_id stringlengths 5 10 | text stringlengths 0 2.9k | title stringlengths 0 2.44k |
|---|---|---|
1848130_1 | all the way down,'' said J. F. Maxwell, who has surveyed the lower Mekong. ''China is all wrecked.'' Until recently it was war that saved the turtles, but it is peace that threatens them now. For decades this 30-mile strip of river was a refuge for Khmer Rouge guerrillas, the armed remnants of the regime that cost the lives of 1.7 million people from 1975 to 1979. The area became accessible when the guerrillas disbanded at the end of the 1990s. As a no man's land it offered a haven for rare plants and animals that have fallen victim to development in safer places. ''It's an emergency to get this place preserved, because if it goes there's nothing to replace it,'' said Mr. Maxwell, who is curator of the Chiang Mai Herbarium in Chiang Mai, Thailand. ''They've had their war, they've killed their people, and the second generation is coming in now,'' he said of the Cambodians. ''Motorboats are coming up the river, people are moving in, and no one is controlling this.'' In the natural course of things, two or three of the released baby turtles will survive, grow into giants the size of a sofa and live for as long as a century, almost all of it buried under the sand, Mr. Emmett said. Or they will all die, victims of overfishing, pollution and environmental degradation, bringing their endangered species closer to an end. ''These things have survived the extinction events that wiped out the dinosaurs and now we're going to wipe them out,'' said Mr. Emmett, a wildlife biologist based in Cambodia. ''Look, we can't let them go extinct now.'' The huge and little-studied Cantor's turtle (Pelochelys cantorii) seems to have already disappeared from the neighboring countries of Vietnam, Thailand and Laos. It was last spotted in Cambodia in 2003, and nobody knew until now whether it still survived. In March a team that included Conservation International, the Cambodian government and the conservation group WWF, formerly known as the World Wildlife Fund, made the first survey of the area since it became safe to explore and found it teeming with the diversity of a complete ecosystem. ''The existence of such an extensive area of natural habitat that still borders the Mekong is almost unthinkable,'' R. J. Timmons, a bird and mammal expert, wrote in a report for the WWF. He called for the creation of a haven | How to Survive in Cambodia: For a Turtle, Beneath Sand |
1848129_2 | now shipped by sea to China and Europe. It would also provide a shortcut for Russian oil and other natural resources transported to South Korea. Such a rail system would save South Korea $34 to $50 a ton in shipping costs, said Lim Jae-kyung, a researcher at the Korea Transport Institute. But creating such a system, transportation analysts and government officials say, would require years of confidence-building talks and billions of dollars in investment in North Korea's decrepit rail system. Officials acknowledge that North Korea will probably have to give up its nuclear weapons and improve its human rights record before it could attract significant investment from South Korea or international development aid. Six-nation talks aimed at ending North Korea's nuclear weapons programs have been stalled for months. ''I cannot understand why we should give rice, flour, fertilizer and everything else the North Koreans want when they don't do anything for us,'' said Hong Moo-sun, 71, one of a dozen South Koreans protesting just outside Munsan Station on Thursday. The protesters were calling for North Korea to return their relatives, among the hundreds of people taken to North Korea after the war and believed to be held there against their will. Members of the Grand National Party, part of the conservative opposition, called the event on Thursday a ''train of illusion'' organized to draw voters' attention in an election year. South Korean officials say a trans-Korea railroad would invigorate inter-Korean trade, which tripled to $1.35 billion last year from $430 million in 2000. It would also bring cash to North Korea, which could collect an estimated $150 million a year in transit fees from trains that pass through its territory, Mr. Lim, the researcher, said. But procuring international aid to renovate the rail network and letting trains from one of Asia's most vibrant economies, carrying exports and tourists, rumble through its isolated territory could threaten the North Korean government, experts say. They say North Korea now relies on keeping its people ignorant of the outside world to maintain its totalitarian grip on power. Both Koreas agreed in 2000 to reconnect their rail systems, which had been severed by aerial bombing during the war. It took three years to relink the tracks on the west and east ends of the border. After four more years of haggling and delays, the North Korean military agreed this month to allow the one-time test | North and South Send Trains Across the Korean Frontier |
1848493_1 | a new airport in nearby São Joao del Rei, the locals will likely see more foreign visitors in the region, which is dotted with historic hamlets that line the Estrada Real, an 18th-century route through mountains and forest established by the Portuguese crown for the transportation of gold, silver and diamonds. (Minas Gerais means ''general mines.'') Town merchants and hoteliers -- many of them transplanted artists and professionals from other parts of Brazil and South America -- told me they were pleased about the new airport, but no one seemed overly enthusiastic. They welcome tourism; they just don't want to see Tiradentes overrun. And they've been remarkably successful at fending off the hordes. Although the town hosts an international film festival every January and one of Brazil's best culinary festivals in August, most travelers to Brazil still overlook Tiradentes, gravitating to the beaches in the northeast or to Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. And for years, the only people who bothered to seek out the village at all were art aficionados and history buffs. They came to see the religious sculptures carved by the Baroque master Antonio Francisco Lisboa in a whitewashed stone church, Matriz de Santo Antonio, which dates from 1752 and sits at the highest point in the village. Or they came to honor Joaquin Jose da Silva Xavier, the martyred independence leader after whom the town was named. Xavier, a local dentist, was known as Tiradentes, ''the tooth puller.'' There are monuments to him everywhere; restaurants and hotels are named for him; and the date of his execution, April 21, 1789, is commemorated every year as a national holiday. Remarkably, in the years since I began coming here, things don't look much different. There have, in fact, been several openings -- small inns and pousadas, or guesthouses, along with a handful of restaurants and antique shops. But every new place is discreetly housed in one of the village's terra-cotta-roofed cottages, freshly whitewashed and given a colorful trim. The village still remains one of the best preserved and most historic in South America. Indeed, local residents regularly pack village council meetings to convince politicians not to pave certain roads or throw open the region to mass tourism. These days, the biggest issue before the council is a bill to ban vehicles from the winding, narrow cobblestone streets. In Tiradentes, where residents still hang tin buckets on their | Village Vanguard |
1848552_2 | about the modern book, which is a hybrid of materials. My book is one consistent material throughout. But why would anyone want to hold a book with plastic pages? Think about a catalog that was printed on polymers. You get the L.L. Bean catalog, and you can put it back in the mail so that the plastics industry can dissolve it. In that case, why stop with catalogs? Why not just have people deposit their L.L. Bean clogs and parkas in the mailbox when they get tired of wearing them? Patagonia will take back their boxers and long underwear to return them to a polymer, based on an idea I originally had. In other words, the mailbox is the new garbage can. Right. It eliminates the concept of waste. And it engages the postal system as part of the recycling process. It means that nothing has to be junked. It means life after life. If we were to look at this from a psychological perspective, how would you explain your obsession with waste? I was born in Tokyo -- my father was an importer-exporter. I remember at 2 o'clock in the morning, ox carts would come into the city and take out what they called the ''night soil.'' Meaning sewage? Yes. I don't know why we talked about it all the time. My mother talked about it -- what happens to the poop. At night, out went all the waste and then, in the morning, the carts would come in from the farms with the tofu and the meat and the vegetables. So waste equals food for me. What kind of equation is that? Did you think the waste was magically transformed into food? It was. The waste was taken to the farms as fertilizer, which fed the soil, which fed the plants and animals, which fed us. Which became the basis of your zero-waste approach to the universe? I wouldn't use that phrase. If I said zero waste, then it makes it sound like I don't like waste. I love waste! Great. Make sure you tell that to Steven Spielberg, who I hear bought the rights to ''Cradle to Cradle'' and is making a documentary about you. I can't talk about it. Can you recycle that answer into something better, please? Not everything needs to be recycled. DEBORAH SOLOMON THE WAY WE LIVE NOW: 5-20-07: QUESTIONS FOR WILLIAM MCDONOUGH | Calling Mr. Green |
1848490_2 | topics relevant to world peace on the anniversary of Lincoln's oration. The clear message was that those who perished at Gettysburg had given their lives not only to restore the Union but also to support the peaceful resolution of conflicts into the future, and on a global scale. Since this concept was consistent with the postwar ethos that had given rise to the United Nations, it stood to reason that the building would be designed in a similar modern idiom. The decision to demolish the Cyclorama Center was made in 1999. Efforts to preserve it have been led by groups including the World Monuments Fund, the Recent Past Preservation Network, Docomomo and Preservation Pennsylvania. It is not hard to fathom why the Park Service has turned a deaf ear. Neutra was from Venus. Gettysburg's place on the map of history was inscribed by Mars. In this sense, and only this sense, those who favor demolition are being responsibly contextual. Those who favor demolishing the structure draw from the same inventory of clichés that often appear when someone wants to annihilate a modern building: the building is functionally obsolete, architecturally undistinguished, inappropriate to its site and so on. I don't doubt that people believe these things. Fifty years ago, when people wanted to tear down Beaux-Arts buildings, they believed they were white elephants. The preservation movement emerged, in fact, to protect us from beliefs that become entrenched with changing taste. More to the point, we are living in Martian times. A Park Service capable of selling books that present a creationist view of the Grand Canyon is unlikely to look favorably on a structure designed to deter the prospect of an apocalyptic End of Days. A Martian would be particularly suspicious of Neutra's building, because its Venusian character is spatially coded by the design itself. The Cyclorama Center takes its name, location and part of its shape from the panoramic 1884 painting of the Battle of Gettysburg, by the French artist Paul Philippoteaux. The painting is now being restored and will be reinstated in the new visitors' center. Placed within the round concrete drum, it depicts Pickett's Charge as an observer might have witnessed it were he standing near the very spot where the drum rises today. The 360-degree canvas is a stirring example of military site-specific art, with its galloping steeds, riders contorted with purpose and pain, and clouds of | The Talk: Icons; Martial Plan |
1848793_2 | react quickly, remain popular, there are now huge games run in online virtual worlds. World of Warcraft, for instance, has millions of players around the world who must organize themselves into teams to accomplish complex tasks. In some online games like EVE, these teams are actually called companies, and the politics involved would impress the most cutthroat executive. The emergence of these complex role-playing games inspired the formation of Seriosity, which sells e-mail software. A Stanford communications professor, Byron Reeves, was a co-founder of the company in 2004, and, two years later, received $6 million from Alloy Ventures. Mr. Reeves and an Alloy partner, J. Leighton Read, met poolside, and while their daughters practiced their swimming, they discussed whether work would not be better if it were more like a video game. Early this year, Seriosity released a beta version of an e-mail add-on called Attent, which is being tested by about a dozen companies, some in the Fortune 500. Attent takes the idea of a virtual currency, common in online games as well as online worlds like Second Life, and applies it to corporate e-mail. Employees assign one another ''Serios,'' the currency in Attent, for ideas, completing tasks and so on, and use them to help distinguish their e-mail from normal corporate spam. Over time, Attent users can gain not only Serios but also badges of excellence for, say, linking engineering and marketing, much as public skills rankings are widely used in online multiplayer games. Others in the company can see the badges, and presumably tap those people for help when they need it. Right now, Attent doesn't look much like a video game, and it will probably never have a dramatic, colorful three-dimensional appearance. But Mr. Reeves noted that virtual economies were key to most online games, and that Attent would help companies assign value to the collaborative aspects of work. ''Right now, we barter our attention and our willingness to attend a meeting, and we barter feedback and credit in collaborative groups, and it's just not very efficient,'' he said. Executives may find that software is not the most valuable thing they can get from video gaming. Jane McGonigal, an affiliate researcher and resident game designer at the Institute for the Future, said she had done research that showed the qualitative advantages companies gain when they hire gamers, including an enhanced ability to innovate rapidly and collaborate | Why Work Is Looking More Like a Video Game |
1848794_0 | As the strains of ''Pomp and Circumstance'' dissolve into the past and the latest batches of college graduates issue forth into the work world, they can expect a warm welcome from the nation's employers. Some companies might view these new graduates as ''cheap labor,'' but in general it is more polite to use the term ''entry-level workers.'' Employers intend to hire 19.2 percent more new college graduates than they did last year, according to a recent poll by the National Association of Colleges and Employers. And for a lucky few who are trained in a high-demand field, the salaries will be anything but cheap. Web developers, petroleum engineers and pharmacists (with master's degrees) are among those likely to command higher pay right out of the gate, according to Challenger Gray & Christmas, the outplacement firm. Another hot field (though it doesn't pay as well) is ''forensic accounting.'' In other words, all the financial transgressions of recent years have at least provided new jobs for aspiring young accountants. PHYLLIS KORKKI OPENERS: THE COUNT | Hiring Outlook Shows There Is Life After Finals |
1848800_15 | paved road, potable water or treatment plant,'' he says. ''This kind of stand-still situation cannot be justified anymore.'' But some conservationists contend that Jalisco coast could attract low-impact, environmentally friendly tourism by building so-called eco-resorts like the Ecolodge in Costa Rica. The Ecolodge is situated in a 1,000-acre private nature reserve in a lowland tropical rain forest; guests sleep in bungalows, and recreation -- centered around the rain forest and the nearby ocean -- includes hiking, bird watching and kayaking. Similar lodges, increasingly popular among families, can be found in Panama, Ecuador, Chile and Peru, said Héctor Ceballos-Lascuráin, an eco-tourism consultant and environmental architect in Mexico City. ''Foreign tourists are spending $250 to $300 per night at these places, and they are located in or on the border of protected areas,'' he says. ''But Mexico is promoting the same mass beach tourism. These public servants here don't understand what eco-tourism is about. I have given up on talking to them.'' Mr. Marcaccini says he believes that the Hernández project will allow other resorts to be built near the biosphere reserve, tipping the ecological balance there. He notes that in 1992, the developers succeeded in building the El Tamarindo Golf Resort, a swank oceanside facility 40 minutes south of the reserve with a 2,000-acre golf course and several villas with private swimming pools and Jacuzzis. Indeed, Semarnat recently authorized a group of other developers to build another golf resort, La Tambora, just north of the Hernández project. La Tambora will spread across 1,684 acres and will feature an 18-hole golf course and clubhouse, a 100-room boutique hotel, three beach clubs, a wedding facility, a new airplane hangar, a helicopter pad and horse stables. Mr. Marcaccini has the same withering view of La Tambora that he has of Marina Careyes: ''It will be like a vampire sucking up all the resources.'' And he says he believes that Marina Careyes is opening a door to development run amok in the biosphere. ''This world will become one giant garbage can one day,'' he says. Ms. Goldsmith, sitting by her pool, slices into a mound of fresh mozzarella cheese from her estate's organic farm, and opines on La Tambora and Marina Careyes. ''It's greed, greed and more greed,'' she says. ''This, at a time when everybody knows what's going in the world with climate change and how important it is to keep the trees. I | Who Controls Paradise? |
1850333_13 | cool.'' -- Roberto C. Goizueta Coke is now available in more than 200 countries, the result of an aggressive global expansion that began in 1906 in Cuba, Panama and Canada. Today, about 70 percent of Coke's sales are overseas. In the first quarter this year, Coke's volume growth in China was 17 percent; in its Eurasia division, which includes Eastern Europe, India and Russia, volume increased 16 percent. Coke officials say they have turned around problematic markets like Japan, India, Nigeria and Germany. But on Coke's global map, the United States remains a glaring black spot that is not only embarrassing, but could potentially infect other markets around the globe. The United States, together with Canada, generates 21 percent of the company's profits. Last year, Coke's overall beverage sales in the United States were flat, and soft-drink sales were down slightly. In the first quarter this year, Coke's overall United States sales were down 3 percent. And it could get worse. Consider, for example, what is happening at a McDonald's restaurant on the corner of 13th and Woodlawn in Wichita, Kan. The experiment does not look like much -- just two unmarked coolers behind the front counter. But what's inside the coolers is a surprise, because McDonald's has always given Coke preferential treatment: not only are there Coke products like Dasani and Powerade, but there's also Mountain Dew, Lipton Green Tea and Gatorade, each made by Pepsi. McDonald's installed the coolers during the last year in about two dozen restaurants, mostly in Kansas and Missouri, after it realized that a growing number of customers were buying their Big Macs and Chicken McNuggets and then heading elsewhere for drinks. Besides the coolers, the test-market McDonald's are also offering free ''flavor shots'' that allow customers to personalize drinks. ''It's really about us selling more beverages,'' said Karen Wells, McDonald's vice president for strategy in the United States. ''Everything we've heard so far is very positive from our customers.'' Coke remains the first choice of McDonald's and is working closely with the hamburger chain on the test marketing. But Ms. Wells said that consumers would ultimately decide McDonald's beverage choices -- a view that threatens a cozy relationship that began in 1955 with a handshake between the McDonald's legend Ray A. Kroc and a Coke executive guaranteeing that Coke drinks would be given preference at the hamburger chain. Indeed, Coke still dominates the | Does Coke Need A Refill? |
1850471_1 | Plans Have a Similar Theme'' (May 20) suggests that the suburbs are being favored over the cities. The problem with this analysis is that it looks only at the percentage increases in spending (and not current allocations), and it pays no attention to the source of the revenues that support this increased spending. As at present, the cities will receive much more aid per student under the proposed new state aid programs, while the suburban towns are disproportionately the source of income tax revenues that fund those aid programs. Given the need and distribution of income, this is not unreasonable. But both new budget proposals you describe rely on tax increases. According to estimates of tax and aid increases, residents of suburban towns like Madison can expect to pay about 10 times as much in increased personal income taxes as their communities would get back in increased school aid. To suggest that, under such a formula, ''the cities are losing badly'' reflects the assumption that ''the government'' pays for programs. It does not. Taxpayers do, and it is critical to examine the source of tax revenues before drawing conclusions about who benefits from increased government spending. Peter G. Coffey Madison To the Editor: What's wealthy, privileged and white all over? Given the legislature's two school aid plans, it's Connecticut's suburbs. What's at the heart of both plans is an effort to make the wealthy suburbs even wealthier at the expense of our cities. After reading the Westport first selectman's ''we're grateful'' comment, one wonders if our elected officials aren't more servants of greed than servants of the people. But their moral bankruptcy shouldn't come as a shock. Eight years ago the legislature identified 28 schools as ''failing.'' Guess where the schools were located? In the state's poorest cities. To ''fix'' these schools, they proposed no additional funds, only admonitions that the impoverished communities must ''work harder'' because, as one legislator (who by the way is still in office) told me, ''We're not going to throw good money after bad.'' Only when public pressure from urban centers intensified did the legislature add new aid. Two years later those funds were quietly withdrawn. Today's ''political reality,'' to paraphrase the quoted lobbyist, defines the same historical reality: continue to advantage the already advantaged while blaming those most in need. Michael James New London The writer is a professor of education at Connecticut College. | Cities, Suburbs And School Aid Plans |
1850349_1 | a person compared with $6,096 in the United States -- come anywhere near matching the richest country in the world? Statistics from the World Health Organization, the C.I.A. and other sources all show that the people of Cuba and the United States have about the same life expectancy -- 77 years, give or take a few months -- while infant mortality in Cuba is significantly lower than in the United States. Of course, many people regard any figures about Cuba as at least partly fiction. But even if the longevity statistics are correct, they are open to interpretation. Carmelo Mesa-Lago, a professor emeritus of economics at the University of Pittsburgh, said statistics also show that Cuba has a high rate of abortion, which can lower infant mortality rates and improve life expectancy figures. The constant flow of refugees also may affect longevity figures, since those births are recorded but the deaths are not. Despite such skepticism, many medical experts say they do believe that average Cubans can live as long as Americans, and the reason may lie in a combination of what Cuba does well and the United States does poorly, if at all. Dr. Robert N. Butler, president of the International Longevity Center in New York and a Pulitzer Prize-winning author on aging, has traveled to Cuba to see firsthand how doctors are trained. He said a principal reason that some health standards in Cuba approach the high American level is that the Cuban system emphasizes early intervention. Clinic visits are free, and the focus is on preventing disease rather than treating it. Dr. Butler said some of Cuba's shortcomings may actually improve its health profile. ''Because they don't have up-to-date cars, they tend to have to exercise more by walking,'' he said. ''And they may not have a surfeit of food, which keeps them from problems like obesity, but they're not starving, either.'' Cuban markets are not always well stocked, but city streets are dotted with hot dog and ice cream vendors. Bellies are full, but such food can cause problems in the future, as they have in the United States. Dr. Butler has just completed a study that shows it is possible that because of the epidemic of obesity in children, ''this may be the first generation of Americans to live less long than their parents.'' There could be one great leveler for Cubans and Americans. While | 'Sicko,' Castro and the '120 Years Club' |
1850183_1 | the same time last year, more bears are turning up in residential and commercial neighborhoods and cities this spring because the bear population is growing, Mr. Rego said. There are an estimated 300 black bears in the state, he said, up from fewer than 50 in the late 1980s. Twenty years ago, fewer than 100 sightings were reported annually; last year, there were more than 2,000. ''The bears are returning to the state,'' Mr. Rego said. ''Connecticut has had a regrowth of forest, so there's now a suitable habitat for them.'' Since May 24, 2006, the rural town of Granby has had the most sightings in the state, with 140, followed by Sherman, with 117, Brooklyn, 100, and Barkhamstead, 99. West Hartford has had nine bear sightings in the last year, and Hamden has had six. Other cities and well-populated towns that have had sightings include Bristol, 17, and Danbury, 6. Only bears that appear unable to return to forested areas are tranquilized, Mr. Rego said. They are then relocated to state land that is considered a proper environment for them, he said. ''We try to minimize the distance that we move them,'' he said. ''Over the years, most of the bears have been moved less than 10 miles. We know bears often wander great distances shortly after they're released. So the release location really isn't that important.'' State officials recommend that residents avoid intentionally feeding bears and urged homeowners to remove potential food sources by taking down bird feeders, storing garbage cans inside a garage or shed and picking up scraps of pet food, barbecue leftovers or fruit that falls to the ground from trees. Dogs should be kept on leashes, and livestock should be moved inside at night. ''As the bear population increases, conflicts with humans are inevitable,'' Dale May, the department's wildlife director, said in a statement. ''If bears find food rewards near homes, they can become habituated and lose their fear of humans.'' Black bears rarely attack humans, environmental officials said, and can often be scared away by loud noises. Mr. Rego said he expected black bear sightings to increase. ''There's nothing limiting the population,'' he said. ''The only mortality we've documented is bears being hit by cars.'' Officials asked that sightings be reported through the D.E.P.'s Web site, www.ct.gov/dep, or by calling (860) 675-8130 on weekdays or (860) 424-3333 at night and on weekends. WILDLIFE | Bear Sightings Rising In Residential Areas |
1847499_2 | organizations and activists are lining up behind proposed federal legislation that would give most workers the right to seven paid sick days annually to take care of their medical needs or those of their families. The legislation, sponsored by Senator Edward Kennedy and Representative Rosa DeLauro, would require employers with 15 or more workers to provide the sick days. Among the organizations pushing for paid sick days is the Public Welfare Foundation in Washington, which recently approved a $1 million ''special initiative'' on the issue. Deborah Leff, the foundation's president, noted that it's the poorest workers who most often are forced to choose between going to work sick or losing a day's pay, and that a disproportionate number of those workers are women -- many of them with children. ''At least 145 countries have paid sick days,'' said Ms. Leff. ''The United States is the only industrialized country lacking such a policy. Our goal is to change that.'' An overwhelming majority of Americans favor paid sick days for full-time workers. One poll showed that 95 percent of workers find it ''unacceptable'' for employers to deny sick days to workers. But the Kennedy-DeLauro legislation is facing a tough road. As one might imagine, the industries that would be affected are ice-cold to the idea. The response of Cracker Barrel Old Country Store to my inquiries on this issue is illustrative. A spokeswoman said in an e-mail message: ''Because employees working in the restaurants have flexible schedules, they can schedule doctors' appointments and other appointments that sick leave and personal time are generally used for at times when they are not working. ''If employees need to miss a shift due to illness, there are generally many opportunities to make up that lost shift later in the week, or the next week.'' That is the kind of workplace policy that prompts Debra Ness, the president of the National Partnership for Women and Families, to note that ''for millions of workers, getting sick can mean the beginning of an economic disaster.'' Allowing a worker to recuperate from an illness, or take care of a sick child, without suffering undue economic hardship should be a matter of basic humanity and fundamental decency. It should not be politically controversial in a country that considers itself the most advanced on the face of the earth, and that babbles incessantly about the importance of family values. Op-Ed Columnist | The Right to Paid Sick Days |
1847572_2 | positive tests for synthetic testosterone stand for themselves. This case is different in at least one respect: USADA is opening one of its hearings to the news media for the first time, at Landis's request. A room with about 100 lawyers, reporters, witnesses and members of the public watched a summary from both sides regarding the biggest doping case in recent history. Young told the three arbitrators in his opening statement that there were only two questions he had to answer during the 10-day hearing. ''One, does this meet the criteria for a positive test?'' Young said. ''And two, are these analytical results reliable?'' He added, ''Not only does this instrument hit the bull's-eye inside, it hits the bull's-eye outside in the wind.'' Young said Landis had failed a test not just once, but eight times, for synthetic testosterone. Seven of his backup samples tested retroactively by the French lab showed that each had traces of synthetic testosterone, he said. Suh, however, said the case was more complicated. ''This case is an utter disaster,'' Suh said, of the way USADA has gone about prosecuting the case. Suh told the three arbitrators from the American Arbitration Association that USADA was basing its case on questionable science and ethics practiced by the French national anti-doping lab, which conducts drug testing for the Tour de France. He said he and his team would outline eight violations of the International Standard for Laboratories, a governing body that oversees laboratories sanctioned by the World Anti-Doping Agency. As Suh gave his opening statement, he flashed a PowerPoint presentation, which included a photograph of Landis celebrating after the Tour de France, wearing the yellow jersey. Seated with his lawyers Monday, Landis wore a yellow tie and a blue shirt. He chewed gum and sipped from a water bottle, smiling when his lawyers made a point and frowning when USADA's lawyers said something he did not like. Even though the hearing gives the public a first-hand look at a doping case for the first time, it will most likely be difficult for the average cycling fan to follow because it is heavy on science but thin on the drama that has turned Landis into a pariah for some, and for others into a hero who is fighting the system. The tone of the hearing is not likely to change. USADA called two witnesses Monday and has several more | Landis Takes Doping Case to Court, Hoping to Keep Title |
1847451_0 | Scientists have known for years that when fishing trawlers drag nets and gear across the ocean bottom they trap or kill almost all the fish, mollusks and other creatures they encounter. And the dragging destroys underwater features like reefs, turning the bottom to mud. Now, scientists have used satellite images to show fleets of trawlers leaving plumes of mud behind them like contrails. They hope the images will focus wider attention on trawling damage, and on the possible uses of satellites to monitor fishing. One of the researchers, Kyle Van Houtan, who earned his doctorate in environmental science in December at Duke, began the work when he was studying the nesting success of sea turtles and wanted to check the influence of shrimpers, who trawl the bottom for their catch. He turned for guidance to Daniel Pauly, director of the fisheries center at the University of British Columbia, which maintains an elaborate global database on fishing. Looking at satellite photos of boats at work, ''I kept seeing lines on the images,'' Dr. Van Houtan said in a telephone interview. ''My first thought was they looked like contrails from aircraft.'' Instead, he and Dr. Pauly dubbed them ''mudtrails.'' Churning up mud does immense harm, Dr. Pauly said in a telephone interview. Fish cannot see in water that is murky with suspended sediment. The mud can also clog their gills and set off algae blooms, which, in turn, lead to vast increases in bacteria. Ultimately, the result is a dead zone. Even if that worst case does not materialize, trawling can change a vibrant ocean bottom into, in effect, a shrimp farm. The mud of repeatedly trawled areas is congenial to shrimp, Dr. Van Houtan said, ''but anything else you might like to eat, like tuna, is gone.'' ''It was one of those eureka moments,'' he said of his realization that mudtrails were visible from space. When he looked at images of prime fishing areas, ''we saw an amazing density of boats,'' he said. ''You can see the birds following the boats to get the discarded bycatch.'' The good news, Dr. Pauly said, is that trawlers and their mudtrails can be seen so clearly that it would in theory be possible to monitor fishing by satellite. Even if captains of individual boats do not want to cooperate in such efforts, Dr. Pauly said, ''we can see what they do.'' | Satellites Show Harvest of Mud That Trawlers Leave Behind |
1845231_35 | turned out to be a vivacious woman with a soothingly enthusiastic voice. After all the abstraction involved in thinking about wisdom, she had turned to a more pragmatic role as a geriatric neuropsychologist, helping families and lawyers determine mental capacity in older people experiencing cognitive declines; in fact, she helped write the California State Bar manual for making these determinations. She never contributed anything to the wisdom field after 1982, although Paul Baltes continued to send her papers from Berlin and Monika Ardelt has occasionally sought her counsel. I asked her if she regretted not continuing in the field, and she said not at all. ''I reached a fork in the road,'' she said. ''Wisdom can be a very abstract concept, and as I got older, I gravitated to more practical approaches.'' We talked about wisdom in contemporary culture, and gradually the conversation turned to bees. ''You know, bees have been around for hundreds of million of years, at least, as living creatures,'' Clayton said. ''And when you work a hive, and you're there with that hive alone, and you hear how contented the bees are, you just have the sense that they have the pulse of the universe encoded in their genes. And I really feel that the concept of wisdom is like that, too. Somehow, like the bees, we are programmed to understand when someone has been wise. But what wisdom is, and how one learns to be wise, is still somewhat of a mystery.'' WISE COUNSEL How researchers elecit the advice people give to judge their wisdom. Since 1984, researchers affiliated with the Berlin Wisdom Project at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin have tried to develop psychological tests to measure wisdom. In one common test, more than 700 subjects have been asked to respond to hypothetical situations concerning pivotal life events like divorce and job loss, as well as life assessments; the replies were then analyzed according to the criteria of the Berlin Wisdom Paradigm and rated on such qualities as knowledge about human nature, acknowledgment of uncertainty and an appreciation of relativistic attitudes. Here are some examples of the situations and questions presented. Michael, a 28-year-old mechanic with two preschool-aged children, has just learned that the factory in which he is working will close in three months. At present, there is no possibility for further employment in this area. His wife recently | The Older-And-Wiser Hypothesis |
1845361_0 | ONE giant cardboard box held hundreds of power cords, coiled like snakes, and a tower of computer monitors, wrapped in plastic, stood six feet high. Piled on a wooden pallet were electronic relics -- like a Soundesign combination record player-radio-eight-track player. Montclair's biannual electronic-waste collection had been under way for less than an hour, and dozens of residents had already dropped off carloads of so-called e-waste. ''My biggest joy is getting rid of those old C.R.T. monitors,'' Chris Ehrenbard, a Montclair resident, said at the site. Spring is when many municipalities hold special collections of electronic equipment that might have once found its way into a landfill. It is also the time for household hazardous-waste collections, where residents can get rid of pesticides, paints and solvents, and trash like tires, motor oil and batteries. ''It's definitely the season when people clean out their basements and closets,'' said Gray Russell, Montclair's environmental coordinator, who said the March 31 collection netted 22.7 tons of waste. The town paid a contractor, Advanced Recovery, of Port Jervis, $300 to handle the materials -- a bargain compared with the $1,650 it would have spent to incinerate it all, Mr. Russell said. ''We're doing better financially, plus we're doing good for human health and preventing valuable stuff from being destroyed,'' he said. New York, New Jersey and Connecticut are considering laws to require recycling of a variety of electronic equipment like computer parts, which are rife with the toxic metals lead, cadmium and mercury. While there are no state or federal laws that bar residents from dumping chemicals with their trash or down the drain, local governments began encouraging people to recycle them in the 1970s and '80s. About half of the waste collected at municipal events is recycled, said John Kelsey, the vice president of Clean Harbors Environmental Services, of Norwell, Mass. It contracts with local governments in the New York City area, taking in about one million pounds of material a year. Lead from car batteries can be removed and resold to vendors who need it for other products; used antifreeze and motor oil can be cleaned and repackaged, often ending up back on the store shelf, Mr. Kelsey said. Toxins like pesticides and vermin killers usually cannot be recycled and are incinerated, he said. Advanced Recovery says it stages hundreds of e-waste recycling events in New York and New Jersey, netting almost 300 | A Central Stop for All That Hazardous Waste |
1845365_0 | ONE giant cardboard box held hundreds of power cords, coiled like snakes, and a tower of computer monitors, wrapped in plastic, stood six feet high. Piled on a wooden pallet were electronic relics -- like a Soundesign combination record player-radio-eight-track player. Montclair's biannual electronic-waste collection had been under way for less than an hour, and dozens of residents had already dropped off carloads of so-called e-waste. ''My biggest joy is getting rid of those old C.R.T. monitors,'' Chris Ehrenbard, a Montclair resident, said at the site. Spring is when many municipalities hold special collections of electronic equipment that might have once found its way into a landfill. It is also the time for household hazardous-waste collections, where residents can get rid of pesticides, paints and solvents, and trash like tires, motor oil and batteries. ''It's definitely the season when people clean out their basements and closets,'' said Gray Russell, Montclair's environmental coordinator, who said the March 31 collection netted 22.7 tons of waste. The town paid a contractor, Advanced Recovery, of Port Jervis, N.Y., $300 to handle the materials -- a bargain compared with the $1,650 it would have spent to incinerate it all, Mr. Russell said. ''We're doing better financially, plus we're doing good for human health and preventing valuable stuff from being destroyed,'' he said. New York, New Jersey and Connecticut are considering laws to require recycling of a variety of electronic equipment like computer parts, which are rife with the toxic metals lead, cadmium and mercury. While there are no state or federal laws that bar residents from dumping chemicals with their trash or down the drain, local governments began encouraging people to recycle them in the 1970s and '80s. About half of the waste collected at municipal events is recycled, said John Kelsey, the vice president of Clean Harbors Environmental Services, of Norwell, Mass. It contracts with local governments in the New York City area, taking in about one million pounds of material a year. Lead from car batteries can be removed and resold to vendors who need it for other products; used antifreeze and motor oil can be cleaned and repackaged, often ending up back on the store shelf, Mr. Kelsey said. Toxins like pesticides and vermin killers usually cannot be recycled and are incinerated, he said. Advanced Recovery says it stages hundreds of e-waste recycling events in New York and New Jersey, netting almost | A Central Stop for All That Hazardous Waste |
1845325_0 | ONE giant cardboard box held hundreds of power cords, coiled like snakes, and a tower of computer monitors, wrapped in plastic, stood six feet high. Piled on a wooden pallet were electronic relics -- like a Soundesign combination record player-radio-eight-track player. Montclair's biannual electronic-waste collection had been under way for less than an hour, and dozens of residents had already dropped off carloads of so-called e-waste. ''My biggest joy is getting rid of those old C.R.T. monitors,'' Chris Ehrenbard, a Montclair resident, said at the site. Spring is when many municipalities hold special collections of electronic equipment that might have once found its way into a landfill. It is also the time for household hazardous-waste collections, where residents can get rid of pesticides, paints and solvents, and trash like tires, motor oil and batteries. ''It's definitely the season when people clean out their basements and closets,'' said Gray Russell, Montclair's environmental coordinator, who said the March 31 collection netted 22.7 tons of waste. The town paid a contractor, Advanced Recovery, of Port Jervis, N.Y., $300 to handle the materials -- a bargain compared with the $1,650 it would have spent to incinerate it all, Mr. Russell said. ''We're doing better financially, plus we're doing good for human health and preventing valuable stuff from being destroyed,'' he said. New York, New Jersey and Connecticut are considering laws to require recycling of a variety of electronic equipment like computer parts, which are rife with the toxic metals lead, cadmium and mercury. While there are no state or federal laws that bar residents from dumping chemicals with their trash or down the drain, local governments began encouraging people to recycle them in the 1970s and '80s. About half of the waste collected at municipal events is recycled, said John Kelsey, the vice president of Clean Harbors Environmental Services, of Norwell, Mass. It contracts with local governments in the New York City area, taking in about one million pounds of material a year. Lead from car batteries can be removed and resold to vendors who need it for other products; used antifreeze and motor oil can be cleaned and repackaged, often ending up back on the store shelf, Mr. Kelsey said. Toxins like pesticides and vermin killers usually cannot be recycled and are incinerated, he said. Advanced Recovery says it stages hundreds of e-waste recycling events in New York and New Jersey, netting almost | A Central Stop for All That Hazardous Waste |
1845413_0 | ONE giant cardboard box held hundreds of power cords, coiled like snakes, and a tower of computer monitors, wrapped in plastic, stood six feet high. Piled on a wooden pallet were electronic relics -- like a Soundesign combination record player-radio-eight-track player. Montclair's biannual electronic-waste collection had been under way for less than an hour, and dozens of residents had already dropped off carloads of so-called e-waste. ''My biggest joy is getting rid of those old C.R.T. monitors,'' Chris Ehrenbard, a Montclair resident, said at the site. Spring is when many municipalities hold special collections of electronic equipment that might have once found its way into a landfill. It is also the time for household hazardous-waste collections, where residents can get rid of pesticides, paints and solvents, and trash like tires, motor oil and batteries. ''It's definitely the season when people clean out their basements and closets,'' said Gray Russell, Montclair's environmental coordinator, who said the March 31 collection netted 22.7 tons of waste. The town paid a contractor, Advanced Recovery, of Port Jervis, N.Y., $300 to handle the materials -- a bargain compared with the $1,650 it would have spent to incinerate it all, Mr. Russell said. ''We're doing better financially, plus we're doing good for human health and preventing valuable stuff from being destroyed,'' he said. New York, New Jersey and Connecticut are considering laws to require recycling of a variety of electronic equipment like computer parts, which are rife with the toxic metals lead, cadmium and mercury. While there are no state or federal laws that bar residents from dumping chemicals with their trash or down the drain, local governments began encouraging people to recycle them in the 1970s and '80s. About half of the waste collected at municipal events is recycled, said John Kelsey, the vice president of Clean Harbors Environmental Services, of Norwell, Mass. It contracts with local governments in the New York City area, taking in about one million pounds of material a year. Lead from car batteries can be removed and resold to vendors who need it for other products; used antifreeze and motor oil can be cleaned and repackaged, often ending up back on the store shelf, Mr. Kelsey said. Toxins like pesticides and vermin killers usually cannot be recycled and are incinerated, he said. Advanced Recovery says it stages hundreds of e-waste recycling events in New York and New Jersey, netting almost | A Central Stop for All That Hazardous Waste |
1845190_1 | I do almost all of my communicating by e-mail. I've been known to e-mail people who were literally standing next to me, which I know sounds crazy, because at that distance I could easily call them on my cellphone. But I prefer e-mail, because it's such an effective way of getting information to somebody without running the risk of becoming involved in human conversation. I've become so dependent on e-mail that I sometimes wonder how we ever got by without it. Imagine, for example, how useful it would have been for Paul Revere. Instead of having to climb onto a horse in the middle of the night and ride through Massachusetts spreading the alarm, he could have simply whipped out his BlackBerry, fired off a quick message to the patriots in Lexington and Concord, then gone to sleep (unless he also had TiVo). Of course there might have been problems. Since Revere was typing with his thumbs, his e-mail probably would have said something like, ''teh nritish are cming.'' As a result the recipients might not have grasped the urgency of the message. The Concord patriots might have assumed it was mainly intended for the Lexington patriots, while Lexington might have assumed Concord was going to handle it, and we would still be British subjects today. I'm not saying that would be a bad thing; I'm just saying it was not what Revere meant to accomplish. E-mail, for all its efficiency, often fails to achieve its intended result; a vague or carelessly worded message can cause major problems -- personal, legal and financial -- for senders and receivers. Helping you avoid these problems is the goal of ''Send,'' an informative, entertaining, thorough and thoughtful book. The authors are media veterans -- David Shipley is deputy editorial page editor of The New York Times; Will Schwalbe is editor in chief of Hyperion Books -- with extensive, and not always positive, experience sending and receiving e-mail. They summarize their essential message in two rules: ''Think before you send'' and ''Send e-mail you would like to receive.'' These rules may seem obvious, but both are deceptively easy to break in our rapid-fire, multitasking world. Many of us, especially if we have handheld e-mail devices, routinely process e-mail while engaging in other activities such as walking, talking, eating and even (you know who you are) driving. I am not proud of this, but I | You've Got Trouble |
1845393_3 | deer on the 11,000-acre Naval Weapons Station Earle, which stretches from the Leonardo section here to Colts Neck. But an Earle spokesman, Patrick L. Fisher, said there was no record of such an event. Other forest denizens are not so elusive. White-tailed deer, nearly eliminated in New Jersey by 1900 because of deforestation and commercial hunting, now number about 175,000 statewide. About 20,000 deer a year are killed in the state in vehicle collisions, said Joseph B. Paulin, a wildlife researcher for Rutgers Cooperative Extension who studies human and wildlife interaction. Hunters kill about 60,000 deer a year, but the population still grows, he said. People seem increasingly concerned about black bears. In 1995, 285 bear complaints were reported. By 2003, the number rose to more than 3,000, Mr. Paulin said. There have been only two bear hunts since 1970, largely because of public opposition. Instead, wildlife officials are trying to teach people how to avoid bears by keeping garbage and food away and by using rubber bullets and pyrotechnics to scare them off, said Larry Herrighty, the chief of the state's Bureau of Wildlife Management. In March, wildlife officials shot and killed a 532-pound male bear in Stillwater after it repeatedly tried to break into a garage looking for food. Even wild turkeys, which were reintroduced to New Jersey in 1977 and now number about 23,000, have been generating ire. In the spring, young males seeking mates sometimes perform what is called a ''crazy jake dance'' and attack cars, Mr. Herrighty said. As of last week, the coyote that bit Liam Sadler had not been caught. State officials set four snares on the property but removed them after a week, Mr. McBride said. Middletown police officers were patrolling the area every night and still setting traps, Mr. Scharfenberger said. Residents are learning to adapt. Nancy Moorzitz, who lives a few blocks from the Palludan property in the Presidential Path neighborhood, where two coyotes were spotted loping through the streets on the night of the attack, said she now carries her car panic alarm button while walking her Labradoodle puppy at night. Her neighbor Teri Sparacia no longer lets her grandchildren out in the yard alone. Still, Ms. Sparacia said, ''I grew up in Brooklyn and I said I was never afraid to walk those streets, so I'm not going to let a coyote keep me in the house.'' WILDLIFE | A Close Call, and a Sign of a Thriving Animal World |
1849804_1 | fell 0.47 percent in Shanghai and 0.6 percent in Shenzhen on Thursday as investors responded to the warning. But the warning was not news to Mr. Zhou and other Chinese officials. The central bank, securities regulators and prominent business executives have all been cautioning investors that buying stocks is not a guaranteed path to riches -- all with less apparent effect than Mr. Greenspan. ''Will the Shanghai market correct at some stage? Yes, that's inevitable,'' said Michael R. P. Smith, the chief executive of HSBC's extensive Asian operations. ''Valuations are too high, I think; you can't sustain P/E multiples of 40, 50 times.'' The economy is booming, but fairly low inflation, 3 percent, also makes for a conundrum similar to what Mr. Greenspan faced as Federal Reserve chairman: it is harder for Mr. Zhou to justify raising interest rates significantly. For Mr. Zhou, there is a further complication in that he faces considerable uncertainty about his personal future. Five years into his current job, he turns 60 next year, and so by Chinese standards is due for a transfer or promotion. ''It could come at any time; I tend to think it will happen before the 17th Party Congress,'' expected in October or November, said Victor Shih, a Chinese banking specialist at Northwestern. Whoever succeeds Mr. Zhou confronts one of the toughest challenges of any financial policy maker. Chinese families eager to make money are opening brokerage accounts around the country, with the number of new accounts rocketing from several thousand a day two years ago to nearly 300,000 a day this month. Investors leaving a Shanghai brokerage firm on Wednesday were exuberant, as the Shanghai A share index closed at 4,354. Chen Zhiwei, a restaurant chef, said, ''With more new stocks listed, the bullish trend will keep going until the index hits 15,000.'' Like Mr. Greenspan in the heat of the Internet frenzy, Mr. Zhou and his colleagues in the Chinese government have been cautious about trying to pop the bubble themselves. The Chinese government chose administrative measures, instead of market forces like higher interest rates, to prevent the economy from overheating in 2004 and to curb real estate speculation over the last two years. The government has taken a few such measures this year, like investigating fund managers to make sure that they do not engage in self-dealing at the expense of their clients, and requiring this week | China's Leaders Confront Their Own Manic Market |
1849804_3 | that new brokerage customers sign forms acknowledging that they understand the risks of stocks. But stocks sailed higher on Wednesday after an announcement by the finance ministry and State Administration of Taxation that the government had no plans to raise taxes on share transactions, an approach the government has sometimes taken in the past to curb speculation. Cash is pouring into the stock market partly because money is pouring into China in general. With the Chinese government intervening heavily in currency markets to hold down the value of the yuan against the dollar, China is on course for a surplus this year of up to $400 billion in the current account, the broadest measure of trade. The Chinese leadership has shown considerable caution in allowing the currency to appreciate. Mr. Zhou declared Wednesday morning that gradualism would remain China's policy as it pursues a long-term strategy of making the yuan more ''flexible.'' Chinese officials frequently refer to flexibility in describing a willingness to see more intraday volatility in the yuan, which remains tightly linked to the dollar. But that does not necessarily mean faster appreciation of the yuan. Raising interest rates, a conventional cure for asset speculation, runs the risk of attracting even more foreign investment to China. The People's Bank of China has raised interest rates only four times in the last 13 months, while also raising eight times the percentage of assets that commercial banks must keep as reserves at the central bank. Partly because the People's Bank of China does not have nearly the same independence as the Federal Reserve and partly because Chinese economic policy makers have shunned the celebrity surrounding many of their overseas counterparts, Mr. Zhou has not attracted as much attention as Mr. Greenspan. But now he is the subject of a guessing game about possible successors -- and about the extent to which career jockeying may make public officials leery of unpopular decisions. The most commonly cited potential governors are Shang Fulin, the chairman of the China Securities Regulatory Commission; Guo Shuqing, Communist Party secretary of the China Construction Bank; and Wu Xiaoling, who is the central bank's senior deputy governor but at 60 may already be deemed too old to succeed Mr. Zhou. Mr. Zhou was president of China Construction Bank and then chairman of the China Securities Regulatory Commission before taking over leadership of the central bank, so Mr. Shang | China's Leaders Confront Their Own Manic Market |
1847958_4 | for food had climbed more than 30 percent in the last two years with the oil boom, while Venezuela's capacity to produce food grew only 5 percent. He points to inconsistencies in the government's approach, like having one ministry charged with redistributing land to reduce food imports while another is tasked with importing large amounts of food. ''The double talk from the highest levels is absurd,'' Mr. Machado said. ''By enhancing the state's power, the reforms we're witnessing now are a mechanism to perpetuate poverty in the countryside.'' Top-down land redistribution projects have a troubled history in Latin America, including Venezuela itself, which last tried it in the 1960s. Even neighboring countries like Brazil, with a flourishing agribusiness industry, struggle with militant demands for land from the rural poor. But Venezuela, unlike many of its neighbors, has long imported most of its food, and uses less than 30 percent of its arable land to its full potential, according to the United Nations. A good part of the reason is the havoc that its oil wealth plays on the economy, with a strong currency during times of high oil prices making it cheaper to import food than to produce it at home. Meanwhile, vast cattle ranches take up large areas of arable land. But no country in the region has currently hit the land distribution issue as aggressively as Mr. Chávez. ''By 2008, I predict, no big landowners will be left in the state of Yaracuy,'' said Franklin Ochoa, 23, a member of the cooperative committee that manages Bella Vista. In fact, Yaracuy, one of Venezuela's smallest states, is not filled with especially large holdings. With some of the country's most fertile soil, the state has been home to immigrants from Cuba, Portugal and Spain who arrived after World War II and assembled relatively small sugar cane farms and cattle ranches. Some of these immigrants or their children are now doing everything they can to leave. Fátima Vieira, the daughter of a Portuguese truck driver who moved to Venezuela 50 years ago, said she was struggling to receive compensation for a 170-acre sugar cane farm controlled by squatters. She said squatters had burned much of her sugar cane in an attempt to intimidate her. Ms. Vieira, 43, said she also feared for her life after a gunman shot her brother, Antonio, in the neck one balmy night in August in 2003, | A Clash of Hope and Fear As Venezuela Seizes Land |
1847938_1 | gulf war illnesses have a physiological basis, and far more research will have to be done before it is known whether those illnesses can be traced to exposure to sarin. The long-term effects of sarin on the brain are still not well understood. But several lawmakers who were briefed on the study say the Department of Veterans Affairs is now obligated to provide increased neurological care to veterans who may have been exposed. In March 1991, a few days after the end of the gulf war, American soldiers exploded two large caches of ammunition and missiles in Khamisiyah, Iraq. Some of the missiles contained the dangerous nerve gases sarin and cyclosarin. Based on wind patterns and the size of the plume, the Department of Defense has estimated that more than 100,000 American troops may have been exposed to at least small amounts of the gases. When the roughly 700,000 deployed troops returned home, about one in seven began experiencing a mysterious set of ailments, often called gulf war illnesses, with problems including persistent fatigue, chronic headaches, joint pain and nausea. Those symptoms persist today for more than 150,000 of them, according to the Department of Veterans Affairs, more than the number of troops exposed to the gases. Advocates for veterans have argued for more than a decade and a half that a link exists between many of these symptoms and the exposure that occurred in Khamisiyah, but evidence has been limited. The study, financed by the Department of Veterans Affairs and the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, is the first to use Pentagon data on potential exposure levels faced by the troops and magnetic resonance imaging to scan the brains of military personnel in the exposure zone. It found signs of brain changes that could be due to exposure, showing that troops who had been exposed at higher levels had about 5 percent less white matter than those who had little exposure. White matter volume varies by individual, but studies have shown that significant shrinkage in adulthood can be a sign of damage. The study was led by Roberta F. White, chairman of the department of environmental health at the Boston University School of Public Health. Dr. White and other researchers studied 26 gulf war veterans, half of whom were exposed to the gases, according to a Defense Department modeling of the likely chemical makeup and location of | Troops' Exposure to Nerve Gas Could Have Caused Brain Damage, Scientists Say |
1847978_1 | right time or running successful hedge funds. Arguably, these activities improve the allocation of capital and thus enhance productivity. But even if these individuals perform no socially useful function, their gains reallocate wealth from one class of investors to another. That is, one group of investors reaps profits by buying in first and bidding up equity prices, thereby causing later investors to pay more for the same companies. This process transfers value from the relatively wealthy to the extremely wealthy, but it doesn't much hold back the poor. Nor are recent changes in equality about the tax system. Whatever one thinks of President Bush's reductions in marginal tax rates, pretax incomes also show greater inequality. Immigration has a smaller influence on wages than is often believed as well. Claudia Goldin and Lawrence F. Katz, both professors of economics at Harvard, estimate the numbers in their recent paper, ''The Race Between Education and Technology: The Evolution of U.S. Educational Wage Differentials, 1890 to 2005,'' soon to be expanded into a book. College graduates have been gaining relative to high school graduates. But competition from immigrant labor accounts for only 10 percent of the change in the wages of unskilled workers, relative to the skilled, since 1950. Starting about 1950, the relative returns for schooling rose, and they skyrocketed after 1980. The reason is supply and demand. For the first time in American history, the current generation is not significantly more educated than its parents. Those in need of skilled labor are bidding for a relatively stagnant supply and so must pay more. The return for a college education, in percentage terms, is now about what it was in America's Gilded Age in the late 19th century; this drives the current scramble to get into top colleges and universities. In contrast, from 1915 to 1950, the relative return for education fell, mostly because more new college graduates competed for a relatively few top jobs, and that kept top wages from rising too high. Professors Goldin and Katz portray a kind of race. Improvements in technology have raised the gains for those with enough skills to handle complex jobs. The resulting inequalities are bid back down only as more people receive more education and move up the wage ladder. Income distribution thus depends on the balance between technological progress and access to college and postgraduate study. The problem isn't so much capitalism as | Why Is Income Inequality in America So Pronounced? Consider Education |
1849139_2 | eased the tax burden on peasants and sought to curtail confiscations of farmland for development. But China's hinterland remains volatile compared with the largest cities, which are relatively prosperous and stable. Coercive measures, including forced abortions and sterilizations, were common in the 1980s, when the so-called one-child policy was first strictly enforced. More recently, many parts of China have been relying more on financial penalties and incentives to limit the growth of its population, which is 1.3 billion. But local officials who fail to meet annual population control targets can still come under bureaucratic pressure to reduce births or face demotion or removal from office. Several people said in the Internet accounts of the campaign in Guangxi that officials had issued fines starting at 500 yuan and ranging as high as 70,000 yuan, or $65 to $9,000, on families who had violated birth control measures at any time since 1980. The new tax, called a ''social child-raising fee,'' was collected even though most violators had already paid fines in the past, the people said. According to an account on Longtan, a Web forum, officials in Bobai County in Guangxi boasted that they collected 7.8 million yuan in social child-raising fees from February through the end of April. Many families objected strongly to the fees and refused to pay. Witnesses said that in such cases villagers were detained, their homes searched, and valuables, including electronic items and motorcycles, confiscated by the government. ''Worst of all, the gangsters used hammers and iron rods to destroy people's homes, while threatening that the next time it would be with bulldozers,'' said a peasant who identified himself as Nong Sheng and who faxed a letter complaining of the abuses to a reporter in Beijing. Mr. Nong said the crackdown was widespread in several counties in Guangxi. He said local courts had declined to hear any cases brought by opponents of the policy, citing an edict from local officials. Other villagers reached by phone described an escalating series of confrontations that began Thursday and continued through the weekend. Several described in detail an assault on the government offices of Shapi Township, Bobai County, by thousands of peasants. They said villagers broke through a wall around the building, ransacked offices, smashed computers and destroyed documents, then set fire to the building. There were inconsistent reports of death and injuries during that clash and a later police crackdown. | Harsh Birth Control Steps Fuel Violence in China |
1849130_1 | all to storage once the trip is over. Although the concept of luggage forwarding dates back at least a decade -- one of the first companies, Luggage Express, started in 1996 -- it will no doubt continue to gain popularity as air travel becomes more difficult. With last summer's adoption of new restrictions on liquids that can be carried onto flights, some travelers who previously did not check bags are now doing so. This appears to be placing more pressure on the airlines. According to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics, American airlines reported 8.02 incidents of mishandled luggage per 1,000 passengers in the first quarter of this year, up from 6.24 incidents in the period last year. For all of 2006, the airlines reported 6.73 incidents, which was itself up from 6.64 reports in 2005. The bureau defines a mishandled bag as one that has been lost, broken into, damaged or delayed. What may also help the luggage shipping services are the fees some carriers are charging to check bags. British Airways, for instance, announced in February that it would simplify its previous fee structure and allow economy-class passengers starting their trips in the United States to check free two bags, each weighing a maximum of 23 kilograms (about 50 pounds). Business- and first-class passengers who begin their trips in the United States can check up to three bags, each weighing up to 23 kilograms. But the airline is charging £120 (about $236) for each additional checked bag, or for any overweight checked bag. The carrier's policy for passengers who begin their trips in Britain and are not taking trans-Atlantic flights is even more stringent. (Fees are discounted 30 percent if prepaid online.) John Lampl, a spokesman for British Airways, said the new charges would be fully phased in by early October. He said the fees were intended in part to safeguard the ''health and safety'' of British Airways baggage handlers. Spirit Airlines, a low-fare carrier based in Miramar, Fla., will start charging travelers to check bags next month -- $5 a bag if the payment is made online and $10 a bag if it is made at the airport for a maximum of two bags. The cost of checking additional bags will be $100 each. The baggage shipping companies -- which include Luggage Express, a subsidiary of Universal Express, based in Boca Raton, Fla.; Luggage Concierge in Hawthorne, N.Y.; | Itineraries; Meet Your Clothes at the Hotel |
1849118_0 | The urge to conserve is obvious at the Interface Corporation, from slogans painted on the factory floor (''One Planet/Zero Harm''), to prize parking spots reserved for car-poolers, to packing boxes so relentlessly recycled that they sit, wrinkled and battered, festooned with the remains of previously applied masking tape (bought from Germany, because the extra adhesive in American masking tape causes more wear and tear). Less obvious is the way the company now looks at all of its processes, from the time designers think of a new pattern until customers return their worn-out carpet for recycling. For example, when the company decided in 2000 to introduce a new line of carpet tiles, designers began by asking, ''How would nature make a floor?'' They thought of forests, where the ground is covered by pebbles, leaves, twigs, soil. ''What they discovered was everything is random, it's never the same, and it's always beautiful,'' said Stuart Jones, vice president of sustainable development for Interface Research and Development. This biomimicry produced Entropy, now one of Interface's hottest patterns. Its randomness allows it to be applied any-which-way and tremendously reduces the amount of finished tiles that must be rejected as ''off-quality.'' The nylon cloth facing for Entropy, and other patterns, is made a few miles from here, in another Interface plant at West Point. An engineer there figured out that running the tufting machines with many relatively small creels of fiber, rather than fewer large creels, would greatly reduce waste -- ''about $180,000 worth of first-quality nylon'' annually, Mr. Jones said. The rubbery backing for the tiles is applied at the plant here, where some of the company's greatest progress has been made. For example, company engineers worked with city engineers to find out how much methane, a greenhouse gas, was coming out of the LaGrange municipal dump. The answer, it turned out, was enough to power the Interface plant there for probably 40 years, Mr. Jones said. So the company agreed to adapt its boilers and buy the gas, if the city would pipe it in. The upshot was abundant power, cheaper than the natural gas it replaced; a multimillion-dollar revenue stream for LaGrange; longer life for its landfill, whose volume decreases as methane is drawn off; and a more pleasant environment for the dump's neighbors. And because the LaGrange plant is now diverting methane away from the atmosphere, and because methane is a much | Harnessing Methane, Cutting Waste, Recycling Tiles |
1849106_3 | is eccentric but its rotation is steady, so Saturn's gravity affects it unevenly, creating tidal forces within it. Those tidal forces cause lateral slip along the cracks, similar to the movement of a seismic fault on Earth, report Francis Nimmo of the University of California, Santa Cruz, and colleagues in the journal Nature. The shearing action generates enough heat, the authors say, to turn the water beneath the ice to vapor. But how does the vapor escape? A second Nature paper, by Terry A. Hurford of NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and colleagues, suggests that the tidal forces periodically put the cracks in tension, forcing them open. A Fine-Art Cleaner For Those Places That Are Hard to Reach Clogged pores. They're the bane of teenagers, and of art conservators who work on frescoes, too. The tiny pits and pores in the plaster can become filled with contaminants, making them very hard to clean. Piero Baglioni, a chemist at the University of Florence in Italy, has worked on alternative methods for cleaning frescoes and other works of art for years. The technique involves creating microemulsions, which consist of fine droplets of organic solvents and water, on the order of 50 to 100 nanometers wide. In the journal Langmuir, Dr. Baglioni and colleagues report on their most efficient microemulsions yet, which they have used to remove acrylic polymers applied over frescoes during earlier, faulty conservation efforts. Dr. Baglioni said determining the correct formula was difficult, but once it was obtained, the microemulsions formed spontaneously. They can be applied to a surface with cellulose fiber and washed off with water. One advantage of the microemulsions, he said, is that the droplets are so small they can easily penetrate and remove the polymer inside the pores, ''which pure solvents cannot do.'' Another advantage is that far less solvent can be used -- as little as a gram or two in a liter of water -- so the environmental impact is much less. In the same paper, Dr. Baglioni's team reported on using a different microemulsion to clean a heavy scum of hydrocarbons and salts from artwork damaged in the Florence flood of 1966. That's another advantage of the technique -- it can be customized for the particular restoration task. Dr. Baglioni said art restorers tended to be a conservative bunch, but added, ''In the next 10 years, probably everybody will use this approach.'' Observatory | OBSERVATORY |
1849117_1 | as a violation of the ''notification norms'' that ''constrain the behavior of nodes in social networks.'' Technology now lets us tell everyone everything at once, but we still value a network that existed before the Web: the grapevine. When you pass along gossip to a friend or colleague, you're doing more than just relaying news. You're defining a social circle. You're reassuring the listeners that they're in the loop -- and subtly obliging them to remember that you are, too. The golden rule of this ''information order,'' as Dr. Ryan calls it, is to tell unto others as you would have them tell unto you. You shouldn't leave your trusted colleagues at the office in the dark about a coming shake-up, but you shouldn't be an electronic font of trivia, either. You filter the news for them and expect them to do the same for you. You tell them what they need to know in the way they expect to hear it. ''Even though we all claim to hate gossip and being in or out of the loop, there's an emotional benefit to grapevines,'' Dr. Ryan says. ''I think of it as informational grooming, like primates picking bugs off each other. We don't want to get information all at once. Some you want to get as an insider: 'I talked to Bob yesterday and he wanted me to tell you' Telling everyone violates our sense that we live in a rich array of social relationships.'' Technology hasn't eliminated the desire for rules about who tells what, when and how. You don't want your wife or girlfriend to tell you she's pregnant by sending an e-mail message. A close friend could be miffed if he found about your hot date on Friday not from you, but from a casual acquaintance who had already seen pictures of it on your Facebook page. A host may think it's a friendly gesture to e-mail invitations to a party with all the recipients' names in the address line, but if the names aren't in alphabetical order and yours is near the end, the message may not seem so friendly. You could have the same out-of-the-loop feeling as a manager who learns big news about his department in the same e-mail message sent to everyone else in the company. Every message incorporates another message in the way it is delivered, whether it's an e-mail or a | As the Grapevine Withers, Spam Filters Take Root |
1846145_6 | But the negotiators decided against any system for guaranteeing a division of credits by region, preferring one focused on reducing emissions wherever they occurred. ''Those were rejected on the grounds that you wanted to get more bang for the buck and they didn't want this to turn into another U.N. institution with a lot of emphasis on regional balance,'' said Mr. Doniger, who is now climate policy director at the Natural Resources Defense Council. The wind turbine project here in Houxinqiu, an impoverished area of China, shows the pluses and minuses of the current system. It generates nearly 24 megawatts of electricity that would otherwise come from coal. China is already building enough coal-fired power plants each year to light all of Britain. Farmers here still use mules to pull their steel-tip wooden plows and draw their aging wooden carts, the rough-hewn slats bleached white by years of sun and rain. The setting sun vanishes into a dark murk over the plains to the west, where China has been rapidly building coal-fired power plants. Li Guohai, a local peasant riding his mule cart home with his wife on a recent evening, explained how he had received free electricity since the wind turbines were erected four years ago. He has saved enough money that he bought an all-steel plow for his mules to pull; the new plow now frees his son to finish junior high school and perhaps go to high school, Mr. Li said. The project is narrowly profitable even without Clean Development Mechanism payments, Mr. Tao, the general manager, said. But the payments made the project more attractive and made it easier to raise money for it. While Mr. Tao was reluctant to discuss the company's finances, Clean Development Mechanism records show that the wind farm saves the equivalent of 35,119 tons of carbon dioxide emissions a year. At $8 a credit, that is worth $281,000. Mr. Tao does not rely on that money to make the project viable, as the C.D.M. subsidies aim to do, but it helps him pay for more turbines. ''Without the Clean Development Mechanism, we'd still be profitable,'' Mr. Tao said. But ''you need the C.D.M. for further expansion.'' The Energy Challenge Articles in this series are examining the ways in which the world is, and is not, moving toward a more energy-efficient, environmentally benign future. Previous articles are at nytimes.com/energychallenge. The Energy Challenge | Clean Power That Reaps a Whirlwind |
1849893_0 | A highly anticipated test of a new Pentagon system to defend against long-range ballistic missiles was halted early on Friday because the target rocket fell far short of the designated interceptor range in the Pacific, officials announced. Since the attacking rocket and dummy warhead never reached the area to be defended, the missile interceptor was never launched from its base at Vandenberg Air Force Base, north of Santa Barbara, Calif., officials said. The Missile Defense Agency will categorize the aborted mission as a ''no test,'' because no new information was generated on the overall system, including the interceptor, radar and command systems. ''We were not able to get the target downrange far enough or high enough to present a threat to the system,'' Lt. Gen. Henry A. Obering III, director of the missile agency, said. ''It fell well short of the intended area. The system itself never had a chance to recognize it as a threat, and so did not respond to the target.'' In a telephone interview, General Obering said early information from the test range indicated that the failure was in the second motor of the three-stage target rocket, launched from Kodiak Island, Alaska. The target rocket was a Polaris intercontinental ballistic missile from a family first used to carry nuclear warheads 40 years ago. General Obering said that the interceptor missile scheduled for the test remained ready for launching, but that it might take until August to prepare another target missile and dummy warhead. The previous major antimissile test, in September, was a success. Although designed just as a trial run of the radar at Beale Air Force Base, near Sacramento, the interceptor missile hit and destroyed the attacking rocket. After that, another test was delayed until this week while experts perfected a system to relay test information to ground monitors from the interceptor, although that system would not be on board in wartime. The Bush administration envisions a limited system of 40 missile interceptors at Fort Greely, Alaska; 4 at Vandenberg; and 10 in Poland. The administration calls the system a counter to a small-scale attack like one that might be initiated by countries like Iran and North Korea. Democrats in Congress have proposed cutting money to delay the Polish program and tracking radar in the Czech Republic. In Moscow, Kremlin officials have warned that deploying the American missile-defense components to Central Europe would damage relations. | Missile Defense Test Is Halted After the Target Rocket Fails |
1847345_1 | richer, make tens of millions of Americans poorer. How much poorer? In the mid-1990s a number of economists, myself included, crunched the numbers and concluded that the depressing effects of imports on the wages of less-educated Americans were modest, not more than a few percent. But that may have changed. We're buying a lot more from third-world countries today than we did a dozen years ago, and the largest increases have come in imports from Mexico, where wages are only about 11 percent of the U.S. level, and China, where wages are only 3 percent of the U.S. level. Trade still isn't the main source of rising economic inequality, but it's a bigger factor than it was. So there is a dark side to globalization. The question, however, is what to do about it. Should we go back to old-fashioned protectionism? That would have ugly consequences: if America started restricting imports from the third world, other wealthy countries would follow suit, closing off poor nations' access to world markets. Where would that leave Bangladesh, which is able to survive despite its desperate lack of resources only because it can export clothing and other labor-intensive products? Where would it leave India, where there is, at last, hope of an economic takeoff thanks to surging exports -- exports that would be crippled if barriers to trade that have been dismantled over the past half century went back up? And where would it leave Mexico? Whatever you think of Nafta, undoing the agreement could all too easily have disastrous economic and political consequences south of the border. Because of these concerns, even trade skeptics tend to shy away from a return to outright protectionism, and to look for softer measures, which mainly come down to trying to push up foreign wages. The key element of the new trade deal is its inclusion of ''labor standards'': countries that sign free trade agreements with the United States will have to allow union organizing, while abolishing child and slave labor. The Bush administration, by the way, opposed labor standards, not because it wanted to keep imports cheap, but because it was afraid that America would end up being forced to improve its own labor policies. So the inclusion of these standards in the deal represents a real victory for workers. Realistically, however, labor standards won't do all that much for American workers. No matter how free | Divided Over Trade |
1847042_0 | LAST year, when my son Sean was 12, he started to shoot baskets, watch too much television and have his first major crush. He said ''my bad'' after forgetting homework and plunged his size-seven feet into sneakers before bolting without a jacket. All of this astonished me -- not because he was growing up, but because he was leaving the land of special needs that he and I had inhabited for such a long time. Sean's preschool teacher had led us there. ''You should have Sean evaluated for developmental issues,'' she said. He knocks down playmates' block towers, she told me, because he wants to play but cannot work out how to join in. He stands too close, yet is fearful of bumping anyone. He cannot work scissors, holds crayons but doesn't color, smiles even when he cries. But I had begun questioning Sean's development years before that -- at 9 months when he could not crawl; at 18 months when he did not climb over the crib rail; at 2 when he threw no tantrums. My amateurish research suggested the high-functioning end of the autism spectrum. I thought some pieces fitted. Sean seemed uncomfortable in his own skin. The experts in Paterson, Montclair, Morristown and other towns in northern New Jersey agreed only on a dizzying list of therapies, for fine, gross, ocular, oral and auditory motor-skill delays, and sensory integration dysfunction. With no diagnosis, the upside was Sean would not be labeled. The downside (insurance skirmishes aside) was the lack of a road map. A cousin whose son had four different diagnoses said, ''Let him march to the beat of his own drummer.'' I dismissed it as cloyingly trite advice, then. I kept reading, about mothers who improvised at-home behavior reinforcement and therapy, and I added the recommended techniques to others I was using. In time, the distracting hand flapping and spinning ceased. Therapists stemmed the incessant talking that left teachers exasperated and prospective playmates bored. But it was another matter to teach a young boy how to be a kid. When Sean was 4, he had an outsize but studious passion for the differing pumping capacities of fire trucks. At 6, he lined his trucks in neat rows instead of playing with them. In kindergarten, he collected acorns alone at recess, recoiling when classmates scattered the nearby mulch during a game of tag that he did not | When a Child Outgrows the Safety Net |
1846996_0 | LAST year, when my son Sean was 12, he started to shoot baskets, watch too much television and have his first major crush. He said ''my bad'' after forgetting homework and plunged his size-seven feet into sneakers before bolting without a jacket. All of this astonished me -- not because he was growing up, but because he was leaving the land of special needs that he and I had inhabited for such a long time. Sean's preschool teacher had led us there. ''You should have Sean evaluated for developmental issues,'' she said. He knocks down playmates' block towers, she told me, because he wants to play but cannot work out how to join in. He stands too close, yet is fearful of bumping anyone. He cannot work scissors, holds crayons but doesn't color, smiles even when he cries. But I had begun questioning Sean's development years before that -- at 9 months when he could not crawl; at 18 months when he did not climb over the crib rail; at 2 when he threw no tantrums. My amateurish research suggested the high-functioning end of the autism spectrum. I thought some pieces fitted. Sean seemed uncomfortable in his own skin. The experts in Paterson, Montclair, Morristown and other towns in northern New Jersey agreed only on a dizzying list of therapies, for fine, gross, ocular, oral and auditory motor-skill delays, and sensory integration dysfunction. With no diagnosis, the upside was Sean would not be labeled. The downside (insurance skirmishes aside) was the lack of a road map. A cousin whose son had four different diagnoses said, ''Let him march to the beat of his own drummer.'' I dismissed it as cloyingly trite advice, then. I kept reading, about mothers who improvised at-home behavior reinforcement and therapy, and I added the recommended techniques to others I was using. In time, the distracting hand flapping and spinning ceased. Therapists stemmed the incessant talking that left teachers exasperated and prospective playmates bored. But it was another matter to teach a young boy how to be a kid. When Sean was 4, he had an outsize but studious passion for the differing pumping capacities of fire trucks. At 6, he lined his trucks in neat rows instead of playing with them. In kindergarten, he collected acorns alone at recess, recoiling when classmates scattered the nearby mulch during a game of tag that he did not | When a Child Outgrows the Safety Net |
1847219_4 | Had Four Abortions in Six Years!'' a headline on the popular Web portal, Sina.com, declared recently. Abortion inside China became a controversial political issue outside China after the introduction of the country's family planning policy in 1979. The policy, which limits most urban families to one child, had an immediate impact: Abortion rates soared in the early 1980s, and then again in 1990, when enforcement was tightened. International criticism quickly followed. In response, China has gradually shifted its approach, even if family planning policy remains mostly unchanged. Family planning officials say they emphasize maternal care and contraception. Married women are still having abortions, some voluntarily, others reluctantly, to avoid the heavy fines levied for having a second child. Some women, particularly in rural areas, choose to abort a female fetus because of cultural preferences for a son. Family planning officials have tried to stop such ''sex selective'' abortions and also deny that married women, as a group, are forced to have abortions to meet population quotas. In 2002, China passed a law prohibiting coercive or forced abortions. But human rights abuses can still occur. In April, villagers in southwest China accused local officials of forcing dozens of women to have abortions to meet family planning quotas. Over all, though, family planning officials and Chinese health experts say the number of married women having abortions is going down, even as the numbers for unmarried women are going up. Ministry of Health statistics recorded a peak of 14 million abortions in 1990. The latest numbers, for 2005, showed 7.1 million abortion cases in that year. The United States, by comparison, had 1.29 million abortions in 2002, according to the Guttmacher Institute. Experts say the official Chinese figures are probably incomplete because they do not include private hospitals or women who use abortion pills. One recent Chinese study predicted that there could be as many as 13 million abortions every year, though no explanation of how the study arrived at that number was provided. National abortion statistics do not break out married and unmarried women. But family planning officials say the abortion rate is dropping among married women partly because more than 80 percent of married women with a child are using long-term contraception like IUDs, or have been sterilized to comply with the one-child policy. By contrast, millions of young, unmarried women have flocked to cities since the 1980s, a journey for | Today's Face of Abortion in China Is a Young, Unmarried Woman |
1847008_0 | LAST year, when my son Sean was 12, he started to shoot baskets, watch too much television and have his first major crush. He said ''my bad'' after forgetting homework and plunged his size-seven feet into sneakers before bolting without a jacket. All of this astonished me -- not because he was growing up, but because he was leaving the land of special needs that he and I had inhabited for such a long time. Sean's preschool teacher had led us there. ''You should have Sean evaluated for developmental issues,'' she said. He knocks down playmates' block towers, she told me, because he wants to play but cannot work out how to join in. He stands too close, yet is fearful of bumping anyone. He cannot work scissors, holds crayons but doesn't color, smiles even when he cries. But I had begun questioning Sean's development years before that -- at 9 months when he could not crawl; at 18 months when he did not climb over the crib rail; at 2 when he threw no tantrums. My amateurish research suggested the high-functioning end of the autism spectrum. I thought some pieces fitted. Sean seemed uncomfortable in his own skin. The experts in Paterson, Montclair, Morristown and other towns in northern New Jersey agreed only on a dizzying list of therapies, for fine, gross, ocular, oral and auditory motor-skill delays, and sensory integration dysfunction. With no diagnosis, the upside was Sean would not be labeled. The downside (insurance skirmishes aside) was the lack of a road map. A cousin whose son had four different diagnoses said, ''Let him march to the beat of his own drummer.'' I dismissed it as cloyingly trite advice, then. I kept reading, about mothers who improvised at-home behavior reinforcement and therapy, and I added the recommended techniques to others I was using. In time, the distracting hand flapping and spinning ceased. Therapists stemmed the incessant talking that left teachers exasperated and prospective playmates bored. But it was another matter to teach a young boy how to be a kid. When Sean was 4, he had an outsize but studious passion for the differing pumping capacities of fire trucks. At 6, he lined his trucks in neat rows instead of playing with them. In kindergarten, he collected acorns alone at recess, recoiling when classmates scattered the nearby mulch during a game of tag that he did not | When a Child Outgrows the Safety Net |
1846965_0 | LAST year, when my son Sean was 12, he started to shoot baskets, watch too much television and have his first major crush. He said ''my bad'' after forgetting homework and plunged his size-seven feet into sneakers before bolting without a jacket. All of this astonished me -- not because he was growing up, but because he was leaving the land of special needs that he and I had inhabited for such a long time. Sean's preschool teacher had led us there. ''You should have Sean evaluated for developmental issues,'' she said. He knocks down playmates' block towers, she told me, because he wants to play but cannot work out how to join in. He stands too close, yet is fearful of bumping anyone. He cannot work scissors, holds crayons but doesn't color, smiles even when he cries. But I had begun questioning Sean's development years before that -- at 9 months when he could not crawl; at 18 months when he did not climb over the crib rail; at 2 when he threw no tantrums. My amateurish research suggested the high-functioning end of the autism spectrum. I thought some pieces fitted. Sean seemed uncomfortable in his own skin. The experts in Paterson, Montclair, Morristown and other towns in northern New Jersey agreed only on a dizzying list of therapies, for fine, gross, ocular, oral and auditory motor-skill delays, and sensory integration dysfunction. With no diagnosis, the upside was Sean would not be labeled. The downside (insurance skirmishes aside) was the lack of a road map. A cousin whose son had four different diagnoses said, ''Let him march to the beat of his own drummer.'' I dismissed it as cloyingly trite advice, then. I kept reading, about mothers who improvised at-home behavior reinforcement and therapy, and I added the recommended techniques to others I was using. In time, the distracting hand flapping and spinning ceased. Therapists stemmed the incessant talking that left teachers exasperated and prospective playmates bored. But it was another matter to teach a young boy how to be a kid. When Sean was 4, he had an outsize but studious passion for the differing pumping capacities of fire trucks. At 6, he lined his trucks in neat rows instead of playing with them. In kindergarten, he collected acorns alone at recess, recoiling when classmates scattered the nearby mulch during a game of tag that he did not | When a Child Outgrows the Safety Net |
1847180_4 | expanded the definition of disability over time to reflect more conditions and impairments, including mental disabilities. The most recent population survey, in 2002, showed the disabled population to be the country's largest minority: 51 million, or 18 percent of all Americans. Most -- 32 million -- suffer from a disability classified as severe. Although this huge and complex group includes both the man with a $30,000 computer-controlled prosthesis and the brain-injured woman who is immobile, stereotyping and stigmatization are still a problem, particularly for the mentally disabled. And while public perceptions about the capabilities of the mentally disabled have improved, said Dr. Stephen B. Corbin, a senior vice president of Special Olympics International, they are still ''mixed and inadequate.'' Nevertheless, the gradual gains in access to education and independent living have allowed many disabled people to take their place in society's mix. Surveys show that people with disabilities are voting and going to restaurants, for example, at rates comparable with the non-disabled. With increased access has come visibility. The public image of the disabled is increasingly ''informed by actual experience of disability rather than an imagined understanding of it,'' said David T. Mitchell, an associate professor of disability studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Mr. Mitchell, who is also a filmmaker, uses a wheelchair because of a neuromuscular condition. His 1995 documentary, ''Vital Signs: Crip Culture Talks Back,'' focuses on the concept of a cultural identity. But, he cautioned: ''We shouldn't go too congratulatory yet. Our progress is largely a measure of the fact that we were so regressive for so long.'' The arts have become one of the most visible vehicles for participation. In the last few years particularly, said Kari Pope, the coordinator at the National Arts and Disability Center at the University of California, Los Angeles, there has been more exposure of disabled artists ''getting out there'' through film festivals, dance companies, theater and the visual arts. In Hollywood, disabled members of the Screen Actors Guild and other entertainment groups are agitating for plots that include more disabled characters and for the hiring of more disabled actors to play both disabled and nondisabled roles. Though jobs are still scarce, the quality of roles and the diversity of characters has improved. Some disabled actors noted that they are no longer relegated to maudlin or villainous roles. It is a sign of the times that Marlee Matlin, | Clearly, Frankly, Unabashedly Disabled |
1848412_6 | even allow one into their homes -- face legal jeopardy, local Haitians say. Residents recall that back in 1998 another boatload of escaping Haitians died off the shore here, after the police fired at the boat. Authorities say they were firing warning shots and did not cause that vessel to capsize. ''We're still human and ought to be treated that way,'' said James Prosper, a Haitian-born pastor who has lived in Turks and Caicos for 24 years and who complained to the government recently about the rough treatment endured by those caught without papers. ''If a Haitian is mistreated, I feel it, because it's in my blood,'' said Ronald Gardiner, a Haitian-born businessman who is now a ''Belonger,'' as citizens of Turks and Caicos are called. On Turks and Caicos, Haitians pick up trash and sweep the streets. They make the hotel beds and pour the concrete. The tourism industry here is booming, a far cry from the 1990s when a Gallup poll found the islands had the lowest name recognition in the world. Now, Hollywood stars vacation in hidden bungalows. Other well-heeled sun worshipers fly in on tickets that can cost less than the several thousand dollars some Haitians pay to get a spot on a sloop. The police here say some migrants smuggle drugs and guns, which means every sloop is considered a security threat. In fact, the recent deaths revived a call among local officials to create a defense force to better patrol the surrounding waters. ''These are poor people seeking a better life but among them are criminals,'' Inspector Duncan said in an interview. ''We believe some of them may be former members of the Tontons Macoute,'' a reference to the armed thugs who ruled the Haitian countryside during the long years of the Duvalier dictatorships. The Haitian authorities hope the tragedy may help keep more Haitians home. They are considering using photos of the latest overturned vessel and the resulting bodies thrown into the sea as part of a public education campaign to discourage others from making the trip. ''The answer to migration is economic development and, as you know, that won't happen overnight,'' said Louis Joseph, who is Haiti's ambassador to the Bahamas. ''When you don't have money to eat or to send your children to school, you don't know what to do. So you leave -- or you try, like these people did.'' | New Routes And New Risk To Flee Haiti |
1848390_3 | vehicle. They called in a canine unit, a Mobile Response Team and an aviation unit. But the troopers had no radio link to the aircraft, foliage obscured the wooded terrain from the air, and when dogs and the mobile team arrived two hours later, Mr. Phillips had disappeared. ''The practice during this manhunt was that most, if not all, initial responses were assigned to the M.R.T.,'' the report said, referring to a Mobile Response Team whose 45 members were not always available to pursue sightings and other leads. ''Consequently, some apprehension opportunities may have been lost because immediate M.R.T. response was not a practical expectation.'' Another close encounter occurred on Aug. 19, when a trooper spotted Mr. Phillips on a motorcycle in Chautauqua County. The trooper followed him to a vacant house, parked his patrol car nearby and called for a license plate check. Only later did he call for backup. Help arrived within minutes, but while the trooper was waiting Mr. Phillips jumped out of a rear window and escaped again. ''It is difficult to understand the actions of the trooper,'' the report said. ''His failure to immediately initiate a police radio transmission to request backup is inexplicable.'' There were repeated occasions, the report said, when the authorities communicated with one another by cellphone instead of using police radios, partly in the belief that Mr. Phillips and his relatives and friends were monitoring police frequencies with scanners. There was evidence of this. On July 16, the fugitive was seen at a summer house in Cattaraugus County. He was gone when troopers arrived, but they found a pot of hot coffee, cigarette smoke in the air and a printout of state police radio frequencies. While using cellphones may have avoided tipping off the fugitive about police actions, the report said, they were at a serious disadvantage. At best, they allowed commanders to talk to troopers only one at a time or in small numbers. Using police radios to broadcast orders to large units would have created swift responses. Moreover, difficult terrain limited the effectiveness of cellphones. And there were other communications problems. Radio communications in rural areas of the state where the search was concentrated have long been flawed, with the state police forced to use a radio system that dates back to the 1960s. A modernized system is to be tested this year, with deployment expected next year. A | Hunt for Fugitive Was Beset By Confusion, a Report Says |
1825964_1 | he said. To curb demand, which has been driven in part by subsidies that keep the domestic pump price at a mere 35 cents a gallon, the government plans to begin rationing gasoline in March, a measure so unpopular, and potentially explosive, that rationing plans have been put off several times in the past. Iran's energy problem is in many ways at the heart of the nuclear controversy as well. Iran's leadership says it wants to develop nuclear power generation to free its petroleum resources for domestic use or for exports. The United States and other Western countries say Iran is using the program as a front for building weapons. At a time of relatively high prices, oil is clearly providing Iran's government with enormous strength -- but also with an Achilles' heel. In December, the United Nations Security Council voted unanimously to impose limited economic sanctions on Iran until it halts its nuclear program. So far, American and European officials say they are not seeking to cut off Iran's oil exports, because that would disrupt global markets and raise prices for Western consumers. Still, the pressure on Western energy companies not to deal with Iran may ultimately speed that outcome. Iran currently exports about 2.5 million barrels a day. In recent weeks, senior American officials warned several European oil companies that if they invested in new energy projects, they risked financial sanctions in the United States, according to a European energy executive who spoke on the condition that he not be identified because of the delicate nature of his company's relations with Iran. Foreign investors, who have helped promote Iran's oil development, have been scarce since the 1979 revolution, and the country's oil industry has now suffered decades of economic, political and technical problems. Iran has signed no firm oil or gas contracts with foreign investors since June 2005, when Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was elected president and began flaunting the country's nuclear ambitions and renewing tensions with the West. At home, meanwhile, Iran has had to appease a population historically prone to unrest. It spends about $20 billion each year, or 15 percent of its economic output, to keep consumer prices low for gasoline, natural gas, electricity and other energy products, according to estimates from the International Monetary Fund and others. Those subsidies have prompted double-digit growth in consumption in this country of 70 million people. Iran holds 11 percent | West Adds to Strains on Iran's Lifeline |
1825923_0 | LATE TO THE GATE -- Airlines last year had the lowest percentage of on-time arrivals since 2000, according to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics in the Transportation Department. In 2006, domestic aircraft arrived on schedule 75.45 percent of the time, compared with 72.59 percent in 2000. The five airlines with the worst on-time arrival rates last year were Skywest (63.9 percent); American Eagle, owned by AMR (64.3 percent); JetBlue Airways (64.8 percent); Alaska Air (66.3 percent); and Northwest Airlines (66.6 percent). As for luggage, with a sharp increase in the number of checked bags because tighter security procedures reduced the number of carry-on bags, airlines mishandled bags at a rate of 6.73 per 1,000 passengers, a slight increase over 2005 (6.64 per 1,000 passengers). SOUTHWEST REINSTATES SAN FRANCISCO -- Southwest Airlines, which abandoned San Francisco International Airport in March 2001, says it plans to resume service there in the early fall. ''San Francisco International is the only major Bay Area airport we don't currently serve, having made a very difficult decision in 2001 to cease service there after nearly 20 years,'' said Gary C. Kelly, the airline's chief executive and vice chairman. Mr. Kelly said Southwest left San Francisco because ''facility and runway constraints meant we could not compete and be profitable, and there was no growth potential beyond the 14 flights we had at the time.'' Southwest also complained about flight delays. He said recent ''constructive changes'' at the airport prompted the decision to return. Southwest said resuming service in San Francisco would not affect its 142 daily departures from Oakland International or its 77 daily departures from San Jose International. EXCESS BAGGAGE -- Coach-class travelers to and from certain worldwide destinations on British Airways are now limited to a single checked bag weighing no more than 23 kilograms, or just over 50 pounds. Excess bags on long-haul flights will cost $236 for passengers in British Air's long-haul economy-class cabins. But coach passengers to and from the United States, the Caribbean, Nigeria, Mexico and Brazil -- routes on which British Airways has tough competition -- will still be permitted to check in two bags free. REGISTERED TRAVELER EXPANSION -- Clear and Air France have opened online enrollment for Clear's Registered Traveler program, which Clear's parent, Verified Identity Pass, expects to expand to Terminal 1 at Kennedy International Airport in March. Air France, part of Air France-KLM, is a marketing | MEMO PAD |
1825856_2 | weight gain. Subsequent formulations of the pill sought to balance reduced estrogen levels with increasing amounts of progestins -- hormones that help to suppress ovulation and to regulate the cyclical development of endometrial tissue. The newer progestins in third-generation pills, like desogestrel, were intended to avoid the side effects caused by older versions, which included increased low-density lipids, weight gain and acne. Beginning in the mid-1990s, a series of studies, mostly in Europe, suggested that compared with women taking second-generation contraceptives, those using third-generation pills suffered higher rates of venous thrombosis -- blood clots in the deep veins of the legs, lungs and other parts of the body. But other studies were less conclusive, and in any event, the absolute risk to the average woman was small. ''There may be a modest increase in clotting with third-generation progestins, but it is far, far less than occurs in pregnancy itself,'' said Dr. Charles J. Lockwood, chairman of the obstetrics, gynecology and reproductive sciences department at Yale University. Still, Dr. Lockwood, who is also acting chairman of an F.D.A. advisory panel on reproductive health drugs, said many of the original studies used to evaluate contraceptive pills drew on homogeneous groups of healthy women who were not representative of Americans as a whole. Smokers and obese women, for example, were usually excluded from the studies. As a result, some disadvantages of low-dose oral contraceptives may have been understated. Some researchers have also wondered whether low-dose contraceptives are as effective as advertised for women who are overweight, since they too were often excluded from evaluation. In 2004, researchers at the University of Washington compared weight and body mass index for 248 women who became pregnant while on the pill with a group of 533 women who did not. Overweight and obese women were 60 percent more likely to become pregnant than women who weighed less, the scientists found. ''It's yet another unpleasant surprise of the obesity epidemic,'' Dr. Lockwood said. Nonetheless, his panel refused last month to set a benchmark by which the agency could measure the efficacy of new oral contraceptives. To do so would unduly limit the choices available to women with a wide range of risks and needs, Dr. Lockwood said. The advisory panel is urging the F.D.A. to weigh new contraceptives against available alternatives and to continue evaluating the drugs even after they are on the market. Perhaps more important, | Pressing To Look Closer At Blood Clots And the Pill |
1825861_0 | Smelling a compound in men's sweat called androstadienone raises levels of the hormone cortisol in heterosexual women, a small study has found, suggesting for the first time that human pheromones might be useful in clinical medicine. Smelling androstadienone has previously been shown to improve mood and increase sexual arousal in women, but this is the first time that an olfactory stimulus from a specific molecule has been found to lead to a change in hormone levels. The study appears in the Feb. 7 issue of The Journal of Neuroscience. Researchers gave 21 women 20 sniffs from a bottle containing 30 milligrams of androstadienone, and then, on a different day, had them sniff an identical bottle that contained baker's yeast, a similar-smelling substance. Neither the researchers nor the subjects knew which bottle was being presented. The researchers then took saliva samples to track changes in levels of cortisol, a hormone that increases blood pressure and blood sugar levels, among other effects. Sniffing androstadienone significantly improved the women's mood and increased their sexual arousal, according to the women's own descriptions, and raised their cortisol levels as measured by saliva tests. The authors acknowledge that they cannot unequivocally determine whether androstadienone influenced cortisol, which then influenced mood, or whether a change in mood caused by another mechanism led to a change in cortisol. ''Manipulating hormones is a route for therapy in many diseases,'' said Noam Sobel, the senior author and now associate professor of neurobiology at the Weissman Institute in Israel. ''Usually, altering hormones has lots of unpleasant side effects. If we can trigger hormone changes by smell, fool the system into changing levels of hormones, that can be really powerful.'' VITAL SIGNS: RESPONSES Correction: February 24, 2007, Saturday A brief report in Science Times on Feb. 13, about a study of hormonal responses to the odor of a substance in male sweat, misspelled part of the name of an institution in Israel where the senior author of the study works. It is the Weizmann Institute of Science, not Weissman. | Using the Nose to Change Hormone Levels |
1827375_0 | To the Editor: Re ''After So Many Deaths, Too Many Births'' (Week in Review, Feb. 11): As President Paul Kagame of Rwanda prepares to embark on an energetic ''population control program,'' he would do well to heed the experiences of many other countries, such as India. Rather than targeted incentives to limit births, a comprehensive approach is needed to ensure contraceptive choice; safe pregnancy and childbirth; child survival (oral rehydration therapy, immunizations, nutrition and so on); and prevention of sexually transmitted infections, including H.I.V. and AIDS. Adrienne Germain New York, Feb. 12, 2007 The writer is president of the International Women's Health Coalition. | Rwanda's New Path |
1827803_0 | Mel Karmazin, the chief executive of Sirius Satellite Radio, made a lot of phone calls seeking advice before he entered into a merger deal with XM Satellite Radio on Monday. Maybe he should have called Charles W. Ergen, the founder and chairman of EchoStar Communications. Mr. Ergen could have given Mr. Karmazin an earful about his failed effort to merge EchoStar with DirecTV four years ago, a deal that seems eerily similar to the one Sirius and XM have proposed. Will the government see things differently this time? Michael K. Powell, the former chairman of the Federal Communications Commission who blocked the EchoStar-DirecTV deal, is not so sure. ''I do think it could get through, but I don't think it's going to be an easy one,'' he said. ''It's going to be incumbent on the companies to demonstrate that the analysis in EchoStar-DirecTV is different.'' In opposing that deal, regulators -- both from the F.C.C. and the Justice Department -- argued the merger would create a monopoly. EchoStar and DirecTV, on the other hand, argued that the market should be defined more broadly than simply satellite television and should encompass cable television operators and telephone companies providing video over phone lines. When Sirius and XM announced their merger on Monday, they made a similar argument -- that their market is much bigger than just satellite radio. ''In addition to existing competition from free 'over-the-air' AM and FM radio as well as iPods and mobile phone streaming, satellite radio will face new challenges from the rapid growth of HD Radio, Internet radio and next generation wireless technologies,'' the companies said. There is no question that times have clearly changed: a decade ago, the argument for a Sirius-XM merger would have never had a chance. Joel I. Klein, then the acting assistant attorney general in charge of the antitrust division, gave a speech to the radio industry 10 years ago this week, suggesting that merging terrestrial radio stations in the same market was ''no different from a situation where all soft drink manufacturers would seek to merge and control 100 percent of that market. We wouldn't walk away from such a merger -- and if you like soft drinks I should think you wouldn't want us to walk away -- merely because there are lots of other beverages out there, such as milk, juice, beer, wine, et cetera.'' But the regulatory tone | Shift on Antitrust Issues May Aid Sirius-XM Deal |
1824489_2 | invest in such projects. The Mashantucket Pequot tribe had 200 members the day the Foxwoods casino opened, many fewer when the idea for a casino in Connecticut was developed. Mr. Thomas, who met with the Pequots in his previous incarnation as an art dealer, said they inspired him to begin his quest. Many Indian tribes including the Cheyenne, Arapaho and others in Oklahoma, California and Wisconsin have tried to build casinos on land far from their historic homes, but the Unalachtigos are noteworthy for their current humble status and the proximity of their hoped-for property to New York City. New Jersey has asked that the Unalachtigos's federal case be dismissed, which was the fate of a 2001 case the tribe had filed in state court. In papers seeking the dismissal of the case, the state argues that tribes are prohibited from suing states and state officials in Indian land claims, and that in any case the statute of limitations on the claim has run out. The state also questions the legitimacy of Mr. Thomas's band, saying it requires formal recognition from the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs. ''Because of this ongoing administrative proceeding, the Appellate Division strongly recommended that plaintiff obtain the B.I.A.'s determination before proceeding in federal court,'' the state wrote in urging dismissal. Mr. Thomas replied that the state waived its rights to sovereignty over the tribe in 1758, and said the tribe does not require federal recognition to run casinos, because ''gaming is public policy in New Jersey.'' He talks at length -- and with specificity -- about the $776 million in casino revenue the tribe could share with the state, suggesting it could be used for property tax relief. Legal argument is a skill Mr. Thomas discovered and used as a sort of get-out-of-jail-as-soon-as-possible card -- he spent four months of a three-year sentence behind bars in 1990 after pleading guilty to conspiracy and attempted theft charges relating to a car insurance scheme. This is a point his adversaries bring up frequently and one the appellate court rebuked the state for raising, calling it ''offensive, unwarranted, and irrelevant.'' But several experts in Indian law said they were doubtful of the tribe's chances, noting the legal bar is high for tribes seeking to run casinos. ''So if they become federally recognized and if it looks as if they have a solid land claim, a good lawyer might | A Tribe Dreams of a Casino, and of a Less Spartan Life |
1824372_4 | second floor and saw a thick black smockrising from a car in al-Bab al-Mudham round-about (200 meters away from the NLA). I asked the security to prevent all members of staff from going outside the building, fearing that there might be another car-bomb.'' Working to replace rare books and documents that have been destroyed, Dr. Eskander has been in touch with the British Library ever since the Iraq Library and Archive was burned and looted in 2003 when Mr. Hussein's regime fell. The British Library is trying to send another shipment of microfilm and books, Ms. Finlayson said, although, she added: ''Our contact is quite sporadic -- it's difficult to get material there. It's hard for him to keep in touch.'' The response to the diary has been very moving, said Andy Stephens, secretary to the British Library Board. ''To me, why it's so powerful is these are people doing exactly the same job we are here, and we can relate to them.'' He said there has been some interest in dramatizing the excerpts on the radio. Two weeks ago the library gave people an opportunity to send in comments. Most offered support and prayers, and expressed frustration about being unable to help. ''I just want to say how important I think it is both that the BL supports its colleagues in crisis in the ways it is doing,'' Andrew King of Canterbury Christ Church University wrote in an e-mail message to the British Library, ''and that the Web site allows BL users like me to reflect on the consequences of war for an educated elite who in other, less troubled, countries might not think it possible that they might be subject to terror such as Saad Eskander is going through.'' In the e-mail exchange, Dr. Eskander wrote: ''I used to be very optimistic. But, the security situation is getting worse daily.'' Although all available resources have been directed to keeping the collections safe, ''terrorists attacks, especially mortars shelling represent a considerable threat,'' he wrote. ''It is extremely difficult for my staff, including me, to work in a normal way. Many roads and bridges are often blocked. Hundreds of checkpoints are responsible for the daily heavy traffic. There is always the possibility of daily car-bomb attacks, assassinations, kidnapping and so on. Sometimes our drivers refuse to go to dangerous districts. All these 'tiny things' affect our works on daily basis.'' | Baghdad Day to Day: Librarian's Journal |
1829056_4 | on Climate Change said such melting could take a millennium or more. But because of a lack of long-term measurements and poor understanding of the physics of ice, that analysis largely excluded hints of an accelerating flow of ice and meltwater from Greenland into the seas. ''The change of phase from snow and ice to water is the biggest tipping point in the earth's system, and so although the International Polar Year covers a huge range of science, for me the big issue is climate change and the impact that it's having here,'' said Chris Rapley, the director of the British Antarctic Survey, in a message from Antarctica. ''Over the next two years, I'm looking forward to major progress on key issues,'' he said. ''The trillion-dollar question from the point of view of sea-level rise: how much, how quickly?'' The climatic equations are complicated. Over the two years -- researchers want to study both regions through complete summer and winter cycles -- teams will examine the effects of shifting solar activity, greenhouse gases and the synthetic chemicals that harm the ozone layer, which have an outsize impact at the poles. Other scientists will intensively study the warming of the permafrost and tundra across vast stretches of northern continents for signs that thawing ground, bogs and lakes are giving up emissions of methane and carbon dioxide. Marine scientists will plumb the Arctic Ocean and productive waters around Antarctica to see how shifts in sea ice and ocean currents affect species from clouds of shrimplike krill to whales, penguins and polar bears. Most of these subjects have already been a focus of research. But several veteran earth and polar scientists said periodic intensive efforts like the polar years helped them to generate fresh ideas, collect data that individual countries lack the resources to pursue, and refresh the public's appreciation for the splendor of the world's least-habitable places. Walter Munk, 89, an emeritus professor of geophysics at the University of California, San Diego, who helped run the 1957-58 effort (called the International Geophysical Year), said that what was needed most was long-term studies of earth's poles and oceans. But he added that the polar year would provide a necessary short-term focus. ''Our society is poorly conditioned for sustained efforts,'' he said in an e-mail message. ''I rather think that without the occasional burst there would have been even less of a sustained effort.'' | 2-Year International Study of Polar Changes Set to Begin |
1829025_3 | to simply download video from satellites to in-car hard drives for later viewing. ''People relate to video, so maybe they make too big a deal of it,'' he said. ''We are not in the video business.'' He does concede, however, that the combined company's future would mean more than just talk and music. ''Our view has been that we are in the business of audio entertainment,'' Mr. Parsons said. ''But we look at how we can improve the listeners' experience in ways that flow very naturally from the high-quality data platform we have.'' The future services Mr. Parsons foresees are more modest. One, invisible to users, involves using the satellites to keep the data on in-car navigation systems constantly and automatically up to date. Another is a trick the iPod learned long ago: displaying album cover art when songs are playing. But there are limits to what even a combined satellite radio company can do. Satellite systems effectively do not allow two-way transmissions, ruling out services such as e-mail. And without enormous reinvestment, the systems are not likely to approach the transmission speeds of WiMax, a new wireless technology being developed by Nortel Networks and others that will probably start operating within the year. Those systems, like cellphone networks, will pass moving users from tower to tower and offer transmission speeds comparable to high-speed, wired connections in homes. Susan Kevorkian, an analyst with IDC, said that the satellite radio connections with automakers would give them a significant advantage over WiMax, at least in the short term. But she added that the new company might find more immediate benefits from changing the structure of radio pricing. Currently, subscribers are tied to receivers, not users. Ms. Kevorkian said that limits the willingness of people to own more than a single receiver as well as the time they spend listening to the systems. ''Satellite radio is in and of itself a compelling service,'' she said. ''The way it's been sold to date has demonstrated that value to consumers.'' Correction: February 28, 2007, Wednesday An article in Business Day on Monday about the fallout from a possible merger of XM Satellite Radio and Sirius Satellite Radio omitted the word ''not'' in a quotation from Susan Kevorkian, an analyst with IDC, about the marketing of satellite radio to users. She said, ''The way it's been sold to date has not demonstrated that value to consumers.'' | Can Video Help Save the Satellite Radio Business? |
1829155_0 | If the idea of stepping off the consumer grid is appealing, but the reality of living the secondhand lifestyle seems daunting. The Compact members say that you are not limited to shopping at Goodwill and yard sales. Plenty of previously owned and lightly used goods can be found at a variety of resources. Some are listed below: www.craigslist.org: The granddaddy of online classifieds, you can list what you are looking for as well as search for what you need. www.eBay.com: While still an excellent source of used goods, some retailers hawk new items here as well, so Caveat Compactor. www.freecycle.org: Why buy anything new when you might find exactly what you need -- from clothes to tires to computer printers -- on this giant giveaway network? www.habitat.org/env/restores.aspx: Even home improvements can be secondhand with "quality used and surplus building materials" from Habitat for Humanity ReStores. www.lala.com: For those who are still pre-MP3, this site allows you to trade used CDs for $1 (plus 75 cents for shipping). www.recycle.net: An exhaustive list of companies that buy, sell or trade recycled goods, including things you never think about, like minerals and obscure auto parts. And don't forget about good old-fashioned generosity. Rachel Kesel, a Compacter who lives in San Francisco and often swaps or barters for things she needs, says she has been amazed by the largess of those around her. "My bike seat was stolen, and a guy I hardly know gave me one," she said, adding, "Some people I work for gave me a bed. People do things like that." | Some Help in Buying Secondhand |
1829553_0 | The huge influx of immigrant workers to California since 1990 generated a 4 percent increase in the wages of the average American worker in the state, according to a study by the Public Policy Institute of California, a nonpartisan research group. American workers moved into higher-paying jobs as immigrants filled low-skilled occupations, concluded the study by Giovanni Peri of the University of California, Davis. The study also found no evidence that immigrants arriving after 1960 had displaced American workers with the same education in the state's job market. JULIA PRESTON | National Briefing | West: California: Immigration Seen Raising Worker Pay |
1829495_0 | ''How are you?'' President Hugo Chávez asked Tuesday in his nightly live radio program after a special guest phoned in from Havana. ''Very well,'' replied Fidel Castro, speaking in what was believed to be his first live broadcast since relinquishing power to his brother last July. That exchange was in thickly accented but politically pointed English; then the two switched to Spanish for a chat that touched on the plunge in the Chinese stock market on Tuesday, their skepticism about using corn to produce ethanol and mockery of President Bush's coming visit to several Latin American countries. (Venezuela and Cuba are not on the itinerary.) ''I feel I have more energy, more strength, more time to study,'' said Mr. Castro, whose voice sounded thin and frail on ''Hello, President,'' which Venezuela hears five nights a week. ''You don't know the happiness it gives us to hear your voice and to know you are well,'' Mr. Chávez said. ''We send you a hug; we are gratefully surprised.'' Critics of Mr. Chávez see echoes of Mr. Castro in his efforts to consolidate his power, ruling by decree and creating a single socialist party. Mr. Castro expressed only pride in Mr. Chávez, crediting him with ''raising the flag to save the species.'' Mr. Chávez, 52, has occasionally been seen on video with Mr. Castro, 80, since the Cuban leader's illness and seclusion began last year. But some Cuba watchers initially said they believed Mr. Castro's illness might dilute Venezuela's alliance with Cuba. However, recent developments have dispelled such speculation. Venezuela is financing the installation of fiber optic cable to improve Cuba's Internet and telecommunications systems and is planning to send 100,000 Venezuelans to Cuba on ''revolutionary'' tourism jaunts, in addition to maintaining shipments to Cuba of about 100,000 barrels a day of subsidized oil. Cuba, meanwhile, has sent thousands of social workers to Venezuela to install fluorescent light bulbs in homes to help conserve energy. Thousands of other Cubans are at work in Venezuela, providing subsidized medical care and advice on mining and sugar cultivation. | Chávez Shares Some Airtime With Castro |
1827971_0 | Google is taking aim at one of Microsoft's most lucrative franchises. On Thursday, Google, the Internet search giant, will unveil a package of communications and productivity software aimed at businesses, which overwhelmingly rely on Microsoft products for those functions. The package, called Google Apps, combines two sets of previously available software bundles. One included programs for e-mail, instant messaging, calendars and Web page creation; the other, called Docs and Spreadsheets, included programs to read and edit documents created with Microsoft Word and Excel, the mainstays of Microsoft Office, an $11 billion annual franchise. Unlike Microsoft's products, which reside on PCs and corporate networks, Google's will be delivered as services accessible over the Internet, with Google storing the data. That will allow businesses to offload some of the cost of managing computers and productivity software. For corporate technology staffs, ''we think that will be a very refreshing change,'' said Dave Girouard, Google's vice president and general manager for enterprise. The e-mail and messaging package, which is based on products like Gmail, Google's e-mail service, has been available in a free trial since August and is supported by advertising. It has been used by thousands of businesses, educational institutions and other organizations, Google said. Google will continue to provide the extended bundle of software free to businesses and educational institutions. But it will also offer businesses additional e-mail storage and customer support for an annual fee of $50 a user. By comparison, businesses pay on average about $225 a person annually for Office and Exchange, the Microsoft server software typically used for corporate e-mail systems, in addition to the costs of in-house management, customer support and hardware, according to the market research firm Gartner. Google said initial customers of Google Apps would include a unit of Procter & Gamble and SalesForce.com, a pioneer in the business of delivering software as an Internet service. ''We are in the process of phasing out Microsoft Office and Exchange from our company,'' said Marc Benioff, the chief executive of SalesForce.com and a frequent Microsoft critic. Google Apps comes at a time of increased competition between Microsoft and Google in a number of areas, including Internet search and advertising and mobile services. And it comes just as corporations are considering whether to upgrade to recently released versions of Microsoft Windows and Office. While most analysts say that businesses will increasingly use software delivered over the Internet and | A Google Package Challenges Microsoft |
1827960_4 | became worse in the economic downturn after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. ''We realized that it didn't make any sense going forward with our old business model,'' said Alan Shimel, co-founder and chief strategy officer. After further research, however, they discovered that clients were especially interested in the security applications -- systems for intrusion prevention and analyzing areas of potential vulnerability -- that were part of the initial product. So they decided to focus entirely on those applications, transforming the company into an Internet security business. The firm introduced the first product in April 2002. With a total of three products on the market and around 100 employees, sales are now ''more than $5 million,'' Mr. Shimel said, and, from 2002 to 2004, grew about 2,000 percent. How do small businesses figure out just what their next steps should be? Some companies, like StillSecure that have considerable venture backing, can take advantage of help from their backers. The company's two investors, Mobius Venture Capital in Palo Alto, Calif., and the 3i Group in London, which had put in about $21 million, introduced executives to specialists in the security market. Also, the firms allowed StillSecure to interview other businesses in their portfolio, for further research. Even so, StillSecure, as Ms. Lurie did, also turned to existing customers for inspiration. Indeed, it was during talks with a few clients that Mr. Shimel learned that their primary attraction was the security elements in the original technology. Other people tapped the insights of distributors and other important players in their market. When Michael Sands helped found LesserEvil Brand Snack Company in March 2004, at the top of the low-carb fad, he expected his specially designed popcorn to be an instant hit. Unfortunately, by the time he was ready to introduce the product on the market, the fad had fizzled. But, after discussions with distributors, brokers and retailers, he learned that a similar product promoted as ''all natural'' would probably have a better reception. So, he redid the product using a new sweetener, revamped the packaging and introduced a new popcorn called All Natural Kettle Corn in 2005. Last year, his company introduced a second product, a reduced-fat potato stick. ''Like any good entrepreneur, we knew how to admit when we'd made a mistake and how to adapt quickly to the market,'' Mr. Sands said. ''And we never thought about closing up shop.'' SMALL BUSINESS | The Magic Is in the Tweaking |
1823431_4 | imagery. Thursday's weather posed a problem for the satellite effort, as a layer cake of clouds hovered over the search area. ''There definitely was a significant cloud cover,'' said Chuck Herring, a spokesman for DigitalGlobe. But because of the high and urgent demand for that particular strip, he said, the shot was taken. Once the satellite's images were received by imaging experts on Thursday, Digital Globe engineers worked on making them accessible to engineers at Amazon, who divided them into manageable sizes and posted them to Amazon's Mechanical Turk site, which allows the general public to scrutinize images in search of various objects. ''This is a first sift through these images,'' said Werner Vogels, chief technology officer at Amazon, who had Dr. Gray on his Ph.D. committee at Vrije University in Amsterdam. ''If the volunteers see something, we ask them to please mark the image, and we'll take all the images that have been marked and review them.'' Similarly, Microsoft's Virtual Earth division, is having satellites capture high-resolution imagery in an area along the coastline and will post the images for volunteers to scrutinize. Microsoft is also collecting radar satellite images which penetrate clouds and is using them together with its Oceanview software, which can automatically detect vessels. Lt. Amy Marrs, a spokeswoman for the Coast Guard, said that should a volunteer find something in one of the satellite images that appeared to be a ''convincing and tangible'' lead, the Coast Guard would follow up. Lieutenant Marrs said it was highly unusual for there to be no trace whatsoever of a missing vessel, not even an oil slick. As the mystery deepened, speculation among the public increased: grief-induced suicide, perhaps, or a heart attack; a run-in with a band of pirates or a pod of orca whales; a collision with a partly sunken cargo container. But most of the computer scientists preferred to remain scientifically sound. As of Friday, the blog dedicated to the search had started filling up with ideas and educated guesses about Dr. Gray's cellphone, which had transmitted a signal as late as 7:30 Sunday evening, an hour before he was reported missing. And more private planes went up, with a run down the California coastline. Prof. James Frew, an associate professor of environmental information management at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who has worked with Dr. Gray and is helping to coordinate the search, said | Silicon Valley's High-Tech Hunt for Colleague |
1823437_4 | consequences become inevitable.'' ''Since 2001, there has been a torrent of new scientific evidence on the magnitude, human origins and growing impacts of the climatic changes that are under way,'' said Mr. Holdren, who is the president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. ''In overwhelming proportions, this evidence has been in the direction of showing faster change, more danger and greater confidence about the dominant role of fossil-fuel burning and tropical deforestation in causing the changes that are being observed.'' The conclusions came after a three-year review of hundreds of studies of past climate shifts; observations of retreating ice, warming and rising seas, and other changes around the planet; and a greatly expanded suite of supercomputer simulations used to test how the earth will respond to a growing blanket of gases that hold heat in the atmosphere. The section released Friday was a 20-page summary for policymakers, which was approved early in the morning by teams of officials from more than 100 countries after three days and nights of wrangling over wording with the lead authors, all of whom are scientists. It described far-flung ramifications for both humans and nature. ''It is very likely that hot extremes, heat waves and heavy precipitation events will continue to become more frequent,'' said the summary. Generally, the scientists said, more precipitation will fall at higher latitudes, which are also likely to see lengthened growing seasons. Semi-arid subtropical regions, already chronically plagued by drought, could have a further 20 percent drop in rainfall under the panel's midrange outlook for increases in the greenhouse gases. The summary added a new chemical consequence of the buildup of carbon dioxide to the list of mainly climatic and biological effects foreseen in its previous reports: a drop in the pH of seawater as oceans absorb billions of tons of carbon dioxide, which forms carbonic acid when partly dissolved. The ocean would stay alkaline, but marine biologists have said that a change in the direction of acidity could imperil some kinds of corals and plankton. The report essentially caps a half-century-long effort to discern whether humans, through the buildup of carbon dioxide and other gases released mainly by burning fuels and forests, could influence the earth's climate system in potentially momentous ways. The group operates under the aegis of the United Nations and was chartered in 1988 -- a year of record heat, burning forests and | SCIENCE PANEL SAYS GLOBAL WARMING IS 'UNEQUIVOCAL' |
1823350_2 | and forgetfulness in Greek literature. The so-called memory wars peaked in the 1980s, when some patients in therapy described long-lost scenes of abuse, often at the hands of their parents. Books and news articles dramatized the experience, and some charges turned into high-profile court cases. The debate died down in the 1990s, after experts raised questions about many claims, but it has revived in recent years, largely because of the sexual abuse scandal in the Roman Catholic Church. The authors of the new paper report that they received ''more than 100'' responses to their challenge. Euripides' Heracles, in a fit of madness, murders his wife and children, but forgets the incident after suffering an injury. In Shakespeare, King Lear at first does not recognize his daughter Cordelia when he awakens disoriented in the French camp. In some versions of the Sanskrit epic Ramayana, the immortal monkey Hanuman forgets that he possesses supernatural powers. But none of these adventures fit the authors' strict criteria: a healthy person blacks out a specific traumatic event, only to retrieve it a year or more later. Madame de Tourvel's experience -- submitted by Richard J. McNally, a Harvard psychologist and a repressed-memory skeptic -- may offer ''the first glimmering of a concept'' that arose during the Romantic era in the 1800s, later took hold in the writings of Freud and eventually provided a staple in Hollywood movies, Dr. Pope said. David Bromwich, a professor of English at Yale and author of ''Disowned by Memory: Wordsworth's Poetry in the 1790s'' (University of Chicago Press), disavowed any special expertise on the memory debate. But he said the Romantic period ''was full of poets and others saying that the mind works by a combination of invention and re-creation of material from half-forgotten memories.'' The scientific dispute is over what constitutes normal forgetting. Studies show that healthy people usually remember frightening or dangerous incidents more vividly than other experiences: the brain preserves these impressions because they are important for survival. But those who believe in the brain's ability actively to repress say this system may break down if the memory is too upsetting. ''Dr. Pope is famous for saying trauma is memorable, but when he is presented with cases of forgetting trauma -- as in the 101 cases in my Web site -- his answer is that they are normal forgetting,'' Ross E. Cheit, a political scientist at Brown | A Study Of Memory Looks at Fact And Fiction |
1823339_3 | Kyoto concert hall, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles and buildings for the Olympics in Barcelona and Turin. Mr. Isozaki, who once studied in Florence, envisions the exit as a steel-and-stone echo of the statue-filled Loggia dei Lanzi in nearby Piazza della Signora. The contrast between old and new became, perhaps inevitably, one target of criticism. Under the administration of former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, an undersecretary of culture froze this exit project (and caused some offense when he wrote an article with a headline calling Mr. Isozaki a ''kamikaze of architecture''). Architectural ruins were discovered near the site, causing more delay. But not all the opposition focused on the exit. Ms. Petrioli Tofani, for example, said she largely liked Mr. Isozaki's plan. ''He is a learned man,'' she said. ''He was perfectly aware that he was not building in a desert.'' Rather, she and others have complained about the internal changes. Some opponents, like Riccardo Francovich, professor of medieval archaeology at the University of Siena, who consulted on parts of the project, worry about whether the new construction, especially the staircases, would destroy underground ruins and archaeological sites. A particular complaint is whether one of the staircases would require any demolition to the foundation of what remains of the San Pier Scheraggio church, where Dante and Boccaccio are said to have preached. Ms. Petrioli Tofani said she was most concerned, however, that all of the pieces might not fit together in a way that preserves the character of the Uffizi, which she called its own ''work of art.'' ''I am not against today's creativity,'' she said. ''What is important is that today's creativity is not at the expense of the past.'' Paola Grifoni, Florence's superintendent for architecture, said the plans take into account these concerns. The staircase, she said, will not touch the church foundation. She argued that the projects would change very little, given all that needed updating, including a complex ventilation system, and given a desire to keep the museum open while the work went on. ''It's not a destructive renovation,'' she said. ''It is extremely conservative.'' She contended that at this late date the project was bound to go forward. Mr. Francovich said, however, that he hoped there would still be room for it to evolve. ''It should be more organic,'' he said. ''The project should have all the flexibility necessary to make changes.'' | Uffizi Expansion Is Finally (Well, Maybe) to Begin |
1824823_1 | The singer Mary J. Blige (left), a nominee in both the record and song of the year categories at the 49th annual Grammy Awards on Sunday, does a guest turn as the coach, whose past life is hindering her ability to put a stop to the team's adversities. 8 P.M. (CMT) COWBOY U -- Fallon Taylor, a champion barrel racer, helps the city slickers get closer to competing in the rodeo for $25,000. Dinner is authentic ranch cooking, followed by a wild cow riding contest. And then another bunkmate heads off into the sunset. 8 P.M. (TLC) OUTRAGEOUS PROPOSALS -- With the help of friends and experts, men ask their girlfriends to marry them in ways the women will always remember. 9 P.M. (NBC) LAS VEGAS -- Tomb raiders: Ed, Danny, Mike and Delinda try to track down a world-famous mummy that was stolen before it reached an exhibition at the Montecito. 9 P.M. (Animal Planet) MS. ADVENTURE -- When someone gets your goat, do you put up your paws or turn the other cheek? Tonight, Rachel Reenstra travels around America to learn how animals fight. 9 P.M. (Sundance) LADETTE TO LADY -- Will you be having tea with those crumpets and tarts? Eight working-class women, or ladettes (right), navigate the old-fashioned curriculum of an upper-crust ladies' finishing school in the English countryside in Season 2 of this reality series. Tonight, the girls, as they're known locally, check into Eggleston Hall and attend a shooting party at one of Yorkshire's poshest country estates. 9 P.M. (TLC) WHAT NOT TO WEAR -- Who wants to buy real estate from someone who looks like she's living on the street? In this episode, Stacy and Clinton help Sarah D. upgrade her wardrobe of sweatshirts, yoga pants and fleece so that she doesn't scare away future homeowners. 10 P.M. (NBC) LAW & ORDER -- Do as I say, not as I do: when a gay actor is found dead, a popular minister (Anson Mount) known for speaking out against homosexuality becomes the prime suspect. 10 P.M. (National Geographic) BATTLE OF THE BEARS -- When four black bears are found savagely murdered, the culprits aren't your everyday poachers. This special looks at the vicious struggle being waged between black bears and grizzly bears (left) in the heart of Yellowstone National Park, and the reasons these animals can't live in peace. KATHRYN SHATTUCK Tonights TV Listings | WHAT'S ON TONIGHT |
1823839_2 | encourages rulers to invade foreign lands, to escalate when battles go badly, to scorn critics, to be cocksure of themselves in the face of adversity. The themes of the classics tend to be the opposite. Literature and history invariably counsel doubt and skepticism -- even when you think you see Desdemona's infidelity with your own eyes, you don't; even when your advisers are telling you ''it's a slam-dunk,'' it's not. The classics have an overwhelmingly cautionary bias, operating as a check on any impulsive rush to war. Perhaps that is because, as Foreign Policy argues in its most recent issue, humans have an ingrained psychological tilt to hawkishness. In many ways, the authors note, human decision-making tends to err in ways that magnify conflict and make it difficult to climb down from confrontation. My hunch is that the classics resonate in part because they are an antidote to that human frailty; literature has generated so many warnings about hubris in part to save us from ourselves. Eastern classics have that same purpose of trying to tame and restrain us. The central theme of Chinese philosophy is the need for moderation, and Sun Tzu's famous ''Art of War'' advises generals on how to win without fighting. (Sun Tzu and Julius Caesar alike also appreciated the diplomatic benefits of treating enemy prisoners well; they would be appalled by Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo.) So Mr. Bush should resolve that for every hour he spends with Mr. Cheney, he will spend another curled up with classical authors like Sophocles. ''Antigone,'' for example, tells of King Creon, a good man who wants the best for his people -- and yet ignores public opinion, refuses to admit error, goes double or nothing with his bets, and is slow to adapt to changing circumstance. Creon's son pleads with his father to be less rigid. The trees that bend survive the seasons, he notes, while those that are inflexible are blown over and destroyed. Americans today yearn for the same kind of wise leadership that the ancient Greeks did: someone with the wisdom to adjust course, to acknowledge error, to listen to critics, to show compassion as well as strength, to discern moral nuance as well as moral clarity. Alexander the Great used to sleep with the ''Iliad'' under his pillow; maybe Mr. Bush should try ''Antigone.'' Oh, and for Mrs. Bush? How about Aristophanes' ''Lysistrata''? Op-Ed Columnist | Under Bush's Pillow |
1828892_4 | some churches certainly did depart, but the Methodist, Lutheran, Presbyterian and Episcopal churches now ordain women. However, some conservative corners of the Episcopal Church and some provinces in the Anglican Communion still do not ordain women as priests or bishops. When the Episcopal Church elected a woman, Katharine Jefferts Schori, as presiding bishop last summer, it rubbed salt in the wound, Mr. Kater said. ''The strength of the reaction by conservatives around homosexuality is partly because of a sense of offense around the ordination of women,'' he said. Dale Basil Martin, a professor of religious studies at Yale University, said, ''When women's ordination came up in the 70s, the African churches weren't nearly as strong as they are now.'' Another difference is that the struggle for women's ordination was led by women already organized into mission societies and women's leagues, said Mark Alan Chaves, a professor of sociology at the University of Arizona, and author of a book on the conflicts over women's ordination. ''They weren't activists, they were church women, part of the establishment, and they were often key players in terms of pushing their denominations to do this,'' he said. The question now is whether the battle over homosexuality in these churches ends more like the one over women, or the one over slavery. In the Anglican Communion, the churches have weathered doctrinal battles in the past by papering over their differences -- literally issuing paper after paper that graciously agreed to disagree, or putting off the question until a cooler set of heads showed up at the next meeting. The Episcopal Church is one of the few that did not split over slavery. Churches in the Confederate States did form a separate alliance, Mr. Kater said, but the national Episcopal Church met without them and ''pretended they were out of the room,'' calling out the dioceses' names for a vote ''as if they had just gone to the bathroom.'' ''After the war there was a simple reconciliation process, and they were all brought back in as if it had not happened,'' he said. ''I was taught in seminary that this was the great strength of the Episcopal Church, that when all the other churches divided, it stayed together and this was a sign of its great sense of unity. I think it was shameful, that the church considered that unity was more important than slavery.'' THE NATION | A Divide, And Maybe A Divorce |
1828645_3 | the burden of exchanging the Empire (once nearly a quarter of the world's land mass, often pink on classroom maps) for a diminished ''imperial commonwealth.'' And she carried on as if the diminishment were merely the result of smart, modern tailoring, a custom-made global outfit for the ingénue figure she cut. It strikes me now that the queen's handbag is a symbol of this contraction. The bag -- often made by Launer London, holder of the Royal Warrant for handbags -- is invariably smallish. Its contents are said to be limited to a handkerchief, comb, lipstick and compact. The symbolism of this minimal kit-on-a-strap is not difficult to unpack. The lipstick represents the pink that once colored the maps. The mirror is the sea o'er which Britannia's navies once ruled. The handkerchief represents the Industrial Revolution, specifically the spinning jenny, and the process by which raw materials from the colonies were transformed into the fine stuffs for which the British are still esteemed. The comb signifies the personal maintenance required when crowns come off. The loss of imperial India, on Aug. 15, 1947, was a particularly Bad Hair Day. And then Suez. An empire in a bag: isn't that what we all crave? Along with some handy tools for repairing the damage empires inflict upon the rulers as well as the ruled? Add it all up, and the message of the handbag is clear: This woman has traveled far, she has traveled light, and she has traveled alone. Even when she had the royal yacht at her disposal and was surrounded by sailors, she was cloaked in solitude, with no one to turn to but horses, dogs and doltish freaks of human nature. Again, this is stoicism transformed into fashion, a lesson in the endurance of hardship turned into a fashion accessory. If your husband walked two paces behind you, wouldn't you look for a prosthetic device to take your arm on stressful state occasions? Such resourcefulness should be rewarded with highest honors. There is ample precedent for deriving titles from inanimate objects. Think of the Order of the Garter. The present heir has even harbored a fantasy of being reincarnated as a tampon. But wouldn't a handbag be more suitable for public receptions? The honorific initials, H.R.H., could remain. And in the spirit of republicanism, referendums would determine which handbag ascends in majesty to rule the dwindling waves. Icons | The Heir Bag |
1828552_2 | bathroom, with its mighty shower and gasping vacuum toilet, to a pair of white-sheathed mattresses on a platform mere inches above the floor. The ceiling, the shelves and the entire bathroom were, like much that bears the prefix easy-, orange. The whole setup could have fit inside the bedroom of my Manhattan tenement apartment. This is just what easyCruisers expect. In fact, it's easyCruise's sales pitch. Nothing is included -- not maid service (optional at $10 a day) or breakfast or offshore excursions or, most crucially, drinks. But no matter: Since the cabins cost as little as $19 a night, depending on when you book and how many frills you're willing to do without (I splurged on a window), the $4 gin and tonics and $7 tropical fruit salads seem like nothing. In any case, the ship itself is not the draw -- the islands it visits are. EasyCruiseOne bounces between St. Martin, St. Kitts and Nevis, Antigua, St. Bart's and Anguilla, arriving around 9:30 a.m. and rarely departing before 3 a.m. What this means is that, unlike passengers on most cruise ships, which generally leave port in the early evening, easyCruisers are not required to eat, drink and seek entertainment onboard, but rather have full days to explore the islands. Often, this took the form of trips organized by Dario Endara, the boyish cruise director, who sent people snorkeling, sea-kayaking and on helicopter flybys of Montserrat, the island ravaged by volcanic eruptions in the 1990s. Unsure of what to expect, I signed up for three trips in three days. The first, on St. Kitts, was a $55 hike led by an older man who pointed out fluffy egrets in acacia trees, scooped up almond pods from the forest floor and attributed all we saw to ''the Almighty.'' Another hike ($35) took nine of us up Nevis's central mountain. At first, the guide, a biologist and former Peace Corps volunteer named Jim Johnson, seemed freakish with his unruly beard, nerd-worthy eyeglasses and professorial intensity. But as we trudged up the centuries-old trail and through the wet, muddy rain forest, we realized Jim knew his mountain. Need a rain hat? He fashioned one from leaves and twigs. Want to open a coconut? He showed us how with a rock. Burned your hand on the caustic sap of the manchineel tree? Urinate on it, he said -- or use vinegar. Only one | Sailing With Few Frills or Inhibitions |
1828529_2 | foresight been so at odds with hindsight. When Nixon took office in 1969, he inherited a war in Vietnam that was costing the United States far more in lives, money and reputation than is the current war in Iraq. The strategic arms balance had shifted in favor of the Soviet Union, whose leaders had crushed dissent in Czechoslovakia and were promising to do so elsewhere. Meanwhile race riots, antiwar protests and an emerging culture of youthful rebellion were making the United States, in the eyes of its new president, almost ungovernable: the nation, Nixon worried, was on the verge of going ''down the drain as a great power.'' Playing the ''China card'' did not resolve these difficulties, but it did regain the initiative. With this single act, Nixon and Kissinger dazzled their domestic critics, rattled the Soviet Union, impressed allies (despite their exasperation at not having been consulted) and set up an exit strategy for a war that had become unwinnable: the United States might indeed ''lose'' South Vietnam, but it would ''gain'' China. Despite its implications for the unfortunate Vietnamese, this was an outcome with which it was hard to argue. At the time, China too faced huge problems, and in contrast to Nixon, Mao had created most of them. He did so through disastrous economic policies -- his ''Great Leap Forward'' had led to the death by famine of as many as 30 million Chinese between 1958 and 1961. His provocations had made China's only major ally, the Soviet Union, a dangerous adversary. And by unleashing a violent Cultural Revolution against his own regime, Mao had turned China into an isolated, exhausted, unpredictable state run by an apparent madman -- one armed with nuclear weapons. During the summer of 1969, Soviet diplomats quietly began asking how the United States would respond if Moscow should decide to launch a preventive war, presumably nuclear, against the Chinese. Nixon's unexpected reply -- that the United States regarded China's security as vital to its own -- was therefore of great interest to Mao when the Americans found ways to convey it to him. The Great Helmsman may have been ''a heartless tyrant,'' as MacMillan says, but he was also a crafty realist. Drawing on recently released Chinese sources, she shows that it was Mao himself who steered the course toward rapprochement with Washington, overruling the hesitancies and objections of his subordinates. Mao's | Great Leap Forward |
1828553_0 | AS the apparent success of easyCruise demonstrates, cruises aren't just for retirees and families anymore. Shedding its image as a stodgy pastime for old people, the cruise industry is working to attract passengers under 35 with themed party cruises, raves, poker tournaments, beer pong matches and onshore excursions like bar hopping that appeal to those still paying off their college loans. ''The onboard products have evolved to include more activities, amenities and programs for younger travelers,'' said Terry Dale, the president of Cruise Lines International Association. ''Bearing this in mind, it is not surprising that special interests geared toward younger travelers, such as music, are on the rise.'' The number of cruisers 25 to 39 continues to grow steadily, accounting for 31 percent of cruise passengers in 2006, compared to 28 percent in 2002, according to the association. Among the pioneers of the spring-break-style voyage is the Groove Cruise, a series of three trips that began in 2004 and that each now draws about 300 passengers, mostly close to 30 in age. They offer three days of house music with DJs like Bad Boy Bill and Donald Glaude, beach parties, belly-flop contests and volleyball tournaments. Groove Cruise passengers share the ship with other cruisers, but there is still plenty of flesh and inebriation. ''Things can get pretty crazy on these cruises -- lots of flashing, hookups, people having sex on balconies, even swingers,'' said Tracy Lee, the Groove Cruise photographer. This year's voyages, on Royal Caribbean Sovereign-class ships, will sail from Miami for Coco Cay and Nassau, the Bahamas (May 11 to 14), and from Los Angeles to Ensenada, Mexico (July 20 to 23). A third cruise from New York City to Bermuda is being planned for the fall. Prices range from $389 to $2,299 a person, double occupancy (877-438-9438, www.whettravel.com). Binge drinking seems to be a major pastime on the Rock Boat, an annual cruise that has attracted more than 2,000 passengers, averaging about 30 years old. While rock 'n' roll is the main draw, with over 20 acts like Sister Hazel and Toad the Wet Sprocket, there are plenty of other frat-worthy attractions. No shuffleboard here: featured activities include beer pong matches, wine tastings, Texas Hold 'Em tournaments and a Mardi Gras-style parade, using luggage trolleys as floats. ''It's a bunch of drinking with no rules,'' said Andrea Garcia, 30, a marketing consultant from Los Angeles who has | Ships Are Rocking More, and Not From Waves |
1828550_0 | WHEN the Norwegian Cruise Line's Sun sails out of New Orleans for Central America in April, Kelli Darcy, her husband, her two sons and 51 other friends and members of her family, including both sets of her boys' grandparents, will be among the ship's passengers. The group, ranging in age from 2 to 78, will cave dive, zip line and tour their way through Belize, Guatemala and Mexico on the seven-day trip. After several cruises with her sons Kody, 7, and Kenny, 9, Ms. Darcy has learned the tricks to keeping both children and adults happy at sea: Eleven-day cruises are too long for her sons, getting a cabin that sleeps four requires making a reservation early, ships with children's pools can minimize angry glares from adult passengers, and a good onboard kids' club not only keeps her sons from too much time outside, where they risk ''getting sunburned and tired out,'' but also gives the adults time to engage in more grown-up pursuits like martini-making clinics. ''We can go to dinner with them, or they can have dinner at the kids' club, where they might have a pizza-making party,'' Ms. Darcy said. Children and cruise ships are no strangers these days, and cruise lines, even smaller luxury ships, are catering not only to the nuclear family but also to multiple generations traveling together. Cruise lines are preparing onboard areas for children, rolling out more activities with an educational slant and arranging port activities that accommodate extended families. Europe is being touted as the latest family-friendly destination, as lines send their biggest and newest ships to the Mediterranean for the summer. Most cruise lines have now dedicated areas on their ships for organized children's activities and places for teenagers to hang out, and well, stay out of trouble. ''If the teen is unhappy, then no one is happy,'' said Carolyn Spencer Brown, editor of the online magazine Cruise Critic. Carnival Cruise Lines, which expects to carry 575,000 children this year, has a teenagers-only Club O2 on its ships. Royal Caribbean ships have nightclubs for teenagers, and Holland America just completed a fleetwide revamp of shipboard children's areas, including adding a hangout area called the Loft on all ships and, on some ships, a teenagers-only sundeck that has a waterfall, a pool and a juice bar. Princess Cruises has spa treatments for teenagers like the $92 ''fake bake'' -- a body | Clearing the Decks, And Staterooms, For the Whole Clan |
1828580_1 | that ''educators already know how to educate everyone and that they just need to try harder'' is a costly wrong impression, he wrote. Not all schoolchildren have the intellectual capacity to reach ''basic achievement'' levels. In college, similar limitations apply. The number of Americans with the brains to master the most challenging college classes, Murray argued, is probably closer to 15 percent than to 45. Of course, part of the reason Americans think everyone should go to college is for its noneducational uses. Anyone can benefit from them. Colleges are the country's most effective marriage brokers. They are also -- assuming you don't study too hard -- a means of redistributing four years' worth of leisure time from the sad stub-end of life to the prime of it. (Just as youth shouldn't be wasted on the young, retirement shouldn't be wasted on the old.) But the price of college long ago outstripped the value of these goods. The most trustworthy indicator that an American college education is something worthwhile is that parents nationwide -- and even worldwide -- are eager to pay up to $180,000 to get one for their children. This is a new development. A quarter-century ago, even the top Ivy League schools were a bargain at $10,000 a year, but they received fewer applications than they do now. Presumably, college is steadily more expensive because its benefits are steadily more visible. In 1979, according to the economists Frank Levy and Richard Murnane, a 30-year-old college graduate earned 17 percent more than a 30-year-old high-school grad. Now the gap is over 50 percent. These numbers don't tell us much about how people get educated at a typical American college offers. You can go to college to get civilized (in the sense that your thoughts about your triumphs and losses at the age of 55 will be colored and deepened by an encounter with Horace or Yeats at the age of 19). Or you can go there to get qualified (in the sense that Salomon Brothers will snap you up, once it sees your B.A. in economics from M.I.T.). Most often, parents must think they are paying for the latter product. Great though Yeats may be, 40-some-odd thousand seems a steep price to pay for his acquaintance. The timeless questions that college provokes -- like ''What the hell are you going to do with a degree in English?'' -- | What a College Education Buys |
1826790_0 | INTERNATIONAL A3-8 House Passes Resolution Rebuking Bush on Iraq A sharply divided House of Representatives passed a resolution formally repudiating President Bush's decision to send more than 20,000 new combat troops to Iraq. The resolution was approved 246 to 182. A1 Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki told President Bush that the increased effort to provide security in Baghdad had gone exceedingly well so far, Mr. Maliki's office said. A6 Iran's Shadowy Foreign Force The Quds Force, which conducts overseas operations for Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and is suspected by the United States of supplying sophisticated explosives to Iraqi militants, remains remarkably mysterious even to those who closely study the country. A1 Italy Indicts 26 Americans An Italian judge indicted 26 Americans, most of them C.I.A. agents, in connection with what will become the first trial of the American program of rendition, a practice of seizing suspected terrorists and interrogating them in other countries. A1 Chávez Expands Price Controls Faced with an accelerating inflation rate and shortages of basic foods, President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela has threatened to jail grocery store owners and nationalize their businesses if they violate the country's expanding price controls. A3 Anglican Rift Over Gays Widens Seven archbishops who say they represent more than 30 million Anglicans worldwide refused to take Communion in Tanzania with the new head of the American Episcopal Church, to protest her support of gay clergy members and blessings for same-sex unions. A3 NATIONAL A10-12; 16 House Votes for Tax Cut For Small Businesses The House voted 360 to 45 to pass a $1.3 billion tax cut for small business, which will be linked to a bill that would raise the minimum wage to $7.25 an hour from $5.15. A10 A Campaign Against McCain Senator John McCain, the Arizona Republican who would like to be president, is a popular man in his state, having won re-election in 2004 with about 76 percent of the vote. But a vocal slice of the state's Republicans are agitating against him in a way that they hope might throw off his presidential campaign. A12 A New Crime-Fighting Tool At least seven states have enormous biometric databases of driver's license photographs or are working on them. The databases may become a radical innovation in law enforcement to fight crime, but critics say they may also represent a profound threat to privacy. A10 Inquiry on Storm Response Gov. | News Summary |
1826713_2 | baseball reigns supreme, soccer stadiums. In an indicator of concern with Mr. Chávez's economic policies, which included nationalizing companies in the telephone and electricity industries, foreign direct investment was negative in the first nine months of 2006. The last year Venezuela had a net investment outflow was in 1986. Shortages of basic foods have been sporadic since the government strengthened price controls in 2003 after a debilitating strike by oil workers. But in recent weeks, the scarcity of items like meat and chicken have led to a panicked reaction by federal authorities as they try to understand how such shortages could develop in a seemingly flourishing economy. Entering a supermarket here is a bizarre experience. Shelves are fully stocked with Scotch whiskey, Argentine wines and imported cheeses like brie and Camembert, but basic staples like black beans and desirable cuts of beef like sirloin are often absent. Customers, even those in the government's own Mercal chain of subsidized grocery stores, are left with choices like pork neck bones, rabbit and unusual cuts of lamb. With shoppers limited to just two large packages of sugar, a black market in sugar has developed among street vendors in parts of Caracas. ''This country is going to turn into Cuba, or Chávez will have to give in,'' said Cándida de Gómez, 54, a shopper at a private supermarket in Los Palos Grandes, a district in the capital. José Vielma Mora, the chief of Seniat, the government's tax agency, oversaw a raid this month on a warehouse here where officials seized about 165 tons of sugar. Mr. Vielma said the raid exposed hoarding by vendors who were unwilling to sell the sugar at official prices. He and other officials in Mr. Chávez's government have repeatedly blamed the shortages on producers, intermediaries and grocers. Those in the food industry argue that the price controls prevented them from making a profit after inflation rose and the value of Venezuela's currency plunged in black market trading in recent weeks. The bolívar, the country's currency, fell more than 30 percent to about 4,400 to the dollar in unofficial trading following Mr. Chávez's nationalization of Venezuela's main telephone company, CANTV, and its largest electric utility, Electricidad de Caracas. Fears that more private companies could be nationalized have put further pressure on the currency as rich Venezuelans try to take money out of the country. Concern over capital flight has made | Chávez Threatens to Jail Violators of Price Controls |
1826702_1 | The Oprah Magazine. Among the maladies identified: BlackBerry thumb: a pain or numbness in your thumbs caused by constant e-mailing, messaging or Internet surfing on hand-held devices. Cellphone elbow: ''No kidding. Cubital tunnel syndrome can result from constantly holding a cellphone to the ear. In severe cases, it can cause permanent nerve damage.'' P.D.A. hunch: neck pain caused by looking straight down at your minimonitor. OUT OF TIME? -- ''Now that people look at their cellphones, iPods or BlackBerrys to tell time, watches may be going the way of cassette tapes and pagers,'' Peter Robison writes in Bloomberg Markets. Spending on watches has fallen 17 percent over the last five years; the only market segment reporting that they bought watches more frequently ''than they did in 2001 were those older than 50,'' according to a survey conducted by Experian Simmons. One 24-year-old quoted in the article said, ''Watches look weird on your wrist.'' All this may augur that the tradition of giving someone a gold watch upon retirement won't last much longer. THE SKINNY -- Obesity can be, at least in part, a problem of personal responsibility. But corporations that leave the issue there are being remarkably shortsighted, two business professors argue. Writing in Sloan Management Review, Kathleen Seiders of Boston College and Leonard L. Berry of Texas A&M list four reasons business needs to be doing something about the rising rate of obesity. The first two have to do with corporate self-preservation. While class-action suits against restaurants and food companies over their menus have not gained traction, they certainly might. And concerns about things like supersize portions and trans fats could cause consumers to boycott the companies that offer them. Third, ''companies will not be able to function efficiently if a significant proportion of their current and future employees suffer from obesity,'' they write. ''The likelihood of more absenteeism and 'presenteeism' (when workers are on the job but unable to perform optimally), as well as rising health care costs associated with obesity, make it imperative for business leaders to get involved.'' Fourth, opportunities exist for companies to develop new products that address the need to slim down the population, allowing those that create them to ''fatten the corporate bottom line.'' FINAL TAKE -- ''Excess weight could be sapping your brainpower,'' Heather Lee writes in Prevention, reporting on a study by French researchers who found that healthy slimmer people had | Wireless Codependency |
1829262_0 | HIGH FLYING -- More people are going abroad in style. International premium travel -- that is, first-class and business-class flying -- grew 4.3 percent last year compared with 2005, according to the International Air Transport Association. Premium travel on the trans-Atlantic routes, which represent 16.1 percent of international premium traffic (the biggest proportion when travel within Europe is not counted) rose 7.8 percent in December compared with December 2005, and rose an overall 3.5 percent for the year. Premium traffic on Europe to Asia routes and all routes to the Middle East continued to grow in double digits, said the group, which represents 250 world airlines. Worldwide there were about 2.1 billion passengers in 2006, and 10.5 percent of them flew premium classes, the group said. HIT LIST -- The top 10 online travel sites in January, based on the number of visits to 20 sites, were these: MapQuest (11.94 percent market share); Expedia (4.62 percent); Yahoo Maps (4.04 percent); Travelocity (2.92 percent); Southwest Airlines (2.87 percent); Orbitz (2.76 percent); Cheap Tickets (2.60 percent); Google Maps (2.02 percent) Yahoo Travel (1.3 percent) and American Airlines (1.28 percent). That is according to Hitwise, an Internet usage research company. RENOVATIONS IN LOS ANGELES -- There was a groundbreaking ceremony at Los Angeles International Airport yesterday for a $575.6 million renovation of the Tom Bradley International Terminal. Officials said the renovation to the 1 million-square-foot terminal was needed to help the airport compete with airports like San Francisco International as demand surges for trans-Pacific travel. Some ticket and check-in counters and screening gates will be relocated during the three-year project, but airport officials said that they expected there would be no disruptions in flight operations. When the renovations are complete, airport officials said, four new megalounges will replace the 16 individual airline lounges and significantly expand overall lounge space by 72 percent, to 47,000 square feet. Three of the new lounges will serve airline alliances, and the fourth will serve unaffiliated airlines. ET CETERA -- About $10 billion a year is spent by 12- to 18-year-olds traveling without their parents, usually on a school or other group trip, but sometimes traveling independently, according to a new survey by the Student and Youth Travel Research Institute at Michigan State University. Thanks to booming travel demand, the two major manufacturers of commercial airliners, Boeing and Airbus, are ''sitting on enormous production backlogs,'' said the Center | MEMO PAD |
1829334_2 | incinerators. But methods of separating circuit board materials often involve heat or chemicals or both, and that can create additional environmental problems. Jia Li and colleagues at Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China have developed and tested an environmentally friendly recycling method that uses technology similar to what might be found in a laser printer. The technique is described in the journal Environmental Science and Technology. First, components like switches and capacitors (which can contain toxic metals) are stripped from the boards. Then the boards are crushed, effectively breaking them down into metallic and nonmetallic particles. These are separated using an electrostatic method, essentially the same technique that spreads toner across a rotating drum in a laser printer to produce a page. The separation process uses a metal drum, too, that the mixed particles fall onto. The nonmetallic particles pick up a static charge, while a stronger charge is induced in the metallic particles. Both stick to the drum, but the metallic particles are immediately discharged to an electrode. Without a charge, they fall off the drum into a hopper. The nonmetallic particles remain on the drum as it rotates, eventually being scraped off so they fall into another hopper. The metals can then be separated using conventional techniques, while the researchers experimented with turning the resinous particles into a kind of nonmetallic plate that they suggest could be used as insulating boards or other building materials. La Isabela's Final Failure Christopher Columbus may have been one heck of an explorer, but as an administrator he left a lot to be desired. La Isabela, the settlement he established on his second voyage with high hopes of finding silver and gold, lasted just four years. The colony found precious little save for disease, storms and hunger before it was abandoned in 1498. Now there's more proof of the misery that was La Isabela, which was on Hispaniola in what is now the Dominican Republic. In the colony's last days, researchers say, settlers made a desperate attempt to extract silver from ore they had brought with them. But they botched the job. The researchers base their conclusion on analysis of a type of ore, called gallena, and glasslike slag, both of which were found at the site. Archaeologists had thought that perhaps this was evidence that the settlers had at least tested local ores. But in a paper in The Proceedings of | OBSERVATORY |
1826345_2 | 2003, as the U.S. battled France over the second Security Council resolution. Clinton's argument at this point was that inspections were working and should be given more time. ''It is preferable that we do this in a peaceful manner through coercive inspection,'' she said on March 3, but went on, ''At some point we have to be willing to uphold the United Nations resolutions.'' Then she added, ''This is a very delicate balancing act.'' On March 17, Bush gave Saddam 48 hours to disarm or face attack. Clinton tried to be critical of the Bush policy while being deferential to the office of the presidency. She clearly had doubts about Bush's timing, but she kept emphasizing that from her time in the White House, she knew how unhelpful it was for senators to be popping off in public on foreign policy. At one press event in New York, she nodded when Charles Rangel said Bush had failed at the U.N. But when reporters asked Clinton to repeat what Rangel had just said, she bit her tongue. On March 17, as U.S. troops mobilized, she issued her strongest statement in support of the effort. Clinton's biggest breach with the liberal wing actually opened up later, in the fall of 2003. Most liberals went into full opposition, wanting to see Bush disgraced. Clinton -- while an early critic of the troop levels, the postwar plans and all the rest -- tried to stay constructive. She wanted to see America and Iraq succeed, even if Bush was not disgraced. When you look back at Clinton's thinking, you don't see a classic war supporter. You see a person who was trying to seek balance between opposing arguments. You also see a person who deferred to the office of the presidency. You see a person who, as president, would be fox to Bush's hedgehog: who would see problems in their complexities rather than in their essentials; who would elevate procedural concerns over philosophical ones; who would postpone decision points for as long as possible; and who would make distinctions few heed. Today, the liberal wing of the Democratic Party believes that the world, and Hillary Clinton in particular, owes it an apology. If she apologizes, she'll forfeit her integrity. She will be apologizing for being herself. Op-Ed Columnist Correction: February 18, 2007, Sunday In Thursday's column I reported, based on a well-placed source, that Hillary | No Apology Needed |
1823049_4 | an Iranian bomb from ever reaching its target. ''It is obvious that this bomb, at the moment it was launched, obviously would be destroyed immediately,'' Mr. Chirac said. ''We have the means -- several countries have the means to destroy a bomb.'' Mr. Chirac also retracted his prediction that a nuclear Iran could encourage Saudi Arabia and Egypt to follow suit. ''I drifted -- because I thought we were off the record -- to say that, for example, Saudi Arabia or Egypt could be tempted to follow this example,'' he said. ''I retract it, of course, since neither Saudi Arabia nor Egypt has made the slightest declaration on these subjects, so it is not up to me to make them.'' As for his suggestion in the first interview that Israel could be a target of an Iranian attack and could retaliate, Mr. Chirac said: ''I don't think I spoke about Israel yesterday. Maybe I did so but I don't think so. I have no recollection of that.'' There were other clarifications. In the initial interview, for example, Mr. Chirac referred to the Iranian Islamic Republic as ''a bit fragile.'' In the subsequent interview, he called Iran ''a great country'' with a ''very old culture'' that ''has an important role to play in the region'' as a force for stability. Mr. Chirac's initial comments contradicted the long-held French policy of deterrence, which holds that Iran must not go nuclear. The thinking is that a nuclear-armed Iran would give Iran the ability to project power throughout the region and threaten its neighbors -- as well as encourage others in the region to seek the bomb. Under Mr. Chirac's presidency, France has joined the United States and other countries in moving to punish Iran for refusing to stop enriching uranium, as demanded by the International Atomic Energy Agency and the United Nations Security Council. Iran insists that the purpose of its uranium enrichment program is to produce energy; France, along with many other countries, including the United States, is convinced that the program is part of a nuclear weapons project. The purpose of the initial interview was for Mr. Chirac to talk about climate change and an international conference in Paris later this week that parallels a United Nations conference on the global environment. The question about Iran followed a comment by Mr. Chirac on the importance of developing nuclear energy programs that | Chirac Unfazed By Nuclear Iran, Then Backtracks |
1822907_0 | Destination Doormats, round welcome mats introduced last month by the home-furnishings retailer Chiasso, do more than just make a statement. They are made of recycled tires, so they are also environmentally friendly. The doormats come in two designs. One, a bright red bull's-eye, has the slogan ''You Are Here'' across the center. The other depicts a city manhole cover. (Available cities include New York, above, Chicago and Paris; there is also a generic version that reads ''Metro Sewer.'') The doormats, which are 24 inches in diameter and cost $28, are available at chiasso.com or (877) 244-2776. STEPHEN MILIOTI CURRENTS: DOORMAT | A Witty Welcome, Responsibly Made |
1826920_5 | toward deinstitutionalization, more kids with disabilities stayed home, and researchers started investigating what influence that really had on brothers and sisters. At first, they sought to test for the expected negative impacts, interviewing parents and their typically developing children to measure those children's levels of depression and behavior problems. For the most part, those studies failed to uncover the sorts of difficulties that had been hypothesized. Researchers concluded that although growing up with a developmentally disabled sibling may be challenging, it doesn't cause any sort of pathology. Subsequent research suggested that when one child has a disability, siblings may in fact benefit. After all, they receive what amounts to an intensive training in tolerance and empathy. In various studies, parents in such families have characterized their typically developing kids as more caring and mature than average, while college-age siblings have described growing up with someone with a disability in favorable terms. Children with a disabled sister or brother have reported more positive interactions and less conflict with their sibling than kids whose siblings aren't disabled, though ''less conflict'' cuts both ways, since sibling fights aren't necessarily bad. In conversation, researchers will refer to ''supersiblings'' -- children who are especially sensitive and responsible as a result of growing up with someone with a disability. But such children haven't been studied extensively, and it now seems too simplistic to categorize the experience of having a sibling with a disability as strictly positive or negative. The supersibling notion may have provided a useful corrective to earlier views, says Tamar Heller, head of the department on disability and human development at the University of Illinois-Chicago, but researchers have moved on to address more practical questions: Are support groups useful? How can families best plan for the future? ''We're just starting to have some research that's really looking at what are the variables that make things better for families,'' Heller says. Because of the particular challenges of autism, siblings of children with the disorder tend to have a harder time than siblings of children with other sorts of special needs: they enjoy fewer positive exchanges with their brothers or sisters and show more behavior problems themselves. Fewer positive interactions might simply follow from the fact that the disorders on the autism spectrum are characterized by social deficits -- from difficulty with eye contact and absence of reciprocity on the milder end to total lack of | Her Autistic Brothers |
1826894_7 | condemns the distribution of contraceptives to young black women by Planned Parenthood and others, whose practices she links to eugenics. Similarly, the chapter on infectious disease opens with the story of an African-American man who was legally detained to ensure he took his tuberculosis medication. Whatever the ethics of this particular case, it concerns quarantine practices, not research. (Patients who follow treatment only erratically contribute to the rise of dangerous drug- resistant strains.) Washington then seems to dismiss directly observed therapy, in which patients must be watched ingesting a complex sequence of medication daily, as yet another of the ''inequitable policies'' -- blacks have a 300 percent greater risk of contracting tuberculosis than whites -- that have ''shaped the uncomfortably close relationship between African-Americans and infectious disease.'' In a discussion of how ''medical sadism'' has been exported to Africa, Washington writes that ''third world women subjects of thalidomide trials for leprosy and AIDS were not warned of the horrible birth defects the drug can cause.'' As with many of Washington's inflammatory claims, there is no citation. And her implication that third world women bear the brunt of this research is simply wrong. Of the six controlled clinical trials of thalidomide for leprosy (which were actually conducted between 1965 and 1971), those in Israel, Venezuela, Malaysia and the United States enrolled men or postmenopausal women, while trials in India, Mali, Somalia and Spain enrolled only men. Furthermore, one of the largest longitudinal studies of thalidomide for leprosy did not single out third world women at all but was done in the United States, Canada and United States territories. Washington says that she wrote ''Medical Apartheid'' in order to help close the ''health gap'' that afflicts African- Americans -- a gap she blames in large part on the untrustworthiness of the medical establishment, which leads many blacks to avoid care. The gap is certainly real: today, blacks die younger than whites, have substantially higher infant mortality rates and receive fewer medical services. Documenting the history of medical research involving black Americans is a necessary and worthy project, but a book as rife with errors and confusions as this one will neither help reduce health disparities nor protect against future exploitation. Ezekiel Emanuel is an oncologist and chairman of the department of clinical bioethics at the National Institutes of Health. He is co-editor of the forthcoming book ''Ethical Issues in International Biomedical Research.'' | Unequal treatment |
1827617_1 | the program, which he plans to formally announce today. But certain elements have been agreed to. The compensation applies to delays and other problems defined as within JetBlue's control. That excludes weather and air traffic control problems. It includes crew shortages, maintenance problems and also, importantly, the airline's failing to recover from weather and air traffic problems by the second day, assuming that the airport is open to flights. The future-flight vouchers would increase in value according to the length of delay. In the case of departures that are delayed one to two hours, for example, passengers would get $25 off a future flight.For a delay of two to four hours, the passenger would receive $50 off a future flight. With delays of more than six hours, passengers would be entitled toa free round-trip flight equal in value to the one bought for the delayed flight. The payments are retroactive to last Thursday and the stranded passengers from the day before, an icy Wednesday, would also qualify for the flight credits. Similar flight vouchers would be given for delays in getting passengers off arriving flights. Arriving passengers on a flight stranded on an airport tarmac more than 30 minutes would get $25 off a future flight. Again, the discounts would increase as the delays lengthened, up to a round-trip ticket for a delay of more than three hours. For departing flights that are stranded on the tarmac away from a terminal, passengers would be given $100 off a future ticket for a delay of more than three hours. If the delay is more than five hours, passengers would get round-trip tickets, and, unless takeoff is imminent, the plane will return to the terminal to let passengers off. The penalties for stranding passengers on departure go into effect later because of the long lines that develop for takeoff at some airports, Mr. Neeleman said. ''There's other things we're working on with luggage," he said in an interview, taking a break from a meeting in which he was hammering out the plan with executives and lawyers. "It's retroactive and it's effective," Mr. Neeleman said. "You can imagine if we cancel a second day of flights how much it would cost," he said, though he did not quantify that cost. JetBlue canceled more than 1,000 flights during the last week, the bulk after Wednesday, when the ice storm hit the East Coast. He | JetBlue to Begin Paying Penalties to Its Stranded Passengers |
1827611_0 | ABOUT $170 billion is spent each year on business travel in the United States. Nearly 90 percent of that is ''managed'' -- that is, booked by corporate departments -- in-house or under contract with a travel management company, or both. Managed programs have one great advantage: volume. They negotiate significant discounts with specific airlines, hotels and car rental companies in exchange for a guaranteed amount of business. In such companies, there is pressure for employees to book ''within policy.'' While this saves the company money, it also limits the control individual employees have over their travel. For example, you may want to earn your elite-status frequent flier miles on American Airlines and stay at a Hilton hotel brand to get your points. But your company may have discount deals with United Airlines and Hyatt, or other combinations. While some companies offer flexibility, basically you're out of luck if your needs and the travel department's don't mesh. On the other hand, as noted here last week, there is the rapidly growing business-travel market of small companies, independent contactors and others who can't negotiate volume discounts. According to Orbitz, which recently introduced a companion Web site called Road Warrior to serve this market, online ''unmanaged'' business travel spending is about $28 billion a year. That is a pretty big pool of potential revenue. So with the rapid growth of small-business and independent employee travel, booking sites, including those run by airlines and hotels, are scrambling to redesign their Web sites to appeal to that Internet-savvy market. It's not necessarily just the budget traveler, either. The Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company this week plans to introduce a redesigned Web site (www.ritzcarlton.com) that stresses user friendliness and includes over 1,000 photographs showing guest rooms, meeting rooms and the like at the 61 Ritz-Carlton hotels worldwide. Location-specific information, with links to local weather, cultural attractions and transportation maps, will also be available to encourage more direct booking and real-time interactive use on the site. Airlines are also grasping the importance of having sophisticated Web sites that offer extra value -- not just fares, but airline-hotel packages and easier ways to book frequent-flier award travel. A lot of us have become disenchanted with airline elite-status mileage programs because upgrades, their primary lure, are harder to get. But a lot of us still see value in piling up miles (the ones you can get by using credit cards as | Airlines Sharpen Sites For Web-Savvy Traveler |
1827497_8 | day. Families of children with intractable epilepsy often have a hard time getting the constellation of services they need. ''Throughout the years, we've had to find things out for ourselves,'' Ms. Leitner said. ''Nobody ever said to us, 'Nora needs speech therapy,' or 'Nora should see a developmental pediatrician.' '' Even finding the right school was a trial; the Leitners now drive Nora 30 miles each way to the Orchard Friends School in Moorestown, N.J. Social isolation is a persistent issue. Schools may not want to include students with epilepsy on field trips; peers may not invite them for sleepovers. ''A lot of it just seems to be awareness issues,'' Mr. Leitner said. ''Most people have never seen somebody have a seizure.'' Dr. Bergqvist agreed. ''It is frightening to see a child seize,'' she acknowledged. ''And then based on that fright, people decide, 'I can't deal with that child.' People still think it's contagious.'' In late November last year, the Leitners agreed to give the vagus nerve stimulator another try. Nora has stayed on the diet, though it appears to be no match for the effects of puberty. Meanwhile, she is having as typical a 12-year-old life as she can. She loves to swim and has taken gymnastics, piano lessons and hip-hop dance classes; her bedroom brims with books, dolls and stuffed animals; she dotes on the family dog, Franklin, and the cat, Lily. Dr. Bergqvist says Nora could experience a remission after she goes through puberty. Until then, the choices continue. But Ms. Leitner acknowledged that their approach may have to change. ''At a certain point, I'm going to have to stop worrying about her ability to think and go for the seizure control,'' she said. But she knows that it will not be easy. ''If she had always been the way she was before the diet, I probably wouldn't be as dramatic about this as I am,'' she said. ''But I've seen what she can do.'' For his part, though, Dr. Devinsky says that families like the Leitners, torn as they may be over the correct path to take, are on the right track. ''If there's a message, it's not to give up,'' he said. ''They should do everything possible to maximize the quality of life of their child, but at the same time, never, ever give up. Because there will be other things coming down the pike.'' | Battling Epilepsy, and Its Stigma |
1827604_2 | its dioceses, which have appealed to the Anglican Communion to free them from oversight by the presiding Episcopal bishop, Bishop Jefferts Schori. Several dozen more parishes have aligned themselves with bishops outside the United States whose churches are more conservative theologically. At a late-night news conference in Dar es Salaam, the Most Rev. Rowan Williams, archbishop of Canterbury, the denomination's spiritual leader, said the group hammered out ''an interim solution that certainly falls very short of resolving all the disputes.'' Tensions ran so high at the meeting that church officials abandoned the traditional group photo of the leaders on Sunday. Even church services were a tense affair as seven conservative archbishops declined communion rather than celebrate the Eucharist with Bishop Jefferts Schori. The communiqué yesterday detailed at length what the Episcopal Church should do to heal the rift over homosexuality. It called on the House of Bishops to adopt an explicit ban against blessings of same-sex unions and to make clear that clergy in homosexual relationships cannot be confirmed as bishops. In June, Episcopal leaders asked dioceses to refrain from consecrating openly gay bishops, but some dioceses continued to put forward candidates. Ten of the 110 Episcopal dioceses officially permit same-sex blessings, according to Clinton Bradley, administrator of Integrity, the gay rights group. Others allow priests to perform blessings if couples request them, he said. To assuage the concerns of traditional American dioceses, the primates, the general equivalent of an archbishop, essentially allowed conservatives to elect their own ''primatial vicar.'' The vicar is to report to a council of five members, two of whom will be selected by Bishop Jefferts Schori, the communiqué states. She and the council together will decide the vicar's powers. Analysts described the arrangement as highly unusual for the Anglican Communion, where primates have clear lines of authority and full responsibility for their own geographical regions. ''I've never seen anything like this before, but then the American Episcopal Church went pretty far off the reservation, very much counter to what the Anglican Communion said was its policy,'' said David Hein, a religion professor at Hood College in Maryland and co-author of the book ''The Episcopalians.'' ''It is an unprecedented response to an unprecedented action.'' The move at least partly satisfied the demands of conservative Episcopal leaders in the United States, who have been begging the Anglican Communion for what they call ''alternative oversight.'' Bishop Robert Duncan | Anglicans Rebuke U.S. Branch On Blessing Same-Sex Unions |
1827502_0 | Jett Lucas, a 14-year-old friend, tells me the kids in his middle school send one other a steady stream of instant messages through the day. But there's a problem. ''Kids will say things to each other in their messages that are too embarrassing to say in person,'' Jett tells me. ''Then when they actually meet up, they are too shy to bring up what they said in the message. It makes things tense.'' Jett's complaint seems to be part of a larger pattern plaguing the world of virtual communications, a problem recognized since the earliest days of the Internet: flaming, or sending a message that is taken as offensive, embarrassing or downright rude. The hallmark of the flame is precisely what Jett lamented: thoughts expressed while sitting alone at the keyboard would be put more diplomatically -- or go unmentioned -- face to face. Flaming has a technical name, the ''online disinhibition effect,'' which psychologists apply to the many ways people behave with less restraint in cyberspace. In a 2004 article in the journal CyberPsychology & Behavior, John Suler, a psychologist at Rider University in Lawrenceville, N.J., suggested that several psychological factors lead to online disinhibition: the anonymity of a Web pseudonym; invisibility to others; the time lag between sending an e-mail message and getting feedback; the exaggerated sense of self from being alone; and the lack of any online authority figure. Dr. Suler notes that disinhibition can be either benign -- when a shy person feels free to open up online -- or toxic, as in flaming. The emerging field of social neuroscience, the study of what goes on in the brains and bodies of two interacting people, offers clues into the neural mechanics behind flaming. This work points to a design flaw inherent in the interface between the brain's social circuitry and the online world. In face-to-face interaction, the brain reads a continual cascade of emotional signs and social cues, instantaneously using them to guide our next move so that the encounter goes well. Much of this social guidance occurs in circuitry centered on the orbitofrontal cortex, a center for empathy. This cortex uses that social scan to help make sure that what we do next will keep the interaction on track. Research by Jennifer Beer, a psychologist at the University of California, Davis, finds that this face-to-face guidance system inhibits impulses for actions that would upset the | Flame First, Think Later: New Clues to E-Mail Misbehavior |
1828416_2 | microRem per scan, according to security agency and company officials. The machine is already being used in some prisons, by United States customs and at Heathrow Airport in London. Dr. Albert J. Fornace Jr., an expert in molecular oncology at Georgetown University Medical Center, said such a low dose was inconsequential, even for pregnant women. ''Obviously, no radiation is even better than even a very low level,'' Dr. Fornace said. ''But this is trivial.'' But David J. Brenner, a professor of radiation oncology at Columbia University, said that even though the risk for any individual was extremely low, he would still avoid it. ''The question is, Do you want to add to your already existing risk?'' Professor Brenner said, recommending that pregnant women and young children, in particular, avoid the device. ''There are other technologies around that can probably do the job just as well without the extra radiation.'' The machine beams a low-energy X-ray at the passenger, which after it bounces off the surface of the skin is processed by computer software that highlights metals or elements like nitrogen that are found in explosives or weapons. The X-ray is not strong enough to penetrate much beyond the skin, so it cannot find weapons that may be hidden in body cavities. ''A lot of people aren't really comfortable with a pat-down,'' said Ellen Howe, a security agency spokeswoman, ''so they may find this to be an alternative they may appreciate.'' She added that the X-ray images would be destroyed immediately. Aviation security officials are rushing to bring new screening devices to airports because of the London-based plot last summer to use liquid explosives to blow up airliners headed to the United States. The devices now used at the nation's airports, the X-ray machine for carry-on bags and the metal detector for passengers, rely on 1950s-era technology that cannot reliably detect liquid or plastic explosives. Earlier efforts by the federal security agency to introduce more advanced checkpoint technologies have stumbled, including the so-called puffer machines, which blow air on passengers to search for minute traces of explosives. After installing 94 of the machines at 37 airports, officials suspended the program last year, saying the devices broke down too often. More puffer machines may be bought if the problems can be resolved. Officials intend to try other alternatives, like a so-called millimeter wave machine that uses harmless radio waves, instead of X-rays, | New Airport X-Rays Scan Bodies, Not Just Bags |
1826594_0 | Bruce M. Metzger, an eminent scholar and translator of the Bible who oversaw the publication of a widely used modern edition that eliminated all the thees and thous and many of the hes, died on Tuesday in Princeton, N.J. He was 93 and a longtime Princeton resident. The cause was respiratory failure, his son John said. At his death, Dr. Metzger was emeritus professor of New Testament language and literature at Princeton Theological Seminary, where he had taught for more than 40 years. An ordained Presbyterian minister, Dr. Metzger was a world-renowned authority on translating the New Testament from the original Greek. He was best known to the general public for supervising the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, which uses contemporary English and does away with much of the exclusively masculine language of previous translations. Introduced in 1990, the New Revised Standard Version is used in several formats by many Protestants, Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox Christians. Dr. Metzger also oversaw publication of The Reader's Digest Bible (1982), which condensed 850,000 words down to 510,000. He was an editor of the United Bible Societies' Greek New Testament, published in 1966, and a past chairman of the American Bible Society's committee on translation. As a scholar, Dr. Metzger was known in particular for his close textual studies of the New Testament and the Apocryphal literature, books that are not part of a recognized canon. He also wrote about the Bible as it was rendered by Eastern branches of the church -- Greek, Slavonic, Georgian, Ethiopic, Syrian and Armenian -- drawing on his command of ancient and modern languages. Besides Greek, Latin and Hebrew, Dr. Metzger knew Coptic, Syriac, Russian, German, Spanish, French and Dutch, among others. Among his dozens of books are ''The Early Versions of the New Testament: Their Origin, Transmission, and Limitations'' (Clarendon, 1977); ''Manuscripts of the Greek Bible: An Introduction to Greek Palaeography'' (Oxford University, 1981); ''Breaking the Code: Understanding the Book of Revelation'' (Abingdon, 1993); and ''The Bible in Translation: Ancient and English Versions'' (Baker Academic, 2001). With Michael D. Coogan, Dr. Metzger edited The Oxford Companion to the Bible, published in 1993. Bruce Manning Metzger was born in Middletown, Pa., on Feb. 9, 1914. He earned a bachelor's degree in Latin and Greek from Lebanon Valley College in 1935. In 1938, he received a bachelor's in theology from Princeton Theological Seminary, and in 1939, | Bruce Metzger, Scholar and Bible Translator, Dies at 93 |
1826636_0 | As airlines and stranded passengers struggled to deal with hundreds of cancellations and delays caused by Wednesday's storm, things got particularly bad for JetBlue Airways last night when police officers were called to one of its service counters to help with irate customers. At Newark Liberty International Airport, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey sent five police officers to guard the JetBlue counter at the airline's request. ''In the process of canceling a flight there were some passengers becoming unruly,'' and JetBlue wanted police assistance, said Marc La Vorgna, a spokesman for the Port Authority. At Kennedy International Airport, where JetBlue is the largest carrier, 125 of the airline's 560 scheduled flights were canceled yesterday, said Jenny Dervin, a company spokeswoman. ''We had a problem matching aircraft with flight crews,'' she said. ''It was a snowball effect from yesterday's ice storm,'' she said, adding that 95 percent of JetBlue's flights out of Kennedy after 5 p.m. were canceled. The cancellations left many passengers with a sense of whiplash. Fred Dulaney, of Stamford, Conn., had been scheduled for a Wednesday flight to Florida, which he boarded twice before it was canceled. He said he and his wife returned home and booked a flight on another airline, not planning to use their JetBlue tickets. Yesterday, he said, ''they called us at 5 o'clock and told us they had a flight for us at 11 p.m.'' But when the couple arrived at the overflowing JetBlue terminal at Kennedy, they were told that no more JetBlue flights would be leaving that day. ''There were literally thousands of people in winding lines,'' he said. ''Some had been there for hours and hours and hours.'' Ms. Dervin said customers with tickets for canceled flights would be given a refund, or would be rebooked on the next available flight. However, she cautioned, ''because it's a holiday weekend, the next available flight may not be until Tuesday.'' | JetBlue Flight Snarls Continue |
1824709_1 | very different from the passenger-baggage inspection system -- were sufficient to prevent a bomb from getting aboard. Mandating physical inspection of all air cargo could actually reduce safety, said Kip Hawley, the security administration's director, because the high cost would require other security measures to be curtailed. ''History is full of examples of invincible secure systems failing, like the Titanic,'' Mr. Hawley said. ''If you put all of your resources into making something invulnerable, you end up ironically with less security.'' The debate has implications not only for air safety, but also for the financial health of the nation's airlines. Twenty-two percent of domestic air cargo travels on passenger aircraft, or about 2.8 million tons a year, producing $4.7 billion a year in revenue for the airlines. And this steady stream of air cargo -- most of it promised for delivery in one or two days -- is often what makes the difference between a profitable route and one that loses money. Industry officials fear that tougher standards may force cargo off passenger planes and onto flights reserved just for cargo, or cause huge delays. ''Imagine automotive manufacturing facilities idled due to the lack of airbags or other parts, restaurants closed because seafood did not arrive or flower shops without flowers on Mother's Day and other holidays,'' the Air Transport Association said in reply to Mr. Markey's plan. ''These are very real concerns.'' At major airports across the United States, there are few similarities between security systems for cargo and passenger baggage even though both end up on the same plane. For passenger baggage, almost the entire security system is focused on one moment: when the bag is handed off, as passengers arrive at the airport. Every bag is electronically scanned or examined by a second device that swabs it to check for traces of explosives. In unusual circumstances, physical or canine searches are substituted. The security effort is not nearly so intense for air cargo at any one point. Instead, transportation officials have tried to build a security zone surrounding the cargo packages during their journey from the manufacturing plant to the plane. Much of the cargo system is based on a belief that the government can be confident of cargo security if it has a record of who is sending the package and has completed background checks on the freight forwarding and air cargo employees who have access | Security Debate Centers on Tougher Standards for Inspections of Air Cargo |
1824605_2 | their bets on a new kind of radio-controlled three-wheeled vehicle it is calling the Tyco R/C Terrainiac. Scheduled to go on sale in the summer for about $80, the Terrainiac is a futuristic-looking vehicle powered by a single rear wheel that is a complex treaded ball, referred to by its makers as a ''sphere drive.'' The body of the vehicle has been engineered with a controllable joint that allows the Terrainiac to pivot or twist like a human torso. The results are radical turns at high speeds as its high-torque electric motor drives the vehicle over practically any sort of terrain; thus its name. But George Benz, director of marketing for Tyco Radio Control, said the toy will not be limited to solid surfaces. The sphere drive is hollow, helping to provide buoyancy as well as locomotion when the Terrainiac takes to the water. ''The tricky part of development is making these toys have tremendous performance on land and really deliver when it gets wet,'' he said. WowWee, whose previous creations include the robotic toy Robosapien, is also working on a radio-controlled vehicle for release this year that walks on four spidery, multijointed legs. It is called Roboquad and is expected to cost $100. And Wild Planet Entertainment, which makes a line of ''spy toys for any mission'' under the rubric Spy Gear, had added a surveillance wrinkle to a rather conventional remote-controlled vehicle. Its Spy Video Car, which sells for $140, has a front-mounted camera that wirelessly transmits a live video image that can be viewed in an eyepiece. ''A separate transmitter in the car transmits the video over a 2.4 megahertz frequency like a wireless phone uses,'' said Shannon Bruzelius, the product integrity engineer at Wild Planet, which operates research and development centers in San Francisco and Hong Kong. He said the company plans to add a $15 Mobile Spy Ear vehicle (not remotely controlled) equipped with a microphone and an amplifier that can wirelessly beam sounds up to 75 feet to an earbud the user wears. But of all the innovations brimming in toy vehicles these days, the most startling have been reserved for those that achieve flight. Late last year, Jakks Pacific, a toymaker in Malibu, Calif., released a lightweight radio-controlled flying wing called the XPV, or Xtreme Performance Vehicle, which sells for $60. Once its onboard battery is fully charged, the twin-propeller craft can soar | Circuits; If Leonardo Had Made Toys |
1824729_3 | with work. ''In theory, the rules are there to rescue things as they come out,'' Dr. von Falkenhausen said. But, in reality, developers and local officials often sidestep the rules, partly because surveys and excavations can be time-consuming and create costly construction delays. Chinese archaeologists, as a group considered well trained, are greatly outnumbered, and Dr. von Falkenhausen said many of the local antiquities bureaus tried to perform a sort of archaeological triage by rescuing antiquities before they were stolen or destroyed. Public support for preservation is hard to gauge, and Mr. Xu said archaeologists often must convince local officials that an ancient site has value and should not simply be steamrolled. In the most important sites, archaeologists try to leave the relics undisturbed; the mausoleum of Emperor Qin Shihuang outside Xian, by the famous site of the terra cotta warriors, is being left untouched until technology advances enough to ensure a safe excavation. Unquestionably, archaeological projects are under way all over China. In 2005, the National Antiquities Bureau approved excavations at 600 sites, including 17 where ancient chariots were recovered. Each year, as a tool of public education, the State Administration of Cultural Heritage publishes a glossy book detailing the 10 major archaeological finds of the year. As important as what is being unearthed, Chinese archaeology has also contributed to a rethinking of Chinese history and the belief that the Han Chinese people originated solely from the Yellow River region in central China. Discoveries over the past two decades have proved that an advanced civilization had also developed farther to the south, near the Yangtze River, suggesting a far more complicated national history. In 2005, a sophisticated piece of bronze found in southern Zhejiang Province dated back roughly 10,000 years. Beijing itself is a microcosm of the tension between new and old. Almost the entire ancient city has been destroyed during the past six decades, a process accelerated in recent years as developers and city officials have rushed to prepare the city for the Olympics. Entire neighborhoods of ancient lanes and courtyard houses have been flattened as developers have raced to finish projects before the Games. But at the actual sites of the Olympic venues, the most prestigious and highest profile construction project in China, organizers have been careful to work with preservationists. Song Dachuan, a scholar at the Cultural Relics Research Institute, said that farmers and tradesmen most | Olympic Construction Unearths Ancient Treasure Trove |
1824703_1 | nuclear device. A13 More Letter Bombs in Britain A letter bomb exploded at Britain's main motor vehicle agency, extending what the police depicted as a coordinated series of attacks. A6 NATIONAL A10-14 Final Prosecution Flourish As Leak Case Nears End The prosecution in the perjury trial of I. Lewis Libby Jr. neared the end of its case with a final dramatic flourish, putting Tim Russert of NBC News on the witness stand to deliver what could be a serious blow to Mr. Libby's defense. A1 Religion a Factor for Romney As he begins campaigning for the Republican presidential nomination, Mitt Romney is facing a threshold issue: whether his Mormonism will be a big obstacle to winning the White House. A1 NASA Reviews Screenings NASA is reviewing its psychological screening and checkup process after the arrest of Capt. Lisa Marie Nowak, the astronaut accused of attempted murder, space agency officials said. They will also try to determine whether officials missed ''indications of concern'' in Captain Nowak's case. A14 Concerns for Asylum Seekers A bipartisan federal commission warned that the Bush administration, in its zeal to secure the nation's borders and stem the tide of illegal immigrants, may be leaving asylum seekers vulnerable to deportation and harsh treatment. A17 SCIENCE/HEALTH Prescription-Free Diet Drug The Food and Drug Administration approved the first officially sanctioned weight loss drug to be sold without a prescription. Experts expect the drug, Alli, to be available to consumers in the summer. A16 NEW YORK/REGION B1-6 With Comptroller Choice, Lawmakers Rebuff Spitzer New York State lawmakers rebuffed Governor Spitzer by choosing one of their own as the next state comptroller, reneging on a deal they made with the governor to choose candidates deemed qualified by an outside panel. Mr. Spitzer had wanted a candidate from outside the Legislature who had financial expertise. A1 BUSINESS DAY C1-13 Blackstone's Bid Wins The competition over Equity Office Properties Trust, the nation's largest office landlord, ended with the Blackstone Group, coming out on top. A1 Business Digest C2 SPORTSTHURSDAY D1-6 Weighing Female Athletes Twenty-five seasons after the National Collegiate Athletic Association began sponsoring women's basketball, the weights of amateur female athletes are almost never published, in basketball or any other sport, and the very idea of weighing female athletes is under vigorous debate. A1 ARTS E1-12 Book Award Nominee Criticized A previous finalist for the National Book Critics Circle award accused one of | NEWS SUMMARY |
1823174_0 | In its 2001 assessment, its third, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimated that in the next hundred years sea level would rise globally by at least a few inches and perhaps as much as three feet, a catastrophe for low-lying coastal areas and island nations. In Paris today the panel will issue its fourth assessment, and people familiar with its deliberations say it will moderate its gloom on sea level rise, lowering its worst-case estimate. In theory that is good news, because rising seas bring erosion and flooding to coastal areas. But a lower estimate has not been uniformly cheered. In letters to and conversations with panel members, and in scientific journals, several climate experts said the estimate was almost certainly wrong because the panel was leaving out a growing body of data on melting glaciers and inland ice sheets, which are major contributors to sea level rise. Those experts say that unless the finding is modified, the panel -- widely cited as an authoritative voice on climate change -- risks condemning itself to irrelevance. Climate experts have ''a great deal of confidence'' in observations that sea level rise is accelerating, said Laury Miller, an oceanographer at the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration who was a reviewer for part of the coming report. Good satellite measurements date only from the last decade or so, he said, so it is hard to draw firm long-term conclusions from them. Also, he said, computer models of how glaciers and ice sheets melt cannot account for much of the observed melting, even though ''presumably it is going into the ocean.'' But so far at least, he said, ''the observed sea level rise has been tracking the upper range'' of the 2001 estimate. ''It's pretty unequivocal,'' he said. Michael C. MacCracken, who led the Office of Climate Change in the Clinton administration and who was also a reviewer for some of the new assessment, said he could understand why scientists on the panel might be uneasy about relying too much on models. But in that event, he said, they should make it known that their estimates did not include factors like ice sheet movement and collapse, which appear to be accelerating. In a letter to panel members on Jan. 21, Dr. MacCracken said lowering the worst-case sea level estimate would ''result in a serious misimpression being conveyed to policy makers and the public.'' In | Even Before Its Release, World Climate Report Is Criticized as Too Optimistic |
1823196_0 | President Jacques Chirac, seeking to limit the diplomatic reaction over his remarks on Iran's nuclear ambitions, reaffirmed Thursday that France remained committed to preventing Iran from becoming a nuclear power. The statement was issued within hours of the publication of an interview in which Mr. Chirac said that if Iran had one or two nuclear weapons, it would not pose a serious danger because the launching of such a weapon would lead to the immediate destruction of Tehran. The president's office denounced the publication of his comments as a ''shameful campaign'' and accused American news media outlets of ''using any excuse to engage in France-bashing.'' The remarks, made in an interview on Monday with The New York Times, The International Herald Tribune and Le Nouvel Observateur, a weekly magazine, differed vastly from stated French policy and from what Mr. Chirac has often said. On Tuesday, Mr. Chirac summoned the same journalists back to Élysée Palace to retract many of his remarks. ''France, along with the international community, cannot accept the prospect of a nuclear-armed Iran,'' said a statement from his office issued on Thursday. ''The Iranian nuclear program is opaque and therefore dangerous for the region in terms of proliferation and an arms race.'' Along with Britain and Germany, France has been spearheading diplomatic efforts to persuade Iran to abandon parts of its nuclear program. In December, it joined the United States and other countries in passing a United Nations Security Council resolution calling for sanctions on Iran for its refusal to stop enriching uranium. Despite the statement on Thursday from Élysée Palace, Le Monde called Mr. Chirac's remarks on Iran a ''radical turnaround that comes at a bad moment'' and argued that they also risked diminishing France's credibility on the international stage. ''When the international community will reconvene in New York and again threaten Iran, people will question how credible the French position is,'' the newspaper said in an editorial. Several of France's main allies in the negotiations with Iran said Thursday, at least officially, that they were reassured by the president's swift self-correction. Reacting to the notion that a nuclear-armed Iran would not be highly dangerous, the British foreign secretary, Margaret Beckett, said, ''It is not a sentiment I share, and from what I understand, the French president doesn't share it anymore, either.'' A German diplomat said he was confident that French policy on Iran was unchanged, while | In Uproar, Chirac Again Retracts Remarks on Nuclear Iran |
1825545_1 | diverse pieces of American reality, and to expose what they call ''the myths of neopopulism.'' The first myth, they write, is the myth of the failing middle class. It's true there are more households headed by young and old people, who tend to have lower incomes. But if you take households headed by people in their prime working years, 25 to 59, you find those people are not failing. Their median income is $61,000. If they are married, their median income is $72,000. Those are decent incomes in most parts of the country. Moreover, their living standards are not stagnant. Between 1979 and 2005, the percentage of prime-age households making over $100,000 in current dollars rose by 12.7 percentage points. As Ben Bernanke, the Fed chairman, said last week, incomes at all levels are rising; it's just that incomes at the upper end are rising much faster. The Third Way authors also dispute recent warnings of wildly increasing income volatility. The main reason incomes have grown more volatile over the past decades is motherhood, they write. As women play a more significant role in the economy, their movements in and out of the labor force to care for children increase volatility. The report goes on to challenge the direst warnings about rising credit card debt (household assets have risen faster than debts), rising corporate profits (they are cyclical and pretty much normal for this stage in a recovery) and American decline. The Third Way authors are not saying everything is hunky-dory -- far from it -- but they are saying Democrats tend to lose when they are relentlessly grim and when the reality they describe is detached from the reality most Americans experience. Moreover, they are restating the truth neopopulists are loath to admit: that no nation on earth is better positioned to take advantage of an ever-more-open economy, and today's challenge is not to retard openness but enable more people to take part in it. The second half of the report describes how government can help people adjust to the new economic rules. Frankly, I wish the authors had been a bit more creative here, asking, for example, why so many people don't heed the huge incentives to finish high school and college. There are deeper mental and cultural processes in play than can be dealt with by the usual mix of tax credits. Still, the significance of the | Who's Afraid of the New Economy? |
1825494_0 | RICK BRENNAN, director of brand management for Kumho Tire USA of Rancho Cucamonga, Calif., is candid about his company's name recognition, at least when compared with that of industry giants like Goodyear and Michelin. ''We have very low brand awareness,'' Mr. Brennan said. ''From our perspective, anything we can do to create some amount of buzz or get people talking about Kumho, that's something we very much want to do.'' Creating tire buzz, however, is a rather tall order: tread depth and traction measurements are infrequently discussed on the cocktail-party circuit. So in its quest to set tongues wagging, Kumho has gone gimmicky: its new Ecsta DX tires are imbued with scented oils that make the rubber smell like lavender for a year. The idea for the Ecsta DX was first suggested at a 2005 product planning meeting in Akron, Ohio, where Kumho operates a technical center. ''We were thinking, 'How can we get more attention than anybody else?' '' Mr. Brennan said. One notion was to capitalize on the vogue for drifting, a motor sport in which drivers propel their cars sideways in controlled skids rather than straight ahead. This brainstorm would soon lead Kumho, a subsidiary of the Kumho Tire Company of South Korea, to create the Ecsta MX-C, which emits plumes of colored smoke when screeched side-to-side across asphalt. After those at the meeting agreed to start developing the Ecsta MX-C, someone said, '' 'If we can make them smoke, then the next step would be to make them smell,' '' Mr. Brennan recalled. ''We sort of laughed at that one.'' But about six months later, after the MX-C had been rolled out to some media fanfare, Kumho began work on its aromatic tires. Kumho's designers first tried lacing tires with scented pellets, but found that the odors didn't permeate evenly throughout the rubber. They eventually concocted a scented oil that is poured into the rubber mixture during production. The oil is heat-resistant, so it won't dissipate in the friction between tire and road. According to the company, the scent is most noticeable immediately after normal driving, when the tires are warm. Several scents were tried, including pine, jasmine, rosemary and orange. But a 12-member focus group preferred lavender, Mr. Brennan said, because it was the most fragrant of the group. But if the DX turns out to be a hit, jasmine- and orange-scented tires may soon | Sweet Smell Of Sidewalls |
1825556_4 | Readers were advised that women living without a spouse -- the new majority -- included ''a relatively small number'' whose husbands were temporarily away from home serving in the military or out of town working, or who were institutionalized. The article never alerted readers, however, to the exclusion of the mostly spouseless females in ''group quarters,'' such as college dormitories; counting those residents would have tended to bolster the number of women living without a spouse and the new majority. Readers could have been given a fuller and more realistic perspective on the 2005 data on women living without spouses, in addition to a presentation of basic historical data that provided consistency and comparability. With a long-acknowledged trend topping 50 percent by one count, the main thrust of the article was assessing the kind of women who constitute this new majority. And that should have included pointing out that almost 90 percent of the more than six million females ages 15 to 17 in the new majority are still living with their parents. Common sense would also seem to have called for telling readers how many women above high school age were living without spouses in 2005. Simply subtracting the numbers for the A.C.S.'s 15-to-17 category from the total provides the data for females 18 and older. It shows that 48 percent of them were living without husbands -- short of the 51 percent reached when high-school-age females were included -- a fact that merited equal billing in the article. Eliminating all teenagers and counting only women 20 and older would have shown that 47 percent were living without a spouse in 2005, according to my math. Consultants to The Times at Queens College can provide historical data on the percentages of females in various age categories who were living with, and without, a spouse. (They use samples of individual raw Census Bureau data that can vary slightly from the A.C.S. numbers.) The consultants gave me historical data for all females 15 and older, as well as all those 18 and older. My rough plotting of the percentages of females living without a spouse in each of the two age ranges since 1950 produced trend lines that were essentially parallel. The eye-catching assertion that more women in America were living without a husband than with one obviously vaulted this article to Page One. ''It is true that the 51 percent | Can a 15-Year-Old Be a 'Woman Without a Spouse'? |
1825519_8 | pedigree of many of the other early biotechnology companies like Genentech, Amgen, Biogen and Chiron. Academic superstars started each of those companies. In contrast, Dr. Scannon had just finished his medical residency and, despite his doctorate in chemistry, he remained a neophyte when it came to business. ''I'd never talked to a venture capitalist,'' he recalls. ''I'd never talked to anyone.'' But he began pounding the pavement in 1980 in search of investors, starting with physicians he knew. At first, the going was tough, he said. But in October of that year, Genentech went public and its stock soared on its first day of trading, from $35 to as high as $86. After that, Dr. Scannon said, investors sought him out. Early investors were intrigued by Xoma's plans to develop monoclonal antibodies. The monoclonals were hailed at the time as potential ''magic bullets,'' able to home in on disease-causing molecules in the human body. By the end of the 1980s, Xoma was in advanced testing of a drug to treat sepsis, a potentially fatal reaction by the body to bacterial infection. Pfizer had licensed the rights to market the drug. Xoma had a second drug, in a partnership with Johnson & Johnson, to treat a sometimes fatal complication of bone-marrow transplantation. In 1992, anticipating commercial success for its drugs, Xoma hired an experienced pharmaceutical executive, John L. Castello, as its chief executive. But sepsis, a rapidly progressing disease, turned out to be a minefield, not only for Xoma but also for other companies that followed it. Within weeks of Mr. Castello's arrival, the company learned that the Food and Drug Administration would not approve the sepsis medicine. Drugs from other companies also failed to win approval, and it became apparent that monoclonal antibodies' day was yet to come. Instead of a leading a commercial drug company, Mr. Castello found himself saddled with an enterprise in need of a turnaround. ''When I got here, I didn't expect to be sitting here 14 years later talking about getting profitable,'' says Mr. Castello, who is still at his post. Rather than fold up shop, the company decided to keep fighting by moving on to the next project. This decision, Mr. Castello said, stemmed partly from a lesson he learned when he was a prize fighter in his youth: ''It's very difficult to beat somebody if they will not stay down on the floor.'' | It's Alive! Meet One of Biotech's Zombies |
1825550_1 | given incentives and detailed disincentives for families to limit themselves to three children. Previous efforts had been opposed by officials who told Ms. Nyiramilimo that education, not population, was the problem. But nearly half of Rwanda's legislators are female, and Ms. Nyiramilimo is among several who have spent years pushing for a serious population control effort. The country's population has quadrupled over the last half-century. Today Rwanda has 8.8 million people; most are subsistence farmers. If current fertility rates are not curbed -- Rwandan women bear an average of 6.1 children -- the population will double by 2030. That would almost certainly doom Mr. Kagame's ambitious plan to raise Rwanda from poverty over that same period. ''The last government's philosophy was that the country was too small for all Rwandans,'' said Dr. Richard Sezibera, a close adviser to Mr. Kagame, referring to the rulers who oversaw the genocide. ''We insisted that the country was big enough to accommodate everybody. But many people took that to apply to the unborn as well, and we're having to face that mind-set.'' Dr. Sezibera and President Kagame, like many members of the minority Tutsi group that suffered the brunt of the genocide, were forced out of Rwanda decades ago and grew up as refugees. Officials who are designing the new population control program said it would include a requirement that everyone who visits a hospital or health center for any reason be counseled on family planning. Women of child-bearing age will be offered free contraceptive devices including Norplant II, a small silicone pin that is inserted beneath the skin and is effective for up to five years. All schools will offer comprehensive sex education courses. ''The basis for this new campaign is already in place,'' said Laura Hoemeke, director of the Twubakane Decentralization and Health Project, a community initiative that includes family planning. Though the Bush administration has often discouraged birth control, the United States government is financing this program. Political opposition to population control measures has melted away as it has become clear that President Kagame now strongly favors them. In a sign of the changing climate, a government-sponsored newspaper, New Times, recently published a supplement with a front-page headline, ''Rapid Population Growth: A Constraint on Resources.'' Below was a photo of an idyllic landscape with the caption, ''This beautiful scenery will diminish if population is not controlled.'' An accompanying editorial said that | After So Many Deaths, Too Many Births |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.