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800252_1 | may soon pull even with the slumping sugar industry. "The steady and sustained development of tourism is something that the Cuban Government regards as being of the utmost importance," said Miguel Brugueras, deputy director of Cuba's National Tourism Institute, the Government body that oversees the industry. Government officials here report revenue of $850 million from 616,000 foreign visitors in 1994 and anticipate that some 800,000 tourists will spend slightly more than $1 billion this year. By contrast, in 1988, the last full year before the Soviet empire disintegrated, 309,000 people visited Cuba and spent just $189 million. Before Mr. Castro came to power in 1959, Cuba was the principal tourist destination in the Caribbean, attracting 300,000 visitors a year, 80 percent of them Americans. But that influx was cut off by Washington's 34-year trade embargo against Cuba. For many years the Communist Government derided tourism as corrupt and demeaning, and resumed it only because of the disappearance of the Soviet bloc, which accounted for 85 percent of Cuba's foreign trade. To accommodate an anticipated increase in visitors, the Cuban Government has embarked on a major hotel construction and renovation drive. The bulk of the construction has been in Varadero, 125 miles east of here. Along miles of glittering amber sands, Spanish, Mexican, French, German other foreign chains now operate hotels catering to European and Canadian travelers. Cuba is also scheduled to re-enter the cruise business, from which it has been virtually absent for three decades. Under an agreement signed with the Italian company Costa Crociere, a 480-passenger cruise ship, the Costa Playa, will call at Cuban ports beginning in late November. "In the Caribbean, that's one of the most important sources of income," Mr. Brugueras said, "but this is something that is not up to us. We will truly be able to open to cruise ship passengers only when the United States permits it." He was alluding to the major hindrance to Cuba's tourism project: the absence of the United States, which would naturally be its largest market. The embargo forbids American citizens to spend money in Cuba and prohibits passenger ships that stop in Cuba from docking in the United States in the same voyage. But Mr. Brugueras shrugged that off. "American businessmen are losing a magnificent opportunity," he said. "They are going to have to be alert, because this is something that we are not going to abandon." | Cuba, Eager for Tourist Dollars, Dusts Off Its Vacancy Sign |
800088_1 | may soon pull even with the slumping sugar industry. "The steady and sustained development of tourism is something that the Cuban Government regards as being of the utmost importance," said Miguel Brugueras, deputy director of Cuba's National Tourism Institute, the Government body that oversees the industry. Government officials here report revenue of $850 million from 616,000 foreign visitors in 1994 and anticipate that some 800,000 tourists will spend slightly more than $1 billion this year. By contrast, in 1988, the last full year before the Soviet empire disintegrated, 309,000 people visited Cuba and spent just $189 million. Before Mr. Castro came to power in 1959, Cuba was the principal tourist destination in the Caribbean, attracting 300,000 visitors a year, 80 percent of them Americans. But that influx was cut off by Washington's 34-year trade embargo against Cuba. For many years the Communist Government derided tourism as corrupt and demeaning, and resumed it only because of the disappearance of the Soviet bloc, which accounted for 85 percent of Cuba's foreign trade. To accommodate an anticipated increase in visitors, the Cuban Government has embarked on a major hotel construction and renovation drive. The bulk of the construction has been in Varadero, 125 miles east of here. Along miles of glittering amber sands, Spanish, Mexican, French, German other foreign chains now operate hotels catering to European and Canadian travelers. Cuba is also scheduled to re-enter the cruise business, from which it has been virtually absent for three decades. Under an agreement signed with the Italian company Costa Crociere, a 480-passenger cruise ship, the Costa Playa, will call at Cuban ports beginning in late November. "In the Caribbean, that's one of the most important sources of income," Mr. Brugueras said, "but this is something that is not up to us. We will truly be able to open to cruise ship passengers only when the United States permits it." He was alluding to the major hindrance to Cuba's tourism project: the absence of the United States, which would naturally be its largest market. The embargo forbids American citizens to spend money in Cuba and prohibits passenger ships that stop in Cuba from docking in the United States in the same voyage. But Mr. Brugueras shrugged that off. "American businessmen are losing a magnificent opportunity," he said. "They are going to have to be alert, because this is something that we are not going to abandon." | Cuba, Eager for Tourist Dollars, Dusts Off Its Vacancy Sign |
800288_0 | A fledging program at Public School 321 in Park Slope, Brooklyn, provides a vivid example of how the special-education system in New York City should work, school officials and education advocates agree. Children with and without disabilities are in class together and learning. In a fifth-grade classroom on a recent morning, 36 children sat on cushions and couches discussing geometry. It was hard to make out that eight children were either learning disabled or emotionally disturbed. Two teachers, including one licensed in special education, taught the class together as a teacher's aide hovered. In another classroom, a second-grade teacher read aloud from an oversized book with a cluster of students in a corner, while another teacher patiently listened as a boy read on the floor. One girl skimmed alone through an advanced-level book with chapters. About 115 special-education students attend P.S. 321, out of 1,200 children in the school. In the three years since the inclusion program began, the number of classes exclusively for special-education children there has shrunk from nine to six, as more children have returned to the regular classrooms. The program is being praised by independent evaluators, school officials say. P.S. 321 is one of four schools in the city with the voluntary inclusion program. Three dozen preschool classes across the city have a similar program, which has resulted in a sharp decline in referrals to restricted special-education classes, said Stephen K. Allinger, the lobbyist for the school board in Albany. Beth Lief, the executive director of the New York City Fund for Public Education, a private advocacy group, estimated that about half the schoolchildren now enrolled in the city's exclusively special-education classes could benefit from such programs. The new program costs slightly more money than if there were two separate programs, because P.S. 321 wants to keep the student-to-teacher ratios as low as possible, officials say. 'It's not a snap of the fingers," Ms. Lief said. "It turns on its head the way teachers are teaching. But it's not money holding it back." LYNDA RICHARDSON | For a Few, A Revision Is Working |
800086_0 | While the rest of Latin America has come to embrace Cuba in recent years by increasing investment and trade, Argentina has made no secret of its strong dislike for the Government of Fidel Castro. Since the election of President Carlos Saul Menem in 1989, Argentina has been openly critical of Cuba, accusing Havana of violating democratic principles and human rights and failing to make good on a $1.3 billion debt to Argentina. After a meeting of Latin American presidents two years ago, Mr. Menem made headlines by calling Mr. Castro "repugnant" and Cuba a "pathetic Communist state." Striking back, Cuban officials have repeatedly said Argentina's attacks were intended to win "crumbs" of credit and aid from the United States, with which Argentina has sought stronger ties. But the long chill in Argentine-Cuban relations appears to be thawing. At the annual meeting of leaders from Latin America, Spain and Portugal at this ski resort this week, Mr. Menem told reporters that "relations between the two countries are good" and that he and Mr. Castro had "exchanged Argentine wine and Cuban cigars." Mr. Menem, whose country was host to the fifth Ibero-American Summit Conference, sat Mr. Castro next to him during a coffee break to allow photographers to capture the two leaders together on film. Asked about reports that he had a private meeting with Mr. Menem, Mr. Castro said: "No, we did not meet alone, but he treated me very well." Such niceties are major shift from the antagonistic comments two years ago by Foreign Minister Ricardo Alarcon of Cuba, who suggested that the summit meeting of presidents be held in the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires, "where there are some ladies who have been marching for years." He was referring to the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, who hold a weekly demonstration in the square to protest the killing of their children during the military Government's "dirty war" of repression in the 1970's. The Argentine Foreign Minister, Guido di Tella, said in an interview that relations between the two countries have improved in the last year, after Cuba's promise to repay its $1.3 billion debt. He said the payment will be made in the form of assets or portions of assets that will be transferred to Argentine businesses. "The way we have treated Cuba in this summit takes into account its willingness to acknowledge its debt," Mr. di | Argentina, Once a Bitter Foe of Cuba, Mellows After Debt Deal |
800248_0 | While the rest of Latin America has come to embrace Cuba in recent years by increasing investment and trade, Argentina has made no secret of its strong dislike for the Government of Fidel Castro. Since the election of President Carlos Saul Menem in 1989, Argentina has been openly critical of Cuba, accusing Havana of violating democratic principles and human rights and failing to make good on a $1.3 billion debt to Argentina. After a meeting of Latin American presidents two years ago, Mr. Menem made headlines by calling Mr. Castro "repugnant" and Cuba a "pathetic Communist state." Striking back, Cuban officials have repeatedly said Argentina's attacks were intended to win "crumbs" of credit and aid from the United States, with which Argentina has sought stronger ties. But the long chill in Argentine-Cuban relations appears to be thawing. At the annual meeting of leaders from Latin America, Spain and Portugal at this ski resort this week, Mr. Menem told reporters that "relations between the two countries are good" and that he and Mr. Castro had "exchanged Argentine wine and Cuban cigars." Mr. Menem, whose country was host to the fifth Ibero-American Summit Conference, sat Mr. Castro next to him during a coffee break to allow photographers to capture the two leaders together on film. Asked about reports that he had a private meeting with Mr. Menem, Mr. Castro said: "No, we did not meet alone, but he treated me very well." Such niceties are major shift from the antagonistic comments two years ago by Foreign Minister Ricardo Alarcon of Cuba, who suggested that the summit meeting of presidents be held in the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires, "where there are some ladies who have been marching for years." He was referring to the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, who hold a weekly demonstration in the square to protest the killing of their children during the military Government's "dirty war" of repression in the 1970's. The Argentine Foreign Minister, Guido di Tella, said in an interview that relations between the two countries have improved in the last year, after Cuba's promise to repay its $1.3 billion debt. He said the payment will be made in the form of assets or portions of assets that will be transferred to Argentine businesses. "The way we have treated Cuba in this summit takes into account its willingness to acknowledge its debt," Mr. di | Argentina, Once a Bitter Foe of Cuba, Mellows After Debt Deal |
800241_1 | cloned. The cellular telephone industry is losing about $480 million a year through cloning, although more recent estimates put losses as high as $1 billion, according to Nicholas Arcuri, vice president for fraud control at Bell AtlanticNynex Mobile. Mr. Morgenthau likened it to a techno-war. "This has been a serious and growing problem, even though a lot of steps have been taken by service providers to stop this," he said. "It's a continuous war going on between the technology which is available and the efforts to stop people from stealing these numbers." The process of snatching the numbers from the air and cloning them is a fairly simple one technically, although Mr. Morgenthau called the operation in 4D a sophisticated one that could quickly produce a high volume of business. When used to make a call or even when simply turned on, a cellular phone periodically transmits its identification numbers through radio waves. Someone working for the "cloning" group might station himself in a high cellular traffic area, such as sitting in a car on a major highway like the approaches to the George Washington Bridge or at airports. He would intercept the telephone identification numbers with an electronic device or scanner with special software, Mr. Morgenthau said. The numbers are then put into the computer equipped with a special software program, and then another device connecting the computer and a cellular phone can transfer the numbers to that cellular phone. The process takes about five minutes. The calls made on the cell phone with the illegally transferred code end up on the bill of legitimate customers. Although the phone companies have been absorbing the costs of this fraud, Mr. Arcuri acknowledged that it eventually has an impact in rising costs to the consumer. According to the police, the occupants of 4D charged $50 to clone a phone. The phones were usually brought in from the street by the people who wanted to use them: drug dealers who liked the mobility the phones offer in eluding traces by the authorities, immigrants who want to phone home across thousands of miles without paying and middlemen who sell the phones at a $50 to $75 markup. The police said New York City detectives assigned to the Manhattan District Attorney's Squad, acting on a tip received in May, spent the next few months working undercover, going to Apartment 4D to buy cloned phones, | 3 Men Accused of Stealing Cellular Phone ID Numbers |
797890_0 | In a deliberate slap at the nuclear testing policies of France and China, the Norwegian Nobel Committee today awarded its 1995 Nobel Peace Prize to Joseph Rotblat, a physicist who helped develop the atomic bomb but subsequently led a campaign to eliminate nuclear weapons. In awarding the prize to Mr. Rot- blat and the little-known organization he heads, the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs, the Nobel Committee said it wanted to send a message of protest to France and China over the nuclear weapons tests they have conducted recently despite widespread international opposition. "It is a protest against nuclear arms in general, but particularly testing," said Francis Sejersted, the chairman of the five-member committee, which is appointed by the Norwegian Parliament. Norway's Prime Minister, Gro Harlem Brundtland, has been highly critical of France's decision to conduct up to eight nuclear tests in the South Pacific. Asked if the committee was calling on France and China to halt nuclear weapons testing immediately, Mr. Sejersted said, "That is the indirect message." Mr. Rotblat, who is 86 and was born in Poland, said he considered the French and Chinese testing programs "an outrage." But he said the French testing program had put nuclear weapons back in the public eye after they had become less of an issue with the end of the cold war. The award of the peace prize, he said, provided another opportunity to bring pressure on those nations to stop their testing and to lobby all the nuclear powers to dismantle more of their arsenals. In Paris, the French Government issued an official statement of congratulations to Mr. Rotblat. But the award clearly stung many French politicians, who have seen President Jacques Chirac's decision to resume testing after a three-year hiatus draw criticism around the world. Pierre Lellouche, a member of the French Parliament and a former adviser to Mr. Chirac, said that he was "perfectly scandalized" by the award and that Pugwash had been a tool of Soviet propaganda. At a news conference in London, Mr. Rotblat said the prize was an honor for the scientists associated with the Pugwash project, "who have been trying for 40 years to save the world, sometimes against the world's wishes." "I am not predicting that by this prize the world will be safer," he said. "But my hope is that more scientists will be encouraged to think seriously about the | Peace Prize Goes to A-Bomb Scientist Who Turned Critic |
797819_1 | its way to President Clinton, who is expected to veto it. [ 1. ] U.S. Opposes China Project In response to strong opposition from the Clinton Administration, the country's chief export credit agency is not likely to help American companies win work on China's mammoth Three Gorges Dam. The Administration opposes the project because of environmental and human rights concerns, worries that protracted litigation over the project would tie up valuable Export-Import bank resources and doubts about the dam's financial viability. [ 1. ] RJR to Cut Work Force 5.2% RJR Nabisco said it would move the headquarters of its international tobacco operations to Europe and cut its work force in the United States by 5.2 percent in an effort to reduce costs and bolster global sales. The moves will result in a $160 million charge. [ 35. ] Pechiney to Sell Turbine Business Pechiney International of France announced that it was selling its turbine components business to an American joint venture of the Carlyle Group and the Thiokol Corporation for $750 million. The sale includes the Howmet Corporation, which makes cast components for gas turbine engines, and the Cercast Group, a producer of aluminum castings. [ 35. ] Denver Faces Action Over Bonds The S.E.C. has informed Denver officials that it plans to bring an enforcement action against them over the sale of $3 billion worth of bonds to finance the city's new airport. [ 34. ] Panel Set for Communications Bill Nearly two months after the House and Senate passed separate bills to overhaul the communications industry, the two chambers named the lawmakers who will participate in a conference committee to iron out differences. But prospects for the bill are still murky. [ 35. ] Boeing Strike Is Over Outside Work The biggest issue in the week-old Machinists strike at Boeing is the company's announcement that in trying to save about $600 million, it will seek to have a majority of its work done outside the company. The union wants the right to review the outside work and to offer an alternative bid. [ 7. ] Book Fair No Longer a Page Turner Once fax machines began letting agents and publishers exchange proposals across oceans, the Frankfurt Book Fair lost much of its significance and allure and now has the feeling of a tired cocktail party. Publishers still try to talk up their forthcoming titles, but as one | BUSINESS DIGEST |
797589_0 | The Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded its 1995 Nobel Peace Prize yesterday to Joseph Rotblat, a Polish-born British physicist who helped develop the atomic bomb but subsequently led a campaign to eliminate nuclear weapons. In awarding the prize to Mr. Rot blat and the organization he heads, the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs, the committee said it wanted to send a message of protest to France and China over the nuclear weapons tests they have conducted recently despite widespread international opposition. Mr. Rotblat, 86, who has called the nuclear testing programs "an outrage," said the $1 million prize was an honor for the scientists associated with the London-based Pugwash project, "who have been trying for 40 years to save the world, sometimes against the world's wishes." Article, page 3. | Nobel Prize for A-Bomb Critic |
797887_0 | The Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded its 1995 Nobel Peace Prize yesterday to Joseph Rotblat, a Polish-born British physicist who helped develop the atomic bomb but subsequently led a campaign to eliminate nuclear weapons. In awarding the prize to Mr. Rot blat and the organization he heads, the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs, the committee said it wanted to send a message of protest to France and China over the nuclear weapons tests they have conducted recently despite widespread international opposition. Mr. Rotblat, 86, who has called the nuclear testing programs "an outrage," said the $1 million prize was an honor for the scientists associated with the London-based Pugwash project, "who have been trying for 40 years to save the world, sometimes against the world's wishes." Article, page 3. | Nobel Prize for A-Bomb Critic |
797666_1 | Clinton, who is expected to veto it. [1.] U.S. Opposes China Project In response to strong opposition from the Clinton Administration, the country's chief export credit agency is not likely to help American companies win work on China's mammoth Three Gorges Dam. The Administration opposes the project because of environmental and human rights concerns, worries that protracted litigation over the project would tie up valuable Export-Import bank resources and doubts about the dam's financial viability. [1.] RJR to Cut Work Force 5.2% RJR Nabisco said it would move the headquarters of its international tobacco operations to Europe and cut its work force in the United States by 5.2 percent in an effort to reduce costs and bolster global sales. The moves will result in a $160 million charge. [35.] Pechiney to Sell Turbine Business Pechiney International of France announced that it was selling its turbine components business to an American joint venture of the Carlyle Group and the Thiokol Corporation for $750 million. The sale includes the Howmet Corporation, which makes cast components for gas turbine engines, and the Cercast Group, a producer of aluminum castings. [35.] Denver Faces Action Over Bonds The S.E.C. has informed Denver officials that it plans to bring an enforcement action against them over the sale of $3 billion worth of bonds to finance the city's new airport. [34.] Panel Set for Communications Bill Nearly two months after the House and Senate passed separate bills to overhaul the communications industry, the two chambers named the lawmakers who will participate in a conference committee to iron out differences. But prospects for the bill are still murky. [35.] Boeing Strike Is Over Outside Work The biggest issue in the week-old Machinists strike at Boeing is the company's announcement that in trying to save about $600 million, it will seek to have a majority of its work done outside the company. The union wants the right to review the outside work and to offer an alternative bid. [7.] Book Fair No Longer a Page Turner Once fax machines began letting agents and publishers exchange proposals across oceans, the Frankfurt Book Fair lost much of its significance and allure and now has the feeling of a tired cocktail party. Publishers still try to talk up their forthcoming titles, but as one publisher said about the fair, "Socially, it's rewarding, but that's about it." [10.] Crop Estimate Jolts Coffee Prices | BUSINESS DIGEST |
797579_2 | be free to bid on contracts, the absence of cheap credits is likely to make American concerns less competitive against their Japanese and other foreign rivals that have access to subsidized government credits. Caterpillar said it was encouraged to submit its request for what is known as a "letter of interest" by Export-Import Bank officials both before and after they had received the White House memo, evidently because they wanted to bring the issue to a conclusion. "The Ex-Im Bank came to us both before and after the White House memo and encouraged us to make an application," said Bill Lane, Washington manager of government affairs for Caterpillar. "We hope that Kenneth Brody, as head of this independent agency, will make an independent decision." The bank has not yet replied to Caterpillar's request. Mr. Lane said the contract Caterpillar is after would provide it with 1,000 man-hours of work, though he declined to disclose its dollar value. Although the White House believes the bank should not back the Three Gorges project, the Administration nonetheless wants to avoid publicizing the decision or condemning the dam since this would further strain relations with China. Other American companies interested in bidding for portions of the Three Gorges project are known to include Voith Hydro Inc., the United States subsidiary of the German turbine manufacturer J. M. Voith G.m.b.H. and Rotec Industries, a company specializing in heavy concrete construction. In the White House memo, which was first reported in The Wall Street Journal today, Samuel R. Berger, deputy national security adviser, said there were three broad reasons for the Administration opposition. "First, we think it would be unwise for the U.S. Government to align itself with a project that raises environmental and human rights concerns on the scale of the Three Gorges," the memo states. Second, the memo cites "the legal difficulties that would be associated with any decision to provide assistance," saying that environmental and human rights groups probably would sue the bank if it became involved, leading to protracted litigation that would tie up the bank's funds. Finally, the White House expressed concern about the project's financial viability, saying private bankers and the World Bank have raised serious questions about the Chinese Government's estimates of the project's likely cost as well as its economic benefits. And the World Bank has refused to give it any support. But the memo concludes that to | Export Agency Likely to Deny China Dam Aid |
797878_2 | be free to bid on contracts, the absence of cheap credits is likely to make American concerns less competitive against their Japanese and other foreign rivals that have access to subsidized government credits. Caterpillar said it was encouraged to submit its request for what is known as a "letter of interest" by Export-Import Bank officials both before and after they had received the White House memo, evidently because they wanted to bring the issue to a conclusion. "The Ex-Im Bank came to us both before and after the White House memo and encouraged us to make an application," said Bill Lane, Washington manager of government affairs for Caterpillar. "We hope that Kenneth Brody, as head of this independent agency, will make an independent decision." The bank has not yet replied to Caterpillar's request. Mr. Lane said the contract Caterpillar is after would provide it with 1,000 man-hours of work, though he declined to disclose its dollar value. Although the White House believes the bank should not back the Three Gorges project, the Administration nonetheless wants to avoid publicizing the decision or condemning the dam since this would further strain relations with China. Other American companies interested in bidding for portions of the Three Gorges project are known to include Voith Hydro Inc., the United States subsidiary of the German turbine manufacturer J. M. Voith G.m.b.H. and Rotec Industries, a company specializing in heavy concrete construction. In the White House memo, which was first reported in The Wall Street Journal today, Samuel R. Berger, deputy national security adviser, said there were three broad reasons for the Administration opposition. "First, we think it would be unwise for the U.S. Government to align itself with a project that raises environmental and human rights concerns on the scale of the Three Gorges," the memo states. Second, the memo cites "the legal difficulties that would be associated with any decision to provide assistance," saying that environmental and human rights groups probably would sue the bank if it became involved, leading to protracted litigation that would tie up the bank's funds. Finally, the White House expressed concern about the project's financial viability, saying private bankers and the World Bank have raised serious questions about the Chinese Government's estimates of the project's likely cost as well as its economic benefits. And the World Bank has refused to give it any support. But the memo concludes that to | Export Agency Likely to Deny China Dam Aid |
797592_0 | In a deliberate slap at the nuclear testing policies of France and China, the Norwegian Nobel Committee today awarded its 1995 Nobel Peace Prize to Joseph Rotblat, a physicist who helped develop the atomic bomb but subsequently led a campaign to eliminate nuclear weapons. In awarding the prize to Mr. Rot- blat and the little-known organization he heads, the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs, the Nobel Committee said it wanted to send a message of protest to France and China over the nuclear weapons tests they have conducted recently despite widespread international opposition. It is a protest against nuclear arms in general, but particularly testing," said Francis Sejersted, the chairman of the five-member committee, which is appointed by the Norwegian Parliament. Norway's Prime Minister, Gro Harlem Brundtland, has been highly critical of France's decision to conduct up to eight nuclear tests in the South Pacific. Asked if the committee was calling on France and China to halt nuclear weapons testing immediately, Mr. Sejersted said, "That is the indirect message." Mr. Rotblat, who is 86 and was born in Poland, said he considered the French and Chinese testing programs "an outrage." But he said the French testing program had put nuclear weapons back in the public eye after they had become less of an issue with the end of the cold war. The award of the peace prize, he said, provided another opportunity to bring pressure on those nations to stop their testing and to lobby all the nuclear powers to dismantle more of their arsenals. In Paris, the French Government issued an official statement of congratulations to Mr. Rotblat. But the award clearly stung many French politicians, who have seen President Jacques Chirac's decision to resume testing after a three-year hiatus draw criticism around the world. Pierre Lellouche, a member of the French Parliament and a former adviser to Mr. Chirac, said that he was "perfectly scandalized" by the award and that Pugwash had been a tool of Soviet propaganda. At a news conference in London, Mr. Rotblat said the prize was an honor for the scientists associated with the Pugwash project, "who have been trying for 40 years to save the world, sometimes against the world's wishes." "I am not predicting that by this prize the world will be safer," he said. "But my hope is that more scientists will be encouraged to think seriously about the | Peace Prize Goes to A-Bomb Scientist Who Turned Critic |
803500_3 | Mr. McIntyre but also to his host in Pound Ridge, who regularly uses the terminal. "I understood completely," Mr. McIntyre said by telephone last week. "In England, when the Irish Republican Army was still planting bombs, you couldn't check anything anywhere in public. But it would have been nice if they had posted a sign or something in the terminal." Mr. McIntyre was fortunate. He was able to leave his luggage at his friend's office in midtown. "Pretty soon, all the rubbish bins will disappear and you won't be able to leave parcels at the art galleries," he added, again comparing it to the situation in England (although luggage checkrooms at some train stations there are now being reopened and other restrictions are being lifted). Jeanine Moss, a spokeswoman for the New York City Convention and Visitors Bureau, said the weary-traveler-with-baggage-in-tow problem was not that common and was more likely to apply to international travelers than to one-day visitors to the city. "Many of the day-trippers come in by car and don't usually carry much in the way of personal belongings," Ms. Moss said. "What you're describing primarily affects the traveler who is changing airports and has a layover and the baggage isn't checked through to the final destination. They are so few, I doubt it's a huge problem." Although there are no checkrooms or lockers in most public areas at La Guardia, Kennedy and Newark airports, most airlines allow members of their flight clubs and passengers traveling first-class or business-class to leave luggage in private lounges, before check-in. In addition, some airlines like American and United allow passengers to check their luggage at any time on the day of departure. "You could conceivably check in in the morning for later-day flight," said Tim Smith, a spokesman for American. "It's more an operational issue than security, since we perform the same security procedures no matter when you check in." USAir has no formal time limit, but asks passengers to check their baggage in no earlier than four hours before departure. Still, every new problem creates opportunities. Picture this: some ingenious entrepreneur rents an empty storefront, installs a few metal detectors, hires a clerk and a couple of security guards and, for a modest fee, checks parcels for a limited period. Mr. Brucker of Metro-North thinks it's an idea whose time has come. "They wouldn't be lacking for customers," he said. | Miles to Go and Nowhere to Unload |
803540_0 | Hitachi Ltd. said yesterday that it had joined with three other Japanese companies to form a consortium to compete for bids to build hydropower generators for the Three Gorges Dam project in China. Backed by the Ministry of International Trade and Industry and the Export-Import Bank of Japan, the consortium -- Hitachi, the Toshiba Corporation, the Mitsubishi Electric Company and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Ltd. -- met with Chinese officials on Monday and Tuesday to give a presentation on Japanese expertise in the construction of power stations, a Hitachi spokesman said. The Japanese Government's backing stands in contrast to the position taken by the Clinton Administration, which opposes the project because of environmental and human rights concerns and because of doubts about the dam's financial liabilities. COMPANY NEWS | JAPANESE COMPANIES TO BID ON DAM PROJECT IN CHINA |
803506_0 | IT'S just what you would imagine an interior based on the Tower of Pisa would be: very Italian and a little quirky, humorous and, well, leaning. David Rockwell (above), the designer of Nobu and the Monkey Bar, has given Torre di Pisa, a new restaurant at 19 West 44th Street, the look of an Italian piazza where de Chirico would feel at home. Lined with plaster and hammered copper building facades, it is all just a bit askew. There is a tilting clock tower with a huge face with Roman numerals. Blue and white china plates seem to float off flocked wallpaper. It looks like you could put on a performance of 'Rigoletto' here," Mr. Rockwell said. "Rigoletto" on an ocean liner in a storm is more like it. In the main dining room, tables surrounded by sofa-shaped banquettes and plump velvet chairs are set out on a parquet floor under the wings of a tilted arcade. Plush carpeting and silver stenciling on a deep burgundy wall give the Cigar Room, a private room at the rear, a clublike feeling. And as an extra-nice touch, off-white linen napkins are rolled into a semblance of the tower itself. Torre di Pisa is a branch of a restaurant in Milan, Italy, owned by Paolo and Marco Meacci. Telephone: (212) 398-4400. | Currents;This Surreal Way To Your Table |
794795_0 | A big red harvesting machine cut through a field of alfalfa near here, neatly harvesting the crop. It was a typical fall sight, except for one thing: the machine had no driver. The harvester fulfills no fantasy vision of a robot of the future -- no flashy tricks, no R2D2-type charm. But a robot it is, a robot that uses satellite signals, artificial vision and a computer to sense its location and adjust the steering to keep cutting a straight line over the rolling hills of western Pennsylvania. The hulking machine, in many ways a less glamorous, earthbound version of vehicles designed to rove distant planets, is the advance guard of a new generation of robots -- the first ones that can move freely, see the world around them and respond to changes. They are vastly more flexible than the latest in factory robots, which reach, blindly, for a point in space to weld or paint. National competitiveness is at stake in developing mobile robots. Those involved are painfully aware that an earlier generation of factory robots were developed in the United States in the 1970's, but the initiative was lost to overseas companies because of what many saw as the shortsightedness of American managers. "America lost the robot wars for the last few decades," said Daniel S. Goldin, administrator of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, in a recent discussion with employees. "You can't go into a modern factory in America today and find a robot manufactured in America." To be sure, these mobile robots are still very much works in progress. The harvester, for example, had to be turned by a human driver at the end of each row. But the technology is moving rapidly, and applications in agriculture, mining, health care and other service jobs appear within reach. Researchers are particularly intrigued by the possibilities of using robots to assist the elderly at home. "The basic hurdles have been overcome," said William L. Wittaker, principal research scientist at Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute. "The work has crossed the line from black magic and mystery to engineering." Mobile robots, Mr. Goldin said, could develop into a $15-billion-a-year industry. NASA officials estimate that farm vehicles alone are driven more than one billion miles a year, though no one has any idea how much of that robots could claim. The harvester is a joint project of Carnegie Mellon, NASA and | Down on the Farm With R2D2; Mobile Robots Leaving Factory Cousins in Dust |
794696_0 | Coffee prices fell yesterday on the Coffee, Sugar and Cocoa Exchange in New York on signs that a recent agreement by coffee producers to hold back exports may be falling apart. On other commodity markets, cotton prices fell while soybeans rose. The Commodity Research Bureau index of 21 commodities fell 0.83 point, to 238.49. Late Thursday, a federation of Brazilian coffee exporters reported that coffee shipments from July through September would total 3.3 million 132-pound bags. That is 10 percent more than the limit that Brazil, the world's biggest coffee producer, agreed to under a plan by the Association of Coffee Producing Countries to hold back 20 percent of normal exports. "Brazil has sold more coffee than they were expected to do, and that's why the market came down," said Fernando Valendia, coffee broker with Landia International. Coffee for December delivery fell 5.4 cents, to $1.181 a pound. Cotton prices fell for a second day as damage to the crops in the Southeast from Hurricane Opal was below expectations. The storm, which made landfall near Pensacola, Fla., on Wednesday evening, struck cotton fields in Alabama and Florida, largely bypassing the unharvested crops in Georgia and the Carolinas. "Georgia didn't get nearly as much damage as we thought it would," said Will Leatherman, manager of Conti Cotton in Greenville, N.C. In addition, "the crops around the world keep getting bigger," with India and Pakistan, both leading producers, enjoying favorable weather conditions after suffering disastrous crops last year. Cotton for December delivery fell 2.82 cents, to 85.9 cents on the New York Cotton Exchange. Soybean prices gained amid expectations that China was looking to buy more oilseeds on world markets. China approved plans to import 200,000 metric tons, or 7.35 million bushels, of soybeans last night and could buy 800,000 metric tons of soybean oil during the next few months, traders said. The nation will seek bids from several exporters. The United States is the world's largest soybean producer. Soybeans for November delivery at the Chicago Board of Trade rose 3.5 cents, to $6.4050 a bushel. December soybean oil surged 0.30, or 1.1 percent, to 27.06 cents a pound, the highest for the active contract since July 26. FUTURES MARKETS | Coffee Slips on Signs the Accord On Exports May Be Crumbling |
794711_0 | A big red harvesting machine cut through a field of alfalfa near here, neatly harvesting the crop. It was a typical fall sight, except for one thing: the machine had no driver. The harvester fulfills no fantasy vision of a robot of the future -- no flashy tricks, no R2D2-type charm. But a robot it is, a robot that uses satellite signals, artificial vision and a computer to sense its location and adjust the steering to keep cutting a straight line over the rolling hills of western Pennsylvania. The hulking machine, in many ways a less glamorous, earthbound version of vehicles designed to rove distant planets, is the advance guard of a new generation of robots -- the first ones that can move freely, see the world around them and respond to changes. They are vastly more flexible than the latest in factory robots, which reach, blindly, for a point in space to weld or paint. National competitiveness is at stake in developing mobile robots. Those involved are painfully aware that an earlier generation of factory robots were developed in the United States in the 1970's, but the initiative was lost to overseas companies because of what many saw as the shortsightedness of American managers. "America lost the robot wars for the last few decades," said Daniel S. Goldin, administrator of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, in a recent discussion with employees. "You can't go into a modern factory in America today and find a robot manufactured in America." To be sure, these mobile robots are still very much works in progress. The harvester, for example, had to be turned by a human driver at the end of each row. But the technology is moving rapidly, and applications in agriculture, mining, health care and other service jobs appear within reach. Researchers are particularly intrigued by the possibilities of using robots to assist the elderly at home. "The basic hurdles have been overcome," said William L. Wittaker, principal research scientist at Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute. "The work has crossed the line from black magic and mystery to engineering." Mobile robots, Mr. Goldin said, could develop into a $15-billion-a-year industry. NASA officials estimate that farm vehicles alone are driven more than one billion miles a year, though no one has any idea how much of that robots could claim. The harvester is a joint project of Carnegie Mellon, NASA and | Down on the Farm With R2D2;Mobile Robots Leaving Factory Cousins in Dust |
805485_3 | is, says the report, "a vast and expanding ecological tragedy." As fish stocks become depleted and fish get harder to find, the investigators say, fishermen sometimes dump entire 55-gallon drums of cyanide into shallow reef communities, making "aquatic graveyards" of them. Coral reefs are the largest structures created by life. Biologically, their richness compares with that of tropical rain forests. They have come under assault in many places from a warming climate, pollution, overfishing and physical destruction, but the trade in live reef fish appears especially destructive. If left alone, the reef ecosystems might recover in a few decades, but the report says this is not likely: Coastal populations are rising, and villagers who have long depended on the reefs for their livelihood and main source of animal protein are likely to denude them again as soon as they begin to recover. The destruction of the reef ecosystems to supply markets in other Asian countries is devastating many local village economies in the Pacific, says the report, which adds that some divers have also been killed or disabled by the bends after pursuing the dwindling supply of fish to greater depths. Despite the general illegality of poison in fishing, the investigators found, many governments have been unable to enforce the laws in the case of cyanide, and they cited allegations that bribery is sometimes practiced. The authors advocate giving control of fishing on remaining healthy reefs to villagers as the best way to preserve them. Dr. Johannes said that Indonesia and the Philippines, where the destruction has so far been greatest, are beginning to recognize this and take action accordingly. Nevertheless, the report says, "no slowing in the geographic expansion of the fishery nor of consumer demand is in sight." It has long been a popular Chinese custom to keep fish alive until moments before cooking, the authors wrote. But demand has recently been spurred, according to the report, by the rise of a growing class of newly rich business people in the rapidly expanding economies of southeast Asia. "Along with a Rolex and a BMW," the authors write, "one can signal that one has 'arrived' by eating very highly priced fish in public." Demand seems to rise further if a particular fish is thought to be endangered, as happened in Hong Kong when newspapers reported that Indonesia had banned the export of humphead wrasse. Fishing boats in search of | A Food Fad's Ripple Effect On Reefs of Pacific: Cyanide |
805791_0 | Charging that the courts are moving too slowly to clean up an illegal dump here, Gov. George E. Pataki said today that he would authorize spending $250,000 in state funds to seal off the site -- an abandoned warehouse overflowing with garbage. "This site is an outrage and not just because of the tremendous threat this poses to the Hudson River, the environment and the state," Governor Pataki said. "It's an outrage because this has gone on for so long." The Governor had planned to announce the closure at a news conference beside the site, the former warehouse for the Anaconda wire manufacturing company, so he could show reporters the mountains of wood scraps, sofas, tires and other construction and demolition debris inside the six-acre building. But the Governor was locked out, along with state and local officials. The padlock on the chain link fence around the warehouse had been changed early this morning. Instead, the Governor stood in front of the locked gates and announced that the state would go to court seeking permission to temporarily seal the building. The $250,000 cost of the work will be paid from the hazardous-waste management budget of the Department of Environmental Conservation. The money will go to repair hundreds of broken windows, to carve fire lanes through the trash and to stop leaks in the roof that could cause potentially carcinogenic runoff to leak into the Hudson River. A development company, Harbor at Hastings, and an owner of the company, Philip Eisenberg, bought the warehouse and 32 acres of riverfront property in 1988. When Harbor at Hastings's plan to build waterfront condominiums on the property fell through, the company leased the building to Age Carting, a Westchester County trash-hauling company, to be used as a recycling transfer station, said John Cronin, an environmentalist who said he had been trying to get the site cleaned up for years. The owners of Age Carting, Edward and Gregory Fucci, received a permit in 1989 to store 2,400 cubic yards of recyclable materials in the warehouse for up to two weeks at a time before transferring the material to a recycling center. Instead, Age Carting began bringing in all sorts of refuse, Mr. Cronin said. The building now contains about 80,000 cubic yards, or two football fields worth of trash, Governor Pataki said. In September, the garbage caught fire, causing a blaze that took five days | Pataki Moves to Seal Illegal Dump With $250,000 in State Money |
805751_3 | is, says the report, "a vast and expanding ecological tragedy." As fish stocks become depleted and fish get harder to find, the investigators say, fishermen sometimes dump entire 55-gallon drums of cyanide into shallow reef communities, making "aquatic graveyards" of them. Coral reefs are the largest structures created by life. Biologically, their richness compares with that of tropical rain forests. They have come under assault in many places from a warming climate, pollution, overfishing and physical destruction, but the trade in live reef fish appears especially destructive. If left alone, the reef ecosystems might recover in a few decades, but the report says this is not likely: Coastal populations are rising, and villagers who have long depended on the reefs for their livelihood and main source of animal protein are likely to denude them again as soon as they begin to recover. The destruction of the reef ecosystems to supply markets in other Asian countries is devastating many local village economies in the Pacific, says the report, which adds that some divers have also been killed or disabled by the bends after pursuing the dwindling supply of fish to greater depths. Despite the general illegality of poison in fishing, the investigators found, many governments have been unable to enforce the laws in the case of cyanide, and they cited allegations that bribery is sometimes practiced. The authors advocate giving control of fishing on remaining healthy reefs to villagers as the best way to preserve them. Dr. Johannes said that Indonesia and the Philippines, where the destruction has so far been greatest, are beginning to recognize this and take action accordingly. Nevertheless, the report says, "no slowing in the geographic expansion of the fishery nor of consumer demand is in sight." It has long been a popular Chinese custom to keep fish alive until moments before cooking, the authors wrote. But demand has recently been spurred, according to the report, by the rise of a growing class of newly rich business people in the rapidly expanding economies of southeast Asia. "Along with a Rolex and a BMW," the authors write, "one can signal that one has 'arrived' by eating very highly priced fish in public." Demand seems to rise further if a particular fish is thought to be endangered, as happened in Hong Kong when newspapers reported that Indonesia had banned the export of humphead wrasse. Fishing boats in search of | A Food Fad's Ripple Effect On Reefs of Pacific: Cyanide |
805533_0 | Charging that the courts are moving too slowly to clean up an illegal dump here, Gov. George E. Pataki said today that he would authorize spending $250,000 in state funds to seal off the site -- an abandoned warehouse overflowing with garbage. "This site is an outrage and not just because of the tremendous threat this poses to the Hudson River, the environment and the state," Governor Pataki said. "It's an outrage because this has gone on for so long." The Governor had planned to announce the closure at a news conference beside the site, the former warehouse for the Anaconda wire manufacturing company, so he could show reporters the mountains of wood scraps, sofas, tires and other construction and demolition debris inside the six-acre building. But the Governor was locked out, along with state and local officials. The padlock on the chain link fence around the warehouse had been changed early this morning. Instead, the Governor stood in front of the locked gates and announced that the state would go to court seeking permission to temporarily seal the building. The $250,000 cost of the work will be paid from the hazardous-waste management budget of the Department of Environmental Conservation. The money will go to repair hundreds of broken windows, to carve fire lanes through the trash and to stop leaks in the roof that could cause potentially carcinogenic runoff to leak into the Hudson River. A development company, Harbor at Hastings, and an owner of the company, Philip Eisenberg, bought the warehouse and 32 acres of riverfront property in 1988. When Harbor at Hastings's plan to build waterfront condominiums on the property fell through, the company leased the building to Age Carting, a Westchester County trash-hauling company, to be used as a recycling transfer station, said John Cronin, an environmentalist who said he had been trying to get the site cleaned up for years. The owners of Age Carting, Edward and Gregory Fucci, received a permit in 1989 to store 2,400 cubic yards of recyclable materials in the warehouse for up to two weeks at a time before transferring the material to a recycling center. Instead, Age Carting began bringing in all sorts of refuse, Mr. Cronin said. The building now contains about 80,000 cubic yards, or two football fields worth of trash, Governor Pataki said. In September, the garbage caught fire, causing a blaze that took five days | Pataki Moves to Seal Illegal Dump With $250,000 in State Money |
795991_0 | On the Boardwalk yesterday, passers-by were asked to think about the boards they were walking on. About 20 members of New Jersey Rain Forest Relief, a Red Bank conservation group, chanted slogans criticizing municipal officials for using wood from Brazil to reconstruct the Boardwalk. City officials have said wood from the tropics lasts three times longer than other types of lumber and does not splinter as easily, the A.P. reported. Conservation groups say that buying this wood encourages environmentally damaging clear-cutting and deforestation. Rain Forest Relief said the company supplying Ocean City with its wood had not been certified as a responsible harvester. TERRY PRISTIN NEW JERSEY DAILY BRIEFING | Protest Over Brazilian Wood |
796043_0 | On the Boardwalk yesterday, passers-by were asked to think about the boards they were walking on. About 20 members of New Jersey Rain Forest Relief, a Red Bank conservation group, chanted slogans criticizing municipal officials for using wood from Brazil to reconstruct the Boardwalk. City officials have said wood from the tropics lasts three times longer than other types of lumber and does not splinter as easily, the A.P. reported. Conservation groups say that buying this wood encourages environmentally damaging clear-cutting and deforestation. Rain Forest Relief said the company supplying Ocean City with its wood had not been certified as a responsible harvester. TERRY PRISTIN NEW JERSEY DAILY BRIEFING | Protest Over Brazilian Wood |
793369_4 | It is a message echoed by officials who keep track of immigrant groups in the church at the United States. Catholic Conference's offices in Washington. "We don't want to ignore national borders, or disrespect them," said Sister Suzanne Hall, director of the Office of Pastoral Care of Migrants and Refugees. "But the primary consideration is that we are sisters and brothers." Looking over a list of Asian Catholics, Sister Suzanne estimated that the church in this country is spiritual home to 1.3 million Filipinos, 200,000 Vietnamese, 80,000 Koreans, perhaps as many as 70,000 Chinese and smaller numbers of Cambodians, Laotians and Hmong. Many of the larger groups arrived with their own priests and nuns, and some have ordained priests from within their communities here. More recent Catholic immigrants come from Eritrea and Ethiopia in East Africa, and Nigeria, Ghana and Liberia in West Africa, Sister Suzanne said. And just in the last year, she added, her office has made contact with new communities of Mayan Indians from Guatemala, who have recently settled in Florida and Arizona. They speak their own languages, rather than Spanish, meaning that priests who know Quiche and Mam must be brought up on visits from Central America to serve their spiritual needs. "We have Masses for them when we can," she said. Yet such immigrant groups are small when compared with those Catholics who have arrived from Spanish-speaking nations of Latin America. The latter are well known to Ron Cruz, executive director of the Catholic Conference's Secretariat of Hispanic Affairs. He estimated they number 22 million, slightly more than a third of the American church's total population. About one-fourth were born outside the United States. Hispanic Catholics defy the geographical stereotypes of men and women who settle within a few hundred miles of the Mexican border or in the neighborhoods of a few of the nation's biggest cities, he said. "They're virtually all over the country," Mr. Cruz said. "I just came from Portland, Ore., where they have an incredible Hispanic population." And two years ago, at a workshop for Hispanic Catholics he arranged in Newark, Mr. Cruz said he was "amazed at the number of doctors," men who had immigrated in hope of finding medical work in America. "It's a whole gamut," he added. "Yes, you have lots of poor, but you also have increasing numbers of professionals." A VISIT FROM THE POPE: NEW COMMUNITIES | With Every Wave of Newcomers, a Church More Diverse |
793102_4 | It is a message echoed by officials who keep track of immigrant groups in the church at the United States. Catholic Conference's offices in Washington. "We don't want to ignore national borders, or disrespect them," said Sister Suzanne Hall, director of the Office of Pastoral Care of Migrants and Refugees. "But the primary consideration is that we are sisters and brothers." Looking over a list of Asian Catholics, Sister Suzanne estimated that the church in this country is spiritual home to 1.3 million Filipinos, 200,000 Vietnamese, 80,000 Koreans, perhaps as many as 70,000 Chinese and smaller numbers of Cambodians, Laotians and Hmong. Many of the larger groups arrived with their own priests and nuns, and some have ordained priests from within their communities here. More recent Catholic immigrants come from Eritrea and Ethiopia in East Africa, and Nigeria, Ghana and Liberia in West Africa, Sister Suzanne said. And just in the last year, she added, her office has made contact with new communities of Mayan Indians from Guatemala, who have recently settled in Florida and Arizona. They speak their own languages, rather than Spanish, meaning that priests who know Quiche and Mam must be brought up on visits from Central America to serve their spiritual needs. "We have Masses for them when we can," she said. Yet such immigrant groups are small when compared with those Catholics who have arrived from Spanish-speaking nations of Latin America. The latter are well known to Ron Cruz, executive director of the Catholic Conference's Secretariat of Hispanic Affairs. He estimated they number 22 million, slightly more than a third of the American church's total population. About one-fourth were born outside the United States. Hispanic Catholics defy the geographical stereotypes of men and women who settle within a few hundred miles of the Mexican border or in the neighborhoods of a few of the nation's biggest cities, he said. "They're virtually all over the country," Mr. Cruz said. "I just came from Portland, Ore., where they have an incredible Hispanic population." And two years ago, at a workshop for Hispanic Catholics he arranged in Newark, Mr. Cruz said he was "amazed at the number of doctors," men who had immigrated in hope of finding medical work in America. "It's a whole gamut," he added. "Yes, you have lots of poor, but you also have increasing numbers of professionals." A VISIT FROM THE POPE: NEW COMMUNITIES | With Every Wave of Newcomers, a Church More Diverse |
793395_0 | To the Editor: In "The Slacker Myth" (Op-Ed, Sept. 27), John Tyler and Frank Levy assure us that "The market for new college graduates is reasonably solid" and conclude that "education is becoming ever more valuable." Perhaps, but relative to what? And what are the policy implications? It is well known that the real earnings of the lower 80 percent of men fell sharply in the 1980's. The declines were the greatest for those with the least education. Does that make education the lifeboat for living standards in the 1990's, as Mr. Tyler and Mr. Levy suggest? For a variety of reasons, the answer is no. First, the writers correctly point out that earnings of college-educated workers were similar in 1979 and 1993, but this ignores the trends over this period. After seeing their wages increase in the early 80's, those with just college degrees have suffered steady and substantial declines in real pay since 1987. The magnitude of this reduction in wages was not greatly different from that experienced by new workers with just a high school degree. Second, only one-quarter of the work force had a college degree or more in 1993; two-thirds of the work force had a high school degree or less. Even if schooling had the payoff the writers suggest, it would take decades to shift these percentages enough to recover from the earnings losses of the 1980's. Only those with professional degrees have held their own over the last eight years. What would be the effect of a massive increase in the supply of college-educated workers on their own wages? How many workers with professional degrees does our economy need? Already, the United States has higher shares of college-educated workers than its developed-country competitors, and yet, among advanced countries, only the United States experienced both widespread declines in real earnings and sharp increases in inequality in the 1980's. Education is important for many reasons. But inadequate skills were not the problem in the 1980's, and raising the rate of growth in the share of college-educated workers is not the solution. I suggest the problem is not in the skill mix of American workers but in our labor market institutions. DAVID R. HOWELL Associate Professor Graduate School of Management The New School for Social Research New York, Sept. 28, 1995 | A Degree Doesn't Equal High Pay |
793076_0 | Ranking Irish and British officials say that they are close to resolving the issue that has blocked the Northern Ireland peace effort for months -- the dispute over the disarmament of the Irish Republican Army and the scheduling of full-fledged talks. Up to now, Britain has insisted that the I.R.A. must start disarming before full talks can begin, and Sinn Fein, the I.R.A.'s political arm, has refused to discuss disarmament until Britain sets a date for talks. But after months of verbal warfare, the tone of public statements on the issue began to soften in the last week and officials now say they believe face-saving language will be found to allow Britain and the I.R.A. to work out a deal. Negotiations would involve the Irish and British Governments and all the parties in Northern Ireland, including Sinn Fein and the Protestant unionist parties opposed to the I.R.A.'s goal of a united Ireland. "Inexorably we're moving toward an all-inclusive dialogue," Prime Minister John Bruton of Ireland said today after meeting with David Trimble, the new head of the Ulster Unionist Party, the largest Protestant political group in Ulster. Mr. Trimble, whose visit here marked the first formal meeting by a leader of his party and an Irish Prime Minister since the latest outbreak of sectarian strife in Northern Ireland in 1969, also took a clearly softer line, saying the paramilitaries must "establish their commitment to exclusively peaceful methods" before entering full-fledged talks. For this, he said, there had to be a "satisfactory resolving of the weapons issue," but he did not say that this involve the surrender of arms. Essentially, Sinn Fein wants Britain to drop or finesse its demand for I.R.A. disarmament before talks begin, while Britain and Ireland are pushing the I.R.A., which has been observing a cease-fire for over a year, to abandon violence forever. The proposed deal has been put to Gerry Adams, the leader of Sinn Fein, which has had several meetings recently with Irish and British Government officials as well as with American officials. Mr. Adams is said to be under pressure from the White House to accept a compromise that would probably involve putting the disarmament issue to a newly-created international agency, while political talks are scheduled, probably for December. The new agency's specific mandate, and the question of whether its recommendations would be binding, is still under discussion. It is expected to be | Britain and I.R.A. Inch Closer to Peace Talks |
793410_0 | The Food and Drug Administration has approved the first of a new class of nonhormonal drugs to treat osteoporosis, the bone-thinning disease that cripples millions of postmenopausal women, Merck & Company announced today. The company said the drug, alendronate sodium, not only stops the breakdown of bone characteristic of osteoporosis, but also restores some of the bone mass loss to the disease. Studies with almost 2,000 women also showed that the drug, to be marketed under the name Fosamax, reduced the risk of painful spinal fractures from the disease that cause many women to lose height with age. Osteoporosis is a thinning and weakening of bone that afflicts about 25 million Americans, most of them elderly and 80 percent of whom are women, according to the National Osteoporosis Foundation. Up to eight million women have a severe form of this brittle-bone disease, causing many to experience spontaneous fractures, usually in the vertebrae of the back. The most common treatment for women with osteoporosis has been hormone therapy using estrogen, the female hormone that decreases in the body after menopause. But many women are unable to take estrogen because of various side effects and fears that it may increase the risk of certain cancers. Dr. Ethel Siris, director of osteoporosis programs at the Center for Women's Health at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center in New York, said the new drug gives women an alternative treatment for the bone condition that appears to cause few adverse reactions. Dr. Siris, who conducted studies with the drug, said it works by blocking excessive breakdown, or resorbtion, of bone, allowing the body's natural bone-replacement mechanism to keep up. After menopause, more bone is broken down than is replaced, typically causing bone to weaken. Cindy Pearson of the National Women's Health Network, a Washington-based advocacy group, said her organization applauded new treatments for the bone condition, but was concerned that Fosamax would be overprescribed if osteoporosis is defined too broadly. Many women may be adequately treated with calcium and vitamin supplements and exercise, she said, and may not require treatment with a prescription drug, particularly in early stages of the disease. Merck said Fosamax, which will be marketed in conjunction with Wyeth-Ayerst Laboratories, will be available in pill form at an estimated cost to patients of about $600 annually. Reported side effects are generally mild, including nausea, heartburn, gas and abdominal pain. | New Osteoporosis Drug Wins F.D.A. Approval |
793127_0 | To the Editor: In "The Slacker Myth" (Op-Ed, Sept. 27), John Tyler and Frank Levy assure us that "The market for new college graduates is reasonably solid" and conclude that "education is becoming ever more valuable." Perhaps, but relative to what? And what are the policy implications? It is well known that the real earnings of the lower 80 percent of men fell sharply in the 1980's. The declines were the greatest for those with the least education. Does that make education the lifeboat for living standards in the 1990's, as Mr. Tyler and Mr. Levy suggest? For a variety of reasons, the answer is no. First, the writers correctly point out that earnings of college-educated workers were similar in 1979 and 1993, but this ignores the trends over this period. After seeing their wages increase in the early 80's, those with just college degrees have suffered steady and substantial declines in real pay since 1987. The magnitude of this reduction in wages was not greatly different from that experienced by new workers with just a high school degree. Second, only one-quarter of the work force had a college degree or more in 1993; two-thirds of the work force had a high school degree or less. Even if schooling had the payoff the writers suggest, it would take decades to shift these percentages enough to recover from the earnings losses of the 1980's. Only those with professional degrees have held their own over the last eight years. What would be the effect of a massive increase in the supply of college-educated workers on their own wages? How many workers with professional degrees does our economy need? Already, the United States has higher shares of college-educated workers than its developed-country competitors, and yet, among advanced countries, only the United States experienced both widespread declines in real earnings and sharp increases in inequality in the 1980's. Education is important for many reasons. But inadequate skills were not the problem in the 1980's, and raising the rate of growth in the share of college-educated workers is not the solution. I suggest the problem is not in the skill mix of American workers but in our labor market institutions. DAVID R. HOWELL Associate Professor Graduate School of Management The New School for Social Research New York, Sept. 28, 1995 | A Degree Doesn't Equal High Pay |
793138_1 | the House Republican leadership has put forward, which is scheduled for votes in committee this month, relies heavily on ideas that would offer little help to mussels: programs to breed species in captivity, for example, or the creation of biodiversity reserves on public lands, mostly in Western states where relatively few mussel species live. The bill offers some financial incentives for landowners to preserve habitat they own that is suitable for endangered species, but it not clear that there would be enough money to make payments to everyone whose activities otherwise would jeopardize mussels in nearby streams. And while the Republican sponsors argue that they intend to insure that good science supports all decisions about whether and how to protect species, scientists involved in protecting mussels say their endangerment is well documented and the only thing that can save them is to preserve their deteriorating habitat. Senator Richard Shelby, an Alabama Republican who has sponsored the moves to rein in the listings of new species for protection, has singled out proposals to list mussels in that state as endangered or threatened "an excellent example of what's wrong with the current listing program." In a statement submitted to a Fish and Wildlife Service hearing earlier this year, he called the proposed listings -- since caught in the freeze on new listings -- an exercise in "scientific deception." But the scientific literature expresses little doubt about the demise of the mussels. Of nearly 300 species native to the United States, half are in serious trouble: about 20 are considered extinct, about 60 are listed as threatened or endangered, and about 70 have been proposed for listing. When Fisheries, the journal of the American Fisheries Society, published a survey of the entire fauna in 1993, it listed only 70 species as stable. "Everybody talks about biodiversity in the tropical rain forests," said Dr. Arthur E. Bogan, a research associate in invertebrate zoology at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh. "But you don't have to go to the tropics to see a major extinction event." In a 1993 article in the peer-reviewed Journal of the American Society of Zoologists, he said that the entire family of mussels was "poised on the brink of a major and widespread extinction." The extinction of the mussels has been documented for decades, and is not in dispute among malacologists. They understand, too, why it is happening. | Freshwater Mussels Facing Mass Extinction |
793143_0 | The Food and Drug Administration has approved the first of a new class of nonhormonal drugs to treat osteoporosis, the bone-thinning disease that cripples millions of postmenopausal women, Merck & Company announced today. The company said the drug, alendronate sodium, not only stops the breakdown of bone characteristic of osteoporosis, but also restores some of the bone mass loss to the disease. Studies with almost 2,000 women also showed that the drug, to be marketed under the name Fosamax, reduced the risk of painful spinal fractures from the disease that cause many women to lose height with age. Osteoporosis is a thinning and weakening of bone that afflicts about 25 million Americans, most of them elderly and 80 percent of whom are women, according to the National Osteoporosis Foundation. Up to eight million women have a severe form of this brittle-bone disease, causing many to experience spontaneous fractures, usually in the vertebrae of the back. The most common treatment for women with osteoporosis has been hormone therapy using estrogen, the female hormone that decreases in the body after menopause. But many women are unable to take estrogen because of various side effects and fears that it may increase the risk of certain cancers. Dr. Ethel Siris, director of osteoporosis programs at the Center for Women's Health at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center in New York, said the new drug gives women an alternative treatment for the bone condition that appears to cause few adverse reactions. Dr. Siris, who conducted studies with the drug, said it works by blocking excessive breakdown, or resorbtion, of bone, allowing the body's natural bone-replacement mechanism to keep up. After menopause, more bone is broken down than is replaced, typically causing bone to weaken. Cindy Pearson of the National Women's Health Network, a Washington-based advocacy group, said her organization applauded new treatments for the bone condition, but was concerned that Fosamax would be overprescribed if osteoporosis is defined too broadly. Many women may be adequately treated with calcium and vitamin supplements and exercise, she said, and may not require treatment with a prescription drug, particularly in early stages of the disease. Merck said Fosamax, which will be marketed in conjunction with Wyeth-Ayerst Laboratories, will be available in pill form at an estimated cost to patients of about $600 annually. Reported side effects are generally mild, including nausea, heartburn, gas and abdominal pain. | New Osteoporosis Drug Wins F.D.A. Approval |
793261_0 | WITH rates of violence among teen-agers rising precipitously, the argument over the causes of violent behavior has never been more charged. Nature got a hearing last month at a University of Maryland meeting on possible genetic influences on violence. Last weekend, nurture had its day, at a meeting at the New York Academy of Sciences on the childhood causes of violence. Several strands of findings presented by researchers at the weekend conference pointed to the same conclusion: brutality and cruelty to children can leave a clear mark on the chemistry of the brain. And those changes in brain chemistry may be the route by which a brutalized child becomes a violent adult. The conference also offered some glimmers of hope for changing an established inclination to violent behavior. One animal study that was particularly telling showed that normally mild-mannered golden hamsters that were threatened and attacked when they were young, and that grew up to be cowardly bullies, had lasting changes in the brain circuitry for two neurotransmitters that regulate aggression. And parallel data from several long-range studies of large groups of children show that those who were childhood victims of abuse or neglect were the most violent as teen-agers. The hopeful news came from programs that seek to help these children learn to better control their aggressive impulses. "Even if a child has a predisposition to aggression, he can learn to override it," said Dr. Karen Bierman, a psychologist at Pennsylvania State University. "The more aggressive kids just need more help from their parents, teachers and friends." The research on golden hamsters took advantage of that species' habit of living singly, and being fiercely protective of their nesting territory -- or, in this case, laboratory cage. In the wild, adolescent hamsters ordinarily go off on their own and establish a solitary nest. But in the experiment, adolescent hamsters were placed in the cage of a mature one, thus violating its territory, for an hour a day over a week's time -- about half a hamster's adolescence. The older hamsters threatened and attacked the younger ones to protect their territory from the interloper. When those younger hamsters grew up they were given their own territories, and experimenters placed other hamsters in the cages of the traumatized ones. If an interloper was the same size, the traumatized hamster tended to cower or run. But if the interloper was smaller and weaker, | Early Violence Leaves Its Mark on the Brain |
793405_1 | the House Republican leadership has put forward, which is scheduled for votes in committee this month, relies heavily on ideas that would offer little help to mussels: programs to breed species in captivity, for example, or the creation of biodiversity reserves on public lands, mostly in Western states where relatively few mussel species live. The bill offers some financial incentives for landowners to preserve habitat they own that is suitable for endangered species, but it not clear that there would be enough money to make payments to everyone whose activities otherwise would jeopardize mussels in nearby streams. And while the Republican sponsors argue that they intend to insure that good science supports all decisions about whether and how to protect species, scientists involved in protecting mussels say their endangerment is well documented and the only thing that can save them is to preserve their deteriorating habitat. Senator Richard Shelby, an Alabama Republican who has sponsored the moves to rein in the listings of new species for protection, has singled out proposals to list mussels in that state as endangered or threatened "an excellent example of what's wrong with the current listing program." In a statement submitted to a Fish and Wildlife Service hearing earlier this year, he called the proposed listings -- since caught in the freeze on new listings -- an exercise in "scientific deception." But the scientific literature expresses little doubt about the demise of the mussels. Of nearly 300 species native to the United States, half are in serious trouble: about 20 are considered extinct, about 60 are listed as threatened or endangered, and about 70 have been proposed for listing. When Fisheries, the journal of the American Fisheries Society, published a survey of the entire fauna in 1993, it listed only 70 species as stable. "Everybody talks about biodiversity in the tropical rain forests," said Dr. Arthur E. Bogan, a research associate in invertebrate zoology at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh. "But you don't have to go to the tropics to see a major extinction event." In a 1993 article in the peer-reviewed Journal of the American Society of Zoologists, he said that the entire family of mussels was "poised on the brink of a major and widespread extinction." The extinction of the mussels has been documented for decades, and is not in dispute among malacologists. They understand, too, why it is happening. | Freshwater Mussels Facing Mass Extinction |
793157_0 | WITH rates of violence among teen-agers rising precipitously, the argument over the causes of violent behavior has never been more charged. Nature got a hearing last month at a University of Maryland meeting on possible genetic influences on violence. Last weekend, nurture had its day, at a meeting at the New York Academy of Sciences on the childhood causes of violence. Several strands of findings presented by researchers at the weekend conference pointed to the same conclusion: brutality and cruelty to children can leave a clear mark on the chemistry of the brain. And those changes in brain chemistry may be the route by which a brutalized child becomes a violent adult. The conference also offered some glimmers of hope for changing an established inclination to violent behavior. One animal study that was particularly telling showed that normally mild-mannered golden hamsters that were threatened and attacked when they were young, and that grew up to be cowardly bullies, had lasting changes in the brain circuitry for two neurotransmitters that regulate aggression. And parallel data from several long-range studies of large groups of children show that those who were childhood victims of abuse or neglect were the most violent as teen-agers. The hopeful news came from programs that seek to help these children learn to better control their aggressive impulses. "Even if a child has a predisposition to aggression, he can learn to override it," said Dr. Karen Bierman, a psychologist at Pennsylvania State University. "The more aggressive kids just need more help from their parents, teachers and friends." The research on golden hamsters took advantage of that species' habit of living singly, and being fiercely protective of their nesting territory -- or, in this case, laboratory cage. In the wild, adolescent hamsters ordinarily go off on their own and establish a solitary nest. But in the experiment, adolescent hamsters were placed in the cage of a mature one, thus violating its territory, for an hour a day over a week's time -- about half a hamster's adolescence. The older hamsters threatened and attacked the younger ones to protect their territory from the interloper. When those younger hamsters grew up they were given their own territories, and experimenters placed other hamsters in the cages of the traumatized ones. If an interloper was the same size, the traumatized hamster tended to cower or run. But if the interloper was smaller and weaker, | Early Violence Leaves Its Mark on the Brain |
793348_0 | Ranking Irish and British officials say that they are close to resolving the issue that has blocked the Northern Ireland peace effort for months -- the dispute over the disarmament of the Irish Republican Army and the scheduling of full-fledged talks. Up to now, Britain has insisted that the I.R.A. must start disarming before full talks can begin, and Sinn Fein, the I.R.A.'s political arm, has refused to discuss disarmament until Britain sets a date for talks. But after months of verbal warfare, the tone of public statements on the issue began to soften in the last week and officials now say they believe face-saving language will be found to allow Britain and the I.R.A. to work out a deal. Negotiations would involve the Irish and British Governments and all the parties in Northern Ireland, including Sinn Fein and the Protestant unionist parties opposed to the I.R.A.'s goal of a united Ireland. "Inexorably we're moving toward an all-inclusive dialogue," Prime Minister John Bruton of Ireland said today after meeting with David Trimble, the new head of the Ulster Unionist Party, the largest Protestant political group in Ulster. Mr. Trimble, whose visit here marked the first formal meeting by a leader of his party and an Irish Prime Minister since the latest outbreak of sectarian strife in Northern Ireland in 1969, also took a clearly softer line, saying the paramilitaries must "establish their commitment to exclusively peaceful methods" before entering full-fledged talks. For this, he said, there had to be a "satisfactory resolving of the weapons issue," but he did not say that this involve the surrender of arms. Essentially, Sinn Fein wants Britain to drop or finesse its demand for I.R.A. disarmament before talks begin, while Britain and Ireland are pushing the I.R.A., which has been observing a cease-fire for over a year, to abandon violence forever. The proposed deal has been put to Gerry Adams, the leader of Sinn Fein, which has had several meetings recently with Irish and British Government officials as well as with American officials. Mr. Adams is said to be under pressure from the White House to accept a compromise that would probably involve putting the disarmament issue to a newly-created international agency, while political talks are scheduled, probably for December. The new agency's specific mandate, and the question of whether its recommendations would be binding, is still under discussion. It is expected to be | Britain and I.R.A. Inch Closer to Peace Talks |
801488_0 | A COMEBACK in Latin America and the Caribbean of dengue fever, a disease once thought to have been nearly eliminated, has prompted health officials to warn travelers to those areas to take some simple precautions to reduce the risks of contracting the disease. First, the officials stress, visitors should carry insect repellent to use at the times of day that the mosquito that transmits the various forms of the disease, Aedes aegypti, is most likely to bite -- the early morning and late afternoon. And since the mosquito also likes to migrate indoors, it is important to make sure that a hotel room is free of insects at bedtime; windows should not be left open unless they are screened. Outbreaks in more than a dozen countries this year led the Pan American Health Organization to designate dengue fever an epidemic this summer, and although the disease is not ordinarily fatal, health authorities are worried about the emergence of a potentially lethal strain called dengue hemmorhagic fever. The largest number of cases of classic dengue, some 88,000, has been reported in Brazil, with two states heavily visited by foreign tourists, Bahia and Rio de Janeiro, registering the most severe outbreaks. But the situation appears most serious in Central America, where both Guatemala and El Salvador have declared states of emergency, and in Venezuela, which has reported nearly 3,000 cases of hemorrhagic dengue. In the Caribbean, significant numbers of cases have been reported in Montserrat, Antiqua, the Dominican Republic, St. Kitts and Dominica. The disease is also endemic to tropical parts of Asia and Africa, but no major outbreaks have been reported there. Aedes aegypti is also found in Florida, Texas and other Southern states, although no cases have been reported in the United States this year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. But with the number of Americans traveling abroad having doubled in the last decade, health experts say it is essential for physicians and visitors to the tropics to familiarize themselves with the disease, which has an incubation period of as long as two weeks. "Any time you go to an urban environment in the tropics you have to consider yourself at risk," said Dr. Duane Gubler, a dengue specialist at the Atlanta centers. "There is probably less risk at the beach, but you can't be sure, because the mosquitoes have been found even near | Health Officials Warn On Re-emerging Fever |
801761_0 | The United States, Britain and France have announced that they will sign the South Pacific Nuclear Free Zone Treaty in a move to help reduce tensions between the region and the Western nuclear powers. France said, however, that it will continue its present series of nuclear tests in the South Pacific, begun in September, before joining the treaty. Under the treaty, the three nations will agree not to test or base nuclear weapons in the region or to use them against any regional nation that has signed the accord. The announcement was made on Friday here and in London and in Paris. China and Russia, the only other declared nuclear weapons powers, have already signed the 1985 treaty. New Zealand, which with Australia has led an international diplomatic campaign against France because of the testing in the French-owned Mururoa and Fangataufa atolls, said it welcomed the decision but still hoped to persuade France to abandon the tests. The United States will not relinquish its rights to traverse the region with ships with nuclear materials. Washington's refusal to abandon transit rights or reveal what weapons are aboard ships led to New Zealand's withdrawal from a regional security organization led by the United States. The Pacific accord -- often known as the Rarotonga Treaty, from the islands where it was completed and opened for signatures on Aug. 6, 1985 -- is one of several regional pacts that are creating zones where nuclear weapons are off limits. WORLD NEWS BRIEFS | Western Nuclear Powers To Sign Pacific Accord |
802303_0 | The United States, Britain and France have announced that they will sign the South Pacific Nuclear Free Zone Treaty in a move to help reduce tensions between the region and the Western nuclear powers. France said, however, that it will continue its present series of nuclear tests in the South Pacific, begun in September, before joining the treaty. Under the treaty, the three nations will agree not to test or base nuclear weapons in the region or to use them against any regional nation that has signed the accord. The announcement was made on Friday here and in London and in Paris. China and Russia, the only other declared nuclear weapons powers, have already signed the 1985 treaty. New Zealand, which with Australia has led an international diplomatic campaign against France because of the testing in the French-owned Mururoa and Fangataufa atolls, said it welcomed the decision but still hoped to persuade France to abandon the tests. The United States will not relinquish its rights to traverse the region with ships with nuclear materials. Washington's refusal to abandon transit rights or reveal what weapons are aboard ships led to New Zealand's withdrawal from a regional security organization led by the United States. The Pacific accord -- often known as the Rarotonga Treaty, from the islands where it was completed and opened for signatures on Aug. 6, 1985 -- is one of several regional pacts that are creating zones where nuclear weapons are off limits. WORLD NEWS BRIEFS | Western Nuclear Powers To Sign Pacific Accord |
802145_0 | A COMEBACK in Latin America and the Caribbean of dengue fever, a disease once thought to have been nearly eliminated, has prompted health officials to warn travelers to those areas to take some simple precautions to reduce the risks of contracting the disease. First, the officials stress, visitors should carry insect repellent to use at the times of day that the mosquito that transmits the various forms of the disease, Aedes aegypti, is most likely to bite -- the early morning and late afternoon. And since the mosquito also likes to migrate indoors, it is important to make sure that a hotel room is free of insects at bedtime; windows should not be left open unless they are screened. Outbreaks in more than a dozen countries this year led the Pan American Health Organization to designate dengue fever an epidemic this summer, and although the disease is not ordinarily fatal, health authorities are worried about the emergence of a potentially lethal strain called dengue hemmorhagic fever. The largest number of cases of classic dengue, some 88,000, has been reported in Brazil, with two states heavily visited by foreign tourists, Bahia and Rio de Janeiro, registering the most severe outbreaks. But the situation appears most serious in Central America, where both Guatemala and El Salvador have declared states of emergency, and in Venezuela, which has reported nearly 3,000 cases of hemorrhagic dengue. In the Caribbean, significant numbers of cases have been reported in Montserrat, Antiqua, the Dominican Republic, St. Kitts and Dominica. The disease is also endemic to tropical parts of Asia and Africa, but no major outbreaks have been reported there. Aedes aegypti is also found in Florida, Texas and other Southern states, although no cases have been reported in the United States this year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. But with the number of Americans traveling abroad having doubled in the last decade, health experts say it is essential for physicians and visitors to the tropics to familiarize themselves with the disease, which has an incubation period of as long as two weeks. "Any time you go to an urban environment in the tropics you have to consider yourself at risk," said Dr. Duane Gubler, a dengue specialist at the Atlanta centers. "There is probably less risk at the beach, but you can't be sure, because the mosquitoes have been found even near | Health Officials Warn On Re-emerging Fever |
804059_0 | Defiant in the face of international condemnation, France said it conducted a third underground nuclear test this afternoon at its site in the South Pacific. The test took place beneath Mururoa Atoll in French Polynesia, the Defense Ministry said tonight. It said the explosion was equal to about 60,000 tons of TNT. This test was necessary to guarantee in the future the security and reliability of our arms," the Ministry said in a short statement. Governments and environmental groups worldwide have condemned France for breaking a 1992 moratorium on nuclear tests on Sept. 5 with an explosion beneath the atoll, about 750 miles southeast of Tahiti. The first test measured less than 20,000 tons, slightly larger than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945. A second, much more powerful blast of about 110,000 tons was set off on Oct. 2 beneath neighboring Fangataufa Atoll. France says it needs to conduct up to eight underground tests before May to check its nuclear arsenal and develop computer testing that render future detonations unnecessary. President Jacques Chirac has promised to sign a global test ban treaty after this series of tests. He said this week that the series might be cut back to just four more tests. Mr. Chirac has been harshly criticized by European neighbors, South Pacific governments and the environmental group Greenpeace, which has led a series of dramatic high-seas protests against the test. The French Navy seized at least five Greenpeace ships after they crossed into the 12-mile exclusion zones around the atolls. Since 1992, all of the world's nuclear powers except China had adhered to the testing moratorium. | France, Defying Protests, Holds Another Nuclear Test in the Pacific |
796257_4 | process of star birth." Hydrogen constitutes the preponderance of the gas in these globules, but there are also sufficient traces of oxygen, carbon, nitrogen and sulfur to form dozens of complex molecules. One of these, the chemical dicarbon monosulfide, served as the tracer in determining the motion of gases falling toward and feeding the protostar and its surrounding disk. Emissions from the molecules in radio wavelengths, though extremely weak, were detected and plotted by radio telescopes. The roughly spherical region of the gas cloud whose image was obtained by the radio astronomers extended over a distance about 7,000 times that of Earth's orbit around the Sun. That distance is comparable to the outermost regions of the solar system, far beyond the planets and out where comets are formed. Examining the images, the astronomy team led by Dr. Velusamy searched for evidence that material was still falling straight in toward the protostar, as most theorists assumed. Or was it spiraling in? Or had it already stopped? In their report, the astronomers said the telescopes detected a radial flow of the tracer molecules, arising primarily from the outer parts of the collapsing cloud and extending in about half of the cloud's radius. The scientists were not sure why there was an absence of the molecules in the deeper interior of the cloud. But they concluded that the velocity and pattern of the in-falling material supported "the evidence for inside-out collapse" and was consistent "with accretion onto a rotating central disk." The apparent inside-out collapse has been a source of confusion for theorists and observers alike. More than a decade ago, astronomers began finding that nearly all newborn stars go through a phase in which they seem to be rejecting mass at the same time they were also presumably drawing in mass from the cloud collapse. This was a common occurrence. Astronomers repeatedly observed two jets of gas shooting out at opposite sides and perpendicular to the disk of rotating matter around the protostar. The rotational forces were apparently twisting the magnetic field lines, producing winds carrying gas out in powerful jets. The outflow phenomenon was as frustrating as it was fascinating. The jets were easily detected by radio telescopes and tended to obscure the view of other star-formation processes, like the inflow of material. So astronomers naturally devoted most of their time and thought to the jets they could see but could | In Dust Cloud, Rare Glimpse Of New Star Aborning |
796222_0 | To the Editor: Your Oct. 6 news article on Adelphi University's president states that he has sponsored a core curriculum based on the classics. The core curriculum, developed by a committee of faculty and administrators, has a modern focus. The two courses required of all students are called "The Modern Condition." They are surveys, superficial in my opinion, of modern figures like Nietzsche, Kafka, Eliot, Freud, Einstein, Conrad and Heisenberg. There is a two-semester course, borrowed from the English department, in Western world literature, a traditional course at many universities, but it is an elective, not a requirement. PETER FARLEY Chairman, English Dept. Adelphi University Garden City, L.I., Oct. 6, 1995 | Adelphi's Curriculum |
796333_6 | across the phylogenetic scale. The grim tally is presented in the Clutton-Brock and Parker paper, which also offers complex game theories to give the various behaviors a mathematical and evolutionarily dynamic framework. They suggest that the relationship between the sexes is a so-called war of attrition, with the males harassing, the females resisting and the question being in each case who will persist the longest. Often males win the war because the incentives for each sex are asymmetric: a female often has less to gain by resisting a particular male, since regardless of who the father is, she will have an offspring. But for his part, the chance of fertilizing a female may mean the difference between offspring or no offspring at all. Hence, males keep hitting on females. The authors cite the female dung fly, which may occasionally be drowned in the liquid dung she feeds on while several males compete for access. At least one in a thousand female elephant seals that dare to venture away from their harem and the protective bull overseeing it will be killed by a subordinate and sexually hungry male. Among olive baboons, females are likely to be attacked by males five times a week and seriously wounded about once a year; such wounds may lead to abortion or death. Life for the red deer offers a multitude of hazards. A female may on occasion be killed by the dominant male. Alternatively, sex with a subordinate and inexperienced male can prove lethal, as he roughly attempts intercourse in the rectum. But lest it begin to sound as if females are pathetic and helpless victims, the authors describe a number of female counter-strategies to male harassment and aggression. Like Anthophora bees, many other female animals simply avoid males and will leave an area when a male comes sauntering along, as many species of cats are known to do. Females often seek partnerships with dominant males that have a proven track record for beating back competitors. Many female ungulates end up joining the already large harem of a super-alpha male, seeing it as preferable to risking life with a beta partner who may be subject to frequent challenges by surrounding males. Some females take a feminist approach, forming coalitions with other females. This strategy is most elaborate among the bonobo, or pygmy chimpanzee, in which females cement their social bonds with frequent genital-to-genital rubbings and | Sexual Harassment: Why Even Bees Do it |
796341_0 | LIKE their baboon and orangutan counterparts, male humans have been known to harass their females, but as always, they are considerably more refined in their approach. After all, even a wolf does not know how to wolf-whistle; and what baboon could figure out that if he stands next to a female in a crowded subway car and gives her a grope, he can make her wonder if it was just an accident? Nudge and wink aside, some anthropologists and primatologists theorize that male harassment of and aggression toward females is more elaborate among humans than among any other primate species. They also propose that while the motivation to harass is the same for men as it is for any male animal -- to co-opt a female's control over her sexuality and short-circuit her annoying desire to exert female choice -- it has been comparatively more successful for men than for even the most belligerent of gorillas. Dr. Barbara Smuts of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, has pointed out that most female primates may put up with a lot of intimidation by their male folk, but that nonetheless female movements and female mating decisions are never systematically controlled by males. In addition, nonhuman female primates always are responsible for feeding themselves, said Dr. Sarah Blaffer Hrdy of the University of California at Davis. When they are hungry, they do not wait for their mate to bring home the bananas. By contrast, in many human cultures female sexuality has been strictly circumscribed, and the woman who ventures out alone, beyond the protection of her home, father or husband, risks the potentially dangerous encroachments of any footloose man she encounters. Even in comparatively liberal societies like America, a woman who dares to go to a bar or a fraternity party alone is not given much sympathy if she is hassled or even attacked. Moreover, in many cultures, a woman's ability to earn aliving is limited, which means that a woman on her own risks not only harassment, but extreme impoverishment. A man's size advantage over a woman does not entirely explain his dominance. Writing in a recent issue of the journal Human Nature, Dr. Smuts said that "although male primates typically are larger than females, this does not mean that they always win when they have conflicts of interest with females." She added, "Their larger size is balanced by the fact | Raising Aggression to an Art Form |
796256_0 | LIKE their baboon and orangutan counterparts, male humans have been known to harass their females, but as always, they are considerably more refined in their approach. After all, even a wolf does not know how to wolf-whistle; and what baboon could figure out that if he stands next to a female in a crowded subway car and gives her a grope, he can make her wonder if it was just an accident? Nudge and wink aside, some anthropologists and primatologists theorize that male harassment of and aggression toward females is more elaborate among humans than among any other primate species. They also propose that while the motivation to harass is the same for men as it is for any male animal -- to co-opt a female's control over her sexuality and short-circuit her annoying desire to exert female choice -- it has been comparatively more successful for men than for even the most belligerent of gorillas. Dr. Barbara Smuts of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, has pointed out that most female primates may put up with a lot of intimidation by their male folk, but that nonetheless female movements and female mating decisions are never systematically controlled by males. In addition, nonhuman female primates always are responsible for feeding themselves, said Dr. Sarah Blaffer Hrdy of the University of California at Davis. When they are hungry, they do not wait for their mate to bring home the bananas. By contrast, in many human cultures female sexuality has been strictly circumscribed, and the woman who ventures out alone, beyond the protection of her home, father or husband, risks the potentially dangerous encroachments of any footloose man she encounters. Even in comparatively liberal societies like America, a woman who dares to go to a bar or a fraternity party alone is not given much sympathy if she is hassled or even attacked. Moreover, in many cultures, a woman's ability to earn aliving is limited, which means that a woman on her own risks not only harassment, but extreme impoverishment. A man's size advantage over a woman does not entirely explain his dominance. Writing in a recent issue of the journal Human Nature, Dr. Smuts said that "although male primates typically are larger than females, this does not mean that they always win when they have conflicts of interest with females." She added, "Their larger size is balanced by the fact | Raising Aggression to an Art Form |
796351_4 | process of star birth." Hydrogen constitutes the preponderance of the gas in these globules, but there are also sufficient traces of oxygen, carbon, nitrogen and sulfur to form dozens of complex molecules. One of these, the chemical dicarbon monosulfide, served as the tracer in determining the motion of gases falling toward and feeding the protostar and its surrounding disk. Emissions from the molecules in radio wavelengths, though extremely weak, were detected and plotted by radio telescopes. The roughly spherical region of the gas cloud whose image was obtained by the radio astronomers extended over a distance about 7,000 times that of Earth's orbit around the Sun. That distance is comparable to the outermost regions of the solar system, far beyond the planets and out where comets are formed. Examining the images, the astronomy team led by Dr. Velusamy searched for evidence that material was still falling straight in toward the protostar, as most theorists assumed. Or was it spiraling in? Or had it already stopped? In their report, the astronomers said the telescopes detected a radial flow of the tracer molecules, arising primarily from the outer parts of the collapsing cloud and extending in about half of the cloud's radius. The scientists were not sure why there was an absence of the molecules in the deeper interior of the cloud. But they concluded that the velocity and pattern of the in-falling material supported "the evidence for inside-out collapse" and was consistent "with accretion onto a rotating central disk." The apparent inside-out collapse has been a source of confusion for theorists and observers alike. More than a decade ago, astronomers began finding that nearly all newborn stars go through a phase in which they seem to be rejecting mass at the same time they were also presumably drawing in mass from the cloud collapse. This was a common occurrence. Astronomers repeatedly observed two jets of gas shooting out at opposite sides and perpendicular to the disk of rotating matter around the protostar. The rotational forces were apparently twisting the magnetic field lines, producing winds carrying gas out in powerful jets. The outflow phenomenon was as frustrating as it was fascinating. The jets were easily detected by radio telescopes and tended to obscure the view of other star-formation processes, like the inflow of material. So astronomers naturally devoted most of their time and thought to the jets they could see but could | In Dust Cloud, Rare Glimpse Of New Star Aborning |
796451_0 | To the Editor: Your Oct. 6 news article on Adelphi University's president states that he has sponsored a core curriculum based on the classics. The core curriculum, developed by a committee of faculty and administrators, has a modern focus. The two courses required of all students are called "The Modern Condition." They are surveys, superficial in my opinion, of modern figures like Nietzsche, Kafka, Eliot, Freud, Einstein, Conrad and Heisenberg. There is a two-semester course, borrowed from the English department, in Western world literature, a traditional course at many universities, but it is an elective, not a requirement. PETER FARLEY Chairman, English Dept. Adelphi University Garden City, L.I., Oct. 6, 1995 | Adelphi's Curriculum |
796129_1 | air travel to buses, mail, schools, hospitals and weather forecasts, France's vital functions are expected to be reduced or suspended completely for more than a day. The strike is the first major labor challenge to the conservative Prime Minister, Alain Juppe, who came to power in May with promises to cut France's huge deficit as well as 11.5 percent unemployment. He is grappling with a public sector that accounts for half the nation's productivity. The Government says nearly 40 percent of its deficit-ridden budget goes into public sector employee paychecks. Unions counter that they are being made scapegoats for France's economic crisis. The Organization for Economic Development and Cooperation says state workers in France made up 25 percent of the work force in 1993, compared with 14.5 percent in the United States, 16.9 percent in Britain and 14.9 percent in Germany. Mr. Juppe also is under fire for his role in a housing scandal. His office has denied persistent rumors that his resignation is imminent. The walkout began when the nation's train system shut down at 8 P.M. Workers said it would not resume until 6 A.M. Wednesday. Paris train stations were eerily empty as the last travelers straggled away. Unions planned demonstrations for Tuesday, and their leaders threatened more strikes, demonstrations and work slowdowns unless the Government backs down. It is the first time that all seven Government service unions have united to strike since 1986, when Jacques Chirac, now France's President but then its Prime Minister, froze wages. The French railway company said most international trains scheduled to leave Paris on Tuesday would be canceled, as would 75 percent of domestic trains. The Government said the police would not issue parking tickets or read parking meters on Tuesday, to help people forced by the bus and subway shutdown to drive to work. France's Civil Service Minister, Jean Puech, said today that the Government would hold new salary talks with public sector unions in the second quarter of next year. He criticized the strike for upsetting citizens' lives. But a recent public opinion poll published by the newspaper Le Figaro indicated that the French are divided on the issue: 47 percent approved of the strike and 48 percent opposed it. The franc and the French stock market have fallen since Mr. Juppe pressured Finance Minister Alain Madelin to resign in August after he urged cuts in civil service jobs. | 5 Million Strike in France to Protest Pay Freeze |
796254_6 | across the phylogenetic scale. The grim tally is presented in the Clutton-Brock and Parker paper, which also offers complex game theories to give the various behaviors a mathematical and evolutionarily dynamic framework. They suggest that the relationship between the sexes is a so-called war of attrition, with the males harassing, the females resisting and the question being in each case who will persist the longest. Often males win the war because the incentives for each sex are asymmetric: a female often has less to gain by resisting a particular male, since regardless of who the father is, she will have an offspring. But for his part, the chance of fertilizing a female may mean the difference between offspring or no offspring at all. Hence, males keep hitting on females. The authors cite the female dung fly, which may occasionally be drowned in the liquid dung she feeds on while several males compete for access. At least one in a thousand female elephant seals that dare to venture away from their harem and the protective bull overseeing it will be killed by a subordinate and sexually hungry male. Among olive baboons, females are likely to be attacked by males five times a week and seriously wounded about once a year; such wounds may lead to abortion or death. Life for the red deer offers a multitude of hazards. A female may on occasion be killed by the dominant male. Alternatively, sex with a subordinate and inexperienced male can prove lethal, as he roughly attempts intercourse in the rectum. But lest it begin to sound as if females are pathetic and helpless victims, the authors describe a number of female counter-strategies to male harassment and aggression. Like Anthophora bees, many other female animals simply avoid males and will leave an area when a male comes sauntering along, as many species of cats are known to do. Females often seek partnerships with dominant males that have a proven track record for beating back competitors. Many female ungulates end up joining the already large harem of a super-alpha male, seeing it as preferable to risking life with a beta partner who may be subject to frequent challenges by surrounding males. Some females take a feminist approach, forming coalitions with other females. This strategy is most elaborate among the bonobo, or pygmy chimpanzee, in which females cement their social bonds with frequent genital-to-genital rubbings and | Sexual Harassment: Why Even Bees Do it |
799127_0 | President Jacques Chirac was surprised and baffled by worldwide protests against his decision to resume French underground nuclear testing in the Pacific last month, his aides say, but what really hurt was the feeling that France's partners in the European Union did not like the tests. Just how much some French officials take offense at being pilloried became clear recently to a group of 25 Danish high school students who arrived by train at the Gare du Nord wearing antinuclear "Chirac, non!" T-shirts and found their way barred by a phalanx of French police. News of their unusual experience trickled out in Danish newspapers last week, and was confirmed by French and Danish officials today after a report appeared in the French daily Le Monde. The French authorities acknowledged that the facts were more or less as the newspapers reported them and promised a more detailed explanation by the Interior Ministry later. It would be "Paris, non!" for them, the ban-the-test Danish students from Tarnby were told, unless they removed the offending T-shirts. After negotiation got them nowhere, they took them off. This still did not satisfy the police, who warned that subversive garments could provoke anti-French feelings and be taken as an insult to the chief of state. The forces of order took the offending young Danes under escort to their hotel near the Place de la Republique and kept them under surveillance for several hours. "They were spotted by French border police in the train on the way down to Paris and were told then to cover up before they arrived," one high-ranking Danish diplomat here said. "They settled it themselves with the police, and the embassy never heard about it until after they got back home." Border controls along the French-Belgian frontier were not abolished at the start of this year, despite a plan to drop them as a symbol of growing European togetherness, because the French authorities were not satisfied that their neighbors were tough enough about keeping out drug smugglers, terrorists, illegal immigrants and troublemakers. Denmark is also part of the European Union, and is as skeptical as France about surrendering national sovereignty. The Danish students from Tarnby set out to learn something about France, and know now what can happen when freedom of speech comes into conflict with lese-majeste. "France is a very different country," said one of the adults, who asked not to | T-Shirts and Lese-Majeste Collide in France |
799457_0 | President Jacques Chirac was surprised and baffled by worldwide protests against his decision to resume French underground nuclear testing in the Pacific last month, his aides say, but what really hurt was the feeling that France's partners in the European Union did not like the tests. Just how much some French officials take offense at being pilloried became clear recently to a group of 25 Danish high school students who arrived by train at the Gare du Nord wearing antinuclear "Chirac, non!" T-shirts and found their way barred by a phalanx of French police. News of their unusual experience trickled out in Danish newspapers last week, and was confirmed by French and Danish officials today after a report appeared in the French daily Le Monde. The French authorities acknowledged that the facts were more or less as the newspapers reported them and promised a more detailed explanation by the Interior Ministry later. It would be "Paris, non!" for them, the ban-the-test Danish students from Tarnby were told, unless they removed the offending T-shirts. After negotiation got them nowhere, they took them off. This still did not satisfy the police, who warned that subversive garments could provoke anti-French feelings and be taken as an insult to the chief of state. The forces of order took the offending young Danes under escort to their hotel near the Place de la Republique and kept them under surveillance for several hours. "They were spotted by French border police in the train on the way down to Paris and were told then to cover up before they arrived," one high-ranking Danish diplomat here said. "They settled it themselves with the police, and the embassy never heard about it until after they got back home." Border controls along the French-Belgian frontier were not abolished at the start of this year, despite a plan to drop them as a symbol of growing European togetherness, because the French authorities were not satisfied that their neighbors were tough enough about keeping out drug smugglers, terrorists, illegal immigrants and troublemakers. Denmark is also part of the European Union, and is as skeptical as France about surrendering national sovereignty. The Danish students from Tarnby set out to learn something about France, and know now what can happen when freedom of speech comes into conflict with lese-majeste. "France is a very different country," said one of the adults, who asked not to | T-Shirts and Lese-Majeste Collide in France |
803177_0 | Pfizer Inc. said yesterday that it planned to sell its food science group to Cultor Ltd. of Finland. The terms of the sale were not disclosed. Pfizer, based in New York, said the sale of the unit, which develops specialty food ingredients, was part of the company's plan to refocus on its health care businesses. Sales of the food science group rose 26 percent in the third quarter compared with the corresponding period in 1994. Through the first nine months of the year, the group reported $232 million in sales, up 7 percent from the year-earlier period, Pfizer said. Cultor had sales of about $1.5 billion in 1994. COMPANY NEWS | PFIZER TO SELL FOOD SCIENCE GROUP TO FINNISH COMPANY |
803052_1 | emissions reductions can be achieved without big changes in life styles. The report comes at a time when 142 countries that are parties to the 1992 climate treaty signed in Rio de Janeiro are negotiating reductions in carbon dioxide emissions and other heat-trapping greenhouse gases. The emissions come mainly from the burning of fossil fuels like coal and oil. The industrialized countries of the world have already pledged, as a first step, to cap the emissions at 1990 levels by the year 2000. The report also comes as Republicans in Congress are seeking to reduce by as much as 40 percent the funds for the Clinton Administration's program to reach the 1990 cap. The role of the intergovernmental panel, which consists of about 2,500 experts around the world, is to advise the treaty parties. An economics working group reported in Montreal 11 days ago that earlier action to cut emissions might relieve the burden on future generations by giving them more flexibility. The new report, from another working group, says that loss of this flexibility would force deeper emission cuts later on. An average increase in global temperature of 1.5 to 6.3 degrees by the year 2100, predicted by a third working group, would cause a sea level rise of 6 to 37 inches by then and more in the following centuries, according to the report issued yesterday. Many low-lying coastal areas around the world could be inundated, the scientists say. An average rise of about 39 inches, they say, could place 70 million people at risk. The panel also said climate change could produce, among other things, these consequences: *Bring an increase in heat waves, floods, droughts, fires and pest outbreaks in some regions. *Lead to the disappearance of entire forest types. *Make desert climates more extreme. *Cause a rise in the number of heat-related deaths and illnesses. *Increase the range of vector-borne infectious diseases like malaria, yellow fever, dengue fever and viral encephalitis. The report says that if existing technology were applied strictly, energy savings of about 25 percent could be achieved in homes, businesses and industrial plants during the next 30 years, and that greenhouse-gas reductions could be even larger. It said energy use by motor vehicles could be cut by about a third during the same period by using efficient drive trains, light-weight materials and low-air-resistance design. Further reductions could come if vehicles were made smaller. | U.N. Warns Against Delay in Cutting Carbon Dioxide Emissions |
803075_0 | Wheat prices fell sharply on the Chicago Board of Trade yesterday as traders grew concerned that high prices were deterring sales for export. On other markets, crude oil and sugar prices rose. The Commodity Research Bureau index of 21 commodities slipped 0.07 point, to 241.66. An expected large Russian order for American wheat failed to materialize this week. Traders also noted that China bought two million metric tons of wheat from other suppliers last week. "We've been losing market share to a number of countries for several months," said John Kleist, research director at ING Derivatives Clearing in Chicago. "You don't have any rumors of China being around or Russia being around." Wheat prices, which surged to a 14-year high of $5.0875 a bushel on Friday, retreated yesterday. Soft red winter wheat for December delivery fell 10 cents, to $4.93 a bushel, the largest one-day drop since Aug. 16. Traders also expect that a larger crop in Australia would allow that country, the world's fourth-largest wheat exporter, to lure customers from the United States. Crude oil prices rose amid expectations that a reduction in shipments from Mexico last week caused by a hurricane pushed American stockpiles lower. Petroleos Mexicanos, Mexico's state oil company, had to halt exports and cut production in the Gulf of Mexico twice last week because of the hurricane's high winds. Mexico exports more than one million barrels a day to the United States, about 15 percent of total American imports. Crude oil for December delivery rose 11 cents, to $17.34 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange. November unleaded gasoline gained 0.06 cent, to 49.87 cents a gallon, while November heating oil climbed 0.42 cent, to 49.36 cents a gallon. FUTURES MARKETS | Prices for Wheat Fall on Fears That Exports by U.S. May Slow |
803351_1 | emissions reductions can be achieved without big changes in life styles. The report comes at a time when 142 countries that are parties to the 1992 climate treaty signed in Rio de Janeiro are negotiating reductions in carbon dioxide emissions and other heat-trapping greenhouse gases. The emissions come mainly from the burning of fossil fuels like coal and oil. The industrialized countries of the world have already pledged, as a first step, to cap the emissions at 1990 levels by the year 2000. The report also comes as Republicans in Congress are seeking to reduce by as much as 40 percent the funds for the Clinton Administration's program to reach the 1990 cap. The role of the intergovernmental panel, which consists of about 2,500 experts around the world, is to advise the treaty parties. An economics working group reported in Montreal 11 days ago that earlier action to cut emissions might relieve the burden on future generations by giving them more flexibility. The new report, from another working group, says that loss of this flexibility would force deeper emission cuts later on. An average increase in global temperature of 1.5 to 6.3 degrees by the year 2100, predicted by a third working group, would cause a sea level rise of 6 to 37 inches by then and more in the following centuries, according to the report issued yesterday. Many low-lying coastal areas around the world could be inundated, the scientists say. An average rise of about 39 inches, they say, could place 70 million people at risk. The panel also said climate change could produce, among other things, these consequences: *Bring an increase in heat waves, floods, droughts, fires and pest outbreaks in some regions. *Lead to the disappearance of entire forest types. *Make desert climates more extreme. *Cause a rise in the number of heat-related deaths and illnesses. *Increase the range of vector-borne infectious diseases like malaria, yellow fever, dengue fever and viral encephalitis. The report says that if existing technology were applied strictly, energy savings of about 25 percent could be achieved in homes, businesses and industrial plants during the next 30 years, and that greenhouse-gas reductions could be even larger. It said energy use by motor vehicles could be cut by about a third during the same period by using efficient drive trains, light-weight materials and low-air-resistance design. Further reductions could come if vehicles were made smaller. | U.N. Warns Against Delay in Cutting Carbon Dioxide Emissions |
793506_0 | A few weeks ago I attended question hour at the Australian Parliament, a raucous weekly event when the opposition questions the Prime Minister, Paul Keating. Mr. Keating was asked about France's claims that it was entitled to test its nuclear weapons in Polynesia because these colonies were actually part of France. His voice dripping with contempt, Mr. Keating said: "Oh, yes. There are Polynesians all the way down from Aix-en-Provence. They pop out of the woodwork. They are doing Polynesian dances in the back end of the Loire Valley, in the walled city of Carcassone, in the lovely humidity of Aix-en-Provence. There are Polynesians everywhere." As Mr. Keating was doing this little hula, the Australian lawmakers were falling out of their seats with laughter. They were laughing at France -- and with good reason. President Jacques Chirac's arrogant decision to defy the world and go ahead with two nuclear bomb tests in Polynesia deserves contempt. It is a sign of a country whose leadership is seriously out of touch with the main currents of the post-cold-war world. President Chirac is known as "Le Bulldozer" for the way he plows ahead, undeterred by critics. "L'ostrich" would be more appropriate. It isn't just Greenpeace and a few environmental radicals eating seaweed and wearing sandals who are protesting France's explosions at the Mururoa and Fangataufa atolls. Japan and Sweden each sent ministers to Tahiti to express their opposition, Australia and New Zealand boycotted French products, while 9 out of the 12 members of the European Union spoke out against the tests. What Mr. Chirac has totally missed is that the anti-nuclear movement has gone Main Street. The nuclear debate is no longer between leaders who want to test and environmentalists who don't. Now the debate is between nations that are thinking environmentally and those, like France, that are not. During the cold war the fear of being obliterated by the Soviet Union overrode the fear of testing nuclear weapgger threat is the bomb itself. The world isn't afraid of Chernomyrdin, the Russian Prime Minister, it's afraid of Chernobyl, the Russian meltdown. The bomb was designed to prevent another Pearl Harbor, but what people are really worried about is another Three Mile Island. As the French writer Dominique Moisi puts it: "Now that the threat against which we need nuclear weapons is no longer clear, all that is clear is the threat of the | Foreign Affairs;The French Ostrich |
793665_0 | A few weeks ago I attended question hour at the Australian Parliament, a raucous weekly event when the opposition questions the Prime Minister, Paul Keating. Mr. Keating was asked about France's claims that it was entitled to test its nuclear weapons in Polynesia because these colonies were actually part of France. His voice dripping with contempt, Mr. Keating said: "Oh, yes. There are Polynesians all the way down from Aix-en-Provence. They pop out of the woodwork. They are doing Polynesian dances in the back end of the Loire Valley, in the walled city of Carcassone, in the lovely humidity of Aix-en-Provence. There are Polynesians everywhere." As Mr. Keating was doing this little hula, the Australian lawmakers were falling out of their seats with laughter. They were laughing at France -- and with good reason. President Jacques Chirac's arrogant decision to defy the world and go ahead with two nuclear bomb tests in Polynesia deserves contempt. It is a sign of a country whose leadership is seriously out of touch with the main currents of the post-cold-war world. President Chirac is known as "Le Bulldozer" for the way he plows ahead, undeterred by critics. "L'ostrich" would be more appropriate. It isn't just Greenpeace and a few environmental radicals eating seaweed and wearing sandals who are protesting France's explosions at the Mururoa and Fangataufa atolls. Japan and Sweden each sent ministers to Tahiti to express their opposition, Australia and New Zealand boycotted French products, while 9 out of the 12 members of the European Union spoke out against the tests. What Mr. Chirac has totally missed is that the anti-nuclear movement has gone Main Street. The nuclear debate is no longer between leaders who want to test and environmentalists who don't. Now the debate is between nations that are thinking environmentally and those, like France, that are not. During the cold war the fear of being obliterated by the Soviet Union overrode the fear of testing nuclear weapgger threat is the bomb itself. The world isn't afraid of Chernomyrdin, the Russian Prime Minister, it's afraid of Chernobyl, the Russian meltdown. The bomb was designed to prevent another Pearl Harbor, but what people are really worried about is another Three Mile Island. As the French writer Dominique Moisi puts it: "Now that the threat against which we need nuclear weapons is no longer clear, all that is clear is the threat of the | Foreign Affairs; The French Ostrich |
794196_0 | President Clinton has signed an executive order that would ease restrictions on travel to Cuba by Cuban-Americans, academics, artists and members of the clergy, and allow American relief agencies and human rights groups to greatly expand their work in Cuba, Administration officials said today. In a speech on Friday, Mr. Clinton also plans to announce measures that would allow American and Cuban undergraduates to study in each others' countries and American news organizations to open bureaus in Cuba, the officials said. Mr. Clinton signed an executive order instituting the changes on Tuesday as part of a broad new effort to increase the flow of democratic ideas into Cuba, they added. The order calls for the removal of travel restrictions for Cuban-Americans who want to visit seriously ill relatives in Cuba. The President also will allow Western Union to set up offices in Cuba to help Cuban-Americans send money to their relatives for travel to the United States once they obtain visas. In August 1994, when thousands of Cubans attempted to sail to the United States, President Clinton ordered sanctions against Cuba to punish Mr. Castro for allowing the migration. He restricted travel by academics and barred Cuban-Americans from sending money to relatives. Now these restrictions are being relaxed. Several officials suggested the new policy might be the first step toward a further opening toward the island, although they insisted Mr. Clinton would not only uphold the 33-year-old trade embargo on Cuba but strengthen it. The executive order also calls for the hiring of more officials to enforce the embargo, the officials said. Several American officials, citing Fidel Castro's past ambivalence toward increased contacts between Cubans and Americans, suggested that the Cuban President might block many of Mr. Clinton's new initiatives from taking effect. Mr. Castro, upon learning of the plan several weeks ago, pre-emptively denounced the Administration's moves as efforts to subvert socialism in Cuba. Several conservative Cuban-American groups were quick to attack the changes, saying they could help prop up Mr. Castro and create warmer ties between the United States and Cuba. Ramon Cernuda, the Miami representative of several Cuban dissident groups, said of the executive order: "On the one hand it will be applauded for humanitarian and family reasons by many in the Cuban-American community. The criticisms will come from those who want to maintain a climate of isolation and deprivation in Cuba." Andres Nazario Sargen, leader of | Clinton Signs Order Easing Travel, Aid and Money Transfers Between U.S. and Cuba |
794249_0 | After years of opposing nuclear weapons, the opposition Labor Party voted today to retain Britain's powerful Trident nuclear missiles. The vote at the party's annual conference was a triumph for the Labor Party leader, Tony Blair, and underlined his success in shedding the remains of the party's socialist tenets since taking over 15 months ago. This vote shows a new maturity in the party's attitude to defense," Mr. Blair declared. "On issue after issue we have seen a party united, sensible and determined to build the new Britain we all want to create." The vote, in which 55 percent of delegates favored keeping the United States-made missiles, was the latest blow to the party's left wing at the four-day conference, which ends on Friday. Party delegates earlier rejected an attempt to reinstate a Marxist-style clause on public ownership in the party constitution and endorsed a series of measures that will increase Mr. Blair's power over trade union affiliates and the party rank-and-file. Mr. Blair is well ahead in opinion polls and Labor is widely expected to defeat the Conservative Party, led by Prime Minister John Major, in elections that must be held by May 1997. Until this year, Labor Party conventions had repeatedly voted to scrap Britain's Trident missiles, to the embarrassment of the party's leadership as it shifted toward the center. The $1.5 billion Trident missile program was ordered by the Conservative Government during the Cold War to replace aging Polaris missiles. The Government has said that with the end of the Cold War, it will restrict the firepower of Trident and cut its nuclear arsenal by 25 percent by the end of the century. The four Trident submarines will carry a maximum of 96 warheads each, down from 128 each. There remains strong anti-nuclear sentiment in Labor, and earlier in the day, the party censured France for conducting nuclear tests in the South Pacific. The Labor conference also criticized the British Government's refusal to criticize the tests by France, Western Europe's only other nuclear power. | Labor Party Votes to Keep Nuclear Arms |
794195_4 | "ripped door off freezer locked with hasp." Another read: "Bear tore car apart looking for remains of toasted cheese sandwich." In another report, an upcountry resident complained that a bear "bent the side of the trailer." Although black bear attacks on humans are extremely rare, last year a black bear attacked and killed a man inside his trailer. Colorado is one of the few states to reimburse livestock losses caused by bears. But losses and complaints have risen so fast that the state last year tightened its policy on miscreant bears, to two strikes from three, meaning state wildlife officials are supposed to relocate bears only once for eating garbage. Under the policy, recidivists are to be destroyed. But despite the tough public line, officials are reluctant to carry out capital punishment. A black bear that was trapped and moved from Boulder last week had apparently broken into four houses, largely by prying open cellar windows. Adult black bears weigh up to 450 pounds and stand up to 5 feet. Largely vegetarians, black bears are omnivores, eating anything from beetles to small deer. Roaming into backyards, bears will eat melon rinds from compost piles, grease off barbecue grills, seeds from bird feeders, vegetables from gardens and apples from trees. In a reverse Goldilocks event this summer, a Boulder woman came home one afternoon to find an outside door forced open, her kitchen vandalized and her refrigerator ransacked. When officers came to inspect the burglary, they found a 70-pound cub snoozing upstairs, on the floor of the woman's bedroom. Trying to help bears and people co-exist, Colorado wildlife officials have embarked on an intensive education campaign. Residents of mountain communities, many of them migrants from areas without bears, are taught to store their garbage and pet food indoors, bring in bird feeders at night, protect livestock with electric fences and cut down berry bushes near their homes. "Problem bears are the result of 'problem' people," reads the script of one informational slide show. But in Conifer, down at the Desperado's Restaurant where he was doing renovation work, Mr. Mayne talked about "the bear problem." "My whole purpose is to protect people and livestock," Mr. Mayne said. A leader of the Conifer 4-H Club, he listed 4-H animals and birds killed here this summer by bears: 7 sheep, 2 goats, 1 pig, 1 llama, 5 geese and 24 chickens. Although Mr. Mayne | In Foothills of Rockies, Neighbors Are Bears |
794213_4 | "ripped door off freezer locked with hasp." Another read: "Bear tore car apart looking for remains of toasted cheese sandwich." In another report, an upcountry resident complained that a bear "bent the side of the trailer." Although black bear attacks on humans are extremely rare, last year a black bear attacked and killed a man inside his trailer. Colorado is one of the few states to reimburse livestock losses caused by bears. But losses and complaints have risen so fast that the state last year tightened its policy on miscreant bears, to two strikes from three, meaning state wildlife officials are supposed to relocate bears only once for eating garbage. Under the policy, recidivists are to be destroyed. But despite the tough public line, officials are reluctant to carry out capital punishment. A black bear that was trapped and moved from Boulder last week had apparently broken into four houses, largely by prying open cellar windows. Adult black bears weigh up to 450 pounds and stand up to 5 feet. Largely vegetarians, black bears are omnivores, eating anything from beetles to small deer. Roaming into backyards, bears will eat melon rinds from compost piles, grease off barbecue grills, seeds from bird feeders, vegetables from gardens and apples from trees. In a reverse Goldilocks event this summer, a Boulder woman came home one afternoon to find an outside door forced open, her kitchen vandalized and her refrigerator ransacked. When officers came to inspect the burglary, they found a 70-pound cub snoozing upstairs, on the floor of the woman's bedroom. Trying to help bears and people co-exist, Colorado wildlife officials have embarked on an intensive education campaign. Residents of mountain communities, many of them migrants from areas without bears, are taught to store their garbage and pet food indoors, bring in bird feeders at night, protect livestock with electric fences and cut down berry bushes near their homes. "Problem bears are the result of 'problem' people," reads the script of one informational slide show. But in Conifer, down at the Desperado's Restaurant where he was doing renovation work, Mr. Mayne talked about "the bear problem." "My whole purpose is to protect people and livestock," Mr. Mayne said. A leader of the Conifer 4-H Club, he listed 4-H animals and birds killed here this summer by bears: 7 sheep, 2 goats, 1 pig, 1 llama, 5 geese and 24 chickens. Although Mr. Mayne | In Foothills of Rockies, Neighbors Are Bears |
794214_0 | President Clinton has signed an executive order that would ease restrictions on travel to Cuba by Cuban-Americans, academics, artists and members of the clergy, and allow American relief agencies and human rights groups to greatly expand their work in Cuba, Administration officials said today. In a speech on Friday, Mr. Clinton also plans to announce measures that would allow American and Cuban undergraduates to study in each others' countries and American news organizations to open bureaus in Cuba, the officials said. Mr. Clinton signed an executive order instituting the changes on Tuesday as part of a broad new effort to increase the flow of democratic ideas into Cuba, they added. The order calls for the removal of travel restrictions for Cuban-Americans who want to visit seriously ill relatives in Cuba. The President also will allow Western Union to set up offices in Cuba to help Cuban-Americans send money to their relatives for travel to the United States once they obtain visas. In August 1994, when thousands of Cubans attempted to sail to the United States, President Clinton ordered sanctions against Cuba to punish Mr. Castro for allowing the migration. He restricted travel by academics and barred Cuban-Americans from sending money to relatives. Now these restrictions are being relaxed. Several officials suggested the new policy might be the first step toward a further opening toward the island, although they insisted Mr. Clinton would not only uphold the 33-year-old trade embargo on Cuba but strengthen it. The executive order also calls for the hiring of more officials to enforce the embargo, the officials said. Several American officials, citing Fidel Castro's past ambivalence toward increased contacts between Cubans and Americans, suggested that the Cuban President might block many of Mr. Clinton's new initiatives from taking effect. Mr. Castro, upon learning of the plan several weeks ago, pre-emptively denounced the Administration's moves as efforts to subvert socialism in Cuba. Several conservative Cuban-American groups were quick to attack the changes, saying they could help prop up Mr. Castro and create warmer ties between the United States and Cuba. Ramon Cernuda, the Miami representative of several Cuban dissident groups, said of the executive order: "On the one hand it will be applauded for humanitarian and family reasons by many in the Cuban-American community. The criticisms will come from those who want to maintain a climate of isolation and deprivation in Cuba." Andres Nazario Sargen, leader of | Clinton Signs Order Easing Travel, Aid and Money Transfers BetweenU.S. and Cuba |
798753_0 | How can the Government better inspect the nation's growing aviation industry? Federal Aviation Administration officials point to new computer software that it will use to analyze records that inspectors have been feeding into a national computer database for several years. The software -- developed by the F.A.A., university researchers and agencies like the Department of Defense and set to begin operating nationwide in 1997 -- is supposed to detect trouble spots that need more attention. It might show, for example, that the percentage of pilots found to be unsatisfactory in flight checks was higher at one airline than at similar airlines, or that there was an unusual number of findings that record-keeping was not up to date. The problem is that many inspectors are either entering data inaccurately or not doing it at all, according to the inspectors themselves and reports by the F.A.A. and the General Accounting Office. A 1992 agency report said that some inspectors did not view the computer system as accurate because some records were getting lost before they were entered. Some inspectors were maintaining their own lists of work that required follow-up inspections "since the confidence level in the automated systems was low," the report said. The computer network that stores the raw data of inspections was recently upgraded but has also had problems. For example, an internal agency document said the software sometimes deleted the names of pilots from the record of their F.A.A. checkup, effectively rendering that record useless for evaluating pilots. In a report in February, the General Accounting Office said the mistakes in existing computer records "could potentially misdirect F.A.A. resources away from the higher-risk aviation activities." The study quotes from many of the F.A.A.'s own reports on accuracy problems with the data, and adds that officials in charge of the new analysis program had expressed concerns last fall that the quality of data "poses a major risk item for the system." In its report, the accounting office concluded, "The axiom 'garbage in, garbage out' applies" to the new analysis software. Nevertheless, the F.A.A. says that the computer records are effective for tracking trends. "Data quality is something we're going to continue to work on," said Anthony J. Broderick, associate administrator for regulation and certification of the F.A.A. "But it's not a show stopper at all." | Looking to Software for Help |
798732_5 | on matters like pilot training. Working from 90 domestic and 4 international offices, they oversee 7,298 airline aircraft and 184,434 general aviation aircraft, 682,959 active pilots, 4,817 repair stations, 656 pilot training schools and 192 maintenance schools. Besides all that, inspectors do such things as issuing permits for air shows and overseeing the helicopter companies that lift refrigeration units onto the roofs of shopping malls. Each year on average, an inspector performs more than 400 inspections, which each take from five minutes to five weeks. The average operations inspector is a pilot who joined the F.A.A. with 8,000 hours of flying time; new maintenance and avionics inspectors generally have about 18 years' experience in their fields. The average annual salary is $57,500. Since inspectors cannot watch every pilot bank a plane or each mechanic turn a wrench, they occasionally use spot-checks to determine whether airlines have met maintenance and safety standards. Usually they check records kept by the airline. Inspectors look for unsettling trends in a plane's log book, like repairs that needed to be done a second time, a possible sign of an airline not adhering closely to maintenance procedures. Some inspectors say that before the airline industry was deregulated in 1978, they could trust workers in the industry to do their job properly. But deregulation has caused endless turmoil and financial pressures on aviation businesses. Every year, one in four small airlines goes out of business and a new one takes its place. Many smaller operations cut corners, some inspectors say. "You have mechanics that falsify documents," said one experienced inspector who spoke on the condition of anonymity, "and overlook things that are obvious to them because they are afraid of reprisals from their bosses. The trust is gone." There are other pressures on the agency's inspection system. The nation's airline fleet is aging beyond the years of service that manufacturers originally anticipated. There is no age at which a plane has to be taken out of service. With the expected growth in air travel, the crash rate for jets could be as high as one crash a week worldwide by the year 2010 unless the accident rate of the last decade is lowered, the Boeing Company estimates. Congress has its eye on cutting the F.A.A.'s annual budget of about $8.6 billion, mostly for air traffic control, even though the agency is taking a greater role in assessing | MARGINAL SAFETY: A special report.; F.A.A.'s Lax Inspection Setup Heightens Dangers in the Sky |
798732_7 | aviation safety in the foreign countries to which many Americans fly. The agency's inspectors must also keep up with rapidly advancing technologies like electronics for cockpit controls. David R. Hinson, the F.A.A. Administrator, announced in July that the agency would "take a fresh look at the way we do things," including a review of the safety inspection system and the way it makes safety rules. The Transportation Secretary, Federico F. Pena, said last week in an interview that he had been trying to infuse the agency with a more "businesslike" culture, in part, by bringing in new managers. When he took over the agency in 1993, he said, he encountered a culture he said had been characterized by "aloofness." Mr. Broderick, the F.A.A. official, said the agency had adjusted well to the growth of the airline business. Over the last 12 years, the number of inspectors has almost doubled, to the current strength of about 2,500, from its modern-day low of 1,331. "The work force, the systems, the training, the handbooks, the resources -- everything is just completely different from what it was," Mr. Broderick said. "It has gone from red to green, black to white." But critics argue that that is not the point. Kenneth M. Mead, who recently ended seven years as the director of transportation issues for the General Accounting Office, said that his agency and others had pointed out improvements the agency needed to make but that it had not done enough to address them. "An agency that has set a goal of zero accidents needs to have in place an A-plus program in order to accomplish that goal," he said. Accountability Many Complaints, Little Action For an agency that says it is emphasizing perfection, the F.A.A. can seem rather complacent about those in its ranks who fall short of that standard. The National Transportation Safety Board has raised such concerns after investigations of several accidents. After a Delta Air Lines 727 crashed at the Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport on Aug. 31, 1988, killing 14 people, the safety board said the aviation agency had failed to correct or address deficiencies, including poor discipline among Delta pilots, that had cropped up consistently in agency inspections of the airline before the 1988 accident. The board said, for instance, that an inspector who had overlooked problems at Delta was put back in charge, without any follow-up by supervisors to | MARGINAL SAFETY: A special report.; F.A.A.'s Lax Inspection Setup Heightens Dangers in the Sky |
798231_5 | on matters like pilot training. Working from 90 domestic and 4 international offices, they oversee 7,298 airline aircraft and 184,434 general aviation aircraft, 682,959 active pilots, 4,817 repair stations, 656 pilot training schools and 192 maintenance schools. Besides all that, inspectors do such things as issuing permits for air shows and overseeing the helicopter companies that lift refrigeration units onto the roofs of shopping malls. Each year on average, an inspector performs more than 400 inspections, which each take from five minutes to five weeks. The average operations inspector is a pilot who joined the F.A.A. with 8,000 hours of flying time; new maintenance and avionics inspectors generally have about 18 years' experience in their fields. The average annual salary is $57,500. Since inspectors cannot watch every pilot bank a plane or each mechanic turn a wrench, they occasionally use spot-checks to determine whether airlines have met maintenance and safety standards. Usually they check records kept by the airline. Inspectors look for unsettling trends in a plane's log book, like repairs that needed to be done a second time, a possible sign of an airline not adhering closely to maintenance procedures. Some inspectors say that before the airline industry was deregulated in 1978, they could trust workers in the industry to do their job properly. But deregulation has caused endless turmoil and financial pressures on aviation businesses. Every year, one in four small airlines goes out of business and a new one takes its place. Many smaller operations cut corners, some inspectors say. "You have mechanics that falsify documents," said one experienced inspector who spoke on the condition of anonymity, "and overlook things that are obvious to them because they are afraid of reprisals from their bosses. The trust is gone." There are other pressures on the agency's inspection system. The nation's airline fleet is aging beyond the years of service that manufacturers originally anticipated. There is no age at which a plane has to be taken out of service. With the expected growth in air travel, the crash rate for jets could be as high as one crash a week worldwide by the year 2010 unless the accident rate of the last decade is lowered, the Boeing Company estimates. Congress has its eye on cutting the F.A.A.'s annual budget of about $8.6 billion, mostly for air traffic control, even though the agency is taking a greater role in assessing | MARGINAL SAFETY: A special report.;F.A.A.'s Lax Inspection Setup Heightens Dangers in the Sky |
798231_7 | aviation safety in the foreign countries to which many Americans fly. The agency's inspectors must also keep up with rapidly advancing technologies like electronics for cockpit controls. David R. Hinson, the F.A.A. Administrator, announced in July that the agency would "take a fresh look at the way we do things," including a review of the safety inspection system and the way it makes safety rules. The Transportation Secretary, Federico F. Pena, said last week in an interview that he had been trying to infuse the agency with a more "businesslike" culture, in part, by bringing in new managers. When he took over the agency in 1993, he said, he encountered a culture he said had been characterized by "aloofness." Mr. Broderick, the F.A.A. official, said the agency had adjusted well to the growth of the airline business. Over the last 12 years, the number of inspectors has almost doubled, to the current strength of about 2,500, from its modern-day low of 1,331. "The work force, the systems, the training, the handbooks, the resources -- everything is just completely different from what it was," Mr. Broderick said. "It has gone from red to green, black to white." But critics argue that that is not the point. Kenneth M. Mead, who recently ended seven years as the director of transportation issues for the General Accounting Office, said that his agency and others had pointed out improvements the agency needed to make but that it had not done enough to address them. "An agency that has set a goal of zero accidents needs to have in place an A-plus program in order to accomplish that goal," he said. Accountability Many Complaints, Little Action For an agency that says it is emphasizing perfection, the F.A.A. can seem rather complacent about those in its ranks who fall short of that standard. The National Transportation Safety Board has raised such concerns after investigations of several accidents. After a Delta Air Lines 727 crashed at the Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport on Aug. 31, 1988, killing 14 people, the safety board said the aviation agency had failed to correct or address deficiencies, including poor discipline among Delta pilots, that had cropped up consistently in agency inspections of the airline before the 1988 accident. The board said, for instance, that an inspector who had overlooked problems at Delta was put back in charge, without any follow-up by supervisors to | MARGINAL SAFETY: A special report.;F.A.A.'s Lax Inspection Setup Heightens Dangers in the Sky |
798243_0 | How can the Government better inspect the nation's growing aviation industry? Federal Aviation Administration officials point to new computer software that it will use to analyze records that inspectors have been feeding into a national computer database for several years. The software -- developed by the F.A.A., university researchers and agencies like the Department of Defense and set to begin operating nationwide in 1997 -- is supposed to detect trouble spots that need more attention. It might show, for example, that the percentage of pilots found to be unsatisfactory in flight checks was higher at one airline than at similar airlines, or that there was an unusual number of findings that record-keeping was not up to date. The problem is that many inspectors are either entering data inaccurately or not doing it at all, according to the inspectors themselves and reports by the F.A.A. and the General Accounting Office. A 1992 agency report said that some inspectors did not view the computer system as accurate because some records were getting lost before they were entered. Some inspectors were maintaining their own lists of work that required follow-up inspections "since the confidence level in the automated systems was low," the report said. The computer network that stores the raw data of inspections was recently upgraded but has also had problems. For example, an internal agency document said the software sometimes deleted the names of pilots from the record of their F.A.A. checkup, effectively rendering that record useless for evaluating pilots. In a report in February, the General Accounting Office said the mistakes in existing computer records "could potentially misdirect F.A.A. resources away from the higher-risk aviation activities." The study quotes from many of the F.A.A.'s own reports on accuracy problems with the data, and adds that officials in charge of the new analysis program had expressed concerns last fall that the quality of data "poses a major risk item for the system." In its report, the accounting office concluded, "The axiom 'garbage in, garbage out' applies" to the new analysis software. Nevertheless, the F.A.A. says that the computer records are effective for tracking trends. "Data quality is something we're going to continue to work on," said Anthony J. Broderick, associate administrator for regulation and certification of the F.A.A. "But it's not a show stopper at all." | Looking to Software for Help |
803704_0 | The Kwoks had just sat down to a meal of steamed fish and stir-fried pork. With a roar, the floor shuddered and the chopsticks in Kwok Tai-ming's hands clattered against his rice bowl. Overhead, seemingly skimming the roof of the tiny seventh-floor apartment, a Cathay Pacific 747 screamed past, banking amid apartment blocks toward Hong Kong's airport at Kai Tak. And then another, and another, every two or three minutes. By mid-1998 those jets will be stilled. Kai Tak is Asia's third-busiest airport, hunkered down in the heart of the city -- the Kwoks and more than 350,000 people live in its landing path -- and stretched far beyond its capacity. So Hong Kong, like many fast-growing Asian cities, is building a new one -- and in the process giving a resounding vote of confidence in Hong Kong's future. But this is no ordinary project. Hong Kong is spending more than $20 billion (United States) to literally reshape the city to make way for the airport. With the possible exception of the Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River in China, it is the world's largest infrastructure project. Perhaps most startling, to those who hear regularly of delays and cost overruns elsewhere, this one, after an initial snag, is humming along largely on schedule and is even under budget. Taxes have not gone up. Mountains of debt do not loom. The opening may be delayed because of squabbles about how it will be operated, but construction is moving rapidly ahead. But the price for this efficiency, some say, can be seen in a relatively lax attitude toward environmental concerns and an exploitation of workers. It is, as everyone here points out, very Hong Kong. "There're no unions," said James W. Little, a planner at Greiner International Ltd., which drew up the airport's master plan. "You import a lot of cheap labor. They work 24 hours a day. I don't think based on the environmental laws in the U.S. you could build this airport. Face it, it's freewheeling here." The huge project includes the following: A brand new town, complete with schools, police stations, fire houses and shopping centers, that will be home to 20,000 people. Two suspension bridges, one with a central span longer than that of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge in New York. A high-speed rail system to whisk travelers the 21 miles from central Hong Kong to the airport | Reshaping Hong Kong's Face |
803695_0 | American businesses eager to do business with Cuba are pushing every pressure point they can to end the U.S. embargo, except the one that might work. They refuse to use their economic influence to pressure Fidel Castro to give Cubans political and human rights. All these businesses achieved their wealth through the American system: free enterprise with political democracy. Democratic capitalism: the combination has been the key for them and American society. By itself, capitalism can operate in a dictatorship. It did in Nazi Germany, in Imperial Japan and in Saddam's Iraq. Now it is at work in China, overseen by the Communists, and in a dozen other dictatorships. The business executives involved know this. That's why they busily seek out new markets for capitalism in dictatorships like China, like Cuba. So some critical questions are at the heart of the push for trade with Cuba. They have been at the heart of every controversy on empowering dictatorships through American economic might. Once they were debated openly, passionately. Now they are not even raised, not by the business community, not by academics and journalists also trying to end the embargo. Do U.S. businesses have the moral and political right to transfer the fruits of democratic capitalism, which come from the efforts of the entire American population, workers as well as C.E.O.'s, to strengthen a dictatorship so that it can more efficiently control and persecute its own entire population? Or do they have the obligation to try to use the lure of capitalist investment to bring some liberty to the people of the dictatorships -- who will be making for Americans any profit they take out? On Wednesday, President Castro demonstrated at The New York Times the wit and intelligence that so entrance the hundreds of American business leaders who make the pilgrimage to Havana. Charming -- but not charming enough to erase memory. The man sitting there committed the greatest crime any revolutionary could. He asked for and got the help of Cuba's people to destroy the Batista dictatorship. Then he brought them not freedom but another dictatorship -- fully equipped with firing squads, kangaroo courts, political prisons, intellectual and political suppression. One party, one leader, one mouth. He uses truth and falsehood not as values in themselves but as conveniences of the moment. He said almost casually that yes, Amnesty International's figures of about 600 political prisoners in Cuba | On My Mind;How to Trade With Cuba |
803896_0 | The Kwoks had just sat down to a meal of steamed fish and stir-fried pork. With a roar, the floor shuddered and the chopsticks in Kwok Tai-ming's hands clattered against his rice bowl. Overhead, seemingly skimming the roof of the tiny seventh-floor apartment, a Cathay Pacific 747 screamed past, banking amid apartment blocks toward Hong Kong's airport at Kai Tak. And then another, and another, every two or three minutes. By mid-1998 those jets will be stilled. Kai Tak is Asia's third-busiest airport, hunkered down in the heart of the city -- the Kwoks and more than 350,000 people live in its landing path -- and stretched far beyond its capacity. So Hong Kong, like many fast-growing Asian cities, is building a new one -- and in the process giving a resounding vote of confidence in Hong Kong's future. But this is no ordinary project. Hong Kong is spending more than $20 billion (United States) to literally reshape the city to make way for the airport. With the possible exception of the Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River in China, it is the world's largest infrastructure project. Perhaps most startling, to those who hear regularly of delays and cost overruns elsewhere, this one, after an initial snag, is humming along largely on schedule and is even under budget. Taxes have not gone up. Mountains of debt do not loom. The opening may be delayed because of squabbles about how it will be operated, but construction is moving rapidly ahead. But the price for this efficiency, some say, can be seen in a relatively lax attitude toward environmental concerns and an exploitation of workers. It is, as everyone here points out, very Hong Kong. "There're no unions," said James W. Little, a planner at Greiner International Ltd., which drew up the airport's master plan. "You import a lot of cheap labor. They work 24 hours a day. I don't think based on the environmental laws in the U.S. you could build this airport. Face it, it's freewheeling here." The huge project includes the following: A brand new town, complete with schools, police stations, fire houses and shopping centers, that will be home to 20,000 people. Two suspension bridges, one with a central span longer than that of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge in New York. A high-speed rail system to whisk travelers the 21 miles from central Hong Kong to the airport | Reshaping Hong Kong's Face |
803886_0 | American businesses eager to do business with Cuba are pushing every pressure point they can to end the U.S. embargo, except the one that might work. They refuse to use their economic influence to pressure Fidel Castro to give Cubans political and human rights. All these businesses achieved their wealth through the American system: free enterprise with political democracy. Democratic capitalism: the combination has been the key for them and American society. By itself, capitalism can operate in a dictatorship. It did in Nazi Germany, in Imperial Japan and in Saddam's Iraq. Now it is at work in China, overseen by the Communists, and in a dozen other dictatorships. The business executives involved know this. That's why they busily seek out new markets for capitalism in dictatorships like China, like Cuba. So some critical questions are at the heart of the push for trade with Cuba. They have been at the heart of every controversy on empowering dictatorships through American economic might. Once they were debated openly, passionately. Now they are not even raised, not by the business community, not by academics and journalists also trying to end the embargo. Do U.S. businesses have the moral and political right to transfer the fruits of democratic capitalism, which come from the efforts of the entire American population, workers as well as C.E.O.'s, to strengthen a dictatorship so that it can more efficiently control and persecute its own entire population? Or do they have the obligation to try to use the lure of capitalist investment to bring some liberty to the people of the dictatorships -- who will be making for Americans any profit they take out? On Wednesday, President Castro demonstrated at The New York Times the wit and intelligence that so entrance the hundreds of American business leaders who make the pilgrimage to Havana. Charming -- but not charming enough to erase memory. The man sitting there committed the greatest crime any revolutionary could. He asked for and got the help of Cuba's people to destroy the Batista dictatorship. Then he brought them not freedom but another dictatorship -- fully equipped with firing squads, kangaroo courts, political prisons, intellectual and political suppression. One party, one leader, one mouth. He uses truth and falsehood not as values in themselves but as conveniences of the moment. He said almost casually that yes, Amnesty International's figures of about 600 political prisoners in Cuba | On My Mind; How to Trade With Cuba |
800584_0 | Stripped of its most controversial provision, a bill that would moderately tighten the United States embargo against Cuba was approved overwhelmingly today by the Senate. The vote was 74 to 24. The bill would insure that a country that buys Cuban sugar and molasses does not resell either product to the United States. It also seeks to reduce aid to Russia by $200 million -- the same amount Russia reportedly pays Cuba to rent an electronic intelligence-gathering base. The legislation, sponsored by the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Jesse Helms, also orders the Administration to try to block Cuba from becoming a member of international financial institutions. In addition, it requires the Administration to seek a worldwide embargo against Cuba at the United Nations. That bid is considered largely symbolic since the General Assembly has repeatedly sided with Cuba when the American embargo has come to a vote. No other country bars trade with Cuba. President Fidel Castro is expected to raise the issue on Sunday when he speaks before the General Assembly during celebrations of the United Nations' 50th anniversary. The Administration announced on Wednesday that Mr. Castro would be granted a visa to travel to the United States despite Republican objections. Final passage of the legislation today was anticlimactic. The key vote occurred on Tuesday night when Senator Helms and his allies narrowly lost a procedural vote on a provision to discourage foreign investment in Cuba, which could leave the country's economy prostrate. Under that proposal, investors would shy away because they would not be assured of legal title to any property they acquired. Senator Helms would have achieved that by allowing American residents whose property was confiscated three decades ago to lay claim to the properties in United States courts. The House approved a Cuba sanctions bill last month that contains the controversial provision, and Senator Helms said he hopes it survives the process of reconciling the House and Senate bills. | Curb on Trade With Cuba Is Tightened |
796969_1 | protection for the ecosystem. It passed in the Congress, but on Sept. 1, President Sixto Duran Ballen vetoed it. A few days later, protesters wielding machetes and supported by the mayor of the largest town, Puerto Ayora, seized the Charles Darwin Research Station and the national park headquarters. They closed two airports that serve the archipelago. The Government sent in troops and calmed the situation. It also agreed to talk with the protesters about their grievances. Their demands included the signing of the bill, control of local government, a requirement that all visitors spend at least one night ashore and the dismissal of the park superintendent because he opposed a shift to local control. The islanders' anger at the Government has been building since December, when the Government closed a lucrative fishery for sea cucumbers, which are exported for use in Asian cooking, after the legal harvesting limit was vastly exceeded. The fishermen seized the Darwin station but didn't harm anyone. The sea cucumber fishery is only one of several industries that have threatened the islands' ecosystem. The Ecuadorian Government also banned the shark fishing industry because the fishermen killed sharks, took the fins and let the rest of the carcass rot. But this is not the familiar story of poor locals whose need for economic development is being fought by affluent outside conservationists. Long-term residents have relied on agriculture and subsistence fishing. And their economic future will be improved more by preserving the ecosystem and promoting tourism than by exports of extracted natural resources. The Government is negotiating with the islanders on providing economic advantages. But conservation is not negotiable. The ecological threat goes well beyond the overfishing of the sea cucumbers. At least 90 of the famed giant tortoises have been killed in recent years, and a major fire, probably arson, destroyed parts of the largest island. Fishermen have camped on some islands illegally and have destroyed a critical mangrove habitat. The protesters have threatened further arson -- and hostage-taking -- if their demands are not met. Neutralizing this threat and protecting an area crucial to our understanding of nature and humans' place in it should be high on the agenda this week as Timothy Wirth, the Undersecretary of State for Global Affairs, visits Ecuador. Marc Miller, a law professor atEmory University, is a visiting scholar at Stanford University, where Donald Kennedy is a professor of environmental science. | Saving the Galapagos |
797238_0 | To the Editor: Re "In Foothills of Rockies, Neighbors Are Bears" (news article, Oct. 6): In 1992 Colorado voters approved a ballot measure to ban three repugnant bear-hunting practices: luring bears to piles of rotting meat and jelly doughnuts and shooting the feeding animals at point-blank range; chasing bears with packs of hounds and shooting the animals off a tree branch, and hunting bears during spring season, when mothers nurse their dependent cubs. It is asinine to claim, as hunters do, that an end to these trophy-hunting methods has caused a bear population explosion in Colorado. Bear hunting results in the skewing of a bear population's age structure in favor of younger animals. Since younger bears, particularly males, are the most likely to become involved in conflicts with people, hunting will not solve and may worsen any bear nuisance problem. Shooting and killing random bears does nothing to stop surviving bears from raiding the same garbage cans left open by residents. What's needed, as the Colorado Division of Wildlife suggests, are site-specific measures such as bear-proof garbage cans. MICHAEL MARKARIAN Director of Campaigns Fund for Animals New York, Oct. 6, 1995 | Hunting's Not Answer For Bear Nuisances |
797137_0 | Three years after Brazil was host to the Earth Summit, shepherding ambitious international accords on biodiversity and climate change, burnings in the Amazon region appear to be approaching the worst levels ever, while information on the country's most explosive ecological issue -- the extent of forest clearing in the Amazon -- has virtually dried up. The burnings, aggravated by six months of little or no rain in the region, are leaving a thick blanket of gray smoke over forest and savanna. At the height of the recent burning season, the forest was cloaked in shadow, the sun appeared veiled and neither stars nor moon could be seen in the night sky. The vast fires are not runaway blazes alone, but an annual ritual from early July to November as ranchers, farmers and developers clear land for cattle grazing, planting or building. Much of the smoke rises from regrown forests in areas that were felled years ago, along with pastures and savannas. But the locations of some fires suggest a large amount of virgin rain forest is being cleared as well. Airports in much of the Amazon have been closed for at least part of every day because of the thick smoke. Doctors at one hospital in Rondonia said they were seeing many more patients as a result of the burnings this year than last, with many children suffering from respiratory problems. "According to our statistics, this year is the worst year as far as fires are concerned," Marcio Nogueira Barbosa, director general of the Brazilian Government's National Institute for Space Research, said in an interview. "We know that the situation in some parts is very dire." The increase comes after several years of claims by the Government that destruction of the Amazon rain forest had slowed thanks to steps it had taken, including the elimination of Government subsidies for clearing virgin forest. But environmental experts contend the country's failure to analyze the extent of deforestation since 1991, along with the stepped-up levels of burnings in the Amazon region, raise doubts about those claims. The fate of the Amazon rain forest has drawn worldwide interest because it is believed to be home to a large share of the world's species. Atmospheric scientists also say that extensive clearing of the rain forest may contribute to the threat of global warming. Alberto Setzer, who tracks burnings in the Amazon for the National Institute | Amazon Is Burning Again, as Furiously as Ever |
797260_2 | Try to put it in the wrong category and it bounces out. When the sorting is done, the results are displayed as a bar graph, showing how many in each category, with pictures of those sorted. Zurk also has a feature in which children can wander about snapping "photos" for an electronic scrapbook they can save and view or annotate with notes. A simple on-screen switch chooses among English, Spanish or French, allowing the Zurk games to do double duty as reinforcements of language skills. Destination: Rain Forest (Edmark, 800-691-2985, $35) is the third in a series of Imagination Express educational programs from Edmark (the others are Neighborhood and Castle, with Ocean due later this month). The target audience is children 6 and up, Edmark says, though the younger end of this group may not be able to make full use of the features. The focus is storytelling. To create a rain forest adventure, children can choose among more than a dozen scenes, from a tranquil pond to a roaring waterfall to cut trees in a clearing. That choice becomes the setting for one or more pages in a story, to which dozens of characters can be added. The choices range from children who live in the forest to loggers with chain saws. Many story-creation programs use such backdrops and characters, but Edmark's tools are particularly sophisticated. When the characters are pasted in, for instance, they are automatically sized -- larger in the foreground, smaller in the background. Once the characters are in the scene, they can be moved around, and dialogue or narrative can be created, either by typing text into the appropriate spaces or by speaking, when the computer has a microphone built in or attached. The strongest points of The Smithsonian Presents Total Amazon (Computer Curriculum, 408-745-6270, $39.95) are the introductory video and its wealth of data. But the presentation is fairly static and the program lacks an effective search mechanism, undercutting its usefulness to students. The limitations are quickly apparent. The introductory screen offers four choices, and if you click on "Activities" you see an uninviting screen with a photograph and nine boxes, labeled "Activity 1" through "Activity 9" -- without a clue as to what is inside. Click one on and a question pops up, with a multiple-choice answer, all in drab text. This is not the stuff of which effective multimedia software is made. | Children's Software for Navigating Tropics and Alphabet; Discovering the living delights of a rain forest |
797102_0 | To the Editor: It was heartening to read (news item, Oct. 5) that Reina Ramos, a senior at Mother Cabrini High School for Girls in Manhattan, would participate as an altar server at the Central Park papal Mass. At the time of Vatican II in the mid-1960's, my wife, the daughter of an American diplomat in Rome, was a student at Trinita de Monti Catholic school. The Vatican conference placed a heavy demand on altar servers since the delegates had to say Mass every day; so girls at the school were recruited to be altar servers. That was 30 years ago. Progress for women likely will not come from doctrinal soul-searching but from the realization that the institution needs faithful women for its survival. ALFRED R. BARR Washington, Oct. 5, 1995 | Will America Take Pope's Message to Heart?; Progress for Women |
797230_1 | for the ecosystem. It passed in the Congress, but on Sept. 1, President Sixto Duran Ballen vetoed it. A few days later, protesters wielding machetes and supported by the mayor of the largest town, Puerto Ayora, seized the Charles Darwin Research Station and the national park headquarters. They closed two airports that serve the archipelago. The Government sent in troops and calmed the situation. It also agreed to talk with the protesters about their grievances. Their demands included the signing of the bill, control of local government, a requirement that all visitors spend at least one night ashore and the dismissal of the park superintendent because he opposed a shift to local control. The islanders' anger at the Government has been building since December, when the Government closed a lucrative fishery for sea cucumbers, which are exported for use in Asian cooking, after the legal harvesting limit was vastly exceeded. The fishermen seized the Darwin station but didn't harm anyone. The sea cucumber fishery is only one of several industries that have threatened the islands' ecosystem. The Ecuadorian Government also banned the shark fishing industry because the fishermen killed sharks, took the fins and let the rest of the carcass rot. But this is not the familiar story of poor locals whose need for economic development is being fought by affluent outside conservationists. Long-term residents have relied on agriculture and subsistence fishing. And their economic future will be improved more by preserving the ecosystem and promoting tourism than by exports of extracted natural resources. The Government is negotiating with the islanders on providing economic advantages. But conservation is not negotiable. The ecological threat goes well beyond the overfishing of the sea cucumbers. At least 90 of the famed giant tortoises have been killed in recent years, and a major fire, probably arson, destroyed parts of the largest island. Fishermen have camped on some islands illegally and have destroyed a critical mangrove habitat. The protesters have threatened further arson -- and hostage-taking -- if their demands are not met. Neutralizing this threat and protecting an area crucial to our understanding of nature and humans' place in it should be high on the agenda this week as Timothy Wirth, the Undersecretary of State for Global Affairs, visits Ecuador. Marc Miller, a law professor at Emory University, is a visiting scholar at Stanford University, where Donald Kennedy is a professor of environmental science. | Saving the Galapagos |
796977_0 | To the Editor: Re "In Foothills of Rockies, Neighbors Are Bears" (news article, Oct. 6): In 1992 Colorado voters approved a ballot measure to ban three repugnant bear-hunting practices: luring bears to piles of rotting meat and jelly doughnuts and shooting the feeding animals at point-blank range; chasing bears with packs of hounds and shooting the animals off a tree branch, and hunting bears during spring season, when mothers nurse their dependent cubs. It is asinine to claim, as hunters do, that an end to these trophy-hunting methods has caused a bear population explosion in Colorado. Bear hunting results in the skewing of a bear population's age structure in favor of younger animals. Since younger bears, particularly males, are the most likely to become involved in conflicts with people, hunting will not solve and may worsen any bear nuisance problem. Shooting and killing random bears does nothing to stop surviving bears from raiding the same garbage cans left open by residents. What's needed, as the Colorado Division of Wildlife suggests, are site-specific measures such as bear-proof garbage cans. MICHAEL MARKARIAN Director of Campaigns Fund for Animals New York, Oct. 6, 1995 | Hunting's Not Answer For Bear Nuisances |
797067_0 | To the Editor: It was heartening to read (news item, Oct. 5) that Reina Ramos, a senior at Mother Cabrini High School for Girls in Manhattan, would participate as an altar server at the Central Park papal Mass. At the time of Vatican II in the mid-1960's, my wife, the daughter of an American diplomat in Rome, was a student at Trinita de Monti Catholic school. The Vatican conference placed a heavy demand on altar servers since the delegates had to say Mass every day; so girls at the school were recruited to be altar servers. That was 30 years ago. Progress for women likely will not come from doctrinal soul-searching but from the realization that the institution needs faithful women for its survival. ALFRED R. BARR Washington, Oct. 5, 1995 | Will America Take Pope's Message to Heart?;Progress for Women |
796899_0 | Three years after Brazil was host to the Earth Summit, shepherding ambitious international accords on biodiversity and climate change, burnings in the Amazon region appear to be approaching the worst levels ever, while information on the country's most explosive ecological issue -- the extent of forest clearing in the Amazon -- has virtually dried up. The burnings, aggravated by six months of little or no rain in the region, are leaving a thick blanket of gray smoke over forest and savanna. At the height of the recent burning season, the forest was cloaked in shadow, the sun appeared veiled and neither stars nor moon could be seen in the night sky. The vast fires are not runaway blazes alone, but an annual ritual from early July to November as ranchers, farmers and developers clear land for cattle grazing, planting or building. Much of the smoke rises from regrown forests in areas that were felled years ago, along with pastures and savannas. But the locations of some fires suggest a large amount of virgin rain forest is being cleared as well. Airports in much of the Amazon have been closed for at least part of every day because of the thick smoke. Doctors at one hospital in Rondonia said they were seeing many more patients as a result of the burnings this year than last, with many children suffering from respiratory problems. "According to our statistics, this year is the worst year as far as fires are concerned," Marcio Nogueira Barbosa, director general of the Brazilian Government's National Institute for Space Research, said in an interview. "We know that the situation in some parts is very dire." The increase comes after several years of claims by the Government that destruction of the Amazon rain forest had slowed thanks to steps it had taken, including the elimination of Government subsidies for clearing virgin forest. But environmental experts contend the country's failure to analyze the extent of deforestation since 1991, along with the stepped-up levels of burnings in the Amazon region, raise doubts about those claims. The fate of the Amazon rain forest has drawn worldwide interest because it is believed to be home to a large share of the world's species. Atmospheric scientists also say that extensive clearing of the rain forest may contribute to the threat of global warming. Alberto Setzer, who tracks burnings in the Amazon for the National Institute | Amazon Is Burning Again, as Furiously as Ever |
797000_2 | Try to put it in the wrong category and it bounces out. When the sorting is done, the results are displayed as a bar graph, showing how many in each category, with pictures of those sorted. Zurk also has a feature in which children can wander about snapping "photos" for an electronic scrapbook they can save and view or annotate with notes. A simple on-screen switch chooses among English, Spanish or French, allowing the Zurk games to do double duty as reinforcements of language skills. Destination: Rain Forest (Edmark, 800-691-2985, $35) is the third in a series of Imagination Express educational programs from Edmark (the others are Neighborhood and Castle, with Ocean due later this month). The target audience is children 6 and up, Edmark says, though the younger end of this group may not be able to make full use of the features. The focus is storytelling. To create a rain forest adventure, children can choose among more than a dozen scenes, from a tranquil pond to a roaring waterfall to cut trees in a clearing. That choice becomes the setting for one or more pages in a story, to which dozens of characters can be added. The choices range from children who live in the forest to loggers with chain saws. Many story-creation programs use such backdrops and characters, but Edmark's tools are particularly sophisticated. When the characters are pasted in, for instance, they are automatically sized -- larger in the foreground, smaller in the background. Once the characters are in the scene, they can be moved around, and dialogue or narrative can be created, either by typing text into the appropriate spaces or by speaking, when the computer has a microphone built in or attached. The strongest points of The Smithsonian Presents Total Amazon (Computer Curriculum, 408-745-6270, $39.95) are the introductory video and its wealth of data. But the presentation is fairly static and the program lacks an effective search mechanism, undercutting its usefulness to students. The limitations are quickly apparent. The introductory screen offers four choices, and if you click on "Activities" you see an uninviting screen with a photograph and nine boxes, labeled "Activity 1" through "Activity 9" -- without a clue as to what is inside. Click one on and a question pops up, with a multiple-choice answer, all in drab text. This is not the stuff of which effective multimedia software is made. | Children's Software for Navigating Tropics and Alphabet;Discovering the living delights of a rain forest |
799938_0 | Reminders of Dangers of Guns | |
799538_0 | Reminders of Dangers of Guns | |
799936_0 | In an apparently significant policy shift, the top British official for Northern Ireland suggested today that the Irish Republican Army might not have to disarm before its representatives are permitted to take part in talks on a peace settlement in the British province. For months the peace effort has been stalled by British insistence that the I.R.A.'s political wing, Sinn Fein, could not enter formal talks until the I.R.A. had begun to disarm. Sinn Fein has insisted that this is an unacceptable precondition, that they could not persuade the I.R.A. military command to disarm before new talks begin. But today, Sir Patrick Mayhew, Britain's Secretary for Northern Ireland, reached agreement with the Irish Government at a meeting in Belfast, the Northern Ireland capital, that the next step in the peace effort would be the establishment of a disarmament panel and the start of bilateral talks involving the two Governments and all the parties in Northern Ireland, including Sinn Fein. Sir Patrick seemed clearly to be proposing a compromise to the disarmament dispute by saying the disarmament agency might find a way for Sinn Fein and the I.R.A. to give assurances that they are permanently committed to nonviolence. Such assurances, he indicated, could result in a place for Sinn Fein at a negotiating table. "If the commission could come up with some means of generating that necessary confidence by some other means," than actual disarmament, he said, "then we want to look at that very closely and look at it on its merits. Using face-saving language to reassure Sinn Fein and to defend an apparent shift in Britain's position, he added that there "is no sacrifice of any principle or any point upon which any party has taken its stand." Dick Spring, the Irish Foreign Minister, who met with Sir Patrick in Belfast today, said the two Governments were eager to get the so-called two-track peace process moving. Mitchell McLaughlin, a senior Sinn Fein official, responded cautiously to Sir Patrick's statement, saying that if it meant that Britain was abandoning its disarmament-before-talks position, then Sinn Fein would "make a considered judgment." Referring to the British disarmament demand, he added, "If in fact we are stepping back beyond that and people are reformulating the proposition, then Sinn Fein will look at the detail of it and we will look at it positively." Mr. McLaughlin noted that Sir Patrick had not mentioned one | Britain Hints at a Shift in Policy Over I.R.A. Disarmament Issue |
799642_1 | the more than 1,100 members of the American Dance Therapy Association are celebrating the organization's 30th anniversary. And at an annual conference this week in Rye Brook, N.Y., they will convene to discuss the ever-widening uses of their approach to communication and expression. Just as talk psychotherapists vary widely in their techniques, dance/ movement therapy is a diverse field, with each practitioner providing an individualized approach. Often the techniques of dance/movement therapy are combined with other psychotherapeutic methods, including art and music therapy as well as talk therapy. The dance therapist's role typically varies with the needs of patients. As Dr. Fran J. Levy, a Brooklyn psychotherapist who uses movement, explains in her forthcoming professional book, "Dance and Other Expressive Art Therapies: When Words Are Not Enough" (edited by Judith Pines Fired and Fern Leventhal and published by Routledge, $18.95): "Many move with their patients in supportive and mirroring roles while others act essentially as empathetic observers. Occasionally, some therapists do their own dances to reflect what they perceive, or to help the group feel more comfortable with movement." Dance/movement therapy has helped those afflicted with a wide range of problems: physical and mental limitations, speech and learning disabilities, a history of sexual abuse, autism, family discord and personal psychological problems associated with feelings or acts that may be difficult to describe in words. For example, children and even many adults who have been sexually abused are often unable to articulate exactly what they feel or to describe in words the painful things that happened to them. "But," Dr. Levy explained, "if you give them room to move, their story can unfold through movement. The trauma is in their bodies, and movement helps them release or express it." Through movement, patients are better able to bring feelings to the fore and move on from there. Once feelings are identified and expressed, patients can often discuss them more freely, strip away the barriers they had created and move forward in their lives in a healthier fashion. Bonnie Bernstein, a dance therapist from Palo Alto, Calif., tells of a patient named Dana who was tormented by the idea that she could somehow have prevented being raped. The therapist encouraged her to dance an enactment of the rape and to include various actions she imagined she could have taken. As she danced, the patient discovered that if she had tried to fight back, | Personal Health |
799552_0 | France will not allow itself to be intimidated, will not flinch under pressure, and will not capitulate to barbarism." -- PRIME MINISTER ALAIN JUPPE of France. [A1:6] | No Headline |
799967_0 | "France will not allow itself to be intimidated, will not flinch under pressure, and will not capitulate to barbarism." -- PRIME MINISTER ALAIN JUPPE of France. [ A1:6 ] | No Headline |
799549_1 | Julie Dorf, executive director of the commission, as she opened the session in a hall across First Avenue from the United Nations. Few human rights issues are as contentious as the treatment of homosexuals, since the cases frequently involve behavior that societies regard as immoral and governments classify as criminal. Last month, the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing jettisoned "sexual orientation" from the anti-discrimination clause of its platform. Despite that, James C. Hormel of San Francisco, co-chairman of yesterday's tribunal, said he discerned advances. He cited the decision by some governments to grant refugee status to homosexuals and the deletion of homosexuality from the World Health Organization's list of diseases. "These may seem like baby steps," Mr. Hormel said, "but they are steps." In another step, the Committee to Protect Journalists, based in New York, has examined curbs on the gay press. Its executive director, William A. Orme Jr., said many journalists tended to see the staffs of gay and lesbian publications "not as colleagues but as political activists." However, he said, "no matter whether a gay journalist is beaten, a lesbian publication confiscated, or a law passed prohibiting the 'promotion' of homosexuality, the freedom to report and the right to a free flow of information are severely curtailed." The committee has recommended that the United States grant political asylum to Yaroslav Y. Mogutin, 22, a gay Russian journalist who faces arrest and imprisonment for an article he wrote on the war in Chechnya. He is now living in New York City, awaiting a decision from the Immigration and Naturalization Service. At the human rights hearing, Elizabeth Lim, 39, of the Philippines said that she and her partner, Evangeline Castronuevo, were dismissed last year from their jobs at the Balay Rehabilitation Center in Quezon City after disclosing their relationship to a co-worker. They are appealing their dismissal. She was followed by Ciprian Cucu, a 20-year-old Romanian, who said he and his lover, Milorad Marian Mutascu, were arrested in 1993 after being turned in to the police by Mr. Cucu's sister. While in jail, Mr. Cucu said, he was raped by other inmates, then beaten by the warden when he disclosed the rapes in court. At their trial, Mr. Cucu and Mr. Mutascu received suspended sentences. But that was not the end of the case. "In May," Mr. Cucu said, sobbing as his words were translated, "Marian committed suicide." | On the World Stage, Homosexuals Are Seeing Advances |
799956_1 | Julie Dorf, executive director of the commission, as she opened the session in a hall across First Avenue from the United Nations. Few human rights issues are as contentious as the treatment of homosexuals, since the cases frequently involve behavior that societies regard as immoral and governments classify as criminal. Last month, the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing jettisoned "sexual orientation" from the anti-discrimination clause of its platform. Despite that, James C. Hormel of San Francisco, co-chairman of yesterday's tribunal, said he discerned advances. He cited the decision by some governments to grant refugee status to homosexuals and the deletion of homosexuality from the World Health Organization's list of diseases. "These may seem like baby steps," Mr. Hormel said, "but they are steps." In another step, the Committee to Protect Journalists, based in New York, has examined curbs on the gay press. Its executive director, William A. Orme Jr., said many journalists tended to see the staffs of gay and lesbian publications "not as colleagues but as political activists." However, he said, "no matter whether a gay journalist is beaten, a lesbian publication confiscated, or a law passed prohibiting the 'promotion' of homosexuality, the freedom to report and the right to a free flow of information are severely curtailed." The committee has recommended that the United States grant political asylum to Yaroslav Y. Mogutin, 22, a gay Russian journalist who faces arrest and imprisonment for an article he wrote on the war in Chechnya. He is now living in New York City, awaiting a decision from the Immigration and Naturalization Service. At the human rights hearing, Elizabeth Lim, 39, of the Philippines said that she and her partner, Evangeline Castronuevo, were dismissed last year from their jobs at the Balay Rehabilitation Center in Quezon City after disclosing their relationship to a co-worker. They are appealing their dismissal. She was followed by Ciprian Cucu, a 20-year-old Romanian, who said he and his lover, Milorad Marian Mutascu, were arrested in 1993 after being turned in to the police by Mr. Cucu's sister. While in jail, Mr. Cucu said, he was raped by other inmates, then beaten by the warden when he disclosed the rapes in court. At their trial, Mr. Cucu and Mr. Mutascu received suspended sentences. But that was not the end of the case. "In May," Mr. Cucu said, sobbing as his words were translated, "Marian committed suicide." | On the World Stage, Homosexuals Are Seeing Advances |
799535_0 | In an apparently significant policy shift, the top British official for Northern Ireland suggested today that the Irish Republican Army might not have to disarm before its representatives are permitted to take part in talks on a peace settlement in the British province. For months the peace effort has been stalled by British insistence that the I.R.A.'s political wing, Sinn Fein, could not enter formal talks until the I.R.A. had begun to disarm. Sinn Fein has insisted that this is an unacceptable precondition, that they could not persuade the I.R.A. military command to disarm before new talks begin. But today, Sir Patrick Mayhew, Britain's Secretary for Northern Ireland, reached agreement with the Irish Government at a meeting in Belfast, the Northern Ireland capital, that the next step in the peace effort would be the establishment of a disarmament panel and the start of bilateral talks involving the two Governments and all the parties in Northern Ireland, including Sinn Fein. Sir Patrick seemed clearly to be proposing a compromise to the disarmament dispute by saying the disarmament agency might find a way for Sinn Fein and the I.R.A. to give assurances that they are permanently committed to nonviolence. Such assurances, he indicated, could result in a place for Sinn Fein at a negotiating table. "If the commission could come up with some means of generating that necessary confidence by some other means," than actual disarmament, he said, "then we want to look at that very closely and look at it on its merits. Using face-saving language to reassure Sinn Fein and to defend an apparent shift in Britain's position, he added that there "is no sacrifice of any principle or any point upon which any party has taken its stand." Dick Spring, the Irish Foreign Minister, who met with Sir Patrick in Belfast today, said the two Governments were eager to get the so-called two-track peace process moving. Mitchell McLaughlin, a senior Sinn Fein official, responded cautiously to Sir Patrick's statement, saying that if it meant that Britain was abandoning its disarmament-before-talks position, then Sinn Fein would "make a considered judgment." Referring to the British disarmament demand, he added, "If in fact we are stepping back beyond that and people are reformulating the proposition, then Sinn Fein will look at the detail of it and we will look at it positively." Mr. McLaughlin noted that Sir Patrick had not mentioned one | Britain Hints at a Shift in Policy Over I.R.A. Disarmament Issue |
799825_1 | the more than 1,100 members of the American Dance Therapy Association are celebrating the organization's 30th anniversary. And at an annual conference this week in Rye Brook, N.Y., they will convene to discuss the ever-widening uses of their approach to communication and expression. Just as talk psychotherapists vary widely in their techniques, dance/ movement therapy is a diverse field, with each practitioner providing an individualized approach. Often the techniques of dance/movement therapy are combined with other psychotherapeutic methods, including art and music therapy as well as talk therapy. The dance therapist's role typically varies with the needs of patients. As Dr. Fran J. Levy, a Brooklyn psychotherapist who uses movement, explains in her forthcoming professional book, "Dance and Other Expressive Art Therapies: When Words Are Not Enough" (edited by Judith Pines Fired and Fern Leventhal and published by Routledge, $18.95): "Many move with their patients in supportive and mirroring roles while others act essentially as empathetic observers. Occasionally, some therapists do their own dances to reflect what they perceive, or to help the group feel more comfortable with movement." Dance/movement therapy has helped those afflicted with a wide range of problems: physical and mental limitations, speech and learning disabilities, a history of sexual abuse, autism, family discord and personal psychological problems associated with feelings or acts that may be difficult to describe in words. For example, children and even many adults who have been sexually abused are often unable to articulate exactly what they feel or to describe in words the painful things that happened to them. "But," Dr. Levy explained, "if you give them room to move, their story can unfold through movement. The trauma is in their bodies, and movement helps them release or express it." Through movement, patients are better able to bring feelings to the fore and move on from there. Once feelings are identified and expressed, patients can often discuss them more freely, strip away the barriers they had created and move forward in their lives in a healthier fashion. Bonnie Bernstein, a dance therapist from Palo Alto, Calif., tells of a patient named Dana who was tormented by the idea that she could somehow have prevented being raped. The therapist encouraged her to dance an enactment of the rape and to include various actions she imagined she could have taken. As she danced, the patient discovered that if she had tried to fight back, | Personal Health |
792472_0 | THE menu of mortgage options is becoming a buffet, with nearly every variation conceivable. While mortgage rates are bouncing around near historic lows, a few home buyers are forgoing the promise of a low fixed-rate loan for 15 or 30 years. This group of borrowers, albeit a small one, is choosing adjustable-rate loans -- often with a twist. The standard adjustable loan carries a rate that adjusts each year. Some others, sometimes called hybrids, carry a fixed rate for 3, 5, 7 or 10 years and then adjust each year. But to convince finicky borrowers that an adjustable-rate loan could be good for them, lenders are promoting a type that adjusts every three years or five years, rather than annually, after the initial period. "These loans have been around for a while," said Bruce R. Lublin, a mortgage banker with the Homerica Mortgage Corporation, which has offices in Harrison, N.Y., and Westport, Conn. "But they were overshadowed by the other kinds of A.R.M.'s. Recently, though, as buyers learn more about different mortgages, we are finding that more people are taking the 3-3's and 5-5's," which are loans that adjust every three or five years. The monthly payment is smaller on an adjustable loan than on a fixed-rate loan, accounting for much of the adjustable loan's appeal. But psychologically, the leap is great. Home buyers worry about the havoc an adjustable loan could some day cause for their household budgets. The promise of less frequent adjustments can calm those fears. Generally, borrowers pay slightly higher rates for loans that adjust every three years or five years than they would for loans that adjust annually after three or five years of predictable payments. At Homerica, the difference is 0.25 of a percentage point. Homerica is offering a loan that adjusts every three years at an initial rate of 5.5 percent with 2.75 points down, or 6.25 percent with 1.25 points down. A point is a fee paid by the borrower, generally, at closing, that is equal to 1 percent of the loan amount. If the borrower is willing to accept annual adjustments after three years, Homerica's initial rates fall to 5.25 percent and 6 percent, respectively. At least 30 lenders across the nation offer loans that adjust every three or five years, said Keith T. Gumbinger, a vice president with HSH Associates, a mortgage research company in Butler, N.J. "They are dusting | As Mortgage Rates Drop, Choices Rise |
792689_3 | the 49-year-old bishop of Cracow -- that America, for him, was terra incognita. "He knew then that in his intellectual formation there was something substantial missing," Dr. Navarro-Valls explained. "He came from Poland, but practically speaking, he grew up within the European tradition; he studied Sartre and the German phenomenologists. He knew America as a place where thought does not exist as thought, but as action, translated into the American way of life. And that is why he was interested. How could a country that doesn't have big names, big thinkers, have such a strong influence on the world?" It is doubtful how much a Polish cleric, sent on a whirlwind tour of Polish-American parishes, really picked up about the American way of life. His next trip in 1976 -- to Philadelphia for a Eucharistic Congress, to Boston and Washington -- was even more limited. A European View And by the time he came as Pope in 1979, many still detected in him a classic European attitude toward Americans. "I think he had a tendency to look down on the United states, to see Americans as naive, simplistic and materialistic, which was the consistent portrayal of the States in Poland at the time," said Father Avery Dulles, a Jesuit theologian at Fordham University. "There was also a tendency in Europe to resent the United States as a world leader, and he may have imbibed a little of that." By some accounts, the 1979 trip was not altogether successful. It was then that many American Catholics -- while thrilled at the first pastoral visit by a successor to St. Peter -- came face to face with the rigidity of this Pope's moral doctrine. And it was then that Pope John Paul II first encountered the contentious American spirit, when Sister Mary Theresa Kane, president of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, publicly challenged him on the ordination of women as priests. When the weeklong trip was over, the National Catholic Reporter concluded that the Pope "did not grasp the pluralism" of American society. "Has John Paul II misread the U.S. experience," asked a headline on an editorial complaining that the Pope seemed to view American Catholics as "dilettantes dabbling in Christianity." His second trip in 1987 gave him a wider view of the States, taking him across the South and Southwest, up through California and across to Detroit. "On that trip | New World; What the Pope Sees (and Doesn't) in America |
791954_1 | Town of Harrison is now involved in similar litigation. It has imposed a 90-day moratorium as it tries to write new zoning. Greenburgh decided to take pre-emptive action and craft an ordinance with no court case looming. "I wanted to get the community involved in drafting a new law with the support of the phone company," said Paul J. Feiner, Greenburgh's supervisor. "This approach, as far as I know, is unique. Hopefully we'll be able to meet the needs of the technology companies and not upset residents about the placement of these antennas." Bell Atlantic Nynex Mobile Communications and AT&T Wireless, the two licensed providers of cellular telephone service in the county, were both invited to participate in writing the new law. Greg Meese, a lawyer who is rpresenting Nynex, was a member of the committee that drafted the ordinance. Lawyers for AT&T Wireless are now reviewing the latest draft. On Sept. 13, the proposed law was forwarded to the planning board for review. It will then pass it on to the Town Board, along with proposed changes, for approval. The document attempts to regulate the whole spectrum of antennas, including ones used for cellular telephones, radio broadcasts and satellite television. It is based on laws enacted by the cities of Seattle and Portland. It makes a distinction between antennas that only receive and those that transmit, as well as receive, radio waves. Transmitting antennas are usually used for commercial purposes and produce a stronger electromagnetic field. One concern of the communities is the perceived health risk associated with these antennas. They emit electromagnetic radiation, and in some studies the emissions have been associated with childhood leukemia, although no definitive threat to human health has yet been established. "We had to be very careful how we dealt with that," said Catherine Lederer-Plaskett, a resident who helped write Greenburgh's ordinance. "I happen to believe that a health risk will be established someday. But at the same time the technology is getting smaller and more precise all the time, that it may eventually level itself out." When the Town of Mamaroneck amended its zoning to deal with this issue, it scrupulously avoided the health question. "We didn't say there was a health risk," said Supervisor Elaine Price, "just that the emission levels should be within acceptable levels." Greenburgh's proposed law tries to minimize the risk by restricting transmitting antennas to nonresidential zones, | In the Region: Westchester;Greenburgh Drafting a Cellular-Antenna Ordinance |
792135_3 | the 49-year-old bishop of Cracow -- that America, for him, was terra incognita. "He knew then that in his intellectual formation there was something substantial missing," Dr. Navarro-Valls explained. "He came from Poland, but practically speaking, he grew up within the European tradition; he studied Sartre and the German phenomenologists. He knew America as a place where thought does not exist as thought, but as action, translated into the American way of life. And that is why he was interested. How could a country that doesn't have big names, big thinkers, have such a strong influence on the world?" It is doubtful how much a Polish cleric, sent on a whirlwind tour of Polish-American parishes, really picked up about the American way of life. His next trip in 1976 -- to Philadelphia for a Eucharistic Congress, to Boston and Washington -- was even more limited. A European View And by the time he came as Pope in 1979, many still detected in him a classic European attitude toward Americans. "I think he had a tendency to look down on the United states, to see Americans as naive, simplistic and materialistic, which was the consistent portrayal of the States in Poland at the time," said Father Avery Dulles, a Jesuit theologian at Fordham University. "There was also a tendency in Europe to resent the United States as a world leader, and he may have imbibed a little of that." By some accounts, the 1979 trip was not altogether successful. It was then that many American Catholics -- while thrilled at the first pastoral visit by a successor to St. Peter -- came face to face with the rigidity of this Pope's moral doctrine. And it was then that Pope John Paul II first encountered the contentious American spirit, when Sister Mary Theresa Kane, president of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, publicly challenged him on the ordination of women as priests. When the weeklong trip was over, the National Catholic Reporter concluded that the Pope "did not grasp the pluralism" of American society. "Has John Paul II misread the U.S. experience," asked a headline on an editorial complaining that the Pope seemed to view American Catholics as "dilettantes dabbling in Christianity." His second trip in 1987 gave him a wider view of the States, taking him across the South and Southwest, up through California and across to Detroit. "On that trip | New World;What the Pope Sees (and Doesn't) in America |
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