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758765_0 | To the Editor: Last year's killing of a bird watcher by a cougar in a state park near San Diego was certainly tragic (news article, April 23). But such incidents are as rare as they are tragic. Since 1890, there have been only 13 fatal attacks by cougars on people in North America. Information we have compiled indicates that for every person killed by a cougar, there were 1,317 people killed by lightning, 333 by bees and 1,200 in hunting accidents. Dogs, rattlesnakes and even deer are more dangerous. The hunting lobby is using the rare cougar attack on a person as a political weapon to open a trophy season on the animals -- a goal rebuffed by voters in a 1990 state ballot initiative. Voters recognized that random killing of cougars by trophy hunters does nothing to minimize the already remote risk of a cougar attack. In fact, nearly half of 20th-century cougar attacks in North America have been on Vancouver Island, British Columbia -- one of the most heavily hunted areas on the continent. The Humane Society accepts that individual wild animals judged to be a threat to people should be removed. But the injurious act of one should not provide license to wreak vengeance on other members of an animal population. We are encroaching on their habitat, and we must respect that they should have a place to live as well. WAYNE PACELLE V.P., Government Affairs & Media Humane Society of the United States Washington, April 24, 1995 | Rare Cougar Attack Is No License to Shoot |
754445_2 | much of this can be politically tolerated is uncertain at best. Any form of energy tax in the United States, for instance, seems a dead issue for the foreseeable future. For poorer countries, the stakes are especially high; they need fossil fuels to develop their economies and raise their standards of living. These countries have steadfastly and so far successfully resisted having specific emission reduction targets and timetables imposed on them. The planned talks on reducing greenhouse gases after the year 2000 will apply only to industrialized countries and the former Soviet bloc, but the door was left open in Berlin for more explicit measures by developing countries after 1997. Environmentalists had feared that the developing countries might close the door, but they did not. In fact, the developing countries softened what had been their implacable opposition to allowing rich countries to get credit toward meeting their reduction targets by providing technology or money to help poor countries reduce theirs -- for example, by investing in an energy-efficiency project. Pilot projects in this "joint implementation" arrangement will now be allowed on a voluntary basis, but no credit will be assigned during the pilot phase. Tim Wirth, the Under Secretary of State who headed an American delegation, called this breakthrough Berlin's "signature item." Developing countries make essentially a moral argument for requiring more of the richer nations, and sooner. They point out that the richer nations are responsible for most of the carbon dioxide emitted so far and that their emissions per person far outweigh those of third world countries. The United States, for example, is the world's largest source of emissions. As of 1991, the nation's per capita emissions of nearly 20 metric tons a year were almost 10 times those of China. But that is expected to change dramatically. China, with its huge coal reserves, could well become the world's largest source of emissions in 25 years, according to a new study by Yale University's Center for Environmental Law and Policy. Other developing countries are also expected to increase their share of global emissions, and the United Nations projects that without further controls, they will far surpass the richer nations' combined total some time in the next century. The Yale study "shows that the impacts from the developing countries can no longer be ignored as they have been to date and were at Rio," said Daniel C. Esty, the | Climate Talks Enter Harder Phase of Cutting Back Emissions |
754955_0 | Canada, France, Britain and the 15-nation European Union have started an unusual campaign to block a bill in Congress that would tighten the trade embargo against Cuba, saying the bill would unjustifiably punish foreign companies that have dealings with Havana. These allies assert that the bill, sponsored by Senator Jesse Helms, the North Carolina Republican who is chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, would bring improper pressure on other countries to adhere to Washington's policies by, for example, barring any country that imports Cuban sugar from selling sugar to the United States. The Europeans and Canada have threatened to retaliate if their companies are punished by the legislation. The European Union warned in a letter to Congressional leaders that "the collective effects of these provisions have the potential to cause grave and damaging effects to bilateral E.U.-U.S. relations." To protest the Helms bill, and a companion bill in the House introduced by Representative Dan Burton, Republican of Indiana, the countries have issued diplomatic protests, complained to Trade Representative Mickey Kantor, and sent letters to Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich and to Senator Bob Dole, the majority leader. In a note to the State Department, Canada said, "Should these bills become law, the legislation would constitute an objectionable attempt to extend U.S. measures against Cuba beyond U.S. jurisdiction and would constitute an illegitimate intrusion upon third countries." The bills would deny visas to any foreigner whose company buys or rents property that Cuba expropriated from an American and would prohibit foreign-owned subsidiaries of American companies from lending money to any foreign person or company that deals with such confiscated property. The European Union's representative to the United States, Andreas van Agt, and France's Ambassador, Jacques Andreani, sent a letter to Mr. Gingrich and Mr. Dole, saying, the European Union "cannot accept that the U.S. unilaterally determines and restricts European Union economic and commercial relations with any foreign nation that has not been collectively determined by the U.N. Security Council as a threat to peace." Clinton Administration officials say they are reviewing the Helms-Burton bill to determine whether to support it. Several officials said they were sympathetic with the bill's goal of intensifying pressure on Fidel Castro, but they expressed concern that the bill would enrage American allies by penalizing them for dealing with Cuba. Administration officials say they plan to work with Congress to change provisions they find objectionable | Allies of U.S. Seek to Block Bill on Cuba |
754922_1 | Ireland peace talks. The effort has been snagged in recent weeks by a dispute between Britain and Sinn Fein over the agenda for talks that would have Sinn Fein officials meet publicly for the first time with a British official about the crucial issue of disarming of the I.R.A. The Sinn Fein president, Gerry Adams, has insisted that the British agree to discuss not only decommissioning the I.R.A. arsenal, but also "demilitarization" of the north by Britain. The meeting is not expected to take place until after Easter. In confirming today in Belfast that 400 more troops would leave, in addition to the 400 whose departure was announced a month ago, Sir Patrick Mayhew, the Northern Ireland Secretary, clearly seemed to be responding to Sinn Fein's demands for "demilitarization." After the withdrawals, Britain will still have about 18,000 troops in the North. The I.R.A. guerrilla force of about 400 men has an arsenal estimated at 100 tons of weapons, including explosives. The decision of the Irish Government to release more prisoners means that Ireland has now made 21 early releases since the I.R.A. cease-fire began on Sept. 1. The I.R.A. calls the convicts political prisoners. The Dublin Government notes that they have been convicted of crimes involving murder of police, I.R.A. fund-raising robberies and gun-running. The Irish and British actions came within a week of Easter, when the I.R.A. holds marches to commemorate the 1916 Easter Rising, at which an Irish republic was declared on the steps of the General Post Office in Dublin. After a week of fighting, British troops defeated the Irish rebels and the rebellion's leaders were executed. The British and Irish concessions strengthen the position of Mr. Adams among the military leaders of the I.R.A., whose support is essential to sustain the cease-fire. Today's concessions were grudgingly acknowledged by Martin McGuinness, who heads the Sinn Fein delegation in exploratory talks with the British. "We are seeing the British Government demilitarizing by installments," he said, adding that the I.R.A. cease-fire last year was "in one fell swoop -- they sent their soldiers home." The withdrawal was praised by the Ulster Unionist Party, the principal mainstream Protestant party in the North. But Peter Robinson, deputy leader of the hard-line Democratic Unionist Party, said it was "a unilateral decomissioning of arms" by Britain and a concession to the I.R.A., which was "holding on to its illegal weapons of death." | Britain to Pull 400 More Troops Out of Ulster |
756363_3 | the Chief's insights and influence came earlier this year, when a woman reported that thieves were stripping aluminum siding off her boathouse. "She was riding down the road one day and saw this truck go by, and said, 'That looks like my damn aluminum!' " the Chief said. He had a pretty good idea who one of the thieves was, he said, and he went by to have a talk. The man confessed, and said he had accomplices. The Chief ordered him to round up the accomplices and appear at his Town Hall office at 2 o'clock the next afternoon. At precisely 2 P.M. the next day, six men arrived and turned themselves in. Over the next few days, a total of 13 men confessed to the thefts. "They may lie to me for a little while, but not for long," Chief Matherne said. It seems like effortless police work, but it broke his heart a little, too. Some of the men brought their families with them, to wait in the Town Hall lobby. The sight of children always bothers him, he said. "They say, 'Uncle Pat, I had to do it because my babies was hungry.' I say, 'You don't like to work too damn much, that's why you did it.' " The bayou is not a rich place, populated mostly by fishermen and workers in what is left of the oil industry. Stealing has been a part of the culture for more than 200 years, but it was once done on a much grander scale. This town, on the edge of Bayou Barataria, is named for the French pirate Jean Lafitte, who helped Andrew Jackson and his army of sharpshooters defeat the British in the Battle of New Orleans in 1815. Now the stealing involves mostly outboard motors and fishing boats. "You steal something like that, you take away a man's living," the Chief said. "What does he tell his wife?" Chief Matherne takes theft seriously, but he seems to despise drug dealers. If he suspects someone of dealing drugs, he parks his cruiser in their driveway at night and just sits there. "They move on out," he said, sooner or later. He became Chief because friends encouraged him, he said, and because he had always wanted to try it. He does not mind that some days his department does not even get a call. And when it | In a Louisiana Bayou Town, 'Uncle Pat' Is the Law |
756324_0 | China, publicly breaking ranks with the other acknowledged nuclear-weapons powers, said today that it could back an extension of the nuclear nonproliferation treaty for either an indefinite period or a series of fixed periods of no less than 25 years' duration. The other four nuclear-weapons powers -- the United States, Britain, France and Russia -- are lobbying for an indefinite and unconditional extension of the Treaty on the Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons, which came into force in 1970 and is due for renewal this year. They argue that any other outcome would weaken the treaty. France's Foreign Minister, Alain Juppe, told the conference today that the 15-member European Union and six Eastern European countries were all firmly behind an indefinite extension. With the number of treaty signers now up to 178, supporters of an indefinite extension would need at least 90 votes to insure that outcome. Today, the Campaign for the NPT -- a group of independent arms-control and nuclear monitoring organizations -- said that it counted 82 "yes" votes for indefinite extension and 37 nations leaning in that direction but uncommitted. Under what rules voting will take place has not yet been decided, however. Mexico indicated today that it could still not support an indefinite extension, a position taken before the conference by Egypt, Indonesia and Venezuela. Experts said after the speech by China's Foreign Minister and Deputy Prime Minister, Qian Qichen, that Beijing is apparently hedging its bets to maintain a position somewhere between the West and leading developing nations that reject an indefinite extension. These developing nations argue that such an extension would perpetuate a permanent division of the world into nuclear weapons haves and have-nots. In his speech, Mr. Qian made a strong call for the "complete prohibition and thorough destruction of nuclear weapons." He also recalled that only China has made a public commitment to a "no-first-strike" nuclear policy, and he called on all other weapons states to follow China's lead in pledging never to initiate a nuclear attack. While saying that the nuclear nonproliferation treaty "has its limitations and defects," Mr. Qian said that China supported the treaty's extension. But he ruled out a renewal for one fixed period -- one of three options under Article VI of the accord -- as "not desirable." "If the option for indefinite extension is chosen," he went on, "it must be made clear that such an extension | China Breaks Ranks With Other Nuclear Nations on Treaty |
756299_0 | The dazzling mosques, cupolas and minarets of this ancient caravan city, which have helped shape the sacred framework of Islamic life for more than a thousand years, are falling to pieces. So are many of the mosaics and mausoleums of Samarkand and Khiva, this struggling country's two other fabled staging posts for the Silk Road, the route of spiritual, economic and intellectual commerce between Asia and Europe for centuries. Ravaged not only by time and neglect, but also by disastrous irrigation policies that have left aged foundations so soaked and swollen that many have begun to crack and buckle, hundreds of buildings in the three cities are unlikely to make it to the next millennium. "This is a place not only for our country or for Islam," said Robert Almeev, the director of architectural and archeological preservation in Bukhara, whose office sits within the crumbling walls of the Ark, an ancient fortress that is the city's most famous and imposing structure. "Bukhara is one of the world's great treasures. And every day parts of it disappear. We are doing the best we can to save what is left. But we need much more money and much more help." Last year, the United Nations agreed, placing Bukhara and Khiva, whose fundamental problems are even worse than those of Samarkand, on its small list of architecturally threatened centers of ancient civilization. International experts have begun trickling in, hoping to help slow the decay created by the diversion of huge amounts of water from the country's principal lakes and rivers to farmland and by the misuse of drainage pipes. Those policies have run noble rivers practically dry and left water standing where there shouldn't be any at all. Debates rage about the best way to restore what has been lost, with many preservationists arguing that it is better to let the cities collapse into ruins than to turn them into diminished modern theme parks for the past. In part that has already happened. Much of the Soviet restoration work, carried out in the 1960's and 70's, only made things worse, accelerating deterioration by ignoring the special needs of the alluvial soil and salty desert environment. In some cases, metal support rods and conventional brick laid less than two decades ago have already been worn to dust. And in others, buildings that lasted for hundreds of years have been rebuilt with modern materials and | Ancient Mosques Along Silk Road Are Falling Apart |
756299_1 | the United Nations agreed, placing Bukhara and Khiva, whose fundamental problems are even worse than those of Samarkand, on its small list of architecturally threatened centers of ancient civilization. International experts have begun trickling in, hoping to help slow the decay created by the diversion of huge amounts of water from the country's principal lakes and rivers to farmland and by the misuse of drainage pipes. Those policies have run noble rivers practically dry and left water standing where there shouldn't be any at all. Debates rage about the best way to restore what has been lost, with many preservationists arguing that it is better to let the cities collapse into ruins than to turn them into diminished modern theme parks for the past. In part that has already happened. Much of the Soviet restoration work, carried out in the 1960's and 70's, only made things worse, accelerating deterioration by ignoring the special needs of the alluvial soil and salty desert environment. In some cases, metal support rods and conventional brick laid less than two decades ago have already been worn to dust. And in others, buildings that lasted for hundreds of years have been rebuilt with modern materials and no thought to their heritage, giving many ancient religious structures the surreal veneer of a modern American mall designed to look old. "In the 1960's there were 12,000 important archeological monuments in this country," said Shirinov Temyr, the director of the Uzbek Academy of Science's archeological division. "Since then we have lost at least 5,000 of them. People like to talk about the best scientific approach to saving those that remain. We don't have time, experts or tradition for that. If we wait for perfection we will be left with nothing." Drainage systems used in the Middle Ages for the mosques and housing in all three cities are now clogged and covered with the detritus of many centuries of life. In their place are broken and corroded Soviet pipe systems that have let pools of water 12 feet deep accumulate beneath the foundations of many fragile buildings. There are no more archeologically significant or majestic places in Central Asia than the holy towns of Samarkand, Bukhara and Khiva. Always considered among the most exotic places on earth, they stand at the center of a vast region of deserts, steppes and mountain passes that stretches from the Caspian Sea to the | Ancient Mosques Along Silk Road Are Falling Apart |
756279_0 | BUSINESS travelers and tourists alike can avail themselves of Western medicine while in Russia, at the Columbia-Presbyterian/Moscow Clinic in the heart of Moscow at 4 Dobryninsky Lane. The outpatient clinic's staff consists of seven United States board-certified doctors who are on contracts and available 24 hours a day. The clinic provides primary care, family medicine and pediatrics. Patients have access to CT scanning, ultrasound and full X-ray. Open since last September, the clinic is a joint venture of Pepsico World Trading Inc., Columbia-Presbyterian Health Services and the Fund for Large Enterprises in Russia, a private investment company with offices in New York and Moscow. To use the clinic, visitors must belong to U.S. Global Health, the name for the joint venture, and memberships can be bought at the clinic. Business travelers can purchase annual memberships for $90; tourists can buy 10-day memberships for $39 or 30 days for $90. For additional information or applications, call (800) 335-9068 Luggage Carts, Finally The Detroit Metropolitan Airport installed luggage carts in its international terminal in 1977, but passengers in the two busier domestic terminals had to find other ways to cope. Now the airport has finally figured out where to put carts in those terminals, so 1,150 of the luggage carriers are available in ticket lobbies, baggage claim areas, connecting corridors, the parking deck and curb front. The eventual discovery of where to put the carts may not have prompted shouts of "Eureka!" In fact, any unusual noise around the airport -- the world's 15th busiest, with almost 27 million passengers last year -- is likely to have been a collective sigh of relief from passengers who, 18 years and heaven-only-knows how many wrenched backs later, finally have access to a convenience available for years at airports in Monroe, La., Sioux Falls, S.D. and Blountville, Tenn. Tax Law and Travel When Congress returns from recess it is expected to consider increasing the tax deduction for business meals and entertainment expenses, which was lowered to 50 percent from 80 percent on Jan. 1, 1994. Responding to a recent survey by Air Travel Card, 80 percent of corporate travel managers said they had not changed their travel policies or budgets as a result of the tax law changes, and 73 percent indicated they would not change current travel policies even if Congress increased the deduction. At the same time, though, 94 percent of the corporate | Business Travel; How to find an American-operated clinic in the heart of Moscow, day or night. |
753550_2 | they have clinched a majority, they still worry that some developing countries could outmaneuver them in a procedural battle in New York. Spurgeon M. Keeny Jr., president of the Arms Control Association, a Washington-based research center on issues affecting the spread of nuclear weapons, said, "This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to get indefinite extension." Recent lobbying efforts have paid off, Administration officials said, by getting some wavering countries to commit themselves. Last Friday seven Central American nations publicly backed the treaty for the first time. In recent weeks Argentina, Peru and the Philippines have also announced their support. Administration officials say they have clinched a majority when they count those countries and another 10 that have made private commitments, as well as Japan, South Korea, 13 South Pacific nations and the 54 nations in the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. Despite the treaty's success in limiting the size of the nuclear club, diplomats say that it has expanded beyond the five powers to include three nations that have refused to sign the treaty: Israel, Pakistan and India. In addition, some countries, notably North Korea and Iraq, have pursued programs to develop nuclear weapons even though they had pledged under the treaty not to do so. Indonesia's delegate to the United Nations, Nugroho Wisnumurti, said today that the United States should not push through a vote on indefinite extension when so many countries remained uneasy about the idea. He said the United States should work with developing nations to find a compromise that would command a consensus. Over the last two months President Clinton has taken several steps demanded by developing countries as a condition for backing permanent extension. In February he announced that he would extend the American moratorium on testing of nuclear weapons and drop Washington's argument that countries have the right to drop out of the comprehensive test ban treaty after 10 years. On Wednesday the United States joined Russia, China, Britain and France in promising to help non-nuclear nations that are attacked or threatened with attack by a nuclear power. One of the big questions has been whether Arab countries as a bloc would oppose indefinite extension in deference to Egypt, which has indicated it does not support permanent extension because Israel has refused to sign the treaty. But Administration officials say a few North African and Persian Gulf states have signaled their intention to | U.S. Aides Say Most Signers Back Lasting A-Ban Pact |
753463_0 | Christian Pineau, a leader of the French Resistance who became one of postwar France's most active Foreign Ministers, died on Wednesday in Paris. He was 90 and had homes in Paris and Vence, a resort in the French Alps. A gentlemanly politician and Socialist, he served as Foreign Minister from 1956 to 1958. During his tenure he signed the Treaty of Rome, one of the foundations on which the European Union is built, and spoke for France to a skeptical world in the Suez War in 1956. He also sought solutions to France's colonial problems and worked to mitigate the cold war by shifting the focus from military confrontation to closer economic links. Christian Paul Francis Pineau was born in Chaumont-en-Bassigny, Haute-Marne, the son of an Army colonel. His father died when he was young and his mother married Jean Giraudoux, the playwright. He earned degrees in political science and law, and went to work for the Bank of France. With the German occupation, he helped to found an underground newspaper, Liberation, and went on secret missions as a liaison between occupied France and Gen. Charles de Gaulle's Free French headquarters in London. He was captured twice by the Nazis in 1943. Tortured by the Gestapo and sentenced to death, he escaped the firing squad with forged identification papers and he was sent to the Buchenwald concentration camp. He was liberated by American soldiers in 1945. In the postwar Fourth Republic, he turned to politics and was elected to the National Assembly. His first Government position, his appointment as Food Supply Minister, came barely three weeks after his release from Buchenwald. He held a variety of cabinet posts in a succession of short-lived Governments. Just before he took charge of the Foreign Ministry he was designated Prime Minister but failed to cobble together a cabinet. A courteous, well-dressed and modest man of distinguished bearing, Mr. Pineau once said the motto of his foreign policy was "negotiate, negotiate again, negotiate always." He wrote children's books as well as memoirs of the Resistance, the Suez crisis, the Treaty of Rome and Nikita S. Khrushchev. His first children's book was titled "Tales From I Don't Know When" and dedicated to Giraudoux, his stepfather. | Christian Pineau, French Hero And Foreign Minister, Dies at 90 |
755048_0 | CAN a series of silly bovine spoofs from a tiny agency help establish a national brand of low-fat milk? With its eye-grabbing magenta carton sporting a Holstein wearing sunglasses, and quirky commercials pumped up by jazzy music, the brand, Cool Cow, aims to be hip. Licensed to local dairies, Cool Cow began appearing in North Dakota in December 1993 and is expanding gradually; it is also available in Minnesota and beginning this week will be produced and distributed by Marcus Dairy in Danbury, Conn., for sale in Connecticut, Brooklyn, Queens and Long Island. The Cool Cow campaign was created by the Soho Advertising Group, an offbeat shop in New York with $2.5 million in billings. It was founded in 1990 by Christopher Pollock, a former creative director at the Saatchi & Saatchi Advertising unit of Cordiant P.L.C. who grew weary of big-agency bureaucracy. Until now, Soho has survived on orphan projects like creating posters for sports events sponsored by Philip Morris in Latin America and designing direct-mail campaigns to help sublet office space. But the company marketing Cool Cow, Milk Made Inc., was seeking something more unconventional. "If I wanted to live a boring life, I'd have stayed a banker," said Patrick Cory, a former director of strategic marketing planning for the Citibank unit of Citicorp who is chairman, president and chief executive of Milk Made. The start-up company was financed with $1.5 million from 120 investors. Cool Cow, aimed at the health conscious, contains a proprietary butterfat substitute, a vegetable fat called Farmelle. Milk stripped of its butterfat is blended with Farmelle to taste like low-fat milk but has half a gram of saturated fat. A glass of traditional low-fat milk has up to two grams of fat, while whole milk has eight grams. In keeping with Milk Made's quest for the quirky, Soho's campaign pokes fun at Cool Cow's source. Cows are carried off on stretchers, presumably felled by heart disease; use exercise equipment, and undergo liposuction. Milk Made is spending $250,000 to run the spots on WTNH-TV, an ABC affiliate in New Haven, and on three Connecticut cable networks. The company is seeking another $1 million in capital before it begins advertising in New York City. Dairies like Cool Cow because a distinctive product can be sold at higher profit margins; Cool Cow costs about 25 cents more a half- gallon than regular milk. In its first | THE MEDIA BUSINESS: Advertising; A tiny agency builds a quirky campaign to promote a low-fat milk with national aspirations. |
758112_0 | In an embarrassing mix-up for Japan's sensitive plutonium-based energy program, a Japanese Governor on Tuesday temporarily barred a ship carrying highly radioactive nuclear waste from docking and unloading its cargo. The Governor, Morio Kimura of Aomori Prefecture in northern Japan, eventually relented after receiving written assurances from the national Government that his province would not become the permanent storage site for the waste. The ship, which spent all Tuesdaywaiting offshore after arriving from France, docked in the harbor of Rokkasho village this morning. But the last-minute standoff, after the ship had spent two months traveling halfway around the world, caused chagrin among Japanese officials while providing a psychological victory for the several hundred antinuclear protesters who had gathered in Rokkasho, where they were watched over by an even greater number of police officers. "This shipment is both a technical and political test and in many ways it's a test that failed," said Damon Moglen, coordinator of campaigns against plutonium programs for the environmental group Greenpeace. "It's been an extraordinarily controversial shipment." Makiko Tanaka, the head of Japan's Science and Technology Agency, called the Governor's resistance "truly regrettable." The shipment, the first of its kind for Japan, is part of the nation's plan to reduce its dependence on imported oil by developing plutonium-burning breeder reactors. These reactors are supposed to produce more nuclear fuel than they consume, creating a self-sustaining cycle. Under the plan, spent fuel from Japan's existing uranium-burning nuclear power plants is sent to France and Britain, where reprocessing plants extract plutonium for shipment back to Japan. The high-level radioactive waste that arrived on Tuesday is a byproduct of the plutonium extraction operation. Late in 1992, Japan created an international furor with its first shipment of more than a ton of plutonium from France. Many countries along potential routes barred the ship from entering their waters. Opponents said there was a risk that terrorists or hostile countries would try to hijack the ship to obtain plutonium to make bombs. Tuesdday's shipment did not attract as much attention because the waste cannot be used to make weapons. Still, the 14 tons of high-level waste contained more radioactivity than the plutonium cargo, and some countries did bar the ship from their territory. When Japan's program goes into full operation there will have to be many shipments of both plutonium and waste. Rokkasho, a fishing village near the northern end of Japan's | A-Waste Ship, Briefly Barred, Reaches Japan |
758216_0 | The old European Socialism of nationalized industries and a cradle-to-grave welfare state is a dying creed. But French voters, buffeted by persistent double-digit unemployment rates, seem reluctant to give up entirely on activist government. Lionel Jospin, the candidate of the demoralized, scandal-battered French Socialist Party, finished a surprising first in Sunday's initial round of presidential balloting. The first-round runner-up, Jacques Chirac of the Gaullist party Rally for the Republic, outpolled his Gaullist rival, Prime Minister Edouard Balladur, with calls for aggressive government action to combat unemployment and other social ills. Almost 60 percent of first-round voters cast their ballots for candidates generally associated with the right, but not necessarily with passive government. Mr. Chirac is favored to win the May 7 runoff and succeed Francois Mitterrand. But Mr. Jospin has 10 more days of campaigning to try to pull another upset. Considering his late entry into the race, his stodgy style and the weakened condition of his party, Mr. Jospin has done very well. Domestic social issues, especially unemployment, dominated the campaign, even though the president's main constitutional power lies in foreign affairs. Mr. Jospin advocated government spending and employment programs, while Mr. Chirac emphasized government financial incentives and subsidies to the private sector. The main international issue has been France's role in the European Union, which holds a decisive constitutional conference next year. Both candidates sounded vaguely pro-European themes, but Mr. Chirac has long had a reputation as a nationalist. Both should be able to get along at least as well with Washington as Mr. Mitterrand did, with French cultural protectionism and traditional sympathy for Quebec separatism the principal potential irritants. Francois Mitterrand has presided over France for 14 years, longer than anyone since the Emperor Napoleon III. He has become an emblem for stability and continuity. Voters seeking energized government and dynamic social policies can now choose between Socialist and Gaullist versions. | France Votes for Action |
757113_3 | then sent rappelling down the building's frame to shore up an unsteady beam. "It was faster to train him to put in that bolt than to teach one of us how to rappel," said the man organizing that phase of the rescue effort. But in many areas, bodies were left behind for another day because further work was deemed unsafe. "We got in there and searched what we could," said David R. Peaks, a volunteer with Salt Lake City's Rocky Mountain Rescue Dogs, a search and rescue team called in by the Federal Emergency Management Agency. "Then they sent us away because it wasn't safe." For the past three days, architects' plans and engineering drawings have been used as a map for possible trouble. Paul Ed Kirkpatrick, the structural engineer who worked on the $13 million building when it was built in 1977, said most of the main support columns on the north wall were gone. Another run of nine structural columns in the center is severely weakened. "Columns that were only built to support one floor are suddenly supporting four times that," he said. "It's as if you had a tree that was supported by cables" at various intervals. "If you put an elephant on the top of that tree, it could hold," he said. "But without the cables, the tree would buckle and break. That's what we may be facing here." Mr. Kirkpatrick added that moving some of the debris could change stresses within the structure and cause some apparently intact areas to collapse. Rex D. Paine has been coordinating efforts to shore up the broken and weakened beams. His company, Oscar J. Boldt Construction, is working with about 48 employees, who have volunteered their time, to go first into the most unstable areas and drive steel pipes and wood pilings between broken structures that otherwise might collapse on rescue workers. Mr. Paine described the north side of the building as "pancaked" with the roof resting at the level of what was once the third floor. "Right now, it's hard, all by hand, basically what a person can pick up," he said of the clearing process. "There's heavy equipment. But we can't use it." As hope of finding easily accessible survivors begins to fade, the larger machinery will be called in to pull apart floors that collapsed one atop the other. "Right now, we're still working on the | A Slow and Gruesome Search Through Unstable Wreckage |
754339_0 | To the Editor: In your April 6 report on breast-cancer treatment an expert is quoted as saying that while chemotherapy prolongs survival it does not necessarily cure the disease. That holds for most types of cancer. You report in addition that researchers found no survival benefits from chemotherapy in postmenopausal women. Prior to the appearance of chemotherapy several decades ago -- in fact since around 1900 -- removal of estrogen-secreting glands, like ovaries, and later of adrenals and pituitary, was known to prolong survival of breast cancer victims and also to suppress recurrent disease without any improvement in the cure rate. Chemotherapy in menstrual-age women, by inducing menopause, also halts estrogen production, with great toxicity to the patient. The absence of beneficial effect in older women is explained by the low level of estrogen to begin with. One field of treatment that calls for scientific and objective therapeutic and cost-benefit analysis is chemotherapy of common cancers. As now practiced chemotherapy may be an illusory pathway to cancer cure. GEORGE KLEINFELD, M.D. Boca Raton, Fla., April 6, 1995 | Time to Rethink the Benefits of Chemotherapy |
754317_6 | coming from Asia, Africa and other regions of the developing world, countering the argument of governments there that human rights are a Western preoccupation. Gertrude Mongella of Tanzania, as secretary general of the official gathering in Beijing in September, and Supatra Masdit of Thailand will lead the parallel forum of nongovernmental organizations. Another strong voice for women within the system is Noeleen Heyzer, a Singaporean, who was recently appointed head of the United Nations Development Program for Women. In the national missions surrounding the United Nations, which act as embassies to the international organization, women do not fare much better than in the Secretariat. Gillian Martin Sorensen, an Under Secretary General and adviser to Mr. Boutros-Ghali on public policy, said 75 of the 185 member nations had no women of professional diplomatic status assigned to New York. Because United Nations officials are often drawn from these diplomatic ranks, women lose out on both levels. The leaders of only five United Nations missions are women. Apart from Ms. Albright, they are Akmaral Arystanbekova of Kazakhstan, Claudia Fritsche of Liechtenstein, Annette des Iles of Trinidad and Tobago and Aksoltan Ataeva of Turkmenistan. Women who have been recruited for professional jobs here and who are not drawn from the diplomatic corps or international civil service say they are treated as outsiders. Teresa L. Dutkevitch was hired in 1991 as executive assistant to the director of a Unicef division, but she said she soon learned that the system "tends to significantly under-utilize people like me." Educated at Drew, Oxford and Yale, she had worked in Congress and in the international marketing division of AT&T. At Unicef, she said she was "frequently reduced to Xeroxing and distributing documents that went unread or setting up meetings that were unproductive." In December, when she returned from an emergency mission in Rwanda, her job at headquarters was abolished, and she is still waiting for a comparable assignment. Tour guides are the lowest-ranking professional employees at the United Nations, and this international assortment of personable young people often see the culture of the United Nations at its most spontaneous. A guide recently described how she had applied for a full-time Secretariat job and was introduced to her interviewer as a potential career employee. He took her on a tour of his department and crowed to colleagues: "Just look at her! Wouldn't you love to have her in this office?" | Is the U.N. an Equal Employer? Women Say No |
752803_0 | Unlike Hollywood, the dance world has never promoted the myth of careers by chance. Being discovered at a soda fountain, Lana Turner style, is not the way dancers rise out of the ranks. For 20 years, Sylvia Waters has trained young performers in the Alvin Ailey Repertory Ensemble. Although conceived as an apprentice troupe to the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, the group has taken on a life of its own under Ms. Waters's direction. For one thing, it commissions new works like "The Rain Forest," a colorful and imaginative piece by Kathryn Posin with a specially commissioned score, for electronic and Brazilian folk instruments, by Nana Vasconcelos and Teese Gohl. The ballet had its local premiere on Friday night in Aaron Davis Hall at City College. Schuyler G. Chapin, the city's Commissioner of Cultural Affairs, joined Judith Jamison and others (the dancers Donna Wood Sanders, Mary Barnett and Ronni Favors and Ms. Waters's husband, Chauncey Jones) in paying tribute to the love and labor that Ms. Waters has poured into her task. It may seem, by definition, a thankless one. Yet a sign of success is how many of Ms. Waters's dancers profit from the two or three years they spend with her before joining major companies. Ms. Favors, an ensemble graduate who danced with Lar Lubovitch, noted that Ms. Waters "taught us to work with all kinds of choreographers." Ms. Posin, for instance, does not choreograph in Ailey's style, although he once invited her to create a minimalist piece for the senior company, now directed by Ms. Jamison. "The Rain Forest" finds her in a different mood, highly eclectic in her idiom. Ms. Posin knows how to make things happen onstage, and her abstract ode to tropical rain forests is a vivid allegory in which natural phenomena find their rightful place. Carol Vollet-Kingston has designed fanciful costumes with a Brazilian folk motif and a pipe sculpture as a tree of life. The props that hang from the branches double as symbols and, sometimes, musical instruments. In the central duet, Christina Gonzales, as Moon, cantilevers out from Amos Machanic, as Sun, whose gong is also his circular insignia. Jeffrey Gerodias, as Thunder, waves a metal sheet while others shake Brazilian rattles and bells. Dwana Smallwood, as Wind, whirls a more modern sound-producing party favor. Ms. Posin integrates the instruments into a musical whole that includes the accompanying tape's own | An Ailey Ensemble Pays Tribute to Its Leader |
752890_1 | warfare in Northern Ireland, which has claimed more than 3,100 lives since 1969. They often refer to Catholics as "nationalists" or "republicans," and to Protestants as "unionists" or "loyalists." But Mr. Dunlop set the tone in a 2 1/2-hour discussion in which Catholics were usually called Catholics, Protestants were Protestants, and the religious denominations themselves were described as religions, not "communities" or "traditions." In a statement, Mr. Dunlop's delegation emphasized that his church had nothing to do with the Rev. Ian Paisley, the hard-line political leader and evangelist in Northern Ireland who accuses the South of "Rome rule." "It is true that Protestantism has carried within itself a serious element of anti-Catholicism," the pastor said, but he added that it was gradually diminishing, "not least through the efforts of the Catholic Church." The Irish Government created the weekly Forum for Peace and Reconciliation to deal with two central issues in the peace effort. The first was relatively simple -- to welcome the I.R.A.'s political wing, Sinn Fein, into the political arena in the Republic of Ireland. Sinn Fein's president, Gerry Adams, accepted an invitation to the forum, shook hands with Albert Reynolds -- the Prime Minister at that time -- and took his seat. The second aim may never be fully achieved: to bring leaders of Northern Ireland's Protestant unionist political parties to Dublin to discuss differences openly. They declined the invitation, attacking the forum as a propaganda pulpit for Mr. Adams and his supporters. To attract the Protestants, the Irish Government chose a Protestant Judge, Catherine McGuinness of Dublin, to lead the forum. But only one Protestant leader agreed to come, John Alderdice of the small Alliance Party, a 60-40 mix of Protestants and Catholics that is neither unionist nor reluctant to talk about a new political status for this island. Religious leaders of the Protestant majority in the North were nowhere in sight for months. But after northern Protestant paramilitaries joined the cease-fire and it held for months, the Presbyterian delegation arrived and was greeted by Judge McGuinness and one of the three Protestant members of the 166-member Parliament. One of the first things that bothered them, the clergymen said, was that Britain's banner was not among the many national flags in front of Dublin hotels. And they objected to the militaristic words of the Irish national anthem, "The Soldier's Song." But most of all, they objected to | Presbyterians, in Peace Forum, Tell Their Fears of Dublin |
754084_3 | from along the East Coast. Long Island calls, he said, have so far been about illegal clamming. "In New England," he said, "we got calls about bleaching lobsters." It is illegal to take female lobsters with eggs. But dishonest fishermen are scraping off the eggs and bleaching the lobsters to hide their sex. The line is not limited to calls about fish. "We welcome calls about any endangered marine life," Commander McPherson said. For the Coast Guard is not just search and rescue. Saving fish "is one of our multipurposes," he said. "Our motto is, 'Protect the fish of today so there will be fish tomorrow.' We can board any U.S. vessel anywhere in the world, and we will go on board that vessel," even to measure fish. "Our vessels have yardsticks aboard," he said. Lieut. Comdr. Don Bruzdzinki of the fisheries law enforcement division said every call would be looked into. "If it's not our jurisdiction," Commander Bruzdzinki said, "we'll pass it on to state or local authorities." To find out what is legal to catch and how many can be kept, the state has set up a toll-free telephone number, (800) R-E-G-S-D-E-C. A recent call found that flounder have to be 11 inches and that the limit is 15 a day. The fluke season starts on May 1, with six a day allowed at a minimum of 14 inches long. It is also now against the law to cut off the head or filet a fish before arriving on shore. Weakfish have to be 16 inches, with just six a day, and bluefish have no size limit, but just 10 a day can be caught in all sizes, including snappers. If you see flagrant violations consider calling S-A-V-E-F-I-S-H. But don't make up a violation. The Coast Guard also has a hoax number, (800) 2-N-O-H-O-A-X. "Sixty percent of the calls we get," Commander McPherson said, "are hoaxes." Not Born in the U.S.A. The newest member of the Southampton Village police force has just learned his first English word. "He knows, 'Sit!' " Officer Michael Medio said. He should learn, "Thank you." The village would probably not have a new police dog -- Max, a German shepherd from Czechoslovakia -- if it weren't for a donation. Charlotte and Elena Ford contributed to the village the $3,500 to buy the dog. Southampton residents, including the Fords, were concerned about an increase | LONG ISLAND JOURNAL |
753955_0 | There may be two to four million tires on this five-acre Kings Park site; they have been accumulating since 1987. A company that planned to recycle the tires went out of business in 1990. A new plan by Smithtown would send millions of old tires from the Izzo brothers' site in Kings Park to be shredded and burned at the incinerator in East Northport, helping to generate and sell energy. Page 4. (Vic DeLucia/The New York Times) | To Reduce Tire Mountain: |
753926_3 | new equipment, which is 200 percent. That's a big difference." Unlike auctions of Van Goghs and Picassos, when construction equipment comes on the block, there is never a minimum reserve, Mr. Lyon observed. "We're nothing like the art auctions," he said. "The items we auction go to the highest bidder, period. It's as simple as that." Mr. Lyon said he expected the Tarrytown auction to generate anywhere from $2 million to $3.5 million in sales. His company works on a 10 percent commission. "But it's not as lucrative as it might sound," he said. "We have to do a lot of preliminary work before the auction. For instance, about two months before the event we're responsible for advertising nationally in all the trade papers. We also send out color brochures and promote the auction every which way to get a crowd. And on the day itself, 15 or 20 of our people will be working at the auction and afterward till every piece is called for." Prices for used equipment are at an all-time high. "It's almost scary," Mr. Lyon said. "But it's supply and demand at work. What's making the market so strong are foreign buyers and contractors in the Northeast. There's not much work in the Northeast, and the contractors can't buy a lot of new equipment, so everyone is looking for good used stuff. Items like rubber-tire loaders that you use for moving earth and highway building are really hot." And since the design of heavy construction equipment doesn't radically change from year to year, Mr. Lyon added: "Used offers better value. For instance, a medium Caterpillar sells for $150,000 new. Two years later, it'll sell for $100,000. At last year's auction, a 1991 Cat 950F rubber tire loader fetched a record price of $97,500." The chairman of the auction committee, John T. Cooney Sr., is vice president of County Asphalt Company of Tarrytown. Mr. Cooney agreed that used heavy construction equipment is scarce. "Not much used comes on the market," he said. "Prices are firm." Mr. Cooney, who is putting five or six pieces up for sale, said: "I expect to do well. No matter what kind of a day we have, the real buyers will come out. The lookers might be put off, but we expect a crowd. If one of my pieces goes cheap, I'm confident that the others will average it out." The | Readying an Auction of Heavy Equipment |
754105_0 | THIS WEEK | Complex Relations |
752911_0 | To the Editor: Your March 26 news article about the most recent encounter between a human being and a mountain lion in California saddened me because I knew that it would be followed by an article about the mountain lion's unnecessary slaying (news article, March 29). Californians must realize that, unfortunate as it is when an animal harms someone, killing mountain lions in response to such incidents is unjustified. In addition to being gratuitous violence in retribution for an animal's natural behavior, it does not do anything to help protect people from mountain lion attacks. Studies must be done to identify the territories of the animals, and people must be cautioned to steer clear or enter at their own risk. Every day, humans "develop" more wild habitat, displacing more wild animal. Since we force them to live closer to us than we, and they, would prefer, we must learn to coexist with them. LESLIE GERSTENFELD-PRESS Washington, March 31, 1995 The writer is a biologist with People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. | Learning to Live With Cougar Neighbors |
752985_1 | control over the content they carry and try to build safeguards into their systems. Even so, determined individuals can get around the safeguards, as evidenced by the appearance earlier this year of child pornography on the America Online service. (Alerted by some of its users, America Online notified the Federal Bureau of Investigation and an inquiry was begun.) At the other end, a determined individual, whether adult or child, can also find such material. For the most part, however, it is not easy to find "obscene" materials in cyberspace. Recently I went out into the networks deliberately trying to find examples of extreme pornographic images, and hours later had found nothing that I could not have found more easily (and at higher photographic resolution) at a local adult bookstore. Most of the images, in fact, appeared to be scanned from magazines. Also, many of the most graphic sexual materials consist of compressed and segmented image files that must be retrieved from secluded sites on the Internet, sites that appear to shut down and move frequently. Once found, the images must typically be downloaded in chunks, assembled and converted using software tools. One might argue that a child smart enough to log on to a file transfer protocol (f.t.p.) site and assemble these files is smart and mature enough to benefit from a discussion with his or her parents on the personal and social values needed to deal with such images. Today's child will undoubtedly encounter disturbing images or events at some point, whether on a street corner, a television screen or the Internet. It is impractical to think one can shield children from such occurrences. It is possible, and necessary, to give the child the ability to form judgments and values about the things he or she will encounter in life. The best way to do that is to maintain open lines of communication between parent and child. Beyond that, there are several practical ways to minimize the risk of a child's encountering objectionable material or being harmed as a result of being on line. These steps are outlined in a pamphlet called "Child Safety on the Information Highway," which is available free from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children by calling (800) 843-5678. Ernie Allen, president of the center, outlined the following common-sense steps a parent can take: Learn about what your children are doing when they | Helping Children Avoid Mudholes |
752984_7 | Carmen. He surmised that this might be an "expression of tension or territorial marking behavior." The relationship began in June 1990 after he caught her in a barrel trap -- two 50-gallon drums welded together -- with bait tied to a trigger attached to a door. After briefly tranquilizing her, he attached a stout leather collar with a small radio transmitter around her neck. Carmen was then 4 years old and weighed about 120 pounds. He subsequently tracked her using telemetry with a small receiver with earphones and H-shaped antenna -- the closer the bear, the louder the signal. In the spring of 1991 he repeatedly came upon Carmen and her three cubs, who scampered up a tree in typical bear behavior, "enabling me to approach the refuge tree, talk and leave food," he said. He left doughnuts, which Carmen consumed while remaining suspicious. But, he said, "after approximately 150 hours of being approached, talked to and fed (day-old leftovers from Mister Donut in Marquette), the bear and her cubs tolerated observation from distances of 2 to 12 meters as she foraged, nursed her cubs, napped." With that his bear walks commenced. He trailed Carmen and the cubs periodically, logging 100 hours with them until they denned in the late autumn. In the winter snow, he located the mother with her yearlings again, pulled them out of their den, sedating Carmen so that she and her offspring could be weighed and measured and blood samples taken. The cubs were also tagged. He repeated this procedure with Carmen year after year, eventually abandoning the lure of doughnuts and logging 700 hours with her. Ultimately, he was able to approach Carmen more or less at will, to observe her communicating with her cubs and yearlings and recognizing some of her vocal signals. "She clicks her teeth to send them up a tree, and blows, 'Uff,' to bring them down," he said. "Clicking her jaws hard means, 'I'm here.' When she pops her lips it means you did something wrong. Slapping the ground with a paw means you're pushing her. Then 'Hawhawhaw' is the top expression of anger." One day he got a lip popping from Carmen when he deliberately placed a doughnut on a log next to a harmless pine snake. Then she marched off disdainfully. In circumstances like this, he communicates with her in a soft voice, saying repeatedly, "It's O.K.," | SCIENTIST AT WORK: Terry DeBruyn; Black Bears Up Close And Personal |
755878_6 | is Daniel Ellsberg, the former Defense Department official who leaked the Pentagon Papers and who is now director of Manhattan Project II, a disarmament program at Physicians for Social Responsibility in Washington. He said in an interview that cold-war thinking was taking place in important parts of the American policy establishment, where the ghost of the Warsaw Pact, the defunct Soviet-led military alliance, still hovers. This is reflected, Mr. Ellsberg said, in the language of the assurance recently made by the United States, Britain, France and Russia, which tempered a pledge not to use nuclear weapons against a non-nuclear-weapons nation with exceptions for nations that may be allied a nuclear-weapons country. "NATO policy was and still is based on a plan to initiate nuclear weapons use in case of attack from the Warsaw Pact," he said. China made the only unconditional "no first use" pledge. The United States has done so only in supporting the 1967 Treaty of Tlatelolco, which barred nuclear weapons from Latin America and the Caribbean. Mr. Bunn described this as "a discrepancy hard to explain." Another regional accord, the Rarotonga Treaty, made the South Pacific a nuclear-free zone in 1985. Although the conference here will focus on continuing efforts to halt the spread of weapons, other issues, not all directly covered by the pact, are likely to be debated. Nuclear powers will be urged to move faster in drafting a separate treaty barring nuclear tests, and on a pact to stop production of fuel for nuclear weapons. Critics of the pact will also point to the continuing failure to persuade India, Israel and Pakistan, which have nuclear technology and almost certainly nuclear weapons, to join the treaty. North Korea, Iran and possibly Iraq, which signed the treaty, are suspected of violating it. After conflicting signals from Cairo, Egypt's chief delegate to the United Nations, Nabil A. Elaraby, repeated on Thursday that his Government could not agree to an indefinite extension if the treaty lacked "universality." This was an allusion to Israel. For their part, the Israelis say they cannot agree to any non-nuclear pact as long as the nuclear intentions of countries like Iraq and Iran remain suspicious and while the region lacks an acceptable reality of general peace. There will also be calls to strengthen the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna, the United Nations agency that is charged with monitoring compliance but must operate | Discord Is Rising Over Pact On Spread of Nuclear Arms |
755896_2 | lower-level officials, to the talks. Speaking on a visit to Dublin about the lack of a celebration of the Easter Rising anniversary, he said: "It's quite apparent when one comes through the capital city that for the Irish establishment it was as if 1916 was an accident of history which they want to forget. And that's quite disgraceful." There was no reply from the Government of Prime Minister John Bruton. The observation of the Easter Rising, which actually began on the following Monday, is the most important event of the year for republicans, who want to end British rule in Northern Ireland. Their political ancestors stood on the steps of the General Post Office in Dublin on that Monday in 1916 and declared the establishment of a republic, then fought for a week with the British Army before surrendering. At the time, many Irish opposed the rebellion, which they saw as hurting chances for negotiating home rule with Britain, and a stab in the back to tens of thousands of Irishmen fighting in the British Army in World War I. But Britain executed the leaders of the Rising, and public opinion changed, leading to the revolution that achieved a treaty of independence for southern Ireland in 1922, but left the six counties of the North as part of Britain. A civil war followed between those who accepted the treaty and those who opposed it. Sinn Fein lost, and its opponents took control and eventually founded today's principal political parties in Ireland, including Fine Gael, the party of Prime Minister Bruton. For decades, Sinn Fein has refused to accept the legitimacy of the Dublin Goverment, but the party is supported by only about 2 percent of the electorate in the Irish Republic and about 11 percent in the North. Ten years ago, Sinn Fein decided that it would take part in the Irish Parliament if it won any seats, but it has not. On the Northern Ireland peace talks, Mr. Adams said today that Sinn Fein was still willing to discuss I.R.A. disarmament with the British, if the British would assign a minister, as distinguished from a lower-ranking civil servant, to talk to them. Sinn Fein has been talking with lower-level officials since December in exploratory talks that are designed to lead to full-fledged talks involving all the political parties in the North, including the majority Protestant unionists and Sinn Fein. | I.R.A. Leader Faults Dublin And London |
757886_2 | and Viagene will create a formidable competitor in the emerging field of gene therapy, one that is likely to create a rush for alliances and new capital sources among the other contenders. Mr. Boni noted that Viagene was the first corporation to begin human therapeutic trials of a gene therapy drug. Viagene has initiated eight Phase 1 human clinical trials, which are intended to show the safety of drug candidates, and in late 1994 began the first Phase 2 clinical trial aimed at showing the efficacy of gene therapy. Viagene's gene therapy products are being studied for use in treating diseases, including malignant melanoma, kidney cancer, and HIV infection. Chiron and Viagene began collaborating on the development of gene therapy for the prevention and treatment of cancer in November 1993. "We believe that gene therapy is an important enabling technology that will yield innovative health care products across a broad spectrum of indications, in particular for cancer and infectious disease, where Chiron has longstanding programs, products, and businesses," said William J. Rutter, the chairman of Chiron, which is based in Emeryville, Calif., outside of San Francisco. "This transaction further consolidates our gene therapy program." While gene therapy was once considered primarily useful in treating known diseases of genetic deficiency, like cystic fibrosis or hemophilia, the early efforts of companies like Viagene are aimed at creating immunotherapeutics, which work like sophisticated vaccines against viral diseases and cancer. With Chiron's focus on adult vaccines for diseases like AIDS and hepatitis, and anti-cancer drugs, the company has a natural synergy with gene therapy. Jeff Works, Viagene's vice president and chief financial officer, said in a telephone interview that the $9-a-share acquisition price actually represented a substantial premium to the stock's trading range of $3.50 to $4 a share in most of the last 12 months. He said the acquisition would enable Viagene to conduct its research and development free of the difficulty of trying to raise capital in the public markets. "Although we have, even today, roughly $27 million in cash, that's not going to last two years," Mr. Works said. "So there's a real limit to what we can do with this technology, and capital is just not readily available. On the other hand, Chiron is able to raise considerable capital easily; it will be up to us to convince them to spend it on gene therapy in San Diego." COMPANY NEWS | Chiron to Acquire a Gene Therapy Concern for $95 Million |
757847_0 | Gerry Adams, the political leader of the Irish Republican Army, said today that he welcomed the British decision to assign a minister to talks about the disarmament of the I.R.A.'s arsenal, estimated at 100 tons of weapons, including explosives. The three-month delay in agreeing to such talks had snagged the Northern Ireland peace effort and raised fears that it could lead to a break in the I.R.A. cease-fire, now in its eighth month. In an interview this morning, anticipating the British announcement, Mr. Adams, the president of Sinn Fein, the I.R.A. political arm, was optimistic that the peace effort could now proceed toward his goal of full-fledged peace talks, involving the Irish and British Governments, Sinn Fein and the Protestant unionist parties in the North. The British announcement today that bilateral talks on disarmament would be held was a step toward all-party negotiations, Mr. Adams said. Asked if he thought that the delay raised the likelihood of renewed I.R.A. violence, he said, "I don't think that's an issue at this time." The British decision was sent to Mr. Adams in Dublin by the Northern Ireland Office, which administers the British province, in Belfast. The letter said the decision was based on assurances from Sinn Fein that it would discuss I.R.A. disarmament "in a serious and constructive manner," and added that Britain was now willing to discuss the question of British security forces in the province, an issue Sinn Fein calls "demilitarization." Mr. Adams, speaking in his small office in a dingy downtown Dublin building, discussed the peace effort with unusual frankness, in terms of his personal doubts and depressions. And he spoke in a conciliatory tone about the domestic political problems that may have caused Prime Minister John Major of Britain to delay the disarmament talks. There was none of the angry polemic he has often used to castigate Mr. Major and Britain. Generally, he conveyed calm resolution to keep talking until Britain agreed to his demand for all-party talks. He added that the all-party talks should also be called immediately. Most officials and experts say that while the ministerial talks between Sinn Fein and London will start soon, the all-party talks are at least several months away, mostly because the Protestant Unionist parties still refuse to be seated with Sinn Fein. Sinn Fein's ultimate goal is a united Ireland without British control in the North; the Protestants want the | Gerry Adams Applauds the British Move |
757891_0 | Almost before the boom of the explosion that devastated the Federal building had stopped reverberating across downtown Oklahoma City, cyberspace was alive with commentary. It proved to be an illustration of the global web of computer networks at its best and its worst: some people asked what they could do to help and reached out to succor the victims, while others transmitted tasteless jokes and some people applauded the destruction of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in a truck bombing last Wednesday. Leonard Conn, president of Internet Oklahoma, or Ionet, and members of his staff were one of the first groups on line, creating an "electronic page" of information about the bombing on the World Wide Web section of the Internet. "We felt an obligation to disseminate information to those around the world looking for loved ones and friends," Mr. Conn said during exchanges of electronic messages. For example, Ionet maintains an updated list of those who died and those who were hospitalized, using data from the medical examiner. In addition to whatever information a World Wide Web "page" contains, it provides on-screen links to other connections on the Internet that have additional or related information. That allows a reader to leap from place to place, a process known as surfing the net. One link on the Ionet page announced the formation of a "listserv" devoted to the bombing. A listserv is an electronic mailing list; every member can send one message to a central computer and have a software program copy the message and send it to thousands of people. There are thousands of listservs on every conceivable topic. Aaron Dickey, a freelance writer in New York who contributes to Wired magazine, which covers electronic communications, runs a couple of small listservs for "generation Xer's" -- people in their 20's. Mr. Dickey said that soon after the Oklahoma City blast he noticed a dramatic drop in all discussions except those about the bombing, and decided to set up the bombing listserv. "I only sent out one message announcing it, and I had people joining it from all over the world," he said. Within 24 hours, he had nearly 500 members and the message traffic was constant. On the one day the list was monitored, more than 200 message arrived. Most of the messages seemed to have been written and transmitted while the writer was watching television coverage, providing | The Explosion Echoes in Cyberspace |
757882_4 | evidence. Officials said the fifth through ninth floors have already been cleared, American flags fluttering from each finished floor. Chief Hansen said cranes were picking away some of the larger chunks of concrete that sat atop the mammoth pile of debris in front of the building, while workers picked away at the edges. Removal of the debris is slowly giving them access to the areas smothered underneath, as well as relieving pressure on the weakened support beams in the middle of the building. Workers continue to burrow into new voids, shoring up walls and ceilings as they proceed. "We're working feverishly to get there," Chief Hansen said. "We're working hard on structural stabilization." That is one reason officials are refusing to proceed with large-scale clearance and bulldoze the site. Mayor Ron Novick said debris still had to be removed carefully because a hasty removal could prove to weaken walls and columns. He added that it could also further hamper body removal and identification, as well as possibly damage evidence in the criminal investigation. Rescue workers said that as long as there were new places to search some held out hope for finding even a single survivor. "History shows us incidents like the Philippines, Armenia and other large earthquakes where buildings collapse and victims have lived for a week or more," said Deputy Chief Paul Maniscalco, a member of the New York contingent of the FEMA Urban Search and Rescue Squad. "It's an anomaly, but you're not going to take away that last chance for a family." Two out of town FEMA teams will be replaced by fresh squads from Virginia and Florida. "All of us have families at home who are suffering in ways we were not aware of, and we'd like to be home," said Kevin Trost, the safety officer for the Sacramento contingent. "It makes them nervous. They'd like to be able to touch us." For many of the rescuers, all they have been able to touch since last week has been the rough and unforgiving heap of rubble and bodies, where all thought of the outside world vanishes for the moment. "For me, it's this pile, this moment," Phil Yeager, a member of the Phoenix FEMA team, said yesterday. "If I remove this brick, this piece of concrete the result is going to be a hand, a moan. Hope is personal." TERROR IN OKLAHOMA: AT GROUND ZERO | Bone Weary, Rescue Crews Are Keeping Hopes Alive |
747324_1 | person, to change the channel of a television set or perform other simple tasks that are now beyond the reach of many patients. Dr. Jonathan R. Wolpaw, who heads the project at the Health Department's Wadsworth Center for Laboratories and Research, said in an interview that although the technology is in its infancy, early results are so encouraging that a limited clinical trial will begin soon. Since the early 1930's, psychologists have known that the brain emits electromagnetic waves that can be detected and measured by attaching electrodes to the scalp. Many researchers have studied the rhythmic patterns of these pulsations and attempted to relate them to specific brain functions. Electroencephalography, or EEG, as the measurement procedure is called, has long been used to detect tumors or other forms of brain damage, and a "flat" encephalogram is sometimes used as legal evidence of death. Although EEG patterns respond in clearly detectable ways to such external stimuli as flashing lights, it has proved far harder to deduce thought patterns, emotions or other brain activities. One problem is that every significant feature of a brain wave pattern is at least partly obscured by "noise" or interference from other brain activities. Despite the bewildering complexity of brain wave patterns, however, laboratories in the United States and Europe have shown unequivocally that by conscious effort a person can control some brain emissions, and with training can use this control in ways that nature never achieved. "Our subjects can't exactly describe what it is they learn to do," said Dr. Grant McMillan, director of the biocybernetics project at Wright-Patterson's Aeronautical Systems Center. "But it's a little like learning to walk. After a while, they say, they no longer have to think about what they're doing." The mental tasks required of subjects at the Wadsworth Center in Albany are far more complex because they involve two separate channels of brain emissions, one used for moving a computer cursor up or down, and the other for moving it right or left. Dr. Wolpaw and his colleague at the center, Dr. Dennis J. McFarland, recently wrote in a paper in the journal Electroencephalography and Clinical Neurophysiology that subjects "typically reported using imagery to control cursor movement, for example, running, to move the cursor down, or floating, to move it up." After learning the technique, subjects no longer needed the mental imagery to stimulate appropriate brain emissions, and they | How Brain Waves Can Fly A Plane |
747276_2 | cigarettes -- enough to identify her to the militants as a "prostitute." Yet when an Algerian doctor applied for asylum here this year, saying she had been threatened with death because she supervised male physicians, the I.N.S. case officer said that violence in Algeria was "too random" to support her claim to belong to a "particular social group" at risk of persecution. If Algeria's violence is considered too random to warrant asylum, awkward questions arise about countries -- including a close U.S. ally, Saudi Arabia -- where abuse of women is systemic. In 1993, after almost two years of deliberation, Canada granted asylum to a Saudi student known as Nada who had argued that she risked flogging and imprisonment for walking in the street with her hair and face uncovered. In the U.S., asylum experts say that Nada's predicament would most likely have been viewed by the I.N.S. as a matter of cultural mores rather than as persecution. But substitute race for sex and the American position seems untenable. Imagine a country half black and half white, where the blacks may not legally leave the house without a white's permission, or where they may be caned in the street for refusing to wear the official segregating dress. That is the situation for women in Saudi Arabia. Last spring, some experts in immigration law at Harvard Law School submitted guidelines on asylum for women to the I.N.S. with the hope that they might become the basis for a fairer assessment of claims of persecution. With anti-immigrant sentiment rampant in the Republican Congress, however, any attempt to liberalize I.N.S. standards is sure to meet resistance. Yet asylum seekers constitute a tiny fraction of the people seeking admission to the U.S. each year. Opening the gate wider to persecuted women is hardly likely to result in a flood of new applicants. Most of the persecuted women live in countries where men control their right to leave the country, or even the house. By granting asylum to women like Naima Belahi, the Algerian seamstress, the U.S. could send a powerful message to those who distort religion to justify terror. The message would be that Americans, too, hold certain things sacred -- and among them are liberty, equality, the pursuit of happiness and the right to hold one's own beliefs. Geraldine Brooks is author of "Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women." | A Well-Founded Fear |
751155_6 | Usenet groups, ostensibly to preserve scarce computing resources for more academic topics. As more elementary schools and high schools connect to the Internet, however, the trend toward filtering at lower grade levels is growing. Siecom Inc., an Internet service provider in Grand Rapids, Mich., supplies 20 elementary and secondary schools with restricted, one-way access to Usenet discussion groups. The company eliminates some discussion groups from its service, then gives schools the option of eliminating more. The schools may scan all incoming and outgoing student electronic mail for objectionable words. A school can designate the words it will not allow. "We really had no idea that the level of interest in our service would be so high," said Rob Oates, the president and general manager of Siecom. Commercial on-line services that connect to the Internet, including Prodigy and America Online, already include simple software tools that can be used by parents or teachers to restrict access to some of the dicier areas of the network. "We do not believe our role should be as surrogate parents for anybody," said Brian R. Ek, a spokesman for Prodigy, a service based in White Plains that has an estimated two million users. "We tell you about the good, the bad and the ugly on the other side of the curtain and let you make the choice." Prodigy's software requires a household's main account holder, who must have presented a valid credit card number and thus is presumed to be an adult, to activate access to individual Usenet, chat and bulletin board areas for other members of the household. Without such action, the areas are blocked. "We also have a software program through which every bulletin board note passes, and it looks for obscenities and slurs in a straight keyword search," Mr. Ek said. America Online, the country's fastest-growing commercial service, simply hides the names of sex-related news groups from a menu of Usenet options. To gain access to a sex-related board, the user must type the exact name of the news group. Many Internet users have suggested that controls by parents or teachers are preferable to controls by the Government. "Governmental control sufficient to shield children from any chance of exposure to indecent material would have to limit it to the point that adults couldn't access it either," said Mr. Burk, the law professor, "reducing adult speech, as the Supreme Court says, to the | Despite a New Plan For Cooling It Off, Cybersex Stays Hot |
748727_4 | have become an evolutionary factor relatively recently, Dr. Jones and others say. Among urban middle-class people, birth rates have dropped in the last two centuries, while they have remained high among many poorer groups, especially the more numerous rural people of the third world. Because the rural poor on average have more children per parent, and the children are more likely to survive than was the case not so long ago, they have become more successful than their middle-class urban compatriots in passing on their genes. The evolutionary impact of these fertility factors is unclear, scientists say. One possibility, they say, is that if the global population doubles before stabilizing late in the next century as United Nations demographers predict, the more prolific groups will expand rapidly and genetically overwhelm the less prolific, who generally are more likely to be shielded from evolutionary pressures. Another possibility is that after the population explosion has run its course, the majority of humanity will gradually be shielded from natural selection -- albeit with an altered genetic profile. The fertility factors may already be weakening. United Nations demographers say third world birth rates are dropping so rapidly that on average, they will reach the "replacement level" of a little more than two births per woman of child-bearing age in all countries within the next 50 years. If so, the evolutionary importance of fertility differences would be sharply reduced. However, they would not be eliminated if, as seems certain, some individuals continue to have more children than others. Some evolutionary biologists believe humans will eventually take their future firmly into their own hands through genetic engineering. Once the 100,000 human genes are mapped in detail, "we will be in position to choose our own course of evolution," said Dr. Edward O. Wilson of Harvard University. Whether to intervene in that course deliberately is a political and moral issue, and Dr. Wilson says the decision may be to do nothing. If it is otherwise, "at that point, Darwinian natural selection will have ceased," he said, adding: "I don't think the human species will ever go extinct. I think we'll find the wisdom to put ourselves on the course of near-infinite tenancy of the earth." All but 1 percent of all species that have ever lived are now extinct, but many, in Dr. Jones's words, "stayed unchanged as living fossils" for much of their species lifetimes. He | Evolution Of Humans May at Last Be Faltering |
748482_8 | on a "mat table" -- a king-size mattress on a platform with padded sides -- as an aide massaged their spindly limbs. It was a home for the profoundly retarded, none of whom could walk or talk. The six residents had lived at the Mansfield Training School, and Stephen Lyford, the group home's supervisor, had worked with them there for 20 years."I didn't want them to move," Mr. Lyford said. The six residents, however, quickly adjusted to having their own rooms and began going on trips into town. Staff took them shopping, to lunch at a nearby McDonald's and to swim at a recreation center. One woman, who spent years with her head bent down, began to look around. She no longer insisted on eating in only one spot, but was relaxed enough to take her meals in different places. "She's more alert and more sociable," Mr. Lyford said. "This place has been better for her. It's been better for all of them." Mr. Lyford said the change is partly a result of better staffing, up to a ratio of three or four staff to six residents per shift. James Conroy, a researcher who has studied the transition from institutions to group homes in Connecticut, said that the former Mansfield residents he tracked showed improvement after moving into group homes. At least 10 studies have shown that parents who had opposed such a move later reported greater satisfaction with the new arrangement. The Southbury parents say such studies are biased. Philip K. Bondy, a retired Yale Medical School professor whose wife, Sarah, heads Southbury's parents association, noted that it was difficult to find doctors and dentists outside of institutions who were willing to treat the profoundly retarded. Parents also cite state statistics that show group homes have a higher incidence of abuse and neglect than Southbury, although some experts dismiss these findings. Even advocates for community living acknowledge that group homes, if not monitored closely, can become mini-institutions. And, it is not always clear what the retarded prefer. Asked about her years at Mansfield, one retarded resident of a group home fondly recalled working in the institution's kitchen. "Used to help the baker man at Mansfield," she said. "He would give me milk. He would give me four cups of coffee. Learned to cook, learned to cook potatos." Two of her house mates expressed relief at being out of Mansfield, | Enduring Institutions: Care for the Severely Retarded -- A special report.; Plight of Some Retarded Adults Renews Debate on Big Institutions |
748513_0 | Polar Bears, Almost Every One of Them | |
749839_3 | on CNBC and the author of a financial guide cum travelogue called "Investment Biker." As in the 70's, he said, there is too much money floating around in the world -- a sure recipe for inflation, some economists say. But another crucial factor in the inflation of the 70's, he added, was that the supply of raw materials dried up when African countries went from being exporters to importers. A supply disruption is also likely today -- from the nations that made up the old Soviet Union, which are running out of stuff to export. In general, he added, low raw-materials prices in recent decades have discouraged investments in new production. "I bet nobody has said they have a cannot-miss deal in a sugar plantation," he said, "and if anyone has come to you with a hot tin mine, I'd be surprised." Demand for raw materials, gold and other commodities will also increase as "less developed" countries start to catch up. "The two billion people in India and China each use one barrel of oil a year, while in Taiwan they use 11 and in the U.S. they each use 33," said Mark Holowesko, president of Templeton, Galbraith & Hansberger Ltd., which manages the Templeton mutual funds. Inflation weighs on the minds of money managers like William Fleckenstein, a principal of Olympic Capital Management of Seattle, which invests more than $1 billion. "People believe in stocks and bonds, and they believe in the chairman" -- Alan Greenspan, that is, of the Federal Reserve -- and his ability to engineer an economic slowdown that will spark neither inflation nor recession, Mr. Fleckenstein said. "The case for commodities is, What if everybody gets it wrong?" Robert A. Beckwitt does not expect a surge in inflation, and he finds it hard to bet on the future of China and Russia. But as manager of Fidelity Investments' giant Asset Manager funds, he has made some commodity-linked investments as insurance, and suggests that 5 to 10 percent of a portfolio might belong in such investments. "Inflation is low, and while it could go down to 1 percent, it could also go to 6 percent," he noted. "How do I invest and make money in a period when inflation goes from 3 percent to 6 percent? Commodities are one of the few things you know that correlate with inflation." FINALLY, some investment gurus favor commodities simply | What? Pork Bellies Back in Fashion? |
749692_3 | have defected are "deserters." Good riddance, he said. "I'm very happy about it," Mr. Balceiro said. "There will be fewer Cubans angry with the government inside Cuba." Families, along with teams, have been torn apart by defections. Emilio Lara, an Olympic weight lifter, sought political asylum in Puerto Rico in 1993, leaving behind his brother Pablo Lara, a silver medalist in the 165-pound weight-lifting category at the 1992 Barcelona Olympics. Pablo Lara, who won three gold medals and set two world records at these Pan Am Games, said he remained in contact with his brother. "We have our differences, but he is still my brother," Mr. Lara said. Approximately 30,000 athletes remain in Cuba, 2,000 at the elite level, said Mr. Gonzalez, the sports minister. The country, whose President also happens to be its No. 1 sports fan, spends about $100 million a year on sports, Mr. Gonzalez said. That figure is approximately equal to the annual budget of the United States Olympic Committee, but it is artificial, pegged as it is to a one-to-one exchange rate between the Cuban peso and the American dollar. The black market rate has been as high as 100 pesos to the dollar but has dropped sharply in recent months. "Sports is part of the culture and the national dignity," Mr. Gonzalez said. "It is not only a political experience but also one of patriotism in difficult times." In striving for economic self-sufficiency in sports, Cuba has employed some decidedly capitalistic measures, such as charging a small amount of money to fans who attend sporting events. And if other countries need coaches to upgrade their Olympic-style baseball or volleyball teams, the Cubans are willing to rent them out in exchange for hard currency. Some 500 Cuban coaches are now offering their expertise in various sports in 38 countries, Cuban officials said. Osvaldo Garcia, the former Cuban national water polo coach who defected to Miami, said in a telephone interview that coaches who work abroad keep 30 percent of their salary, give 70 percent to the Cuban Government and must travel without their families to assure that they will return. Athletes are also being exported to other countries, where they compete and send home a large percentage of their earnings. Javier Sotomayor, the Olympic high jump champion, and six other track and field athletes compete for a professional club in Madrid. Five Cuban baseball players, | Cuba's Financial Crisis Erodes Sports Programs |
749668_0 | As the House prepares for debate on welfare legislation next week, the leaders of the nation's Roman Catholic bishops today denounced parts of the Republican bill that could end cash assistance for many children born out of wedlock, unmarried teen-agers who have children and legal immigrants. The bishops said they were speaking not as partisan political lobbyists but in an effort to illuminate "the moral dimensions and human consequences of this debate." In the statement today, titled "Moral Principles and Policy Priorities for Welfare Reform," the bishops agreed that "the status quo is unacceptable" but said the Federal Government must not abandon its role in fighting poverty. They said the coming debate would be "a test of our nation's values and our commitment to the 'least among us.' " The statement by the Administrative Board of the United States Catholic Conference, the top leadership of the nation's bishops, echoes the concerns of many Democrats who have criticized the bill on the ground that it would punish children for parents' behavior. That view is shared by diverse groups, including supporters and opponents of abortion rights, child welfare advocates and civil libertarians. Despite such opposition, the bill is likely to be passed by the House. Its fate in the Senate, however, is far less certain, and the bishops' statement, which raises the concern that ending subsidies for children born to women on welfare would encourage abortions, could kindle opposition from conservative Republicans opposed to abortion rights. The bill to be considered by the House would bar the use of Federal money to provide cash welfare benefits for a child born to a woman already receiving public assistance. Most states now provide extra money to indigent families for each additional child, and some Republicans say that encourages women to have more babies -- a contention disputed by the Children's Defense Fund and by some economists. The House bill would also deny cash assistance to children born out of wedlock to women younger than 18, and to the women as well. The Roman Catholic Church, Catholic Charities USA, the National Right to Life Committee and opponents of abortion like Representative Christopher H. Smith of New Jersey say the proposed restrictions on welfare benefits would increase pressures on poor women to have abortions. They say that pressure would be particularly strong in states that pay for Medicaid abortions but not for the costs of rearing | CATHOLIC BISHOPS CHALLENGE PIECES OF WELFARE BILL |
749639_0 | Little more than a month after Government troops recovered territory controlled for more than a year by peasant rebels in the south, efforts at peace talks between the two sides are gathering momentum. In a communique published on Friday, rebel leaders from the area, in Chiapas state, welcomed the promulgation of a new law that offers a framework for talks and a temporary amnesty for the insurgents. The statement, dated March 11, continued to condition any new talks on the full withdrawal of army troops from the area, where the rebel Zapatista National Liberation Army had been allowed to operate freely before the military occupation began on Feb. 9. But even while it remained doubtful that the insurgents would accept a simple redeployment, mediators were quick to describe the flurry of recent movement as progress. "There is a new climate," the Roman Catholic Bishop who has been the main intermediary between the two sides, Samuel Ruiz Garcia, was quoted as saying after a meeting on Friday with Government officials. For the moment, the Government and the Zapatistas are merely talking about talking. A breakthrough would mean only a resumption of the face-to-face contact that began and ended with one meeting in the Lacandon rain forest on Jan. 15 between delegations led by the Interior Minister, Esteban Moctezuma, and the rebel leader known as Subcommander Marcos. An agenda for negotiations to end the 15-month-old uprising has not even been discussed, at least not publicly. Nor have Government officials put forth any kind of plan addressing the Zapatistas' demands for greater democracy, changes in economic policy, aid to poor farmers and new rights for Indians. Government officials take it for granted that a settlement will also be complicated by the collapse of talks on political reform measures between the Government and political parties and by the polarization of Chiapas society that has taken place over the last year. At the same time, the military's sweep into the region has apparently increased the pressure for compromise on both parties. The relatively small and poorly armed rebel force, which never represented a serious military threat, disappeared into the dense tropical rain forest as the army moved in along the rutted dirt roads that connect the larger hamlets and villages. Rebel threats of a prolonged guerrilla war in the event of any such action by the Government proved empty; after five weeks, three deaths have | Rebels in Mexico Welcome New Law to Advance Talks |
749185_2 | a growing problem. The insurance industry says that claims for air bag thefts have increased significantly in the last year, with the first theft reports appearing in 1992. Fifty-two air bags were snatched from cars parked in Co-Op City parking garages in the Bronx over the Columbus Day weekend. In a sting last summer, New York City police detectives uncovered 102 stolen air bags at 10 junkyards and auto repair shops citywide. "A couple of years ago, we never saw this," said Jeremiah J. Smith, a special agent for the National Insurance Crime Bureau in Washington. "It is new, and it is growing." In part, the crooks themselves are driving the market by forcing people to buy new air bags after theirs have been stolen. Because the bags are not reusable, the driver of an air bag-equipped car who is in a front-end collision will need a new one. About one in four cars on the road today has an air bag, and by 1998, they will be required for the driver and front-seat occupant in all new passenger cars. "Unfortunately, this is one of those situations in which demand creates its own supply," said Kim Hazelbaker, senior vice president of the Highway Loss Data Institute in Arlington, Va. The suppliers tend to be unscrupulous auto shops and junkyards that send out requests for a specific air bag model, said Detective Tom Burke of the auto crimes division of the New York Police Department. A street thief trades the part to the junkyard for whatever he can get -- $20 or a vial of crack -- and the junkyard sells it to a body shop for $200 or more. Alan Friedman, the owner of Diagnostic Auto Center in Brooklyn, said an unscrupulous junkyard would most likely meet a request for an air bag with the following response: "We don't have it. Give me a day." Mr. Friedman, who is a mechanic and does not replace air bags, said that the temptation to cheat the insurance company, as well as the customer, may be too much for some body shops. "It becomes a good deal," Mr. Friedman said. "That's the bottom line." The devices, which weigh three to four pounds, inflate when sensors release an electrical charge. Stealing them, particularly the ones installed on the driver's side, is a simple matter, the police say. A thief will typically snip wires connecting | As Automotive Air Bags Become Common, So Does Stealing Them |
749347_0 | Six months before an international conference on women opens in Beijing, the Chinese Government and the Vatican are maneuvering to silence critics by asking the United Nations to deny them credentials to attend the meeting. At least 200 and possibly 300 nongovernmental groups have been affected, American officials and human rights organizations say. Among those being denied the necessary documents are Taiwanese and Tibetan women's organizations, which China wants barred, and several religious groups, including Catholics for a Free Choice, which opposes the Vatican's stand against abortion. The Vatican's observer mission here acknowledged today that it had challenged the credentials of certain groups but declined to explain why, the Rev. Carl J. Marucci, a mission spokesman, said. Calls to the Chinese mission were not returned. Representatives of some conservative groups, secular and interdenominational, were also refused credentials initially, said Christopher J. Check, of the Rockford Institute's Center for the Family in America in Rockford, Ill., which describes itself as a traditional organization supporting family life. Some of these groups, including Rockford, had been turned down after being told they were not sufficiently focused on women's issues, but they have now been admitted on appeal, Mr. Check said. Several lesbian organizations report that their delegates have also been turned down. The Administration is pressing the United Nations Secretariat to disclose the names of groups and individuals being denied credentials and to explain the grounds for rejection, American officials say. The United States has also called for the establishment of an international committee to review denials. Representative Nancy Pelosi, a California Democrat who is chairman of the international task force of the Congressional Caucus on Women's Issues, said, "Many women are very concerned about freedom of speech and freedom of association at the conference." "Accreditation should not be a politicized process," she said. On Wednesday, during a Congressional hearing, Ms. Pelosi asked Madeleine K. Albright, the chief United States delegate to the United Nations, to insist that a list of rejections be made public. The dispute over the Beijing meeting -- where issues of women's rights in health, education, politics and economic development will be discussed -- follows a confrontation last week in Geneva between China and the United States over a resolution at the United Nations Human Rights Commission critical of China's human rights practices. In choosing Beijing as the site of the Fourth World Conference on Women, the United Nations | U.N. Talks On Women Under Fire |
747909_3 | as the Italian police hunted for him. "No one really cared about monuments because people were interested in their own lives," said Davide Ratti, a 13-year-old student at the Vivona school who was busily sketching an architectural plan of the villa's east facade on a recent day. His friend Lorenzo Tramuto, 12, said he was more fascinated by the garden. "These children have a real hunger for green," said their English teacher, Lucio Forte. For the moment, Vivona students are studying the villa's architecture, its history and its rare collection of exotic plants and trees. But for five days in May, they will play hosts as the villa is opened to the public during a citywide memorial for the city's most famous Mafia fighters, the judges Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, who were killed in 1992. The plan is to invite residents and tourists to follow any of 12 tours of the city, with stops at the various adopted monuments. The efforts of the estimated 8,000 schoolchildren in the project coincide with a campaign by the Palermo region to expand its own restoration projects, with particular attention to monuments dating from the Middle Ages. In the last decade, the number of restoration projects begun each year has increased, from 1 or 2 to between 10 and 15, said Guido Meli, the director of the region's cultural office. But the revival of central Palermo, with its narrow medieval streets, collapsing shells of buildings, broken lights and paltry city services, requires much more, Mr. Meli said. "Monuments are like islands in the sea," he said. "What is missing is a kind of tranquillity of life. It is the fabric, the context of central Palermo that has been degraded." Mr. Meli said the Mafia's giddy profiteering at the city's expense is only one reason for Palermo's sorry state. "Was the Government coerced by the Mafia, or did the Mafia simply take advantage of the Government's own stupidity and lack of planning," he said. "In the end, everyone was responsible." Now, many people in Palermo say they are ready to take back their city. "Now is a fortunate moment," said Ms. Siragusa, the education commissioner. "There is a greater civic awareness and a desire for change. For about 10 years now, we have been able to talk about the Mafia. But now we have gone beyond the Mafia, and we are talking about ourselves." | Palermo Journal; After the Mafia, a Sort of Children's Crusade |
747936_3 | camera, hand held or mounted on a police cruiser, to detect metallic and nonmetallic weapons at a distance of up to 12 feet. Jeremy Travis, the director of the National Institute of Justice, said police officers who stopped a car and then ordered suspects out would be able to scan them for concealed weapons without leaving the safety of their squad car. The camera works because the human body naturally emits very strong electromagnetic signals in the millimeter wavelength, said Dr. G. Richard Huguenin, the inventor of the device at the Millitech Corporation. Colder objects, like guns or knives, emit almost no such signals and effectively "block" the body's emissions. They can thus be "seen" by the camera, forming a clear image on a monitor. Unlike X-rays or other metal detectors in current use, Dr. Huguenin said, this technology relies on passive natural emissions that do not expose the people being scanned to radiation or electromagnetic fields. A second device, the most conventional of the three, is a greatly enhanced version of the metal detectors now used in airports and courtrooms. It will combine an array of advanced magnetic sensors with a computer to provide a signal to a monitor if someone is carrying a gun or other metallic weapons. Justice Department officials say it would provide a more reliable reading of whether someone was armed than the current versions. Its disadvantage, they said, is that it is not transportable. This technology will be developed by the Idaho National Engineering Laboratory. The third technology will use a low-intensity electromagnetic pulse that can be trained on a subject and, when linked to a computer, will send a signal, like a red or green light, indicating that the person being scanned is armed. The device, which can be housed unobtrusively in a briefcase, could be placed in stores, banks or shopping malls and operated by remote control, Justice Department officials said. It is to be developed by the Raytheon Corporation. Mr. Schumer and Professor Wilson both said they hoped that successful testing of the new gun detectors could lead to more Congressional support for research by the National Institute of Justice. It now has a research budget of less than $10 million a year, a tiny fraction of what the Federal Government spends for research into cancer, heart attacks, AIDS and even the $310 million annually devoted to research on Alzheimer's disease. | Justice Dept. Awarding Grants to Develop Gun Detectors |
750368_2 | the talks, for trying to negotiate the early release of I.R.A. prisoners and for the reform of the overwhelmingly Protestant Royal Ulster Constabulary, the police force. Mr. Coogan, who has many friends in Sinn Fein, and other experts said that Northern Catholics and Protestants want negotations that could bring their imprisoned fathers, husbands and sons home rather than military operations that risk more death and imprisonment. And, among politicians, the need to keep talking also reflects the rarely spoken fear that a particularly heinous violation of the cease-fire, one that killed several civilians or British police or soldiers, could still collapse the peace effort. Mr. Coogan and Irish officials said that Mr. Adams was compelled to make a worth-the-price concession to the British in order to gain Mr. Clinton's approval of his visit: his agreement to discuss I.R.A. disarmament with British ministers. Asked this week if he was still ready to discuss I.R.A. disarmament at such talks, Mr. Adams said, "Absolutely," but he declined to say how soon that might happen. Previously, Mr. Adams had insisted that disarmament could only be discussed at all-party talks, including Northern Ireland's Protestant leaders, as part of a final peace settlement. Two weeks before he left for America, Mr. Adams said, "Republicans are fairly patient," and would not expect to be included in all-party political talks on disarmament, for three or four months. Politically, outside the I.R.A., Mr. Adams has also won concessions. Until he and John Hume, the influential leader of the Catholic-dominated Social Democratic Labor Party, began a secret peace initiative two years ago, Sinn Fein was banned from the United States as a front for a terrorist organization. Now Mr. Hume, once a political enemy whose candidate defeated Mr. Adams in the 1992 British Parliamentary election, has personally introduced Mr. Adams to Mr. Clinton in Washington. And Mr. Adams can visit America, raise money, and, most important, he has achieved an old Sinn Fein objective: pulling the White House into a mediator's role between the I.R.A. and the British. American pressure on London delights Sinn Fein and the I.R.A. because it influences, and sometimes vexes, the British Government. Mr. Adams's agreement, under White House pressure, to discuss disarmament with British ministers was followed in a matter of days by a British concession on the issue Mr. Adams calls "demilitarization": the promised withdrawal of 400 British troops from the North. And Mr. | The I.R.A.'s Political Strongman |
750232_2 | cannot be to intervene and try to control the market by other means. Indeed, generations of donors have given in the hope and trust that Yale would promote freedom of thought and learning. To accept Mr. Bass's additional condition would have been to violate that trust. Finally, one did not have to be in the grip of any particular political outlook to think that there were serious flaws in the original plan. Administratively, there was a decision that senior Bass professors be appointed primarily from within the existing faculty. Anyone trying to balance Yale's budget would have been delighted with the influx of money to pay for existing expenses, but Yale thereby sacrificed the opportunity to attract great scholars working elsewhere to its campus. In design, the course was going to be yet another survey, which I have come to think is a tired way to introduce students to Western civilization. Yale students are asked to read too much. Philosophy, Aristotle said, begins in wonder and awe; it also, he said, requires leisure. Students need time to think about that which inspires them. Surveys tend to degenerate into that cliche of a European tour: if this is Tuesday, it must be Plato. And Yale already has nearly a hundred courses that survey periods of Western civilization. In spite of that, I think that a distinctive introductory course would have been great. If I had been given $20 million and asked to design a program -- and who can resist an occasion like this to fantasize -- I would have designed a year-long course in which students read four, maybe five, books: in philosophy, Plato's "Republic"; in history, Thucydides's "History of the Peloponnesian War"; in literature, "Antigone," "The Odyssey" and, perhaps, "Oedipus Rex." That's it. At the end of a year, students would have been introduced to some fundamental works around which the West was constituted; more importantly, they would have learned to read carefully and to think for themselves. As the curtain goes down, there are bodies lying all over the stage; one can't help but think that everyone involved is worse off. Yet if I were to teach this drama, it would be as a comedy, not a tragedy; and surely the restorative moment, even in this act, is Yale's refusal to cede control of faculty appointments to outside pressures. Jonathan Lear is a professor of philosophy at Yale. | The $20 Million Question |
746536_0 | Representative Thomas J. Bliley Jr. speaks with a forked tongue when he talks about the Food and Drug Administration. In one breath he accuses the agency of pokiness and nitpicking: "It breaks my heart when I think of American citizens having to go to Switzerland or Mexico to get the drugs or devices they need to stay alive because the Washington bureaucracy won't approve them." In the next, he implies that the F.D.A. cannot be poky and nitpicking enough when it comes to reviewing RU-486, the French abortion drug. Congressman Bliley's is the lead signature on a citizens' petition that Americans United For Life filed with the F.D.A. demanding that it apply the strictest possible review standards for RU-486. The petition also argues that the agency should not use data from foreign studies. But who besides Mr. Bliley, Americans United for Life and others who share the same anti-choice sentiments has accused the agency of planning to relax its standards for RU-486? Nobody. And do they realize that drugs on which they themselves may depend would not be available here were it not for data from foreign studies? In any case, facts are not the issue. What is at issue is a politically motivated effort to deny the American market a drug that can make abortion the wholly private decision it should be -- a drug that also has potential for treating certain female diseases. Since 1981, 250,000 women in 20 countries have used RU-486. It would be ridiculous for the F.D.A. to blind its eyes to that large statistical universe. Meanwhile, the nonprofit Population Council is conducting its own clinical trials, with 2,100 women at 12 American sites. Once the trials are finished and when and if RU-486 is submitted for approval, the F.D.A. promises to give it the same rigorous scrutiny it would give any other drug. Such a promise, however, is sure to cut little ice with Mr. Bliley and company. By their lights, it is politics, not science, that decides what pharmaceuticals American women will have access to. | Representative Bliley's Double Talk |
747692_1 | Federal Communications Commission to grant maximum feasible flexibility to how the licensees use the rights. The legal framework for spectrum allocation dates from a time when Americans clustered around the radio to listen to Jack Benny. And it shows. The F.C.C. is charged with identifying the uses for the spectrum that best serve the public, and then handing out licenses to those most likely to do the job right. By the 1950's, however, the process had become a funhouse for lawyers and lobbyists, as companies and whole industries jockeyed for free use of what was becoming a very scarce resource. The outdated process deteriorated to farce by the 1980's, when the F.C.C. was passing out parts of the spectrum for cellular phone systems. Licenses to serve cities that were not arbitrarily assigned to regional Bell companies have been sold and resold for tens of billions of dollars. In despair of finding the most suitable applicants through hearings as usual, the F.C.C. tried lotteries for allocating cellular licenses in less densely populated regions. But hundreds of thousands of people deluged the agency with their lottery "tickets" -- the forms that gave them a chance to become rich overnight. Congress got wiser in the 1990's, finally succumbing to the argument that the Treasury was a more worthy recipient of the pot of gold at the end of the spectrum. But auctions cannot unleash the productivity of older spectrum licenses issued on the implicit assumption that communications technology was cast in stone. How much is really at stake here? A 1992 research paper by Evan Kwerel and John Williams, then members of the F.C.C.'s staff, suggests the magnitude of the waste. They asked what would happen if a single, lightly used UHF television channel in Los Angeles were reassigned to a third cellular phone system for Southern California. They estimated the value of the permanent loss of the television signal, as measured in ad revenue and program diversity lost, to be about $140 million. But the benefits from adding a third cellular system in the crowded market would have a cumulative value of $1.2 billion. Hence the net benefit of shifting a single television license in a single market to a higher valued use exceeded $1 billion. The example is obsolete because new spectrum is now being assigned to provide competition for Los Angeles's two cellular networks. And as Mr. Kwerel is the | Economic Scene; Managing the airwaves for productivity and profits. |
752053_0 | China said today that it would not respond to international appeals for the release of the country's most famous political prisoner, Wei Jingsheng, who has been detained without charges for a year. Chen Jian, a Foreign Ministry spokesman, said at a news conference that the arrest of Mr. Wei on April 1, 1994, was a matter of "China's internal affairs." He refused to say whether Mr. Wei was alive. "If I answer you," Mr. Chen said, "you might quickly follow up with a question on his health." Mr. Wei, 45, was released in September 1993 after 14 1/2 years in prison and has become the symbol of China's repressed democracy movement. During his six months of freedom, Mr. Wei spoke frequently and publicly about the need for political reform in China and called on the Government to free thousands of political prisoners. His activities captured the attention of the Clinton Administration. In February 1994, the State Department's top human rights official, John H. F. Shattuck, met privately with Mr. Wei, angering Chinese officials, who detained Mr. Wei again a little more than a month later. China also has indefinitely postponed discussions on allowing officials of the International Committee of the Red Cross access to Chinese prisons and political prisoners. In January, Chinese officials had told Mr. Shattuck that detailed talks would resume at the end of March. "There's nothing," a Red Cross official said. "The Chinese find themselves unavailable even though these dates have been suggested by them." Beginning in November 1993, Foreign Minister Qian Qichen said China was willing to undertake serious discussions with the Red Cross over access to political prisoners. But the talks have suffered from frequent delays. A senior Chinese prison official said recently that he considered it "impossible" that China would allow Red Cross investigators unfettered access to its prisons. The statement on Mr. Wei and the postponement of the Red Cross talks is part of China's overall retrenchment on rights since May, when President Clinton decided no longer to use the threat of trade sanctions to pressure China to improve its human rights record. Previously, the United States had been able to warn China that without some progress, Washington would withdraw "most favored nation" trade privileges, which amount to minimal tariffs on Chinese exports to the United States. Since reversing that policy, Clinton Administration officials have expressed frequent disappointment over China's failure to respond | Is Top Dissident Even Alive? Beijing Will Not Say |
752109_3 | the bank's outlook in domestic terms," said Hermann Remsperger, chief economist at the BHF Bank in Frankfurt. "The domestic scenario gave room for a cut. If there are effects in other countries, that is fine. But the bank is concerned about Germany." Analysts said today's move was exceptional because it marked one of the few times the Bundesbank had responded to the pressures of the currency markets -- attempting to defend the German economy. "The danger is that once you start playing this game, the market decides to take you on and see if you will cut rates again if the currency continues to strengthen," said Adrian Cunningham, chief currency economist for the Union Bank of Switzerland in London. Members of the Bundesbank's council seemed later in the day to try to curb expectations that the rate cut would calm the currency markets and solve the dollar's problems. "I do not believe our decision can significantly change currency markets," said Hans Tietmeyer, president of the bank. "The currency markets are determined primarily by a judgment of the situation in weak currency countries." But Finance Minister Theo Waigel was more optimistic. "The measures taken by the Bundesbank will contribute to strengthening the trust in the stability of exchange rates in the markets," he said. Though most analysts agreed that the bank was reacting to the mark's surging strength, the bank tried to play down its market reaction. It justified the interest-rate move because its key measure of the German money supply had fallen below the bank's target range. The bank uses a broad money supply measurement called an expanded M-3, which includes cash in circulation, demand and savings deposits at banks and money market accounts. Its yearly range for this M-3 measurement is a growth rate of 4 percent to 6 percent. It said today that between January 1994 and 1995, it had grown only 2.4 percent, including an uptick in February of seven-tenths of 1 percent. As a result, it said, it could cut interest rates without fearing a surge in inflation. The central bank also said that because the strong mark made imports cheaper for Germans, inflationary pressures would also be reduced. "The appreciation of the mark should form a considerable counterweight to the upward pressure on domestic costs and to the price rise for imported raw materials, as well as industrial products," the bank said in its statement. | A Surprise German Rate Cut Propels the Dollar Up by 2% |
746103_2 | N.Y.; at Sprouts Towne, Route 22, Brewster, N.Y., and by mail from Adriana's Caravan in Brooklyn, (800) 316-0820, and Country Cottage Savories, Jefferson Valley, N.Y., (914) 228-1584. Off the Menu Chef Celebration A gaggle of top French chefs flew into town last weekend to put the icing on a yearlong celebration of Le Cirque's 20th anniversary. On Sunday night, 110 people paid $1,000 each to join in and dine on Paul Bocuse's truffle soup, Roger Verge's scallops with mango, Gerard Boyer's lobster with fennel and Alain Ducasse's spit-roasted woodcook. The guests, among them the talk-show host Rush Limbaugh, the San Francisco chef Jeremiah Tower and Philippe de Montebello, director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, did not get to eat the roasted ortolans, though. These tiny, greasy, crunchy, gamey-tasting songbirds, considered a delicacy, were served only at a preview lunch for the press on Saturday. But the Sunday crowd drank far better wines, mostly magnums of 1982 Corton Charlemagne and Chateau Haut-Brion, because Sirio Maccioni, the owner of Le Cirque, saw to it that his co-host was Marvin Shanken, publisher of The Wine Spectator. Leaning Toward Manhattan Torre di Pisa, a restaurant that opened in Milan in 1959 and is a magnet for figures in fashion and the press, is opening in New York at 19-21 West 44th Street. Paolo Meacci, the principal owner, will bring a chef from Italy to prepare many Tuscan specialties, like the tagliata steak, beef with mustard sauce and pastas for which Torre di Pisa is known. David Rockwell will design the restaurant, which is scheduled to open in the fall. Turkish but Not Turkish Orhan Yegen, the owner of Deniz (pronounced den-EEZ), which opened last week at 400 East 57th Street, said the name means "ocean sea" in Turkish. But Mr. Yegen, who is the former owner of Turkish Kitchen in Murray Hill, said his new restaurant is not Turkish nor is it strictly seafood. "It is food of the Mediterranean," he said. "And because I am Turkish, from Istanbul, you could say there is 15 percent of my heritage in anything I make." The restaurant is understated, suffused in gold-beige, and will seat 250 when a cafe area is opened in the front. The main courses, $14.50 to $19.50, include simple grilled salmon, trout stuffed with creamy spinach in a dill and lemon sauce and succulent roast baby lamb with cracked wheat pilaf. | Food Notes |
746152_0 | In 1911, the Johns-Manville Corporation built a 1.8-million-square-foot roofing-products plant in a 216-acre field and lent its company name to the town that sprang up nearby. But in 1986, beset by asbestos-lawsuit problems and filing for bankruptcy protection, Johns-Manville closed the plant and dealt a huge blow to the town's economy. Late Monday, the Town Council voted 4-3 to allow the Indianapolis-based Adesa Corporation to open an 82-acre automobile auction business on the site, where used-car dealers will bid on vehicles no longer of use to fleet owners. Adesa also agreed to develop 26 acres as general retail space for shops and stores. "I think it's a great deal for the town," said Mayor Angelo Corradino, who cast the tie-breaking vote on the basis of the estimated 900 new jobs and $1.1 million in new taxes. NEW JERSEY DAILY BRIEFING | Renewal Built on Used Cars |
746147_4 | plan was but the grandiose scheme of ambitious politicians, greedy business executives and dreamy civic boosters. The doubters also warned that even though bonds would be sold to pay for the project, it nevertheless would end up costing the average citizen money because air carriers would have to raise fares to meet higher landing fees and taxi companies would have to charge passengers for longer trips. In fact, the fares for many flights in and out of Denver International have been raised $20 each way above the fares to and from Stapleton. Airlines say the increase is necessary because the landing fee for the new field is more than $18 a passenger, compared with $6 for Stapleton. As for ground transportation costs, a taxi to or from the city's center now costs about $35, more than twice the old Stapleton fare. "I don't like the extra costs," said Richard Mills, a sales manager from Colorado Springs. "But we've got this new facility now and so it'll just have to become part of doing business. We'll just have to see what tourists and skiers and the like do." Utah ski resorts think they know. They have mailed out advertisements that read: "In Denver, you could lose your luggage. In Utah you could lose yourself." If, despite all the problems, the opening of Denver International was a notable achievement, so too was the closing of Stapleton. After the last flight departed on Monday at 9:38 P.M. -- Continental Flight 34, bound for London -- the runways were officially closed and airport employees then labored through the rest of the night to complete the transfer of more than 10,000 baggage carts, plane tugs, fire engines, catering trucks, de-icing machines and untold truckloads of tickets, tags and gift shop sundries. Stapleton will be put up for sale, with the city hoping that busy industrial parks and peaceful suburbs will be built where planes once roared. But thus far there has been no great rush to acquire the tract. Likewise, as has often occurred at other new airports in their early days, there is no great rush yet to build on the outskirts of Denver International. As Continental Flight 34 lifted out of Stapleton on Monday night, ending an era stretching back to the days of open cockpit barnstorming, the tower radioed a final message. "Continental 34," said the controller, "the torch is passed to | Finally, 16 Months Late, Denver Has a New Airport |
749370_3 | In I.R.A. strongholds like Crossmaglen, in South Armagh, where British soldiers once moved about only in helicopters, police officers now give out traffic tickets. Gradually the sense built that what began as two slippery cease-fires could be turned into something permanent. Now what is needed is for representatives of the armed men and other parties to begin substantive talks with British and Irish Government officials. One sign of how things have changed is that the visit to Washington by Gerry Adams, the leader of Sinn Fein, which is the political arm of the I.R.A., is creating consternation in London but has not aroused much visible anger among Protestants here. One political advocate who is close to a Protestant paramilitary organization even remarked that it might be good to build up Mr. Adams's stature so he can control the "hard men" in the I.R.A. By the same token, with all the calls for the I.R.A. to "decommission" its weapons, even some senior officials in the security forces recognize that it would be unrealistic to expect any I.R.A. leader to turn over the weapons all at once and still remain in control. A token gesture -- similar to Britain's announcement this week that it is withdrawing 400 men -- would be enough to keep the momentum going, they say. It is a source of hope that some people on each side recognize that their counterparts are also under pressure from their own constituencies. They seem willing to cut each other some slack. Those who have followed the conflict here for a long time are optimistic. "I almost don't see how it can go wrong," said David McKittrick, the correspondent for The Independent. "The loyalists will only start up again if the republicans do. And the republicans have so much invested in the process so far -- if they were to set bombs off, they'd be out of everything in a minute." Still, there are reminders of how close "the troubles" remain. On Thursday night a bomb that was found in a shop in the border town of Newry partly exploded as it was being defused. It was the third such bomb found in the past six months. No one knows whether they are being left by a renegade I.R.A. unit or by agents provocateurs from the other side, but in either case the aim is the same -- to end the peace. | Catholics and Protestants Parade Together in Ulster for St. Patrick |
749403_1 | religious forces -- the Vatican, the World Council of Churches and an array of Muslim, Buddhist and other religious groups -- were represented at both gatherings. But this time the forces of faith agreed, with each other and their secular counterparts. Muslim leaders, the Vatican and Hillary Clinton, who spoke at the meeting, all insisted that education for girls and young women was essential to economic and social development. Religious groups participating in a parallel conference of nongovernmental organizations were among the loudest voices calling for the forgiveness of poor nations' international debts. The Vatican converged with feminist lobbies, Ms. Campbell pointed out, in demanding that the economic value of women's work at home be recognized in the kind of economic statistics that underlie every nation's planning and policy making. The conference on social development was "ready-made for people of faith," Ms. Campbell said. She noted that at the beginning of the gathering's official declaration and program of action, world leaders acknowledged that their societies must meet the "spiritual needs of individuals" as well as the material ones. "The United Nations document read more like something from a church," she said. Dr. Vendley suggested, by way of explanation, that when the United Nations tried to flesh out what it meant by a notion like "social development," it was "being forced into language familiar to religions" by addressing questions like "who are we?" and "where are we going?" and "what do we owe one another?" The organizers of the Copenhagen conference even held a preparatory "Seminar on the Ethical and Spiritual Dimensions of Social Progress" last October in Bled, Slovenia. In this and other conversations that took place in connection with the gathering, Dr. Vendley sees the first steps toward "elaborating a positive vision of a common human destiny, although obviously in the appropriately this-worldly terms." Much in these gropings toward a new vision is sharply at odds with the market-based, growth-oriented, technology-driven economic development plans that are in use. "Our current dilemma is that we use a social development model when we state our intentions, but that we apply an economic growth model when we act," Konrad Raiser, General Secretary of the World Council of Churches, told a plenary session of the Copenhagen conference. Of course, the resemblance of Copenhagen to the Sunday pulpit may also spring from the fact that exhortation, fervor and pledges are generally the stuff of | Beliefs |
748264_1 | get involved with the process." Stephen W. Lewis, who set up his own computerized bulletin board service for information about the legislature last year, said allowing people to access information electronically would also save copying, paper, postage and other costs associated with traditional forms of disseminating information. With the push of a button and at almost no cost an electronic message can be copied to millions of homes. "At this time it's impossible to quantify what the savings might be, but they would not be insignificant," Mr. Lewis said. "We could maintain a huge mailing list without any real expense." "We have in Connecticut a very highly educated, very high-income state, so this would be a natural place to establish computer access to government. I guess it's just that there haven't been enough people in government who have the experience with computers to bring these ideas forward." But a new legislative task force is recommending wider use of the information superhighway as a way to encourage participation in government. Its report urges state support for libraries to purchase computers that would be available to the public, that legislative data be made available via toll-free telephone lines and that legislators be given electronic mail addresses. One task force member surveyed members of the General Assembly on E-mail; 82 percent of those responding said they would be interested. Richard Ferrari, a Republican of East Granby and a member of the task force, said that disseminating information via printed documents "is little better than scribes scribbling down the stuff." Computerized bulletin boards and E-mail will give legislators the chance to communicate with more of their constituents. "We're supposed to be accessible to our constituents, and this is just another way to be accessible," Mr. Ferrari said. "The more information we get out there, the better. It's essential, for us to do a good job, that people know what we're doing and react to it." Mr. Lewis, the administrator of the legislature's public health committee, set up a bulletin board service a year ago that lists the committee's bills, as well as general information about the legislature, including a list of the names, home telephone numbers and addresses for all 187 state legislators. "When I first suggested the idea to the Office of Legislative Management, I don't think anyone knew what I was talking about," Mr. Lewis said. "I got them to agree to | Access Gets New Meaning In Local Politics |
748289_0 | WELL into the last century, piracy was still a matter of great concern, and several sightings of a mystery ship off the Atlantic coast in the summer of 1839 both fascinated and bothered sailors and newspaper readers alike. The ship, described as a "long, low, black schooner," would be seen and then disappear, only to reappear a bit further north. It was like a ghost ship, zigzagging aimlessly and seemingly lost. Then, in late August, the mystery ended when the ship was confiscated off Montauk Point by a naval brig doing surveys in the area. Her name was the Amistad and she had a number of black people on board, including a few children, who had been captured in Africa, taken to Cuba, sold into slavery and put on the Spanish schooner to go around the island from Havana to a sugar plantation in Principe. They rebelled, taking over the Amistad and in the process killing the ship's captain and cook while losing several of their own number. The slaves -- led by a young man called Cinque -- then attempted to return to Africa by forcing the two men who had bought them to steer the ship in an easterly direction. But at night the slaveowners would change direction, to the northwest, hoping to land at a port in the United States where they could arrange for the slaves to be imprisoned and punished After the ship was confiscated at the entrance to Long Island Sound, it was towed to New London and the slaves were taken to the New Haven jail, charged with piracy and murder. In jail, they became instant celebrities. More than 5,000 people paid 12 1/2 cents each to see them exercising on the nearby town green. Life masks of each were made by a wax museum entrepreneur. A local artist painted a portrait of Cinque. More importantly, the prisoners became a rallying cause for abolitionists. Their incarceration was followed by a series of court actions, in Hartford, New Haven and finally in Washington, D.C. The fate of the Amistad slaves was finally decided after former President John Quincy Adams, old and tired, made a dramatic appearance before the United States Supreme Court to plead their case. The High Court ruled that a decision by the district court in New Haven was correct: the Amistad passengers had been illegally pressed into slavery, which, although it | Reconstructing a Spanish Ghost Ship and a Tale of Slavery |
748251_0 | Canada, acting unilaterally to protect depleted fishing stocks, has seized a Spanish trawler just outside Canadian territorial waters, in a confrontation with the European Union over North Atlantic fishing rights. "You have chosen a government in Ottawa that will stand for Canadians," Prime Minister Jean Chretien told a cheering meeting of his Liberal Party in Winnipeg on Friday, a day after the trawler was seized off Newfoundland. "We have shown our determination. The rest we'll see." Canadian newspapers, many of them praising Mr. Chretien's action, are calling it "gunboat diplomacy." But it has brought accusations of "organized piracy" and threats of retaliation from the European Union headquarters in Brussels. The Spanish Government, condemning the action as a "flagrant violation of international law," said it would send a naval vessel to protect its fishing fleet, the largest in Europe. Spanish fishing boats had been scooping up the large flat fish known as turbot in the breeding grounds of the Grand Banks. On Friday, in a first act of reprisal, European ministers dropped plans to sign a scientific cooperation agreement with Canada. Officials of the 15-nation European Union also spoke of restricting imports from Canada and said they would "re-evaluate the appropriateness" of attending a meeting of the seven most powerful industrial nations in Halifax, Nova Scotia, in June. The area where the fishing boat was seized once had plentiful northern cod. But years of overfishing have led to the disappearance of that species. A three-year-old moratorium on cod fishing has left some 50,000 Canadian fishermen and fish plant workers unemployed. When Spain and Portugal joined the European bloc in 1986, they had to accept demands -- chiefly from France and Britain -- not to fish in other European waters for 16 years. As a result, both Spanish and Portuguese fleets have focused on the waters close to Canada, and many Canadians hold them responsible for plundering the fishing stocks. Despite the initial flareup of tempers, most analysts expected the conflict to be contained and eventually settled diplomatically. Fisheries Minister Brian Tobin of Canada said on Friday that both Spanish and Portuguese trawlers had withdrawn from the Grand Banks, and suggested this could create a "pause for dialogue." Ottawa warned it might make arrests last Monday, when 45 Spanish trawlers were sighted in the disputed waters, which lie east of Newfoundland just outside Canada's 200-mile territorial waters. After a three-hour sea chase | Canada and Spain Face Off Over Fishing Zone |
748259_2 | should accidents occur. As a result, it is rare for them to be detained because their owners take precautions not to run afoul of the rules. And tankers have come under intense scrutiny since the Exxon Valdez oil-spill disaster in 1989. The big change involves freighters. Nationally, 303 foreign-flag ships were cited by the Coast Guard in 1994, four months of which fell under the old rules, officials said. The total for 1994 is a sharp increase over that for 1993, though it is difficult to make an exact comparison because the Coast Guard kept track of detentions differently before last May, officials said. "This is a threat that is beginning to materialize," said Roger Kohn, a spokesman for the International Maritime Organization in London, an arm of the United Nations that regulates shipping. "Owners are not replacing ships the way they used to, so the ships are getting older and older," Mr. Kohn said. "The average age is 18 years, and that's very old. Some owners are finding it difficult to do the maintenance that is necessary. They are also going for cheap crews from developing countries. If you look at the casualty and accident records each year, you find that the same group of countries comes at the top of the list." The violations are wide-ranging: faulty steering, navigation, engines or firefighting or lifesaving equipment, including lifeboats; structural damage to the ship, like the leaks on the Favorit; defects that lead to pollution, like oil spills, or poorly trained crews. The Coast Guard stresses that only a small percentage of foreign-flag ships are in poor shape. It has found that those in violation of the policy are usually registered in nations that may take little interest in whether the ships are seaworthy. The agency has targeted ships that are registered in 15 countries, including India, Argentina and several others in Latin America. Even as the Favorit was forced into drydock in January, another freighter, the Harkishin, which sails under an Indian flag, was being detained in the harbor because of leaks and defects in its lifeboats and electrical systems, the Coast Guard said. The inspection of the Favorit provided a glimpse of the hazards that the Coast Guard often detects. After the Favorit, which was built in the 1970's, hobbled into a drydock at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, Lieutenant Westerberg and three other Coast Guard officers spent several | The Safety Zone; Coast Guard Tries to Rid Waters of Deficient Foreign Ships |
748171_0 | THIS is the ultimate test for Monsanto. It was no mean feat to genetically alter bacteria so that they produce a cow hormone that increases milk output. And in the face of fierce objections from opponents of biotechnology, it took nearly a decade to win Food and Drug Administration approval to market the hormone. But a year after Monsanto began selling the hormone, it is clear that the biggest challenge of all will be recouping the hundreds of millions of dollars it has invested. The stakes go far beyond the Monsanto Company and the dairy industry. The hormone -- which is known formally as bovine somatotropin, or BST, and goes by the brand name Posilac -- is the first genetically engineered product to be used to increase food production. And the consensus is that if a deep-pocketed giant like Monsanto cannot make a go of it, Wall Street will shy away from investments in food-industry biotechnology for years to come. All this only adds to the sense of mission driving folks like Steven Blank, one of 50 salesmen Monsanto has put in the field as its front line in what may be the most innovative, wide-ranging marketing effort ever seen in agriculture. A beefy, affable 33-year-old son of an Illinois farmer, Mr. Blank criss-crosses northeastern Wisconsin and Michigan's Upper Peninsula for Monsanto, which is based just outside St. Louis. His base is a desk tucked behind the heater in the basement of his home on the suburban outskirts of this industrial city. "Selling Posilac is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity," said Mr. Blank, exuberantly comparing its potential impact to the revolution in grain production born of the first John Deere plows and the invention of high-yield hybrid corn seed. Mr. Blank jumped to Monsanto from Upjohn Inc., where he had sold animal health products for 10 years, after deciding that Upjohn's own BST research was not far enough along. Mr. Blank will not say it, but selling Posilac is no easy task. Even though it has the F.D.A.'s blessing, the hormone faces bitter opposition from critics who question the thoroughness of the agency's review. Led by Jeremy Rifkin's Washington-based Pure Food Campaign, those critics are campaigning hard to persuade consumers that Posilac is unhealthy for cows and risky for consumers of dairy products. Most farmers are scornful of the human health arguments, noting that milk from cows injected with BST is chemically | Monsanto Has Its Wonder Hormone. Can It Sell It? |
748220_1 | involve training lay people in ministerial duties, sometimes with a visiting minister or priest acting as mentor; creating "yoked" churches, with two or more congregations served by an itinerant minister, or trying some combination of both concepts. "Among all the denominational leaders I talk with," said John Bennett of the Missouri School of Religion Center for Rural Ministry, "I think there is a readiness and an openness to consider a variety of models in this part of the country." Indeed, Mr. Bennett said the Presbyterian Church (USA) recently produced a document listing 17 "pastoral options" for small churches, in addition to the traditional model of a single full-time pastor. Increasingly, he said, churches "look to lay ministry, yoked ministry." There are no statistics to measure the extent to which such forms of ministry have grown, but Protestant officials say that economics, more than any other factor, has fueled them. Small church budgets, they say, cannot meet the rising cost of having a full-time minister. "To support a pastor in ministry in the United Methodist Church, you're talking about a $45,000 to $50,000 salary package," said Robert Kohler, the director of the denomination's division of ordained ministry. Mr. Kohler said that the Methodists were "using more and more lay people with special training in ministry" to keep small congregations alive. Sometimes, lay ministers work with members of the clergy who may specialize in religious education or youth ministry. "It creates a team approach to ministry," he said. Among Roman Catholics, a declining number of priests has meant that more priests who serve in rural areas have taken on an itinerant role, saying Mass in multiple parishes and performing marriages while nuns, deacons and lay people take on the daily administrative and even pastoral duties. A similar arrangement prevails in small, isolated synagogues whose congregations bring in a rabbi to lead High Holidays services and officiate at bar and bat mitzvahs and weddings, but leave regular services to lay people. The Hulstrands belong to the 5.2 million-member Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, the nation's third-largest Protestant denomination. Nearly 10 percent of the denomination's 9,703 pastors with congregations are serving two or more churches, said the Rev. David Alderfer, the denomination's director for rosters and statistics. Three years ago, officials at the Lutherans' headquarters in Chicago produced a study showing that one-third of their 11,000 congregations drew no more than 50 people each | Innovative Plans Fill Pulpits In America's Rural Churches |
749919_9 | aid, totaling $109 million. Others were lured by the new sense of urgency and growth that emanated from the university. The infusion of money also made possible the energetic, decade-long recruitment of a stellar faculty to fill 88 new chairs. The hunt and capture was supervised by Duncan Rice, a Scotsman who was himself recruited in 1985 from Hamilton College, in upstate Clinton, by President Oliva. He is now vice chancellor. N.Y.U. had the advantage of flexibility. Unlike many public colleges and universities where salaries are tied to rank, there was nothing to stop Mr. Rice and his colleagues from luring an associate professor, for instance, with a higher salary than that received by a full professor in the same department. Not all the new hires have been welcomed with open arms. Andrew Ross, who was drawn from Princeton in 1993 to head N.Y.U.'s American Studies Program, has faced criticism for his focus on such matters as gay and lesbian studies. Mr. Rice, as dean of the faculty of arts and science, began to think systematically about recruitment, he said, soon after his arrival in 1985. That year, he learned that Anthony Movshon, a leading N.Y.U. specialist in neuroscience, was about to accept an offer from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "It made me wonder about what we could do to persuade him to stay, and, if we succeeded, how we might use Movshon to attract other outstanding people in his field," Mr. Rice said. "I knew that neuroscience was one of the most rapidly expanding fields in the biomedical sciences -- people were talking about this being the Decade of the Brain -- and it seemed like an opportunity to create a center of strength." Eventually, Mr. Rice persuaded Professor Movshon to stay by creating the Center for Neural Science, which gave him the unusual opportunity to hire 10 professors and develop what is now an internationally known center for the experimental and theoretical study of the human brain. Other professors were lured by the promise of rejuvenating a troubled department. By the early 1990's, N.Y.U.'s department of political science had become a victim of internal strife, its staff pared as 6 of 27 faculty members quit. But the resignations meant that a new chairman would have the opportunity to reshape a department. Russell Hardin, a leading expert on the role of morality in politics, was lured from the | Buying Excellence: How N.Y.U. Rebuilt Itself -- A special report.; A Decade and $1 Billion Put N.Y.U. With the Elite |
749999_1 | who participated from 1989 to 1993 graduated from high school, went on to college, avoided child-bearing and escaped involvement with the criminal justice system at a greater rate than did a comparable control group. The program's success offers hopeful lessons for budget-cutting politicians and pessimists who think no intervention can change the downward trajectory of poor youths. The experiment, called the Quantum Opportunities Program, is especially encouraging because the participants were not special or self-selected. The 25 participants at each of four sites -- Philadelphia, Oklahoma City, San Antonio and Saginaw, Mich. -- were randomly chosen from lists of students entering ninth grade whose families were on welfare. They were rough kids from rough neighborhoods. Some were killed or landed in prison. Those who stuck it out were required to participate year-round in academic tutoring and computer skills training, community service, and life skills training, like alcohol and drug abuse awareness and family planning. Students were given a stipend of $1.33 for each hour they participated. For every 100 hours, they received $100 bonus payments and an amount equal to their total earnings, which accrued toward college or post-secondary training. The financial rewards became an incentive for students to continue in the program and welcome extra income for financially strapped families. Over four years, students spent an average of nearly 1,300 hours in program activities. The average cost per participant was $10,600. Many of the program's lessons went beyond books. Students were taken to museums, plays and concerts. The adult supervisors, from the Opportunities Industrialization Centers of America, became not just mentors, but surrogate parents or family members, with roots in the same community. By the end of the program, 63 percent of the Quantum Opportunities Program participants graduated from high school, 42 percent were enrolled in a post-secondary program, 23 percent dropped out of school, 24 percent had children and 7 percent had arrest records. By contrast, of the control group, 42 percent finished high school, 16 percent went on to post-secondary schools, 50 percent dropped out, 38 percent had children and 13 percent had arrest records. The Labor Department and the Ford Foundation will test the program in a larger demonstration of about 700 participants in five sites starting in September. Even as budget-cutters prepare to slash funds for youth development and job training, the success of the program shows that careful investments in disadvantaged youths can work. | A Youth Program That Worked |
750020_0 | The Xerox Corporation, continuing its strategy of seeking growth through the computer industry, is set to announce technology today that will make it easier for customers to use their corporate computer networks to send electronic documents to printers and copiers in remote offices. Xerox, the Hewlett-Packard Company and Novell Inc. have been developing the project for two years, and they say the technology is based on software that Novell intends to begin shipping early next year. At that time, Xerox and Hewlett-Packard expect to be ready with printers and copiers capable of working with the remote-access software. "What we are working toward is ease of use," said Peter Van Cuylenberg, Xerox's executive vice president for systems. He said the new technology would remove the difficulty computer users now have in determining what kinds of printing equipment is connected to a network. Using the new software, printing machines now under development will interact with remote users, registering themselves in directories and feeding back information on each printing job ordered. A remote machine would also signal potential users if it was out of order or low on paper, toner or other supplies. Xerox officials have said they do not expect their traditional copier business to grow much faster than the overall economy. So they are focusing on newer types of machines that can turn a stream of data into a printed page and that can be connected to computer networks. In printers, meanwhile, Hewlett-Packard and Xerox are competitors. But Hewlett-Packard is stronger at the desktop level, while Xerox has concentrated on much larger, high-speed machines. Officials of the companies said they cooperated on the two-year project to make both types of machines attractive by making them easier to use on a network. Richard King, an executive vice president of Novell, said the new technology system would be open to other hardware manufacturers and that the company planned to work with independent software developers on specific applications. INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY | Xerox to Announce Technology To Make Remote Printing Easier |
749956_3 | to try to soothe British sensitivities. It also took a firmer line on the question of arms. Testifying before the House International Operations Committe, Richard C. Holbrooke, Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs, said, "Nonviolent constitutional parties cannot be expected to sit at a table with the political representatives of paramilitary groups who have retained the right to return to violence if they do not achieve their goals." At a White House ceremony Friday attended by Mr. Adams and by the Irish Prime Minister, John Bruton, the President also called on the paramilitaries -- a term that applies to armed groups on both the Catholic and Protestant sides -- to hand over their weapons. He said: "To those who have laid down their arms, I ask you now to take the next step and begin to seriously discuss getting rid of these weapons so that they can never be used again and violence will never again return to the land." Mr. Clinton singled out Mr. Major for praise, asserting that the British Prime Minister "deserves our salutes for the brave risks that he has taken to make peace." Mr. Major's tough stand today contradicts the impression given by Mr. Adams that substantive talks would occur any day now. It appeared intended to extract some positive sign, perhaps even a symbolic gesture, that Sinn Fein might be ready to remove some weapons from its stockpile, estimated at 100 tons. The British Government has reportedly sent an agenda for the high-level talks to the top Sinn Fein negotiator, Martin McGuinness. In television interviews this morning, Mr. McGuinness said he was "hopeful that talks could take place in the next 10 to 14 days." The fallout from Mr. Adams' visit has pushed the relationship between Washington and London to its lowest point in years. Mr. Major was so incensed over the President's decision to meet Mr. Adams and allow him to raise money that he declined to accept a phone call on March 10. The excuse given first was that the British leader was preoccupied preparing for a trip to the Middle East and then, days later, that he was traveling. But British officials have recently acknowledged that pique was the real reason. The two leaders, who do not have an easy relationship, are scheduled to meet around April 2, when Mr. Major visits Washington. It will be their third face-to-face encounter. | Major, Taking CLinton's Call, Maintains Tough Stand on I.R.A. |
751399_1 | and a former manager of digital information distribution at the Oracle Corporation, to be the magazine's first interactive editor. Ms. Nelson decided on a practical approach to interactive services, focusing not on new technology but on readers' ability to respond to the magazine through any medium with which they felt comfortable. "There are people who like to interact who are not technical and they're going to write us letters," she said. "But later they might phone us, then fax us, and eventually they might get a computer and E-mail us. If you don't provide them with the steps, you can't expect them to make the jump to the new technology." Soon after her arrival, Ms. Markham upgraded the magazine's telephone system, establishing hot lines for fitness tips, survey responses and voice mail for the editors. She also established an address on the Internet, self.com, for electronic mail. Starting with the July issue, the magazine was redesigned to reflect Ms. Markham's new vision, and now includes technology reviews, graphics resembling computer icons and feature articles about E-mail and the Internet. "Self is unique in that their interactive content is integrated with their print magazine," said Aimee Pamintuan, an analyst at the Jupiter Communications Corporation, a market research company in New York. "With other magazines, there's little connection between them." The interactive push has led to a sharp increase in reader responses -- Self now gets about 7,000 telephone calls a month, 400 E-mail messages, 700 letters and as many as 7,000 fax responses. Ms. Nelson's next step after the redesign was to expand into the on-line world. A recent survey conducted by Self confirmed that its readers were a likely audience for on-line services: 40 percent of the respondents had access to portable or home computers, 20 percent owned modems and 19 percent were already connected to on-line services. Ms. Nelson avoided making an exclusive agreement with a single commercial provider because she said the magazine would have little control over the presentation of its editorial material and would be limited in its ability to experiment. Instead, the magazine has been conducting a series of monthly forums on various smaller, more intimate on-line services. A monthlong forum on gun control was held on the Well, for instance, a national on-line service known for its thoughtful, heated debates, and another forum on fitness appeared on Women's Wire. "The monthly forums are popular | Self Takes Its Own Route To the On-Line Newsstand |
751381_3 | importing their raw materials from Peru and Bolivia, where the biggest drug crops are grown. As a fine mist of glysophate settled over a poppy field here, Col. Jose Leonardo Gallego, director of Colombia's anti-narcotics police, said, "The peasants don't cooperate." In mid-December, guerrillas trapped Colonel Gallego for two days in Miraflores, an Amazon town surrounded by coca plantations. When police in two helicopters went to rescue him, guerrillas raked the aircraft with fire from automatic rifles, killing a police lieutenant. The episode occurred during two months of protests against eradication in two of Colombia's largest coca growing states -- Guaviare, in central Colombia, and Putumayo, on the border with Ecuador and Peru. In Guaviare -- described as "a sea of coca" by one police official -- officials estimate that traffickers pay $5 million a year in protection money to the state's main guerrilla group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or Farc. In Putumayo, protests against eradication peaked Dec. 22, when about 1,000 coca growers occupied pumping stations along the Transandino pipeline, shutting down local oil production for three weeks. "We voted for Samper, not for the D.E.A.," protest signs said, referring to the United States Drug Enforcement Administration. To make peace, the Government promised to use aerial eradication only against plots larger than 7.5 acres. President Samper unveiled a $300 million program to bring roads, telephones, schools, health clinics and rural electrification to the 300,000 families affected by eradication. But the farmers get four times as much money for coca as for the highest-earning legal competitor. A week after the President's speech, guerrillas shot down a police helicopter in Putumayo, killing three police officers. Some Colombians say they worry that the eradication may be splashing gasoline on the smoldering embers of a 30-year-old guerrilla war. Peru has shied away from eradication out of fear of pushing peasants to the Shining Path guerrillas there. In Colombia, some officials say, the eradication campaign by 2,500 counter-narcotics police may be tightening a loose alliance between the guerrillas, traffickers and peasants. "In the coca zones, the Farc. fronts are showing that, after many years, subversion has found a definitely solid popular base," Roberto Pombo, a columnist, warned in an essay in Semana, Colombia's largest selling weekly news magazine. "With the coca growers, the Farc achieved the eternal dream of the guerrillas, which is to share an enemy with the people: the state." | U.S. Copters Are a Target in Colombia |
747068_1 | The bombings often shut it down, putting her out of work, sometimes for months. The I.R.A. declares that it is fighting for Northern Ireland's Catholics. Mrs. Hegney, who is Catholic, said she prays for them, and for the Protestant guerrillas too. She told her children that "a sick man" had killed their father and that he was now in heaven with Granny, his mother. Her daughter, Julie-Anne, said that at first she hated Granny for taking him away and that she saw her father return to her room one night. She said she wanted to die and go to heaven with him. Lately Julie-Anne, who is now 8, says only, "I wish I could see him, mummy, for one wee minute." Mrs. Hegney joined a group of Catholic and Protestant widows of guerrilla war victims, and they exchange their feelings and problems. But the cease-fires that have raised the hopes for peace and a normal life for most people in Northern Ireland also left her and the other widows feeling depressed, she said. "During the trouble, we were all in it together," she said. "Everyone in Belfast was affected. But when the peace came, I felt isolated. Other people can get on with their lives. We can't." Last October, as reports spread that the Protestant guerrillas, following the lead of the I.R.A., were going to call their own cease-fire, she hoped it would not be on Oct. 13, the third anniversary of her husband's killing, but it was announced on that day. "It didn't feel right," she said. "I was praying for peace, but I didn't want it on that day." Now, she said, she faces he prospect of seeing representatives of the guerrillas become celebrated personalities as they approach formal negotiations with the British and Irish Governments and the other political parties in the North. "I don't like the idea that after they've killed so many people, they'll be sitting down to say what the future will be, when people like these destroyed my children's future. But if it stops people being murdered, I've no objection." Her children still miss their father. Karl Jr., who is 14, wants to be a lawyer. She said she asked him if he would defend someone he knew to be guilty of a "terrible crime." Karl said: "Would you serve him if he came into the Europa. You do what you're paid to | Belfast Journal; A War Widow's Thoughts at Peace's Dawning |
747072_2 | greater vigilance against corruption were focused on local party officials, not the ranks of senior party officials and military officers where corruption is believed to be endemic. His emphasis on "mistakes" in economic management seemed aimed at Mr. Zhu, whose power over the economy has vaulted him above Mr. Li in influence at times over the last two years. Mr. Li's case was simple. He said price liberalization measures and a weak harvest had sent prices of many commodities soaring, but that "the mistake we made was that we had underestimated the repercussions of these measures." "The Government took no emergency measures to stop these practices and launched no overall austerity program," he said, because some officials were trying to "prevent a sharp decrease in economic growth." China's economy grew at 11.8 percent in 1994, compared with the 9 percent Mr. Li had sought. His comments implied that a timely austerity program could have headed off inflation and brought growth down to a manageable level. Mr. Zhu, seated two rows behind Mr. Li during the speech, held his posture ramrod straight, never glancing at the text of the speech before him, while other vice prime ministers scribbled and underlined the document. During his speech, Mr. Li said China would seek to slow its economic growth rate of 12 to 13 percent of the last three years to 8 to 9 percent. The central Government plans to slow the pace of investment, and reduce the number of national construction efforts so that financing can be made available for major projects that are already under way, like the Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River, the largest hydroelectric project in the world. The annual session of the congress gives the 53 million members of the Communist Party the opportunity to display its strength, with delegates from every province and from each of China's 55 minority groups. But the body itself lacks any real legislative powers and serves to ratify the decisions made by the party's 170-member Central Committee, whose chairman is President Jiang Zemin, the party's general secretary. Five years ago, Qiao Shi, chairman of the National People's Congress and a member of the Politburo, was considered a contender to succeed Mr. Deng as paramount leader but was edged out by Mr. Jiang and has since lost other important party posts. Mr. Li's power in the inner circle comes from his long | Chinese Leader Says 'Mistakes' By Government Fueled Inflation |
747133_4 | Mr. Gaarder, a former high school teacher, had intended to write a philosophical primer for young adults but abandoned the effort when his prose bored even him. He decided to take his idea -- the history of philosophy from the natural philosophers of ancient Greece to Freud and his pleasure principle -- and encase it in a novel. And so he created Sophie, a precocious 14-year-old who opens her mailbox one day to find a cryptic document asking two age-old questions: Who are you and where does the world come from? Instead of ripping up the papers and cranking up her Walkman, she embarks on a tour of Western philosophy, learning about people like Spinoza, Locke, Hegel and Kierkegaard. In the middle of the novel, she meets her philosopher-teacher, the beret-wearing Alberto Knox, and the two stumble into a philosophical thicket when they discover that they may be characters in someone else's story (and, yes, the novel outside the novel is called "Sophie's World"). For a long time Mr. Gaarder had no idea what a gold mine his book was. "I thought it was a book for only a very few people," he said in an interview. "I would have been very pleased if it had sold 2,000 copies." Interestingly enough, it wasn't until the book took off in Germany that its success reverberated back to the home market. "It seems like Germans just like philosophy as a theme," said Mia Bull-Gundersen, rights manager for the book's Norwegian publisher, Aschehoug. The book then moved from country to country in a manner that recalls the success some years ago of Umberto Eco's "Name of the Rose." Perhaps the biggest surprise was the interest in Great Britain, where philosophy tends to be regarded with about as much enthusiasm as psychotherapy -- not very much, in other words. But Orion, the British publisher, said the book had already sold about 50,000 copies here, in a country with a population one-fifth that of the United States, and about 20,000 copies in the Commonwealth markets of Australia and New Zealand. Mr. Straus of Farrar, Straus said Americans were perhaps more interested in books that promise quick pop-culture solutions. "This is a book that, if you read it, you learn much more about the various philosophers than you did before," he said. "But Americans' attitude seems to be, 'Who cares from Socrates?' " THE MEDIA BUSINESS | For a European Best Seller, a U.S. Taste Test |
747458_0 | Britain's chief official on Northern Ireland appeared today to ease his Government's conditions for the political arm of the Irish Republican Army to enter into all-party peace talks on Ulster's future. During a visit to Washington, the official, Sir Patrick Mayhew, suggested that Sinn Fein, the I.R.A.'s political wing, would be allowed to enter the talks if the I.R.A. showed "a willingness in principle to disarm progressively." Previously, Sir Patrick and Britain's Prime Minister, John Major, have said that Sinn Fein would be allowed to take part in the talks only if there were "substantial progress" in disarming the largely Catholic I.R.A. But later today, British officials insisted that Sir Patrick was not signaling a shift in policy on Sinn Fein's participation. Secretary of State Warren Christopher backed Sir Patrick's call for the I.R.A. and Protestant paramilitary groups to surrender their arms. "To those who have laid down their arms, including both the I.R.A. and the Loyalists, we ask them to take the next essential step, and that is to move toward disarmament," Mr. Christopher said. Sir Patrick said that his Government would deem several options for I.R.A. disarmament acceptable: destroying its estimated 10 tons of arms, turning the arms over to officials in Northern Ireland or the Republic of Ireland, or surrendering arms to officials from a third nation. Sir Patrick said he would be open to having the United States send officials to serve as a neutral third party for receiving arms from the I.R.A. and Protestant paramilitary groups. But Clinton Administration officials, under heavy criticism from Republicans in Congress for undertaking too many overseas commitments, said they made no formal offer to send Americans to Ulster to oversee the disarming of Catholic and Protestant paramilitary groups. Sir Patrick showed little enthusiasm for the expected visit to Washington next week by Gerry Adams, the leader of Sinn Fein. At a luncheon with reporters, he urged that the Clinton Administration not allow Mr. Adams to raise money here, saying that if the peace talks fell apart, the I.R.A. might decide to resume its campaign of violence to end British rule in Northern Ireland. The I.R.A.'s declaration of a cease-fire last September was seconded in October by the Protestant groups fighting to preserve British rule. Sir Patrick said the I.R.A.'s command structure was in place and that it continued to recruit volunteers, maintain an arsenal of explosives, mortars and machine | British Official Appears to Ease Terms for I.R.A. Role in Talks |
747414_0 | The island of Cuba has never looked as fantastically exotic as it does in "I Am Cuba," a nearly 2 1/2-hour swatch of cinematic agitprop that aspires to be the "Potemkin" of the Cuban Communist Revolution. Completed in 1964, during the headiest days of the romance between the Soviet Union and Cuba, this Russian-Cuban co-production is a feverish pas de deux of Eastern European soulfulness and Latin sensuality fused into an unwieldy but visually stunning burst of propaganda. Supervised by the great Russian director Mikhail Kalatozov, who is best known for "The Cranes Are Flying," it suggests Eisenstein filtered through "La Dolce Vita" with an Afro-Cuban pulse. "I Am Cuba," which opens today at Film Forum, is structured like a social realist mural with five panels, each of which illustrates a different aspect of the revolution. After surveying the fleshpots of tourist Havana with a leering disapproval, it moves into the sugar cane fields, then returns to the city to follow the leftist student movement. From there it journeys to the country to show the bombing of the innocent peasants' hillside dwellings. It ends in the mountains marching with Fidel Castro's ragtag army. Although the movie has a cast of hundreds, its characters are little more than stick figures on which to hang the movie's revolutionary rhetoric. The heroes include Betty (Luz Maria Collazo), an exploited Havana bar girl who lives in a seaside shack; Pedro (Jose Gallardo), an impoverished cane cutter whose land is sold out from under him; Enrique (Raul Garcia), a militant student leader, and Alberto (Sergio Corrieri), an indefatigable freedom fighter. With their shining, idealistic faces, they are picture-postcard revolutionaries working against a government run by cigar-smoking, sour-pussed monsters. Leading the list of enemies are the fat-cat American businessmen (including one grotesque Jewish caricature) who draw lots for the favors of Havana bar girls forced by poverty into prostitution. In one of the film's most inflammatory scenes, American sailors singing a jingoist anthem chase a frightened young woman (Celia Rodriguez) through the city's deserted streets. Threaded through the screenplay, written by the Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko and the Cuban novelist Carlos Farinas, is an oratorical narration by a woman representing the anguished soul of the nation. "I thought your ships brought happiness," she tells the ghost of Christopher Columbus. "Ships took my sugar and left me in tears." The oratory escalates, as she describes the trunks | A Visionary Cuba, When Believers Still Believed |
746232_0 | The grab for Somalia's most prized piece of real estate began just before dawn today as looters clambered over the walls and gates of Mogadishu's airport while United Nations forces pulled back. If the Pakistani brigade's withdrawal behind American lines was well-rehearsed, the Somali clan fighters, and the army of looters, seemed as thoroughly prepared for this moment. As the looters began pouring into the airport, about 30 Somali armed trucks, said to belong to the forces of the clan leader, Gen. Mohammed Farah Aidid, sped out of Mogadishu's narrow side streets and careered onto the airstrip to take control. Automatic gunfire echoed sporadically down the airstrip, stray bullets whizzing over the bunkers. During the tension-filled hour American troops hunkered down in sand bunkers, at some points separated from the Somalis only by concertina wire and several hundred feet of sand. One Somali was killed by a Marine sniper this morning after he fired a rocket-propelled grenade at the Marines. At first it was unclear what the Somali fighters were after. But by midmorning the atmosphere had calmed down considerably, and the technicals, as the heavily armed vehicles are known, had routed the looters and taken complete control of the airport, making today the first time the airport has been in Somali hands since American troops arrived in December 1992. Uniformed Somali police, armed only with clubs and sticks, joined the fighters, but as Somalia still has no government, United Nations and American officials said it was unclear where police loyalties lay. Today, the police and gunmen seemed to belong to the faction of General Aidid, one of the most powerful clan leaders in the country, but in the preceding days rival clans were fighting near the airport. At 3 P.M., General Aidid arrived at the airport, escorted by six technicals, to survey his new domain. For about an hour, marines watched the man who had been hunted for months by the American military, who once had a $25,000 reward out for his capture, and who was accused of responsibility for the deaths of 30 Americans, as he strolled through the airport buildings a few hundred yards away. Dressed in a white shirt and black pants, his traditional cane under his arm, General Aidid did not even look up at the Americans. His loudspeakers broadcast messages discouraging looting. After repeated predictions of an all-out inter-clan battle for the airport, today's | Gunmen Race For the Spoils In Somalia |
751664_1 | gave themselves the highest overall health rating; the self-reported health of West Virginians was the poorest in the nation. While 91.6 percent of Alaskans rated their health as good to excellent, only 76.6 percent of West Virginians gave their health status such high marks. When the researchers looked at the number of days during the month before the survey that were marred by physical or mental problems, the District of Columbia emerged at the top of the heap. Washingtonians averaged 28.4 days (out of the previous 30) during which they considered themselves to be in good physical health and 28.6 days during which they said they were in good mental health. Over all, they said that 27.3 of the previous 30 days were "good health days" during which neither physical nor mental problems kept them from performing their usual activities, like caring for themselves, doing their work or participating in recreation. By contrast, West Virginians reported 25.9 days of good physical health and 27 days of good mental health, with an average of 24 "good health days" in the previous month. New Yorkers said they were in good physical health for 26.9 of the previous 30 days, and in good mental health for the same number of days. Over all, 87.6 percent of the adults surveyed rated their health as good to excellent. Dr. Myrna Weissman of the New York State Psychiatric Institute in New York City, who conducted a nationwide study of the prevalence of mental disorders in the 1980's, said the number of people in the current survey who reported days of impaired mental health "may or may not be trivial, depending upon how impaired they were and how persistent was the impairment." Dr. Zack said the survey, done by random telephone dialing to reach residents over 18 at their homes, undoubtedly overestimated the health of the nation, since those in institutions and hospitals, the homeless and those too poor to have a telephone were not surveyed. Nonetheless, he said, the data provide a different and perhaps clearer picture of people's overall health status than is obtained from studies of death rates, hospitalizations and doctor visits. "There are a lot of disabilities that people don't go to the doctor for, such as the aches and pains of arthritis that may cause them difficulty in walking upstairs or getting out of bed," he said. "And many people who are | Gloomy Reports to the Contrary, 87% of Americans Feel Healthy |
751809_1 | Wednesday. At issue in the protest is whether it was legal for the Stars & Stripes crew to replace its boat's damaged keel with an older version of its fin and ballast bulb. Bill Koch's America syndicate asked the event's five-member international jury to review the action. But by this evening, it was not clear whether the jury was going to agree to a hearing. The America camp agreed to postpone its protest until the matter of jurisdiction is sorted out. "What's the process?" asked Will Robinson, a spokesman for America . "We don't have a clear sense of it." America's Cup rules require that a keel that replaces another must be similar to the one that was removed, La Dow said. To remove any question about the legality of changing keels, the Stars & Stripes syndicate asked the America's Cup Defense Committee to approve the appendage switch, which they did, La Dow added. The Mighty Mary team has taken to filing protests in the last week. In races it has won, the protests have been withdrawn. At times the complaints appear nonsensical, as in the protest last Friday -- subsequently withdrawn -- over a guest on Stars & Stripes. The individual turned out to be a San Diego Port Authority official taking photographs of the Conner crew. The rules prohibit cameras on board as a way to control spying. Cracks started appearing in the Conner campaign's veneer with the start March 18 of the Citizen Cup defense semifinals. Although Stars & Stripes was able to hold its own with Mighty Mary in the standings, winning did not come easily. But it wasn't until Sunday that the loose underpinnings in the Stars & Stripes quest turned into a serious flaw. After saving Stars & Stripes from sinking when a leak developed around the keel, the crew spent the next 48 hours in nonstop repair work. The yacht's 13-foot fin and 20-ton bulb were damaged, said Paul Cayard, the boat's strategist. With the eleventh-hour breakdown, the team had no choice but to put its old keel fin and bulb back on the boat. It was the one used in Round 1 of the trials, and replaced with the now-damaged appendage in Round 2 last February. "Obviously, we don't think it was as fast as the bulb we just lost, or it would have been on the boat," Cayard said. YACHT RACING | Conner Wins on Water, But Has Problems on Land |
751773_4 | such as Qiao Shi and Li Ruihuan have made speeches recently that put perceptible distance between them and the comments or policies of Mr. Jiang's Government. Mr. Qiao has emphasized the need to democratize the party and Li Ruihuan has indirectly criticized the hard-line approach Beijing has been taking toward Hong Kong, which reverts to Chinese sovereignty in 1997. The first rumors of the corruption investigations surfaced in December, but Chinese officials have begun confirming bits and pieces of them to Western diplomats. Thus far, the investigations involve the Beijing municipal government, a prominent real estate development near the Forbidden City, the city's largest steel mill, top city officials or their family members, the city's Public Security and State Security bureaus and a state investment conglomerate. The debate over the scale and dimensions of this power struggle -- even over whether to call it a power struggle -- is taking place among foreign diplomats here and in Hong Kong. There are some Western officials who do not think the rumblings within the party amount to a power struggle yet. "You know our line on this," said one Western diplomat in Beijing, explaining his embassy's view that President Jiang stands at the center of a stable collective leadership that is committed to continuing Mr. Deng's economic reforms and advancing the rule of law in China. Other Western and Chinese analysts disagree. One Chinese Government official, also speaking on the condition that his name not be used, said President Jiang is exploiting an anti-corruption campaign to undermine his rivals in the powerful Beijing municipal government. Mr. Jiang, a former Shanghai party boss, has conspicuously relied on promoting Shanghai officials to crucial posts in the Government and in the security forces, so much so that his critics have accused him of building a "Shanghai faction." "There is definitely a power struggle," said the Chinese official, who has held military and security posts. "I don't know how long the transition will last, but there will be struggle. It will be commonplace and, at times, it will be violent." A spokesman for the Beijing municipal government said he was forbidden to respond to queries on the investigations. "To me, corruption is not the issue," one Western diplomat said, "everything involves power and is seen as involving power." "There has always been corruption," he continued, "but investigating corruption is a tool, a weapon against someone else." | Signs of a Power Struggle Come to Light in China |
750661_0 | To the Editor: Re "Cuba: Time to Change Direction" (editorial, March 19): The claim that trade and contact will bring about the end of the Castro regime ignores facts that make the argument inapplicable to Cuba. Fidel Castro has taken no steps that would allow increased trade and contact to lead to political or economic liberalization. Instead, any hard currency from United States trade and investment, and multilateral development loans that would follow, would substitute for reform. The Cuban Government controls every industry that generates significant hard currency, including agriculture, mining, medical supplies and tourism. Almost none of the hard currency generated by foreign companies reaches ordinary Cubans. Foreign companies in Cuba are not permitted to hire employees except through Communist Party-controlled agencies. The Government pays these workers the equivalent of $5 a month in pesos. Cubans themselves cannot hire employees, buy supplies from nonstate sources or protect earnings from arbitrary confiscation by Government squads created by decree to seize assets of those deemed unduly wealthy. If, as the argument goes, the purpose of rapprochement with Mr. Castro would be to get money into the hands of ordinary Cubans, make them less dependent on the regime and enable them to support institutions independent of state control, like political parties, newspapers, church groups, and professional and labor organizations, the argument is settled. Mr. Castro is not permitting it. Investors from France, Spain and Mexico have been providing crucial support for the Castro regime for years, yet there is no benefit to ordinary citizens. It is curious that you present Cuba's military threat as a paranoid fantasy. Cuba may not pose the same military threat it once did, but Mr. Castro's inclinations apparently remain unchanged. In November a Russian military delegation led by the chief of staff of Russia's armed forces visited Havana to discuss, among other things, the creation of a joint weapons production facility. Russia is also providing $200 million annually in continued financing for Cuba's eavesdropping facility at Lourdes. Unsafe Soviet-era nuclear power plants are the subject of a possible French renovation project. The attempt to ascribe continued support for the embargo and other anti-Castro measures solely to Senator Jesse Helms is inaccurate, and you should know better. Twenty senators, including Bob Dole and me, not to mention the Democrats Charles Robb, Joseph Lieberman and Ernest Hollings, support continued pressure on Mr. Castro by co-sponsoring the Cuban liberty and | Trade Won't Make Cuba More Democratic |
750657_0 | The United Nations Secretariat is tarnishing a forthcoming conference on women's issues by denying credentials to a slew of non-governmental organizations, possibly more than 200, without explaining why. The action has bred suspicion that the Secretariat is responding to political pressures from the conference's Chinese hosts or such powerful participants as the Vatican. In several instances, the denials resulted from direct pressure. The Chinese, who were eager to have Beijing as the conference site, pledged that the forum would be open to all relevant non-governmental as well as governmental groups. However, they asked, and got, the U.N. to deny credentials to women's organizations from Taiwan and Tibet, their political adversaries. The Vatican does not want to hear from Catholics critical of the church's views on family life and abortion. It tried to have the U.N. deny credentials to Catholics for a Free Choice and its sister groups in Mexico, Brazil and Uruguay, but were repulsed after an outcry. Some non-governmental groups denied accreditation may indeed not meet the Secretariat's criteria of "competent" and "relevant." The simplest way to find out is for the Secretariat to grant Washington's request that it disclose the names of those refused credentials along with the reasons. The United States also asked, and succeeded in getting, an international panel to review the denials. Full disclosure is the only way for the U.N. to defuse suspicions that it is letting political and sectarian pressure determine who gets to speak for women. | Fencing Off the Women's Conference |
750662_0 | To the Editor: Having much admired A. M. Rosenthal's recent articles on Mexico, I was taken aback by the vehemence of his March 17 column on Cuba. Isn't it possible that Danielle Mitterrand was motivated (to the point of inaccuracy about Fidel Castro's regime) less by romantic ideology of the left than by simple distress at the suffering of the Cuban people under the United States embargo? In the case of Mexico, Mr. Rosenthal sees the arrogance with which the United States treats a poor country. Surely this was also the case with Cuba. It was our support for the dictator Fulgencio Batista that drove Cubans to become an ossified regime in the Soviet empire. The important point is not whether Mr. Castro is justified or even whether Cubans are justified; it is whether we are justified -- not in the past but now. The embargo forces them to choose between hunger and the Cuban exile leader Jorge Mas Canosa -- who, to many, means United States tutelage or civil war. The same problem exists with the repugnant regime of Iraq. We have offered conditions for easing the blockade that we know President Saddam Hussein will never accept. We are thus using hunger and disease as a tool to bring on a coup. A recent history of the 20th century calls ours "the age of extremes" (Eric Hobsbawm). The absolute language of war has justified a vast increase in the scale of violence and loss of distinction between combatants and civilians. Is it any wonder that the end of the cold war has brought, not peace, but a cancerous civil strife justified with resurgent myths of ethnic purity? Or that the dispossessed use the same dehumanizing logic to justify terrorism? If we think forward to those who must live in the coming century -- with large parts of the world in extreme poverty and with global environmental degradation and scarcity of resources -- is there any chance our children and grandchildren can build a decent future? Reading Mr. Rosenthal in the past months, I hear one who is prepared to face those truths of himself and his society that most of us spend most of life evading. I hope he will continue this search and re-examine our responsibilities in the embargoes of Cuba and Iraq. DAVID KEPPEL Essex, Conn., March 19, 1995 | Trade Won't Make Cuba More Democratic; Is Embargo Justified? |
748990_5 | The first step in the healing process is to recognize the hurt you have done. But the British must acknowledge the hurt they have done." His speeches left some in tears and others hopeful but cautious. Sandra Kelley in Albany said her son had returned ecstatic from seeing Mr. Adams, embarrassed at his inability to speak Irish. Frank Durkan, the New York lawyer who has defended I.R.A. members in the United States, said that while Mr. Adams would never be able to fully combat British influence in America, "there would at least be a powerful voice." Msgr. James J. Murray, a senior adviser to John Cardinal O'Connor, lauded Mr. Adams's and the I.R.A.'s apparent "movement from violence to reconciliation." But Mary Nolan, who for years headed a Brooklyn chapter of the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association, cautioned that "money isn't going to solve the problem, and if people think that way they are in for a big letdown." At the Essex House yesterday, Paul Bryce, a man who was born in Belfast but who has lived in New York for 30 years, called the event "remarkable, one we never thought we'd see in our lifetime." Margaret Walsh, standing with her husband who was born in Northern Ireland, offered a translation of an Irish expression: "Our day has come." There were protesters, too. One man, Thomas Clarke, a Northern Ireland resident, stood outside the Essex House with a picture of his 16-year-old son on a placard. His son, he said, had been beaten by I.R.A. thugs in Belfast, driven ultimately to suicide. He also distributed copies of a recent Northern Ireland newspaper article that claimed to document recent and continuing I.R.A. terror. "I know Gerry Adams, and I see he is acting now as the prince of peace," said Mr. Clarke. "But he remains the author of beatings done by his people, still being done by his people." The protest, though, was small, drowned out by applause and standing ovations for Mr. Adams. The man regarded not long ago as an outlaw was talking about peace, about the possibility of making "Irish children laugh -- permanently." "We all have complicated pasts," said Edward Gaffney, a law school dean at Valparaiso University in Indiana who said he had long resisted donating money to groups thought to be connected to the I.R.A. "But we are all now standing in a moment of hope." | I.R.A. Backer Leaves Shadows for the Crystal Chandeliers |
746993_4 | to overcome the effects of prior discrimination." This means seeking the best candidates from excluded groups even if their qualifications on paper don't always match those of white men. White males have long benefited from unstated preferences as fraternity brothers, golfing buddies, children of alumni and the like -- unconscious biases that go largely unrecognized until affirmative action forces recruiters to think about how they gravitate to people like themselves. Changing or eliminating those preferences breeds backlash. Polls show most Americans believe less qualified blacks get hired or promoted over whites, though few seem to know whites who are victims of reverse discrimination. "Blacks are such a small fraction of the population that the lost opportunities to white men are really minuscule," said Barbara R. Bergmann, an economics professor at the American University in Washington. One strategy that may gain ground would shift affirmative action to target class, or, more precisely, income. The most critical gateway at which racial preferences can make a difference may be entry to college, where many blacks realize middle-class aspirations. Even while most low-income blacks have been left untouched by affirmative action, the small percentage who are attractive to good colleges are wooed and financed, and later sought by graduate schools and corporations. For years, such elite colleges as Dartmouth, Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have mixed race and class to give low-income white youngsters admission preferences similar to those for minorities. But with Federal scholarships cut, some other schools are taking the opposite tack, satisfying affirmative-action goals with middle-class blacks and selecting other students who can pay. Fewer than 10 percent of last fall's college freshmen came from families with incomes under $ 20,000. If income replaced race entirely as a qualifier for preferences, whites would be the major beneficiaries, and racial integration would probably decline. Of the 14.6 million poor Americans under the age of 18, fully 61 percent are white. And since whites tend to outscore blacks and Hispanic students on the standard admissions test even where their family incomes are the same, many middle-class black and Hispanic students would continue to need preferential treatment to make up the gap. Within each racial and ethnic group, average Scholastic Aptitude Test scores increase as income rises, from a mean total of 766 out of 1,600 for those from families earning under $ 10,000 a year, to a score of 1000 in | THE NATION: A Leg Up; My Equal Opportunity, Your Free Lunch |
746910_3 | to call spirit or soul. All his recent work, from "La Tragedie de Carmen" to his similarly spare version of Debussy's "Pelleas et Melisande," has attempted to penetrate beneath the surface of things, intuit human mystery, and find ways of embodying life's invisible, inscrutable aspects. "The worst disease today is reductionism," he said on a recent visit to his native London. The question of the spirit "is simply laughed out of court, and I think many people want it back. Certainly, that sort of materialism sets off a deep wish in me to go in the opposite direction." He found support for that wish in his reading of the more adventurous mathematicians and scientists, starting with Dr. Sacks, who is as much a philosopher and metaphysician as a neurologist. But "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat" has an obvious emotional appeal, too. The feeling it communicated to Mr. Brook was of modern Homeric heroes battling fearsome tricks of destiny. "So in a totally different way," he said, "I hoped to achieve what Greek tragedy does. These illnesses show you a situation, more intense than normal, where the question 'What is fate?' is no longer an intellectual subject for debate. And the extraordinary thing is that, when they do so, you're strengthened, with this mysterious, cathartic effect. You can simultaneously face the terrors of human existence and its amazingly positive side." TAKE THE EXAMPLE OF IAN, A Yorkshireman who as a 19-year-old butcher's apprentice cut his finger, developed a fever and emerged with no feeling at all from his neck down. For a time he was a rag doll who lay in bed and let his mother look after him. But then he discovered that by using his eyes and exercising his will he could make his senseless limbs move. Feeling nothing, he learned to stand, walk, build up an entire repertory of movements and gestures. Last year he went to a party at the National Theater in London, where "The Man Who" was playing, telling Mr. Brook afterward that he had taken a big risk in doing so. For the first time he had abandoned his sneakers for black shoes, making it hard to see his feet and monitor them as he walked upstairs. "Well, I couldn't come to a first night in white shoes, could I?" he said. But that was in 1994, after the French | Peter Brook Voyages To Inner Space |
746919_2 | and cliffs will shrink from their current grandeur to something that most certainly will still be beautiful, but perhaps more on the scale of the lower Hudson. "River traffic will be disrupted only briefly," said Zhen Xiaoli of the Chongqing press and culture office. "But there's no doubt that as the water rises, the mountains will appear less imposing and the gorges will lose some of their beauty." Though not among the deepest canyons in the world, the Three Gorges, lying near the midpoint of the Yangtze River's 4,000 mile run from the Qinghai-Tibetan plateau to the East China Sea, are nonetheless one of China's greatest natural wonders. Over millions of years, lush, majestic mountains were cleaved by the fast-moving Yangtze current. The gorges still constrict the river to 100 yards in width at points along its course. The Three Gorges lake will be a deep and narrow band of water, seldom more than a mile wide, over the 411 miles from Yichang to Chongqing. Chongqing, which will become the head of the lake and a new inland port, was the World War II headquarters of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek and the American Gen. Joseph W. Stillwell, who served as chief of staff to the Chinese Nationalist army fighting the Japanese. There are many unanswered questions about Chongqing's new port, where Yangtze River tours originate. Engineers say silting from the river may choke the port and require constant and costly dredging. And Chongqing doesn't have the money to treat the millions of tons of raw sewage it will be dumping into the still waters of the new lake. Questions about money and environmental concerns, as well as worries about the dam's vulnerability to earthquakes and silting, have given rise to fierce debates, which continue even now as the project is being started after 40 years of study. In the year 2003, as limited power generation begins, the water level will be allowed to reach its maximum planned height, giving the reservoir a depth of up to 525 feet. Officials are trying to put the best face on things despite all the uproar. "When the water level goes up, some of the scenic sights will be submerged, but some new ones will be created," said Zhang Hong, an official at the Chongqing tourism administration. "Visitors will be treated to a new and different perspective on the river's charms." TRAVEL ADVISORY: CORRESPONDENT'S REPORT | Countdown for Trips Along the Yangtze River |
816633_2 | In Roanne, a Loire valley town of 40,000, the police, whose estimates tend to be on the low side, counted 10,000 demonstrators. Mr. Juppe, 50, a graduate of the elite National School of Administration, where President Jacques Chirac also received his training as a civil servant, became the focus of widespread public anger over the suddenness and severity of the austerity measures. Explaining them on television halfway through the strike, Mr. Juppe sounded like a patronizing economics professor trying to convince a dull class that his plans were good-faith attempts to save the national health insurance and pension system from ruin. The Paris demonstration today included demands for him to withdraw the plan, which would decree a national income tax increase of 0.5 percent and increase the health premiums paid by retired people. But Mr. Juppe, backed by Mr. Chirac, has vowed to press on and has ignored demands from the unions to meet with them before a "social summit" scheduled for next Thursday. When he announced the plan a month ago, along with the since-shelved measures to reorganize the deficit-ridden national railroad system and change pension rules for state employees, he said that his Government might be in danger of falling if two million people took to the streets. "That dumb remark of Juppe's about two million, we reached that number a long time ago," Mr. Blondel, wearing a red scarf at the head of the Paris demonstration, said this afternoon. Mr. Blondel had vowed to keep up the strike pressure until Mr. Juppe went, but Mr. Blondel's aides conceded on Friday that many union members wanted to return to work. "The workers are hatefully angry because they hate being treated with contempt," Mr. Blondel said. Employees in the private sector, where less than 10 percent belong to unions, did not join the strike movement, and a public opinion poll published today by the daily Le Monde newspaper found that 49 percent of the French people thought Mr. Juppe should pursue his plan, compared with 47 percent who thought he should withdraw it. Four percent had no opinion. Businesses estimate that retail sales in the peak Christmas buying season are down about 50 percent so far from last year's figures, and a small-business federation estimated that bill payments lost in postal strikes and transportation tie-ups that delayed deliveries could cause as many as 5,000 small businesses to go bankrupt. | Claiming Victory, Strikers Rally in Cities Across France |
816465_0 | NO way would I want to go into court to defend the bears of New Jersey. Not with this rap sheet: KILLED BY BEARS 1993 1 lamb. 1994 4 chickens, 16 rabbits, 2 goats. 1995 30 rabbits, 21 chickens, 1 goat, 8 pheasants. 1996 (First four months of fiscal year, which began in July) 29 rabbits, 24 chickens, 2 goats, 1 lamb, 1 poodle. "The poodle is a first," Patty McConnell conceded ruefully. Mrs. McConnell is a wildlife biologist who heads the black bear research project for the State Fish and Game Division. As she has done since she first went into the woods to track black bears nearly 14 years ago, Mrs. McConnell maintains careful accounts of bear damage. From the annual records, it would seem that we are looking at what sociologists might call a downward behavioral spiral. As if we didn't have enough to worry about, bears have become a problem in the most densely populated state in the country. There are several reasons for this. One is the residential development that keeps sprawling into the places where bears live, especially in northwestern New Jersey, along the Kittatinny Ridge and in the lake country of Sussex and western Passaic Counties. Another reason is that some residents in these areas actually feed the bears, like stray cats. But the main reason is simple: more bears. "Every day we're losing habitat, but the bear population is going up," said Mrs. McConnell, who is 52 years old and spends months of each year in the woods with the bears, who have become amazingly adaptable to suburbanization. When she first started on the black bear project in 1982, there were fewer than 30 bears in the wild in New Jersey. Now, there are more than 400, not counting the ones that meander across the Delaware from Pennsylvania. Only a small number of bears actually cause a nuisance or even show up in public, Mrs. McConnell said. But bears do like to walk, and sometimes get lost. A few years ago, one indelibly traumatized male bear got himself stranded on a patch of grass at America's most terrifying intersection -- the junction of Routes 23, 46 and 80 near the Willowbrook Mall. Recently, rambling bears have been spotted throughout North Jersey. "Sometimes they get bogged down and we have to go in and catch them," Mrs. McConnell said. Black bears are not | When Bears Get Too Close for Comfort |
816644_0 | Stating that there was no assurance that it would succeed, former Senator George J. Mitchell has begun the work of the new international panel that is to deal with the dispute over disarmament of the Irish Republican Army in Northern Ireland. Mr. Mitchell, head of the International Body on disarmament, said on Friday in Belfast, the Ulster capital, "we understand that the success of our efforts is far from assured but we believe that the process of peace and reconciliation now underway in Northern Ireland is historic." The panel marks a change in British policy: for decades London had rejected the idea of a foreign diplomatic involvement in achieving a political settlement in Northern Ireland, saying it was an internal British problem. But the internationalization of the Northern Ireland situation had long been a goal of Sinn Fein, the political wing of the I.R.A. The panel is to try to work out a compromise between Sinn Fein and the British Government and Protestant political leaders in Northern Ireland. The British insist that the I.R.A. make a start on disarming before Sinn Fein is allowed to take part in negotiations to reach a political settlement of the strife that has killed more than 3,100 people since 1969. Sinn Fein holds that this is an unacceptable condition and that the I.R.A. has proved its committment to peace in the unilateral cease-fire it has kept since September 1994. British officials have said that the panel might find a way, aside from actual disarmament, that would settle the dispute by obtaining from Sinn Fein other assurances for the Protestant majority that the I.R.A. has abandoned forever its "armed struggle" to end British control of Northern Ireland. But Gerry Adams, the leader of Sinn Fein, said Friday that he doubted the panel would succeed unless Britain dropped its demand for a start of disarmament before full peace talks could begin. The panel met with Sir Patrick Mayhew, the British Northern Ireland Secretary on Friday. Today, it heard from Ulster political officials before taveling to Dublin for two days for meetings with Sinn Fein and Irish Government officials. The panel is to make a recommendation by mid-January. Its other members are Harri Holkeri, a former Prime Minister of Finland, and Gen. John de Chastelain, chief of staff of Canadian defense forces. | Northern Ireland Disarmament Panel Convenes |
816703_0 | There are hundreds of severely ill or disabled children whose parents are unable or unwilling to care for them. Michael Rodriquez, at school with his physical therapist, Kara White, is one of the fortunate ones: He has a foster family. Article, page 61. THE NEEDIEST CASES | For Disabled, An Embrace |
816645_0 | New research by the World Health Organization provides more evidence that some newer birth control pills may double the risk of blood clots compared with older types. But two studies by the organization, published today in The Lancet, a British medical journal, agreed with earlier studies that the risk is very low for the millions of women worldwide who take the pills. An estimated three or four cases of blood clots in deep veins can be expected each year among 100,000 women of reproductive age who do not use oral contraceptives. The recent findings indicate that the number of cases would rise to 10 a year for women taking the old types of pill and 20 among those using the new types of pill. Blood clots in veins, usually in the legs, can cause major health problems if they break away and travel into the vessels of the lungs. In rare cases they can lead to death. The new types of pills, sometimes called combined or low-dose pills, combine the hormone estrogen with one of two types of the hormone progesten, desogestrel or gestodene. The British Government issued a warning about them in October after early, unpublished research showed a correlation between the pills and an increased risk of clots in deep veins. It advised doctors not to prescribe them to women who are overweight, have varicose veins or have a history of blood clots. Dr. Olav Meirik, with the special program of research in human reproduction at the health organization, said that "in general the modern low-dose pills are safe contraceptives and have less adverse effects than the pills used in the 60's and 70's." "We cannot say these new pills should be banned," he added Two contraceptives sold in the United States contain the same ingredients as the pills in the study: Desogen by Organon and Ortho-Cept by Ortho Pharmaceuticals. They account for 15 percent of the oral contraceptive market. When low-dose pills were introduced in the 1980's, they were hailed as a major improvement over earlier oral contraceptives, which had occasional side effects like weight gain, hair growth and acne. The new formula was also believed to cut the risk of strokes and heart attacks. The research by the health agency, an arm of the United Nations, was conducted in 17 countries in Africa, Asia, Europe and Latin America. Such factors as a woman's medical background and | Birth Control Pill Risk Affirmed but Called Low |
816666_0 | The woman was not a saint, but she said she wanted to be the foster mother of a child with special needs. She was given Vadim -- a 2-year-old boy with severe brain damage. He had a seizure disorder and was unable to suck or swallow. He could not walk or talk. He spit up. And he cried all weekend long. On Monday morning, she carried Vadim back to the agency that had given him to her three days earlier. Take him," she told Jodee Tolomeo, the clinical coordinator for the medical foster boarding home program at the Children's Aid Society. "I can't take this." As Ms. Tolomeo recalled last week: "We never heard from her after that. I don't think I could have done it either." About that time, Fortunata Loyola, 45, a mother of five in Flushing, Queens, heard about the program. She was touched. She applied for a child and received Vadim. He was as cranky as ever, but Ms. Loyola persevered. She hugged and cradled him, hoping to soothe his constant cries. She massaged his spastic, stiff legs. "She didn't sleep for months at a time," Ms. Tolomeo said. "She would come into the agency looking so tired. She just stuck with it. No one trains you to have that kind of patience." Vadim is now 6. He has a feeding tube taped to his face, uses a wheelchair and cannot speak. But his anguish seems to have eased. Recently, he smiled. And Ms. Loyola, soon to be his adoptive mother, loves him as one of her own. "Since the day that I met him, I was all happy and crazy for him," Ms. Loyola said. "I like boy babies. I don't care that he's sick." There are hundreds of other children like Vadim, who are chronically and sometimes terminally ill, and who have been abandoned by parents who could not or would not care for them. But there are only a handful of adults like Ms. Loyola. The children's maladies vary widely. One child now in the Children's Aid Society program is awaiting a kidney transplant; another has neurofibromatosis, more commonly known as Elephant Man's disease. Parents like Ms. Loyola must attend intensive classes instructing them on their children's medical needs. They spend days and nights in hospitals, at doctor's appointments and giving physical therapy. "You have to see it to believe it," said Edilberta | Devoted Parents Help Children With Special Needs Flourish |
818326_0 | International anger over French nuclear testing in the South Pacific cut deeply into sales of Beaujolais nouveau this year, a wine trade association reported today. Eighteen percent less of the trendy young wine was sold during this year's primary marketing period, compared with the same period in 1994, the National Interprofessional Wine Office said. The figure was the first official word of the damage done to Beaujolais vintners by protests against President Jacques Chirac's decision to resume nuclear weapons tests. Beaujolais nouveau became a target of anti-nuclear groups because it goes on sale each year with a major marketing blitz. The wine is ritually uncorked each year amidst considerable celebration on the third Thursday in November. | Protests Hurt Wine's Sales |
818316_0 | THE imagery of surf now seems permanently attached to the Internet, but Judith Martin, who writes the syndicated column Miss Manners, has suggested that one might hark back to the world of 19th-century ships to evoke the social dynamics of cyberspace. On such a vessel, a group of strangers would book passage and become part of a seaborne world isolated from ordinary society and all its social baggage. Young rakes would often feel free to invent distinguished lineages and alluring titles. And young ladies, Ms. Martin says, "used to be warned, when beginning a journey, to be suspicious of shipboard introductions." So, too, in cyberspace where any human contact is fraught with uncertainty. Every "chat room" or bulletin board is a gathering of strangers, bound by little outside their on-line experience. A citizen in this strange world can invent a persona, a name, a title or a biography and shed it the next moment. And while a century and more ago, a ship's voyage constructed an alternative society, one governed by strict rules, on line there are almost no bounds. There is human contact without any sign of human presence. There are no facial expressions to communicate feelings and reactions; there are no tones of voice like those that can make telephone conversations intimate; there are no hints like those once coded in handwriting or stationery, to give the reader a sense of the sender's personality, and there is not even much time to consider the words being written. There is only that collection of strangers typing their words to other bodiless ciphers on a screen. Is it any wonder, then, Ms. Martin asks, that there should be problems with on-line behavior? Ms. Manners, who will be dealing with some of these issues in a book to be published this spring titled "Miss Manners Rescues Civilization," sees the on-line world as a new frontier in the development of etiquette. "The sanctions of etiquette only have force," she explained, "because if you behave badly, you get a bad reputation." But on line, a bad reputation can be evanescent: its existence depends on shared memories and shared values, and while these do exist in many places in the on-line world, there are many more where they don't. While people do have reputations, cyberspace covers a lot of territory and there are drifters who have little stake in one news group or another, | Technology: CONNECTIONS;Miss Manners has been keeping an eye on cyberspace, and she is not amused. |
818316_2 | and are thus somewhat impervious to commonly used sanctions of the on-line world: flaming, or giving an offender as good as he gave through electronic mail; and bozo filters, which keep the messages of selected parties from one's own electronic mailbox. Even these sanctions are problematic. Sanctions imply the existence of a community in which the violator must live. Sanctions have an effect because the person is grounded in that community and relies on it. Without such a relationship between a citizen and a community, what guides behavior? "All the problems of society at large exist in cyberspace," Ms. Martin says, "but there are no sanctions like those in the society at large." So, throughout the chat rooms and bulletin boards of the Net, there is always the risk of explosions of impulsiveness, rudeness, offensiveness, recklessness. There is evidence enough just in the notices posted by on-line services that try to threaten a form of sanction: expulsion. Before one enters the chat rooms of the Microsoft Network, a standard etiquette notice includes a prohibition against "typing in all capital letters" -- the electronic version of yelling. Compuserve provides a warning before one calls up the news groups of Usenet, where one can post messages to a global readership: "Avoid 'spamming' " -- tossing copies of a message indiscriminately into multiple news groups, leading to a big mess. In the CB Simulator region of Compuserve, where freewheeling conversation takes place, visitors give themselves monikers that proclaim their sexual legerdemain; many then follow through, discarding niceties of conversation and instantly soliciting sex. Eavesdrop on the America Online Kids Chat, and often, childish rudeness will be taken to new levels. Even ordinary E-mail is a little less considered and a little more blunt than its handwritten forebears. So netiquette -- as the manners of cyberspace have come to be called -- is a constant issue. Partly, of course, this is because chat rooms have so many people talking at once that conversation is splintered into a series of one-liners. The impulse is to be quick and forthright. This is not a medium conducive to subtlety. Serious talk can also be lost in the midst of trivia: read the horrifying tales of teen depression and attempted suicide in the America Online teen bulletin boards, and they can seem to have the same banality as discussions of television soap operas. Ms. Martin suggests that American | Technology: CONNECTIONS;Miss Manners has been keeping an eye on cyberspace, and she is not amused. |
813417_0 | To the Editor: Your description of the poor condition of New York City schools (editorial, Nov. 27) applies not only to the public school system but also to the public and private nonprofit agencies that provide the bulk of educational and social services in the city. The bill for deferred maintenance among nonprofit social service agencies alone can be conservatively estimated at $2 billion to $3 billion. More disturbing, many managers of these programs have reluctantly accepted serious facility deterioration -- including noncompliance with provisions of health and safety codes. The life cycles of many of these buildings are ending simultaneously. The two public facilities building booms of this century occurred in the 1920's and 30's and the 1960's and 70's. Buildings from the first period were built to last; those later were built cheaply, often containing asbestos. All need complete renovation. Preventive maintenance is virtually nonexistent, though it would extend the life of capital items such as roofs. When maintenance needs are not promptly met, they become geometrically more costly with time. Regulations and red tape increase facility costs and delay action in all sectors, particularly the public and nonprofit sectors. Compliance with laws covering asbestos, fire safety, accessibility and facades has taxed budgets. When these regulations are layered onto those that govern construction with public funds and provide for program needs, the price tag and lead time escalate. We need to support a simplified system for making timely decisions about public facilities, and we need to find the political will to plan, budget and invest in these facilities with a long-term perspective. The system makes it too easy to neglect that leak in the roof. CLARA MILLER Exec. Dir., Nonprofit Facilities Fund New York, Nov. 29, 1995 | Schools Aren't Alone in Tumbling Down |
813344_1 | effort and expense to (almost) everyone in the United States" -- much as telephone and postal services are inexpensive and easy to use. Based on Rand's study of on-line communities (like Latino Net in San Francisco and the Blacksburg Electronic Village in Virginia), and what it discovered about how citizens use E-mail today, the report concluded that "use of electronic mail is valuable for individuals, for communities, for the practice and spread of democracy, and for the general development of a viable national information infrastructure." Even if one is willing to accept the report's basic premise -- that access to E-mail will promote democracy -- there are still many practical considerations to be addressed before launching the entire United States population into cyberspace. The biggest sticking point is how to pay for it. Tora Bikson, one of the study's authors and a psychologist in Rand's Social Policy Department, said that an amount equal to about $100 a household, or about $1 billion a year, would be sufficient to amortize E-mail service (and the required computer equipment) for the poorest 10 percent of the nation's population. To raise that money Rand proposes a system in which communications and information service providers would be charged an E-mail tax that would go into a special fund. The Federal Government would then dispense vouchers from this fund that qualified low-income individuals could use for signing up for an E-mail service or buying the necessary computer equipment. Even though a new Federal tax is likely to find few proponents in industry or Congress, Dr. Bikson contends that an E-mail tax could go a long way toward helping the Internet achieve "universal" status quickly. "The assumption is that if businesses can really operate through the Net and reach almost everybody in the country, everyone benefits," she said. But assuming we agree on how to finance universal access, who then provides every citizen in the nation with a unique E-mail address? Do we each get a national E-mail identity card, or maybe require that our E-mail address be our Social Security number? Dr. Bikson concedes that that is a mind-boggling problem. "The report didn't recommend a specific addressing mechanism, just that one was needed," she said. "In fact, we encouraged the U.S. Postal Service and possibly the Federal Communications Commission to consider some mechanism to make sure that there is a always a default address for people." | The Rand Corporation salutes E-mail as the new foundation of democracy. |
819563_1 | public, finance research and offer support for other moebius families. Mrs. Campbell got free legal help from a law firm and pro bono aid from a medical advertising agency. Her friends in the Larchmont Newcomers Club supplied her with fund-raising ideas and manpower. Mrs. Campbell, an M.B.A. formerly involved in pharmaceutical marketing research, is the foundation's president. Mr. Campbell, a medical advertising executive, is on the board. The Campbells' first effort, a small cocktail party at their home in May 1994 netted $13,000. They are hoping to clear $6,000 from the three holiday concerts, which they said were attended by 600 people. The foundation has 450 members -- families and individuals affected by moebius syndrome -- in the United States and Canada, a quarterly newsletter, a hot line and a biannual conference. The first one was held in Los Angeles in 1994. Moebius (pronounced MO-bee-us and alternatively spelled mobius) syndrome victims suffer from lifetime facial paralysis, which prevents them from smiling, frowning, making facial expressions, moving their eyes from side to side or blinking. Often there are other physical problems as well -- malformed limbs, tongue and jaw problems and low muscle tone. The ability to suck is usually impaired in newborns, and older children have speech problems. The disorder occurs when the sixth and seventh cranial nerves, those governing facial and eye movements, are not fully developed. The name for the disorder comes from Paul Julius Moebius, the German neurologist who identified it 100 years ago. The syndrome is rare, and it is also often underdiagnosed, said Dr. Marcia Wishnick, a medical adviser for the foundation and a clinical professor of pediatrics at New York University Medical Center. She has four moebius children, including Douglas, in her care, which may be more than any other doctor in the country. Mrs. Campbell said that doctors at the hospital where Douglas was born mistakenly told her that he was probably "mentally deficient." He was not diagnosed as having moebius syndrome until he was 3 months old. "Douglas is very bright, but these babies are often called retarded," Dr. Wishnick said. "Many doctors have never seen the syndrome in 30 years of practice." Dr. Wishnick will take part in the foundation's second conference in July in Tarrytown. Also taking part will be Dr. Ronald Zucker, head of the department of plastic surgery at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto and professor | Fighting a Paralyzer of the Face and Eyes |
813132_1 | prosperous by Cuban standards -- to workers in industries like mining and sugar who receive small hard-currency bonuses on top of peso salaries that amount to as little as $5 a month. This summer, the Government also made it legal to open small privately run restaurants, known as paladares, that do business in dollars. It sometimes seems that new paladares open daily on every block in Havana, so eager are Cubans to go into business for themselves. Since the new income tax does not apply to peso salaries, it is likely to affect few Cubans, at least at first. Those who earn up to $2,400 a year in foreign currency will pay 10 percent of their salaries, with the rate rising to 50 percent for the tiny number who earn more than $60,000. Significantly, the decree does not apply to the dollars sent to Cubans by relatives abroad. Those remittances, most from the United States, are estimated at more than $400 million a year and have become a key support of Cuba's economy. By some calculations, 40 percent of families in Havana and 20 percent in the provinces receive some support from family members overseas. Cubans, who have not paid income taxes since the truly unequal pre-1959 days, join Russians and Poles, Czechs and Slovaks and other citizens of newly capitalist countries who are now paying income taxes. Even China has adopted an income tax, aimed at the rapidly commercializing coastal areas. With Mr. Castro traveling this week in China, which has increasingly become Cuba's model of how to open an economy without ceding political control, a search for additional sources of revenue can be expected. The Finance Ministry plans to tax rental income, and a new graduated system of taxes for Cuba's 200,000 self-employed, who now pay a fixed monthly quota regardless of what they make, is in the offing. Enforcement may prove more complicated, however. The legislation permitting taxation of foreign currency earnings was passed during the summer of 1994, providing ample time for those Cubans fortunate enough to be earning dollars to figure out ways to evade taxes. "Sure, they can withhold money off the top from the poor suckers who work in the hotels or restaurants," said an architect who earns more in one evening as an unauthorized taxicab driver than he does in an entire month at his official job. "But that's no reason for | In Cuba, a Tax On Capitalism |
813135_0 | In a country that likes to claim to be the cradle of revolution, the sight of strikers marching or youths taking on riot police looks familiar enough. But the anti-Government movement that has shaken France over the past 10 days is anything but revolutionary: civil service workers are fighting to prevent change. With public transportation already paralyzed in all major cities, the strike has now begun spreading to the Government-owned gas, electricity, postal and airline industries where workers fear their benefits will be sacrificed to cut huge deficits in the Government budget and the social security system. But to back away from reforms, President Jacques Chirac and Prime Minister Alain Juppe would become lame ducks after barely seven months in office. If France is to play a major role in Europe, including the adoption of the single European currency planned for 1999, drastic moves like a balanced budget are required. An unrelated student movement demanding more funds for education has added to concern that France may be sliding toward a social breakdown similiar to the anti-Government protests of May 1968. Everyone, it seems, expects a long strike. MARLISE SIMONS NOV. 26-DEC. 2 | France Slows to a Crawl |
812975_1 | check the proprietary lease to determine whether the issue is addressed there. If the lease contains no provision for use of the garage space, however, and there are no other written documents giving use of the space to the shareholder, then under most circumstances the matter is subject to the discretion of the board of directors. "That means that the use of the space is subject to whatever rules or regulations the board wants to impose," Mr. Saft said. "It means that the individual might be able to use the space at no fee at all for 10 years and then, all of a sudden, the board can say, 'The charge for the space is $100 a month,' and that's that." Lenders' Policies On Walkups Q Recently, my girlfriend and I were denied a mortgage on a condominium because of an obscure policy the lender has on five-story walkups. This would not have been so bad except that we were informed of this policy four weeks into the application process. Now we must scramble to find another mortgage before the closing date or face losing the property altogether. Is the lender legally required to inform us of such obscure policies at the time of application? Is there a document I can request from a lender that provides information on such policies? . . . Paul Mackles, Edison, N.J. A Margaret Scott, president of Mortgage Advisory Services, a mortgage broker in Manhattan, said that lenders are generally not required to make applicants for mortgage loans aware of all of the specifics of their underwriting criteria. In fact, Ms. Scott said, to do so -- or to provide a document that details all of those criteria for every applicant -- would be a practical impossibility. "Each of the lenders I work with gives me a large, two-inch-thick three-ring binder that contains their underwriting policies," Ms. Scott said. "And I have a separate three-inch-thick binder from Fannie Mae with its criteria. Most people don't appreciate that mortgages are very complicated things." Any good mortgage broker, however, earns his or her commission by being aware of lenders' underwriting policies and should make applicants aware of potential glitches before they occur. In fact, Ms. Scott said, that should have been done early on in the situation described. "It's really not such an obscure policy," Ms. Scott said, referring to the aversion many lenders -- and | Q. & A. |
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