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1005919_6 | not hung up on the tragedy.'' Mr. Jackson is one of almost two dozen travel agents in more than a dozen states who said ''Titanic'' had helped increase their bookings. ''We're having the best year in our history,'' said Vicky Cannavale, owner of Cruise Shops Travel in Albuquerque, N.M. ''In the first three months of this year, with that big help from the movie, we've sold as many cruises as we sold in six months last year.'' ''Crazy as it sounds, we're getting bookings for cruises all over,'' said Dottie Baum, a travel agent at Ahoy Cruise and Travel in Egg Harbor Township, N.J. ''People like all the elegance in the movie, and they figure the tragedy was years ago and couldn't happen again.'' Captain Garrett of the Coast Guard would not go quite that far. ''But I'm impressed with the advances in safety of cruise ships,'' he said, ticking off a half-dozen safety features that did not exist 86 years ago. They include radar, fire alarms and sprinklers, better-trained crews and land-based computers that can detect water leaks aboard ships at sea. And icebergs are of scant concern -- not because those mountains of ice have been rendered harmless, but because they are detectable by radar, and the few cruise ships that venture anywhere near them give them wide berth. Fourteen percent of agents surveyed by the American Society of Travel Agents said the movie resulted in greater consumer interest in cruises, while only 1 percent said the movie made clients less interested. Only after the Titanic disaster were cruise ships required to carry enough lifeboats and inflatable life rafts for every passenger on board. The Sun Princess, for example, which can carry 3,196 passengers and crew, carries lifeboats and life rafts for 3,996 people. Life rafts aboard cruise ships, incidentally, can hold up to 100 people. They also carry provisions and a radio, and are supposedly impervious to tipping over in high seas. Some things, however, have not changed since 1912. In keeping with the ''women and children first'' tradition, some cruise lines -- including Royal Caribbean and Norwegian Cruise Line -- request that men stand behind the women and children during the evacuation drill. But tradition is apparently all that keeps that custom alive. ''We've looked to see where it says women and children first,'' Captain Garrett said, ''and we can't find it anywhere in maritime law.'' | Allure of 'Titanic,' Minus Ice, Is Packing Cruise Ship Cabins |
1005909_1 | Jean de Brichambaut, who was handing out fliers today for the Citizens' Movement, a leftist group. ''They didn't recognize the danger.'' Roman Catholic, Protestant, Jewish and Muslim leaders published a joint statement today expressing concern about the National Front's ''racist, xenophobic and anti-Semitic ideas'' and calling on the French people to ''rediscover the founding values of democracy.'' Not visibly present in the demonstrations were organizations associated with the conservative parties, though their national leadership condemned the power-sharing deals. So did President Jacques Chirac, a conservative, who called the National Front racist and xenophobic in a televised speech Monday night. The National Front, founded by Jean-Marie Le Pen in 1972, won 15.5 percent of the vote on March 15 and enough seats in the regional parliaments to tip the balance toward the conservatives despite gains by the left. The parliaments, established in the 1980's to decentralize power from Paris, control regional spending for construction of public schools, road and rail networks, and job training and assistance programs. Mr. Le Pen's steady rise has paralleled an increase in urban tensions after the immigration of millions of Muslims from former French colonies in North Africa. The French authorities put most of them into vast urban housing projects in working-class neighborhoods around big cities racked by high unemployment and fear of crime. The original working-class French inhabitants of these places provide Mr. Le Pen with much of his vote. He has called for the return of millions of foreign immigrants to their countries of origin as a way to reduce France's 12.1 percent unemployment rate. He also says that French-born citizens should have priority over immigrants for state services and welfare benefits, and he has been fined for dismissing the Holocaust as a ''detail,'' a crime under French law. In the assemblies, he offered support to mainstream conservatives who would pledge not to raise taxes and make fighting crime a priority. Two of the five conservative regional presidents who accepted election with support from the Front have since given in to public pressure and resigned, but three have refused despite being suspended by their party, the Union of French Democracy. Other large demonstrations took place in Amiens, Bordeaux, Toulouse, Rennes, Strasbourg and Marseilles, with scores of smaller ones in other cities throughout France. Bruno Megret, Mr. Le Pen's deputy and heir apparent as National Front leader, denounced the demonstrations as ''a danger for democracy.'' | Thousands March in France to Protest Far-Right Push for Power |
1005617_2 | made up my life: healing and spirituality, social justice, and media and communications. Q. You blend spirituality with broadcasting? A. Yes. I started doing a radio show on WGSM radio on Long Island back in 1968, when I was still a priest. I was working with Pete Fornatele, and he and I have been friends and partners ever since. In 1973, I hosted a show for WABC Radio called ''On This Rock,'' where I would ask rock music performers to discuss the meaning behind their music and not just how many albums they had sold. Then came ''The Bill Ayres Show'' on WPLJ, a call-in show which is still on. It deals with emotion, healing and spirituality. Q. How did you get involved in the fight against world hunger? A. In the 70s, aside from my radio shows, I'd been working on a series of TV shows for Channel 9 about the third world. I came into contact with a missionary order which went all over the world. They had a film library and, one day, I sat and watched four hours of what I call ''horror films'' -- films of people starving all over the world. I knew about this kind of thing, but I had no idea the extent to which it was going on. It was one of those days that changes your life. I remember sitting in my car afterwards and my head felt like it was just going to explode. I knew I had to get involved, to try and help in some way. Q. When did WHY begin? A. Shortly after that occurrence, Harry Chapin was a guest on my radio show. He invited me to his house for dinner, and we became great friends. I suggested that we work on the problem of world hunger together, and he immediately agreed. Harry was a very quick study and had a tremendous amount of energy and intelligence. We formed WHY in 1975, but it was a very unequal partnership because Harry was able to raise a great deal of money, he had boundless energy and he just put his heart and soul into this project. When he died in a car accident in 1981, I wasn't running WHY; I was on the board. About a year and a half later, the organization was in serious trouble, so I agreed to take it over for a | Q&A: Bill Ayres; In Forefront of Fighting World Hunger |
1005983_0 | British and Irish officials said today that an outbreak of violence in Northern Ireland would not delay the resumption of peace talks on Monday. On Friday night a retired British policeman, Cyril Stewart, was shot dead by two masked men in a supermarket parking lot in Armagh, southwest of Belfast. Both the Irish Foreign Minister, David Andrews, and the British Secretary for Northern Ireland, Mo Mowlam, said the peace talks would resume as scheduled. The shooting was claimed by a Republican splinter group, the Irish National Liberation Army, which opposes the peace talks. Protestant leaders said the shooting was an attempt to provoke retaliatory violence by Protestants. Also on Friday, a bomb exploded in the backyard of a prison officer in Portadown; no one was injured. Protestant paramilitaries had threatened violence against prison officials last week. | World News Briefs; Peace Talks on Schedule Despite Killing in Ulster |
1005585_0 | AIRLINE passengers may not notice, but Government officials say that steps taken since the beginning of the year have made travel more secure. On Jan. 1 the airlines began modernizing the system they use to decide which passengers -- and their bags -- deserve closer scrutiny. For 25 years the airlines have relied upon their ticket agents to make that judgment, but this year they began switching to a computer to do the job, and the Federal Aviation Administration has set the end of 1998 for all airlines to be using computers. The system, called Computer Assisted Passenger Screening, relies on secret criteria to determine who might be trying to smuggle a bomb on board; it also includes for scrutiny a random sample of those who would ordinarily not be searched. Security officials with the airlines and the Government would not say what fraction of passengers will normally be allowed through by the computers under the new system without close attention, but it's likely to be a majority of passengers. For the minority who are ''selected'' there are two changes in how their baggage is handled. First, their checked baggage (not carry-on) is put through a scanner that measures the shape and density of objects inside, to sense their chemical composition. Such scanners did not exist a few years ago. Engineers are working on more sophisticated machines; one problem with these is that they can leave stripes in undeveloped film in the bags. If no such equipment is available, and in most American airports it is not, the other method is to make sure that if the bag gets on the plane, the passenger does too, a technique called bag matching. Matching has been in place on international flights for years, but is new to domestic travel. The five-year plan, beginning last October, is for more scanning and less matching. Vice President Gore, in a speech at San Francisco International Airport on Jan. 30, said the solution lay in ''tapping the awesome power of our newest technology to shield us from the hazards of a sometimes hostile world.'' But the cost is awesome, too, with the bag scanners running from $700,000 to $1 million each. The F.A.A. reported at the end of January that it had purchased 54 explosive-detection systems and 22 automated X-ray devices, both for scanning checked bags. The budget submitted by President Clinton in January calls for | Security Stepped Up At U.S. Airports |
1005903_1 | legal battles have ''put Cyber out of the spamming business.'' ''The most important benefit of this judgment is the message we've sent to spammers that illegally tap our resources and clog up the Internet with this trash -- we won't stand for it,'' said Garry Betty, chief executive of Earthlink, which is based in Pasadena, Calif. ''On top of that, now they'll pay a very real penalty.'' Mr. Wallace, who negotiated the settlement himself, could not be reached for comment. Mr. Wallace is far from the only spammer on the Internet. The ability to send millions of E-mail messages for the price of an Internet account has give rise to a whole industry of electronic hawkers. But Mr. Wallace was among the first and was considered particularly pernicious because he developed and sold programs like ''Cyber Bomber'' that enabled others to follow more easily in his digital footsteps. More recently, he ceased sending spam himself and sought to build a business as a conduit for other spammers who are typically cut off by their Internet providers as soon as their activities are discovered. Earthlink and virtually every other company that sells Internet access have fielded thousands of customer complaints over the last year about unwelcome E-mail clogging mailboxes with material about get-rich-quick schemes and pornographic Web sites. Such advertising is estimated to account for about 10 percent of all E-mail worldwide and is blamed for slowing other traffic over the global computer network. While the Internet companies most affected by the surge in junk mail pursue its purveyors in court, software programmers are developing technical ways to block bulk E-mail and legislators are writing laws that aim to protect consumers from what is sometimes seen as an invasion of privacy. Last week, Washington became the first state to enact an anti-spamming law. The measure makes it illegal for junk E-mailers to forge return addresses or misrepresent the point of origin of a message, a common tactic used to circumvent the restrictions Internet service providers place on the distribution of bulk E-mail. On Tuesday, California lawmakers will hold the first hearing on a bill that seeks to keep Internet users from receiving unsolicited commercial E-mail. And several anti-spam bills are pending in Congress. Bulk E-mailers contend that they are simply pursuing a business opportunity, that many E-mail recipients are glad to be informed of their products and that their right to | Biggest Sender Of Junk Mail On Internet Agrees to Stop |
1005699_2 | offering flexible hours, telecommuting, job sharing and additional training. ''I tell my clients that they've got to create opportunities for people to reinvent themselves over and over again,'' says Mr. Tulgan. And what do the companies get in return? Increased productivity, experts agree. ''It's really about recognizing that workers are people, too,'' Mr. Tulgan says. Large and small companies may approach the problem in different ways, but, at a minimum, they're looking for guidance. ''The tight labor market has upped the ante. Companies have to do more,'' says Robert D. Noonan, vice president and counsel for management services for the Connecticut Business and Industry Association. The association will offer a special session at its annual two-day conference on Employment, Law and Human Resources Management in June to focus on recruiting and retention strategies. ''And I expect it will be very well attended,'' says Mr. Noonan. An association survey on personnel policies of 200 Connecticut companies last year indicated that up to half are paying rewards to existing employees for referrals, 90 percent provide training and development opportunities for salaried employees and one-third offer 100 percent tuition reimbursement for undergraduate courses. (The number goes up to one-half for graduate courses.) Many are shortening or eliminating waiting periods for health benefits, providing medical coverage for domestic partners, accelerating raises, expanding leave policies and subsidizing child care and adoptions. ''Flexibility varies with the industry,'' says Mr. Noonan. The more progressive companies also find visibility and community service powerful tools for attracting new employees and invigorating current staff. Small, private firms like Essential Data, a $12 million company that provides technical writers and documentation trainers to businesses, and the Atlantic Group, with 50 marketing, creative and print production employees, can offer even the quirkiest policies and benefits. ''I try to make my associates feel appreciated,'' says Antoinette Allocca, president of Essential Data. ''And that can't just be in the pocketbook.'' When she notices a staff member is under particular pressure, Ms. Allocca says, she may prescribe a massage or a round of golf. Birthday parties are celebrated and breakfast is available daily. Stephanie Primm, president of the Atlantic Group, says her philosophy has always been to keep the office atmosphere loose, creative and full of team spirit -- especially when looming deadlines add to the stress level. ''People need to be allowed to be themselves,'' says Ms. Primm. ''They need to have a little | Appetite for Talent, Fed With Flexibility |
1005584_1 | Hurbanis, a Mastercard spokeswoman. Cirrus (but not Plus) also publishes a master directory, which you can check at your local bank before traveling. Cirrus also offers a locator service by phone -- (800) 424-7787. Both Visa and Mastercard operate A.T.M. locators on the Internet. A search this month for Santiago, Chile, in www.visa.com, produced 99 locations; Mastercard's site, www.mastercard.com, even more. The Visa site also provides maps showing the three nearest A.T.M.'s to any address in the United States, Canada and Australia. Ms. Woodward said European countries should be available in the summer. Of course, just about any decent-size airport will have a machine. While Ms. Schaffer said A.T.M.-card personal identification numbers with four, five or six digits will work in most of Europe and South America, some travelers have reported being unable to use cards with PINs of more than four digits. So check with your bank before leaving to be sure your PIN will work where you are going. Finally, some foreign machines' key pads have numbers only, so if your PIN is in letters, convert it to numbers and memorize it. Puerto Rico by Car Q. My boyfriend and I plan a trip to Puerto Rico in May. We want to rent a car and drive around the island. Can you suggest places to visit, and should we rent a car before we leave or at the airport? -- Miriam Lodieski, Forest Hills, Queens. A. Spokesmen for both Hertz and National said they saw no advantage in not reserving a car before you fly to Puerto Rico. Dan Callahan of National said that the car rental companies operate much as the airlines do and that generally, the earlier you reserved the better the rate. Asked about waiting, he said that ''you can run into deals that pop up suddenly'' on occasion but that you are more likely to pay higher rates or, worse, might not even get a car. Lauren Garvey of Hertz concurred, and since she has been to the island several times, recommended the rain forests at the eastern end of the island as a ''don't miss.'' El Yunque is the popular name for the Caribbean National Forest, the only rain forest in the national park system. A bit inland and south, off Route 52, is the Carite Forest Preserve. From there, you could get back on Route 52, drive to the south coast, then | Q and A |
1004357_3 | in the peace talks that resume here on March 23 under pressure from the two sponsors, the Governments of Britain and Ireland, to produce a settlement by April 12 that can be put to a referendum vote in Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland by May 22. The Protestant parties have been begrudging participants in a process that they view with suspicion because it had its origins with the two Catholic parties, the moderate Social Democratic and Labor Party and Sinn Fein, the political wing of the outlawed Irish Republican Army. ''When you've got a government that increasingly wants to detach from you, it makes the Unionists feel unwanted and a bit paranoid,'' Mr. Wilson said. ''You could say we have taken on a siege mentality.'' As in the peace talks, there is no impulse in the City Council for compromise. Mr. Wilson said that while he bore no ''personal animosity'' toward Mr. Maginness, a member of the Social Democratic and Labor Party, he could never imagine collaborating with him. ''He is in a very strong position to give the Nationalist position, and I would expect him to do that just as I did when I was Mayor and gave the Unionist position,'' he said. ''But I don't care how able he is, I can't vote for the Nationalist position.'' His greatest fear, he said, is that the election this summer for a new Lord Mayor will go to Sinn Fein. Despite the cease-fires that have been observed by the major paramilitary groups, Belfast remains a profoundly divided city, with a 20-foot-high metal fence euphemistically called the ''peace line'' running through its middle. ''People talk about East and West Belfast as if they were separate places, totally distinct from one another and a million miles apart in terms of the people who live there,'' Mr. Maginness said. He, his wife, Carmel, and their eight children live in North Belfast, the one area of the city that is mixed. But it is also the most stained by bloodshed. More than 600 people have died there in acts of sectarian violence since 1969. The responsibilities of the council are parochial, including such things as recreation, sanitation, local economic development and civic promotion. Elected for a year's term by the council, Mr. Maginness said he wanted to devote his time to giving ''balanced and established leadership to a very divided city.'' But | Belfast Journal; The Chain This Catholic Wears Speaks Volumes |
1004392_1 | carried the human immunodeficiency virus, or H.I.V. At first glance, the question of whether the Americans With Disabilities Act covers people with asymptomatic H.I.V. infections appears an unlikely vehicle for this first Supreme Court test of a law more identified with the image of a public building being retrofitted for wheelchair access than of a person with no visible impairment walking without assistance into a private medical office. But far from being an anomaly, this case brings to the fore an important unresolved issue under the disability law: the definition of disability. In the 1990 law, Congress did not specify diseases or conditions. Rather, it brought people under the law's umbrella in essentially two ways, to quote the statutory language: if they have ''a physical or mental impairment that substantially limits one or more of the major life activities'' or through ''being regarded as having such an impairment.'' Although regulations issued by the Justice Department have provided more specific guidance, explicitly identifying ''H.I.V. disease (whether symptomatic or asymptomatic)'' as an example of an ''impairment,'' the lower courts have found the definition troublesome. Lower courts have ruled that conditions like epilepsy, insulin-dependent diabetes, breast cancer and some mental illnesses are not covered. The courts are divided over whether asymptomatic H.I.V. infection is a disability. ''The utility of the statute for people with significant medical disorders is before the Court right now,'' Wendy E. Parmet, a law professor at Northeastern University in Boston, said in an interview. Ms. Parmet, one of the lawyers representing Sidney Abbott, the plaintiff in this case, said that increasingly, ''courts are creating high hurdles, cutting plaintiffs off at the pass'' by questioning whether a condition amounts to a disability. ''If this were a racial discrimination case,'' Ms. Parmet said, ''we would be discussing the nature of the discrimination, not whether the plaintiff is really black or how many black ancestors she might have had.'' In the case now before the Court, Bragdon v. Abbott, No. 97-156, the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, in Boston, applied the disability law to Ms. Abbott on the ground that her H.I.V.-positive status had led her to conclude that she could not have children; she testified that she feared both infecting a baby and not living long enough to raise a child. She was therefore ''substantially limited'' in the ''major life activity'' of reproduction, the appeals court ruled | Court to Weigh Whether H.I.V. Is a Disability |
1001280_2 | briefcases are considered carry-on luggage. CONTINENTAL -- Passengers on domestic flights can board with as many as six different types of carry-on luggage, including laptops or briefcases; however, they may be required to check some of these if flights are full. Rules for overseas flights are more strict and vary by destination. T.W.A. -- Passengers are permitted two pieces of carry-on luggage; laptops, but not briefcases, are considered carry-on luggage. T.W.A. will further limit carry-on bags if flights are full. US AIRWAYS -- Two carry-on bags permitted; both laptops and briefcases are considered carry-on luggage. Since Northwest announced its initiative in November, both the Federal Aviation Administration and the Air Transport Association, the carriers' trade association, have begun to study airlines' carry-on baggage policies. The F.A.A. is in the process of drafting guidelines, while the association has set up a task force to study the matter. So far, Northwest's new carry-on rules have annoyed some business travelers. According to Jeanine Shumaker, a spokeswoman for Rosenbluth International, a major corporate travel agency, several Rosenbluth customers are ''not at all pleased by the new policy.'' She cited the threat of lost bags as a major complaint. Janet Durbahn, president of the upper Midwest chapter of the American Society of Travel Agents, said she had found that Northwest's elite frequent fliers were ''taking up all the room'' in overhead bins of aircraft. Michael F. McCoy, president of the Meridian Financial Corporation in Indianapolis, who flies twice weekly, said: ''It can cost me one hour to check in my garment bag. If you're a business traveler, that's a lot of time just to stand in line. If the airlines are going to make me check my luggage, they should have an efficient system, like Southwest does, where you can check things at the gate.'' Hotel Update S Air Group's Swissotel has started a new World Wide Web site (www.swissotel.com) that allows guests to make bookings and also features special rates that change monthly. Paris Sejour Reservation rents apartments in Paris that include weekly cleaning and concierge service; fax and answering machines and laundry and chauffeur service are also available for an extra fee. Studio apartments start at $75 a night, while three-bedroom apartments begin at $300 a night. Travelers can check out the apartments on the company's Web site (www.qconline.com/parispsr). Paris Sejour Reservation's phone number is (312) 587-7707; the fax number is (800) 582-7274. | Business Travel; Flying may get more complicated as airlines continue to tighten restrictions for carry-on bags. |
1001300_3 | have a tower taken down in her Vermont town of Charlotte. ''We just want to make sure the towers are appropriately sited.'' But even in Vermont, the Hardwick discussion showed, opinions are deeply split. Most everybody likes the convenience and life-saving potential of cell phones. But they do not trust cellular phone giants backed by Federal clout. ''The natural landscapes of Vermont are our greatest economic resource,'' said Janet Newton, a resident of the Thistle Hill area of Cabot, which has been fighting a proposed cell tower. ''We Vermonters claim the right to make land-use and quality of life decisions at the state and local level.'' One resident said a study had shown that property values would drop 25 percent near a cell tower; several others commented that the long-term health effects of living near microwave-emitting towers were not yet known. On the other side were residents who wanted to be able to dial 911 from anywhere, and those like Deb Moore, an emergency room nurse, who described how important it was to be able to sustain contact between an ambulance crew and the hospital preparing to treat its patient. It is a problem in Vermont, ''as wonderfully rural as it is, to hit a dead zone,'' Ms. Moore said. ''We need to look at other issues for Vermont besides aesthetics and your property values.'' Debate over tower siting has been heating up in recent months in part as a result of the 1996 Federal Telecommunications Act, which fostered telephone-industry competition and allowed many new players into the cellular phone market -- players who need towers. The rash of antenna building also stems from the swelling pool of cellular phone users, and from the advent of technology known as P.C.S., or personal communications systems. P.C.S. systems use digital transmissions rather than analog ones and need more antennas because their range is shorter. Over all, said Tim Ayers, vice president for communications of the Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association, the largest association representing the wireless industry, it will take up to 125,000 antennas to build the cellular system authorized by the F.C.C., and the process will take until perhaps 2005. The antennas are often easy to install in cities, where they can be stuck on existing tall buildings, steeples and roofs; in largely rural areas like Vermont, towers are often needed. The cellular companies face pressures of their own, Mr. Ayers pointed | It's a Control Thing: Vermont vs. Cell Phone Towers |
1001223_0 | I GET a little fatigued listening to some of my adventuring pals -- whether daredevil whitewater kayakers, strong-armed polar women or round-the-world sailors -- mock sea kayaking as boring. A quasi-sport, they call it, requiring fitness levels equivalent to what's needed for riding a rocking chair on the front porch. While admittedly the majority of my sea kayaking hours have been spent in calm to soporific settings -- face it, a big reason for the sport's growing popularity is its perfect-ness for paddling across mostly flat stretches -- I have also spent countless hours stroking for my life, my heart nearly pounding through my paddle jacket, because of either the absolute necessity of nonstop paddling or the potential dangers (often hidden) lurking just off-bow. An example. One day last spring in the Pacific Ocean, 10 miles off Ventura, Calif., I made 7,200 continuous paddle strokes over four hours. I know this because I calculated them. Arm-wearying pulls through heavy seas. Not even a second to reach for the bottle of water snuggled between my legs. Trying to stay on the smooth downside of 10-foot waves breaking from the north while simultaneously aiming my kayak due east. I also had to be wary of the half-mile-long tankers that smoke through the Santa Barbara Channel, as well as the occasional fin of a blue shark. Some of my other trips featured different hurdles. Off the east coast of Labrador, the threat was icebergs; in Alaska's Glacier Bay, eight-ton whales breaking the surface; around Corsica, the odd pot-shot from the .22 of a bored mini-Mafioso; off Chile's Patagonia, gales from the Pacific. Those times, those challenges, are the rarity. Danger is not why I choose to spend as many hours as I do in the cockpit of a 17-foot-long plastic boat. Some years back I embarked on a quest for the peaceful, the tranquil, the balmy. As a result, most of my boating hours have been spent gliding across glasslike lakes or down calm rivers, often with the current at my back. The most copacetic place I've paddled? Probably sneaking down one of Lake Powell's 96 side canyons, far from the roar of the jet skis, exploring from water level the once-towering desert peaks. Many of my favorite moments have been spent on waters close to home, and usually late in the day: a tide-pulled float down the Hudson River, or a gentle | Gliding Serenely Across a Pond, or Paddling for Your Life |
1001355_0 | Tower Air Flight 30 from Kennedy International Airport to Tel Aviv was delayed on Sunday night by mechanical difficulties. But this was more than just a routine delay. First, passengers were told to wait a half-hour. Then another half-hour. Then an hour. And so on, for 12 hours, as more than 400 passengers took up temporary residence in the Tower Air terminal with no food, no hotel accommodations and no shortage of ill will toward what they said was a most unhelpful and uninformed staff. It was so infuriating, passengers said, that when the flight finally left at 11:30 on Monday morning, more than 200 passengers refused to board the plane. They had been offered a $50 discount off their next flight, later increased to $100, which fell far short of the free ticket or hotel accommodations that they had demanded. They were even told that the plane would take off without them, but with their luggage. Still, the irate passengers would not board. And the plane took off. ''People started to yell, 'We want the luggage! This is ridiculous!' '' said an agitated Ronen Yefet, 33, of Seaside Heights, N.J., who was at the airport to say goodbye to his wife, Mali, 26, and 9-month-old son, Aviv. ''It was like an uprising, or a strike.'' By late yesterday, some passengers who had taken later Tower flights -- including Mr. Yefet's wife and son -- had been reunited with their luggage. But other passengers, and Mr. Yefet, were still seething over the whole episode, which complicated some people's plans to celebrate the Jewish holiday Purim, which begins tonight at sundown. Yesterday, a Tower Air spokeswoman, Brenda Burrows, acknowledged that the delay ''was extremely unfortunate.'' She said the airline was unable to place passengers in hotels because it could not foresee that the delay would last so long, and was unable to retrieve the luggage because of security regulations. ''Tower Air tried to do everything they could,'' Ms. Burrows said. ''It's certainly not a common occurrence, and we certainly hope that it won't happen again.'' Ms. Burrows said that she was not sure what kind of mechanical problems plagued the Boeing 747 plane before its scheduled departure of 11:30 P.M. on Sunday. The Israeli newspaper Yediot Ahronot reported yesterday that the air-conditioning was faulty. Tower Air, which was founded 12 years ago, is best known for offering cheap, unrestricted fares from | Passengers Rebel Over Tower Air's 12-Hour Flight Delay |
1001221_2 | risk getting skunked when the fish were always biting in Bergman's pages? These habits held fast for the next half-century. I have spent some wonderful vacations sailing, but you cover ground faster and learn a lot more by reading ''The Cruising Guide to the New England Coast'' by Roger F. Duncan and John P. Ware, or one of the sailing books by William F. Buckley Jr., perhaps ''Atlantic High: A Celebration,'' or ''Racing Through Paradise: A Pacific Passage.'' You stay drier and healthier, too. I know the terrifying thrill of rolling in a boat 360 degrees from reading David and Daniel Hays's beautifully written ''My Old Man and the Sea,'' which is about sailing a small boat around Cape Horn. But it's not something I ever want to do in actuality. I haven't the time, courage or skill to sail around the world in a small boat without sophisticated equipment, as Joshua Slocum did from 1895 to 1898, but I can have the experience vicariously by reading his great and literate account of the adventure, ''Sailing Alone Around the World.'' Of course you miss the smell of the air, the pull on your muscles, the ecstatic sense of triumph that goes with sailing for home, reaching the peak or subduing the big fish. Who wouldn't trade places with Sir Francis Chichester at the end of his ''Gypsy Moth Circles the World,'' or Maurice Herzog at the high point of his ''Annapurna,'' or Hemingway's Santiago when he harpoons the marlin in ''The Old Man and the Sea''? STILL, physical danger and the threat of destruction are what is essential to the greatest sports adventures. On looking back at my mountain adventures of 1947, I see now how satisfying it was to experience the high drama of Ullman's novel as a catharsis of my lower-level anxieties. But you don't really want to go through such things. You don't want to be tossed by the 100-foot-high waves described by Sebastian Junger in ''The Perfect Storm'' and end up at the bottom of the sea with the crew of the Andrea Gail. You don't want to starve to death in the Alaskan wilderness like Christopher Johnson McCandless in Jon Krakauer's ''Into the Wild.'' Or die on the face of Mount Everest the way several climbers did in Krakauer's later book, ''Into Thin Air.'' It is really much better to read about such things. Besides, | For Adventures of the Mind, Establish Base Camp in an Easy Chair |
999271_1 | on Wednesday, experts in epidemiology from the Federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry said they had determined that past local studies, which had found no evidence of a link, were scientifically sound, but they called for further review. The problem may be part of a national trend, they said. Brain cancer in children up to 4 years old has increased by a per capita rate of 47 percent in the last 20 years, said Dr. Wendy Kaye, chief epidemiologist for the Federal agency, which is based in Atlanta. She wants to include Rochester in a $500,000 study of the occurrence of brain cancer in three states. Mrs. Cusenz (pronounced like cousins), whose cancer maps drew the interest of the Federal experts last fall, said she would keep pressing them for more studies. She has been involved in the effort since 1995, when the older of her two sons became her first green angel. She had taken her son Christopher, now 21, to the doctor to follow up on his complaint that two fingers on his right hand were becoming numb. His illness was diagnosed as cancer of the spinal cord, one of just 150 cases seen worldwide each year. Four days later, the family flew to New York City, where the tumor was surgically removed. Although Christopher Cusenz lost some motor control and had to learn to walk and feed himself again, doctors were optimistic about his recovery. But eight months later the tumor was back. During a second visit to New York for surgery, Mrs. Cusenz met Sandra Schneider, whose daughter was being treated for cancer of the central nervous system. Mrs. Cusenz said, ''We got to talking and comparing where we lived,'' which turned out to be within a few miles of each other. In Rochester, they started an informal support group named Brainstormers that grew from 2 families to 11 in a year. ''It just seemed too coincidental,'' Mrs. Cusenz said. ''Evelyn started saying, 'Gee, is there a chance Kodak is to blame or this?' '' Concerns about the company's emissions peaked in 1988, when Kodak acknowledged that it had released 20 million pounds of toxic chemicals into the air the previous year. About half the material released was methylene chloride, a toxic solvent used to make film base. The Environmental Protection Agency suspects methylene chloride to be a carcinogen, but medical experts have never | Rochester Parents Fret, and Sue, Over Cancer |
1000414_0 | In BEARS!, a National Geographic Explorer special, the veteran host of the series, Boyd Matson, introduces three separate stories of the fearsome beasts while Coco, a brown bear, toys with his hand like a domestic pet. The first story, ''Lights! Camera! Bears!,'' focuses on the Seus family , who train animals for television and movies -- most famously, that scene stealer Bart (above with Doug Seus), who upstaged his co-stars Alec Baldwin and Anthony Hopkins in the 1997 film ''The Edge.'' The second story, ''Realm of the Great White Bear,'' is David Wright's paeon to polar bears, from the moment twin cubs emerge from their den to blink in the icy glare until they're almost ready to face life alone at age two. Narrated by Keith David, the story was filmed on the island of Svalbard, halfway between Norway and the North Pole, and captures surprisingly tender maternal moments as the mother teaches the cubs to observe their icy world. But don't be fooled by the apparent docile nature of a bear, warn the rangers at Montana's Glacier National Park; they can run 35 miles an hour and kill within seconds if they are scared or surprised. This is made chillingly clear in the final story, ''Bear Attack,'' through accounts of survivors and filming of grizzlies in the wild -- SUNDAY at 7 and 11:05 P.M. and SATURDAY at 10 A.M. on TBS. Suzanne O'Connor SPOTLIGHT | Bear Facts |
1000644_0 | WHEN he was starting out as a standup comedian in the 1960's, Woody Allen joked about being expelled from college for cheating on a philosophy exam: ''I looked within the soul of the boy sitting next to me,'' he said. Three decades (and 30 years of personal psychotherapy) later, Mr. Allen still sprinkles his movie scripts with references to philosophers like Kierkegaard and Kant, as well as to psychoanalysts like Freud. There may be a lesson here -- at least if you're a philosopher. Taking note of psychotherapy's mixed record during its century-long domination of the effort to address people's practical problems of living, some philosophers have begun to scamper back down from the ivory tower to conduct business the way Socrates did -- by returning, literally, to the marketplace. They are hanging out their shingles. Springing from a movement that began in Germany in the 1980's, a small but growing number of American philosophers have opened private practices as ''philosopher practitioners,'' offering a therapy based on the idea that solutions to many personal, moral and ethical problems can be found not in psychotherapy or Prozac but deep within the 2,500-year-old body of philosophical discourse. ''Psychiatry and psychology ultimately have failed people,'' said Lou Marinoff, a professor of philosophy at City College in New York who has been seeing private clients -- at $100 a session, about what psychologists get -- since 1991. Dr. Marinoff, who estimates that there are several dozen philosophers in private practice in the United States, wants to lead like-minded colleagues back to their ancient place at the center of the emotional tumult of daily life. Typical clients, he said, are ''refugees from psychotherapy,'' some seeking deeper truths and others just looking for a better way to deal with depression and anxiety. ''What we're suggesting is, if you can be referred by your H.M.O. to a psychologist or a psychiatrist, you should be able to be referred to a philosopher, too,'' said Dr. Marinoff, who is the president of the American Philosophical Practitioners Association, which has several hundred members. The group has drafted licensing criteria and is leading a state-by-state drive for certification. The most notable success so far is a bill making its way through the New York State Assembly that would establish a board to license philosopher practitioners, and thus propel their campaign to qualify for insurance reimbursement. Anxious Psychiatrists With health maintenance organizations | The Nation: I Bill, Therefore I Am; Philosophers Ponder a Therapy Gold Mine |
1000484_1 | be installed in communities and that towns could not deny access because of health concerns. The law poses a problem, said Richard Cameron of Muttontown, an opponent of the tower. Because of the law, Mr. Cameron said, if a village opposes a tower because of health concerns, the utility can sue. ''We can't deny a tower for health concerns, because there is no conclusive evidence that says these towers are dangerous,'' he said. ''But there is also no conclusive evidence that says they are not dangerous. We know what happened with breast implants and asbestos. Everyone said there was nothing wrong with them, and then five years later we found out there were problems. ''We are concerned about a decline in property values in the surrounding area. Anyone knows that if there is a choice of buying two houses and one has a tower in its front yard, you know what the choice would be.'' The Wall Street Journal, he said, has cited a study by an appraiser in Houston that showed that 10 properties along a transmission line sold for 13 to 30 percent less than 100 comparable properties elsewhere in the neighborhood. The towers pose environmental risks, Mr. Cameron said, because diesel generators provided the power, causing noise and air pollution. The site is adjacent to a 600-acre preserve, he added, that is the home to rare bird species. He said that birds could easily strike the towerin overcast skies with low visibility. ''In addition,'' Mr. Cameron said, ''a 145-foot tower is pure ugly. Nobody deserves to buy a home in a beautiful residential community, then wake up to look at an eyesore like this tower would be.'' The situation is larger than a local issue, another resident, Leonard Gero, said. ''It has become like a gold rush,'' he said, ''with cell-phone companies racing to find sites to erect as many towers as possible with no controls on them.'' For a few years cellular companies have tried to build towers or antennas at other sites in the Muttontown-Brookville area, including atop the Brookville Police Station, at the Brookville Country Club and at the Reformed Church of Muttontown. Because those sites are private, the owners had to apply to the Zoning Boards of Appeals, where community opposition halted the plans. The municipal Muttontown site is not subject to the appeals board, requiring just the approval of the Village Board | Cellular Tower Is Opposed in Muttontown |
1000578_0 | Westchester has applied to the Federal Energy Regulation Commission for intervenor status in the review of the proposed Millennium Pipeline Project, County Executive Andrew J. Spano said last week. Columbia Gas Transmission Company has applied to the regulatory commission for permission to build a 24-inch-diameter pipeline, which would carry up to 700 million cubic feet of natural gas a day from Canada through Westchester to a distribution point in Mount Vernon. The company has indicated that it wants to begin construction of the pipeline by the summer of 1999. ''This intervenor status would not signify either opposition or support, but give us a seat at the table,'' Mr. Spano said. Preliminary plans call for the pipeline to cross through parts of Cortlandt, Croton-on-Hudson, Yorktown, New Castle, Mount Pleasant, Briarcliff Manor, Greenburgh, Elmsford, Ardsley, Yonkers and Mount Vernon. It would pass near or through sites like George's Island Park, Croton Gorge Park, the Briarcliff-Peekskill Trailway, the North County Trailway, Hudson Hills, Graham Hills, Sprain Ridge Park, the Bronx River Parkway, Tarrytown Lakes Park, Ridge Road Park and the Grasslands in Valhalla. Under intervenor status, the county would receive notice of project reviews, would be able to take part in regulatory commission hearings and could appeal decisions. IN BRIEF | Pipeline Review |
1000335_0 | CURRY-Philip J., Jr. Of Bristol, RI. Formerly of New Canaan, CT. On Friday, March 6, 1998. Survived by his wife Maureen Cohalan Curry; six sons, Philip of Easton, Conn., Michael of Barrington, R.I., Christopher of Orlando, FL., Sean of Boston, MA., Edward of New York City, and David of Charlottesville, VA; a daughter Margaret Curry of New Canaan, CT; and four grandchildren. Funeral mass Monday, March 9 at 10:30 AM, St. Aloysius Church, Cherry St, New Canaan. Interment, Calvary Cemetery, Queens. Visitation, Hoyt Funeral Home, 199 Main Street, New Canaan, Saturday 7-9 PM, and Sunday 2-4 and 7-9 PM. Contributions may be made to the Canterbury School, New Milford, CT. 06776. | Paid Notice: Deaths CURRY, PHILIP J., JR. |
1000447_2 | are Catholic or Protestant, do lasting harm. He is Catholic, and he does speak of the ''800 years of oppression'' during which Catholics in Northern Ireland were ''not allowed to have their culture or religion.'' But he also decries the transition the Irish Republican Army made from ''relatively peaceful'' to ''downright terrorism'' in the 1960's. The Irish Republican Army and its Protestant counterparts, the Ulster Volunteers and the Ulster Defense Association, he said, are composed of ''people who have a vested interest in continuing the violence because they have nothing else to do with their sad lives.'' ''The children, as is so often the case, are innocent victims,'' he said. ''Because of the simple accident of geography -- being born in a certain place -- they suffer.'' He added that many do not get opportunities to change stereotypes that are forced on them by adults. In 1991, census reports said the vast majority of people in Northern Ireland live in neighborhoods that are almost exclusively Catholic or exclusively Protestant. ''I obviously cannot change the whole situation in Northern Ireland, but I feel that, through the program, we can offer Protestants and Catholics a chance to meet and become friends, and we can provide some relative peace and security for at least a few weeks for some children.'' Those who want to be host families can apply by calling the organization at 949-6492. There is no cost to the hosts, who provide room and board. The organization pays for the children's transportation to America and for medical insurance. Some families take one, some take two children. When there are two, they are almost always a Catholic and a Protestant. But the process of getting to know one another begins on the charter plane ride over and continues after the children have returned to Ireland. Northern Ireland Children's Enterprise owns a house in Ballycastle, County Antrim, on the seacoast north of Belfast, where continuing programs -- weekends, special parties, classes and so forth -- provide opportunities for relationships to progress. In January, the organization bought another house in Belfast. The program in Ireland is not only for 9- through 12-year-olds, but also for teen-agers and adults. Thomas F. Burns, a 46-year-old vice president of a bank who lives in Somers, his wife, Lynette, and their children, Tracey, Jessica and Danny, now 17, 15, and 11, respectively, have been hosts for the last | The View From/North White Plains; Group Helps Open Homes to Belfast Children to Further Peace |
1000509_0 | To the Editor: In her essay, Anne Bernays tells us blithely that ''only five out of every thousand travelers submit official missing luggage claims.'' What this means is that on a typical international jet flight with, say, 400 passengers, two will submit a claim. Look around you. Will it be your neighbor? The haughty gentleman in first class? Will it be the harassed mother with a suitcase full of disposable diapers and bathtub toys? Now look in a mirror. Will it be you? MIRIAM HECHT New York, N.Y. | Carry-On Bags |
1000689_0 | Two and a half years after the United Nations international conference on women in Beijing put forward proposals for government action on women's rights, representatives of organizations from around the world are meeting here for two weeks to take stock of progress. Even skeptics say they are impressed at the extent to which many governments have followed through on their pledges. They attributed this largely to pressure from increasingly strong local and international women's organizations. In a report published this week, the New York-based Women's Environment and Development Organization says 70 percent of 187 national governments have drawn up plans to improve women's rights. Around the world, 66 countries have established national offices for women's affairs, and 34 of these have the power to propose legislation. In countries as diverse as Mexico, Germany, China and New Zealand, laws have been passed to curb and punish domestic violence. Some progress has been made on securing property rights for women in Africa and Asia, and laws have been tightened on trafficking in girls and women, according to the new report, ''Mapping Progress: Assessing Implementation of the Beijing Platform 1998.'' In Britain, a new Women's National Commission has drawn up an agenda for the Government based on 12 areas of action agreed on in Beijing, said Elizabeth Sidney, a commission member. ''Since Beijing,'' she said, ''the Government reports annually to us on these 12 points, which is a phenomenal change.'' The Government has made better child care and employment opportunities its priorities. Ms. Sidney is among those campaigning for changes in laws and regulations governing taxes and benefits to give women economic independence throughout life. ''What's happened here could not have happened without Beijing,'' said Charlotte Bunch, executive director of the Center for Women's Global Leadership at Rutgers University. ''The energy, the activity of Beijing, has not gone away.'' Ms. Bunch and others gathered here for the session of the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women said the increased involvement of private groups of all kinds had been the key to the success of the Beijing conference, and of a parallel informal convention of nongovernmental organizations. Louise Frechette, the new United Nations Deputy Secretary General, said in a speech this week that relationships between private organizations and governments had improved in many countries since the 1993 international conference on human rights in Vienna and the 1995 women's conference in Beijing. Many | Women See Key Gains Since Talks In Beijing |
1000645_0 | Variety may be the spice of life, but spice may be, in part, what makes life possible in the tropics. The flavorful folklore that surrounds the abundant and creative use of spices in hot climates ranges from the persistent notion that the hot stuff triggers a cooling sweat to the intriguing thought that heavy seasonings disguise the odor and flavor of spoiled food. But according to a new thesis promulgated by two Cornell University researchers, such quaint explanations have no rational or scientific basis. After analyzing the extent and variety of spices used in traditional recipes from 36 countries, the two suggest that the spices most prominent in hot climates are potent inhibitors of bacteria and fungi that can cause food to spoil and make people ill. Heavily seasoned foods, they say, help to prevent spoilage rather than disguise it. Dr. Paul Sherman, an evolutionary behaviorist, and Jennifer Billing, then a Cornell student, published their conclusion and its abundant supporting evidence in the current issue of the Quarterly Review of Biology. They found a direct relationship between the average temperature in the countries and the use of spices that kill or suppress microorganisms. The researchers suggested that although traditional cooks had no specific knowledge of the antimicrobial action of spices like onion, garlic, cumin, turmeric, ginger, chili peppers and dozens of other plant-derived seasonings, the incidental use of these spices may have conferred a survival advantage that prompted families, neighbors and descendants to adopt the same seasoning habits. By trial and error, these cooks seemed to have learned to take advantage of the chemicals that such plants manufacture to protect themselves and their dining companions against unwanted invaders, Dr. Sherman said. JANE E. BRODY | March 1-7; A Pepper a Day Keeps Germs Away |
1000549_3 | The Rockefellers conveyed 44 Stamford acres to the Mianus Gorge Preserve and created four 25-acre lots on the North Castle portion with the approval of North Castle's planning department. If the property ever leaves the family, one lot will go to the Mianus Gorge Preserve and one 25-acre lot that gives access to the 36 acres that embrace the main house, barn and caretaker's house on the Stamford side must be sold with the house. Percy Lee Langstaff, president of the Stamford Land Conservation Trust, who helped draft the Family Estate Zone, calls it ''a very forward looking thing.'' ''I don't know of any other town that has it,'' she said. ''The dedicated land can never be traded, sold, developed or improved and it increases the value of the property around it.'' ''The significance of the zone,'' said Anne H. French, executive director of the Mianus Gorge Preserve, ''is its way of looking at the whole. Stamford and the Rockefellers have been a splendid example of considering the land, not political boundaries. If you took away political borderlines you'd see how ridiculous they are. The Mianus River is 18 miles long with 11 political jurisdictions.'' ''Adding to open space and recreational space is one of our highest priorities'' said Mayor Dannel P. Malloy of Stamford. To speed the process, he has appointed a 10-member Open Space Task Force co-chaired by Mr. Redniss and Robin Stein, chief of the city's Land Use Bureau, ''to help identify sites and facilitate acquisition,'' he said. ''We just completed an open-space master plan,'' said Mr. Stein, ''stating that the city is underserved in recreation and parkland by some 900 acres, according to standards set by the National Parks and Recreation Association, a nonprofit group in Washington.'' Independently of the Family Estate Zone plan, which does not require use of city funds, Stamford has set up a program to purchase land for greenspace. ''A million-dollar kitty for open space acquisition,'' said the Mayor, ''will be added to by $500,000 on July 1. We're looking to allow owners tax breaks in return for gifts or by selling below market rates.'' A $500,000 annual allotment for open space has been included in a six-year capital budget plan. Currently one property, called Blake-Coleman after the two out-of-state sisters who own it, is for sale and eligible for family estate status. Coveted by conservationists, it is comprised of 113 vacant | In the Region/Connecticut; For Stamford, a New Way to Preserve Greenspace |
999865_0 | The State Board of Education today moved closer to a final version of new rules defining which students will be included in special education programs, which now cover 15 percent of all students in the state. State officials vowed that the new rules, expected to be completed next month, will not exclude any children now served by the program. The Education Department has been working for a year on rules that it says will bring more efficiency and accountability to the state's costly special education program. While the board met today, a couple of dozen parents and their children demonstrated outside the department's headquarters here. Inside, board members reviewed some of the 600 written comments they have received from parents and educators throughout the state. By the end of the meeting, there was no final document. But all sides walked away saying they were happier that the work in progress was closer to protecting the needs of children and to the department's push for a better managed program. ''I think that we've won many victories here, but we still have a ways to go,''said Diana Autin of the Statewide Parent Advocacy Network, a nonprofit group. One of the changes that had drawn the most criticism was the department's proposal to create new categories of disabilities. Education officials said that to make their categories more compatible with the Federal Government's, they wanted to eliminate the category now called ''neurologically impaired,'' which included students with disabilities like Tourettes Syndrome. Barbara Gantwerk, who oversees the special education programs for the Department of Education, tried to reassure board members that under the new categories, children with such disabilities would still be eligible under a new category called ''other health impaired.'' | In Trenton, Progress on Special Education Code |
999772_3 | the same failures that had left hearing-impaired students behind both academically and socially nationwide. For instance, a 1988 report by the Council on Education of the Deaf, a nonprofit organization that seeks to improve educational opportunities for deaf and hearing-impaired children, found that by the end of 12th grade, children deaf or hard of hearing children were reading on average at a fourth-grade level and doing math at a sixth-grade level. Some advocates for hearing-impaired and deaf people attribute those statistics to efforts by the hearing to force deaf and hearing-impaired people to communicate in the same manner as they do. ''They've tried to make us poor imitations of hearing people,'' said Joel Goldfarb, president of the J.H.S. 47 alumni association, who is deaf and spoke through an interpreter. ''No matter how they try, we'll remain deaf.'' There has been research since the 1960's supporting the idea that American Sign Language is a separate language, with its own grammar and syntax. The basis of the language is gestural symbols that represent whole words or even sentences. The shape of the hands, speed and direction and the movement of face, head and body are part of the language. Raised eyebrows, for example, can mean a question. Like J.H.S. 47, many schools for the deaf and hard of hearing use a combination of informal sign language, lip reading, American Sign Language, captions and amplification. New York State does not require teachers of the deaf and hard of hearing to know sign language, an issue Mr. Sanders plans to address. ''It is the first public school that will grant a diploma with the same standards that we grant the rest of the population,'' Mr. Sanders said. ''The teachers will have the ability to instruct at the pace of the students, which means they have to communicate in the language of A.S.L., which is the language of deaf people.'' There are 4,000 to 5,000 children in New York City who are hard of hearing or deaf, Mr. Florsheim estimated. Most attend special programs in mainstream schools, and some are enrolled in special state-supported schools, like the Lexington School for the Deaf in Queens. There are an estimated half-million to one million deaf people in the United States and about 20 million with severe hearing impairment. Junior High School 47 has 277 students, and the expansion will make room for an additional 25 to 40 | New York to Teach Deaf in Sign Language, Then English |
1002663_6 | memory loss. But selecting the correct medication from among 20 different antidepressants involves walking some painstakingly fine lines. For example, Dr. Jean Schultz, a geriatric specialist at North Shore University Hospital in Manhasset, N.Y., explained: ''If you have an agitated patient, you want to choose one with sedating effects like Paxil. But if the patient is already quiet and tired all the time, you might choose one like Prozac that is energizing.'' ''Then you must consider physical problems,'' she continued. ''Wellbutrin has some tendencies to cause seizures, so you wouldn't choose it for someone with strokes or head trauma.'' To further complicate the process, older people take a variety of medications for physical conditions, so physicians must juggle those drugs with others prescribed for mental health conditions. ''Sometimes there will be one you want to give that will not interact favorably with something the patient already takes,'' Dr. Schultz said. The sophistication of drugs does not negate the value of traditional therapy and counseling that take place today not only in psychiatrists' offices, but also at nursing homes, churches, community centers, and now on videophones and computers. ''We go to normal settings to destigmatize the process so that senior citizens will be more inclined to seek help,'' said Rita Landberg, director of counseling services for the elderly and their families at the Jewish Board of Children's and Family Services. The organization runs programs in apartment complexes like Co-op City in the Bronx and in a community center in Kings Bay, Brooklyn. Despite various impairments, including memory loss, the five women and one man who meet weekly in a group therapy session at the Bellevue Hospital Geriatric Clinic that is part of the New York University Medical Center are still able to get there on their own. And they all arrived early for a recent session. Without any coaching from their leader, Dr. Candace C. Martin, a clinical psychologist, they began to discuss how to cope with the guilt aroused by the loss of a loved one. ''My friends have all died and my neighbors all moved on,'' said an 84-year-old widow who lives on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. ''After my husband died, I was always saying, 'I should have done this, I should have done that.' I went through a form of hysteria where I would go out and run and run and run. Finally I said to | Decades After Midlife Mark, A Frontier for Mental Health |
1004521_0 | The make-or-break phase of negotiations on the political future of Northern Ireland began today with Protestant and Roman Catholic leaders still sharply divided on how to end the sectarian warfare in this predominantly Protestant British province. The leaders continued to needle each other as the British and Irish Governments, sponsors of the peace talks, emphasized their deadline of April 9 for an agreement. If one is reached, it will be put to referendums in May in this British province and in the Irish Republic. If there is no agreement, or if one is reached but rejected by the voters, officials and experts feel, the result could be a return to widespread violence that could spread to England and to the Irish Republic to the south. Paul Murphy, Britain's politics minister for Northern Ireland, said, ''I am hoping and praying that the next three weeks will in fact produce the settlement that everyone knows has to be produced before we go into a referendum.'' Tim Pat Coogan, author of several standard reference works on the I.R.A., said that even if an agreement was reached by the deadline, it would not necessarily bring peace if dissidents -- Protestant and Catholic -- continued their violence. ''You could have a peace settlement and a war,'' he said. Essentially, the Catholics of Sinn Fein, the political wing of the Irish Republican Army and of the mainstream Social Democratic Labor Party, want the Irish Republic to have more influence in the North. But Protestant unionist parties fear this would be an erosion of British sovereignty. The Protestants want to remain British and worry that giving the Irish Republic more influence would lead eventually to the Republican goal of a united Ireland run from Dublin. Today, the politicians, after a three-week recess, returned to the talks at the Stormont complex in Belfast. Sinn Fein was returning after an 18-day suspension resulting from the Governments' finding that the I.R.A. was responsible for two killings in February. An aura of violence persists in the province. Over the weekend, Irish police south of the border, near Dundalk, found what they said was a Republican-made bomb being assembled for use in the North. In Belfast, the police were attacked with flaming gasoline bottles by a mob of Protestants attempting to enter a Catholic neighborhood. Security has been tightened at the Maze prison south of Belfast after a Protestant prisoner was killed, | Key Phase of Belfast Talks Begins With 2 Sides at Odds |
1004525_1 | are three quality ratings, one that grades tread life, another that rates traction and a third that grades a tire's ability to dissipate heat to avoid blowouts. The tread wear, traction and temperature labeling is required by the Uniform Tire Quality Grading system championed by Mr. Brenner, and allows consumers to quickly compare the quality of tire models. Mr. Brenner, a fiber and textile research scientist, worked for Johnson & Johnson and the Chemstrand Research Center. He joined the National Bureau of Standards in Washington in 1965 as chief of its textile and apparel technology center. He began his work on tire standards in 1967, when he became chief of the bureau's tire systems section. Mr. Brenner continued his work on tire labeling after becoming chief of the tire systems division at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration in 1971. He held several other posts before retiring as the chief of consumer information in the office of market incentives in 1985. Mr. Brenner published a number of articles and books about textiles, chemistry and tires, and was at the time of his death writing a book with a University of Maryland professor, Steven Spivak, called ''Essentials of Standardization for Managers, Engineers and Educators.'' The book is scheduled to be published by Marcel Dekker Inc. of New York. Mr. Brenner was born in Norfolk, Va. He graduated with a degree in chemistry from the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and earned a master's degree in chemistry from Polytechnic University in Brooklyn before serving as a second lieutenant in the Army in Europe in World War II. Survivors include his wife, Margaret Ann, of Silver Spring; his brother, L. Jack, of Cleveland Heights, Ohio; two daughters from his first marriage, Zoe, of Bethesda, Md., and Vivian, of Silver Spring, and five stepsons, R. William Powers of Silver Spring, Richard J. Powers of Madison, Va., Peter A. Powers of Eugene, Ore., Thomas A. Powers of Chantilly, Va., and David M. Powers of Ringwood, N.J. His first marriage, to the late Rose (Finkelstein) Brenner, ended in divorce in 1976. Correction: March 27, 1998, Friday Because of an editing error, an obituary on Tuesday about F. Cecil Brenner, a scientist and regulator who developed the national tire safety and performance rating system, cited his educational background incompletely. In addition to a master's degree in chemistry, he received a doctorate in polymer chemistry from Polytechnic University in Brooklyn. | F. Cecil Brenner, 79, Scientist Who Devised Tire Ratings |
1068802_0 | For the second year in a row, the New York State Education Commissioner and the Board of Regents proposed a sweeping plan yesterday to overhaul the state's increasingly costly and much-criticized program for educating children with disabilities. In general, the proposal would revamp the state's special-education programs by eliminating financial incentives that have encouraged schools to place mildly disabled students into separate, costlier classes. The plan requires the approval of the Legislature, where similar proposals have failed in the past amid lobbying by school officials and parents of disabled students, who have long feared that changes in the program would siphon money from it. The announcement of the plan came during a meeting yesterday in which the State Education Commissioner, Richard P. Mills, and the Board of Regents set their priorities for the 1999 legislative session. In addition to the change in special-education policy, the board and the Commissioner said they intended to press lawmakers and Governor Pataki to increase aid to public schools next year by $885 million, to $12.6 billion.The bulk of this aid, 84 percent, would go to districts in areas with high rates of poverty that have large numbers of students with limited proficiency in English. The districts include most of the state's largest cities, including New York, Rochester, Buffalo and Syracuse. The proposed changes to the method of state subsidies for educating students with physical, emotional, learning or other disabilities would end the practice of giving districts additional money for each student deemed disabled and placed in a special classroom, thus removing any financial incentive for such placements. Thousands of children are placed in special-education programs each year, in part because schools receive an extra $4,000 a year from the state for each child newly enrolled in such a program. The state aid had originally been intended to help school districts provide intensive care and services for children with severe disabilities, like blindness or mental retardation. But in recent years, a growing number of children with mild learning or behavioral problems have also been placed in the programs. As a result, special education has been attacked as a costly and cumbersome bureaucracy that relegates too many children, most of them black and Hispanic boys, into separate classrooms with virtually no hope of returning to regular classes. Under the Regents' new proposal, which would be phased in over seven years, each school district would receive a | Regents Seek Change in Special-Education Policy |
1068755_0 | The Protestant leader of Northern Ireland, David Trimble, accepted his share of the 1998 Nobel Peace Prize today and warned militant Roman Catholics against delays in turning over their arms caches. Mr. Trimble acknowledged that splinter groups on the pro-British side had weapons, too. But he said the Irish Republican Army and its political wing, Sinn Fein, were to blame for resurging tensions that have stalled the peace drive and cast a pall over the awards today. His Catholic counterpart, John Hume, who shared the prize, said that Mr. Trimble was premature to insist on disarmament, because the accord provides two years to achieve it. ''The real issue about guns and arms is that they have been totally silent,'' said Mr. Hume, the head of the Social Democratic and Labor Party. He added that some militants linked disarmament to surrender, a ''psychological factor'' that he predicted would diminish with time. Despite the recognition of continuing problems, the tone was one of thanks for obstacles surmounted. ''It is now up to political leaders on all sides,'' Mr. Hume said, to deliver ''agreed structures for peace that will forever remove the underlying causes of violence and division on our island.'' The laureates have come to personify hopes for peace in a province where 3,200 people have been killed in 30 years of conflict. On May 22 a referendum overwhelmingly endorsed the accord. Mr. Trimble is First Minister in the new provisional Assembly. But he has threatened to put off forming the multiparty Cabinet called for in the accord until paramilitary groups begin to hand in their weapons. ''Any further delay will reinforce dark doubts about whether Sinn Fein are drinking from the clear water of democracy or still drinking from the dark stream of fascism,'' Mr. Trimble, head of the Ulster Unionist Party, told an audience of 1,000 at City Hall. Disarmament is also blocking progress on prisoner releases and creating agencies to link Northern Ireland with Ireland. The chairman of the Nobel committee, Francis Sejersted, praised the two recipients. He called Mr. Hume ''the architect of the peace process'' and a bridge to Catholic hard-liners without whom any agreement would be meaningless. Mr. Trimble and Mr. Hume each seek to mollify extremists on their side. This week the deputy chief of the Ulster Unionist Party, John Taylor, told The Irish Times that conflicting views on how to proceed posed ''a possibility | 2 Ulster Leaders Accept Nobels And Trade Remarks at Ceremony |
1071987_2 | question of personalities has been posed by several members of the Security Council, particularly by Russia, quite clearly, but I think you have to consider the question of personalities as a function of the job that has to be performed,'' he said. ''Second,'' he went on, ''our thinking is that if we can agree on an effective system of continuous monitoring, one that provides adequate guarantees, we should be able to lift the embargo on Iraqi oil sales -- I'm not saying lift all the sanctions, there are other sanctions besides oil, and that's another problem.'' But, he said, ''The oil embargo has already been modified with the petroleum-for-food program. What happens to revenue from those sales is quite closely monitored, making sure they are used for the population and not for buying arms, for example. It shouldn't be that much more complicated to monitor the revenue from sales if the oil embargo is lifted. That's a sensitive issue. It's not something the Iraqis want.'' ''We haven't made detailed proposals; we're simply in the process of discussion,'' said Mr. Vedrine, who has been on the telephone in the last two days with Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright and the British Foreign Secretary, Robin Cook. ''We have expressed some ideas, but we think it has to be discussed with our Security Council partners,'' he said. Other French officials said controls could include monitoring Iraqi ports of entry to make sure that foreign goods bought with oil revenues were only those permitted by United Nations resolutions. -------------------- U.S. Considers More Oil for Food WASHINGTON, Dec. 22 (AP) -- The United States would be willing to consider expanding the United Nations program that permits Iraq to sell $5.2 billion worth of oil every six months, provided the proceeds are used for food and medicine, Under Secretary of State Thomas R. Pickering said today. Mr. Pickering added that the United States would take ''a careful look'' at a Russian proposal for an ''updated assessment'' of the operations of the special commission on Iraq. But he dismissed France's proposal to change the inspection system. The United States intends to keep relying on ''the technical and professional expertise'' of the commission, Mr. Pickering said. He also said the Russian Ambassador to the United States, Yuli M. Voronstov, who was recalled last week to protest the attack on Iraq, was due to return here this week. | France Seeks New U.N. System for Monitoring Iraqi Weapons |
1073213_3 | apologized and insisted, perhaps ingenuously, that he was seeking only to reflect Rumi's ideals. General Sumer refused to accept the apology and retorted, ''Whatever is necessary will be done about you.'' At the museum here, which houses not only Rumi's tomb but also his robes and original manuscripts of his poems in gloriously illuminated Persian, some Turkish visitors complain that the Government is suppressing part of the great man's message. ''I want to cleanse myself spiritually, to learn how to rid myself of worldly things and come closer to God,'' said a 21-year-old college student who wore a head scarf symbolizing her commitment to Islam and who asked to be identified only by her first name, Yadigar. ''But the state authorities don't want to see Mevlana as a spiritual guide,'' she said. ''They are afraid that religious devotion will lead people to rebel against state authority. That bothers me a lot.'' The force of Rumi's passion, especially his belief that the intellect cannot explain the ecstasy of love, has won him devoted followers throughout the Muslim world and beyond. Within a century after his death, his ideas began to penetrate the West, where they influenced cultural figures from Chaucer to Samuel Johnson. Recently they have enjoyed a new wave of popularity in the United States. A multimedia theatrical production based on Rumi's poems, ''Monsters of Grace,'' was performed recently in New York at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. The painter Cy Twombly has produced a series of Rumi-inspired paintings. A new compact disk features Rumi's poems read by Madonna, Goldie Hawn and other celebrities. Oliver Stone wants to turn his life into a feature film. ''He has answers to the great questions of our modern culture,'' said Kabir Helminski, an American scholar who has lectured widely on Rumi's philosophy and was in Konya for the celebration. ''But I do have my reservations about some of the distortions of his legacy. Some people consider him an exponent of mystical eroticism, or a kind of wild-man spirituality. They take his ecstatic spirit but ignore the discipline that should accompany it.'' Rumi looked forward to his death as ''the time of joyful meeting,'' and it came upon him on Dec. 17, 1273. Clergy of all faiths wept behind his funeral cortege. According to a contemporary account, a Greek Orthodox priest said in his eulogy, ''Rumi is the bread that everyone needs to eat.'' | Konya Journal; Festival of Rumi, Poet of Life's Dance |
1068041_7 | irrigation gear to water-stingy toilets. Sometimes, as in the Western states, the switch was inspired by the prospect of water shortages and the increasing costs of irrigation. At the same time, the best sites for dams had long since been exploited, and building new ones had become increasingly costly. Dam construction was also inhibited by growing concern about their negative ecological impact. So the emphasis, at least in the United States, has shifted from scrambling to expand water supplies to using water more efficiently. Water in the industrial world has also become cleaner in the last three decades. Many once-polluted rivers, lakes and streams have been cleared of industrial wastes, and treatment plants have long since made water universally drinkable in the developed countries. The Hudson River, like many American streams, was once given up for dead but today abounds with life. People can even swim in it -- unthinkable 30 years ago. Another ecological disruption is also being remedied. All across the country, from Maine to the Grand Canyon to California, the flow of water from dams is being readjusted and in some cases dams are being removed to accommodate aquatic ecosystems once again. The millennium is not here, however. The change in humans' handling of water has only begun even in the United States, where it is probably the farthest advanced. The continuing runoff of millions of tons of nitrogen from farm fields into rivers and streams alone, could negate many of the constructive efforts by choking the water with too many nutrients. And big dams are still being built, mainly in the developing world, as witnessed most strikingly by the biggest of all, the gigantic Three Gorges project under construction on the Yangtze River in China. There is a major wild card in all of this. Most climate scientists believe that emissions of gases like carbon dioxide will raise the earth's average global temperature by about 3.5 degrees over the next century. A warmer planet, many scientists say, would intensify the water cycle: Floods might become worse. But the land would dry out more and faster between rain storms, and where it seldom rains, the warmth would make droughts more severe. For now, at least, the big question is whether humanity can learn to use an irreplaceable but maybe adequate resource in a way that can slake everyone's thirst without continuing to damage the natural order. WATER | Pushing the Limits Of an Irreplaceable Resource |
1068048_2 | In his presentation last week, Dr. Hern argued that in many parts of the world the increase in human numbers is rapid and uncontrolled, that it invades and destroys habitats, and that by killing off many species it reduces the differentiation of nature. All of these features are characteristic of cancerous tumors, he said. This assessment was applauded by another member of the panel, Dr. Lynn Margulis of the University of Massachusetts, Boston, who is known for her coauthorship of another highly controversial theory known as the ''Gaia Hypothesis.'' The Gaia idea, the brainchild of an English theorist, Dr. James E. Lovelock, and Dr. Margulis, who is a microbiologist, is that the entire Earth deploys feedback mechanisms to maintain an environment hospitable to life. In this it resembles a gigantic living organism, proponents of the idea believe. Life on Earth has survived many crises, including mass extinctions caused by the impacts of asteroids and comets, Dr. Margulis said, and life will continue despite the threats created by humanity -- but with reduced diversity. She agreed with the notion that the human race is a kind of self-destructive cancer. ''For millions of years the Earth got along without human beings,'' she said, ''and it will do so again. The only question is the nature of the human demise that has already begun.'' Dr. Margulis quoted a line from the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche: ''The Earth is a beautiful place, but it has a pox called man.'' A different but complementary perspective was offered by Dr. Compton J. Tucker, a physical scientist at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Goddard Space Center. Dr. Tucker is an analyst of images of the Earth made by Landsat and other orbiting spacecraft. In particular, he keeps track of deforestation and other anthropogenic changes in the global habitat. ''In many regions, we've seen astonishingly rapid change since 1975,'' he said. ''Vast tracts of both rain forest and dry tropical forest have disappeared in the Amazon Basin as human communities expand and clear the land for cattle ranching. This has led to a monoculture dominated by cattle breeding, with losses of immense numbers of the species deprived of forest habitat.'' Several speakers cited United Nations statistics indicating that population growth rates in underdeveloped countries averaged only 1.77 percent a year between 1990 and 1995. The expectation for that period had been for a growth rate of 1.88 | Will Humans Overwhelm the Earth? The Debate Continues |
1068048_3 | said, ''and it will do so again. The only question is the nature of the human demise that has already begun.'' Dr. Margulis quoted a line from the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche: ''The Earth is a beautiful place, but it has a pox called man.'' A different but complementary perspective was offered by Dr. Compton J. Tucker, a physical scientist at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Goddard Space Center. Dr. Tucker is an analyst of images of the Earth made by Landsat and other orbiting spacecraft. In particular, he keeps track of deforestation and other anthropogenic changes in the global habitat. ''In many regions, we've seen astonishingly rapid change since 1975,'' he said. ''Vast tracts of both rain forest and dry tropical forest have disappeared in the Amazon Basin as human communities expand and clear the land for cattle ranching. This has led to a monoculture dominated by cattle breeding, with losses of immense numbers of the species deprived of forest habitat.'' Several speakers cited United Nations statistics indicating that population growth rates in underdeveloped countries averaged only 1.77 percent a year between 1990 and 1995. The expectation for that period had been for a growth rate of 1.88 percent. This suggests that the increase in the population growth rate in underdeveloped countries declined somewhat during that five-year period. But since 1930, when the world population was about 2 billion, the population has nearly tripled, and each doubling has occurred in a much shorter time period than the previous doubling period. The United Nations report projected that the world population could reach 9.4 billion by the year 2050. Demographers say that the population increase has leveled off in China (where the government limits family size) and that the rate of population increase has declined in Bangladesh and some other populous countries. But recent United Nations statistics identified 28 countries (20 of them in Africa) where fertility rates increased during the past decade. Among these countries was the United States, which has the third largest population after China and India, and where the fertility rate increased from 1.9 to 2.1 percent, largely because of Hispanic immigration. All the speakers at the symposium had expected vigorous criticism from the audience of anthropologists, but were surprised to encounter few strongly negative comments. ''Arguments over the accuracy of Malthus's views, future population trends and the Earth's carrying capacity are never-ending and never resolved,'' | Will Humans Overwhelm the Earth? The Debate Continues |
1068045_1 | research at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., who has found that estrogen naturally falls in men after about age 65. ''Three years ago, none of us would have thought that estrogen loss was a factor in male osteoporosis.'' Although men and women have estrogen, it is more abundant in women and plays a central role in female reproduction. The National Osteoporosis Foundation in Washington estimates that of the 10 million Americans who have osteoporosis, more than 1.5 million are men, and that half of women and 1 in 8 men over 50 will have an osteoporosis-related fracture. But because osteoporosis is underdiagnosed in men, the numbers for men are probably higher, the organization's literature says. Medical textbooks describe osteoporosis differently for men than for women. In women it is linked mainly to the sharp drop in estrogen after menopause, because estrogen is known to slow down the natural process of bone loss that occurs with age. In men, however, osteoporosis is said to result from abnormally low levels of testosterone, a sex hormone more plentiful in males. The cause of low testosterone is usually a rare condition called hypogonadism, in which the testicles are underactive. Two studies presented at last week's meeting indicate that estrogen plays a more central role than testosterone in osteoporosis in men. Researchers following residents of Framingham, Mass., over five decades studied 382 elderly white men for eight years, tracking bone density, estrogen levels and signs of hypogonadism. Men with the highest bone density also had the highest estrogen levels; the connection with hypogonadism was negligible. In another study, doctors in Germany measured bone density as well as estrogen and testosterone levels of 300 men with osteoporosis for five years. Forty percent of the men had low estrogen; 20 percent had low testosterone. ''We didn't see a pronounced effect of testosterone on the males' bone mineral density,'' said Dr. Peter H. Kaps, an orthopedic surgeon and the lead author. Dr. Pamela Taxel, assistant professor of medicine at the University of Connecticut Health Center in Farmington, said: ''These are suggestive findings, but larger studies are needed to understand the mechanism of estrogen and testosterone on bone health in men.'' Dr. Taxel is studying the use of estrogen supplements to treat men with osteoporosis. She said research was needed to develop a form of estrogen that helps men without causing side effects like prostate disease or impotence. | Weak Bones Among Men Are Linked To Estrogen |
1068168_0 | To the Editor: By scheduling the impeachment proceedings for the week of Dec. 14 (news article, Dec. 6), the House Judiciary Committee is refusing to put off the vote until the new Congress -- which will have five more Democrats -- is seated. Doing so allows five defeated Republican Representatives to cast a party-line vote in favor of impeachment against the will of the majority of voters in their districts. This is Henry J. Hyde's idea of justice? Surely most Americans do not agree. DANIEL T. ZAMOS No. Myrtle Beach, S.C., Dec. 7, 1998 | Punishment for Clinton: What's Meaningful?; Fairness Denied |
1066499_0 | IF you feel you have become a slave to Julia or Jacques, don't abandon your recipes all at once. And remember: the road to freedom begins with a familiar dish. Choose a favorite recipe, one you have enjoyed preparing, and think about how you might vary it by substituting ingredients or changing the proportions. (Do not try this, however, with cake or pastry; baking without following a formula is only for experts.) To start a stew or casserole, for example, fresh fennel could replace celery. If you like the direction the flavor has taken, you could intensify it by adding a few fennel seeds or a splash of Pernod, or even some fresh tarragon, which also imparts a subtle note of licorice. Some tomato puree can enrich a sauce that previously called for just chicken stock. Does the market have beautiful bunches of Swiss chard? They might be used in a dish designed for spinach. Another way to liberate yourself is to improvise with leftovers. Turn a stew into a soup by cutting the meat into smaller pieces and adding more broth and perhaps a starch, like cooked rice or noodles. Consider turning a vegetable dish, like sauteed mushrooms, into a pasta sauce. Use leftovers in a salad, topping greens with cold pieces of grilled meat or fish. Or dress yesterday's starch, like rice or pasta, with a sauce, which can then be baked to make a casserole. Top it with bread crumbs. Here are some other pointers to help you wing it: Always keep texture in mind when varying recipes or improvising. The texture of the ingredients, not the taste, is what affects how they cook. For example, to replace meaty fresh tuna, best served rare, you need a fish with similar density, like swordfish, rather than a more delicate flaky sea bass, which should be cooked more thoroughly. Taste and check seasonings as you go, but allow food that has been simmering to cool down for a minute before doing so. Do not hesitate to add a little salt -- sea salt is best -- to bring out flavor. More salt is first aid for many recipes. If you detect bitterness in a dish from an ingredient like mushrooms or radicchio, salting tends to cancel it out. (About the only way to modify heavy oversalting is to add starch, like potatoes.) A few drops of lemon juice can | The Road to Cookbook Independence |
1066536_0 | UNTIL recently, the baggage ''sizers'' used at airports to determine whether luggage can be carried aboard planes or must be checked were often little more than adornments. But increasing emphasis on on-time performance has led many airlines to draw a harder line against oversized carry-on luggage, contending that it shortchanges other passengers, slows down the boarding process and leads to costly flight delays. With that in mind, UAL's United Airlines has installed sizers at airports in New York (La Guardia), Los Angeles and Chicago (O'Hare), and plans to install them at 37 more. ''At first, 20 percent of our passengers at those airports had to check the bags they wanted to carry on,'' said Tony Molinaro, a United spokesman. ''Now it's down to 2 to 3 percent.'' Southwest Airlines is testing sizers at Los Angeles, San Diego and Phoenix -- also with apparent high compliance, perhaps because it notified its frequent fliers before the new regulations went into effect. But Continental Airlines dislikes sizers, so much so that last week it sued in California Superior Court to prohibit Delta Air Lines, which operates the baggage sizer that it jointly shares with Continental and America West at the San Diego airport, from imposing its baggage policies on Continental passengers. Continental also warned United and Denver International Airport not to install sizers at the three security checkpoints controlled by United and used by other carriers. ''We made a decision to invest almost $15 million to retrofit our planes with expanded overhead bins,'' said Ned Walker, a Continental spokesman. ''And rather than tell customers what they can't do, our policy will be to explain our guidelines and decide for ourselves if carry-on items will fit. You can have both heavy loads and good on-time performance.'' United, meanwhile, is adding the deeper bins to its entire Shuttle by United fleet, and expects to have them in all 50 planes within the next few months. But, Mr. Molinaro said, the airline is continuing to install sizers at the other 37 airports. Delta has sizers in six airports, but has not yet decided on others. Expect Shorter Vacations With their hectic schedules, the best many workers can manage is a few days off now and then. But once their work schedules lighten, they can take that lengthy, restful vacation they've dreamed about. Right? Don't bet on it. According to a recent World Tourism Organization study, global | Business Travel; U.S. airlines are in a bit of a dust-up over 'sizers' for passengers' carry-on luggage. |
1066582_0 | The Federal Government has warned that New York City could lose Federal aid if it continues to shunt disproportionate numbers of black and Latino children into special education. The city is a legitimate target. But the segregation that has raised red flags in Washington is common throughout the state -- and is due in part to a funding formula that penalizes districts that reduce special-education enrollment while rewarding those who keep enrollment as high as possible and have the highest per-pupil special-ed expenditures. Unless New York State junks this formula, it could find itself stripped of special-education aid and in violation of Federal civil rights laws. This is the second time in two years that the Federal Education Department's civil rights division has questioned why New York City funnels inordinately large numbers of black and Latino students into special-education classes, which often become holding pens for children who learn nothing and rarely graduate. The Board of Education agreed last year to take specific steps to alleviate the problem. But in last month's follow-up, Federal officials noted that many schools were still warehousing blacks and Latinos as well as children whose first language is not English. A two-year investigation by the United States Department of Education's office of civil rights found that African-American children in schools where the principals, faculty and student body are mainly white are most likely to end up in special-education classes. The highest incidence of referrals is found in schools with low poverty rates, high reading and math scores and large numbers of experienced, permanently certified teachers. Theoretically, these schools would be best equipped to deal with students who might need extra help. But these children are often dumped into special ed even when diagnostic tests reveal no need for it. Ethnic stereotypes play a role in disproportionate referrals. But so does the desire to get under-prepared children out of mainstream classes so they will not be tested, bringing down schoolwide scores. In addition, children are sometimes sent to special ed because mainstream teachers lack the time or skill to help them with basic reading problems, the prime cause of special-education referrals. This process is driven by a ''spend-to-get'' state funding formula that awards special-education aid based on how much schools spend for this purpose -- and makes it fiscal suicide for them to shrink their programs. The New York State Education Commissioner, Richard Mills, addressed the | A Special-Ed Warning for New York |
1066526_4 | and a space for tourist accommodations. To get moving, the project needed infrastructure, something hard to come by in a nation where most people still earn less than $1 a day. It also required political leadership, which many would say has also been in short supply. Before democratic reforms, Nepal was ruled by its royal family from 1960 to 1990. Since then, there have been a succession of failed coalition governments -- each one making its own political appointments to a succession of failed Lumbini development committees. ''There is no way to make plans when people know you won't be around for long and they cannot believe what you say,'' said Ram Lal Shrestha, a recently departed head of the Lumbini staff. ''Then there is the problem of the master plan. It is too ambitious for us. So we build a library, for instance -- who is going to pay to operate the air-conditioning?'' At present perhaps only 20 percent of the original master plan has made it off the drawing board. A handful of monasteries are complete and archeological work goes on. Three years ago, in the temple ruins near the pillar, a reddish-brown slab was found in a position that indicated it had been left as a marker. The stone was alien to the area, and Nepalese scholars have concluded that it denotes the precise location -- down to the inch -- of Buddha's birth. Other scholars are not so sure. ''Academically, it cannot be determined -- and I don't think there is any way to ever know for sure,'' said Hiroyuki Kawashima of the Japan Buddhist Federation. All in all, the present sluggishness made this a wise time for the Nepalese Government to solicit help. The United Nations Development Program has agreed to review the master plan and consult on future management of the project. Donors have said they would be more inclined to contribute to Lumbini if ledger books are kept open and politics kept out. In the few Lumbini monasteries, among some of the monks drinking tea, there is impatience: Why has it taken so long to pay the proper respect to Lord Buddha? When will millions come to this place and learn of its peace? But other monks are undisturbed. ''Why would anyone hurry to create gardens and buildings and monuments?'' they ask, echoing the Buddha in reply: Everything is transient and nothing endures. | Lumbini Journal; Buddha's Birthplace Hopes for a New Incarnation |
1073346_0 | WHEN the first loaf of white bread enriched with three vitamins and a mineral appeared in the grocery store in 1943, only a mad scientist could have imagined where the manipulation of food would lead. Today, the fastest-growing category of foods is made up of those that contain not just added vitamins and minerals, but also elements intended to prevent heart disease and cancer or to fight colds and depression. Called nutraceuticals, designer foods or functional foods, these pumped-up products blur the line between food and medicine. They are causing confusion among Federal regulators and the food industry, and concern among nutritionists and doctors. ''Consumers are looking toward self-medication and for ways to enhance their health,'' said Dr. Michael Heasman, a senior research fellow at the Center for Food Policy at Thames Valley University in London. ''It's sort of a tidal wave waiting to crash, driven by corporate ambition to add more value in a basically static food market, and by baby boomers disillusioned with conventional health care.'' There's calcium in Tropicana orange juice and echinacea in Fresh Samantha drinks; Stonyfield yogurt has L. reuteri bacteria to protect against salmonella and E. coli 0157:H7. Psyllium has been added to cereal, frozen entrees, bread and pasta in Kellogg's Ensemble line. As functional foods have moved from natural-food stores to supermarkets, sales have reached $17 billion, said Gene Grabowski, the vice president for communications of the Grocery Manufacturers of America in Washington. ''According to several surveys we've taken, people would rather get their cholesterol-lowering elements or prevent osteoporosis or hypertension through tasty foods instead of pills,'' he said. ''You are going to see a barrage of functional foods in 1999 and 2000.'' The problem is that this trend is moving faster than Federal regulation. Are these new products food additives, dietary supplements or new drugs? Each of those is regulated differently. While new drugs must always have approval of the Food and Drug Administration, for instance, dietary supplements are barely regulated at all. And that leaves the public inadequately protected, because there is often little scientific evidence of their efficacy to begin with, and because there are no standards for their purity or for their levels in food. Right now, a delegation from the Grocery Manufacturers has been meeting with the F.D.A. to lobby on the definition of functional foods and on how they should be regulated. The list of participants reads | A Little Medicine With Your Food? |
1072060_1 | several children wanted to know when they could start playing with it. While the box says it is for children 3 to 7, it was clear from my students' responses that children as old as 10 enjoy the program. After exploring the activities section of the game, which stars the Arthur character of the books by Marc Brown and of PBS's most popular children's show, I quickly realized why my students were so enthusiastic. There are five activity areas, all of them fun but none of them particularly educational. I loved the Deep Dark Sea, where I navigated a scuba-diving Arthur around the hazards of the deep sea but was horrified that this could in any way be classified as educational. The game is pure entertainment and does not, as the publisher states, help children learn about world geography or ocean life. In Frankenfish, children can combine features of different fish to create new sea creatures with funny names; I found it equally disappointing. While it provides some basic information about fish types, the information is superficial. Other sections provide useful reading exercises. In Treasure Hunt, the player matches pictures with the words identifying them to move along a path to a treasure. If the given word is ''mom'' and the player correctly clicks on a picture of Arthur's mom, the player progresses three spaces, one space for every letter in the word. When you win the game, you get to choose what to do with the treasure and read a newspaper article about your decision. At a store run by D.W., Arthur's sister, players can hone their counting skills by providing change to pay for various items. The activity also has a cafe where the player follows D.W.'s direction for various recipes by dragging various ingredients to her mixing bowl. My students quickly discovered that they did not need to listen to D.W. and that there was little consequence to not following a recipe. D.W. does not even react when the player puts three worms in the mixing bowl rather than eggs. Toy Copter also proved disappointing. The player navigates a remote-controlled fire helicopter around a room while trying to drop water balloons and firefighters on targets. Although that was initially fun for my students, they quickly tired of it and moved on. Like too much of this program, the educational content seemed to be an afterthought. LIBRARY/READING TUTORS | Arthur Is Mostly Just Fun |
1070084_2 | innovation will continue but more of the work will shift to academic laboratories and big drug companies. Congress has vowed to double the annual budget of the National Institutes of Health the next five years from last year's $13.6 billion. This year's budget is already up to $15.6 billion. And big pharmaceutical companies, which at first largely ignored biotechnology, have now adopted its techniques, which involve using genetic engineering, genetics and other advanced insights into how cells operate. Still, small biotechnology companies, like their counterparts in electronics and computers, can often move faster and more efficiently into new scientific areas than can big companies. The biotechnology industry has seen such hard times before, most recently from 1992 to 1994. Some executives and analysts think this is just another cyclical downturn, tied to the overall volatility in the stock market this year. Indeed, biotechnology stocks have rallied with the rest of the market in recent weeks. ''I've heard of gloom and doom already three or four times,'' said Dr. Alain Schreiber, president of Vical Inc., a San Diego gene therapy company. But others say that investors have permanently soured on biotechnology and that the entire system by which biotechnology companies have been created and financed is breaking down. ''We're trying to figure out what makes sense as a business model for this industry,'' said Brian Atwood, a partner at Brentwood Venture Capital in Menlo Park, Calif. ''Nobody's figured that out yet.'' It is not that the technology has failed. Although it has not produced as many new drugs as early investors had anticipated, biotechnology is now bearing fruit. Ten drugs developed by biotechnology companies were approved or recommended for approval in the third quarter of this year, and more than 280 drugs are in middle- or late-stage clinical trials. And the unraveling of the genetic code presents a cascade of opportunities. The problem is the long times and huge sums required to develop these drugs. To get money, companies must sell shares to the public years before they have products or profits. The stock price can languish while the company conducts clinical trials. While some drugs succeed and investors are amply rewarded, many others fail and the stock price plummets. Investors have pumped an estimated $90 billion into public biotechnology companies since 1980, according to Vector Securities International, an investment bank specializing in health care. Yet over all, the investment has | THE MARKETS: Market Place -- Weed-Out Time in Biotechnology; Once-Hot Industry Feels the Impact of Corporate Darwinism |
1070523_0 | A Digital Dialogue With Michelangelo Pushing the boundaries of what computer technology can do to help art historians, a team of four I.B.M. scientists at the company's T. J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, N.Y., have joined with Jack V. Wasserman, professor emeritus of art history at Temple University in Philadelphia. Their mission: to solve the mysteries surrounding Michelangelo's Florentine Pieta. The nearly eight-foot-tall marble sculpture in the Museo dell'Opera del Duomo in Florence has fascinated scholars, biographers and art historians for decades. Considered one of Michelangelo's finest pieces, it is said to have been created for the top of the artist's tomb. But one day, after Michelangelo had spent a decade working on it, he took a sledgehammer to the sculpture, breaking off hands, arms and legs (later reattached by an assistant) and nearly destroying the work before one of his servants stopped him. By closely examining the sculpture with computer technology, Dr. Wasserman hopes to discover not simply why the artist attacked the work but how he originally conceived the sculpture. Since the project was announced in June, scientists using special photography equipment, lasers, X-ray machines and computers have been taking three-dimensional digital photographs of every inch of the statue. The work is done at night after the museum closes. The I.B.M. scientists piece the photographs together to make a three-dimensional computer image of the Pieta, which enables Dr. Wasserman to study the sculpture from all angles. He is able to examine the contours of the chiseled stone and zoom in on body parts to study them for tool marks. He can remove the parts of the statue that Michelangelo had removed, and study them individually. He can also get a bird's-eye view of the statue, turn it and examine the relationship of the parts as seen from above. ''These are things I couldn't do so easily without the help of the computerized image,'' Dr. Wasserman said. ''I would have had to spend time looking at the piece on scaffolding, and that wasn't possible.'' Now, six months into the project, some discoveries have come to light about the sculpture, which features the figures of Nicodemus, the Virgin Mary and Mary Magdalene supporting the body of Christ. ''Many scholars believe the right arm of Christ is embracing Mary Magdalene,'' Dr. Wasserman said. ''But seen from above, the arm in no way touches her, with the exception of the | Inside Art |
1068949_1 | from the Moscow apartment and offices of Sergei Lisovsky, an advertising mogul with close ties to the financier Boris A. Berezovsky. The investigation is seen as another sign of the plummeting political fortunes of Mr. Berezovsky, the most visible of Russia's so-called oligarchs, and a sign of more aggressive tax collection by the cash-strapped Government. Celestine Bohlen (NYT) SWITZERLAND: RUSSIAN CLEARED OF MOB TIES -- A Swiss court cleared Sergei Mikhailov, a Russian businessman accused of heading a major organized crime family in Moscow, of charges that he belonged to a criminal organization. His acquittal was a blow to the Swiss police and prosecutors, who contended that he had led a gang known as the Solntsevo group, which started out in Moscow before spreading across Europe. (Reuters) FRANCE: RIGHTIST RIFT GROWS -- The split in France's far-right National Front Party widened as its leader, Jean-Marie Le Pen, expelled his longtime deputy, Bruno Megret, and several of Mr. Megret's supporters from the organization. The two men had been fighting for control over the party; Mr. Megret wanted to make the xenophobic and racist image of the group more respectable. Marlise Simons (NYT) NORTHERN IRELAND: SLOW ROAD TO PEACE -- Prime Minister Bertie Ahern of Ireland said he doubted significant progress in the peace effort in Northern Ireland was likely before the end of the year. He cited a report by the Irish national television that the Irish Republican Army had restated its refusal to disarm in the near future. James F. Clarity (NYT) ITALY: TOWER 'SUSPENDERS' DELAYED -- Heavy rain delayed the first steps in a plan to attach steel ''suspenders'' to the Leaning Tower of Pisa in the latest effort to insure that the monument does not topple. The engineer overseeing the work said two sets of two-inch-thick cables had been moved to the base of the 12th-century tower but could not be raised higher along the edifice until the weather improved. (AP) ASIA INDONESIA: SUHARTO SON ACCUSED -- Two days after questioning former President Suharto about his financial affairs, prosecutors named his youngest son, Hutomo Mandala Putro, as a suspect in a corruption case involving a land deal. Two other Suharto sons have been questioned about their financial dealings, but Mr. Hutomo is the first to be named officially as a suspect in a corruption case. Seth Mydans (NYT) INDIA: STRIKE HITS WEST BENGAL -- Trade unions and left-wing | World Briefing |
1071023_16 | who prefer to do their investing close to home. Speyer, however, was a much more worldly figure; he had traveled widely, and his German was fluent. He tried at first to build in China, and when that didn't work out he turned to Germany. He completed the Messeturm in 1990 and a building in Berlin last year. Speyer now has offices in Paris, London, Berlin, Frankfurt and Sao Paulo. He has, in effect, become the merchant banker, the global figure, he had dreamed of being. I once heard him blithely tell a meeting of his executive staff that ''the European business establishment'' was ''furious'' about the sacking of the chairman of a Swiss bank. There are any number of other guys who control more square feet than Speyer does, but none of them can tell you what the European business establishment thinks without consulting The Financial Times. Speyer and his first wife separated in 1987. That should have marked the end of Tishman Speyer, but the business relationship was, by all accounts, undisturbed. ''It was about the most decent divorce I've ever heard of,'' Bob Tishman says. ''There was no reason in the world to destroy what we built up over 20-something years.'' In fact, Tishman still has an emeritus role at the firm. Speyer, meanwhile, married Katherine in 1991. In addition to three children from his first marriage, he has a 6-year-old daughter from his second. Speyer says that on his 40th birthday he decided that the time had come to ''give back.'' This is about 20 years earlier than the point at which the average mogul reaches the stage of philanthropy. Speyer, of course, believed strongly in the old-fashioned tradition of public-spiritedness; he also aspired to something that could not be had around his conference table. As a young man, Speyer had served on the board of the Jewish Guild for the Blind, one of the traditional charities that the old-line families had supported. In the early 80's, he began operating at a different level. He became chairman of the Dalton School, where his children went, and then, in very rapid succession, joined the boards of Columbia University, the Modern and the New York City Partnership, an organization of C.E.O.'s. The most exclusive of these clubs was clearly the Modern, which Speyer was invited to join in 1982. The Rockefellers had been co-founders of the museum, and David | The Anti-Trump |
1071271_1 | go a year ago. ''The Pope's visit was a factor in a process, and we have yet to see where and how it will end,'' said Marifeli Perez-Stable, a professor of political sociology at the City University of New York who is writing a book about Cuba in the 1950's. ''The visit itself was possible because the Government had already embarked on that process.'' The changes evident in Cuba this year are the result of a re-evaluation of priorities that began in the early 1990's, when the Government, overwhelmed by world events and exhausted by its own economic crisis, finally recognized that it was time to switch tactics. At the same time, there has been a shift of power and attitude that has enabled European countries, through the European Union, to become more assertive about Cuba just when the United States had begun to lose interest. An intelligence report released by the Pentagon last May concluded that Cuba was no longer a threat to American security. All these elements have been present for a while, but it took the Pope's visit to get the world's attention. In the last 11 months alone, the Spanish Government named an ambassador to Havana, and the King and Queen of Spain announced they will visit next spring. Italy's Foreign Minister, Lamberto Dini and the Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien visited the island. Guatemala and the Dominican Republic established full diplomatic relations with Cuba. And Cuba's President, Fidel Castro, embarked on highly publicized tours of Portugal, Jamaica, Barbados, the Dominican Republic and Grenada. At the same time, President Clinton ordered a lifting of the ban on direct flights to Cuba and increased to $1,200 the amount of money Cubans here can send to relatives on the island each year. And the Human Rights Commission of the United Nations voted down an American-sponsored resolution condemning Cuba's human rights practices. The Cuban Government allowed the Associated Press to open a bureau in Havana and granted exit visas to the family of the baseball player Orlando (El Duque) Hernandez. About 100 political prisoners were released and, while other Cubans have been apprehended, the number of political prisoners is now far lower than it has been in a long time. Two years ago, there were about 1,000 political prisoners; today, there are anywhere between 300 and 400, according to Elizardo Sanchez Santa Cruz, one of the leading dissidents in | The World; In Cuba, the Grinch Takes a Holiday |
1071279_0 | To the Editor: Re ''The Wall Street Recruiting Bowl'' (Nov. 29): As my own plunge into the working world looms closer, I've grown increasingly appreciative that I attend a college that makes internships financially feasible for students by providing a stipend. For the future investment bankers in the article, this benefit may be less important. But it is crucial for students like me, whose interests lie somewhere off Wall Street and who can't afford to forgo a summer's earnings. Many internships pay little or nothing, even though they provide invaluable experience. Last summer, with help from a program at my college, I completed two internships in Minnesota -- at a district attorney's office, as a victim-and-witness assistant, and in the Attorney General's office, drafting legislation to enable agencies to better serve domestic-violence victims. Do I worry about finding a job? Of course. But I worry far less about succeeding in it. I've gained confidence in my ability to rise to the work world's challenges because I've tested myself, in a thoughtful, substantive way. No job fair or recruiting visit could do that. HEIDI HAGHIGHI Northampton, Mass., Dec. 11 The writer is a junior at Smith College. | The Right Tools |
1071203_2 | and I knew that they only hired until about age 40, and so the window was narrowing,'' he said. ''I went for a prayer walk. And though it wasn't quite like Saul on the road to Damascus, I felt a sense of assurance that Testamints was going to happen.'' He turned down Continental's offer and, with $130,000 in capital raised from local Christian businessmen, created Food for Thought (later renamed Testamints Inc.) in Randolph, N.J. Again he went to Mr. Schindler, who was more receptive now that Mr. Bontempo had both a business plan and financing. Mr. Schindler agreed to produce Testamints in three flavors, with the design of a cross on every mint and a passage from Scripture on each package of 12. (Mr. Schindler said he also put posters in the German production plant, assuring workers that the candies were intended to be inspirational, not sacrilegious.) ''Each one is meant to be encouraging,'' Mr. Bontempo said of the messages. ''There aren't any 'turn or burn' selections.'' An example is ''We love because He first loved us'' (1 John 4:19). TESTAMINTS hit the market in 1996 and quickly became a big seller in Christian bookstores. Mr. Bontempo expects revenues to reach $3 million this year, up from $1 million the first year. QVC, the shopping channel, recently started selling the confections in collectors' tins. Testamints doesn't divulge earnings but says it contributes 10 percent of profits to Christian ministries. After getting the business going, Mr. Bontempo decided to replace himself as chief executive last year, though he remains the majority shareholder. He handed the reins to Alfred Poe, most recently the president of the Campbell Soup Company's meal enhancement group. Mr. Poe has since expanded the product line to fruit sours and Promise Pops, which are likewise wrapped in Scriptural sayings, and plans to introduce Spanish-language Testamints soon. A born-again Christian, Mr. Poe said his goal is to reach further into the secular market, so that ''you can find a Testamint wherever you find a Life Saver.'' Mr. Bontempo, meanwhile, has set out in new directions. In 1997, he was the co-founder, with Valerie Fritz, of the Wee Witness Clothing line, which includes Bibbles -- baby bibs with Bible verse. By the end of this month, he said, Appalachian Inc., a large distributor of Christian products, will have the apparel in 4,000 stores. Spreading the Gospel to the masses, | The Gospel, With Sugar on Top |
1066315_1 | northern capital, and Dublin, the capital of the Irish Republic, said Mr. Mitchell's discussions with Roman Catholic and Protestant leaders had indicated that the Clinton Administration was worried about the possible breakdown of the agreement. The accord has reached a standstill over several issues. They include disarming the Irish Republican Army and creating governmental structures that are to lead to more power for the northern Catholic minority and for the Catholic Irish Republic in the affairs of the predominantly Protestant British province of Ulster. On Sunday, Mr. Mitchell met at a hotel in Cork, south of Dublin, with the Prime Minister Bertie Ahern of Ireland, after he had received two awards for his work as a peacemaker. Mr. Mitchell said that he was on an ''entirely private'' visit and that although he was not officially representing the White House, he would brief Samuel R. Berger, President Clinton's national security adviser, or his assistant, Jim Steinberg, this week. ''I'm not surprised there are difficulties,'' Mr. Mitchell said in an interview. He added that he was ''encouraging all the people involved'' to end the impasse. ''It would be a huge tragedy if this were to fail because of inability to implement the agreement,'' he said. Mr. Mitchell, chairman of the talks until the agreement was reached on April 10, said he was not considering a formal return to the peace effort as a mediator. He is now a lawyer in the law firm of Verner, Liipfert, Bernhard, McPherson & Hand in Washington. He talked with Gerry Adams, president of Sinn Fein, the political wing of the I.R.A., and with the two leaders of the new Northern Ireland Assembly, which is to put the provisions of the peace accord into effect in 18 months. The two leaders, David Trimble, a Protestant unionist and the First Minister of the Assembly, and his deputy, Seamus Mallon, a Catholic nationalist, are to visit Washington early in December and are expected to seek meetings with President Clinton. He also spoke with John Hume, head of the Catholic mainstream Democratic Labor Party, and David Ervine, head of the Progressive Unionist Party, which has ties to Protestant paramilitary groups. He did not talk with the Rev. Ian Paisley, head of the hard-line Democratic Unionist Party, which boycotted the peace talks and attacks the agreement as treachery that will lead to the subsuming of the North into the Irish Republic. | Ex-Senator Returns to Ulster As Peace Effort Starts to Stall |
1066328_1 | enterprises out of difficulty in three years is absolutely achievable,'' Mr. Sheng said. It remained unclear, though, whether the plan remains realistic. Many Chinese are already suffering economically from the severe floods last summer, from the huge slump in the rest of Asia and from the growing unemployment problem. But Mr. Sheng's highly publicized news conference at least sent a clear signal that the Government remains firmly committed to try Prime Minister Zhu Rongji's bitter-pill brand of economic overhaul. At the news conference, Mr. Sheng also insisted that a previously announced policy of ''de-linking'' the Communist Party, Government ministries, the army and the police from their business interests would be effectively accomplished by the end of this year. Business experts have long maintained that China's Government organizations should shed their businesses to curb corruption. But it is highly unlikely that these agencies can truly divest themselves of the thousands of hotels, stores and restaurants they own in four weeks. Significantly, Mr. Sheng's remarks came just three days after Mr. Zhu re-emerged from a few months in the shadows, taking center stage with a very public tour of Liaoning Province, a center of large inefficient state-owned factories. Mr. Zhu's relative silence on economic matters this fall had been taken by many foreign experts as a sign that the central leadership had put on hold his ''get tough'' economic reforms, which have resulted in substantial unemployment and labor unrest, even as they have improved business efficiency. But last week the voluble Mr. Zhu again came on strong, praising state-owned enterprises in Liaoning that had turned a profit for the first time, generally through greater efficiency and by firing employees. ''If Liaoning, one of the major industrial bases in China, can realize the objective of reform of state-owned enterprises, the rest of the country can surely achieve this goal,'' he said. He added that the central Government would allocate close to $1 billion this year to help laid-off workers. The strong statements by both Mr. Zhu and Mr. Sheng were surprising, since economists both in and outside of China recently observed that the Government had slowed the restructuring of state industries, instead pumping money into them to stimulate economic growth. But Mr. Sheng said that the Government plans to stay its course, since there are signs the economy is improving and some of the most bloated state industries have been effectively pruned down. | China Says It Has Not Wavered on Plans for Industrial Overhaul |
1066282_5 | plant life. But he and a graduate student, James Pollack, proposed that the variations were instead caused by wind storms and blowing Martian dust, which turned out to be right. Dr. Sagan went to Cornell in 1968 and stayed there until he died. His influence grew as he edited a leading journal and helped found the American Astronomical Society's Division for Planetary Sciences, raising his field's status. Division membership soared from 100 or so in 1970 to about 1,400 today. As an explorer, Dr. Sagan played important roles in helping NASA loft the world's first wave of interplanetary probes, including ones to Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. He was on the team that set two landers on Mars in 1976. The craft, to his dismay, found no hint of life. Far from giving up the extraterrestrial hunt, he increasingly looked toward the stars. In 1975 and 1976, Dr. Sagan and Dr. Drake searched for alien civilizations with the huge dish antenna at Arecibo, Puerto Rico. The radio telescope, the world's largest, had never before been so used. In 1982, Dr. Sagan rushed to the defense of such work after Senator William Proxmire tried to get it cut from the Federal budget as a waste of money. First, after a tete-a-tete, he got the Senator to end his criticism. Then, he won public backing for such hunts from 70 of the world's top scientists, including seven Nobel laureates. ''We urge the organization of a coordinated, worldwide, and systematic search for extraterrestrial intelligence,'' Dr. Sagan's group wrote in Science, the nation's foremost scientific journal. Part of his growing influence came from the great popularity of his books, most of which were best sellers. ''The Dragons of Eden'' (Random House, 1977) won a Pulitzer Prize. Others included ''Broca's Brain'' (Random House, 1979) and ''Cosmos'' (Random House, 1980). ''Contact'' (Simon & Schuster, 1985), his only fictional work, told of a radio-telescope hunt that stumbled on an alien civilization. Dr. Sagan became increasingly political in the 1980's. In books, talks and protests, he faulted nuclear-arms testing, the Reagan Administration's Star Wars anti-missile plan and, inspired by a dust storm on Mars, warned that nuclear war could result in a smoke-shrouded, deeply frozen Earth that he and colleagues called ''nuclear winter.'' His leap from the ivory tower to television studios and executive suites annoyed some peers. Science magazine in 1982 looked askance at The | Even in Death, Carl Sagan's Influence Is Still Cosmic |
1067423_37 | University Hospital, in Philadelphia, where During and Leone now work, was also doing the procedure. That month, nine therapists and social workers gathered to discuss the new program Jacob was starting at the Saint Agnes rehabilitation center, where the typical disabled child receives $33,000 a year in government-financed services. Jacob's home therapists were there to advise the school therapists who would be taking over. Richard and Jordana took turns rocking their 2 1/2-year-old and giving him a bottle. ''He has been making tremendous strides,'' Richard said. Adler, the speech therapist, explained how much of her time was spent working on chewing and swallowing. She didn't say it, but most Canavan children wind up on feeding tubes. ''He'll drink from a cup, but there's still spillage on the sides,'' she said. She warned that he sometimes choked on solids, ''a bit of a safety issue.'' As if on cue, Jacob began gagging on a waffle Jordana was feeding him, coughing and turning red. The room went dead. ''Breathe,'' said Jordana. There was a moan and Jacob's normal color returned. ''He never used to cough so well,'' said Nancy Wolff, his physical therapist. ''This is good.'' Someone asked if he could flip a switch, and his occupational therapist said no. When the center's medical director, Dr. Maria Pici, asked what gains he had made, the physical therapist said he could roll on his side if she helped. ''If I give him minimal facilitation depending on his mood and I tell him, 'Jacob bring your arm over, bring your leg over,' and of course I'm aligning him, he can roll,'' Wolff said. They asked what Jacob liked. ''Human contact,'' said Wolff. ''And silliness. He loves silliness.'' ''Gassy noises, he loves them,'' Richard said. ''He's there,'' his physical therapist said. ''Definitely,'' his occupational therapist said. Jacob's Oct. 21 report from Children's Hospital in Philadelphia showed no new myelin. While researchers kept the other children's results confidential, parents talked, and Jordana learned that none of the children's M.R.I.'s showed myelin. Or, as Jordana put it, ''at least not yet.'' Still, she saw potential in another new development. Jacob's ophthalmologist had found evidence of new myelin in his eyes. It wasn't likely to help Jacob see better, but the doctor found it ''fascinating.'' Some families grew discouraged. One dropped out, and even Helene Karlin had mixed feelings. ''I don't even want to talk to the other | Fighting for Jacob |
1067653_2 | France. FRANCE did indeed have to overcome sympathies for Serbia that date from World War I, but as recently published memoirs by a British commanding general of the United Nations peacekeepers in Bosnia, Sir Michael Rose, confirm, Britain was strongly opposed to heavy NATO bombing raids that the Americans kept wanting to launch against the Bosnian Serbs. Prime Minister John Major's conservative Government feared that the Serbs would retaliate by attacking the peacekeepers. The impasse was not broken until President Jacques Chirac came to power in France in 1995 and mobilized British and American support for a policy with more military muscle, after the Serbs overran the United Nations ''safe area'' in Srebrenica and massacred Muslim civilians. NATO did go ahead with a strategic bombing campaign and the Serbs, after suffering other setbacks on the ground, agreed to a cease-fire and a beefed-up NATO peacekeeping operation that finally put American troops, along with others, on the ground alongside the French and British. The Labor Government of Prime Minister Tony Blair has begun moving closer to French ideas for making Europe capable of an autonomous defense within NATO, but it has also made privileged British relations with the United States a declared strategic objective. That is much too abject a policy for France, French officials say. After all, Louis XVI gave the Marquis de Lafayette 6,000 troops to help George Washington in 1777 not because the King shared Lafayette's enthusiasm for the revolutionaries but to make trouble for the British, who were his enemy. Ever since, French-American relations have been like a long-running marriage, frequently warmed by frictions. De Gaulle restored pride to a nation humiliated by defeat in World War II, often at American expense. ''The French need to take pride in France,'' de Gaulle explained to his acolyte Alain Peyrefitte in 1962. ''Otherwise, they fall into mediocrity, fight with each other and head for the bistro.'' Henry Kissinger understood. ''De Gaulle was not anti-American in principle,'' he wrote in his book ''Diplomacy'' (Touchstone/Simon & Schuster). ''He was willing to cooperate whenever, in his view, French and American interests genuinely converged. Thus during the Cuban missile crisis, American officials were astonished by de Gaulle's all-out support -- the most unconditional backing extended to them by any allied leader.'' DE GAULLE dominated Europe, but he didn't want anyone else to -- not the Soviet Union, certainly, but not the United States, | The World; The French Aren't Alone in Having Gall |
1067643_0 | Smoke Signal | |
1069832_1 | Sloan Survey, a collaboration of researchers at eight institutions, plans to create a three-dimensional map of a quarter of the sky. It uses two telescopes at an observatory in southern New Mexico, one that performs the initial scans and another for follow-up studies. Among other things, the project aims to determine the red shifts for about a million galaxies and 100,000 quasars. Rethinking Mars The first detailed topographical survey of the north pole of Mars has been completed, and the results may force some changes in theories about the planet. Using a laser altimeter aboard the Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft, a team of researchers has determined that although the Martian ice cap is about 10,000 feet thick, it sits in a bowllike depression that is about 16,000 feet below the average elevation at the equator. That poses problems for a common theory about water on Mars, that it traveled from the pole to the equator in a subsurface aquifer system. The new elevation data show that it would have been practically impossible for such transport to occur. The survey also showed that the ice cap is smaller than previously thought, with a volume about half that of the Greenland ice sheet. Determining how much water there is on Mars, and what happened to it, is crucial to unlocking the planet's history. Vulcanology From Afar Vulcanologists like to sample the gases produced by volcanoes, ''reading'' them for hints of the activity within. But gathering gas samples in or near an active volcano can be, and has been, lethal. Two reports in a recent issue of Nature, however, demonstrate that remote sensing of volcanic gases is now possible. The studies, at Popocatepetl in Mexico and Mount Etna in Italy, make use of an instrument called a Fourier-transform infrared spectrometer. The spectrometer detects infrared light as it passes through, and is absorbed by, a plume of volcanic gas. Because different gases absorb different frequencies of light, the composition of the plume can be determined. The only problem is finding a source of infrared light. Hot rocks or lava are one such source, and occasionally scientists have gotten lucky and located lava in the right place to take readings. Other times an infrared lamp has been used, although placing one in the field is often as hazardous as trying to sample gases. The two new techniques find their infrared in the sky. The Etna | OBSERVATORY |
1069877_2 | Park,'' a genteel 18-inch-by-22-inch oil on canvas, painted around 1892, of a mother and child at Conservatory Water, otherwise known as Central Park's model-boat pond at 72d Street, just off Fifth Avenue. Nobody knows how Mr. Burt acquired the painting, but the view in Bronxville is that it no doubt went well in his living room. Paul Provost, the director of American paintings and sculpture at Christie's, speculated that Mr. Burt might have bought ''Central Park'' at a Manhattan art gallery in the 1920's or 30's -- a time when Modernism made Hassam look old-fashioned -- for less than $1,000. THE painting was hung in the reading room, where the windows were left open in summer to New York humidity and flies. Meanwhile the stock market rose and fell, then rose again. By 1980, the painting was appraised at $150,000; by 1987, at $1 million and by 1991, at $1.75 million. It went out for exhibitions in New York in 1980 and 1994. Starting in the 1980's, the library staff was asked to keep its value quiet, given the building's limited security. By February, when the market in American art was flourishing -- fueled by new money on Wall Street -- another appraisal valued the painting at $4 million. This increase was a surprise, and ''Central Park'' was off the wall and in storage at Christie's within days. ''Almost hours,'' said Jayne Warman, a member of the library board and an art historian. Ms. Campagna said she and the library board immediately began dreaming of renovations that otherwise might have been financed by a tax increase, but they first had to get a court judgment to make sure they could sell the painting in the first place. By September, Judge Albert J. Emanuelli of Surrogate Court in White Plains ruled that the sale of the painting was consistent with Mr. Burt's wishes for ''embellishment'' of the library. The auction was set for Dec. 2 at Christie's on Park Avenue. A few Bronxville residents said the painting should remain in the library, but they are viewed as misguided sentimentalists. ''The bidding started at $1.4 million,'' said Ms. Campagna. ''It went up by the hundred thousands. And it kind of got stalled in the two sixes for a while and then sped up. Then it got stuck in the three fives for a while. And then it sped up again.'' Ms. Campagna | Suburban Librarian's Off-the-Wall Bonanza |
1069868_0 | The British and Irish Governments moved today to deal with rising tension between the Protestant majority and the Roman Catholic minority in this British province. The hostility stems from the lagging peace effort and from an old dispute about a Protestant parade through a Catholic area. The police fear new violence. The offices of Prime Ministers Tony Blair of Britain and Bertie Ahern of the Irish Republic made it clear that they wanted results before Christmas. The Prime Ministers apparently talked to Northern leaders by phone today, urging compromise. ''There are so many sharks in the water,'' said David McKittrick, author of several standard reference works on Northern Ireland. ''But it would be overstating it to say the thing is on the point of collapse.'' The work of the new Northern Ireland Assembly, which is supposed to enact the peace agreement, has stalled over a dispute about when the Irish Republican Army must disarm. Protestant unionists, who want to remain part of Britain, say it must start very soon. Catholic nationalists, who want all of Ireland united, point out that the agreement stipulates only disarmament by May 2000. Recent days have seen sharper invective between David Trimble, the Protestant who is first minister of the assembly, and officials of Sinn Fein, the I.R.A. political wing. Mr. Trimble has barred Sinn Fein from full participation in the peace effort until the I.R.A. begins to disarm. Last Thursday, in his speech accepting the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo, Mr. Trimble described ''dark doubts about whether Sinn Fein is drinking from the clear stream of democracy, or still drinking from the dark stream of fascism.'' Sinn Fein officials said that Mr. Trimble was trying to provoke an I.R.A. attack, but that it would continue to observe the cease-fire it has held for 16 months. The police say the situation may encourage new attacks by I.R.A. mavericks. The Irish police chief, Pat Byrne, said he was sending extra antiterror specialists to the border, a staging area of recent attacks. The atmosphere has also been contaminated by an old dispute over an annual Protestant parade through a Catholic area of Portadown, near Belfast. The march marks a 1690 Protestant victory over Catholics. It was banned in July after the Catholic residents protested. Since then hundreds of Protestants have stayed in the Drumcree church area, poised to move into the Catholic zone. They have recently clashed | London and Dublin Tackle Dual Threats to North's Pact |
1072301_0 | EUROPE FRANCE: BRIBERY INQUIRY ENDS Investigating judges have completed their inquiry into Roland Dumas, head of France's highest administrative tribunal, the Constitutional Council, and his relationship while he was Foreign Minister with Christine Deviers-Joncour, a lobbyist for Elf-Aquitaine, the oil company. The two, as well as four former Elf Aquitaine executives, have three weeks to respond before prosecutors decide whether to try them on bribery charges. Craig R. Whitney (NYT) BRITAIN: CHARLES HEARS ABOUT MARIJUANA Prince Charles, left, renewed a debate about marijuana when he asked a woman with multiple sclerosis whether she had tried using it to relieve pain. British newspapers reported that Charles, visiting a day-care center in Cheltenham, had told the woman, Karen Drake, that he had heard that marijuana could benefit people with multiple sclerosis. (Reuters) RUSSIA: AUSTERITY BUDGET GAINS The Communist-dominated lower house of Parliament voted, 303 to 65, for initial approval for an austerity budget for 1999, after Prime Minister Yevgeny M. Primakov had threatened to resign if the draft failed. The coffers are so bare that the budget calls for Government spending of $29 billion and revenues of $24 billion. The United States Government spends $30 billion a week. (AP) RUSSIA: 5 SUBCRITICAL A-TESTS Russia conducted five subcritical nuclear tests at an Arctic testing range in the autumn, Deputy Nuclear Energy Minister Lev Ryabev said, contradicting previous denials. The Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty does not prohibit such tests, because the amount of plutonium used cannot create a nuclear explosion. But critics say that even limited tests could encourage full-scale tests. (AP) BOSNIA: MILITARY AND SCALE OF AID The military consumes just about the total yearly aid to the country, said Ambassador Robert Barry of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. Mr. Barry gave no specific figures. But Bosnia is receiving a $5.1 billion reconstruction package that international donors have agreed for the period from 1996 to 1999. (Reuters) MIDDLE EAST CYPRUS: TALKS ON USING RUSSIAN MISSILES President Glafcos Clerides will go to Athens next week for talks on whether to deploy a Russian-built missile system that Turkey has pledged to prevent on the divided island. Cyprus was said to be considering putting the S-300 missile systems temporarily on Crete, a move that Greece also reportedly favors. (Reuters) ISRAEL: BETHLEHEM SERVICE ON THE WEB The International Christian Embassy, an evangelical Protestant group in Jerusalem, introduced its Virtual Holyland Web site in time | World Briefing |
1070278_1 | (the structure and content of what we say) and its function, that is, the way that talking, through inflections, gestures and eye movements, creates social relationships. He calls that ''the fundamentally nonlinguistic nature of talking'' or ''intimate talking.'' Village gossip and a baby's cooing are examples. Neither offers much information, but both establish important relationships with neighbors or parents. Mr. Locke argues that new technologies like E-mail and telephone answering machines have increased the amount of functional information we encounter in a day but lack the capacity for intimate talking. The result, he says, is that we now live in an ''autistic society'' that is at home with computers but uncomfortable with human intimacy. A lot of what Mr. Locke writes about social disconnection will be familiar to readers of Robert Putnam, and it will make emotional sense to anyone exhausted after a day of pages, phone calls, E-mail messages and talk radio. But his book trips on a couple of assumptions. The first is that new forms of communication always displace earlier ones, rather than creating new opportunities for conversation. But even Mr Locke provides examples that undercut his own argument. A Finnish student he quotes about the popularity of mobile phones in Scandinavia says: ''We've never been much good at talking to each other face to face. All that's happened is we've found our ideal way of communication -- at arm's length." Mr. Locke also assumes that a lack of intimacy is always a bad thing. Take E-mail, which Mr. Locke calls an ''emotionally parched'' form of communication. He's right, of course: E-mail does strip away the intimacy of face-to-face conversation. But it also strips away some of the fear, guilt, anger and self-consciousness, which is one reason that E-mail has become so successful. Co-workers who otherwise loathe one another can still be productive through E-mail. Children can carry on (relatively) guilt-free relationships with parents. Narrowing the emotional range of conversation can sometimes increase the value of what is being said. And besides, some social relationships -- the kind supported by intimate talking -- aren't worth maintaining. Fifty years ago, my father's working-class London accent would have all but precluded him from attending Oxford or Cambridge. Today, as a university administrator, he now regularly exchanges E-mail with his counterparts at those institutions. I know which world he'd rather be living in. BRUCE HEADLAM LIBRARY/BOOKS ON THE TECHNOLOGICAL SOCIETY | Awash in All These Words, Will We Forget How to Talk? |
1067016_0 | After a day of negotiations and statements that compromise was imminent, Protestant and Roman Catholic leaders apparently failed today to agree on several important issues in the Northern Ireland peace effort. Agreements said this morning to have been all but clinched began unraveling this evening. The damage to the effort by the new Northern Ireland Assembly to enact the provisions of the peace agreement approved in the spring is serious, but not necessarily fatal. The failure to agree leaves the effort stalled, as it has been for months. The Assembly members were apparently close to agreeing on governmental structures intended to give this minority Roman Catholics in the province additional power. In addition to the unsettled problems the chief obstacle remains unsolved: disarming the Irish Republican Army. There was no immediate word on whether the talks would continue on Friday. But officials said that that schedule was highly unlikely and that there would be no progress for the rest of the year. There had been near agreement on some of the governmental structures envisioned in the accord. ''It is progress inch by inch,'' said David Trimble, the First Minister of the Assembly and the Protestant leader of the Ulster Unionist Party. His Catholic nationalist deputy, Seamus Mallon, said significant progress had been achieved. Within hours reports began to issue from the Assembly, in the Stormont area of Belfast, that Mr. Trimble had met Gerry Adams, president of Sinn Fein, the political wing of the I.R.A. Mr. Trimble was said to have repeated his demand for a start to disarmament before allowing Sinn Fein to participate fully in the executive cabinet of the Assembly and in the North-South Ministerial Council, in which Northern Ireland and Ireland are to cooperate. Mr. Adams's reply was not known. But he has repeatedly pointed out that the peace agreement stipulates only that the I.R.A. disarm before May 2000. The failure to compromise today added importance to Mr. Trimble and Mr. Mallon's planned trip this weekend to Washington to meet President Clinton at a White House ceremony. | Ulster Negotiations Stall Again, Unraveling This Time on Details |
1066767_1 | to start is the home page of the Original Paper Doll Artists Guild (www.opdag.com), an organization of doll fans that prints a quarterly newsletter for members and has links to many doll pages. One such site, Marilee's Paperdoll Page includes links for a wide variety of paper dolls -- teen-age dolls, animals and toys, historical figures and celebrity dolls -- along with her own printable dolls (www.ameritech.net/ users/macler/paperdolls.html). ''I get letters from people who have printed a copy of every paper doll linked to my site, just as a collection,'' Marilee wrote via E-mail. (Marilee, who lives in a Chicago suburb, declined to disclose her last name.) ''A Canadian art teacher was coordinating classrooms in different parts of the world. They looked at my site for ideas, made their own paper dolls using photos of their faces, then traded with some other school somewhere.'' Paper dolls have been around since 18th-century France. Some current doll artists, like C. David Claudon (www.tezcat.com/videoc/ PaperDolls.html), design elaborate costumes in medieval, French court and stage styles. Rather than coloring his black-and-white originals, Mr. Claudon scanned them into the computer and colored them on line. ''Learning to paint with the computer added a whole new dimension,'' Mr. Claudon said in an E-mail interview, ''and I really like the freedom it offers.'' There are more familiar doll names on line, too, like the Berenstain Bears (www.berenstainbears .com/dressup.html). The Archie Comics site has a page for fans of Katy Keene, the fashion queen whose comic book, bearing a host of paper dolls, appeared regularly from 1949 to 1961 and again from 1983 to 1990 (www.archiecomics.com/katy). Brenda Sneathen Mattox, a well-known paper doll artist from Indiana, displays only a few of her doll designs on line and sells the complete sets (photon.indy.net/paperdoll/ bsmdoll.html). She said via E-mail that for paper-doll artists, the Internet ''enables us to get our work in front of people who might not otherwise see it, especially kids who barely know what a paper doll is!'' In the paper doll world, Kiss means not the rock group but kisaeke (Japanese for ''changing clothes''), a form of Japanese doll cartoons. They are highly imaginative dolls, but parents should take note: in Japan, dolls and paper doll mannequins often start off nude. Not Barbie nude, but nude nude. Kiss sites should be checked out by parents first. G-rated Kiss offerings are usually available through a Kids Domain | Paper Dolls Going Digital, Tabs and All |
1066807_1 | III, will be named the Palm VII. The company said its numbering strategy left room for other new models but that none would be available this holiday season. The Palm VII's will allow only limited access to the World Wide Web and E-mail through specially designed Web sites. In an effort to turn this handicap into an advantage, Joe Sipher, head of 3Com's wireless effort, described the low-bandwidth design as ''Web clipping'' instead of browsing. 3Com said information and service providers including Bank of America, Moviefone, Mastercard, Visa, Frommer's, Fodor's, E*Trade Group and USA Today had already agreed to develop custom software and sites for the Palm VII. At a news conference, the company said the device would give mobile consumers the ability to retrieve from the Internet small bits of information like airline schedules and telephone numbers, to send brief E-mail messages and to do things like make movie reservations. ''We are going to change the way people access and communicate with the Internet forever,'' said Janice Roberts, the head of 3Com's Palm division. Wireless access to information has long been the Holy Grail both of start-ups like Eo and Radiomail and of large corporations like Apple, AT&T, I.B.M. and Motorola. But most of their efforts to provide it have failed. Geoff Goodfellow, who founded Radiomail Inc., the first wireless E-mail company, in 1988, said: ''This is an attempt to repeat history. This is still a zero-billion-dollar industry.'' Even so, 3Com executives said the Palm Pilot's popularity -- more than two million have been sold -- coupled with growing consumer dependence on the rapidly expanding Web would propel sales of the Palm VII. Analysts, however, said they were disappointed by the wireless service plan, which will begin at $9.95 a month but will cost, on average, 30 cents for each 1,000 characters of information. Mr. Sipher said the basic plan would allow Internet access about six times a day on average. Andrew Seybold, editor of Andrew Seybold's Outlook, a mobile computing newsletter, said he found the service offering disappointing because it would force him to add a second E-mail address, would limit Internet access to special Web sites and would not allow retrieval of information from a desktop computer. Ms. Roberts shrugged off the skepticism. Noting that the industry had also long been skeptical about hand-held computing, she said, ''We've proved them wrong, and we have created a business.'' | 3Com to Offer A Palm Pilot With Wireless Capabilities |
1068306_2 | and did not involve embezzled Ukrainian money. (Reuters) AFRICA COMOROS: LOOTING AND BURNING BY MILITIAS -- Looters ransacked the main town, Mutsamudi, and burned houses on the breakaway island of Anjouan as African nations discussed sending an outside force to end battles between rival militias. (Agence France-Presse) SOUTH AFRICA: OLD PARTY, NEW NAME -- Seeking to overcome its image as the party that set up apartheid, the National Party is changing its name to the New National Party. Its leader, Marthinus van Schalkwyk, said the party had applied to the Independent Electoral Commission to take part in elections next year under the new name. (AP) ASIA-PACIFIC AUSTRALIA: WORLD'S NUCLEAR WASTE REJECTED -- An adviser to President Clinton, Robert Galucci, was quoted by BBC News as saying that Australia's geography and political stability make it ideal for storing the world's nuclear waste. But a spokeswoman for the Industry and Resources Minister said Australia would not accept nuclear waste from other countries. CHINA: 49,000 MOVED FOR THREE GORGES DAM -- China has resettled more than 49,000 people along the Yangtze River this year to make way for the giant Three Gorges dam project, The China Daily newspaper said. The dam, which is scheduled to be completed by 2009, will require the removal of 1.13 million people. The $4.8 billion complex will include a 252-square-mile reservoir. (Reuters) CHINA: 2 MORE DISSIDENTS DETAINED -- The police raided the homes of two democracy advocates, detaining them and seizing literature for a planned opposition party, the Information Center of Human Rights and Democratic Movement in Hong Kong reported. The detentions of the two, Zhang Baoqin and Liu Xianbin, brought to at least 10 the number of party members taken into custody in a nine-day-old crackdown. (AP) INDIA: NO PROGRESS REPORTED IN NUCLEAR TALKS -- Defense Minister George Fernandes said seven rounds of talks between India and the United States on nuclear nonproliferation and military issues that have been held since India conducted nuclear tests in May had ''not taken us one step nearer to any kind of understanding.'' Celia W. Dugger (NYT) THE AMERICAS ARGENTINA: GLOBAL WARRANT FOR EX-DICTATOR-- A Swiss judge has issued an international arrest warrant for a former President, Gen. Jorge Rafael Videla, in connection with the disappearance of a Swiss-Chilean student in Buenos Aires in 1977. General Videla, who seized power in a coup in 1976, was held here in June on | WORLD BRIEFING |
1068273_2 | It took 20 years to see that Rachel Carson was right: DDT was not a cost-free miracle. And neither is biotech.'' Already 38 percent of the soybeans and 25 percent of the corn in the United States and 35 percent of the canola oil from Canada and the United States have been engineered either to produce their own pesticides or to withstand herbicides. Some scientists worry about the effects of bioengineering not only on human health, but also on the environment. There have been no long-term studies, but consequences are already showing up. Genes inserted in seeds to make them resistant to herbicides can transfer from crops to weeds through pollen, creating superweeds. Insects feeding on crops implanted with insecticide genes can become resistant to those insecticides, creating superbugs. In Scotland in 1995, pollen from genetically engineered herbicide-resistant rape-oil seed fertilized untreated plants one and a half miles away. A similar case affected corn in Germany this fall. And in laboratory work, some insects have shown resistance to plants containing insecticide genes. B UT Mr. Margulis said that in the long run, the biggest worry is about biodiversity. A crop grown from several varieties of seeds is a protection against disease and pests that may attack one variety but are unlikely to attack all the varieties at one time. If a farm relies on only one variety, as genetic engineering would promote, one pest or disease could wipe out an entire crop. ''This is a way of getting diversity out of the hands of farmers and into the hands of a few companies who control these seeds, and that makes me nervous,'' Michael Romano, the chef at Union Square Cafe, said. ''Our history has been that when we turned over crops to the agricultural industry, it leads to overdevelopment of one crop, and that leads to depletion of soil and increase in certain pests that leads to using more pesticides just to keep the crop going. This doesn't happen with diversity and rotation.'' The genetic engineering industry thinks differently. Val Giddings, vice president of the Biotechnology Industry Organization, a trade association, said the use of biotechnology to create herbicide-tolerant crops offers ''environmental benefits that are dramatic and of global significance,'' reducing the use of pesticides and increasing efficiency. He said his membership supports F.D.A. policy, which requires labeling if a bioengineered food presents a potential health impact. ''It is good | Chefs Join Effort to Label Engineered Food |
1068254_4 | launched, then my job is to guarantee uniformity of taste. When we have new products with no set standard, then my job is to figure out what about these products consumers like or dislike, so when we launch it, it's at its best.'' Well, what about the emotional taste, the way you feel lying in bed with a pint at the end of a bad day? Does that count? Or more to the point, can she count it? She nods. ''Ice cream is a comfort food, and we are aware that our products will be responded to with more emotion than, say, testing bread. Our hedonic scale of 1 to 9 says you either like it extremely or dislike it. With breads, if you score 5 you're golden. With ice cream you might as well forget about that product. There's not a magic hedonic number but there is a magic range, above 7.'' Thankfully, it's time for lunch, which we have with three flavor developers and Mary Kamm, the company's director of research and development, to whom they all report. You can tell these are people who make their living from dessert -- none of them order any. Instead, they stick to fish and chips and beer. ''I usually crave potato chips,'' Ms. Parizo acknowledges. ''Anything with salt.'' Ms. Kamm gives a brief overview of their yearly work cycle: each January, Ben & Jerry's marketing department gives them a list of products that are selling and those that are not. The flavor developers then look at flavor trends, at the restaurant industry for dessert ideas, and at the beverage industry, a pioneer in new flavors. Using this information, the flavor developers come up with about 200 product concepts. Ms. Parizo then works with consumers to screen them. By May, they are narrowed down to 40 or 50 and are developed further before being tasted by consumers again. Using those results, the marketing department decides which flavors will be put into full commercial development. These are tested again, and if they duplicate their first approval scores, survive. Samples are sent to retailers in December, and the product goes on the shelves the following March. DALE CONOSCENTI is the flavor developer in charge of pints, who takes an annual culinary trip to spot trends. Three years ago it was to New York City, where he ate 70 desserts in a weekend. In | New Ice Creams: Many Are Cold, Few Are Chosen |
1068276_1 | without any specific government policies,'' said Charles Brecher, the commission's research director and an author of the report. The findings are significant because the number of jobs on Wall Street, which ''was the driving force behind the city's economic growth in the 1980's,'' the report says, has been stagnant and is likely to shrink. ''Although New York is fortunate to have a prospering professional business services sector, it cannot be relied upon to provide large numbers of new jobs,'' the report says. Media-related industries now account for 8 percent of all private jobs in the city, compared with almost 14 percent for financial firms and their related legal and accounting firms. Both industries create jobs that pay well; the average wage in the media and communications businesses in New York was $66,395 last year, almost $20,000 more than the average wage for all people in the city who do not work in the government. Some traditional media and communications businesses, including public relations and magazine publishing, will continue to grow quickly, the report says, suggesting that New York's position as a global capital gives it an advantage in the increasingly international media market. But the greatest growth may be in jobs for which New York has not traditionally been a center, like computer programming and design. Much of the attention of city officials and researchers has been on the growth of Internet-related businesses often called new media, which a city-sponsored survey found had created 56,000 jobs, more than half of them in the 18 months before the survey was published in October 1997. But the commission found that much of that ''new media'' work is happening at ''old media'' companies where, for example, a computer programmer would create and maintain Internet Web sites for a book publisher. ''What's really going on is technological change within an old industry,'' Mr. Brecher said. ''There's lot of substitution. The net growth in jobs is not as great as you would think.'' Though New York does not have the reputation as a center of computer and engineering education, the city's colleges and universities produce more people with graduate and undergraduate degrees in these areas than Boston or San Francisco, the report says. It recommends that politicians, business executives and educators form a consortium that would result in ''better training, greater job opportunities for graduates, and additional growth generated by the availability of home-grown talent.'' | Report Sees Media as Source of New Jobs |
1073539_2 | part of efforts to curb ''bin hogs.'' It protested when United added templates at the airport in San Diego -- and benefited from the resulting publicity. The Flight Attendants Association, its members tired of dealing with passengers whose anger at carry-on policies is one element of the wider phenomenon known as ''air rage,'' has appealed to the Government for an industrywide standard. Luggage designers agree. ''It's tough when one or two powerful airlines make a unilateral decision,'' said Chad Mellen, vice president for marketing at the luggage maker Tumi, based in Middlesex, N.J. ''It's like G.M. telling the tire companies all of a sudden that its tires will now be 10 feet tall.'' But Mr. Mellen said: ''The new standards have become our bible. Our three commandments are 22, 14 and 9.'' Myron Glaser of Glaser Designs, a custom designer and manufacturer of luggage in San Francisco, was able to respond more quickly than larger manufacturers. ''Beat the two-bag limit,'' his ads trumpet. His Litigation bag, at 22 inches, will hold a laptop, files, two shirts and a suit, Mr. Glaser says. It will also lighten your wallet by more than $1,000. Early in the summer, Tumi began a rush program to adapt its most popular styles. The first result, Tumi's model 22-65, went on sale in late October. It has been especially successful in Chicago, a United hub, and Atlanta, Delta's home. Four or five other models will be introduced in February. So far, as in Tumi's case, much of the adjustment has had to do with simply shrinking bags, but more radical changes in design lie ahead. The design firm Frogdesign is at work on luggage incorporating new shapes and features for high-tech travelers. Today's high-tech road warriors may travel with 20 or 30 pounds worth of laptop, cell phone, digital assistant and other equipment. The new policies also seem likely to strengthen the tendency to combine briefcase and overnight bag into one unit. Mr. Mellen also sees more casual luggage designs coming -- possibly even backpacks for executives on the road. And the effects may not be limited to luggage itself. Fashion could be changed: Mr. Glaser sees a need for clothing manufacturers to adapt microfibers for lighter, thinner packing. Eventually, road warriors are likely to be as carefully prepacked into their cube and two-thirds as members of the 82d Airborne, alert for rapid deployment. PUBLIC EYE | Carry-On Skirmishes |
1068643_0 | Like it or not, computers are on a collision course with cars. On Dec. 5, the British journal New Scientist reported a new automotive use for the infrared port on the popular Palm Pilot handheld organizers. After modifying the Pilot to capture and retransmit infrared signals from a television set, in an attempt to use the Pilot as a replacement for the standard remote control device, a computer journalist discovered that it could also duplicate the signals that control some automobile security systems. After the owner locks the car using a remote control device (typically on the keychain) and walks away, the Pilot could capture the signal, send it back to the car and unlock the doors. According to the Insurance Information Institute in New York, 23.5 percent of all cars built in North America in 1997 had electronic anti-theft systems, though many use radio waves, not infrared, systems. The Pilot represents a potentially cheaper alternative for those auto thieves thinking of paying thousands of dollars for black-market devices that perform similar tricks. According to the newspaper LA Weekly, some car thieves in Los Angeles are using custom-made electronic devices the size of a walkie-talkie that send out volleys of automobile security code combinations. Thieves park near the target car and bombard it electronically for a couple of minutes until the car's security system chirps and the doors unlock. And earlier this year, the Mercedes-Benz division of what is now DaimlerChrysler Corporation warned that the electromagnetic radiation generated by the microprocessors in mobile phones could disrupt the computer circuitry in airbag restraint systems, anti-lock brake systems and potentially other electronic systems in the car. And you thought talking on a cellular phone while driving was dangerous. PETER H. LEWIS NEWS WATCH | Cars That Open Up To Computers, Literally |
1068477_2 | ever since. According to the International Data Corporation, a market research company, roughly 2.1 billion E-mail messages are sent each day in the United States, nearly double the volume at the end of 1997. That number is expected to reach 8 billion by 2002. E-mail mores and faux pas matter most in workplaces where a growing reliance on E-mail for discussions and decisions means that entire days can pass without a single face-to-face meeting. E-mail use at work now rivals, and in some cases eclipses, the use of the telephone. One misdirected message, or an ill-tempered E-mail sent when emotions are heated, can threaten a career. People who have been using E-mail for a long time have learned to be judicious in using the Cc feature. Harry J. Saal, a philanthropist and entrepreneur in Silicon Valley, began using E-mail more than 20 years ago, when he was a manager at International Business Machines and used the company's internal E-mail system. ''One of the things I've realized is how very much my usage of Cc and Bcc has changed over the years,'' Dr. Saal said. Dr. Saal once used the Cc feature ''as a kind of not very effective bludgeon to bug someone to do something, somehow involving someone else as an observer in the process, maybe their boss,'' he said. Now he rarely uses Cc because he considers it unnecessary. ''About the only times I use Cc these days is for trying to set up a joint meeting with more than two people,'' he said. Even relative beginners -- which includes most people -- can be highly sophisticated in their thinking about their E-mail. ''We all use Cc for the right and wrong reasons,'' said Martha Feingold, director of talent at ZDTV in San Francisco. ''We use it to praise ourselves,'' she said, or for self-protection. She said some people used Cc as a way to show off, putting people in the Cc field not because they need to be there but because they want to advertise the acquaintance. Many people who regularly send E-mail -- jokes, say, or a newsletter -- to a large number of people hide their recipient lists to avoid clutter. Some E-mail programs have an option for hiding recipients in the Cc field, but people do it different ways, depending on the software used. One of the more conspicuous slips of the finger took place | Tracking the Evolution of E-Mail Etiquette |
1068600_0 | More than five years of severe food shortages and a near-total breakdown in the public health system have led to devastating malnutrition in North Korea and probably left an entire generation of children physically and mentally impaired, a new study by international aid groups has found. The study, the first scientific nutritional survey in North Korea, confirms the disturbing reports of international aid workers, who in the last year have gained increasing access to the population of the highly isolated and secretive country. Among other findings, researchers from the World Food Program, Unicef and the European Union found that, because of long-term food shortages, a staggering 62 percent of children under 7 years old suffer from stunted growth. They have discovered that despite a huge international food aid program in the last three years, severe malnutrition is still widespread among toddlers. At crucial stages of brain development, this generation's physical and mental abilities will not develop normally and can never rebound. Separately, international medical workers from groups like the Red Cross have begun to document how the effects of food shortages are being severely compounded by a breakdown in public health services. Even basic water purification systems stand idle for lack of essential ingredients like chlorine, Red Cross workers say, leaving vast numbers of people with such severe diarrhea that they are unable to absorb completely what little food they have. Recently, an increasingly clear and saddening picture of the hungry life of North Korea's 23 million people has come into focus, as the Government has slowly, sometimes begrudgingly, granted increased access to international aid groups, leading to the recent formal study as well as more informal surveys and observations by foreign aid agencies. Past assessments of the magnitude of the disaster are considered flawed because they were based on interviews with a small number of North Korean refugees who had fled into China. And while the researchers and aid workers on the ground in North Korea have not seen evidence of cannibalism or starving children dying by the roadside, as has been described in the more lurid refugee reports, what they did find was in many ways equally disturbing: a population withering after nearly a decade of chronic hunger, people so weakened by malnutrition that colds and stomach flus quickly turn lethal, the future of a generation irretrievably lost. ''Now at last we have hard facts -- the situation | In North Korean Hunger, Legacy Is Stunted Children |
1071768_0 | To the Editor: Re ''Will Humans Overwhelm the Earth?'' Dec. 8: Humans have already overwhelmed the earth. The solution to poverty, hunger, water shortages, global warming, immune system breakdowns (resulting from stresses of crowding), species extinction and other ecological, social, psychological and health disasters is to reduce population to the maximum sustainable level of 3.9 billion. Either we do this consciously through birth control, with everybody ''stopping at one'' until the population declines by more than two billion people, or nature will do it for us. JULI ANN WEBER Westport, Conn. | Reduce Population |
1071692_1 | believe that he carried stigmata and had miraculous healing powers, began venerating him as a saint before he died in 1968. Beatification is the last major step before canonization. Alessandra Stanley (NYT) ASIA INDIA: PRIMAKOV PROPOSES NUCLEAR TRIANGLE -- Prime Minister Yevgeny M. Primakov of Russia became the first head of state from the five nuclear powers to visit New Delhi since India held nuclear tests in May. Mr. Primakov described India as a great power and proposed a ''strategic triangle'' that would involve Russia, India and China, to build peace and security. Celia W. Dugger (NYT) JAPAN: OBUCHI INVITES ARCHRIVAL -- Prime Minister Keizo Obuchi said he hoped that a former archrival and future coalition partner, Ichiro Ozawa, the Liberal Party leader, would join his Cabinet. The Prime Minister would not pinpoint the date for the shuffle. (Reuters) NORTH KOREA: LAUNCHING PREPARATIONS REPORTED -- North Korea is preparing to launch a ballistic missile from the cape of Musu Dan on the Sea of Japan, despite the protests after the firing of a rocket that flew over Japan in August, the Itar-Tass news agency of Russia reported. The agency quoted Russian military officials as having said North Korea was engaged in daily training exercises. (Agence France-Presse) INDONESIA: DOZENS OF RAPES ADMITTED -- The Government acknowledged that dozens of ethnic Chinese women were raped in May in rioting that swept Jakarta. State Secretary Akbar Tanjung denied that the rapes were widespread or systematic and said not all the victims were ethnic Chinese. Seth Mydans (NYT) NEPAL: PRIME MINISTER RESIGNS -- Prime Minister Girija Prasad Koirala resigned. But his Nepali Congress Party said he had struck a deal with a Communist faction to head a new coalition Government. Party officials said Mr. Koirala had won support from a Communist opposition group on the condition that he appoint Communists to the new Government and hold parliamentary elections early next year. (Reuters) MIDDLE EAST LEBANON: BAN ON PROTESTS LIFTED -- The new Government of Prime Minister Salim Hoss has restored the right to protest, lifting a five-year-old ban on demonstrations. Demonstrations were banned in 1993, after a protest against the Oslo peace accords between Israel and the Palestinians led to clashes with the army in which eight supporters of Hezbollah, the militant group, were killed. (Agence France-Presse) CYPRUS: TRIAL DATE FOR 2 SUSPECTED ISRAELI SPIES -- Two Israelis charged with spying on Cyprus pleaded | World Briefing |
1072478_0 | Chico Mendes was not an environmentalist in the traditional sense. It was only three years before his murder, which was 10 years ago this week, that he met environmentalists and learned with amazement that the Amazon Forest mattered to those far away. As head of Brazil's National Council of Rubber Tappers, his concerns were the tappers who were being forced off their land and killed in disputes with invading ranchers. But Mr. Mendes probably did more than any other person to preserve the Amazon. Although it has been burning faster than ever since his death, his ideas and organizational skills have led to new policies and ways of thinking about the forest that provide the basis for hope. Mr. Mendes was a full-time tapper at 11, the son and grandson of rubber tappers. He led the local union in his state of Acre at a time when small farmers and ranchers from Brazil's south were invading the forest and claiming land, which they burned. Mr. Mendes and a colleague, the anthropologist Mary Allegretti, came up with the idea of extractive reserves -- forest land set aside by the Government to be managed cooperatively by locals, who kept it healthy while gathering its rubber, nuts and other products to sell. Mr. Mendes was shot to death by two ranchers who had claimed some of the land marked for one such reserve. Today, the disputes over land and the killings have diminished. The federal Government has set aside about 7.5 million acres of the Amazon as extractive reserves, and some state governments are doing the same. In the state of Amapa, which has been run for four years by one of Mr. Mendes's colleagues, 30 percent of the territory is protected and deforestation has virtually stopped. Amapa's government buys Brazil nuts from the reserves for school lunches and is helping to finance nut processing plants and other projects to make the reserves viable. Mr. Mendes's allies recently won the governorship of Acre state, and hold several Senate seats and many state government posts. Mr. Mendes also created a lasting change in attitudes about the Amazon, in Brazil and all over the world. He lobbied the World Bank in a donated, ill-fitting suit, and the bank, which once financed roads to make the Amazon easier to cut down, is now financing extractive reserves. Brazil's Government has ended its subsidies for cattle ranchers buying | Chico Mendes's Legacy |
1069697_0 | Violence in Northern Ireland | |
1069689_0 | If David Farber is noteworthy for the number of people who want to be included on his influential E-mail list, Paul Vixie is famous -- some would say notorious -- for publishing an on-line list that companies desperately want to avoid being on. Mr. Vixie is the creator and keeper of the Realtime Blackhole List, a frequently updated list of Internet service providers and Web-hosting companies that he concludes are being used to send unsolicited bulk E-mail, or spam. Inclusion on the list is not merely embarrassing, but can be costly. Hundreds of Internet companies, universities and other organizations around the world, following Mr. Vixie's advice, automatically refuse to deliver messages originating from an Internet service that has been, to use the industry patois, black-holed. When Mr. Vixie puts a provider of Internet services on the Blackhole list, the organization will find that not just its spam but also its regular E-mail is blocked from reaching many computer users. Mr. Vixie estimates that 25 percent of the addresses on the Internet would become unreachable to those listed. Those services that have been blackholed at various times include well-known companies like America Online, Microsoft Network, ICG Communications' Netcom On-Live Services and Earthlink Network. Time spent in Vixie purgatory may be only a few minutes or can stretch out into weeks, depending on how quickly the labeled offender takes anti-spam measures. Last June, the Microsoft Network spent three-and-a-half days on the list after Mr. Vixie concluded the company's E-mail servers were being used as a launching pad for spam. Mr. Vixie acknowledges that his tactics may seem harsh, because other messages get blocked along with the spam. But he believes the severity of the consequences provides the best way to get the attention of offending providers, or I.S.P.'s. ''I got E-mail from some mother who could no longer send E-mail to her son in college,'' Mr. Vixie said. ''But either I cause a lot of uncertainty for people until their I.S.P. becomes a model network, or the spammers win, and you and I, and that mother, would have hundreds of messages coming in every day.'' His goals may seem admirable. But Mr. Vixie, a 35-year Internet consultant without so much as a high school diploma, is generating increasing controversy because of his virtually unparalleled degree of power to control Internet traffic. In fact, some critics accuse Mr. Vixie of being arbitrary and | Crusader Thwarts Invaders of the E-Mailbox |
1069720_0 | As an organization dedicated to promoting Christian unity, the World Council of Churches has been a fairly spacious body for those who would affirm the fundamentals of the Christian faith. But during the last week, the Council has found itself in the unusual position of balking at accepting a new member. The resulting controversy illustrates the challenges facing the council as it attempts to keep the global ecumenical movement alive by occasionally reaching beyond its traditional Protestant and Orthodox Christian base to include newly formed independent churches in the developing world, where much of Christianity's growth is occurring. But here in Zimbabwe's capital city, at the organization's Eighth Assembly since its founding, the council recoiled from accepting a new member because of questions over that church's policy on allowing clergy to have more than one wife. The church in question is the Celestial Church of Christ, founded in 1947 in Nigeria by a Methodist lay man, S. B. J. Oshoffa, who reported receiving a vision of an angel who instructed him to teach people to trust in Jesus. The church holds that the Bible is inerrant, and, according to members, teaches that prayer can effect physical healing and that members can prophesy under divine inspiration. Claiming between five million and six million followers worldwide, it is one of what are called the ''African-instituted churches,'' organizations without any direct ties to the European missionaries of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. When nearly 1,000 assembly delegates gathered here on Dec. 3, they faced membership applications from nine religious organizations, including the Celestial Church, all endorsed by the council's executive committee. Eight were admitted during a session two days later. But a decision on the Celestial Church's application was deferred. In response, the Rev. Alexander A. Bada, the church's Supreme Head, published a policy statement saying that ''the question of polygamy'' among converts to the church ''was not seriously addressed'' until after the death of Mr. Oshoffa in 1985. Since 1986, Mr. Bada's statement said, the church has held to a ''firm and irreversible'' policy of refusing to ordain anyone who has more than one wife. But, he said, to avoid splitting the flock and being seen to endorse divorce, it has not asked that polygamous priests ordained before 1986 give up their additional wives. In an interview, a clergy member in the church, Senior Evangelist Olantunji O. Akande, said the | Polygamy Keeps a New African Church From World Council |
1069327_0 | FIFTY years ago, my father was appointed principal of an elementary school near the Brooklyn Navy Yard. He was 44. It was his first command. That's how he has always regarded being a principal; it was like being captain of a ship, he said. This may be why, while waiting for my mother to emerge from life-support, he urges us to read his Patrick O'Brian sea stories as he recalls his own voyages. That Brooklyn school was already old when he took it over in 1948. He spent much of the summer before classes roaming the ancient vessel. One day he discovered a sagging wall in the basement and he pushed it over to reveal a huge tiled room, rusted pipes hanging from the walls and ceilings. In old school records, he discovered that a shower room had been built for a local immigrant community that had no hot running water. Using the brief window of grace that incoming principals get, he persuaded the district to hire plumbers and restore the shower room for a student body that still could not wash itself regularly. To remove any stigma, he created the Swim Club, and promoted its logo, a fish, as if it were the Olympic rings. Kids wanted to wear a white cotton fish patch pinned to their shirts, members only of a club whose sole admission requirement was a good hot shower. Back from our visits to the intensive-care unit, my sister, Gale, and I listen to the old stories with mixed feelings. They remind us that our parents had vibrant lives before this scary, crumpled time, that the 90-year-old woman in the bed is not just a chart, that her 94-year-old husband is not just an object of patronizing doctors (''There is something in her tummy that concerns us,'' they wheedle, ''and we'd like your permission to take a little peek.'') On the other hand, the stories seem like a way of deflecting reality. (Gale and I mutter to each other, ''Did O'Brian's captain ever sail up De-Nile?'') Mom is beginning her third week on a respirator. We are steaming into the uncharted seas of more invasive tests and the monsters of critical decisions lurk in the mists. But the captain, who has never been a demonstrative man, is having a rough time. At her bedside, refusing to weep openly, Dad will only say, ''These tubes have a | A Captain In Rough Waters |
1069213_1 | Ark. ''These people are a very hot commodity. Alltel basically has a standing offer: You come to us and we'll hire you.'' The competition for qualified employees is intense, Mr. Smith said, noting that companies like his have had to resort to aggressive recruiting tactics and offer tempting starting salaries. ''You cannot find enough people to fill the jobs,'' he said. From the job seeker's point of view, however, it may be best to stay in school for an internship -- if you can afford the time and expense. That way, some career advisers say, you can maximize your marketability to get the hottest job at the highest possible salary. ''The dilemma new graduates most often face is that they've got fine academic training, but no hard experience,'' said Betsy Collard, director of programs at the Career Action Center in Cupertino, Calif., in the heart of Silicon Valley. Internships can provide an important edge, she said. ''You'll be able to demand more and get farther faster when you do graduate,'' she added. The training also helps build your comfort level with the working world, reducing the chances of falling on your face later. Career centers at universities often help match students and employers, many of whom are eager for interns. ''I've heard several companies say they cannot get all the interns they want in this area,'' said Dan Lohmeyer, executive director of the IT Alliance, an economic development group for the information technology industry near Dayton, Ohio. But will the job market cool while you're slogging through that extra year? ''These opportunities are not going to go away,'' Ms. Collard said. ''The numbers in school with that area of concentration don't compare with the growing need.'' Mr. Lohmeyer agreed. ''Even when the Y2K problem gets solved, I don't see any diminution of demand on the horizon,'' he said, referring to the Year 2000 computer problem. ''Everywhere you turn, people in business are folding information technologies into what they do. ''I don't think we're talking about a wave here,'' he said of these jobs. ''We're talking about a flood.'' Michelle Cottle is a Washington writer. Each week, she will respond to readers' questions about career and workplace issues. Send them by E-mail to working@nytimes.com or by mail to Working, Money & Business, The New York Times, 229 West 43d Street, New York, N.Y. 10036. WORKING Michelle Cottle is a Washington writer. | The Importance Of Internship |
1070786_1 | at all. They are descendants of domesticated Spanish animals brought to the upper Rio Grande Valley more than 400 years ago. So who has nature on their side? Glacier National Park in the northern Rockies may soon be without any glaciers. Is it a victim of a globe warmed by industrial society on hyperspeed, or just further natural adaptation? Or what about a meticulously sculptured courtyard garden? Does that have anything to do with the natural world, or is it just flora on a short leash? Certainly, the best British gardeners do not consider their hedgerows anything less than natural. Even philanderers of late have taken comfort in the new work on the sexual proclivity of animals. The new thinking goes: males need promiscuity to keep the gene pool healthy; females crave alpha-male security (rich guys) for the same reason. The tag line is the same: sorry, honey, it's nature's way. These attitudes are so human they seem, well, natural. In his new book, ''Nature: Western Attitudes Since Ancient Times'' (University of California Press), the British author Peter Coates gives an exhaustively detailed account of the ever changing history of nature, mostly tied to the political goals of the times. What is surprising is how little has changed. ''Every culture projects its values onto nature and holds them up as nature's own authority,'' writes Mr. Coates, a senior lecturer in the Department of Historical Studies at the University of Bristol. Modern interpretations of nature, Mr. Coates writes, came from late 18th- and early 19th-century Romantic poets, for whom an orchid was the essence of physical sublimity, but anything touched by man was outside the bounds of esthetic purity. In ancient Greece, nature was viewed by leading philosophers as a system and not a physical thing. Human thought, no matter where it strayed, was as natural as a river flowing downhill. But, of course, the Greeks included that most elusive of human attachments -- a soul, or spirit -- in their discussion of what was ''natural.'' Aristotle believed every living thing had a soul, but a human soul was different from that of, say, a bottom fish. The Romans continued the debate of Aristotle and others, to a point. But in the process of expanding and feeding their empire, they stripped much of the natural world bare, and their rationalizations followed. The areas around Rome and Athens were once heavily forested, | Everyone Is Always on Nature's Side; People Just Can't Agree on What's Natural and What's Not |
1070819_0 | Robert C. Johnston, who spent almost half a century shaping Manhattan's skyline from below street level and its map from below the water line, died on Dec. 4 at his home in Milbrook, N.Y. He was 85 and had been the foundation engineer in charge of building the 92-acre landfill addition to Manhattan that became Battery Park City. In a city that sometimes seems defined by the soaring majesty of its lofty spires, it is easy to forget that the towers are not simply plopped down on vacant lots or even constructed from the ground up. Before you can scrape the sky, you must scoop the earth, and in a city where that is no mean engineering feat, Mr. Johnston was a master in managing the designs of excavations and foundation construction for some of the city's grandest buildings. Among them were United Nations headquarters and the former Chase bank headquarters at 1 Chase Manhattan Plaza. In a society that lionizes architects, marine and foundation engineering may not seem like a glamorous calling. But Mr. Johnston, whose father was a builder, grew up in the Bronx apparently dreaming of nothing else. By the time he was 14, his wife, Charlotte, recalled last week, he not only knew exactly what he wanted to do but had also picked out the firm he wanted to do it with. Founded in 1910 by Daniel Moran and long known as Moran & Proctor, the firm, one of the first to work exclusively in marine and foundation engineering, had the field largely to itself. Mr. Johnston was so determined to become a part of the Moran team that he joined the firm as soon as he graduated from Princeton in 1935. With major construction virtually halted in the Depression, he worked for a year without pay just to be part of the action. With time out for civil engineering service with the Seabees, including the Normandy landings in World War II, he remained with the firm through a succession of name changes for his entire career, becoming a partner in 1951. When he retired in 1983, the firm, now simply Mueser Rutledge, was known as Mueser, Rutledge, Johnston & DeSimone. Although he did much of his work in New York, Mr. Johnston had a national reputation. His credits include the Alcoa and United States Steel headquarters buildings in Pittsburgh, and foundations to support heavy aluminum | Robert C. Johnston, Engineer, Is Dead at 85 |
1070821_0 | At least eight people were killed late Thursday night and nine were still missing today after a pleasure boat carrying 26 Cubans capsized off one of the keys that make up Biscayne National Park, Coast Guard officials said. The officials described the incident as a probable case of immigrant smuggling. Coast Guard and immigration officials could not recall a recent incident in which a boat taking refugees across the Straits of Florida had caused so many deaths. The vessel, about 30 feet long, capsized about 11 P.M. on Thursday, Coast Guard spokesmen said, some 20 miles south of Miami near Elliott Key. A passing freighter rescued nine passengers this morning, including two children, who had been clinging to the boat for about 10 hours, the authorities said. The dead passengers were discovered in the vicinity later by a Coast Guard rescue team. Using two cutters and three helicopters, the Coast Guard team searched for the remaining passengers. ''We believe it is a case of smuggling,'' said Jibran Soto, a Coast Guard spokesman. The boat was registered in Florida and was most likely used to bring Cubans to the country illegally, Mr. Soto added. The incident comes as law-enforcement officials have encountered a growing number of cases involving smugglers trying to bring Cuban and Haitian refugees into the United States. But it was not immediately clear whether the group whose boat capsized today had been organized by a smuggler. The site of the capsizing, the shallow flats south of Key Biscayne, holds normally tranquil waters where recreational boats are a common sight. Though more illegal immigrants try to reach Florida during the summer months than in December, the weather has been warm with mild winds. But navigating the waters from Cuba has often been a deadly trip for immigrants trying to leave the island, said Jose Basulto, who heads Brothers to the Rescue, a group that seeks to rescue Cubans and other refugees stranded along the Florida straits. ''We try to tell our brothers in Cuba not to do this because it's costing too many lives,'' he added. In a similar incident in March, three people died when a boat believed to carry 16 refugees capsized off Biscayne Bay. Two people were later charged with smuggling. President Clinton began ordering the deportation of Cuban boat people in May 1995 after a huge influx of Cubans by sea. This amounted to a | Boat Capsizes Near Miami; 8 Cubans Die |
1071512_3 | cellular phones. In contrast, Time Domain's devices can currently transmit 1.25 million bits a second up to 230 feet using just 0.5 milliwatts, or one-thousandth the power used by Bluetooth. These transmission are being achieved with the first working prototype chips the company has received from I.B.M., which fabricated them using the advanced silicon germanium semiconductor material developed for communications applications. Standard wireless transmissions encode data in a continuous sine wave by varying the amplitude (the size of the wave) or the frequency (the number of times the wave cycles each second), sometimes both. In contrast, Time Domain's technology is similar to a Morse code system that at this point in its development, switches on and off 40 million times a second. And unlike traditional radio signals, which are confined to a very narrow frequency, each pulse of ultra-wide band is transmitted across a wide portion of the radio spectrum, so that only a tiny amount of energy is radiated at any single frequency. The company said it believed that the bandwidth, or data-carrying capacity, of its technology can be expanded to many times its current limit -- perhaps as high as billions of bits a second. Moreover, while standard narrowband wireless technologies have a limited bandwidth, the digital pulse approach has the potential to handle a large number of simultaneous users in close proximity, Time Domain officials said. Ultrawide band has the added advantage of being significantly more resistant to ''multipath interference,'' a problem that plagues indoor radio systems because signals tend to bounce off many surfaces. Industry officials said they did not expect an early resolution to the F.C.C.'s inquiry, which was begun in August. One particular obstacle is that a key official at the Federal Aviation Administration has filed an objection with the F.C.C., warning about a potential problem caused by the clustering of large numbers of transmitters, even at very low power levels. industry officials note, however, that current F.C.C. rules permit ''incidental'' emitters -- generally, consumer devices like personal computers, hair dryers, electric razors, automobiles and arc welders -- and that no hazard has been demonstrated from the hundreds of millions of these products in everyday use. Last month, a group of scientists and engineers met at the Interval Research Corporation, a computer industry research center financed by Paul Allen, a co-founder of the Microsoft Corporation, to coordinate industry input into the F.C.C. decision-making process. | F.C.C. Mulls Wider Commercial Use of Radical Radio Technology |
1071540_1 | a Coast Guard spokesman, Paul Henley. Both men charged, Francisco Gomez, 34, who owned the boat, and Pedro Guevara, 32, are natives of Cuba who live in Florida. Border Patrol officials said they had been investigating Mr. Guevara for previous smuggling incidents. The survivors included a 4-year-old and a 9-year-old. Three survivors were Mr. Guevara's relatives, said Dan Geoghegan, the assistant chief of the Border Patrol in Miami. Although the smuggling of aliens, a Federal crime, normally carries a maximum penalty of three years in prison for each person smuggled, both men could face the death penalty, which is allowed in cases in which lives are lost. The boat, a 30-foot Scarab, flipped over near the northern Florida Keys, possibly because of engine trouble and overcrowding, the Coast Guard said. Border Patrol officials said it had departed from Tavernier, in the middle Keys, picked up the refugees and was headed back to Florida. The officials were not sure whether the boat had taken the passengers from Cuba or from the Bahamas, a common starting ground for Cuban refugees wishing to enter the United States. The incident highlighted what law-enforcement agents say is an increase in the smuggling of aliens in the three years since President Clinton, acting on an agreement with the Government of Fidel Castro, ordered the repatriation of Cubans trying to enter Florida by sea. The President's mandate, enacted in 1995, reversed a 35-year policy that had welcomed such refugees to American shores. For years, most Cubans who wanted to come to the United States were forced to use small rafts in a journey fraught with danger and deprivation. Thousands are thought to have died in the unpredictable waters of the Florida Straits and only a few, like well-known baseball players, received widespread attention. Since 1995, however, more Cubans have been resorting to smugglers, who own boats that are better equipped for the journey. ''We don't see many genuine rafters anymore because of the interdiction policy,'' Mr. Geoghegan said. ''If you use a faster boat, there is less chance of being intercepted.'' For smugglers, the route from Cuba to Florida has become profitable. In an incident in early summer, Mr. Geoghegan recalled, Border Patrol officials found that smugglers were charging immigrants $9,000 apiece for the trip. It was not clear how much money Mr. Gomez and Mr. Guevara were thought to have charged the refugees on the Scarab. | 2 Arrested as Cuban Refugee Rescue Ends |
997539_0 | The British and Irish Governments have decided that terrorist attacks by sectarian splinter groups will not be allowed to derail the Northern Ireland peace talks, which are working toward a May 1 deadline for an agreement on the future of the British province, officials close to the negotiations say. They call the decision more a new attitude than a new policy regarding the talks, which resume on Monday without Sinn Fein, the political wing of the overwhelmingly Roman Catholic Irish Republican Army. Sinn Fein was temporarily suspended on Friday on suspicion of an I.R.A. link to the killings of two civilians. The Ulster Democrats, which were expelled in January because of their affiliation with Protestant guerrillas involved in other killings, will return to the talks on Monday. The May 1 deadline is important because any agreement must be put to almost immediate referendums here and in the Irish Republic. The Governments, which are sponsoring the talks, feel that delaying an agreement into June or July would risk entangling it in the unrest that invariably accompanies the annual Protestant patriotic marches, which anger many Catholics. The officials add that only two events could still cause the talks, aimed at ending the sectarian violence that has killed more than 3,200 people in Northern Ireland since 1969, to break down. One would be an admitted, provable act of violence by one of the major paramiltary groups with direct links to parties at the negotiations. The other would be the assassination of a prominent figure in the talks. The new attitude toward splinter groups was signaled three weeks ago when both Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain and George J. MItchell, the former American senator who is chairman of the talks, said that small groups would undoubtedly persist in terrorist acts in the coming weeks. Today, Gerry Adams, the Sinn Fein president, said his party would not be deterred by ''Republican militants,'' that is, Catholic splinter groups opposed to Sinn Fein's participation in the talks. And this afternoon, the Irish Prime Minister, Bertie Ahern, made the new attitude explicit. On Irish Republic television, he said that if new attacks are by ''isolated mavericks,'' then ''we can't be blown off course by that.'' The Irish and British Governments have also tentatively decided to move the talks to a secret location, possibly in continental Europe, in their final weeks, to obviate the dilatory practice of negotiating | New Attacks Will Not Halt Irish Talks |
994559_0 | Protestant leaders, citing two killings attributed to Roman Catholic guerrillas in 24 hours, moved today to have Sinn Fein, the political wing of the I.R.A., expelled from the Northern Ireland peace talks. The Sinn Fein president, Gerry Adams, denied that his party was involved in the killings, but declined to say whether the Irish Republican Army was involved. A senior British official, acknowledging the move for expulsion, said only that the new killings had ''serious implications'' for the talks. If Sinn Fein is to be expelled, the decision will be taken by the highest- ranking official in the British province, Northern Ireland Secretary Mo Mowlam, after consulting with the Irish Republic Government. She had no immediate comment. Ms. Mowlam is in a difficult position. It had taken years of maneuvering for all sides to agree to let Sinn Fein sit at the bargaining table, and it was allowed to do so only after the I.R.A. committed itself to a cease-fire last July. Officials and experts said today that without Sinn Fein, the peace talks would be unlikely to produce an agreement ending the sectarian warfare that has killed more than 3,200 people since 1969. The expulsion of Sinn Fein, they said, would risk provoking the I.R.A. to end its cease-fire pledge and possibly plunge the province into a new round of killing. But all sides in the talks have pledged to shun violence. And two weeks ago, Ms. Mowlam suspended from the talks a Protestant party, the Ulster Democrats, because its paramilitary wing had admitted killing three Catholic victims. This afternoon the head of the Ulster Democrats, Gary McMichael, said that if Sinn Fein was not now expelled, it would mean that the British and Irish Governments, who are sponsoring the peace talks, were applying a double standard. The latest killings came after a two-week lull. A string of attacks since the end of December had left eight Catholics and two Protestants dead. On Monday night, a reputed Catholic drug dealer was shot dead in Belfast, the northern capital. The police said the killers were probably from an I.R.A. front group calling itself Direct Action Against Drugs. Then, this afternoon, a prominent Protestant member of the outlawed Ulster Defense Association was shot dead. No group claimed responsibility for either killing, and a Republican splinter group, the Irish National Liberation Army, denied any involvement. But the police said the killings appeared | New Killings Again Disrupt Peace Talks in Northern Ireland |
994599_2 | no change of planes. Requirements include round-trip travel by Aug. 4, an overnight stay and seven-day advance purchase. Other major airlines, including UAL's United Airlines and US Airways, matched Southwest's rates for their own nonstop service on these routes, but imposed additional restrictions. Continental Airlines now permits passengers flying nonstop to the West Coast from Newark International Airport to check in up to 12 hours before departure at nine places in Manhattan, including the World Trade Center, Grand Central Station and the Port Authority Bus Terminal. The carrier still handles checked baggage at the airport. Passengers on these routes can also earn double mileage in Continental's frequent-flier program through April 1. AMR's American Airlines added a new, Executive Platinum level to its frequent-flier program that gives travelers an upgrade confirmation within 100 hours of departure, and also defers expiration of mileage as long as Executive Platinum status is maintained. To reach this status, travelers must accrue 100,000 points a calendar year; points are calculated by mileage and type of fare purchased. Starting March 1, United Airlines will offer electronic ticketing on flights between the United States and Canada. Swissair is beginning nonstop service five times weekly between San Francisco and Zurich on May 27. Air New Zealand is giving a $747 rebate to passengers who purchase a round-trip first- or business-class ticket for flights from Los Angeles to London; Frankfurt; Auckland, New Zealand, or Sydney, Australia. Travel must be completed by May 31. Hotel Update One-fifth of the 115 member hotels in Preferred Hotels and Resorts Worldwide, the marketing and sales consortium, are offering American Express card holders room upgrades and rate discounts averaging 30 percent through March 15. Through April 15, American Express card holders who reserve a room at the corporate rate at Four Seasons hotels in Toronto and Philadelphia will be upgraded to a suite. They will also receive free car service to their first morning business appointment, cordials and a cigar or chocolates. a free in-room movie and $25 worth of long-distance telephone service. Food for Thought A survey of 1,000 frequent fliers by LSG-Sky Chefs found that 31 percent of those polled ranked food service as the most important reason they preferred a foreign airline; only 12 percent said it was the reason they preferred a United States carrier. And almost 60 percent said it was difficult to distinguish between meals served by different airlines. | Business Travel; Bucking an industry trend, Thrifty Car Rental is increasing mileage rewards for its customers. |
994526_2 | here,'' he said with studied modesty. ''We are just facilitators.'' Of the Blair dinner, he said: ''These are not Escoffier dinners. You tell the President to wait 10 minutes, and he'll tell you to find another job. You can spin it any way you want -- it's still a banquet. How you serve 240 people and have them not think it's another rubber-chicken-circuit dinner, that's the job.'' Mr. Scheib also said he realizes that as important as a dinner might be to a restaurant chef, at the White House it is just one component of an evening that begins at 7:30 and, like the one last week, may not end until 1 A.M. ''Ask someone who came what they remember and they aren't coming for the dinner per se,'' he said. ''They remember the house and meeting the President and Mrs. Clinton and the entertainment.'' In the early days of his tenure Mr. Scheib gained a reputation for cooking ''healthy, nutritious food,'' language he still uses when describing what Mrs. Clinton wants. It's an unfortunate choice of words because, in practice, his food is no different from what many other good chefs produce. Flavor is not sacrificed for calorie count. ''I'm not talking about substituting nonfat cheese,'' he said, ''because if you are going to have cheese it has to be a beautiful, spectacular cheese. I get the gratuitous fat out by using vegetable or fruit purees, by using big and fresh flavors instead of just adding butter and slapping on a piece of foie gras.'' HE is constantly in search of the finest ingredients, but when the ingredients fall short he understands how to improve them. For example, the salad at the dinner was intended to show off a new buffalo milk mozzarella from Egg Farm Dairy of Peekskill, N.Y., one of the many small purveyors of top-quality products he likes to use. A touch of tomato was essential, but Mr. Scheib admitted that it was ''a bit of a push'' to use tomatoes in January, even the special plum tomatoes he gets from California. So he marinated them in a mixture containing mint and basil ''to open up those tastes in the tomato.'' And nestled among the roasted artichoke and paper-thin slices of yellow beets that had been brushed with extra-virgin olive oil flavored with lemon, the tomatoes held up their end of the salad. In keeping with | Just Who's Stirring the Pot in the White House? |
993731_2 | their age, what is it exactly? Advanced middle age? Youthful old age? In real life, both sexes benefit equally from a prolonged spirit of youthfulness, but in movies men live on in perpetual daylight savings time while women are pushed not so gently into the good night, and this double standard has worsened as the age gap has widened from decade to decade. The original ''Love Affair'' (1939) featured Charles Boyer (42) and Irene Dunne (41); the second version (''An Affair to Remember,'' 1957), Cary Grant (53) and Deborah Kerr (36); the third, in 1994, Warren Beatty (57) and Annette Bening (36). Grant and Fred Astaire were notorious for playing romantic leads from one decade to the next with ever shinier ingenues while their original co-stars played mothers, then grandmothers. But Astaire and Grant, possessed of an inimitable style, were the exception rather than the rule. Typically, stars like Stewart and Fonda, Tracy and Gable were part of a more ordered, Noah's Ark sort of universe, where like was paired with like, age group with age group. There was a rotation system in place with unspoken mandatory retirement laws, and no one had tenure as studios replenished aging idols with fresh new faces. Clark Gable became a star in 1934 with ''It Happened One Night'' and had barely 10 years at the top. Gary Cooper lasted a little longer, but when they lingered past their prime (Gable in ''The Misfits,'' Gary Cooper in ''Love in the Afternoon''), the films were flops. Perhaps audiences were disturbed by the sight of Cooper's tired, wintry face with the petal-fresh innocence of Audrey Hepburn. At 56, Cooper was twice Hepburn's age. We know movie stars' faces better than our own and we study them like astronomers poring over star maps, acutely aware of every face-saving stratagem: which part has been tampered with, which left to run slack, which teeth are too white, which jaw is too tight. In giant close-up, movie stars become the focal point of our anxiety about aging and, above all, our excruciating ambivalence toward plastic surgery. We are made uncomfortable by wattles, wrinkles and double chins, and are equally uncomfortable when they vanish overnight. The large screen ruthlessly exposes the desperation, the Frankenstein quality of different sections of the persona uneasily conjoined. How old is a septuagenarian male with new teeth, a new heart; or a postmenopausal woman on estrogen; | Where the Old Boy Always Gets the Girl |
993722_4 | desperate at one point, with little hope of getting a new boat on the water. A neighbor saved the day, with a handshake. While Captain Rathbun commends many Noankers for their good deeds over the decades, he also notes a few other things that they did. Mr. Eldridge, for instance, was famed for practical jokes; an especially memorable one involved lots of slimy eels. Other stories are of unexpected encounters on the water, including one in which the author's normally polite Dad got exasperated at a boat that kept coming too close to his own. ''Can't you see that I am trying to make a living here?'' he yelled. ''Get that Noah's Ark out of here!'' On the other boat, reports Captain Rathbun, there was ''dead silence,'' as all on deck eyed a particular passenger, an angler ''smoking a cigarette in a long holder.'' It was President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who burst out laughing -- and waved as the boat left. Years later, the author and his crew were landing fish every minute when people on a nearby boat -- where nobody was landing anything -- asked him over. Onboard, he found President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who hated not to catch fish, swearing mightily. After advising Ike on lures, the captain directed him to a spot where fish were concentrated. His favorite story, however, is about how his Dad, serving in lean times as the new church sexton, whose duties included heating the baptismal water, almost cooked the clergyman, whose face promptly lost its expression of ''piety and reserve.'' Although the event took place in 1936, he remembers it well. After all, he watched -- and he also heard his Dad regularly regale his charter boat customers with full accounts of it. His favorite kind of fishing was swordfishing, using hand-thrown harpoons. He loved being ''the harpooner, known in the trade as the Striker.'' In the 1960's, however, the thrilling (and dangerous) harpoon method was replaced by the longline method, ''where vessels set out up to 40 miles of baited hooks.'' He points out that this safer, more efficient method has greatly reduced the swordfish population. For all his nostalgia, he has no quarrel with modern improvements, like electronic navigation equipment. He knows what it was like to be without such equipment, in terrible conditions. ''A single mistake could cost you your life,'' he says. Today, he and his wife, | The Noank Fishery, Before Technology |
993709_0 | VELTROL, Litesse and Xylitol are hardly household words, yet they are everyday products found in the food and beverages on the shelves of the bakery, dairy, confectionery, processed meat and poultry, seafood, vegetable, alcoholic and nonalcoholic beverage departments of supermarkets across the United States. For the uninitiated, Veltrol is a key ingredient in the development of compound flavors where a fruity characteristic is essential. Litesse is a polydextrose bulking agent used in reduced-calorie confectionery products and Xylitol? Xylitol is used in chewing gum and confections and recognized for its unusual dental benefits in preventing and reducing dental caries. All three products have been developed by Cultor Food Science, one of the world's largest developers and marketers of high-performance food ingredients. Cultor Food Science is a business sector within Cultor Corporation, based in Helsinki, Finland, an international research and marketing organization focusing on nutrition, operating in more than 30 countries and distributing products worldwide. Cultor's annual sales are approximately $1.8 billion, with Food Science generating about $480 million. Last November, Cultor Food Science moved to Westchester, opening a $15 million, 100,000- square-foot Customer and Technology Center in Ardsley, bringing 150 jobs to Westchester and accolades from the Westchester Partnership for Economic Development At the ribbon-cutting ceremony, the menu, demonstrating the end use of Cultor ingredients, included offerings like reduced-fat, reduced- calorie-butter-cream cake; low-fat pumpkin ice cream, chocolate-raspberry-cream-flavored coffee and anise-flavored sugar cookies. ''Consumers are demanding more from food than ever before,'' said Joseph Dunne, the newly appointed president of Cultor. ''They are more knowledgeable about food and nutrition, and they want better taste, fewer calories, higher nutrition and a longer shelf life. Basically, what we do is help our customers, food manufacturers and processors around the world satisfy consumer tastes by developing specialty ingredients, flavors and protectants for food and beverages.'' The new Cutlor Food Sciences and Technology Center consists of two adjoining buildings: the Customer Building, which contains executive offices, marketing and all corporate operations, and the Technology Building, which includes research and development, technical services and technical development operations. True to Finnish practice, on the lower level of the Customer Building isan employee fitness center with men and women's saunas, furtheringthe belief in the therapeutic effects of the sauna as a way to relax and refresh employees and guests. ''The company as it is today was formed in January 1996 by merging two industry leaders -- Cultor Ltd. and | Food Technology Unit Comes to Ardsley |
993839_2 | calls to relatives. ''Sometimes what we do is as simple as finding an Egyptian newspaper or the person who can get the seaman's last $10 out of a defective phone card machine,'' Mr. Borner said. ''We'll meet a mother from Hamburg at the airport and drive her to the hospital,'' Mr. Padgitt said, ''so she can see her son in intensive care after a crane fell on him.'' On this day, after a Staten Island stop, we boarded the San Felipe, a 547-foot container ship loading at Port Newark for a run to Buenos Aires. Capt. Dirk Trampe, a 36-year-old blond-bearded giant, seemed delighted with company during his 20 hours in sight of New York. He ran us up five breath-taking flights to the bridge, served lunch and told us pirate stories. ''You can't drift at anchorage,'' he said. ''You have to keep moving, especially off the coast of South America, or they'll board you. It's the sophisticated ones with computers who know what you're carrying in the containers that you worry most about. ''But I tell you, forget technology, the old ways still work. Once, I saw two old fishing boats run a long line in front of the bow of a container ship. When the ship sailed into the rope, the little boats were pulled in alongside and the pirates climbed aboard. There's nothing to do. We don't carry guns. That's how you get hurt.'' Like many charter container ships these days, the San Felipe is German-owned. Except for the officers, most of the 24-member crew are from the Philipines. Captain Trampe's problems were not cultural. He went to sea at 15 as a deck boy, the last of a breed, and he lamented the sloppy knot- tying of the computer operators who now sail his ship. The paperwork is overwhelming; the most important machine aboard, he said, is the copier. On the ride back to the Seafarers and International House on East 15th Street, the pastors talked about their work as a possible model for the increasing role of so-called industrial chaplains, the new circuit riders bringing God to the workplace. In June, Pastor Borner begins a 10-week interdominational course of ''clinical'' pastorage; he will bring rabbis and priests to the ships to ''actively listen'' to the Filipino deckhands and, yes, old-school German engineers. ''What was he really saying?'' Pastor Borner asked. ''Is he reflecting the multicultural | Bringing God on Deck |
993890_7 | and ''staying at supplier's beach house'' (say no to either), ''transporting Air Force officials'' (also a no-no, even if they are headed to the airport or even if it is on your way home) ''wearing a pro-choice T-shirt'' (no; too incendiary) and ''dealing with dropped gyroscope'' (confront the person who dropped it, and if necessary, get it inspected yourself.) Some questions, though, are trickier. One hypothesizes the visit of a Boeing engineer to a customer, who offers to let him inspect the design of a rival's aircraft. Should he? Yes, says the booklet, and you don't need to call the ethics officer to ask if it is O.K. After all, the aircraft is a commercial product, and its owner has invited Boeing to check it out -- a perfectly legal procedure. Sometimes a practice may draw more criticism from the outside than from within. The Weyerhaeuser Company in Federal Way, Wash., for instance, has received adverse publicity over the years for clear-cutting forests, but challenging such policies is generally not on the ethics officer's plate. ''Most people here understand why clear-cutting is done the way it is,'' said Nancy Thomas, Weyerhaeuser's manager of business conduct, adding that the company meets and often exceeds required forestry standards in the United States and abroad. ''The employees are really proud of the company.'' Mr. Josephson of the ethics institute in Los Angeles says ethics officers can have their work cut out for them just educating business people on the difference between what is technically legal and what is right. He once posed this question to the top dozen executives of a Fortune 100 company: What should you do if a contract you signed turns out to be unprofitable? The legal specialist in the group responded by discussing the leeway the company would have in backing out, he said. ''I said, 'Don't you see the ethical issues?' '' he recalled. '' 'If you're willing to fight it out in court that you have no obligation to keep promises, on what basis would people think you're an ethical corporation?' '' Though the reaction discouraged him at the time, he now looks on the bright side. ''The field is still in its infancy,'' Mr. Josephson said. ''Fifteen or 20 years ago, the whole concept would've been rejected.'' ALREADY, measuring the results of such programs is like counting the forest fires that Smoky the Bear has prevented | Charting A Course To Ethical Profits |
992459_5 | a 73-year-old brick behemoth that spans three city blocks in Washington Heights and whose illustrious alumni include Henry A. Kissinger. The building began to take a beating in the mid-1970's, its original wooden desk furniture battered by fighting and its classrooms swollen with 4,000 students, nearly double the number it was built to accommodate, said Ismael Noriega, a longtime assistant principal at the school. It was a time when routine maintenance was deferred because of a lack of funds, Mr. Noriega said. By 1989, he said, it was clear that the school's leaky roofs and crumbling window frames needed to be replaced. But those repairs, he said, were put off until 1994, when the school was to get a $35 million expansion -- two classroom towers were to rise from its courtyard, and all exterior repairs would be taken care of. But in 1994, just weeks before the work was to begin, the entire project was scrapped, along with several other high-school expansions that were the victim of the retrenchment in the city's capital plan. Mr. Noriega, sitting in an office scarred with broken windowpanes, said, ''It was disappointing.'' Last winter, under the weight of rain-soaked plaster, the ceiling of the school's sixth-floor horticulture classroom gave way (the students had been moved out several weeks earlier), leaving two long gaping holes with rusted metal supports dangling from them. Water damage is also evident in each of the school's fourth-floor classrooms, where the plaster on the upper part of the exterior wall is swollen and cracking. Ms. Zedalis said that engineers were to finish designing a solution to the school's structural failings -- including replacing its multiple roofs, shoring up its facade and securing its cracked cupola -- in May. While repairs haven't been made at George Washington High because of cuts in the capital budget, school officials say it is less clear why the system has yet to replace the windows at Middle School 80 in the Norwood section of the Bronx. The principal, Lawrence Gluck, ordered those windows bolted shut over this past Christmas break, 12 years after they were condemned and 74 years after many of them were installed. The bolts were necessary, Mr. Gluck said, because some of the windows did not open at all, others would fly open at the slightest touch, and still others would slam shut, ''like a guillotine.'' He was also hoping to | Many Schools, in Disrepair, Pose Hazards |
992470_3 | of China to acquaint himself with economic changes there and, with details of the Pope's visit here then being worked out, stopping in Rome on his way back to meet with Vatican officials. Certain other officials close to Fidel Castro have also seen their roles gradually expand in recent times. The economy czar, Carlos Lage, for instance, now supervises much of the day-to-day administration of government. But to the United States, any government that Raul Castro might head is merely an extension of the current one-party state. The Helms-Burton Act of 1996, which widened American economic sanctions against Cuba, specifically states that the embargo will be rescinded only when ''a transition government in Cuba is in power,'' one that ''does not include Fidel Castro or Raul Castro.'' But Latin American and European diplomats here say they detect certain subtle differences of approach and attitude between the two brothers. Raul, they maintain, is more pragmatic than Fidel on economic issues, but perhaps even more dogmatic on ideological questions. At a special party meeting in March 1996, Raul denounced as ''fifth columnists'' a group of reformers working at several party-sponsored research institutes, who were then purged. But he is also said to have pushed for economic reforms in 1993, when the economic crisis that followed the collapse of the Communist bloc and the loss of Soviet subsidies threatened to bring Cuba to its knees. At the October party congress, the military, which remains the foundation of Raul Castro's power and prestige, was singled out for praise. Then, in late November, the military Chief of Staff, Gen. Ulises Rosales del Toro, was made head of the Ministry of Sugar in what was seen as an effort to increase production after a series of bad harvests in the industry most vital to the Cuban economy. But Raul Castro has not been immune from implied criticism. In December, Raul Valdes Vivo, the head of the party's school for cadres, published a scathing criticism of suggested economic reforms in the party newspaper Granma, arguing that letting Cubans invest in businesses ''would introduce a social force that sooner or later would serve the counterrevolution.'' Mr. Valdes Vivo described investors as nothing more than ''piranhas,'' and warned that they were ''capable in a minimum time of devouring a horse down to its bones.'' Here in Cuba, one of Fidel Castro's nicknames is El Caballo, which means ''the horse.'' | As Heir to Fidel, Raul Castro Assumes Bigger Role in Cuba |
992405_0 | Brazil's President, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, now has on his desk new legislation that finally gives the country's environmental agency a modicum of power to enforce environmental laws. A coalition of ranchers and industrialists managed to strip the bill of some of its toughest provisions, and is trying to persuade Mr. Cardoso to veto the important measures that remain. Before doing so, he should think carefully about a report issued last week by the Brazilian National Space Research Institute, which found that deforestation in Brazil's Amazon is growing alarmingly. Brazil has good laws on the books protecting the Amazon but no legal power to enforce them. The environmental agency can levy only absurdly small fines and collects less than 10 percent of them. The legislation passed last week to correct this has been sitting in Congress for seven years. At the top of the list of measures Mr. Cardoso should preserve is a requirement that companies pay the cost of cleaning up environmental damage they caused, even if the Government cannot prove the damage was intentional. Mr. Cardoso should also save a provision that prohibits proven polluters from getting Government contracts or bidding on Government loans for several years, and another measure setting daily fines for companies that refuse to clean up their damage. Enforcement of environmental laws is particularly crucial given the evidence that damage to the Amazon is rapidly worsening. This contributes to global warming and destroys a forest that houses the most diverse group of plants and animals in the world. The new report, which uses satellite data, found that clear-cutting has been rising at a rapid rate. The 1995-96 burning season saw 7,000 square miles destroyed, almost double the annual deforestation that took place four years earlier. The Amazon suffers from other damage not extensive enough to show up in satellite pictures, such as selective logging, fires and drying. A recent report by Brazil's Congress found that the total area affected annually is more than 22,000 square miles. Another study, by the Woods Hole Research Institute in Massachusetts, found that cutting and burning have dried out the forest to the point that it could burn out of control. Brazil's deforestation is likely to rise as Asian logging companies move deeper into the Amazon. Mr. Cardoso must refrain from further weakening an already weak bill. | Half-Measures to Protect the Amazon |
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