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1007587_3 | electricity spread to become a fact instead of a feature of production. By the 1920's, Maytag was churning out affordable washing machines in Newton, while Ford cars were zipping off the assembly line in Detroit. It takes decades for technology to produce prosperity, the authors say, as they trace similar stop-and-start progress in computerization. And why will the wealth from computerization be so widely spread? Because of more widely available post-secondary education, the authors say, notably at the nation's 1,100 community colleges. THESE schools are largely unappreciated by state legislators, the authors lament, even though ''what goes on at a school like Cuyahoga Community College, in Cleveland and similar institutions across the country is more important to the American middle class than what happens at Harvard.'' Such colleges, now with five million students, prepare new and displaced workers for the technology-heavy economy to come. And as such employees flood the job market, the premium price paid for ''educated'' workers will start to disappear and the now-widening income gap will narrow. That is what happened in the 1920's, the authors show, when high schools, once thought a luxury, were regularly graduating working-class students instead of just the college-bound children of the elite. Computers will ultimately require less expertise anyway, the authors say, thanks to ease-of-use inventions incubated in the Army and the world of the disabled. As for the effects of globalization, Mr. Davis and Mr. Wessel use reporting and reasoning that are a bit less reassuring, though still respectable. They try to show why foreign investment is a boon in places like Tennessee, why imports are prosperity's allies and why free trade is not anti-worker, as it is often painted. Computer programmers in Bangalore, India, won't take cutting-edge software contracts away from Americans; such offshore programming is grunt work, not innovation. (To be fair, the authors acknowledge that pundits once talked this way about Japanese manufacturers.) ''We could be wrong, of course,'' they say about their prosperity theory. A major war could wreck global trade, they note, or the Federal Reserve might unwisely put the brakes on the economy, or China and India could turn into Japanese-style competition for America. But if some of the book's premises seem more solid than others, no matter. ''Prosperity'' pulls together many threads to become a primer of sorts, a framework for figuring out how an economy could work for everyone. OFF THE SHELF | Productivity as the Catalyst of Prosperity |
1007283_2 | of sorghum, the impact-resistant strength of carbon fibers and the flexibility and resilience of synthetic rubber might all be ingredients for domestic comfort. But lest one be intimidated by the substances' complex scientific provenances, Beylerian fondly refers to his resource as ''a petting zoo for materials.'' The metaphor is apt. While the computerized database offers users source material, contacts, history and the possible applications of the assorted materials, the center also puts a high value on tactility. The samples, some 2,800 -- consisting of everything from exotic horsehair textiles treated with synthetic finishes to reconstituted aluminum chips to sheets of carbon tissue -- are all stocked inside bins in manageable bricks, blocks, chunks, tiles and swatches. The bins, stacked on rolling carts, are organized into categories: stone and masonry; glass and ceramics; metals; plastics and rubbers; synthetic fibers, and wood and natural fibers. Open a bin and you may find tiles of crinkled-effect glass, fluid sheets of woven titanium, swatches of ethereal techno-textiles or rippling panels of embossed plywood. Each month, some 50 new samples are voted into the archive by a panel of judges made up of architects, designers, material specialists, engineers and ecologists. If the catalogue of new materials is expanding quickly, so, too, are their applications. Objects on display in the gal-lery suggest a menu of inventive uses: a briefcase of polypropylene; structural building blocks cast from polyurethane resins; a stool made of dyed, reconstituted egg cartons. All are evidence of the ease with which elegance may emerge from the inelegant. A hiking shoe woven from hemp fibers is testimony to the less celebrated rewards of that plant's industrial cultivation, while ''Little Big,'' a brightly colored line of biodegradable tableware that might be used on picnics, points to the practical applications of potato starch. But the architects and designers who consult the material archives are usually quick to envision their own innovative uses. For instance, Nancy Vignola, a senior vice president at Polo Ralph Lauren who oversees design for the Ralph Lauren Home Collection, was drawn to Koryo Board, sheets of compressed sorghum stalks that clearly lend themselves to furniture design. ''If you slice through it to expose the cross-section, it's very beautiful,'' Vignola says. She is currently working with Koryo Board's manufacturer to determine whether it can be produced to furniture-construction specifications. If so, Vignola will work with Henredon, a Ralph Lauren licensee, to design a | Material Man |
1013464_0 | A national debate is under way in the Irish Republic over a provision of the new Northern Ireland peace agreement that would grant early release to Irish Republican Army prisoners convicted of terrorist acts, possibly including murder. The peace agreement, which was approved on April 10 by political leaders of the Protestant majority and the Roman Catholic minority in the British province of Northern Ireland, provides that, after a review, paramilitary organization prisoners may be released within two years. The agreement will be put to separate referendums here and in Northern Ireland on May 22. The debate began five days after the agreement was reached, when nine I.R.A. prisoners serving terms for terrorist offenses were released early by the Irish Government. The act was widely seen as a concession to Sinn Fein, the political wing of the I.R.A., both of which consider prisoners a major issue. There was an immediate outcry from politicians and the public that the agreement made it possible that murderers of Irish policemen would be released before serving mandatory 40-year terms. There are still about 40 I.R.A. prisoners, including several convicted murderers of policemen, in prison in Ireland. The focus of public anger, expressed by members of Parliament and in hundreds of calls to radio programs, is the case of Detective Sgt. Gerry McCabe. While escorting a cash deposit in an unmarked car, he was shot to death with a machine gun in June 1996 in the village of Adare, in western Ireland, by men later officially identified as I.R.A. guerrillas. They were arrested on murder charges in Limerick. No trial date has been set. On Monday the dead officer's brother-in-law, Pat Kearney, a member of the Limerick Chamber of Commerce, said in an interview on national radio that ''they should not be released for at least 40 years,'' adding, ''If I was in charge, I would favor execution.'' Mr. Kearney, a former policeman, said: ''The policemen put their life on the line to protect society. Society should protect the policemen. People tell me I am articulating what people are thinking, that the murder of Gerry McCabe had nothing to do with the political life of this country.'' Michael Kirby, the vice president of the Garda Representative Association, the police union, said the I.R.A. had murdered 13 Irish policemen since 1969, when the sectarian violence in the North began to grow. ''We see these acts as | Debate in Ireland Centers on Provision to Free I.R.A. Prisoners |
1013462_0 | Brazil promised today to set aside 62 million acres of Amazon rain forest for conservation, underscoring the Government's renewed commitment to the faltering preservation of the imperiled tropical wilderness. The pledge, to be carried out with financial and technical assistance from the World Bank and a conservation group, WWF International, would put 10 percent of the Brazilian Amazon under Government protection, three times as much as is now protected, the partners said. The agreement sets in motion a project that will take years to identify the land to be protected, to arrange the financing for the effort and to decide how to manage the forests and enforce the conservation rules. The sponsors acknowledged that carrying out the proposal would be a challenge for Brazil, which has been trying to beef up its environmental enforcement but faces enormous pressures from industries like logging, farming, mining and grazing. ''We are concerned that in so many countries, protected areas have been established without any real protection,'' the director general of the conservation organization, Claude Martin, said. ''They exist on paper, but not in reality.'' Nigel Sizer, a senior associate at the World Resources Institute and an expert on Amazonian forests, called the promise significant, but no panacea. ''It will not by itself significantly reduce the rate of deforestation going on in the region, especially on the frontiers,'' he said. ''The root causes that continue to cause deforestation to accelerate are not addressed.'' Although the conservation program would be the largest undertaken by Brazil, it would hardly halt the degradation in a region that covers nearly one-third of the remaining tropical forests and may hold one-tenth of all plant and animal species. A few months ago Brazil released information that showed that deforestation had accelerated in this decade and that seven million acres were destroyed in the 1994-95 burning season. Environmentalists say even greater acreage than that may have burned in intense and widespread fires over the last several months. Already, 130 million acres of the Amazon's nearly one billion acres are deforested. The decades of perennial fires, logging and other forms of land clearing have long captured international attention and provoked widespread criticism of Brazil's policies. ''This is a testimony of our commitment to preserve the environment for the benefit of our people,'' President Fernando Henrique Cardoso said in a statement. ''I sincerely hope the steps we are taking will encourage other countries | Brazil to Set Aside Vast Tract In the Amazon for Conservation |
1013546_0 | INTERNATIONAL A3-19 Senate Rejects Plan to Add A Tribunal Within NATO The Senate rejected an attempt to create a tribunal within NATO to resolve conflicts before they erupt into full-blown hostilities. The proposal was offered as an amendment to the plan that the Senate is debating to add three Eastern European countries to the military alliance. A14 In Israel, a Divided Celebration Today is the 50th anniversary of Israel, yet Israelis say it is difficult to celebrate when the most bitter conflicts are no longer with the Arabs, but among Jews. And they note that after 50 years, there is still no peace in their land. A1 Sanctions for Kosovo The United States and five allies threatened Yugoslavia with new economic sanctions if it did not agree to hold negotiations with ethnic Albanian separatists in an effort to end the the growing violence in Kosovo. A10 Russian Tycoon Appointed Boris Berezovsky, the Russian tycoon whom President Boris N. Yeltsin dismissed from his position on Russia's security council six months ago, was appointed chief executive of the Commonwealth of Independent States, with Mr. Yeltsin's support. A15 Charges Against Khmer Rouge The United States will ask the Security Council to form a tribunal to bring genocide charges against leaders of the Khmer Rouge guerrillas. A16 Albright in Beijing Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright began two days of meetings to lay groundwork for President Clinton's visit to China in June. A16 Brazil to Protect Rain Forest Brazil promised to set aside 62 million acres of Amazon rain forest for conservation, part of a Government effort to renew a commitment to preserving the imperiled tropical wilderness. A5 Mexican Unions Flawed A United States Labor Department report found favoritism toward unions aligned with Mexico's ruling party in labor elections. The finding provoked a sharp retort from the Mexican Government. A8 Russia's Nuclear Risk A study by a group that won a Nobel Peace Prize, Physicians for Social Responsibility, raised concerns about Russia's control of its nuclear weapons, highlighting the danger of an accidental or unauthorized attack on the United States. A13 French Official Investigated Roland Dumas, France's fifth-ranking official, was placed one step short of indictment in an inquiry into multimillion-dollar payments made to a lobbyist promoting the sale of warships to Taiwan in 1991. Magistrates said they had placed him under investigation for alleged embezzlement and complicity in misappropriation of funds. Mr. Dumas, | NEWS SUMMARY |
1008228_0 | Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain flew into Northern Ireland in an urgent effort to remove a serious snag in the peace negotiations between Protestant and Roman Catholic political leaders. ''I feel the hand of history upon our shoulders,'' Mr. Blair said on arriving at a meeting with David Trimble, the Protestant unionist leader who raised the new obstacle. Mr. Trimble's rejection of new proposals given to the negotiating parties was widely seen as a melodramatic tactic to take the initiative in peace talks. But it could also backfire and push the talks to the brink of a collapse, touching off new sectarian violence. Article, page A3. | British Leader Tries To Save Ulster Talks |
1008276_1 | discovery could affect the medical management of many women at high risk of breast cancer and could lead the way toward a new generation of drugs designed to protect people from a wide range of cancers. But women anxious about the threat of breast cancer would be wise to use caution in demanding access to tamoxifen. There are huge downsides to this drug, most notably that it increases the risk of endometrial cancer (cancer of the lining of the uterus) and of life-threatening blood clots. Even for those at high risk of breast cancer, namely the elderly and those with familial, medical or reproductive risk factors, it can be a complicated decision. For most American women, namely those not in the high-risk group, tamoxifen would seem a questionable gamble until there are data to justify it. British experts criticized the American claims as premature and warned that they might raise false hopes. In a large study of more than 13,000 women, half of whom took tamoxifen daily while the other half took useless placebo pills, tamoxifen cut the rate of breast cancer almost in half. The success rate was so striking that officials ended the study 14 months early to allow participants in the placebo arm to share in the benefits of the drug. The benefits in cancer reduction occurred at all age levels from 35 on up, while the serious side effects occurred only over age 50. Thus the benefits most clearly outweighed the risks for younger women, but that is also the age group where relatively few women (only 2.7 percent of the 40-year-olds, for example) are at high risk for breast cancer. For women age 50 and older, particularly those who have not had a hysterectomy that eliminates the threat of endometrial cancer, the benefit-risk calculation can be a close call. If 1,000 such women were treated with tamoxifen for five years, Federal officials estimate, the drug might prevent 17 cases of invasive breast cancer (and also reduce osteoporotic bone fractures) while causing 12 cases of endometrial cancer and 10 serious blood clots. Like many other health issues, the decision on whether to use tamoxifen will have to be decided case by case by women and their doctors. That may be a nerve-racking exercise, but further studies should better define who would benefit the most from tamoxifen, and whether even better preventive drugs may now be developed. | Breast Cancer Breakthrough |
1008249_0 | Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain flew into Northern Ireland today in an urgent effort to remove a serious snag in the peace negotiations between Protestant and Roman Catholic political leaders in this mostly Protestant British province. ''I feel the hand of history upon our shoulders,'' Mr. Blair said on arriving at Hillsborough Castle, a Government residence south of Belfast, to meet with David Trimble, the Protestant unionist leader who raised the new obstacle this morning. ''It's right to try,'' Mr. Blair said. ''I'm here to try.'' He and Mr. Trimble met for two hours, but no details of the meeting were disclosed. Although his office insisted that Mr. Blair had been scheduled to arrive in Belfast today, it was believed here that his arrival had been moved up from Wednesday in response to the potential new crisis. Mr. Trimble said a set of proposals given to the negotiating parties early today was unacceptable, a rejection that was widely seen as a melodramatic tactic to take the initiative in peace talks. But the tactic could backfire and push the talks to the brink of a collapse, which would probably turn the melodrama into the tragedy of widespread violence by the main Catholic and Protestant guerrilla groups, which are now observing cease-fires. Sectarian violence has killed more than 3,200 people in the North since 1969. [An alleged Protestant paramilitary was shot and killed in Northern Ireland early on Wednesday, Agence France-Presse reported. The hardline republican Irish National Liberation Army later said it was responsible for gunning down the man in the Protestant Hillhampton area of Londonderry. The group, which wants a united Ireland, said the man was a member of the Loyalist Volunteer Force, a Protestant group. Both groups oppose the peace talks and have refused to declare cease-fires.] The deadline for an agreement intended to end 800 years of sectarian violence in Ireland has been set for midnight Thursday. And the former American Senator George J. Mitchell, the chairman of the talks, said this morning that the deadline would not be extended and that his job was virtually over after nearly two years. The Prime Minister arrived hours after the latest, and most serious, obstacle to agreement was advanced by Mr. Trimble, the leader of the Protestant Ulster Unionist Party. Mr. Trimble said the proposals, which were put forward by Mr. Mitchell and have not been made public, were biased | Blair Flies to Belfast After Serious Snag in Peace Talks |
1006702_0 | The leader of the Women's Coalition, which for the first time gave women an official, and often bold and provocative voice in the male-dominated Northern Ireland peace talks, said today that the men running the negotiations have acted to put the women back in a subservient role. Monica McWilliams, the leader of the coalition who was elected a delegate to the peace talks in 1996, said that under the new agreement now under intensive discussion here, the system of elections to a new Northern Ireland political body would make it impossible for her party to win seats. In 1996 the election to the peace negotiation delegations provided for seats for the 10 parties receiving the most votes. The Women's Coalition won two seats with about 2 percent of the vote. But the men have decided, Ms. McWilliams said, that the elections to the political body, to be an essential feature of the new political structure here, would provide no such guarantee. Male leaders confirmed this, but said it was not motivated by anti-feminism or hostility to the Women's Coalition, that it was a political necessity to gain as many seats for their parties as possible. ''There is a macho element in this,'' Ms. McWilliams said, taking time out from the negotiations at the Stormont complex in Belfast. ''They want power sharing, but they want power sharing only for themselves.'' Ms. McWilliams, a senior lecturer in social policy at Ulster University who worked in Detroit as an urban planner in the 1970's, said that the Roman Catholic and Protestant leaders, all of them men, would probably approve a new overall peace agreement by the deadline of April 9 set by former Senator George J. Mitchell, the chairman of the talks. The negotiations continued today. Traditionally, politics in Northern Ireland, with a female population of 52 percent, has been kept as a male domain by both Protestant and Catholic parties. All the province's 18 members of the British Parliament are men. Ms. McWilliams said that the coalition, a mix of Protestants and Catholics, would appeal to Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain in a telephone conversation on Thursday. She said that the British Northern Ireland Secretary, Mo Mowlam, agreed with the coalition, but that neither the British nor Irish Republic Governments, sponsors of the talks, want to overrule the political parties, wanting them to approve a new peace agreement by April 9. | Irishwomen Cry Foul as New Political Rules Leave Them Out |
1006703_3 | companies that include seeds, pesticides, herbicides and fertilizers, a plastic sheet to cover the soil and protective gear for applying the chemicals. The growers say they do not have the technology to extract seeds in the quantity they need. The growers must not only pay for the kits; they must also pledge to sell their harvest to the companies. The companies also hold back 15 cents for each kilo of tobacco the farmer delivers as insurance that the grower will deliver the rest of the promised harvest. The companies contend that they do this so their technical assistance will not be wasted, but the practice also leaves growers little recourse in disputes over acompany's valuation of their crop. The companies tightened the pricing noose after farmers' strikes for higher prices in the late 1980's. When supply fell in 1991, the growers and the companies negotiated a 50 percent increase in payments. But shortly after that the companies banded together, with all offering the same terms to the growers. That ended any opportunity for the growers to negotiate prices. Nelson Proenca is the secretary for development of international investment for Rio Grande do Sul. His office has granted nearly $1 billion in tax breaks to the tobacco companies, but he said the local government had no say in pricing matters. ''Those are private contracts,'' he said. Growers also contend that the companies classify crops at cheaper grades to save money. But Luiz Krugler, director of national marketing for Souza Cruz, said that if growers believe their tobacco is not being graded fairly, they can appeal to national Government inspectors. Growers respond that the inspectors are poorly trained, and seldom disagree with the companies. When growers try to withhold crops because of a disagreement over grading, police officers help the companies seize the crops. The growers, many barely literate, rarely question the companies' right to operate the way they do. Virginia Etges, author of ''Subjugation and Resistance: Gaucho Farmers and the Tobacco Industry,'' said the farmers shared a very traditional concept of the world, ''where loyalty and honesty are very important values.'' ''The companies have absorbed this language and appropriated it for their own ends,'' she said in an interview. A group of growers, sitting on a porch one recent Sunday afternoon, listened to the story of one neighbor whose crops had been seized. ''Well, he owed the money,'' one grower said, | In Brazil Tobacco Country, Conglomerates Rule |
1011763_3 | to Ireland, but to the ''26-county state,'' or ''the Dublin Government,'' which rankles many Irish people. But in citing 1918, Mr. Ahern said, a vote for the Belfast agreement ''will remove any false vestige of democratic self-justification for further acts of violence from any quarter, Republican or Loyalist.'' In the debate, political leaders and other members of the Government coalition, as well as the opposition, praised David Trimble, the leader of the Protestant Ulster Unionist Party in the North. Normally, Mr. Trimble has been a target of invective in the Parliament. But, almost overnight, he is considered one of the architects of the peace agreement. Most speakers also thanked John Hume, the prominent mainstream Catholic leader in the North for starting in 1993 the secret talks with Sinn Fein that resulted eventually in the new agreement. Ruairi Quinn, leader of the Labor Party and a former Finance Minister, said, ''The very design for the talks process itself was the product and vision of its leader, John Hume.'' There was also some praise for Mr. Adams. But because of Mr. Adams' hesitance to give outright approval to the agreement, he was attacked with more fervor than he was praised. Mr. Quinn said Mr. Adams and his deputy, Martin McGuiness, had made ''both a historical and psychological shift from the physical force tradition to that of democratic politics.'' But he added, ''While their conversion is to be welcomed, they cannot be absolved of their responsibility for the many atrocities committted by the I.R.A. with their explicit endorsement and support.'' Proinsias De Rossa, leader of the small Democratic Left party, said, ''It is almost certain that extremists on both sides willl attempt to wreck this agreement by violence.'' He added: ''The agreeement was not a victory for any party. It was a victory for reason, for dialogue and most of all for the countless people who have yearned for an end to the terrible cycle of violence that has blighted Northern Ireland for so long.'' Former Prime Minister John Bruton, who was instrumental in the peace effort until his party was defeated by Mr. Ahern's last June, said: ''History is what we make for ourselves. There is no inevitable march of history in any direction. A united Ireland is not demographically inevitable. The continuance of the Union is not inevitable. Peace is not inevitable. Nor is conflict. Nothing is inevitable in history.'' The | Irish Parliament Backs Ulster Peace Plan |
1011696_4 | Management at Vanderbilt University in 1993. Soon after their arrival at Vanderbilt, they downloaded Mosaic, an early Web browser, for the first time and were immediately captivated by the potential of the Web. IN 1994 they started Project 2000 to study the marketing implications of commercializing the Web, and the program has become a pre-eminent research center for studying electronic commerce. Their recent study is the first to attach numbers to a situation that many people had only suspected. ''Donna Hoffman and Tom Novak have brought serious quantitative methods to many of the tough social issues facing the Internet,'' said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington. ''They have set themselves apart from the pundits, market analysts and commentators.'' In 1995, Drs. Hoffman and Novak were the first to discredit the research of Marty Rimm, an undergraduate who asserted that the Internet was awash in pornography. ''They put him through a Cuisinart,'' Gary Chapman said. They drew attention to themselves again later that year when they challenged the methodology underlying a demographic report that led to inflated estimates of the numer of Internet users. Dr. Hoffman, who has become something of a household name in computing circles, has eclipsed Dr. Novak in the limelight. She travels extensively, lecturing and attending conferences. When reporters call, she answers. Less outgoing by nature, Dr. Novak said he preferred to stay home and do research. Dr. Hoffman said she was completely taken aback by the invective that has poured into her computer over the past week. As of Tuesday, she had received close to 50 E-mail messages, about 30 of them negative. Many critics have taken their opinions to the Net itself. More than 170 postings -- many similar in tone to the E-mail Dr. Hoffman received -- have been made to a discussion forum on ZDNet (www.zdnet.com/zdnn/content/msnb/0417/ 307772.html). Given the speed with which things change on the Internet, Dr. Novak said, the data in the paper, collected more than a year ago, are already out of date. New numbers being gathered appear to paint a more optimistic picture. ''We would expect that many more African-Americans will be on line when we look at the more recent numbers,'' he said. It will be interesting, he added, to see what kind of E-mail the researchers receive once they publish the follow-up study, which they plan to do later this year. | Behind Headlines on Study, a Couple Married to Their Work |
1013267_3 | the computers are equipped with rubberized edges, waterproof trackballs and keypads and a plastic shield to protect the screen. They do not carry a CD-ROM, floppy disk or traditional hard drive but come with a more expensive and durable type of drive known as flash memory. Each student's laptop has an infrared connection to the Internet, similar to the type used in remote controls, that is hooked up to ceilings. The computer's designers, the Net schools Corporation in Santa Clara, Calif., have installed a specially designed Internet server that provides access to more than 20,000 educational Web sites. James E. Dezell Jr., chairman of Netschools, said the company had so far spent $20 million on the two-year project to develop the system now used at North Broward and being introduced at 11 other schools. Mr. Dezell said he expected 18 more public and private schools to have the system by the end of the year. North Broward Preparatory paid about $2,300 a student to have the system installed; additional laptops cost $1,200 each. Other schools are initially expected to pay about $2,000 per student for the system. Teachers and students alike say malfunctions in the server and the overall newness of the system have led to delays and mistakes. Yet, school officials say, an interconnected system that allows teachers to fire off a multiple-choice test, to gather the answers from students and to grade the test in a matter of minutes should eventually lead to more efficiency. The system may also lead to more flexibility. Mr. York found that he could have students perform dissections on line, thus skirting a sometimes controversial school assignment. Dr. Penny Cooper, who teaches social studies, which includes geography, said she recently came across a Web site with a quiz on volcanoes and earthquakes that she assigned to the students. ''I'm learning more, and the students are learning more,'' Dr. Cooper said. The children muse that they still want to use their own computers at home, because the school laptops do not have games and do not allow them to add or change programs or settings. Still, they add, the computers have helped them to become more productive at school. ''It's made it so that if I don't understand something in the textbook I can search for answers on the Web,'' said Noel Provencial, 14, who is in ninth grade. ''My papers are also longer.'' | A Mandate to Force Computer Expertise |
1013353_0 | An influential panel of the New York State Health Department is urging sweeping changes in the regulation of new fertility technologies, including more steps to reduce the incidence of multiple births. In a report being issued today, the panel said doctors providing infertility treatments must think more about the babies born as a result and avoid treatments that are more likely to produce so-called high-order multiple births -- pregnancies of three, four or more babies who are far more prone to devastating problems like retardation and blindness. Doctors should talk with patients in advance about the possible need to abort one or more fetuses in a high-order multiple pregnancy, the panel said. If an abortion is not an option for the patient, it added, doctor and patient should consider other treatments, even if the chances of pregnancy are reduced. The panel, the New York State Task Force on Life and the Law, said that many women are inadequately informed about the risks of fertility treatments and that couples are often not told enough about the costs of such therapies and their generally low chances of success. The therapies include drugs to induce the ovaries to produce eggs, the transfer of embryos fertilized in the laboratory directly into the womb and artificial insemination. With such techniques, a child can be born with three biological parents -- a man who provides sperm, a woman who provides an egg and a woman who carries and delivers the child. The panel rejected calls for legislation mandating health insurance to cover such therapies because it found ''no persuasive reason for giving'' them special legal priority, given that the United States does not pay for everyone's health care. Independent experts who have followed the drafting of the report praised it, particularly its emphasis on the well-being of children born through the new techniques. They predicted it would be a model for regulation around the country. The 24-member panel, made up of doctors, lawyers, ethicists, members of the clergy and others, has had unusual influence since its creation in 1985. Its recommendations are not binding, even in New York, but earlier recommendations have become part of state laws and United States Supreme Court decisions on defining death, withholding and withdrawing life support, organ transplantation and other issues of medical ethics. Dr. Barbara A. DeBuono, the New York State Health Commissioner, said in an interview she would immediately | Health Panel Seeks Sweeping Changes In Fertility Therapy |
1008852_0 | The former American Senator George J. Mitchell, the departing chairman of the Northern Ireland peace talks, said tonight that he had accelerated the pace of the negotiations because he feared that one of the leaders involved in the talks would be assassinated. Mr. Mitchell, who presided today over the approval by Protestant and Roman Catholic leaders of a sweeping revision of the Northern Ireland political structure, said that several weeks ago he became aware of a threat by a paramilitaary group to murder ''a high-profile person associated with the talks.'' ''That includes me,'' he said, without identifying the paramilitary group. ''Violence was increasing at the time,'' he said of a spate of sectarian killing by splinter paramilitary groups in January and February. Fearing that any attack could destroy the peace effort, he spoke to Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain, and they decided to set a deadline of this May for the squabbling politicians to make a deal or to abandon any attempt at an agreement. Later, he said in an interview in the Stormont Hotel, opposite the Government complex where the peace accord was approved late this afternoon, he calculated that if the negotiators were given an Easter recess the momentum would be lost and the talks would stall, as they had several times since they started in June 1966. He persuaded the politicians to set a new deadline for approval of an agreement -- Thursday at midnight. Last week, he said, ''we tried to get people to talk seriously, but we didn't reach that stage until the last few days before the new deadlline.'' By then, Mr. Mitchell said, he had urged Mr. Blair and Prime Minister Bertie Ahern of Ireland to come to Belfast to put pressure on the negotiators, to help negotiate enormously difficult issues involving the Catholic desire to gain more power for Ireland in Northern Ireland affairs and the Protestant determination to remain part of Britain. ''I told them both we wanted a commitment, when they came Thursday, to stay in till we finished, either got an agreement or failed,'' he said. ''If we had an Easter break, we couldn't put it back together again. I told Mr. Blair and Mr. Ahern that their impact would best be achieved if they stayed only a limited time.'' ''If you stay two weeks,'' he told them, ''you become just another guy, down to my level, in | Mitchell Feared the Killing of a Leader |
1008860_0 | While politicians put the finishing touches this week on the historic settlement aimed at bringing Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland together, surveyors in a bleak Belfast neighborhood a few miles away from the talks were busy building a new wall separating the two groups. With the peace effort moving into the critical next phase when the voters of Ireland and Northern Ireland say yes or no to the settlement in referendums next month, the fundamental problem remains: for all the people who want to tear down barriers, there are still people eager to raise them. They range from political activists who believe the proposals shortchange their communities' interests, to fighters in breakaway paramilitary groups who have no interest in the peace effort and struggle to undermine it with savage and random bloodshed. Their motives and tactics may be different, but their common objective is to see the peace proposals voted down. The Governments of Britain and Ireland, the sponsors of the talks, are taking the threat seriously. The Rev. Ian D. Paisley, a longtime militant Protestant leader who kept his Democratic Unionist Party out of the talks, chastised Protestant parties that did take part, saying, ''The people of Northern Ireland at the referendum will totally and absolutely reject you and what you are attempting to do.'' The new 18-foot-high fence, a ''peace line,'' is topped with concertina wire and defines Protestant and Catholic communities in the Whitewell area of North Belfast. There are 30 other such walls snaking through the middle of Belfast. In fact, the only moments of peace that Belfast has known have been, like the walls, intermittent and imposed, and have served to reinforce rather than reduce the divisions. Given the history of Ulster's contentious politics, it is a remarkable achievement that there have been sustained talks and a peace agreement. Throughout the province there is a deep distrust of any notion of partnership, and violence has claimed more than 3,000 lives in nearly 30 years; the most recent death was three days ago. The challenge of obtaining support from the war-weary but mistrustful people of Northern Ireland in the May 22 referendums is as fraught with peril as the peace talks, and an intense campaign is being mounted. ''The Choice is Yours'' say billboards picturing a young couple walking on a beach at sunrise. The slogan is meant to underline the notion that the solution | Now for the Hard Part: Making It Work |
1008868_0 | While officialdom toasted yesterday's peace agreement in Northern Ireland, among Irish and Irish-American New Yorkers there was broad skepticism that seemed to overwhelm the relief. American, British and Irish leaders said the agreement, reached in Belfast, held the promise of bringing peace to a region that has been engulfed in violence for nearly 30 years. The accord, which came just after a deadline set by leaders of the eight political parties involved in the talks, will be put to voters in both parts of Ireland next month. But reservations were abundant in New York, which has been a fund-raising hub for the nationalist or republican faction, dominated by Roman Catholics, which favors a united Ireland. Protestants, the majority in Northern Ireland, generally favor maintaining ties to Britain. ''I would love to be more delighted,'' said Kathleen M. Regan, president of the Bronx Gaelic League, which promotes Irish language and culture. ''There's a lot that could happen, and hopefully will happen. But we've seen so many truces and agreements before.'' Oistin F. MacBride, a professional photographer who lives in the Murray Hill section of Manhattan, fretted that many people would put down the paper or snap off the television and think there was peace in Northern Ireland. ''The pressure cooker of a deadline that was contrived has produced a document that has possibilities,'' he said. ''Other times when there have been possibilities, loyalists have started murdering Catholics.'' But Mr. MacBride, 36, who plans to visit his native Northern Ireland next week, allowed that he was more hopeful than ever. ''At least it's no longer megaphone diplomacy,'' he said. ''People are engaged, even if it's tentatively.'' Some lovers of Ireland were flatly pessimistic. ''I don't think anything's going to work out,'' said Thomas E. Devine, 32, an owner of a concrete business in Norwalk, Conn., who spent two weeks in Ireland exploring his roots last year. ''This is a religious thing. There's too much hatred.'' Brendan J. Moore, a Long Island resident who is on the national board of the Ancient Order of Hibernians, one of the largest Irish groups in the United States, said the mere fact of the talks had improved the public image of nationalists, whose cause he supports. ''Before, people around the world saw it as an internal matter, and all the nationalists had all been labeled terrorists,'' said Mr. Moore, who lives in Blue Point. ''Now, people | In New York, Irish Accord Prompts Skepticism |
1008813_4 | to a reading of scripture, an understanding of Gospel and the practice of the liturgy. To put it more dramatically, Daly was suggesting that if God is a man, then God is a lie, and the church, the patriarchal church, is philosophically, morally and socially bankrupt. The effect of all this across the last three decades has reshaped much of the religious landscape in mainstream Protestant religions, and to lesser degrees in the Catholic Church and in liberal synagogues and the worship groups of other religions. Religious texts, hymnals and prayer books are increasingly gender-neutral or gender-free. More women are in the pulpit than ever before and enrollments at five of the largest divinity schools now approach 22 percent women, according to the Association of Theological Schools. In some denominations, women are moving into leadership posts. The Episcopal Church reports that 20 percent of its bishops, priests and deacons are women. Meanwhile, feminist scriptural scholars say they have uncovered evidence in ancient Gnostic and Coptic texts suggesting that women were, in effect, ordained in the early church, and that the texts include women in the doctrine of the Holy Trinity and suggest an equality between Adam and Eve in the Creation story. The work of scriptural scholarship continues, as does the effort to make sure the language and structure of the church include women. But now a second generation of feminist theologians have expanded the movement's agenda, in large part by adopting some concerns of liberation theology: economic disparity, the ''economic colonialism'' of large nations and corporations, and environmental and health concerns, particularly AIDS, birth control and abortion. ''This idea of interpreting the culture in terms of feminist theology is as important as interpreting the Bible,'' says Letty M. Russell, a professor of theology at the Yale Divinity School. As an example, Ms. Russell cites the biblical example of Ruth's devotion to her mother-in-law, Naomi. ''Reading the story of Ruth and Naomi is quite different in Korea, for instance, where women have problems with mothers-in-law,'' she says. ''To Korean women, therefore, they are not sure it's a liberating text,'' while ''in America a lot of lesbians are interested in Ruth and Naomi because they are so close in terms of their survival.'' Thus, feminism and theology have many meanings and many applications. What is more, women in each religion and in each culture have different priorities. Catholic women, for instance, | Feminists Nurture a More Tolerant Christianity |
1008862_0 | More than 3,000 deaths and 30 years after the Irish Troubles entered their bloodiest era, the political parties of Northern Ireland have signed a peace agreement. The accord, born of a convergence of political courage, perseverance and sheer good luck, will not end the division of Protestant and Catholic. But it will address some historic grievances and promote the use of politics, rather than violence, to solve the rest. The shootings and bombings by Republican Catholic and loyalist Protestant groups that opposed the peace process are likely to continue, but the agreement should marginalize these organizations and lessen support for them. It will make political institutions more representative and more protective of the rights of the Catholic minority. It will also provide a more secure environment for the creation of jobs that Northern Ireland needs. The agreement must be approved by both Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic in a referendum scheduled for May 22. If it passes, elections for assemblies will take place in June. Protestants are expected to pose the strongest opposition. Few thought peace was possible when talks began in September 1996. It came about because the vast majority of Northern Ireland's citizens were sick of violence, and leaders on all sides had the good sense to listen. The leaders were a fortuitously courageous and pragmatic group, especially the Sinn Fein leader, Gerry Adams, who brought the fractious Republican movement to the negotiating table. David Trimble, the leader of the largest Protestant party, in the end defied Protestant demagogues and went along with the proposal. Some of the strongest of the Protestant voices advocating peace were men who themselves had served prison time for murders and other violent criminal acts. Tony Blair, the British Prime Minister, injected new energy into the talks after his election last year, and courageously discarded Britain's longstanding reluctance to deal with Mr. Adams. President Clinton intervened at crucial moments, including the final night of negotiations, to encourage compromise. The whole enterprise was held together by former Senator George Mitchell, who headed the talks with admirable patience and a keen instinct for finding common ground. The deepest divisions came over the powers granted to a council with representatives from both Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic. Catholics wanted the council to have real powers, while the Protestants viewed it as the beginning of an all-Ireland government. The agreement says that the two bodies | An Easter Peace in Ireland |
1008901_6 | predominantly Catholic Republic and the six counties of predominantly Protestant Northern Ireland, which is a province of Britain. Taking part in the talks were 8 of Northern Ireland's 10 political parties, some of them admitted only after paramilitary forces that they represented adopted cease-fires. Two groups, the Ulster Democratic Party, which represents a Protestant force, and Sinn Fein, were suspended from the talks for weeks because of evidence that some of their armed followers had been involved in sectarian killings after Christmas. Both parties were later readmitted. Among the men around the table were murderers and bombers who had emerged from prison with a commitment to peace. And sentiment aside, the paramilitary groups had also made the tactical decision that violence would never secure their goals, a shared conviction that gave these talks a chance for success that fitful past attempts had lacked. The talks began 22 months ago and moved in a desultory and halting manner until Mr. Blair became Prime Minister last May with a Labor majority of 179 seats. The huge victory gave him independence and flexibility that a slim majority had denied his predecessor, John Major. Mr. Blair decided to apply the strength of his position to Northern Ireland, Britain's longest running and most intractable problem. His first trip out of London as Prime Minister, during only his second week in office, was to Belfast, and his first major speech was a warning to Sinn Fein that if the I.R.A. did not resume its cease-fire the peace talks would move forward without it. The I.R.A. declared its cease-fire in July, and by September Mr. Adams and his chief negotiator, Martin McGuinness, led a Sinn Fein delegation into the Stormont Castle Buildings to take their seats at the table. This winter they were invited to 10 Downing Street, becoming the first Irish republicans to cross that threshold since Michael Collins went there to see Lloyd George in 1922. Mr. Blair also gave Mr. Trimble unprecedented access, meeting with him continually at the Prime Minister's official residence to shore up the Unionist's standing in his community. The two parties that did not accept the invitation to join the talks are both hard-line Protestant groups resentful of Mr. Trimble's position. One of the leaders, the Rev. Ian Paisley, called the settlement a ''time bomb;'' the other, Robert McCartney, said it would cause civil war. AN IRISH ACCORD: THE OVERVIEW | IRISH TALKS PRODUCE AN ACCORD TO STOP DECADES OF BLOODSHED WITH SHARING OF ULSTER POWER |
1008841_0 | President Clinton, whose 1994 overture to Gerry Adams of Sinn Fein helped bring the political wing of the Irish Republican Army to the peace table, was deeply involved as the Ulster talks concluded, cajoling and prodding both republicans and Unionists to step out of their parochial interests and take historic risks for peace. From midnight in Washington until 5 A.M., and then again this morning at about 11, Mr. Clinton worked the phones and spoke to every major figure involved: Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain; Prime Minister Bertie Ahern of Ireland; David Trimble of the Ulster Unionist Party, and twice to John Hume, the moderate leader of the Social Democratic and Labor Party, and Mr. Adams, whom Mr. Clinton was most responsible for bringing to the bargaining table. The President also had a long conversation at a crucial moment, at about 3:15 A.M. Washington time, with the former Senator George J. Mitchell, his emissary, who has overseen the Belfast talks for 22 months and whom all parties credit with extraordinary patience, firmness and fairness. With a boost for his own reputation as a peacemaker willing to use American influence, Mr. Clinton said today's pact was an important incentive for that other foreign-policy issue with a huge domestic political constituency: the foundering Israeli-Palestinian peace talks. ''The lesson is,'' he said, ''just don't ever stop.'' Mr. Clinton was weary but exultant today, calling this ''the best chance for peace in a generation'' for the Irish and praising the courage of the participants, who took the important risks, he said, and the fortitude of the two Prime Ministers. He warned that the pact alone was just a step. ''In the days to come, there may be those who will try to undermine this great achievement, not only with words but perhaps also with violence,'' he said. Mr. Clinton was asked to intervene at two key moments, first with the Catholic nationalists, and then with the Protestant Unionists, in both cases to encourage the party leaders that he would support them if they took big risks. Mr. Blair and Mr. Ahern called jointly to ask for his help. The first was to deal with a threat by Mr. Adams to walk out of the talks, and the second was to deal with a similar threat by the Mr. Trimble. According to Representative Peter T. King, a New York Republican who was on the | For the Long Final Hours, Clinton Coaxed |
1008887_1 | violence in the hearts of many people. Then, holding a large brown wooden cross in front of him, Mr. Campbell led the group to his church. The area has been racked by violence in recent decades, as Catholics and Protestants killed each other with bombs and guns. And in recent years it has been the annual site of a Protestant parade through a Catholic section, where residents resisted the marchers, at times violently. This year, however, the parade, scheduled for Monday on the Catholic Lower Ormeau Road coming from the Protestant Ballynafeigh area, was canceled by a Government-appointed commission. In the group, pushing a stroller holding her year-old granddaughter, Nuala, was Philomena McLaughlin, a Catholic who said Protestants had killed her daughter-in-law and the father of her son-in-law, who was shot dead in his fruit shop. ''This is a very important step,'' she said of the peace agreement. ''It's good for all my children and grandchildren. Now they can be reared in peace without fear of bombs and bullets and beatings.'' A Protestant woman, Janet Robinson, said: ''There is a great sense of forgiveness.'' Several years ago, she said, a good friend's legs were blown off by a bomb planted under her car by the Irish Republican Army. The I.R.A., she said, thought the car belonged to a Protestant policeman, but the policeman had moved away. In the stone church on the Upper Ormeau Road, Catholics and Protestants took turns reading about the Crucifixion from the New Testament. On one wall was a large Union Jack; opposite was a large green flag with a shamrock, symbol of the mostly Catholic Irish Republic. Mr. Campbell said, ''We pray for those in our midst whose answer is assassination in words or deeds.'' The Rev. Marlene Taylor, the assistant minister at the church, said as she greeted people leaving the church: ''For actual peace to come, it must come in people's hearts and minds. That will take time. But it's a beginning.'' A Catholic priest from the nearby parish of Drumbo, the Rev. Paul Symonds, said the peace agreement, ''might move us toward a closer unity.'' But he said hostility between Catholics and Protestants would survive the new peace. ''Where the spirit of God is at work,'' he said, ''the spirit of evil will try to destroy. Satan is still at work in the hearts of some people.'' AN IRISH ACCORD: THE IRISH | On Brink of Peace, Catholics and Protestants Pray |
1009888_2 | fenfluramine, so experts in the use of that drug say it is unlikely their hearts were damaged. The boys who were given the drug were the younger brothers of delinquents. The researchers found them through court records and by interviewing mothers to find those who had what the scientists described as ''adverse rearing practices.'' The mothers were then asked to bring the children into the experiment. In return, they were given $125. Articles on the experiments were published in scientific journals last fall. Later in 1997, Ms. Sharav reported the studies to the National Bioethics Advisory Commission, a panel that counsels the President. The commission is now reviewing the Federal Government's rules on experiments with ''vulnerable subjects,'' such as children and mental patients. Disability Advocates, Inc., a nonprofit group based in Albany that helps people with disabilities in human rights cases, referred the experiments to the Federal Office of Protection from Research Risks of the Department of Health and Human Services. On Monday, Dr. Gary Ellis, chief of the Federal office, confirmed that a preliminary investigation has begun and estimated that it would take months to complete. Researchers at Queens College and Mount Sinai did not offer extensive comment on the experiments, but said in a statement yesterday, ''Mount Sinai denies that the research conducted at our institution was in any way illegal, unethical or otherwise improper.'' The chief author of the Psychiatric Institute study, Dr. Daniel Pine, declined to comment, but the director of the Psychiatric Institute, Dr. John Oldham, said in interviews two weeks ago that such studies are very important to study the biological basis of behavior. ''Is there or is there not a correlation between certain biological markers and conduct disorders or antisocial behavior?'' Dr. Oldham said. ''This study was an effort to look at this with a relatively simple method using fenfluramine.'' In the two experiments published jointly by researchers from Queens College and Mount Sinai, the subjects were 66 boys between ages 7 and 11 with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder. The boys were taken off their medication for attention deficit and intravenously given fenfluramine to measure for a chemical they believe is linked to aggression. A spokesman for Mount Sinai, Mel Granick, would not disclose what percentage of the boys in the Queens and Mount Sinai studies were black or Hispanic, saying only that the boys reflected the ''ethnically diverse population of our catchment area.'' | Experiments On Children Are Reviewed |
1009907_1 | years. Hard-line Protestant leaders like the Rev. Ian Paisley, head of the Democratic Unionist Party, which boycotted the peace talks, have voiced strong opposition to the early release of prisoners, saying the accord will free terrorists -- Protestant and Catholic -- to restart the guerrilla war. There are fears that if a substantial number of Sinn Fein's members oppose the agreement, dissidents within the I.R.A. will form splinter groups that will resort to violence. The I.R.A. is still observing a cease-fire it called in July, though many British and Irish officials think dissident republican guerrillas have helped splinter groups' attacks in recent months. Irish officials said the prisoners' release was in keeping with the spirit of the agreement for a new political structure in Northern Ireland. This structure, to be voted on in referendums on May 22 in the Irish Republic and in Northern Ireland, would give the Catholic minority in the North more power and increase the influence of the Irish Republic in northern affairs. But it also assures that there will be no united Ireland without the approval of the Protestant majority in the North. On Monday, as politicians opened the debate over the agreement, the issue of prisoners stirred an energetic dispute. Last year, to speed up the peace effort, Ireland granted early release to 11 I.R.A. prisoners. About 250 remain in British jails in Northern Ireland and Britain, and there is no indication any will be released early. Another issue under discussion is the possibility of a visit to Northern Ireland by Presiden Clinton. After the agreement was approved, George J. Mitchell, the former United States Senator who was chairman of the talks, said Mr. Clinton might visit the North to help win approval of the agreement in the referendum. The President said he would only visit on the invitation of the Prime Ministers of Britain and Ireland. Catholic leaders like John Hume, one of the authors of the effort that led to the new agreement, said a visit by Mr. Clinton would be helpful. But Mr. Paisley's son, Ian Jr., said the President would not be welcome. And John Taylor, the deputy leader of the Ulster Unionist Party, which helped forge the agreement, said that while Mr. Clinton was generally welcome in the North, which he visited in December 1995 to wide acclaim, a visit before the May vote ''could be seen as American interference.'' | As First Step in Peace Accord, Ireland Frees 9 I.R.A. Prisoners |
1009823_3 | abbey, tourists often ask directions to his house, but there is not so much as a postcard of his doorway on sale, much less copies of his book. ''All we know is that this guy never liked us,'' said Ozkan Tatlisulu, a local grocer. ''After we arrived in 1974 he immediately sold his house and moved away. Probably he didn't want to live with us.'' That is not true, because by 1974 Durrell had long since settled in southern France, where he died in 1990. His house has had several owners since he departed, and whoever was inside this month wisely declined to answer the door when curious tourists came knocking. One of the most memorable episodes in ''Bitter Lemons of Cyprus'' is Durrell's account of how a real estate dealer and ''terrestrial rogue'' called Sabri the Turk helped him find his house in Bellapais. Sabri spent days waiting for the right moment to approach the owner, shed theatrical tears of laughter when he heard the initial asking price, and finally closed the deal by promising that Durrell would pay in ''notes -- thick notes, as thick as honeycomb, as thick as salami.'' Today Sabri Tahir is 74 years old and still has a reputation as a rogue. One of his legs was shot off by a business rival, but on a recent morning in Nicosia, he was willing to speak warmly about his old friend. ''Durrell loved it here, but in the end he became very upset,'' Mr. Tahir recalled. ''When people don't like you in this part of the world, they don't say anything directly, but they try to make life hard for you. They started spreading rumors that Durrell had relations with his students and other negative things. They used such nasty words against him that he didn't want to stay in Cyprus.'' In his book, however, Durrell makes no mention of personal troubles and says he left because he could not bear to see his beloved island consumed in a ''feast of unreason.'' Today Greeks reject him because he accused them of degenerating into hatred and terror. Turks cannot embrace him because he wrote of ''the Greek nature of Cyprus'' and found ''a certain hollowness'' to Turkish claims. Like so much in Cyprus, Durrell's stay here ended sadly and bitterly. ''He liked both communities,'' Mr. Tahir said, ''but in the end many people didn't like him.'' | Bellapais Journal; Bitter Memories of a Love Affair With Cyprus |
1012843_2 | characters never assume much life beyond their emblematic status as figures in a well-worn social debate. And the work's prose, while gussied up with the splintered speech and repetitions David Mamet made famous, often feels like the considered position statements in symposiums transcribed in women's magazines like Mirabella. The plot, related in quick, elliptical two-character scenes, brings to mind films like Paul Mazursky's ''Unmarried Woman'' (1978), not to mention the sort of made-for-television movies routinely shown on the Lifetime channel. There's even a glimmer of the revenge fantasy, in giving Ms. Alexander the withering last word, exploited with such flash in ''The First Wives Club.'' Gus (Robert Foxworth), a celebrated newspaper columnist in his 50's, has been married to Honor (Ms. Alexander), a once-celebrated poet who has put her career on hold, for 32 years. (Just so you know, there is Honor the character and ''Honour'' the title.) The couple are a tad smug, in their urbane, literate way, in their domestic ease with each other, even making fun of a friend who has suddenly started dating a much younger woman. ''What is it about facing death that makes a man turn to a tanning salon?'' Gus asks rhetorically. Did you hear the ominous rumble of irony? Sure enough, Gus has soon walked out on Honor to take up with Claudia (Laura Linney), an ambitious blond journalist who wears thigh-grazing suits in fire-engine red. Gus and Honor's daughter, Sophie (Enid Graham), feeling the only security in life has been destroyed, returns to hurl accusations. And Honor, who sees life as an ongoing compromise, and Claudia, a hell-bent-for-success type who happily admits she is without compassion, are forced to assess the generational distance between them. The performances are all solid within the limits of the generic parts. Ms. Alexander again shows her affecting ability to convey the surprise of pain in a woman doing her best to suppress it. Mr. Foxworth, in the evening's most cartoonish role, uses his sonorous voice to project shades of middle-aged masculine fatuity. Ms. Linney, in a variation on the post-feminist vampire played by Elizabeth Marvel in Wendy Wasserstein's ''American Daughter,'' is more strident than she needs to be but improves when doubts finally visit the confident Claudia. The real find of the production, however, is Ms. Graham, making her Broadway debut, who brings a genuinely searing sense of betrayal to Sophie's confusion. She also seems | Oh, No, He's Walking Out on Her Again |
1007835_0 | Working toward a Thursday deadline, the Prime Ministers of the Irish Republic and Britain and Roman Catholic and Protestant leaders in Northern Ireland continued today to try to reach a historic agreement to end the murderous sectarian violence that has racked this island for 800 years. Since 1969, the violence has killed more than 3,200 people in the predominantly Protestant British province of Ulster. Prime Ministers Bertie Ahern of Ireland and Tony Blair of Britain, having met six times in the last four days, are sounding carefully optimistic about the proposal that they thrashed out. Mr. Ahern has begun to call Mr. Blair Tony, and Mr. Blair said the chance for an agreement was quite unlikely to come again for generations. The Prime Ministers' proposals, based on discussions with political leaders, are to be transmitted to the former American Senator George J. Mitchell, chairman of the talks, who will submit them to leaders of the northern parties. Today, the British Northern Ireland Secretary, Mo Mowlam, said that some basic issues remained unresolved but that she still felt that there could be a pact by Thursday. In recent days, the negotiators have met privately and then surfaced to float their conflicting versions of the talks, producing inevitably breathless reports that the talks were succeeding or failing. The issue is the political status of the north, and the proposed reorganization is intended to give the Catholic minority additional power while assuring Protestants that the province will, for the foreseeable future, remain British. If there is an agreement, it would be put to referendums in both parts of Ireland late in May. The essential problem, still unresolved, is how to define the new structure in a way that lets Catholics and Protestants describe it as victory or at least an honorable compromise. The language of the agreement has to in effect say the powers of a proposed North-South Council would be both significant and insignificant. A collapse of the talks would probably lead to renewed violence, including Irish Republican Army attacks in the north and in England and retaliatory strikes by Protestant paramilitary groups in the Irish Republic. The possibility of the assassination of political leaders also worries politicians and the police. ''Everybody agrees that missing the Thursday deadline would be nothing short of a disaster,'' David Davin-Power, chief northern correspondent for Irish radio and television, said today on radio. The political leaders | Hope Over Ulster Rises as Leaders Warm Up |
1007811_3 | work at the Ford Research Laboratory in Dearborn, Mich., won praise for two patents that enable cars to run with cleaner emissions. The devices are especially designed for automobiles that run on natural gas. The technology is in use in California, where stringent new low-emission requirements are in place. Exhaust is created when a mixture of air and fuel is ignited in an internal combustion engine. The inventions reduce the noxious chemicals that cars emit by first filtering hydrogen from the exhaust through a conditioning catalyst. The exhaust gases are then passed through an electronic sensor, which analyzes their oxygen concentration. Determining the amount of oxygen in the exhaust allows more careful control over the air-fuel mixture being fed to the engine. The mixture can be adjusted in response to readings from the oxygen sensor so that a more efficient combination is used. With a more efficient mixture, the car's central catalyst can better reduce noxious gases to meet low-emission standards. The inventors of the devices -- Jeffrey Hepburn, Robert McCabe, Bela Povinger and Raymond Willey -- received patents 5,433,071 and 5,474,054. Clearer Images On Display Screens At Princeton University, five researchers won credit for a patent that improves the resolution of flat-panel display screens while using less space. The researchers -- Stephen Forrest, Paul Burrows, Mark Thompson, Linda Sapochak and Dennis McCarty -- achieved this by vertically stacking red, green and blue pixels, the basic elements for forming images on a screen. Flat panel displays are used in television sets, computers and appliances, and the multibillion-dollar market for them grows every year. Manufacturers are constantly seeking technology to make the screens clearer, brighter and more energy-efficient, while keeping costs down. The stacks are built on a glass panel with a transparent coating of metal. The colored pixels are made of organic material and stacked so that the one with the longest wavelength, the red one, is on top of the pile and the shortest, the blue one, is on the bottom. That leaves green in the middle. The colored pixels are separated by a thin, transparent layer of conductive material, so that light can pass through the stack. This method of arranging pixels requires a third of the space of single-layer arrangements while producing resolution three times as sharp.The invention received patent 5,707,745. Patents are available by number for $3 from the Patent and Trademark Office, Washington, D.C. 20231. | Patents; Scientists and engineers working for companies and a university are named inventors of the year. |
1007899_0 | INTERNATIONAL A3-13 Fifty Years Later, Israel Seeks to Define Its Identity A remarkable ethnic and cultural diversity has evolved in the half-century since Israel was founded as a Jewish state. But whether that diversity marks the success or failure of the Zionist experiment is a matter of considerable debate among Israelis, heading toward the anniversary on April 30. A1 Kosovo Rebels Gain Strength Guerrilla bands from the Kosovo Liberation Army, who are fighting for an independent state in the Serbian province, have dramatically strengthened their presence in the region. Rebel groups that a few weeks ago numbered four or five guerrillas have quadrupled in size, swelled in part by an infusion of troops and weapons smuggled in from Albania. A3 Talks on Ireland Progress Religious and political leaders of the Irish Republic and Britain continued to work toward an agreement to end the violence that has racked Ireland for 800 years. Prime Ministers Bertie Ahern of Ireland and Tony Blair of Britain say they are optimistic about the proposals they have developed. The ideas are to be transmitted to the chairman of the talks, who will submit them to leaders of the northern parties. Britain's Northern Ireland Secretary said that some issues remained unresolved but that she thought there could be agreement by the talks' deadline on Thursday. A4 Concern Over Iranians' Visit The Clinton Administration said it hoped that Iran did not misinterpret the short detention of Iranian wrestlers by immigration authorities when the athletes entered the United States last week to take part in a wrestling tournament. Members of the group, the first Iranian sports team to visit this country since the fall of the Shah in 1979, were detained for two hours, photographed and fingerprinted when they entered the country at O'Hare International Airport in Chicago. They were on their way to the World Cup of Freestyle Wrestling championships at Oklahoma Sate University. A8 Ukraine Mine Explosion Kills 63 A gas explosion killed 63 Ukrainian coal miners in one of the country's worst mining disasters, officials said. They said the bodies of all those trapped below ground when the methane gas blast ripped through a new seam on Saturday had been recovered. (Reuters) Koreas Agree to Talks South Korea said it would accept a North Korean proposal to reopen talks on economic aid and other issues. On Saturday North Korea proposed that officials at the deputy minister | NEWS SUMMARY |
1007883_2 | seem likely to happen soon, despite the occasional months, like March, when the work force shrinks instead of expanding. Still, there are big pockets of potential workers that have yet to be reached. Despite the low unemployment rate nationally, joblessness is just beginning to decline significantly for those without high school diplomas and for black and Hispanic people. And there are regions where unemployment is still relatively high, prompting companies to go where the people are. Many companies enlist their own workers as recruiters, awarding bonuses or prizes for each new employee they bring in. Some, like XL Connect near Philadelphia, which employs 1,500 people skilled in computer networks, pay as much as $1,000 to an employee who recruits someone who stays six months. ''Even then we hired and trained 900 people last year to retain 500,'' Tim Wallace, XL's president, said. ''But we can't pay more than our billing rate, and when others offer higher salaries, we have to let them go.'' The General Electric Company finds itself moving more quickly than in the past to hire experienced candidates, often offering a job within two weeks of meeting a promising applicant. ''These are valuable mid-career people seeking new jobs,'' said Robert Corcoran, a human resources manager, ''and if we delay a decision, others have time to grab them, perhaps at a higher wage.'' The Maytag Corporation, adopting a growing corporate practice, now lists job openings on the Internet -- appealing nationwide for applicants. It is also recruiting, for the first time, among minority organizations, including an association of black men and women who have master's degrees in business. ''We would probably have done this anyway,'' said Kim Miller, Maytag's manager of employment, ''but we are certainly doing it in a tight labor market.'' Like numerous companies forced to choose between raising wages and lowering standards, Otto Engineering decided to accept less math proficiency but hold to a $6 hourly wage for assemblers. Maytag has also lowered standards. Community college graduates with two-year degrees now get jobs in sales and marketing that once went only to those with four-year degrees. And Maytag for the first time is beginning to train computer programmers instead of hiring fully trained ones. ''It could be production folks, nurses, clerical staff,'' Ms. Miller said, ''anyone already on staff who shows an aptitude for programming might come into the training program we are now setting up.'' | EMPLOYERS HUSTLE TO FILL JOB ROLLS, WITHOUT PAY RISES |
1006483_1 | actor, was a leading member of the Canadian Socialist Party and later, when the family returned to England, of the Socialist Party of Great Britain. Ms. Lestor graduated from London University with a diploma in sociology and went to work as a nursery school teacher, opening a nursery school in her own home six years later. At the same time she pursued a career in politics. Disillusioned by what she considered the extremism of her father's party, she joined Labor at the age of 24, won several local elections and was elected to Parliament in 1966. She remained there, with a four-year break, until 1997. She immediately threw herself into the issues that consumed her, introducing a bill to tighten regulations on nursery schools and providers of child care; fighting the Government's attempt to stop paying social security benefits to unwed mothers, and working to insure that abandoned wives could obtain financial support from their husbands. She was passionate about the rights of abused children, saying in a 1989 debate that while it was necessary to ''strike a balance'' between the rights of children and the rest of the family, ''in my book, the rights of the children are paramount.'' Her jobs in the Labor Governments of Harold Wilson and James Callaghan often became jeopardized by the rigor of her principles. In 1974, when she was appointed a junior minister in the Foreign Office with special responsibility for African affairs, she earned the nickname ''the African Queen'' and repeatedly clashed with her superiors over her strong anti-apartheid views. Ms. Lestor was then moved to a ministerial job in the Education Department. But she resigned after a year in protest over spending cuts that threatened the jobs of thousands of teachers and forced the postponement of her goal to change the age when students left state-financed secondary schools to 16, from 15. With the Conservatives in power through the 1980's and into the 1990's, Ms. Lestor worked as the opposition's chief spokeswoman on a number of issues, including children and the family, juvenile crime and race relations. She resigned from her last opposition post, as spokeswoman for overseas development, in 1996, saying that she was too ill to continue. In 1997 she was made a Baroness and elevated to the House of Lords. A flamboyant, warmhearted woman who listed her hobbies in Who's Who as ''playing with children and animals,'' Lady | Joan Lestor, 66, a Crusader In Britain for Children's Rights |
1011119_4 | Paul II, when millions of pilgrims are expected to come to this hill town. ''The real worry is that of time,'' said Mr. Croci. ''The challenge is to do delicate work that requires patience and prudent care very quickly. Usually, something like this would take years to do, and we have just more than a year.'' The restoration efforts have also endured criticism, particularly after a worker in December forgot to turn off a water hose, used to damp down the excess dust as debris was removed from above the vaults in the upper church, allowing a trickle of water to flow over some frescoes overnight. Experts closely associated with the restoration insist that no artworks were hurt, but members of an ad hoc watchdog group that has been closely following the restoration efforts are not reassured. ''The episode of the running water has to be seen in the context of a long sequence of negligence,'' charged Bruno Toscano, an art history professor at the University of Rome. He said that Italy's cultural authorities ignored the structural problems of the basilica for decades while concentrating only on its artworks. He noted, for example, that a book published in 1982, which contained a study of the structure of the basilica based on 12,000 measurements, had pinpointed the most fragile sections of the ceiling. These were precisely the sections that crumbled during the Sept. 26 earthquake. ''The basilica is the most important building in Umbria,'' he said. ''It is No. 1 on the list of the region's artistic patrimony, but an important study of possible danger was ignored. Why?'' More than 1,000 tons of debris has been removed from the corners of the ceilings where it had accumulated during previous restoration: bits of roof tiles, shredded newspapers from 1885 and old nails. Many experts believe the weight of the debris may have had a role in the damage wrought by the Sept. 26 earthquake, causing the sections over the altar and the entrance to collapse. On the outside of the building, work is continuing on the tympanum, which is to be dismantled and rebuilt with the same kind of stone, from the same quarry, that was used seven centuries ago. The bell tower is to be reinforced with chains. Meanwhile, in the vast whitewashed basement of the Franciscan monastery at the foot of the basilica, teams of restorers are sifting through an | Undoing an Act of God At an Italian Basilica |
1011177_0 | This spring, more than two million high school seniors will scan their acceptance letters one last time and decide on a college. Students with stellar transcripts and S.A.T. scores are rolling in scholarships, thanks to a heated competition among elite colleges to attract the hottest freshmen. But young people who fall outside the elite group will find the welcome -- as measured in student aid -- considerably cooler. The luckiest students can pay burdensome tuition without scholarships. Less lucky are the poor and middle-class students who make up the majority of enrollment. Two-thirds will risk academic failure by working at paying jobs 25 hours a week. This entering class will finish college with more loan debt than any in history. Voter outrage about soaring costs and debt has prompted Congress to raise Federal tuition aid ever so slightly this year, after letting it plummet since the 1970's. At the state level, political pressure has forced lawmakers in New York and California to restore some aid to university systems that were systematically starved beginning in the late 70's. But with the children of the baby boomers due soon at the state university door, the Federal and state governments have yet to reverse the destructive policies that drove up tuition costs and forced many students to skip college. Education debt was always a fact of life for doctors, lawyers, dentists and M.B.A.'s, who pay full freight on the theory that they will earn a great deal afterward. But soaring tuition and declining Federal grants have made extensive borrowing commonplace for undergraduates as well. Stories about this problem generally focus on the elite universities, where total costs have exceeded $30,000 a year. Princeton, Yale and Stanford recently refashioned aid packages to provide relief for middle-class families. But the most serious problems are found in the four-year public colleges that educate close to 80 percent of all college students. A recent study from the General Accounting Office found that tuition at four-year public colleges rose by 234 percent between 1980 and 1995, far faster than household income, tuition at private colleges or health care costs. Public college students showed the largest increase in borrowing, with 60 percent needing loans in 1996, up by almost a third from just three years earlier. The percentage of college graduates who owed $20,000 or more doubled to 19 percent. These students are steering away from public-service jobs like | Editorial Observer; Going Bankrupt to Get a College Education |
1011169_3 | return to democracy in many countries and a restructuring of inefficient economies. Perhaps the most discussed issue of the social action plan was its creation of the position of rapporteur, or monitor, at the Organization of America States to report on freedom of expression. The rapporteur would investigate cases of press repression and other free-speech abuses. Despite the rise of democracy in Latin America after decades of military dictatorship, freedom of the press remains a goal rather than a reality across much of the region. Often those opposed to free speech are the democratically elected governments promising to protect it. In the last decade, at least 120 journalists have been killed in Latin America while reporting on corruption, drugs and human rights abuses. Several Latin American governments, like Argentina's, have introduced legislation that critics contend would intimidate the press and quash investigations. In Latin America, the press is often the only check on government. In many of the countries, the executive branch exercises considerable control over the judiciary and the legislature, which are often dominated by members of the President's party or by the President's appointees. Clinton Administration officials have long expressed concern about making new trade deals with countries that do not have independent news organizations to help guard against corruption. That concern has been echoed by those involved with international business and investment. While the meeting focused less on trade issues than the organizers had hoped, trade experts said setting a date to begin free-trade talks and establishing a logistical framework for those negotiations would hopefully keep the momentum for an agreement alive. But the experts acknowledged that the lack of fast-track authority -- under which Congress would be able to approve or reject a trade agreement negotiated by the Administration but not to amend it -- had hurt the United States' credibility on free trade. The Free Trade Area of the Americas would have 34 member nations (Cuba is not included)with 750 million people and a gross domestic product of more than $9 trillion. The United States accounts for 85 percent of the region's economy. The population would be more than double the 370 million of the 15-nation European Union. Last year, United States exports to the hemisphere totaled $286 billion, or 42 percent of its global exports. In the five years since 1992, trade within the Western Hemisphere has risen to $592 billion, from $375 billion. | FREE-TRADE ZONE OF THE AMERICAS GIVEN A GO-AHEAD |
1010468_4 | them, especially those in the water, which was thus immediately spoiled, but which they went on drinking just the same, mud and all, bloody as it was, most fighting to have it. If we're to keep the ideas of Greece alive, we must first rekindle the Hellenic spirit, for the two are inseparable. That spirit, though it may already be lost in the Ivy League, thrives here among students working at Burger King and among night-school returnees, who, once hooked on Thucydides' blood and guts, then -- but only then -- begin to appreciate the power of his thought. Students working off their tuition in places like Fresno, Turlock and Bakersfield don't need the university to tell them how unique their own lives are and how richly diverse their past experiences are. Instead they welcome a tough guy like Thucydides who shows how their brutal experiences are universal, even banal, and thus explicable through abstract canons that exist ''for all time.'' In an age like ours in which setbacks and disappointments are dealt with through therapy rather than accepted as evidence of the tragic nature of our existence, Thucydides' honesty comes as a welcome touch of realism. With him there is no ''feeling your pain,'' no pretense of cheap compassion, and there are no easy apologies for what we are and what we have done. Thucydides offers students of all races and classes the reassurance that we are all more alike than we think. And in so doing, he offers wisdom about the present, but relief from it as well. In central California, students have the strange idea that Thucydides wrote his history from what he saw and did, rather than from what he read, that he became a historian only because he could no longer be a warrior -- that he was a man more like themselves than like their professors. In Thucydides there is a soul every bit as powerful as his ideas. What has nearly killed classical learning is not too little, but rather too much, scholarly information about the unscholarly Greeks. In our 11th hour, we can learn most about Thucydides from those who are still very much Thucydidean in their own lives. Victor Davis Hanson, a professor of Greek at California State University, Fresno, is the co-author, with John Heath, of ''Who Killed Homer? The Demise of Classical Education and the Recovery of Greek Wisdom.'' | Raw, Relevant History |
1010516_0 | Dan Pollard, a Baptist missionary from Oregon, settled his wife and teen-age daughters in Vanino, a remote town in eastern Russia, four years ago, built a congregation of local families and a church of local timber. Now Mr. Pollard and his family have become the first American missionaries reported to be evicted from Russia since the passage of a law last fall that restricts the rights of minority churches and religions and protects the Russian Orthodox Church from competition. Mr. Pollard's case, and other recent reports of religious discrimination in Russia, could jeopardize as much as $30 million in American foreign aid to Russia under legislation passed by Congress last year that restricts the aid unless the Clinton Administration can certify that the Russian Government is not violating religious liberty. ''We are appealing to the leaders in Russia to please help us return,'' Mr. Pollard said in a telephone interview yesterday from Salem, Ore. He said he believed that he had been ousted because a regional official misapplied the new religion law. ''The people there want us,'' Mr. Pollard said. ''We have a congregation that has sent a letter to President Yeltsin saying please let our pastor come back. They have no one else to be their pastor.'' Preachers and proselytizers from many nations and religious movements have flocked to Russia since the fall of the Soviet Communist Government, which for many years repressed religious expression. The law passed last year restricts the activities of any religion not registered by the Soviet state 15 years ago. The law cites only the Russian Orthodox Church, Judaism, Islam and Buddhism as traditional religions native to Russia, and it excludes Roman Catholicism, Protestant groups like the Baptists, and Russian Orthodox breakaway movements, even though most of them have a long history in Russia. Human rights monitors in Russia say the law has been enforced haphazardly and has not resulted in a widespread crackdown, but they have reported scattered cases of priests refused visa renewals, congregations denied meeting places, and a theologian dismissed after he challenged the law. Much of the harassment has been directed at indigenous Russian clergy, not foreigners. Mr. Pollard is the first American church worker to be forced out since the law was passed, the human rights workers say. Mikhail Shurgalin, spokesman for the Russian Embassy in Washington, said he had no information about Mr. Pollard and could not comment | Russians Oust a U.S. Missionary Under New Law Limiting Church Rights |
1009229_5 | family recently boarded No. 1 Special Tourism Bus in the Chinese capital for their first trip to the Great Wall, about 60 miles away. Xinhua, the Chinese news agency, which told their story, said that Mr. Wang was one of nearly 77 million people who visited tourist sites in or around Beijing last year. They spent, on average, about $10 a family. In India, the world's second-most-populous country, whole villages charter buses and occasionally trains to take people with very little expendable income to places that were out of the reach of earlier generations. Tour operators everywhere are finding that standards of living need to rise only marginally for people to get an itch to hit the road. Perhaps even because of hard times -- like the economic stress Asia is now experiencing -- the popularity of short trips continues to rise. Not every place is automatically threatened by an invasion, said Mr. Kaplan. ''Are we messing up the world?'' he asked. ''I see that more in the Caribbean than anywhere else, where the islands are so small. But the Hyatts and Marriotts in a place like Cairo kind of disappear among the 14 million people.'' The widely held view among environmentalists -- who don't know whether to weep or cheer at the news that ecotourism is now one of the fastest-growing travel sectors -- has been that mass international tourism has been the most damaging to natural settings. But as numbers of domestic travelers grow, that assumption cracks. In the case of India, with nearly a billion people, foreign travelers are still very small in number -- not even one-sixth of the 17 million tourists who go to Thailand annually, for example. Indian beaches and mountain resorts, monuments and historical sites are taking a trouncing from short-haul Indian visitors. Similarly, Southeast Asia is experiencing a boom in the construction of clubs and golf courses for the local business class, and it has forever altered rural landscapes. Countries can respond to environmental and cultural problems imaginatively. The Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan raised prices and limited the number of tourist visas issued; it also developed with the World Bank a trust fund for protecting one of the last pristine mountain environments in Asia. The World Bank and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, have both helped the Mexican state of Oaxaca excavate, preserve and display Meso-American archeological ruins -- | The World; Surprises in the Global Tourism Boom |
1009272_0 | Reminders of the global threat to botanical diversity surround us, but we tend to think of them as disparate events rather than parts of a broad pattern. The forest fires in Indonesia and the Amazon seem unrelated to the spread of purple loosestrife, an invasive wetland plant, across the Northeastern United States. The appearance of a housing development on former oak savanna in California seems unconnected to the destruction of native hemlocks by a parasitic Asian insect called the woolly adelgid. But each of these events yields the same result, the destruction of the plant life on which so much of human life depends, not only for the conversion of sunlight into food but also for many medicines and chemical compounds. The progressive loss of biodiversity has been well chronicled. Still, last week's report from the World Conservation Union -- the first worldwide assessment of plant endangerment -- was disheartening. Despite repeated promises from world governments to make things better, the report notes, one of every eight plants in the world, and one of every three in the United States, is threatened with extinction. In raw numbers, that means nearly 34,000 species are threatened, which itself is surely an underestimate because reporting is far less detailed in some countries than in others, and because so many plant species remain unidentified and their status thus unknown. According to the conservation union -- a coalition of scientific and environmental groups, including the New York Botanical Garden and the Smithsonian Institution -- the main threats to plant diversity are development, including logging and agriculture, and the invasion of non-native species that crowd out the native brand. That, too, was already known, if not in quite so much detail. The big unknown is whether governments are prepared to do anything about it. The Earth Summit in Rio de Janiero in 1992 approved a biological diversity treaty aimed at reducing the rate of extinction of plant species. The treaty asked each nation to inventory biological resources and adopt a national conservation strategy. Few have done so. But 160 countries have at least ratified the treaty. The United States has not, largely because of Congressional fears that the treaty would allow others to meddle in America's natural resource policy or involve the United States in expensive projects to help poorer nations. Foot-dragging by the world's richest nation has done nothing to encourage others to get involved | A Census of Botanical Risk |
1009317_2 | stems from the attribute most often cited for his success: his patience and his willingness to listen. Since beginning to come here regularly three years ago as an economic adviser to President Clinton, a mission that grew into his assignment as chairman of the peace talks, Mr. Mitchell has become a popular figure in Belfast. On his strolls through the lobby of the downtown Europa Hotel, where he normally stays, he has to pause to shake hands and greet well-wishers. ''Back for more torture?'' the piano player in the hotel bar once asked him on one of his more than 100 shuttle-diplomacy trips. Since taking over the talks in June 1996, his schedule has been to fly to Belfast for the three days of the week that the negotiations are on and then to return to his law practice in Washington and to Heather MacLachlan, the woman he married after leaving the Senate in 1995, promising her that he was also leaving politics. At the outset of the talks, his widely praised bent for patient attentiveness could be time-consuming. He let Robert McCartney, head of the militant UK Unionist Party, which eventually quit the negotiations, speak for seven hours uninterrupted. He reasoned that just the fact that political leaders of this conflicted society were talking was progress. Mr. Mitchell said that in more recent months, the pace of the talks had quickened. ''When we go in there, we really get down to work,'' he said. A member of the Senate for almost 15 years until his retirement in 1995, Mr. Mitchell said his experience there prepared him well for his role here. ''I had plenty of practice listening to long debates, seeing people waste time, stall and delay,'' he said. The big difference in Northern Ireland, he said, was ''the overlay of violence,'' a reminder of which he received at the start of each day in Belfast when an aide would brief him at breakfast on the shootings and mortar attacks and fire bombings that had occurred overnight. Sectarian bloodshed has cost more than 3,200 lives since 1969. Political parties were admitted to the talks only after signing a commitment to nonviolence and democracy known as the Mitchell Principles. When paramilitary fighters represented by the Ulster Democrats and Sinn Fein, the political wing of the Irish Republican Army, were linked to killings in January, the two parties were suspended from | Can-Do American's Patience Paid Off With an Ulster Pact |
1009372_5 | family recently boarded No. 1 Special Tourism Bus in the Chinese capital for their first trip to the Great Wall, about 60 miles away. Xinhua, the Chinese news agency, which told their story, said that Mr. Wang was one of nearly 77 million people who visited tourist sites in or around Beijing last year. They spent, on average, about $10 a family. In India, the world's second-most-populous country, whole villages charter buses and occasionally trains to take people with very little expendable income to places that were out of the reach of earlier generations. Tour operators everywhere are finding that standards of living need to rise only marginally for people to get an itch to hit the road. Perhaps even because of hard times -- like the economic stress Asia is now experiencing -- the popularity of short trips continues to rise. Not every place is automatically threatened by an invasion, said Mr. Kaplan. ''Are we messing up the world?'' he asked. ''I see that more in the Caribbean than anywhere else, where the islands are so small. But the Hyatts and Marriotts in a place like Cairo kind of disappear among the 14 million people.'' The widely held view among environmentalists -- who don't know whether to weep or cheer at the news that ecotourism is now one of the fastest-growing travel sectors -- has been that mass international tourism has been the most damaging to natural settings. But as numbers of domestic travelers grow, that assumption cracks. In the case of India, with nearly a billion people, foreign travelers are still very small in number -- not even one-sixth of the 17 million tourists who go to Thailand annually, for example. Indian beaches and mountain resorts, monuments and historical sites are taking a trouncing from short-haul Indian visitors. Similarly, Southeast Asia is experiencing a boom in the construction of clubs and golf courses for the local business class, and it has forever altered rural landscapes. Countries can respond to environmental and cultural problems imaginatively. The Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan raised prices and limited the number of tourist visas issued; it also developed with the World Bank a trust fund for protecting one of the last pristine mountain environments in Asia. The World Bank and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, have both helped the Mexican state of Oaxaca excavate, preserve and display Meso-American archeological ruins -- | The World; Surprises in the Global Tourism Boom |
1009201_0 | Officials from Northern Ireland, Britain, the Irish Republic and the United States announced a comprehensive agreement designed to bridge centuries of hatred and end three decades of harrowing violence. After the announcement on Good Friday, British Prime Minister Tony Blair cautioned that real peace is yet to come. While the accord requires a popular vote in both parts of Ireland, and dissidents could resume violence, one hopeful sign has been a sharp decline in the number of killings since a sometimes shaky cease-fire was declared in the province late in 1994. | April 5-11; A Death Toll, Truce and Now . . . |
1009009_3 | them,'' says Danny Hillis, co-founder of Thinking Machines Corporation and now vice president of research at Disney. ''Now copies are so common as to be considered worthless, and very little attention is given to preserving them.'' It's scary. And yet. . . Anyone wandering through the Internet might begin to feel that memory loss isn't the problem. Archivists are everywhere, in fact -- official and self-made. On Sunday, July 3, 1994, I played a hand of bridge that would be best forgotten -- but no, the leading on-line bridge service, OKBridge, has recorded every detail of the bidding and card play in each of the seven million hands played since the beginning of that year. Likewise, any silly message that you broadcast to any Usenet newsgroup is now being stored, for eternity or some approximation thereof, by a variety of commercial services. No matter that you gave your last posting a mere five seconds' thought; you should be prepared to hear your biographer read it back to you in your dotage. Most people, unfortunately, don't have posterity in mind when they fire off their little notes. Internet communication seems so spontaneous and personal. Will people really want future employers to dig up all the messages they've been posting to alt.dead.porn.stars and soc.support.depression.manic? Sometimes, as the years go by, privacy demands a gentle forgetfulness. Many people sitting at company workstations toss off E-mail as casually as they speak -- gossipy E-mail, secretive E-mail, snide E-mail, raunchy E-mail, E-mail meant to self-destruct after serving its instant purpose. But it lives on, as corporate lawyers and prosecutors have realized. Neither sender nor recipient can delete it reliably. To the lawyers' occasional horror -- here comes the subpoena! -- it lingers on disk drives and backup tapes like a late-night guest who has forgotten how to leave. The biggest proprietor of archivable data is the Federal Government, struggling to preserve the records it generates daily on an uncountable scale. It is a matter of current litigation whether every piece of governmental E-mail must be preserved as a ''Federal record.'' Either way, the task of the National Archives and Records Administration is monumental. ''What we're looking at is growth that there's no way we can deal with, using any known technique or resources we can get,'' says Ken Thibodeau, director of the Archives' electronic records programs. ''Digital information technology is creating major and serious challenges | Fast Forward; The Digital Attic: An Archive of Everything |
1002001_0 | In a decision likely to reverberate through America's major Protestant churches, a jury of United Methodists clergy members voted tonight to acquit a fellow minister of a charge that he violated church law by performing a same-sex union for two women in his congregation last September. After deliberating three hours, the 13-member jury announced that it had voted 8-to-5 against the Rev. Jimmy Creech of Omaha, falling a single vote short of the number it needed to convict him under Methodist rules. Because of that, Mr. Creech was declared not guilty. In its narrowest sense, the decision means that a statement adopted by Methodist officials two years ago against ministers' performing homosexual unions cannot be enforced in Nebraska, the church jurisdiction that filed the charge against Mr. Creech. But it is highly likely that the verdict will have a much deeper effect, encouraging those Methodist ministers across the nation who favor same-sex unions to perform them, and also energizing people who want to change the church law that now prohibits the ordination of gay men and lesbians as clergy members. Because of the sharp divisions with the denomination over those issues, one result of the verdict may be a rise in tensions among United Methodists over issues relating to homosexuality. In addition, given that the 8.5 million-member United Methodist Church is the nation's largest mainline Protestant denomination, it is likely that Mr. Creech's acquittal will be felt among other churches, especially within those groups that favor including openly gay men and lesbians in church rituals and leadership. Among the Protestant churches, none have liturgies for same-sex unions nor do any officially allow the ordination of noncelibate homosexuals as clergy members on a churchwide basis, although some regional bodies of the 1.5 million-member United Church of Christ allow those ordinations. Shortly after the verdict was read at First United Methodist Church in Kearney, where the two-day trial was held, Mr. Creech declared it to be ''a historic moment'' for his denomination. ''It is a courageous witness on behalf of this jury and this court. We are guided more by God's grace than by institutional regulations.'' But Melvin Semrad, a critic of Mr. Creech who attended the trial, took a starkly different view, saying the verdict ''sends the message across the country'' that culture had triumphed over church doctrine and rules. Mr. Semrad is a member of First United Methodist Church in | Pastor Found Innocent in Lesbian Ceremony |
1004939_5 | Ms. Aitel-Thompson's sisters prints out the weekly correspondence and sends it by express mail to her brother, a dairy farmer in Vermont, the one remaining off-line sibling. Whether this new mechanism for family intimacy has some sort of therapeutic effect on those who take advantage of it is unclear. But at a time when technology often seems to be straining traditional family relations, sending children off to various corners of the world in pursuit of careers and requiring them to build their own social ties, the global computer network, icon of the fragmented post-modern age, is being pressed into service reinforcing age-old kinship networks. It almost seems instinctual. For even as some of them express dismay about the fogeys' intrusion into their on-line hangout, many children are conspiring to get Internet accounts for their parents. And while little data is available on how many families stay in touch on line, a reporter asking sociologists and psychologists for such information was invariably plied with personal anecdotes. ''The real key was when my parents finally got the E-mail,'' mused Daniel T. Lichter, 44, director of population research at Pennsylvania State University, whose daily family correspondence spans three generations and eight states. ''Once they got it, they networked everybody in. Parents are the hub. Even if they're less computer literate, they're still the focal point.'' One advantage of E-mail over the telephone is the ability to send copies to the entire extended family with a few keystrokes. ''It creates a cohesion that you wouldn't get by making isolated telephone calls,'' said Mr. Lichter, who grew up in Mitchell, S.D., with 10 siblings, all of whom followed his father's recent surgery via his mother's Internet updates. THOUSANDS of family home pages festoon the Web. Many babies now get their own sites in lieu of birth announcements, often mere hours after they are born. With a password provided by their daughter, the grandparents of a newborn named T. J. Herring have been viewing updated pictures of him since his delivery in a San Francisco hospital room earlier this month. Great-Aunt Barb from St. Louis and Uncle Charles from Alexandria, Va., among others, have weighed in with congratulations and advice in the on-line guest book. ''I think the reason people are doing so much of this fishing around for relatives and lost connections is that there's a felt need, a loneliness, a feeling that 'there must | Guess Who's Going On Line |
1004920_1 | in the long term.'' Farrokh K. Captain, a 1967 M.I.T. graduate who lives in Karachi, Pakistan, said his university E-mail had helped him keep in touch with classmates. ''Previously, I was quite disconnected,'' he said via E-mail. And Tor Jakob Ramsoy, an M.I.T. graduate and strategy consultant in Oslo, took a negotiations course offered on line to alumni last year; it featured live video conferences with 30 students in 10 nations and 6 time zones. He said he has received useful business tips through fellow alumni on the Internet and is glad to avoid international phone charges and time-zone calculations while staying in touch. Some colleges and universities offer E-mail service to only some of their alumni. At the University of Pennsylvania, the service is offered to Wharton School and engineering graduates, but the program might be broadened in the future. ''It's certainly something we all want to move toward,'' said Martha Z. Stachitas, director of alumni relations. An alumni E-mail address is a virtual sheepskin hanging on the wall behind one's laptop and can carry a certain cachet. Polly Whitney, a mystery novelist from Boca Raton, Fla., who said she got 300 E-mail messages a day from readers, relies on her Yale address to keep her from losing messages when her I.S.P. fails her (a common occurrence, she said). Further, she is moving to New Jersey, and the E-mail account will keep her in touch during the move. Another Yale graduate, Travis Stansbury, said of the service (via E-mail): ''Given the significantly smaller number of users (compared to most I.S.P.'s), there is a greater chance of getting a 'friendly' user name . . . i.e., 'travis@aya.yale.edu' rather than 'travis756@earthlink.net' or something. Not that big of a deal, but it is a lot easier for people to remember.'' The only problem is that people sometimes think the owner of a university E-mail address is still an undergraduate, users report. Harvard Business School's alumni join forums on line about acquiring capital, making the transition from entrepreneurial management to professional management, and class reunions. Reunion attendance is expected to rise as classmates keep up with one another electronically. ''Last year, the fifth reunion broke attendance records by quite a margin,'' said Ricardo Chavira, assistant director for information technology at the Association of Yale Alumni. He said attendance had been good largely because the head of the reunion committee had used the alumni | On Line, Universities Link To Alumni and Their Wallets |
1005072_1 | two months, in which no one was killed but there was substantial property damage, were probably carried out by members of I.R.A. dissident groups. If the British and Irish Governments, sponsors of the talks, were to find that the I.R.A. had broken the cease-fire it called in July, they would be under heavy pressure to suspend the I.R.A.'s political wing, Sinn Fein, for a second time. Without Sinn Fein at the negotiations, the likelihood of an effective and sustainable peace agreement would be slight, according to officials and experts. An agreement not approved by Sinn Fein could lead, the experts say, to a resumption of the I.R.A. armed campaign, spreading violence to England, which in turn could produce Protestant retaliation here and in the Irish Republic. The bombings and the issue of I.R.A. disarmament have gained momentum in recent days as the negotiators in the peace talks face an April 9 deadline for an agreement to end nearly 30 years of sectarian violence that has killed more than 3,200 people in this predominantly Protestant British province. Today the former American Senator George J. Mitchell, who is chairman of the talks at the Stormont complex here, announced that the negotiations would be accelerated, with delegates working five days a week and evenings so that the deadline could be met. Any agreement will be put to referendums in May in the Irish Republic and Northern Ireland. Sinn Fein returned to the talks on Monday following an 18-day suspension after the Governments found that the I.R.A. had been involved in two murders in February. The party president, Gerry Adams, says that he believes the I.R.A. cease-fire is still in effect and that he does not know who is responsible for the recent attacks. ''It is my belief the Provisional I.R.A. was not involved in recent terrorist incidents,'' Ronnie Flanagan, the British province's chief of police, said this morning. ''I think there are people with engineering ability and technology who were certainly members of the Provisional I.R.A. who might have stood aside for the moment from that organization and who might be offering technology and expertise into other organizations.'' Mo Mowlam, the British Northern Ireland Secretary, said that ''ruthless people were trying to sabotage'' the talks, but that she had received no evidence from Mr. Flanagan, the Chief Constable of the Royal Ulster Constabulary, linking the attacks directly to the overwhelmingly Roman Catholic I.R.A. | Belfast Talks Kept on Course By Ducking Issue of I.R.A. Guilt |
1000228_0 | After seven years of economic growth, the American job juggernaut has not even begun to slow down. In February, for the fourth consecutive month, employers added more than 300,000 jobs, the Labor Department reported yesterday. And as it has month after month, the surge in hiring far exceeded the expectations of economists. The February data brought the total number of jobs created in the last six months to an astounding two million. The unemployment rate edged down to 4.6 percent from 4.7 percent, returning to the 24-year low that it reached in November. Also, the proportion of Americans working -- 64.2 percent -- remains at an all-time high. And perhaps most important, the report underscored how briskly the real pay of average American workers is now rising. The labor market has not been this strong for this long since before the oil crisis in 1973, reflecting a happy confluence of optimism, low inflation, moderate interest rates, high stock prices and a soothing absence of economic policy blunders. While it is hard to imagine that the current pace can continue for long, there are few signs of an abrupt slowdown. ''What's amazing isn't the demand for workers but the ability of the economy to keep delivering them,'' said Edward Yardeni, chief economist of Deutsche Morgan Grenfell. Total hours worked rose sharply in February, and the January increase was revised higher as well. The steep rise in hours -- at a 6.5 percent annual rate so far this year -- implies that the gross domestic product is continuing to grow at a fairly robust pace this quarter. And a sharp pickup in temporary employment -- a gain of 52,000 such jobs in February -- is another possible forerunner of more permanent hiring. (A recent study by the Chicago Federal Reserve suggests that temporary hiring is a reliable leading indicator of future growth in payroll jobs.) While the labor market is getting tighter, pay increases are coming faster. This was perhaps the biggest news buried in yesterday's employment report. Average hourly earnings jumped by 8 cents in February, to $12.60. Although the Labor Department cautioned that the measure was volatile and that last month's figure might have been exaggerated by statistical anomalies, the increase for the last 12 months is just over 4 percent, a sharp acceleration from a 3 percent gain the previous year. ''Tight labor markets are having an effect,'' said | 300,000 FIND WORK |
1000193_1 | and literature; it comes from the Greek words philein and logos) warned it would not publish articles lacking ''rigorous scholarly methods'' or based on ''mere speculation.'' The editorial was widely seen as a declaration of war by traditionalist scholars on the modernists or ''theorists,'' who apply modern analytical methods drawn from feminist studies, poststructural criticism and multiculturalism to the ancient world. ''I thought the traditional approach just fine,'' says Georg Luck of Johns Hopkins University, who wrote the controversial editorial, ''but I had no idea saying so would produce such an uproar.'' The traditionalist approach is based on a close study of ancient languages and literature. At its base is the belief that the values of ancient Greece and Rome provide the ''essential core of Western learning in language, reasoning, ethics, esthetics and philosophy,'' as Professors Heath and Hanson put it. Feminists and theorists, on the other hand, stress the ancient world's elitism, indifference to women, tolerance of slavery and glorification of bellicose white male heroes instead of democracy, free inquiry and human rights. They argue that they are making the classics more relevant by asking the same questions about the ancient world that we ask about our own, questions about the social, political and economic forces shaping literature and thought. ''To keep Latin and Greek vital we must keep asking new questions,'' says Barbara K. Gold, a classicist at Hamilton College. ''Purist approaches are no longer attractive to students. We can't ignore the multicultural campus.'' Amy Richlin, a feminist scholar at the University of Southern California, says: ''I want to inject the excitement we find in feminist and other modern studies into the classics. I want to invigorate it.'' For many theorists, the great texts of antiquity have no immutable significance and can mean different things to different readers. While some find in antiquity the origins of the glories of Western civilization, others see what Nancy Sorkin Rabinowitz of Hamilton College called ''a formative moment of misogyny'' in her introduction to ''Feminist Theory and the Classics'' (Routledge, 1993). Tina Passman of the University of Maine, who describes herself in the same book as ''a lesbian, radical feminist and classicist,'' berated traditionalists for failing to see that the male-dominated ancient Greek world was built on the ruins of an earlier ''harmonious matriarchal/ matrilineal culture.'' Other essays in the volume include ''The Primal Mind: Using Native American Models for the Study | Not to Bury Homer but to Update Him |
1003680_3 | conflicting or unspecific reports about what kind of boat it was, where it had left Cuba and in what direction it was headed. The five were banned from baseball in Cuba last July precisely because the Cuban authorities suspected that they were planning to defect. In fleeing, they joined a steady exodus of talented Cuban athletes attracted by the prospect of lucrative contracts in a wealthier and freer country. More than 75 Cuban athletes have defected since 1991, in daring and sometimes ingenious ways. When competing in other countries, some have sneaked out of hotel rooms or hurdled fences. Others have taken to the seas, braving unpredictable weather or the possibility that they will be caught and sent home. Orlando Hernandez, who signed a multiyear, $6.6 million contract with the New York Yankees earlier this month, set sail from Cuba the day after Christmas with seven companions, some bread, Spam, sugar and drinking water. The group was stranded briefly on Anguilla Cay, near the Bahamas. They were found and rescued by the Coast Guard after a few days. WTVJ television in Miami, an NBC affiliate, reported yesterday that the five men who left around March 10 endured a more harrowing ordeal, traveling 300 miles east of Holguin, Cuba, to arrive on the northern coast of the Dominican Republic with no provisions. But Mr. Cubas said last night: ''I have not heard they are in grave danger.'' Mr. Guim said one problem in confirming the men's arrival might be that they could be afraid of deportation and therefore in hiding. ''It's been like swimming in mud,'' he said of efforts to ascertain what was happening. He added that he believed that the men were in or near the town of Monte Cristi. Mr. Cubas said that the men had put themselves in extraordinary danger. ''I've been out there, and I know what those waters look like,'' he said. ''When you have guys or a guy who is willing to risk or put themselves in God's hands, and it's a very, very difficult trip, you start realizing what a difficult situation they must be in in Cuba.'' Dominican and American officials said the Dominican Republic does not have a simple, unwavering policy about returning Cuban defectors or granting them amnesty, though it has recently improved relations with Cuba and sent many boat people back home. It makes the decisions case by case. | Fugitive Cuban Athletes Are Said to Reach Safety |
1003184_4 | hard. While the mesh is industrial strength, it creates optical patterns as sumptuous as moire silk. Though the mesh has practically no resilience, the chair is not torture to sit in. In fact, it is functionally superior to Le Corbusier's Grand Confort, an alluring plush leather club chair that delivers a surprise karate chop to the sitter's back, then subtly pressures both sitter and seat cushion to slide ungainfully to the floor. Kuramata's chair, like most of his work, operates on the principle of inversion, and there is a kind of comfort here. Expectations and norms can be turned inside out and the world doesn't fall apart. Or maybe it ought to. Kuramata's ethereal effects belie his engagement with materials. Like Gaetano Pesce, Kuramata linked esthetic effects to the probing of new materials and production methods and effects. In Miss Blanche, another Kuramata signature piece, the large, clear Lucite chair takes its name from the corsage Blanche Dubois wears in the final scene of ''A Streetcar Named Desire,'' where she is led away to the insane asylum as a street vendor cries in the background: ''Flores? Flores por los muertos?'' In Miss Blanche, the flowers are artificial roses made of cheap plastic. They float in the thick Lucite form as in a formaldehyde concocted for preserving feelings and lyric hopes. The fabricators held the roses in place with tweezers while the Lucite hardened. The designer called the factory every half-hour to ask how they were floating. In a companion piece, three feathers are embedded in a solid Lucite wedge that can serve as a stool or a table. It's a whimsical piece about gravity. The piece is physically heavy, visually light. If dropped from the Leaning Tower of Pisa, feathers and wedge might decline to fall. A lamp billows like a discarded pocket handkerchief. NO designer could ask for a better presentation than that mounted at New York University's Grey Art Gallery, at 100 Washington Square East. The show, which runs through May 2, was originally at the Hara Museum in Tokyo, a converted Art Deco house with small rooms that did not allow the work to breathe. Here the work is arranged chronologically, in wide-open spaces that enable viewers to identify common themes. Kuramata used to say that his work dealt more with shadow than with light. The installation design, by Michael Morris and Yoshiko Sato of the Morris | Design Notebook; A Star To Swing On |
1003305_0 | To the Editor: In your article (''Where Do Computers Go When They Die?'' March 12), your list of 10 alternative uses for old computers contained one notable omission. Most desktop computers, once retired, make excellent barbecues when filled with charcoal briquettes. Their enormous girth insures that even the thickest steaks cook quickly and evenly, and the melting silicon smells divine. DAVID SACHS Cambridge, Mass., March 12, 1998 | Recycling Cybercarcasses |
1003170_3 | figured I needed help from an experienced spam fighter, so I called Matt Korn. As America Online's senior vice president in charge of network operations, he has to sort 26 million E-mail messages a day, culling them for spam. Although spam is a universal problem for on-line services, America Online's huge population has made it a particularly ripe target. In fact, spammers unleash software programs that interrogate AOL's system to collect lists of screen names, Mr. Korn said. Customers can protect themselves by not publishing their names in the member directory. ''I recommended, for instance, that my own kids not publish their names in the directory,'' Mr. Korn said. America Online estimates that on a given day, as much as 30 percent of the E-mail that arrives from the Internet consists of spam -- clogging computers, annoying customers and prompting Mr. Korn to assign an anti-spam team to stanch the flow. ''It's my No. 1 challenge,'' Mr. Korn said. For now, America Online uses software filters to block E-mail that originates from addresses of known spammers and also tells customers how to restrict incoming mail to a list of approved addresses (for help, type keyword junk mail). Doesn't the phrase ''restrict incoming mail'' say something sad about the state of the Internet? In less than a decade, we have managed to discover the most revolutionary communications medium of the century, populate it, commercialize it -- and rob it of much of its ability to convey useful information. You need not be on America Online to use common sense when confronting spam. Don't be fooled by E-mail that claims you can get your name removed from future mailing lists by sending a reply message to a specific address. ''In general, they actually use this as a validation attempt, to get a new list of E-mail addresses that are active,'' Mr. Korn said. I knew my attempt to track down the spammer was probably drawing more attention to my own E-mail address. But I could not stop myself. I found out that the address to which one could mail $34.95 belonged to a rent-a-mailbox outfit in Fort Collins, Colo. A woman named Cindy answered the phone there, at Mailboxes Etc., and confirmed that the spammer was a customer. ''But I can't give you any more information,'' she said. ''It would violate the customer's privacy.'' Next: Interview with the spammer. E-mail address: Slatalla@nytimes.com | User's Guide; Hunting the Elusive Spammer |
1001830_0 | To the Editor: Bill McKibben (Op-Ed, March 9) argues that in the Sierra Club's environmental debates over immigration, ''numbers count.'' True, but he overlooks an important aspect of the issue: population numbers count not just in the United States but also in the countries from which immigrants come. As we debate the question, let's also address the need for adequate United States support for international family planning programs. Those programs have been under attack in recent years. Ninety percent of the world's population growth is occurring in developing countries. OLIVIA M. SUSSKIND Harrisburg, Pa., March 9, 1998 | Plan on Immigration Misses Point |
1001833_0 | To the Editor: We can, as the Sierra Club proposes, limit immigration in the hopes of decreasing the United States population, the number of people with access to wealth and hence the number who inflict planetary harm (Op-Ed, March 9). But what about an individual who might have five children in his or her native country but only two in the United States because of easy access to birth control? This is one situation in which ''think globally, act locally'' just doesn't cut it. Not acting locally can sometimes be in the best interest of everyone. Also, in order for people to be able to think globally, they must live a global experience in their own cities and neighborhoods. Limiting immigration would make this more difficult. Observing an older man study his English flashcards on the subway inspires me to care for this country and world more than anything. JESSICA MC CANNON Brooklyn, March 10, 1998 | Plan on Immigration Misses Point; Thinking Globally |
1001832_0 | To the Editor: As one of the national leaders of the Sierra Club effort to restore an immigration component to the club's population policy, I agree with much of what Bill McKibben writes (Op-Ed, March 9). We stress that only a comprehensive approach to environmental problems can succeed. We must reduce United States consumption by making our economy more efficient in its use of resources; reduce population growth, birthrates and immigration rates, and support aid that slows worldwide population growth and promotes sustainable development. Where we disagree with Mr. McKibben is in his notion that efforts to address immigration must wait until the other factors are tackled. DICK SCHNEIDER Oakland, Calif., March 9, 1998 The writer is chairman of Sierrans for U.S. Population Stabilization. | Plan on Immigration Misses Point; Time to Act Now |
1001757_0 | In an unexpected change of heart, Cornell University officials have decided to take down the mysterious pumpkin that has been perched atop the school's 173-foot bell tower since early October. For months, professors, students and campus visitors have traded theories about the skill and technique required to impale the pumpkin on the seemingly inaccessible lightning rod on the bell tower, and they have also debated whether it is even a real pumpkin. On Friday, the university will use a crane to hoist the provost, Don M. Randel, to the top of the tower, where he will remove the pumpkin, place it in a cooler and rush it via ambulance across campus to a laboratory for analysis by a team of professors. Officials said they would announce in April whether the pumpkin was real or some artful facsimile. But several students taking part in a contest to determine whether the pumpkin is real said today that they already had the answer: it is. Two groups obtained samples of the pumpkin with the help of helium-filled weather balloons outfitted with tethers to control their direction. A team of engineering students punctured the pumpkin with hypodermic needles connected to its balloon, and a group of physics students hung a robotic drill and video camera from their balloon. ''We were pretty sure it was real, but we didn't have any proof,'' said Chris Regan, a junior who is a member of the engineering team. ''Now we do.'' School officials had long said they did not want to disturb the pumpkin. But now, they said, it is not safe to let nature take its course any longer. ''With warm weather around the corner, we're concerned that large chunks will begin to fall on people,'' said David Brand, a Cornell spokesman. But some skeptics said that all the hoopla surrounding the removal of the pumpkin suggested that Cornell was trying to milk the situation for every last drop of publicity. ''It's gotten to the point that Cornell is beating a dead pumpkin,'' said John Rubino, a graduate student from Ardsley, N.Y. | Cornell Plans to Rescue Pumpkin Stuck on Tower |
1002778_7 | shorter danger period because cobras generally stop trying to pursue them and go on to new conquests. The histories of cobras and pit bulls also tend to differ. Cobras often had violent, traumatic childhoods, criminal records and a personal history of alcohol and drug abuse. Pit bulls, on the other hand, are less likely to have a history of delinquency or criminal behavior, but they are more likely than cobras to have had fathers who battered their mothers. Drs. Jacobson and Gottman said their research shatters many prevailing myths about domestic violence. Contrary to the claims of batterers, their wives rarely do or say anything that would provoke a vicious attack in another kind of marriage. The same words and actions in a nonviolent marriage might trigger a disagreement or argument, but not a fist in the eye. Likewise, the psychologists state emphatically, there is nothing a woman can do or say to stave off or abort a battering episode. In many cases among their study subjects, when the woman tried to end an attack by leaving, the husband pursued her and intensified the beating. Judging from the couples studied, the researchers concluded that battering almost never stops on its own. Although the frequency of physical attacks may diminish with time, in only one case did they stop altogether. Furthermore, even when physical attacks abated, emotional abuse continued and served to keep the wives intimidated and afraid. In fact, Dr. Jacobson said, emotional abuse can be even more damaging than physical abuse because the man is ''always in her face, demeaning, degrading, humiliating, harassing and robbing her of her identity.'' But in another myth-shattering discovery, the researchers found that a large number -- 38 percent -- of women managed to escape from their abusive relationships within the two-year follow-up period. None, however, were the wives of cobras, who were terrified of their husbands' propensity to use lethal weapons. But at a subsequent contact five years after they entered the study, 25 percent of the cobra wives had also left their husbands. All told, 65 percent of the wives of violent men had left them at that point. The researchers said those who left demonstrated extraordinary courage and resourcefulness, because it is upon leaving that the women face the greatest likelihood of being killed. But, as one woman who left said, ''Death would be preferable to continue in this living hell.'' | Battered Women Face Pit Bulls and Cobras |
1002767_1 | of Rockefeller University in New York and their colleagues. ''It means that there is a new mechanism for changing the organization of the adult brain,'' said Dr. William Greenough, a psychologist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign who studies learning and memory in rats. Dr. Fred Gage, a neurobiologist at the Salk Institute in San Diego, said the implications were ''fabulously interesting.'' The investigators, working with marmoset monkeys, added two tracer chemicals to the animals' brains: one that labeled cells that were dividing, the process that gives rise to new cells, and one that labeled mature nerve cells. Cells that were born during adult life and that grew into mature brain cells would be marked by both chemicals. With this method, the researchers looked for, and found, new cells in the animals' hippocampuses. Dr. Gould estimated that thousands of such cells were being made each day. She said she suspected other cells were dying to make room for new ones, but her study did not count numbers of dying cells. The hippocampus was particularly intriguing for another reason, Dr. Gould said. Earlier research had shown that when people are under stress, the hippocampus shrinks in size. For example, people with tumors that pour out the stress hormone cortisol have a diminished hippocampus. So do people with recurrent depression and people with postraumatic stress disorder, Dr. Gould said. It might be possible, she reasoned, that monkeys under stress might decrease their production of new brain cells in the hippocampus, making that area of the brain shrink. To test the hypothesis, Dr. Gould and her colleagues stressed monkeys by putting a male monkey who had always lived alone into a small cage where another male was living. The intruder was terrified and cowered in the cage, with a rapidly beating heart. When Dr. Gould and her colleagues examined the brains of the frightened monkeys, they found that after just one hour of this stress, the monkeys were making substantially fewer new brain cells. The study is being published today in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. As so often happens in science, the seeds for the new view of brain regeneration were sown decades ago, but were largely ignored. In the 1960's, Dr. Joseph Altman, a Purdue University scientist who is now retired, reported that rats make new brain cells throughout their lives. The cells were in the hippocampus | Studies Find Brain Grows New Cells |
1002715_0 | CHESNER - Bernard. Temple Beth-El of Great Neck records with profound sorrow the passing of its member. We extend heartfelt sympathy to his bereaved family. Shelley M. Limmer, President Jerome K. Davidson, Rabbi | Paid Notice: Deaths CHESNER, BERNARD |
1002842_0 | The Vatican issued a document today that it described as an ''act of repentance'' for the failure of Roman Catholics to deter the mass killing of Europe's Jews during World War II. But the document skirted the painful issue of the Vatican's long silences during the Nazi reign of terror. The document, under preparation for 11 years, was greeted cautiously by Jewish leaders, some of whom criticized the Vatican for not judging those Catholics who collaborated with the Nazis or those -- including Pope Pius XII -- who kept silent about Nazi atrocities. Edward Idris Cardinal Cassidy, the Australian head of the Vatican Commission on Religious Relations With the Jews, which produced the 14-page statement, told reporters at a Vatican news conference this morning that it was written as a teaching document for the worldwide church and represented ''more than an apology.'' ''This is an act of repentance,'' he said. The document said, in part: ''In the lands where the Nazis undertook mass deportations, the brutality which surrounded these forced movements of helpless people should have led to suspect the worst. Did Christians give every possible assistance to those being persecuted, and in particular to the persecuted Jews? Many did, but others did not.'' [Text, page A10.] The delay in producing the document has been attributed by many observers to divisions in the Vatican over to what extent the church, its leaders and its teachings contributed to the vicious anti-Semitism of the Nazis. Speakers at the news conference said the process had required waiting for the church itself to ''mature.'' Rabbi David Rosen, director of the Israel office of the Anti-Defamation League and its co-liaison with the Vatican, said, ''It is a very important statement, but it is disappointing in certain respects.'' He noted that Catholic bishops' conferences in France, Germany, Hungary, Poland and other countries have gone further in acknowledging a deeper responsibility for the moral climate that allowed Nazism to dominate much of Catholic Europe. The document carries an introductory letter from Pope John Paul II, who, as the year 2000 approaches, has been leading the church through ''an examination of conscience,'' reviewing sins, crimes and errors that have been committed in its name through the centuries. In his preface, the Pope, who as a young man living under Nazi occupation in Poland witnessed the deportation of Jewish friends, colleagues and neighbors, referred to the Holocaust as an | VATICAN REPENTS FAILURE TO SAVE JEWS FROM NAZIS |
1002837_2 | the rising deluge of junk E-mail. The problem is becoming serious for some of the nation's largest Internet service providers. For example, officials at UUNET, the big Internet provider that is now part of Worldcom Inc., said that at the end of 1998 they had seen their mail volume double, and they estimated that at certain times, as much as 50 percent of that traffic was spam. ''It's a real war,'' said Kyle Jones, a senior systems analyst at UUNET. While he asserted that the systems engineers who maintain the Internet were slowly gaining the upper hand against the spammers, he also said that progress was being made at the expense of the openness and sharing that marked the early days of the Internet. Deploying the new version of Sendmail to Internet service providers will mean that the companies that suffer the burden of unwillingly carrying the most spam will be able to modify their systems to fight back quickly. ''Spam is an arms race,'' Mr. Allman said. ''When we get better, they get better.'' On the other hand, he added, many spammers are using inexpensive, off-the-shelf programs and lack the technical skill to circumvent Sendmail's new spam blockers. Randall Winchester, a computer systems administrator at the University of Maryland at College Park who helped Mr. Allman test the new tools, called them a real big victory. ''As more people use this version, it will make a huge difference,'' Mr. Winchester said. His records show that the new software frequently deflects thousands of E-mail messages an hour from the university's more than 40,000 student E-mail accounts. Mr. Allman said that it generally takes about a year for his entire customer base to adopt each new version of his software. But as major Internet service providers begin to deploy the new technology, he said, it will be increasingly difficult for commercial spammers to avoid detection. Spammers are also under attack in Federal and state legislatures and in the courts, where major Internet service providers like America Online are suing them for harassing customers and stealing resources. On Tuesday, Mr. Allman is to announced plans to start a company, Sendmail Inc., to continue development of both the free version of the program and a new commercial product line. The company, to be based in Emeryville, Calif., has $1.25 million in initial capital from investors including the co-founders of Sun Microsystems, Andreas Bechtolscheim | Internet Is Expanding Arms Race With Junk E-Mail |
1002800_0 | The parties negotiating peace in Northern Ireland are in Washington this week, in what has somehow become a yearly St. Patrick's Day politicians' pilgrimage. This year the ritual is particularly useful. The parties are due to resume formal negotiations next Monday, and have only until about Easter, April 12, to reach an agreement on a peace plan that can be put to British and Irish voters in May -- before the summer marching season. President Clinton is planning to cajole, wheedle, beg and threaten all sides to get down to business. His suasion is sorely needed. So far, the parties have mainly postured. Only the British and Irish Governments seem to realize that the time remaining for peace can be measured in days. Sinn Fein, the political wing of the Irish Republican Army, was excluded from the talks after the I.R.A. was blamed for a bombing that killed two civilians in February. It is likely to return to the negotiating table on Monday. Sinn Fein and the Protestant parties linked to paramilitary groups must understand that further violence will destroy both the talks and their own reputations. Sinn Fein, however, has shown the leadership to begin to prepare its constituency for compromise. A week ago its president, Gerry Adams, offered the party's first written acknowledgment that the talks would not produce the nationalist movement's longtime goal of a united Ireland. Mr. Adams wrote in a Dublin newspaper that while Sinn Fein would continue to pursue unity by peaceful means, the talks could produce useful interim measures improving life for Catholics. His list includes a bill of rights, fair employment, release of prisoners, a new police force and, most controversially, a strong governing body made up of Northern Irish and Irish Republic politicians to oversee most of it. Unionists must persuade their own voters that peace will require change and compromise. David Trimble, who leads Northern Ireland's largest party, the Ulster Unionists, has not yet begun this work. Mr. Trimble has also declined to speak directly to Sinn Fein negotiators in the talks, and his party's written proposals have often seemed perfunctory. The next month will probably see an escalation in violence as desperate fringe groups make a last effort to sabotage peace. But just as the two Governments cannot allow the bombers a veto, neither can the parties let their hard-line constituents set their negotiating positions. Northern Ireland's people are | A Peace Sprint in Northern Ireland |
1002887_1 | Party -- the core of his power -- remains first among the country's leaders. [On Tuesday, the congress ratified Zhu Rongji, the guiding hand in recent economic policy in recent years, as the new Prime Minister by a vote of 2,890 in favor to 60 no votes or abstentions, The Associated Press reported.] On Wednesday, the new Government ministers will be confirmed. Mr. Li is believed to represent a more cautious and conservative strain among China's top leaders. He is stepping down as Prime Minister, a more powerful job than his new one, because he has served out the maximum two five-year terms set by China's Constitution. But he is officially ranked in second place within the party's ruling Politburo, perhaps setting the stage for conflict with the impatient, boldly assertive Mr. Zhu, who is ranked third in the party hierarchy. Today the congress also confirmed Hu Jintao as Vice President, a possible measure to groom him for future top positions. At 55 the youngest member of the Politburo's seven-member Standing Committee, he has long been seen as a comer within the party and has enjoyed Mr. Jiang's patronage. In the past, the position of Vice President has been seen as mainly ceremonial. But senior officials are said to hope that his new post will give Mr. Hu more visibility. Trained as an engineer, he was party chief in two provinces and is now the president of the Central Party School in Beijing, which trains party officials. As the newly shuffled leadership takes over, Chinese and foreign observers are wondering about the possible effect on the congress and its evolving role. The congress is often called a rubber stamp for party decisions, and it is largely that. But under Mr. Li's predecessor, Qiao Shi, it had become more assertive, helping to shape new laws and monitoring how they are carried out. In recent years, sizable minorities of delegates have also made protest votes to register unhappiness with the Government's response to crime, for example, or to express opposition to the costly, giant Three Gorges Dam project on the Yangtze River. The question is whether under the more conservative Mr. Li, the congress may cease to be a force for spreading the rule of law. But some analysts point out that Mr. Li will now see the congress as his own base of power. ''He wouldn't be the first person to | China Nears Completion of Leadership Moves |
1004779_0 | The Eating Well column last May 21 reported on the presence of genetically engineered ingredients in some commercial food products, including three Frito-Lay snack foods and two baby formulas, from Similac and Carnation. Frito-Lay challenged the finding, which had been made for The Times in tests by Genetic ID, a company in Fairfield, Iowa. Genetic ID has since modified its testing, and reports that the products now test negative for the engineered ingredients. The new findings are reported today on page F10. | Editors' Note |
1004764_1 | we've tried to make it attractive to leisure travelers, too.'' Leisure travelers are not likely to be overjoyed that their frequent-flier miles will now have a three-year expiration date. But they will remain valid if members fly at least once during those three years on T.W.A. or Trans World Express, the carrier's commuter airline. Protecting Film Don't pack film in baggage that will be stored in airplane cargo holds. That, at any rate, is the advice of the Federal Aviation Administration, which recently said that its new high-powered X-ray machines in use at perhaps as many as 50 airports around the United States -- the agency will not say which airports -- could damage the film. At the same time the agency said it did not know whether the machines could damage computer diskettes. The F.A.A. recommends that airline passengers transport film in their pockets or carry-on bags, which receive lower doses of X-rays. More Help From Avis Add Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden to the growing list of countries where Avis rental car customers can avail themselves of On Call, a 24-hour, toll-free telephone assistance service. Now Avis customers traveling to 16 nations in Western Europe can use the service to ask for the nearest English-speaking doctor, to refill prescriptions for medication or eyeglasses, or to arrange simultaneous translation in French, German, Spanish or Italian. The only requirements are that customers reserve their car before leaving the United States and that they give their rental agreement number to the On Call operator. Where the Money Goes In the first study of the amount of the spending by visitors in the nation's 435 Congressional districts, the jackpot winner was -- Las Vegas, Nev. That state's First District, essentially greater Las Vegas, earned $9.9 billion from more than 30 million business and leisure travelers, including overseas visitors. The runners-up were Florida's Eighth District ($7.2 billion), which is essentially greater Orlando; Hawaii's First District, which includes the main tourist areas of Honolulu ($7.1 billion), and Nevada's Second District ($6.9 billion), which comprises that part of the state outside the Las Vegas area. No. 5 in the rankings was California's 36th District ($6.1 billion), which includes such popular beach communities as Venice and Redondo Beach. The expenditures in the survey are from 1995, and are based on the districts from the 1993-94 session of the 103d Congress. Expenditures included air fares, hotels, restaurants, | Business Travel; T.W.A. overhauls its frequent-flier program in a move aimed at luring more corporate passengers. |
1004718_0 | PRODUCE snobs alert: there is a tomato on the market, here in March, that actually tastes like a tomato. And, ahem, more painful news: it comes in a plastic net sack. It is a vine-ripened cherry tomato, grown on a ranch just north of Culiacan, in west central Mexico. The James K. Wilson Produce Company in Arizona has been selling the tomatoes since last year. But the fruit variety and how it is grown are apparently confidential. ''It's a very competitive business,'' explained Eric Meyer, a sales associate for the company. He remained mum. Though the tomatoes do not appear beaming and ready to burst, like real summer cherry tomatoes, they are sweet little orbs just the same -- astonishingly full flavored with a gentle acidic bite. For $2.59 for a one-pound sack, the cherry tomatoes are also much cheaper than inferior-tasting hothouse tomatoes from Holland, which cost about $3.99 a pound. Once you get past the plastic sack, these tomatoes are charmers -- you may want to pick up some mozzarella and basil while you are at it. They are in surprisingly good shape, too, with little breakage or bruising. Just tender tomatoes, ranging in size from marbles to golf balls, ready to be popped into the mouth. AMANDA HESSER Wilson's Bamoa Cluster Cherry Tomatoes are sold at Broadway Farm, 2335 Broadway (at 85th Street). | Temptation; Summer's Sweet Taste Captured for March In Some Bright Small Tomatoes |
1004735_4 | consumers on how to register complaints. Also fueling citizen participation was the publication of the rules by the Agriculture Department on the Internet (http:// www.ams.usda.gov/nop). Ms. DiMatteo said she hoped there would be 50,000 comments by the time the comment period expires, on April 30. And then the review process will begin -- again. Revising a Bioengineering Test IN a field as new as genetic engineering, it takes a while to work out the kinks in tests to determine the presence of genetically engineered ingredients in food. These ingredients are deemed safe by the Federal Government, but some scientists continue to express concerns about the possibility of introducing allergens, altered nutritional values, unanticipated environmental consequences, and more. Last May, The New York Times asked Genetic ID of Fairfield, Iowa, to test several products to see whether they contained genetically engineered ingredients. Of the 11 products, 10 tested positive, according to the company's methods. The products included two infant formulas -- Similac Neocare and Carnation Alsoy -- and three snack foods -- Doritos Nacho Cheesier Tortilla Chips, Tostitos Crispy Rounds Tortilla Chips and Fritos Corn Chips, all made by Frito-Lay. After an article reporting these results appeared, an official of Frito-Lay told The Times that it did not use genetically engineered ingredients in these products. Following the manufacturer's complaint, Genetic ID said it suspected that its tests may have been too sensitive, yielding a positive reading because of trace contaminants that may have been picked up during transportation or somewhere else in the system. Genetic ID investigated Frito-Lay's complaint, and several months after the initial findings, the testing company, in consultation with the food industry, decided to change its standard. It informed The Times: ''At the time we tested the samples for The Times, the standard used was 1 in 10,000 (0.01%). This standard has been adjusted to 1 in 1,000 (0.1%) to take into account market realities.'' The general manager of Genetic ID, Carl Jorgensen, said in a telephone interview this week that after its experiences with the new standard, the company is ''more confident than ever,'' that its readings are accurate. ''We no longer have complaints from manufacturers,'' he said. With the new standard, five of the products still tested positive, but the three Frito-Lay snacks and two of the formulas -- Similac Neocare and Carnation Alsoy -- that had previously tested positive now were negative for transgenic ingredients. | Eating Well; U.S. Proposal on Organic Food Gets a Grass-Roots Review |
999722_0 | In an effort to teach special education students more of the curriculum that mainstream students learn, the Department of Education will propose rule changes today that range from how students are classified to the kinds of staff that guide their education, officials said. The changes could go into effect as early as September if approved by the State Board of Education, said Barbara Gantwerk, director of the State Office of Special Education Programs. Under current rules, Ms. Gantwerk said, students are sometimes placed in special education classes when some form of assistance would allow them to remain in the mainstream. Under the proposed changes, the state would continue to provide special education aid for such in-class assistance, she said. But word of the changes has prompted concern. Assemblywoman Barbara Buono, Democrat of Metuchen, yesterday called on the department to delay the changes. Lynn Mayer, a spokeswoman for the New Jersey Education Association, the state teachers union, said 25,000 students would be ''in limbo,'' after failing to meet the proposed new criterion -- severe brain trauma -- for classification as neurologically impaired. But Ms. Gantwerk said most of those students would simply be given a different classification that would still entitle their districts to special education aid. METRO NEWS BRIEFS: NEW JERSEY | New State Proposal For Special Education |
1006296_0 | As Roman Catholic and Protestant leaders met here today with a deadline of 11 days for finding a settlement of Northern Ireland's 29 years of sectarian warfare, two skilled, powerful and antagonistic politicians will determine whether the talks lead to peace, or to more violence. Gerry Adams, president of Sinn Fein, the political arm of the overwhelmingly Catholic Irish Republican Army, and David Trimble, head of the Ulster Unionist Party, the largest organization in this Protestant-dominated British province, will be working strenuously against each other. Each will be trying to shape a new political structure for the province, where more than 3,200 people have been killed in the name of politics since 1969. The success or failure of the negotiations, with a deadline of April 9, will depend on whether the two leaders are able to compromise in a way that permits both to claim victory. Victory, for Mr. Adams, would be an agreement that gives the Irish Republic more influence in the affairs of Northern Ireland. For Mr. Trimble, triumph would be an agreement that made it clear that the province would remain British for the foreseeable future, with only slight concessions to Mr. Adams and the Republican movement. The chemistry between the two, and their very different backgrounds, does not augur well for compromise. Many officials involved in the talks at the Stormont complex here feel that at best the chances are 50-50 for a settlement, which would then be put to referendums here and in the Irish Republic in late May or early June. Both men must constantly look over their shoulders at internal enemies in the Catholic and Protestant political camps. Mr. Adams, who will be 50 in October, is a high school dropout who grew up in a Republican family with a tradition of armed resistance to British sovereignty in the province. He was an I.R.A. leader in the early 1970's and was flown to London for attempted peace talks in 1972. Since 1985, when he took control of Sinn Fein, he has advocated a peaceful settlement, but refrained from denouncing the I.R.A.'s armed campaign. He does not deny that he has influence with the I.R.A., and he has helped persuade the outlawed group to call two cease-fires since 1994. He is opposed by Catholic Republican groups that feel he is selling out true Republican goals. Some of these groups, with I.R.A. help or connivance, | 2 Strong Antagonists Hold Ulster's Fate |
1006230_6 | Dr. Glatstein also cautioned that more research is needed. Dr. Keith Black, a neurosurgeon at Cedars Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, discovered that a naturally occurring substance in the body, bradykinin, can open capillary walls in the brain, but only around tumors. About 80 patients have been treated with a synthetic version of bradykinin, called RMP-7, which is made by Alkermes, a drug company in Cambridge, Mass. Injected into arteries feeding the brain, RMP-7 increased the penetration of chemotherapy and slowed tumor growth a bit in 60 percent of patients with recurrences of a particularly severe type of tumor known as a glioma. ''It's somewhat encouraging,'' Dr. Black said. But he has found a way to improve the treatment. Tests showed that RMP-7 worked well for some tumors but not others, and Dr. Black has identified a second compound that can be combined with RMP-7 to open the barrier in all tumors. Dr. Black said he hoped his discoveries would apply to brain disorders other than tumors, including mental illness. ''One of the major goals we have is to really identify how the normal blood-brain barrier is regulated on a biochemical level,'' he said. ''Once we identify all those components, I think we'll be able to develop a biochemical strategy to open the normal barrier.'' A very different approach to delivering drugs to brain tumors was developed by Dr. Henry Brem, a neurosurgeon from the Johns Hopkins University, and Dr. Robert Langer, a professor of chemical and biomedical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It is a dime-sized disk made of a material that slowly releases a chemotherapy drug for three weeks. Rather than trying to manipulate the blood-brain barrier, this treatment vaults right over it. The disks, known as Gliadel wafers, are implanted in the skull, up to eight at a time, in patients having surgery for a rapidly fatal tumor called glioblastoma multiforme. Drug concentrations in the brain reach 1,000 times the levels that can be achieved with standard chemotherapy. The wafers are not a cure, but they add a few months, sometimes more, to patients' lives. More than 1,000 people in the United States and Europe have had them implanted. The important thing, said Dr. Brem, is that patients do not suffer the nausea, vomiting and hair loss caused by traditional chemotherapy. At the National Cancer Institute, a team led by Dr. Edward Oldfield has | Scientists Find New Ways To Break Into the Brain |
1006261_0 | The Supreme Court took up its first case under the Americans With Disabilities Act today, and the argument over whether the law covers people who have H.I.V. but who show no symptoms of disease served mainly to underscore the statute's complexities. The 1990 law forbids discrimination against anyone with a disability, which is defined in part as ''a physical or mental impairment'' that substantially limits a person in ''some major life activity.'' It also provides that someone who ''poses a direct threat to the health or safety of others'' need not be served in a medical office or other public accommodation. In this case, a dentist who refused to treat an H.I.V.-infected patient in his office is arguing both that the woman was not disabled within the meaning of the law, and that in any event, his refusal to treat her anywhere but in a hospital was justified by his reasonable fear of infection. Two lower Federal courts rejected both arguments, ruling in favor of the patient, Sidney Abbott, in her discrimination suit. During the arguments today, Justices expressed puzzlement or concern over almost every aspect of the case, from the lower courts' analysis of Ms. Abbott's condition to the statistical basis for assessing a dentist's fear of contracting H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS, from a patient. . The lower courts had accepted Ms. Abbott's argument that the ''major life activity'' in which she was ''substantially limited'' was reproduction; she testified that her decision not to have children was based both on her fear of passing the virus to a baby and of not living long enough to rear a child. Justice David H. Souter was outspoken in his doubt about this analysis. He told Ms. Abbott's lawyer, Bennett H. Klein, that while her decision was based on ''a very responsible moral judgment,'' it was a nonetheless a ''self-imposed limitation'' rather than a physical limitation of her condition. ''I don't find it that easy to transfer the moral limitation she's placed on herself to the limitation the statute talks about,'' Justice Souter said. Mr. Klein replied that the law did not require the complete inability to perform a ''major life activity.'' For example, he said, ''breathing'' was accepted as a major life activity under the statute, even though people with impaired respiration are obviously still breathing. ''The statute doesn't require the preclusion of the activity,'' he said. ''The fact | Supreme Court Considers if Disabilities Act Covers H.I.V. Case |
1006285_1 | in trading on exchanges that were open at night. ''Most people don't think it's enough,'' Doug Stetzer, a broker at ED&F Man International in New York, said of the proposed cuts. All OPEC members have pledged their support of the effort, which began a week ago with an agreement by Saudi Arabia, Venezuela and Mexico. Marit Arnstad, Norway's Oil and Energy Minister, said that his country's cuts would not be made until mid-April and depended on other producing nations' living up to their promises to reduce output. The OPEC members said they would begin the cuts tomorrow. Norway has supported OPEC-initiated export cuts in the past in an effort to increase prices. What is unusual in this round of cuts, however, is that the initiative was taken by Mexico, which helped bring about the agreement of the Venezuelans and Saudis, each of whom had been waiting for the other to make the first move. Vahan Zanoyan, president of the Petroleum Finance Company, an energy consulting group based in Washington, said yesterday it was still unclear whether greater cooperation was emerging between OPEC and major non-OPEC producers. ''I really believe that it is premature to even suspect that,'' he said, recalling previous efforts to achieve cooperation. He added that Norway was less dependent on oil revenue for its economic well-being than some other major producing countries -- particularly Mexico, but also many OPEC members. The Norwegians might therefore not have as pressing an incentive to stick by an effort to increase prices. All the producers are struggling to reduce a world surplus of oil caused by an unusually mild winter; the economic crisis in Asia, which reduced expected growth in demand, and rising exports by many producing countries. Though the price of crude oil fell in recent weeks to the lowest level in nine years, it has rebounded a bit on expectations of a supply cut. And that effect may have begun to be felt at the pump. The United States Energy Department said yesterday that the average price for regular gasoline increased to $1.03 a gallon this week, up 3 cents from last week. Normally it takes about one month for the price of crude oil to be passed through to the retail level, so the jump was called unusual. The average retail price, however, was still 17 cents lower than in the same period last year. THE MARKETS: COMMODITIES | Norway Pledges to Take Part In Worldwide Oil Supply Cuts |
999373_8 | land, altering forest management practices to speed growth of existing timber, increasing the use of renewable wood fuel, and planting trees in cities and near houses, where they can reduce energy consumption for air conditioning. In Congress, pro-logging lawmakers have suggested that the best way to maximize sequestration might be to cut down mature forests and replace them with fast-growing plantations of trees, keeping the carbon locked up in the wood for decades after it is harvested, in the form of homes, telephone poles, books and the like. In October, the House passed a nonbinding resolution calling on the United States ''to manage its forests to maximize the reduction of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, among many other objectives.'' That wording was a compromise to mollify environmentalists and their supporters in the House. But the resolution was pressed by Mr. Young, Representative Helen Chenoweth, Republican of Idaho, chairwoman of the forestry subcommittee, and other pro-logging lawmakers. They draw their argument from researchers like John Perez-Garcia, an associate professor of forestry at the University of Washington, who has argued that some forest conservation efforts have perversely added carbon dioxide to the atmosphere by depressing logging. That, he argues, leads to the use of steel and other substitute materials, while allowing forests to get overgrown to the point that they burn. Indeed, there have been estimates that managing a Douglas fir forest in the Pacific Northwest as a monoculture plantation, and harvesting all the trees every 60 years, could sequester more carbon in the wood and in wood products while the tree farm's growth is at its peak than could be accomplished through other approaches. The alternatives studied included leaving the forest alone, or harvesting parts of the forest year to year while leaving its complex ecosystem more or less intact. But this kind of calculation ignores important facts about the carbon cycle and the overall health of forests. For example, when a forest is clear-cut, the carbon in its soil begins to dissipate almost right away, a source of carbon dioxide emissions that lasts for decades. And the other benefits of a forest, such as watershed protection, rich habitat, and recreational use, are destroyed. ''In general, I don't think that is good management,'' said Dr. Hamburg of Brown. ''I don't think you could come up with any data to suggest that you could intensively manage those forests and increase carbon sequestration.'' | Scientists Are Turning to Trees to Repair the Greenhouse |
1004252_2 | accompanied by anxieties (not necessarily their own) about sex. Conservatives routinely fear that any new choice or change will lead to promiscuity, but concern about women's chastity can also be found on the left. Sir William Beveridge, author of the famous report that laid the foundation of Britain's welfare state, originally proposed to deny benefits to divorced or separated mothers if they were the guilty parties. (Reform of British divorce laws was years ahead.) Rowbotham quotes some of the wild opinions and predictions that accompanied the arrival of the birth control pill in the 1960's, but instead of simply denouncing such hysteria, she suggests that the pill opened an era of new uncertainty: neither men nor women were sure they knew how they wanted to use the liberty the pill offered. Though many of the women in this narrative would have described themselves as working for women's causes, they didn't agree on everything. A famous example is the breach between the suffragist Pankhurst sisters, Emmeline, who became a Conservative, and Sylvia, who helped found the British Communist Party. Rowbotham's review of the succession of role models, fashion changes and preferred life styles during the last half of the century is an entertaining reminder of how many styles have competed for women's attention and allegiance. Throughout ''A Century of Women,'' which is more than merely readable, there is a sense of real human beings during changing times -- times women helped to change. Few generalizations survive at the end of the century; one is that working women no longer come just from the working classes. At almost every level of income and education, women now work outside the home, even after they have children. Each woman, Rowbotham says, must seek a balance between job and family, between fulfilling other people's needs and her own. In ''A Shining Thread of Hope,'' Darlene Clark Hine, a professor of history at Michigan State University, and Kathleen Thompson, the editor in chief of ''The Encyclopedia of Black Women,'' explore in depth black women's record of achievement in America in almost every imaginable field. The authors never ask us to admire second-rate work merely because it was accomplished under oppressive circumstances, but call our attention, for example, to the African-American sculptor Selma Burke, whose profile of Roosevelt is on the dime. And when they celebrate black women's business acumen, they point to those who ran the | Sisterhood Is Historical |
1003897_3 | The catastrophe that would have been cheap and easy to fix in 1969 is now a budget-busting, Apocalyptic crisis. Those who feel the way I do about computers can only say, ''Good, the sooner the better.'' There's no evidence that computers help us to work more efficiently. Office productivity has actually gone down in the last 20 years. Apart from the hours wasted on video games and E-mail, office staff now spend about 90 percent of their time learning the new system the boss has just installed, which (the moment they have grasped it) will be instantly replaced by another new system, with manuals the size of the Manhattan telephone directory. And I've never liked the sound of the Internet and the World Wide Web. They have all the marks of a sinister international conspiracy. Some experts predict that, at the Millennium, a computer domino effect will set in, like a power outage, bringing down the whole mysterious structure. This might be a blessing in thin disguise, collapsing a thousand pointless bureaucracies from Liquor Licensing Board to the Federal Government itself, and perhaps even putting a stop to the plague of E-mail. The Luddites never got the credit they deserved. They knew that we sometimes have to go backward in order to go forward. And this is the quick and easy solution to the Year 2000 Problem, although the technocrats won't like it. Here's the solution. We lie to our computers about the date -- just go back to 1900 and do the century all over again. It wasn't a great success the first time -- two world wars, commercial television and Windows 95. Starting from scratch, and with 20/20 hindsight, we might do better. Twentieth century take II: the Titanic floats, Hitler lives out his life as a second-rate house painter, the letters I.B.M. stand for ''Improving Basic Morals,'' messages come in envelopes and a young man from Seattle, Bill Gates, has a brilliant career as a stage illusionist and purveyor of snake oil. My solution is the only one that will work. I have laid in a survival kit for the great event, including a stock of books, board games, pens, paper, envelope, and stamps, to carry me into the 21st century. I would advise you to do the same. OUT OF ORDER David Bouchier of Wading River is an essayist and commentator heard regularly on public radio. | At the Ramparts of the 'Year 2000 Problem' |
1004017_0 | To the Editor: Andrea Kannapell's cover article ''Into the Outside World'' (March 15) deals with the closure of two different kinds of institutions, one for people with psychiatric disabilities, and the other for people with developmental disabilities. They were set up to do entirely different things for people with entirely different disabilities. I am writing in response to what she said about closing developmental centers, those places where 3,500 people with developmental disabilities still live in this state. Ms. Kannapell gives a very balanced view of the controversy over closing developmental centers. One gets the impression that opinions on the subject are equally divided and that equally cogent arguments can be made on either side. Nothing could be further from the truth. The overwhelming majority of people who have lived in those places would never go back to them, want their friends freed from them and want them all closed. Most professionals and most parents of other people with developmental disabilities agree with them. Even though 4,500 families are on a waiting list for community placement, no parents are trying to put their child in one of those institutions today. The closure is opposed by two small groups of people: those who make their living off of developmental centers -- employees and their unions, the politicians and the businesses in the communities where they are situated -- and a few hundred families of people still in there. The economic interests of the first group should not be allowed to keep 3,500 people hostage. The opposition of the family members is more troubling, until one discovers that 25 scientific studies have shown that 83 percent of families find their loved one is better off living in the community after he or she is placed there, even though they may have opposed the closure before it happened. As Ms. Kannapell points out, New Jersey leads the nation in the number of people in those places per capita. That only begins to tell the story of how far behind this state is in the humane treatment of its citizens with developmental disabilities. Five states have closed all their developmental centers; 17 have 200 people or fewer in them. Those places are a thing of the past. Keeping people in them any longer is wantonly cruel and stains our state's good name. Governor Whitman should be commended and supported for moving to close them. | Developmentally Disabled Want Institutions Closed |
1004209_0 | Pressed by Pope John Paul II to be generous toward Cuba, President Clinton announced a softening of American restrictions. He reversed a ban on direct humanitarian flights to Cuba, allowed Cuban-Americans to send $1,200 a year to their relatives and simplified licensing for the sale of pharmaceuticals. The economic embargo will not change, officials insisted. While Fidel Castro is no longer a national-security threat, he remains a political lightning rod for the key state of Florida. STEVEN ERLANGER | March 15-21; U.S. to Ease Cuban Curbs |
1004016_0 | Medicinal herbs and natural products that can help fight disease or just make a person feel better are all the rage now, and the New Jersey Farm Bureau is encouraging local farmers to cash in. The Farm Bureau, in cooperation with Cook College of Rutgers University, wants to start a farmers' cooperative, to grow medicinal plants, known as nutraceuticals. In a cooperative, farmers would hold joint ownership of the products and would sell to a specific buyer, said Peter Furey, Farm Bureau director. Demand is growing for new medicinal plants such as echinacea, said to boost the immune system; St. John's wort, a purported natural antidepressant, and saw palmetto, used as prostate medication. Now, pharmaceutical and vitamin manufacturers in the United States import the plants from other countries, Mr. Furey said. Forty farmers attended the first seminar to discuss forming a cooperative, and another was held Friday. A few farmers have already planted one or two test acres. KAREN DeMASTERS IN BRIEF | Tomatoes? Farmers Consider Growing Jersey Echinacea |
1005406_1 | with inflation, the only way to do that is to increase market share. Acquisitions will account for some of that, Mr. Gibara concedes. But most, he insists, will come from home-grown innovation. Whatever the route, he vows that Goodyear, now trailing the Bridgestone Corporation of Japan and Michelin of France in global sales, will leapfrog over them to the No. 1 spot in the world before five years are out. Last month, amid much hoopla, he began trotting out the products and processes that he expects will drive that growth. There was a passenger tire that unlike the old steel-belted radials replaces polyester with steel throughout the tire carcass, making it, Goodyear said, one of the most durable tires around. There was a run-flat tire that unlike most available models can be installed on old cars without special rims or wheels. And there was Impact -- the Integrated Manufacturing Precision Assembled Cellular Technology -- which Goodyear says will slash the cost of making tires without expensive new plants. ''Are people forgetting that 35 years ago, a tiny tire company called Michelin introduced a radial tire, grew 25 percent a year and became No. 1?'' Mr. Gibara asked. ''Well, we have the radials of the 1990's.'' Still, none of Goodyear's new products look like slam dunks. People who pay $125 each for the run-flat tires, for example, also have to spring $300 for a sensing system to tell them if their tires have lost air. ''These days, you can drive 70,000 miles on the tires your car came with,'' said Marvin Bozarth, executive director of the International Tire and Rubber Association. ''Who wants to pay $800 to put new tires on a car you're ready to trade in?'' Nor is Goodyear traveling a low-traffic road. It commands 29 percent of American sales but just 17 percent of the $70 billion world market. Bridgestone and Michelin are less than two percentage points ahead, but even analysts who recommend Goodyear doubt that it will siphon sales from the leaders. ''Most consumers don't believe there's much difference between, say, a Goodyear or a Michelin tire,'' said Stephen Girsky, an analyst with Morgan Stanley. Moreover, said Efraim Levy, an analyst with Standard & Poors Equity Group, ''Whatever Goodyear comes up with, the competition will match.'' To hear the competition tell it, they already have. Unlike Goodyear, they say, their new tires are rolling and their | A Road Warrior of Innovators; Tires a Slow-Growth Industry? Don't Tell Goodyear's Chief |
1005474_0 | Black bears roaming the forests of New Jersey can breathe a collective sigh of relief. The state's Fish and Game Council voted yesterday not to have a bear hunting season this year. Although New Jersey has not had an official bear season since the 1970's, the issue arose because the black bear population has increased steadily in recent years, said Bob McDowell, director of the State Division of Fish, Game and Wildlife. About 550 black bears can be found in Sussex, Warren, Passaic and Morris Counties, Mr. McDowell said. The animals typically weigh between 400 and 500 pounds. In place of a hunting season, which provoked objections from the public, the council asked state officials to increase their efforts to teach people how to live with the bears, whose behavior elicited 647 complaints from residents and campers last year, Mr. McDowell said. Those efforts could include holding seminars on bear behavior within state parks and in public schools, and distributing pamphlets to campers, he said. METRO NEWS BRIEFS: NEW JERSEY | Black Bears Off Limits To Hunters This Year |
1005398_2 | is believed to be controlled by organized crime, no effort is being made to quell the booming industry. Although industry executives estimate that American businesses lose more than $2 billion a year to piracy in China, it is impossible to accurately estimate how many Chinese customers would actually purchase nonpirated movies or music at a higher, legal price. Yet the fast growth of pirated movies on such a vast scale is a reminder of the risks and unpredictable nature of business operations in China, where law enforcement remains highly political and combating wrongdoing requires both diplomatic pressure and creative solutions. Piracy of musical compact disks is now not as rampant as that of movies, for instance, in part because Mr. Cheng's organization aggressively pursues violators in Chinese courts and in private negotiations, while the international film industry has been relatively passive. Chinese authorities, while still officially committed to protecting copyrights, seem resigned to accepting piracy as a fact of life. Arguing that it makes little sense to go after retailers when producers of pirated movies are the real culprits, officials say there is now little they can do. ''We used to be able to locate the production, but now we can't,'' said Shen Wenping, a senior official at Shanghai's Industrial and Commercial Administration, responsible for anti-piracy efforts here. ''It's very hard to control.'' Joe Papovich, assistant United States trade representative in Washington, said he was unaware of the wide availability of pirated movies in China, but insisted that fighting piracy in China remained a long-term goal. He added that he knew that the center of production had moved to Macao and, to a lesser extent, to Hong Kong. ''We're trying to make contact with someone in Macao about this,'' Mr. Papovich said. ''We're banging hard on Hong Kong.'' The United States trade representative office, he said, depends on industry sources for information, and the Motion Picture Association, which is supposed to track movie piracy on behalf of Hollywood's major studios, has not made any complaints about it. Michael Connors, the Motion Picture Association's chief representative in Asia, said he had not complained because he was unaware that the availability of pirated films had become so open. The Motion Picture Association, Mr. Connors said, has recently focused its efforts on helping Chinese customs officials detect smugglers, even though recent seizures of millions of disks represent a small fraction of what is | China Turns Blind Eye to Pirated Disks |
1001002_3 | director of the center, said that failure to build strong bones through a calcium-rich diet in childhood, adolescence and young adulthood leaves one with a slender bank account of bone mineral when the withdrawals start exceeding the deposits after age 35 and especially when those withdrawals accelerate greatly at menopause. Although hormone replacement and weight-bearing exercise can slow postmenopausal bone loss, they cannot do much for bones when calcium is in short supply. But consuming enough calcium through foods or supplements or both is not as simple as many women think. The current recommended calcium intake for women over 50 who are on hormone replacement is 1,000 milligrams a day, rising to 1,500 milligrams for women not on hormones and for all women over 65. But if your diet is rich in animal protein -- say, more than four ounces a day of meat, poultry or fish -- your calcium needs rise even further, to about 1,500 to 1,800 milligrams even if you take estrogen. In addition, without an adequate supply of vitamin D, your body cannot properly absorb and utilize calcium. There are three sources of vitamin D: foods like fortified milk and products made from fortified milk (yogurt is not among them), as well as some fish; supplements (either a multivitamin with vitamin D or calcium with D) and sun-exposed skin. Although it takes only 15 minutes a day of sun on the face to produce enough vitamin D, current advice to avoid the sun and always use sunscreen have greatly decreased the body's ability to manufacture vitamin D from sunlight. Also, in winter in northern latitudes, the oblique angle of the sun means fewer effective rays reach the skin. Milk and milk products are still the best all-around sources of dietary calcium; nonfat and low-fat versions have more calcium than their fattier cousins. Eight ounces of skim or 1 percent milk provide nearly 300 milligrams, and a cup of nonfat yogurt has 400 milligrams. You can increase the calcium content of milk even further by adding some nonfat powdered milk to liquid milk or by preparing a more concentrated solution of powdered milk than the package calls for, say, by using one cup of powder to prepare 24 ounces of milk, which would give you about 502 milligrams of calcium per cup. If you are lactose-intolerant, you can buy lactose-reduced milk or add the enzyme lactase to | Test at Onset of Menopause Can Avert Bone Loss |
1003500_0 | A group of alumni led by the chairmen of Barnes & Noble booksellers and the Red Apple supermarket chain committed itself yesterday to raising $10 million in the next five years for Brooklyn Technical High School, one of the city's most selective and prestigious public schools. The gift, which would be used to establish a university-style endowment fund that could generate as much as $800,000 in annual income, is believed to be the largest ever pledged to an American public school. Leonard Riggio, a member of the class of 1958 and the chairman of Barnes & Noble, said that $2 million had already been raised. As he sat behind his desk in what he acknowledged was a daze yesterday afternoon, the school principal, Lee McCaskill, ticked off a Christmas list of items that the money was likely to buy: hundreds of new computers, tuition assistance to enroll half the teachers in graduate courses for specialized training, scholarships for graduating seniors, and such once-unthinkable items as an aerospace-quality wind tunnel and an electron microscope, each costing hundreds of thousands of dollars. ''I feel,'' Mr. McCaskill said, ''as if the 4,000 kids here have just won the lottery.'' But word of the gift once again raised questions about the extreme inequities in a system of 1,100 public schools in which some children are tutored in reading in converted locker rooms while others study science in state-of-the-art laboratories with panoramic views. The efforts by the Brooklyn Tech alumni also raised questions of a potential double standard since Schools Chancellor Rudy Crew, who eagerly welcomed the unsolicited pledge yesterday, had spurned a group of parents from a Greenwich Village elementary school who raised $46,000 last autumn to pay the salary of a teacher as a way to reduce class sizes. The teacher was later hired, but with public money. Dr. Crew said yesterday that there was a clear difference between the two cases. It was imperative, he said, that outsiders not be able to skew such baseline features as class size, leaving one school with an advantage over another. But he said he had no quarrel with efforts by individuals or corporations to finance fringe items -- like computers or enhanced teacher training -- above and beyond what the school system provides to all. Dr. Crew said he hoped that the extraordinary largess toward Brooklyn Tech would spur other alumni and corporations to step | Alumni to Give Brooklyn Tech Huge Donation |
1003479_1 | assurances from Motorola and other cellular-telephone operators that interference would be controlled. Radio astronomers throughout the world, at Jodrell Bank in England, the Nancay Observatory in France and the Giant Meter Wave Radio Telescope in India, among many other observatories, are deeply worried about the increasing disruption of their sensitive celestial observations by terrestrial radio pollution: radio emissions by microwave ovens, cordless telephones, satellite navigation systems and, increasingly, microwave communication signals beamed to the Earth by satellites. Astronomers saw a major threat to science in the new $5 billion Iridium system, which, when completed, will use 66 satellites in low-earth orbits to relay cellular telephone calls from any part of the world to any other. The company has successfully orbited 49 satellites and expects to complete the galaxy of 66 by the end of May. The system will be fully operational by September, the spokesman said. These satellites receive signals from points on the ground, relay them to each other and beam them down to receiving stations. They have been licensed to operate in the United States within a range of frequencies from 1621.35 megahertz to 1626.5 megahertz. The problem is that a nearby range of frequencies, 1610.6 megahertz to 1613.8 megahertz, is vital to radio astronomy. There is a strong possibility that powerful emissions in the cellular-phone frequency range will spill into the adjacent frequencies essential to radio astronomy. The frequencies allocated to radio astronomers span the faint radio signals emitted by hydroxyl ions, which are ubiquitous in the solar system and in deep space. Hydroxyl ions, consisting of a hydrogen atom bound to an oxygen atom, are believed to form in the atmospheres of red giant stars before being blown away. They drift through interstellar and intergalactic space and sometimes find themselves in regions of relatively dense gas in which new stars condense and begin to burn. As a result, hydroxyl ions serve as tracer molecules. By detecting and following their radio emissions, astronomers can reconstruct the evolution of galaxies and solve many celestial mysteries. Under the new agreement, which was signed on March 1, Satellite System License Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Motorola, the satellite operator, agrees to give the Arecibo Observatory priority during ''protected'' periods, between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m. Eastern Time daily. During this time, the Iridium system will take any necessary steps to eliminate signals disrupting radio observations by the Arecibo group. | Motorola and Astronomers Agree to a Time Share in Space |
1003482_1 | Cuba from the United States. These flights might carry goods for relief purposes or passengers in emergencies, like funerals. The President will also announce a streamlining of the licensing procedure that allows nonprofit organizations to export and sell pharmaceuticals to Cuba, while letting the organizations themselves insure that the drugs go to the proper recipients, and not the state. And Mr. Clinton will say he is willing to work with Congress on legislation to ease the export of needed food to Cuba. Some Congressional criticism was immediate. Representatives Lincoln Diaz-Balart and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, both Florida Republicans, issued a joint statement accusing Mr. Clinton of seeking ''to unilaterally relax sanctions on the Castro tyranny.'' They said the Pope's visit ''should not be used as a pretext to soften sanctions.'' Ms. Ros-Lehtinen said permitting flights and the payment of money to relatives reduced the price Mr. Castro is paying for shooting down two unarmed civilian aircraft, flown by Cuban exiles testing the Cuban Government, in international waters on Feb. 24, 1996. But others in Miami cheered the decision and said it was another sign of needed change. ''It was overdue,'' said Armando Garcia, vice president of Marazul Charters, the biggest Miami retailer of flights to Cuba. ''Miami's not the same as it was two or three years ago. People are losing their fear of speaking up.'' Larry Birns, director of the Council on Hemispheric Affairs, a research group based here, said he thought the Administration's decision would find general approval. ''There will be some gnashing of teeth in Congress, but with the Pope sanctioning such assistance and excoriating those who don't help, it seems to me the Administration will emerge relatively unscathed by its actions,'' Mr. Birns said. ''It will also win points with the European Union and the rest of Latin America, which has been caustic in its criticism of U.S. policy to Cuba.'' At Mr. Clinton's request, Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright and Samuel R. Berger, the national security adviser, developed the recommendations. Ms. Albright went to Miami in late February to talk to church leaders and Cuban-Americans, including the families of the pilots killed in 1996. On March 7, in a conversation with the Pope at the Vatican, Ms. Albright discussed Cuba and the importance of the Pope's 1979 visit to Poland to ending Communist rule there. His visit to Cuba could be a similar ''point of departure,'' | U.S. TO EASE CURBS ON RELIEF TO CUBA AND MONEY TO KIN |
1001532_0 | This time, it was an eight-hour delay; and then no running water for an 11-hour flight. Just two days after 400 people were stranded overnight at Kennedy International Airport while waiting for a Tower Air flight to Tel Aviv, more than 400 people going the other way were forced to spend the night at Ben Gurion Airport Tuesday night, with no food and no hotel accommodations. Then, once in the air, the passengers were told that there was no running water. They used seltzer to wash themselves. ''It was terrible,'' said Mina Blumenberg, a Tel Aviv resident who was traveling to New York to attend a nephew's wedding. ''The toilets . . . ,'' she said. ''The smell was very bad.'' Brenda Burrows, a spokeswoman for Tower Air, said yesterday that she was not aware of the incident and referred questions to Terry Hallcom, the president of Tower Air. Phone messages for Mr. Hallcom were not returned by last night. According to several passengers, the incident was just the latest scheduling hiccup involving Tower, which offers discounted fares from New York to cities like Tel Aviv, Miami and Paris. On Sunday, more than 200 people at Kennedy were so angered by a 12-hour delay that they refused to board the plane, even though they were told that the plane would take off with their luggage. On Tuesday, Flight 31 from Tel Aviv seemed like a repeat. At first, everything seemed on track for an 11:30 P.M. departure. Then passengers were told of a half-hour delay. Then an hour. And so on. There were no offers of food or lodging during the delay, passengers said. Finally, after much protest from the passengers, the plane departed at 7 A.M. Irving Minkoff of Brooklyn had the misfortune of traveling on both delayed flights. His grandmother died on Sunday. The family sent her body to Israel on T.W.A., which did not have available passenger seats. So the family chose the Tower flight. The flight's delay forced the Minkoffs to postpone the funeral in Jerusalem, Mr. Minkoff said. On Tuesday night, Mr. Minkoff and his father showed up for Flight 31. ''I was saying to everyone, 'I can't believe this is happening again,' '' Mr. Minkoff said. ''I was just falling apart.'' | Tower Travelers Tell of Another Ordeal |
1001536_1 | Minister gives them new hope that the project, expected to cost more than $25 billion, might eventually be scaled back or even abandoned. The dam has been an obsession of the outgoing Prime Minister, Li Peng, a Soviet-trained engineer, while Mr. Zhu has shown no enthusiasm, said Dai Qing, a well-known Beijing journalist and one of the few people inside China who publicly attacks the Three Gorges Dam. ''Zhu has never spoken favorably about the project,'' Ms. Dai said in an interview, noting that Mr. Zhu, as the Deputy Prime Minister in charge of finance and the economy, was notably absent from the celebration at the dam site in November. There is no way to corroborate her view of Mr. Zhu, and some observers believe the dam is too far along, and the Government's prestige too committed, for China to back off now. In the November ceremony, President Jiang Zemin -- who as head of the Communist Party is China's most powerful political figure -- called the damming of the Yangtze ''a remarkable feat in the history of mankind.'' Government officials say the dam will provide huge benefits by controlling floods, providing clean energy and opening the interior to shipping. Critics say that the benefits are exaggerated and that the dam will destroy the Yangtze ecosystem, bury priceless cultural relics and cause suffering for hundreds of thousands. Because of these concerns, the World Bank and United States Export-Import Bank have not lent money to the project, and opponents hope to curb European export credits. The author of the new report on resettlement, an experienced field researcher, has concealed his identity to protect his career. His report is being distributed this week by the International Rivers Network and Human Rights in China, two American-based groups that oppose the dam on environmental and human rights grounds. The Chinese Government has acknowledged sporadic problems of mismanagement but says the first phase of resettling people has generally gone smoothly. By 2003, when the dam is built and the reservoir of water behind it is filled to its initial level, at least 500,000 people must be moved from cities, towns and villages of Sichuan and Hubei Provinces. By 2009, when the reservoir is filled still higher, the Government says a total of 1.2 million people will have to be moved, mostly to better jobs and farmlands. But some people are resisting. ''Foot-dragging opposition to resettlement | Relocations for China Dam Are Found to Lag |
1003028_1 | who have already been killed by the sectarian violence of the last three decades, but you can do it and you must -- now,'' he said, adding that his message was the same to all the parties. The British Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, Mo Mowlam, echoed Prime Minister Tony Blair, who called an agreement on a framework ''agonizingly close.'' While she said that she remains optimistic that one can be reached, she added that in the end it is up to the parties. ''Confidence is crucial to any negotiated accommodation,'' she said this morning. ''And confidence is something Northern Ireland lacks and lacks still.'' A senior American official said the parties are going through political calculations for the negotiations ''to figure out where the others are and what their strategies are.'' Mr. Clinton is pressing the parties ''to play it out so everyone wins, and not as a zero-sum,'' the official said. In a way, he said, the substance of the issues is less important now than the politics. If successful, the talks will set up institutions intended to allow more political influence for minority Catholics in the North; North-South institutions to aid cross-border cooperation, while allowing Dublin more say in the North; and so-called East-West institutions to encourage British-Irish cooperation. Mr. Clinton met Gerry Adams of Sinn Fein, the Irish Republican Army's political wing, on Monday night. Today he met David Trimble, leader of the province's largest party, the Ulster Unionists; John Hume, leader of the Social Democratic and Labor Party; Gary McMichael of the Ulster Democratic party, and Lord Alderdice, leader of the small, nonsectarian Alliance Party. Ms. Mowlam said that those who use violence to block a peace settlement will not stop, but that they were being marginalized and could not be allowed to win. While it is possible that Sinn Fein will not go along with the framework, she said, ''it depends on how they don't accept it.'' Even if they reject what is being offered, she said she hoped they would run for the Northern Ireland assembly in any case, to have a stronger influence on the province's future. But even this framework is only ''part of a process,'' she said, in which all the residents of Ireland will need to learn to solve their problems peacefully, and she praised Mr. Clinton and former Senator George Mitchell, the chairman of the North-South talks, | Clinton Urges Irish to Grab 'The Chance of a Lifetime' |
1003065_0 | More than a million New Yorkers moved out of the city during the 1990's, but new immigrants and children born to them have more than replaced those who left, according to Federal Census figures released today. The city's total population in 1997 reached 7,342,636, half a percentage point higher than the lowest point of the decade, in 1991, the Census figures show. But the mostly static total figures for the 1990's mask huge flows of people: 1.07 million New Yorkers left the city; 677,000 foreigners moved to New York; there were 937,000 births and 516,000 deaths. The slight growth, in large measure, helped push New York State's population to 18 million last year, giving it a 0.8 percent growth rate since 1990. Neighboring New Jersey saw the greatest growth in the region, with its population expanding by 4 percent, taking it slightly over eight million. Overall, states in the Northeast and Midwest continued to lose ground to the booming growth centers of the South and West, the Census report showed, sustaining the steady trend that is inexorably shifting the nation's political and economic might toward the Sun Belt and Rocky Mountains. ''What we're seeing is the Northeast and Midwest losing its political clout,'' said Richard Munson, executive director of the Northeast-Midwest Institute, a bipartisan research organization for members of Congress. ''The leadership of this Congress is decidedly Southern. And they are doing a pretty good job of getting dollars for their states.'' The survey of population changes in the country's 3,142 counties showed that while the country grew by 0.9 percent last year, the Northeast's population increased by only 0.2 percent and the Midwest by 0.6 percent. At the same time, the West's population grew by 1.6 percent and the South by 1.3 percent. The one-year increase in New York City's population was small according to the Census Bureau's estimate: 7,812 people, or barely a 0.1 percent increase over 1996. But it was symbolically important for the city and its Mayor, Rudolph W. Giuliani, who has been trumpeting the city's revival across the nation. But demographers said the rapid turnover of New York City residents documented in the Census Bureau report could also create problems for the city. New immigrants are likely to need more services, taxing overstretched city resources. They will also be unable to vote, leaving them with little voice over government. And the swift in-and-out migration of | Population Of New York Rises Slightly |
998736_2 | just one of the many services Goffen has performed for Titian scholarship over the years -- and it shows one of her principal strengths, her skill as a social historian reconstructing the conditions of patronage, gift-giving and market pricing that affected Renaissance Venice. Now, after a series of learned articles on Titian, Goffen has published a book on one of the most studied aspects of Titian's art -- his treatment of women and goddesses. The book is full of new and startling things -- like her careful argument that the famed Venus of Urbino is masturbating. Goffen relies on Renaissance medical scholarship, which told men their women must achieve orgasm in order to conceive, so they may need some starting-up time. Masturbation here is a wifely art, since this, too, is a marriage picture. Goffen argues that Titian is even sexier than people have thought, but also more respectable. She says that he may have used prostitutes as his models but that his nudes represent respectable women, not courtesans. Though Goffen draws on the insights of feminist criticism, she is refreshingly free from the determination to see nothing but patriarchal oppression in the past. In fact, she finds in Titian a deep regard for women, an empathy with them. She argues from Michelangelo's dismissal of Venetian colorism as ''a woman's art.'' As if taking up this challenge, Titian answered Michelangelo's treatment of the Leda myth -- all coupling muscle and feathers -- by giving his Danae the same pose as Michelangelo's Leda, but letting the god's gold flow over a languorous and receiving body. Titian was unashamed of his identification with feminine ''softness'' and grace. Not that Titian was soft in intellectual terms. Some modern critics have treated this friend of the learned satirist Aretino as an unthinking servicer of patrons. Goffen, by contrast, shows how shrewdly he vindicated his art in terms of the classical paragone (setting a hierarchy of art forms) and a Neoplatonic hierarchy of the senses. She demonstrates that feminist critical theory, so far from imposing anachronistic concerns, can shape our awareness of past issues. Cinematic theories of ''the male gaze'' are used to link the female gaze of Titian's heroines with the primacy of sight in the rating of the senses. The typical Titian woman, with her own focused gaze, is not passive or exploited. She is in control of herself and her surroundings (including | A Man Who Loved Women |
1000079_2 | give birth to a baby?'' Answer: ''No.'' ''Before the baby was born did she and Brian ever discuss killing the baby?'' Answer: ''No.'' ''The entire time she was at the motel did she then believe she had had a miscarriage?'' Answer: ''Yes.'' ''At any time at the motel did she and Brian discuss killing the baby?'' Answer: ''No.'' ''Did she ever see the baby?'' Answer: ''No.'' ''At any time while at the motel did she then know that she had delivered a live baby?'' Answer: ''No.'' The day was marked by furtive, behind-the-scenes maneuvering to keep the motion out of the public domain. In midmorning, court officials said, Judge Ridgely ordered the clerk's office to seal the document. But for reasons that officials declined to explain, the judge's directive apparently did not reach all employees in the clerk's office. In the early part of the lunch recess, workers there gave copies to several reporters. A short time later, however, officials told other reporters that the document was sealed. Shortly before court resumed in the afternoon, Judge Ridgely removed the seal after learning that the document had already been released to some. He issued his orders sealing and then unsealing the motion from his chambers. He said nothing about the motion from the bench. Why the judge imposed the seal remained a mystery. Mr. Hurley, the lawyer for Mr. Peterson, refused to say whether he had made the request. The chief prosecutor, Peter N. Letang, refused to comment. The day's hearing drew dozens of reporters from newspapers, magazines and television and radio stations in New York, New Jersey, Philadelphia and Delaware. Mr. Peterson was not in court today, and Mr. Hurley did not join in any of the day's arguments. Mr. Tanenbaum attacked the credibility of a Newark, Del., police sergeant, Robert Agnor, who prepared the application for a search warrant for Ms. Grossberg's dorm room at the University of Delaware. Police officers seized some of her clothing and bedding there after the baby's body was found in a plastic bag in a Dumpster near the motel. Mr. Tanenbaum has asked Judge Ridgely to throw out the warrant because of mistakes in it and to block introduction of the seized items as evidence. Mr. Letang conceded that errors existed in Sergeant Agnor's application but told Judge Ridgely that the mistakes were unintentional. The judge said he would rule on the motion | Polygraph Test Results Offered in Baby Death Case |
1000085_1 | in recent months. Aware that China's banking and industrial troubles were at least as serious as those of other Asian nations, the leadership began searching for measures that could counteract an economic downturn. Huang Qifan, deputy secretary general of the Communist Party in Shanghai, said in an interview that the leadership had decided that spending money on an enormous crop of public works projects was needed to keep China's economic growth rate at 8 percent, a level that many economists say is needed to avert major unemployment and potential unrest. The spending plan, Mr. Huang said, will build roads, bridges, power plants, sewage treatment plants, water conservation plants and agricultural projects. Broken into three segments, he said, it will amount to nearly one-third of China's $900 billion annual gross domestic product. The money will come from eight principal sources, he said, including domestic bonds, domestic loans, foreign bonds, foreign loans, direct allocations from the central Government and contributions from provincial governments. China has $120 billion in overseas debt, far less than many of its Asian neighbors, so finding international lenders is unlikely to be a problem. China has a strong record of debt repayment, backed up by $140 billion in foreign exchange reserves. A large part of the planned spending was already in the works as part of the five-year plan that began in 1996 where officials map out all large spending projects, like the $30 billion Three Gorges Dam Project. ''Because of the Asian financial crisis, we need to increase the amount significantly,'' Mr. Huang said. ''The total is $1 trillion.'' China's leadership may have been united in approving the spending plan, as Mr. Huang suggested, but a leading role was probably played by Zhu Rongji, the Deputy Prime Minister, who has been in charge of economic affairs since 1993. Chinese exports and foreign investment, once twin engines of a go-go economy, are both expected to drop sharply this year because of the Asian financial crisis. Asian nations are already buying fewer Chinese goods and at the same time undercutting Chinese competitiveness on the world market. Mr. Zhu is expected to be named Prime Minister soon, replacing Li Peng. Known as a stern, no-nonsense manager, Mr. Zhu has aggressively seized on enterprise and banking reform as two of his priorities, asserting it will take only three years to sort out each sector. Yet another issue on Mr. Zhu's table | China to Prime Economic Pump With Mammoth Building Outlay |
1002304_6 | Services: the Division of Developmental Disabilities, which deals with people with mental retardation, cerebral palsy, epilepsy, spina bifida, autism and other physical or neurological impairments; and the Division of Mental Health, which administers psychiatric hospitals and other programs for the mentally ill. Alan G. Kaufman, who heads the mental health division, and Dr. Robert B. Nicholas, who heads the developmental disabilities division, work one floor apart in the same building near the Trenton State House. Both handle budgets of hundreds of millions of dollars. Both have experience deinstitutionalizing. Dr. Nicholas oversaw the closing of Johnstone Developmental Disability Center, in Bordentown in 1992. (A very positive follow-up report four years later was able to trace 155 of the patients.) In 1990, Mr. Kaufman began a three-year effort that resulted in community placements for about 500 people who had been living in psychiatric hospitals. And both are keenly aware that the public tends to blend their otherwise entirely separate agendas into one amorphous, often frightening world. ''Persons with mental illness and persons with developmental disabilities are often confused,'' Mr. Kaufman said. ''The programs that we're doing are similar -- but very different.'' For one thing, the Division of Developmental Disabilities has to play a much more serious game of national catch-up. ''New Jersey has 7.3 percent of the nation's institutional residents, but only 2.7 percent of the nation's population,'' said Dr. David Braddock, a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago who has analyzed state spending on the developmentally disabled for 20 years. ''You can see that it's had a fairly anemic response to the trend toward moving people into the community.'' His research, published last week in a book titled ''The State of the States in Developmental Disabilities'' shows that as of 1996, New Jersey was one of only eight states with more than half of its clients in institutional settings. With 4,338 institutionalized clients that year, New Jersey had more than all but two states: California, with 4,832, and Texas, with 5,517. But New Jersey, with a population of 7.7 million, is much smaller than California, which has nearly 30 million people, and Texas, which has nearly 17 million. The book, published by the American Association on Mental Retardation, also said that from 1992 through 1996, the national average of the number of residents in institutions fell 23 percent. In New Jersey, it fell less than 10 percent. In | Into the Outside World |
1002326_3 | pain, he applied a galvanic battery to his spine. To combat depression and insomnia, he consulted mind-cure therapists and faith healers. To gain insight into abnormal mental states, he tried mind-expanding drugs like hashish, mescal and opium. Simon recounts such wide-ranging experimentation on James's part without ever giving the impression that he was loony or irresponsible. To the contrary, she suggests that he drew sustenance from even apparently trivial trends. The eclecticism of his interests bred a multifaceted vision that drew from the 19th century while pointing toward the 20th. If James's philosophical side was attracted to metaphysics and spiritualism, his scientific side was grounded in the perceived world of human behavior and mental states. In Simon's rendering, James's philosophical positions were intimately linked to his own experiences as a vibrant, suffering human being. Pragmatism, the school of thought that looks to the consequences of ideas to define the truth of those ideas, was more to him than a system to be explained in books and articles. It was interwoven with his experiences as a depressive, physically frail individual who frequently found that he had to act healthy in order to be healthy. Pluralism, which encouraged multiple perspectives by denying that any single system or point of view could explain the world, held more than intellectual interest for him. It emerged from his unceasing search for meaning among the competing systems of his day. Empiricism, which regards all supposed ''facts'' of the universe as hypotheses to be tested in a changing environment, was a methodology he used not only as a professional researcher but also as a skeptical truth-seeker in private life. Given his penchant for living the philosophies he wrote about, it is no wonder that James never fit the mold of the stuffy academic. As a Harvard professor for more than three decades he loved to think aloud spontaneously in front of his classes, allowing his insights to flow in a rambling, sparkling stream. Among the students he inspired were Gertrude Stein, W. E. B. Du Bois and Theodore Roosevelt. Detesting abstractions, he prided himself on his ability to communicate sophisticated ideas in common language, as in his popular books ''The Principles of Psychology'' and ''The Varieties of Religious Experience.'' His pages, as his student Walter Lippmann said, were stained ''with the glad, sweaty sense of life itself.'' Because Simon is mainly concerned with this ''glad, sweaty sense | Radical Pragmatist |
1002512_6 | Services: the Division of Developmental Disabilities, which deals with people with mental retardation, cerebral palsy, epilepsy, spina bifida, autism and other physical or neurological impairments; and the Division of Mental Health, which administers psychiatric hospitals and other programs for the mentally ill. Alan G. Kaufman, who heads the mental health division, and Dr. Robert B. Nicholas, who heads the developmental disabilities division, work one floor apart in the same building near the Trenton State House. Both handle budgets of hundreds of millions of dollars. Both have experience deinstitutionalizing. Dr. Nicholas oversaw the closing of Johnstone Developmental Disability Center, in Bordentown in 1992. (A very positive follow-up report four years later was able to trace 155 of the patients.) In 1990, Mr. Kaufman began a three-year effort that resulted in community placements for about 500 people who had been living in psychiatric hospitals. And both are keenly aware that the public tends to blend their otherwise entirely separate agendas into one amorphous, often frightening world. ''Persons with mental illness and persons with developmental disabilities are often confused,'' Mr. Kaufman said. ''The programs that we're doing are similar -- but very different.'' For one thing, the Division of Developmental Disabilities has to play a much more serious game of national catch-up. ''New Jersey has 7.3 percent of the nation's institutional residents, but only 2.7 percent of the nation's population,'' said Dr. David Braddock, a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago who has analyzed state spending on the developmentally disabled for 20 years. ''You can see that it's had a fairly anemic response to the trend toward moving people into the community.'' His research, published last week in a book titled ''The State of the States in Developmental Disabilities'' shows that as of 1996, New Jersey was one of only eight states with more than half of its clients in institutional settings. With 4,338 institutionalized clients that year, New Jersey had more than all but two states: California, with 4,832, and Texas, with 5,517. But New Jersey, with a population of 7.7 million, is much smaller than California, which has nearly 30 million people, and Texas, which has nearly 17 million. The book, published by the American Association on Mental Retardation, also said that from 1992 through 1996, the national average of the number of residents in institutions fell 23 percent. In New Jersey, it fell less than 10 percent. In | Into the Outside World |
1002334_2 | each other. . . . How much of an acquaintanceship would there have been if I hadn't slept with him?'' The pain underlying her own brush with alcoholism in her 40's, or her one miscarried pregnancy, at the age of 39, is acknowledged but not dwelt on. O'Faolain was reared in a hard school of stoicism. When, as a student at Hull, she wrote to her mother complaining of loneliness, the terse reply came: ''I'm fat, tired, ugly and old, and I have spent all my money and I'm not able to look after my home and my family. Contrast these truths with your easily remedied ills and brighten up.'' This is harsh stuff. Contemporary American mores have taught us to regard O'Faolain's dignified brevity with suspicion -- as a symptom of ''denial'' or, worse still, ''low self-esteem.'' In fact, what O'Faolain exemplifies is that rare and much underrated quality -- a sense of proportion. As a result, while her story incorporates many of the familiar features of the 20th-century Irish narrative -- booze, religious repression, sexual guilt -- it avoids the affectations and subverts the sentimentalities that often afflict a certain sort of self-consciously ''Oirish'' literature. Whether writing about the 1950's Ireland of her childhood, where sex outside marriage was a passport to hell and the illegitimate child of the O'Faolains' maid, ''who was never paid,'' was palmed off on the maid's mother to die slowly of neglect (''Sure, who wants it?'' the child's grandmother said), or the drink-sodden literary Dublin of the 1960's or the modern European democracy of Ireland in the 80's, O'Faolain brings a spiky, independent intelligence that vanquishes cliche. A good example is the manner in which she addresses her own single, childless status. The patriarchal Ireland in which she grew up rendered marriage and maternity a sort of slavery. Having children, she understood, was inconsistent with the pursuit of any sort of interesting or independent life. Even now, she is glad not to have ended up a slothful, resentful house slave like the women she often encounters in Irish B & B's. ''They throw sugar on the fire, to get it to light, and wipe surfaces with an old rag that smells, and they are forever sending children to the shops. They question me, half censorious, half wistful: 'And did you never want to get married yourself?' '' Yet with all that comes a | No Incest, and Only a Little Drink |
1002111_2 | and diesel engines, vastly reducing emissions while bolstering performance and economy. Others are directing their investments into particular types of research, like advanced batteries and fuel cells. But the biggest companies are hedging their bets by developing a portfolio of alternative vehicles; if one technology emerges as the leader, they can quickly pull a vehicle off the shelf. Auto makers are also working on devices that store energy, like flywheels and ultracapacitors. And they are experimenting with lightweight materials like aluminum, plastics and magnesium that may make future vehicles much more efficient. Still, new power sources are particularly intriguing, because of their potential to redefine personal transportation. Here is a look at some leading alternative technologies and their prospects. ELECTRICS The Glow May Be Temporary The earliest electric cars never fulfilled their promise, and faded away by the 1930's. Their long-discussed revival has been slow in coming because of the limited distance they can travel without recharging the batteries. Still, a number of electric vehicles have come to market. Because the cars meet zero-emissions rules in California and the Northeast, they offer a quick fix until other technologies, like fuel cells, are practical. Many experts now predict that electric power is likely to be used to compliment other technologies -- unless a technical breakthrough makes electric cars fully competitive with other types of vehicles. Batteries differ chiefly by the metals used in them; this determines how quickly they deliver energy and defines their range, but each increase in range comes at a substantially higher price. Lead-acid batteries, the current standard, seem likely to be supplanted by nickel-metal-hydride versions, like those in laptop computers. The next step up is lithium-ion. Most electric models are conversions of traditional vehicles. While small companies like the Solectria Corporation of Wilmington, Mass., have been selling these conversions for years, the big auto makers are new to the game. General Motors entered the market in 1996 with its two-seat EV1, available through Saturn dealers in California and Arizona. But only a few hundred people have leased one. The Honda EV-Plus, the first vehicle to use nickel-metal-hydride batteries, was also designed from the ground up as an electric vehicle, and it can be leased by consumers in California. An electric version of the Toyota RAV4 also uses this type of battery, which will be phased into use in the EV1 and G.M.'s S-10 electric pickup. Nissan is | Planting the Seeds for a Crop of Lean, Green Machines |
1002191_0 | Fearful of losing the best chance in three decades to forge a settlement of the conflict in Northern Ireland, the Governments of Britain and Ireland have decided on the risky strategy of driving the lagging peace talks to an early conclusion. To many people in the two countries, with their booming economies, youthful, buoyant images and claims on leadership in modern Europe, Northern Ireland, with its sectarian bloodshed and dour face to the world, is an embarrassment, a persistent irritant, a partitioned place on the wrong continent. Patience, in addition to time, is running out. Antagonists themselves for much of this century, Britain and Ireland are now on an equal national footing and united in their resolve not to lose this chance to attack a problem so wearyingly familiar to both societies that it is identified simply as the Troubles. Northern Ireland has been tormented by a cycle of violence and revenge played out between a Protestant majority, which wants to remain part of the United Kingdom, and a Catholic minority, which wants to unite with the Catholic-dominated Irish Republic to the south. For five months, nearly all parties have been sitting around the same table, haltingly debating terms of a settlement. The talks are going on at a moment when the major paramilitary groups, which have accounted for more than 3,235 deaths since 1969, have decided that the war is unwinnable solely by military means, and the Catholic population has become emboldened in challenging the long-dominant Protestants. The cease-fires underlying the negotiations have given the residents of the North an extended respite from widespread bombings and shootings, and the people of Ulster long to make that lull a permanent feature of life. ''They're revolted by the fear of going back,'' said Mo Mowlam, Britain's Secretary for Northern Ireland. When the negotiators return here after St. Patrick's Day Tuesday, they will have before them working papers drafted by London and Dublin and an Easter deadline to produce an accord. The hope is to submit the agreement to simultaneous referendums in Northern Ireland and Ireland in May and have elections to a new local parliament in June. By moving the deadline ahead six weeks to April 12 and by using deliberately bullish language -- Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain said this week that a settlement is ''agonizingly close'' -- the two Governments imply that they may impose a solution if | For Britain and Ireland, One Goal: Peace in Ulster Now, Imposed if Necessary |
1002319_3 | him until an I.R.A. gunman arrived to kill him. Among the revelations in the book is the fact that unknown to its own Parliament, Britain maintained direct communication with the I.R.A. leadership over a 20-year period through an unnamed man from Londonderry. Taylor discloses through the minutes of clandestine I.R.A. meetings that as long ago as 1975 the British were discussing an eventual withdrawal from Northern Ireland, a concession, suggesting the future dismantling of the United Kingdom, that even today could not be uttered in public by a British official. I.R.A. men tell Taylor of the ease of getting weapons for their cause in the United States, and the author voices his suspicions that American money raised for humanitarian causes was diverted to the purchase of arms. The book tracks the I.R.A. from a time when it considered its war to be winnable to an interim period when it combined the tactics of politics and terror -- ''armalite and the ballot box'' in the chilling phrase of Sinn Fein's Danny Morrison, equating democracy and the I.R.A.'s favorite explosive -- to the present time when it is acting out of the belief that the only path to its long-range goal is negotiations. The current peace talks in Belfast are the most sustained attempt to reach a settlement, but this book chronicles a numbing succession of previous truces, cease-fires and pledges to abandon violence that have broken down. Taylor doesn't try to examine the psychology of those who took up the gun, but he does capture the inevitability of that destiny for so many young Catholics growing up in the dreary housing projects of Belfast. Of his joining Europe's most violence-prone group in 1971, Tommy McKearney said: ''Coming from the community I come from, and came from at that time, with the history we have, being in the I.R.A. is not seen as a criminal activity, and I didn't see it as criminal. I didn't see it any different from any other man joining an army to take part in a defensive war would. Nor was I so naive not to realize that war involves destruction and death.'' For Martin Meehan, a young recruit in 1966, signing up was an honor: ''And we had to come down in our best suits, in our ties and our shoes spit-polished. It was a big occasion, like joining the priesthood.'' Frank Steele, a British security | The Troubles |
1002386_4 | a dial tone, allowing you to make calls at the rates charged by domestic long-distance companies, which generally are lower than rates abroad. Telegroup, a Fairfield, Iowa, long distance company, will examine rates between countries to customize a calling plan, Stan Bierbrier, the company treasurer, said. Information: (800) 338-0225; www.telegroup.com. Cybercafes. A growing number of European cities have cafes that rent Internet access for about $5 per half hour. These are a good way to check E-mail if you use a service such as hotmail.com. E-Mail by Voice. You can have your E-mail messages read to you by a computer if you sign up for Premiere Worldlink's ''platinum service,'' (800) 609-2030 or on the Internet at www.premtek.com, for $19.95 a month. You have your E-mail routed to Premiere, which then uses text-to-speech software to have a computer read the subject line of each E-mail and then the text. ''Once you hear the header, if the message is spam you can discard it and go on to the next,'' said David Allison, Premiere's director of corporate communications. You can use the keypad to indicate one of six canned responses. A number of long-distance carriers have indicated that they may soon offer a similar service. Cell Phones. Your domestic cell phone will not work outside North America, and it will work in Canada, Mexico and the Caribbean only if your cellular company has a roaming agreement with a company at your destination. Much of the rest of the world uses G.S.M. technology, or global system for mobile communications. You also can have calls to your domestic cell phone forwarded to a G.S.M. cell phone in many countries, though it is costly. AT&T Wireless charges $49.99 a year plus $2.49 a minute. The company programs a credit-card sized piece of plastic, embedded with circuits, that you insert into a G.S.M. phone to make and receive calls in 77 countries (though not in South America). Iridium. In September the Iridium system, using a network of satellites, is scheduled to go into service, making cellular-type telephone services available everywhere on the planet. Satellite calls will require special telephones. A spokeswoman said the company has agreements with more than 140 distribution partners worldwide, but was not ready to release their names or prices, which she said would be ''very competitive with existing wireless offerings.'' PRACTICAL TRAVELER DAVID CAY JOHNSTON is a business reporter for The Times. | Cost of Staying In Touch Abroad |
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