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812909_5 | would collect the thousands of images and 135,000 bits per second of Galilean data. Burned into Gounley's memory is the moment when he was "watching that screen, rather like Apollo 13, and blinking, thinking, 'This can't be right.' Because I was seeing clear indications that the motors were working harder than they had to, and nothing was happening." Three of the antenna's 18 ribs were jammed. Months, and eventually years, of emergency trial and error -- heating the antenna's tower and, when that didn't work, cooling it -- failed to fix the problem. Shaking the spacecraft, the cosmic equivalent of kicking a vending machine, was considered and rejected. "We built this for a soft ride," Gounley says. After a long search for explanations, scientists came to believe that in the three years after Challenger, the spacecraft was crippled by a loss of lubricant during cross-country trips between Cape Canaveral and Pasadena: the most perilous part of Galileo's two-and-a-half-billion-mile journey may well have been a truck ride along Interstate 10. During 1992 and 1993, the Galileo team worked on ways to use the ship's other functioning low-gain antenna to save the essence of the mission. To make this possible -- "a very good second best," says Bill O'Neil, the project manager -- the spacecraft's computers were reloaded from afar with new software, a change so profound and complicated that Torrence Johnson says they effectively "reprogrammed its brains." The orbiter will end up sending home about a thousand pictures instead of the 50,000 originally hoped for, but scientists inside and outside the mission now predict that it will fulfill 70 percent of its objectives, a figure unimaginable in the months after April 1991. Other planetary probes, like the Voyagers, have had midcourse corrections made to their equipment, but nothing in the history of the space program rivals the reconstitution of Galileo. And its troubles may not be over. On Oct. 11, the controllers tried to retrieve a single picture of Jupiter that the spacecraft had just taken. In the absence of a working high-gain antenna, which would have transmitted the picture then and there, the image was stored on the craft's tape recorder, and when an attempt was made to retrieve it, the tape slipped and would not rewind. As the stunned scientists tried to determine the nature of the failure, George Alexander, the J.P.L.'s public affairs manager, wondered if Galileo shouldn't | GALILEO, PHONE HOME |
813042_0 | CHINA SYNDROME Trade Complaints Renewed "We will not wait forever," Mickey Kantor, the United States trade representative, said as Washington warned Beijing's leaders to end the pirating of software, music and movies or face stiff trade sanctions. American officials said the Chinese were dragging their feet on enforcing an agreement reached earlier this year to close 29 factories that churn out millions of illegal copies of American films and software. The piracy has cost American businesses at least $800 million this year, they said. SETTLING G.M., Warner-Lambert Fined General Motors will pay an $11 million and an additional $34 million to recall a half-million Cadillacs, settling a Federal complaint that it had installed a computer chip that overrode emissions controls and caused the cars to emit illegal amounts of carbon dioxide. Warner-Lambert pleaded guilty to criminal charges and paid $10 million for concealing faulty drug manufacturing processes. LABOR Pass the Salt The Supreme Court ruled unanimously that a union tactic known as salting was legal. Particularly popular among construction industry unions, salting involves encouraging union officials and members to take jobs with nonunionized employers, hoping to persuade co-workers to organize. The Court ruled that such organizers had the same legal protection as any other employees and that employers could not try to root them out or refuse to hire them. The ruling upholds the policies of the National Labor Relations Board, which are under attack in the Republican-controlled Congress. TOBACCO Penetrating the Smoke Federal and state prosecutors began interrogating Jeffrey S. Wigand, former research chief at Brown & Williamson, the nation's third largest tobacco company, after overcoming the company's attempts to block his appearance. The testimony was taken in private and officials were barred from discussing his answers, but they said their questions focused on to what extent the company covered up and falsified evidence about tobacco's harmful effects. MEA CULPA Contrition Over Daiwa -- From the Regulators "The bottom line is that we did not succeed in unearthing Daiwa's transgressions where we might have," Alan Greenspan, chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, said at a Congressional hearing. New York State's Superintendent of Banking was similarly abashed. Daiwa Bank of Japan has acknowledged that it secretly lost $1.1 billion in bond trading over 11 years; a Federal grand jury has accused the bank's management of conspiring to conceal the losses. Daiwa has been ordered to shut its American operations by | DIARY |
814458_1 | pension scheme. But the postponement seemed unlikely to have any immediate impact on the strike. Beyond the strikers' specific complaints, there seems to lurk a far deeper malaise. "The Government tells our people that the only objective is to fight against deficits and debt," Charles Pasqua, a former Interior Minister with a keen sense of the sentiment in the French heartland, told the weekly magazine L'Express. "But you cannot run this country as you would run a board of directors. The French need dreams, they need hope and they need passion." At present the integration of Europe, the project in whose name the budget cuts and reforms of Prime Minister Alain Juppe are being presented, seems to offer very little in the way of dreams, hope or passion. Indeed French workers increasingly see the Maastricht Treaty of European Union, which calls for the introduction of a single European currency by 1999, as synonymous with job cuts, austerity, declining benefits and general joylessness. Today, for the 15th day, there were no trains, and public transport was at a standstill in Paris, Marseilles and Bordeaux. There were delays of up to two hours at both major Paris airports as air traffic controllers staged intermittent strikes. Postal services continued to function at a fraction of their normal capacity, and about one-third of school teachers were on strike. But the strike showed little sign of spreading into the private sector and the violence remained isolated. In an extraordinary expression of support for the strikers, given the disruption they have caused, 58 percent of French people say the strikes are justified, according to a poll published today by the weekly magazine Le Point. Of the 841 people questioned, 56 percent said they felt "sympathy" for the strikers. Such support suggests the degree to which France is now divided. On the one hand, there is a generally affluent class still favorable to European integration and a strong franc. The franc's strength and France's ability to meet the rigorous German standards set for a single European currency are in turn dependent on reducing the deficit and paring the huge state sector. On the other hand, a growing number of people have the dim but troubling sense that the old values of France are being eroded by the slogan of "Europe," and by the sort of revolution in communications and business that can leave a country's policy captive | Burden of Strikes Increases but France Bends Just a Bit |
814613_1 | pension scheme. But the postponement seemed unlikely to have any immediate impact on the strike. Beyond the strikers' specific complaints, there seems to lurk a far deeper malaise. "The Government tells our people that the only objective is to fight against deficits and debt," Charles Pasqua, a former Interior Minister with a keen sense of the sentiment in the French heartland, told the weekly magazine L'Express. "But you cannot run this country as you would run a board of directors. The French need dreams, they need hope and they need passion." At present the integration of Europe, the project in whose name the budget cuts and reforms of Prime Minister Alain Juppe are being presented, seems to offer very little in the way of dreams, hope or passion. Indeed French workers increasingly see the Maastricht Treaty of European Union, which calls for the introduction of a single European currency by 1999, as synonymous with job cuts, austerity, declining benefits and general joylessness. Today, for the 15th day, there were no trains, and public transport was at a standstill in Paris, Marseilles and Bordeaux. There were delays of up to two hours at both major Paris airports as air traffic controllers staged intermittent strikes. Postal services continued to function at a fraction of their normal capacity, and about one-third of school teachers were on strike. But the strike showed little sign of spreading into the private sector and the violence remained isolated. In an extraordinary expression of support for the strikers, given the disruption they have caused, 58 percent of French people say the strikes are justified, according to a poll published today by the weekly magazine Le Point. Of the 841 people questioned, 56 percent said they felt "sympathy" for the strikers. Such support suggests the degree to which France is now divided. On the one hand, there is a generally affluent class still favorable to European integration and a strong franc. The franc's strength and France's ability to meet the rigorous German standards set for a single European currency are in turn dependent on reducing the deficit and paring the huge state sector. On the other hand, a growing number of people have the dim but troubling sense that the old values of France are being eroded by the slogan of "Europe," and by the sort of revolution in communications and business that can leave a country's policy captive | Burden of Strikes Increases but France Bends Just a Bit |
818804_0 | Theratech Inc. said yesterday that it had asked the Food and Drug Administration to approve its estrogen skin patch and that it planned to make similar applications in Europe early next year. Theratech, based in Salt Lake City, made the announcement with the Procter & Gamble Company of Cincinnati, which has exclusive marketing rights to the patch everywhere but in Asia. The patches deliver Estradiol, the main female estrogenic hormone, through the skin, generally for post-menopausal women with osteoporosis. | Theratech Estrogen Patch |
818769_0 | An advisory council to President Clinton has recommended, after two years of study, that every community connect its elementary and secondary schools to the Internet -- the network of millions of computers around the world that provides a limitless array of on-line information. The council shows that its recommendation would be easily affordable and almost certainly beneficial, especially for poor students whose educational opportunities are limited now by lack of resources in their school districts. Once connected to the Internet, students can explore education opportunities that would otherwise be unavailable. The Internet already makes available to some rural and inner-city students advanced calculus and physiology courses taught by superstar teachers at faraway high schools, courses taught by professors at distant universities and access to art collections and other video and text-based information at the best libraries and museums in the world. Students at one private high school have gone on a simulated archeological dig of an actual site dating back to ancient Greece. In New York City, 125 "at-risk" students -- those with test scores in the bottom 25 to 50 percent of the fifth grade -- were given home computers and access to on-line computer services. The results have been dramatic. Students who were withdrawn in class became highly conversant over computer networks. They substituted investigative learning on the computer for television and other less wholesome distractions. Over 30 percent of the participants took college preparatory courses, compared with 15 percent of students citywide and a lower percentage for at-risk students. The council cites a carefully done study by McKinsey & Company, a management consulting firm, to show that the cost of Internet connections would be modest. The McKinsey study estimates that creating a small laboratory in every school with 25 computers connected to ordinary telephone lines would cost only $11 billion over the next five years. At its peak, the project would cost no more than 1.5 percent of the nation's education budget. Even that figure exaggerates the impact, since many school districts will likely reduce other, less compelling expenditures to pay for computer hardware and software. The estimates look realistic, even cautious. They include ample money to train teachers. They do not envision widespread use of cellular connections that some experts believe could drastically cut the need to run wires through old buildings. Nor does the report anticipate the use of software, already available, that allows users | Connecting Every Pupil to the World |
818751_0 | France detonated a nuclear blast in the South Pacific today, the fifth in a series of tests on two remote atolls that has drawn worldwide protests. The explosion came at 12:30 P.M. local time on Mururoa Atoll, the public radio station France Info reported, quoting the Defense Ministry. The blast was the equivalent of less than 30 kilotons of explosives, the radio reported. By comparison, the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945 measured slightly less than 20 kilotons. The testing has drawn condemnation and protest across the globe. The first explosion, on Sept. 5, led to violent demonstrations in Papeete, Tahiti, the capital of French Polynesia. The blast today was the fifth since nuclear testing was resumed by President Jacques Chirac in September. Mr. Chirac has said France will set off six nuclear explosions before permanently ending its testing program by the end of May 1996. | France Sets Off 5th Nuclear Test in Pacific |
817689_0 | Prime Minister John Major campaigned in both parts of the island today, seeking support for Britain's position on the Northern Ireland peace effort, which has been weakened by a resurgence of vigilante killings widely attributed to the I.R.A. Mr. Major, visiting Belfast and other areas in Northern Ireland as well as Dublin, arrived during the busiest week in years in the official effort to produce full-fledged peace negotiations. In Belfast, he said it was "the overwhelming feeling of the people of Northern Ireland" that the I.R.A. should start to disarm. And he characterized as "utterly unacceptable" the shooting deaths in Dublin this week of two Roman Catholic men with criminal records linking them to drug dealing. In Dublin, Prime Minister John Bruton of Ireland joined Mr. Major in condemning the killings, which at least temporarily have overshadowed the new "twin-track" approach to full-fledged peace negotiations. That new approach began last week with the opening sessions of the commission headed by former Senator George J. Mitchell of Maine. The second track was the start of two-way and three-way preliminary talks involving the Irish and British Governments and political leaders from northern political parties, including Sinn Fein, the political wing of the Irish Republican Army. But after six days of intense activity, there was no solution in sight to the basic problem: the disarmament of the I.R.A. Of the groups involved in the peace effort, only Sinn Fein and its President, Gerry Adams, have declined to condemn the killings outright. Mr. Adams, who is always careful not to condemn the I.R.A., which he represents in the peace effort, has said only that he does not "condone" the killings, and that he is sorry for the dead mens' families. | Major Goes to Ulster and Ireland For Support of the Peace Plan |
815162_0 | The jungles and wildlife of Costa Rica are the focus of two educational trips in February. The first trip, Natural Treasures of Costa Rica, Feb. 3 to 15, offered by the American Museum of Natural History and led by Thomas J. Mirenda, a botanist at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, will visit the Carara Biological Reserve, containing huge vine-laden trees, tropical birds and reptiles; Palo Verde, which contains a dry tropical forest, one of the few remaining in Central America; the Monteverde Cloud Forest Reserve, known for its thick orchid-covered canopy, which attracts such unusual birds as the three-wattled bellbird and the quetzal; La Selva, a rain forest with about 2,000 species of plants and a wide assortment of wildlife; Tortuguero, the national park on whose beaches green sea turtles breed, and Poas Volcano, the largest geyser-type crater in the world. Participants on the second trip, Natural History of Costa Rica, Feb. 13 to 22, sponsored by the Massachusetts Audubon Society and led by Elissa Landre, director of the Broadmoor Wildlife Sanctuary, will visit the Central Valley, Talamanca Mountain Range and Osa Peninsula, concentrating on Irazu Volcano National Park, which contains Costa Rica's highest volcano (11,260 feet); Los Cusingos Farm, the home of Dr. Alexander Skutch, co-author of "The Birds of Costa Rica," and Wilson Botanical Garden, with aroids, palms, ferns, bromeliads, heliconias and marantas. The tour will also offer an aerial tram ride through a private rain forest by Braulio Carrillo National Park. The cost of the 12-night American Museum of Natural History trip is $3,870 a person in double occupancy, including air fare from Miami. The cost of the nine-night Massachusetts Audubon Society trip is $1,925 a person, double occupancy, plus air fare of approximately $600 from New York. Information: American Museum of Natural History (212) 769-5700 or, outside New York, (800) 462-8687; Massachusetts Audubon Society, (800) 289-9504. | Travel Advisory;Tours of Costa Rica Emphasize Jungle Life |
815202_0 | WHEN the Landmark West! preservationists put back the old-style streetlights on West 67th Street, a neighbor gave Arlene Simon, the group's president, just the compliment she had hoped for: "They look as if they've always been there." Indeed, the Bishop's Crook lamppost the group has installed is a handsome design -- though it was never there in the first place, or on any other of the side streets on the West Side where her group is coordinating its installation. But authentically restoring an entire streetscape presents problems. The advent of electric lighting in the 1880's permitted taller, brighter fixtures that required less maintenance than the old gas lamps, and the city began to let out contracts to individual companies for various streets. In 1892, the New York Edison Company got the contract for elegant new twin-arm fixtures along Fifth Avenue, similar to the one that survives at the northeast corner of 23d Street and Broadway. According to the historian Henry Hope Reed, the Bishop's Crook lamppost was designed in 1896 by Richard Rogers Bowker, an Edison Company executive, and it went up on Broadway and some other major avenues, often exactly at the corner, pointing diagonally into the intersection. On the side streets east and west of Central Park, the old style gas lamps remained in place through 1910. In part because there were many competing companies, it is difficult to pin down what lamps were installed when, by whom and where. An examination of about 600 old photographs of side streets on the West Side shows only a single Bishop's Crook design (at 160 West 73d Street), but many lampposts called Type F. The Type F is now virtually unknown; only a few survive in Manhattan, one at 123 West 13th Street. But its short, softly curving arm is a delicate, lyrical alternative to the more straightforward semicircle of the Bishop's Crook. According to Deborah Bershad, director of archives at the Art Commission of the City of New York, the New York Edison Company filed an application for the Type F post in 1911. Magazine articles suggest that it was designed by Charles F. Lacombe, the city's chief engineer of light and power. Later photographs show that the Type F was the lamppost installed all over the West Side, including both streets where Landmark West! has installed the Bishop's Crook lampposts: West 67th off Central Park West and West | Streetscapes: The Bishop's Crook Lamppost;Some Light on a West Side Preservation Endeavor |
814697_2 | and such. Mary Ann Rood, of the Gourd Village Garden Club, quotes the 90-year-old Marvin: "We got so many gourds in this house, Mary wanted to move them out, so I built a museum." I don't think I'll give directions, because we don't need a lot of curiosity seekers trampling Mary's wildflowers or ogling gourd bonnets with no understanding. First, subscribe to The Gourd and see how that sits. Gourd secrets must be earned. There's romance, too. An innocent gourd question written by Ann Thorpe, of southern Australia, to the gourd guru Rodd Friday, of Belvidere, Ill., resulted in a down-under wedding in the Kangarilla Church. Where that is, we don't know, but anyway, the bride roared up in "her late father's Land Rover escorted by six Harley-Davidsons." And I used to think plant societies were tame. Some of the most interesting newsletters are sort of sporadic, like good letters from friends you hear from once in a blue moon. For instance, Plant Wise: The Newsletter of Botanical Dimensions, edited by Kathleen Harrison of Occidental, Calif., is a goldmine of stories and facts about medicinal plants. Botanical Dimensions focuses on collecting and propagating endangered plants from the tropics, particularly the Amazon basin, and on preserving the folk knowledge disappearing with the rain forest. (If you want the "occasional newsletter," as the subscription notice reads, for a year, send $20 to Botanical Dimensions, P.O. Box 807, Occidental, Calif. 95465.) In the jungle, healing is not just a matter of ingesting the right compounds in certain plants. It also has to do with honoring the gods and goddesses who offer them -- and you never know when you may meet one. For example, Francisco Montes, an ethnobotanist from Peru, tells how his grandmother Trinidad Vilchez Pezo, who died at 108, was collecting plants in the jungle one day when she sat down on an enormous fallen tree. There, right on the log, was el puma sanango, a plant said to be good for curing illnesses caused by witchcraft. But when Trinidad tried to dig the plant's root out of the trunk, black blood flowed from the old tree. The forest began to tremble. Trinidad was sitting on Sachamama, the giant boa goddess, who is more than 120 feet long and 6 feet in diameter and lives in the forest covered with trees, herbs, bushes and vines. Only by smoking a pipe and | Sources of Amazement About Gourds and More |
815025_0 | THIS WEEK | Incendiary Doings |
814782_2 | York and New Jersey. At the national level, two Democratic legislators, Senator Harry Reid of Nevada and Ms. Schroeder, have proposed laws similiar to ones in Britain and France making genital mutilation a crime. The Senate version was incorporated into a foreign operations bill in September; the House version is tied up in committees. Female genital mutilation has become an issue in political asylum cases here. A Nigerian woman in Oregon was allowed to remain in the United States last year to protect her two daughters from forced operations in Nigeria. A woman from Sierra Leone was given asylum in Virginia this year while another was turned down in Maryland, although both said they would face persecution in Sierra Leone because of their opposition to the practice. Fauziya Kasinga, 18, who fled last year from an impending operation in Togo, is now in prison in Pennsylvania, appealing a deportation order after a judge ruled that her asylum request was not credible. Surita Sandosham, executive director of Equality Now, a New York-based international women's rights group that leads the campaign for action on the issue in the United States, said that even with immigration guidelines, judges did not seem ready to accept fears of mutilation as a reason for asylum. She said they had ruled that women were not forced to undergo the procedure by governments and so it was not a political matter, or that women had the power to reject such customs. "Is this the message that the United States wants to send women fleeing female genital mutilation at great risk to their own lives?" Ms. Sundosham asked. "It is not in keeping with the letter and spirit of refugee law." Unicef, the United Nations Children's Fund, says that most victims of mutilation are girls between the ages of 4 and 10. The operation -- performed by a midwife, a member of the family, a tribal practitioner or even a doctor -- can take a number of forms, but two are most common. In a clitoridectomy, only the clitoris and perhaps part of the vaginal lips are excised. In infibulation, performed in an estimated 15 to 20 percent of cases, the whole outer genital area may be cut off and the surfaces stitched together, leaving a small hole for urination, until marriage, when a husband can reopen the wound. Infibulation can lead to severe internal infections. African and Asian | Female Genital Mutilation by Immigrants Is Becoming Cause for Concern in the U.S. |
815893_0 | France today sharply criticized its European Union partners who voted for a United Nations resolution urging an immediate end to nuclear tests and said it had no legal impact. "We have observed -- and it is not surprising -- that there has been an insufficient show of unity in the E.U. on a subject concerning the security and defense of everyone," Foreign Minister Herve de Charette told the National Assembly. The United Nations General Assembly voted 85-18 on Tuesday to approve a resolution that "strongly deplores" nuclear testing and "strongly urges" an end to all tests. It did not name any countries, but France and China are the only two still testing. A Foreign Ministry spokesman said the resolution had no legal effect on the underground explosions in French Polynesia in the South Pacific. "Its content is questionable and its impact is weak," said the spokesman, Yves Doutriaux, emphasizing that fewer than half of the 177 United Nations member countries voted for the resolution. Britain, a fellow nuclear power, joined France in voting against the resolution, while Germany, Greece and Spain abstained. But the 10 other European Union countries, unmoved by French diplomatic retaliation after a similar vote in a United Nations committee last month, backed the resolution exactly as they did the previous vote. After the first vote, President Jacques Chirac canceled a summit meeting with Italy and postponed a visit by the Belgian Prime Minister, Jean-Luc Dehaene, in a fit of anger over their backing the motion. Prime Minister Alain Juppe put off a meeting with Finland's Prime Minister, Paavo Lipponen. Despite the new criticisms, Mr. de Charette said he would push ahead with proposals to widen France's nuclear umbrella and told parliament he hoped for "true dialogue" with Germany on the issue in 1996. But he added there was "no question of handing the keys of our nuclear strike force to anyone, not even our best allies." | France Attacks European Allies Over Nuclear Vote in the U.N. |
815865_2 | a three-year-old agreement with Federal and state health and environmental officials, the city had promised to build the plant by June of 2000 -- a date already pushed back from earlier deadlines. But with the location and design thrown into question once again, the plant is unlikely to be operating any time near that date, water officials said. Marilyn Gelber, the city's Environmental Protection Commissioner, said that it also made sense to re-examine the filtration plan now that the city had reached an agreement with watershed communities that may result in cutting the flow of waste water and other pollutants into the reservoirs. "Instead of keeping a narrow focus on filtration, we'll be able to take a much more comprehensive approach to preventing pollution in the Croton system," she said. Although the delay poses no health threat, the lack of filtration could force the city to shut off the Croton supply more and more frequently, said Ronald Tramontano, director of the Division of Environmental Protection of the New York State Health Department. In the summer and early fall, bacteria tend to flourish in the reservoirs, which become overloaded with unwanted nutrients from the watershed's 67 sewage plants. The most serious consequence of delaying the plant, he said, would occur if the city experienced a prolonged drought. During dry spells, the Croton system, which normally supplies only 10 percent of the city's water, is sometimes relied on for as much as 25 percent. If Croton had to be closed, the city would be forced to impose severe water-conservation measures. Officials at the Federal Environmental Protection Agency said any further postponement would be unacceptable. "The bottom line is that water from the Croton system needs to be filtered," said Mary Mears, a spokeswoman for the E.P.A. In 1989, city engineers built an $8 million pilot plant to test a proposed three-stage filtration process. Two of the stages are increasingly popular, bubbling ozone gas through the water to kill microbes and break apart large organic molecules, then passing the water through beds of carbon, which absorb contaminants. But the plant also would pass water through chambers full of steel screens coated with a fine layer of pollution-absorbing material called diatomaceous earth. It is that step that water experts have questioned. A panel of engineers convened by the city's Office of Management and Budget has prepared a report that, according to an engineer on | Mayor Delays Decision On Water Filtration Plant |
818405_0 | When the commander of United States forces in Bosnia, Gen. William L. Nash, visited the muddy river site here today where the Americans are to build the pontoon bridge that will carry American troops into Bosnia, it was, he said, "just to make sure we're reading from the same sheet of music." It is not at all clear that they are, and even more uncertain is when the American troops will begin crossing the Sava River, which marks the border between Croatia and Bosnia. Without a bridge, only 6 percent of the American soldiers who are supposed to be here as part of the NATO-led peace-enforcement mission have made it to Bosnia, mostly by air. And they have been busy securing the American sector's headquarters in Tuzla -- for the troops who have not arrived. This was to be the transit point for most of the American forces headed for Bosnia, and Army officials had said previously that the bridge would be in place by Christmas. The bridge will be built "whenever General Nash says go," Lieut. Col. Brymvar Nymo of Norway, a spokesman for the American-commanded forces in northeastern Bosnia, said today. He added that the General "has not revealed" when that will be. "There is no actual delay," Colonel Nymo said. "There is a deliberate command policy that we go safe." Delay or not, the bridge-building operation is facing another obstacle to completion of the project -- floods. The Sava River has risen more than five feet in the last 24 hours. The miserably cold weather of last week has given way to balmy temperatures, which have melted the snow, causing rivers to swell. "In two or three days, all of this will be filled with water," said Zdenko Simic, as he looked out to the flood plain between his house and the river, which is now filled with American green -- tents, tanks, parts for the bridge, boats. His family has lived by the river for 13 years, and their house is behind an earthen dike where a measuring stick shows just how high the river can flood. "It's going to be a mess," one Army sergeant said. It was only a few days ago that the Army established a base here for the Army engineers who will build the bridge and the Navy Seals who were today plying the polluted waters in rubber boats. If the | G.I. Bridge to Bosnia Is Unbuilt And the Muddy River Is Rising |
818432_2 | zookeeper. Given only a 50-50 chance of survival, the tiny cubs were kept alive in incubators and fed with eyedroppers. With the city hanging on every setback, Klondike's belly swelled up like a balloon because he could not digest the man-made milk formula. That drama was barely surpassed when Snow developed rickets, dragging a bowed leg behind her. Would Snow ever walk? An estimated 300 television stations featured the bears' fight for survival in February. To handle a flood of calls, information about the bears was updated daily on the zoo's answering machine. An airline painted the cubs on the tail of one of its jets. Denver residents booked tours of Canada's polar bear country. Black market imitation polar bears, the "Tundra Twins," popped up in stores. A billboard company turned down as tasteless a proposed advertisement for a talk radio show. Showing Klondike and Snow strapped to electric chairs, the slogan commanded, "Listen, or the bears get it." Psychologists speculated about whether Denver's largely white zoo audience had a fixation on white animals. In 1982, a white tiger, Ramar, helped increase zoo attendance. Next year, the zoo is to receive a rare white alligator. In late summer, after plucking the city's heartstrings for six months, zoo officials announced that the twins would be moved by November, before they reached adolescence. The bears would be shipped to Sea World in Florida because the Northern Shores exhibit at the Denver Zoo was too small for its growing bear population. But then zoo officials discovered that bear mania had run amok. Mayor Wellington Webb urged the zoo to reconsider. A citizen's movement, Save our Bears, collected 15,000 signatures on a petition that demanded that the city build a permanent home for the bears on the grounds of old Stapleton Airport. Tearful children, led by adults in polar bear costumes, demonstrated for the Mayor, and then the City Council. Ms. Baier, who earlier received marriage proposals from anonymous admirers, started receiving death threats. Privately, some zoo officials started to refer to Save Our Bears as the S.O.B.'s. With polls running heavily against transferring the bears, newspaper columns heated up. One man sourly referred to Florida as "well known as a paradise for polar bears." In a rare voice for moving the cubs, one couple wrote The Rocky Mountain News: "We can't listen to the bleeding hearts. They will have us spend millions for | A Rocky Mountain High: Twin Polar Bears |
814067_0 | France will conduct its last nuclear test in February, months earlier than planned, Defense Minister Charles Millon said today. France has conducted four tests at a remote South Pacific atoll since September, when it broke a three-year moratorium. It has pledged to sign a nuclear test ban treaty as soon as six to eight tests are completed. The last French nuclear test should be before the end of February 1996, well before the date initially announced, May 31, 1996," Mr. Millon said. France insists the tests are necessary to develop computer simulation technology to make further tests unnecessary. | World News Briefs;French Set Last A-Test For February, Not May |
814096_0 | THIS WEEK | Incendiary Doings |
817426_0 | Thousands of travelers hoping to spend the holidays in the tropics or amid the warmth of home and family were thwarted yesterday as snow and wind lashed the New York area again and an accident involving a 747 jetliner shut down Kennedy International Airport for several hours. The mishap, which injured several dozen passengers, added to an already deteriorating air-traffic situation. Airlines at La Guardia and Newark International Airports had already had serious delays when the accident at Kennedy closed that airport for more than four hours. By late yesterday afternoon, after hordes of would-be passengers had milled forlornly in the terminals at the three airports, Kennedy had reopened and operations at all three airports were picking up speed. But airline officials stopped short of predicting that all would go well today and tomorrow, or that all travelers (not to mention the luggage and gifts they were carrying) would get to their destinations before Christmas. "Folks are going to need to be patient," said Richard Weintraub, a spokesman for USAir. "The reservations systems are doing the best they can." The National Weather Service said that if the forecast for today held up, there should be no further weather delays. The forecast calls for better conditions, with highs in the 30's and a chance of flurries, on top of the largest December storm since 1960 earlier in the week. [Article, page B12.] But the airlines still faced the problems of matching passengers with seats and, just as daunting, of matching airplanes with pilots and crews. There are industrywide safety rules that regulate the number of hours a crew can spend in the air and on the ground waiting ("Would you want a tired crew flying your plane?" Mr. Weintraub asked rhetorically), so it is not uncommon for an aircraft to be available without a fresh crew, or without a pilot certified for that type of craft. The extent of the delays was illustrated by what happened to Continental Airlines, the major carrier at Newark. The airline canceled 85 to 95 of its 200 Newark flights yesterday, according to an airline spokeswoman, Beth Ballew, and that was a day after it had to scrub 250 flights in the Northeast and mid-Atlantic regions because of weather. Ms. Ballew said about half of the line's 17 flights out of La Guardia were canceled yesterday. The accident that closed Kennedy involved Tower Air's Flight 41 | Jetliner Mishap And Snow Foil Holiday Travel |
817456_0 | In a settlement that could affect Federal support of public radio and television stations nationwide, the United States Commerce Department said yesterday that it would not deny a grant to Fordham University's radio station because it broadcasts Mass for an hour each week. The university station, WFUV-FM, which broadcasts public radio programs from Fordham's campus in the Bronx, had been turned down in 1994 for $262,858 from the National Telecommunications and Information Agency, a division of the Commerce Department. The school, which was founded by the Jesuits, the Roman Catholic religious order that still plays a major role in its administration, sought the grant to help pay for a new radio tower. In rejecting the 1994 application, Federal officials cited a long-held policy of denying support to any broadcaster airing sectarian religious programming. The university sued in Federal District Court in Washington. "The decision to deny Fordham funds, based on one hour out of 168 hours of programming, was a grotesque exaggeration" of the constitutional separation of church and state, the Rev. Joseph A. O'Hare, president of the university, said. Although the Federal court ruled last year in favor of the Commerce Department's decision, yesterday's settlement came as Fordham's lawyers prepared an appeal. "This policy change will give grant applicants greater flexibility," said Larry Irving, the administrator of the National Telecommunications and Information Agency, which distributes $50 million a year in government grants for programming. The agency said grants now would not be denied if they "result in some attenuated or incidental benefit to sectarian interests." But it still will deny grants to to stations where religious broadcasting is "the essential thrust of the grant's purpose." Mr. Irving said he would not speculate on whether any stations receiving Commerce Department money would introduce limited religious programming. The settlement is the latest development in Fordham's troubled efforts to build a new 480-foot radio tower. The tower, across the street from the New York Botanical Garden, is only half built, and the Federal grant will be used to pay for about one-third of the cost of the tower, budgeted at $1.1 million. The Botanical Garden, which said the tower would overshadow its grounds, successfully halted construction in 1994. After 18 months of negotiations, Fordham now intends to move the tower 25 feet. But that plan, which has not satisfied Botanical Garden officials, awaits approval by the Federal Communications Commission, which is reviewing | In U.S. Policy Change, Fordham Radio Station to Get Grant |
815604_0 | Hundreds of thousands of French demonstrators filled the streets of cities around the country today, while union leaders, sensing that they have caught the wind of revolt, hardened their demands. The demonstrators demanded not only a total abandonment of Prime Minister Alain Juppe's comprehensive welfare reform plan but also his resignation, a day after he backed down on several aspects of the austerity plan. Far from appeasing the inflamed sentiments and frayed nerves of nearly three weeks of hardship and confrontation, it appeared that Mr. Juppe's proffered concessions had little impact. The strike, now in its 19th day of paralyzing road, rail and air traffic, only broadened further. Nearly 41 percent of unionized teachers in France joined the effort, even after their leaders recommended that they go back to work, and in many cities parents were being turned away as they brought their children to the school gates. Sanitation workers in several cities joined the strike as well. As a result, mountains of garbage piled up in Bordeaux and Toulouse. The railway union, which led the movement, said it was extending its strike by at least 24 hours. "The balance of power is on my side and on the side of all unions, so it is going to continue," declared Marc Blondel, the leader of the Workers Union, one of the largest movements leading the strike. He wore a red scarf, as did thousands of his supporters, as at least 150,000 people began their march in the capital. They marched everywhere in France today, gathering in the streets by mid-morning, braving the cold. Marseilles, the old Mediterranean port, saw its largest demonstration since the 1968 student worker upheaval that brought down the Government of President Charles de Gaulle, with more than 100,000 strikers demanding the cancellation of the Government's program and many shouting in the streets "Juppe, you're sunk," "Juppe, resign," or "Juppe, make the bosses pay." They were 50,000 in Bordeaux, marching past the office of the mayor, who is Mr. Juppe; 80,000 in Toulouse; 20,000 each in Le Mans, Nantes and Rennes; 25,000 in Le Havre; 11,000 in Dijon; 16,000 in Caen; 15,000 in Avignon, Perpignan, Nice and Saint-Nazaire; 35,000 in Rouen in Normandy, carrying an effigy of the Prime Minister branded "Super J." Organizers said the numbers of those marching were much higher than the police estimates. Altogether, the unions said they had 1.7 million people on | STRIKES IN FRANCE SURGE AS DEMANDS BY UNIONS STIFFEN |
815609_0 | International A3-16 FRENCH STRIKERS TOUGHEN STANCE Hundreds of thousands of demonstrators filled the streets of French cities as strike leaders, appearing to sense they had gained the upper hand, hardened their demands. A1 RUSSIAN COMMUNIST IN SPOTLIGHT As Russia's parliamentary elections near, increasing scrutiny has highlighted contradictions in the platform of the Communist leader, Gennadi A. Zyuganov. A1 CHANGING TONES IN JAPAN Tokyo Journal: Many Japanese women, trained traditionally to speak in artificially high, girlish tones, are lowering their voices in a sign of their changing status. A1 JUBILATION ON THE WEST BANK Tens of thousands of people rejoiced in Nablus in the largest outpouring since Israel began withdrawing its troops from West Bank cities and villages last month. A3 CONGRESS FOCUSES ON CHINA TRIAL The imminent trial of China's leading political dissident has attracted the concern of Congress, creating a new foreign policy problem for the Clinton Administration. A4 National A18-21, B10-15 FLAG AMENDMENT DEFEATED At the end of a six-year battle balancing patriotism against free speech, the Senate rejected a proposed constitutional amendment to outlaw desecrating the flag. A1 ARMY INVESTIGATING ITS RANKS With white soldiers' being charged in the slayings of two blacks that looked to be racially motivated, the Army has ordered an investigation of extremism in its ranks. A1 DEAL ON TV BLOCKING DEVICE House and Senate conferees agreed to require television manufacturers to include a computer chip that would allow parents to block out violent programming in all new television sets. A1 MEDICARE AUDIT BRINGS RETURN After an audit found that Medicare bills had been filed for services that were never provided, the University of Pennsylvania's health system has said that it would pay the Government $30 million to settle its claims. A18 SEASON OF QUESTIONS AND REGRETS Friends of Sam Walker, a house painter from Missouri City, Tex., persuaded him that a gun would protect his family and home. Today, his daughter is dead after he mistakenly shot her during what he thought was a break-in. A18 AGENCY BLOCKS A BRIDGE A bridge that was planned to link an island south of Myrtle Beach, S.C., with the mainland and open the way to development has been blocked by a state agency. A18 Education B16 How bad are American schools? Scholars renew a fractious debate Metro Digest B3 PLAN FOR STERLING FOREST A proposal to enable the Federal Government to help New York and | NEWS SUMMARY |
815719_2 | all the new drugs put on the market in the United States, Germany, Britain and Japan from 1990 through 1994. The four countries account for more than 60 percent of the drugs sold in the world, and each has a somewhat different drug-approval system. During the five-year period studied, there were 214 drugs that came on the world market. The F.D.A. report made two-way comparisons between the United States and each of the other three countries. Each comparison shows that the United States is consistently first to approve more of the drugs that have eventually become mutually available, according to the report. For example, of the 58 drugs approved in both the United States and Britain, 30 were approved first in the United States. Of the 44 drugs approved in both the United States and Germany, 31 were approved in the United States first. Of the 14 drugs approved both in the United States and Japan, 10 were first approved in this country. After comparing speed to market, the report went on to consider whether any important drugs had made it to the market in other countries but not to the market in the United States. The report divided drugs into priority drugs and standard drugs. The priority drugs were defined as providing at least a modest advance over existing therapy or as offering treatment for conditions that had no alternative treatment. Of 29 drugs approved in the Britain but not in the United States, the report said none appeared to be of major public health interest. In Germany, 34 drugs were approved that did not receive approval in the United States. Only one of them was found to be a priority drug, an anti-pertussis vaccine. The manufacturer has never applied for approval in this country, the report said. The study said that comparing the Japanese market with that in the United States was more complicated. It said that the two countries had very few of the new drugs in common. There are many priority drugs on the market in the United States that have not yet been approved in the other countries, the report said. This includes 9 for Britain, 16 for Germany and 33 for Japan. The report concluded that by any objective standard, the United States was a leader, both in the quality and the timeliness of its reviews, especially for therapeutic measures that represent real advances. | U.S. Agency Denies A Drug Approval Gap |
817035_0 | A local politician who had openly criticized military police and local landowners for an attack that killed at least 11 rural homesteaders and wounded hundreds more in August was shot dead on his doorstep Saturday night. Manoel Ribeiro, a councilman from the left-wing Worker's Party and a mayoral candidate in the city of Corumbiara, had told friends he feared somebody might try to kill him for his insistence on justice after the attack. His wife, who is three months' pregnant, said three men fired at her husband at close range. It was an execution," said Jose Francisco Candido of the Brazilian Bar Association's committee on human rights. The killing has drawn the spotlight back to a massacre that, for all the revulsion and shock it caused in this country, has not led to any trials. Though President Fernando Henrique Cardoso has decried the brutality, and dispatched federal police to Rondonia state to investigate the killings, prosecution is strictly a state matter under Brazilian laws. Within the state, only the police themselves are authorized to investigate the military police. "It's an incestuous kind of judicial body that does a terrible job of prosecuting crimes against civilians," said James Cavallaro. He directs the Brazil unit of Human Rights Watch/ Americas, which joined a petition to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights to investigate. Medical and autopsy reports at the time showed that some of the rural workers had been executed, by shots fired in the back and at close range. Mr. Cavallaro said that of 1,681 killings of rural workers and land reform activists between 1964 to 1992, only 26 had led to trialsand only 15 ended with convictions. "Impunity is the rule from which conviction is the exception," Mr. Cavallaro said. | Critic of Attack on Homesteaders By Brazil Police Is Gunned Down |
817120_7 | Wild-2 comet and bring them back in a capsule. In a few weeks, Mr. Goldin, the NASA administrator, is expected to announce an ambitious plan for using ground-based telescopes and a network of small spacecraft to search for Earth-like planets around other stars. The final phase of the program, sometime early in the next century, would be to place a large system of infrared detectors in deep space to search for the spectral signature of water, ozone and other signs of possible life on planets of stars within about 50 light-years from Earth. Another approach to the future is being studied at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory under what is called the New Millennium Program. Led by E. Kane Casani, one of the laboratory's most experienced managers, planners are identifying the likely science missions of the next century and determining the new technologies that would be required for their achievement at reasonable costs. Industry, university as well as Government scientists are involved in the work. The next step, Mr. Casani said, would be to design small spacecraft to test these technologies for propulsion, lightweight structures, microminiaturized controls and greater automation. The flights would have some scientific objectives, but their success would be judged by how well the mission proved out the new technologies. A relatively modest $50 million a year is being spent on the program. The first New Millennium flight, planned for 1998, would involve a 220-pound spacecraft with a miniaturized antenna, advanced solar-power arrays and highly automated controls. It would also be the first spacecraft to rely on solar electric propulsion for its main source of thrust, instead of conventional solid or liquid propellants. With electric propulsion, a spacecraft can get continuous thrust, rather than coasting, and this should reduce the time of flight to a target from, say nine years down to three. "The idea has been around for decades, but NASA science mission managers have never felt that the technology was mature enough to be used for the first time on their mission," Mr. Casani said. "New Millennium will take on this challenge and bring full-scale solar electric propulsion out of the lab and into space once and for all." But will the New Millennium Program sell in Washington? At the question, Mr. Casani spread his arms out, palms up, as if to say, "You tell me." "We are making a big step by doing something fundamentally | NASA Plans New Series of Cheaper Spacecraft |
819074_0 | The shareholders of Debica S.A., a tire maker based in Poland, have approved a plan for the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company to acquire a majority stake in Debica. The plan calls for Goodyear to buy 3.7 million shares, for $60 million, in addition to the stake that Goodyear bought from the Polish treasury earlier this month for $55 million. Goodyear, which is based in Akron, Ohio, will hold 50.7 percent of Debica when the deal is completed. The money is to go toward modernization, expansion and introduction of Goodyear technology to make radial truck tires. Debica is expected to have $200 million in sales this year. COMPANY NEWS | MAJORITY STAKE IN POLISH TIRE MAKER TO BE ACQUIRED |
818892_3 | viewed on a personal computer. In many of the groups hundreds of computer users post comments of a sexual nature. Of the more than 200 groups that Compuserve has banned, most are identified by the prefix "alt.sex" and range from the broadly commercial -- alt.sex.erotica.marketplace -- to the specific, like alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.fetish.feet. A number of the discussion groups are devoted to pedophilia or bestiality. The list of sites was presented late last week by prosecutors in Munich to Felix Somm, manager of Compuserve's German operations. While German authorities contend that the list violates the country's pornography and child-protection laws, critics of Compuserve's action -- some of whom posted complaints at the Usenet group alt.online-service.compuserve -- noted that some of the banned Usenet areas include discussion groups devoted to topics like homosexuality that were not necessarily pornographic or a threat to children. Ms. Dyson, of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said that while many members of Congress might support placing restrictions on sexually oriented Internet material, Germany's new efforts at censorship raised thornier free-speech issues. "The American Government has to understand that while they may only want to outlaw indecency, the Germans could outlaw English on the Internet," she said. A spokeswoman at the German Embassy in Washington said that the embassy had telephoned the German Government in Bonn for more information on the situation but did not yet have a response. Whether it will be possible to impose a ban on any kind of on-line information is a question that has been hotly debated in the computer industry. While Compuserve has removed the specified Usenet groups from its own service offerings, it is still possible for a German personal computer user to use the Compuserve software to connect to the Internet's vast World Wide Web and read and view the sexually explicit material at thousands of other computer sites around the globe. The World Wide Web, a newer and much more diverse multimedia technology than Usenet, is designed to make it easy to hop from computer site to computer site on the Internet with a click of a mouse. Rather than try to impose global bans, many American computer executives say that the best solution to the problem of pornography on the Internet is to employ special filtering software that systematically maps out specific addresses that contain certain kinds of content. The software, which is being developed by companies like Surfwatch Inc. | On-Line Service Blocks Access To Topics Called Pornographic |
818969_0 | With chances improving for completion of a nuclear test-ban treaty next year, France and China have arrogantly defied world public opinion and conducted more nuclear tests to get in under the wire. Now comes word that India, which conducted its one and only nuclear test in 1974, is considering some testing of its own. Even worse, India now suggests it may not sign the test-ban treaty, despite longstanding support for such an agreement. These moves can only raise tensions in South Asia, damage the cause of nuclear nonproliferation and undercut the goals India says it espouses. Earlier this month Tim Weiner of The Times reported that American intelligence experts suspected that India was preparing for a nuclear test. They based their view on a surge of activity at the Pokaran test site in the Rajasthan desert, picked up by spy satellites. India denied that it had any such intention. The Government of Prime Minister Narasimha Rao has been weakened by a series of electoral defeats, and the main Hindu nationalist opposition party is enthusiastically pro-nuclear. A recent poll by India Today, a respected news magazine, showed that 62 percent of the public would approve a nuclear explosion. India should resist these domestic pressures. Testing, among other things, would hurt India's standing in other developing nations that oppose testing by any country. India values the support of many of these counties in its feud with Pakistan. India has long opposed signing the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, which limits the spread of nuclear weapons and bomb technology, on the ground that it discriminates against countries that do not have nuclear arsenals. Its arguments were at least made more credible by its expressed willingness to sign a comprehensive test-ban treaty that applied to all nations equally. Now India is suggesting that it will not even sign such a treaty unless all the existing nuclear powers agree to a timetable for disarmament. Such a demand is understandable but unrealistic, and it should not be used as a loophole for getting out of signing a treaty that it has advocated since 1954. Tensions in South Asia have been aggravated by the willingness of both India and Pakistan to stockpile nuclear materials and develop missiles capable of delivering nuclear warheads. A nuclear test by India will only escalate the nuclear competition and could spill over into the ferocious territorial dispute over Kashmir that has been at the | India's Nuclear Temptation |
819083_2 | strong, since the predominantly Protestant police force, the Royal Ulster Constabulary, usually avoids these neighborhoods. Between Sept. 1, 1994, when the I.R.A. cease-fire began, and Dec. 20 of this year, the police recorded 167 punishment beatings by the I.R.A. In the same period there were 92 punishment beatings by Protestant gunmen in the loyalist paramilitaries, who did not declare a cease-fire of their own until October 1995. Despite the resurgence of violence, most politicians -- other than Protestant unionists, who favor continued ties to Britain -- are reluctant to condemn the killings as a breach of the cease-fire. At a time when hopes for some sort of settlement to the 25 years of sectarian strife are still high among both Catholics and Protestants, no one wants to responsible for dashing them. Joe Hendron, a member of the British Parliament from the Social Democratic Labor Party, a moderate Catholic party, said the evidence was "overwhelming" that "the I.R.A. was directly responsible" for the recent killings "or else arranged for some other republican paramilitary group to carry out the shootings." However, he then added, "I do not see this as being directly related to the cease-fire." Like him, many in authority accept the definition of the cease-fire as "a cessation of military activity" and so tend to regard the punishment actions as deplorable but not something to derail the peace effort. Nonetheless, the surge in violence is unsettling to many. "In everyone's mind is the thought: could this be the start of a gradual unraveling?" said one commentator who follows the I.R.A. closely. "Four killings in four weeks -- we're getting to the stage where we have funerals on the TV screen again." Sinn Fein and its president, Gerry Adams, who represent the political wing of the I.R.A., have not condemned the killings. On Wednesday Sinn Fein said Britain must ease its insistence that the I.R.A. begin to disarm before the organization can be allowed to join in all-party peace talks. Otherwise, it said, renewed conflict was inevitable. A commission headed by a former United States Senator, George J. Mitchell of Maine, is collecting information and suggestions to try to come up with a way around the impasse over the disarmament issue. Correction: January 8, 1996, Monday An article on Dec. 29 about Northern Ireland misstated when the Protestant paramilitaries there declared a cease-fire. It was in October 1994, not October 1995. | 4th Slaying In 4 Weeks In Ulster |
815313_0 | The leader of the largest Protestant political party in Northern Ireland said today that the peace effort in the British province had been set back by the Irish Republican Army statement that it would not cooperate with a new panel on disarming paramilitary groups in the North. On Saturday, the overwhelmingly Roman Catholic I.R.A. said it would not cooperate with the International Body on Decommissioning, which is headed by George J. Mitchell, the former Democratic Senator from Maine. The panel held its first organizational meeting on Saturday in New York. Next weekend, it will take testimony from political groups, government officials and private individuals in Dublin and Belfast. David Trimble, whose Ulster Unionist Party vehemently opposes the I.R.A.'s ultimate goal of a united Ireland free of British control, said on Irish national radio today that the I.R.A. statement probably meant that full-fledged negotiations including Sinn Fein, the I.R.A.'s political wing, would be pushed back beyond the target date of Feb. 15 set by the Irish and British Governments. "It looks as though we're a long way away from negotiating," Mr. Trimble said, "because it looks as though they're not prepared to cooperate fully with George Mitchell and the commission." The panel was set up by the Irish and British Governments to deal with the I.R.A.'s arsenal, estimated at 100 tons of weapons including explosives. The British Government insists that Sinn Fein not be admitted to negotiations until the I.R.A. has begun to disarm. Sinn Fein and the I.R.A. hold that this is an unacceptable precondition to talks. The Mitchell panel is to discuss the issue with all concerned parties, including Sinn Fein, and try to work out a compromise that would pave the way for full-fledged talks in late February. The other members of the panel are a former Prime Minister of Finland, Harry Holkeri, and the chief of staff of the Canadian armed forces, Gen. John de Chastelain. A poll published today in The Sunday Tribune of Dublin found that most of those surveyed in the Irish Republic think the I.R.A. should disarm, at least in part, before being admitted to full-fledged negotiations. Only 18 percent said the outlawed organization should be allowed to keep its arsenal intact. | Protestant Calls I.R.A. Stand a Setback for Peace |
819086_3 | investors claiming more than $700 million in losses. In the same month the Episcopal Church accused its former treasurer of embezzling $2.2 million. Last month the United Methodist Church accused a former comptroller of its General Board of Global Ministries with embezzling $400,000. Both cases, which made the lists, are still in the hands of the legal authorities. Efforts at racial reconciliation were on lists of The Christian Century, Christianity Today and the newswriters. Last June the Southern Baptist Convention -- founded in 1845 in response to attacks on slaveholding -- officially apologized to African-Americans for condoning racism until the civil rights era. The Catholic editors listed "Race in America," a broad topic that could have embraced the Million Man March and the reverberations of the O. J. Simpson trial as well. Disputes over religious freedom and church-state relations are perennials among top religion stories again made the lists. In June the Supreme Court ruled 5 to 4 that the University of Virginia violated the First Amendment by barring a student magazine from receiving student activity fees because it published religious material. In August the Clinton White House produced detailed guidelines about what religious activities are permitted by law in public schools. Neither development satisfied the sponsors who late in the year introduced rival Constitutional amendments intended to allow religious expression in schools and other programs receiving Government money. The status of women was a topic on several lists. The Catholic editors ranked the United Nations Fourth World Conference of Women at Beijing, where church bodies played major roles, story No. 7. The Christian Century made it No. 9 and he religion newswriters, No. 16. The Catholic editors ranked "Women and Church" second, just after the Pope's United States visit. Each list was distinctive in how it singled out certain individuals. Only the Catholic editors, for instance, mentioned Joseph Cardinal Bernardin of Chicago among its "newsmakers." Only the evangelical Christianity Today mentioned the popular Christian singer Sandi Patti and her confession of marital infidelity -- among its top 10 stories, no less. Only the religion newswriters mentioned Norma McCorvey, whose demand for an abortion led to the Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade decision but who was baptized last August by a leader of the anti-abortion movement Operation Rescue. And only Rabbi Rudin mentioned Dr. Jack Kervokian and the need for the religious community to address "the troubling issues he raises." | Beliefs |
814185_0 | The French Government named a mediator today and offered discussions with labor unions representing public employees on its plans to overhaul the social security system and the railroads. But hundreds of thousands of people demonstrated in scores of cities, and the state-run rail network, as well as mass transit in Paris, remained shut down. More than a third of all French public employees were on strike today, the Government said, as the walkout widened to include grammar and high school teachers in the capital. Schools closed across the city, and about 20,000 students demonstrated in the Left Bank for more government spending on the overcrowded university system. Demonstrators burned an effigy of Prime Minister Alain Juppe in Bordeaux, where he is the Mayor, and 45,000 people demonstrated there against the Government's austerity plans. At least 50,000 people demonstrated in Marseilles, according to the police there, and 30,000 in Grenoble. There were scattered incidents of violence in Paris and in Nantes. The three biggest labor union federations called for a walkout by bank workers on Dec. 15. But the strike movement, now about to enter its third week, has not spread broadly to the private sector, even though public opinion polls show that many people sympathize with the strikers rather than with the Government. A new survey by the Ipsos institute for France 2 television said that 53 percent of the respondents thought Mr. Juppe was wrong not to withdraw his austerity measures. Until Wednesday night, the unions were demanding that he do so before they would negotiate with him. But there were signs today that they might be willing to talk if Mr. Juppe shows the flexibility he promised in a televised speech Tuesday night. The mediator appointed today by Mr. Juppe is Jean Matteoli, an economist, who is to meet with railroad union representatives on the Government's proposal to reorganize the 20,275-mile state rail network over the next five years. The unions closed the system in protest against plans to consider abandoning 3,750 miles of underused rural branch lines and change pension rules that allow some railroad workers to retire at the age of 50. | Strikes Spread Across France With Protests |
814391_0 | The French Government named a mediator today and offered discussions with labor unions representing public employees on its plans to overhaul the social security system and the railroads. But hundreds of thousands of people demonstrated in scores of cities, and the state-run rail network, as well as mass transit in Paris, remained shut down. More than a third of all French public employees were on strike today, the Government said, as the walkout widened to include grammar and high school teachers in the capital. Schools closed across the city, and about 20,000 students demonstrated in the Left Bank for more government spending on the overcrowded university system. Demonstrators burned an effigy of Prime Minister Alain Juppe in Bordeaux, where he is the Mayor, and 45,000 people demonstrated there against the Government's austerity plans. At least 50,000 people demonstrated in Marseilles, according to the police there, and 30,000 in Grenoble. There were scattered incidents of violence in Paris and in Nantes. The three biggest labor union federations called for a walkout by bank workers on Dec. 15. But the strike movement, now about to enter its third week, has not spread broadly to the private sector, even though public opinion polls show that many people sympathize with the strikers rather than with the Government. A new survey by the Ipsos institute for France 2 television said that 53 percent of the respondents thought Mr. Juppe was wrong not to withdraw his austerity measures. Until Wednesday night, the unions were demanding that he do so before they would negotiate with him. But there were signs today that they might be willing to talk if Mr. Juppe shows the flexibility he promised in a televised speech Tuesday night. The mediator appointed today by Mr. Juppe is Jean Matteoli, an economist, who is to meet with railroad union representatives on the Government's proposal to reorganize the 20,275-mile state rail network over the next five years. The unions closed the system in protest against plans to consider abandoning 3,750 miles of underused rural branch lines and change pension rules that allow some railroad workers to retire at the age of 50. | Strikes Spread Across France With Protests |
812719_0 | France's embattled Government struggled today with a powerful challenge to its economic austerity program as postal, electric utility and airport workers joined tens of thousands of striking transport employees in protests that have immobilized much of the country. The worst labor unrest in a decade began a week ago with a walkout by train, subway and bus workers over proposed welfare cuts. The shutdown has forced millions of people to walk, bicycle, hitchhike and even roller skate to work. The crippling upheaval spread to air traffic this morning at Orly, one of two airports serving Paris, when strikers from Air France began blocking runways, forcing incoming flights to be diverted. An increasing number of flights were canceled as the day progressed. With the widening protest squeezing the economy and fraying nerves, Government ministers promised to engage trade unions in talks next week but would not retreat on proposed reforms in France's huge public sector or promise increased spending for universities, where thousands of students and teachers have joined the strike. The currency, stock and bond markets registered the impact of the crisis by posting steep losses today. The strike has also affected tourism, an important sector in a country visited by 60 million tourists a year. Museums and travel services have shut down, and small businesses dependent on tourism -- from restaurants and hotels to taxi services -- have suffered. The Christmas retail season has been seriously disrupted with shoppers unable to reach stores. Train stations are eerily empty, with lighted panels everywhere flashing: "Traffic interrupted." Taxis have done little to help stranded commuters, with many drivers unwilling to enter streets where they would be stuck for hours with the buses and private cars. Factories have been laying off workers. Today, Peugeot Citroen idled two-thirds of the 11,800 workers at its Mulhouse auto assembly plant for a day after running out of space to store finished cars that could not be loaded onto freight trains. Some industries began experiencing power shortages as electric utility workers joined the strike. Mail, including bills and payments, was piling up because of the postal strike. Newspaper deliveries have been held up in many parts of the country. The swelling number of motor vehicles in the streets of Paris has worsened air pollution and increased altercations among commuters trying to get to work. "What really annoys me is that I go home at night with | STRIKE TO PROTEST GOVERNMENT CUTS WIDENS IN FRANCE |
813483_0 | The 11-day-old strike over social service cuts that has paralyzed France's capital intensified today as air transport workers, telephone and public finance employees and truck drivers prepared to join in the protests while the Government vowed it would not retreat from its austerity plans. After an emergency meeting of the Cabinet tonight, a Government spokesman, Alain Lamassoure, told reporters the Government was ready for a discussion with the striking unions. But he reiterated the Government's determination to stand by its plans to overhaul welfare benefits for public-sector employees to bring down a $50 billion deficit in the social security system. The unions responded with calls for huge demonstrations this week, insisting they will suspend the protest only if the reforms are scrapped. With public transportation hobbled by walkouts and no resolution to the crisis in sight, the Government was trying to limit damage to businesses by seeking help from the private sector to move people around. Scores of "Bateaux Mouches," the sightseeing boats that usually carry tourists on the Seine, have been chartered to move stranded passengers up and down the river. The Transit Authority has hired about 1,500 private buses to transport suburban commuters from train stations to central parts of the city. Around the city, sidewalks and median strips are covered with cars, now that the police have suspended parking regulations to allow as many people as possible to drive their own vehicles. The Government's goal, officials said, is to create an alternative transportation system that can accommodate up to 100,000 commuters in the greater Paris area. It was clear that the effort is falling far short of what is necessary. Many people said they were walking four to five miles to their workplaces. Radio stations reported record traffic jams in and around Paris. Motorists were moving at only five to six miles per hour on main roads. "I wake up at 4 to get to work by 6:30," said Maria Inteiro, 34, a Portuguese cleaning woman who lives in the city and works mornings at a day-care center on the outskirts of Paris. Mrs. Inteiro said she had two other jobs cleaning homes but has been unable to reach them. Irene Chabbey, who begins her work at Radio France Internationale at midday, said she must walk an hour and a half from her home to the radio station because taxis are unavailable at that time. With neither | As Strike Intensifies, French Government Stands Firm |
813585_0 | Ivy Grows," which the Donna Uchizono Company presented on Saturday night at Dance Theater Workshop, was divided into two works -- "Polynesian Shorts (A Polynesian Review Revue)" and "Quietly Goes a Giant Jane" -- that were separated by a brief pause. Each piece in turn was subdivided into smaller segments. What Ms. Uchizono choreographed was, in effect, a modern-dance equivalent of an old-fashioned Broadway revue. But she lacked the savvy of those producers who knew how to arrange satirical sketches, torch songs, ballads and novelty acts so that their revues had variety and contrast. "Ivy Grows" just crept aimlessly along like a weed. It began promisingly when Jennifer Allen, Nikki Castro, Carla Rudiger, Yukiko Shinozaki and Ms. Uchino stood with their backs to the audience and let their bodily tensions suggest changing emotions. A solo for Ms. Uchizono was even better. She talked as she danced, and her amblings across the stage reflected the twists and turns of her musings about such topics as growing up as an Asian-American, visiting a psychic and learning that a friend had cancer. As she spoke, she began to swing balls attached to cords in what a program note said was an adaptation of a Maori dance. The whirlings of the balls reflected the swirl of her thoughts. Most of the other scenes looked aimless. In one, for instance, dancers in wigs adorned with dangling hair appeared to be vegetation in slow motion; in another, women in elaborate red wigs preened interminably in what may have been a parody of fashion models. "Ivy Grows" needed pruning. The production continues through Sunday. DANCE REVIEW | Preening and Whirling In an Old-Fashioned Revue |
813590_7 | Falling out or blacking out Southern United States and Caribbean Sudden collapse; eyes remain open but sightless; the victim hears but cannot move. Ghost sickness American Indian tribes Preoccupation with death and the dead, with bad dreams, fainting, appetite loss, fear, hallucinations, etc. Hwa-byung ("anger syndrome") Korea Symptoms attributed to suppression of anger, like insomnia, fatigue, panic, fear of death, depression, indigestion, anorexia, etc. *Koro Malaysia; related conditions in East Asia. Sudden intense anxiety that sexual organs will recede into body and cause death; occasional epidemics. Latah Malaysia, Indonesia, Japan, Thailand. Hypersensitivity to sudden fright, often with nonsense mimicking of others, trancelike behavior. Locura United States and Latin America Psychosis tied to inherited vulnerability and/or life difficulties; incoherence, agitation, hallucinations, possibly violence. Mal de ojo ("evil eye") Mediterranean and elsewhere Sufferers, mostly children, are believed to be under influence of "evil eye," causing fitful sleep, crying, sickness, fever. Nervios ("nerves") Latin groups in U.S. and Latin America. Vulnerability to stressful experiences, bringing symptoms like headaches and "brain aches," irritability, upset stomach, etc. Pibloktoq Arctic and subarctic Eskimo communities. Extreme excitement, physical and verbal violence for up to 30 minutes, then convulsions and short coma. *Qi-gong psychotic reaction China A short episode of mental symptoms after engaging in Chinese folk practice of qi-gong, or "exercise of vital energy." Rootwork Southern United States, Caribbean. Illnesses and anxieties, like fear of poisoning or death, ascribed those who put "roots," "spells" or "hexes" on others Shen-k'uei or shenkui Taiwan and China Marked anxiety or panic symptoms with bodily complaints attributed to life-threatening loss of semen. Sin-byung Korea Syndrome of anxiety and bodily complaints followed by dissociation and possession by ancestral spirits. Spell Southern United States A trance in which individuals communicate with deceased relatives or spirits; not perceived as a medical event. Susto ("fright" or "soul loss") Latin groups in U.S. and Caribbean Illness tied to a frightening event that makes the soul leave the body, causing unhappiness and sickness. *Taijin kyofusho Japan An intense fear that the body, its parts or functions displease, embarrass or are offensive to others. Zar North Africa and Middle East Belief in possession by a spirit, causing shouting, laughing, head banging, etc.; not considered pathological. Source: "Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders," fourth edition (American Psychological Association) *Included in an official diagnostic system. (Adapted from "Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders," Fourth Edition (American Psychological Association)) | Making Room on the Couch for Culture |
813524_0 | To the Editor: Re "A Break in the Irish Impasse" (editorial, Nov. 30): You are wrong to claim it is "Britain's unreasonable insistence" that the Irish Republican Army hand in some of its weapons that is the main impediment to progress to all-party talks. The British Government is in favor of all-party talks. But these talks will happen only if all the parties agree to attend. As things stand, they won't. Why? Because those parties that have never been associated with violence have yet to be convinced that the terrorists will not go back to bombing and murdering if they fail to get their way at the negotiating table. Without that confidence, the talks have no chance of success. We think the best way of creating that confidence is for the paramilitary organizations -- Irish Republican Army and Loyalists alike -- to begin to get rid of their weapons. But we will consider constructively and on their merits the recommendations of the international body that Senator George Mitchell has agreed to head. Sinn Fein has long argued that its electoral mandate -- 10 percent -- entitles it to participate in the democratic process on the same basis as the other political parties. That is what it is being offered under twin-track -- which President Clinton described as "a reasonable peace process." How can it be "unreasonable" to ask Sinn Fein to accept the same nonviolent standards as the other parties? PETER WESTMACOTT Counselor, British Embassy Washington, Dec. 1, 1995 | Irish Peace Talks Won't Succeed Yet |
813480_0 | In the aftermath of the near-euphoria created by President Clinton on his visit to Northern Ireland and to Dublin last week, hopes have never been higher among ordinary people and officials for lasting peace in the North since sectarian violence erupted there in 1969. There are still serious obstacles to be faced in the coming months as officials try to work in a new "twin-track" framework. It was announced by the Irish and British Prime Ministers last Tuesday in London, after intense White House pressure to do so before the President's arrival on Wednesday. But many people, north and south, are saying that the peace effort will never be the same and that Mr. Clinton has changed it in several significant ways. First, Mr. Clinton managed to refocus attention on the overall goal of peace by speaking eloquently and forcefully over the heads of the politicians and the paramilitary leaders, whose wrangling over details had slowed the peace effort to a halt in recent months. His clear, terse admonitions to Catholic and Protestant paramilitaries that people want permanent peace and will not tolerate violence were hailed by virtually all political leaders. "Your President put our politicians on this side of the water to shame," said Jim Thornton, a farmer in rural County Louth, on Ireland's border with the North. "He has the Kennedy charisma. He moved us a lot closer to peace." The comparison to Kennedy, who has been virtually canonized here, was made repeatedly here in the aftermath of the Clinton visit. He was the first American President, officials said, to address directly the overwhelmingly Catholic Irish Republican Army. "My message to he I.R.A. is that the twin-track process has provided a mechanism for all the parties, honorably, now to bring their concerns to the table and be heard," he said. "And in the end, peace means peace, and we're all going to support that." Second, and perhaps most significant, Mr. Clinton persuaded Prime Minister John Major of Britain to change London's long-held policy that the United States should have no direct role in Northern Ireland. The new "twin-track" approach created an international commission to deal with the disarmament of the Irish Republican Army, to be headed by George Mitchell, the former Senate majority leader. The disarmament issue has stalled the peace effort for months, with Britain insisting that the I.R.A. make a start on "decommissioning" its arsenal before | Clinton's Role for Northern Ireland Talks: Restoring the Focus on the Big Picture |
816274_0 | French railway workers voted today to end their three-week-old national strike, signaling an end to the country's most serious labor unrest in a decade. Still, the sour mood of widespread discontent remained. The crisis eased after the Government, which has been pressing for a broad austerity plan, made significant concessions this week, especially to the railway workers, who had played a central role in paralyzing the nation. But Prime Minister Alain Juppe held onto proposals to raise health insurance premiums and taxes to save the cradle-to-grave French health insurance system from bankruptcy and fought off union demands that he resign. Many strikers apparently felt they had made their point and began coming back to work as the holidays and school vacations approached. But even many of those who went back to work remained resentful of the way the Government sprang its plans on the public, with little discussion beforehand, a month ago. Commuter and underground transportation service resumed fitfully in Paris today, and Bernard Pons, the Minister of Transportation, said trains around the country could be running by Tuesday. Two of the biggest labor unions are still calling for mass demonstrations on Saturday against Government plans to raise taxes and to alter the social security system to reduce its $13 billion annual deficit. The Government, in its concessions, promised to avoid cutting back pension benefits for public employees and shelved a plan to trim the sprawling national rail system to stanch its $2 billion annual hemorrhage. Striking civil servants and public employees tied Paris and other cities in knots, forced people in the private sector to spend hours getting to and from work and knocked the wind out of retail trade at the height of the Christmas shopping season. The turmoil may have helped drive the French economy into recession in the fourth quarter of this year after growth of 2 percent earlier in the year, many economists said. Private sector workers did not join the strike, but by a slim majority, they thought better of the strikers than of Mr. Juppe's austerity policies, opinion polls indicated. Mr. Juppe accelerated the reform plan so that France could qualify for European monetary union by 1999 under stringent rules set by Germany. Nicole Notat, leader of the socialist French Democratic Labor Confederation, with about 650,000 members, broke with other unions on Wednesday night, urging her members to declare victory and to go | French Rail and Other Workers Ending Their 3-Week Walkout |
818222_1 | the 62-year-old Dr. Caliandro, whose Fifth Avenue church draws thousands of worshipers from all around the city. "My system can't take it." At Calvary Church in Grand Rapids, Mich., 11 performances of a special Christmas program have just drawn more than 20,000 people. "It's very exciting, but the net result is exhaustion," said the pastor, the Rev. Ed Dobson. "I don't have much spirit left." Mr. Dobson, who was an aide to the Rev. Jerry Falwell in the heyday of the Moral Majority, now describes himself as a very nonpolitical pastor of a "mainstream evangelical church" attended by about 6,000 people. Like many clerics interviewed around the country, he swings between weariness and exhilaration when he talks about Christmas. Last Sunday he missed a public-school concert where his 11-year-old daughter was performing: he had to preach at three morning services, and then was back at church for two evening Christmas events. (He managed to catch his daughter's Monday performance, however.) "The general talk among clergy is that Christmas comes but once a year and thank God for that," Mr. Dobson said. "But the truth is that while clergy complain about it they really love it, because it provides a wonderful opportunity for precisely what we've been called to do." Mr. Dobson sounded another common theme of the clergy: "It seems there are an inordinate number of tragedies around this season." His hardest Christmas as a pastor occurred when a leader of the congregation went into the hospital in December for routine treatment, was found to have cancer and died in two weeks. Mr. Dobson said he had a stack of names of all the church members who had become widows or widowers during the year. "I'm calling them all this week," he said, "because this first Christmas without their spouses is so very difficult." Tragedy and hard times are, of course, the specialty of the Salvation Army, and so is Christmas. Besides special activities like toy distribution, blanket drives, children's pageants and, in the New York area, serving 11,000 dinners to the needy on Christmas Day, this is also the organization's prime fund-raising season, with its famous red kettles and curbside music. If a Salvation Army officer -- the organization's term for its clergy -- is married, the spouse also serves as an officer. So at Christmas, said Major William H. LaMarr, general secretary for field operations in the New | For Clergy, Christmastime Means Overtime |
817367_2 | present with physical symptoms rather than psychological symptoms." To help remedy the situation, the team of seven mental health specialists devised a simple diagnostic tool called Prime-MD, for "primary care evaluation of mental disorders," to help primary care doctors detect mental disorders even when the symptoms are well hidden. The project was underwritten by an unrestricted educational grant from Pfizer Inc., a New York pharmaceutical company that produces a popular antidepressant, Zoloft. A year ago in the A.M.A. journal, the team published a study of 1,000 patients showing that Prime-MD, which mainly consists of a questionnaire that patients fill out, significantly improved the recognition of mental disorders in primary care settings. Now, in a new study, also underwritten by Pfizer and published in the A.M.A. journal, the team has reported an astonishingly high impact of mental disorders on patients' "health-related quality of life." The study showed that when both the degree of disability and the prevalence of various disorders were taken into account, mental disorders caused significantly more impairment than did common physical ailments like diabetes, arthritis, heart disease and cancer. Depression alone resulted in more days of disability -- an inability to perform one's usual duties -- than did cancer and diseases of the liver and lungs. Impairment was measured using surveys that assessed patients' physical functioning, bodily pain, role functioning (the ability to perform their usual duties like work, housework or schoolwork), general health, social functioning and mental health. As might be expected, arthritis caused more bodily pain than depression. But depression took a greater toll than arthritis on patients' physical, role and social functioning as well as on their general and mental health. And although cancer might be expected to cause more bodily pain than, say, depression or anxiety disorder, the mental disorders are far more commonly seen in primary care settings and therefore account for more bodily pain because more people are involved. The research team, headed by Dr. Robert L. Spitzer, a psychiatrist at the New York State Psychiatric Institute at Columbia University, pointed out that patients with undiagnosed (and, therefore, untreated) mental disorders now place a huge burden on the medical care system because they repeatedly seek help in primary care settings for physical symptoms that have a psychological cause. In the study, 31 primary care doctors at four sites used Prime-MD to screen 1,000 adult patients for the five mental disorders most often | Personal Health |
817227_3 | -- weaker retail and auto sales, an erratic housing market and some signs that the worldwide demand for semiconductors is winding down after a frenetic year -- it clearly does not view a recession as a real danger. Economic growth, in fact, was not even mentioned in Mr. Greenspan's statement. What gave the Fed a bit of room to operate was the low inflation rate. Curbing inflation is the Fed's chief mission, and with the Consumer Price Index rising only 2.6 percent so far this year, the rate-setting Federal Open Market Committee could initiate a modest reduction without any fear of adding any fuel to the inflationary embers. No sooner had the Fed acted today than the Secretary of the Treasury, Robert E. Rubin, declared that the economy was in fine shape. "We believe that the current expansion has considerable room to run," Mr. Rubin said in a statement that was released jointly with Joseph E. Stiglitz, the chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers. But privately, Mr. Rubin has been warning Administration officials that the markets have built into their current high levels the assumption that a balanced budget deal will be reached. And his warning was borne out on Monday, when the specter of budget impasse was enough to touch off a correction that seemed simply waiting for an excuse to set it off. The unresolved question is whether the slightly better prospect of a budget deal will be enough to sustain the rebound that began this afternoon. While the Fed's cut buoyed the market, that move is not likely to be repeated soon. As one White House aide put it late today: "Next week Alan Greenspan isn't going to be able to put his finger in the dike." The Federal Reserve will not meet to consider interest rates again until the end of January, and it is unlikely to act any earlier unless economic conditions change markedly.. So the markets may be riding out the end of the year on the ups and downs of the budget talks, at once reflecting their progress and influencing their outcome. It is a situation that leaves many analysts and fund managers uneasy. "When you look at the effect the budgets they are talking about have on the economy, it doesn't amount to a hill of beans," said Allen Sinai, the chief global economist at Lehman Brothers. The shrinking | Reserve Board Cuts Key Rate; Markets Climb |
817316_0 | WITH airplanes filling up and profits improving, United States airlines are beginning to crack down on some rule-bending passengers to whom carriers often turned a blind eye when they were bleeding red ink. An informal survey among carriers turned up these examples: Passengers who come running up to the gate at the last minute, usually less than 10 minutes before scheduled departure time, are increasingly being left behind and put on the next flight -- provided there is another flight to that destination, and provided there are seats available. Passengers who arrive at the last minute with lots of luggage may be allowed to board, but their check-in luggage may have to await the next flight. Airlines say they are stricter about enforcing regulations covering both the number and size of carry-on luggage, and are stricter about charging for excess baggage. Carriers say that some passengers make a practice of arriving late with lots of luggage, in hopes the harried ticket agent will check their excess baggage without charge rather than incur the considerable cost to the airline of delaying the flight. With fuller flights, carriers say they have become stingier about upgrading passengers, for instance, from economy to business class and about allowing nonmembers to use airlines' private lounges. When adults buy economy tickets for themselves and first- or business-class seats for their children -- on international flights where youngsters often fly for half price -- carriers say they will try to prohibit the adults from switching seats with their children en route. The crackdown grew partly out of the tightened security regulations recently adopted by the Federal Aviation Administration, including a requirement that adult passengers have photo identification even on domestic flights. That requirement has resulted in airlines discovering stolen tickets and finding passengers trying to board with tickets issued in another person's name. But the biggest impetus for a crackdown is gleaned in the industry's recent financial performance. Last week, for example, the Department of Transportation announced that for that third quarter, the 11 major United States airlines earned a combined operating profit of more than $2 billion and net profit of more than $1 billion -- the second consecutive quarter they exceeded those figures. All carriers showed an operating profit in the third quarter and all but Trans World Airlines, which reported a large write-down associated with its emergence from bankruptcy-law protection, reported a net profit. | Business Travel;United States airlines, flush with business, are cracking down on passengers who bend the rules. |
817217_5 | afford. The strike and the protests were a defense of a way of life that brought cohesion and social peace to France for decades. With the strike now slowly winding down, sociologists, labor union leaders and most politicians agree that the three weeks of unrest will remain a decisive moment that political leaders can ignore at their peril. They see the public solidarity as a wake-up call comparable to other uprisings like the 1968 student-worker upheaval or even, some say, the French revolution itself. "The French have rediscovered they can revolt after years of listening to politicians telling them that such bursts of anger produce catastrophes," said Dr. Gerard Miller, a psychoanalyst and political commentator. "The message was: market rules are not our problems, and don't expect us to be 'reasonable' anymore or put ourselves in the place of our bosses." In an editorial, the left-leaning French daily Liberation wondered: "At this point what is the fight about? Salaries? Jobs? The absence of a future? The survival of Public Service? The cancellation of the Juppe plan?" It added that the malaise touched on "all of it in the same time without doubt, and probably a thousand other things." Those thousand other things that have made France a far more egalitarian society than most Western industrial countries provide a cushion that also permits children of the disadvantaged a fair chance to jump to the middle class in one generation. Sociologists and political scientists have argued during the last three weeks that the principal reform should start with the politicians. They said the best and the brightest of the ruling establishment, like President Jacques Chirac and Prime Minister Juppe, are increasingly the product of an elitist system. "They have become cold machines disconnected from reality except at the level of taxi drivers and their cleaning ladies," noted Marc Bessin, a sociologist at Rouen, in a conversation here. "When someone cries very loudly at your window, you don't order double-pane windows." That message seems to have registered even with hardened right-wingers among French politicians this week, including Charles Pasqua, the tough former Interior Minister known for his aggressive bulldog demeanor. "What's more important is not the confidence of the market but the confidence of the French people," Mr. Pasqua, who remains a formidable power in the conservative coalition Government, said on television the other day. "You cannot run a country without the people." | For French, Solidarity Still Counts |
816854_0 | Multimedia is still a new field, so it is not surprising that many offerings combine video, sound and text in ways that seem experimental or downright zany. Still, even by the eclectic standards of this infant industry, "Supermodels in the Rainforest" has to qualify as one of the more curious combinations of material to find its way onto a CD-ROM disk recently. It mixes the worthy and the well-endowed, a cause celebre that is politically correct (the rain forest) and a media tradition that is decidedly not (female swimsuit models). Think of it as Sports Illustrated's swimsuit issue meets the Sierra Club," a promoter of the disk said. So, multimedia hit or mixed metaphor? Well, that depends on the taste, or perhaps the lack of it, in the CD-ROM marketplace. At the least, "Supermodels in the Rainforest" is an innovative marketing venture from a record label and an environmental group. The Right Stuff, a unit of Thorn EMI's EMI Records Group, has put rock songs on the disk from its groups, including Enigma, Duran Duran and Soul II Soul. The proceeds from the $30 disk, after production costs, will go to Rainforest International, a nonprofit conservation organization. The songs serve as the background music accompanying still pictures and video clips of eight models in the Costa Rican rain forest. Many of the shots have the models standing in jungle streams, wearing one- or two-piece suits. If they wear less they are partly obscured by some bit of rain-forest greenery. On the disk, some models talk about the importance of saving the rain forest to protect air quality and preserve plants used in disease-fighting drugs. A mouse click or two, and maps and text appear on the screen. After World War II, rain forests covered 14 percent of the earth's land surface but today, a narrator says, "half of these primal forests have been destroyed." Yet clearly the disk is not intended for the segment of the environmentally conscious market that will find the pedagogical entries most fascinating. David Weiss, executive director of Rainforest International, said: "The people we're trying to reach here are the kind of college guys who go down to Ft. Lauderdale for spring break. They may well end up being the executives at corporations who make decisions that really affect the environment." The models' commercial rates are $10,000 a day. But they donated their time for this | Female Models Try to Sell Rain Forest Issue on Disk |
815434_1 | the new Schools Chancellor, Dr. Rudy Crew, have called for reform in special education. Yesterday, Peter J. Powers, the First Deputy Mayor, described the plan as a "creative but feasible way" to stem the growing population of special education students, who now number more than 130,000. "We think it's a good proposal," Mr. Powers said. "It's one that warrants further study by the board. It's certainly worthy of them trying to take it to the next step. You've got to look at the endgame. The endgame is to do the best job of educating children who need it, and if you can keep children mainstreamed that is a good thing." The system now consumes more than 22 cents of every education dollar in New York City, includes one quarter of all school employees and funnels a disproportionate number of black and Hispanic boys into dead-end, segregated classrooms. About 60 percent of children classified in special education are segregated, three times the national average. Susan Amlung, a spokesman for the United Federation of Teachers, said the high expense of the plan "might, in fact, be its death knell." Much of the plan hinges on changes in state financing formulas that currently reward schools for placing mildly and moderately handicapped children in special education. The plan also recommends negotiating a state waiver to maintain the system's current spending for at least five years. The report also calls for extra money to train teachers and school staffs to handle an infusion of special education students. "Reform is rarely cheap," the report's authors wrote. "Systemic reform of the magnitude that we propose will help to enrich students' lives but is unlikely to save money." The report envisions a system that would shift special-education money to regular schools, which would use that money for extra teachers and aides to help children with mild and moderate disabilities. The special-education bureaucracy would shrink to serve only the most severely handicapped children. Most special education students in the system are not deaf, blind or classified with any other readily defined disability. Instead, 70 percent are labeled "learning disabled" or "emotionally handicapped," terms many academics say are loosely applied and provide cover for a teacher who wants to get rid of a troublesome student. Once referred to special education, students almost never return to regular education. The panel has added a section in the report on protecting the most | Panel Faults Education Of Disabled |
815392_0 | People of the land of Racine and Moliere, of Hugo and Balzac, of Proust and Sartre, frequently can't grasp what they read, according to a new study that concludes that some literacy skills in France are far worse than those in the United States. But the French need not worry about being embarrassed by the report. When French officials studied its preliminary conclusions two months ago, they were so incensed that they insisted that all references to France be excised from the 200-page document, "Literacy, Society and Economy," published here last week. The survey, which set out to test how literacy skills relate to job success and economic performance, judged reading comprehension in the form of, say, an office memorandum, of documents like tables, nutritional charts and train schedules, and of day-to-day mathematical calculations. "The results show that a disturbing proportion of adults in all countries have low literacy skills," said the report by the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. But the results varied widely by country. For example, in the portion of the study examining the ability to understand and use written information, 7.5 percent of adults in Sweden, 10.5 percent in the Netherlands, 14.4 percent in Germany, 15.3 percent in Switzerland, 16.6 percent in Canada and 20.7 percent in the United States scored in the lowest of five proficiency levels. By these same criteria, 40.1 percent of France's adult population were placed in the lowest level, only marginally better than Poland, with 42.6 percent, according to the left-leaning Paris daily, Liberation, which first reported France's withdrawal from the study. The section featured questions on articles ranging from topics like movie reviews to disposable diapers. The newly expurgated study reported only the results of detailed tests of some 1,500 to 1,800 adults between the ages of 16 and 65 in seven countries -- Sweden, the Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland, Canada, the United States and Poland. "Only the French censored the results, which is tantamount to refusing to acknowledge the truth staring you in the face," Liberation said. Albert Tuinman, a survey organizer at the OECD's education and training division, said he was puzzled by the French reaction because France was the first country to commit itself to participate in the survey. He added that even though France fared poorly overall, it ranked first in the 16-to-24 age category, which he said confirmed the quality of its educational system. | France Finds a Reading Test Incomprehensible |
815412_0 | Every night before she goes to bed, Anna Gilapa gets down on her knees and stuffs cloth in the cracks around her doors and windows to protect her family from the acrid smoke released by the nearby smelter of the Southern Peru Copper Corporation. Mrs. Gilapa fears for the health of her 1-year-old son, Brian, who suffers from severe respiratory problems and often coughs up thick mucous. And for that, she and other residents of this bleak coastal town 580 miles south of Lima blame the largest local company, Southern Peru Copper, which environmentalists say spews 2,000 tons of sulfur dioxide into the air each day, or 10 to 15 times the limit for similar plants operating in the United States. At times, the smoke from the smelter is so thick that it hovers over the city like a heavy fog, forcing motorists to turn on their headlights during the day and sending residents to hospitals and clinics coughing, wheezing and vomiting. On those days, children are told to play indoors. "All we want is an end to the pollution," said Ilo's Mayor, Ernesto Herrera Becerra, who said emissions from the smelter had ruined agriculture and fishing in the area. "This situation would not be allowed to exist in the United States." But officials of Southern Peru Copper, which is controlled by three big American companies -- Asarco Inc., the Phelps Dodge Corporation and the Marmon Group -- maintain that their smelter is not to blame for the town's health problems and that their workers have never complained. Nevertheless, Southern Peru will spend $151 million on environment projects in the region. Environmental groups concede the plant complies with Peruvian environmental standards but say that is precisely the problem. All too often, they say, the absence of strong laws in many developing countries enables giant multinationals -- especially in the mining and chemical industries -- to play fast and loose with the local environment and the local population's health. "I'm afraid these countries are at the mercy of the multinational corporations," said Kenny Bruno, a toxins investigator for Greenpeace, the environmental group. Although some multinational corporations have voluntarily adopted policies that require their overseas operations to comply with the same environmental standards they must follow in the United States, there are currently no agreements between industrialized nations or policing mechanisms to insure compliance, Mr. Bruno noted. As a result, foreign corporations | In Peru, a Fight for Fresh Air |
815399_0 | France's leading unions repeated their calls for large demonstrations across the country on Tuesday after apparently rejecting offers of compromise by Prime Minister Alain Juppe to end an 18-day strike by rail and other public transport workers that has paralyzed much of the country. After meetings with union leaders, the Prime Minister announced tonight that he would be willing to delay for five years an overhaul of the railroad system in addition to suggestions he made on Sunday that he might revise his austerity program. It was devised to eliminate a $50 billion deficit in France's Social Security fund. Apparently sensing victory, union leaders are holding out for a complete cancellation of the Government's austerity program and keeping their hopes alive that the proposed economic changes and the strike might bring about the fall of Mr. Juppe's Government. With trains, buses and trucks largely immobilized and a growing number of public sector employees in other industries, including utilities, hospitals and schools, willing to join the strike, unions are certain they have seized the momentum. Their confidence has been increased by a lack of support for the beleaguered Prime Minister from the public or his political mentor, President Jacques Chirac, who has remained aloof in this crisis. Emerging today from an hourlong meeting with Mr. Juppe, Marc Blondel, secretary general of the Workers Force, one of two major unions embroiled in the duel with the Government, said Mr. Juppe had to scrap all his proposed changes and begin discussions anew on how to plug the deficit that threatens to destroy the Social Security system and prevent France from joining European Union plans for a single currency. When asked if the meeting indicated that the end of the strike was imminent, Mr. Blondel said, "To say that the strike will come to an end is tantamount to having illusions, because you cannot make a strike go away or stop by pushing a button." The militant union chief called for a "global negotiation" involving all aspects of economic reform -- a move that, if accepted by Mr. Juppe, would make the leftist unions partners in policy-making with a rightist Government holding an absolute majority in Parliament in addition to the presidency. Louis Viannet, who leads the other powerful union at the heart of the strike, the General Confederation of Labor, also exhibited little appetite for compromise, calling for huge demonstrations on Tuesday because, | Sensing Victory, Striking Unions in France Press Challenge |
812652_3 | books on tape, untimed tests and some tutoring. "I tell every coach that's trying to recruit me that I'm learning disabled, and I want to visit their office for learning-disabled students," said Ganden. The N.C.A.A. has made concessions to the new wave of learning-disabled students. "We try to accommodate learning-disabled students," Dempsey said. "They can get waivers to take their S.A.T. untimed, if they have been evaluated and diagnosed as learning disabled." Indeed, the N.C.A.A. said that about 500 of the 28,000 high school athletes who go through its eligibility clearinghouse each year have received waivers permitting them to take untimed standardized tests. And if a high school principal certifies that a fundamentals course covers the same content "qualitatively and quantitatively" as a core course, the N.C.A.A. will count it. But Bruce Cameron, the Naperville principal, said he could not do that, since fundamentals courses do not cover as much material as regular courses. Still, he believes the N.C.A.A.'s eligibility rules create daunting hurdles for learning-disabled students. "The Catch-22 for these great athletes with learning disabilities, and Chad isn't the only one we have, is that if they take the core courses the N.C.A.A. requires, their grade-point average will not be high enough to meet the eligibility standard," Cameron said. "But if they take the easier fundamentals courses, where they can achieve good grades and sometimes get the grounding to go on to regular courses, they don't have enough core courses to qualify for the N.C.A.A." Cameron said he would "bet his paycheck" that Ganden would succeed in college. "This is not a dumb kid," he said. "This is a learning-disabled kid." He said that the Gandens had always put their son in classes that met his needs, despite the consequences. "Chad is taking all regular classes now," said his mother, Susan Ganden. "But there were times when he needed those basics courses. When he started regular geometry, and got a D, I told him to forget the N.C.A.A. and switch to fundamentals of geometry the next term. He did, he got an A, and I don't regret it for a minute. It was those fundamental courses that helped him learn to manage regular courses now. Anyway, we have a very good high school and our fundamental courses cover as much as core courses at lots of other schools. But the N.C.A.A. won't look at that. They're wearing blinders." The | Furiously Treading Water |
812518_2 | that caused him to cast aside the fears of other Presidents that a trip here might fray relations with the British. Expressing amazement at the changes that have taken place, Mr. Clinton said that crossing the border with the Republic of Ireland to the south, once an ordeal of search and delay, "now is as easy as crossing a speed bump." John Hume, a Catholic moderate widely revered for his reconciliation efforts, said the President's visit made this "the most historic day ever" for Ulster. He lavished praise on Mr. Clinton for his aid to economic development in Ulster and expressed thanks that "peace in our land has been central to his policy since the day he took office." Ann Hanna, a Belfast Protestant who heard the President more than once today, said: "I didn't think his presence would do much good, but he was absolutely first class, and after listening to him, I think he will help people come together." One American President in four traced his roots to Ulster; only England nurtured the families of more. But Mr. Clinton was the first sitting President to set foot in Northern Ireland when he landed this morning after a brief flight from London. The Ulster leadership hailed his visit as a sign that the truce between the warring factions and the all-party talks that are scheduled for February signaled the approach of an era of peace and prosperity for this 5,267-square-mile enclave of British territory at the northeastern corner of Ireland. Peace has so far brought modest economic benefits to Northern Ireland. In the last two weeks, 14 companies have announced $1.25 billion in new projects, and both the British Government and the European Union supply major subsidies. But the overall unemployment rate is 11.5 percent, and in some neighborhoods it reaches 50 percent. The Union Jack and the Irish tricolor still fly in mute combat as symbols of the conflicting sympathies of various neighborhoods. There were police riflemen keeping watch today on the roof of the Mackie plant. But fruits and vegetables, racks of clothing and other goods now spill onto once-desolate sidewalks in Belfast shopping streets, British Army patrols have all but disappeared and the checkpoints that blocked roads leading from the airport and the Catholic south have been dismantled. The often-bombed Europa Hotel, where Mr. Clinton stayed tonight, has been refurbished, and the old Crown pub, celebrated | On a Day of Peace in Belfast, Faiths Join to Cheer Clinton |
813745_0 | To the Editor: "How Many Minutes to Midnight 50 Years After the A-Bomb's Birth?" (Week in Review, Dec. 3) left me wondering where The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and its subscribers have been since the end of the cold war. Given that the nuclear nations have "tested" hundreds of nuclear weapons aggressively against their own people for the last 50 years -- not to mention France's atomic bombing of the South Pacific, which continues to this day -- I think the magazine's doomsday clock should long ago have been moved forward beyond its misleading midnight threshold. As well documented in "Nuclear Wastelands, a Global Guide to Nuclear Weapons Production and Its Health and Environmental Effects" (M.I.T. Press), the last 50 years of nuclear weapons production and testing have left vast tracts of uninhabitable land on almost every continent as well as mountains of uranium mill tailings, tons of weapons-grade plutonium and millions of gallons of highly radioactive processing liquids -- all of which will remain toxic for millenniums but none of which have been disposed of safely or even adequately protected against natural disaster or terrorist attack. Millions of people living around these sites (as well as downstream and downwind) have had their lives devastated by radiation-induced illnesses. Thousands more generations to come also risk being poisoned by this radioactive legacy, as some of the deadliest plutonium wastes will take more than 240,000 years to decay to "background" levels. Had the doomsday clock kept up with real world events -- advancing at an average rate of, say, one hour per decade throughout the cold war -- it would now have reached approximately 5 A.M. As the light of this new day finally begins to illuminate the scope of destruction that has already been wrought by the nuclear arms race, we need to stop focusing on our nuclear nightmares and get started on the massive cleanup that lies ahead. The doomsday clock still has at least 240,000 years to go. ALBERT DONNAY Baltimore, Dec. 5, 1995 The writer is the founder of Nuclear Free America. | The Doomsday Clock Is Alive and Ticking |
813652_0 | History shows that often the French cannot think about the future before bringing the present crashing down around them, as Prime Minister Alain Juppe must have known before proposing to reshape the deficit-ridden French state to fit 21st-century financial realities. The response from France's powerful public-sector labor unions has been a series of paralyzing transport strikes that will not stop until the Government withdraws proposals to reshape the national health and pension systems and the money-losing railways, labor leaders say. But the Government says it cannot give in and let them collapse. In part, the impasse comes from the clash of two cultures -- an aloof Government, and weak and divided French labor unions whose biggest claim on their members' loyalty is militancy. Two to three hundred young demonstrators clashed with police at the end of the march in Paris today, turning over about a dozen parked cars between Trinity Church and Place Pigalle, and there were similar incidents in Nantes. But workers in the private sector remained largely uninvolved in the strike movement today and Mr. Juppe was still holding firm, surprising financial markets that had expected this Government, like most previous ones, to cave in when threatened with major unrest. The Prime Minister made a gesture nonetheless, telling Parliament tonight that his Government would give labor a say in redesigning the social security system. He reinforced the conciliatory stance in a nationally televised address, taking his case to the people for the first time since the crisis began. "No decision has been made a priori," he said in the television speech. A union leader who has been less critical than others of the Government plans, Nicole Notat, said, "The Damocles sword that has been hanging over us has been lifted." Her union, the French Confederation of Democratic Labor, would not participate in future strikes against change in the health insurance and pension systems, she said, but other union leaders were more reserved. The strike movement had intensified earlier in the day as tens of thousands of union members marched through snow flurries in the streets of Paris in the largest demonstration in the capital so far, calling for the resignation of Mr. Juppe, who easily survived a censure motion in the National Assembly. Other demonstrations took place in Nimes, Lyons and elsewhere around the country. Union leaders have been urging employees in the private sector to join a | French Clash On Cultures |
816198_2 | "to mess with blacks and drug dealers," the affidavit said. When the police searched the trailer where Mr. Burmeister rented a room, they found a Nazi flag, white supremacist literature, and a 9 millimeter Ruger that they believe was used in the slayings. The killings have prompted a criminal investigation by the Fayetteville police, a civil rights probe by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, an internal review of possible racist activity at Fort Bragg and a worldwide Army examination of extremism within the ranks. Officials at Fort Bragg have said they believe racist skinhead activity is restricted to a small, loosely knit group of soldiers, perhaps 20 of the 15,000 members of the 82d Airborne Division, which is headquartered at the base. But civil rights groups have warned that military bases have long been breeding grounds for extremist activity. Raising the specter of Timothy J. McVeigh, an Army veteran who is accused in the April 19 bombing of a Federal Building in Oklahoma City, they have called for a thorough investigation. Mr. Burmeister's yearning for a tattoo came to light in an affidavit that was written to support a request for a search warrant on Dec. 7. It was made public on Wednesday. In the document, a Fayetteville Police investigator, Christopher Corcione, describes his interview with Mr. Meadows, who local police believe was driving his Army friends around that night but was not present for the slayings. "He stated he was aware that Jim Burmeister had his father's 9 millimeter Ruger pistol with him when he left the car," Mr. Corcione wrote. "Throughout the evening, Jim was talking about wanting to earn his spider-web tattoo, which he explained means killing a human." Lieut. Richard E. Bryant of the Fayetteville Police said law-enforcement authorities had interviewed skinheads and white supremacists in the area and concluded that "it was a symbol or a sign that you had killed for the cause, the cause being whatever their beliefs are." Lieut. Bryant said Mr. Burmeister's other comments, as related by Mr. Meadows, "would pretty much tell us that his cause was racially motivated." He cautioned, however, that "just because you have a spider-web tattoo doesn't mean you've killed someone for the cause or killed someone period." Mr. Wright, he said, has denied that he killed anybody to earn his tattoo. Mr. Burmeister's lawyer, Carl G. Ivarsson, said his client has not discussed the tattoo. | Inquiry Into Carolina Slayings Turns to Meaning of a Tattoo |
816222_1 | make France eligible to participate in a unified European currency. But many people say they have come to regard the austerity plan as not only a retreat on social benefits but a change in the whole life style France had become accustomed to since World War II. Government officials said they were pleased with today's developments but are awaiting more evidence that other employees have returned to work. "This is an erosion of the strike , but a very timid one," an official of the public transit authority told Reuters. "There shouldn't be any development before the weekend," the official said. Those returning to work included railway workers in the eastern French towns of Mulhouse, Strasbourg, Reims and Belfort after votes were held in 345 railway union chapters. While the great majority voted to stick with the strike, the proportion of those saying transport workers' demands have been satisfied and strikers should return to work was higher than in previous ballots. Because the votes were being taken by individual union chapters, it was difficult to determine how many strikers returned to work nationwide. In Paris one underground metro line out of the 13 that serve the city ran for 90 minutes from La Courneve-Villejuif before shutting down. But strikes appeared to continue in most cities. In Toulouse in the south of France, city workers voted to extend their strike by another 12 days. About a quarter of salaried workers of the state-owned electric utility, stayed away, as did 8 percent of teachers and five percent of civil servants across the country. Marc Blondel, head of the Workers Force, who has been a major source of momentum in the strikes, said the direct talks that the Prime Minister offered to hold with the unions on Dec. 21 in the context of a "social summit" should begin immediately. "Does he want the strikes and the protest movement to last until the 21st?" Mr. Blondel asked at a news conference today. The leader of the other major union driving the strike, the General Confederation of Labor, warned that if talks failed the consequences would be grave. Louis Viannet demanded that all issues from employment to health care be addressed forcefully. "If on the basis of a limited and vague agenda, a meeting were to have no effect, the backlash would definitely be very strong," said Mr. Viannet in a letter to Mr. Juppe. | A Few Strikers Return to Work in France, but Effect Is Small |
816116_0 | Cultor Ltd. of Finland agreed yesterday to buy Pfizer Inc.'s Food Science Group business for $352.5 million. Pfizer said on Oct. 24 that it was in negotiations to sell the group to the Finnish food-products company. The New York-based drug maker first said Food Science was for sale in July. Food Science provides specialty ingredients like flavors, reduced-calorie bulking agents, fat replacers and food protectants to the food industry. It had 1994 operating profit of $31 million on sales of $304 million. Shares of Pfizer were up $1.125, to $66.25, on the New York Stock Exchange. COMPANY NEWS | PFIZER TO SELL FOOD GROUP TO FINNISH COMPANY |
818536_5 | in report issued in May. Reducing poverty further will require a much greater commitment from the central Government, which has mobilized many small-scale antipoverty projects with the World Bank, the United Nations Development Program and numerous charities, but the main task of poverty reduction remains largely unaddressed. Much Thunder, Little Rain Using a Chinese expression, a Communist Party official in Guizhou said that when the Government talks about investing new financial resources in central and western China, "the thunder is huge, but the raindrops are tiny." "I don't expect a lot from the central Government, because they don't have a lot of money," said the official, who has worked inside Gui zhou's party bureaucracy for 30 years. Even within Guizhou Province, the disparities are significant. The provincial capital, Guiyang, glitters at night under the lights of new hotels, restaurants and karaoke bars whose driveways are choked with the Cadillacs and BMW's of top government and police officials. Corruption is widespread. The provincial chief of public security and the wife of the former Governor were sentenced to death this year. The Governor's wife, Yan Jian hong, was executed on Jan. 16 after she was convicted of embezzling hundreds of thousands of dollars in public funds to build a private restaurant, massage parlor and spa for the thin upper crust of moneyed entrepreneurs and their party patrons who run this province. Three weeks after the riots in Tongren, she was paraded through the streets of Guiyang, standing shackled in the bed of a Liberation brand truck, which drove her to the provincial execution grounds. There, she was told to kneel to receive her executioner's bullet at a downward angle through the back of her head. "I haven't knelt since Liberation," she said defiantly, before being forced to her knees and shot. Within the Chinese Communist Party, some economic reformers fear that the strong emotional pull of egalitarianism is being exploited by party ideologues and other opportunists to undermine Mr. Deng's reforms and his proteges in the Government. But others disagree. "If Deng Xiaoping knew the disparities were as big as they are, he would be more militant than I am in trying to eliminate them," said Hu Angang, a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing. "Every country has regional differences, but in China the regional differences are getting bigger, not smaller." Some in the Party Fear Rebellion Mr. Hu, | Deng's Economic Drive Leaves Vast Regions of China Behind |
818545_4 | Health International. Work is proceeding, albeit slowly, on a new vaginal sponge, a new cervical cap, and other barrier methods that might include not just spermicides but chemicals that could block viruses like herpes and H.I.V. And several injectable hormones similar to Depo-Provera have gone into use in other parts of the world, according to the Family Planning Perspectives article, written by Michael Klitsch, the editor of the magazine. For three decades, researchers have explored the possibility of vaginal rings, small silicone rubber devices that release a contraceptive hormone, an approach the Population Council is still studying. The council, and others, are also trying to develop new contraceptive implants, even though Norplant faces hundreds of liability lawsuits, and its sales have dropped ten-fold since the heady days in 1991 when it was hailed as a contraceptive breakthrough. Perhaps the most widely awaited methods are those for men, whose only contraceptive choices are condoms or vasectomy. "A lot of people are looking toward some hormonal method for men," said James Catterall, interim director of the Center for Biomedical Research of the Population Council. "Anything for men would be a boon, if we can convince people it would be safe and effective." Those at the Population Council also cautioned that no single method would work for every couple, or in every culture. And any dramatically new method -- for men or women -- is likely to be a long way off. "Most of the really new things are in a very early stage of development," Mr. Catterall said, "so it's hard to say how long it would be to get through the regulatory process, which is a very long process." In addition to a systemic male contraceptive, there has been research on other new approaches, among them a contraceptive vaccine, or a pill that would induce menstruation. But neither are anywhere near marketing. For some products, Dr. Alexander said, the likely timetable is a decade or more: "Sometime before 2005, I think we will have spermicides that also reduce the spread of H.I.V.," she said. "A male injectable hormone that will last three months could be between 2000 and 2005. Vaccines will take much longer, maybe 2020." She and Ms. Tew agree that there are plenty of ideas and products on the horizon. "The problem," Ms. Tew said, "is that it doesn't seem as though we're getting any closer to the horizon." | Fears, Suits and Regulations Stall Contraceptive Advances |
818683_1 | desire is a "neurotic adaptation" that can be traced to "smothering mothers and abdicating fathers" has been refuted in many scientific studies. Dr. Richard C. Friedman, in his book on homosexuality, extensively reviewed the attempts to ascertain common personality characteristics and family backgrounds for male homosexuals and concludes that no such commonalities have been established. Homosexuality, like heterosexuality, coexists with all kinds of character structure and personality, all degrees of pathology, and is connected with no clearly distinctive pattern of family dynamics. The entire premise of Dr. Socarides's so-called "treatment" of homosexuality is flawed. The problems that many individuals experience related to homosexuality arise not from their sexual orientation per se, but from the non-acceptance of homosexuality by societies and people like Dr. Socarides. Homosexuality has been one of the diverse manifestations of human sexuality since time immemorial. Various societies have differed in their tolerance toward homosexuality -- our current Western society being particularly non-accepting and homophobic. There is nothing to "fix" in homosexuals because there is nothing broken. Analysts, under the guise of treatment, can cause incredible suffering to patients in attempting to "help them become heterosexual" by forcing upon them their unscientific, unproven theories. What these anguished human beings need is compassion and help in coming to terms with who they are. Dr. Socarides might consider the possibility that he is tragically attempting to repair concretely in the external world his own guilt for having "failed" his son, who is homosexual, instead of coming to terms with his own alleged "shortcomings" as a father by doing reparation on an inner, symbolic level. Dr. Socarides presents no scientific evidence to back up his claim that he has helped 35 percent of his homosexual patients become heterosexual. It is purely anecdotal evidence and unscientific. It is misleading to many potentially troubled individuals seeking help adapting to their homosexual orientation. It is disturbing that the Albert Einstein College of Medicine retains Dr. Socarides on its faculty. Anyone who can state that "the very fact of AIDS is the same-sex sex movement's terrifying contribution to this terrific century" -- which flies in the face of all scientific evidence, which has shown that the majority of AIDS cases resulted from heterosexual transmission and unsafe sexual practices regardless of sexual orientation -- does not belong on the faculty of any medical school worth its reputation. JOHN A. GOSLING, M.D. New York, Dec. 25, 1995 | There Is Nothing to 'Fix' in Homosexuals |
818690_0 | Emmanuel Levinas, a philosopher and religious thinker who made ethical responsibility for "the Other" the bedrock of his philosophical analyses, died of heart failure in Paris on Monday. He would have been 90 within a few days. His thought influenced several generations of French philosophers and, bolstered by his reflections on the Talmud, won an admiring readership among Jewish and Christian theologians, among them Pope John Paul II, who often praised and quoted his work. Born in Kaunas, Lithuania, of Jewish parents who spoke both Yiddish and Russian at home, the young scholar went to France in 1923 at the age of 17 to study at the University of Strasbourg. In 1928-29, he studied under Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger at the University of Freiburg. Over the next few years, he introduced the ideas of both German thinkers to France -- first in a doctoral dissertation, published in 1930, on the theory of intuition in Husserl's phenomenology, then in a French translation of Husserl's "Cartesian Meditations" and finally in a 1932 essay on Heidegger. Dr. Levinas's own philosophy began to emerge after World War II. His family in Lithuania died in the Holocaust, while he, by then a French citizen and soldier, did forced labor as a prisoner of war in Germany and his wife and daughter hid in a French monastery. Like Husserl and Heidegger, Dr. Levinas rejected philosophy's traditional preoccupation with metaphysical questions about being and epistemological questions about how we know. And like them, he rejected attempts at grand abstract systems of explanation. He later came to regret his enthusiasm for Heidegger, after the German philosopher's accommodation to Nazism. In commenting on a discussion of forgiveness in the Talmud, he wrote: "One can forgive many Germans, but there are some Germans it is difficult to forgive. It is difficult to forgive Heidegger." Dr. Levinas's alternative to traditional approaches was a philosophy that made personal ethical responsibility to others the starting point and primary focus for philosophy, rather than a secondary reflection that followed explorations of the nature of existence and the validity of knowledge. "Ethics precedes ontology" (the study of being) is a phrase often used to sum up his stance. Instead of the thinking "I" epitomized in "I think, therefore I am" -- the phrase with which Rene Descartes launched much of modern philosophy -- Dr. Levinas began with an ethical "I." For him, even the | Emmanuel Levinas, 90, French Ethical Philosopher |
743442_1 | from 1982 to 1990, the latest year for which data have been analyzed. The figures show that overall, contraceptive use declined to 59 percent of American women ages 15 to 44 in 1990, from 60 percent in 1988. The report also shows that among those who use some method of contraception, condoms have become much more popular and use of birth control pills has declined. Dr. Jacqueline Darroch Forrest, senior vice president of the Alan Guttmacher Institute in New York, a research group working on reproductive issues, said that the figures confirmed a trend that other data had suggested: "We were moving toward greater prevention of unintended pregnancy, but now the figures look as though they are being reversed," she said. Dr. Forrest said that sexual activity had continued to increase, but at the same time many women had stopped using contraceptive pills. Although condom use is up, a majority of those using condoms say they do so inconsistently, she said. The most popular method of contraception remains sterilization, which in 1990 accounted for 42 percent of the methods used, compared with 28.5 percent for the pill, and 17.7 percent for condoms. New, long-acting methods of contraception like implants or injections were not included in the data because they were not available in 1990. In 1982, only 7 percent of women 15 to 44 used condoms. But in 1988, the figure had risen to 9 percent, and by 1990 it had risen to 11 percent. The pill was used by 30.7 percent in 1988, but by only 28.5 percent in 1990. "A major question is why some women have stopped using the pill," Dr. Forrest said. "Many of the women who have stopped are in the low-income groups. It may be that their increasing lack of access to family planning programs, as budgets for those have not kept up with inflation, is part of the reason. The cost of pills has gone up; maybe it is harder for them to afford." One of the most dramatic trends noted in the study concerned young women who were having intercourse for the first time. In 1982, about 28 percent used a condom at first intercourse, but by 1990 the figure had risen to 55 percent. These women are among those most at risk for sexually transmitted diseases, said Linda S. Peterson of the Center for Health Statistics, the author of the report. | Fewer Women Are Said to Use Contraceptives |
743510_1 | It's not exactly a return to the turn of the century, when more than 50 percent of public secondary school students studied Latin, or to the 19th century, when the University of Georgia admissions requirement for 1843 included "a correct knowledge of Cicero's orations, Virgil, John and the Acts in the Greek New Testament, Graeca Minora or Jacobs's Greek Reader," and tuition was $38 a year. But from 1986 to 1990, the number of college students studying Latin increased by 12.5 percent to 28,000, the highest total since 1968. A comparable, updated survey is not available, but a study by the American Philological Association found that average enrollment in courses on the classics per institution responding to a questionnaire increased to 284 in 1994 from 255 in 1992. Of the 107 classics programs at colleges and universities with four or fewer professors, 27 have been formed since 1981. Professor Morrell's experience at Rhodes College, a small liberal arts college named, as it turns out, for a former president of the college, Peyton Nalle Rhodes, rather than the Greek island, is typical of the activity. Professor Morrell grew up in Blackfoot, Idaho, 150 miles from the nearest classicist, and became interested in German in high school. He soon discovered that what he really wanted to read were the Greek and Latin texts where the German philosophers he was reading got their inspiration. After graduating from Stanford and getting a Ph.D. from Harvard, he came to Rhodes in 1993 after the college debated whether it wanted to keep teaching Latin and Greek at all. Rhodes this year added a second classics professor for the first time in 20 years. Professor Morrell's students tend to be endearingly earnest about their studies. Some, like Jamie Edrington, a second-year student from Memphis, began Latin as preparation for medical studies. But almost as many pick it up, it seems, because they like the elegant precision and symmetry of the language and the window that ancient Greece and Rome provide onto the present. "I'm primarily a philosophy major, but to study classics seems to give some sort of discipline because it's so orderly," said Ms. Edrington, a senior from Wynne, Ark., who often brings a pet boa to class. "It's almost a foil against philosophy in a way, because you can always count on a Latin verb to do what you expect it to do. With philosophy, | Class Notes |
745786_0 | Gerry Adams, the political leader of the Irish Republican Army, indicated today that he wants to allay fears that the I.R.A. might resume its campaign of violence if progress toward peace negotiations in Northern Ireland falters. Although Mr. Adams said in an interview on national radio that he wants peace negotiations between Britain, Ireland and the various political parties of Northern Ireland to begin immediately, the Sinn Fein leader said he could accept a delay of several months "if the issues are being discussed with urgency." Mr. Adams spoke as Sinn Fein, the I.R.A.'s political wing, was concluding the second day of its annual conference in the wake of the new peace proposals advanced last week by the Prime Ministers of Britain and Ireland. Despite his conciliatory comments, Mr. Adams also parried a statement today by the British Northern Ireland Secretary, Sir Patrick Mayhew, on the issue that is blocking the talks -- the decommissioning of the I.R.A. arsenal estimated at 100 tons of weapons. Sir Patrick repeated British policy that the exploratory talks between British civil servants and Sinn Fein could not be expanded until there was "substantial progress" on disarming the I.R.A.. "If every month Patrick Mayhew trots out the same old excuse for not enaging in talks with Sinn Fein," Mr. Adams said, then the British would place "the entire peace process in considerable jeopardy." | I.R.A. Leader Conciliatory on Pace of Talks |
741869_5 | note cards. Mr. Deng's youngest daughter and biographer, Xiao Rong, who insists that her father is "content" with his choice of Mr. Jiang, recently stated in an interview the blunt reality of Mr. Jiang's exposure. "The real question," she said, "is not whether my father's health is good or bad right now, but rather whether the people who have taken over the leadership since his retiring have done a good job or not." By posing this question, Ms. Xiao was making the point that it has yet to be answered. Mr. Jiang, for his part, knows that his leadership is untested and he, therefore, must walk a careful path between hard-liners who want him to stand up to foreign "meddling," and reformers who want to quicken the pace of dismantling the economic legacy of orthodox Communism. Some hard-liners in the party, Mr. Jiang recently complained, have branded him a "capitalist," a word that carries a condemning connotation dating to the 1950's, when Mao Zedong purged economic liberals from the party. In this season of political transition in China, more may be on the line than Mr. Jiang's management of relations with Washington. A book titled "Looking at China Through the Third Eye" that circulated in China last year rattled the party establishment and was banned because it struck at the heart of Mr. Deng's reforms, asserting that they have created "volcanic" forces of disparity and surplus labor that could explode in rebellion. The book's authorship is uncertain. A Western diplomat said: "I think this may be the issue. Is there a debate in the top leadership as to whether China is trying to do the wrong thing?" The wrong thing, he explained, is China's attempt to enter the World Trade Organization by stripping away the protected markets of its state-owned industries, by reforming its banking system by acknowledging colossal bad debts, and by forcing money-losing state enterprises into bankruptcy. If the consequences of these steps are lost markets, production shutdowns, large-scale layoffs and social instability, that could spell catastrophe for the Communist Party. For now, Mr. Jiang is neither defending himself nor articulating a new vision of relations with the United States. Soon he may have a new challenge, as powerful voices in Congress press for stronger American support for Taiwan. "What we see at the moment is an inability by the Chinese to give any signals," a diplomat said. | Is China Stumbling?; Some See Mishandling of Ties With U.S., Raising Questions About Deng's Successor |
741813_0 | AFTER the great earthquake of 1923 struck Tokyo, virtually the only significant downtown building left standing was Frank Lloyd Wright's Imperial Hotel. Because Wright had built the hotel essentially on a foundation of floating pads, its base acted as a shock absorber, soaking up seismic motion without transmitting it to the rest of the building. Since then structural engineers have used the Imperial Hotel as a model for earthquake-resistant structures, inventing different ways to make buildings that are flexible as well as strong. Now three professors from Kansas State University have come up with a new way to design a building that will withstand seismic shocks. The Patent Office has notified the team that it will receive a patent Tuesday for its "stiffness decoupler for base isolation of structures." "We've essentially created a building with moving parts," said Philip G. Kirmser, a professor of engineering at Kansas State. "When the ground shakes the base of the building will shake, but above ground the building will remain almost stationary." Normally a building is structurally supported by a network of columns stacked upon each other from one floor to the next. The lowest rung of columns, which are underground, are the most substantial and essentially are embedded in the building's footings. The engineers propose that the above-ground columns of their earthquake-proof building be built according to conventional methods, while the support columns below ground would be hollow. Within each large column would be a number of steel pipes filled with concrete. While not strong enough to support the building by themselves, these interior, miniature columns would bend and sway in response to the Earth's motion. Attached to the top of each exterior column would be four highly polished steel plates that extend into the column slightly and jut substantially outside of it. These steel plates would butt against a steel plate attached to the concrete slab forming the floor above. As the earth moves, the upper and lower steel plates would slide back and forth across each other. This way, the engineers said, the columns below ground absorb the seismic energy without transmitting it to the rest of the building above ground. But what would keep the building from sliding off the lower columns in the case of a severe jolt? Two things, the engineers say. First, the upper and lower steel plates are tethered with a cable. Second, the interior columns | Patents; Three Professors Have Found a New Way to Help Buildings Withstand the Shock of an Earthquake |
741802_0 | With peace talks collapsing in Brazil today, Peruvian and Ecuadorean soldiers tried to settle on a rugged Amazon battlefield what diplomats failed to settle at a negotiating table. After six days of talks in Rio de Janeiro, diplomats from South America and the United States broke off talks in frustration today after Ecuador announced that it needed "further time" to study a cease-fire plan. At the front, about 220 miles southeast of here, Peruvian mortars and warplanes again bombed Ecuadorean positions today. But as the border war moved through its second week, military officials on both sides said that fighting was shifting to guerrilla tactics. In the thick, jungle-cloaked terrain of the Cenepa River basin, helicopters are of limited use. Both sides reportedly are using Amazon Indians to guide jungle warfare units. In a sign that fighting might increase, Peru closed northern airports today to commercial air traffic and President Alberto K. Fujimori visited a military staging area. Ecuador's President, Sixto Duran Ballen, left today on an emergency diplomatic mission to Brazil, Argentina and Chile. Although the disputed 48-mile stretch of jungle border has not been demarcated, Peru claims that Ecuador started four years ago to build military posts on land that Peru considered its own. At the time, Peru was bogged down in a civil war with the Shining Path movement. With the Shining Path increasingly under control, Peru's Government has been able to turn its attention in recent months to what it called "border infiltrations." Since fighting started on Jan. 26, Peruvian forces have attacked eight Ecuadorean border posts, killing 10 Ecuadorean soldiers and wounding 17, military officials here say. Peru admits to losing 12 soldiers and 1 civilian, a fisherman killed by a land mine. But both sides say that the real death toll is several times higher. Citing risks of epidemics caused by bodies decomposing in the 130-square-mile contested area, Ecuador's Defense Ministry asked the nation's Red Cross to retrieve remains of soldiers from the jungle. In another indication that authorities are underreporting casualties, Peruvian state television reported Thursday that a mobile hospital, 100 doctors and tons of medical supplies were sent to Bagua. "Indigenous communities are suffering because of the fighting between both armies," said a group based here that speaks for rain forest tribes, the Coordinate of Amazon Basin Indigenous Organizations, or Cabio. "There are reports of bombings of the civilian population, of epidemics | Peru and Ecuador Wage Guerrilla War as Talks Break Off |
740859_1 | the numbers of cancers of the breast, prostate and brain that are diagnosed. *Smoking, which has resulted in a rise in related cancers, especially lung cancer in women and bladder cancer in men. *Increased exposure to the sun, with an accompanying increase in melanomas. *The AIDS epidemic, which has led to a rise in cancers like non-Hodgkin's lymphoma and Kaposi's sarcoma. While the researchers found there was no reason to suspect that increases in common cancers like those of the breast and prostate are in any significant way the result of exposure to cancer-causing substances in the environment, they noted that for other cancers, "some trends remain unexplained and might reflect changing exposures to carcinogens yet to be identified and clarified." One of Dr. Devesa's co-authors, Dr. William J. Blot, an epidemiologist now working for the International Epidemiology Institute Inc., a research and consulting firm in Rockville, Md., said the rise in non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, the cancer that killed Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, while partly explained by its association with AIDS, was also possibly influenced by environmental exposures. But, he added in an interview, "lymphomas are relatively minor types of cancer." Another co-author, Dr. Joseph F. Fraumeni Jr., an epidemiologist at the cancer institute, said it was possible that environmental factors might be involved in increases in cancers of the brain, liver, testicles and kidneys, but he added that what these might be was not known. As for breast cancer, the rise in tumors that are stimulated by estrogen, but not in those that do not respond to estrogen, "suggests that some hormonal factor may be involved," Dr. Fraumeni said. He listed as possible external influences the use of contraceptive and menopausal hormones and exposure to estrogen-like compounds in plants and to chlorinated hydrocarbons that act like estrogens. Still, the research team concluded, "Increasing exposure to general environmental hazards seems unlikely to have had a major impact on the overall trends in cancer rates." But the team added, "Rising rates for certain tumors have been clearly influenced by changing exposures to tobacco smoking, H.I.V. infection and sunlight." The researchers' analysis compared the number of cancer cases and deaths per 100,000 people in different age groups during two periods: 1975 through 1979 and 1987 through 1991. Although the data represent only those cancers that occurred among whites in this country, the researchers did examine rates in other groups and said, acknowledging some exceptions, | Cancer Cases Up, but Future Isn't Bleak |
740859_3 | that "patterns among blacks generally resembled those among whites." During the time span studied, cancer incidence, adjusted for age, rose by 18.6 percent among men and by 12.4 percent among women. Prostate cancer contributed most heavily to the increase in cancers among men. The researchers attributed all or nearly all of this rise to wider detection of early cancers through the treatment of benign prostate disease and the use of a highly sensitive blood test for prostate-specific antigen, or P.S.A. Other major contributors to the rise in cancers in men were non-Hodgkin's lymphoma and Kaposi's sarcoma in men with AIDS, and melanoma. Among young men, there was a rise in cancers of the oral cavity and throat, which might be related to their increased use of smokeless tobacco and alcohol. Among women, increased rates of breast and lung cancers accounted for the overwhelming majority of the rise in the incidence of cancer. The researchers said the ever-widening use of routine screening mammography was mainly responsible for the 30.1 percent rise in breast cancer incidence. Mammography is picking up many early cancers that might not have become clinically apparent for several years. Dr. Philip Cole, an epidemiologist at the University of Alabama School of Public Health who commented on the study in an editorial in the same issue of the journal, added that changes in reproductive habits, namely a tendency to delay childbearing and to have fewer children, were also likely factors in the rise in breast cancer. As for lung cancer, the researchers cited cigarette smoking as the main cause of the 65.3 percent increase in incidence in women. By contrast, lung cancer rose by only 2.5 percent in men, many more of whom have quit smoking in recent decades. As for cancers on the decline, the analysis showed that the largest decrease occurred for cancer of the uterus, a decline that the researchers related to the now-standard practice of adding progesterone to the estrogen used by millions postmenopausal women. Stomach cancer, which has been declining for decades, continued to fall, "most likely related to improvements in diet, including availability of fresh fruits and vegetables, better methods of food preservation," including refrigeration. They also cited a lowered prevalence of infection by Helicobacter pylori, the bacterium that is now known to cause ulcers and to play a role in stomach cancer. Based on this detailed look at the changing rates of | Cancer Cases Up, but Future Isn't Bleak |
740858_1 | the numbers of cancers of the breast, prostate and brain that are diagnosed. *Smoking, which has resulted in a rise in related cancers, especially lung cancer in women and bladder cancer in men. *Increased exposure to the sun, with an accompanying increase in melanomas. *The AIDS epidemic, which has led to a rise in cancers like non-Hodgkin's lymphoma and Kaposi's sarcoma. While the researchers found there was no reason to suspect that increases in common cancers like those of the breast and prostate are in any significant way the result of exposure to cancer-causing substances in the environment, they noted that for other cancers, "some trends remain unexplained and might reflect changing exposures to carcinogens yet to be identified and clarified." One of Dr. Devesa's co-authors, Dr. William J. Blot, an epidemiologist now working for the International Epidemiology Institute Inc., a research and consulting firm in Rockville, Md., said the rise in non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, the cancer that killed Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, while partly explained by its association with AIDS, was also possibly influenced by environmental exposures. But, he added in an interview, "lymphomas are relatively minor types of cancer." Another co-author, Dr. Joseph F. Fraumeni Jr., an epidemiologist at the cancer institute, said it was possible that environmental factors might be involved in increases in cancers of the brain, liver, testicles and kidneys, but he added that what these might be was not known. As for breast cancer, the rise in tumors that are stimulated by estrogen, but not in those that do not respond to estrogen, "suggests that some hormonal factor may be involved," Dr. Fraumeni said. He listed as possible external influences the use of contraceptive and menopausal hormones and exposure to estrogen-like compounds in plants and to chlorinated hydrocarbons that act like estrogens. Still, the research team concluded, "Increasing exposure to general environmental hazards seems unlikely to have had a major impact on the overall trends in cancer rates." But the team added, "Rising rates for certain tumors have been clearly influenced by changing exposures to tobacco smoking, H.I.V. infection and sunlight." The researchers' analysis compared the number of cancer cases and deaths per 100,000 people in different age groups during two periods: 1975 through 1979 and 1987 through 1991. Although the data represent only those cancers that occurred among whites in this country, the researchers did examine rates in other groups and said, acknowledging some exceptions, | Cancer Cases Up, but Future Isn't Bleak |
740858_3 | that "patterns among blacks generally resembled those among whites." During the time span studied, cancer incidence, adjusted for age, rose by 18.6 percent among men and by 12.4 percent among women. Prostate cancer contributed most heavily to the increase in cancers among men. The researchers attributed all or nearly all of this rise to wider detection of early cancers through the treatment of benign prostate disease and the use of a highly sensitive blood test for prostate-specific antigen, or P.S.A. Other major contributors to the rise in cancers in men were non-Hodgkin's lymphoma and Kaposi's sarcoma in men with AIDS, and melanoma. Among young men, there was a rise in cancers of the oral cavity and throat, which might be related to their increased use of smokeless tobacco and alcohol. Among women, increased rates of breast and lung cancers accounted for the overwhelming majority of the rise in the incidence of cancer. The researchers said the ever-widening use of routine screening mammography was mainly responsible for the 30.1 percent rise in breast cancer incidence. Mammography is picking up many early cancers that might not have become clinically apparent for several years. Dr. Philip Cole, an epidemiologist at the University of Alabama School of Public Health who commented on the study in an editorial in the same issue of the journal, added that changes in reproductive habits, namely a tendency to delay childbearing and to have fewer children, were also likely factors in the rise in breast cancer. As for lung cancer, the researchers cited cigarette smoking as the main cause of the 65.3 percent increase in incidence in women. By contrast, lung cancer rose by only 2.5 percent in men, many more of whom have quit smoking in recent decades. As for cancers on the decline, the analysis showed that the largest decrease occurred for cancer of the uterus, a decline that the researchers related to the now-standard practice of adding progesterone to the estrogen used by millions postmenopausal women. Stomach cancer, which has been declining for decades, continued to fall, "most likely related to improvements in diet, including availability of fresh fruits and vegetables, better methods of food preservation," including refrigeration. They also cited a lowered prevalence of infection by Helicobacter pylori, the bacterium that is now known to cause ulcers and to play a role in stomach cancer. Based on this detailed look at the changing rates of | Cancer Cases Up, but Future Isn't Bleak |
742802_2 | I saw were fairly current -- within the last two weeks -- and if I were young, mobile and willing to live in parts of the country where Starbuck's is never likely to open franchises, I might actually have some possibilities. There were some listings in my chosen field, Writing/Editing/Reporting/Narrating, as it is called in the data base. In sales and marketing, I could look at more than 100 listings; in health care, several hundred. If however, I wanted to go into the family business and become a longshore person or teamster, I would have to search elsewhere. A request for opportunities in the fields of "entertainment" or "amusement" inexplicably provided listings for a certified public accountant, a data security analyst, a powerbuilder and a phlebotomist, though, as we all remember, Nixon found nothing amusing or entertaining about phlebitis. ANY technological enhancement to the ads is strictly limited to the volume available in one place. Ad-speak survives: "Immediate opportunity in the public affairs area for a talented staff writer." An ad for a dental insurance company in Memphis notes that Memphis has many times been judged the "cleanest city in America." The ad fails to mention two important reasons why people do go to Memphis: Graceland and barbecue. Perhaps one of the great advantages of going on line in search of employment is the chance to stray. Looking for the interactive career counseling option, I inadvertently found the menu for discussion groups and ended up clicking my way down the cutting edge of interpersonal communication before returning to the Career Center. Back in the center, I opened windows on a formidable list of data bases, occupational surveys and files of advice, all of which seemed quite solid. Models of letters for every occasion -- cover, networking, post-interview thank you, post-rejection thank you -- manage to be obeisant without actually groveling. With my bad attitude toward on-line information somewhat shaken, I turned to Richard Nelson Bolles's new edition of "What Color Is Your Parachute" (Ten Speed Press, $14.95). The book is a sentimental favorite if only because I actually knew people who carved out career niches for themselves by following its advice. "Parachute" remains the most complete career guide around, even as the field has burgeoned in the quarter of a century since it was first published. With its inventories of interests, experience, achievements and goals and compendiums of advice, it | At Work; Stalking the Useful Career Guide |
742937_4 | to "return to the road of negotiations for a political solution." Where Mr. Salinas and Mr. Zedillo agreed on Chiapas, one official who has worked for both of them said, was that the problems created by the rebellion were far more political than military, and that the politics of the situation were changing. In the eight months after the uprising, Mr. Salinas has said he sought peace with the Zapatistas and then avoided a confrontation with them largely out of concern that they might be able to disrupt the August presidential election. Neither he nor Mr. Zedillo, however, questioned the Government's strategy of trying to isolate the rebels militarily and politically, ringing their relatively small swath of Chiapas with army troops and trying to erode their support by pouring money into public-works projects on the outskirts. During the nearly four-month interregnum, Mr. Zedillo sought repeatedly to resume peace talks, but was unsuccessful. Several officials have acknowledged that President Zedillo exaggerated the rebels' role in the capital flight that forced the Government to begin devaluing the peso on Dec. 20. But they said the rebels' marginal ability to unsettle foreign investors in Mexican securities with threats of new fighting did help convince Mr. Zedillo that the situation should be dealt with quickly. Having promised earlier that his patience would not be exhausted in Chiapas, Mr. Zedillo prefaced his announcement of the crackdown on Thursday by recounting a history of his frustration with the Zapatistas. Mr. Zedillo said the crackdown was intended to prevent imminent acts of violence by the Zapatistas, but he provided no details. The small arsenal of captured rebel weapons displayed on Friday did little to prove his assertion that they represented a serious threat. Although it was never clear why the Government would withhold information about the identities of Marcos and other rebels, a few Mexican and American officials said as early as last summer that the Government was relatively sure of who they are. On Friday, however, several officials insisted they had only grown certain of that information as a result of recent intelligence. Some aides to Mr. Zedillo acknowledged that his own troubles -- the economic crisis, the unraveling political agreement, an uproar in his party over his private deal with the leftist opposition to settle a disputed election in the southern state of Tabasco -- had figured in his strategy. After being widely criticized as | Behind Mexico's Harder Line On Rebels, a Political Shift |
742947_1 | three Peruvian attack jets and a helicopter Friday afternoon, Peru's President acknowledged today. "Yesterday, we lost two Sukhoi, one A-37 and a helicopter," Alberto K. Fujimori, told foreign correspondents gathered at the Presidential Palace here. Peru's President said that one Sukhoi pilot and the two-man crew of the A-37 successfully ejected over the rain forest and were rescued by Peruvian troops. Peru's President, who is personally directing the 17-day-old border conflict with Ecuador, said he did not know the fate of the missing crew members. So far, both sides admit to casualties totaling 47 dead and 94 wounded. The loss of the aircraft, which have a replacement cost of about $13 million, comes as Peru has stepped up a bombing campaign on Tiwinza, an Ecuadorean hilltop military base. Reinforcing Peru's offensive, heavy artillery and armored units rumbled out of Lima's Rimac Fort on Friday and drove up the Panamerican Highway to northern Peru. In Quito, Ecuador's Defense Minister, Jose Gallardo, warned today at a news conference: "We believe this is the prelude to a large-scale attack. Peruvian Air Force started yesterday to use high-power bombs to soften our positions." Powerful explosives are carving pockmarks in the jungle around Tiwinza with 15-yard-wide craters, the Ecuadoreans say. Further heating up the fighting, Ecuadorean pilots flew bombing missions on Friday against Peruvian units that are slowly working their way up the swampy valley of the Cenepa River. Peru and Ecuador are estimated to have 4,000 soldiers in the area. In the Brazilian capital, Brasilia, peace talks continued fruitlessly today, and human rights leaders called for "a humanitarian truce" to recover bodies from the battlefield. "There are dozens of cadavers exposed in the jungle climate of 100-degree temperatures and 80 percent average humidity, which accelerates decomposition, raising the threat of epidemics," said Juan de Dios Parra, general secretary of the Latin American Association for Human Rights, an independent group based in Quito. He appealed to the United Nations and to the Organization of American States to push for a halt in the fighting. But President Fujimori rejected cease-fire calls this week, saying they were "distraction tactics" by Ecuador to consolidate its "intrusions" in Peruvian territory. On Friday night, Ecuador's Government accepted a cease-fire mediation offer made by former President Jimmy Carter, and by Oscar Arias Sanchez, a former Costa Rican president and a Nobel Peace Prize winner. Peru has not commented on the offer. | Ecuador and Peru Trade Air Strikes Along Border |
743009_1 | at formal negotiating sessions that are to include all the parties in the North, including Sinn Fein, the political wing of the Irish Republican Army. The peace effort is now moving in two sets of meetings, one called "exploratory talks" between officials of Sinn Fein and British civil servants, the second between Dublin and London. Ten days ago both sets were briefly snagged when details of the Irish-British plan were leaked to The Times of London, detonating waves of outrage from Northern Protestant leaders, who want the British province of Ulster to remain British, and saw in the disclosures plans to subsume the province into a united Ireland, the ultimate goal of the I.R.A. Both Prime Ministers assured them that no proposals for cross-border institutions would be imposed on them, that they would have a veto and that anything approved by officials would have to be submitted to a referendum. But the disclosures impelled two feuding northern Protestant-dominated parties -- the moderate Ulster Unionists of James Molyneaux and the Democratic Unionists led by the hard-line evangelist, the Rev. Ian Paisley -- to lay aside their differences and begin to form a united front to oppose what they deplore in the upcoming plan. In this plan, the differences between Ireland and Britain are serious, although officials on both sides say the differences can be smoothed. One problem is the Irish constitutional claim to sovereignty in the North and the corresponding British law that partitioned Ireland in 1922. More difficult to resolve has been what kind of cross-border institutions will be proposed to bring North and South closer politically and economically. In the Sinn Fein talks in Belfast with British civil servants, one sticking point has been the British demand that substantial progress be made in disarming the I.R.A. before Sinn Fein is allowed to take part in formal negotiations. The disarmament issue appeared to be at an impasse on Thursday as the two sides prepared to meet in Belfast. But any crisis was postponed when Sinn Fein announced it had found evidence of electronic surveillance in one of the rooms it used for private meetings during recesses. The British denied that they had been doing any bugging, but began an investigation that delayed the talks. The president of Sinn Fein, Gerry Adams, said he wanted to resume the talks soon, and Sinn Fein and the British were discussing a new date. | British and Irish Chiefs to Meet on Peace Plan |
745147_0 | State Comptroller H. Carl McCall said yesterday that the construction of New York City's third water tunnel, the largest capital project in the state, had been beset by mismanagement, citing a lack of competitive bidding on materials and millions of dollars spent on items not related to the project. In an audit released yesterday, Mr. McCall said mismanagement of the huge project -- which is to carry water to the city from a reservoir in Valhalla, N.Y., and is intended to supplement two existing water conduits -- would cost New York City taxpayers millions of dollars. "This is the most expensive capital project the city has ever undertaken and is vital to the city," Mr. McCall said. "The main problem is that it is not being managed well," he added. "If the city Department of Environmental Protection does not do a better job adhering to some of the guidelines on how a city project should be managed, it will be even more costly to the city." Speaking to reporters at a press conference in City Hall, Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani discounted the Comptroller's audit, saying the four-year period reviewed in the report ended before his administration came to office. "My reaction is that, if the Comptroller takes a good look at the report, he might want to change his endorsement in the last election," he said of Mr. McCall, a Democrat who supported Mayor David N. Dinkins. Mr. McCall's report said that since 1977, the city had purchased a specialized cement used in the concrete for the tunnel from just one supplier, without competitive bidding. Competitive bidding on that item is essential, he said, because concrete accounts for a third of the nearly $6 billion cost of the project. "Without competition, vendors have little incentive to improve their service," Mr. McCall said. The report also said that the agency purchased televisions and video equipment for three times the price charged for such items in consumer electronics stores. It also said that $3.3 million from the project's capital budget was actually spent for operating expenses, a violation of city budget rules. The current Commissioner of Environmental Protection, Marilyn Gelber, who was appointed by Mayor Giuliani, acknowledged that there had been problems in the management of the project. "In hindsight, looking back at some of the things that were done four and five years ago, he may be correct," she said. "We | Audit Cites Mismanagement In Water Tunnel Project |
745024_0 | The tough, muscular characters in Lee Tamahori's ferocious "Once Were Warriors" are primed for fighting. And they need no battlefield: their hostilities are played out in the bedroom, in front of the children or in crowded bars. In his visceral first feature, Mr. Tamahori offers social realism with a savage kick, depicting Maori New Zealanders whose ties to their own history have been destroyed. Left floundering in an inhospitable urban world, they have lost touch with their tribal past to become part of a rootless global subculture. The misery seen here would be familiar anywhere. Having said he hoped to make a film that would stand viewers' hair on end, Mr. Tamahori fully realizes that goal. "Once Were Warriors," a tale of vicious brawls within the family of Beth Heke (Rena Owen) and her belligerent husband, Jake (Temuera Morrison), is a brutally effective family drama. Rough around the edges and crudely obvious at times, it still presents a raw, disturbing story of domestic strife. Only when he tries to look on the bright side does Mr. Tamahori sound false notes. Both this film's stars are frighteningly credible, in part because they both look like pure sinew and brawn. Beth has long tied herself to a violently abusive husband, but "Once Were Warriors" makes it clear that she is not simply a victim. Ms. Owen, a fiery actress with the sad, sensual look of a hard-knocks Jeanne Moreau, radiates a physical vitality that makes sense of this union. Against her better judgment, Beth falls for Jake's swagger even while she recoils from his bullying cruelty. Jake sports the tattoos, black leather and heavy musculature that make most of the film's characters resemble members of a biker gang. There's something poignant about their need to dress interchangeably and look fierce in this way. The film's male characters are drawn together in boozy solidarity, grasping for the collective identity that vanished with their Maori tribal life. When Jake brings home his drunken buddies for middle-of-the-night parties in the Heke household, the revelers sing together as if they were gathered around a campfire, wishing for a fellowship that no longer exists in their everyday lives. Behavior within this group is ritualized and sharply divided along male and female lines. While the men brawl heartily and glower at their women, the women are meant to stand by admiringly and gossip about the men's sexual prowess. | For a Family, the War at Home |
745066_0 | Behind the bluster and the pages and pages of legalisms rained down on Belfast this week was a crucial question that has never before been posed to this divided island: do the people of Northern Ireland want to remain citizens of Britain or create a new united Ireland? It was presented as a choice, but it was clear from the language of the document, and the words of Prime Ministers John Major of Britain and John Bruton of Ireland, that the leaders were pushing for changes that would bring Ireland and Northern Ireland economically and politically closer. According to the plan, referendums in both places would eventually decide how close, if at all. The leaders seemed to believe that the two tracks of the peace effort could be kept alive, both with Protestant leaders who want to remain part of Britain, and with officials of Sinn Fein, the political wing of the Irish Republican Army, which wants a united Ireland. The hurdles, as Mr. Major calls them, are formidable. But, he said on Wednesday: "The unimaginable of two years ago has been achieved. The unimaginable of two years ahead must now be begun." How soon a decision might be made, if ever, is still far from certain. It will depend on whether the British and Irish leaders can keep the peace effort moving and on what the politicians in Northern Ireland feel their constituencies want them to do. The British Government is making available here tens of thousands of copies of the 58 proposals, known as "A New Framework for Agreement." But no polls have been taken since the document was presented on Wednesday, and random interviews on street corners indicate that most people have not yet digested it. Irish and British officials, and prominent people not involved in the peace effort, say all their contacts with ordinary Protestants in Northern Ireland indicate that they want their leaders to keep talking, to avoid a resumption of violence. In the Irish Republic, no opposition to the framework has surfaced. The Protestant leaders have toned down their threats to walk away from the peace effort and the framework. Tonight they resumed their threats to bring down Mr. Major's Government by using their votes in Parliament, a movement that could solidify, possibly in a debate next week. They have agreed to continue meeting with Mr. Major and other officials to discuss proposals of | The Hidden Question; Beyond the Northern Ireland Framework, What Do Ordinary People in Ulster Want? |
741639_0 | Confronted with the expectation that the world's population will grow by at least 2 billion people in the next two decades and the reality that demands for basic foods are already outstripping supply, international experts will meet in Switzerland on Thursday to discuss urgently needed advances in agricultural technology. "Unless there is a major investment in transforming technology, we are in for very severe problems," said Ismail Serageldin, the World Bank's vice president for environmentally sustainable development and the chairman of its Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research, which called the meeting. According to the World Bank, 700 million of the world's 5.6 billion people now face endemic hunger not caused by natural disasters, which in most years add millions more to the numbers of underfed and undernourished people. Most of the perennially hungry are in India and sub-Saharan Africa, Dr. Serageldin said. Although there have been large increases in crop yields over the last 25 years for many basic grain, root, fruit and legume crops, scientists have found that the per-capita output of food has leveled off or dropped in some critical regions of Africa and Asia, where the population growth is fastest. Countries with already unhealthy balance-of-payment gaps are having to import more food. Land has been degraded in many areas, often because of inefficient or poorly maintained irrigation systems. Nearly three-quarters of the world's fresh water now flows into irrigation, Dr. Serageldin said. "Whether we stabilize the population at 8.5 billion rather than 10 or 12 billion in the next century, the pressures are coming," Dr. Serageldin, a development expert from Egypt, said. "We will have two billion more in the next 20 years no matter what, and 95 percent of them will be in the poorest countries." Dr. Serageldin said that population, poverty and the environment cannot be considered without including agriculture. He said that environmentalists traditionally thought of agriculture as "the enemy" because farmers chopped down forests and added pesticides and fertilizers to earth and water. "They were right," he said, but he added that there is no way to protect the environment unless great strides are made in agriculture and farmers are able to grow more on the land they have or can reclaim. The World Bank's concern with stagnating or dwindling food production is shared by the independent Worldwatch Institute, based in Washington, which just published its 1995 State of the World report. | Experts Focus On Stagnating Food Supplies |
741761_0 | THERE is good news for air passengers yearning to breathe free. Mexico, yielding to pressure from the United States, is dropping its requirement that the cabins of arriving planes be sprayed with insecticide. This means that at least 5.1 million air passengers who travel there each year from the United States -- the total is for 1993, the most recent year available -- will no longer be subjected to the insecticide d-phenothrin before they land. Mexico said its own airlines would act immediately and foreign lines would be notified promptly. Secretary of Transportation Federico F. Pena said he was pleased with the step, announced Jan. 19. He has been pressing for elimination of all cabin spraying, asserting it is a danger to the health of passengers with breathing problems or chemical sensitivities. Mexico is by far the most popular destination for United States travelers among the seven that have now dropped spraying. It ranks third in passengers, behind Canada and Britain, among all countries served by flights from the United States. Jamaica, another country that has dropped the requirement, is also a big tourist destination, the eighth in terms of passengers from the United States, with some million annually. The other countries that have taken similar action are El Salvador, Chile, Cape Verde, St. Lucia and Belize. Of these, only El Salvador and Chile rank among the top 50 destinations for United States passengers. According to Arnold G. Konheim, a policy expert in the department on safety, environment and security, 18 countries say they still require spraying while passengers are aboard: Argentina, Antigua and Barbuda, Barbados, Congo, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, Grenada, India, Kenya, Kiribati, Madagascar, Mauritius, Mozambique, New Caldedonia, Nicaragua, Seychelles, Trinidad and Tobago and Yemen. Of these countries, Antigua and Barbuda, Argentina, Barbados, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic and Trinidad and Tobago rank among the top 50 in air traffic from the United States. In addition, Mr. Konheim said, Australia, New Zealand, Panama and Fiji require spraying but allow it to be done while the planes are empty. In this case, a long-lasting spray, permethrin, is used, every six to eight weeks. But, Mr. Konheim said, the status of all countries is not known because some have not responded to the survey, sent last March to all 165 countries the United States recognizes. Mr. Konheim said 88 countries had replied, some after two additional requests. Among those | Clearing the Air A Bit in the Skies |
741477_0 | Because of recent bomb threats, airlines have tightened security measures at about three dozen airports in east Asia, resulting in delays of up to one to two hours or more for travelers flying to and from that region. The heightened security for an indefinite period that was imposed by the Federal Aviation Administration on Jan. 10 includes searches of passengers and their baggage. Airlines are also telling travelers that most containers they are carrying containing more than one ounce of liquid, aerosol or gel will be confiscated because bombs disguised in such containers are hard to detect. Airports affected by the heightened security include those in Tokyo, Manila, Singapore, Bangkok and Taipei. The extra security measures were prompted by a report from Philippine police in January that they had raided an apartment in Manila earlier and found materials used to build bombs as well as evidence of a plan to put bombs on United States carriers. Two planes flown by United Airlines were also recently ordered to land before reaching their destinations because of bomb scares. A flight from Tokyo to Honolulu was ordered back to Japan, and a flight from Los Angeles to Hong Kong was ordered to land. In December, an explosive device that went off aboard a Philippine Airlines flight killed a Japanese tourist and injured several others. ADAM BRYANT TRAVEL ADVISORY | Airlines Tighten East Asian Security |
741571_0 | H ELMUT NEWTON has prided himself on being the bad boy of American fashion photography since the 70's, when he spread androgyny, lesbianism and sexually voracious women across the pages of Vogue. He has had plenty of company in the interval and this month has finally met his match on the score of outrageousness and misogyny -- not another photographer but designers of shoes. His pictures in the current Vogue of shoes with heels high enough to alarm an orthopedist show a model in a wheelchair, then on steel crutches with two men assisting her, then in teensy shorts and a leg brace that looks like a high-tech scaffold to straighten the Leaning Tower of Pisa. In other pictures she appears to be uninjured, but considering the difficulty of maneuvering in such shoes, she probably won't stay that way for long. Mr. Newton is a high-heel fetishist in, so to speak, good standing. For years his models have favored maximal heels and minimal clothing, so he must have been a natural to pitch thousand-dollar Chanel stiletto slingbacks, chunky platforms (ideal for the vertically challenged) and a spiky "dominatrix-worthy shoe" by Manolo Blahnik. Vogue says this season's "strong, seductive woman" becomes in Newton's hands "a towering symbol of the new femininity." How clever of him to make her frail; no one likes women too strong. How charmingly perverse to equip her with steely medical accessories. The medical bit has been broached by Mr. Newton before -- lots of times, at least in his books. Maybe he is repeating himself because he has caught the rage for recycling, or perhaps he has gone post-modern, appropriating his own ideas. "Sleepless Nights" (1978) had several women -- including Paloma Picasso -- in elaborate neck and torso harnesses, all of which obligingly left their breasts exposed. It's just so hard to shock these days, when the current cover of The Village Voice carries a photograph of a naked woman's nether parts with a tampon string hanging down. At least Mr. Newton displays a semblance of humor, however warped, by dressing women who can't walk in shoes they can't walk in. He also photographs a model in a skirt slit to the waist (that ought to get their attention) who has only one leg; the second one stands on its own beside her (which ought to get their attention, too). The designers under consideration could never | Newton Still in a Heel Period |
741737_0 | "SHOW BUSINESS," AN OLD Hollywood saw has it, "is high school with money." In an industry motored by equal parts ego, envy and status lust, a Hollywood player's coffer has always been of interest to voyeurs of excess. But now wages for stars and studio bosses have spiraled toward the gross national products of several small underdeveloped countries, and fiscal unreality has percolated down to the screen itself. Story lines feature sums of money that have no more connection to life as most people know it than do space aliens or fairy godmothers. In "Shallow Grave," a thriller set in Scotland that will open on Friday, three young professionals sharing an apartment in Edinburgh find a suitcase gorged with $:50 notes in the room of a new flatmate who has died. The remaining roommates, who are best friends, decide to dispose of the body and keep the cash. But friendships perish under the weight of the apparently huge amount of money. Initially, perhaps in keeping with the current fiscal unreality, the film's director, Danny Boyle, had asked his props people to mock up $:2.5 million (roughly $4 million) in $:50 notes. "They started," he said; "then they told me they'd need a small lavatory to hold it all. So we decided to leave it unspecified." The boldest recent statement of the new economic idiocy may be "Dumb and Dumber," a box-office smash about two quarter-wits, Lloyd (played by Jim Carrey) and Harry (Jeff Daniels), who stumble upon a briefcase filled with ransom money. Giddy, Lloyd pays $250,000 in cash for a Lamborghini and hands out clumps of currency for tips. When he is moved to tears, he dries his eyes with crumpled $100 bills. No one, of course, wants cinema verite from a master of slapstick like Mr. Carrey. But whereas film makers used to bow to how money was actually used, more recent Hollywood story lines seem based on Life, the old Milton Bradley board game designed to mirror daily living, except that participants played with fistfuls of $100,000 bills, each bearing a picture of Art Linkletter. While current F.B.I. statistics show that the average bank robbery yields only $3,039, no self-respecting heist movie would dare offer such stakes. In Hollywood the yardstick most often used is the $640 million in negotiable bearer bonds sought by the bad guys in "Die Hard," the 1988 thriller starring Bruce Willis. "Ever | What Hollywood Doesn't Know About Money |
740941_0 | Prospects for peace negotiations in Northern Ireland hit a snag today when details of a British-Irish plan to guide the talks were leaked to the press and published, provoking a storm of protest from unionist politicians of Ulster. The Protestant unionists, who want Northern Ireland to remain part of Britain, said the plan went too far in giving the Irish republic a role in running the affairs of the six counties of the north. In particular, they objected to a proposed joint north-south Irish authority that would have strong executive powers in certain areas and would deal directly with the European Union. To the unionists, this was too large a concession and it conjured up the slippery slope that is their ultimate nightmare, a trail of events leading to Irish unification. The publication of key sections of the draft document in The Times of London turned into a sudden crisis for the Government of Prime Minister John Major and threatened the delicate, 13-month search for a way out of 25 years of sectarian conflict in Northern Ireland. "If this document were agreed by the British Government it will be regarded as a sellout," said David Trimble, a Member of Parliament from the dominant and moderate Ulster Unionist Party. "It is completely unacceptable to unionists." Mr. Trimble said the unionists might not only refuse to join in negotiations on Northern Ireland, but they might also withdraw their support from the Conservative Government in Westminster, reducing Mr. Major's working majority in Parliament into a minority. The gravity of the response to the report was signaled by a special debate this afternoon in the House of Commons and by a televised address by the Prime Minister this evening. In his five-minute speech tonight, Mr. Major pleaded with the people of Northern Ireland not to jeopardize hopes for peace that have been raised by nearly six months without violence. He said talks with Dublin were continuing and promised that there was nothing to fear because "nothing is going to be imposed on Northern Ireland." "The Government is working for a peaceful future in Northern Ireland," Mr. Major said. "Tonight I ask for time, and I ask for trust and I promise to pursue a lasting peace." Throughout the day, the Government was trying to put out fires ignited by the unionists, who represent the province's 950,000 Protestant majority. Government officials pointed out that the | A Leak in Ulster Peace Plan Stirs a Storm |
742170_1 | in Burundi there is no life for Burundians," said Aly Wood, the co-director of the Goodall Institute, "The Kibira is its own watershed. Without it there is no rain, no water, no crops, no life. We have to start teaching this in first grade." Though the Government says it is committed to forest conservation, it is hardly functioning, Western diplomats here say. Indeed, there seems little chance that conservation efforts will get a high priority in a country teetering on the brink of civil war. The opposition, dominated by the minority Tutsi tribe, is demanding the overthrow of the Government, which is led by a member of the Hutu majority. Tensions here in the capital were palpable today, the eve of a general strike in which opposition militants plan to set up barricades in an effort to paralyze the city. Hundreds of thousands of refugees from last year's blood bath in Rwanda, now living in camps in northern Burundi, have compounded the deforestation problem, felling trees for firewood. But even in quieter times, the environmental pressures on Burundi have been relentless. With more than 260 people per square mile, Burundi is the second most densely populated country in Africa. More than 90 percent of Burundians are farmers, and they have been cutting away at the forest to increase their land. Officials here say the symbiotic relationship between animal, forest and human is often lost on the mostly uneducated Burundian farmers. Many of the farmers see the animals as predators that destroy their crops, and they are unaware of the importance of a watershed. Ms. Wood says that forest preservation must evolve as a grass-roots effort, emphasizing education. But much of what the Goodall Institute wants to do looks like a wish list. The institute, founded in 1989 by Jane Goodall, the renowned naturalist who has devoted her career to studying chimpanzees, wants to create a controlled habitat in the forest for the chimpanzees here, a place where visitors can go to see the chimpanzees, as with the lowland mountain gorillas is Rwanda and Zaire. But it has a minuscule budget of $35,000 a year. It barely manages to support its 20 Burundian employees, feed its chimpanzees and maintain two vehicles and two houses. Until mighty feats of fund-raising and political transformation are achieved, the institute has the sad task of caring for its orphaned chimps. In a walled-in courtyard, the | Bujumbura Journal; In the Chimps' Sad Fate Is an Omen for Burundi |
742170_2 | than 90 percent of Burundians are farmers, and they have been cutting away at the forest to increase their land. Officials here say the symbiotic relationship between animal, forest and human is often lost on the mostly uneducated Burundian farmers. Many of the farmers see the animals as predators that destroy their crops, and they are unaware of the importance of a watershed. Ms. Wood says that forest preservation must evolve as a grass-roots effort, emphasizing education. But much of what the Goodall Institute wants to do looks like a wish list. The institute, founded in 1989 by Jane Goodall, the renowned naturalist who has devoted her career to studying chimpanzees, wants to create a controlled habitat in the forest for the chimpanzees here, a place where visitors can go to see the chimpanzees, as with the lowland mountain gorillas is Rwanda and Zaire. But it has a minuscule budget of $35,000 a year. It barely manages to support its 20 Burundian employees, feed its chimpanzees and maintain two vehicles and two houses. Until mighty feats of fund-raising and political transformation are achieved, the institute has the sad task of caring for its orphaned chimps. In a walled-in courtyard, the younger chimpanzees play, scream at intruders and climb on any visitor who gets too close. But the 10 adults and five adolescents are either caged or chained. All of the chimpanzees in the compound were captured in the wild as infants, when they are easily sold as cute, cuddly pets. But when they grow into adults they can be dangerous. Adult males weigh about 110 pounds, can easily rip flesh with their canine teeth and have the strength of five men, the institute's workers say. Like Bahati, who now runs to hug every visitor, the other chimpanzees here have sad pasts. Fifteen-year-old Poco spent 10 years in a cage over a mechanic's shop, placed there to attract business, before he was handed over to the institute. Uruhara, 5, was so neglected and malnourished that he had lost almost all of his hair. Akela, 6, was handed over by the owner of a local hotel five years ago, along with three other chimpanzees that he kept in cages to amuse the guests. Ms. Wood said the institute was trying to raise money to ship the adult chimps under its care to Kenya, where they would live in a large controlled habitat | Bujumbura Journal; In the Chimps' Sad Fate Is an Omen for Burundi |
744921_0 | Computer security officials issued a warning yesterday to hundreds of thousands of Internet network administrators, alerting them to a potentially serious flaw in a program used to handle electronic mail sent by millions of people each day on the global network. If exploited by skilled programmers, the flaw in a program called Sendmail could be used to gain unauthorized access to computers, read electronic mail, erase or modify sensitive files and remotely set off rogue programs that would give the programmers control over the computers. Sendmail is one of the most popular programs used on the several million "hub" computers that route electronic mail for Internet users. "There is tremendous potential for people to exploit it," said Barbara Fraser, senior member of the coordination center of the Computer Emergency Response Team in Pittsburgh. The group is an international agency that is partly financed by the Federal Government. Ms. Fraser said computer companies were working quickly to create software "patches" to fix the flaw in Sendmail. Many patches have already been put in place, she said. Previous versions of Sendmail have been targets of computer hackers, but Ms. Fraser said the new flaw, which was discovered only recently, could affect "anybody running any version of Sendmail." | Internet Warning Is Issued |
744843_1 | its constitutional claim to sovereignty over the North. Both Prime Ministers emphasized that those two proposals were a good starting point toward a political agreement to end a conflict that has killed more than 3,100 people since 1969, when the Irish Republican Army opened its violent campaign to end British rule of Northern Ireland. A cease-fire has been in effect since Sept. 1. But the Rev. Ian Paisley, the hard-line leader of the Democratic Unionist Party, warned today that his supporters would "break this conspiracy you have hatched against them." His deputy, Peter Robinson, said that "when you lick away the sugar coating," the framework for talks "then leads to a united Ireland." Ken Maginnis, of the moderate Ulster Unionist Party, said the approach sent an implicit message to the I.R.A.: "When you go back to your guns, don't bomb London." The response from leaders of Sinn Fein, the political wing of the predominantly Catholic I.R.A., was muted, although the Sinn Fein leader, Gerry Adams, described the document's "ethos" as "one Ireland and an all-Ireland arrangement." But Sinn Fein officials said the party would not formally comment on the framework until after its annual conference in Dublin next weekend. Analysts said the I.R.A. political wing was trying to avoid the impression of gloating over provisions that pleased them, particularly the use of the term "sovereign united Ireland" in the context of a proposal. A united Ireland is the ultimate goal of the I.R.A. and the ultimate abomination for the Unionist leaders. About 60 percent of Northern Ireland's 1.6 million people are Protestants, and polls indicate that most consider themselves British. Both Prime Ministers said that despite unionist opposition, prospects were improving for formal negotiations involving their governments and all the northern parties including Sinn Fein. Asked at a news conference what the odds were for such negotiations, Mr. Major said, "I'm not a bookmaker, but they're improving." Later, speaking of the five-month-old cease-fire and the accelerated peace effort, he said: "The unimaginable of two years ago has been achieved. The unimaginable of two years ahead must now be begun." Mr. Bruton commented that "I'd say the odds are about 5 to 1" in favor of full-fledged talks, adding, "It's very likely that we will see that happening." Ireland's Foreign Minister, Dick Spring, said: "It's going to happen. For every of day of peace the chances get better." A British official | Britain and Ireland Issue a Plan for Full Talks on Ulster |
744908_3 | its own demise," said Sister Elizabeth Johnson, also of the St. Joseph order, commenting on the richness of the modern nun's life even as it fades. A professor at Fordham University, she was one of the first female theologians permitted to receive a doctorate by the church authorities in the liberalization decrees that capped the Second Vatican Council three decades ago with an often traumatic wave of change. But in the view of another pioneer nun theologian, Sister Sandra Schneiders, those changes may have helped undo the real anomaly of the modern nunnery, "the false inflation" of vocations from the 1950's and 60's, when tens of thousands of Catholic girls entered the sisterhood. Sister Sandra is a professor at the Jesuit School of Theology in Berkeley, Calif., who finds the novice shrinkage normal, not troubling, in the church's larger historical pattern, in part because so many options beyond the traditional sisterhood have opened for religiously inclined women in a church increasingly short of male clerics. "To me the present situation is the more normal one," said Sister Sandra, who has spent 40 years as a member of the Immaculate Heart of Mary order of Monroe, Mich. "One reason why it looks disastrous is because we're still thinking of the ministry of religion being the staffing of large enterprises." Some younger women are church rectors or wives of the new generation of married deacons, jointly involved in executive parish roles. Some are free to be canonical lawyers. One sister, Gloria Garcia, is a civil executive at the United Nations. "The religious life has always been meant to be countercultural and prophetic," Sister Elizabeth said. Sister Sandra added, however, that she constantly met gifted young women who seemed perfect for the changing sisterhood, but were repelled by a sense of sexism and "institutional oppression" in the church. "They'll say, 'I'd love to be a Sister of Mercy, but I don't want to publicly be a Roman Catholic,' " Sister Sandra said. "The only way to change this is to address the oppression." Sister Elaine, for all her feminist dedication, worries that there will not be enough hands-on nuns when the suffering and the poor cry out for help. "The idea of sisterhood means so much to me, especially when I hear my black women friends talk of being 'sisters,' " she said. "I pray in the chapel every morning from 4 to | Still Married to Christ, and Never Happier; As Fewer Women Become Nuns, Sisters Say the Calling's Rewards Have Expanded |
744990_3 | Chrysler donation of $30,000 for the fall 1994 term supported a student project critiqued by Chrysler's design team three times, the final time at the end of the semester, in mid-December. Chrysler's investments apparently pay off: 30 of the 300 members of its design team are graduates of the center. This project called for students to design cars for use in Russia, China or Brazil. They had to take into account the country's geography, climate, average family size and income, highway system and number of gasoline stations, among other things. The Chrysler designers were looking for projects that were visionary rather than for designs that would actually go into production. "We don't want students to undercut the fees of design professionals or be 'work for hire,' " said Tim Butte, director of corporate relations at the college. "We sponsor projects to educate the students, not to find marketable designs." David Brown, president of the college, put it another way: "A car is so complex and such a high risk that the notion a student idea will take the world by storm is romantic. It doesn't happen." For her part, Ms. Colet would have been happy just to win the applause of the Chrysler designers. After all, she was up against some stiff competition. Toby Gillies, 25, for instance. In Mr. Gillies's vision, Brazilians would be able to make do-it-yourself cars out of precut aluminum sheets and put them together, paper-doll fashion, with tabs and slits. Plastic doors would be made out of recycled material. Such a car would "put the people to work, and keep the car light," Mr. Gillies said. Customers would order parts from a central plant -- frames, engines, precut sheets and plastic fabrics -- and assemble the pieces at home. The cost: $4,000 a car. The Chrysler representatives were delighted with his project. Or Jean-Pierre Durand, 25, who offered the "Chibo," a multipurpose, six-seat vehicle that could be a taxi, a pickup truck or a boutique-on-wheels. Or Peter Carris, 28, whose amphibious car would take advantage of the many rivers and coastal waterways of Brazil as well as stand up to its rough and rugged roads. Price: $6,000. Or Nicolas Garfias, 26, who presented a flexible car with a metal trunk that flipped up and a pleated fabric top that rolled down for easy loading -- of surfboards, for example. "It doesn't look like anything on | The Cars Supply The Drive |
742683_0 | In 1993, when the United States Navy reversed its policy of banning women from serving on combat ships, it moved into uncharted territory. The questions flew: Would women and men living in close quarters for long stretches lower or lift morale? Would they distract each other from their duties and interfere with readiness? Then a seeming epidemic of shipboard pregnancies, beginning with a 10 percent pregnancy rate among the women on a supply ship during the Persian Gulf war, set off more alarms. Some guidelines were clearly needed. Navy Secretary John Dalton took an important step this week by issuing a sensible policy on pregnancy. For a Navy trying to overcome a dismal record on gender issues, painfully illustrated by the Tailhook scandal, the policy required a delicate exercise to balance practicality and sensitivity in dealing with pregnant sailors. The brass had to decide several issues: whether such sailors should immediately be put ashore, be censured or punished if unmarried, receive lighter duties, be under suspicion of using pregnancy as an excuse to get ashore, and, if ashore, whether they should continue to live in barracks. The ban on sex between people serving on ships remains, but shipboard pregnancy will generally not be seen as evidence of wrongdoing, since most sailors have frequent shore leaves. The new policy acknowledges that most pregnant women are able to perform most daily functions well, but may also have special needs. Rather than seeing those needs as a burden, the Navy offers unequivocal support to pregnant sailors. It assures them full access to obstetric care, promises a return after pregnancy to the same or equivalent duties, and instructs that pregnancy absences or restricted duties "shall not be the basis for downgrading marks or adverse comments." The policy also demands assessments of the actual effect of pregnancy on sailors' assignments. A Navy spokesman says that since last October, five of the 500 women on board the aircraft carrier Eisenhower have left due to pregnancy, and that out of a total crew of 5,000, such a number has no effect on the ship's readiness. Secretary Dalton is to be commended for demanding some facts to go on for the future, and for creating reasonable conditions for women. It is a pleasing turnabout for the Navy. | Sailing Into Motherhood |
742684_0 | In 1993, when the United States Navy reversed its policy of banning women from serving on combat ships, it moved into uncharted territory. The questions flew: Would women and men living in close quarters for long stretches lower or lift morale? Would they distract each other from their duties and interfere with readiness? Then a seeming epidemic of shipboard pregnancies, beginning with a 10 percent pregnancy rate among the women on a supply ship during the Persian Gulf war, set off more alarms. Some guidelines were clearly needed. Navy Secretary John Dalton took an important step this week by issuing a sensible policy on pregnancy. For a Navy trying to overcome a dismal record on gender issues, painfully illustrated by the Tailhook scandal, the policy required a delicate exercise to balance practicality and sensitivity in dealing with pregnant sailors. The brass had to decide several issues: whether such sailors should immediately be put ashore, be censured or punished if unmarried, receive lighter duties, be under suspicion of using pregnancy as an excuse to get ashore, and, if ashore, whether they should continue to live in barracks. The ban on sex between people serving on ships remains, but shipboard pregnancy will generally not be seen as evidence of wrongdoing, since most sailors have frequent shore leaves. The new policy acknowledges that most pregnant women are able to perform most daily functions well, but may also have special needs. Rather than seeing those needs as a burden, the Navy offers unequivocal support to pregnant sailors. It assures them full access to obstetric care, promises a return after pregnancy to the same or equivalent duties, and instructs that pregnancy absences or restricted duties "shall not be the basis for downgrading marks or adverse comments." The policy also demands assessments of the actual effect of pregnancy on sailors' assignments. A Navy spokesman says that since last October, five of the 500 women on board the aircraft carrier Eisenhower have left due to pregnancy, and that out of a total crew of 5,000, such a number has no effect on the ship's readiness. Secretary Dalton is to be commended for demanding some facts to go on for the future, and for creating reasonable conditions for women. It is a pleasing turnabout for the Navy. | Sailing Into Motherhood |
744672_0 | The Outboard Marine Corporation replaced its chairman, chief executive and president today, abruptly ending James C. Chapman's tumultuous five year's at Outboard's helm. Succeeding Mr. Chapman is Harry W. Bowman, a top Whirlpool Corporation executive with a strong marketing background. Mr. Chapman had downsized Outboard, which makes Johnson and Evinrude engines and a variety of fishing and leisure boats, and invested heavily in the development of new technology and products. But the company has been losing market share to its main rival, the Brunswick Corporation, and profits have been falling below Wall Street's expectations. Outboard's stock has been hovering around $20, less than half its 1989 peak of $46, even though the boating industry is in the midst of a strong recovery. Mr. Bowman, who is 51, denied that he had made complete control a condition for taking the job. The decision to give him "a clear field" from the outset was driven by the board and Mr. Chapman stepped down voluntarily, Ronald C. Kuykendall, a company spokesman, said. "I will be consulting with both Mr. Chapman and Charles Strang," said Mr. Bowman, referring to Mr. Chapman's predecessor as chairman and chief executive, who is still active on Outboard's board. Mr. Chapman had departed from Outboard's Waukegan, Ill., headquarters for Florida and was unavailable for comment, the company said. Except for the lack of any formal transition role for the 63-year-old Mr. Chapman, Mr. Bowman's appointment will not surprise investors. Last summer, Robert D. Randolph, the chief operating officer, resigned after the company's board made it clear he would not be promoted when Mr. Chapman retired because his engineering and manufacturing background was too similar to that of Mr. Chapman. Mr. Bowman, a native of Pennsylvania who joined Whirlpool in 1971 after four years in the Air Force and a brief stint at an executive placement company, will have to learn the boating business from the ground up. "I haven't been into boating since my college years," he conceded, recalling that his parents had an Evinrude-powered boat at their vacation home in the Adirondacks. But Mr. Bowman has run businesses bigger than Outboard. His rise through Whirlpool's ranks included a period at the head of the Kenmore Appliance Group, as senior vice president in operations for all of North America, president of Whirlpool Europe, and, most recently, as executive vice president in charge of integrating Whirlpool's businesses globally. For the | Outboard Marine Gets New Chief |
744610_4 | has been particularly interested in the Arctic because of its potential for delivering insights into the magnitude of global environmental change. The freeing of the Navy's attack subs comes as the force shrinks in response to lessening global threats. Norman Polmar, a naval expert and author in Alexandria, Va., said the fleet has 84 submarines, down from 95 or so in the late 1980's. It is to drop to 55, or perhaps lower, by the year 2000. Mr. Polmar estimated that the subs now in use cost $50 billion to $70 billion to build. "It's smart," he said of the sharing program. "It gets scientists more supportive of the Navy." The program is also widely seen as helping the Navy sharpen its Arctic edge. The ecological usefulness of attack subs was demonstrated even before the sharing program by such scientists as Dr. Alfred S. McLaren, a former attack submarine commander who succeeded in getting some secret Navy data declassified, including periodic measurements of Arctic ice thickness. The trial run of sharing began in August 1993 when the attack submarine Pargo sailed from its base in Groton, Conn., with five civilian scientists from Lamont-Doherty, the University of Alaska and the University of Washington. During the 38-day cruise, the scientists collected data on such things as water temperature, salinity, ocean depth, ice thickness, gravity anomalies and ice composition as seen by an upward-looking video camera. They also took more than 1,500 water samples for chemical and biological analysis back on land. "A remarkable variety and quantity of data were collected for disciplines ranging from atmospheric science to submarine geology," the scientists wrote in the winter 1993 issue of The Journal of the Marine Technology Society, a professional group based in Washington. After that trip, and after long negotiations, a handful of Federal agencies in June 1994 agreed to launch a joint program of annual excursions over an initial five-year period. Signatories included the Navy, the National Science Foundation, the United States Geological Survey and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The agreement allows the Navy to cancel or shorten any cruise "if operationally required" and bars the public release of gathered data until the Navy has made sure it contains no secrets. The Navy agreed to pay for the ship time and the costs to civilian agencies of scientific research and any additional gear. The 300-foot-long Cavalla, which was commissioned in 1973, | U.S. Navy's Attack Subs to Be Lent For Study of Arctic Icecap |
744589_0 | AFTER world leaders met in Rio de Janeiro nearly three years ago and signed a treaty to prevent human interference from causing dangerous changes in the earth's climate, the question quietly slipped down the international agenda. It was drained of urgency not least by an interruption of the global warming trend that had propelled the issue to the forefront in the 1980's and early 1990's. But the issue has simmered along as scientists advising the 120 nations that have ratified the treaty continue to warn of grave risks if humanity persists in pumping heat-trapping industrial waste gases like carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. And next month, as new signs emerge that the warming trend may have resumed, the parties to the treaty will meet for the first time, in Berlin, to confront the issue of whether stronger measures are necessary. Global temperatures have not climbed back to the record level of 1990, and the issue has not regained the immediacy it had. Partly as a result, there is no unanimity on whether stronger steps are necessary. This was made clear over the last two weeks as the international committee that negotiated the climate treaty, meeting here in its final session, attempted to frame the questions to be grappled with in Berlin. The questions are not trivial, since any significant reduction in carbon dioxide emissions, which have been relentlessly increasing as industrial societies burn ever-larger quantities of fossil fuels like coal and oil, would have a large economic impact. The world economy runs on fossil fuels, and powerful interests oppose any attempt to reduce their use. As the first step toward a broad objective of stabilizing atmospheric concentrations of heat-trapping gases short of dangerous levels in time to prevent disruption of world agriculture and natural ecosystems, the treaty calls on industrialized countries to aim at capping emissions of the gases at 1990 levels by the year 2000. That is only a first step because there is so much excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that only a reduction in emissions will stabilize the overall concentration at any level up to double today's, according to a panel of scientists advising the treaty parties. In fact, say the scientists, capping emissions at 1990 levels would not lead to overall stabilization of concentrations for two centuries. A doubling of today's concentrations, say the scientists, would cause the average global temperature to rise by 3 | Nations to Consider Toughening Curbs on Global Warming |
744569_2 | major projects have been approved, that tells you a logjam is still there," said Roger W. Sant, chairman of the AES Corporation of Arlington, Va., an independent power producer. "But you always think you're going to be the exception." Mr. Sant hopes that his plans with five Chinese partners to build a 2,100-megawatt power plant will soon be approved by the State Planning Commission in Beijing, and he says he has received indications that they will. Not this week, he said, but soon. The project would put a coal-fed power plant at the mouth of a big coal mine in Shanxi Province, and the electricity would be transported across three provinces. A 15 percent rate of return is specified for an initial phase, but none is mentioned if production is increased later. For Chinese officials who listened patiently to American complaints today, the response was not too subtle. "Shanghai has great demand for power," said Yang Xiong, vice director of the Shanghai Planning Commission. "We also have people from many other parts of the world who are interested in investing here." Melissa Brown, an analyst at J. P. Morgan Securities Asia, said she suspected that the Chinese authorities might solicit bids on some big power projects as a way to gather market information before making policy decisions. "The Chinese authorities may need to use this period to educate themselves and to come up with a policy that's robust," she said. "If that takes some time, so be it." In Shanghai today, Ms. O'Leary presided over the signing of eight private-sector agreements between United States and Chinese concerns, which she said represented more than $1 billion in business. But six of them were letters of intent or memorandums of understanding, indicating that the projects were still in a preliminary phase. Only two were joint-venture agreements to build modest-sized power plants, a $27 million thermal plant in Zhejiang and a $28 million steam plant in East Shanghai, neither of which required approval from Beijing because they were under a $30 million limit. Ms. O'Leary acknowledged that the timing of her trip was awkward because Chinese and United States trade officials are scheduled to resume a final round of talks on Wednesday, aimed at averting a trade war that could begin next Sunday. "Heck, if it was easy, somebody else would be doing it," she said shortly after arriving in Shanghai on Sunday. | For U.S. Energy Industry, Big Barriers in China |
744246_0 | JOSIAH CUNNINGHAM seemed on the verge of breaking into dance as he savored the word "normal" and lavished it upon his son, Jeremiah. "Normal," he exulted, three years after he first plunged into nightmare suspicions that his eerily withdrawn, uncontrollable toddler might grow up autistic. "I work with mentally retarded people, driving and cooking for them, and there was Jeremiah when he was 2, rocking all the time, not speaking properly, very unruly, rocking like the mentally retarded," Mr. Cunningham recalled uneasily. Instantly, the father's frown at the recollection shoots back to a lilting smile worthy of his native Jamaica. "NOR-mal," he sounded it. "No label on him," he said of the news that 5-year-old Jeremiah will be transferring into a public school kindergarten class next fall. "Normal kid be going to school like any other kid." The lad, through special socializing and learning techniques, boosted himself from an initial I.Q. of 70 to his current 93, within the treasured range of normalcy. "I looked through the mirror and could see him getting good," Mr. Cunningham said, summarizing three years of progress by speaking of the one-way mirror windows at a private agency called the League Treatment Center. This is a little-known inner-city bastion at which 500 children and adults are treated daily for autism and other handicaps. Parents can remain invisible as they watch gifted, patient teachers take children through repetitious steps of self-awareness, control and communication that have proved to unlock a surprising number of them like Jeremiah. LATELY, the league, a 40-year-old teaching and research center working in one of the most mysterious areas of human ailment, is realizing that it is as much a part of the battered social welfare system as any number of more familiar, more stereotyped notions of workfare and welfare, shirkers and cheats. For almost all of the league's $15 million annual budget comes from welfare aid, particularly Medicaid. It is a precious public boon that the league's executive director, Hannah Achtenberg Kinn, finds being feverishly singled out by a new generation of politicians at all three levels of government. "We are scrambling," Ms. Kinn said. She thought the main threat had receded last October, after Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani retreated from proposed cuts in the center's programs and backed the Democratic gubernatorial ticket. But now Mr. Giuliani has crossed back and joined the new welfare- and tax-cutting mood in Albany and | On Sunday; Budget Scythe Poised to Slash Autism Center |
744407_6 | visions were surely not private ones; their art is anonymous, for the concept of "individual" did not yet exist. At the point at which the individual begins to detach himself from the collective, the artist begins to achieve what we call "identity"; art may still be in the service of the nation or the tribe, but it has the unmistakable stamp of personality on it, and may be highly original. Consider Hieronymus Bosch, the late-15th-century Belgian, and the remarkable paintings he set beside conventional Christian-iconographic art of his era and earlier: how bold, how bizarre, how hallucinatory were Bosch's great altarpieces "The Garden of Earthly Delights," "The Hay Wagon," "The Temptation of St. Anthony" and "John the Baptist in the Desert." If ever there was a brilliant "pathology of art," Bosch is our patron saint. The exquisite mosaics and frescoes of the Byzantine-Roman world, in the service of an impersonal religious piety, blend together in their harmony (or blandness) once one has seen the eruption of sheer genius in a visionary like Bosch. Where was the critical intelligence that could have begun to assess Bosch in his time, let alone presume to prescribe his art? The earliest sustained work of literary criticism in Western culture is Aristotle's "Poetics" (circa 335-322 B.C.), believed to be primarily a defense of tragedy and the epic as they were attacked by Plato in "The Republic." Where Plato saw drama as disturbing and disruptive to the well-run state and argued that the poet should be banished from it, Aristotle argued that literature's more profound effects were beneficent and purgative and that the poet was a valuable citizen of the republic. "The Poetics" is a meticulously descriptive, not a prescriptive, work; Aristotle based his famous theory of catharsis on drama he had seen, works by Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides. Twenty-three hundred years after it was written, "The Poetics" is arguably our greatest single work of esthetics. Yet out of this seminal work by one of the world's great imaginative minds, there came to be, in subsequent centuries, as interpreted by less imaginative minds, a set of rigid rules meant to prescribe how drama must be written, else it is "not art." So Neo-Classic dogma decreed that art insufficiently "Aristotelian" was not art. Even Voltaire, the inspired demolisher of others' delusions, rejected Shakespeare as barbaric because he did not conform to Neo-Classic principles of unity. THE ENGLISH | Confronting Head On the Face of the Afflicted |
744215_0 | A threat by moderate Protestant Unionist leaders to disrupt the peace effort for Northern Ireland appeared to recede today, as high-ranking Irish and British officials agreed on the text of a new framework document intended to lead to a permanent political settlement of the sectarian warfare in the British province of Ulster. After a four-hour meeting in Dublin, the Irish Foreign Minister, Dick Spring, and the British Northern Ireland Secretary, Sir Patrick Mayhew, said they had put the framework in final shape, with only a few minor details yet to be decided. The document includes proposals to alter the Irish constitutional claim to sovereignty in the North and for cross-border institutions that would bring the North and the Irish Republic closer politically and economically. It is expected to be unveiled publicly within the next 10 days at a meeting between Prime Ministers John Major of Britain and John Bruton of Ireland. For two weeks, senior officials of the moderate Ulster Unionist Party had threatened to refuse to take part in talks, particularly if they were based on the new document, and to seek to bring down the the Government of Mr. Major, who needs the nine Unionist Party votes to keep his working majority. But on the eve of the meeting in Dublin, the leader of the Ulster Unionists, James Molyneaux, said the party would continue to talk to British officials and to members of other Northern parties with a view to a settlement. He said his party, suspicious of the framework, would bring its own set of proposals to the meetings. The Unionist proposals are likely to concentrate on the creation of a new Northern Ireland assembly to replace direct rule of the province from London, in effect since 1974. This afternoon, Sir Patrick said Mr. Molyneux's statement had "encouraged" him because it meant the Unionist leader "is prepared to talk about the issues which will be addressed in the document." During Unionist attacks on the new framework in recent weeks, some experts and British officials had predicted that the Unionists would find a face-saving way to stay in the peace effort. The British and Irish Governments are known to be hoping that the Unionists would bow to pressure from voters accustomed to nearly six months of peace, since the cease-fire by the Irish Republican Army. The Unionists' principal complaint was that the framework's proposals for cross-border institutions were | Ulster Threat To Peace Bid Seems to Fade |
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