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1039538_0 | LIKE an armada of tall ships, tales of the sea are sailing onto bookshelves. There are salty soap operas featuring sensitive mariners drawn to the high seas to heal marital heartbreak or cope with terminal disease. There are manly memoirs and survival books by Alaskan crab fishermen and Antarctic explorers. For hard-core nautical buffs there are handsome books on maritime arcana and history, like the recent ''Safeguard of the Sea: A Naval History of Britain, 660-1649,'' by N.A.M. Rodger (W. W. Norton, 1998). And then there are recycled classics like C. S. Forester's swashbuckling Horatio Hornblower adventures and more obscure novels like ''The Black Ship,'' a 1963 work by Dudley Pope about a bloody mutiny aboard the H.M.S. Hermione in 1797. What is it about the siren call of the sea that makes readers want to thumb through a ''cookery book'' like ''Lobscouse & Spotted Dog'' (Norton, 1998) for recipes for sweetbreads in malmsey, spotted dog (an eggy custard tinged with rosewater) and other 18th-century galley fare? Whatever the answer, there is enough money in seafaring literature these days to prompt a host of trade publishers to cash in. The boom has been driven mainly by Norton's success with Patrick O'Brian's series of historical seafaring novels following the exploits of Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin, and ''The Perfect Storm,'' Sebastian Junger's 1997 nonfiction best-seller about the destruction of a swordfishing boat by a violent Atlantic nor'easter. Such imitation in publishing is as basic as paper. Publishing houses are simply observing a cherished and fundamental ritual of the trade: Follow the wake of popular books with titles in every possible permutation till the boom goes bust. Sometimes the publishing pack is hungry for memoirs of dysfunction and anorexia; in other cases it's mystery books mixed with cooking recipes or titles by new-age authors with direct lines to God. ''They're playing follow the leader here,'' said Starling Lawrence, editor in chief of Norton. There are more than 3 million copies of the 18 Aubrey-Maturin books in print, Mr. Lawrence noted, with the next installment, ''The Hundred Days,'' to be published in October. Mr. Lawrence sees little evidence that the public hunger for naval literature has been sated. He said several publishers were prepared to pay a seven-figure advance this summer for a manuscript about the 1820 wreck of a whaling ship by a whale. But before the auction could take place, Penguin | Ideas & Trends; Armchair Sailors On the Seven Seas |
1039447_0 | The bungee-cord ride at Steel Pier in Atlantic City and three others like it at other shore parks are not open for thrill seekers. The Steel Fear ride in Atlantic City is being dismantled after a 180-foot tower collapsed last week, and others in amusement parks in Wildwood, Ocean City and Seaside Heights are being reinforced although no problems were found in those structures, said William Catanoso, whose family owns all four areas. The collapse is still under investigation by the state. The steel tower that fell onto a nearby bumper car ride, trapping four children for a few minutes before spectators and emergency medical workers could rescue them, may have collapsed because of a faulty weld, said Christopher Wolf, a state Community Affairs Department spokesman, and Mr. Catanoso. The inventor of the ride, Grant Balwanz of Tennessee, has said he believes a defective piece of steel caused the problem. The Department of Community Affairs is investigating the collapse. Three children were treated at the Atlantic City Medical Center and released the night of the accident, while one was admitted for treatment of undisclosed injuries and was still hospitalized on Thursday, a supervising nurse said. KAREN DeMASTERS IN BRIEF | After Tower Collapses, Four Shore Rides Are Closed |
1039277_0 | IN a city whose modern sprawl so often threatens ancient treasures, the Egyptian Government has begun an unusual effort to preserve a religious site that has suffered from years of neglect and bungled repairs. The two-year project stands out because it targets not one of the Pharaonic temples or Islamic monuments for which Egypt is better known but a Coptic Christian church in old Cairo, a crowded, gritty quarter often bypassed by visitors. The 10th-century basilica, known as the Hanging Church, is built atop the remnants of a far more ancient Roman fortress. Its name refers to its precarious design; the floor of palm-wood beams hangs in midair, supported only at the edges by three Roman columns. It is among the oldest churches of its kind in Cairo, but until the $6.7 million renovation began earlier this year, many here feared that it might be near collapse. The earthquake that rocked the city in 1992 left its walls badly cracked, while layers of paint fell regularly from its ceilings. And although the church has been renovated several times in this century alone, some previous efforts had caused more damage than was fixed. In 1983 an engineer ordered that an interior column be removed, then watched in horror as the chapel ceiling it had supported came crashing to the floor, destroying all the artwork inside the chapel. More recently -- and more worrisomely -- a mysterious pool of ground water that had long sat at the foot of the Roman fortress had begun to rise steadily, carrying salts and bacteria that were weakening the pillars on which the structure rests. To some Coptic Christians, who make up about 10 percent of Egypt's population of 62 million, the fate of the Hanging Church had begun to seem like a metaphor for their ancient community, which many complain has been denied its due respect. But now that the restoration is finally under way, Egyptian antiquities officials point to the church as an example of their commitment to preserving the country's multireligious heritage. ''This is not a pharaonic, Islamic or religious issue,'' said Ali Hassan, then chairman of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities, when the decision to go forward with the project was announced last fall. ''This is about restoring monuments.'' Officially, the site is called the Church of the Virgin, named for Mary, who is reputed to have once stayed the night just | A 10th-Century Church Is Rescued in Old Cairo |
1039574_0 | DIARY: THE RUSSIAN BEAR | Mauling the Market |
1041731_0 | To the Editor: Re ''Managing Flood Waters in China'' (editorial, Aug. 23): As you suggest, it is time to forgo the Three Gorges dam project and devote the estimated $50 billion it will cost to ''more effective flood management strategies'' on the Yangtze River.. While floods are almost always classified as natural disasters, human activities have clearly intensified the recent flooding. The Yangtze basin is one of the most densely populated in the world. Intensive land development and widespread deforestation have undermined the water-holding capacity of the watershed. Although China has announced logging restrictions in the basin, development in the flood plains and the draining of lakes that hold overflow continue. LESTER R. BROWN Washington, Aug. 24, 1998 The writer is president of the Worldwatch Institute. | Fending Off the Yangtze |
1041754_1 | United States is not among them) that ratified the treaty. If approved, these regulations would be included in a binding international agreement early next year. But the team has exceeded its mandate. Instead of limiting the agreement to genetic modifications that might threaten biodiversity, the members are also pushing to regulate shipments of all genetically modified organisms and the products made from them. This means that grain, fresh produce, vaccines, medicines, breakfast cereals, wine, vitamins -- the list is endless -- would require written approval by the importing nation before they could leave the dock. This approval could take months. Meanwhile, barge costs would mount and vaccines and food would spoil. How could regulations intended to protect species and conserve their genes have gotten so far off track? The main cause is anti-biotechnology environmental groups that exaggerate the risks of genetically modified organisms and ignore their benefits. Anti-biotechnology activists argue that genetic engineering is so new that its effects on the environment can't be predicted. This is misleading. In fact, for hundreds of years virtually all food has been improved genetically by plant breeders. Genetically altered antibiotics, vaccines and vitamins have improved our health, while enzyme-containing detergents and oil-eating bacteria have helped to protect the environment. In the past 40 years, farmers worldwide have genetically modified crops to be more nutritious as well as resistant to insects, diseases and herbicides. Scientific techniques developed in the 1980's and commonly referred to as genetic engineering allow us to give plants additional useful genes. Genetically engineered cotton, corn and soybean seeds became available in the United States in 1996, including those planted on my family farm. This growing season, more than one-third of American soybeans and one-fourth of our corn will be genetically modified. The number of acres devoted to genetically engineered crops in Argentina, Canada, Mexico and Australia increased tenfold from 1996 to 1997. The risks of modern genetic engineering have been studied by technical experts at the National Academy of Sciences and World Bank. They concluded that we can predict the environmental effects by reviewing past experiences with those plants and animals produced through selective breeding. None of these products of selective breeding have harmed either the environment or biodiversity. And their benefits are legion. By increasing crop yields, genetically modified organisms reduce the constant need to clear more land for growing food. Seeds designed to resist drought and pests are | Who's Afraid of Genetic Engineering? |
1041794_2 | for thousands of years. Lu Qinkan, a retired Government hydrologist and flood prevention expert, said that in 1980 an important report by the Ministry of Water Resources laid out plans for reinforcing and raising the main dikes along the Yangtze. But by 1987, only $48 million of the $1.2 billion that was called for had been spent on the project. ''Eighteen years have passed,'' Mr. Lu said in an interview, ''but the main dikes are in a state of disrepair, leading to breaches this year.'' The neglect of downstream dikes, Mr. Lu and other critics say, reflects a bias toward building dams and reservoirs to battle floods despite their inherently limited capacity. Though the topic is too politically sensitive for the official news media to explore, this year's floods have revived private debate about the giant Three Gorges Dam under construction along the upper reaches of the Yangtze. On television and in newspaper interviews, officials involved in the project have tried to capitalize on the crisis, contending that the dam will greatly reduce -- if not eliminate -- flooding like this year's. Mr. Lu, who was involved in feasibility studies for the Three Gorges Dam but who refused to sign the recommendation to proceed, said its effect could only be small. In 1954, he said, in the last great flood comparable to this year's, water flowing into the dam site totaled about 300 billion cubic meters. But the flood-retention capacity of the dam is only 22 billion cubic meters, he said. And another 359 billion cubic meters of water flowed into the river below the dam site. Along with improving dikes, critics of the dam-centered approach to flood control say, more must be done to protect natural waterways that can soak up water and to set aside basins downstream where overflows can be diverted. But China's intense population pressures and poverty make this ever more difficult. Hubei Province -- on the middle reaches of the Yangtze, where this year's damage is worst -- was once known as the province of 1,000 lakes, many of them linked to the Yangtze system, said Zhou Kuiyi, vice director of the Government's Research Center on Flood Disasters. But because of draining projects and siltation, many of the lakes have simply disappeared, he said. The huge Dongting Lake in Hubei is the most important single lake for retaining excess waters along the Yangtze. According to | China Admits Ecological Sins Played Role in Flood Disaster |
1037324_2 | where they found lists of clients, including businesses and private clubs, investigators said. According to customs officials, 240,523 Cuban cigars worth an estimated $3.1 million -- or $12.99 per cigar -- were seized in the United States in 1997, more than double the 96,216 cigars seized in 1996. The importation of Cuban cigars is a felony under Federal law; an exception can be made for cigars worth less than $100 that are brought in their luggage by travelers arriving directly from Cuba. To be sure, almost since the United States imposed a trade embargo on Cuba in the early 1960's, American cigar smokers in the thousands have hidden verboten stogies in their luggage in the attempt to get them past customs inspectors. For decades, tobacconists in London, Toronto, Mexico City and elsewhere have pursued a profitable sideline mailing contraband Cuban cigars to customers in the United States. Usually the bands, labels and boxes are removed to prevent their identification by postal authorities. Run-of-the-mill tourists usually suffer no more than confiscation, but the penalties for those importing or selling Cuban cigars in commercial quantities can be severe: up to to 10 years in prison and a fine of up to $100,000. Penalties in the six recent Federal prosecutions have included fines and guilty pleas but not jail sentences. Experts said there was an abundance of bootleg Cuban Cohibas, Montecristos, Romeo Y Julietas and many more questionably nondescript Cuban -- and pseudo-Cuban -- cigars available in the city and across the country. There are dozens of ''cigar friendly'' bars, restaurants and clubs in New York City catering to aficionados whose ranks have swollen in recent years. ''There is a great pressure to supply Cubans to your upscale clientele,'' said Jeff Tass, who for three years owned the Havana Tea Room and Cigar House at 265 East 78th Street, and recently reopened it as a restaurant, the Palmetta Plantation House. ''I would tell them that not only has their sale been illegal since 1961, but I would remind them that the quality of Cuban cigars has been increasingly inferior,'' he said. ''These days, the Cubans are rolling just about anything that falls off a tree.'' Mr. Grossich, the Cigar Bar owner, said that the cigar fad had plateaued, but added: ''The market isn't contracting. We now have a lot of cigar smokers who are truly aficionados, and they enjoy coming to our establishments.'' | 7 Arrested in U.S. Effort to Stop Cuban-Cigar Sales |
1038712_0 | SUGAR TUMBLES. Sugar futures fell more than 4 percent after a purchase of sugar by Indonesia was smaller than originally announced, disappointing traders. The October contract dropped 0.39 cent, to 8.66 cents a pound. | THE MARKETS: COMMODITIES |
1038655_3 | Riggins, 24, a computer-science student at Sacramento State University who runs a Web page on West Coast swing dancing and considers himself a fairly sophisticated computer user. ''What was once urban legend is now reality.'' Gary Marx, a sociologist at the University of Colorado who writes about the impact of technology on society, said such reactions underscored the extent to which many high-tech tools are accepted without much question and quickly incorporated into everyday life. ''Because we are so enmeshed in contraptions which are beyond our control, we take an enormous amount on faith,'' Professor Marx said. ''There's a sort of generalized confidence in technology, whether it's that the toothpaste hasn't been adulterated or the phones haven't been tapped. It gets spilled over to faith in E-mail. Obviously this is naive and dangerous.'' Still, Professor Marx added, balancing risk with the benefits of using technical tools is an important part of the process. ''There's an ecology of suspiciousness where you don't have the resources to continually guard against every potential breach,'' he said. ''And the fact is there are not a lot of horror stories out there. So you need to say, 'Given that this is out there to be abused, how does it actually get abused, and who abuses it?' '' Security experts say they would rather see that energy channeled into taking basic precautions, like downloading patches for flawed programs and using antivirus software, to safeguard the security of computer systems. ''The unfortunate thing is that even after this, people will just continue to send and receive E-mail as before,'' said Mark Rasch, a lawyer who prosecuted Robert Tappan Morris a decade ago for exploiting a security flaw in a program called Sendmail that is similar to the flaw just found in the Microsoft and Netscape E-mail programs. ''People just need to become much more attuned to the basic insecurity of the Internet and of E-mail itself.'' At the Federally financed Computer Emergency Response Team, an organization at Carnegie Mellon University that tracks security problems and issues national advisories, analysts hope that the publicity surrounding these E-mail security gaps will drum up support for things like simple encryption that can assure a receiver of a sender's identification. ''There are technologies, like digital signatures, which could solve these problems,'' said Jim Ellis, a senior analyst with the group. ''If you knew where your E-mail was coming from, you would | E-Mail Flaws Make Usually Confident Users Feel Uneasy |
1038731_6 | to promote rural businesses as alternatives to farming. Eva Reitzlein, an official in the Bavarian agriculture ministry in Munich, says that about 7,000 of Bavaria's 185,000 working farms take in paying guests, accounting for one-third the total number of farms offering agritourism in Germany. This year, she said, to better market the farms abroad, Germany's regional governments will begin ranking them with a star system like that used for hotels. Meanwhile, however, Europe continues, under international pressure, to dismantle price supports for farm products, which will cut into profits for farmers like Mr. Thaller and Mr. Lenzi. Under a government plan called Agenda 2000, Bavaria will order farmers to trim milk production by 15 percent to 20 percent so that the milk price will rise, Mr. Thaller said. If that happens, he said, not even tourism receipts will suffice to keep his farm alive, and he will be forced to take outside work as an electrician, a trade he learned before turning to farming. Yet his optimism is unbroken. ''I like to assume things will get better,'' Mr. Thaller said. In Tuscany, Mr. Lenzi, 37, faces a similar struggle. He restored his farm with grants from the regional government in Siena, matched by European Union funds, and guests arrive in steady streams. But wading through European farm policy complexities, a maze of price supports and production quotas, is taxing, and the white Vernaccia wine that is his specialty now commands a price of $98 for a hundred liters, compared with $285 a decade ago. ''You won't get rich,'' he said, then added with a wave of the hand at his cluster of stone buildings, ''But you're preserving what's here.'' Despite government subsidies, Ms. Reitzlein of the Bavarian agriculture ministry acknowledged that farm incomes in Bavaria ''do not keep step'' with urban incomes and ''remain very depressed.'' But Giovanni Pacini, who is responsible for rural tourism in the province of Siena, where more than 3,000 farms, including Mr. Lenzi's, take in guests, points to thousands of ancient villages, churches and farm buildings that have been saved from sure destruction. ''An enormous patrimony has been rescued,'' he said. Rosi Thaller says there is yet another benefit -- that farmhouse guests have introduced her six children, including Martin Thaller, to a world they otherwise would not have known. ''Our kids visited with the guests' kids, and our kids benefited,'' she said. ''They went | INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS: Preserving A Heritage Via Bed and Barns; European Governments Subsidize Agritourism |
1040205_2 | it this way: ''People who have prospered here,'' he declared from the podium. ''We should try to help the country come up.'' The audience responded with hearty applause. But in the back of the banquet room, a prominent New York City doctor, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, smiled knowingly. No amount of patriotic fervor, he said, could compete with the profitability of these five-year bonds. Their tax benefits are attractive, as is their 7.75 percent interest rate, 2 percentage points higher than comparable United States Treasury bonds. The doctor said he had invested what he called a small amount even though he does not support the nuclear test blasts; he called the tests ''the dumbest thing.'' ''I'm Indian, I have all good wishes for India,'' he confided. ''But I'm only doing it because it makes sense to me. They knew nobody would do this if it didn't make economic sense.'' In some ways, this transaction resembles the remittances that immigrants from all over the world send to their families back home, often just a few dollars a week saved from their pay. The Resurgent India Bond offering, however, is a shrewd effort by the Indian Government to tap into the wealthiest corners of its diaspora. Investors must buy a minimum of $2,000; the average purchase at the State Bank of India's New York City branch is about $20,000. The bank did not exactly help its cause when it failed to make applications available at its New York City branches during the first few days of the offering, which opened on Aug. 5. Even so, it succeeded in persuading Indians worldwide to kick in $2 billion in less than two weeks. Now, the bank is hoping for $3 billion by the time the offering ends Monday. The idea of the Resurgent India Bonds emerged shortly after the Government led by the Bharatiya Janata Party, or the B.J.P., detonated five underground nuclear bombs in a northern desert of Pokhran in May. With the tests, India proclaimed itself a nuclear nation. It also drew a heap of condemnation and economic sanctions from the United States and several other Western countries. By no means did the blasts enjoy universal support among Indians in this country. Opponents demonstrated against nuclear buildup on the subcontinent and published protest advertisements in the Indian-American press. Supporters lobbied members of the United States Congress and pledged to | India Taps Into Its Diaspora; Expatriates Buy Bonds for Love of Country, and 7.75% Interest |
1040116_0 | THE Immigration and Naturalization Service is expanding its automated immigration inspection system, which speeds up processing time for certain travelers arriving in the United States from overseas. The system is currently available at Kennedy International Airport in New York, Newark International Airport, Miami International Airport and Los Angeles International Airport, as well as at I.N.S. preclearance sites at Pearson International Airport in Toronto and Vancouver International Airport in British Columbia. It will be offered at San Francisco International Airport by early October, and at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, Washington Dulles International Airport and Honolulu International Airport by early 1999. To use the system -- called the Immigration and Naturalization Service Passenger Accelerated Service System, or Inspass -- travelers proceed to a special kiosk upon arrival at the airport and insert their enrollment card. They then place their hands in a device that reads the geometry of the top of the hand. If their identity is validated, the kiosk prints an inspection receipt and travelers may go on their way. According to the I.N.S., the process takes 15 to 20 seconds. To enroll in the program, travelers must fill out an I.N.S. Form I-823, which can be obtained from the agency or downloaded from its World Wide Web site (www.usdoj.gov/ins/ forms). The form and supporting documents must be returned in person to an airport with a special kiosk; an I.N.S. inspector will then interview the applicant and obtain a photograph, fingerprints and hand geometry biometric image, a digital picture of the top of the hand. Citizens of the United States, Canada and Bermuda can participate in Inspass, as can people who travel to the United States three or more times a year and are citizens of the 26 countries that take part in the I.N.S. Visa Waiver Pilot Program. Up the River Virgin Group's Virgin Atlantic is offering free boat service to the City of London -- the British capital's financial district -- for its first-class passengers flying into Heathrow Airport. Passengers are transferred by limousine to Ferry Wharf in Brentwood, where they board a six-passenger boat with departures timed to incoming flights. Sailing up the Thames River, the boat leaves passengers at St. Katherine's Dock in the City; upon request, it can also drop them off at points like Chelsea Harbor or Canary Wharf. According to the airline, the boat trip from Heathrow to the City takes one hour; the same | Business Travel; The I.N.S. is expanding its automated system for clearing travelers into the United States. |
1040550_2 | to defuse the bomb. Then they tied him to almost six years in jail. Years later, he said, he heard somebody shout, ''David Ervine has been killed.'' It was another David Ervine, but he knew that as long as Catholics and Protestants were killing each other, one day the Ervine who had heard the shout would hear no more. As time passed, he decided that unless Protestants and Catholics shared political power they would all be prisoners, all targets. The day after we met, he announced that his ''paramilitaries'' considered the war to be over, not someday but now. The happiness of everybody in Ireland faded at 3:10 P.M. last Saturday. Staying with friends in the county of Tipperary, we heard the news -- a bomb had exploded in the village of Omagh in Northern Ireland. Hundreds injured, arms and legs left bleeding in the streets, 28 people dead, including 23 women and children, but not counting the children who happened to be in the womb of a woman killed as she shopped the stores of Omagh. Two days later a gang of terrorists calling themselves the Real I.R.A. said they had done the deed. They whined that they had really not meant to hurt anybody, which made Ireland sick with fury. They are a gang of terror specialists that split away from the Irish Republican Army when its political arm, Sinn Fein, backed the peace agreement. The bombing was beyond any single act of atrocity Ireland had known. But it also created something else Ireland had not known. Protestant politicians came to the funerals with Catholic fellow members of the new Northern legislature. David Trimble, the Protestant top minister of the legislature, drove to Dublin to see and consult with the Prime Minister of the Irish Republic. The Prince of Wales walked and talked without fuss or ceremony among the broken-hearted and left behind a small simple bouquet -- the best moments of the House of Windsor in a long time, said all. Laws against terrorists were tightened, and so were Irish hearts and determination. Yet who can say there will be no more bombings? But everybody can say and many do, often, that terrorists are now at war not with Catholics or Protestants, but with the nation of Ireland. They say that is a war the killers cannot win and pray that God will hear the Irish nation. | On My Mind; The War Against Ireland |
1040621_1 | of times for the people of Omagh, they must also appear to the be the worst of times for the small but shockingly dangerous splinter groups intent on bringing down'' he peace accord. ''It is thus possible,'' Mr. McKittrick added, ''to hope that the political and moral illiterates are, one by one, realizing that war has had its day and to hope that Ireland is still moving in the direction of eventual peace.'' Andy Wood, a political consultant and former British Information Director here, said the Catholic Republican guerrilla groups were now quite likely to end their attacks and spend much of their time trying to elude the police and intelligence officers of Britain and Ireland. Mr. Wood, a Government insider for 10 years until last year, said the ''draconian'' security and legal measures advanced on Wednesday by the Irish Government would add pressure on the dissident paramilitary groups to abandon violence. But the bombing may also lead, he added, to ''internecine bloodletting'' between the Real I.R.A. and the Irish Republican Army. The Real I.R.A., with about 100 dissidents, some of whom are skilled bomb makers, broke from the I.R.A. after it had called a cease-fire 13 months ago that helped lead to the peace accord. The Irish Republican Army and its political wing, Sinn Fein, are embarrassed by terrorist attacks by other smaller republican groups. ''And who in Omagh or anywhere is going to care if a couple of these guys are murdered?'' Mr. Wood added. The Irish Parliament, under Prime Minister Bertie Ahern, is to meet in two weeks to consider, and probably approve, a series of measures that Mr. Ahern said were ''draconian'' to combat terrorism. In part the proposals, which could have been made any time in the decades of violence, are to show an angry public that the Government is acting decisively. Whether the new measures would result in capturing more terrorists cannot be predicted. A spokesman for the Royal Ulster Constabulary said today that three people who were being questioned about the Omagh bombing had been released from police custody without having been charged. The two others, arrested on Monday in and around the Omagh area, were still being held. One provision that the Irish Government is considering would make it easier to imprison someone accused of membership in a terrorist organization. Another would double, to four days, the time that a terrorist suspect | Ulster Looks for a Glint of Hope in Reaction to Bombing |
1040594_4 | I want the world to understand that our actions today were not aimed against Islam, the faith of hundreds of millions of good, peace-loving people all around the world, including the United States. No religion condones the murder of innocent men, women and children. But our actions were aimed at fanatics and killers who wrap murder in the cloak of righteousness, and in so doing, profane the great religion in whose name they claim to act. My fellow Americans, our battle against terrorism did not begin with the bombing of our embassies in Africa, nor will it end with today's strike. It will require strength, courage and endurance. We will not yield to this threat. We will meet it no matter how long it may take. This will be a long, ongoing struggle between freedom and fanaticism, between the rule of law and terrorism. We must be prepared to do all that we can for as long as we must. America is and will remain a target of terrorists precisely because we are leaders; because we act to advance peace, democracy and basic human values; because we're the most open society on earth; and because, as we have shown yet again, we take an uncompromising stand against terrorism. But of this, I am also sure. The risks from inaction to America and the world would be far greater than action. For that would embolden our enemies, leaving their ability and their willingness to strike us intact. In this case, we knew before our attack that these groups already had planned further actions against us and others. I want to reiterate, the United States wants peace, not conflict. We want to lift lives around the world, not take them. We have worked for peace in Bosnia, in Northern Ireland, in Haiti, in the Middle East and elsewhere. But in this day, no campaign for peace can succeed without a determination to fight terrorism. Let our actions today send this message loud and clear: There are no expendable American targets. There will be no sanctuary for terrorists. We will defend our people, our interests and our values. We will help people of all faiths, in all parts of the world, who want to live free of fear and violence. We will persist and we will prevail. Thank you, God bless you and may God bless our country. U.S. FURY ON 2 CONTINENTS | Clinton's Words: 'There Will Be No Sanctuary for Terrorists' |
1040652_2 | planning for new attacks. ''We had very specific information about very specific threats with respect to very specific targets,'' sais Samuel R. Berger, the national security adviser. ''You will have noted over the past week that we have closed certain embassies, we have drawn other embassies down, we have taken other measures to protect American citizens abroad, so that in addition to the general expressed intention of this organization to perpetrate terrorist incidents against the United States, there was very specific information and very reliable information.'' Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright said, ''We are doing everything we can to protect Americans everywhere.'' She did not provide details, but she emphasized that the air strikes were only ''a part of a long-term battle against terrorism and the terrorists who have, in fact, declared war on us.'' Ms. Albright, who as an added precaution traveled today with a police escort in addition to her usual security detail, said: ''What I think is very important for the American people to understand is that there may in fact be retaliatory actions. We are very concerned about that.'' Senior officials said today that in addition to issuing obvious messages and precautions, American officials have also been working with other countries to disrupt plans for attacks on American embassies, particularly in Albania. The officials were reluctant to identify other countries, saying they did not want to give terrorists either ''a game plan'' or ''an indication of what we know,'' one official said. Staff reductions are expected in American embassies in Central Asia and the Caucasus, like Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Georgia and Tajikistan, officials said. The worldwide warning issued today intensified earlier messages of Aug. 16 and Aug. 7. The announcement today urged Americans to take ''additional and enhanced precautions'' in Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Libya and North Korea, where there are no American diplomatic posts. It reminded Americans that embassy operations have already been suspended in Somalia, the Sudan, Guinea-Bissau and the Congo. -------------------- Shots Fired at U.N. Officials KABUL, Afghanistan, Friday, Aug. 21 (Agence France-Presse) -- Armed men shot at a small group of foreign United Nations officials in a minibus here early today, injuring one, hours after United States strikes on suspected terrorist bases in Afghanistan. The injured official, covered in blood, was taken to the offices of the International Committee of the Red Cross for treatment. U.S. FURY ON 2 CONTINENTS: SECURITY | A New Worldwide Warning For Americans to Be Cautious |
1040542_0 | To the Editor: Jane E. Brody, in referring to cell phones in her Aug. 18 Personal Health column, ''Health Scares That Weren't So Scary,'' notes that the incidence of brain tumors has risen slightly in recent years. Actually, the incidence rates for primary brain tumors have increased by 25 percent since 1973. Moreover, the National Institute of Environment Health Sciences recently issued a report stating that electric and magnetic fields, like those surrounding power lines, should be regarded as a possible human carcinogen. While it is still not clear what the causes of brain tumors or other types of cancers might be, it is important for the public to let researchers and government officials know that finding out why we get cancer is as important as understanding how to treat it. ROBERT TUFEL San Francisco, Aug. 18, 1998 The writer is director of patient services at the National Brain Tumor Foundation. | Cell Phone Carcinogens? |
1041527_2 | Kutubiyya's, it could also be retired to a museum, though one can imagine it being treated quite differently. For example, in Fez, several hours to the north, city planners have decided to hire local artisans, people from the city's walled center, or medina, who have been strictly trained in an old craft tradition, to fix up the decorated facades of ruined monuments, adding their own designs in the style of the originals. There's nothing kitsch or ersatz about the plan. The medina is not a theme park or a museum. It's a community. The workers who live there get jobs with the restoration, and the buildings are put back into use. One landmark site has become a museum; others are mosques, restaurants, homes and a university dormitory. Relative Values, Parochial Esthetics It is a philosophy of historical continuity: If the heel on your favorite shoe breaks, you don't throw the shoe away or stick it on a shelf to admire it. You replace the broken heel with a new one and keep walking. Looking at the minbar in the Casbah mosque, it is possible to be reminded how modern conservation, like almost every other issue in art, is a matter of relative values and parochial esthetics. Western conservators, loyal to a secular museum culture, claim a certain objective rightness based on scientific devotion to a work's historical integrity. This is a perfectly justifiable approach if you think in terms of museum objects. But which context is ultimately more faithful to the spirit of something like the minbar: the Casbah mosque or the Badi Palace Museum? Every generation has claimed to understand the intent of past artists. Restorers in previous centuries who saw the darkened Sistine Chapel ceiling were convinced that Michelangelo was a painter of shadows, so they added their own dark touches to his work, reinforcing a view of him that affected future restorers, and so the cycle proceeded. When an artist named Mazzuoli stuck darkening glue to the Sistine ceiling in the early 18th century, he was just reflecting the beliefs of his day, as restorers today, having cleaned away the grime, reflect the modern faith in science, technology and historical revivalism. A century from now, the ceiling will probably look as much like a work of late-20th-century restoration as the darkened ceiling looked like an anachronism. The point isn't that the Kutubiyya minbar should be returned to | From Mosque To Museum; Restoring an Object's Surface May Petrify Its Heart |
1041548_0 | SUGAR SLUMPS. Raw sugar futures fell 3 percent on concerns that demand from Russia, a big importer, would weaken at a time of large crops in Brazil and elsewhere. October raw sugar fell 0.26 cent, to 7.93 cents a pound. | THE MARKETS: COMMODITIES |
1039824_6 | ARTS E1-8 OBITUARIES A13 Dr. Bennett M. Derby A neuropathologist who specialized in brain injuries suffered by prize fighters and who persuaded New York boxing officials to establish stronger safety standards, he was 69. His efforts resulted in mandatory protective headgear for amateur boxers, softer ring mats to prevent head injury, and trauma training for referees and ringside doctors. A13 Wallace Henry Coulter An inventor whose experiments spawned the Coulter Corporation, one of the world's leading makers of medical diagnostic equipment of all types, he was 85. Mr. Coulter, who held 74 patents, was best known for developing the ''Coulter Principle,'' which provided a methodology for counting, measuring and evaluating microscopic particles suspended in fluid. A13 Charles Roger Carlisle The deputy director general of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade from 1987 to 1993, he was 69. Mr. Carlisle's tenure roughly coincided with the Uruguay Round, a series of international talks that resulted in the formation of the World Trade Organization in 1995. A13 BUSINESS DAY D1-10 Tracking Cellular 911 Calls A Silicon Valley company has begun the first public safety trial of a system that will enable cellular telephone users to broadcast their locations to 911 emergency-system operators. D5 All of Conoco May Be for Sale The DuPont Company, which in May announced plans to sell the public 20 percent of its Conoco Inc. oil subsidiary, may be looking to sell all of Conoco. DuPont declined to comment on a report in a London newspaper that the French oil company Elf Aquitaine wants to buy Conoco for $24 billion. D2 Stocks Lower in Tokyo Stocks were lower in Tokyo today. At midday, the benchmark Nikkei index of 225 issues was down 210.84 points, or 1.39 percent, at 14,913.09. (Bloomberg News) Business Digest D1 SPORTSMONDAY C1-10 Singh Wins P.G.A. Vijay Singh won the P.G.A. Championship by shooting a steady two-under-par 68, finishing at nine-under 271 for the tournament. C1 Money vs. Heritage A battle has erupted between those who argue that the collection of trophies and awards earned by Calumet Farm, which declared bankruptcy in 1991, should go to the highest bidder and those who say that it is an important part of Kentucky's horse heritage and should stay put. C1 EDITORIAL A14-15 Editorials: Terror in Northern Ireland; bad air days; Steven R. Weisman on Columbus Circle. Column: Bob Herbert. Bridge E6 Metro. Diary B2 Crossword E4 Weather A12 | NEWS SUMMARY |
1039773_0 | The British and Irish Republic Governments said today that they would hunt down those responsible for the car-bomb attack on Saturday that killed 28 people and wounded more than 200 in Omagh, a usually quiet town in the center of Ulster. The attack was the deadliest in 29 years of sectarian violence in this predominantly Protestant British province. But in a sense it was expected by London and Dublin, the sponsors of the peace agreement intended to give the minority Roman Catholics more power here and to give the overwhelmingly Catholic Irish Republic more influence in Northern affairs. As the peace agreement moved close to approval in the spring, Prime Ministers Tony Blair of Britain and Bertie Ahern of the Irish Republic warned that splinter groups, Catholic and Protestant, would not honor the cease-fires being observed by the mostly Catholic Irish Republican Army and two major Protestant paramilitary groups, the Ulster Volunteer Force and the Ulster Freedom Fighters. Their worst fears were realized in the attack on Saturday. Tonight they met here, 55 miles east of Omagh, to discuss how to catch the killers. The most intense focus was on a group that calls itself the Real I.R.A., because most officials and ordinary people apparently believe that this group placed the deadly car bomb on Market Street. Other Catholic groups, the Irish National Liberation Army and the Continuity I.R.A., have not been active in recent weeks, although they have denounced the peace agreement and cease-fire. A particularly violent Protestant group, the Loyalist Volunteer Force, declared last week that it was ceasing military operations. Officials and ordinary people continued to discuss the tactics in the bombing, which appeared to mislead the police with a warning that said the attack would be near the courthouse. Acting on the warning, the police moved hundreds of people to a point nearer the eventual explosion. Most people said today that it made no difference whether the group that carried out the attack had deliberately or mistakenly misled the police. The Irish Republic President, Mary McAleese, seemed to reflect the feeling of most people in Omagh after having inspected the blood-stained rubble there on Market Street this morning. ''Whoever planted that bomb knew exactly what they were doing,'' she said. Catholic dissidents say the peace agreement is a sellout that will not lead to a united Ireland. Protestant dissidents say the agreement is a sellout, the | British and Irish Pledge to Hunt Ulster Car Bombers |
1039754_0 | DO you think like the Mayor? If you have ever wondered about this, well, then, here's a chance to test your Rudy-Q against Hizzoner's. What is the most effective step that the city could take to bolster recycling? A: Increase the frequency of pickups. B: Expand public education about the program. C: Install recycling bins on subway platforms and in other public places. D: Crush up huge slabs of asphalt and concrete, bury the rubble in a landfill and call the whole process recycling. If you answered D, pat yourself on the back or, if you prefer, just kick an addict off methadone. At Fresh Kills, the city's Sanitation Department has long used the debris from old roads to construct temporary pathways through the dump. It is the cheapest way, officials say, to keep the trucks carrying the city's garbage from sinking into it themselves. No one, for fairly obvious reasons, ever thought of the process as recycling until two years ago, when Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani proposed the idea. According to a 1989 law, the city must recycle 25 percent of its waste measured by weight: Why not count those tons of old cement and asphalt toward the total? The Mayor pressed this argument despite incredulous resistance from environmentalists, community groups and the City Council. He advocated it through two losing court cases, and would presumably still be advocating it now except that the state's highest court refused to let him. In a brief ruling last month, the State Court of Appeals summarily dismissed the city's request for another hearing on the issue and so left standing the lower court's judgment that asphalt slabs are ''not even remotely like'' the materials the recycling laws were meant to cover. Even as the Mayor has worked so creatively with old roadways, he has shown precious little interest in what more conventional minds think of as recycling. Though the city's program has gradually expanded to include more materials, like junk mail and milk cartons, Mr. Giuliani has repeatedly cut its financing. In recent years, the frequency of recycling pickups has actually fallen in many neighborhoods outside Manhattan. The city's overall recycling rate, meanwhile, has stalled at about 15 percent of household trash. HAVING lost the asphalt argument, the Mayor is legally obliged to improve the recycling rate, yet right now, he is again trying to squeeze the program's budget. This spring, the | Metro Matters; To the Mayor, This Law Is Garbage |
1039729_0 | TWENTY years ago, Honda imported into the United States for the first time an automobile with a galvanized body -- which meant that the car's steel frame had been coated with zinc to prevent rusting. By the mid-1980's, nearly all new cars had galvanized bodies. But in solving the rust problem, galvanized steel has created new, unanticipated troubles now that many of those cars -- and other galvanized machinery and consumer products -- are landing in the scrap heap. For steel mills that recycle the steel into new metal, removing the zinc is a huge headache. Zinc, it turns out, melts at a much lower temperature than steel -- at 600 degrees Fahrenheit versus 1,600 degrees Fahrenheit. At the high temperature needed to melt steel, ''the zinc comes off as a white hazardous fume that is expensive to capture,'' said Michael Lucas, chairman of Metal Recovery Technologies Inc., a company based in East Chicago, Ind. Metal Recovery Technologies recently patented a process that it says will remove the zinc cheaply without creating hazardous byproducts. The scrap metal is first passed through rotary drums that contain a warm bath of sodium hydroxide. As the zinc combines with the solution to form sodium zincate, it washes away from the steel. Then the zinc itself is recovered. The sodium zincate is passed through tanks containing magnesium plates. As a low-voltage electrical charge is applied, the zinc ions cling to the plates. The zinc is then slurried off and dried. Mr. Lucas said his company was building a plant to use the new process and was licensing the use of its system to steel mills. He contended that the process could save industry millions of dollars in energy costs. Metal Recovery Technologies received patent 5,779,878. A New Method For Commuting Chuck Mullen, an independent inventor who for the most part works out of a home office, thinks that people waste far too much time and energy driving to and from their jobs. So he has designed and patented a radically new transportation system for commuting by car. His light rail system would replace the high-occupancy vehicle lanes feeding into many cities. As drivers approached, they would enter their destinations into a computer and pay with a type of credit card. Then they would drive their cars onto ramps, which would engage the wheels of a vehicle, much as an automatic car wash does, and | Patents; Solving a problem for recyclers, a new method gets the zinc more easily out of galvanized steel. |
1039769_2 | serious architect of another era to evoke tradition and modernity as they were then viewed. The architect Robert A. M. Stern has led an unsuccessful campaign to get it designated as a landmark, which would keep it preserved in the face of what he calls the ''ever-present tendency to dismiss, or even revile, the recent past.'' Other architects have begun standing up for a building they admit privately they were trained to dislike, in part because of its original reactionary purpose. When Mr. Giuliani announced the new Time Warner complex last month, I felt eager myself to see that dowdy marble shower stall torn down. Now I am not so sure. The essence of urbanism, articulated by the architectural historian Vincent Scully, is a kind of dialogue across time by buildings that respect each other. When I studied under Mr. Scully at Yale, he reviled that building. Recently, he told me he sympathized with the views of his former student, Mr. Stern. ''It's strikingly awful, a pungent anachronism, a folly,'' Mr. Scully said. ''But if we acted only on current preferences, we would be tearing everything down.'' With so many new visitors to Columbus Circle, the Stone structure may yet find new life as a museum for art or music. But no dialogue across time will be possible unless it is better facilitated by the circle itself. That is why the urgent priority of the Mayor should be to generate discussion on transforming the whole area. The Municipal Art Society sponsored a competition in which several architects proposed building fanciful hemispheres or circles of light overhead. More realistic, perhaps, would be an elaborate new circular pattern of trees, paving stones, benches and fountains restoring life to the circle. Any surface improvements could be enhanced by a rethinking of transportation patterns below ground. The Columbus Circle subway station is a subterranean nightmare, in which riders scuttle through dark decrepit tunnels to make connections or get to the surface. Mr. Childs, the architect of the Time Warner complex, suggests a set of raised skylights bringing light and clarity to the underworld. The American Institute of Architects has called for a thorough rehabilitation of the subway to reflect its coming importance as a hub. With Times Square, Grand Central Terminal and possibly the old Post Office at 34th Street transforming themselves before our eyes, there is ample evidence that New York City can | Editorial Observer; The Circle Comes Round at Columbus Circle |
1036671_8 | vessels in tissues with inadequate blood flow. Some experts say that the search for cancer treatments has increased spending on gene therapy technology, which will eventually help people with genetic diseases. ''Maybe the quickest route to solving cystic fibrosis is to take a detour,'' said Dr. Alan E. Smith, chief scientific officer at Genzyme Corporation, a biotechnology company that conducted eight unsuccessful gene therapy trials for cystic fibrosis. Now the company is concentrating on cancer and cardiovascular disease as well as Gaucher's disease, a rare inherited disorder. Mrs. Cohen is also hopeful that techniques developed for cancer gene therapy will be applied to her son's disease. Other treatments for genetic disorders are being tried. Genzyme is treating Gaucher's using genetic engineering. The necessary gene is implanted in vats of cells, producing an enzyme that is sold to patients for about $150,000 a year. In the ideal case, gene therapy would require a single injection of genes that would then allow the patient to make his or her own enzyme. But for a drug company, a one-time cure for a rare disease might offer less chance of profit. The biggest problem with gene therapy has been developing the vectors -- usually partially disabled viruses -- that can deliver the genes to the cells. But scientists say progress has been made, and other techniques have been developed to do away with viruses altogether. ''It's going to work in the next couple of years for many more genetic diseases,'' said Dr. R. Michael Blaese, a gene therapy pioneer at N.I.H. who recently became chief scientific officer at Kimeragen, a new company. Rather than inject entire genes, the company's technology will just ''correct the typos'' in the patient's own genes. Dr. Blaese said the company's first clinical trial will probably be for a rare inherited liver disorder called Crigler-Najjar disease. Avigen, a gene therapy company in Alameda, Calif., has improved the condition of dogs with hemophilia B for 20 weeks with a single injection of the gene for Factor IX, the missing blood clotting agent. The company, which hopes to begin human trials this year, uses a vector made from an adeno-associated virus, a type of virus that has received little attention. Avigen's president, John Monahan, said the company would focus on more common inherited diseases rather than cancer. ''For cancer,'' he said, ''there's not even an agreement on what the gene should be.'' | Gene Therapy's Focus Shifts From Rare Illnesses |
1036517_2 | who insist that psychoanalysis can't prove ''the cause-and-effect connections it claims between unconscious motivation and its visible manifestations in ordinary life and in a clinical setting,'' a major theme in one of his previous books, ''Love and Its Place in Nature: A Philosophical Interpretation of Freudian Psychoanalysis.'' To deny such connections, he argues, is tantamount to denying that people are sometimes driven by unconscious motives and behave irrationally. This relates to what he says is really the object of the attacks on Freud, namely ''the very idea that humans have unconscious motivation,'' that what ails us may lie beyond the reach of psychopharmacology and neuropsychiatry (for all they have contributed) and that we are capable of meaning more than we say. Our capacity to mean more than we say is the common thread of all the essays here, which explore philosophically the phenomenon of transference in psychotherapy, the nature of the unconscious mind and the role of Eros in Freud's thinking. In the chapter ''Knowingness and Abandonment: An Oedipus for Our Time,'' Mr. Lear reinterprets Sophocles's ''Oedipus Tyrannus,'' pointing out that while Oedipus murdered his father and slept with his mother, he did not do so because of the complex Freud named after him. Instead, Mr. Lear argues, Oedipus's flaw was to have understood the Delphic oracle too easily, to have assumed that ''meaning is transparent to human reason'' and to have ignored ''unconscious meaning.'' He ''displays a 'knowingness' eerily reminiscent of contemporary culture's demand to already know,'' Mr. Lear concludes. ''But there is a sickness in this 'knowingness': reason is being used to jump ahead to a conclusion, as though there is too much anxiety involved in simply asking a question and waiting for the world to answer.'' Mr. Lear offers similarly astute and original readings of Aristotle's ''Poetics,'' Plato's ''Symposium'' and ''Republic'' and Wittgenstein's ''Philosophical Investigations.'' He feels free to range so widely because he sees the work of these writers as related; each in his own way was ''working out the logic of the soul.'' Each knew ''that one of the most important truths about us is that we have the capacity to be open minded: the capacity to live nondefensively with the question of how to live.'' Unfortunately, a third of these essays plunge so deeply into philosophical and psychoanalytic arcana that even a patient reader is likely to feel taxed, at least in places. But | Disturbing Signs Behind Reports of Freud's Demise |
1036500_0 | To the Editor: Re ''The Little Rain Forest That Could'' (column, July 28), by Thomas L. Friedman: The Brazilian Government could learn a lot from Costa Rica, which has opened its natural wonders to tourists and used the revenue to protect its rain forests. Some 25 percent of all of the species of flora and fauna on the planet exist in this tiny country. The greatest benefit of the rain forests for man, however, is the seemingly infinite array of complex biochemicals produced and found only in these natural laboratories, some of which will be invaluable to mankind when they are discovered. However, the biochemical secrets that took millions of years of evolution to develop and perfect could be lost and forgotten forever in a generation if we continue to disrespect nature. MICHAEL PRAVICA Cambridge, Mass., July 29, 1998 | Brazil's Rain Forest |
1037844_3 | amount of oil to buy food and medicine for humanitarian purposes. In the program's first year, Iraq bought 817,000 metric tons -- about $114 million worth -- of hard red winter wheat, which placed that country eighth among foreign buyers of American wheat. At a time when wheat prices are at 10-year low, and orders from Asia have plummeted because of the economic crisis there, the new business from Baghdad is welcome news in Topeka and Austin. Of course, American businesses prefer to avoid sanctions altogether. Last year, as the Administration was weighing whether to impose a ban on new American investment in Myanmar because of its human rights abuses, the Unocal Corporation signed a deal with that Government to expand a $1.2 billion joint venture with the French oil company, Total, to develop gas fields off the coast. Unocal denied that there was any rush to sign the deal ahead of impending sanctions. ''It was coincidental,'' said Barry Lane, a company spokesman. In other pariah states like Cuba and North Korea, American farmers and businesses are donating food or agricultural products outright with the Administration's blessing, hoping to position themselves to compete with international rivals when embargoes are finally lifted. The U.S. Grains Council, the export development arm of the American corn, barley and sorghum industries, donated 4,000 pounds of mixed feed grain last spring to a Cuban aid organization. Kansas wheat farmers and the wheat industry's export development arm donated 22,000 pounds of flour to Cuba in February with an eye on the day a new regime rules in Havana. ''Cuba could be a pretty significant market,'' said Lisa Jager, a spokesman for U.S. Wheat Associates, the export arm. Opening Doors In May 1997, Washington State and Mercy Corps International, a relief organization in Portland, Ore., donated 500 apple trees to North Korea. ''We've been trying to figure out ways to open the door there,'' said Ralph Munro, Washington's secretary of state, who helped organize the donation. But commercial dealings with cash-poor rogue nations are still risky. Last year, North Korea abruptly abandoned a plan to barter zinc for 20,000 tons of American wheat. North Korea's snub came as the ship-bound wheat was only days from delivery, and left the American company, Cargill, Inc., a Minneapolis-based commodities dealer, in the lurch. ''We sold the grain on the market at a significant loss,'' said Bonnie Raquet, a Cargill spokeswoman. | The World; How to Bypass Sanctions and Do Business |
1037604_4 | camp, Paul Bosnich, a Canadian environmentalist, led a hike up a nearby hillside. Those who accepted the challenge were rewarded with a vista of the Sheslay's looping path through steep mountain slopes, velvet green meadows and dense, endless stands of aspens. That night, after a hearty dinner of spaghetti with meat sauce, garlic bread, Caesar salad and wine, Mr. Bosnich conducted a bear safety talk around the campfire. If we should happen upon a bear, he cautioned, slowly back away or make a loud noise. Never run, he said, unless you happen to be close to a climbable tree and there's no other option. The two shotguns that the guides carried would only be used as a last resort. To that end, all the guides carried Mace and bear bangers, hand-held devices that projected a stream of sparks ending with a cherry bomb-like report. We got a chance to see a bear banger in action a few days later, during a two-night stay at the Sheslay-Tatsatua confluence, when a 300-pound cinnamon black bear invaded our camp in the predawn murk. Though we had already spotted several grizzlies from afar, this was the first time we'd found a bear rummaging in the kitchen area. Moments after the cry of ''Bear in camp!'' rang out, Mr. Bosnich emerged from his tent and fired off a bear banger that exploded a few feet from the animal's head. When that failed to discourage the bear, Mr. Kean, joined by Mr. Bosnich and a couple other guides, finally managed to scare it off by raising their arms and yelling like maniacs. TO our considerable relief, most of the animals we encountered were happy to keep their distance. The previous afternoon, on a hike up Goat Haunt, a nearby peak, we had come within a few dozen yards of a group of grazing snow-white mountain goats, formidable beasts that are related to antelopes and that look like a cross between a sheep and a polar bear. When we ventured close, they turned their backs and sauntered down the sheer rock cliffs with gravity-defying grace. While the Taku is generally tranquil, it does have its wild moments. On our sixth day, we braved the Grade 3 T-bone rapids and Grade 4 Box Canyon, churning swaths of white water wedged between massive rock slabs. All four boats made it through without mishaps, and an hour or so later, | In the Realm of Bears |
1037914_1 | advisory resolution on human sexuality. Its original text, written in committee, affirmed a traditional position on marriage as the lifelong union of a man and a woman. It also condemned homophobia. But when the document was brought before the whole conference, socially conservative bishops toughened its language with amendments, one calling for abstinence from any sex outside marriage, another pointedly rejecting homosexual activity as ''incompatible with Scripture.'' Those who took the lead in this process were mainly from the churches of Africa and Asia. ''It allows us to uphold biblical teaching, especially biblical morality,'' said Archbishop Donald Mtetemela of Tanzania, speaking for the amendment against homosexual activity. A Nigerian bishop was more blunt: ''To accept homosexuality in our church is for Anglicans to commit evangelical suicide.'' Their emphatic approach seemed to take liberal bishops by surprise, leaving them out-organized and out-talked. In the Episcopal Church, by contrast, conservatives had failed to block some bishops from ordaining gay men and lesbians as priests. After two hours of debate, the amended resolution was passed. The story here had partly to do with numbers. At the 1988 gathering, Anglican leaders proclaimed the next 10 years as a ''decade of evangelism.'' The results were spread unevenly, to say the least. The churches in Africa and Asia grew, while those in England and North America did not. In fact, American membership fell. This time, 228 African bishops who were heads of dioceses came to the conference, up from 130 in 1988. Such growth in Africa and South Asia is a major trend within Christianity. ''This is still news for most of the Christian population in the United States of America,'' said Dean Gilliland, a professor of contextual theology and African studies at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, Calif. ''They don't know the center of gravity has moved from the West.'' In Africa, where the faith has been growing fastest, there are an estimated 27 million Anglicans, more than 10 times the number of Episcopalians in the United States. To take another example, African Lutherans increased from 5.7 million to 9 million since 1991, surpassing the total membership of Lutheran denominations in North America. But numbers do not tell the whole story. Many of the African and Asian churches exist in societies where Christianity is a minority faith, often confronted by antagonistic religious competitors, such as militant Islamic groups, or overtly hostile secular governments. ''It's not | The World: A Conservative Surge Surprises; In England With the Anglicans in Full Cry |
1037548_4 | of messy, weedy corners. We have to cure suburbanites of their passion for ''tidying up.'' Eldredge movingly describes how a neglected corner of Chicago has regenerated a postage-stamp morsel of prairie. Natural ecology has a memory longer than human cupidity. In the tropical rain forests the situation is both worse and more delicate. With some justice, the local governments resent finger wagging from Western ecologists, especially since men in suits from the same Western countries are offering them good cash for their wood or animal products. Eldredge tells an illuminating story of being sold rare tenrecs in Madagascar by children, and sneaking up the road to release them again into the wild. Who is in the right in this case? We all know of the greed that is destroying great tracts of Indonesia; a colleague of mine discovered that a species of fish used as a staple item of diet was not even a named species. It may be doomed even before its ecological needs are known. Clearly this is a global scandal, but can the tribesman be blamed for reaching for the last fat fish, and can a hungry child be expected to lament the passing of a salamander? The story of man's dominion over nature and his subsequent abuse of power cannot be told too often, and Eldredge, a curator at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, has provided one of the most succinct accounts yet. The problem is that it is hard to know who is listening: people are too busy mining the seam to heed the death of the canary. Politicians are mostly not evil, but political expediency has already allowed them to squander the fisheries, collude in the destruction of rain forest, fail to prevent erosion in the Himalayas and exhibit dismal feebleness in the face of the supposed inexorability of markets. President Clinton's hand still hovers over the signature that might commit him to expensive pollution reduction. The Australians have even won concessions to increase greenhouse emissions. Eldredge's list of what we must all learn is sensible and biologically informed. But we will probably go on nudging other inhabitants of our planet into oblivion until the stench of our own pollution forces us to realize that it is already too late. Richard Fortey is the author of ''Life: A Natural History of the First Four Billion Years of Life on Earth.'' | Demolition Derby |
1037996_1 | reported, and 200,000 more are expected to be moved. Local governments will compensate families whose homes are destroyed, the agency promised. Flooding occurs virtually every summer in China. In the past, official statistics on flood casualties have sometimes been unreliable because local officials have exaggerated conditions in hopes of receiving additional money from Beijing. The central authorities, in turn, often use natural disasters as a political rallying cry nationwide. Flooding in 1996, for instance, was also called the worst in decades by officials in badly affected areas. This year's flooding appears to affect more areas than the floods of 1996, but it is difficult to assess accurately because the authorities are barring foreign reporters from badly flooded areas. Tonight, state television broadcast pictures of soldiers venturing into fast-rushing water to try to rebuild dikes with canvas bags filled with sand and rocks. Other soldiers were shown ferrying residents out of badly stricken areas in rowboats and senior officers were seen exhorting the troops to greater efforts. Warning that soldiers risked contracting cholera and other diseases from contaminated water, the authorities reported that all manner of preventative measures were being taken, including traditional Chinese potions. According to official accounts, the Yangtze River has not flooded so badly since 1954, when 30,000 people died. This year, most of the 2,000 people reported killed died in landslides and mud flows that swallowed houses and villages, said Fan Baojun, Deputy Minister of Civil Affairs. An unknown number of soldiers have died fighting the floods. More than 200 people were washed away when a dike burst today in Jiayu County, in Hubei Province, the official China Daily reported. So far, the newspaper said, the bodies of five soldiers and eight civilians have been recovered. Some 40,000 people were stranded near Jiujiang, in neighboring Jiangxi Province, when flooding from a collapsed dike left them surrounded by water, the New China News Agency reported. Farther downstream on the Yangtze, in Anhui Province, an onslaught of water arrived from two sides as the river swelled in the west and a typhoon brought heavy rains in the east. In Hunan Province, farther south, 2.3 million soldiers and civilians worked to build flood defenses in case the typhoon caused rain there. Concerned about long-term weather forecasts, the New China News Agency quoted meteorologists's predictions that five to seven typhoons would hit China in the next three months. Hundreds of thousands | Floods Now Imperiling Big Cities, China Says |
1043018_0 | It had been a bad year for the army. First, it faced accusations in the United States that it was involved in a plot to funnel contributions to the Democratic Party in exchange for easier access to American satellite technology. In July, President Jiang Zemin subjected the army to a rare public scolding, charging it with smuggling and ordering its generals to sell off their many businesses. But then came the floods, offering the promise of redemption. With hundreds of thousands of soldiers as the backbone of the nation's defense, this summer's record-breaking floods have provided the scandal-prone army with both a challenging battle -- and a golden opportunity for image burnishing. At Harbin's river-front Stalin Park, 3,000 soldiers have spent the last two weeks shoring up a mile-long stretch along the Songhua River, including a crucial but tenuous section of dike that protects this major industrial city in China's far northeast. A few hundred feet away, citizens have been gathering at the park gates to watch the dike-building effort, conducted in full public view with an almost theatrical flare. The soldiers sing songs about courage as they march across the wide plaza to the river. Their green camouflage fatigues, bright orange life jackets and brilliant red flags stand out against the white wall of sandbags reinforcing the dike. Every night, all over China, the television shows images of soldiers -- evacuating children, hefting sandbags onto a crumbling dike, chest-deep in the water forming a human chain to hold a river at bay. This week many newspapers carried features on Guo Jiancheng, a young officer who gave his life vest to a soldier who could not swim, and was himself then swept away. There are now 278,000 soldiers fighting floods along the Yangtze River in central China -- the biggest mobilization of military personnel in that area since the Communists took power in 1949 -- and another 100,000 in the northeast, mostly along the Songhua and Nen Rivers here in Heilongjiang Province. It is a return to the grass roots for an organization that in recent years has often seemed less a military fighting force and more a big business. In Harbin, the soldiers have been living in the park since Aug. 16, when their first risky task was to build up the original dike, which was on the verge of being submerged, with bags filled with mud and stones. | Scandal-Tarred Army Gets Chance to Do a Good Deed |
1043027_3 | affect either people or wildlife by acting on three primary endocrine systems, those governing estrogen, androgen and thyroid hormones. (In the endocrine systems of nearly all animals, glands located throughout the body synthesize hormones and secrete them into the bloodstream. Receptors in the cells of various organs and tissues respond to these chemical messages to regulate sexual development, reproduction, metabolism, the brain and central nervous system, and other bodily functions.) The proposal is so ambitious that it would be impractical to subject every chemical to its full battery of tests. So the committee is recommending a system of triage to sort the estimated 87,000 chemicals that are in use. Some of them, like polymers with molecules too large to cross cell membranes, are unlikely to pose endocrine problems and have been excluded. Of more than 62,000 chemicals that remain, the 15,000 produced in large quantities, plus all pesticides, would be the first to be screened. Even the initial screening of 15,000 high-volume chemicals would be a daunting task if not for the new technologies that are being tried out in the Long Island laboratory. OSI Pharmaceuticals, using much the same techniques, already screens seven million chemicals a year looking for potential new medicines, and midway through the E.P.A. committee's review, its experts realized that the same approach might well be used to set priorities for screening potential endocrine disrupters. Under the agency's plan, a chemical would be subjected to comprehensive biological assays, including tests on laboratory mammals, birds, amphibians, fish and shrimp, after the initial screening suggests that it needed further testing. Those animals would be dosed with chemicals and closely examined for effects that are thought to be caused by endocrine disruption, like changes in the size of uterine or brain tissues. Though some of these tests have been used before, not all have been used to assess endocrine disruption, and there are also difficult questions about whether it is appropriate to use these tests to examine the effects of very small doses of chemicals. The expert committee warned that only fully validated tests should be adopted, and there is some question how long that might delay the project. But most participants believe that in two to five years, the screening ought to be in full swing. ''These kinds of things don't come along very often, where you have both science evolving and a regulation evolving together,'' said Theodore | E.P.A. to Hunt Dangers in Everyday Products |
1042159_0 | The Food and Drug Administration has approved the first drug that works by blocking the action of a gene. Isis Pharmaceuticals Inc., a biotechnology company in Carlsbad, Calif., said it had received approval late Wednesday for its drug, fomivirsen, for the treatment of CMV retinitis, a virus that can cause blindness in AIDS patients. Fomivirsen will be made by Isis and marketed as Vitravene by the Ciba Vision Corporation, the eye-care unit of Novartis A.G., the Swiss pharmaceutical giant. Shares of Isis rose 56.25 cents yesterday, to $9.8125, in Nasdaq trading. Vitravene is based on a technology known as antisense, which holds great promise for harnessing genetic information to make potent drugs with few side effects. Antisense drugs, which are essentially snippets of DNA that switch off genes that prompt cells to produce disease-causing proteins, could in theory treat all manner of infections, inflammatory diseases and cancers. But it has been difficult to make the technology work in practice, and the field has been beset by skepticism that it could work at all. The F.D.A.'s rapid approval, which comes just five months after the application for Vitravene was submitted, ''should give people more confidence in the antisense platform as a way to make drugs,'' said Paul Boni, an analyst with Punk, Ziegel & Knoell. ''With any brand new technology, you never know when the world will be ready for it,'' he said. ''This could be the first important step for antisense to get accepted.'' The size of the market for Vitravene is not clear because the incidence of CMV retinitis has been in decline as AIDS patients live longer, healthier lives thanks to antiviral drugs. But recent studies show many patients either resisting or not tolerating those drugs, so infections like CMV retinitis may increase. Some analysts expect the market to be less than $20 million. Vitravene is injected directly into the eye, where it interferes with the replication of the cytomegalovirus, which destroys the retina. The side effects of Vitravene are minimal, while existing therapies are extremely toxic, so it could become the primary therapy for the disease. ''It's very exciting from a patient-care point of view,'' said Dr. Debra Goldstein, an assistant professor of ophthalmology at the University of Illinois and a principal investigator on Vitravene. ''All of the other drugs we have are very similar, so if you are resistant to one there's a chance you're resistant | F.D.A. Approves a Drug That Blocks a Gene |
1040719_0 | The heightened security measures at public buildings in New York City went almost unnoticed yesterday. Around town, the security alert ordered by Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani and Police Commissioner Howard Safir manifested itself in small, all but imperceptible ways. At midday, five Metropolitan Transportation Authority officers were standing outside Grand Central Terminal, for example, when normally there would be one. A New York City police officer who usually patrols several blocks near the Port Authority Bus Terminal was sticking close to the bus station, and two police officers had been sent to the United Nations building to stand guard on the sidewalk. The officers said they were on the lookout for suspicious packages or cars left on the street with their engines running. But they themselves were not arousing any curiosity. ''Nobody's asked any questions -- except directions,'' said one officer, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. On Thursday, officials of the Federal Aviation Administration and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey said they were also taking precautions because of the possible threat of terrorism. But passengers at Kennedy International Airport and Newark International Airport said they were puzzled by the absence of a more visible show of security. ''I expected all these strict rules when I got here today,'' said Kate Doble, who was boarding a flight at Kennedy to return home to Sydney, Australia, after working as a summer camp counselor in North Carolina. ''I expected to be checked or have someone go through my bags, but they just passed me by.'' Laurent Mercier, a French Government worker who was traveling to Los Angeles, said he was surprised that no one stopped him from leaving unattended luggage on a seat near the United Airlines ticket counter in Newark. ''I left my bag on the seat and went to smoke a cigarette, and nobody said anything,'' he said. Mr. Mercier said that because of the military strike, he had arrived at the airport 2 hours and 15 minutes before his scheduled 6:30 P.M. departure. ''If there had not been a strike, I would have gone to the Port Authority and caught a bus at about 4:15 to get here at 5:15,'' he said. Earlier in the day, passengers arriving at Kennedy after an Aeroflot flight from St. Petersburg, Russia, said they noticed something a little out of the ordinary when they picked up their luggage | After Air Strikes, City Tightens Security |
1040742_3 | has been far less coverage of the human displacement, in part because the Government has restricted access to the more severely affected areas. The Chinese Public Health Bureau and the Chinese Red Cross have nearly doubled the number of public health teams out in the field, to 10,000, over the past four weeks. It is unclear how many people are living on dikes in China, perched precariously on narrow structures with water lapping on both sides. But Ms. Amy, from the Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, said that 300,000 people were living on dikes in the Dongting Lake area when she visited two weeks ago. She said that some had been stranded because they had had no time to evacuate, but that others angrily defied orders in order to guard property. The Government intentionally blasted dikes and flooded some villages to reduce water levels in urban centers downstream, a decision that angered residents. She said some families had taken furniture, chickens, pigs and even tractors with them. She added that the crowded conditions, poor sanitation as well as humans and animals living together made the refugees vulnerable to disease. Many people are drinking river water that is contaminated by human waste. The Red Cross is distributing water purification tablets, medicines and chlorine spray for disinfecting sanitation pits and previously submerged land, once the waters recede. Outbreaks of skin infections and infectious diarrhea have already occurred, although more serious diseases like cholera and typhoid that sometimes follow flooding have not. ''We have not heard of these -- yet,'' Ms. Amy said. ''And I'm saying 'yet' because there are so many people out there and the high risk period hasn't arrived.'' She said such diseases tend to occur when the flooding stops and standing water allows for the breeding of germs. There have been emotional benefit shows on television in Beijing the last two nights, featuring a mixture of popular performers and representatives of companies, school and Communist Party cells announcing donations in cash or in kind. The Beijing Public Security Bureau pledged $40,000. A woman identified as Xue Wen, along with her 17 children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren pledged $3,000. But there are rumblings that, in addition to the rains, government policy is to blame for the current catastrophe. An article this week in a popular newspaper, Southern Weekend, blamed poor dike upkeep and clear-cutting of trees as factors. | As Floods Rage, Relief Efforts Just Beginning in China |
1040684_1 | American refusal was another serious setback for the group, the 32 County Sovereignty Committee. The committee opposes the new Ireland peace accord and the participation in the new Northern Ireland Assembly of Sinn Fein, the political wing of the Irish Republican Army. The committee and the Real I.R.A. left the I.R.A. after it called a cease-fire in July 1997 that led to the peace agreement. Ms. McKevitt and her partner, Michael, a former Irish Republican Army bomb expert, are leaders of the committee, which wants the six counties of Northern Ireland to join the 26-county Irish Republic. They have been linked publicly by both the Irish and British Governments to the Real I.R.A., the small paramilitary group that admitted the Omagh bomb attack, the deadliest in 29 years of sectarian violence in the mostly Protestant British province of Ulster. Mr. McKevitt did not apply for a visa. But three other members of the committee who did are unlikely to get them. One of the trio, Francie Mackey, a councilor in Omagh, complained of police harassment on Monday when his son, Shane, was arrested for questioning about the bomb attack. The younger Mackey was released on Thursday; two men are still being held. The committee members wanted to seek funds and support from radical Irish Americans who, like the committee, oppose the peace agreement and support, tacitly or openly, the continuation of Ulster violence that has killed more than 3,200 people since 1969. In interviews this week, Ms. McKevitt said she and Michael had not been involved in the Omagh attack, which she condemned. But, on Irish national television, she refused to condemn all political violence. Ms. McKevitt's brother, Bobby Sands, became an I.R.A. hero and martyr in 1981 when, as an I.R.A. prisoner, he starved himself to death. In recent days, the McKevitts have been harried in their hometown, near Dundalk, not far from the border with the North. Dozens of neighbors held a vigil demanding that they leave town. This morning, security guards prevented Ms. McKevitt from entering the shop she runs in a Dundalk shopping center. Her lawyers said she was considering taking legal action against news organizations that spread ''false and defamatory'' stories about her and Mr. McKevitt. Two London newspapers, The Express and The Daily Telegraph, this week identified Mr. McKevitt as the leader of the Real I.R.A. and published his photograph on their front pages. | U.S. Rejects Visa Request From Woman Linked to Real I.R.A. |
1025999_1 | six children and was widowed last year. ''I stayed home and did the housework.'' Back then, when it was assumed that older women would do little more than rock and knit their days away, no one was talking about osteoporosis, a condition in postmenopausal women in which bones become so porous they easily break. These days anyone who reads newspapers or magazines or watches television has probably heard not just about osteoporosis but that strength training can help prevent it. That knowledge, as well as other health concerns, convinced Mrs. O'Sullivan and the other older women to join one of a series of 10-week fitness classes at the South Shore Y.M.C.A. that combine 20 minutes of aerobic exercise with strength training on 12 different Nautilus machines. With six students in a class, two instructors and an exercise room separate from the gym, the women get plenty of personal attention. Even so, just walking into the class was a big step for Mrs. Tedeschi. ''I was intimidated by the machines,'' she said. ''You wonder at our age, Can I do this?'' Studies by Wayne L. Westcott, the fitness research director at the Y here, and others show that not only can women Mrs. Tedeschi's age and older do it, but that they can derive enormous physiological benefits from twice-a-week strength training. One landmark study, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 1994, was conducted by Miriam E. Nelson, the associate chief of the human-physiology laboratory at the Research Center on Aging at Tufts University, and a co-author of the book ''Strong Women Stay Young.'' The yearlong study, which is detailed in Dr. Nelson's book, included 40 postmenopausal women ages 50 to 70 -- all healthy but sedentary and none taking artificial estrogen, the primary preventive treatment for osteoporosis. Half the volunteers -- the control group -- maintained their usual nonexercising routines, while the other half lifted weights at 70 to 80 percent of their capacity twice a week. A year later, the women who didn't exercise were less active than before. They had lost muscle and bone density and gained body fat -- just as most women who don't exercise regularly begin to do after age 40, according to Dr. Nelson. The exercisers, however, traded fat for muscle, improved their balance and gained strength and small but significant amounts of bone density. Well into the study, Dr. Nelson | Older, Wiser, Stronger: Grandmas Head for the Weight Room |
1026098_3 | hospital to be a tertiary care center, or even right below that level,'' said Dr. Joli Yuknek, director of pediatric emergency medicine at the Westchester Medical Center in Valhalla and a member of the committee. ''But you do want some policy to expedite things because time is of the essence. What we don't want to happen is, 'Oh, gee, I have this sick kid we need to transfer to another place. O.K. Now who should I call, where's the phone number?' Then you get the operator, she transfers you to some other place. We want a policy where you call Hospital A, and the system is activated to transport that child.'' One of the goals of the committee is to see that every hospital in the county with an emergency room meets the minimum standards of the American Academy of Pediatrics for an emergency department approved for pediatrics. The criteria cover basic staffing, training, equipment, supplies, policies and procedures for treating pediatric emergencies. Hospitals that meet the standards will be given a logo to display showing their compliance. ''Just as with the safe house program, this will alert the community to havens where their seriously ill or injured children will have a greater chance for a positive outcome,'' Dr. Dreyfus said. To encourage education in caring for sick or injured children, the group is also acting as a clearinghouse for educational courses on pediatric advanced life support and has put together a calendar on classes in the Hudson Valley for emergency medical technicians, pediatricians and hospital emergency departments. For decades, emergency treatment was geared to the adult population, Dr. Yuknek said. But children differ as patients both physically and physiologically. Just as adult-size clothing does not fit children, so too are adult-size oxygen masks, blood pressure cuffs, forceps, needles and other medical equipment too big for a child. A child's physical size can also affect how he is injured and how diseases affect him. Without proper training, emergency care professionals may overlook early signs of respiratory or circulatory distress. For instance, a child may be in shock, but unlike an adult, he may still have a normal blood pressure. While all emergency room professionals and ambulance corps workers receive basic training in resuscitation and advanced cardiac life support, they do not necessarily get specialized pediatric training, said Dr. Arthur Cooper, chief of pediatric surgical critical care at Harlem Hospital and | Revamping Emergency Treatment Of Children |
1025965_0 | A woman in the rural Midwest and a woman in an East Coast city receive identical breast-cancer diagnoses. Yet the East Coast city dweller has a lumpectomy, removal of just a part of her breast, while the entire breast of the rural woman is surgically removed. Why did the treatments differ? Questions like this involving the outcome of treatment have recently become the focus of women's health experts seeking to define the best treatment for various medical problems. Called ''outcomes research,'' this new area of investigation is defined as ''determining what works'' in medical treatment, said Phyllis Greenberger, the executive director of the Society for the Advancement of Women's Health Research, a private nonprofit organization based in Washington. Measurements of outcomes include not just hospitalization or even survival, but also cost and more subjective matters, like the patient's and the doctor's satisfaction and how it will affect the patient's quality of life, issues that might be measured in interviews and surveys. For treatment of early-stage breast cancer, there are two main surgical choices: lumpectomy, followed by radiation treatment, or mastectomy, the complete removal of the breast. Clinical trials have shown these approaches to have nearly identical cure rates. Yet, Ms. Greenberger said, mastectomy is more common in rural states, while lumpectomy is more common in urban and teaching hospitals. Other treatments have exhibited similar regional and demographic variations. Hormone-replacement therapy for postmenopausal women is more common on the East and West Coasts and less common in the Midwest, she said. Hysterectomy rates are higher in the South and the Midwest, and higher among blacks than whites. In one California study, more Caesarean sections were performed on women with health insurance than on women without it. ''Obviously, there are a lot of variables you have to take into consideration -- the individual, the clinician and the standard of treatment,'' Ms. Greenberger said, discussing the hysterectomy rates. ''But it seems to be true that people in one part of the country get a more invasive treatment than people in another part of the country.'' Outcomes research, she said, tries to determine why that is and then disseminate the findings. ''Is it a result of patients' preference, or is it because clinicians are used to doing things that way, or is it the best and most appropriate form of treatment?'' JEANNE B. PINDER CHECKUPS | Looking at What Works |
1026356_0 | The world's forests have been under siege since the turn of the century, but this year has been calamitous. In Canada, Brazil, Mexico, Central America, Africa and Indonesia, fires have destroyed nearly 40 million forested acres, an area as large as New York State. The easy explanation is El Nino, a perverse weather system that has flooded some regions but left others bone dry. But the main culprit, as always, is human activity, chiefly logging, mining and agriculture, which dries out the forest by stripping it bare of trees, leaving even humid tropical rain forests vulnerable to fire. For that reason, the fires are likely to reoccur, with or without El Nino, unless something is done to curb mankind's insatiable appetite for wood. In that context, there was a small ray of hope in the announcement last week that a small South American country, Suriname, had decided to give permanent protection to four million acres of untouched tropical forests, about one-tenth of the entire country. Suriname reached its decision at the urging of Conservation International, an American environmental group that has set up a private trust fund to help Suriname manage the area. The group became actively involved in Suriname several years ago, when Asian timber interests -- having pretty much stripped their own countries of marketable hardwoods -- sought timber rights on 11 million acres of Suriname's forests. Suriname rejected that deal, and has now put four million of these acres out of reach. What makes this decision so heartening is that Suriname is a poor country that might normally have jumped at the quick profits promised by foreign logging interests. Far richer nations like Brazil have been unable to resist these blandishments, and Asian timber interests are even now burrowing deeper into the Amazon rain forest. At the other end of the economic scale, Guyana, Surname's destitute neighbor, has opened up two-thirds of its forest mass to foreign companies. Suriname chose the long-term economic value of forests over short-term revenues from logging and other resource-depleting activities. It hopes over time to make money from tourism generated by the forest and its spectacular animal life, from non-timber forest products like tannins and resins, and from ''bioprospecting'' -- the search for medicines among forest plants. The National Institutes of Health and big pharmaceutical companies like Bristol-Myers Squibb are already engaged in this search. This avenue has been left unexplored by | Suriname's Example |
1025975_0 | IN the last three decades, the fortunes of hormones, like the wages of sin, have risen and fallen. Or should I say hormone-replacement therapy, or H.R.T., in the ultimate testosterone-oriented analogy, has become the political football of feminism. We of Gen BBB (Baby Boomers and Beyond) have been through this before -- with the I.U.D. in the 70's; some women swore by it, others deplored it. But the effects and side effects of H.R.T., being a medication, are more ambiguous: on the one hand, it promotes well-being, halts osteoporosis and prevents heart disease; on the other, it increases the risk of uterine and other forms of cancer. In the absence of hard evidence and long-range data, politics rushes in to fill the gap. That it's a controversy to which there is no one-size-fits-all solution doesn't prevent supporters and opponents from presenting their cases as if they were the last word. There are the New Age grass-roots feminists who veto anything they think of as an insufficiently tested drug, especially a popular hormone like Premarin, which is made from the urine of pregnant mares. And there are the feminists who try to shame hormone-users like me, conjuring the image of gray-haired nymphomaniacs going wild, like men on Viagra: instead of tending to grandchildren, we're accused of running after men half our age. Both types incline to conspiracy theories -- a male medical establishment colluding with pharmaceutical companies bent on power and profits -- rarely acknowledging that many of the most prominent advocates of hormone replacement therapy are doctors who are women. On the Internet, where opinion-mongering is a 24-hour sport, one guru -- calling herself a ''foremother of the women's spirituality movement'' -- tells of farms in North Dakota and Canada where 75,000 to 85,000 pregnant mares are kept tethered to provide the components of Premarin. And in a demonstration that yes, Virginia, feminists do have a sense of humor, she asks: ''How can you tell if you've overdosed on Premarin? Answer: You start craving oats, hay and wide-open spaces and start looking for a stud.'' And then it hit me with Eureka force: all those women of my acquaintance, Gen BBB's, emerging from ''The Horse Whisperer'' red eyed and weepy, yet with a rosy glow! Robert Redford, a little girl, a big girl and a gorgeous horse in one aphrodisiac package. What's not to identify with? I had discovered not | If You Liked the Movie, You'll Probably Love the Hormones |
1025969_0 | EVERY day Marcie Rothman, who is 51, takes three Body Wise Female Advantage nutritional capsules -- an arsenal of 22 ingredients marketed as the natural answer to menopause. Soy protein is a selective estrogen-response modifier meant to stabilize a woman's suddenly dwindling supply of estrogen; along with black cohosh root, it is now a popular way to fight hot flashes. Mexican yam is a trendy natural source of progesterone, and passionflower, valerian root and kava are supposed to ameliorate mood swings. The capsules also contain evening primrose oil and flax seed for essential fatty acids, as well as gotu kola and alphaketoglutaric acid, both of which are supposed to keep the brain sharp. Add vitamin pills, a calcium supplement to fight osteoporosis, exercise, a no-smoking policy and a low-fat diet, and Ms. Rothman figures that she has done everything she needs to do. In fact, Ms. Rothman is helping to support a $4 billion alternative-remedy industry by dosing herself with nontraditional treatments. Twenty years ago she would have been at the fringe of consumer society. Today, she is a foot soldier in a revolution that includes members of the medical establishment, like Dr. Susan M. Love, who co-wrote ''Dr. Susan Love's Hormone Dilemma,'' and Dr. David Heber, the director of the Center for Human Nutrition at the University of California, Los Angeles. Women, who buy the majority of medicines and medicinal treatments, have a dizzying array of products at their disposal, from vitamin supplements like the Body Wise line, with its scientific-sounding claims, to pulverized Chinese herbs. WHAT these products do not have yet is quantifiable proof either of quality or of effectiveness. No regulatory agency enforces quality control of these supplements, and there are not nearly enough scientific data to confirm that their ingredients do what they profess. ''There is a resurgence of a romantic idea about nature,'' said Dr. Richard Friedman, the director of psychopharmacology at New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center. ''Like all ideology, it's dangerous. The bottom line should be, if it works and it's safe and effective, what does it matter where it came from? Molecules are molecules.'' Before 1994, the Government categorized dietary supplements as food additives. Companies had to prove their products' safety to the Food and Drug Administration, which could yank an item off the shelf. But the 1994 Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act put the burden of proof on the F.D.A., | With Alternative Medicine, Profits Are Big, Rules Are Few |
1025978_1 | much about designer estrogens remains unknown. Just last month, a two-year trial conducted by Eli Lilly was completed and reportedly showed that raloxifene reduced the risk of breast cancer up to 70 percent in 7,700 healthy women. This was similar to a smaller study published in December in The New England Journal of Medicine that found raloxifene increased bone density in 601 women in Europe. This smaller study convinced the Federal Food and Drug Administration to approve the drug (its brand name is Evista, made by Eli Lilly) for the prevention of osteoporosis. In April, a five-year National Cancer Institute study of raloxifene's close cousin, tamoxifen, in healthy women at high risk for breast cancer was stopped one year early because results were so persuasive. Investigators said the reduction in breast cancer in the women on tamoxifen (its brand name is Nolvadex, made by Zeneca Group) was so stunning -- about 45 percent after four years -- that it was unethical to continue, the researchers say. They wanted to give the women in the placebo group the chance to take tamoxifen, too. But, some researchers say, the risk-benefit ratio of designer estrogens, while promising, might still be less favorable for most menopausal women than that of the standby, estrogen itself. The most popular form of replacement estrogen, Premarin (made by Wyeth-Ayerst), is the No. 1 selling drug in the United States. It is used primarily for short-term treatment of problems like hot flashes, mood swings and vaginal dryness that can occur in some women around the time of menopause. I N recent years, Premarin has also been prescribed on a long-term basis for women at risk of cardiovascular disease or osteoporosis, the leading causes of death and disability in women past menopause. Premarin has been shown to increase bone mass 4 to 5 percent, to increase the ''good'' high-density lipoprotein, or HDL, cholesterol level (thought to be the best predictor of heart attacks in women) 33 percent and, in preliminary studies, to reduce the risk of Alzheimer's disease as much as 50 percent. But Premarin has three big drawbacks: it presents a three- to five-times greater-than-normal risk of uterine cancer; a three times greater risk of potentially fatal blood clots, and the possibility, still unconfirmed, of increasing the risk of breast cancer. Designer estrogens have similar risks. Tamoxifen doubles or triples the risk of uterine cancer (the early data for | Behind the Buzz on Designer Estrogens, Questions Linger |
1025963_3 | in the body. Assigning such an important role to the reproductive organs is not new to our belief system. In ancient Greece, women who were classified as having nervous or ''hysterical'' disorders were thought to be suffering from an upward dislocation of the womb. Treatment for nervousness and hysteria entailed, among other things, trying to repel the womb back into place by applying noxious-smelling odors to the mouth and nose. As a few women can testify today, the perception that the reproductive organs caused hysteria later manifested itself in the widespread use of hysterectomies and ovarectomies to treat behavioral disorders among American women during the early part of this century. Science and medicine have historically used biologically-based sex differences to justify obvious acts of misogyny. It is not surprising, then, that a natural response has been for women to insist on equality implicitly based on the assumption that the sexes are essentially the same. But women may be just as ill served by a medical profession that treats men and women as equals as by one that follows what Dr. Rudolf Virchow, a famous 19th-century German doctor, believed. (He was the first to describe leukemia and is regarded as the founder of cellular pathology.) As Dr. Virchow put it, ''Woman is a pair of ovaries with a human being attached, whereas man is a human being furnished with a pair of testes.'' Recent research demonstrates that while men begin to suffer from coronary artery disease earlier in life than women do, once they are afflicted women are more likely to die of coronary complications. Men are also more prone throughout most of their lives to high-blood pressure, but as women get older, this advantage disappears. The delayed onset of cardiovascular disease in women may be linked to the fact that the female hormone, estrogen, which is produced mostly by the ovaries, protects the circulatory system from disease. Differences in the quantities of estrogen, essential for organization and maintenance of tissues and organs in both sexes, plays an important role in brain development and appears to be the reason that men's brains are bigger, but women's brains have more neurons. Estrogen makes blood vessels more elastic, stimulates them to expand and allow good blood flow, and prevents cholesterol accumulation on the inside of blood vessels. As women age, however, they lose the protective benefits of estrogen because, in a rather dramatic | Gender Specifics: Why Women Aren't Men |
1025984_3 | when Congress decreed economic punishment for nations caught building the bomb, whether they were foes like Iran, Iraq, South Africa, Libya and North Korea or friends like Argentina, Brazil, India and Pakistan. Over the years, more than 40 nations acquired the reactors needed for nuclear research or power and probably a dozen acquired the fuels and know-how needed to stockpile explosive ''devices'' that could be quickly turned into bombs. Israel did that to protect itself in a sea of hostile neighbors but avoided sanctions by denying it had ''a bomb.'' Pakistan started building atomic devices 25 years ago and India tested one in 1974, probably to impress China after a brief border war. There was thus no technological reason for India to ostentatiously test an A-bomb last month; like America and the Soviet Union of the Sputnik era, it used engineering prowess to raise the morale of its people and the stature of its politicians. Then Pakistan, a weaker rival, could do no less. Among the advanced industrial nations, only Germany and Japan, the big losers in World War II, responded to international pressure and promised never to build atomic weapons. They chose, uniquely, to gain global respect by building economically strong societies. But even their restraint is unlikely to survive the atomic anarchy now unfolding. As Americans, we should have insisted that ''I've got mine, Jack'' is not a formula for communal safety. Precisely because we give the world so much reason to admire our politics, our economics and our culture, it also desires our weaponry. The most practical argument against proliferation is that mere possession of the bomb can never yield protection. True deterrence of an enemy requires an atomic force that can survive an attack and respond in kind. But as India and Pakistan are now proving, that will only intensify the quest for better missiles and extend their costly arms race. If I and other observers had resisted the nuclear club's double standard and exposed its hollow assumptions about human nature, the world might by now have devised more effective international controls over atomic weapons. The have-nots might have been appeased if they had been given a major voice in a strong international inspection agency and the right to pry even into the monopolists' stockpiles -- including ours. Instead we have wasted the half century since Hiroshima and provoked a chain reaction that is truly prolific. | Word & Image; Nuclear Reactions |
1025939_0 | The Perfect Storm: A True Story of Men Against the Sea By Sebastian Junger. Harper Paperbacks, $6.99. In 1991, a 72-foot swordfishing boat and its crew of six were hit in the Atlantic by a violent nor'easter with 120-mile-per-hour winds and waves up to 100 feet high. The ensuing tragedy is reconstructed in harrowing fashion, largely through the accounts of survivors in other boats. ''The result is thrilling -- a boat ride into and (for us) out of a watery hell,'' Anthony Bailey said here last year. Publish and Perish: Three Tales of Tenure and Terror By James Hynes. Picador USA, $14. These novellas, driven by the monsters of pretension and ambition that lurk in the groves of academe, meld post-modern farce with old-fashioned cliffhanging narrative. ''Hynes is fearlessly playful, a riveting storyteller and a graceful observer of human folly,'' Cathleen Schine wrote last year in the Book Review. Another satirical romp set in academia, Straight Man, by Richard Russo (Vintage Contemporaries, $13), follows the misadventures of a wisenheimer English professor at a third-rate college in Pennsylvania. In 1997 our reviewer, Tom De Haven, called this ''the funniest serious novel I have read since -- well, maybe since 'Portnoy's Complaint.' '' Southern Cross: The Beginnings of the Bible Belt By Christine Leigh Heyrman. University of North Carolina, $16.95. The itinerant evangelical preachers who swept through the South as the Baptist and Methodist churches were taking shape in the late 18th century adapted their tone and theology in surprising ways to win white male converts and broaden their appeal beyond women, children and slaves. This is a ''wonderfully told and beautifully written story,'' Charles B. Dew wrote here in 1997. The Sharp Teeth of Love By Doris Betts. Scribner, $12. A former anorexic and current medical illustrator named Luna Stone ditches her handsome fiance as they head to Nevada to get married, and flees to the mountains near Donner Lake, where she takes up with a snaggletoothed boy and a dropout from a Lutheran seminary. Last year in the Book Review, Maxine Chernoff said this novel ''relates with considerable tenderness'' the story of how the three wanderers ''emerge from their emotional wilderness.'' The same publisher has reissued a collection of Betts's short fiction, Beasts of the Southern Wild: And Other Stories ($11). Whether exploring the inner life of a girl in labor, a schoolteacher or a disfigured bus passenger, the writing | New & Noteworthy Paperbacks |
1026398_1 | for a new generation of military helicopters. The Mayor of Izmir, Turkey, where a French consortium is a leading candidate for a billion-dollar contract to build a new subway, said he would veto any French participation if the genocide resolution became law. Another French consortium is bidding to build a nuclear power plant in western Turkey. French officials have sought to calm Turkey's fears. They have pointed out that the resolution does not fix blame for the killing of Armenians and promised that it will have no effect on bilateral relations. ''This bill is not about foreign policy,'' said Yves Doutriaux, a spokesman for Foreign Minister Hubert Vedrine, after Mr. Vedrine met with a Turkish delegation in Paris. ''The minister stressed that French policy toward Turkey would not change, nor was there a demand on the part of deputies that it should be changed.'' The resolution was introduced in the National Assembly by 80 Socialist deputies, including Jack Lang, chairman of the parliamentary committee on foreign relations, and Laurent Fabius, president of the assembly. It was unanimously adopted at a session at which only 29 of the 500 assembly members were present. Mr. Fabius said it was ''in no way a gesture against modern Turkey.'' To become law, the resolution must be passed by the Senate and signed by President Jacques Chirac. Mr. Chirac is planning a visit to Armenia later this year. About 300,000 people of Armenian descent live in France, and French-Armenian ties have historically been close. Some French officials quietly suggested recently that they hoped to arrange for the resolution to die in the Senate. That solution is not enough for some Turks, though. ''What we prefer is neither the suspension nor the burial of the bill in the Senate, but the actual killing of it,'' said Hakan Tartan, a member of the Turkish Parliament who was part of a Turkish delegation that visited Paris to protest the resolution. ''I told the deputies that this draft law has created a great outcry in Turkey.'' The question of what happened during the forced deportation of Armenians from eastern Anatolia in 1915 is highly emotional for Turks and Armenians. Armenians say that 1.5 million of their people were slaughtered in the first modern genocide. Turks say 300,000 Armenians died after their military leaders sided with Russia in an attempt to separate the region from Turkey. Free discussion of the | Turks Fume Over Stance By French On Armenia |
1026242_0 | When Cory Henkel pushed her daughter, Kyra, in the baby swing at Bleecker Playground in Greenwich Village, they would draw a sea of stares from children and adults alike. ''Their awkwardness was understandable,'' Ms. Henkel wrote in a letter to the Department of Parks and Recreation, asking that at least one special swing be installed to accommodate disabled children like Kyra, 8, who is unable to sit unsupported on a standard flat swing or grasp its chains. Ms. Henkel's wish was granted in the spring of 1997. Then, when a district-imposed school reorganization sent Kyra to Public School 33, at Ninth Avenue and 26th Street, Ms. Henkel sensed it was time to fight another battle. The recreation area closest to her daughter's new school, Chelsea Playground, was not accessible to the handicapped. But she wanted to insure that her daughter, who suffers from Rett Syndrome -- a disease that afflicts only girls and is characterized by profound mental retardation and physical impairment -- could continue to play among other children her age. Last December, Ms. Henkel wrote to the City Parks Foundation, a nonprofit group that works with the Department of Parks and Recreation, to request that a few of the $300 Jenn Swings -- the kind added at Bleeker Playground -- be installed in the Chelsea Playground. Much to Ms. Henkel's delight, the foundation came through. ''When we got her letter it was moving, intelligent and brought to our attention a gap in the city's ability to help children like Kyra,'' said Deborah Landau, the foundation's executive director. The board approved a $15,000 grant to put the bright red Jenn Swings in 46 parks throughout the city. To identify the most appropriate places for the new swings, the foundation staff spent several weeks doing research to determine which of the public schools near the city's 854 playgrounds had the largest concentrations of disabled students. The last swing was installed earlier this month. ''When you have a child who doesn't walk, and the one thing they can do is swing, they take great enjoyment from it,'' Ms. Henkel said. ''The swings have made Kyra a part of the community and makes the other kids her peers.'' These are the 46 playgrounds in which the City Parks Foundation paid for the installation of Jenn Swings: Bronx Mullaly Park River Avenue and 164th Street Noble Playground Bronx River Avenue and 179th Street | Fighting for the Right To Swing With the Crowd |
1025650_0 | Turks who believe that the military has become too deeply involved in politics here are hoping that the emergence of a new military commander in August will have a profound effect on national life. The five-year term of Turkey's Chief of Staff, Gen. Ismail Hakki Karadayi, who has led the military deeply into politics in an effort to stem what he says is the rise of religious fundamentalism, expires on Aug. 30. His successor is likely to be an officer who believes that the military should stay closer to its barracks and further away from politics. Turkey has had weak and fragmented Governments for the last five years. This week the latest in the line of embattled Prime Ministers, Mesut Yilmaz, announced that he would resign at the end of this year and that new national elections would be held in April. As civilian leaders have proved unable to overcome personal and political rivalries, the role of the military has increased considerably. It is now the country's most potent political force, as it showed last year by forcing the resignation of Prime Minister Necmettin Erbakan, whom officers accused of supporting fundamentalism. The military has also taken over principal responsibility for Turkey's relations with Greece and other nearby countries, as well as for policy toward Cyprus and toward this country's Kurdish minority. It encourages prosecutors to pursue cases against writers, journalists and politicians who express heretical views on these or other matters. Military commanders have compiled a list of businesses that Government agencies should boycott because they have been deemed favorable to political Islam. They are pressing Parliament to pass a series of anti-fundamentalist laws, including curbs on Islamic foundations and new restrictions on the construction of mosques. With the military now so involved in civilian policy, and with political parties so weak and fragmented, a change in the top military command might have a far more profound effect on Turkish life than an election. The Turkish military command operates under strictly observed rules and traditions. They dictate that General Karadayi will step down in August and that he will be replaced by the army commander, Gen. Huseyin Kivrikoglu. Although General Kivrikoglu has kept a low public profile and declines requests for interviews, officers who know him and commentators who monitor the army believe that he will seek to curb the military's political role. Some speculate that he will transfer senior | Turks Hope General Will Lead Army Pullout From Politics |
1024071_3 | fact that both Governments had signaled that they wanted talks to begin soon. ''After all that's happened, you'd have to expect that they'd play cat-and-mouse,'' a Western envoy in New Delhi said. ''But it's clear that both sides recognize the need to start talking about nuclear weapons, and to do it soon, for their own sake and to show the world they understand the seriousness of the issues involved.'' A clearer indication of how far New Delhi and Islamabad are prepared to go in restraining a nuclear arms race is likely to emerge when they begin talks. Although today's efforts to schedule talks proved abortive, there were signs that Mr. Vajpayee and Mr. Sharif were already looking beyond talks at the level of foreign ministry officials to a possible summit meeting in early July, when government leaders of seven South Asian nations are to gather in Colombo, the Sri Lankan capital. Dates for the annual regional meeting have been up in the air since the nuclear tests, with doubts whether the Indian and Pakistani leaders would attend, and if they did, whether they would meet. But Western diplomats said they were told by the Indian Foreign Ministry today that the Colombo meeting was likely to take place between July 9 and 12, and that Mr. Vajpayee and Mr. Sharif were likely to meet then. When the two nations do meet, their discussions on nuclear weapons are likely to focus on several proposals including a formal agreement not to conduct any further tests, a step both Governments have said they are ready to take; a nonaggression pact, a proposal put forward by Pakistan that India has said it will consider, and a commitment by both nations not to be the the first to use nuclear weapons. That idea is favored by India but not by Pakistan, which has said it regards a nuclear arsenal as a counterweight to India's large advantage in conventional forces. But Pakistan has said it will not abandon plans to develop a nuclear arsenal, as demanded by the United States and the other nations that met today in London, unless India abandons its arsenal. And India has said the only circumstance under which it will forgo the development of nuclear arms is if the established nuclear powers -- Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States -- agree to eliminate their arsenals, something all five have rejected. | Pakistani Rebuff for India, But Talks May Be Closer |
1024132_0 | INTERNATIONAL A3-5 NATO and Russia Set Deadline for Yugoslavia The United States, Russia and six other major industrial nations that are meeting in London gave President Slobodan Milosevic of Yugoslavia until Tuesday to call off Serbian attacks on ethnic Albanians in Kosovo. A1 The United States and its allies are reluctant to use force against the Yugoslav Army, despite NATO's decision to put on a display of air power in countries bordering Kosovo province, officials of the United States and other NATO countries said. A5 Democracy Protest in Nigeria Hundreds of Nigerians demanding democracy confronted a powerful deployment of the police and soldiers at a marketplace in Lagos, in the first showdown with Nigeria's new military leadership. Security forces responded with tear gas and shots in the air, witnesses said. A3 Pakistan Rejects Indian Offer An Indian proposal for talks to lessen tensions on the subcontinent was quickly rejected by Pakistan, but the offer nonetheless appeared to move both Governments closer to direct negotiations over the crisis set off by recent nuclear tests. The United States and seven other industrialized nations said they would act to postpone loans to both countries. A4 Toll in India Cyclone Rises The death toll from a cyclone that hit western India this week may be much higher than first reported, with as many as 1,000 dead, a Government Minister said. Officials in Gujarat, the state ravaged by the storm, confirmed 716 deaths. They said the toll could climb as relief workers reach more than a dozen villages cut off since Tuesday. Many bodies have already been cremated. (Agence France-Presse) Tour Boat Sinks Off Galapagos A 70-year-old American woman died and three other elderly Americans were missing after a charter boat sank near the Galapagos Islands, off Ecuador. Eleven passengers and eight crewmen survived. The boat stayed afloat for 20 to 30 minutes after it was swamped by two waves, a survivor said. A nearby yacht helped begin the rescue effort. Naval and private boats continued searching for the missing. (AP) France to Try Six in Bombing France has decided to try six Libyans in absentia for the 1989 bombing of a French airliner that blew up over Niger, killing 170 people, judicial officials said. Libya has refused to hand over the suspects, who include a brother-in-law of the Libyan leader Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi. No trial date was set. (AP) Guerlain Mansion Is Raided About | NEWS SUMMARY |
1024081_1 | grave mistake if he imagines the international community will be as slow to respond in Kosovo as it was in Bosnia,'' the British Foreign Secretary, Robin Cook, said after the meeting today, which was originally called to coordinate the international response to nuclear weapons tests last month by India and Pakistan. The eight countries issued a statement today warning Mr. Milosevic that if international demands were not met, there would be ''moves to further measures to halt the violence and protect the civilian population, including those that may require the authorization of a United Nations Security Council resolution.'' Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright said, ''We're all working together as much as we can on this.'' The ministers also urged the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague to extend its writ to cover crimes against humanity in Kosovo by Serbian commanders and their political leaders. France, like Russia, has been insisting that before any NATO air strikes or peacekeeping missions can be decided, a United Nations Security Council resolution is needed to authorize the use of force in Kosovo. The French said today's statement indicated that Russia would deliver a strong message to Mr. Milosevic in Moscow next week. The Russian Foreign Minister, Yevgeny M. Primakov, said today that Moscow remained opposed to military action, but Hubert Vedrine, his French counterpart, said, ''I think the Russian position is not yet their last word.'' The United States believes existing United Nations resolutions regarding the former Yugoslavia provide sufficient authority for any military intervention that may be decided. Mr. Vedrine emphasized the importance of keeping Russia, a traditional ally of Serbia, in the emerging international consensus that the world may have to step in to stop the fighting from spilling over into the rest of the Balkans if Mr. Milosevic does not respond quickly. Russia did agree to the warning the group issued today. Meeting in Brussels on Thursday, NATO defense ministers commissioned contingency plans for military intervention, including possible air strikes against strategic military targets in Serbia, and scheduled a large-scale demonstration of NATO air power across the border from Kosovo in Albania and Macedonia that could take place next week. The British Defense Ministry said today that the exercise could involve some 20 to 30 aircraft from more than 6 NATO countries, including Britain and the United States. Russia said it would not participate. All except | Key Industrial Countries Demand Serbs Halt Offensive in Kosovo |
1024624_1 | were doing all that killing,'' she said, ''my wee Zoe asked, 'Why has that man been killed?' '' after another tit-for-tat killing between Protestant and Catholic paramilitary groups. ''I realized then,'' Mrs. Purdy said, ''that I'm 30 years old and I have never known peace in my lifetime. The agreement means peace for my three children. So I voted yes in the referendum.'' About half the Protestants in the province voted no, mistrustful of the Irish Republican Army's willingness to continue its 11-month-old cease-fire while politicians try to reshape the province's political structure. But she is hopeful. ''I'd like to think they mean it,'' she said of the I.R.A. and its political wing, Sinn Fein. Ordinary people, officials and experts agree that the rate of killings has dropped sharply since the first I.R.A. cease-fire in August 1994. From 1969 until 1994, the rate was about 10 dead a month; now, after four years of intensive effort toward a peace settlement, the rate is about about one a month, and none since the agreement was approved on May 22 in referendums here and in the Irish Republic. The Northern Ireland police force, the Royal Ulster Constabulary, says there has been little if any paramilitary violence since the referendums. Instead of reports of bombings and shootings, people have been discussing the nasty theft of five lambs, including a black one, owned by two young girls near Portadown, west of here. But some experts emphasize that justifiable hope must still be tempered with skepticism -- that if the politicians do not move ahead toward new governmental panels to carry out the agreement voters, and gunners, could change their minds. ''The agreement got a solid endorsement in the referendum,'' said Andy Wood, a political consultant and former Information Director for the British Government here. ''We'll have to see whether it receives such solid support six months from now. A lot of people thought of their kids, swallowed hard, held their noses, and voted for it.'' Disillusionment, he said, could lead to a return of violence. David McKittrick, author of several books on Northern Ireland, is also wary. ''Nobody really thinks it's all over forever,'' he said. He said violence could erupt, as it has in recent years, if Protestant marchers are allowed to take their parades through resentful Catholic neighborhoods later this month and in July. ''It's very dicey,'' he said of the prospects | In Ulster, a Feeling That Peace Has a Chance |
1024667_0 | To the Editor: A June 9 Science Times article reporting on a study of cancer patients showing that false hope can lead patients to choose aggressive therapies that increase suffering raises issues encountered by those who are unprepared to face them. Doctors often try to soften the blow, sometimes with the thought that they can deliver the message incrementally. However, cancer patients themselves may be less receptive to understanding the truth over time because of several factors. Cancer metastasizing into the brain as well as treatment like radiation to the brain can affect one's reasoning powers. So, too, can the debilitation and chronic pain that often accompany cancer. The doctor delivering information to his patients weighs his understanding of the best interest of the patient. DONALD L. SHERAK , M.D. Brookline, Mass., June 10, 1998 | Nation of Caregivers Needs Greater Foresight; Patients' False Hopes |
1024362_2 | series of parallel basalt ridges, which at one time were lava. One side is a sheer scarp, the other side is a slope, but rocky and difficult to develop.'' The name trap rock, she believes, evolved from a Swedish word trappa, meaning step, describing the configurations that formed layers of basalt in the Jurassic and Triassic periods. ''What triggered the legislation,'' she said, ''was one landowner who wanted to put his foundation right on a section of Connecticut's Blue Trail system.'' Existing development on the ridges varies widely from none at all in Meriden, which is surrounded by seven ridges, to about 30 homes built over several years on Avon's ridges, where 10 additional houses have been approved for construction and an additional eight are in the approvals pipeline. They will be priced from $800,000 to $3 million. Stephen Kushner, Avon's town planner, said that the views justified the prices. So far, restrictive measures have been hailed by townspeople who regard the majestic chains of mountains as among their most precious assets. In addition, ''they are major water-recharge areas,'' said Mr. Zimmer. ''Water percolates down through the ridges to reservoirs at the base of the mountains,'' he said, adding that development could contaminate the water. But the new rulings are causing confusion and resentment among individual ridgeland owners and developers who contend that their holdings are being rendered worthless. Contractors, too, who have been mining the century-old ridge quarries, crushing the rock to build roads, houses, hospitals, storm sewers, schools and an endless array of construction projects are suddenly concerned about future supplies. ''The stone that's mined in Connecticut, Massachusetts and New Hampshire is the best in the world,'' said Joseph LaRosa, owner of LaRosa Construction in Meriden. ''Perhaps they could designate certain areas for new quarries'' -- a practice, quarriers say, that has been followed in some Western states. TOM FRANCOLINE, a developer in Avon and chairman of the Connecticut Developers' Council, is concerned that ''building materials in this part of the country are extremely expensive.'' ''But it will be a lot more expensive,'' he said, ''to bring stone in from elsewhere, adding to fuel consumption and pollution.'' Meriden's City Council approved the new zoning last year, based on a model set of regulations that conforms to the 1995 state statute and was distributed to all the towns. But the city's Planning and Zoning Commission rejected the Council's map | In the Region/Connecticut; Towns Implementing Ridge Development Limits |
1024568_2 | were clearly reacting against the growing number of women who have entered the labor force, for when a woman works, she also earns and therefore would be less likely to submit to her husband's will. While few Americans call themselves feminists, most have accepted this change and are reluctant to undo it. Today, in fact, many fundamentalist women work. Nancy Ammerman, a sociologist at Hartford Seminary, studied one such church and found that 85 percent of its female members with children under the age of 25 had entered the labor force at least once. The Southern Baptist Convention, which justified the new declaration by referring to biblical passages, believes the Scriptures must be obeyed literally. The same can be said of First Amendment absolutists, who read the Constitution, a text sacred to them, as though its prohibition of an establishment religion also forbade any and all connections between God and government. The Wisconsin court decision is controversial. It may well be, as some said, that it reverses 35 years of judicial rulings on church and state. But the rhetoric of some of the decision's critics suggests that government must not only be neutral among religions, it must also be neutral between religion and non-religion. Many Americans find such constitutional fundamentalism as puzzling as the religious fundamentalism of the Southern Baptists. After all, the United States has long had what sociologists call a ''civic religion'' that couches the special destiny of the United States in spiritual language. Specific faith can lead to strife or oppression, which is why so many Americans prefer it to be a private matter. But general faith -- embodied in the notions that, for example, God is good, people ought to believe in something and religion builds character -- has always been a part of our public life. In that non-specific God, Americans still trust. Just as many of America's deepest believers have accommodated themselves to the secular reality around them, so many of our country's most liberal and progressive thinkers have come to recognize the importance of the public uses of faith. An inner-city minister appears on the cover of a national news weekly describing his efforts to confront gangs with God. Catholic bishops, not the labor unions, provide the most powerful criticism of capitalist excess. It is as if a large segment of the American left woke up to discover that a completely secular society | Religion, With A Grain of Salt |
1024650_6 | workers rarely do. A union may be able to even the playing field by tracking health and safety issues and negotiating improvements. Another explanation, favored by Mr. Hamermesh, is that all unskilled workers -- union and nonunion -- have lost much ground over the last two decades as skilled workers added so much more to corporate productivity. ''Over all, workplace safety hasn't changed much,'' Mr. Hamermesh said. ''High-paid blue-collar workers with hazardous jobs have simply become low-paid blue-collar workers in hazardous jobs.'' In sheer number, construction workers are probably the group most affected. Asbestos workers in New York City are a good illustration. In the late 1980's, the union wage for removing asbestos insulation from old buildings was $31 an hour. But in the 1990's, an influx of largely Polish immigrants eager for even hazardous jobs led to a rise in nonunion removal companies and a collapse in wages for both groups. ''Contractors had no trouble getting workers for $12 to $15 an hour -- and workers willing to do the job without respirators,'' said Pawel Kedzior, the business manager for Local 78 of the Asbestos, Lead and Hazardous Waste Laborers. The local has made a comeback under new leadership, recruiting 1,200 Polish and 500 Hispanic members. But the current union wage of $19.90 an hour for asbestos removal -- sometimes with little effort to protect workers from asbestos detritus -- is the contemporary reality of the market for unskilled labor. After making some assumptions about the value of job safety, Mr. Hamermesh found that the increased risk of injury between high-paying and low-paying work had significantly compounded wage inequality. By his calculation, the change in injury rates magnifies the growth in the wage gap by as much as 30 percent. To many advocates for the poor, such evidence underscores the importance of enforcing health and safety regulations and of encouraging employers to provide benefits to low-wage earners. Economists do not disagree, but they say that the relatively low productivity of unskilled workers is the root of the problem and warn that it is not so easily solved. An increase in amenities and benefits for these people would almost certainly lead to downward pressure on wages or increased unemployment. ''There's no obvious way around it,'' said Mr. Krueger of Princeton. ''At the end of the day, mandated improvements in working conditions would most likely be paid for by wage cuts.'' | BENEFITS DWINDLE ALONG WITH WAGES FOR THE UNSKILLED |
1027519_3 | the first time next week. But its order of business will be brief. It will formally select its two leaders and then move into a ''shadow'' existence in the fall, creating rules and committees and selecting other members of the 12-member executive that will in effect be Northern Ireland's Government. That will almost certainly make Mr. Adams a minister, an eventuality that Mr. Paisley and hard-line opponents of Mr. Trimble in his own party have continually cited as a reason for opposing the peace effort. The areas for which the Assembly will be responsible include agriculture, health, education, the environment and economic development. Even though the Assembly will not formally be up and running for an estimated six months, there was an urgency to having the vote now so the process would be completed before the Protestant marches that have been flash points for violence begin in July. Among the Assembly's most important early chores will be creating a cross-border council that will bring members of the Northern Ireland Government together with ministers from the Irish Government. That responds to the desire of most Catholics for closer ties to Dublin and is the part of the peace settlement that Mr. Paisley and his followers are most eager to stymie. The businesslike campaign and the orderly vote were conducted in an atmosphere of unexpected stability. Although a splinter republican group, the Irish National Liberation Army, succeeded in bombing the market square of the rural village of Newtownhamilton near the Irish border on Wednesday, there have been far fewer outbreaks of violence than had been predicted by Chief Ronnie Flanagan of the Royal Ulster Constabulary. All the major paramilitary groups have been maintaining a cease-fire, and the election today was at once a product of that achievement and a guarantor of its continuation. No results will be known until ballot counting begins on Friday. But the era of formalized cross-community action in Northern Ireland actually began today because of the nature of the ballot. Voters were asked to fill in as many as 12 names in order of preference in a proportional-representation procedure that lets winning candidates with surplus votes ''transfer'' them to finishers behind them. That meant that Protestants interested in blocking militant Catholic candidates would most likely be writing in the names of moderate Catholics in some of the secondary slots and that Catholics might do the same thing with | 108 Elected To Assembly For Ulster |
1027393_0 | A Voyage Back in Time Unlike the youth of the 18th century, today's youngsters don't have the option of running away to sea. But after H. M. Bark Endeavour sails into New York Harbor today, they will feel as if they do. An Australian vessel, the Endeavour is an exact replica of the British ship in which Capt. James Cook sailed around the world in 1768. Stopping in New York for 10 days, it will operate as a floating museum, with guides to explain its history. ''You go below, and the entire lower deck is set out as it would have been 230 years ago,'' said Geoff Kerr, the first mate. One side reflects daytime activity, with tables set for a meal; the other is equipped for night, with the sailcloth hammocks on which ordinary sailors slept. A bit more graciously appointed is the Great Cabin, a work area with charts, logs, drawings and plant specimens. (Although these are replicas, the vessel does have some Maori artifacts from the South Pacific and a piece of the original ship's iron ballast.) Visitors will also see the quarters for the marines, the officers, the captain and ''the gentlemen'' (scientists and artists). ''These guys were in what you'd call our three-star section,'' Mr. Kerr said. ''We don't make it to four or five stars.'' Indeed, the average seaman had a far from luxurious life, with a steady diet of salt beef, salt pork and sauerkraut, washed down with copious beer (even at breakfast). The ''seat of ease,'' or toilet, consisted of a double plank with a hole cut in it, extended over the side of the ship. The officers got chamber pots. Although the Endeavour includes these details, Mr. Kerr and his colleagues enjoy 20th-century amenities, which are concealed in the hold. But the feeling is strictly old-fashioned. Venturesome spirits can spend a free night aboard, Mr. Kerr said, in exchange for minor 18th-century duties: helping with deck-swabbing and one two-hour watch. The Endeavour, open tomorrow through July 6, from 10 A.M. to 6 P.M., at North Cove Yacht Harbor, 393 South End Avenue (at Liberty Street), Lower Manhattan. Admission: adults, $10; the elderly, $8; ages 17 and under, $5; family of five, $25. Information: (703) 519-4556. Visiting Old New York Now that summer is here, wouldn't it be fun to stroll down the Boulevard, play a fast game of skully and then | FAMILY FARE |
1027449_3 | responsible for coordinating the implementation and enforcement of 504. The H.E.W. regulations, which appear without change in the current regulations issued by the Department of Health and Human Services, define ''physical or mental impairment'' to mean: ''(A) any physiological disorder or condition, cosmetic disfigurement, or anatomical loss affecting one or more of the following body systems: neurological; musculoskeletal; special sense organs; respiratory, including speech organs; cardiovascular; reproductive, digestive, genito-urinary; hemic and lymphatic; skin; and endocrine; or ''(B) any mental or psychological disorder, such as mental retardation, organic brain syndrome, emotional or mental illness, and specific learning disabilities.'' In issuing these regulations, H.E.W. decided against including a list of disorders constituting physical or mental impairments, out of concern that any specific enumeration might not be comprehensive. The commentary accompanying the regulations, however, contains a representative list of disorders and conditions constituting physical impairments, including ''such diseases and conditions as orthopedic, visual, speech, and hearing impairments, cerebral palsy, epilepsy, muscular dystrophy, multiple sclerosis, cancer, heart disease, diabetes, mental retardation, emotional illness, and drug addiction and alcoholism.'' . . . H.I.V. infection is not included in the list of specific disorders constituting physical impairments, in part because H.I.V. was not identified as the cause of AIDS until 1983. . . . In light of the immediacy with which the virus begins to damage the infected person's white blood cells and the severity of the disease, we hold it is an impairment from the moment of infection. As noted earlier, infection with H.I.V. causes immediate abnormalities in a person's blood, and the infected person's white cell count continues to drop throughout the course of the disease, even when the attack is concentrated in the lymph nodes. In light of these facts, H.I.V. infection must be regarded as a physiological disorder with a constant and detrimental effect on the infected person's hemic and lymphatic systems from the moment of infection. H.I.V. infection satisfies the statutory and regulatory definition of a physical impairment during every stage of the disease. The statute is not operative, and the definition not satisfied, unless the impairment affects a major life activity. Respondent's claim throughout this case has been that the H.I.V. infection placed a substantial limitation on her ability to reproduce and to bear children. Given the pervasive, and invariably fatal, course of the disease, its effect on major life activities of many sorts might have been relevant to our | Excerpts From Supreme Court Opinion on H.I.V. Infection as a Disability |
1027449_4 | cause of AIDS until 1983. . . . In light of the immediacy with which the virus begins to damage the infected person's white blood cells and the severity of the disease, we hold it is an impairment from the moment of infection. As noted earlier, infection with H.I.V. causes immediate abnormalities in a person's blood, and the infected person's white cell count continues to drop throughout the course of the disease, even when the attack is concentrated in the lymph nodes. In light of these facts, H.I.V. infection must be regarded as a physiological disorder with a constant and detrimental effect on the infected person's hemic and lymphatic systems from the moment of infection. H.I.V. infection satisfies the statutory and regulatory definition of a physical impairment during every stage of the disease. The statute is not operative, and the definition not satisfied, unless the impairment affects a major life activity. Respondent's claim throughout this case has been that the H.I.V. infection placed a substantial limitation on her ability to reproduce and to bear children. Given the pervasive, and invariably fatal, course of the disease, its effect on major life activities of many sorts might have been relevant to our inquiry. Respondent and a number of amici make arguments about H.I.V.'s profound impact on almost every phase of the infected person's life. In light of these submissions, it may seem legalistic to circumscribe our discussion to the activity of reproduction. We have little doubt that had different parties brought the suit they would have maintained that an H.I.V. infection imposes substantial limitations on other major life activities. From the outset, however, the case has been treated as one in which reproduction was the major life activity limited by the impairment. It is our practice to decide cases on the grounds raised and considered in the Court of Appeals and included in the question on which we granted certiorari. We ask, then, whether reproduction is a major life activity. We have little difficulty concluding that it is. . . . Conception and childbirth are not impossible for an H.I.V. victim but, without doubt, are dangerous to the public health. This meets the definition of a substantial limitation. The decision to reproduce carries economic and legal consequences as well. There are added costs for antiretroviral therapy, supplemental insurance, and long-term health care for the child who must be examined and, tragic to | Excerpts From Supreme Court Opinion on H.I.V. Infection as a Disability |
1027516_0 | A California judge today voided a gambling agreement that had been set up by Gov. Pete Wilson without legislative approval or the support of state Indian tribes, who argued that they would lose much of their revenue because of the compact's restrictions on slot machines. ''The Governor has the authority to negotiate but not bind California without prior constitutional or legislative approval,'' Judge Lloyd G. Connelly of Sacramento County Superior Court, said in his ruling. Among the plaintiffs was State Senator Richard Polanco, a Los Angeles Democrat, who said: ''It's a great victory for Native Americans in California and it's a great victory for the Legislature. I'm a very, very happy Legislator right now.'' Dave Nenna of the Tule River Indian reservation told The Associated Press that he hoped the ruling would lead to fair negotiations. But Mr. Wilson said in statement that the ruling ''will have no practical effect'' because a bill to ratify the compact is pending before the Legislature. The bill has already passed the Senate and is supposed to be voted on by an Assembly committee on Monday and a final vote could come within the next few weeks. ''This lawsuit was an effort to preserve the tribes' illegal gaming,'' the Governor said in his statement. ''They will not succeed.'' He also said he planned to appeal the ruling. The dispute centers on the compacts that the 1988 Federal law requires tribes and states to negotiate before casinos can operate. Last March, the Governor signed an agreement with the Pala Band of Mission Indians -- a small tribe with no gambling -- that greatly restricted gaming. Saying the agreement should be the ''model'' for every California tribe involved in gaming, Gov. Wilson demanded that all tribes either sign the Pala Band compact or shut down their casinos while negotiating another agreement. Four tribes and five State Legislators took the Governor to court, saying he alone did not have the authority to enter into the agreement. A contingent of tribes went to Washington earlier this month to plead their case as an issue of sovereignty. Even though gambling is estimated as a $500-million-dollar industry in the state, most of the 39 gambling tribes have not signed the Pala compact, and in the Governor's view, are operating illegally. The tribes say compact's restrictions on the type and number of slot machines they can use would cost them about | Casino Deal With Indians In California Is Ruled Void |
1022542_3 | the ''un'' syllable will be lost in the confusion. ''Leave your baggage behind'' is preferred over ''Don't take your baggage.'' Students said they wished they got better attention from the passengers while giving safety instructions, but the teachers said passengers who thought they knew everything were probably still picking up information subconsciously. One problem often cited was passengers' instinct to exit the way they came in, even in an emergency; few passengers turn to use an exit behind them. The Carry-On Problem Ms. Pollard listed 10 topics for discussion by small student groups, ranging from evacuations and cabin fires to problems with carry-on bags, passenger interference with crew members and ''passenger seat-belt discipline.'' Many of these problems are part of an F.A.A. safety drive. For example, there was frequent consideration of how to eliminate excess carry-on bags and the resulting choked aisles and heavily laden bins. The participants agreed that getting excess bags checked before boarding worked better than trying to carry bags out through the narrow aisles later. But the trainers said that the gate agents pushed the problem down the line to the flight attendants. Employees of several airlines mentioned new, tighter rules on carry-ons. Ms. Pollard said that the agency was pleased at these voluntary steps, but added that it was the many exceptions to the limiting of passengers to one or two carry-on bags ''that get us into trouble.'' Right now, the Federal regulation says only that airlines must create rules to get luggage ''properly stowed'' before takeoff and have these rules approved by the agency. Ms. Pollard said a surprising number of passengers wrote the agency to request industrywide carry-on rules to keep ''too many and too large'' bags out of the cabin. ''We still may write a regulation,'' she said, ''but it will take three to five years.'' Meantime, according to participants in the workshop, more than one airline is asking designers for bigger luggage bins in the cabin. Two exercises were carried out, one an evacuation down a slide onto the ground from a fuselage filled with theatrical smoke and the other a jump from a shortened airplane wing into water while wearing a life vest. For the dry evacuation, we were told to wear shoes that laced up and long-sleeved shirts in natural fibers. There was no speed requirement, as there is when research on new slides or other equipment is being | Where Airlines Learn Safety |
1022813_1 | on the topic. TOM KUNTZ In January, the Journal of the American Medical Association raised alarums with ''Incidence of Dog Bite Injuries Treated in Emergency Departments,'' a study by researchers at the University of Pittsburgh. They began with a long historical perspective: The close association between humans and domesticated dogs began at least 12,000 years ago. Since then, people have been intimately involved in domesticating the wild dog into hunter, guard and companion. However, the domesticated dog retains many of its wild instincts, including behaviors that all too often lead to human attacks. This risk has always been present. Only now, however, are we beginning to gain a full understanding of the impact of dog bites on populations. And how: Recent work by Sacks et al has improved the precision of national estimates for dog bite-related mortality and for dog bites receiving any medical attention. For the 10-year period 1979 through 1988, an annual average of about 15 fatal dog attacks was documented in the United States, with extrapolated estimates suggesting that as many as 20 per year may have actually occurred. Based on a random household survey, the Injury Control and Risk Survey conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, it was estimated that about 800,000 bites occur annually that require medical attention. Of course, there are many minor bites that go without medical attention. But by sifting national data on emergency-room visits, the researchers were able to focus on the most serious injuries: The annualized weighted estimate of the incidence of new dog bite-related injuries seen in U.S. E.D.'s [emergency departments] was 333,687 [annually] for a rate of 12.9 per 10,000 persons. These injuries comprised about 0.4 percent of all emergency-department visits during the study period. . . . Ages of victims of dog bite-related injuries ranged from younger than 1 year to 91 years (median age: 15 years). Incidence rates were significantly higher among children aged 0 to 9 years, especially among boys. The 5- to 9-year-old male age group had the highest rate, 60.7 emergency-department visits per 10,000 persons. The estimated 57,580 dog bite-related visits for boys aged 5 to 9 years represent 3.6 percent of all injury-related emergency-department visits in this age and sex group. Among the cases in which body part area could be determined (about two thirds of the cases), the face, neck and head (combined) were the leading body-part sites | Word for Word / Rover Rage; Chomp: A Dog's Breakfast About Dog Bites |
1022612_6 | said, say that the Branford Land Trust might want to buy the property at a fair-market price, even though Trust officials have given no indication they would do so. He also recalled suggestions he reduce his proposed course to nine holes, or even six, in the latter case with three different sets of tee boxes. The Giordanos have been a part of Branford for three generations, and Mr. Giordano insisted he would not do something to create the kind of problems seen at Pine Gutter Brook. ''The reason this is controversial is the presence of the Connecticut Fund for the Environment,'' he said. ''Their performance has been honed by past procedures. We've always tried to work with them. They've been totally closed-minded. They don't want this golf course to happen.'' Curt Johnson, a staff attorney with the Fund who has worked on other golf course proposals, confirmed that golf courses are a Fund concern. ''I do not know of a single residential development over 250 acres in the state of Connecticut that doesn't involve a golf course,'' he said. ''There are two issues. One is siting. What kind of parcel are they building on. The second is the ongoing operation. What kind of fertilizer will they use? What kinds of pesticides and insecticides?'' But he denied the Fund is obstructionist. Far from opposing every course proposed in the state, it is currently actively resisting only two: Mr. Giordano's project in Branford, and a proposed course in Easton that the Fund says would decimate one of the state's largest sections of forest land, and the state's second-largest trout breeding area. ''The wildlife whose populations are plunging in Connecticut are those dependent on large contiguous parcels,'' he said. In other cases, the Fund has worked at reaching compromise, he added. There have even been course proposals the Fund has approved of. Such was the case with Mr. Gentile's project, Pistol Creek. ''Pistol Creek on balance is pretty decent,'' Mr. Johnson said. ''They really built around the wetlands, because they had a lot of acres of old farm field to work on. It made more sense.'' While assembling the Pistol Creek parcel took three years, getting the necessary environmental approvals took only 18 months. Pistol Creek's biggest hurdle has been working around the ruins of an old pistol factory. The factory was owned by Simeon North, a one-time partner to Samuel Colt, and | New Golf Courses Face Vocal Opponents |
1022874_2 | -- with the multinationals and other wealthy foreign investors ready to snap them up at fire-sale prices. ''What does this mean to the people on the ground in these countries?'' asked Randall Robinson, the president of TransAfrica and an opponent of the Crane-Lugar bill. He noted that I.M.F. structural adjustment programs are already under way in some African countries and studies of those programs have shown disturbing effects. Ghana is one example. It is cited as an I.M.F. success story. And yet, as Mr. Robinson pointed out, public spending on education, health and agriculture -- in accordance with I.M.F. dictates to limit spending -- has been falling. Health care for the poor has taken a particularly heavy hit, even though children are dying in staggering numbers. Half of all deaths in Ghana in recent years have been of children under 5, though that age group makes up just one-fifth of the country's population. In Senegal, under the guidance of the I.M.F., spending on education has been cut. One might ask what sense this makes in a country in which more than 65 percent of adults and 77 percent of all women are illiterate. From the point of view of the I.M.F. and the multinationals, it makes economic sense. The trade bill also requires participating countries to join the World Trade Organization, even though many African countries have chosen not to join. The Organization for Economic Development, a supporter of the W.T.O., has reported that sub-Saharan Africa would be a loser under W.T.O. rules because countries that import more food than they export would inevitably be hurt by requirements to cut domestic agriculture subsidies. This is not a small matter. Four in 10 Africans suffer in some degree from hunger or malnutrition. Agricultural subsidies can be a matter of life and death in such populations. But the trade bill fashioned in Washington says simply: you will join the W.T.O. Attempts to amend the bill -- to modify the most onerous requirements -- have been beaten back. President Nelson Mandela of South Africa has characterized the bill as ''not acceptable.'' But most sub-Saharan leaders, faced with desperately poor populations and desperately high unemployment, have signed on. They appear to hope that in some way, somehow, a trade agreement with the big boys, with the United States and its great corporations, will alleviate their economic suffering. It's a situation ripe for wholesale exploitation. | In America; At What Cost? |
1022857_1 | supported holding a transportation strike during the World Cup. In December 1995, 62 percent of those surveyed sympathized with striking rail and transport workers; in November 1996, 74 percent supported striking truck drivers. A Christmas Present ''I feel sad and almost ashamed,'' said Interior Minister Jean-Pierre Chevenement as negotiators were trying to reach a settlement before the games kick off on Wednesday. Mr. Chevenement and the Socialist Prime Minister, Lionel Jospin, were elected a year ago by voters who never forgave Mr. Jospin's conservative predecessor, Alain Juppe, for trying to cut the pension benefits of the rail and transit workers in 1995 as part of an unpopular Government austerity plan to prepare for the coming single European currency. When strikers shut down rail and mass transit networks, the country was paralyzed, but with Christmas approaching many workers were just as happy to back the strikers and stay home. This time things were different. The irony of a Socialist-led Government criticizing strikers is only one of many contradictions in the latest episode in France's struggle to pull its cosseted welfare-state economy into the 21st century. Mr. Chevenement even had to deny rumors that he was considering calling in the French equivalent of the National Guard to replace the strikers the way President Reagan replaced striking American air traffic controllers in the early 1980's. The French feel as strongly about soccer as they do about social justice. Taxpayers put up $450 million for a new stadium in Paris for the World Cup, and Air France planes have been splashed with bright color pictures of players from 32 countries. Buses in Paris display welcome signs in many languages, and special trains have been arranged to transport fans and players among the 10 cities in which the 64 games will be played. France's national honor is at stake, the authorities keep reminding people. No American-style private-sector improvisation, a la Atlanta during the last Olympics and Denver during the 1994 World Cup, would do for the glory of France. With a sense that the eyes of the world were on them, many French felt indignation when transportation unions started in with business as usual -- by trying to hold up employers for ransom just when their work was most needed. The pilots were not the only ones on the picket lines, though truck drivers, who shut down the country's roads in 1997 and the year | The World; Even the French Hate This Strike |
1022878_3 | & Poor's also warned recently that it might cut both nations' credit ratings. That, The Nation contended, would hurt Pakistan more than India. POLLUTION Flipper's Revenge Royal Caribbean Cruises Ltd., the world's second-largest cruise line, agreed to plead guilty to Federal charges of dumping oil at sea, lying to the Coast Guard about the discharges and tampering with witnesses and evidence, and as a result would pay $9 million in penalties. The practice saved tens of thousands of dollars a year per ship, the company said. In court, prosecutors said some officers had received bonuses for cutting operating costs. The offenses covered by the agreement occurred from 1990 to 1994, while Royal Caribbean's stewards and deckhands wore buttons that said ''Save the Waves'' and urged passengers not to bring on deck any paper goods or other objects that might blow overboard. BEVERAGES Bubbling Over? In what could become France's biggest wine scandal in decades, one of Bordeaux's most prestigious wine properties, Chateau Giscours, has been charged with fraudulent winemaking practices. According to the charges, cheap wine from another district was added to the chateau's, wine from two vintages was blended together, excess sugar was added to the wine to raise the alcohol content (sacre bleu!), and wood chips were used to give some of the chateau's wine the taste and smell of wine that had been aged in oak barrels. Giscours, one of the largest estates in the Medoc, was one of the 61 chateaus -- out of thousands in Bordeaux -- that were included in the 1855 classification that remains the standard by which prestige Bordeaux wines are known. JOBS Semiconductor Blues Motorola Inc. announced that it would eliminate 15,000 jobs, or 10 percent of its work force, and take a $1.95 billion charge against second-quarter earnings, the strongest indicator yet of tough times in the semiconductor industry. The company also warned Wall Street that it would report an operating loss for the second quarter, its first plunge into the red since the semiconductor industry slump of 1985. Other high-technology companies have also announced cutbacks: National Semiconductor plans to lay off 1,400 people; Intel, the world's biggest chip maker, expects to eliminate 3,000 jobs through attrition, and Applied Materials, the biggest supplier of chip-making equipment, is offering voluntary severance packages to cut costs. For the economy as a whole, the unemployment rate was unchanged in May, at 4.3 percent. | DIARY |
1022717_1 | with them. Among Conservative Jews, who are told by their rabbis that a child's Jewishness is defined through the mother, 67 percent do not agree, asserting that it should be through either the mother or father. Recently, in Cortlandt Manor, N.Y., a teacher was dismissed from a Catholic parochial school because she had married a divorced Episcopalian who had not had a previous marriage annulled by the Catholic church. Three-quarters of the parents of the classroom children signed a letter insisting that the marriage was a private matter with no bearing on her teaching and demanding her reinstatement. Why this disparity? Are laypeople dozing off during the preacher's homily or simply turning a deaf ear? Of course, on some matters within a denomination even the clergy disagree. Within the Episcopal church, for example, the question of sanctifying homosexual commitment ceremonies elicits different answers from different officials. But on social and religious issues upon which clergy of a particular denomination are generally united, the answer is more than ''Different folks, different strokes.'' After all, the positions the clergy pronounce week after week are more than opinion. They are the foundation beliefs and social policies of the church with which the dissenting layperson has affiliated. Several years ago, a home was purchased at the end of my block and converted into assisted living for the elderly under the management of the Presbyterian church in Metuchen. When I attended a town meeting on the proposal, a member of my congregation shouted across the room, ''Rabbi, what are you doing here?'' Others I knew from local churches clapped and nodded heads in agreement. The Presbyterian minister and I were shocked that our shared religious message of attending to the powerless, including the infirm aged, had been publicly spurned. The objectors had not heeded our message because they did not appreciate a fundamental role of the ministry. There are three functions that all clergy fulfill: * Pastor: attending to the ill and bereaved, counseling the stressed, consoling the harmed. * Priest:executing the rituals that surround life's passages at birth, puberty, marriage and death. * Prophet: criticizing and rejecting what may be commonly accepted policies and practices of both individuals and society and insisting on repentance. The voice of the pastor soothes and the ritual of the priest stabilizes. The criticism and call to repentance of the prophet stings and annoys. Two years ago, the Roman | The Good Shepherd |
1023301_0 | The campaign for the new Northern Ireland Assembly began in earnest today as Sinn Fein, the political wing of the Irish Republican Army, abandoned its traditional policy and announced formally that it would field candidates even though the assembly is almost certain to have a Protestant unionist majority. Sinn Fein, a predominantly Roman Catholic party, had said until two months ago that it would never take part in the new assembly, which is being set up under the Northern Ireland peace agreement approved in referendums on May 22 here and in the Irish Republic. The 108-member assembly, to be elected on June 25, is to return this predominantly Protestant British province to self-government and to set up a body in which the North and the Irish Republic will cooperate. The British Government took direct control of the province's government during sectarian disorders in 1972. The new peace accord is intended to change Northern Ireland politics, giving minority Catholics a fairer share of power and giving the overwhelmingly Catholic Irish Republic added influence in Northern affairs. Gerry Adams, president of Sinn Fein, began the campaign by warning that the entire peace effort could be disrupted again by violence provoked by Protestant patriotic parades through resentful Catholic neighborhoods. The parades, celebrating a Protestant victory over Catholic forces in 1690, have led to clashes with the police and costly vandalism. The parade season reaches its peak early next month. Mr. Adams, at a news conference, referred to Catholic hopes, saying: ''Following the events of the last year, the expectations among nationalists is that these parades should be banned and that nationalists' rights should be upheld. If we are to avert a major crisis in the coming weeks then the Irish and British Governments need to move now to resolve the situation.'' Britain's Northern Ireland Secretary, Mo Mowlam, said, ''I think if we all, after the Assembly elections, do everything we can to make sure that the parades pass less violently this year we have a chance in Northern Ireland that hasn't been seen for many, many years.'' The chance, Ms. Mowlam meant, was for an increase in foreign investments in the North. She spoke as she met Commerce Secretary William M. Daley, who is leading a group of 17 American executives on a tour of Ulster and the Irish Republic. ''I don't think there is any question that violence and support of violence | Sinn Fein Enters Campaign For New Ulster Assembly |
1023306_0 | His assignment from his bosses at Bell Laboratories in 1931 was simple: Build a 100-foot-long rotating antenna to find out what was causing the static that interfered with trans-Atlantic telephone calls. His discovery was anything but simple: The static was the first evidence that stars and galaxies were emitting radio waves. Karl G. Jansky's serendipitous discovery of what he called ''star noise'' led to work in the field of radio astronomy in 1950, and the rest is history -- or, more properly, cosmology. For it is through radio astronomy that scientists have confirmed much of what they theorized about black holes, pulsars and the lingering microwave signature of the Big Bang. Today, armed with new details from recently discovered notes, a group of scientists, including two Nobel Prize winners whose own discoveries were made possible by Mr. Jansky's, gathered here on the grounds of Bell Laboratories to dedicate a sculpture of the original device -- stylized and miniaturized -- on what is believed to be its original site. Mr. Jansky died in 1950, and until his notes were found, the only trace of his discoery was a sign that pointed vaguely toward a grassy area of the company's research complex. No one knew exactly where the rotating array of brass piping and receivers mounted on four wheels from a Model T -- Mr. Jansky called it his merry-go-round -- had been situated. ''It didn't seem right to just go out there and pick a spot,'' said Robert Wilson, the Nobel Prize-winning astronomer whose own radio telescope in 1964 detected the microwave radiation left over from the Big Bang itself, and who helped uncover the lost notes. ''Because Jansky's antenna was the start of our science, we wanted to mark it appropriately'' he said. Mr. Jansky's son, David, noted today that Mr. Jansky had died without ever hearing the term radio astronomy. Tony Tyson, an astrophysicist who helped find the lost notes, said of Mr. Jansky's discovery: ''The astronomers were mystified and the electrical engineers were clueless. So no one beat a path to his door, but he was 20 years ahead of his time.'' It was only after World War II that the Jansky discovery attracted widespread attention. Jesse Greenstein, 89, an astronomer who was one of the few to recognize its importance at first, said today that analysis of radio waves emanating from space provided researchers with ''10,000 times | Commemorating a Discovery in Radio Astronomy |
1023332_3 | The privatization plan alarmed some school officials and education experts. Mark Alter, a New York University professor who focuses on special education, called the privatization plan ''scary.'' ''That would make me nervous,'' he said. ''The key is not to separate out instruction from assessment.'' The city's special education population has ballooned since Congress passed a law in 1975 guaranteeing equal education for the disabled. The majority of the roughly 140,000 children in the city's special education program are not blind, deaf or suffering from chronic illnesses like cerebral palsy. Instead, they are classified as either learning disabled or emotionally disturbed -- evaluations that can be based on varying perceptions of teachers and evaluators. Among special education students in the city's elementary schools, about 60 percent are segregated in separate classrooms or separate schools, and few return to a mainstream classroom or receive diplomas. Another board spokeswoman, Karen Crowe, yesterday said the numbers of children returned to non-special education classes have inched up over the last year, from 3,345 in the 1995-96 school year to 3,854 in the 1996-97 school year. Critics of New York's current $2 billion special education program, including many inside the system, say it is driven by a financial incentive system that rewards the city for each additional child it places in special education. Each referral into special education reduces class size, offers a swift solution to classroom disciplinary problems and improves a school's cumulative scores on standardized tests because many special education children are exempt from the examinations. In recent years, the city's special education system has come under intense scrutiny from Federal civil rights officials. Last year, the civil rights arm of the United States Department of Education warned New York City school officials to correct the overrepresentation of black and Hispanic children in special education classes or risk losing million of dollars in Federal aid. Earlier this month, the department directed state officials to change the formula, and threatened New York with the loss of $300 million in aid. Several bills are pending in both houses of the Legislature in Albany that would do that. The Mayor's task force is also expected to call for an expansion of services for children in mainstream classrooms, from speech therapy to counseling sessions, so that students who are at risk can be helped in general education classes rather than having to be sequestered in special education classes. | Mayor Wants To Privatize Pupil Reviews |
1021708_0 | TAKE heart, all ye who harbor a taste for green tomatoes. No longer do you need to wish in secret that the sun will dim and the winds will blow, so that regular tomatoes will not ripen but will fall to the ground prematurely. No longer must your hankerings for fried green tomatoes leave you dependent on the unkindness of nature. The zebra tomato has arrived, and it will remain on shelves as long as the sun shines in Southern California and Mexico, where tons of this green heirloom variety are now being grown. They are available in Manhattan at Balducci's, 424 Avenue of the Americas (Ninth Street); Dean & DeLuca, 560 Broadway (Prince Street), and Grace's Marketplace, 1237 Third Avenue (71st Street), and by mail through Culinary Specialty Produce, (908) 789-4700. And these zebras are lookers. Their skins can be green on green, or tawny with green stripes. The fruit is smallish and can be round or plum-shaped; the insides are firm, pulpy and chewy, finely balanced between acid and sweet. Since the zebras are fully realized adults, not striplings harvested before their time, they taste more mellow than sharp and are firm without being hard. A cornmeal dusting and some bubbling hot olive oil do wonderful things to slices of zebra. The tomatoes make delicious preserves and pickle nicely. In exotic recipes, like Vietnamese chicken salad, thinly sliced strips of zebra pulp can take the place of green papaya. A touch of sugar and a splash of vinegar or lemon let the cook exaggerate the zebras' naturally mild sweet and sour taste. Those who seek the juicy succulence of most heirloom tomatoes might find zebras lacking. They don't squirt or lend themselves to poetic recollections of Grandmother's garden. No, zebras are self-possessed. Their natural firmness allows them to hold up well in the wok, saute pan, oven or grill. They may not be juicy, but they are cool. COLD SPICED CHICKEN AND ZEBRA-TOMATO SALAD Time: 15 minutes, plus 1 hour chilling Juice from 2 lemons, about 5 tablespoons 1 tablespoon sugar 1 teaspoon kosher salt 1/8 teaspoon white pepper 2 tablespoons Thai fish sauce 1 teaspoon fresh minced chili pepper, more if desired 10 green zebra tomatoes 2 cups shredded, cooked chicken, cold 1 cup finely shredded cabbage 1 tablespoon chopped fresh mint, plus sprigs for garnish 1 tablespoon chopped fresh cilantro, plus sprigs for garnish. 1. Combine | What's Green And Has Stripes? A Zebra Tomato |
1021783_0 | ''You can study here and be home for supper,'' declared an advertisement for the University of Windsor published recently in The Detroit News. But just in case that was not inducement enough, officials of the university -- in Windsor, Ontario, on the Detroit River opposite Detroit -- are lowering tuition for Americans beginning this fall. ''We think this is a tremendous deal for U.S. students,'' said Dr. Ross H. Paul, the university's president. ''With this new tuition fee, we are offering young American men and women access to a solid education at a competitive price.'' The price is $3,500 (United States) a year for American undergraduates, compared with about $6,500 for other foreign students and about $2,500 for Canadians. Information has been sent to more than 4,500 high school seniors in Michigan, Ohio and Indiana, eliciting several hundred inquiries. With only 10 American undergraduates out of 10,000 at the University of Windsor this year, administrators are hoping for a windfall by the September application deadline for the coming school year. ''What struck me was the small number of American students we have enrolled here now,'' Dr. Paul said. ''Crossing the border both ways is an everyday occurrence for many people.'' The aggressive marketing strategy comes in the wake of deregulation of foreign student fees by the Ontario government, along with severe cuts in money from Ottawa over the last five years. The cutbacks have forced a more corporate mindset, with the United States seen as a largely untapped market. About 3,000 Americans study in Canada every year, compared with 23,000 Canadians in the United States. ''The deregulation of international fees has really changed the climate,'' said David A. Scott, senior adviser for government and community relations at the Council of Ontario Universities. While recruiting foreign students is not a new idea, Mr. Scott said, the strategy is. ''Business tactics become fuzzy when talking about academic institutions,'' he added. Other universities are also looking to the United States to increase their visibility, enrollment and income. In 1996 the University of Toronto teamed with McGill University in Montreal and Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, for a 15-city marketing tour of the United States, visiting high schools and college fairs. ''It's simple economics,'' said Paul R. Beel, McGill's recruitment activities officer. ''There is great opportunity for American students to come up to Canada. Our dollar makes it a lot less expensive, plus they | Canadian Colleges Look Across Border to Fill Their Classes (and Coffers) |
1028125_0 | Responding to impassioned pleas from developing countries desperately seeking a vaccine to fight the AIDS epidemic, an ethics panel convened by the United Nations is recommending major changes in the way experimental vaccines are tested in people. Earlier guidelines, intended to prevent exploitation, called for testing any experimental AIDS vaccine in the country where it was made before testing it in a developing country. But today, after a two-day meeting, the panel recommended that such trials be allowed to take place in any country, including those in the third world, even if not first tested in the manufacturer's country. The old guidelines were having the unintended effect of impeding possible vaccine trials in many developing countries, said panel members from developing countries like Zambia, Thailand and Uganda. ''We are asking for more flexibility in the guidelines right now,'' said Sophia Mukasa Monico, director of an AIDS support organization in Uganda. Reflecting a widespread view on the panel that American ethical standards should not be imposed on developing countries during an epidemic, Maj. Rubaramira Ruranga, from a research center in Kampala, Uganda, asked rhetorically, ''Who should be a guinea pig for whom? ''What is ethical in one place is not always what is ethical in another.'' Major Ruranga said. Each day, he pointed out, 16,000 people worldwide become infected with H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS, and 90 percent of them are in developing countries. The discussions came at what Dr. Peter Piot, the head of the United Nations AIDS Program, said was the first international meeting on the ethics of AIDS vaccines. The United Nations has sponsored six regional meetings on the issue during the last two years. The panel's actions are expected to be largely adopted by the United Nations AIDS Program and thus by researchers worldwide. They represent a shift from older attitudes of paternalism and protectiveness to greater empowerment by developing countries and a victory over what leaders in such countries regard as cultural imperialism, Dr. Piot said. ''People in Africa are not as ignorant as they were 10 to 20 years ago, and they know their rights,'' said Dr. Nkandu Luo, the Minister of Health for Zambia. In the past, drug companies and scientists have conducted research on people in the third world that led to development of drugs that were not made readily available to people in the countries where the research was done. In | Ethics Panel Urges Easing of Curbs on AIDS Vaccine Tests |
1028080_4 | has lost control of the criminals, he said. ''The old rules no longer apply and new ones haven't emerged,'' he said. Lucio Mendoza, a former analyst at the national security agency who now runs a research organization, said the authorities have not only lost control but that members of the police are now the main organizers of crime. Starting in the late 1960's, he said, successive presidents gave the police, especially members of an elite corps known as the Federal Security Directorate, license to eliminate accused subversives by whatever means they felt necessary. By the early 1980's guerrillas had been suppressed, and the police turned their extralegal skills to organized crime. ''It was like a cancer that expanded,'' Mr. Mendoza said. ''They went into drugs, car theft, kidnaps, piracy, truck hijackings. This is the cause of the crime rates we see today.'' In a recent newsletter, Mr. Mendoza cited 39 articles published in major Mexican newspapers between May 22 and June 9, each detailing spectacular police criminality. One said Mexico City police officers, using a government computer, were identifying and then threatening citizens who report crime. Another reported the arrest of 11 police officers who were trafficking in migrant workers in the state of Veracruz. Another said a federal agent had organized a prison break in the state of Tamaulipas, which borders Texas. If the hypotheses put forward to explain the crime surge are tidy, criminality is complex, and what seems to make sense in one place may not in another. Homicide, for instance, has jumped dramatically in Tijuana and Ciudad Juarez, cities that are the main border drug corridors; organized crime is clearly at work there. Murder is also rampant in the Mexico City suburbs, where the newly rich are building luxury residences alongside slums. There, some believe that growing economic inequality is the cause, since, as the criminologist Lawrence Sherman of the University of Maryland says, ''Inequality is a major predictor of homicide.'' Some crimes and the investigations of them become so byzantine that they support various hypotheses. One such case was the murder of a senior banking executive, found dead in his car last August. Because his watch was missing, the authorities said he had been killed during a robbery; the economic crisis seemed to blame. But then, as the case dragged on, new factors seemed to be at play. No arrests were made in this prominent | The World: What Went Wrong?; Mexico Can't Fathom Its Rising Crime |
1027725_4 | be made by comparing it to other forms of anti-Semitism. If one claims that only Jews were treated in a special way, one has to analyze the treatment of other victims; if one claims that only Germans committed certain deeds, one has to compare them to the deeds of non-Germans. If one claims that all Germans acted in a certain way, as Goldhagen does, it is insufficient to base one's conclusions on three groups of perpetrators; rather one has to compare the behavior of different groups in German society. It is odd that a professor of political science makes no attempt to look at his evidence in a comparative framework.'' Comparisons do not relieve Germany of responsibility for World War II and the Holocaust, Birn argues. But they are ''certainly highly relevant'' to the individual motivations of ordinary Germans and their root causes. She further complains that when Goldhagen does make a stab at comparison, he claims unconvincingly that -- with the ''partial'' exception of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia -- this century's Turkish, Soviet, Indonesian, Tutsi and Pakistani genocides all differed from the Holocaust because they had a basis in some ''pre-existing realistic conflict (territorial, class, ethnic or religious).'' Birn has apparently tracked down all of Goldhagen's sources and contends that many could easily support conclusions opposite from his. She mocks his claim to have revised all previous writing on the Holocaust and says he ''only caters to those who want simplistic answers to difficult questions, to those who seek the security of prejudices.'' For this assault, Birn and her original British publishers earned Goldhagen's formal threat of a libel action, as well as a richly annotated rebuttal, ''The Fictions of Ruth Bettina Birn,'' which has been splayed across the Internet. The relish with which Goldhagen and his critics parse each other's every phrase and footnote guarantees many more rounds of battle. Obviously, explaining evil is turning out to be as difficult as preventing it. If we truly understood the causes of human barbarity, human behavior would have improved over the ages alongside our technology. Yet here we are closing out probably the most brutal century ever, which began, as Finkelstein dryly observes, with Teddy Roosevelt invoking a ''superior people theory'' to justify colonial wars against Indian ''savages'' in the American West and Filipinos across the Pacific. ''Eliminationist'' sentiments have cropped up in almost all societies, and many have | Willing Executioners? |
1027989_4 | waiting. He steered his small ocean boat, the Airgasm, toward lower Manhattan, while a crewman hooked one of the Wall Streeters to a large yellow parachute. The Airgasm raced ahead, and the woman was lifted into the air until her chute was soaring 300 feet over New York Harbor. Mr. Santoriello turned in the direction of the Statue of Liberty, then steered toward the World Trade Center for a sunset view. And off Pier 63 Maritime, at 23d Street and the Hudson River, there was a scene out of ''Hawaii Five-O'': six paddlers from the New York Outrigger canoe club chanted in Polynesian as they propelled an ocean-going outrigger canoe along the city's coastline. ''It's big surf, big waves,'' said Matt Herbert, a 28-year-old architect, who was one of the paddlers. ''When we get down to Liberty, we have to really fight through the swell.'' Of course, even in the water, it's hard to leave the city entirely behind. James Arnold, who surfs weekdays at Rockaway Beach in Queens to escape the stress of running his Manhattan construction company, said he finds his outdoor sport ''infectious.'' He added archly: ''And that would cover the water. It can get pretty funky out there.'' For surfers, Rockaway isn't exactly the Banzai Pipeline. The waves average three to six feet and break close to the shore. Still, Mr. Arnold said, ''you can ride a block or two.'' (His sense of distance is obviously different from that on Oahu.) The best surfing is from August through December, when hurricanes far out in the Atlantic Ocean increase the swell up to 10 feet. What's more, Mr. Arnold said, surfers at Rockaway are welcoming to newcomers, not always the case at popular beaches in California and Hawaii. Jokes aside, experts say the waterways around New York City are cleaner than they have been in decades, thanks to strict environmental laws and new sewage treatment plants. And the adventure athlete can always get out of town. One reason New York qualifies as a great outdoor city, according to Outside, is its proximity to a wide variety of natural landscapes, from hiking gorges at Bear Mountain to trout streams in the Catskills. On weeknights, at the 46-foot-high textured fiberglass climbing wall at Chelsea Piers, many of the regulars are staying in condition for weekend trips to the Shawangunk Mountains, west of New Paltz, N.Y., considered one of the | Radical! New York is Adventure-Sport City |
1028155_2 | steps in the assembly called for in the peace accord, though it insured what Mr. Trimble called ''a bumpy ride.'' The settlement, the product of 26 months of negotiations in Belfast, sets up a number of councils intended to balance opposing desires: the Catholics' wishes to form a closer association with the Republic of Ireland, and the Protestants' to remain part of Britain. The anti-agreement campaign, led by the firebrand Mr. Paisley and aided by dissidents within Mr. Trimble's party, made significant inroads into his support. ''The people of Northern Ireland have written the obituary notice of Trimbleism,'' Mr. Paisley exulted after the vote. ''I believe it is the end of his leadership of anything in Northern Ireland.'' Mr. Adams, whose party increased its vote total from past elections, said that he ''appreciated David Trimble's difficulties'' and that he thought the fracturing of the Unionist vote was ''regrettable.'' Asked about Mr. Trimble's longtime refusal to speak to him, Mr. Adams, who will now become a minister in the new Northern Ireland Government, sounded conciliatory. Mr. Trimble, he said, ''has a place on this island, and it should be an honorable place and an honored place, and he has to accept that I have to be treated on the basis of equality.'' Among the winners were men who once committed acts of sectarian violence but have since become some of the most passionate backers of a negotiated peace. They included Gerry Kelly, the man convicted in an I.R.A. bombing of a London court building that killed 1 person and wounded 250. There were also the leaders of the Progressive Unionist Party: Billy Hutchinson, a former Protestant paramilitary gunman with two murder convictions, and David Ervine, who spent five years in jail for possession of explosives. The first meeting of the assembly is to take place Wednesday in the same conference hall where peace negotiations held. The principal order of business will be to select a first minister, most likely Mr. Trimble, and his deputy, probably Mr. Hume. There will be discussion on whether the assembly should make its permanent home in the neoclassical Stormont Palace, which housed the old legislature famously described by its first speaker in 1922 as ''a Protestant Parliament for a Protestant people.'' Catholics have long associated that body, and its limestone building full of heroic Unionist paintings and statuary, with Protestant domination of the province. After the | Vote for Assembly Realigns Northern Ireland Loyalties |
1028120_1 | even though the rebels were vastly outnumbered and outgunned. The episode showed both Mexicans and international observers how volatile the civil conflict in Chiapas has become and how far President Ernesto Zedillo has moved toward open military confrontation with the Zapatista rebels, more than four years after the Indian guerrillas first emerged with a brief New Year's Day uprising. Mary Robinson, the former President of Ireland who is the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, made her first public comments about Mexico after the El Bosque episode. She said there might have been ''serious violations of the rights of indigenous people'' and called for the peace talks to resume. Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright also made a rare reference to Chiapas at a recent Senate hearing, saying the United States was ''pressing'' Mexico to resolve the situation. The comment set off a diplomatic tempest as the Government hotly rejected any American pressure in what it regards as a purely domestic issue. The violence came only days after the peace negotiations reached their low point, when the Bishop of Chiapas, Samuel Ruiz Garcia, resigned as mediator. The operation at El Bosque was the fourth in a series of Government military actions since April to dismantle what the Zapatistas call their ''autonomous'' town governments and to reinstate officials belonging to the Government's party, the Institutional Revolutionary Party. The Zapatistas began two years ago to set up the alternative governments in Indian towns where they are popular, after they signed a partial peace agreement with the Government. The agreement laid the groundwork for the Zapatistas to evolve from a clandestine organization of armed guerrillas into a peaceful political movement. It also established the foundations for greater legal autonomy for Indian communities across Mexico. The partial accords were never officially carried out because of differences between the Government and the Zapatistas over how to put them into effect. Late in 1996 the peace talks collapsed. But the Zapatistas went ahead and acted on the accords by asserting their political control and setting up ''autonomous'' governments in communities across the Indian regions of Chiapas where their followers predominate. At the same time, the Zapatistas boycotted the national elections of July 1997, even though Mexico's electoral system underwent a major reform and Mexicans elsewhere were expressing their views at the polls with unprecedented enthusiasm. In December 1997 tensions exploded between entrenched authorities of the | Mexico Squeezes Rebels, Provoking New Grief |
1028139_2 | this size, you make friends the moment you walk up the gangplank and remove your shoes, as is required. You don't want to scuff the wood, which is what you'll be on virtually every moment out of your room. In fact, you'll spend most of the day barefooted. Not even deck shoes are permitted. The boats are hand-built of chestnut and oak, the interior of cedar and Indian walnut by local craftsmen in the Black Sea. It was from there, say the sailors, that adventurous souls set out to South America more than 2,000 years ago. Much of the cruising is on motor power. Because the boats are close to shore, there are times when there isn't enough wind. But for a few hours a day, when the wind is right (not too strong, mind you, because these are not ocean-going vessels), they hoist the sails. The captain barks orders in Turkish and then there is quiet, except for the whoosh of wind into the sails. Because of the wide decks, there is room for everyone to sit and schmooz aft, where meals are often served. The fellow doing the serving could be the chef, a deck hand, or even the captain. Usually, dinner is below in the combination living room-dining room-den. If you sail to the west out of Kalkan in southeast Turkey, you will stop at one of the 12 Islands of Gocek, supposedly a favorite of Cleopatra's. In fact, the legend goes, she was so taken with one of the islands that her inamorata, Marc Antony, shipped a boatload of sand from these beaches back to her in Egypt. Like Marc Antony, you'll pass the Blue Lagoon of Oludeniz, and you can ask to stop at Gemiler Island and take a hike across Byzantine ruins. If someone's on duty, he will charge you about $2. The eastbound trip -- you get both directions if you go for a week -- includes the Basilica of St. Nicholas. Then, you spot the ruins of a sunken city at Kekova. . You can get information about the Amazon Solo by fax in Turkey at 011-90-252-645-2683. Through September, rates run about $400 per person for three nights, about $700 for five nights, and about $750 for a week. To make reservations on other gulets of varying sizes, try Efor Travel and Tours in New York at (212) 687-4949. THE BOATING REPORT | Cruising Along the Turkish Coast, Comfortably |
1027727_0 | THE GIFT OF TIME The Case for Abolishing Nuclear Weapons Now. By Jonathan Schell. 240 pp. New York: Metropolitan Books/ Henry Holt & Company. $25. In 1982 Jonathan Schell published a vivid and eloquent book on the likely consequences of a nuclear war between the Soviet Union and the United States. ''The Fate of the Earth'' reflected, and no doubt reinforced, the intense anxiety of the time about the danger of nuclear war. Schell rejected as utterly inadequate the efforts to deal with this danger by arms control, and this raised the obvious question: What could be done to remove the threat of nuclear destruction? Two years later Schell gave an answer in a new book, ''The Abolition,'' in which he called for the elimination of nuclear weapons. He recognized that the knowledge that made nuclear weapons possible could not be eradicated. But he argued that this knowledge, even though it might in theory enable some states to build nuclear weapons, would also serve as a deterrent against such breakout attempts. This argument seemed quite utopian in 1984, when Soviet-American relations were at a very low point. But the world was on the brink of momentous changes, and as the cold war ended, the Soviet Union and the United States took steps to reduce their nuclear arsenals. Mikhail Gorbachev called for the abolition of nuclear weapons by the year 2000, and at a summit conference in Reykja- vik, Iceland, in October 1986 he and Ronald Reagan, to the consternation of many experts, discussed the possibility of complete nuclear disarmament. Although no treaty emerged from Reykja- vik, that meeting was a breakthrough, laying the basis for future agreements. With the cold war over, the nuclear danger receded from public consciousness -- or at least it did until the recent Indian and Pakistani nuclear tests. Much has indeed been achieved: Russia and the United States have signed arms reduction treaties; Belarus, Kazakhstan and Ukraine have given up the nuclear weapons left on their territory by the breakup of the Soviet Union; South Africa has dismantled its nuclear weapons; the Iraqi and North Korean programs have apparently been stopped; the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty was extended indefinitely in 1995, with the support of over 180 signatory states. The United States -- like the other major nuclear weapons states, Russia, Britain, France and China -- is committed, under Article VI of the nonproliferation treaty, to | Zero Option |
1023488_0 | Unable to hire enough teachers, the Dallas school board voted last month to lure them with $1,500 signing bonuses. Corporate recruiters paid out much larger bonuses -- averaging $17,500 -- to Cornell's business school graduates. Even Burger King has got into the bonus game, offering $5,000 in some cities to hire away restaurant managers from rival fast-food chains. The signing bonus is proliferating in America, and growing ever larger as employers bid for scarce workers. A recruiting tool that had been limited to upper-level managers, highly skilled technicians and athletes, it is spreading today to many others, even civil servants. The Labor Department, for example, is for the first time offering a bonus of up to $4,000 to attract young economists. The hiring bonus appears to be flourishing because employers, faced with the lowest unemployment rate in a quarter-century, have shifted some of the bargaining from wages to the less costly one-time payments. And job applicants, accepting the shift, often welcome the bonus as a windfall to pay off accumulated debt, or as a measure of their value -- and status -- in the eyes of their new employers. One 30-year-old woman, recently hired as a consultant at Price Waterhouse, accepted the proffered $85,000 salary without challenge, but balked at the $5,000 signing bonus. ''I barely had to say that $5,000 was not enough, and they said, 'Fine, would $10,000 make you happy?' and I got that,'' she said. She declined to give her name out of concern, she said, that other newly hired consultants at Price Waterhouse who got smaller bonuses might be resentful. The hiring bonus is just the latest tool that companies have turned to in recent years to hold down wages. The others include profit sharing, flexible schedules, tuition subsidies, stock options, health club memberships and ''performance'' bonuses in lieu of raises for those already on the payroll. While wages are now rising a bit faster than they have in a decade, hiring bonuses are ballooning and spreading across the work force -- absorbing some of the pressure for still-greater income. ''Signing bonuses are certainly rising faster than starting salaries,'' said Stephen Johansson, director of career services at the Johnson Graduate School of Management at Cornell University. ''It is much harder to raise the starting salaries because you end up having to pay people coming in the door more than those who have been there two | Signing Bonus Now a Fixture Farther Down the Job Ladder |
1023425_0 | A NEW sprout in the enchanted broccoli forest is causing semantic chaos in specialty produce markets and leaving adventuresome retailers and cooks searching for words. The diminutive hybrid -- mild, peppery and slightly sweet -- is basically a baby broccoli. The pale stems are as slim as spears and rarely exceed six inches long; the head is a loose cluster of florets that resemble infant broccoli rape. Its flavor marries well with butter or olive oil, lemon, lime, light-tasting vinegars, pancetta, prosciutto, tarragon, Parmesan or fresh goat cheese. And because of its understated flavor, it is a logical candidate to serve with shellfish and mild-tasting meats like chicken or veal. But what to call it? Marketers have tried everything from brocoletti and broccolini to asprobroc and asprospeer: it's as if retailers had closed their eyes and pointed to a page of ''What Shall We Name the Baby?'' The Sakata Seed Corporation, the Japanese company that developed the hybrid in 1993, called it aspiration, invoking the company's hopes while suggesting a relation to asparagus. But in 1995, when Sakata went into partnership with the Mann Packing Company, a large broccoli producer in Salinas, Calif., the vegetable's lineage was revealed as slightly more humble. Aspiration, it turns out, is a cross between broccoli and gai lan, or Chinese broccoli. Asparagus is not part of the equation. In fact, said Richard Leibowitz, the owner of the Culinary Specialty Produce company, a vegetable distributor in Mountainside, N.J., crossing broccoli with asparagus would be like breeding a chipmunk with a tree. It can't be done. Mr. Leibowitz, who also publishes a weekly newsletter for fancy-food grocers, has followed the naming game. ''My sense is that broccolini will stick,'' he said. Most vegetable marketers agree. The name broccolini emphasizes its relationship to broccoli, said Joe Nucci, a spokesman for Mann Packing. The affectionate diminutive also appeals to the country's ongoing infatuation with baby vegetables. Unlike with conventional broccoli, the edible part is not the stalk, but only the tender side shoots. Unlike its larger ancestor, which is harvested once a season, broccolini is harvested five times a year and is therefore more like a firm, yet pliant sprout. So, though it has the delicate fresh personality of a spring green, it is available year-round. It can do just about anything broccoli can do, while looking cuter, tasting milder and lasting longer. It is delicious diced, blanched, | Broccoli's Short, Sweet Cousin |
1023471_0 | Palau's President describes his nation as an island paradise, with the world's best scuba diving in pristine South Pacific waters, abundant seafood, safe streets and a growing economy. ''One might think that our paradise is free of drug problems,'' President Kuniwo Nakamura said in a statement to the General Assembly's special session on illegal drugs. But an imported form of methamphetamine -- nicknamed ''ice'' -- has begun to entice users as young as 13 and 14 years old. ''Although our law enforcement is well trained and respected, we lack the technology to effectively combat this terrible problem,'' said the President's statement, which was delivered to a largely empty chamber by Palau's representative, Hersey Kyota, on Monday night. Oratory from big nations like the United States dominated the opening of the special session on Monday. But the full scope of the drug problem has unfolded in sometimes poignant testimony by smaller and poorer countries like Palau, the United Nations' newest member. They have lined up to recount how drug trafficking and consumption have corrupted their struggling economies and societies and why they are hard pressed to stop it. A result has been more candor than characterizes most General Assembly sessions. Former Soviet republics have complained of rising drug use in the wake of the heady arrival of democracy. Caribbean nations have recounted the dangers of being overrun by drug smugglers. Many countries have asked for financial and technical assistance and a greater effort by developed countries to reduce the demand for drugs. Prime Minister Kubanychbek Jumaliyev of Kyrgyzstan said today that ''while two or three years ago people in Kyrgyzstan had only a theoretical idea of what heroin is, nowadays it has become one of the main drugs on the illegal market.'' Since Armenia found itself on the drug trafficking route from Central Asia, its Foreign Minister Vartan Oskanian said, local drug seizures have risen thirtyfold since 1993 and narcotics-related crime in Armenia is up by 150 percent. New-found democratic freedoms left many Armenians vulnerable to drugs, Mr. Oskanian said, ''not just of personal use but for quick and easy financial gain.'' Prime Minister Basdeo Panday of Trinidad and Tobago said his island nation's proximity to South America made it vulnerable to cocaine trafficking. Among the results, he said, were a rise in serious crime, the recruitment of unemployed people as drug traffickers and users, and a dramatic escalation in addiction. | From Palau to Kyrgyzstan, Leaders Agree: The Scourge Is Drugs |
1023526_1 | in the hope that they could evaluate students and decide on placement more efficiently. The school-based teams have long been criticized for simply rubber-stamping a teacher's referral, and for funneling a disproportionate number of black and Hispanic boys into dead-end, segregated classrooms. Once assigned to special education, students are rarely allowed to return to regular education and few graduate from high school. Most special-education students are not deaf, blind or classified with any other readily defined disability. Instead, 70 percent are labeled ''learning disabled'' or ''emotionally handicapped,'' terms that are loosely applied and may provide cover for a teacher who wants to get rid of a troublesome student, recent studies of the system have found. For years, schools chancellors and blue-ribbon commissions have tried to reform the city's special-education system in the hope of shifting large numbers of children back into regular classrooms. Those efforts have singled out the evaluation system, which has developed into a parallel hierarchy within the school system. The city's 1,000 three-member teams are not required to teach any students. They mainly administer psychological and educational assessments. The teams are not under the control of school principals now, although Schools Chancellor Rudy Crew is proposing to change that system by allowing principals to assign the teams to supporting classroom teachers. The school teams are now overseen by an extensive bureaucracy consisting of 32 district outposts, known as the Committees on Special Education. The committees include a core of psychologists and other professionals supported by dozens of file clerks, typists and other workers. Extensive files are kept on each student, often reaching hundreds of pages. The committees report to special-education officials at the Board of Education's central headquarters in Brooklyn. When a teacher refers a student to special education, the clock begins to tick. The school system must evaluate the child within 30 school days and decide on a placement within 60 days. A Federal court decree requires that children suspected of having a disability be processed in a timely fashion. If the school-based team determines that the child is disabled, it writes an individual education plan -- a sort of academic prescription with diagnosis and statement of the kind of services needed. The team also meets with the child's parent, who has a right to refuse the school team's recommendation and demand a hearing from an impartial hearing officer, paid for by the Board of Education. | Special Education Evaluation Teams Have Few Backers |
1025231_11 | other sacred duties -- ''valid but not licit'' is the tortured phrase used by the Vatican to describe their status. The Vatican has even granted secret approval to some official church leaders, Dr. Madsen says. For many years, to help meet the acute shortage of theology teachers, China has allowed groups of Vatican-ordained priests, from Hong Kong, Taiwan and elsewhere, to teach in official seminaries in China, according to church officials in Hong Kong. Groups of official Chinese priests have also studied in the Vatican-run seminary in Hong Kong. The Repression Jail Still Awaits The Defiant And still the repression of some Christians continues, to different degrees among the country's far-flung regions. The number of people in jails or labor camps for their religious activity is a matter of dispute, but loose assertions abroad that thousands are in prison appear to be exaggerated. Two major human rights groups, Amnesty International, based in London, and Human Rights Watch, in New York, both say -- while admitting to deep uncertainties -- that they find solid evidence only that scores of people are now in some form of long-term detention for their Christian activities: several dozen Catholic leaders, and a similar number of Protestants, are thought to be held. Imprisonment is increasingly reserved for major organizers and leaders, while brief detentions and fines have been the more common penalty levied against illegal Christian groups, said Arlette Laduguie of Amnesty International. But she warned that information even on some recent large-scale crackdowns, like the arrests of hundreds of Roman Catholics last year in Jiangxi Province as part of a campaign against a powerful illegal movement, may not emerge for many months. Nina Shea, director of the Center for Religious Freedom in Washington and one of the sharpest American critics of China, said that on the basis of various field reports her group believes that at least 500 Christian leaders are serving sentences, while at least another 500 followers are detained at any given time, justifying her published statements that thousands are under arrest. Conflict and arrests may have intensified in the mid-1990's as the Government, faced with an explosive spread of Christian groups and a shortage of reliable pastors, made a strong new push to require all religious groups to register with authorities. Those refusing have often been hounded. While the registration drive is notorious among the house churches and their international supporters, it | WARY FLOCK: A special report.; China's Churches: Glad, and Bitter, Tidings |
1025200_2 | to avoid the sort of altercations that occurred at the Prado beach on Monday during the England-Tunisia game. An additional 180 police officers will supplement the 1,300 who were already scheduled to be in Toulouse for the match. Reinforcements also will be sent to Lens. But it is not just a question of numbers. Several shopkeepers and bar proprietors said police officers sometimes stood by waiting for orders while damage was being done or fighting was taking place. ''You have to be very attentive, and the police who were in some cases spread out needed to be quicker to react,'' said Dominique Vlasto, a spokesman for the Marseilles tourist office. Jean-Claude Gaudin, the Mayor of Marseilles, said, ''The error we made was not to want to give the image of Marseilles as a city under siege.'' He added that about 400 English fans caused the trouble, many of them not known hooligans. Britons crossing into France or other continental European nations are required to show passports at the border, which in theory should make it possible to identify known hooligans before they arrive. In practice, there are many ways to slip across European borders. ''They came from everywhere,'' Vlasto said. ''We saw some arriving in cars the same morning. Some were already in France and came alone, some in small groups. It's very tough today in Europe. The border controls are not as strict as before.'' In the wake of the disturbances in Marseilles, French officials were in no mood to give the benefit of the doubt. Police held 58 Scottish supporters for four hours today after the group arrived in Bordeaux for the match between Scotland and Norway. The group, reportedly identified after a tip was received from Scottish police, crossed into France from Spain and had no tickets for the match. The fans reportedly were allowed to watch the match on television under surveillance and then were to be escorted back to the border. Several German fans were arrested in Paris on Monday night before the match between the United States and Germany. If England were to finish second in its group, an entirely feasible prospect, and then win its second-round match, it would play in Marseilles again. ''If that happens,'' Gaudin, the Marseilles Mayor said, ''I would ask the French republic to put all possible means at our disposal to avoid any more problems.'' WORLD CUP '98 | After Unrest, The Fans Are Quiet |
1027263_0 | To the Editor: Re your June 20 front-page article on United States efforts to push Colombia to use tebuthiuron, a herbicide, to kill coca plants: You note opposition by the manufacturer as well as by environmentalists, who predict groundwater contamination and increased deforestation. Yet the Government insists that the use of this herbicide is necessary to the war on drugs. Do we really need to defoliate a portion of the Amazon watershed to displace coca cultivation? What about the native people who have lived there for centuries? This decision lends credence to the charges that the global war on drugs is causing more harm than drug abuse itself. BETTY KING Alexandria, Va., June 22, 1998 The writer is a professor of biology at Northern Virginia Community College. | Aid Colombian Military, But Attach Strings |
1027207_2 | seek to have the order overturned, however.] The three men, who would be released on Tuesday, have been given credit for good behavior.] Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright ordered the release of relevant American documents in response to requests by members of Congress and representatives of the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights, which represents the families of the churchwomen and which interviewed the guard members. State Department officials have said the 300 pages will be published and posted on a State Department Web site in a few days. Throughout the 12-year civil war, in which 75,000 people were killed, the Reagan and Bush Administrations always echoed the Salvadoran Government's contention that the slayings were the work of a small group that was acting on its own. The documents, however, make clear that officials at the American Embassy in San Salvador, based on conversations with the highest levels of the Salvadoran military, had strong indications to the contrary and that their superiors in Washington apparently chose to ignore the indications. In February 1985, Mr. Pickering met with the Defense Minister at the time of the killings, Gen. Jose Guillermo Garcia. General Garcia acknowledged that ''there existed an attitude among the National Guard elements that colleagues should be protected'' and suggested that a subaltern might have been directly involved in the murders. ''When it became clear the women had been murdered, he thought immediately of Col. Edgardo Casanova,'' military commander in the zone where the churchwomen were abducted, a State Department cable about the discussion said. ''Without recounting specifics, Gen. Garcia noted that, sometime before the churchwomen incident, something similar had happened within the territory falling under Casanova's jurisdiction,'' the cable said. In another cable, Mr. Pickering related a conversation with the Deputy Defense Minister, Col. Rafael Flores Lima, regarding information that ''Edgardo Casanova had been aware of and possibly ordered the murder of the churchwomen.'' General Flores Lima ''noted that Gen. (then Col.) Garcia had had reservations about Edgardo Casanova,'' the document states, and it pointed out that Colonel Casanova had been transferred to a desk job at headquarters partly ''because of Garcia's concerns.'' Lawyers for the families of the churchwomen said today that they particularly welcomed a chance to examine the ''special embassy evidence'' that American officials, as well as a judicial commission that is looking into the case, have always cited as proving that the guard members acted | Files Focus on Salvador Colonel in U.S. Women's Deaths |
1027154_7 | wild areas,'' said Mr. Spring, who does not miss his E-mail when he's out of town, and whose co-author, Harvey Manning, graduated to an electric typewriter from a manual one just two years ago. But Dr. Heim, who has written about information fixation, said what people do while unplugged was more important than the length of time they spent away from technology. ''Without rebooting our awareness, it doesn't matter whether we unplug or not,'' he said via E-mail, his preferred medium. ''Technology retrains our nervous system. It gives us a pace and tempo. We need to actively plug ourselves into the operating system of earth and sky, mountain and river, inhale and exhale.'' Reconnecting Opening an E-Mail Time Capsule LAST July 1, Peter Crabb, a psychology professor at Pennsylvania State University at Abington, Pa., announced that he would turn off his E-mail for the foreseeable future. His department had switched to a Web-based system, and he had no interest in following. ''I don't do the Web,'' he said archly. ''It's against my religion.'' Last week, out of curiosity, he read through the 200 E-mail messages his server had saved since September. The techno time capsule yielded ''mostly junk,'' he said, as well as a missed opportunity for a $2,000 consulting job. But there was no irreparable damage to his professional or social life. Breaking his messages down into categories, he found that 44 percent were from an electronic mailing list that someone had put him on, that 26 percent were from college administrators and that 20 percent were from colleagues. The rest included four requests from students and four requests from reporters for interviews, the latter causing him some regret. He learned of one administrative mix-up that would have made him furious at the time, but that message was sent in October. Professor Crabb loved E-mail until a year or so ago, when he started to see it as a form of control by administrators. ''It's a great tool for telling people what to do and for monitoring people's work behavior,'' he said. Now he is going back on line, at his department's request -- a prospect sweetened slightly by the new $3,000 laptop he was issued. But Professor Crabb still isn't happy about the prospect of spending time on line. ''I don't want to sit in front of a computer more,'' he said. ''I want to do that less.'' | Only Disconnect (For a While, Anyway) |
1027129_0 | Each spring, starting in the 15th century, the Chinese Emperor went to Jufu Hall, above left, the temple of agriculture in the Forbidden City in Beijing, changed into farmer's clothes and briefly plowed the land, a ritual to bring good luck. ''But it's no mere changing room,'' said Bonnie Burnham, president of the World Monuments Fund in New York, a group devoted to preserving endangered art and architecture. Jufu Hall is notable for its roof of glazed tiles and its beams embellished with lacquered golden dragons. And it is decaying. On June 11, the fund announced that Jufu would receive $30,000, one of 19 grants from the American Express Company. Determining factors for the grants are the importance of the structure and the urgency of the need for repairs. A nominee, selected from the fund's list of 100 most endangered sites, can be a famous complex like Angkor in Cambodia, Ms. Burnham said, ''or it can be a unique survivor, where everything else of its kind has disappeared.'' Another grant of $30,000 went to preserve fragile wall art showing running animals at the 13th-century cliff dwellings, top right, at Mesa Verde National Park in Colorado. A crumbling folly, made to look like a Roman aqueduct, in Lednice Park in the Czech Republic, bottom left, won a $50,000 grant. The Masaka Cathedral in Kitovu Village, Uganda, bottom right, was built in 1927 of local brick, timber and sheet iron. A $20,000 grant will help repair its sagging roof and cracks in the walls and will add support arches to the cathedral, the seat of the first African Roman Catholic bishop. Information: (800) 547-9171. ELAINE LOUIE CURRENTS: WORLD MONUMENTS GRANTS | Saving Endangered Art and Architecture |
1027239_7 | get a jump on things.'' Another attraction is the anti-conventional nature of an industry, many of whose giants -- Steven P. Jobs and Stephen Wozniak, the founders of Apple computers, in addition to Mr. Gates, -- are college dropouts. Job opportunities at computer companies often emphasize loose dress codes and strange hours as well as the financial possibilities. Here, for example, is how Trilogy, the Austin software company, describes its ''company culture'' on its Web site: ''What matters at Trilogy? Results, results, results. The focus is not on how many meetings you attend or that you show up for work at 7 in the morning every day. What's more important is the value you add to Trilogy and the experience you bring. As for work hours, Trilogy believes in flexibility. It makes the most sense that people work when they are most productive, and only you know when that is.'' It says that some employees dress fancy for work because they want to while others ''wear a clean T-shirt and shoes when they want to dress up,'' adding: ''Some work from 5 A.M. to 5 P.M., others don't believe in the cruel and unusual abuse of alarm clocks and never show their faces before lunch time.'' There is further talk of huge bonuses and ''company boats, spontaneous trips to Las Vegas, nights out on the town, trips to Hawaii, fully stocked kitchens.'' Employers say there are distinct advantages to younger people. They have enormous energy, are willing to work long hours and still consider working all night an adventure. But others say they prefer to hire people who have finished college, both because their minds are more trained and disciplined and because it is better for them to get their degrees. ''We want to use their talents and be respectful of their education,'' said Dawn Legg, director of operations at Dega Technologies in San Luis Obispo, Calif., a start-up company whose Web master is 18 years old. ''At the same time, we have a business to run.'' Many of those who left college to take jobs say they want to go back to school, either part time soon or full time later, both for the sake of long-term job security and for the satisfaction of having completed their degrees. But their elders worry that by the time those former students feel the need to return, it will be too late. | Voracious Computers Are Siphoning Talent From Academia |
1027192_0 | The latest figures on the global AIDS epidemic are frightening beyond expectations. A country-by-country analysis by the United Nations AIDS program has found that H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS, is running wild through many parts of the developing world, especially the impoverished nations of Africa south of the Sahara. The virus has infected one in four adults in Botswana and Zimbabwe, and almost one in five adults in several other African countries. Most do not even know they harbor the virus, but virtually all are doomed unless modern science or their own beleaguered governments can pull off some miracle not yet in sight. As it stands now, the AIDS pandemic is destined to rival the Black Death of the Middle Ages and the influenza pandemic of 1918-1919 as a global horror. Unfortunately, there are no sure-fire weapons to bring the epidemic under control. Drugs to treat the disease have become increasingly effective. But they are prohibitively expensive for poor countries where the virus is most prevalent. Although it is heartening that several drug companies are planning huge price cuts for poor nations, even that will leave the cost too high for most Africans. Prevention programs stressing health education and condom use have helped some countries slow transmission of the virus. But the best hope would be a vaccine to prevent infection. The first full-scale clinical trial of an AIDS vaccine is just getting under way in the United States and Thailand, but many experts believe the vaccine being tested is not very promising. The message in the latest U.N. estimates is that efforts to secure an effective vaccine must be broadened and greatly intensified. Otherwise, today's shockingly high H.I.V. infection rates will only get worse. | The H.I.V. Plague |
1022380_0 | While President Clinton was speaking enthusiastically yesterday in favor of a program to help schools and libraries connect to the Internet, the Federal Communications Commission, under pressure from Congress, was preparing to scale back the program, officials close to the commission and to Congress said yesterday. Some 30,000 schools and libraries have submitted applications for Internet grants totaling $2.02 billion. But under the plans being considered by the commission, the program would almost certainly get less than $1.7 billion this year, and possibly less than $1.4 billion, the officials said. Big long-distance phone companies contribute most of the money that goes into the program. The commission and lawmakers are concerned that fulfilling all the applications from schools and libraries could lead to higher long-distance telephone rates. But while some members of Congress want to cut off funds to the program completely, F.C.C. officials want to shrink the program more modestly. Negotiations among commission, Congress and White House officials are expected to continue through the weekend. Still, the commission is not expected to agree to stop collecting money for the program altogether, as has been urged by four powerful members of Congress. The AT&T Corporation and the MCI Communications Corporation have said they intend to make charges for the program explicit on customers' bills. That move has led to pressure on lawmakers to eliminate the charges, even though the F.C.C. has given long-distance companies new savings to compensate for the new fees, and rates have fallen partly as a result. Referring to the school and library program by its Washington nickname, Mr. Clinton said yesterday, ''I say we cannot afford not to have an e-rate.'' ''Thousands of poor schools and libraries and rural health centers are in desperate need of discounts,'' the President said, giving a commencement address at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. ''If we really believe that we all belong in the Information Age, then, at this sunlit moment of prosperity, we can't leave anyone behind in the dark.'' The President has set a goal of connecting every classroom to the Internet by 2000, and he said yesterday that by this time next year ''we will have connected well over half our classrooms, including 100 percent of the classrooms in the nation's 50 largest urban school districts.'' The F.C.C. collected $625 million for the schools and libraries program in the first half of the year. If the | Cuts Are Urged In Internet Fund Clinton Praises |
1022392_0 | The Clinton Administration renounced the last vestige of control by the United States Government over the Internet's basic structure yesterday, acknowledging that the computer network had grown too big, too global and too commercial to be overseen by any one nation. That last vestige is the distribution and management of Internet addresses, an issue that has become the focus of increasingly heated debates and litigation as companies, institutions and individuals found that the land rush to cyberspace was being slowed because all the best addresses had already been snapped up. In a long-anticipated policy paper, the Administration said it would turn over the management of the Internet's address system to an international nonprofit group that could represent a range of constituencies from large corporations struggling to protect their trademarks and market their products on line to Saturday night Web surfers. The final policy dispenses with many of the more controversial Government mandates that had produced widespread opposition to early drafts of the report. Instead, adopting a plan that could become a general model for Internet self-governance, the Government will abdicate the sticky task of building a consensus across national boundaries, private and public sectors, and big and small businesses to the as-yet-unformed group. While governments are not soon likely to abandon attempts to control aspects of the Internet within their territories that violate moral or cultural values -- pornography, pedophilia, gambling and invasion of privacy are the most popular targets -- the ultimate futility of localized efforts to place limits on a global network is widely expected to result in more Internet self-regulation. The question of who gets what address on the Internet does not strike at the core values of any one group or culture, but it has become an increasingly contentious issue. That is because while real estate in cyberspace is theoretically unlimited, the Government has only authorized the use of a handful of ''top-level domains,'' the suffixes at the ends of Internet addresses that are supposed to denote what type a site is. The ''.edu'' domain, for example, is restricted for use by schools and universities, while ''.gov'' is available only to governments, and ''.mil'' can be used only by the military. In addition, ''.org'' is supposed to denote nonprofit organizations, and ''.net'' is given out only to Internet service providers. That leaves everyone else, from the largest corporations to your Aunt Mae, vying for a domain | U.S., in Shift, Drops Its Effort to Manage Internet Addresses |
1024802_1 | with 19 organizations, including the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, the Duke Comprehensive Cancer Center in Durham, N.C., the University of Texas and the Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center in Los Angeles. Florida had the highest busy rate, with half the callers getting busy signals last year. ''We recognize that we have a problem,'' said Jo Beth Speyer, director of the Miami office of the Cancer Information Service. The report said that callers, especially cancer patients, were often desperate for information, and that some were ''highly emotional.'' They ask, for example, about treatment options, the genetics of breast cancer and how to enroll in clinical trials testing the safety and effectiveness of new cancer therapies. ''The calls often involve life-and-death situations, said Christy A. Thomsen, chief of the Cancer Information Service at the National Cancer Institute. ''The callers may be in crisis.'' The information service answers questions about all types of cancer, using data and literature reviewed and approved by the cancer institute, a unit of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md. Ms. Brown, the inspector general, said the cancer institute had not established performance standards for its contractors. As a result, she said, ''contractors are not required to keep their busy signal rates or wait times under any specific threshold.'' Ms. Thomsen accepted many of the inspector general's findings and recommendations and said that the cancer institute would address the problems. ''There are more people calling us than we've been able to serve,'' she said. ''We are concerned about that. We are working hard to decrease our busy signal rate. Our goal is to have a busy rate no higher than 10 percent.'' The waiting time averaged 7.2 minutes last year and 5.3 minutes in the first five months of this year, Ms. Thomsen said. ''We'd like it to be under two minutes, but it's not,'' she added. Information specialists said that callers sometimes had to wait 20 minutes or more. Federal investigators said the regional structure of the telephone service was inefficient. ''Callers are not routed to the first available information specialist,'' but are sent to the regional office serving their geographic area, the inspector general said. ''We observed at least one contractor with phone lines open for most of the day, while other offices had persistent queues of waiting callers.'' Ms. Brown said that money and other resources of the Cancer Information Service were | Busy Signals Too Common on Cancer Phone Line, Report Says |
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