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1024841_4 | Suriname, in South America. The Asbury Park Press reported today that one of the 23 -- a man named Chen Da Xing -- stashed some mementos near the beach at Bay Head where the boat sputtered to a halt. These included a pair of pants, a jacket, a razor, a spiral-bound notebook with English phrases, and cigarettes made in Suriname. The 23 were apparently not the only Chinese men who were in South America, waiting for an opportunity to sneak into the United States, the man from Minjiangko said. After waiting for what might have been the better part of a year, the men left South America perhaps two or three months ago, boarding a big ship. There may have been 200 men, most of whom were from Fujian. But the man said he did not recognize a soul from his Minjiangko life, and he often felt lonely. The voyage was difficult: sleep was but a dream, and food consisted only of rice porridge. At some point, the bigger ship discharged a group of about two dozen, who then were transferred to a smaller boat, the Oops II. But the Oops II lost its way in heavy fog and ran aground on the night of May 30 near the New Jersey borough of Bay Head. The immigrants jumped into the surf and headed toward the Victorian mansions that stood sentinel along the waterfront. At first, the Immigration and Naturalization Service captured 22 of the men; a 23d was later found wandering around the town, hungry and wet. The 23d man also said that there were two other missing passengers who had been hiding; they have yet to be found. Last Monday, the United States Coast Guard took custody of a freighter that was intercepted about 195 miles east of San Salvador Island in the Bahamas, and the authorities have said it may have been a so-called mother ship used in the Oops II smuggling operation. That ship, the Oriental I, reportedly discharged 24 Asian men -- 23 from China and one from Malaysia -- who were picked up by a speedboat and taken to the Bahamas. The men were later captured and, like the 23 in Elizabeth, are being detained as illegal immigrants. Even so, the man from Minjiangko said he hoped that he would be granted asylum. ''I've suffered a lot,'' he said. ''I don't want to go back.'' | Chinese Detainee Recalls Life as Smugglers' Cargo |
1024823_1 | club extended its reach to the eastern rim of Asia and the Pacific. This left a huge gap, a vacuum, and that vacuum lies in southern Asia and Africa.'' Experts on India have long assumed that the second most populous country saw itself as a major power thwarted since independence in 1947 from taking its rightful place among nations. As the United States moved closer to China in recent years, with President Clinton's using the phrase ''strategic partnership'' with Beijing, the Indians grew increasingly frustrated that they were not accorded the same attention. Instead, Mr. Singh said, India was lectured about its unwillingness to sign treaties against the spread of nuclear arms and against testing weapons. He called Washington's priorities insulting. ''You can't put a gun to India's head and say, 'Sign this paper and then we'll listen to you,' '' he said. With a review of the 1996 Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty due next year, he said, India knew that it would come under renewed pressure to sign the pact and that it had a narrow window of opportunity for testing. He said India was stunned by the Clinton Administration's denunciation of the nuclear tests that New Delhi conducted on May 11 and May 13. The United States, Mr. Singh added, seemed to misread the end of the cold war as the end of threats to national security everywhere, while India remained between two potentially dangerous nations, Pakistan and China. ''The United States of America then proposed a new thesis, that the principal dynamic or relations would be trade and commerce,'' Mr. Singh said. ''The United States assumed everyone thought the same.'' American officials who traveled to India in the months before the nuclear tests did not agree that this was the message that they conveyed. Clinton Administration officials said they made it extremely clear in talks with the Indians that they were looking for a wider range of relationships, but they also stressed the importance of India's refraining from testing or deploying weapons and encouraged the Indians to be candid about their plans with the United States. The officials, stung by the flouting of reassurances from New Delhi days before the tests, said they were now wary of any Indian promises to adhere to treaties or to give up the option of deploying nuclear arms. Americans have also joined in the Security Council condemnation of India, which Mr. | Why India Thinks Atomic Equation Has Changed |
1027644_2 | all the taxes have not been collected. The tobacco companies deny any complicity. ''There isn't a shred of evidence to support that,'' said Robert R. Parker, president of the Canadian Tobacco Manufacturers Council. ''The accusation has been made as part of a push to raise taxes in the U. S.'' On a sunny summer day, when the big, easy, waterfront park in Cornwall is ruled by gangs of joggers and bicycling French-speaking women from Quebec, it is difficult to picture this as Mr. Martelle's Dodge City. But there is no question that before Canada lowered taxes in 1994 to previous levels, cigarette smuggling had changed the character of this Ontario town near the borders of Quebec and the United States. ''If you came into Cornwall then, you could go into any bar, take any taxi, go up to any gas station attendant and ask where to buy smuggled cigarettes,'' said Cpl. Michel Joulet, who headed the anti-smuggling unit in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police Cornwall detachment from 1990 to 1992. The smuggling worked this way: cigarettes were made in Canada and exported -- without local taxes -- into the United States. These cigarettes have different names (du Maurier, Player's), different packaging (long, flat boxes) and even a different taste, one that most American smokers have never accepted. It was always clear that most of the Canadian exports would not be sold in the United States. Many were brought to warehouses on the St. Regis/Akwesasne Mohawk Indian Reserve near Cornwall and sent back across the St. Lawrence into Canada at prices about half as high as fully taxed cigarettes. Smuggling increased the level of violence in the otherwise quiet city. Many people, including Corporal Joulet, agree that it was not uncommon to hear gunshots along the river at night. For a time, private boats simply did not venture out on the river. High-speed chases across the international bridge at the west end of town were common, and someone once fired a shot into Cornwall's community center. How bad was it? ''Bad,'' said Cerdan Lager, owner of Cornwall's Downtown Diner, an old-fashioned restaurant and ice cream parlor with booths and red-checkered tablecloths where Mr. Martelle's commercial was filmed. ''Shooting at houses, everything. So when Ron talks, he talks.'' But when Mr. Martelle talks, his opponents are ready with counter attacks. They point out that although he calls himself a former Mountie, he | Cornwall Journal; In Tax Debate, a Hero Or a Tobacco Hireling? |
1027630_8 | to better police our activities and establish a certain level of credibility for our operations,'' said Peter Hess, a lawyer coordinating the effort. Salvagers want to preserve the right to sell artifacts to collectors. But the newest wrinkle is the private, for-profit collection. Barry Clifford of Provincetown, Mass., is salvaging the Whydah, a pirate ship whose crew included escaped slaves, and charging admission. ''I can't bring myself to divide and sell it,'' he said. RMS Titanic Inc. is netting $1 million every three months from three traveling exhibits of 5,000 artifacts. ''The company has not recovered its $20 million investment, but we have an appreciating asset,'' said its president, George Tulloch. In fact, few if any of Mr. Fisher's imitators have recouped their investments. One 1990 study of 20 shipwrecks found that just one -- Mr. Fisher's -- made money. In this century, only one other wreck the Atocha's size has been found, the Central America off South Carolina, with $1.2 billion in coins and bullion. As known wrecks are picked over and hunts move offshore, the risks and costs for investors increase. With modern technology, many believe that another golden age of salvage will begin after deepwater regulations are decided. But the treasure may be history, not gold, said Paul Johnston, curator of maritime history for the Smithsonian Institution, who is excavating the royal yacht of the King of Hawaii, sunk in 1824. ''Where we have made progress is in recognizing that these are limited resources that need to be protected for the benefit of all, not just a few salvagers who want to line their pocket,'' he said. ''This is a diminishing marine resource, like whales, that need some kind of international care.'' Mr. Fisher, whose fight with cancer began about the time he discovered the Atocha, insists his business will survive him, as his children take over. In the meantime, he still runs the business of selling dreams. ''Look at this,'' he said to a group that stepped into his office not long ago, pointing out a pattern of sonar echoes, the modern equivalent of the X on a treasure map. ''If that's what I think it is, we've found the Margarita, 40 tons of gold and silver and over $2 billion in emeralds and lots of other stuff.'' ''Really? No!'' said one visitor. Without missing a beat, Mr. Fisher slid over a blank contract seeking $50,000. | Sunken Treasure's Sinking Fortunes; 'X' No Longer Marks the Spot For Governments or Investors |
1025856_0 | I came here expecting to hear all about how the Indian nuclear test was meant to cope with the Pakistani threat. What I heard instead was Indians from across the political spectrum insisting that their nuclear sound and light show on May 11 was actually meant to signal America and China that India views their emerging ''alliance'' with great concern and will not let these two powers carve up Asia without regard to India. Even those Indian politicians who denounce their nuclear tests as a cheap, jingoistic maneuver by India's new Hindu nationalist Government, when you scratch them, will tell you these tests were the only way for India to get what it wants most from the U.S. and China: R-E-S-P-E-C-T. I finally realized the depth of this sentiment when I went to see a saffron-robed Indian human rights campaigner, Swami Agnivesh. Surely, I thought, he will disavow this test. But no sooner did we sit down on the floor of his simple Delhi house than he declared: ''We are India, the second-largest country in the world. You can't just take us for granted. India doesn't feel threatened by Pakistan, but in the whole international game India is being marginalized by the China-U.S. axis.'' As long as the cold war was on, and the Soviets were in effect protecting India against China, India did not feel an urgency to develop its own nuclear weapon, notes Raja Mohan, strategic editor of The Hindu newspaper. But the Soviet collapse, coupled with U.S. pressure on India to sign the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and not go nuclear, coupled with the rise of China as an economic and military powerhouse, left the Indians feeling they were on their own. Said Mr. Mohan: ''It was clear that China had run ahead of us and they were being incorporated as the world's No. 2 power and that we were being told to stay in a small box, while the U.S. gave South Asia to China.'' When I asked India's Defense Minister, George Fernandes, what he would say to President Clinton about the Indian tests, he answered: ''I would ask Bill Clinton why is it that you feel yourself so close to China and you can trust China with nuclear weapons and you can trust yourself with nuclear weapons and you can trust Russia, France and Britain with nuclear weapons, but you cannot trust India?'' Mr. Fernandes | Foreign Affairs; Both Sides Now |
1025827_1 | we have to do,'' he said, urging the Yugoslav President, Slobodan Milosevic, ''to come to his senses'' and stop building support for the rebels of the Kosovo Liberation Army through his attacks on innocent civilians. ''Milosevic's attitude is irrational,'' Mr. Jospin said. ''The international community accepts Kosovo as part of the Yugoslav federation, so the solution is autonomy. There is a crazy evolution of events and I hope Milosevic will come to his senses.'' Mr. Milosevic withdrew autonomy from the province in 1989. Mr. Jospin, a Socialist, was elected a year ago in a major defeat for the conservative French President, Jacques Chirac. The benefits of economic prosperity must be shared, he said today, as must the pain of economic adjustment, like the transition France is undergoing in its effort to adapt its state-dominated economy to the demands of global competition. Although Mr. Chirac is ultimately responsible for France's foreign policy, there is a sharing of power between the President and Prime Minister, and Mr. Jospin has received first-class treatment from the Clinton Administration. In addition to meeting with Mr. Clinton, he has also met with the Vice President, and the Secretaries of State, Defense and Treasury. Mr. Jospin, whose approval rating in France has never fallen below 50 percent, is a likely presidential candidate in 2002, and the Clinton Administration wants to get to know him better, officials said. Mr. Jospin and Mr. Clinton together attended the opening of a new French-American business council intended to promote trade and investment. In return, Mr. Jospin has been preaching a new period of global partnership with the United States and an end to the backbiting that marked the end of Mr. Clinton's first term. The French Foreign Minister at that time, Herve de Charette, and Secretary of State Warren M. Christopher rubbed each other the wrong way over issues ranging from Africa to the Middle East. While their successors, Hubert Vedrine and Madeleine K. Albright, have had their differences -- over American sanctions on Iran, for instance, and over Iraq -- both have worked hard to emphasize common goals. Ms. Albright goes out of her way to speak the French she learned in a Swiss school, and Mr. Vedrine praises her at every occasion. Mr. Jospin, for his part, insisted on speaking a vigorous, clear English, and his various toasts and speeches have praised the longstanding alliance between France and the | French Premier Says West Faces Quandary on Kosovo |
1025883_1 | and plant coca elsewhere. Last year, Colombia became the world's leading coca grower. The American and Colombian authorities also say tebuthiuron offers greater protection for the pilots who are destroying the coca. Guerrillas have fired on low-flying planes spraying liquid herbicide in the early morning, when winds are calm and temperatures are lower. But tebuthiuron pellets can be dropped from higher altitudes in virtually any weather, making pilots less vulnerable to ground fire, the police said. Washington has lobbied governments in the Andean region of South America to accept tebuthiuron for more than a decade, even though the chemical's manufacturer, Dow Agrosciences, a subsidiary of the Dow Chemical Company, strongly opposes its use in Colombia. ''Tebuthiuron is not labeled for use on any crops in Colombia, and it is our desire that the product not be used for coca eradication,'' the company said in a statement. Tebuthiuron granules, sold commercially as Spike 20P, should be used ''carefully and in controlled situations,'' Dow cautioned, because ''it can be very risky in situations where terrain has slopes, rainfall is significant, desirable plants are nearby and application is made under less than ideal circumstances.'' The warning is a rough description of conditions in Colombia's coca growing regions. Dow, which faced years of lawsuits and public protest over the use of its Agent Orange defoliant during the Vietnam War, said that if approached, it would refuse to sell tebuthiuron for use in Colombia. But American officials note that Dow's patent on the chemical has expired, allowing others to make it. Critics in Colombia, including Environment Minister Eduardo Verano, say the health effects of tebuthiuron on farming areas are unknown and its use will only increase deforestation by pushing coca growers deeper into forest. ''We need to reconsider the benefits of the chemical war,'' Mr. Verano said. ''The more you fumigate, the more the farmers plant. If you fumigate one hectare, they'll grow coca on two more. How else do you explain the figures?'' American officials, backed by the Colombian police, maintain that the benefits outweigh the environmental risks. The liquid herbicide used now, at a cost of millions of dollars to the United States, has mostly been washed away in the heavy rainfall of the Amazon, said Luis Eduardo Parra, the Colombian anti-drug squad's environmental auditor. The United States Ambassador to Colombia, Curtis Kamman, said, ''For a net environmental positive effect, getting rid of | Pushed by U.S., Colombia Plans New Chemical Attack on Coca |
1024001_0 | A fishing vessel registered in Venezuela has been impounded by the United States Coast Guard in connection with the smuggling of 23 Chinese men who landed on the shore of an affluent seaside town in New Jersey two weeks ago, Federal authorities said last night. The 120-foot fishing trawler, named Oriental I, was captured off the shores of the Bahamas on June 2 by the Bahamian coast guard after the ship was spotted dropping off at least 24 illegal immigrants, most of them Chinese, Bahamian authorities said last night. An official with the United States Coast Guard in Miami confirmed that the vessel had been turned over to the guard and was being towed toward the Florida shores last night. The official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said that the captain, a South Korean with Venezuelan nationality, and a seven-man crew, probably of Chinese heritage, were on the boat and under arrest. ''It is all very preliminary,'' the official said. ''We have the boat and men in custody, and it is being investigated whether or not there is any connection between this incident and the New Jersey landing.'' A crowded smugglers' power boat that apparently lost its way in darkness and dense fog ran aground on the coast of Bay Head, N.J., on May 30, and its ragtag cargo of 23 Chinese men plunged into the surf, crawled ashore and hid themselves among shrubbery and sand dunes before being gathered up by the local police. The authorities suspected that the small boat, named Oops II, was only a small part of a larger smuggling ring that was bringing illegal immigrants into the United States by way of the Atlantic shipping lanes. After Oops II ran aground, the Coast Guard spread a dragnet from the Canadian coast to the Caribbean in search of a larger ship that may have transferred the 23 men to the smaller boat. | Trawler Is Held in Immigrant Smuggling |
1023886_0 | With the Internet becoming increasingly important in commerce and education, the Federal Government should be redoubling its efforts to help disadvantaged communities get on line. Instead, some in Congress want to pull the plug on a modest program that is critical for thousands of schools and libraries around the nation that cannot afford to pay for Internet access on their own. The ''e-rate'' program, created by the 1996 Telecommunications Act, provides subsidies to poor schools and libraries to pay for wiring and telephone costs. The cost of computers, software and teacher training are not covered. Most of the funding comes from big long-distance companies that pushed for passage of the act, which allowed them to pursue new lines of business. Now those companies are pressuring Congress and the Federal Communications Commission, which administers the program, to cut the subsidies. More than 30,000 schools and libraries have applied for subsidies totaling $2.02 billion, an amount less than the annual spending limit of $2.25 billion set by the F.C.C. So far only $625 million has been collected for the first half of the year. Today the F.C.C. is expected to decide whether to collect $1.3 billion in the second half of the year, as planned. Any significant reduction would be irresponsible given the needs of schools and libraries. The political pressure on the F.C.C. has been intense, with opponents deploying several different arguments. Congressional critics warn that e-rate collections will cause long-distance companies to raise their rates. The carriers, by putting a separate e-rate charge on telephone bills, are threatening to pass the cost on to consumers, when in fact they should be absorbing that cost. House Speaker Newt Gingrich plays to that strategy by labeling the e-rate subsidy a ''tax.'' The e-rate program is a public obligation that the carriers agreed to and are required to finance under the 1996 law because they stand to reap enormous financial benefits from deregulation. Access charges that long-distance companies pay to local phone companies have been cut significantly as a direct result of the 1996 act. Should the F.C.C. decide to trim the program, it will be capitulating to company greed at the expense of communities all over the country. | Keep Internet Funding for Schools |
1023951_0 | INTERNATIONAL A3-11 NATO Preparing Plans For Attack on Serb Forces NATO defense ministers ordered contingency plans for bombing Serbian military targets in Kosovo and even in Serbia. They said they would also stage a huge demonstration of force just across the border to give the Yugoslav President a taste of the power that could be brought against him if he did not stop attacks in Kosovo province. A1 The Yugoslav Army is seeding its border with Albania with land mines, apparently to try to stop Kosovo rebels from crossing the border and to block the return of thousands of refugees who have been driven from their homes, European military observers said. A1 President Boris N. Yeltsin of Russia invited President Slobodan Milosevic of Yugoslavia for talks in Moscow in an effort to head off NATO action. A10 Clinton Explains Beijing Visit President Clinton, responding to Congressional criticism of his forthcoming summit meeting in China, described his policy of cooperation with Beijing as ''principled and pragmatic.'' He said that it was in America's interest to engage China on shared commercial and security issues while not turning a blind eye to Beijing's human rights record. A8 The chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Senator Jesse Helms, accused the Clinton Administration of shielding China from sanctions that could block Chinese companies from the launching of American satellites. A8 Protests Allowed in Indonesia Indonesia's military affirmed its backing for the reform movement that is spreading through the country, but it warned that it would act if protests got out of hand. A11 Pakistan Warns of Hard Times Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif called on Pakistanis to economize, as the nation faced sanctions because of the Government's nuclear tests. Pakistan also formally announced a moratorium on nuclear tests and invited India to join it as a ''confidence-building measure'' to reduce tensions. A6 Trial of Teheran's Mayor The trial of the Mayor of Teheran, Gholamhossein Karabaschi, began this week and appears to have turned up the political temperature in Iran at a time when relations between conservatives and moderates are growing more strained. A6 Nigeria Forbids Protests Nigeria's newest military Government, moving aggressively in the face of its first major challenge from the opposition, denied permits for a planned mass pro-democracy demonstration and warned that it might use force to stop it. The opposition said it would go ahead with the planned protest in Lagos, the | NEWS SUMMARY |
1025499_0 | To the Editor: A June 12 editorial advocates the Federal Communications Commission's e-rate program and castigates long-distance telephone companies for putting a separate e-rate charge on their bills and threatening to pass the cost on to consumers. You argue that long-distance companies should absorb the $2 billion annual cost of this ''modest program.'' Regardless of one's opinion of the e-rate program, it is misguided to argue that companies operating in the competitive long-distance market could somehow insulate consumers from the cost of this program. Competition drives prices to costs, including federally mandated costs unrelated to the business of providing long-distance service. Also, fundamental notions of fairness in political accountability require that consumers be informed about the federally mandated charges they are paying for the e-rate program. PETER PITSCH Washington, June 12, 1998 The writer is a consultant to a long-distance company. | Schools Don't Need Web |
1021434_4 | police officer confided. Normally, the only big news is an occasional traffic fatality, he noted. Everyone seemed to know something about what had happened, even those who saw nothing but the smugglers' boat, Oops II, before the Coast Guard towed it away to its station in Manasquan Inlet. The craft, a 1983 Century with twin screws, had a beat-up look about it, a low profile with a small cabin, rusted stern plates, a hull coated with chipped white paint and a broken and dangling step at its stern. The boat was registered at the Wright Island Marina in New Rochelle, N.Y., officials said, but investigators declined to say more. Joey Aquino, the marina owner, said he had sold the craft last December to an Asian man named Jason. He said he could not remember the last name or much about the boat. ''It was an old boat,'' he said. ''We sell boats every day.'' Mr. Bergeron said that while he had no details, the journey of the refugees had probably begun in China several months ago. Preliminary interviews, he said, suggested that they and their families had paid up to $40,000 each to be brought to this country, lured by promises of new lives of freedom and high paying jobs. The reality for most, he said, was far different: months locked in the hold of a ship, with minimal food and water, in dismal sanitary conditions, under the power of ''enforcers'' who keep them in line with beatings, sexual abuse and physical deprivations. If the refugees reach New York City, the officials said, they are often held hostage while ransoms are extorted from relatives, or forced to work at menial jobs for their captors. It was unclear, Mr. Bergeron said, where the refugees had been picked up by the smugglers' boat, or where that craft had been headed. The boat could have picked them up at a mother ship off shore to be ferried into the New York metropolitan area, or might even have brought them from some Caribbean island. Investigators said the boat might have been headed for the Manasquan Inlet, a few miles north of Bay Head, possibly to be met there by a confederate who would take the refugees on to New York City. But it had apparently become lost in fog that reduced visibility on shore and over the water to as little as 10 feet, | 22 Illegal Immigrants Seized After a Jersey Shore Landing |
1021406_4 | completed an assessment of the accident review in May 1997. That is the same month Loral applied for its most recent waiver, for the Chinasat 8 satellite. Company's Concerns Reach White House The first notice to the White House of unusual problems with the Chinasat 8 waiver application came in an early January memorandum from the State Department detailing the factors for the President to consider. Although couched in careful bureaucratic language, the State Department document made it clear that this was no routine export license application. The State Department pointed out that China's transfer of missile technology to Iran might prohibit the export of the Loral satellite or any other satellites or related items. ''Moreover,'' the State Department memo stated, ''information about unauthorized defense services provided by Space Systems/Loral and another U.S. firm to China's Long March 3B Launch Vehicle'' could lead to imposition of harsh sanctions against the company. But the State Department and other agencies nonetheless recommended granting the waiver, because the deal would enhance the United States' leadership in commercial telecommunications, provide an incentive for China to adhere to international nonproliferation rules and improve trade ties with Beijing. After virtually no debate at the White House, the State Department memorandum was rewritten as a decision paper for the President. The State Department's concern about technology transfers to Iran appeared nowhere in the decision document, but a new element is inserted in the first and in most subsequent drafts. The President must act quickly, the draft states; any delay will cost Loral money. ''Due to severe contractual penalties which Loral will incur if it cannot begin technical discussions with the Chinese by next week, we recommend that you take action on this issue by January 20,'' read the first draft of the Presidential memorandum, dated Jan. 13. A day earlier, Loral officials had made known to the White House their frustration at the slow Government response to their waiver application, which was submitted in May 1997. A Loral letter found in White House files stated that unless the approval is granted within a week, the launching, scheduled for November, would be delayed by several months, costing the company at least $6 million. Any such delay would give the Chinese grounds for canceling the project, which would cost Loral $20 million, the company warned. ''Our competitors in Europe,'' Loral officials complained, ''do not suffer delays due to export | The White House Dismissed Warnings on China Satellite Deal |
1021356_1 | assassinated. In his 20 years of adult life -- just 20 -- he grew and changed as few of us do, least of all politicians. He started as the hard-boiled Senate investigator, the supposedly ruthless political strategist in his brother's Presidential campaign. He ended as the man who spoke for the powerless and the abused, in Harlem and the Appalachians and Vietnam. Some thought it was President Kennedy's death that made him become sympathetic to the victims of injustice. But it was always there. He was a tenderhearted man who hid tenderness under a hard shell lest he be taken as weak. But then in so many ways he was not like other political leaders. He was internal, often silent, communicating his empathy without words. He was gregarious and lonely, forceful and vulnerable, melancholy and funny, especially about himself. This Sunday the Discovery Channel on cable television will show a three-part documentary based on Jack Newfield's book, ''Robert F. Kennedy: A Memoir.'' It is a superb piece of work, bringing laughter and tears. Before he became Attorney General, he said once, he had not thought about racial discrimination in this country. I asked him why he focused on it so forcefully after he was in the office. ''There are injustices,'' he said, ''and they are flagrant. And I have the power and responsibility to do something about them. So I intend to do it. It's quite simple.'' But of course it wasn't simple. Not everyone responds by committing himself when he sees others experiencing cruelty; most turn away and remain uninvolved. He responded. ''We don't have to agree with one another,'' he said. ''This is a country of diversity. But there doesn't have to be the bitterness, there doesn't have to be the hatred, there doesn't have to be the distrust.'' When Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was killed, on April 4, 1968, Robert Kennedy was campaigning in Indiana for the Democratic Presidential nomination. He went to a scheduled rally in Indianapolis, with a largely black audience that did not know the news. He told them. From memory, he quoted Aeschylus. Then he said: ''So let us dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago, 'to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world.' '' There was a fateful quality in him, as if he knew the odds against making the world, | Abroad at Home; What Might Have Been |
1021351_3 | small country, but we don't have any presence in Iraq, for instance,'' Mr. Amorim, a former Foreign Minister, said. ''I think for the council as a whole this will be very useful. The council is to hold its next major review of sanctions on Iraq in October, when it is expected to move toward declaring Baghdad under long-term surveillance on nuclear arms, following the recommendations of the International Atomic Energy Agency. But the recent nuclear tests by Pakistan, an Islamic country, and India, a longtime friend of Iraq, may give some members new qualms, some diplomats said. In coming days the council will also consider a measure to allow Iraq to buy $300 million in equipment to upgrade its oil processing. After the council agreed this year to more than double the value of the oil that Iraq can sell abroad to buy food, medicine and other civilian goods for a population that has suffered under the sanctions, Secretary General Kofi Annan has approved a plan for $4.5 billion in sales in the next six months. Of that total $1.5 billion is to be set aside to compensate victims of the invasion of Kuwait, a requirement that rankles Baghdad. Improved distribution is getting needed goods to Iraqis even before the higher figures kick in, the United Nations spokesman for humanitarian issues, Eric Falt, said on Thursday in Baghdad. Agriculture has begun to pick up in many areas with the supplying of fertilizers, spare parts for farm machinery and veterinary supplies, Mr. Falt said. Nearly 200 of 600 requested ambulances have been delivered, he added, and the next oil-for-food distribution plan approved by Mr. Annan will raise caloric intake in the basic food basket distributed to every Iraqi. But complications have arisen as the money for civilian imports increases. Recently the Government asked for a cellular telephone system, along with other communications equipment. United Nations officials and diplomats from the United States, Britain and other nations objected. The request was cut from the new plan, although the United Nations did say that experts would be sent to Iraq to assess the need. ''The Iraqi regime is obviously trying to get what it can out of this for the personal use of the leadership,'' a Western diplomat said. ''This is precisely why there is hesitation about what we give Iraq, and why requests have to be gone through with a fine-tooth comb.'' | Top U.N. Inspector to Brief Security Council on Iraqi Failures to Provide Information |
1021323_2 | mania for Internet companies has been fueled by the succession of mind-boggling stock-for- stock transactions. For example, late last year, Microsoft bought a small company called Hotmail for $400 million in stock. Hotmail is a provider of a free, advertising-supported E-mail service. The company's service allows anyone with a standard Web browser to send and retrieve E-mail using a Hotmail account. At the time of the deal, Hotmail said it had more than nine million E-mail accounts. Of course, no computer users are paying for those accounts, many people have multiple accounts, and the ability to aim advertising at those users is a bit unpredictable. But when a company like Hotmail, with no real revenue to speak of, is sold for $400 million, other companies may feel like failures in comparison -- even when they are sold for three to five times the amount their investors put into them. In the pre-Internet days, a return of five times invested capital would have been terrific. But venture capitalists like myself will be judged not only by the absolute dollars we return to our investors, or the internal rate of return on the capital invested, but against our peers, many of whom have seen $2 million investments turn into $1 billion in value in three to five years -- thanks to those runaway stock prices. This unrealistic comparison threatens the foundations of one of the most remarkable constructs of a capitalist economy. The business of venture capital, providing growth financing to entrepreneurs in exchange for equity in fledgling or semi-established companies, can be a superb engine of economic growth, creating an enormous number of jobs and fueling an entrepreneurial spirit essential to a healthy economy. But when a company with no visible means of support, let alone a plan to generate revenue, sells for $400 million, even normally sharp-witted venture capitalists lose their minds. In a mad scramble, they start outbidding each other to provide capital to what they hope will be the next Hotmail. So what? Who gets hurt? The entrepreneurs. I know one chief executive who has worked day and night for three years to build his Internet software company. He has suffered through all of the dysfunction and pain of nurturing a start-up. This year, in the first full year of selling his product, his company is the No. 1 or No. 2 player in the market (depending on | Technology; For Internet stocks, the fall of overvalued companies can hurt strong companies as well. |
1021364_2 | the fact that they came a day after Pakistan conducted its second round of nuclear tests in 48 hours, without a significant Indian protest on either occasion. The Foreign Ministry statement also drew attention for its conciliatory tone toward Pakistan and China, the two nations India cited as security threats when it justified its own tests on May 11 and 13. The statement said India ''remains firmly committed to a policy of friendly and cooperative relations with all its neighbors, to the promotion of peace and stability in the region and to the resolution of all outstanding issues through bilateral dialogue and negotiations.'' And it disavowed any intention of threatening Pakistan. In this, as in in its offer of new nuclear weapons talks, the Indian statement struck a tone markedly different from the one that was paramount in New Delhi in the first two weeks after India's tests. Several officials, led by the hard-line Interior Minister, Lal Krishna Advani, made statements that linked references to India's enhanced military power with threats to take military action over the disputed territory of Kashmir, causing fears in Washington and elsewhere that India might be on the verge of starting a war. Prime Minister Vajpayee angered China by citing Beijing's growing arsenal of nuclear weapons, the unresolved border disputes between the two countries and China's history of transferring crucial nuclear weapons technology to Pakistan as the principal reasons why India decided to conduct the nuclear tests. The Indian officials' remarks prompted opposition leaders to charge that Mr. Vajpayee was jeopardizing years of painstaking negotiations with China that had begun to show dividends in recent years, with growing cross-border trade and moves toward troop pullbacks in disputed areas. The Indian statement came a day after the Foreign Ministers of the so-called Group of Eight nations -- Britain, Canada, Germany, France, Italy, Japan, the United States and Russia -- announced that they would meet in London on June 12 to try to adopt a joint response to the nuclear tests by India and Pakistan. So far, these nations have responded differently, with some, including the United States, imposing severe economic sanctions on the two countries and others, including Britain, France and Russia, condemning the tests but not joining the sanctions. By offering to open talks on a new treaty, diplomats said India appeared to be making its opening bid for a settlement of the crisis. But | India Calls for Talks On a Treaty to Limit All Atomic Arsenals |
1021428_1 | historian who has written extensively about Chinese immigration. In those alternative ports, Mr. Kwong said, the smugglers are able to procure fraudulent documents and send the immigrants to the United States on a commercial flight. He said the smugglers, known as snakeheads, often chose ports where ''the possibility of corruption and evasion is high.'' A spokesman for the Immigration and Naturalization Service in Washington, Russell A. Bergeron, said smugglers also sailed from China to South and Southeast Asia before boarding planes to Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Central America. From there the immigrants fly to the United States. In the last five years, Border Patrol agents have reported about 1.5 million arrests at the country's Southwest border. The vast majority involve Mexicans and Central Americans, but immigration officials have seen a gradual increase there in the number of Chinese, Indians and Pakistanis -- ''nationalities whom we would not typically see at the Southwest border,'' Mr. Bergeron said. In the last year, Federal Border Patrol agents caught about two dozen Chinese immigrants trying to cross the border illegally from Mexico to Arizona, Federal immigration officials said. In 1996, two Pakistani men were drowned while swimming across the Rio Grande to Texas. The price that Chinese immigrants pay to be smuggled has climbed, Mr. Kwong said -- to about $45,000 today from $30,000 in the days of the Golden Venture, five years ago. The young men who came ashore Saturday night, including one 17-year-old, told the authorities in New Jersey that they paid $40,000 apiece. It is not clear whether they made the entire journey by sea. The authorities said it was possible that they sailed from China on a larger ship and switched to the 28-foot powerboat close to the New Jersey shore. Only the most desperate people, Mr. Kwong observed, would be willing to make the entire journey by sea. ''There are so many bad stories about the horrendous conditions on these ships,'' he said. ''It is not the preferred way. This could have been an inexperienced smuggler.'' Federal immigration officials said yesterday they did not know why the smugglers relied on this unpopular mode of transportation, or where the immigrants boarded the Oops II, which is registered at the Wright Island Marina in New Rochelle, N.Y. But the officials credited stepped-up intelligence and enforcement efforts for having stanched the flow of shiploads of smuggled immigrants. In June 1993, | Crackdowns Have Smugglers Trying New Routes, Officials Say |
1022168_1 | have at least temporarily halted their nuclear tests and toned down their rhetoric, there is an opening for diplomacy aimed at freezing further weapons development. A modest step was taken yesterday in Geneva, where Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and the foreign ministers of Russia, China, Britain and France urged India and Pakistan to refrain from further testing and open negotiations with each other. The meeting also called on the two countries to sign the international treaties banning the testing and spread of nuclear weapons. But achieving these worthy goals will not be easy, and a newly nuclear South Asia still crackles with danger. India and Pakistan are both working to miniaturize their nuclear bombs to fit on missiles; their troops trade fire across a tense border, and they cannot even agree on a format for discussing their conflicting claims to Kashmir. India and Pakistan must be coaxed into signing the international nuclear treaties. In return they should be given access to the safety technology that established nuclear powers use to prevent accidental detonations and theft. Encouragingly, Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee of India has proposed a testing moratorium and offers to negotiate an agreement with Pakistan promising that neither country will be the first to introduce nuclear weapons into combat. Pakistan's Prime Minister, Nawaz Sharif, also seems interested in negotiating new guidelines for military restraint. But New Delhi says it will sign the global nuclear arms treaties only if it is legally recognized as a nuclear weapons country. That would legitimize India's plans to proceed further toward arming itself with nuclear weapons. India also conditions its signature on the established nuclear powers' committing themselves to eliminating their own nuclear arsenals. That is a desirable goal, but has little chance of achievement in the near future. The five nuclear powers yesterday rightly rejected amending the treaties to expand the ranks of nuclear armed countries. But there may be artful language that can satisfy Indian and Pakistani pride while preserving the integrity of the accords. Congress should give President Clinton authority to lift sanctions against India or Pakistan if either signs the treaties. Russia has special ties to this region, as does China. Beijing helped Pakistan develop its bomb, but now wants to show it can act responsibly against the spread of nuclear weapons. They should act in concert with Washington to help edge South Asia back from the nuclear brink. | Time to Talk in South Asia |
1022230_3 | bags that look as if they have been through something horrible, like an explosion and a fall from 13,000 feet. Frank Carven, whose sister Paula and her 9-year-old son, Jay, were on board, is one of the five relatives who will assist the safety board. ''If you didn't get anything back, if you didn't get any luggage but for a pair of pants or a torn T-shirt,'' Mr. Carven said yesterday, ''I can see where it would be very important.'' What the teams decide is not identifiable or not worth trying to return to families will be set aside, with no decision yet on what happens next. The material could be incinerated and buried at a memorial park, or could be boxed and stored indefinitely, like the wreckage of planes themselves. ''It's very difficult to say, 'Oh, this is worthless and nobody'll want this,' and throw it away, and God forbid, it's somebody's last remnant that some family could point to,'' said Mr. Carven, a lawyer in Bel Air, Md. Mr. Carven pointed to the emotional importance for his family to recover jewelry that had belonged to his sister. ''My mother doesn't go a day without wearing most of it,'' he said. When Mr. Carven and the others complete their work, a shorter list of items, maybe 200, will go into a new catalogue with clearer pictures, to be recirculated among the relatives. John Holst, of Smithtown, N.Y., whose son and daughter-in-law were on the flight, said he was glad that the safety board was making the effort. One part of that effort is taking better photos; the ones in the first catalogue were F.B.I. evidence pictures, with some items in plastic bags on which the word ''evidence'' was printed in block capitals. The board has learned that the fate of the objects still has the capacity to inflict pain on the relatives. In Pittsburgh, for example, in January 1995, four months after a USAir 727 mysteriously rolled over and crashed, relatives of the dead got in a screaming match with airline representatives in the lobby of the Hilton Hotel, where the safety board was holding a hearing. The airline said it had about 70 pieces of jewelry and other personal effects from the 132 passengers, and told the families that these would be available for pickup at the airport; some of the relatives asked the airline to bring the | Catalogue of Sorrow: Belongings of Flight 800 Victims |
1022254_0 | When her husband died, leaving her a widow at the age of 77, Genevieve May started drinking to assuage her grief. ''I wouldn't get up in the morning,'' she said. ''I realized I was using alcohol to raise my spirits. It raises your spirits for a little while, and then you become depressed.'' At 83, Dr. May, a California psychiatrist, checked into the Betty Ford Center in Rancho Mirage, Calif., to be treated for alcoholism. Now 88 and sober for five years, Dr. May understands how an older woman can easily succumb to addiction. ''With people dying around you, you feel more lonely and isolated,'' she said. ''One tolerates alcohol less as one ages, and then you have this extra stress of loss.'' An estimated 1.8 million American women 60 years and older abuse alcohol, and 2.8 million women abuse psychoactive or mood-altering prescription drugs, says a report released on yesterday in Washington. The report, by the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University, calls the levels of such abuse a hidden epidemic among the country's 25.6 million women 60 years and older. Yet the report, which draws on national surveys and interviews with 400 doctors, said that of 1.8 million older women with alcohol problems, barely 11,000 were in treatment. The report did not give comparable statistics for older men. But other studies have found alcohol abuse somewhat more common among men than women, whose heavy drinking is more likely to go unnoticed because they tend to do it alone. Older women also have more access to prescription drugs and are more likely than men to overuse them or combine them with alcohol. According to the report, titled ''Under The Rug: Substance Abuse and the Mature Woman,'' research suggests that older women who abuse drug or alcohol can recover more successfully than younger ones. But most older women are also ashamed to seek treatment, their children are hesitant to confront them, and doctors sometimes mistake their addiction for other ailments like Alzheimer's disease or depression, the report said. Betty Ford, the former First Lady who went public with her own problems with alcohol and painkillers after leaving the White House over two decades ago, said doctors tended to pass over such conditions ''and move on to more medical stuff.'' ''I think they find it hard to spend the time on it,'' Mrs. Ford said in a | Many Women 60 and Older Abuse Alcohol and Prescribed Drugs, Study Says |
1022206_1 | unclear. ''We have no illusions that we will succeed overnight,'' Ms. Albright said. Since the end of the cold war, the United States and Russia do not have as much leverage as they once had in the region, and the three other countries do not have much either. They will evaluate how well today's strategy works, and foreign ministers of the seven leading industrial democracies plus Russia -- a group that includes all the nations here today except China -- will meet again in London on June 12 to discuss further steps, officials said. That will add to pressure already brought by Germany, Japan, Canada and Italy to get India and Pakistan to sign the 1996 nuclear test-ban treaty and an earlier agreement to keep nuclear weapons from spreading. Germany and Japan both suspended aid to India after it tested nuclear weapons last month. Today's meeting was headed by China, which India views as almost as big an adversary as Pakistan, and the Foreign Minister, Tang Jiaxuan, made little effort to disguise the Chinese view that India bore the main responsibility for starting a new arms race in the region. The five foreign ministers called on India and Pakistan to avoid threatening moves by their conventional military forces, and said they would encourage both to negotiate a solution on Kashmir. American officials said the United States would offer both countries assistance in ''confidence-building'' technologies that would allow them to monitor each other's activities in the region. The United States, which has imposed economic sanctions on both countries as required under American law, made no attempt here to get other countries to follow suit. France and Russia were both opposed, and French officials said their main aim here was a plan to encourage both countries to sign and ratify the 1996 Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. ''Isolating India and weakening Pakistan economically is not the way,'' one French diplomat said. France conducted underground nuclear tests in the South Pacific in 1995. After a worldwide uproar, President Jacques Chirac ended the testing and France signed the test ban treaty in 1996. China also ended its own underground tests and signed at about the same time. Some people think France could be in a position to become the Western country with the greatest leverage over India and Pakistan. In the French view, India's motivation in developing operational nuclear weapons was as much fear and | Five Nations Join in Plea To Pakistan And India |
1025099_9 | reporter used an undercover camera recently to show that under-age gamblers were easily boarding the more than a dozen casino riverboats docked around the state, state gambling regulators are now threatening to rescind the licenses of casino operators who cannot keep under-age gamblers off their boats. In other states with legalized gambling, there are similar concerns. A citizen watchdog group in Illinois, for example, recently filmed under-age students drinking and gambling on the state's riverboats. The state gaming board then took steps to enforce age minimums. ''The truth of the matter is under-age gambling is a little like under-age drinking,'' said John Kennedy, Louisiana's secretary of revenue and a member of the state gaming control board. ''Minors, by definition, don't have the reasoning power of adults. If you don't have the reasoning power than you can't know your limits.'' Still, many teen-agers simply do not want to wait until they are old enough to gamble. In Atlantic City last year 38,502 juveniles were escorted out of the city's 12 casinos, according to the state's casino control commission. An additional 52,364 under-age would-be gamblers tried to enter a casino and were turned away. Too often, though, experts say, enforcement is lax. A familiar scene played itself out recently at the Tropicana Casino here. Madelyn Carabello was locked in a hypnotic trance as she dropped coins in a slot machine and watched the reels spin to a stop. After she had been playing for an hour and a half, a security guard approached her and asked for identification, then escorted her out. If her flawlessly youthful face, striped denim jeans and tennis shoes were not enough to tip the casino's security staff that it had an under-age gambler in its midst, surely the gold pendant around her neck was a dead giveaway. It was a large heart, surrounding the numeral 19, her age. But despite her age, it was not the first time that Ms. Carabello, a freshman at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City, had gambled in a casino. She recalled the eagerness with which she and 10 classmates boarded a gambling boat on their prom night in Miami. ''We heard that you only had to be 18'' to gamble on the boat, she said. ''I had heard how it was in a casino, that you could win money and stuff. I was like, 'Okay, let's do it.' | RITE OF PASSAGE: A special report.; Those Seductive Snake Eyes: Tales of Growing Up Gambling |
1025056_9 | reporter used an undercover camera recently to show that under-age gamblers were easily boarding the more than a dozen casino riverboats docked around the state, state gambling regulators are now threatening to rescind the licenses of casino operators who cannot keep under-age gamblers off their boats. In other states with legalized gambling, there are similar concerns. A citizen watchdog group in Illinois, for example, recently filmed under-age students drinking and gambling on the state's riverboats. The state gaming board then took steps to enforce age minimums. ''The truth of the matter is under-age gambling is a little like under-age drinking,'' said John Kennedy, Louisiana's secretary of revenue and a member of the state gaming control board. ''Minors, by definition, don't have the reasoning power of adults. If you don't have the reasoning power than you can't know your limits.'' Still, many teen-agers simply do not want to wait until they are old enough to gamble. In Atlantic City last year 38,502 juveniles were escorted out of the city's 12 casinos, according to the state's casino control commission. An additional 52,364 under-age would-be gamblers tried to enter a casino and were turned away. Too often, though, experts say, enforcement is lax. A familiar scene played itself out recently at the Tropicana Casino here. Madelyn Carabello was locked in a hypnotic trance as she dropped coins in a slot machine and watched the reels spin to a stop. After she had been playing for an hour and a half, a security guard approached her and asked for identification, then escorted her out. If her flawlessly youthful face, striped denim jeans and tennis shoes were not enough to tip the casino's security staff that it had an under-age gambler in its midst, surely the gold pendant around her neck was a dead giveaway. It was a large heart, surrounding the numeral 19, her age. But despite her age, it was not the first time that Ms. Carabello, a freshman at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City, had gambled in a casino. She recalled the eagerness with which she and 10 classmates boarded a gambling boat on their prom night in Miami. ''We heard that you only had to be 18'' to gamble on the boat, she said. ''I had heard how it was in a casino, that you could win money and stuff. I was like, 'Okay, let's do it.' | RITE OF PASSAGE: A special report.; Those Seductive Snake Eyes: Tales of Growing Up Gambling |
1025029_3 | including elderly people and parents with young children, were forced to flee. ''A group of English fans charged toward the stands, and there was general panic,'' Dray said. Riot police arrived several minutes later and fired tear-gas canisters into the crowd, and as the match at Stade Velodrome continued, the acrid smell of the tear gas soon drifted into the upper reaches of the stadium. The prefecture's spokesman said 18 people were treated at local hospitals because of injuries suffered at Prado beach. ''It's war,'' said one French teen-ager of North African descent as he limped away from the beach. ''It was the hooligans against us,'' said Ramzi Hizi, a French 18-year-old whose parents are Tunisian immigrants, as he pointed to a large bruise on his wrist he said was caused by a rock. ''I don't know why people are surprised.'' Gareth Davies of Surrey, who attended the match in Marseilles wearing an English jersey, said, ''I'm ashamed to wear the shirt.'' Paul Thompson, also from Surrey, said of the violence: ''It all takes the edge off our team's victory a bit. But we arrived this morning and went through the city, and there were so many bars, and all the English fans were drinking themselves into oblivion. The authorities should have thought before the match about all of this. It's up to them. They can either make money selling alcohol or they can pay the bill to clean up the mess afterward.'' Marseilles residents were quick to turn their anger with the English into support for the Tunisians. ''I've never seen so many French people rooting for Tunisia,'' said Mehdi Benismail, a 25-year-old from Paris with dual Tunisian and French citizenship. ''There's a lot of racism against North Africans in France, but people were honking at me and shouting encouragement to me when they saw me wearing my Tunisian flag to the game.'' Proust said 16 shops and restaurants in the old port were damaged during the incidents on Sunday night. He said English police had been working closely with French police to help identify potential hooligans but said ''you can't check every person who comes into Marseilles.'' Meanwhile, French Interior Minister Jean-Pierre Chevenement said extra security measures would be taken for England's final two first-round games: on Monday, June 22, in Toulouse against Romania, and on Saturday, June 26, in Lens against Colombia. Because England appears to be | Fans Set Off Another Day of Violence |
1027064_4 | has cut its prevalence by nearly 15 percent -- to 2.3 percent in 1997 from 2.7 percent in 1994. A drop in new infections was noted especially among sex workers and their clients. ''Even in the industrialized world, reductions of this magnitude are virtually unheard of,'' Dr. Piot said. Senegal instituted campaigns for safer sex that has kept its infected rate low at about 2 percent. ''Senegal acted before it had a major problem, but there are not enough of those countries,'' Dr. Piot said. But more than money will be needed to match such efforts elsewhere, he said. ''The overriding need is political courage -- deciding to move ahead with effective approaches -- despite cultural constraints -- such as promotion of condom use, sex education in schools and widespread health education programs,'' he said. As H.I.V. is spread, it insinuates itself into communities little troubled in the past and strengthens its grip on areas where AIDS is already the leading cause of death. In Botswana, the infection rate has more than doubled to 25.1 percent in 1997 from 10 percent in 1992. Surveys have found 43 percent of pregnant women infected in 1997 in the major urban center of Francistown. In 1995 in Harare, the capital of Zimbabwe, 32 percent of pregnant women were infected. In one town on the Zimbabwe-South African border, 70 percent of women attending prenatal clinics in 1995 were found to be infected. H.I.V. rates are lower in Asia, Eastern Europe and South America. But an alarming trend is the doubling and tripling of transmission rates in some countries in these areas since 1994, including Russia, Ukraine and Moldova. Because over half the world's population lives in these regions, ''small differences in rates can make a huge difference in the absolute numbers of people infected,'' the United Nations report said. In expressing alarm about the widening gap in infection and death rates between industrialized and developing countries, Dr. Piot said the gap ''shines the spotlight on the have-nots of the epidemic.'' The United Nations group attributed the gap to inadequate measures to stop transmission of H.I.V. and to make available the combinations of anti-H.I.V. drugs that help forestall development of deadly AIDS-related infections and cancers. Last year, deaths from H.I.V. left 1.6 million children without at least one parent. From the time the epidemic was first recognized in 1981 to the beginning of 1998, 8.2 | Parts of Africa Showing H.I.V. In 1 in 4 Adults |
1028303_1 | negotiated a program in which four million condoms for women were sold in developing countries last year at a cost of 50 to 90 cents, compared with $2 to $3 in the United States. Scores more millions of condoms for men have been sold to combat H.I.V. since the AIDS epidemic was discovered in 1981. Such preventive measures have slowed down H.I.V. infection rates in developed countries and a few developing countries like Senegal, Thailand and Uganda. But, ''Why is it, despite our efforts, that 16,000 people a day are still getting H.I.V. when the infection is preventable?'' Dr. Piot asked. ''It's a collective failure of the world.'' Dr. Ruth Cardoso, the wife of the President of Brazil, said that ''the AIDS epidemic is a global public health priority.'' ''Governments everywhere must be called upon, once and for all, to stop adopting the self-defeating attitude of downplaying the problem's urgency and to take on the fight against AIDS as a major priority,'' Dr. Cardoso said. Brazil ranks fourth on the United Nations' list of infected countries, with 580,000 adult carriers of H.I.V. AIDS is Brazil's second-leading cause of death in people ages 20 to 49, Dr. Cardoso said. In Brazil, she heads a government-civilian program to combat poverty and social ostracism. Ruth Dreifuss, the Swiss Minister of Interior, Health and Social Affairs, said, ''The benefits of targeted prevention campaigns far exceed their supposed negative effects.'' ''Sex education and the promotion of condoms among young people works and does not lead to an increased number of sexual partners,'' Ms. Dreifuss said. Drug users have access to free needle exchange programs in Switzerland, and Ms. Dreifuss said that that had drastically reduced the sharing of needles, a source of H.I.V. transmission. She also said that 87 percent of the Swiss population supported such measures. Critics pointed to the United States Government's lack of financial support for needle exchange programs, which researchers have shown to be effective in reducing H.I.V. infections. In April, the Secretary of Health and Human Services, Donna E. Shalala, endorsed the use of needle exchanges but declined to give communities Federal money to run such programs. Asked about the discrepancy between the scientific findings and the Clinton Administration policy on needle exchange programs, Dr. Helene Gayle, who heads the AIDS program at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said: ''We all know that science should be the basis | At AIDS Conference, a Call to Arms Against 'Runaway Epidemic' |
1026744_2 | a status change next year.'' Some environmentalists fear removing the bear from the list would offer it less protection, allowing, for example, more logging and oil and gas development on Federal land. Mr. Servheen, who predicts the bear could be removed from the list by the year 2000, expects to release a draft of a document this fall that will spell out how the grizzly will be managed by Montana, Wyoming and Idaho once the bear is off the list. A battle is expected because the bear is one of the most charismatic animals in the American West, and it arouses fierce emotions on both sides of the issue. ''De-listing is premature,'' said Louisa Wilcox, a coordinator of the Sierra Club Grizzly Bear Ecosystem Project. ''It's going to be a classic Yellowstone knock-down, drag-out fight.'' At the core of the debate are the numbers. Grizzly bears are secretive and unpredictable, making a truly random sample extremely difficult. Complicating the issue further is that the greater Yellowstone ecosystem is an ecological ''island'' with no link to other grizzly bear populations. And there are many opinions on how many bears are necessary to assure long-term survival. It is not the present population level alone that concern Mr. Mattson. The outlook for critical elements of the bear's habitat is poor on almost every count, he said. Whitebark pines are the cause of most concern. Not only are their nuts a critical fall food for the bears, but they draw the bears to higher elevations and keep them away from people. Conflicts between bears and people are the leading cause of bear mortality in the Yellowstone ecosystem, and there is a direct correlation between bad pine nut crops and mortality rates, Mr. Mattson said. A disease called blister rust, which kills whitebark pines, has made its way into areas north and west of Yellowstone, destroying most of the trees. At the same time, some studies indicate that global warming is causing the range of the pines to shrink. Moreover, Yellowstone lost roughly 27 percent of its whitebark pines in the 1988 fires, and the trees will take about 100 years to replace. Global warming may also affect another prime food source, the army cutworm moth. These moths feed on the nectar of high altitude flowers at night. During the day, grizzlies find them under the rocks in talus slopes. Biologists have seen as many | Scientists are Disputing The Fate of the Grizzly |
1023650_3 | at work on a Holocaust memorial in Vienna, a large concrete casting of an inside-out library, with the books on the outside. Each of these projects is ambitious, and each comes with its share of problems. In planning the water tower, for example, Ms. Whiteread had to find the right tower to cast and the right site. ''I wanted an old tank, because of the grain of the wood embossed on the surface,'' she said. The venerable American Pipe and Tank Lining Company in Manhattan ended up giving her a 25-year-old wooden tank. And the company's owners, Steven and Richard Silver, found the site. They remembered removing an old tank from the building and, together with Tom Eccles, director of the Public Art Fund, approached the building's owners to see how they would feel about having a Rachel Whiteread work on their roof. Fortunately, they turned out to be contemporary art lovers. Then there was the problem of finding the right material. ''I wanted a tough, ultraviolet material that would withstand weather changes,'' said Ms. Whiteread. After extensive research, she discovered a company in California and visited it three months ago to test the material and make sure it would give the desired translucent effect. ''I'm happiest showing things in daylight,'' she said. When the material arrived in New York, fabricators cast the tower as a whole and eventually polished the surface until they achieved the desired texture. The process sounds easier than it was. At one point, the internal structure gave way because of the immense heat and pressure from the casting. ''We underestimated what the problems would be,'' Ms. Whiteread said. ''Eventually we resolved them.'' The installation, though it had to be carefully managed, went smoothly by comparison. Because the tower weighs about 9,500 pounds, a 250-ton crane with a 195-foot boom had to be used to hoist it to the roof. (The weight may seem considerable, but it is actually minimal compared to the average New York City water tower, which can weigh 40,000 to more than 300,000 pounds, depending on size.) The cost of the project, $270,000, was the most the 20-year-old Public Art Fund has spent on a single artist. Funds came from several sources, including the New York arts program of Beck's, the German brewery. Although the average life span of a New York City water tower is 25 years, Ms. Whiteread expects hers | SoHo Site Specific: On the Roof |
1023698_0 | The General Assembly concluded a special session on the world drug problem today with the 150 participating nations promising to work to reduce their appetites for illegal drugs within the next five years. The effect was to place reduction of demand on par with reduction of supply as an ''indispensable pillar'' in combating the spread of illegal drugs. Until recently, the drug-fighting strategies of the United States and many other consumer countries focused on intercepting drugs from producing countries. The participants also shifted from a purely law enforcement approach toward reducing drug supply to an approach of alternative development, including inducing farmers who grow coca leaf and opium to switch to less lucrative crops in return for roads, hospitals, schools and other means to a better life. On the recommendation of the United Nations International Drug Control Program, the delegates endorsed an ambitious proposal by its director, Pino Arlacchi, to phase out cultivation of opium and coca leaf in 10 years. The countries also agreed to do more to expose money laundering, to tighten up on chemicals used to process illegal drugs and to cooperate on extraditing traffickers. ''We are not starting a new 'war on drugs,' '' Mr. Arlacchi told the delegates. ''In fact, there never was one. Instead, the better analogy for the international community is that of a doctor facing a deadly disease. Drugs quite simply kill people. And it is our responsibility to help find the cure.'' The three-day session was filled with speeches that described the damage done by drugs as well as calls for concerted action against the traffickers. The session has been more useful in bringing delegates together offstage to compare how their respective countries deal with the problems and to discuss a coordinated response. Today, the Netherlands, which has the most liberal drug policies, took the session into the uncharted waters of ''harm reduction,'' a public health concept for reducing the damage drug users cause themselves and others. ''Our primary aim is to protect health and social well-being and to reduce the harm and risks associated with drug abuse,'' the Dutch Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister, H.A.F.M.O van Mierlo, said. ''Within this context, we believe that drug users should not be criminalized for their habits, but on the contrary, should be provided the help they need.'' He said his country tried to make drug use less glamorous by bringing it into | International Effort Is Pledged to Curb Demand for Illegal Drugs |
1028440_2 | special photography equipment, lasers, X-ray machines and the most powerful computers in America, will try to help resolve one of the most intriguing mysteries of Renaissance art. But it will not be an easy task. ''There are many problems here that I realized I would never solve by normal means,'' Dr. Wasserman said. ''I wanted to be able to move the statue, to take it apart, to see it the way it was when Michelangelo broke it up. How was I ever going to accomplish any of that?'' In addition, Dr. Wasserman said he wanted to be able to look at the statue's individual parts and understand what it looked like before the broken pieces were put back on. Working with a special visual shape camera called a Virtuoso, the I.B.M. researchers are compiling the most complete digital documentary ever attempted of any sculpture. Using the camera, which was originally designed for plastic surgeons to take three-dimensional photographs, scientists were able to take thousands of accurate 3-D pictures of every millimeter of the gargantuan statue. The camera works by taking several pictures of images at the same time from slightly different perspectives, creating something like a three-dimensional map of the area. Thousands of maps are made and then they are merged with the help of the computer. The camera also takes color pictures at different distances and in varying light. They too are blended by computer. Working at night when the statue's permanent home, the Museo dell'Opera del Duomo, is closed, the team has so far assembled more than 10 million data points -- essentially digital recollections of parts of the statue -- that will be merged to create with astonishing fidelity the complex contours of the chiseled stone. The team has collected enough data to fill 8 gigabytes of hard disk space -- four times the size of a normal hard disk in the average home computer. When they are done, the researchers will have gathered at least 80 gigabytes of information needed to create an image of the statue. That is actually the easy part. Creating a program that will allow the picture to be compressed enough so that it can be placed on the Internet, and made available to millions of people, might prove far more difficult. ''You see some nice three-dimensional graphics,'' said Gabriel Taubin, the manager of the visual research team at I.B.M. ''But not | Michelangelo's Heartbreak Comes to Life in New Light; Transforming His Pieta to 80 Gigabytes |
1028584_4 | has not done so yet. In comparison with much of the rest of Asia, however, Shanghai looks healthy. Round-the-clock construction continues on skyscrapers throughout the city, if on fewer than before. The unemployment rate is rising steadily, as state-owned factories downsize, yet average family income is still climbing marginally. There are relatively few formal events planned during Mr. Clinton's stay here, and officials doing advance work say that offers the Clinton family the flexibility for shopping and walks, or quiet time away from their 1,000-member entourage. Tuesday's itinerary includes only three events, leaving almost the entire afternoon free for something unscripted. Wednesday's plans are almost as relaxed. On Monday, after speaking at Beijing University, the Clintons took it easy. They stayed in, at Diaoyutai Guest House, playing cards and board games, Mr. McCurry said. Hillary Rodham Clinton also has a handful of nonofficial visits planned in Shanghai. To combine her interest in health care and children's welfare, she is to visit the Shanghai Children's Medical Center, a new hospital built by Project Hope, an American-based foundation, and Shanghai's Second Medical University. It is the first hospital in China devoted to treating children, and it was created by nongovernmental entities. ''This was not in any five-year plan,'' said William B. Walsh, president and chief executive of Project Hope, which has been active in China since 1983, training and advising medical workers in public health. ''It reflects the kind of volunteerism that is starting to grow in China today.'' It has also helped, Mr. Walsh said, that two of Shanghai's former leaders who welcomed Project Hope here were later promoted to the nation's top posts: President Jiang Zemin and Prime Minister Zhu Rongji. Mrs. Clinton also plans to visit a women's education and training center and the Shanghai No. 3 Girls' School. On Wednesday she will visit the Ohel Rachel Synagogue, originally built for Jews who lived in Shanghai before the Communist-led army arrived in 1949. Mrs. Clinton also joined her husband at the roundtable discussion today at the Shanghai Library, entitled ''Shaping China for the 21st Century,'' which highlighted the way an information-driven age will affect all countries. CLINTON IN CHINA: THE OVERVIEW Correction: July 14, 1998, Tuesday A front-page article on June 30 about President Clinton's arrival in Shanghai referred incorrectly to the new Shanghai Children's Medical Center, which was on Hillary Rodham Clinton's itinerary. It is not the first | President Arrives in Shanghai; Focuses on Talk With Citizens |
1021621_1 | they are connected to an organized-crime organization of some kind,'' she said, calling the Chinese smuggling business particularly odious because it funnels hapless immigrants into sweatshop jobs where they are abused, exploited and overworked. ''This is a multibillion-dollar criminal enterprise played out on a global scale,'' Mrs. Meissner said. Investigators were still searching for the captain and presumed owner of the boat, who slipped through police hands before anyone realized that the abandoned craft had unloaded a human cargo of illegal immigrants. He was identified by the authorities as a Korean-American, Jason Choi, 38, of Flushing, Queens. His 30-foot fiberglass pleasure boat, the Oops II, ran aground at the end of Mount Street in Bay Head, one of the wealthiest towns on the Jersey Shore, and for the first three hours, the police treated the incident as little more than a case of a captain who had foundered in heavy fog and purposely beached his craft. When he was questioned by state troopers at a phone booth near the boat, Mr. Choi identified himself as the owner and said he had lost his way while fishing and ran the boat up on the beach because he was running out of fuel. John Hagerty, a spokesman for the state police, said that the registration documents for the boat were in order and that a check found no outstanding warrants for Mr. Choi. Troopers even gave Mr. Choi a ride into downtown Point Pleasant. When reports began to come in about Chinese men wandering around the town, the local police called the troopers again. The aborted ride in the Oops II was probably the final leg of an arduous journey from China. Typically, smuggling rings bring Asian immigrants across Eastern Europe or southern Africa, then to South America, before heading up through the Caribbean or Central America to Mexico. The boat itself offered few clues -- some blankets, water bottles and a few cans of a nutrient supplement -- to the conditions or duration of the final leg of the immigrants' journey, Bay Head's Police Chief, William Dikun, said. It was still unclear whether the 22 men, like so many before them, were destined to work off much of the $25,000 to $30,000 in smuggling fees in the sweatshops of New York City. While many Fujian immigrants have risen to positions of political and economic power in the Chinese-American community in New | Chinese Men Are Queried In Jersey Shore Smuggling |
1021489_1 | how the law should work. It also reflects the realization that the Endangered Species Act's true aim is to protect healthy and biologically diverse habitats, and not just one imperiled species after another. That cannot be done without the involvement of private landowners, any more than a pianist can play with only the black keys. So Congress and the Clinton Administration are trying to give developers a bigger role in protecting the nation's biological diversity. Five years ago, when the Endangered Species Act was under attack by business groups, the Clinton Administration began to aggressively encourage the use of ''habitat conservation plans,'' or H.C.P.'s, on private lands, which are estimated to provide habitat to 80 percent of all protected species. H.C.P.'s are binding, voluntary agreements in which a landowner adopts conservation measures, sometimes going beyond what the law strictly requires, in exchange for permission to develop some property even if endangered wildlife and habitat are hurt in the process. A landowner might agree to leave some forest untouched to protect wetlands from sediment and stream banks from erosion and to preserve natural corridors for animals. Otherwise, homes can be built, sewers trenched and driveways paved. Habitat conservation plans were authorized by Congress in 1982. But before 1994, there were only about 20 such active arrangements. In contrast, by the end of last year there were more than 200; hundreds of more are coming. And their size is increasing from fewer than 1,000 acres at the outset to tens or even hundreds of thousands of acres in recent cases. Tens of millions of acres are being brought under this umbrella. The new approach, advocates said, would reassure property owners and provide incentives to protect the diversity of life on their land. The Clinton Administration credits the new arrangements for helping to insure the recovery of hundreds of species, from the red-cockaded woodpeckers in rural Southeastern pine lands to the gnatcatcher songbirds in the heavily populated coastal-scrub ecosystems around San Diego. The gnatcatchers, along with scores of other species of plants and animals, are protected by a habitat conservation plan that is widely viewed as a national model for managing real-estate development. But it is an approach that creates suspicion and even hostility among some environmentalists and conservation biologists, who say it presents too many long-term risks. ''Under many H.C.P.'s, development is permitted and habitat is destroyed despite great uncertainty about whether | The Endangered Species Act Gets a Makeover |
1021488_0 | IN the big picture and in the long run, it's true: to paraphrase Yosemite Sam, there is biological gold in them thar rain forests. The active ingredient in roughly one in four prescription drugs comes from plants. And biotechnology companies are eager to gain access to exotic environments containing tens of millions of plant and animal species that have yet to be scrutinized. In the most visible deal, Merck, the giant pharmaceutical maker, is paying Costa Rica cash plus royalties to preserve the country's fragile tropical forests. But economists speak with virtually one voice in warning that biodiversity is not going to pay for itself. The creation of property rights in the wilderness can play only a minor role in protecting endangered habitats. ''The potential return to bioprospecting has been greatly exaggerated,'' argued David Simpson, a senior fellow at Resources for the Future, an environmental research organization in Washington. As a result, the major contribution of economics in the biodiversity debate will likely be the forcing of policy makers to deal more realistically with intangible, nonuse values. That is the kind of thing usually left to philosophers. And since such intangibles are more immediately interesting to the citizens of affluent countries than to the largely poor custodians of tropical ''hot spots'' of biodiversity, the lesson's starting point is that there are no free rain forests. ''In the end, species preservation comes down to trade-offs -- in deciding how much we are willing to sacrifice in the name of preserving natural habitats,'' concluded Martin Weitzman, an economist at Harvard. Like everyone else, economists assume that the keys to everything, from more effective drugs to more nutritious, disease-resistant crops, are secreted in tropical forests. Why, then, isn't the repository for these natural wonders valued accordingly? What counts, Mr. Simpson said, is scarcity. And while there may be millions of potentially useful species, there is also vast biochemical redundancy in the environment. Thus the value of any acre is limited by the fact that an identical species probably grows on thousands of other acres, and that many of the useful chemicals will show up in hundreds or even thousands of species. Evolution decreed, after all, that both coffee and tea contain caffeine as a defense against predators. And where naturally occurring chemicals are extremely rare, the value of looking for them is offset by the high cost of such a task. Mr. Simpson | . . . Economists Point To Values Beyond Price |
1023112_2 | neglect, erosion and vandalism. Much has had to be closed: only 20 villas are now open to the public, down from 64 in 1956. Frescoes are fading, walls are collapsing and 2,000-year-old floor tiles unprotected from rain lie jumbled on the ground like Scrabble pieces. The World Monument Fund and Unesco both put Pompeii on their lists of endangered world treasures last year and pledged to help pay for restoration projects. The Italian Government has also promised $60 million for the site during the next three years. And this, too, is not enough, its caretakers say. ''We need $280 million just to protect and restore what we have,'' said Pietro Giovanni Guzzo, 53, superintendent of the Pompeii ruins. The $60 million will be used for restoration and preservation, not for existing archeological work and new excavations. Nor will it trickle down to the neighboring town. Mr. Guzzo, who was appointed three years ago, said he was aware of the smoldering rancor of the town of Pompeii but could do little about it. ''It's true that we have to find a way to involve the town more in what we do,'' he said. The town of Pompeii does have one famous shrine, the Madonna of Pompeii, which each year attracts more than 1.5 million religious pilgrims. Four million are expected to journey there in 2000. Worshipers of the Pompeii Madonna tend to be pious but poor, and they do not spend much money in the town. Nor do they frequent its hotels, most of whose 600 beds are rented out by the hour. Tour groups bus thousands in every day to see the ruins, and then race them off to Naples or the resort town of Sorrento, bypassing the town of Pompeii. The town's inability to attract the development that would tempt tourists is a typically southern Italian problem. Its region, Campania, is prone to mudslides and earthquakes as well as deeply infiltrated by the Neopolitan Mafia, known as the Camorra. Legitimate businesses are reluctant to invest. Construction, mostly Mafia-controlled, is shoddy and illegal. State money for public works projects has a history of getting diverted along the way. The three previous mayors of Pompeii are awaiting trial on corruption charges. When local law enforcement officials want to tear down illegal housing, they call in the army to insure that it gets done. Mayor Staiano is well aware that his plan | Pompeii Journal; A Pagan Gem, and Next Door, the Mob's Dead Hand |
1023061_2 | computer companies and Web programmers prime places on the My Space bar, but the bar can also be customized by individual users -- adding icons, removing others or deleting the bar altogether. Industry analysts who have seen Pixel's software are impressed. ''Instead of just complaining about Microsoft's control of the screen, this company has figured out a way around the problem,'' said Rob Enderle, an analyst for Giga Information Group, a research firm. ''This could be a technology with legs.'' Computers are generally shipped with the slender bands of unused screen space partly to insure that if the monitor is jostled in transit, none of the display is obscured. But many companies, schools and stores set up personal computers so that Windows occupies the entire screen, including the overscan area. Still, Pixel's business plan rests on the assumption that the overscan area is open real estate -- outside Microsoft's direct control. Pixel's managers and legal adviser are experienced in dealing with Microsoft. Pixel is a unit of Ark Interface II, a computer interface designer that until recently was a wholly owned subsidiary of Packard Bell NEC. Ark had developed a ''shell'' program for Packard Bell in 1994, called Navigator, that ran on top of Windows 3.1 and tried to make computers easier to use. Last month, Packard Bell NEC sold Ark to a group of investors, including Pixel's management team. Pixel, its managers say, was born of a sense of frustration with Microsoft's contract restrictions. ''The contracts changed every year, and 15 months ago they really closed up,'' said Tom O'Rourke, the president of Pixel. ''That forced us to think outside the box -- at least outside the Windows desktop.'' The technical challenge of devising a way to use the overscan space fell to David Nason, Pixel's vice president of research, a computer scientist who formerly worked for Microsoft. Pixel filed a patent application for its technology last November, and the patent approval process typically takes 18 months or so. Pixel's legal adviser is Robert Steinberg, a partner at Irell & Manella in Los Angeles. Mr. Steinberg is an intellectual-property expert who wrote the patent for data-compression technology that became the center of a legal dispute between Microsoft and Stac Electronics Inc., which Mr. Steinberg represented. In 1994, a jury ordered Microsoft to pay Stac $120 million for patent infringement. Microsoft appealed but settled the case for an estimated $50 | Small Company Builds on Edge Of Microsoft's Real Estate |
985448_0 | The outbreak of violence in Northern Ireland has drawn calls for asserting greater Government authority at the province's top-security prison, where paramilitary groups exercise largely uncontested internal control. Protestant politicians have demanded a public inquiry into how a leader of a Protestant paramilitary force, Billy Wright, 37, was shot to death inside the Maze prison nine days ago by inmates who were members of a Catholic paramilitary group. The killing led to two vengeance attacks on Roman Catholic gatherings by gunmen from Mr. Wright's group that left two men dead and eight others wounded and cast a darkening shadow over the peace talks under way in Belfast. The British Government turned aside the demand for a public inquiry but set up two official investigations, one of the killing and the other of the overall situation in the prison, which is outside Belfast. It has said it will publish the results. But even those taking part in the investigations have warned that it will be difficult to change the conduct of an institution that is peculiar to the troubled province, where sectarian violence has claimed more than 3,200 lives since 1969. More than 20,000 people -- including virtually all the Irish peace negotiators -- have served prison time in the name of politics. ''There can never be any guarantee of complete security in any prison, and especially a prison of this nature,'' said Adam Ingram, the Minister for Security in Northern Ireland. ''That is the world in which politicians must live.'' ''Nowhere is there such a concentration of dedicated paramilitaries and terrorists,'' he added, ''and that does make for a unique situation.'' More than 600 members of Catholic and Protestant paramilitary groups inhabit the imposing fortress-like building in the suburban village of Maze, segregated by group into eight H-shaped blocks within 16-foot high walls bristling with guard towers, cameras and searchlights. Armed British soldiers patrol the flood-lit perimeter. Inside their wings, the prisoners are never locked into their cells, and guards cannot search their living spaces without gaining the approval of inmate leaders and telling them a day ahead of time where they intend to look. In an Irish Republican Army escape attempt uncovered in March, inmates had managed to keep undetected, in their wings, 13 tons of earth they had dug up to make their tunnel. The prisoners elect their own leaders, called ''officers commanding,'' who negotiate directly with the | Britain Urged to Crack Down on Ulster Prisoners |
989910_0 | Panama is debating whether to let Washington keep American troops there to combat drug trafficking after the 1999 pullout date set by the canal treaties. The proposal, called the Multinational Counternarcotics Center, is one of several efforts to broaden the role of Latin American militaries in fighting drugs. It is dismaying to see Congress and the Clinton Administration return to a strategy that has failed and could harm Latin democracies. Washington is seeking to keep more than 2,000 soldiers in Panama for 12 years to continue coordinating radar searches for suspicious aircraft, a job that could be done from American soil. The troops would also train Latin American military and police forces in drug-fighting. The project needs the approval of Panama's Congress and its voters in a referendum. Some American officials say the proposal is a way for Washington to maintain ties and coordination with Latin militaries now that cold-war rationales have evaporated. Military aid and sales to Colombia have also been resumed, and this year Congress approved a five-year project costing up to $100 million to train and equip the Colombian and Peruvian militaries to interdict drugs transported by river. Washington has periodically pushed the Mexican military to take on an anti-drug role, and since 1996 has provided training, intelligence and equipment. Some cooperation with Latin American law enforcement is useful. Crop substitution programs, which give coca-growing peasants economic incentives to switch crops, deserve expansion. But no one should put too much store in efforts to stop the production of cocaine in Latin America. Past efforts have not reduced the flow of drugs to the United States. A Rand Corporation study showed that source-country control was by far the least cost-effective way of reducing cocaine use. Treatment for addicts, it found, could have the same impact at a 20th of the price. Even effective military operations show this strategy's limits. The Peruvian Air Force has stopped many planes carrying coca paste to Colombia for processing. But that success, along with a fungus that has attacked Peru's coca plants, has simply pushed coca-growing into Colombia. Military strategies are not only ineffective, they can be harmful. The virus of corruption contaminates everyone who comes near the drug war, as the wave of recent arrests of Mexican officers shows. There is evidence from several countries that militaries have used their American equipment and training to fight guerrillas or to abuse human rights. | Illusions of a War Against Cocaine |
989867_1 | fears that the peace effort may collapse. In a statement in Belfast this afternoon, the Ulster Freedom Fighters said they had killed the three Catholics to retaliate for the killing of two Protestants by the Irish National Liberation Army, a splinter group that is not observing the cease-fire declared on July 20 by the Irish Republican Army. Because the Ulster Freedom Fighters said they were again observing a cease-fire, suspicion for today's killing fell on the Ulster Volunteer Force, a splinter group that has acknowledged killing three Catholics in the last four weeks. The Ulster Freedom Fighters, in an apparent effort to allay fears that their campaign would continue and provoke I.R.A. retaliation, said its action was ''a measured military response'' to Catholic attacks. The group said it would now return to abiding by the cease-fire it declared in October 1994. The statement by the Ulster Freedom Fighters was politically significant because the group is represented at the peace talks by the small Ulster Democratic Party. The party said it welcomed the words of the Ulster Freedom Fighters today and said it was still dedicated to a peaceful settlement. Pressure has been building on the Irish and British Governments, sponsors of the peace talks, to eject the Ulster Democratic Party from the talks on the ground that their paramilitaries had violated the pledge of nonviolence required of participants in the negotiations. Dublin and London want the Ulster Democrats to remain in the talks along with another group that represents Protestant paramilitaries, the Progressive Unionist Party. The participation of two smaller Protestant parties, plus the large Ulster Unionist Party, is considered important for any possible peace agreement. Earlier today, Gerry Adams, the president of Sinn Fein, the political wing of the I.R.A., indicated that the overwhelmingly Catholic I.R.A. would hold to its cease-fire despite the recent killing of Catholics. He said of the I.R.A., ''the fact that they haven't'' resumed violence indicated that they were part of ''all the efforts to stabilize the situation.'' But the Rev. Ian Paisley, head of the hard-line Democratic Unionist Party, which is boycotting the peace talks, said of the Ulster Freedom Fighters' statement, ''They'll go back to violence.'' Dr. Paisley has insisted that the two small Protestant parties be ejected from the talks because they are fronts for Protestant paramilitaries. His party competes for votes with the smaller groups in elections in working-class Protestant areas. | New Killing in Belfast Adds to Doubts on Ulster Peace Talks |
989884_5 | 5,000 pleasure boats larger than 100 feet exist, double the number of a decade ago, said Jim Gilbert, who edits Showboats International magazine. Every year for the last three, 200 boats -- six miles of yachts -- have been under construction in boat yards around the world. Nearly half of the orders are from Americans. Most come from the growing clan of self-made multimillionaires, flush from an public offering, a buyout or stock options, who have reached a financial zenith and want to repair to the ocean in safety and comfort. Take Jim Mattei, 48, an investor and a builder of condominiums and shopping centers. ''It's really the only passion I have,'' Mr. Mattei said in a telephone interview from his home in Charlotte, N.C. ''I don't mind working 8 or 10 hours on the boat.'' Like most owners of large yachts, Mr. Mattei moved up, from a 57-foot Chris Craft to a 90-footer to his present 120-foot Emerald K. He's building a 150-foot boat, which will also have satellite phones, three tenders, a crew of six and an art collection. Why a bigger boat? Family. ''We look like Noah's ark when we arrive, my mother, who is 80, my son and all his friends,'' Mr. Mattei said. ''We have five staterooms, and we were always full. It's nothing about egocentric rich guys with big toys. It's completely changed from the 80's.'' Yes, the boats have become even more immense, with richer interiors, bigger engines and more water toys. When a mega-yacht pulls into Fort Lauderdale, it's as if a tiny nation washed up, in terms of economic impact. If it docks at Pier 66, for example, the tie-up, complete with phone and room service, costs $450 a night, or $13,500 a month. Fuel can run several thousand dollars. And the marina could take in more big boats if it had the space. ''The business we turn away are the 120-footers.'' said James R. Allmand 3d, general manager of the Hyatt Regency Pier 66. ''It gets frustrating.'' A 150-foot motor craft can cost $1.5 million to run and maintain a year, said Bob Saxon, who manages 80 yachts for owners, chartering many to help defray expenses that typically include $500,000 for crew, $200,000 for fuel, $100,000 in insurance, $65,000 for food and liquor, and $225,000 for hauling the boat out of the water and normal repairs. A bottom paint job | Sailing the High-End Seas; Luxury Craft Are Back and Prices Are Bigger Than Ever |
988016_0 | The bold and risky effort that Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain has put into energizing Northern Ireland peace talks is showing encouraging results. After months of preliminary haggling, Northern Ireland's Protestants and Roman Catholics have before them the outlines of a broad political settlement. With luck and hard work, the proposals submitted by the British and Irish Governments this week could provide a realistic basis for resolving the troubles that have killed more than 3,000 people since 1969. Luck will be needed to keep the fringe terrorist groups who are active on both sides from unleashing wider sectarian violence that could wreck the settlement talks. Hard work must come in the bargaining sessions during which Northern Ireland's political parties will try to turn these broad proposals into workable governing arrangements. Steady and visible negotiating progress could help marginalize the terrorists. London and Dublin drew up their plan after sounding out the Northern Irish parties participating in the peace talks. It incorporates the minimum requirements of the Catholic nationalist minority, who seek greater political equality and a chance at eventual Irish reunification, and the Protestant Unionist majority, who want to preserve ties to Britain and majority rule. Under the plan, Northern Ireland would have its own elected legislature, the first since 1972, chosen by proportional representation and with guarantees for minority rights. An all-Ireland council of ministers with members from both North and South would consult and make decisions in areas of mutual concern. Finally, a broader British Isles council would link Northern Ireland's administration with the British and Irish Governments and the soon-to-be-created administrations of Scotland and Wales. These arrangements are designed to give the nationalists greater equality in the north and a link to Dublin, while assuring Unionists a separate Northern Ireland, majority rule and the British connection they seek. The challenge for negotiators will be defining the relative powers of these three bodies. At a minimum, nationalists must acknowledge, for now, the continued partition of Ireland while Unionists must concede more power to Dublin and Northern Catholics. Yet compromise along these lines has already been tacitly accepted by the mainstream parties representing the majority of the Protestant and Catholic communities. Every party in the talks should heed the will of those they claim to represent in a province fed up with killing and yearning for peace. | Ireland's Blueprint for Peace |
987978_1 | of Socrates,'' Mr. Cronkite sees Aristophanes (E. G. Marshall) and says, ''He has just come from the theater, where his play 'Lysistrata' is in rehearsals.'' Straight out of the time capsule, ''You Are There'' can be a hoot today. But in historical terms, the series, which ran from 1953 to '57, is fascinating and important. The writers it used were blacklisted, and the names on the credits are the names of their fronts. Tonight and tomorrow at the Walter Reade Theater, the Film Society of Lincoln Center offers three ''You Are There'' episodes followed by panel discussions with some of their creators, including Sidney Lumet, who directed the series, and the screenwriter Walter Bernstein, who later wrote the film ''The Front'' and the recent memoir about the blacklist, ''Inside Out.'' ''The Death of Socrates'' is conspicuously stage-bound, as television was in those days. But time and context add some astonishing perspectives. The ancient Greek argument about freedom of expression takes on a different meaning when you know the episode was written by the blacklisted Arnold Manoff, using the front name Kate Nickerson. And it is eerie to note how little the Cronkite narrative differs from a report on ''Dateline.'' On a lighter note, keep an eye on Plato. ''Citizen Plato, I wonder if you would . . .'' a reporter begins, only to be cut off by Plato, instantly recognizable as a very young Paul Newman, in his first television role. ''Not right now, please,'' Mr. Newman says, turning from the camera as if he were dodging the paparazzi. The other episodes, not available for preview, are: ''The Torment of Beethoven,'' with Lorne Greene as the composer (with a script by Abraham Polonsky, who wrote the classic films ''Body and Soul'' and ''Force of Evil''), and ''The Tragic Hour of Dr. Semmelweis,'' written by Mr. Bernstein, about the man who discovered that when trying to prevent the spread of disease, it helps to wash your hands. ''You Are There'' serves a gleeful dual purpose, as a curiosity and as sociological evidence. The program, ''To Illuminate Our Time: You Are There,'' will be shown tonight at 6:30 and tomorrow afternoon at 4. Tonight's panel includes Mr. Lumet and Mr. Bernstein. Tomorrow's includes Mr. Bernstein, the director Lee Grant, and the ''You Are There'' art director, Bob Markell. Admission: $8.50; $5 for society members; $4.50 for seniors at matinees. Information: (212) 875-5600. | Critic's Choice/Television; 'A Day Like All Days,' Says a Voice From the Old Days |
986813_0 | Worried that sales might be hurt by growing public awareness of light truck pollution, the Ford Motor Company said that all of its sport utility vehicles, including the Ford Explorer and Lincoln Navigator, would be low-emission vehicles for the 1999 model year. This will make them roughly as clean as new cars, at a cost of a little more than $100 a vehicle. Chrysler said that it would make clean-running Jeep Cherokees and Grand Cherokees, but not a cleaner version of the highly popular Dodge Durango. General Motors and foreign auto makers said they would study the issue. Reducing smog will not address another environmental problem of sport utility vehicles: their poor gas mileage, which makes them produce more global warming gases than cars. Detroit auto makers did say, however, that between 2001 and 2004 they would start building some high-technology cars that would get 60 to 80 miles per gallon. KEITH BRADSHER | January 4-10; Cleaning Up Sport Vehicles |
987042_0 | The University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey needs to find 1,000 women who are aged 60 to 79 and are willing to commit some time for the next eight years to help further the knowledge of the effects of hormone treatments and other factors on the health of older women. The study is part of a look at 67,000 post-menopausal women undertaken by the National Institutes of Health. Volunteers, who are needed by the end of the month, will become part of clinical trials that measure whether hormone therapy, diet modification and vitamin therapy can delay or prevent heart disease, cancer, Alzheimer's disease and osteoporosis. The study involves at least three interviews at the university's Newark, New Brunswick or Paramus campuses and follow-up interviews at least once a year, said Dr. Norman L. Lasser, head of the study for New Jersey who is also director of the preventive cardiology program and a professor of medicine at the New Jersey Medical School in Newark. Information can be obtained by calling (800) 966-3610 or on the Internet at www.nhlbi.nih.gov/nhlbi/whi1/. KAREN DeMASTERS IN BRIEF | University Seeks Older Women For Study of Their Health |
986789_3 | can typically result in more than $1,500 a month in payments. In urban areas like New York City, the expansion of the wireless antenna network has gone smoothly, with residents hardly blinking at the addition last year of hundreds of inconspicuous antennas erected by telecommunications companies amid the visual clutter of rooftops, light poles and the like. But in the suburbs and exurbs, in places like Franklin Lakes or San Dimas, Calif., residents accustomed to a little elbow room and open vistas became alarmed last year when the flood of new antenna construction began. Many antennas were initially proposed to go on conventional poles or towers, rising as high as 150 feet, and town officials from the Hudson Valley to Medina, Wash., the home of several high-technology tycoons, including Bill Gates, tried to block construction. Disputes over esthetics and claims of possible health hazards have prompted more than 150 towns around the United States to try to delay towers with moratoriums or restrictive ordinances. Frequently, health questions, like the possibility that electrical fields might cause cancer, have dominated discussions about the antennas at public meetings. But Federal communications laws prevent local governments from prohibiting antennas on the basis of any health threat. Federal Communications Commission officials say that Federal limits for emissions from wireless telephones and antennas are so low that there is no conceivable hazard. Phone companies have successfully challenged many of the local rules in court, contending that they restrict competition or violate provisions of the 1996 Federal law. But now, the telephone companies have shifted gears, teaming up to share towers where possible and avoid them altogether by putting antennas on existing structures like water towers, church steeples, even atop the Green Monster left-field wall at Fenway Park in Boston. The shift is being prompted in part by the eagerness of Bell Atlantic Nynex Mobile, Sprint, AT&T and the others to avoid alienating potential customers. ''We want to be a good neighbor,'' said Mary Ann Noyer, a spokeswoman for AT&T Wireless. ''That's why we have our stealth policy.'' That approach emphasizes hiding antennas where possible and sharing sites with other companies. Reflecting on the spread of wireless antennas and the resulting controversy, some historians say the current debate echoes events of nearly 100 years ago, when the original network of telephones began to spread in earnest across the country. Many communities criticized the unsightly wires and poles, | It's a Tree! It's a Cactus!; Phone Companies Try to Soften a Suburban Antenna Invasion |
986959_0 | Checking in for domestic flights may take longer beginning this month because some passengers will be selected for inspection of their baggage and identification papers based on a secret screening formula adopted by the Federal Aviation Administration. The new procedures will make check-in for domestic flights more like that for inter national departures, including matching some passengers to their checked baggage. Bag matching is a security measure in which a passenger's bags may not be transported unless the passenger is on the flight. The new F.A.A. rules had been proposed for years but were adopted only after the crash of T.W.A. Flight 800 in July 1996 led to creation of the White House Commission on Aviation Safety and Security, which recommended the new policy. During the coming months the major carriers are expected to install computer programs that will screen passengers, but until then individual airline employees will decide who to select for extra scrutiny and, officials said, some people will be chosen randomly. The passenger-screening techniques will be used to select people who will be matched to their bags or who will have their luggage screened by an explosives detector. Officials will not disclose the screening criteria, but have said that frequent travel to countries that are suspected of harboring terrorists and passengers who use cash to buy one-way tickets are among those most likely to be subjected to the increased security screening. In October the Justice Department issued an opinion that the selection of passengers for screening did not discriminate on the basis of race, color, national or ethnic origin, gender or religion. Both the American Civil Liberties Union and the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee have voiced concern that the system may be used in a discriminatory manner, and the A.C.L.U. has posted a complaint form on its Internet home page. The increased security procedures should not delay flights and will be less intrusive than the current system of pulling someone aside and searching his bags, said David Fuscus, a spokesman for the Air Transport Association, which represents all the large domestic carriers. The major airlines have already advised their check-in and gate agents on how to deal with passengers who are offended by being selected for the new security checks. ''If you ask why you were selected we can't tell you because that would violate the F.A.A. rules,'' said Joe Hopkins, a spokesman for United Airlines. ''Asking will | New Security Checks On Domestic Flights |
986973_2 | less tolerant of others who are different and may react by ignoring them or picking on them. Both behaviors are equally painful.'' Last year, while working with a developentally disabled student in the middle school, Mrs. Stutz and Ms. Sabo recognized that the youngster was being scapegoated by other students and that she was severely depressed. ''We tried to figure out how we could change the perceptions among students toward a developmentally disabled child or toward anyone who is different,'' said Mrs. Stutz, ''and how we could help kids learn to treat others with more acceptance and kindness.'' Following a grant application to the New York State Developmental Disabilities Planning Council, Mrs. Stutz and Ms. Sabo received $1,125 to develop a program that became known as TACK (Tolerance, Acceptance, Caring and Kindness). ''We wanted to address all categories of common scapegoating,'' said Mrs. Stutz, ''and to sensitize students to all kids who are different, whether they have a physical disability, a learning disability, a medical condition or are from a foreign culture. The idea was to help students understand that they have to get to know these kids beyond their differences, as individuals.'' The first phase of the TACK program recently took place in individual classrooms, where professionals led students in exercises that allowed them to experience different situations as someone with a disability might experience it. Students were instructed to write with their opposite hand using only two fingers, then to read a garbled passage and answer questions about it. For the final exercise, students were told that they could only talk to fellow classmates of the same color, and three students were intentionally left out, she said, and had no one to talk to. The purpose, she explained, was for them to experience exclusion. The second component of the TACK program was the panel presentation, brought to Herricks by Project DOCC (Delivery of Community Care). The project, started by several mothers of chronically ill children, is a teaching program that grew out of a pediatric residency training program at North Shore University Hospital in Manhasset. The project, said one of the founding mothers, Maggie Hoffman, was intended to sensitize doctors to the special needs of chronically ill children and their families but has expanded into the school districts. Today, she said, as more children with handicaps have begun to go to school in the mainstream of public education, | A School Teaches Students to Accept Those Who Are Different |
987018_4 | canal.'' And then he recommended a crown. ''She said, 'Sonny! I'm 103. Do I need this crown?' '' His response was: ''The reason you come to me is I'm not going to tell you you're too old for anything. And the truth is, you're probably not going to live past 137 . . . but I'd say, get the crown.'' It's a Dog's Life, Just What He Wanted FRANKLIN LAKES Thomas van Aken is tall and very slender, with large thick glasses and the calm, deep voice of a classical-radio disk jockey. He does not look like the kind of man who would wrestle a wolf to the ground, crouch over it and growl, but then, appearances are famous for their failings. ''He was testing me,'' Mr. van Aken said. The wolf, a research subject, had been jumping on him with escalating energy. Domination was Mr. van Aken's only option; quailing would have meant inviting a vicious attack. Mr. van Aken has a master's degree in animal behavior and studied wolves for five years at the North American Wildlife Park Foundation in Battle Ground, Ind., to prepare himself for the line of work he fell in love with 16 years ago, when he was a bored advertising writer for Saks Fifth Avenue. Last Sunday, as the owner and operator of a service called Dog's Best Friend, he happily set out, driving his black Ford Bronco from his home in Upper Saddle River to a woodsy Franklin Lakes house to unravel the tangle of behavior problems afflicting Mason, a big, friendly 18-month-old black-and-brown mutt. Mason's people, John and Marianne Rhodes, who got her from the local animal shelter, had differing priorities. Mrs. Rhodes wanted Mason to stop jumping on people. (''Hello,'' she greeted Mr. van Aken. ''Mason!'') Mr. Rhodes wanted Mason not to run away. Their previous dog, a stray named Jake, had run off once too often and been poisoned by a territorial neighbor. As if trying to helpfully demonstrate her problems, the dog kept dashing over to Mr. van Aken as he interviewed the Rhodeses. She licked his face (''Mason!'' said Mr. Rhodes). She bit at his pen. She drank his coke. (''Mason!'' said Mrs. Rhodes.) It was replaced. She drank it again (''Mason!''). ''And then she does this thing with the light,'' Mrs. Rhodes said. Mr. Rhodes got a flashlight and beamed it at the floor. Mason's eyes | At Your Service, at Your Door |
986759_1 | army and huge Saxon armored vehicles back on the street. The people of West Belfast, where much of the killing has taken place over the years, say that they hope it will not happen, but that they expect more bombs and shootings, even as Mo Mowlam, the Northern Ireland Secretary, appeared on Friday to have persuaded Protestant paramilitary groups not to boycott the talks. Without the participation of the Protestant parties allied to guerrilla fighters, there is not likely to be any significant progress in the negotiations. ''Recent acts of sectarian violence have once again left the people of Northern Ireland very fearful for the future,'' Ms. Mowlam, the highest-ranking official in the British province, said she told the Protestant prisoners in the Maze prison on Friday. Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, the most prominent Irish-American politician in Irish eyes, and long an opponent of the violence of the I.R.A. and Protestant guerrillas, reflected the public fear, speaking in Londonderry on Friday night before coming to Belfast today on his first visit to Northern Ireland. In remarks that received prominent coverage on television and on the front page of newspapers here, he said: ''There are some who seek to wreck the peace process. They are blinded by fear of a future they cannot imagine, a future in which respect for differences is a healing and unifying force. ''They are driven by an anger that holds no respect for life, even for the lives of children.'' New disputes and stalemates, many people say, will stall the talks. Splinter paramilitary groups, which are not taking part in the talks and are not bound by cease-fires called by larger groups, will continue to use violence in an attempt to end the entire peace effort as the main parties argue over who is ultimately responsible for the new attacks. ''I think it's all going to blow up again,'' said Aidan Darragh, 31, the owner of a newspaper and candy shop on Andersonstown Road in the Catholic part of West Belfast. ''It'll break into total mayhem.'' Maureen McCorry, 62, a Catholic housewife, said, ''I can't see any answer but civil war.'' She said her brother, a cabdriver, had once been kidnapped and threatened at gunpoint by Protestant paramilitaries. On the Shankill Road, an adjacent Protestant area, the mood was the same. A few yards from where an I.R.A. bomb killed nine Protestants in 1993, | Ulster Is Downcast as New Violence Clouds Talks |
987041_0 | A block from her office in the United States Custom House in Philadelphia, Helen Mahan Forester, a community planner with the National Park Service, stands on the western bank of the Delaware River. Gazing north, she can see not just smokestacks, abandoned industrial plots, nightclubs and marinas, but also a continuous 40-mile circuit of bridges, roads, riverside embankments, public parks, wildlife refuges, bike paths and hiking trails, linking 17 riverfront communities in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, from Washington Crossing to Camden. The goal of what is being called the Delaware River Heritage Trail ''is to unify the entire Delaware River valley to stimulate tourism, recreation, historic preservation and environmental awareness,'' said Ms. Forester, a Camden native. Although the trail has been on the Park Service drawing boards since 1995 and could take several years to be completed, Ms. Forester called 1998 ''a pivotal year.'' ''We've spent the last two years spreading the word, attending meetings, rounding up community volunteers, getting feedback about what is and isn't doable,'' she said. ''It's been an extremely complicated undertaking, and there are many issues that haven't been settled yet.'' Those issues range from the kind of signs identifying the trail, the construction of pedestrian bridges and walkways in wetlands in Delran and Cinnaminson, public-access easements on commercial property, and the use of right-of-ways along New Jersey Transit's proposed light rail project from Trenton to Camden. The one issue that typically frustrates such projects -- money -- ''is not a problem,'' Ms. Forester said. ''There are pots of public and private grant money available for landscaping and maintenance that we can dip into as we've achieved a consensus among the communities involved.'' Although that consensus ''is still pretty far off,'' she added, the first parts of the trail, in the riverfront parks in Bristol, Trenton and Burlington City, could be dedicated as early as this summer. Linking those parks with other riverfront areas ''is going to take some time,'' she said. Jean Shaddow, director of the Trenton Division of Natural Resources, said, ''Everybody in the city pretty much approves, and the trail is just about done from here into Hamilton Township, where you can get on the Delaware and Raritan Canal to Bordentown.'' ''But,'' she added, ''I'm only beginning to understand the kind of obstacles we face if we are going to have complete open-space access along the river.'' Among those obstacles is a Route | A Trail Leads From the Past Into the Future |
991368_0 | To the Editor: Anthony Lewis's concluding comment in his Jan. 26 column -- that ''the correlation between our leaders' puritanism and their statesmanship is zero'' -- neatly sums up the central malady of our time: the widespread belief that a human being is not an organic whole. We have come to accept the idea that an individual can compartmentalize himself without doing damage to himself or others. But Aristotle said that no separation exists between an individual's moral and cognitive faculties. He asserted that intellect is impaired by ethical defects. Plato's ''Republic'' supports a similar thesis. Appetites and desires should be subordinated to reason, since only reason has the capacity to perceive action that will benefit the individual and the community. It might be useful to recall the main argument in ''The Republic'': No state or citizen will ever find fellowship, freedom and peace until the political leadership has undergone rigorous training in philosophy. The result of this training is someone who finds his deepest pleasure in virtuous acts. Happiness, which lies in possessing virtue, allows the blossoming of the humanity of the individual and community. MICHAEL WAGNER Brooklyn, Jan. 26, 1998 | Independent Counsel Act Is Two-Edged Sword; Philosopher Presidents? |
991361_0 | Medical scientists thought they understood multiple sclerosis. Its central feature, they said, was a relentless loss of the insulation that sheathes nerve cells, causing a short-circuit in the electrical signals passing through the cells. But now it turns out that this loss of nerve cells' insulator, a fatty substance called myelin, is only part of the story. Using a laser-scanning microscope, researchers have observed the severing of nerves in the brains of patients with multiple sclerosis cells, presumably by chemicals in the brain. The severing and death of these spaghetti-like nerve cells could explain why people with multiple sclerosis eventually are unable to walk, for example, or why they may lose vision in an eye. Once nerve cells die, their functions are lost. It also suggests strategies for treatments with experimental drugs that can prevent nerve cell death, at least in laboratory experiments, with the ultimate goal of stopping the progress of the incurable disease. Such drugs are being tested in other diseases, like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's, that are caused by nerve-cell death. But no one had thought to test such drugs in multiple sclerosis. In a study being published today in The New England Journal of Medicine, the researchers compared brains taken in autopsies from 11 patients with multiple sclerosis and 4 people who did not have brain disease. The investigators, led by Dr. Bruce D. Trapp, chairman of the department of neurosciences at the Lerner Research Institute of the Cleveland Clinic Foundation, examined 47 affected areas in the brains of patients with multiple sclerosis. The researchers found that the number of severed nerve cells per cubic millimeter of affected brain ranged from 875 to 11,236. But they found less than one severed nerve cell, on average, in similar regions of brains of people who did not have the disease. Although there had been previous hints that multiple sclerosis might involve nerve cell death, ''this is the first study to rigorously quantify'' the effect, said Dr. Barry Arnason, professor of neurology and director of the multiple sclerosis clinic at the University of Chicago. Multiple sclerosis experts, including the authors of the study, were taken aback by the findings. ''I was surprised,'' said Dr. Roland Martin, an acting section chief at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke. He said loss of myelin, or demyelination, was considered the hallmark of multiple sclerosis. ''Every textbook article starts by saying that | Study of Brains Alters the View On Path of M.S. |
991346_0 | INTERNATIONAL A3-9 Albright Says U.S. Is Ready To Act Alone Against Iraq Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright said the United States was ready to act alone if necessary to punish Iraq for its efforts to develop chemical and biological weapons. Though Ms. Albright reiterated the warning that President Clinton delivered on Tuesday, White House and Pentagon officials sought to stamp out expectations that a strike against Iraq was imminent or inevitable. A6 Iraq said it might ask the International Court of Justice to intervene in the standoff. The Iraqi Foreign Minister, Mohammed Said al-Sahaf, said the Clinton Administration was trying to cover up its ''miserable crisis'' by making Iraq a scapegoat. A6 In public, Arab leaders are voicing strong opposition to the use of force against Iraq. But diplomats in the Persian Gulf region say some officials there have told them in confidence that they would support military strikes at the weapons installations that give Iraq the ability to threaten its neighbors. The apparent contradiction between those public and private views tells much about Arab sentiment about Iraq seven years after the gulf war. A6 Worries Over Riots in Indonesia Indonesia's Government has begun to fear that thousands of newly unemployed people could rise up in violent protests and shake its hold on power. Small food riots have already begun in parts of Java, and the Government is bracing for the possibility of more riots when it ends price subsidies for beans, sugar and flour on Sunday. The moves are part of an austerity plan to end the country's economic crisis. A3 Safer World for the U.S. Top American intelligence officials testified that while the world bristles with weapons, the United States is relatively secure from the threat of war. In testimony before a Senate committee, the experts warned, however, that potential threats still come from the spread of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons. A3 Environmental Law for Brazil The Brazilian Congress gave the country's environmental agency legal authority to enforce environmental protection laws, days after Government figures showed that destruction of the Amazon rain forest had reached its worst-ever level in the mid-1990s. A8 De Klerk Acknowledges Affair Answering speculation, former South African President F. W. De Klerk publicly acknowledged a longstanding affair with a married woman, but denied that it had forced him to leave politics last year. Mr. DeKlerk, 61, is also married. He said that | NEWS SUMMARY |
991275_0 | In a plaza next to one of this city's most important shrines, the colossal Monument to the Revolution, a humble water pipe has become a curious monument of its own to what is, literally, Mexico City's continuing collapse. Flush with the ground in 1934 when the Monument to the Revolution was built, the water pipe now soars 26 feet into the air. Why? Firmly anchored in a hard layer of subsoil beneath the city's shallow aquifer, the pipe has stayed put in the last six decades while the city has fallen away. Mexico City is sinking. So much water has been pumped out from the aquifer beneath it to satisfy the metropolitan area's 18 million residents that the ground is collapsing underfoot at a stunning rate. Many cities have experienced subsidence. The most famous, Venice, has sunk about 9 inches during the 20th century as its water table has dropped. But from here Venice's problems seem marginal. Mexico City has sunk 30 feet. ''The sinking of the soil in Mexico City is one of the biggest engineering problems any city has faced, anywhere,'' said Ismael Herrera Revilla, a mathematics professor at the National Autonomous University who led a binational scientific panel in a five-year study of the city's water crisis. In 1519, when the Spaniards conquered the Aztec capital, Tenochtitlan, there was plenty of water; Mexico City originally straddled two lakes. But the conquistadors who built their own city next to the Aztec one brought engineers to drain the lakes. Early in this century the fast-growing city exhausted its natural springs. Digging of wells began, and as the city pumped more and more water, the soil began to give way. In the early decades of this century, annual sinkage in the city center averaged about 2 inches, but when it peaked at mid-century the soil was collapsing away at the astonishing rate of 19 inches a year. Because the subsidence is not uniform, it has caused hundreds of millions of dollars in damage to buildings and other structures over the years, especially in the colonial-era city center. Because of cracking and the threat of worse, engineers have put up scaffolding to support the ceiling and walls of the National Cathedral, the largest and oldest in Latin America, and are carrying out a complex and costly effort to shore up its foundations. Across the central Zocalo plaza, the sinking has caused | Mexico City Journal; Capital's Downfall Caused by Drinking . . . of Water |
991307_1 | the ground that it lacks statutory authority. ''The law isn't out to put everybody in jail,'' said Eduardo Martins, head of the agency, the Brazilian Environment Institute. ''These elements will be sufficient for an efficient management of the environment.'' A Senate version of the bill, passed unanimously last July and sent to the Chamber of Congress, was hailed by ecologists as a model of protection. But environmentalists complained that the Government had taken away major provisions of the bill in the last few days, significantly weakening it. The provisions included prison sentences for damaging the environment, fines for degrading the environment regardless of intent, and an easy mechanism for holding managers, owners and majority shareholders personally liable for pollution by their companies. Also thrown out was a provision that would have barred corporate polluters from receiving Government loans. ''They turned a bill that was highly positive into a law of very little usefulness,'' complained Joao Paulo Capobianco, secretary general of the Socio-Environmental Institute, a nonprofit group based in Sao Paulo. Environmentalists had largely been encouraging President Fernando Henrique Cardoso, whose support in Congress depends on lawmakers with close ties to agribusiness and industrial interests, to put off the vote. But Mr. Martins argued that the bill was acceptable to the opposition, which had agreed not to obstruct today's vote. ''The law is the product of the democratic process,'' he said. The bill now awaits Mr. Cardoso's signature. On Monday, Brazil issued figures showing that unprecedented deforestation between 1994 and 1995 had destroyed an area larger than New Jersey. The next year, destruction slowed, but remained significantly higher than it had been before 1994. ''Deforestation goes up and goes down, independent of what the Government's doing,'' said Philip Fearnside, an ecology professor at the National Institute for Research on the Amazon in Manaus. ''It means there's a lot that's not understood and not under control of government.'' Mr. Fearnside said the bill had grown weaker than environmentalists expected, but added, ''It's important to have something done, because it's obvious that nothing's been done.'' Senator Marina Silva, who had worked on the tougher version of the bill for the Senate, said the law that was approved today lacked the punch to stop the unchecked damage to the environment that has been the norm in Brazil. ''I only lament the work that was done here in the Senate was completely sidetracked,'' she said. | Brazil, Its Forests Besieged, Adds Teeth to Environmental Laws |
989721_3 | to sugar cane. He must prepare the fields, plant the cane, water it and fertilize it. When the cane is ready, the Government sends a brigade of men to cut it and haul it away. For his efforts, which take about a year, he was recently paid 266 pesos and 99 cents, about $12 at the current rate of exchange. On the rest of the land Mr. Veliz can grow what he chooses and use it for his own consumption. Any products he has left over he can sell in a produce market, but he has to pay a tax to the Government. He has 20 cows, which he tends and milks every day. But he must sell the milk to the state, a liter daily per cow, at 36 cents per liter. If he is caught selling it to someone else, he can be fined, he said. What bothers him the most, as a lifelong owner of land, is that he cannot kill his own cows, he said. If a cow dies or is killed by someone else, he must report it immediately to the Government. The cows are checked regularly by Government inspectors, who brand each of them with metal clips attached to the ears. The clips have numbers, which are recorded in government files. Mr. Veliz can always raise and kill pigs, sheep and chickens. But that has become an expensive proposition. If he leaves them on his finca they will most likely be stolen by people even hungrier than he is. In the last years, he has lost 66 sheep, 36 turkeys and 12 pigs worth 50,000 pesos ($2,174). Now he keeps his pigs in the homes of his children who have backyards. At night, though, they must take them inside and keep them in the bathroom for fear of theft. It takes about seven months of daily feedings and proper care to raise a pig succulent enough to eat. ''You see that there?'' asked Mr. Veliz, pointing to a small, sickly looking pig his neighbor owns. ''That is his only hope. But it will take a long time before he can put it on the table.'' While the pigs fatten, most people survive on a diet of rice and beans, sweet potato and an occasional egg. Today, for a long day of work at his finca, Mr. Veliz packed a lunch of rice and black | Where's the Joy of Life? The Dirt Poor in Cuba Wonder |
984687_0 | To the Editor: ''Where All Doors Are Open for Disabled Students'' (front page, Dec. 28) reports that Jeron Fox, a 17-year-old with cerebral palsy, ''serves as '12th man' for the high school football team, cheering from the bench.'' Full inclusionists advocate a one-size-fits-all philosophy regarding school placement. This is wrong. Most children attending our school for the deaf don't want to be the 12th player on an 11-member team. They want to be one of the 11. Throughout the country in schools for the deaf, student governments, school newspapers and yearbook squads, interscholastic athletic teams, mock-trial clubs and academic honor rolls are composed of deaf students as bona fide participants, not honorary members. What's right for one student may be wrong for another. OSCAR P. COHEN Superintendent Lexington School for the Deaf Jackson Hts., Queens, Dec. 30, 1997 | 'Mainstreaming' Disabled Students Has a Price; Why Be '12th Man'? |
984689_0 | To the Editor: According to your Dec. 28 front-page article on the costs of providing disabled children with ''an appropriate'' educational program, Vermont's special education budget has grown from $3.6 million in the early 1970's to $110 million today; such services account for 20 percent of Woodstock's elementary school budget. What your article doesn't tell us is what has happened to enrich the education of the more than 85 percent of children whose needs can be met in a comprehensive classroom: the availability of supplemental science, art, music, foreign-language and other specialists and their teaching materials; class-size changes; financing for field trips, school libraries and nurses. And there is no mention of what testing, guidance and educational services are available to children with I.Q.'s of 150 and above -- or of 130 and above, the cutoff point for the less selective gifted and talented education programs. Yet providing appropriate education for the gifted requires more in logistics than in financing, say, $1,500 extra a year per pupil versus the $100,000 to $150,000 that a number of states are now spending per severely disabled pupil. B. MEREDITH BURKE Palo Alto, Calif., Dec. 29, 1997 The writer was a visiting scholar at the Hoover Institution, 1996-97. | 'Mainstreaming' Disabled Students Has a Price; At Expense of Gifted |
984688_0 | To the Editor: Your Dec. 28 front-page article says Vermont ''is singular in its commitment to integrating severely disabled students into regular classrooms.'' As a lawyer, I have represented such young people in Social Security disability claims and had to overcome the presumption in the disability regulations that a high school diploma meant that someone could read and write on a high school level. Though my clients had received regular diplomas, throughout their education they had had the one-on-one assistance of teacher assistants. One client told me that in addition to a high school diploma she had received a standard driver's license. When asked how she took the written test, since she could not read, she explained that someone had ''helped her.'' When asked how while driving she would read the signs, she answered, ''I don't know.'' The Vermont Department of Vocational Rehabilitation helped the woman to obtain a part-time job, subsidized through incentives to private employers and one-on-one training by a state professional. After three weeks, she learned to place labels on merchandise. Although the state no longer provides a trainer, the employer provides a supportive supervisor. MARIANNE G. KORY Burlington, Vt., Dec. 29, 1997 | 'Mainstreaming' Disabled Students Has a Price; A Case in Vermont |
984686_0 | To the Editor: Re ''Where All Doors Are Open for Disabled Students'' (front page, Dec. 28): As the parent of a special-education student, I believe that New York City and state should take a lesson from the Vermont inclusion experience. New York's special-education reform proposals assume that inclusion will produce a cost savings, or at least a capping of costs. But this is a fallacy. Despite the virtual elimination of segregated special-education classes, Vermont's special-education tab has continued to rise. This is because children with significant disabilities require expensive supports regardless of whether they sit in a regular classroom or a special-education classroom. In New York City, none of the inclusion proposals include adequate financing for student supports in the classroom, comprehensive teacher training or smaller class sizes. It is absurd to plan inclusion of students with significant disabilities in overcrowded classrooms where the teacher has received no more than a crash course in special education. MARGARET PUDDINGTON New York, Dec. 28, 1997 | 'Mainstreaming' Disabled Students Has a Price |
984591_2 | talks of their political representatives along with those of Sinn Fein, the political wing of the I.R.A., who joined the negotiations in September after its fighters declared their own cease-fire in July. The talks, sponsored by the British and Irish Governments and headed by a former United States Senator, George S. Mitchell, are due to resume on Jan. 12 after a holiday break. They are aimed at ending nearly 30 years of religious and political conflict that has resulted in more than 3,200 deaths. While progress toward an accord by a May deadline has been halting at best, the talks had succeeded in forestalling the kind of retaliatory violence that has returned this past week. In recent weeks the atmosphere around the talks has become increasingly sour, with the leaders of the Protestant groups taking part complaining bitterly that the British Government is showing favoritism toward the Catholics. Citing the need for confidence-building measures to shore up the negotiations, London has permitted 161 prisoners from the Maze to take 10-day Christmas leaves with their families, approved the moving of some Catholic prisoners from British jails to Irish ones, and staged the dramatically symbolic visit of Gerry Adams and a delegation of his Sinn Fein party to 10 Downing Street to meet with Prime Minister Tony Blair. The Protestant leaders have expressed anger in particular about what they see as a one-sided attitude by the British Secretary for Northern Ireland, Mo Mowlam, and called this week for her dismissal. Ken Maginnis, the deputy leader of the largest Protestant group, the Ulster Unionist Party, said today that his group did not excuse this week's two Protestant attacks but said Ms. Mowlam's role was contributing to the kind of instability in his community that led to violence. ''If you look at what has happened over the last couple of months, with concession after concession after concession being given to the Provisional I.R.A., then people here have become so dispirited they have been not wishing for terror but saying, 'The only thing that pays is violence.' The Secretary of State and her team have done nothing to contradict that particular notion.'' On Wednesday Ms. Mowlam held a two-hour meeting with a Unionist delegation led by David Trimble, the head of the Ulster Unionist Party, that was described as acrimonious. Mr. Trimble was denouncing what he contends is coddling of Catholic inmates and demanding a | Spate of Killings Puts Cloud Over Talks on Ulster Peace |
984626_0 | INTERNATIONAL A3-9 Israel's Foreign Minister Threatens to Resign Post Foreign Minister David Levy threatened to resign in the midst of a dispute over the 1998 budget, creating a crisis for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and forcing him to delay the budget vote until Monday. A1 One Dead in Belfast Shooting Tensions rose in Northern Ireland, after a Catholic man was shot dead and five others were wounded when masked Protestant paramilitaries opened fire on a crowded pub in Belfast. The Loyalist Volunteer Force, a breakaway group opposed to peace talks, claimed responsibility and promised more violence in retaliation for the killing of Billy Wright, the group's founder. Talks aimed at ending nearly 30 years of conflict are to resume on Jan. 12. A4 Zapatistas Mark Anniversary Members of the Zapatista National Liberation Army celebrated the fourth anniversary of their invasion of four towns in southern Mexico, which was motivated by their drive for autonomy for the nation's Indians. The Zapatistas have expressed disappointment that little has changed in the four years. A3 Rebels Attack Burundi Village Rebels attacked a village and military camp on the outskirts of Burundi's capital, killing at least 160, in what officials called the biggest rebel assault in that country in recent years. According to the head of security forces in Burundi, the rebel group attacked a village and killed civilians who refused to accompany the guerrillas. The attackers were repelled when they tried to seize the capital's airport. A8 Controversy in Kenyan Vote The situation surrounding the presidential election in Kenya remained explosive as the slow counting of ballots continued. With more than half the constituencies counted, Democratic Party candidate Mwai Kibaki, a former Vice President, was putting up a strong fight against President Daniel arap Moi. Mr. Kibaki and another opposition candidate said they would not accept the results if Mr. Moi were to win, accusing officials of rigging the election. A8 Congo to Organize Elections President Laurent Kabila of Congo said his Government would organize national elections early in 1999. Mr. Kabila made the pledge in a nationally broadcast New Year's address, despite opposition within his own Government and at a time of widespread popular disenchantment with his rule. A8 Russia Gets Another New Ruble Russia introduced new rubles, worth 1,000 times as much as the old ones, marking the third time in less than a decade that the Government has tried to | NEWS SUMMARY |
984615_0 | Tensions over the future of the fragile peace talks in Northern Ireland grew yesterday after Protestant paramilitaries killed a Catholic man and wounded five others in a pub on New Year's Eve. It was the third sectarian killing in the province in a week. At the Clifton Tavern in North Belfast, two men, one carrying a handgun and the other a submachine gun, fired at random, then sped away in a waiting car with a woman in the back yelling in triumph, according to onlookers. A breakaway group opposed to the peace talks claimed responsibility for the killing. It was revenging the death of Billy Wright, its founder, in an attack in prison last weekend. Article, page A4. | Killings in Ulster Jar Planned Peace Talks |
984655_0 | To the Editor: In ''Study of Sex Experiencing 2d Revolution'' (front page, Dec. 28), Richard A. Posner, chief judge of the Federal Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in Chicago, describes Plato's ''Symposium'' as a defense of homosexual love. That is like describing ''Hamlet'' as a defense of dueling. Although in the ''Symposium'' Socrates acknowledges the reality of homosexual love, the point of the dialogue is that we should learn to progress from the love of physical beauty to the love of souls and ideas, and eventually to the love of ''beauty absolute'': a beauty which ''once you have seen it, you will never be seduced again by the charm of gold, of dress, comely boys, or lads just ripening to manhood.'' In other words, platonic love. Perhaps what Judge Posner needs is a dose of the good old-fashioned scholarship rarely found in ''gender'' studies. DAVID HAYDEN Wilton, Conn., Dec. 29, 1997 | Must Sexuality Be a Radical Subject? |
986055_0 | FOR anyone looking at Valdir Cruz's beautiful, silvery photographs of the remote Indians of the Amazon rain forests, it is difficult to shake the notion that they are images of ghosts populating ghost towns. In these images, the product of visits to northern Brazil and southern Venezuela over the last three years, children curled up in hammocks and groups of painted hunters stare into his camera from a lost world: spare, circular bamboo villages, cut into the dense rain forest like sundials, their ancient physical and religious rhythms ruled by the need for food, still sought by men using bows and poisoned darts. The ghostly feeling is underscored by the knowledge that the very existence of these Indians, known as Yanomami in Brazil and Yanomamo in Venezuela -- the last tribes in the Americas still untouched by modern civilization -- is gravely threatened. Since the mid-1970's, they have been devastated by malnutrition and malaria, caused by the incursions of gold miners and others who have forged into their isolated homelands. For the Brazilian-born Mr. Cruz, whose earlier successes as a portraitist centered on the famous -- the likes of Henry Kissinger and Spike Lee -- it was this sense of something unknown to the world and rapidly slipping away that lured him from his home and studio on West 14th Street into the rain forest. But in the process, what started as a simple project to photograph rain-forest leaders has become a remarkable artistic and now humanitarian obsession for Mr. Cruz, 43, whose work is focusing attention on the Indians. Some of it is being shown for the first time in the United States at Throckmorton Fine Art, 153 East 61st Street, through Saturday. ''I have a tendency to fall deeply into whatever I'm doing,'' he said last week, unrolling a rug-size map of Brazil on the floor of his modest apartment, where photo equipment competes for space with bows, arrows, straw baskets and other rain-forest mementos (he said they keep him connected). ''But this has gone a lot further,'' he continued, his dark, Che Guevara looks animated by a glimmer of missionary zeal. ''And I see a project that will, probably, be a lifetime project.'' The pictures have been compared by critics to ''The North American Indian,'' Edward S. Curtis's classic pictorial study. But Mr. Cruz is interested in more than artistry or documentation. Vicki Goldberg, whose photography criticism | AT HOME WITH: Valdir Cruz; A Fragile World Through a Lens |
986055_4 | outside but open on the inside. Within the ring is a disk of land swept of trees and underbrush, for dances and for children to play. But because villagers must rely intimately on one another for survival, families have no separate dwellings, not even curtains as partitions. Their hammocks are simply draped around their fires, with one family inches from the next. ''The shabono is remarkable for observers,'' Mr. Tierney said, ''because everything is occurring in this open-air theater, readily apparent.'' Even so, it took Mr. Cruz days before he could begin to photograph. And he felt dissatisfied with simply taking pictures as so many lay sick or dying around him. So on his second trip, and a third last year, which was on a Guggenheim Foundation grant, he took medicine and medical workers partly paid for by Brazil's National Health Foundation. ''I would say that he spent two-thirds of his time with us, assisting the medical team,'' Mr. Tierney said. ''He didn't go in posing people, taking shots. He just kept a very low profile and helped, typically for four or five days, before he even started thinking about the cameras.'' ''It was a generous way of working,'' he added. As Mr. Cruz worked, his pictures took on an added dimension. Barbara Millstein, curator of photography at the Brooklyn Museum, said: ''I think he was as surprised as anyone at how well he did with it. He was able to look at them as individuals and not parts of a tribe, not as objects.'' The closeness he nurtured made him sensitive to the gradual but often debilitating effects of outside culture on the Indians, including the slightly less isolated Ingarico, near the Brazil-Guyana border, and the Macuxi of the Brazilian grasslands. The more remote Yanomami villages in the highlands, spare as they are, are visibly much more ordered and cohesive than those near mining areas, like the Homoxi district of Brazil. Those villages could be mistaken for Sao Paolo slums, with dirty children and houses patched with plastic. ''You look at those people, and you look in their eyes, and you see something lost, a sadness, like they've lost hope,'' Mr. Cruz said. Mr. Cruz's last stay in the forest lasted five months, but he is raising money for a fourth trip that could last even longer. ''You begin to understand why anthropologists will go spend a year in | AT HOME WITH: Valdir Cruz; A Fragile World Through a Lens |
991588_0 | INTERNATIONAL A3-7 Blair Opens an Inquiry Into Irish 'Bloody Sunday' Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain said he was opening a new judicial inquiry into the ''Bloody Sunday'' killings of more than a dozen unarmed civil rights marchers by British soldiers in Northern Ireland in 1972. The event became a focus of Roman Catholic rage in the troubled province. A1 Albright Presses Iraq Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright held talks with the French Foreign Minister and then spoke of France's preference for a diplomatic solution to the crisis with Iraq. But Ms. Albright and Foreign Minister Hubert Vedrine issued coordinated remarks designed to insure that Saddam Hussein knows that the time for a diplomatic capitulation is now, American diplomats said. A6 Israel Ready to Retaliate Defense Minister Yitzhak Mordechai said Israel would respond if Iraq attacked it in retaliation for an American military strike. Israeli officials say there is a low probability of an Iraqi missile strike and they see no imminent threat. But many Israelis have been unsettled by intense media coverage of the dangers posed by chemical and biological agents. A6 French Trial Suspended The trial in France of Maurice Papon on charges of complicity in German war crimes ended its 58th session with a wave of controversy concerning the judge. Questions were raised whether the judge should step down after an unexpected assertion that he was distantly related to one of the surviving victims. The judge suspended the trial until Monday. A4 31 Die in Peru Avalanche At least 31 people died when an avalanche caused by heavy rains obliterated part of a remote town in Peru's southern Andes, local officials and witnesses said. A river burst its banks some 400 miles southeast of Lima, setting off a landslide. It buried nearly 100 homes and forced hundreds of people to flee by running or swimming in the flood of mud and rocks, according to the witnesses and officials. (Reuters) Explosion on Russian Sub A naval captain was killed and at least four sailors were hurt in a gas explosion on a nuclear submarine in Russia's far north, the Russian navy said, adding that no radiation leaked. The submarine was undergoing maintenance at Zaozersk base at the time of the blast, which sent poisonous ammonia gas, used as a coolant, spewing as the workers were fixing an energy unit. (Reuters) Couple Missing on Barrier Reef An American | NEWS SUMMARY |
991541_0 | Jan. 30, 1972, was not the first day in the 20th-century history of Irish conflict to have gained the name Bloody Sunday and become a rallying cry for political change. The first occurred on Nov. 21, 1920, at the height of Ireland's struggle for independence from Britain, and led to more than two dozen casualties, half of them British intelligence officers killed by Irish Republican Army gunmen, the rest spectators and a player at a Gaelic football match in Dublin, shot dead when security forces opened fire. Today's decision to reopen the investigation of the events of 26 years ago in Londonderry reflects the importance that the Catholic leaders of Northern Ireland and many residents of the province's Catholic communities have attached to the second Bloody Sunday. The campaign to re-examine what happened that day has become a focus for men like John Hume, the leader of the Social Democratic and Labor Party and a Londonderry man who was on streets of the city when the shooting broke out, and Gerry Adams, president of Sinn Fein, the political wing of the I.R.A. Although 3,235 people, more than 900 of them members of British and Northern Irish security forces, have died in the past three decades, the 14 deaths in Londonderry took on the galvanizing political force for Catholics that the Sharpeville killings of 69 black demonstrators by the South African police in 1960 did in starting 30 years of armed struggle against white rule. Londonderry, or Derry, as Catholic residents call it, was at the time a relatively untroubled part of Northern Ireland, with little of the republican yearnings found in Belfast. British troops had originally been welcomed by the Catholics, who felt they had come to protect them. The Rev. Edward Daly, 64, a retired bishop, was also in the fray, and became the centerpiece in the most frequently reproduced image of the shootings, frantically waving a white handkerchief at troops as he helped carry a victim away. ''Many young people I have talked to in prison have told me they would have never joined the I.R.A. had it not been for what they witnessed on Bloody Sunday,'' he said in a recent interview in his Londonderry study. To him and many Catholics, the 1972 investigation by Lord Widgery, the British Lord Chief Justice, which exonerated the troops and suggested the marchers had been armed, drastically deepened the distrust | Two 'Bloody Sundays': Catalysts for Change |
991516_0 | To the Editor: It is difficult to comprehend what it means to destroy about 11,200 square miles of rain forest as occurred in Brazil in 1995 (news article, Jan. 27). That area is equivalent to 6.5 million football fields. Furthermore, it isn't lack of money to prevent forest destruction that is the problem. At the 1990 G-7 summit meeting, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher of Britain and Chancellor Helmut Kohl of Germany announced an initiative to conserve Amazonia's rain forest. More than $250 million was pledged by the world's richest countries. The World Bank was given the task of administering the effort. Five years later forest clearing had almost tripled, and only a fraction of the G-7 pledge has been spent. The plan has been plagued by bureaucratic inefficiency in Brasilia and at the World Bank and exacerbated by a lack of political interest in Brazil. It's high time for the G-7 to ask both parties tough questions and to seek more creative ways to save forests. NIGEL SIZER Washington, Jan. 29, 1998 The writer is a senior associate with the World Resources Institute. | Saving Brazil's Forest |
991583_4 | quiet, slightly built man, he teaches music appreciation in the public schools. His great love is the piano, but his hands now occasionally shake like the needle on an electrocardiograph. His eyes are tired, his complexion pale. Some days, he looks as if he's been turned on a spit until all his juices have run out. Mr. Vals has never actually lived in the building. ''Can you imagine,'' he said morosely, ''our family bought three units as an investment and then -- being greedy, stupid, whatever -- we bought three more.'' Among the new president's first actions was to complain to the Attorney General's office and to start filing lawsuits. But the litigation was unlikely to bring a quick remedy, said Jonathan Beyer, chief of the Attorney General's real estate financing bureau. His office advised negotiations. As a first step, Astoria Federal and the Vista board agreed to hire the highly regarded engineering consultants Wiss, Janny, Elstner, Associates Inc. While the condominium owners had long grumbled about leaks and cracks, no one had questioned Vista's stability. That changed when Wiss, Janny found the tower to be ''too tall,'' ''not well-tied together'' and ''susceptible to progressive collapse.'' How could this be, condo owners like Mr. Avella wondered: ''Wouldn't you think New York has building inspectors and a permit process that protects you?'' But engineers and architects, licensed by the state, certify the soundness of their own structural plans, explained the Building Commissioner, Gaston Silva. These professionals are then left to look over their own shoulders, with their licenses, and hence their livelihoods, at risk. ''We haven't checked applications for structural plans in about 20 years,'' Mr. Silva said. ''Buildings are so sophisticated these days. The level of expertise is beyond what a municipal engineer can deal with.'' A certificate of occupancy had been granted to Vista Tower after a perfunctory check for proper fire exits. No one apparently noticed that the 15-story tower was built, as Mr. Silva said, ''in a manner common only to low-rise construction.'' Vista Tower, in fact, has no steel skeleton for bracing. Instead it is made up of layers of concrete, with each level meant to support the one above it. And while this layering method may be a good way to bake a lasagna, or even to erect a smaller building, it does not seem to work for a structure of 15 stories. And so, | The Leaning Tower of Flushing; Evacuated Condo Owners Want Years of Ordeal to End |
991584_2 | to accompany political progress in five-month-old peace talks that are aimed at settling the conflict by May. These steps have included the early release of prisoners, the transfer of inmates from jails in England to jails in Ireland and the granting of holiday leaves to imprisoned guerrillas. Producing a credible account of what happened on Bloody Sunday was, he said, ''a way forward to the necessary reconciliation which will be such an important part of building a secure future for the people of Northern Ireland.'' The families' goal has been to clear the names of the victims, and they gained the active support of the Irish Government, which seven months ago sent Mr. Blair a dossier of new evidence. Bertie Ahern, the Irish Prime Minister, sought to force Mr. Blair's hand by saying he would publish the new information before Friday's anniversary. The 178-page document was issued in Dublin shortly after Mr. Blair made his announcement. It accused Lord Widgery, the Lord Chief Justice of England, who conducted the 1972 inquiry, of ''tainting the victims with responsibility for their own deaths'' in order to clear the conduct of the elite paratroopers. The closest a British Government has ever come to a review was a letter in 1992 from Prime Minister John Major to John Hume, the head of the Social Democratic and Labor Party, which runs the government in Londonderry. Mr. Major wrote, ''Those who were killed should be regarded as innocent of any allegation they were shot whilst handling firearms or explosives.'' The expression was considered evasive by many Catholics because it left unchallenged the ''strong suspicion'' put forth in the Widgery report that the marchers might have been handling weapons or bombs earlier. The Widgery report, which was issued less than three months after the killings, cited the ''strong suspicion'' that the marchers were armed, accepted soldiers' claims of having been under attack, and argued that ''there is no reason to suppose that the soldiers would have opened fire if they had not been fired upon.'' Among the items of evidence cited by campaigners for a new inquiry were minutes of a Downing Street meeting the day after the shootings between Prime Minister Edward Heath and Lord Widgery, where Mr. Heath reminded the Justice that ''we were in Northern Ireland fighting not only a military war but a propaganda war.'' Mr. Heath, a wintry figure in the Commons | BRITAIN TO REOPEN ITS INQUIRY OF '72 IN ULSTER KILLINGS |
985699_2 | Government with finding a way to protect the 800-year-old marble leaning Tower of Pisa have announced a plan to brace the structure as a first step in halting its tilt. A4 NATIONAL A10-14 Clinton Plans to Introduce Balanced Budget for 1999 President Clinton said he would propose a balanced Federal budget for 1999, three years ahead of schedule, signaling the end of the deficit politics that confined the dreams of a generation of Presidents and lawmakers. He predicted that the deficit in 1998 would fall to less than $22 billion -- a virtual rounding error in a budget of more than $1.7 trillion. A1 Unabom Trial Halted on 1st Day The trial of accused Unabom killer Theodore J. Kaczynski was halted just before it got under way when Mr. Kaczynski said he had ''very important'' complaints about his lawyers. After a four-hour closed-door meeting between Mr. Kaczynski and his lawyers and the judge, the jury was sent home and the trial was postponed for at least two days. A1 Managed Care Agency Urged A special advisory commission recommended that California establish a new state agency to oversee the administration of health maintenance organizations and enact a wide range of measures intended to protect consumers and improve care. A1 Ford Plans Cleaner Trucks Ford announced that it would start selling sport utility vehicles and Windstar mini-vans that would produce as little air pollution as cars this autumn. Chrysler, after initially expressing reservations, said it would match that move in its most popular sport utility vehicle. Executives at General Motors said they had the technology to reduce emissions and are reviewing whether to do so. A1 Nichols's Fate Goes to Jury Prosecutors invoked images of bombing victims and defense lawyers invoked a biblical tale of mercy as they made their final arguments over whether Terry L. Nichols should be executed for his role in the Oklahoma City bombing. The jurors -- who convicted Mr. Nichols last month of conspiring with Timothy J. McVeigh in the 1995 bombing of the Federal Building that killed 168 people -- began deliberations on the sentencing phase of the trial. A10 NEW YORK/REGION B1-7 Ferraro Enters Race, Assails D'Amato Record Geraldine A. Ferraro stepped back into the political arena, assailing Senator Alfonse M. D'Amato for partaking in ''the politics of smear,'' and denouncing his record on environmental protection and education. Ms. Ferraro attempted to turn what her | NEWS SUMMARY |
985685_10 | epidemics kept ticking away, usually going unreported because they were sporadic and few doctors thought to test for E. coli. But some outbreaks were hard to miss. In September 1984, 34 out of 101 people living in a Nebraska nursing home became ill with E. coli infections. They had eaten contaminated hamburgers. In October 1988, 32 junior high school students from a school in Minneapolis developed bloody diarrhea from eating contaminated hamburgers in the school cafeteria. Nonetheless, said Dr. James Marsden, a professor of meat science at Kansas State University, ''other than among scientists, I don't think it really sank in what a serious issue this was until the Jack in the Box outbreak,'' in 1993, when four children died and hundreds of people became ill. Ridding meat of the new E. coli strain became ''the biggest challenge ever to face the industry,'' Dr. Marsden said. Public health officials also changed their tack. The disease control centers made a video about E. coli O157:H7 and sent it to public laboratories, suggesting they look for the bacteria. Suddenly, the E. coli were everywhere. ''We used to recognize outbreaks every couple of years,'' said Dr. Griffin, the epidemiologist for the centers. ''Now we see 25 to 30 a year.'' And the list of foods that caused outbreaks keeps growing. ''We look at that list and say, 'Wow,' '' Dr. Griffin said. But how, scientists asked, were the E. coli entering the food chain? Because the first outbreaks seemed to be associated with ground beef, scientists looked into cattle and other farm animals. Initially, the scientists came up empty handed. In 1982, the Department of Agriculture could not find E. coli O157:H7 in any animals in the country, indicating that the infected cows that contaminated the McDonald's hamburgers must have been rarities. But now, said Dr. Michael Doyle, the director of the University of Georgia Center for Food Safety and Quality Enhancement in Griffin, Ga., as many as 1.5 percent to 5 percent of dairy cows carry the organism. Dairy cows and other cattle seem to be the Typhoid Marys of the epidemics, carrying the bacteria harmlessly in their feces. From there, the bacteria enter the food supply. In modern meat plants, a single contaminated carcass can be ground up with scores of other cows to produce hamburgers. E. coli O157:H7 has also gotten into apple cider, possibly because farmers fertilized their crops | Detective Work and Science Reveal a New Lethal Bacteria |
985739_2 | where the best-laid plans often fall victim to procrastination or politics, skeptics abound. Over the years, some Pisans point out, the tower has shown greater stability than, say, Italy's governments, of which there have been more than 50 since the end of World War II. Others, like Rina Staderini, one of 101 stallholders along the tower's western flank who peddle items like miniature plastic replicas of it, favor a strict hands-off policy. ''If they touch it, it will topple,'' Mrs. Staderini said. ''If they leave it in peace, it will stay on its feet.'' In 1965, after a drop in Pisa's water table caused the tilt to accelerate, a new law transferred responsibility for the tower's well-being from Pisa to Rome. But the experts disagreed on a choice of therapy. ''It is as with a sick person,'' said Mr. Favilli, the tower keeper. He is a retired agronomist appointed by Pisa's Archbishop as the 97th holder of an office founded in 1089, before the tower was built, essentially to oversee construction of the adjacent cathedral and baptistry. ''At times the choice of therapy is difficult,'' he said. ''The experts are all luminaries, and are not always of one mind.'' Work on the tower began in 1174, under Bonanno Pisano. It was completed when Tommaso Pisano capped it in 1350 with a belfry. In January 1990 the tower was closed to the roughly 800,000 energetic visitors who, despite its incline of roughly 16 feet from the perpendicular, clambered up its 294 steps yearly to enjoy the splendid panorama from the top. The plan hit upon by Mr. Jamiolkowski and his panel is to exploit the stability afforded by the strap and cables to perform the riskiest part of the project: pouring a ring of concrete underground around the foundations, then driving 10 steel cables from one side of this ring and anchoring them in firm layers of soil about 165 feet below the base. This anchoring is necessary if, as the experts hope, the tower is to be reopened to visitors someday. The two cables and strap can afterwards be removed, though no one is willing to guess how soon that will happen. Just how risky the operation is became evident in 1995, when excavations around the base suddenly caused the 14,000-ton tower to lurch nearly one-tenth of an inch in one night. To pull it back, 230 tons of lead | Pisa Journal; A Long List on How to Stop a Tower's Slight One |
990822_1 | may become somewhat irregular -- shorter or longer, lighter or heavier -- or she may experience premenstrual syndrome, menstrual cramps or headaches that are showing up for the first time or worse than in the past. Hot flashes may become bothersome during the day, and night sweats may disrupt her sleep, resulting in increased irritability, fatigue and difficulty concentrating. But the symptoms of perimenopause are often more subtle. According to Dr. Nancy Lee Teaff and Kim Wright Wiley, authors of ''Perimenopause: Preparing for the Change'' (Prima, Rocklin, Calif., 1996, $12.05), ''When they first begin to appear, perimenopausal symptoms may seem unrelated to each other, and women often treat each problem individually, not seeing the connection until years later.'' Among the possible symptoms are insomnia, difficulty concentrating, poor memory, reduced stamina, itchy or dry skin, wrinkling, urinary incontinence or frequency, vaginal dryness, headaches, declining libido and mood swings. ''A woman may say, 'I'm falling apart,' failing to recognize that she has only one condition, perimenopause, that is manifesting itself in many ways,'' Dr. Teaff and Ms. Wiley wrote. At the same time, other hidden changes may be taking place that can increase a woman's risk of future health problems. High levels of estrogen during a woman's childbearing years protect against heart disease, which is why women rarely develop it before they turn 50. Estrogen helps raise the blood levels of the ''good'' cholesterol, HDL, which counters arterial clogging. It also maintains the elasticity of blood vessels and diminishes the tendency of the blood to form clots. In the book ''Perimenopause: Changes in a Woman's Health After 35'' (New Harbinger, 1997, $13.95), Drs. James E. Huston and L. Darlene Lanka point out that heart disease is the leading killer of women 50 to 75 years old, claiming five times as many lives as breast cancer. Estrogen also helps maintain bone density and ward off the later development of osteoporosis. Few women realize that they begin to lose bone in their 30's; the loss merely accelerates at menopause if estrogen is not taken along with an adequate amount of calcium through food or supplements. ''During the approximately 15 years of perimenopause, you have a good shot at averting the adverse changes these two conditions can wreak on your body later in life,'' Drs. Huston and Lanka said. What You Can Do Dr. Teaff recommends that perimenopausal women who are experiencing symptoms have their | Menopause Begins Silently, Before Its Symptoms |
990810_3 | the sixth century B.C. and belonged to a citizen of the Greek island of Samos. Aristophanes, Xenophon, Plato and Aristotle all make references to Aesop in their writings. But many of the fables which are considered ''Aesopian'' are in fact stories that were added well after his supposed death. There are at least three different collations of the ancient Greek text. Mr. Temple said that he chose to use one compiled by a French scholar, Emile Chambry, that was published in 1927. ''We have taken Chambry's text to represent the 'complete' fables of Aesop for the purposes of this volume,'' Mr. Temple writes in his introduction, ''although every scholar would probably alter the text by taking away some and adding others according to his or her own personal choices.'' Mr. Temple, who is not affiliated with a university, said he had not consulted other scholars in doing his translations. Several scholars said it was not uncommon for English translators and publishers from the 18th century through World War II to expurgate earthy parts of classical works by writers like Aesop, Chaucer and Shakespeare. ''The fables began to take on a moral tone,'' said Jacob Stern, a professor of classics at the City University of New York. ''Their moral message was added later.'' Mr. Temple, who is 52, said he grew up in Kentucky and attended the University of Pennsylvania, where he studied Sanskrit. He has written eight books, including ''Conversations With Eternity,'' about ancient Greek oracles and divination techniques, and ''The Sirius Mystery,'' about extraterrestrials. His translation of the Babylonian ''Epic of Gilgamesh'' was produced at the Royal National Theater in London in 1993. He has also produced television dramas, he said. Olivia Temple is a magazine writer and a painter. Mr. Temple said that the significance of his new translation lay in the portrait it provides of classical Greece. ''We have a false picture of ancient Greece,'' he said in the interview, ''as if everyone was walking around like Plato, talking about philosophy.'' But pre-Christian Greece, Mr. Temple writes in the introduction to the book, was an agrarian society, ''a world of brutal, heartless men -- and of cunning, of wickedness, of murder, of treachery and deceit, of laughter at the misfortune of others.'' This new, unexpurgated version of Aesop's fables, Mr. Temple said, underscores '' the softening effect'' that the advent of Christianity had on the Western world. | New Translation of Aesop Finds a Still Beastlier Side |
990896_0 | Pressed by other participants in the precarious Northern Ireland peace talks, a small Protestant party with links to a paramilitary group that admitted killing three Catholics this month pulled out of the negotiations today. While the withdrawal added another note of instability to the already fragile talks, it was not seen as necessarily an irreversible setback. David Andrews, the Foreign Minister of Ireland, resisted suggestions that the peace effort was in jeopardy. ''There are no prospects whatsoever of the talks collapsing,'' he said. The group that left the talks today was the Ulster Democratic Party, the political representatives of the Ulster Freedom Fighters, which said on Friday that it had abandoned a three-year-old cease-fire and committed the three killings. ''We fully believe we are about to be expelled from the process, so there is no point in taking part,'' said Gary McMichael, the party's leader. He said the party remained committed to a peaceful resolution of the problems of Northern Ireland and expressed hope that it would be allowed to return to the table. ''We are not walking away from the process,'' he said. ''We want back into the negotiations, with the same power as all the other parties, as quickly as possible.'' Mo Mowlam, the British Secretary for Northern Ireland, said later that the party might be readmitted in a number of weeks depending on events. Since Christmas, renewed violence in the province has left 10 people dead, 8 of them Catholics. All those taking part in the negotiations have pledged themselves to non-violence and democracy. The talks involve the British and Irish Governments as well as eight Northern Irish political parties. The sides are aiming for a May deadline to produce some settlement of the sectarian conflict. The talks, which have been going on in Belfast since September, moved to London today for three days under a scheduled rotation that will take them to Dublin next month. It had been planned at the London talks to focus on a document submitted two weeks ago by Britain and Ireland in an effort to accelerate the panel's halting progress. The document contained proposals suggesting the creation of a Northern Ireland legislature and two largely consultative bodies addressing the Protestants' desire to remain a part of Britain and the Catholics' yearnings for stronger links with the Republic of Ireland. The Protestants greeted that plan warmly. But Sinn Fein, the political wing | Small Group Of Protestants Quits Talks On Ulster |
990958_1 | may become somewhat irregular -- shorter or longer, lighter or heavier -- or she may experience premenstrual syndrome, menstrual cramps or headaches that are showing up for the first time or worse than in the past. Hot flashes may become bothersome during the day, and night sweats may disrupt her sleep, resulting in increased irritability, fatigue and difficulty concentrating. But the symptoms of perimenopause are often more subtle. According to Dr. Nancy Lee Teaff and Kim Wright Wiley, authors of ''Perimenopause: Preparing for the Change'' (Prima, Rocklin, Calif., 1996, $12.05), ''When they first begin to appear, perimenopausal symptoms may seem unrelated to each other, and women often treat each problem individually, not seeing the connection until years later.'' Among the possible symptoms are insomnia, difficulty concentrating, poor memory, reduced stamina, itchy or dry skin, wrinkling, urinary incontinence or frequency, vaginal dryness, headaches, declining libido and mood swings. ''A woman may say, 'I'm falling apart,' failing to recognize that she has only one condition, perimenopause, that is manifesting itself in many ways,'' Dr. Teaff and Ms. Wiley wrote. At the same time, other hidden changes may be taking place that can increase a woman's risk of future health problems. High levels of estrogen during a woman's childbearing years protect against heart disease, which is why women rarely develop it before they turn 50. Estrogen helps raise the blood levels of the ''good'' cholesterol, HDL, which counters arterial clogging. It also maintains the elasticity of blood vessels and diminishes the tendency of the blood to form clots. In the book ''Perimenopause: Changes in a Woman's Health After 35'' (New Harbinger, 1997, $13.95), Drs. James E. Huston and L. Darlene Lanka point out that heart disease is the leading killer of women 50 to 75 years old, claiming five times as many lives as breast cancer. Estrogen also helps maintain bone density and ward off the later development of osteoporosis. Few women realize that they begin to lose bone in their 30's; the loss merely accelerates at menopause if estrogen is not taken along with an adequate amount of calcium through food or supplements. ''During the approximately 15 years of perimenopause, you have a good shot at averting the adverse changes these two conditions can wreak on your body later in life,'' Drs. Huston and Lanka said. What You Can Do Dr. Teaff recommends that perimenopausal women who are experiencing symptoms have their | Menopause Begins Silently, Before Its Symptoms |
990884_1 | destroyed from 1995 to 1996, less than in the previous year, but sharply up from the average annual levels in the rest of the decade. ''It shows the situation was not under control as the Government kept insisting over the last two years,'' said Garo Batmanian, head of the Brazilian office of the World Wildlife Fund. ''We're destroying our biodiversity. Humanity is becoming poorer.'' Earlier this month, a separate study issued by a Congressional commission showed that 22,393 square miles of the Amazon were being destroyed each year through deforestation -- which shows up on satellite images -- as well as through logging, ground fires and thinning of previously virgin forest, which may occur undetected by satellites beneath the forest canopy. The Woods Hole Research Institute, studying the same phenomenon, concluded last year that the Amazon is reaching an unprecedented level of dryness, raising the threat that rain forest could catch fire and burn out of control. The last time Government officials released deforestation figures, two years ago, they showed a 34 percent increase over the 1990-91 period. And as they did then, officials today announced a series of proposals. These included steps to regulate forest burnings and logging concessions, to appropriate large landholdings, and to coordinate policies between the Government's land reform and environmental agencies. But many of the measures, Mr. Batmanian said, lacked the money or the legislation to be effective, and represented a ''wish list'' more than a plan of action. On Tuesday, the Brazilian Congress is scheduled to vote on a bill that would establish criminal penalties for some acts of environmental harm and to grant the federal environmental agency legal authority to enforce environmental statutes. The bill has languished in Congress for seven years. Without such authority, the agency charged with protecting the environment is largely ignored by the people and industries it is supposed to regulate. According to Government figures, it collects only 6 percent of the fines it levies. While the bill, which is expected to pass, is critical to establishing an environmental policy, under pressure from the industrialists' lobby the Government watered down stiff penalties that originally included possible prison time. ''Clearly it's a long overdue step for the Brazilian Government to give its environmental agency statutory authority, but the way they're doing it -- loosening the laws, giving away the farm to the special interests -- is going to make it | Data Show Recent Burning of Amazon Is Worst Ever |
987155_3 | been put back into coverage. In recent months, the paper has begun publishing suburban tabloids two and three times a week for distant counties from a ring of new suburban bureaus, using 30 new reporters, editors and photographers. Perhaps because the changes have been so sweeping, when the paper's top editors and its publisher, Donald E. Graham, talk about what they have done, they tend to talk more about reach than reporting. ''If you drive 50 miles west of the District of Columbia you end up in a place called Fauquier County, Va., where 47 percent of all adults read The Washington Post on Sundays,'' said Mr. Graham, 52, who is also president of the Post Company, when asked to describe what his paper had accomplished. ''And if you drive 50 miles east to St. Mary's County, Md., you end up in a place where 40 percent of all adults read The Post,'' he added. What is missing in this inventory of success are accounts of the articles themselves. Even readers who love The Post complain that while the paper delivers the news with unstinting depth and breadth, it rarely surprises. ''Their definition of news is more conventional than that of The Los Angeles Times or The New York Times,'' said Thomas B. Rosenstiel, a former media critic for The Los Angeles Times and now director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism, a media watchdog group chiefly financed by the Pew Charitable Trusts. ''It's more institutional, more process oriented,'' Mr. Rosenstiel said. ''Is that necessarily because they're in Washington and government is the dominant local industry? Or is it because they are operating according to conventions?'' While the paper pays close attention to the processes of government, its management is also closely focused on the newsroom staff. In particular, newsroom managers have made a concerted effort to increase the number of black, Hispanic and Asian journalists. The effort came at a price. Tensions over race and careers were brought roughly to the surface two years ago, when an article in The New Republic portrayed The Post as a caldron of racial anger, with white staff members blaming minority preferences for stunting their careers, and blacks charging that their work was being held to a higher standard. Despite some factual errors, Mr. Downie said, the piece hit home. ''It reflected reality because we have surfaced those tensions more than any | Think Globally, Focus Locally; Seeking 'Cruising Speed', Washington Post Editors Prefer Stability to Sizzle |
987166_0 | Now that Michelle Kwan, Tara Lipinski and Nicole Bobek have finished 1-2-3 at the Olympic trials, many in the figure-skating community believe that they can also sweep the medals at next month's Olympic Games. ''We can be 1-2-3,'' said Christa Fassi, who coaches Bobek. ''I really think we have the Dream Team for these Olympics.'' Never has the United States sent to the Olympics three women who have won a national championship. Kwan won her second national title on Saturday night with a joyous performance that received perfect marks of 6 from eight of the nine judges for artistry, after a short program on Thursday that was awarded seven 6's for presentation. Combined, Kwan's performances were considered the greatest efforts at the national championships. ''They will go down in history as the best set,'' said Brian Boitano, the 1988 Olympic champion. Concerning the Winter Olympics in Nagano, Japan, it is not unprecedented for American women to win all the medals at an important competition. Kristi Yamaguchi, Tonya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan finished first, second and third, respectively, at the 1991 world championships. But several factors would seem to make an Olympic sweep unlikely. First, it may be diffcult for Kwan, Lipinski and Bobek to repeat in unison the engaging, redemptive performances they delivered on Saturday night. And even if they deserve the medals, it does not mean they will win them. The cold war is over, but judging can still play out along political fault lines. At the 1994 Winter Olympics in Lillehammer, Norway, the 5-4 judges' victory that Oksana Baiul of Ukraine achieved over Kerrigan to win the gold was a classic East versus West vote. By the same token, what is often viewed as politics may be simply a matter of taste. Not every judge appreciates the same type of skating. Some may prefer the artistic sophistication of one skater, others may prefer the technical superiority of another. Baiul mesmerized an audience; Kerrigan was technically efficient but remote. ''You have so many countries; not all of them look at skating the same way,'' said Linda Leaver, Boitano's coach. ''People are still arguing about Oksana and Nancy four years later. It's not just East-West. It's what people admire in a skater. I think the Americans will have to be slam-dunk good to sweep the medals. It will have to be indisputable.'' Besides the three Americans, only four other skaters | With U.S. Team Set, Thoughts Turn to Nagano and Another Sort of Triple |
987174_0 | On the eve of resumption of formal peace talks aimed at ending the long history of political violence in this British province, Northern Ireland was shocked today by a particularly bizarre sectarian killing. A Roman Catholic doorman, Terry Enwright, 28, was shot dead outside a Belfast night club. He was a nephew-by-marriage of Gerry Adams, the President of Sinn Fein, the Irish Republican Army's political wing. The killing occurred shortly after midnight outside a club owned by relatives of David Ervine, leader of the Progressive Unionist Party, which represents Protestant paramilitaries at the formal peace talks. Mr. Ervine and Sinn Fein officials said the killers were members of the Loyalist Volunteer Force, and the guerrilla group later asserted responsibility for the killing. The group splintered away from the Ulster Volunteer Force, the paramilitary group represented at the talks by Mr. Ervine. Tension was already high over a series of recent killings on both sides. But because of the victim's ties to major figures on both sides, the attack raised fears even higher that one of the Catholic splinter paramilitary groups -- which have never bound themselves to the cease-fire being observed by larger guerrilla groups -- would retaliate by killing Protestants. This could throw the peace effort into new turmoil. Mr. Adams told reporters this afternoon: ''I know it's important to you to reflect the fact that this young man was married to a niece of mine, but that should not be used as any excuse for killing him. He was heavily involved in community work. He was a good -- a brilliant -- Gaelic football player.'' The new killing and the confusion caused over the weekend by reports that the British would make new proposals for a political settlement were not expected to keep the formal talks from resuming here tomorrow. But they clearly dissipated the atmosphere for the compromise sought by the British and Irish Governments, the sponsors of the talks, which had set next May as a deadline for a final agreement ''It would seem that the L.V.F. were intent on killing the Catholic doormen,'' Mr. Ervine said. ''I look at this situation with awful foreboding. We are awfully devastated.'' But he indicated that his party would take part in the talks scheduled to resume on Monday, in Stormont, on the edge of Belfast under the chairmanship of former Senator George J. Mitchell. On Friday, a crisis | Kinsman of Sinn Fein Chief Killed at Protestant Club |
987148_3 | said. ''I like the attention.'' Her previous employer, a mom-and-pop publishing company, ordered her to remove any reference to the company, and she did, but felt violated and quit. ''It upset me that someone was spending so much time digging into my personal Web site and reading everything and giving it to my boss,'' Ms. Sommerfield said. ''I didn't feel like my boss needed to act like my parents.'' She quickly was hired at a large company with many Internet-savvy employees. She showed the site to her employer, who also asked her not to use the company's name. ''Almost everybody at the company has a personal Web page,'' she said. ''I am the only person who has been told, 'You may not tell anybody where you work.' I feel kind of bad crumbling under society's foot.'' Companies are accustomed to dismissing employees for misuse of computers at work. Many company policies restrict use of E-mail, limit access to offensive Web sites and prohibit disclosure of confidential information. Few policies, if any, directly address personal Web pages. The closest corollaries in the non-computer world involve dismissals ofworkers for posing nude in magazines like Playboy. Such dismissals -- of New York City police officers, Wall Street stockbrokers, even a ball girl for the Chicago Cubs -- have not been successfully challenged. ''It's an interesting dilemma,'' said Linnea B. McCord, a professor of business law at Pepperdine University. ''Tampering in people's privacy goes pretty far and gives the employer a lot of power. But if you can be fired for bad judgment for sitting in a public place in your underwear, you can be fired for sitting in your underwear on the Internet.'' Employees have some safety only if they are dismissed for a reason relating to race, sex, religion, ethnicity, age or disability. Some employees are protected by union or personal contracts that limit reasons for dismissal. State and Federal laws protect whistle-blowers, those who refuse to do something illegal, and workers who file claims for workers' compensation. Some local ordinances prohibit discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. There are no applicable First Amendment free-speech protections -- the First Amendment restricts the actions of government, not business. The employees dismissed in the Web page cases are still free to speak out about their cases -- and they do on their Web pages. Mr. Barrett and Ms. Sommerfield say they do not | It Isn't Just Big Brother Who Is Watching |
987163_3 | kilos from one olive tree and 150 kilos from another,'' said Francisco Tarifa, a burly farmer who also heads the local cooperative. ''How can you subsidize a tree? Some have one trunk, some four. They behave differently if you prune them or water them or kill the weeds.'' Any remaining respect for the officials in Brussels dissolved last year when Franz Fischler, the European Commissioner for Agriculture, visited Baena. Mr. Fischler, who is Austrian, gamely picked an olive from a branch, ate it raw like a cherry, and pronounced it good. That story is still prompting contempt in a country where everyone knows that this bitter, indigestible fruit must be carefully pressed or cured in brine for weeks to become edible. ''Having a raw olive is like eating an unplucked chicken or an uncooked potato,'' scoffed Mr. Tarifa. This hallowed tree with its whorls and silver foliage has, of course, been a mainstay of life around the Mediterranean at least since biblical times, but only in the last few decades has its treatment drastically changed. Weeping branches are getting pruned so the hydraulic arm of a tractor can reach the stem and shake it till the fruit drops. Irrigation and fertilizer systems are creeping into the groves. At the German Baena cooperative mill, conveyer belts take olives to be washed, then crushed and spun in modern machinery. Gone are the stacks of mats where the flesh was pressed till the glistening juices dripped down the sides. Today's oil is stored, not in clay jars, but in stainless steel. For the Baena region, the next step is to take on Italy, which buys almost half of Spain's oil exports and then bottles and resells them under prestigious Italian names. ''We've been great at producing, but bad at selling ourselves,'' said Mr. Tarifa, demonstrating how his cooperative is copying some of Italy's best sales gimmicks. He got permission from the Duke of Baena, who lives in Madrid, to use the duke's name and coat of arms. ''There it is, on our grand reserve,'' he said, holding up a cut-glass bottle worthy of any boutique. ''And, of course, the cloudier the better.'' Just one thought: Did Mr. Tarifa ever put butter on his table? ''Butter,'' said Mr. Tarifa, twisting his face. ''It's terrible for your health.'' He paused to find something worse. ''Putting butter in food,'' he said darkly, ''is a mortal sin.'' | Baena Journal; No Olive Branch in the Embattled Olive Groves |
988654_1 | and neglect. ''What they do is not rocket science,'' said Michael Petit, deputy director of the Child Welfare League of America. ''It's way harder than rocket science.'' On the front lines of calamity, caseworkers like Ms. Diaz-DeJesus have no energy for debating the age-old conundrum of child welfare: to preserve biological families or commit more children to foster care. They are barely aware of new Federal legislation that makes it easier than it has been in decades to end parental rights. Ms. Diaz-DeJeus has more mundane concerns. How will she find time to accompany Maria R., the mother of three, to a hearing for her first grader, suspended for slashing the seats of a school bus with a box cutter? How will she persuade this 25-year-old woman that a puppy is an extravagance when she can barely feed her children? And how will she teach her to say ''Be quiet'' instead of ''Shut up'' to her children? By conservative estimates, nearly 1,000 children in the United States are killed by their parents or guardians each year. For every one killed, 500 more are severely injured. And 500 others suffer lesser injuries or are not fed, supervised, educated, immunized or kept clean. The children who grow up, studies show, are found disproportionately in prisons, mental hospitals and drug treatment programs. ''They all come from the same cookie cutter,'' Mr. Petit said, citing studies in Sacramento and Hennepin County, Minn., that reveal dramatic correlations between the child welfare and criminal justice systems. ''If you don't get childhood right, it's hard to get adulthood right.'' The Case Too Many Facts All Too Familiar Solutions are easy when a child has been molested, shaken into a coma or yanked until a bone snaps. The hard cases are the murky ones, when an investigator, responding to a complaint called into an emergency phone line, discovers a marijuana-smoking mother who has a bad attitude, a fetid apartment and belligerent children. That is what the department found, in March 1996, when it began a file on Maria R. and her three children, whose circumstances, experts say, are typical of the hundreds of thousands of child welfare cases across the nation. (The department, required by law to protect the confidentiality of its clients, would not allow full identification of the family) Maria R., born in Puerto Rico and now 25, is poor, uses drugs episodically, was pregnant before | ON THE CASE -- A special report.; Child Welfare Foot Soldier Treads Fine Line |
988309_2 | to pour into Prague after the collapse of Communism. The old structures are still there, and in some cases have been well restored. But the context in which they are seen is being inexorably changed by signs, billboards, vast expanses of outdoor cafes, fast-food joints and souvenir shops. Mr. Spicka is particularly outraged by the fashion for fresh paint. Of the parliament buildings, a group of medieval and Baroque buildings originally used as apartment houses, he said: ''They were much better when they were monochrome.'' He is not happy, either, about the exterior buff color of the newly restored Obecni Dum (Municipal House). And he is angered by what he calls the Legoland colors that have been used on the exteriors of private houses. Even where the colors are basically pastel -- pale pinks, subdued greens or eggshell blue -- the paint itself is damaging. Non porous modern paints, he said, are suitable for new houses with dry plaster but are unsuitable for the walls of old buildings that have been impregnated with fumes and dampness. Such acrylic paints trap moisture and eventually can cause walls to crumble. In Wenceslas Square, neon lights give the skyline a garish look. New stores peddling jeans, T-shirts and trendy housewares have transformed the thoroughfare into a tourist's shopping nirvana. Even DKNY, with a large black-and-white flag flapping in the wind, is there. Farther along the street, McDonald's and Dunkin' Donuts have taken up residence. And all around the area, currency exchanges with glass fronts and currency boards have been gouged into the facades of centuries-old buildings. On top of the tourist clutter on the square, architects recently unveiled their drawings for a modern office building, featuring bold triangles, circles and squares, that is under construction across the street from the famous statue of St. Wenceslas on horseback. The computer-generated drawings of the stark facade have raised questions among preservationists about why the city fathers approved the design. (The recently opened Frank Gehry office building, nicknamed ''Fred and Ginger,'' is widely accepted as a fine example of modern architecture.) In general, Mr. Spicka said, the people of Prague appreciate the historic character of their city. But after decades of being deprived of the chance to make money, they have allowed the market to take over. ''Unfortunately, the sponsoring of preservation has not yet become fashionable in this country,'' he said. TRAVEL ADVISORY: CORRESPONDENT'S REPORT | Is the Golden City Taking On Too Many Colors? |
988612_1 | Another Fox special, ''Close Call: Cheating Death,'' exhibited a curious sense of decorum: One scene shows a member of a bomb squad leaning over a chamber where a possible explosive is stored, only to have it detonate in his face. The explosion itself is repeated seven different times throughout the program. Many of the repetitions are in slow motion. The camera focuses on the gore following the accident, featuring a close-up of the man's hand, which is missing three fingers as a result of the blast. Interestingly, the excessive graphic-ness in this scene is followed by a later sequence in which a man, in the process of rescuing his friend from a helicopter crash, inadvertently reveals the top portion of his buttocks, which are digitally blurred. One can only assume that the creators of this program felt that there was no problem showing viewers a man having his face blown up seven different times, but that viewers needed to be protected from the image of a ''butt crack.'' The study said sensationalistic nature documentaries commonly employ devices like repetition, ominous music and slow motion to heighten viewers' fears: For instance, one of the most graphic scenes in [Fox's] ''When Animals Attack III'' shows a bull impaling a woman with its horns and tossing her through the street like a rag doll. By the time the segment concludes the attack has been shown no less than three different times. Does manipulative production count? You bet: One noteworthy instance of this effect concerns an attack by a house cat. When it aired on [CBS's] ''The World's Most Dangerous Animals Part III,'' the attacking cat was portrayed as vicious and deadly. Interestingly, the exact same footage was shown on a different program as a comedic moment when it aired on NBC's ''TV Censored Bloopers.'' TV series, as opposed to specials, were found to be less violent than those the year before. Surveying 107 of them on the four networks, the report found that some popular prime-time shows like ''N.Y.P.D. Blue'' presented violence appropriately, taking pains to show its consequences. But others, particularly CBS's ''Walker, Texas Ranger'' starring Chuck Norris, were beyond the pale: [In the episode of Nov. 2, 1996,] Walker is forced to confront an old nemesis from the Vietnam War, Randy Shrader, who has become a high-priced soldier of fortune. After stealing a top-secret military helicopter to use in a drug-smuggling | Word for Word / Mayhem on the Tube; Television's Most Violent: It's Payback Time |
988744_1 | in the third world to convince the media, the public and policy makers that similar changes are not needed. The tobacco companies have long lobbied policy makers here and abroad to prevent passage of antitobacco measures. But in the last three years they have sharpened their campaigns overseas to influence how tobacco-related issues are portrayed in the news or presented to the public, and there are signs that some of those efforts are paying off. For example, British-American Tobacco, which is owned by B.A.T. Industries, has had seminars at luxury resorts worldwide at which it has offered foreign journalists data that play down the health risks of smoking. To head off indoor smoking restrictions, large cigarette producers have also begun public relations campaigns abroad that recycle the same theme. And advertising agencies like Leo Burnett Inc. of Chicago, the creator of the legendary Marlboro Man campaign, have used their talents on behalf of tobacco producers to thwart antismoking programs outside the United States. In the Philippines, for example, Leo Burnett officials proposed a public relations strategy to Philip Morris in late 1994 aimed at removing ''cancer awareness and prevention'' as a ''key concern'' of health department officials in that country, an internal agency document shows. Though a Leo Burnett spokesman said that Philip Morris did not buy the proposal, agency executives took credit in the document for helping that year to ''neutralize'' the effects of a Philippine Government plan intended to reduce smoking by children. The document also stated that the agency had ''propagated studies that point to other possible causes of lung cancer.'' Some tobacco executives see the proposed settlement in the United States not as a blueprint for a new worldwide approach to cigarettes but solely a concession to legal realities in America. Under the plan, in exchange for protection from lawsuits, the tobacco companies agreed to finance antismoking campaigns, restrict marketing and pay penalties if youth smoking does not decline, among other things. But the document is virtually silent about the cigarette makers' overseas operations, an area that antismoking advocates want to see addressed in the coming Congressional debate on the proposal. John Bloom, manager of international issues for the Coalition for Tobacco-Free Kids in Washington, said the proposed settlement did not address issues like whether tobacco producers should be required to acknowledge the harmful nature of their products wherever they do business. The Congressional debate over | Tobacco Industry, Conciliatory in U.S., Goes on the Attack in the Third World |
988439_1 | parents of the children one evening a week. One mother from Merrick, whose 9-year-old son attended the course, said the one to two ratio of instructor to child was what made her son learn transitional and communication skills that he had found difficult with other teachers and counselors. ''They didn't just play ball,'' she said. ''They broke down the teaching of the sport into different steps.'' The course cost $7,000. Several scholarships were given for less. Howard Abakoff, director of A.D.H.D. services at New York University's Child Study Center, said an extension of the center is expected to open in Nassau County next summer. In addition, the center will be training teachers to help children with the disorder in three North Shore school districts as part of its Alternative Learning Program next year. Most doctors agree a behavioral program is needed for every child with the disorder, whether or not they are taking medication. Dr. Harold Koplewicz, a child psychiatrist with the N.Y.U. Child Study Center and a leading expert on attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, said: ''If these types of clinics are available, then you can tailor the treatment. We don't recommend long-term psychotherapy. Most A.D.H.D. kids are not there to gain insights about themselves. You want to give them techniques.'' Usually, parents first encounter the possibility of attention deficit disorder or its subcategory, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, when teachers observe a child having problems focusing, reading or behaving in the classroom. Schools forbid their teachers from offering a diagnosis, leaving parents anxious and uncertain about their child's problem. Parents must decide to investigate A.D.H.D. themselves by going to a doctor. Then comes the confusing and costly tasks of choosing the right doctors and of getting a diagnosis. Typically, a selection of doctors is assembled, including some combination of clinical psychologists, neuropsychologists, child psychiatrists, pediatric neurologists and psychotherapists. Despite this level of expertise, the diagnosis itself can be tricky when linked or confused with visual or auditory processing problems, language or learning disabilities, or a host of other behavioral symptoms known as comorbid disorders. Children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder fall into three categories: predominantly hyperactive impulsive, predominantly inattentive and a combination of these. The symptoms, which include lack of organizational skills, fidgeting, and running or climbing excessively, can range from the extreme, where children cannot get dressed or are extremely aggressive, to the mild, where a child has difficulty | New Focus on Attention Deficit Disorder |
988672_2 | anything except rainy conditions. They did not, they protested, train for air-conditioning. They did not train to test themselves against the cartoon generation, either, but this year, there is a veritable teen-age invasion. No matter that Martina Hingis, the women's defending champion, is still a mere teen-ager herself. To the newcomers, the 17-year-old Hingis may be a contemporary but she is no ally; she is merely another incumbent waiting to be dethroned by the likes of Croatia's 15-year-old Mirjana Lucic, the 16-year-old Anna Kournikova, and the threatening sisters from the United States, the Williams girls. The 17-year-old Venus Williams, who was runner-up to Hingis at the United States Open and has open designs on the No. 1 ranking, beat Hingis this week en route to a runner-up finish at the Sydney International. The 16-year-old Serena Williams joked about having a multiple personality and evil alter egos named Selena and Sophia -- names that the confused news media occasionally stuck her with last fall while she tuned up for this year's Grand Slam debut by walloping Top 10 types like Monica Seles and Mary Pierce in Chicago and then advancing to the semifinals in Sydney. The sisters will not advance so far together this time. The draw has them headed for a second-round match with each other should both win their openers. Venus must first defeat Alexia Dechaume-Balleret of France, while Serena is paired against sixth-seeded Irina Spirlea of Romania. Spirlea's last Grand Slam match was a semifinal loss to Venus Williams at last year's United States Open, during which Spirlea created a stir by bumping Williams during a change-over. The men's side of the Australian draw also has its babes in arms. The 16-year-old Lleyton Hewitt, who stunned Andre Agassi two weeks ago in Adelaide, is actually one of several homegrown contenders for the championship. Their presence turns the former Flinders Park into a veritable playground, which seems quite fitting considering the Australian Open's relative kiddie status beside the three other Grand Slam events. In these parts, international veterans are a vanishing breed. Besides Becker, prominent names on the list of absentees are the former champions like Steffi Graf, whose season-ending health problems began here last year, and Seles, whose attentions to her ailing father/coach, Karolj, mandated her withdrawal from this event, which she last won in 1996. Also missing will be the 1996 French Open champion, Yevgeny Kafelnikov; the | Australian Crucible: Blowflies, Heat and Teen-Agers |
988561_2 | service.'' The traditional tuneup started to become obsolete with the Clean Air Act of 1970, which required the installation of P.C.V. valves to keep oily emissions inside the engine. Changes in the rules in 1972 forced the use of catalytic converters and unleaded gasoline to reduce emissions of unburned hydrocarbons, carbon monoxide and nitrous oxides. Increasingly tighter regulations led manufacturers to install carburetors that could not be adjusted or tampered with, and idle speed and air-fuel ratios were set at the factory. Carburetors were eventually replaced by very precise, very reliable electronic fuel-injection systems that precisely meter fuel to each cylinder under all conditions, from frigid starts in Minnesota to trailer-towing across Death Valley in July. The old-style ignition distributor could not provide the consistently hot spark needed for the leaner air-fuel mixtures required by clean air rules. So electronic ignition systems replaced the distributor and eliminated the points-and-condenser tuneup. Most new cars and trucks have computer-controlled electronic ignition systems with no moving parts, so there is nothing to adjust or replace. The last old-technology part in the system was the conventional steel spark plug, and it has been replaced in virtually all new engines with platinum-tipped spark plugs that can last a very long time without misfiring or deteriorating. But even platinum-tipped spark plugs may need to be replaced more quickly after prolonged stop-and-go driving or if they have been fouled by the use of bad gasoline. With modern metallurgy, precision machining, electronics and catalytic converters, today's cars produce 97 percent less hydrocarbon, carbon monoxide and nitrous oxide emissions than a typical engine in 1970. The Government requires that emissions control systems not only function correctly when new, but throughout their ''useful lives.'' Manufacturers must warrant that every component will work for five years or 50,000 miles with no degradation, and for 10 years or 100,000 miles with some degradation. These regulations were phased in starting in 1994, and have applied to all cars and light trucks since 1996. Most 1998 models also have second-generation on-board diagnostics -- known in the industry as OBD-II -- that keep electronic records of the system's performance for the life of the car. A dashboard light comes on if any component fails, even for a moment. In addition to the demise of the traditional tuneup, the old-fashioned ''lube job'' has faded away. Most modern cars and trucks have ''lubed for life'' suspension systems. | The 100,000-Mile Tuneup: Just Make Some Pit Stops Along the Way |
988651_1 | in the third world to convince the media, the public and policy makers that similar changes are not needed. The tobacco companies have long lobbied policy makers here and abroad to prevent passage of antitobacco measures. But in the last three years they have sharpened their campaigns overseas to influence how tobacco-related issues are portrayed in the news or presented to the public, and there are signs that some of those efforts are paying off. For example, British-American Tobacco, which is owned by B.A.T. Industries, has had seminars at luxury resorts worldwide at which it has offered foreign journalists data that play down the health risks of smoking. To head off indoor smoking restrictions, large cigarette producers have also begun public relations campaigns abroad that recycle the same theme. And advertising agencies like Leo Burnett Inc. of Chicago, the creator of the legendary Marlboro Man campaign, have used their talents on behalf of tobacco producers to thwart antismoking programs outside the United States. In the Philippines, for example, Leo Burnett officials proposed a public relations strategy to Philip Morris in late 1994 aimed at removing ''cancer awareness and prevention'' as a ''key concern'' of health department officials in that country, an internal agency document shows. Though a Leo Burnett spokesman said that Philip Morris did not buy the proposal, agency executives took credit in the document for helping that year to ''neutralize'' the effects of a Philippine Government plan intended to reduce smoking by children. The document also stated that the agency had ''propagated studies that point to other possible causes of lung cancer.'' Some tobacco executives see the proposed settlement in the United States not as a blueprint for a new worldwide approach to cigarettes but solely a concession to legal realities in America. Under the plan, in exchange for protection from lawsuits, the tobacco companies agreed to finance antismoking campaigns, restrict marketing and pay penalties if youth smoking does not decline, among other things. But the document is virtually silent about the cigarette makers' overseas operations, an area that antismoking advocates want to see addressed in the coming Congressional debate on the proposal. John Bloom, manager of international issues for the Coalition for Tobacco-Free Kids in Washington, said the proposed settlement did not address issues like whether tobacco producers should be required to acknowledge the harmful nature of their products wherever they do business. The Congressional debate over | Tobacco Industry, Conciliatory in U.S., Goes on the Attack in the Third World |
988984_0 | Gerry Adams and a delegation from his Sinn Fein party voiced their strong objections today to a new British-Irish negotiating blueprint in a ''frank'' meeting with Prime Minister Tony Blair. But they said they remained committed to participation in the current peace talks in Belfast. They also said they would not be driven from the negotiations by the actions of renegade sectarian groups that have killed six people since Christmas and have promised more violence to drive home their objections to the talks and cease-fires being observed by the larger paramilitary groups. ''We are still very positive about the peace process,'' Martin McGuinness, the chief negotiator for Sinn Fein, the political wing of the Irish Republican Army, said after the session at 10 Downing Street today. ''There are things which are wrong which we are trying to change, but we are hanging on there.'' The number of deaths rose to six this morning with the shooting of a man with links to one of the Protestant parties in the talks as he worked in his carpet shop in the Belfast suburb of Dunmurry. The victim, Jim Guiney, was gunned down at point-blank range by two men, one dressed in a wig, who then ran out to a waiting getaway car. The Irish National Liberation Army, a breakaway Catholic group that objects to the Irish Republican Army's cease-fire, claimed responsibility for the killing. The same group started the current cycle of violence with the killing of Billy Wright, 37, the jailed leader of a Protestant paramilitary group, in the Maze prison outside Belfast on Dec. 27. Mr. Wright's group, the breakaway Loyalist Volunteer Force, has avenged its leader's slaying by killing four Catholics, with the most recent killing on Sunday. Fergal McCusker, 28, a building worker from the County Londonderry town of Maghera who had just returned from living in the United States, was shot to death outside a Catholic church as he returned home from a pub. In the call claiming responsibility, a member of the group said, ''This is not the last.'' The meeting today, the second time in six weeks that Mr. Adams and his top aides have been to the British Prime Minister's official residence, focused on the party's anxiety over a document submitted to the talks a week ago by the British and Irish Governments in an effort to give the halting talks what they called | Gerry Adams, Meeting Blair, Objects to New Ulster Blueprint |
984404_0 | This is one Southeast Asian country that has mostly dodged the economic crisis that is sweeping through the region. It is too poor to feel the pain. Here in this settlement of thatched homes and parched fields, a good year is a year without drought or flood, when the harvest is just enough to feed the villagers. The last good year was 1993. Placid and beautiful under what seems eternal sunshine, Laos is a nation of hungry people whose single annual rice crop, already too small for its needs, is devastated almost every year by natural disasters. By most international measures, this is one of the 10 poorest countries in the world, a landlocked Communist nation of 4.6 million people whose chief natural resources are its shrinking forests and the potential hydropower of its rivers. The gross domestic product last year was just $1.7 billion. Chronic malnutrition stunts the growth of nearly half the nation's children. The subsistence farmers who make up more than 80 percent of the population were hardly touched by Asia's decade of rapid growth and have hardly felt the downturn that is squeezing Laos's neighbors around the region. ''With an economy so desperately poor -- the annual income is $350 -- and most of its population in subsistence agriculture, it's been insulated from the region's problems,'' a Western diplomat said. The country's currency has fallen along with that of its bigger neighbor, Thailand, but its imports and foreign trade are minimal. Gasoline prices have risen, but few people have cars. There has been no stock market crash in Laos; there is no stock market. On this sunny day in Na Tao, 30 miles north of Vientiane, the capital, on one of the country's few rural roads, village elders had spread straw mats on the ground for a feast of fish, vegetables, rice and locally brewed rice wine. Ducks, chickens and turkeys pecked around the edges of the feast for scraps. ''There is no irrigation here so I have only one harvest a year,'' said Kham Phao, the headmaster of a nearby secondary school who also farms about two and a half acres of rice land. ''It's just enough to feed the nine people in my family.'' The villagers were celebrating the reopening of a one-room elementary school that was destroyed two years ago in a storm. The Government had no money to rebuild it, but Somsanouk | Na Tao Journal; Asia's Wealth Ebbs, but Laos Is Too Poor to Care |
984463_3 | by a passenger. The administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration, Jane Garvey, said in a statement that the changes would ''bring security for air travelers in this country to a new level of effectiveness.'' The changes follow the recommendation of an aviation safety and security commission, headed by Vice President Al Gore, that was established after the crash in July 1996 of TWA Flight 800, a jumbo jet that exploded shortly after takeoff from John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York. At that time, the Federal Aviation Administration and other experts believed that the TWA plane had been brought down by a bomb. Now investigators say they are fairly confident that the cause of the explosion was mechanical or electrical failure, but airlines and airports around the country are still changing procedures and installing new equipment in an effort to improve security. Various companies have developed machines to scan bags, some with multiple X-rays that are integrated by a computer, others that sniff for nearly infinitesimal signs of explosives. But these are expensive and too slow to search all bags. Mr. Husseini contended that better equipment would eventually be needed. Airlines tried using a profiling system to stop hijacking, he said, and that has not been entirely successful. ''What stopped hijacking was putting everyone through a metal detector,'' he said. ''They should put everybody's luggage through new high-tech machines.'' That would cost the airlines money, Mr. Husseini said, but would be far more effective in protecting the public. Gregory T. Nojeim, a lobbyist with the A.C.L.U., said passengers who ''fit the profile'' could face public embarrassment, like having their luggage searched in front of other passengers, or could face intrusive personal questioning or being escorted from the check-in counter to the airport gate by security personnel. But people who fit the profile might never know it, even if they or their luggage were handled differently. For example, the airline might run the bags of such people through a sophisticated scanner, and might double-check that if such a person checked a bag, the person actually boarded the flight. A spokeswoman for the A.C.L.U. said the organization would analyze the complaints received through its new Web site to look for patterns that might show illegal discrimination. About 100 people complained in 1997, a spokeswoman said. A spokesman at the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee said it had received about 200 complaints in 1997. | Airlines Criticized for Plans to Flag Suspicious Travelers |
984449_1 | ''It's not unusual when we get these northeasters or similar types of storms that we get a lot of incidents of parapets, parts of balconies or other parts popping loose,'' said Gaston Silva, the city's Buildings Commissioner. ''What is unusual is that this all happened at the same time as Madison Avenue, which was very dramatic,'' Mr. Silva said, referring to the office tower where a ton of bricks fell to the street earlier this month, slightly injuring two people. ''And then we had the building collapse on 42d Street. So when all of these other smaller things happen, it looks like some sort of pattern. It gets more attention than it normally does.'' But the incidents have also once again raised questions about whether the city should, or can, keep a closer watch on the maintenance of its aging architecture. While pieces of bricks and stone commonly fall from buildings in the city and draw little attention, such mishaps have generated heated debate and even prompted the passage of sweeping new laws when they have injured or killed pedestrians. In 1979, after the death of a Barnard College freshman struck by falling stone at 115th Street and Broadway, the city created Local Law 10, which requires owners of buildings taller than six stories to hire engineers or architects every five years to inspect facades and parapets facing public walkways. But in two of the recent incidents -- the one at 540 Madison Avenue in which part of a brick facade crumbled on Dec. 7, and one Tuesday afternoon in which a piece of parapet fell from the Church of Scientology building on 46th Street between Broadway and Eighth Avenue -- the buildings' owners had failed to file reports of the self-inspection. And though the reports were due last February, the city had not compelled either owner to file them. The owners of the Madison Avenue tower had been cited for the failure, as had the Church of Scientology. But Ilyse Fink, a spokeswoman for the Department of Buildings, said officials had now begun to allow owners much more time, in some cases several months, to explain themselves before they are summoned to a hearing of the city's Environmental Control Board. That board decides whether rules have been broken and can impose a monthly fine of $150 until reports are filed. The reason, she said, is that the hearings can | That Flurry of Falling Brick? It's Coincidence, Chicken Little |
986360_2 | they might have supported some academic research on the genetic engineering of tobacco, F.D.A. officials have said. But internal cigarette company documents clearly show that top executives of both Brown & Williamson and B.A.T. were involved in plans to both develop genetically engineered tobacco with high nicotine levels and to commercialize such products long before they were ever questioned by F.D.A. officials. The documents, which were turned over by B.A.T. in connection with smoking-related lawsuits filed by state attorneys general, reflect meetings of the Tobacco Strategy Review Team, a group headed by top officials of B.A.T. and its tobacco subsidiaries including Brown & Williamson. The documents have been obtained by the Justice Department as part of its investigation. Company officials who attended meetings of the group in the late 1980's and early 1990's included Patrick Sheehy, then the chairman of B.A.T.; Raymond J. Pritchard, then the chairman of Brown & Williamson, and Martin Broughton, now the chief executive of B.A.T., the documents show. One document, minutes of a November 1989 meeting, said a strain of genetically engineered tobacco, code-named Y-1 and yielding ''high nicotine and low tar, had been developed exclusively for Brown & Williamson'' by DNA Plant Technology, a subsidiary of the DNAP Holding Corporation that develops genetically engineered fruits and vegetables. At a 1990 meeting of the group, Mr. Pritchard told top B.A.T. officials that it had ''2 million pounds of Y-1 tobacco and would be consumer testing cigarettes with a low-tar nicotine ratio during the autumn,'' another document says. Later that year, Mr. Pritchard noted that tests involving products containing Y-1 were under way, another document shows. When F.D.A. investigators visited Brown & Williamson in May 1994, they were not aware of the Y-1 project, but learned about it a short time later from an informer. In June 1994, Brown & Williamson officials told agency officials that it had imported five million pounds of Y-1 tobacco from Brazil and used some of it in five brands of cigarettes in 1993 and 1994. Brown & Williamsom officials have insisted that the nicotine levels in cigarettes containing Y-1 were the same as those in conventional cigarettes. Separately, lawyers close to a smoking-related lawsuit brought by Texas State officials against the tobacco industry said the parties were involved in out-of-court settlement talks that were expected to be completed soon. Jury selection in the case is scheduled to start on Monday. | File Suggests A Possibility Of Deception On Tobacco |
984767_1 | will eventually succumb to the same forces that have killed off other manufacturing trades in the area. In the last 15 years, New Jersey's share of the domestic market for embroidery has declined to 70 percent from 90 percent, according to a 1996 report by the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken. Foreign and domestic competition and the more austere fashion trends of recent years have driven a number of family-owned companies out of business. While some manufacturers take heart from recent signs that embellishment is returning to women's apparel, many others are so demoralized that they have ignored offers of state aid to help them modernize their operations. ''People don't have the appetite to put more money into the business,'' said Stanley Kotkin, the president of Dako Lace, a 41-year-old company in West New York. Cy Thanikarry, the director of the New Jersey division of economic development, acknowledged that the industry had been slow to grab the life preserver extended by the state. ''I am disappointed because I still believe that this industry has tremendous potential,'' he said. Founded more than a century ago by Swiss immigrants seeking proximity to New York City's garment factories, the embroidery industry in northeastern New Jersey has provided work for successive waves of new arrivals. Around the turn of the century, hand-operated looms were replaced by automated machines, which were soon imported on a large scale, turning hundreds of Swiss, Austrian and German immigrants into manufacturers. In recent decades, most of the workers -- including those who start out on the lowest rung as ''shuttlers,'' loading bobbins of yarn into boat-shaped shuttles -- have come from Spanish-speaking countries. Northeastern New Jersey was well suited to the industry because the 40,000-pound machines could be anchored in the bedrock of the Palisades to keep the needles from vibrating. Most of the looms are programmed by punchings, with the arrangement of the holes determining whether the fabric is to be transformed into, say, so-called Venise lace, in which the background fabric will later be burned away, or eyelet embroidery with tiny holes, or a loosely stitched embroidered panel that will be used to decorate a bra. Today, some of the punchings on the old machines have been replaced by computer disks, but Deerbrook is the only manufacturer in the region with the latest electronic Schiffli machine, named for the shuttles, which look like small boats, or | In New Jersey, a Delicate Industry Unravels |
991779_2 | are open, and this is why it is necessary to intensify the search for a diplomatic solution.'' Yves Doutriaux, a spokesman for Mr. Vedrine, said before the conversation between the two Presidents today that ''there has been no change in France's position.'' But American officials said France had now made clear that it is willing to be closely associated with American warnings to Iraq, even while hoping that force would not have to be used. ''The French have said what they have to say in a more helpful way than ever before,'' an American official said. ''They are also aware of the value of unanimity in the Security Council.'' Russia, which has a permanent seat in the Council, said again today that it was opposed to the use of force in the current crisis, as is China. In October, France, Russia and three other nations abstained from a United States-supported Security Council resolution threatening new international sanctions if Iraq did not cooperate more fully with inspections to insure that it stopped making or trying to make nuclear, chemical and biological weapons and destroyed all stocks and factories. These would be in addition to the economic sanctions imposed after the war in the Persian Gulf in 1991. Iraq then tried to bar Americans from the inspection teams, and American officials said the split in the Security Council had encouraged the confrontation. France, siding with Russia, argued then that American implacability toward Mr. Hussein was driving him to defy the United Nations resolutions. If Iraq knew that complying would get the economic sanctions lifted, the French argued, it might have a reason to cooperate. That remains France's position today, with Mr. Hussein again defying the inspection process. But French officials now say they share American irritation with his behavior. ''We don't understand what he thinks he is doing,'' an official in the decision-making process said. ''We believe the Security Council should show great firmness and make clear to the Iraqis that they can't dictate to the international community.'' After talks with Secretary General Kofi Annan of the United Nations in Paris on Tuesday, Mr. Chirac said he supported doubling the amount of oil Iraq is allowed to sell, now $2 billion worth every six months, to pay for food, medicine and civilian needs. Officials said he mentioned this proposal to Mr. Clinton in the telephone conversation tonight. STANDOFF WITH IRAQ: IN PARIS | Backing U.S., France Warns Iraqis to Yield on Arms Inspections |
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