Village, Calif., but a blood-and-urine panel that analyzes the condition of your DNA is a relatively new development. The panel, offered through the California WellBeing Institute as part of several luxury-lifestyle packages, including a $2,800 executive physical, is boomingly popular: about 50 people signed up in January, the first month it was available. Four years out from the sequencing of the human genome, DNA has become like the rain forest. Rummage around enough, one suspects, and you can eventually find the source of anything, be it heart-disease risk or unflattering frown lines. But even as research scientists struggle to catalog this elaborate ecosystem, companies selling the promise of genetically customized treatments have rolled out the tent and set up shop. At spas, in particular -- where individual skin analyses and bespoke facials are already mandatory -- DNA has been seized upon as the ultimate, and most intimate, evolution in personalized care. In November, the MGM Grand in Las Vegas began offering cheek swabs courtesy of SpaGen, a program devised by a company called Salugen. SpaGen issues dietary recommendations (and hawks supplements) based on minor variations in six genes that have been linked to nutrient metabolism. Dermagenetics in New Jersey bases a genetically derived skin cream on a similar principle. There is little proof that such personalized products can make a difference for your health. But it makes sense that they might. Indeed, the general idea -- that thousands of subtle variations in our genetic functions affect both our health and how we age -- is broadly accepted. And while some of these variables may be innate -- about half of us carry a minor permutation that hampers our ability to metabolize folic acid, for instance -- others are simple wear and tear: the result of years of exposure to all the things that can cause DNA to break down, a long list that includes, but isn't limited to, cigarette smoke, sunburn, weed killer, coffee, antibiotics, neoprene and charcoal-grilled steak. In theory, knowing how these changes in genetic production affect our overall health could enable us to correct for them. The folic acid permutation, for instance (one of seven gene permutations that SpaGen tests for), cuts our ability to benefit from the vitamin threefold. The solution: triple the amount of folic acid in your vitamin pack. According | The Talk; Let's Get Genetical |
1840270_4 | when patients were allowed to track their viral load -- to see how it went up or down, based on their behavior -- they took their medication more reliably. Conrad dreamed up a corollary: if ordinary people could watch the genetic damage that accrues from eating Ho Hos, they would change how they ate. ''It's like a bathtub,'' Conrad explains. ''The tub is your accumulated amount of DNA damage. So what controls that? There's the faucet: the rate of damage going in. That's stuff like smoking, sunbathing, eating pesticides. On the other end, there's the drain. That's your body's ability to repair the damage.'' There's also a third variable, sensitivity, or how likely one's DNA is to break under stress, which Conrad likens to the height of the tub. If your DNA breaks easily, your tub will fill -- and ultimately overflow, in the form of cancers and other ailments -- that much sooner. The interaction between these three results, he asserts, provides a snapshot of your genetic health: how much damage you're doing, and how easily you're able to bounce back. ''Everybody has that crazy uncle who smoked and sunbathed and lived to be 95,'' Conrad says. ''How'd he do it? He may have had a huge drain.'' For anyone not endowed with a prodigious drain, presumably the only option is to turn down the faucet -- the amount of free radical damage. In the body, free radicals injure cells by reacting with guanine, one of the four basic components of DNA, and transforming it into 8-hydroxy-2-deoxyguanosine (8oxodg for short). According to Conrad, as the body's genetic repair system kicks in, it snips off the aberrant 8oxodg segment, which washes out in urine. The higher your 8oxodg count, in other words, the more oxidative damage your body is experiencing. What makes this measure so useful, Conrad believes, is that it's extraordinarily sensitive to various outside factors. Smoking a cigarette, for instance, will cause your 8oxodg rates to spike almost immediately. So does a bad sunburn. (''Whether you bake yourself inside or out, it's going to come out in your pee,'' Conrad remarks cheerfully.) Then there's what Conrad calls ''the Merry Christmas phenomenon.'' He flips to a pair of graphs that belong to a husband and wife who had their urine analyzed at least once a month for a year. Both have identical Christmas-tree-shaped spikes in their otherwise level charts. | The Talk; Let's Get Genetical |
1840304_3 | to board the plane of another. The safety audits involve five days of inspections by a six-member team. Any findings must be addressed, and there are follow-up audits. The audit program was not created to allay (or confirm) the anxieties of passengers. Instead, it is supposed to save airlines money. American carriers cannot enter code-share agreements with foreign airlines unless those airlines have had safety audits. The Federal Aviation Administration will accept the new standardized audit, so a United States airline does not have to send its own people to do the job. The international trade group lists the airlines that have a passing grade on a current audit at www.iata.org/ps/services/iosa/registry.htm. But it does not list the ones that failed. The European Union's banned list is less comprehensive, because it covers only airlines that are judged not safe and that want to fly to Europe. An English-language version of the list is available at ec.europa.eu/transport/air-ban/list--en.htm. It names nearly 100 airlines, mostly African and some from Central Asia. According to Douglas E. Lavin, the International Air Transport Association's vice president for North America, his group's audit is ''an answer to the blacklist,'' as the European list is known. The blacklist does not give airlines the information they need to solve their problems, he said, and the audit program covers airlines that do not want to fly to Europe. The Federal Aviation Administration is much less comprehensive, concerned only with airlines that fly to the United States. While it does occasional brief inspections of foreign planes landing in America, it does not rate airlines. Instead, it decides whether its counterparts in foreign governments have the resources necessary for effective oversight. It does not distinguish among airlines in those countries. There are 20 countries on its list not meeting the F.A.A. standards, including Belize, Congo, Paraguay and Ukraine. The list is available at www.faa.gov/passengers/international--travel. Knowing about an airline, of course, does not give complete information about the how safe a trip might be. Accidents can be caused by bad airports or air traffic control systems. And the biggest risk of accident in foreign travel may not be in the air at all, but on the streets or highways. But the I.A.T.A. rating and the European blacklist offer clues. ''I do like that,'' said Dr. Hofman of the European list. ''It's kind of like a Moody's bond rating, for airlines.'' HEADS UP: FOREIGN AIRLINES | Safety Records a Click Away |
1843167_1 | of Art in Ohio. He put together a distinguished collection of classical Greek ceramics that the J. Paul Getty Museum, then based entirely in Pacific Palisades, Calif., purchased in 1984. The collection included a superb sixth-century B.C. black-figure vase decorated with narrative scenes by an anonymous artist; such was Mr. Bareiss's standing as a collector that the artist is now referred to as the Bareiss Painter. Among non-Western fields, he embraced Japanese pottery and Chinese ceramics, but his outstanding contribution was to the appreciation and study of African art. His interest in that field was born early and indirectly. In 1948, as a member of MoMA's Young Collectors Club, he was asked by the museum's director, Rene d'Harnoncourt, to bid on the museum's behalf for several African pieces coming up for auction in Stuttgart, Germany. Mr. Bareiss's bids were successful, and his fascination with African art was settled. He later recalled being struck at the time by how little scholarly and critical attention had been given to the area, apart from noting its influence on artists like Picasso and Brancusi. For him, African art became increasingly meaningful on its own terms, as an aesthetic of the highest accomplishment and complexity. ''In my view it has had (and may indeed still have) a far greater influence on people than the philosophies and religions of Western Europe and the Near East or the Orient,'' he wrote in 1997 in the catalog for ''Kilengi: African Art from the Bareiss Family Collection,'' a traveling exhibition of the African objects he had acquired with his wife, Molly Stimson Bareiss, his longtime partner in collecting. He shaped their African collection of more than 800 objects in distinctive ways. Although its major concentration is work from Central Africa, particularly the Democratic Republic of Congo, it also makes significant forays into southeastern Africa, including Angola, Mozambique, Tanzania and Rwanda, largely ignored until that time by other collectors and museums. Mr. Bareiss's embracing and exploratory worldview was in part a product of his international background. Born in Tübingen, Germany, in 1919, he came to the United States in 1937. Starting in the 1970s, he lived more than half the year in Munich, where he ran his family's textile manufacturing business until it was sold in 1984. In Munich, he joined other collectors in founding the Galerie Verein, which was instrumental in building a collection of contemporary German art that | Walter Bareiss, 87, Dies; Specialist in African Art |
1838360_0 | An article on Wednesday about an analysis of studies on the effects of hormone therapy for menopause misstated the results of a study on the risks of taking estrogen alone as hormone therapy. Estrogen alone increased the risk of stroke; it did not also increase the risk of breast cancer. The article also omitted the name of the journal that published the analysis. It was the Journal of the American Medical Association. | Correction |
1838338_3 | moving a ton of soybeans from Mato Grosso to port was $88 in February, much higher than Brazil's $48 average cost for soybean transport, and nearly six times the average cost of $15 a ton in the United States, according to the Brazilian Vegetable Oils Association. ''We recognize that we are coming close to a real bottleneck,'' said Eduardo Bartolomeu, who runs logistics for Companhia Vale do Rio Doce, the large mining company and a major stakeholder in Brazil's railroad and port assets. ''The infrastructure in place isn't competitive over the long term.'' A dearth of railway and river options in Brazil has kept the trucks rolling. Brazil's government in January introduced a plan that would allocate more than $28 billion to improve transportation through 2010. The plans include adding 1,500 miles of rail, but it is not clear where the money will come from. ''A lot was said a few years ago about big partnerships between C.V.R.D. and China to boost the country's railroad infrastructure,'' a company spokesman, Fernando Thompson, said. ''None of those plans have gone forward, and we have no current discussions under way with Chinese companies'' on expansion. C.V.R.D. may help build a new north-south railway link, Mr. Bartolomeu said -- but only if it ''makes economic sense.'' For now, amid sharp competition for space on cargo trains, the company has reduced the soybean products it shipped by rail last year by 11 percent, to 5.8 million tons. The level was still more than double the soy that the company shipped in 2001. One key rail link that takes Mato Grosso beans to the São Paulo coast, which is operated by the logistics company América Latina Logística, has cut its soybean cargoes by around a third this year, forcing even more trucks into action, said José Luiz Glaser, the general manager for grains and oilseeds at Cargill Brazil. América Latina Logística denied reducing overall cargo on its railroad, and said its shipments of farm products, particularly sugar, had risen this year. As the rigs finally near Brazil's southern ports, they are sometimes thrust into long lines. The season's cooling afternoon showers come as no relief from the heat. Strict humidity limits on soybean cargoes mean that loading grinds to a halt during rains. ''Sometimes the worst lines aren't so bad for us,'' Mr. Requena said. ''When traffic is at a standstill, you can close your eyes.'' | A Bumpy Ride on a Brazilian Highway, and Long Waits at Either End |
1838374_2 | market for land, a competition between several different products for the same amount of land,'' said Sergio Barroso, president for the Brazil operations of Cargill, the biggest grain trader in the world. Brazil's soybean industry is losing acres to sugar cane for ethanol production in some areas, he said, and is competing with corn, cotton and cattle. ''If you put it all together between feed and food,'' Mr. Barroso said, ''it is going to be a tremendous challenge.'' Expectations ran high three years ago when Hu Jintao, the president of China, visited South America and toasted a strategic partnership with his Brazilian counterpart, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, predicting trade between the countries would double to $20 billion. China pledged $10 billion in investments. To some extent, Brazilians have been disappointed in the follow-up. The Chinese have struggled with red tape in Brazil and hesitated while waiting for Brazilian rules to activate public-private investments. ''Very little has happened,'' said Pedro de Camargo Neto, a former official in the agriculture ministry in Brazil who is now an agribusiness consultant. But China has continued its buying spree in Brazil. The soybean trade between the countries has exploded. Last year Brazil sent nearly 11 million tons of beans to China, a 50 percent increase from the previous year and nearly double the amount shipped in 2004. Early indications are that Brazil has produced yet another record crop, and analysts expect that China will devour most of it. While the United States remains the largest producer of soybeans, last year Brazil became the biggest exporter. This year the United States will regain the crown, but its soybean exports are expected to fall by 23 percent by 2009-10, according to the Agriculture Department. For all the gains here, though, the surge in exports to China has created unease among many in Brazilian agriculture, who worry the tightening relationship will accelerate a development model in which Brazil is too reliant on sales of raw natural resources rather than higher-value products. And after enjoying a trade surplus with China, Brazil slipped into a deficit in the most recent quarter as the Chinese stepped up shipments of manufactured goods. The challenge of supplying China is already showing signs of strain. A soybean boom has turned to a bust in the last two years for many farmers here in Mato Grosso, a state in western Brazil the size of | China's Appetites Lead to Changes In Its Trade Diet |
1837047_0 | Q: As a professor of cognitive science at Indiana University who spends his time thinking about the process of thinking, what do you make of Descartes's famed pronouncement, ''I think, therefore I am''? Who knows what that means? It's a tiny, little aphorism. You can interpret it any way you want and say, ''What a wise man he was!'' You first became known in 1979, when you published ''GÃ del, Escher, Bach,'' a campus classic, which finds parallels between the brains of Bach, M. C. Escher and the mathematician Kurt GÃ del. In your new book, ''I Am a Strange Loop,'' you seem mainly interested in your own brain. This book is much straighter. It's less crazy. Less daring, maybe. You really know how to plug a book. Well, O.K., I don't know. Questions of consciousness and soul -- that is what the new book was motivated by. You write movingly about your wife, Carol, who died tragically in 1993, and suggest that her soul remains embedded in your consciousness. You can imagine a soul as being a detailed, elaborate pattern that exists very clearly in one brain. When a person dies, the original is no longer around. But there are other versions of it in other people's brains. It's a less detailed copy, it's coarse-grained. You make it sound as if a soul can be Xeroxed. You can't duplicate someone exactly. I didn't say exactly. I said coarse-grained and approximate. Lower-resolution. Aren't you just putting a clever gloss on the phenomenon of memory? Many people believe that our lives end not when we die but when the very last person who knew us dies. Memory is part of it, yes, but I think it's much more than memory. It's the fact that my wife and I, for example, became so intimately engaged that her essence was imported into my brain. Why do you think you are still in mourning after all these years? She died when our children were so young. The chance to watch her children grow up was taken away from her, and that was the thing that absolutely destroyed me. In your book, you also discuss the souls of animals and your conversion to vegetarianism. I don't feel I have the right to snuff the lives of chicken and fish. What about mosquitoes? If a mosquito has a soul, it is mostly evil. So I don't | The Mind Reader |
1836980_0 | KAREKEN--Lynne Marcus, March 30, 2007, at age 70. Predeceased by her brother, David Marcus. She is survived by her loving husband of 46 years, Ronald; sons, David (Ann Kosobud) of Indianapolis, Jeremy (Gail Griffin) of NYC; grandchildren, Daniel, Michael and Benjamin; cousins, nieces and nephews. Lynne was a former soloist, Metropolitan Opera Ballet and former second Ballerina, National Ballet, Washington, DC. Funeral Services will be held in Rochester, NY. To leave a message of condolence, please visit: www.brightonmemorial chapel.com | Paid Notice: Deaths KAREKEN, LYNNE MARCUS |
1841510_3 | There are garden-variety sculptures from Roman baths and archaeological fragments more meaningful to specialists than to the rest of us, along with imperial portrait busts, funerary reliefs and the Badminton sarcophagus, whose reputation belies the fact that it's a bit over the top. The Met's Greek and Roman collection is enormous but not like the collections in Athens, Rome, Naples, London, Paris or Berlin, built around stupendous masterworks. You can say, though, that it tells the whole story. With the Greek galleries, finished eight years ago, Western antiquity from the Bronze Age through the reign of Constantine now unfolds in logical, stately order, as was intended from the museum's early days. Thousands of objects have been exhumed from storage (it's about time) and animated by new touch-screen computers (useful up to a point) and by air and sun. In total there are 57,000 square feet of exhibition space for classical antiquity, around 30,000 for Rome alone, equivalent to all the galleries at the Whitney Museum combined. You can exit Rome into African art then go directly into modern art, which depended on both Rome and Africa for utterly different ideas about the human body. That itinerary, richly detailed and arrived at over the years as the Met evolved, argues strongly for the universal museum -- the encyclopedic collection, modeled after Diderot -- a concept lately assaulted by lawyers, archaeologists and advocates of nationalism. I'm with the philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah on this score. Looted art, proved as stolen, must be repatriated. But only in a narrow legal sense does patrimony necessarily belong to modern states occupying lands where ancient cultures once were. The Taliban demonstrated how dubious that claim may be when they blew up the Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan. Respect for other cultures can come not just from returning an object to where it came from but also from ''holding onto it because you value it yourself,'' Mr. Appiah has written. My epistolary friend sent me a second e-mail message. In 1430, he pointed out, the Italian humanist and book hunter Poggio Bracciolini acquired some Greek sculptures by the great Polyclitus and Praxiteles. A head of Bacchus, Bracciolini told a fellow classical devotee, ''ought to feel grand, for if he deserves lodging anywhere it is certainly in my country, where he is particularly worshiped.'' Bracciolini even enlisted Donatello to check out his Greek collection. The point is that objects | Classical Treasures, Bathed in a New Light |
1841681_1 | a woman to give up her monthly menses,'' said Ronny Gal, an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein & Company. But if the new pill, called Lybrel, is approved, Mr. Gal predicts an onslaught of advertising meant to persuade women to do just that. The drug's maker, Wyeth, said yesterday that it was expecting F.D.A. approval in May, but has declined to discuss its marketing plans. The company's research shows that nearly two-thirds of women it surveyed expressed an interest in giving up their periods. That dovetails with the findings of similar research conducted by Linda C. Andrist, a professor at MGH Institute of Health Professions in Boston. ''We don't want to confront our bodily functions anymore,'' Ms. Andrist said. ''We're too busy.'' Doctors say they know of no medical reason women taking birth control pills need to have a period. The monthly bleeding that women on pills experience is not a real period, in fact. And studies have found no extra health risks associated with pills that stop menstruation, although some doctors caution that little research has been conducted on long-term effects. The topic has, however, inspired an hourlong documentary by Giovanna Chesler, ''Period: The End of Menstruation?,'' currently screening on college campuses and among feminist groups. Ms. Chesler, who teaches documentary making at the University of California, San Diego, said she became concerned about efforts to eliminate menstruation when she first heard about the idea several years ago. ''Women are not sick,'' she said. ''They don't need to control their periods for 30 or 40 years.'' The subject has also ignited a debate within the Society for Menstrual Cycle Research, a scientific organization that studies both the medical and social science of menses. In 2003, the group issued a position statement saying that more research was needed before women could make an informed choice about using pills that suppress their periods. That statement could be revised at the group's meeting scheduled for Vancouver, British Columbia, in June. Ms. Hitchcock, a director of the organization, said that although some research has been comforting, she remained concerned that medical science did not fully understand the long-term implications of interrupting women's periods. The same hormones that work on the menstrual cycles act in the brain, bones and the skin, she said. ''You need to think about whether there are consequences we don't know about for the whole body,'' said Ms. Hitchcock, who | Pill That Eliminates the Period Gets Decidedly Mixed Reviews |
1841511_1 | discussion included in the catalog (and, in part, on the gallery walls), the concept for ''Philosophy of Time Travel'' began not with a desire to recall acts of recent terrorism, but with a wish to create an installation that would symbolize the clash of African and Western cultures, a concept the artists thought appropriate for an exhibition at the Studio Museum. At first they considered displaying a Doric column (an emblem of Greek humanism) that had been smashed to smithereens by an Egyptian pyramid (to their minds a pan-African symbol). Egypt reminded one of the artists of Sun Ra, the African-American musician who combined Egyptology with space-age spiritual philosophies in his cosmic jazz. Sun Ra's ideas about space exploration (he claimed to have been descended from the inhabitants of Saturn) led them to ''Donnie Darko'' (2001), a film that involves giant rabbits, hallucinatory travels through time and space, a plane crash in which an engine falls out of the sky and lands on the roof of a house, and a book titled ''Philosophy of Time Travel.'' The artists can't agree on the moment they decided to use Brancusi's sculpture instead of the column and pyramid, but they all agree that their goal was to strip it from its context as a Modernist World War I memorial and drop it into a different time and space: to present new, liberating meanings and the possibility of nonstandard histories. The results are seven rhomboids, about the same size as the original, which appear to have torn through the gallery's ceiling, splintered the surrounding drywall and smashed into the floor, tearing the wooden floorboards into shreds. The giant forms are painted to resemble the cast-iron original and carved to look as if they have traveled at high speeds through space. The ones that have hit the floor resemble the front end of a totaled car. The collective succeeds in ridding ''Endless Column'' of its Modernist sanctity by turning it into something more akin to a Hollywood blockbuster than a memorial sculpture. The rhomboids, made of Styrofoam cubes covered with fiberglass and enamel paint, give the piece the look of a film prop. From one angle, the installation recalls the man-eating tyrannosaurus in Steven Spielberg's ''Jurassic Park.'' ''Philosophy of Time Travel'' seems to be more of a remix than a rupture: the obvious themes of the destruction of the father (here symbolized by Brancusi's masterpiece) | Riffing on Modernism: Through the Roof, Brancusi! |
1839697_3 | the ensuing uproar. In January, an assistant to Mr. Jennings used a gwb43.com account to circulate a document discussing Democrats who are being singled out for defeat in 2008. ''Please do not e-mail this out or let people see it,'' the e-mail read, adding, ''It is a close hold, and we're not supposed to be e-mailing it around.'' Other messages have brought scrutiny as well, including exchanges between Susan Ralston, a former assistant to Mr. Rove, and Jack Abramoff, the lobbyist convicted of corruption charges. Ms. Ralston apparently preferred to e-mail Mr. Abramoff and associates on her national committee Blackberry. In one exchange, Mr. Abramoff and a colleague worried about an e-mail message that wound up in the White House system. ''Dammit,'' Mr. Abramoff wrote, ''it was sent to Susan on her rnc pager and was not supposed to go into the WH system.'' At issue is how the White House complies with two seemingly competing laws. One is the 1978 Presidential Records Act, which requires the administration to ensure that its decisions and deliberations are ''adequately documented'' and that records flowing out of those decisions are preserved. The other is the Hatch Act, which prohibits federal officials from engaging in political business on government time. In order to comply with the Hatch act, the Clinton administration also permitted certain officials to hold dual e-mail accounts. But Bush White House officials say theirs is the first administration to operate in the era of instant communications. They say compliance has grown more complicated, and the White House rules have not kept pace with technology. As a result of their review, Mr. Stanzel and the senior official said the White House has put into effect a policy requiring, among other things, that officials with national committee e-mail accounts obtain permission for those accounts from the White House counsel's office. The new policy also requires officials with two accounts to sign a ''statement of understanding, saying they understand their obligations here and intend to comply with them,'' the senior official said. Asked if he had any evidence that officials were intentionally using the national committee accounts to circumvent record-keeping requirements, Mr. Stanzel said he had not interviewed White House aides about how they made decisions on e-mail accounts. ''I can't speak to people's individual e-mail practices,'' he said. ''I think the best we can say is were trying to do a comprehensive review.'' | Advisers' E-Mail Accounts May Have Mixed Politics and Business, White House Says |
1841220_3 | who runs the city's special education program, with 180,000 students, acknowledged that the program had been troubled until recent years by misclassification of children and ineffective approaches. But she said that four years ago, under Chancellor Joel I. Klein, new efforts were begun to step in as early as kindergarten with children struggling to read. More than half of all special-education students now spend most of their day in mainstream classes, and are pulled out or assigned to work with special-education teachers who go to the classroom. Phonics programs are more often used. ''We believe you shouldn't have to classify a child to give them the instructional help they need,'' she said. Some of the flaws Ms. Wernikoff pointed out were criticized years ago, but the city school system is a ship that takes ages to turn around. PEOPLE sometimes stereotype illiterate adults as children of the boondocks who left school to help on farms. But Carlos and Lissette are children of the Bronx, and finished high school with what was then known as a certificate of attendance and is now called an Individualized Education Program diploma. They were not counted as dropouts; nationally about half of learning-disabled students drop out. But the I.E.P. diploma is not accepted by most colleges, the military or employers seeking graduates. Graduates of special education often join the army of illiterate adults who clean houses, stock clothes or work with their hands. Lissette, a ponytailed single woman with a wide-eyed smile, worked at a Loehmann's clothing store, though she now lives off disability payments. She believes that infant meningitis impaired her, and as a young girl she was placed in occupational training classes. ''I didn't get the proper help,'' she said. ''They had me in the wrong classes with kids who were retarded.'' Carlos, a father of three grown children who has thinning hair and a goatee, works as a maintenance man at a nursing home. He started school before the federal disabilities law was passed in 1973, but eventually wound up in special education classes at DeWitt Clinton High School. ''At that time,'' he said, '' they put all the rowdy kids and the kids who are retarded all in one class just to get them out of the way.'' Until he began the Fisher Landau program five years ago, he would order foods in a restaurant ''if the picture looks good.'' He | Word by Word, the World Becomes a Little Less Mystifying for Illiterate Adults |
1845856_1 | dying each day is just plain wrong,'' said David Oot, a public health expert on the team that produced the Save the Children report, ''State of the World's Mothers: Saving the Lives of Children Under 5.'' Despite many hopeful stories, broad progress against infant and child mortality has flagged since international health agencies began a campaign to reduce deaths 25 years ago, the researchers concluded. By the end of the 1980's, global rates of child mortality had fallen 20 percent, and the lives of 12 million children were saved. ''Much of the momentum behind the child survival revolution has now been lost, and gains achieved in the 1980s and early 1990s have slowed or reversed,'' the report says. ''Under-5 mortality declined by only 10 percent from the early 1990s to 2000.'' Among the 60 developing countries where 94 percent of the child deaths occurred, 20 have either made no progress or have regressed, while 24 have cut death rates of children under 5 by at least 20 percent. Iraq experienced the most staggering rise in under-age-5 mortality -- 150 percent over 15 years. Since the war began in 2003, deteriorating health services, rising inflation and electricity shortages have worsened living conditions, the report said. In 2005, about 122,000 Iraqi children died before their fifth birthdays. In countries that progressed, a focus on family planning was central to progress, the report said. In the five countries that made the greatest strides in reducing child deaths -- Egypt, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Nepal and the Philippines -- women's use of contraceptives rose and fertility rates declined. In those countries, mothers were less likely to be physically depleted by having too many babies in too short a time. With fewer children, families were also able to invest more in the care of each child. Political will was also an essential ingredient of success -- and in Malawi, Tanzania, Nepal and Bangladesh was even more important than national wealth, the report found. Egypt, which has cut the death rate of children under age 5 by 68 percent since 1990, more than any other country, has shown a particular commitment to children's health, said the researchers at Save the Children, a nonprofit group, and other experts. ''In words and deed, Egypt has put children more at the center of their social agenda than most other countries,'' said Ruth Levine, author of ''Millions Saved: Proven Successes in Global | Report on Child Deaths Finds Some Hope in Poorest Nations |
1845903_2 | or in their clothes that screeners often miss. Deploy at every airport checkpoint multiview X-ray machines that automatically rotate passengers' carry-on bags so screeners can see them from every angle, improving their ability to spot concealed weapons. Install explosive-detection technologies at every airport checkpoint to spot trace explosives on passengers' bodies and bags. Redouble efforts to develop technologies to detect liquid explosives. Inspect 100 percent of the cargo in passenger planes. Ensure that only Americans work at airports and that all workers are screened each time they approach a checkpoint, hangar, tarmac or similar area. Seaports Inspect (ideally before they reach our shores) 100 percent of the cargo ships bound for United States ports for radiation to detect any concealed weapon of mass destruction. Borders Triple the number of Border Patrol Agents, and supplement their efforts with sensors, cameras and unmanned aerial vehicles that are actually deployed and work. End the visa-waiver program, which enables terrorists to reduce their chances of being caught at legal ports of entry by using passports from visa-waiver countries like Britain and France to bypass the scrutiny that visa applicants have to undergo. Rededicate the Department of Homeland Security to the goal of adding an exit feature to the automated border entry system, so we know whether terrorists who slipped into the country have left. Mass Transit Provide money for mass transit authorities to deploy armed police patrols, bomb-sniffing dogs and technology, surveillance cameras, public awareness campaigns and random bag searches permanently, not simply during heightened states of alert. Intelligence Ensure that the intelligence community provides the Department of Homeland Security with any information concerning threats against the country and that the department disseminates that information quickly to relevant state and local government officials, first responders and private businesses. Preparedness Ensure that, in the event of an attack, there is a clear chain of command among the federal, state and local governments; interoperable communications among first responders; supplies of food, water and medicine; and clear, workable evacuation plans. It is only a matter of time before another catastrophic attack is attempted. The sooner we take the steps outlined above the less likely such an attempt is to succeed. Clark Kent Ervin, the former inspector general of the Department of Homeland Security, is the director of the Homeland Security Initiative at the Aspen Institute and the author of ''Open Target: Where America Is Vulnerable to Attack.'' | Answering Al Qaeda |
1845905_4 | province's most distant extremes. The Democratic Unionist leader, the Rev. Ian Paisley, once said that he would be ready for talks only ''when you marry Christ to Beelzebub.'' So what happened? Did he and Sinn Fein's Gerry Adams just grow up? Were they able to understand the terror of fathers and grandfathers -- that our children might one day become as bad, or as conflicted, or as confused, as us? Is today's swearing-in ceremony the final, inevitable triumph of reason over hatred? Hardly. The victories of peace aren't as immediate as those of war. It is difficult to imagine the members of the Assembly's opposing parties shaking hands and agreeing on the colors of the flowers for the Easter parade. It will be a long, rocky road. Parts of the North are still separated by 50-foot-high ''peace'' walls. More than 90 percent of public housing is segregated, and research has shown that even 3-year-olds still display sectarian instincts. But in the aftermath of so many decades of violence, children are out in East Belfast scrubbing the walls free of political graffiti. Fierce enemies are shaking hands. Prisons, like the infamous H-Block, have been torn down. There is no greater moment in war than the end of it. The vague dream of getting older, for politicians and terrorists and even children, is that we can somehow still become better people. As much as anything, the move toward devolution is a glimmer of hope for the rest of the world -- if it can happen in Northern Ireland, it's possible that it can happen anywhere. Palestine. Sri Lanka. Iraq. One of the reasons that center holds is that no one politician, or party, or popular figure is trying to own the peace. It is an international agreement that owes as much to the vision of political leaders as it does to the thousands of mothers and fathers who have brokered it from the inside. The questions of this generation of children are yet to be shaped. With luck and vision, the ''Why?'' will be said with a bewildered look backward rather than with a horrified glance about. For a nation that has shouldered so much for so long, the possibility of no more needless small white coffins is almost answer enough. Op-Ed Contributor Colum McCann, a professor of creative writing at Hunter College, is the author, most recently, of the novel ''Zoli.'' | Sounds of Silence in Northern Ireland |
1844443_1 | a clinical professor of psychiatry at Weill Medical College of Cornell University. To the Editor: Your article about ''chemo brain'' brings up two points: post-chemotherapy neurotoxicity is just a part of a constellation of issues that we as oncologists are helping our patients cope with; and let's stop using the term ''chemo brain,'' since many women find it offensive. The American Society of Oncology is developing guidelines for cancer survivorship that will deal with these issues in a systematic, evidence-based manner. What we are doing at our hospital is going one step further and developing protocols that include preventive interventions at the time of initial diagnosis to see if we can attenuate the effects of chemotherapy, sudden hormonal changes and depression, which often coexist. We hope that our efforts can translate into refinement of those guidelines. We must also remember that cognitive impairment affects men and children, too. Anthony F. Provenzano, M.D. Chief, Medical Oncology Lawrence Hospital Center Bronxville, N.Y., April 29, 2007 To the Editor: It is one thing for physicians to ignore unfamiliar symptom constellations. It is another to project a lack of information (the ''illusions'') onto patients and to diagnose ''delusions.'' The use of psychiatric labels as default diagnoses (somatization, anxiety) carries with it some unimaginable penalties. These include harmful medical interventions; social stigma and loss of familial support; reductions in medical insurance coverage; and inability to qualify for disability. Such misdiagnoses are also a disservice to psychiatry, a branch of medicine in dire need of positive signs for diagnostic validity rather than reliance upon an absence of data. The phrase ''I don't know'' leads to research, which ultimately provides answers. It also does no harm to the patient. Hippocrates had the right idea. Barbara Rubin Hartland, Vt., April 29, 2007 To the Editor: You say breast cancer survivors complaining of cognitive difficulties after chemotherapy ''were often sent home with a patronizing 'There, there.' '' You quote Dr. Daniel Silverman, a researcher at U.C.L.A., as saying, ''Until recently, oncologists would discount it, trivialize it, make patients feel it was all in their heads.'' As an oncologist who has treated many such patients, I believe that both statements are unfair and that most oncologists have not been callous to patients with these problems. It is no surprise that chemotherapy drugs with multiple other serious side effects can also affect cognitive function. The lack of successful therapy for this | Chemotherapy and the Brain |
1844372_2 | for thousands of years, and produces half of the world's crop, but inadequate infrastructure and pest quarantines have limited its exports to less than 1 percent of the global mango trade. Besides hoping for lucrative sales to affluent expatriates, Indian mango growers are eager to export to the United States because they are proud of their country's signature fruit. The average farm is small, and most owners have not benefited from the boom in India's service sector. A United States Agency for International Development program is helping growers to improve agricultural and marketing practices. The Indian exporters' optimism may be foiled by the brutal cost of flying mangoes halfway around the world. None of the major United States mango importers, who have close ties with their Latin American suppliers, seem interested in Indian sources. Now is peak season for Mexican mangoes, which provide 60 percent of the United States supply, and typically are inexpensive, 50 cents a pound wholesale -- about a tenth what the Indian fruit might cost. ''I think the price is going to be an issue,'' said Erwan Landivinec of Baldor, a distributor to high-end markets in New York. Shipments could be less expensive by sea, but the fruit might not survive the 18-day journey. Florida mango growers long ago imported trees or seeds of the best Indian varieties, including Alphonso, but these varieties don't grow well in the state's humid climate. The main Florida varieties originated from Indian stock, however, and imports of these fruits, which are now grown in Latin America, dominate the United States market. About five years ago Citrofrut, a large Mexican juice processor, planted Alphonsos to add color and flavor to its mango purée. This experiment raises the possibility that moderately priced, unirradiated fresh Alphonsos eventually might be available from Mexico. ''We'd grab that in a second,'' said Bill Gerlach of Melissa's World Variety Produce, a national specialty wholesaler. Some public health advocates oppose irradiation of produce, claiming that it causes harmful chemicals, but this use has not yet become as contentious as irradiation of meat, which applies a higher dose and serves a different purpose, to sterilize bacteria. The Food and Drug Administration and the World Health Organization endorse food irradiation as safe. Dozens of studies have found that the effects of irradiation on mango quality vary markedly by dose, variety and ripeness at treatment. Overall, the process delays ripening, extends | A Luscious Taste and Aroma From India Arrives at Last |
1844372_3 | price is going to be an issue,'' said Erwan Landivinec of Baldor, a distributor to high-end markets in New York. Shipments could be less expensive by sea, but the fruit might not survive the 18-day journey. Florida mango growers long ago imported trees or seeds of the best Indian varieties, including Alphonso, but these varieties don't grow well in the state's humid climate. The main Florida varieties originated from Indian stock, however, and imports of these fruits, which are now grown in Latin America, dominate the United States market. About five years ago Citrofrut, a large Mexican juice processor, planted Alphonsos to add color and flavor to its mango purée. This experiment raises the possibility that moderately priced, unirradiated fresh Alphonsos eventually might be available from Mexico. ''We'd grab that in a second,'' said Bill Gerlach of Melissa's World Variety Produce, a national specialty wholesaler. Some public health advocates oppose irradiation of produce, claiming that it causes harmful chemicals, but this use has not yet become as contentious as irradiation of meat, which applies a higher dose and serves a different purpose, to sterilize bacteria. The Food and Drug Administration and the World Health Organization endorse food irradiation as safe. Dozens of studies have found that the effects of irradiation on mango quality vary markedly by dose, variety and ripeness at treatment. Overall, the process delays ripening, extends shelf life, and is gentler than the hot water dip used on most imported mangoes to kill pests. Whether or not Indian mango imports succeed commercially, it seems likely that irradiation will soon become a common treatment for many tropical fruits. Facilities in Hawaii and Florida that treat modest quantities of produce have been the primary irradiated sources for the United States so far, but a huge Mexican irradiation facility is expected to start operation in a year. Arved Deecke, general manager of Phytosan, the company building the plant, said irradiation will be cheaper than the hot water dip, and that he plans to treat a quarter of Mexican mango exports by 2012. Thailand likely will be sending irradiated fruit to the United States within a year, and several other countries have applied to do it or have inquired about it. Moreover, the Food and Drug Administration is proposing new rules that would no longer require irradiated foods to bear the international radura symbol, if they are not ''materially changed'' by irradiation. | A Luscious Taste and Aroma From India Arrives at Last |
1844455_1 | gather for potluck dinners at the Masonic Lodge. ''As Latin America lowered its own barriers to trade and investment, its firms began to look at the world in a very different way,'' said Robert Pastor, vice president for international affairs at American University in Washington and a former adviser on Latin America to President Jimmy Carter. ''Now Latin America is not just a destination, but an originator of capital and investment.'' Samba is not exactly a hit here in Wilton, but a Brazilian-owned steel company, Gerdau Ameristeel, has become one of the two biggest employers in town, importing a new management style and fresh capital to modernize and expand an old mill and temper a tough American labor union. Since arriving in the United States in 1999, Gerdau has swiftly acquired an empire of 17 mills across 11 states, to become the nation's fourth-largest steel producer. Similarly, in the last couple of years the Mexican company Cemex has emerged as the No. 1 supplier of cement and ready-mix concrete in the United States, with almost 10,000 employees across the country. The Brazilian oil company Petrobras has become one of the biggest players in deep-water exploration in the Gulf of Mexico, using techniques developed in its own ocean waters. ''It's a trend that is clearly growing, and we see it multiplying year after year,'' said Jerry Haar, a business professor at Florida International University who is an expert on the multi-Latinas. ''These companies need to expand into new markets because they have reached market saturation at home, just as Wal-Mart has done here.'' There are no official estimates of how many Americans work for Latin American companies in the United States, but experts say it could be as many as 100,000 out of the five million people who work here for foreigners. Direct foreign investment from Mexico, Central America and South America rose from a tiny base of $8 billion in 1995 to $13.5 billion by 2000, but then jumped more sharply to $30 billion in 2005, according to the Commerce Department's Bureau of Economic Analysis. Analysts and government officials who track foreign investment say that number is continuing to rise rapidly. One recent example of that growth is Cemex's $14 billion deal to buy the Rinker Group, an Australian construction supply company with large operations throughout the United States. Bush administration officials say that they welcome the trend. ''An open | New Accents in the U.S. Economy; Latin American Companies Make Big Gains North of the Border |
1844394_3 | with residents. Their umbrella group is the Education Finance Council, which offers a Borrower Benefits Book, Outreach Book and Financial Aid Guides, at www.efc.org/cs/root/resources/resources. The federal Department of Education also offers a guide to student loans: ''Funding Education Beyond High School,'' which is available at www.studentaid.ed.gov/students/publications/student--guide/2006-2007/english/index.htm. Students should also look for different ''borrower benefits'' that lenders offer, like interest rate reductions after on-time payments or as a reward for using direct debit from a bank, experts said. But Mr. Kantrowitz, who has a financial aid Web site, FinAid.org, warned that one late or missed payment could cancel the discount. He advised students to seek an upfront waiver or an origination fee rebate. Justin S. Draeger, a spokesman for the National Association of Financial Aid Administrators, said students should seek private loans that mirror federal loans as much as possible, including allowing an extended repayment if the borrower becomes unemployed or returns to school. Commercial online sites, like SimpleTuition.com and eStudentLoan.com, allow students to compare loan options for both federal and private loans. But doing this is not so easy, Mr. Shireman said. He used SimpleTuition.com to compare rates for borrowing $10,000 in private loans over 20 years. Student Funding Group LLC advertised a 7.27 percent rate, but when Mr. Shireman completed the paperwork, the best rate was 8.75 percent plus a 4 percent origination fee, despite his excellent credit score. ''The actual rate was between 9 percent and 10 percent,'' Mr. Shireman said. Sergio E. Sotolongo, head of Student Funding, based in Liberty Corner, N.J., maintained that its loan rates were ''credit sensitive so the best credit score could result in a zero origination fee and a rate that floats quarterly.'' He said that currently that would be 7.27 percent. Mr. Shireman's second search came up with a 7.875 percent loan from Sun Trust Banks Inc., which had advertised an ''as-low-as rate'' of 7.28 percent. But the site did not mention the federal Stafford loans, with their top rate of 6.8 percent, he said. SimpleTuition's listings did include federal PLUS loans, with a 7.92 percent interest rate. Although that rate was higher than those listed on private loans, Mr. Shireman said it was a fixed rate, a point that the Web site did not make clear. This, he said, ''is a critical and potentially expensive distinction,'' pointing out that with the federal loan, students know exactly what they will pay | Try Shopping Around For Student Loans |
1850883_0 | The tires whine, and sometimes they moan. Sometimes they send up a whistle I don't even hear until it stops. Now and then the asphalt runs smooth and true. But mostly the interstate is a series of discontinuities -- a sharp thump as we hit a shallow overpass, a few miles partly paved with recycled rubber, a long sequence in western Nebraska where the tires make the sound of the special effects in Walter Mitty's mind. And then there is Omaha, where the freeway looks smooth but is really a dozen heavily corrugated miles that must drive the truckers insane. In imagination, Interstate 80 is a single line, the shortest practical distance between San Francisco and New York. To be at any one point on that line is to feel the length of the whole, as if the only here that matters is the here you come upon when you're finally there. I get so used to watching the landscape zoom past us that I lose track of the fact that we're the ones zooming along while the landscape stays perfectly still. I think of that when we come to the Nebraska grasslands. A windmill is pumping water into a stock tank surrounded by cattle. The grass is bent low. These are reminders that the wind is more than just the breeze of our passing, the bucking windstorm that follows a semi. This is a native wind, quartering down stiffly out of the northwest. This is the wind that everyone who lives here learns to live with. Whenever I drive across country, I carry a single question with me, and I ask it over and over again. Could I live here? It's natural enough, I suppose -- a central question for a species whose habitat is defined as much by imagination and emotion as it is by strict biological constraints. It's a question that raises the matter of time as much as place. Cutting across central Wyoming, I look up a draw and see a sheltered spot under the hills where the sagebrush breaks into grass, and I think, ''I could live there.'' And I could, now, because living anywhere has been made so easy in our time. It's no longer really a problem of physical limits -- how far you have to haul water and salt and flour, how long you can go without company. But what I'm really | Pondering Some Old, Familiar Questions on the Road Across Country |
1850912_0 | The odd thing is that conservatives wear pinstriped suits. They love the ancients so much that they really should be walking around in togas. The main contribution of the Greeks to modern American politics may have been Michael Dukakis, who once climbed the Acropolis in wingtips. But that doesn't stop conservatives -- especially the Straussians who pushed for going into Iraq -- from being obsessed with ancient Greece, and from believing that they are the successors to Plato and Homer in terms of the lofty ideals and nobility and character in American politics -- while Democrats merely muck about with policies for the needy. Harvey Mansfield, a leading Straussian who taught political science at Harvard and who wrote a book called ''Manliness'' (he's for it), gave the Jefferson lecture recently at the National Endowment for the Humanities in Washington. It was an ode, as his book is, to ''thumos,'' the Greek word that means spiritedness, with flavors of ambition, pride and brute willfulness. Thumos, as Philip Kennicott wrote in The Washington Post, ''is a word reinvented by conservative academics who need to put a fancy name on a political philosophy that boils down to 'boys will be boys.' '' In his prepared remarks, Mr. Mansfield did not mention the war, which is a downer at conclaves of neocons and thumos worshippers. But he explained that thumos is ''the bristling reaction of an animal in face of a threat or a possible threat.'' In thumos, he added, ''we see the animality of man, for men (and especially males) often behave like dogs barking, snakes hissing, birds flapping. But precisely here we also see the humanity of the human animal'' because it is reacting for ''a reason, even for a principle, a cause. Only human beings get angry.'' The professor used an example, naturally, from ancient Greece to explain why politics should be about revolution rather than equilibrium: ''What did Achilles do when his ruler Agamemnon stole his slave girl? He raised the stakes. He asserted that the trouble was not in this loss alone but in the fact that the wrong sort of man was ruling the Greeks. Heroes, or at least he-men like Achilles, should be in charge rather than lesser beings like Agamemnon who have mainly their lineage to recommend them and who therefore do not give he-men the honors they deserve. Achilles elevated a civil complaint concerning a | How We're Animalistic -- In Good Ways and Bad |
1850813_0 | AT a symposium on Spanish cuisine last November, I anticipated two days of deconstructed, itsy-bitsy food, the hallmark of molecular cuisine that has captivated top chefs worldwide. But amid the clouds of garden soil foam (no lie) and quivering plates of clam jelly, what captured my attention was the sweetly pungent perfume that wafted from the food station of María José San Román, chef of Monastrell in Alicante. It was the aroma of the dried crimson stigma of the purple crocus sativus linnaeus -- saffron. Ms. San Román, who cut a striking figure in her black chef's tunic, served me a small plateful of papas bravas, a traditional Barcelona tapa of garlicky potato cubes. In the manner of a matador executing the fatal estocada, I impaled one of the potato pieces on a toothpick, swirled it in a plate of olive oil infused with the smoky paprika pimentón, and then dipped it in allioli, the Catalan term for aioli. The taste was peppery, floral and creamy, with an edge of garlicky sharpness. But all of these flavors were extended, elevated and focused by a touch of saffron. Next, she offered a tray of almond meringues, each one the size of a half-dollar. They were light and crunchy with a nutty sweetness. Again, the bright tastes were harmonized by saffron. ''It's the only spice that you see, you smell, and you taste with such power,'' she said at a well-attended seminar she gave the next morning, as she poured a packet of saffron threads into her hand. She inhaled deeply and a beatific smile brightened her face. That power can make saffron the most intimidating spice in your kitchen, but, as I found from cooking with saffron, its power dictates a sparing hand. Even Ms. San Román, while doing research to help Spanish scientists at the University of Castile-La Mancha redevelop Spain's saffron industry, found that many cookbooks call for too much saffron. ''When I began looking at recipes,'' she said, ''and saw the amounts of saffron called for I realized they were basically all wrong. They'd call for two grams for a flan. You could make 60 servings of flan with two grams!'' As she proceeded with a cooking demonstration for the symposium, at the Culinary Institute of America's Greystone campus in St. Helena, Calif., she showed how such a tiny amount can have a significant impact. The trick lies | Saffron Power: Yellow, Yet Not Necessarily Mellow |
1846527_3 | correct most of these problems, many of these children are still left with a lifetime of significant illness. This is on top of the myriad other problems that are realized to some degree in all Down syndrome children. Medicine is often said to be ''in the business of putting itself out of business'' by promoting preventive care, including prenatal testing. For those who would not choose to terminate under any circumstance, there is no need to obtain testing, but for those who would like to know and possibly terminate (90 percent, according to the article), these tests are invaluable, should be made available to all and may help individuals possibly avoid a very significant life-changing illness. Gil Herzberg, M.D. Larchmont, N.Y., May 10, 2007 To the Editor: What happens to these children once parents are no longer available to care for them? What percentage of Down syndrome adults can live independently and earn a decent living? While raising a child with this syndrome can be a positive experience, it is crucial that future parents approach the decision of giving birth to such a baby with a realistic view of the entire life cycle: both that of inevitably aging parents and that of an aging adult with Down syndrome. Marion Hunt Chapel Hill, N.C., May 9, 2007 To the Editor: The parents you interviewed echo what attitude research has shown for 50 years: that people with intellectual disabilities continue to be challenged by the public's misperceptions and limited expectations. A national survey recently conducted by our center conclusively demonstrated that the American public believes that most people with intellectual disabilities are moderately impaired and dependent on others for their daily care. In reality, approximately 85 percent of people with intellectual disabilities, including Down syndrome, are mildly impaired and capable of a wide range of self-help and independent living skills. Unfortunately, the prognoses that doctors give to parents are often informed by misperceptions, leading parents to believe that a child with a disability can never achieve the quality of life demonstrated by the children in your article. To help parents and policy makers make informed decisions about these issues, an appreciation for the wide range of competence among people with intellectual disabilities is critical. Gary N. Siperstein Boston, May 10, 2007 The writer is a professor and director of the Center for Social Development and Education at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. | To Raise a Down Syndrome Child |
1849320_1 | first major exhibition about antiquity,'' Andrew S. Ackerman, the museum's executive director, said in an interview, ''and the first time we've displayed ancient archaeological artifacts.'' Those antiquities, ranging from coins to a sixth-century-B.C. amphora, or vessel, with an image of Athena driving a chariot, were borrowed from the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. It is pure serendipity, museum officials say, that the show is opening only a month after the renovated Greek and Roman galleries just across Central Park at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. But while the two museum experiences are in some ways complementary, the Children's Museum says it intends to provide a context to make visits to the Met more understandable. Mr. Ackerman recalled one child in his research group who asked, ''Didn't the Greeks do anything more than make statues?'' He hopes the show will answer that question. ''Our goal was not to separate art from history from science from philosophy,'' he said. ''Traditionally, when you go to an art museum, you only see art. At a history museum, only history. But in ancient Greece, it was all of a piece. We wanted that holistic experience.'' The comprehensive approach is apparent in the four sections of the exhibition, which focuses on two main periods: the late Bronze Age (about 1500 to 1200 B.C.) and the Classical period (about 480 to 323 B.C.) The first area, ''The Gods of Olympus,'' includes a video introduction to Greek culture narrated by Zeus, Poseidon and Athena, whose tall painted figures preside. The space also includes digital quizzes about the gods and a chance to play what is essentially a game of 20 questions with Aristotle, a talking bust. The second, ''Growing Up Greek,'' introduces the household and the gymnasium, or school, with stations that explain the importance of weaving (there is a real loom to try) and the society's emphasis on physical fitness: two mechanical hands on pedestals invite children (and curious adults) to arm-wrestle. The ''Odyssey'' section opens with the huge Trojan horse, whose multilevel interior is open for climbing. Some of the subsequent journey is then presented in physical form -- like the cave of Polymephus (the Cyclops), with fuzzy animatronic sheep that bleat when children crawl under them, as Odysseus did to escape -- and some in digital form, like a game that presents situations from the Odyssey and asks players to choose among | A Voyage to Olympus For Young Mortals |
1850658_0 | Over the years, many people have tried to simulate the winds of hurricanes and measure the effects. They have set up model wind tunnels. They have used the equivalent of airbags to simulate wind gusts. They have even used jet engines. But according to Stephen P. Leatherman, director of the International Hurricane Research Center at Florida International University, it can be difficult to get real-life results if your wind tunnel is so small you have to scale buildings down to the size of a birdhouse. ''You can't scale gravity,'' Dr. Leatherman said. ''You can't scale shingles and learn about how they are failing.'' So he and his colleagues are ''bringing the hurricane into the lab,'' as he put it, with an array of two fans, each 17 feet in diameter with a 1,000-horsepower-plus motor. The machine also has a water feature, to reproduce the effects of storm-driven rain. Financed by the State of Florida, the equipment can produce 120-mile-per-hour winds -- the equivalent of a Category 3 hurricane. The goal is to use the machine to determine with precision how buildings fail during storms. Scientists have long drawn conclusions about storm survivability by surveying wreckage and noting which buildings fell and which stood. ''But when you see a building that's torn apart,'' said Dr. Leatherman, who has done such surveys, ''you can't always see why it failed.'' At a weather conference last month in Nassau, Bahamas, Dr. Leatherman said he and his colleagues hoped to use the fans to see which components in a typical house fail first, how the failure of one component affects the stability of others, and what kind of retrofitting would improve things. At the conference, he played a film showing the effects of the fan array on a modest house: As the fans started to whir, shingles flew off the roof, windows shattered and the door blew open. ''We put tape on the windows,'' he recalled. ''That was useless. Wind flow blew the windows out. It started blowing furniture around. We ran it with the water on: at 10 minutes at 100 miles per hour, the paint was bubbling. A couple days later we came back and there was mold all over the place.'' With additional financing from RenaissanceRe, a reinsurance firm in Bermuda, Dr. Leatherman is hoping to create a six-fan wall of wind, to simulate even more devastating effects. | With Hurricanes in the Lab, They Can Blow the House Down |
1849611_2 | and possibly a hotel. ''The train is now moving down the tracks,'' said Larry A. Silverstein, the 76-year-old developer who had leased the World Trade Center complex six weeks before the Sept. 11 attack. The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which owns the land at ground zero and built the trade center, will get about $870 million from yesterday's settlement, which is to go toward the cost of erecting the $3 billion Freedom Tower, the tallest and most symbolic skyscraper planned for ground zero, as well as the retail space at the complex. Mr. Silverstein will get the remaining $1.13 billion for three large office towers to be built along Church Street, between Vesey and Liberty Streets. As part of the deal, the Port Authority and Mr. Silverstein had to relinquish their claim that the companies owed more than $500 million in interest resulting from delays in making the payments. The insurers, in turn, abandoned their claim that they did not owe the money until the project was completed, in 2012. Despite the insurance dispute, there has been some activity at the 16-acre trade center site. Hundreds of construction workers are laboring on the Port Authority's $2 billion PATH train station and the foundation of the Freedom Tower. The authority expects to turn over the eastern portion of the site to Mr. Silverstein at the end of this year so that he can begin building. He completed a nearby tower, 7 World Trade Center, last year. ''Look how far we've come in the last year,'' Mr. Silverstein said yesterday. ''A year ago today, we opened 7 World Trade Center, a huge success and a validation of downtown as a world-class business district. We've started construction on the Freedom Tower. We reached an agreement on who would build what and when. And now we have the resources to rebuild as quickly and spectacularly as possible.'' Mr. Spitzer said the agreement, which ends all the litigation, was a collaborative effort on the part of many officials who had lost ''patience with the ongoing fighting that didn't serve the public interest or the effort to rebuild.'' Officials and real estate executives involved in the negotiations said they had asked the administration of Governor Spitzer's predecessor, George E. Pataki, to have the state's insurance superintendent become involved in the settlement effort, but that it never happened. That changed in late March | INSURERS AGREE TO PAY BILLIONS AT GROUND ZERO |
1849556_0 | The police in southwestern China arrested 28 people for instigating riots over family planning controls over the weekend, but officials were also dispatched to the affected regions to ''deal with complaints'' about the area's strict measures to enforce limits on family size, state news media said Wednesday. Seven towns in a rural part of the Guangxi autonomous region erupted in violence over heavy fines and other measures to impose tighter family planning controls in the area, the official Xinhua news agency said in its first report about the unrest that began late last week. As many as 3,000 people stormed government offices, overturned vehicles, burned documents and confronted officials, the news agency reported. It did not mention whether there had been deaths or injuries. Residents said in earlier telephone conversations that tens of thousands of people had participated in riots and that as many as five people had died, including several officials involved in family planning work. The unrest stemmed from an unusually intensive two-month campaign to collect steep fines and prevent births over quota in Guangxi, a part of the country that had loosely enforced population control measures in the past, the news agency said. According to accounts posted on the Internet by villagers and witnesses, officials were requiring health checks for women and forcing pregnant women who lacked approval to give birth to undergo abortions. It was one of the largest episodes of violent protest over family planning policies in recent years, and it underscored continued tensions over the country's top-down efforts to limit the growth of its population, which stands at 1.3 billion. Huang Shaoming, chief of Bobai County, the area where most of the violence occurred, attributed the outbreak to ''backward ideas about birth control and the rule of law'' among the people he governs, according to comments carried by Xinhua. But he also said, ''It's also possible that problems exist in the government's birth control work, which led to the frustration of the people.'' He promised to address popular complaints while also pushing ahead with stricter enforcement of the regulations. Meanwhile, the police in the area said they had arrested 28 people they accused of fomenting violence and promised to ''punish such obvious violations of the law,'' Xinhua reported. | Chinese Police Arrest 28 in Riots Against Family Planning Laws |
1849583_3 | embrace the Islamic Republic. The mullahs, in a very personal, Iranian way, have replied. Since the Germans and the French first introduced the idea of ''constructive engagement'' with Tehran in the early 1990s, Iran has consistently checked any Western effort to have a meaningful ''dialogue of civilizations.'' Little harmless things are possible -- Western scholars attending academic conferences; Western-Iranian sporting events that the mullahs care little about -- but nothing that challenges the regime's core beliefs and mission. The humbling of the United States remains the raison d'être of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's children, who still see themselves as the vanguard of a militant Islamic world. Since the summer of 1999, when Iran's reformist student movement was crushed by the security services, European investment in Iran has grown rapidly, by the tens of billions of dollars. As the money flows in, the clerical regime has harassed and murdered lay and clerical dissidents, exiling some of its most trenchant critics abroad or sending them to jail. Expanding commercial contacts, the Europeans had argued, was supposed to open up Iran and moderate its leadership. Messrs. Baker and Hamilton, and much of the ''realist'' camp in the Democratic and Republican Parties, have essentially made the same argument. The clerical regime, however, knows what Italian city-states and the Ottoman Empire knew well: you can trade with and concurrently try to vanquish your enemy. Europeans and many Americans are enraptured by the idea that commerce and capitalism make friends out of enemies, a view that conveniently allows one to spend less on defense and practice a more friendly foreign policy. Advocates of engagement don't want to see that for Iran's ruling clergy there is no fundamental contradiction between seeking trade deals with Boeing and Exxon and also bombing American troops in Saudi Arabia, abetting the movement of Al Qaeda's holy warriors (see the 9/11 commission report) and exporting explosive devises to Iraq to kill American and British soldiers. Many Iranians feel ashamed about the Islamic revolution's violent excesses, which were particularly bad 25 years ago when I was a student of Mrs. Esfandiari and her husband, Shaul Bakhash. However, the two never failed to point out the basic decency and beauty of their homeland and of the men and women who made the Iranian revolution. Now the revolution's ugliness has again pre-empted the country's goodness by brutalizing a woman who has done as much as any | Prisoner of Her Desires |
1849579_1 | e-mail that was flagged as spam. Mr. Madlener's company was guilty by association, as are many companies that use outside e-mail service providers that offer shared servers. ''It happens a lot,'' said Shar VanBoskirk, senior analyst with Forrester Research. ''There's so much spam out there and it's so expensive to manage that even big I.S.P.'s simply can't handle the volume.'' Several years ago, Gary Bevers, the current group publisher for National Petroleum News Magazine, created an e-mail newsletter for his previous employer and sent it out to a list of names he had bought from a reputable marketing company. Unfortunately, the list was old, and only 600 messages out of 10,000 made it through to the intended recipients. The rest were returned as invalid. Because so many e-mails bounced back as addressee unknown, his company's I.P. address was branded a spammer. It looked as though he had sent messages to random names and addresses even though he had bought what he thought was a solid permission-based list. ''It was a simple weekly newsletter with advertising, and we had advertisers complaining that they weren't even getting the newsletter,'' Mr. Bevers said. As Mr. Bevers and Mr. Madlener can attest, getting on a blacklist was easy but getting off was another matter. It can take time and perseverance to be unblocked, said Stefan Pollard, director for consulting services at the e-mail service provider EmailLabs, based in Menlo Park, Calif. ''You have to be constantly reviewing and monitoring your bounce logs and looking for the messages that say you've been blocked. The messages will provide the name of the list that's blocked you and why,'' Mr. Pollard said. ''Then you have to go to that list that's blocking you and follow their directions about how to get off. It's going to take diligence and hard work.'' For example, if a company is using a purchased list or an affiliate list -- an e-mail list provided by a marketer -- it will have to, at minimum, sever ties with the affiliate or provide the name and contact information for the list owner. If a company is working with its own list, it will have to provide proof of what is known as legitimate opt-ins, a record of how, when and where each person on the list signed up to receive e-mail messages from you. Sometimes, a company is blocked because its e-mail server is | When They Say You Are a Spammer |
1849513_0 | Q. I'm tired of granite countertops. What are some alternatives? A. It is surprising that most high-end kitchens are finished off with slabs of granite when you consider the multitude of countertop materials available. There is a lot to like about granite, but there are many other options that offer different looks and performance characteristics. Your choice should depend on ''what you want to do with your countertop,'' said Andrew Dent, vice president of Material ConneXion, a material library and consulting company that helps designers find new products. Every material has pros and cons; Dr. Dent advised looking for one that is nonporous, stain-resistant, hard and durable, with solid color all the way through (unlike laminate), in case it is nicked. For those hoping to add color to a kitchen, Dr. Dent recommended composite materials like Corian, which combine acrylic polymers with mineral additives to create extremely tough surfaces in a range of colors, from off-whites to brilliant mandarin ($40 to $80 a square foot installed; corian.com). Although Corian was introduced by DuPont 40 years ago, designers continue to experiment with it because it is a versatile product that can be worked into custom shapes. Other composites like Zodiaq ($45 to $90 a square foot installed; zodiaq.com), also by DuPont, and Silestone ($70 to $100 a square foot installed; silestoneusa.com) use quartz as the mineral component to create an even harder surface. Many of these composites look like stone, and they come in a wide variety of colors and patterns. If you are searching for a material with a feeling of warmth, take a look at countertops made out of recycled paper. The source material may be surprising, but the finished product -- compressed paper sealed with resin -- is surprisingly durable. PaperStone ($30 to $60 a square foot; kliptech.com) and Richlite ($85 to $110 a square foot installed; richlite.com), which was originally developed for skateboard ramps, Dr. Dent said, are two of the most popular recycled paper countertop products on the market. Or you could try Counterfeit, a material made from shredded decommissioned dollars ($80 to $85 a square foot; shetkastone.com) produced by a company called Shetkastone. If you prefer natural stone, but want something less common than granite, consider soapstone. There are two main varieties available: an extremely soft stone used for sculpture, and a harder stone used for architectural installations. Vermont Soapstone sells the latter for use | ROOM TO IMPROVE |
1847679_2 | the case that many high school courses are not providing the necessary quality that he described. ''Course titles don't matter nearly as much as what is taught and how it is taught,'' said Michael Cohen, president of Achieve, a Washington-based organization that works with states on academic standards. ''There is tremendous variation in what is taught in a course called Biology or Algebra 2.'' Kati Haycock, director of the Education Trust, another Washington group that advocates setting standards, said she finds many schools not offering challenging work. ''When you look at the assignments these kids get, it is just appalling,'' she said. ''A course may be labeled college-preparatory English. But if the kids get more than three-paragraph-long assignments, it is unusual. Or they'll be asked to color a poster. We say, 'How about doing analysis?' and they look at us like we are demented.'' Other researchers have also found problems with high school rigor. A study released last year by the National Center for Educational Accountability in Austin, Tex., for example, found that a majority of low-income students who received credit for a college-preparatory curriculum in Texas needed remediation when they got to college. Chrys Dougherty, the center's research director, said the ACT report showed that the problems found in Texas were widespread, and that ''many high school students are not learning the content implied by the titles of the courses in which they are enrolled.'' The ACT report also found that students who took more courses than the minimum core performed better on their exams and had a higher chance of doing well in college. Even then, however, college readiness was not assured. But the report said high school students should not have to take more advanced courses to be well prepared after graduation. A rigorous set of core courses should achieve that, they said. With so many high school students not fully prepared for college-level work, some critics say that the continuing push to expand the Advanced Placement Program, which offers college-level work to high school students, is misguided. In 2000, Education Secretary Richard W. Riley announced a goal of having every school in the nation add an Advanced Placement course each year for the next decade. Even before that, the program was mushrooming, with the number of exams given nearly doubling since 2000. But it is questionable whether increased access to Advanced Placement courses has expanded college | Study Finds College-Prep Courses in High School Leave Many Students Lagging |
1847765_2 | executive suite.'' A good way to find interns is through universities, he said. ''It is a personal reward to an employer to be a mentor,'' Mr. Sullivan said. ''You feel like you make a difference in someone's life.'' ''Interns have an opportunity to network, develop relationships and gain experience,'' Mr. Sullivan said. He got his start in accounting during college as an unpaid intern for a solo practice in upstate New York. Stefanie Seidel, an intern who was mentored by Mr. Sullivan, returned to the firm after graduating from the State University of New York at Oneonta in 2006. ''I can recommend it to anyone in any field if they have an opportunity to do an internship,'' she said. In college you learn the technical aspects of your profession, she said, and in the internship you learn the human aspects, relating to the people at the firm and to the clients. HIRE RETIREES -- A business wanting the most efficient, experienced professional available as a summer vacation replacement can often consider its own retirees, said Avery E. Neumark, a partner in the New York accounting firm Rosen Seymour Shapss Martin & Company. Many welcome a brief return to the work force. ''If the ideal person is not available,'' Mr. Neumark said, ''look for anyone else in the field.'' Asking professional contacts for referrals helps to both find the best people and avoid fees that temporary-help agencies charge, he said. EMPLOY YOUR CHILDREN -- Family-owned businesses can realize both personal and monetary rewards by employing their children, said Sidney Kess, a New York lawyer and accountant. The money you pay them stays in the family, and there are large tax advantages. The children also get an early introduction to the business, helping both generations to decide whether the children will enter the business and one day run it. He recommended keeping time records as evidence that the work was done, and said that wages cannot exceed the going rate for the work. Because the standard income tax deduction is $5,350 this year, a child can earn that much without owing any tax, and if she files a W4 form (available at irs.gov) saying on Line 7 that she does not expect to owe any tax, no withholding is required, Mr. Kess said. If the child puts money into an I.R.A., she could earn up to $9,350 and owe no tax. CHOICES | Time for Iced Tea And Summer Internships |
1847706_0 | To the Editor: Re ''Clean Power That Reaps a Whirlwind'' (''The Energy Challenge'' series, Business Day, May 9): There are problems with the Clean Development Mechanism, to be sure. The most troubling aspect of it is not that China has used it effectively, but that it has so far failed the countries, like those in Africa, that will be hardest hit by climate change. Given that any tenable solution to reducing carbon emissions will be market-based, it is past time to propose solutions to make the C.D.M. work for the countries that have been cut out of it to date. That is just what we at the Center for American Progress, in a commitment to the Clinton Global Initiative, have been doing for the last year. By putting interested investors into direct contact with African governments with attractive project possibilities, we are determined not just to lament the shortcomings of the current system but also to overcome them. John Podesta Tom Daschle Washington, May 9, 2007 The writers are, respectively, president and chief executive; and distinguished senior fellow at the Center for American Progress. | U.N. Emissions Program |
1844283_0 | Early in the 20th century, the safeguarding of food at American ports often amounted to inspectors from the Food and Drug Administration prying open containers of molasses or sugar and examining them for mold or insect parts. The F.D.A. has come a way since then. But not much more. Last year, inspectors sampled just 20,662 shipments out of more than 8.9 million that arrived at American ports. China, which in one decade has become the third-largest exporter of food, by value, to the United States, sent 199,000 shipments, of which less than 2 percent were sampled, former officials with the agency said. Now, as F.D.A. inspectors travel to China to investigate the source of contaminated pet food that has killed at least 16 dogs and cats and sickened thousands of others, critics in Washington are warning that the agency is woefully understaffed and underfinanced to keep America's food supply safe. ''The public thinks the food supply is much more protected than it is,'' said William Hubbard, a former associate commissioner who left in 2005 after 27 years at the agency. ''If people really knew how weak the F.D.A. program is, they would be shocked.'' Globalization and new manufacturing capabilities have changed the makeup of the food that Americans put on their table. Food processors in the United States are buying a greater number of ingredients from other countries, becoming more of an assembler in the nation's food supply chain. ''With globalization, American food processors are turning to less-developed countries to get food ingredients because they can get them so much more cheaply,'' Mr. Hubbard said. To be sure, the F.D.A. has a number of procedures aimed at identifying problems with imported foods. Last year, the agency visually inspected over 115,000 shipments in addition to sending samples of over 20,000 shipments to a laboratory for analysis. Still, the number of food inspections has lagged even as the number of food imports has shot up in recent years. Shipments more than doubled to an estimated 9.1 million this year from 2000, and are more than four times what they were in 1996. They have also doubled in value to $79.9 billion since 1996, according to the United States International Trade Commission. Congress is scheduled to tackle the agency's financing issues and food-safety concerns as part of a broader hearing today of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. The F.D.A. employs | Food Imports Often Escape Scrutiny |
1848122_0 | Giorgio Cavaglieri, an architect who took his fascination with how buildings and cities change over time from his native Italy to New York, where he helped start and define the city's preservation movement, died on Tuesday in Manhattan. He was 95. His nephew Andrew Tesoro announced the death. Mr. Cavaglieri designed airfields for Mussolini's army; worked with Rosario Candela, the renowned designer of luxury Manhattan apartment buildings; and won many awards. But his best-known work is probably the Jefferson Market Library in Greenwich Village, which he restored in the mid-1960s. That building was saved after preservationists had been unable to stop the demolition of Penn Station, and the project is generally regarded as the first real instance of successful historic preservation in New York City. The battle to convert what had been a courthouse, considered the city's premier High Victorian Gothic building, was led by Margot Gayle and other preservationists. But it was Mr. Cavaglieri's work to restore -- he used the word refresh -- the building that made the dream reality. He began with four years of preliminary study, then integrated modern library facilities, like air-conditioning, elevators and furniture, into the turreted Victorian fantasy. He carefully differentiated old details and new ones. He took countless photos to ensure accuracy in replacing a stained-glass window and carved black walnut doors. But features he designed as new -- rather than copied -- were contemporary in material and style. The new entrance to the old circular stair tower, for instance, was through a sleek glass door set into the old carved limestone. The most striking addition was a stark catwalk above the main reading room. During the time he was working on the Jefferson Market building, Mr. Cavaglieri also altered the old Astor Library at 425 Lafayette Street into Joseph Papp's Public Theater. He opposed freezing the past in time, and some of his solutions were innovative: his 1983 renovation of a row of town houses on Madison Avenue, for example, involved a dramatically stylish red granite front. Christopher Gray, who writes the ''Streetscapes'' column in the Real Estate section of The New York Times, wrote that today's preservationists would almost certainly see this as an insult to the original design. Mr. Cavaglieri told Mr. Gray, ''I don't think it would be wise or right to interpret the opinion of a dead man.'' Mr. Tesoro, also an architect, said his uncle was | Giorgio Cavaglieri, Urban Preservationist, Dies at 95 |
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