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771942_0 | The Monsanto Company said yesterday that it would acquire a 49.9 percent stake in Calgene Inc., the biotechnology company best known for its development of a genetically engineered tomato, for $30 million. As part of the transaction, Monsanto will turn over to Calgene its 50 percent interest in Gargiulo L.P., the largest packer and shipper of fresh tomatoes in the United States. Analysts said the agreement would help all three companies by bolstering Monsanto's position in agricultural biotechnology -- in which it has already spent an estimated $1 billion on research and development -- and by making Calgene and Gargiulo the nation's predominant supplier of fresh tomatoes. The deal "makes tremendous strategic sense," said James McCamant, editor of the Agbiotech Stock Letter. "By combining the two organizations you insure that the new entity will be the dominant supplier of fresh market tomatoes for some time." In addition to the Flavr Savr, a genetically engineered tomato with an extended shelf life, Calgene has developed seed oils with large potential markets in the food and chemical industries. Monsanto, the big chemicals company based in St. Louis, makes bovine growth hormone, which stimulates milk production in cows, and herbicide-resistant soybeans, potatoes and cottonseed. Shares of Calgene closed yesterday at $8.25, up 50 cents, after trading as high as $9.9375. The stock was among the most active Nasdaq issues, with almost four million shares traded. The average daily volume of Calgene is 396,600 shares. On the New York Stock Exchange, shares of Monsanto rose 50 cents, to $88.625. Under the terms of the deal, Monsanto will make an equity contribution of $30 million to Calgene, which is based in Davis, Calif. Monsanto will also make long-term credit available to Calgene and Gargiulo. After turning over its current 50 percent interest in Gargiulo to Calgene, Monsanto intends to exercise its options to acquire the remaining half of Gargiulo, which is based in Naples, Fla., and then turn it over to Calgene. Douglas Groh, an analyst with Merrill Lynch, said sales of bovine growth hormone by Monsanto had exceeded the company's estimates, encouraging it to play a greater role in agricultural biotechnology. "The real benefit to Monsanto," he said, "is gaining access to the plant oil development Calgene has done." He said that Calgene would gain "distribution from Gargiulo, and Monsanto has the deep pockets to fund the research." Mr. McCamant of the Agbiotech Stock Letter | Monsanto to Acquire 49.9% of Biotechnology Company |
771893_2 | of the men were away hunting. The miners killed 12 Indians, most children. "It was terrible," said Carlo Zacquini, a Roman Catholic layman who works with survivors from Haximu, the village where the Indians were killed. "One of the miners stabbed a child, then cut his head off." Although the killings took place a few miles across the border, in Venezuela, Brazil agreed to prosecute, partly because witnesses said the raiding parties were entirely composed of Brazilians. Under Brazilian law, suspects can be prosecuted here for genocide even if the crime took place abroad. "The reaction of Brazilian authorities has been inadequate, but the reaction of Venezuelan authorities has been nonexistent, abysmal," said James Cavallaro, an American lawyer who is director for Brazil for Human Rights Watch/Americas. The New York-based rights group is preparing complaints against Brazil and Venezuela before the Inter-American Commission, part of the Organization of American States. Defending Brazil's handling of the case, Franklin Rodrigues, the Federal Prosecutor here, said that seven suspects could be tried in absentia next year. The other 17 are not only fugitives -- but they have also been identified only by their nicknames. Brazil has had mixed success in its efforts to protect the forest-dwelling Yanomami, considered to be the largest group of people in the Americas still living largely according to Stone Age ways. Authorities say there are about 18,000 Yanomami, about half in Brazil and the other half in Venezuela. The Brazilian Federal Police have largely been able to choke off supply flights to miners working illegally in the 37,000-square-mile reservation that the Government granted the Yanomami in 1992. From a peak of roughly 20,000 illegal miners five years ago, only about 250 are working on Yanomami lands now, Mr. Zacquini said. "The police stop the planes," said the Rev. John Saffirio, a Catholic priest who runs a Yanomami mission 200 miles southwest of here. "Our area is clean of miners." But the miners have left a legacy as deadly as their bullets. In the late 1980's, 1,500 Brazilian Yanomamis died of malaria and other imported diseases. Over the last two years, 17 Yanomami from Haximu alone have died of malaria. "We eradicate malaria from one area, but then the miners come in and reinfect it," said Mr. Zacquini. "If illegal mining is not completely stopped, the work against malaria will continue to be like throwing sand into the sea." | Atrocity Case In Amazon Is Botched |
771881_0 | U.S. and Japan Set Deal With Just Hours to Go With just hours left before $5.9 billion in sanctions were to kick in, the United States and Japan found common ground on automotive trade. After long, turbulent talks, the key bargainers proclaimed a new era for two scrapping nations. But a close look shows an accord that is often deliberately vague and may fall short of President Clinton's goal of cracking open Japan's markets. [ Page A1. ] On Capitol Hill, praise was cautious and muted. Some Democrats wanted more, while Republicans fretted about confrontational tactics. And Phil Gramm said, "The President was only shooting blanks." [ D7. ] Japanese auto companies will now -- surprise! -- do exactly what they were planning to do: become even tougher competitors here. [ D6. ] "We didn't cave in," said a Japanese trade official, insisting that Tokyo had agreed to no targets, had specified no figures. [ D6. ] China hungers for cars, Detroit is eager, but bureaucracy and logistics still intrude. [ D7. ] Senate Passes Lawsuit Limits A measure to discourage shareholder lawsuits passed the Senate by a surprisingly large margin after a flood of ads on both sides. Backing it were accounting firms and brokers, while consumer groups and regulators opposed it, concerned that duped investors would have little recourse. [ A1. ] New Head for Endangered Council The Council of Economic Advisers got a new chairman -- even as House Republicans moved closer to ending its financing. [ A18. ] "It would be a pity to throw away a bargain" -- that summed up the reaction of many economists to the notion of scrapping the council. Peter Passell: Economic Scene. [ D2. ] Monsanto to Acquire Calgene Stake Monsanto will buy half of Calgene, known for its genetically engineered tomato. [ D3. ] Healthy Profits at Morgan Stanley Morgan Stanley reported a healthy increase in quarterly profits. [ D5. ] Disclosure on Pension Plans If their pension plans have too little money to pay promised benefits, big companies must break that news to workers this year -- and warn them of possible consequences. [ D3. ] T.W.A. to Try Bankruptcy, Again T.W.A. is trying bankruptcy again, but this time it hopes to emerge with less debt and a more realistic strategy. [ D3. ] Prudential Is Sued Over New Era Prudential Securities has been sued by two charities | BUSINESS DIGEST |
771888_0 | Air travel and air mail deliveries were delayed throughout California today when airport authorities tightened passenger and baggage security in response to a terrorist threat to blow up a California flight. Just as the annual Fourth of July holiday travel crush was beginning to build, scores of plane departures were delayed for 30 minutes or more as airport authorities here and elsewhere in the state began checking the identities of all passengers and increased the X-raying all bags, whether destined for the cabin or the hold of planes. Before they could board, passengers had to show photo identifications and proof that luggage they were carrying was theirs. The delay of air-mail shipments, which constitute about a third of all mail movement, involved mainly packages. Initially, all letters were delayed, too, but after holding them for eight hours, the airlines resumed delivery of those letters weighing less than 12 ounces. Package delivery will resume as soon as airlines can set up ways to scrutinize them, officials said. "We must -- and we will -- implement whatever actions are necessary to safeguard the traveling public," David R. Hinson, the head of the Federal Aviation Administration, said after the terrorist threatened in a letter to The San Francisco Chronicle to "blow up an airliner out of the Los Angeles International Airport sometime during the next six days." While airline officials, like passengers, expressed concern and frustration today about the threat, they said that by and large the problems, except for mail delays, were not much worse than those caused by a major bout of bad weather. "Most of our flights are operating on time and what delays we've had have been 20 minutes or so at worst," said Joe Hopkins, a spokesman for United Airlines, one of the largest carriers in California. "They have been some scattered cancellations but mostly the kind we have every day, nothing serious." The airlines reported no passengers' cancelling their flights because of the threat though passengers could hardly miss seeing the increased presence of armed guards and bomb-sniffing dogs. "I'm taking my chances," a passenger, Allene Golub, a 67-year-old retired lawyer, said as she shuffled through a longer-than-usual line to check her bag and board a flight out of Los Angles for Philadelphia. For those apprehensive about taking their chances, Mayor Richard J. Riordan of Los Angeles offered this assessment at a morning visit to the airport | Threat Delays Air Travel And Mail in California |
767595_2 | have got to be made." The army's higher profile over the last year can be traced to a widely quoted remark that Raul Castro made last July, just before the period when 32,000 Cuban boat people left the country, trying to reach the United States. "Beans are more important than cannon," he said in a speech that was regarded as acknowledging the state's need to adopt a more pragmatic approach. Soon afterward, Cuba announced a new system of farmers' markets, with Raul Castro and other military officials reportedly taking a direct role in their organization. Cuban consumers and officials say soldiers delivered or sold more than three-quarters of the fruits and vegetables initially available at the markets. The involvement of the armed forces in agriculture is not new, dating back to the sugar harvest campaigns of the early years of the revolution. But since the end of the Soviet Union and Cuba's loss of subsidies of up to $5 billion a year, the production and distribution of food have been among Cuba's most severe problems and a source of popular unrest. The role of the armed forces has increased in an effort to alleviate that pressure. "Our specific task is defense, but defense includes everything," Raul Castro said in an interview with the Communist Party newspaper Granma after the refugee crisis ended. "Right now it involves providing food for our people, which along with sugar production has been designated by our Commander in Chief as the main strategic task." According to diplomats, the number of conscripts in special units called the Youth Labor Army, assigned to plant and harvest basic foods, has increased sharply as a result. To prevent theft, which has become more of a problem than ever, soldiers also guard food shipments from the countryside to the cities. In an interview in December, Carlos Lage, Cuba's top economic official, said the farmers' markets had been strongly "pushed by Raul, but with the support of Fidel." He said the Defense Minister has "had a very important role in the experiences of the Revolutionary Armed Forces and in bringing that experience into the civilian realm." Even before the farmers' markets were started, the Cuban military had moved into several other highly profitable business ventures. One is a construction company that has won lucrative contracts for hotels and beach resorts and is involved in several industrial and public utility projects. The | In Cuba, Army Takes On Party Jobs, and May Be Only Thing That Works |
766255_0 | A tough Corsican ritual was played out here the other night. A sports car came sweeping past a Government building. From the car, three masked figures sprayed the dark offices with gunfire. As the fusillade echoed around the heavy stone walls of this medieval port, the patrons of the Napoleon Bar hit the floor like a well-drilled crowd. And no sooner had the sounds faded than the interpreters of Corsica's violent politics got to work. It's against those new gun controls," one patron declared. "It must be about a construction license," another said. And in the ensuing debate, local connoisseurs identified no fewer than three nationalist groups that could have sent out the assault team. As Corsican acts of revenge go, this was mild. The fierce dynamics of the island's separatist struggle last year included 400 bomb explosions and 40 killings, most of them believed to be political and most not solved. Corsican separatists who want more or full independence from Paris have been around since 1768, when Genoa sold this Mediterranean island to France. But the modern armed movement, which began two decades ago, has been unrelenting. What distinguishes the recent violence, however is that the once dominant Corsican National Liberation Front has split into quarreling factions. More than a dozen competing groups now claim the right strategy or doctrine to gain more control over Corsican affairs. Three factions have armed guerrilla branches. Under this tattered umbrella, mutual suspicion and conspiracies sprout everywhere. In conversations with members of different groups it becomes clear that maneuvering against rivals takes at least as much energy as the fight against Paris. There have been turf wars over who collects which "revolutionary taxes" -- the name for the protection money that many businesses are forced to pay. In recent months, nationalists have even killed one another. As worrying to many people is evidence that the separatist struggle has become a cover for common crimes. "The worst part," an Ajaccio restaurant owner said, "is that the factions are attracting young Rambos who are interested in the power of guns and not in idealism. It's getting very dangerous." What is also different is that more Corsicans are tired of violence. In January, after four gangland killings in one week had traumatized the northern town of Bastia, some 500 women published an anti-violence statement in the newspapers which they called a "Manifesto for Life." Since then, | Ajaccio Journal;France's Wild Isle: Killers for a Cause, or a Racket |
772141_0 | Passengers at Los Angeles International Airport found themselves facing disconcerting personal interrogations today as they checked their luggage with blue-shirted skycaps on the sidewalks outside the terminals. In the wake of a bomb threat in the Unabom case on Wednesday, officials said the interrogations and heightened security at the airport would continue indefinitely. "Just put your suitcase on the curb and show me a photo ID, sir," said one luggage handler as a passenger climbed from a car. Peering closely, the luggage handler noted a discrepancy. "What's your address? That's not the one listed on this license, so we're going to have a little trouble here," he said, and the interrogation began. "What street do you live on in Albuquerque? Is it a house or an apartment?" Satisfied, the luggage handler hoisted the man's bags onto his cart as the passenger, somewhat bewildered, handed him a tip. The airport bustled today, and the curbside luggage inspections seemed to proceed smoothly at the start of the long July 4 weekend, despite a threat by the anonymous bomber to explode a bomb on a flight leaving here. But local travel agents said they were seeing a slight dip in travel through Los Angeles International Airport, and smaller nearby airports reported an unusual surge of travelers. Security was tight as both baggage handlers and ticket agents checked identification and as extra police and security officers patrolled the terminals. For 45 minutes this morning, Terminal 1 was closed as jittery security officers removed a briefcase from a conveyor belt to a secure area, where a bomb squad blew it up. An airport spokeswoman, Dianne Scully, said the briefcase turned out to be filled with sales brochures and a sample lighting fixture. The Federal Aviation Administration and the Los Angeles Department of Airports said they would maintain heightened security procedures for the time being. Although the crowds seemed as heavy as ever and airlines reported normal service, there was nervousness among passengers who had balanced their travel plans against a slim chance of disaster. "Of course, it's been on my mind," said Gabriele Ward, who was headed for Hawaii. "I'm scared. But it's going to be my vacation and I'm not going to let him control that." The bomber's assertion in a letter received on Wednesday by The New York Times that his threat had been a hoax increased the irritability of some travelers. "He's | Bomb Hoax Leaves Los Angeles Airport With the Jitters |
772172_3 | authority. "Ironically, we were in part responsible for the canal's decline and so there's a symmetry to our taking it over and revitalizing it," Mr. Tufo said. Seven public hearings will be held in August, but so far there has been no groundswell of opposition. One reason is that Mr. Tufo has carefully avoided talk of condemning private property, even though private ownership clouds prospects for an uninterrupted hiking trail. Seeking to allay fears about overdevelopment of bucolic areas, he has restricted plans for major structures to eight canal cities and towns. In addition to those for Syracuse, tourist clusters are being planned for Tonawanda, Rochester, Oswego, Seneca Falls, Little Falls and Whitehall. Another 96 smaller areas are also contemplated. No environmental group has taken a position on the canal's development, though individual members express concerns about overdevelopment and dredging silt that may contain toxic materials. The reaction yesterday of Clara Sauer, executive director of Scenic Hudson, which has been overseeing the designation of the Hudson River Greenway, was typical. "By connecting the Erie Canal with the Hudson River, it would be an absolute home run," she said. "It would extend the greenway from one end of the state to the other." The New York State Canal Recreationway Plan, as the project is called, capitalizes on the canal's history, encouraging visitors to see discontinued canal segments and antique locks, aqueducts and bridges. Mr. Tufo grows animated when he describes the scenic vistas that appear, as through an opening curtain, when a lock lifts travelers to a new water level. "It's like a Verdi opera," he said. But the plan seems aimed mostly at more active pursuits. The most important goal is to spur use of the canal by motorboats, charter boats and canoes, and Mr. Tufo said he has already spoken to French boat operators to enlist their bids. Mr. Tufo spoke of an ambitious canal trip taken by Robert M. Morgenthau, the Manhattan District Attorney, and his wife that took them west across the canal, northeast up Lake Ontario and the St. Lawrence Seaway and down Lake Champlain and the Champlain Canal. Last year, locks were opened for pleasure boats 116,000 times, a figure that suggested underuse to the consortium that studied the canal, which was headed by the Manhattan architectural firm of Beyer Blinder Belle. Another goal of the project is the creation of an end-to-end trail stretching | Major Restoration Is Planned for Erie Canal |
772076_0 | Although student-athletes in Division I sports continue to graduate at a slightly higher rate than the general student population, the graduation rate for men's basketball players dropped for the first time in four years, according to an annual survey by the National Collegiate Athletic Association. The study, which included 302 Division I schools and tracked athletes who entered college in 1988, found that 58 percent of the athletes on scholarship graduated within six years, compared with 57 percent of the overall student body. That rate has remained nearly constant since the first group of students came through college after admission standards were toughened when Proposition 48 took effect in 1986. But that pattern did not hold true for men's basketball, which has been one of the lightning rods for academic reform. After steadily climbing from a low of 38 percent for student-athletes entering in 1984, the first class studied, the graduation rate fell from a high of 46 percent in last year's survey to 42 percent this year. The cause for the downturn was not clear, and may just have been a one-year aberration, but it occurred among both black and white players: The rate for black players dropped from 39 percent to 37 while the rate for white players fell from 57 percent to 50. Football, another of the focal points of reform, continued its steady climb from a low of 47 percent in 1984 to 56 percent this year. The executive director of the N.C.A.A., Cedric W. Dempsey, said in a news release that the overall increase in graduation rates is evidence that tougher admission requirements are paying off. "In general," he said, "the N.C.A.A.'s efforts to increase academic standards for incoming student-athletes are having a positive effect throughout their academic careers." That the overall numbers have leveled off since the adoption of Proposition 48 is not surprising, according to Creed Black. Black, who as president of the Knight Foundation Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics was instrumental in pushing for even tougher academic standards, said, "Proposition 48, while it was an improvement, the standards were still minimal." Black said Proposition 16, the cornerstone of the Knight Commission's reform proposal, will give the numbers a new lift when it takes effect on Aug. 1, 1996. "Raising the bar a little bit higher will increase the graduation rates for both minority and majority students," Black said. Other findings of the survey | Men's Graduation Rate In Basketball Is Down |
771442_1 | the jeep and sprayed the President's car with automatic-weapons fire. Another three or four gunmen opened fire on the President's car from the street and rooftops. The President's security detail, trailing his limousine, killed the two assailants on the road. The three Ethiopian policemen were struck in the exchange of fire. The other assailants, including the driver of the vehicle, apparently escaped, security officials said. A Palestine Liberation Organization official, who insisted on not being identified, said the P.L.O. Ambassador in Ethiopia, Yousef Rajeb Radi, had been wounded in the leg during the attack. One of the President's bodyguards was also wounded, security officials said. Mr. Mubarak said he had felt that the "circumstances were not usual" on the trip into Addis Ababa when he noticed that all of his bodyguards had been placed in one car. "Suddenly I found a blue van blocking the road and also a man flat on the ground," the 67-year-old President said. "A machine gun started. I can't tell you exactly what nationality they were, but they didn't look like Ethiopians or blacks." Security officials said about a dozen rounds from AK-47 assault rifles had struck the President's limousine. "I wasn't afraid at all, because it was an armored car," a composed Mr. Mubarak told reporters in Cairo. "The car windows were hit by one of the bullets, which almost went through. It had no effect at all." The President, who had gone to Ethiopia for the opening session of the Organization of African Unity, was greeted at the airport in Cairo by Government ministers, tearful family members and leaders of the country's opposition parties. "Thanks to God, I am here, safe and sound," he said, smiling to the gathering. He told them, "It is possible the terrorists came to Ethiopia through Sudan," a neighboring country that has a radical Islamic Government. Ethiopian officials described the attackers as Arabs. No group has claimed responsibility, but militant Islamic groups have wounded several senior officials in the last two years in a drive to establish an Islamic state in Egypt. President Mubarak has taken strong measures to curb the fundamentalists, from cracking down on student demonstrations to having fundamentalists who are convicted of terrorist acts executed. In their fight for an Egyptian theocracy, the militant groups have set their sights on foreigners as well as Government officials. More than 760 people have been killed in the | EGYPTIAN LEADER SURVIVES ATTACK |
771443_5 | in San Francisco, ruled last year that the policy violated the Fourth Amendment. "Children are compelled to attend school, but nothing suggests that they lose their right to privacy in their excretory functions when they do so," Judge Ferdinand F. Fernandez said in the appeals court decision. In his opinion today, Justice Scalia did not reject the notion that school children have a "privacy interest," but he said it was a limited one for students generally and for student athletes in particular. He noted that athletes typically showered and dressed in a communal setting and were often required to maintain academic, disciplinary and physical standards not required of other students. He also said that participation in interscholastic sports was voluntary. The majority opinion's emphasis on the distinctive nature of student athletics raised the question of how far the Court's analysis extended beyond the context of the case. Justice Scalia acknowledged that question in his opinion but answered it only obliquely. "We caution against the assumption that suspicionless drug testing will readily pass constitutional muster in other contexts," he said. Justice Scalia said that "the most significant element in this case" was that "the policy was undertaken in furtherance of the government's responsibilities, under a public school system, as guardian and tutor of children entrusted to its care." Consequently, it is fairly certain that the decision is not an endorsement of routine drug-testing of adults in the the workplace. Based on his dissenting vote in the 1989 case, Justice Scalia, for one, would not support such a program. In a concurring opinion, Justice Ginsburg said the Court was "reserving the question" of whether random testing of all students would be constitutional. Drug-testing is common in private industry, where the ruling today has no application at all. The Constitution restricts the Government, not the private sector. A spokesman for the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees said today that government employees who carried weapons or who operated sanitation trucks or other heavy machinery were commonly subject to drug testing. But the spokesman, James August, said that numerous efforts to broaden these programs to employees whose jobs were not related to public safety had been blocked in the lower courts. -------------------- Services for Late Chief The Court announced today that former Chief Justice Warren E. Burger, who died of congestive heart failure on Sunday, would lie in state in the Court's | High Court Upholds Drug Tests For Some Public School Athletes |
771483_0 | Esther Rome, co-author of the best seller "Our Bodies, Ourselves" and women's health advocate for more than 25 years, died at her home in Somerville, Mass., on Saturday. She was 49. The cause was breast cancer, said a friend, Judith Norsigian. Ms. Rome argued that issues of cosmetic surgery, eating disorders, body image and sexually transmitted diseases as they affected women belonged in the social- and economic-policy arena as much as in the medical world. She was instrumental in fostering the public debate over toxic shock syndrome and its link to the use of tampons in the early 1980's. A decade later, she served as a consumer advocate on the Food and Drug Administration committee that investigated the potential hazards of silicone breast implants. The committee's work led to a partial ban on implants and Ms. Rome led a support group for women with implants who had health problems. Until days before her death, she was working on her latest book, "Risking Health for Love," with her co-author, Jane Hyman, that examines the health risks of choices that women make, covering breast implants, sexually transmitted diseases and domestic violence. Ms. Rome was among 12 young professional women who were not medical experts but who were concerned about health issues who gathered in a lounge at M.I.T. in 1969 to exchange the information about doctors and other health topics. The group later formed the Boston Women's Health Book Collective. A year later, the women published a collection of papers challenging long-held approaches to medical treatment of women. The papers addressed a range of topics including childbirth and rape. Called "Women and Their Bodies," it was a 75-cent newsprint guide to the physical and psychological makeup of women. In 1971 they changed the name to "Our Bodies, Ourselves" and the book inspired a grass-roots, consumer-advocacy movement, becoming a bible to a generation of young women. In college dormitories and apartments across the country groups of female baby-boomers, hungry for the kind of information their mothers did not always have, gathered to discuss the book. They formed support groups and grappled with women's health issues made more immediate by the availability of birth-control pills and the legalization of abortion. The book was attacked as pornographic by the Moral Majority and other conservative groups and it was banned from some schools. By 1973 it had sold more than 350,000 copies. Now in its third | Esther Rome, Author, Dies at 49; Sought Better Health for Women |
768937_0 | Researchers at Harvard Medical School have found in a large study that women who continue to use hormone replacement therapy for five or more years after menopause are 30 percent to 40 percent more likely to develop breast cancer than women who have never used menopausal hormones. The finding is the latest in a series of conflicting studies on the relationship between hormones and breast cancer. Although estrogen has long been known to be able to promote the growth of some existing cancers, its possible role in causing breast cancer has been highly controversial. The new study, being reported today in The New England Journal of Medicine, considered only the relationship between hormones and breast cancer, not the rather substantial benefits of postmenopausal estrogen documented in previous studies. Past studies have shown, for instance, that hormone replacement therapy sharply reduces the risk of developing heart disease, the leading killer of American women, and osteoporosis, a loss of density in the bones that can lead to debilitating or life-threatening fractures. Thus, one of the authors said, the new study should not be the sole basis for a woman's decision on whether to use postmenopausal hormones. And other experts argued that even with the new findings, estrogen's benefits to the heart more than outweighed any risk of breast cancer. The study of 122,000 nurses was mainly intended to see if adding progestin to estrogen replacement therapy would block estrogen's effects on the breast. Although previous studies have shown that including progestin in hormone replacement therapy can protect the uterus against estrogen-induced endometrial cancer, no such protection was found for the breast in the new study. Among those who were taking estrogen alone and had done so for five or more years, the risk of breast cancer increased 30 percent and among those who used a combination of estrogen and progestin, the risk was 40 percent higher, a difference that was not statistically significant. To put this risk in perspective, instead of the 7 cases of breast cancer that would be expected to occur over a 10 years among 200 women who were initially 55 years old, 10 such cancers would be found if all the women used postmenopausal hormones. The study, directed by Dr. Graham A. Colditz of Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston, documented 1,935 newly diagnosed cases of invasive breast cancer that occurred among the women | New Clues in Balancing the Risks Of Hormones After Menopause |
769085_5 | of long-distance service -- something they are now forbidden to do. Under the compromise, 10 states, including New York and Connecticut, would be allowed to proceed with efforts to give all competitors equal access to the short-haul market. But the short-haul business of the Bell companies would remain protected for at least three years in all other states. Lawmakers were still bracing for one other big fight, expected on Thursday, over provisions that would greatly relax cable television price regulations. Today, however, the most important vote was on indecency and the Internet. Senator Exon and other supporters of tough restrictions said they had carefully drafted their provision to avoid any interference with free speech. To a great extent, the measure is modeled on existing laws that were written to prohibit obscene telephone calls and other forms of telephone harassment. The measure also draws on a body of court decisions about regulating "indecent" material in television or radio broadcasting. Under the law, indecent programming is much milder than obscenity or pornography, which are not protected by constitutional rights to free speech. Indecent material includes four-letter words and explicit descriptions of sexual activity or excretory functions. Under current law, the Federal Government can block indecent programming on radio or broadcast television at times when children are most likely to be in the audience. But computer and communications experts say the amendment is certain to raise new legal and practical issues that arise with the basic nature of the Internet. The use of the World Wide Web, a rapidly growing segment of the Internet, can quickly blur the distinction between people who send and receive sexual material. People armed with a modem and the proper software can tap into thousands of different "Web sites" and retrieve images, documents and even full-motion video with a mere click of a mouse. Another issue is the Internet's inherently global reach, which is difficult for a single government to control. People using the Internet can tap into computers on other continents as easily as they reach computers across town, and the cost is the same. Likewise, people in the United States can set up Internet sites outside the United States and electronically replenish them with new material without ever leaving the country. Today, however, many lawmakers appeared untroubled about the complexity. "I always vote the way my mother tells me," Senator Simpson said. "There are always contradictions." | SENATE SUPPORTS SEVERE PENALTIES ON COMPUTER SMUT |
769557_0 | WHETHER or not judges and legislators limit affirmative action, its promise is being fulfilled for many blacks who have made striking gains in income and employment in the 30 years since the Government began guaranteeing equal rights to jobs and education. Just how much those gains can be attributed to affirmative action preferences and other Government remedies is arguable. But over those three decades, a tiny middle class typified by doctors, teachers and small entrepreneurs working often within the boundaries of the black community evolved into a larger, more diverse group that has been charted by economists, courted by politicians and validated by prime-time sitcoms on television, which belatedly discovered a vast consumer market. It also appears that the boats of the middle class rose on the high tide of the 1980's. Gains have occurred in higher education, careers and income. The number of black lawyers, doctors and engineers has risen sharply; the earnings of a growing contingent of government workers, pharmacists, mathematicians, designers, engineers and others approaches or even surpasses that of comparable whites, and this group now accounts for a higher proportion of blacks in their chosen professions than their proportion in the general population. For young, college-educated two-earner married couples, income differentials between blacks and whites are negligible. According to an analysis of the 1990 Census for The New York Times, almost as many black workers between the ages of 25 and 44 are college graduates as are high school dropouts. Just 20 years ago, there were five times as many black high school dropouts as college graduates in the work force. "It's the result of breaking down barriers in education and jobs, and affirmative action could have helped overcome some of them, especially for education," said Dr. Andrew A. Beveridge, a sociologist at Queens College who conducted the census analysis for The Times. Last week, the Supreme Court cast doubt on the constitutionality of Federal programs that award benefits on the basis of race. The Colorado case, Adarand Constructors v. Pena, involved a requirement that 10 percent of Federal money spent on highway projects go to businesses owned by "disadvantaged individuals." The case was returned to Federal District Court where a formidable new standard set by the Supreme Court will now be applied: whether "narrowly tailored" programs accomplish a "compelling governmental interest." If the judicial decision seems abstract, the gains by many blacks since the Government | Moving On Up; The Greening of America's Black Middle Class |
769586_2 | providing 65 percent of national tax revenues. The party's political identity is at stake. "What we are engaging in is socialism, and our final goal is to achieve Communism," Song Ping huffed recently in a commentary in People's Daily, the official Communist Party newspaper. A Clear Challenge To Deng's Policies Mr. Song, a 78-year-old conservative party elder, asserted that Mr. Deng's reforms had led to "erosion by the corrupt thinking of capitalism." Just in case readers missed the point, he added, "Our country has been carrying out socialism for several decades and we don't have any reason not to talk about Communism." Chinese and Western experts say this prominent manifesto represents a clear challenge to Mr. Deng's policies by party conservatives. Some fear that a strong conservative backlash could stifle -- or even roll back -- the trend toward more market-based decision making in the management of state-owned factories, where ad hoc money-making strategies and product innovations have demonstrated that a capitalist spirit has taken root within the old system. In a rare public admonishment made in a speech attended by senior Chinese leaders, the United States Ambassador, J. Stapleton Roy, warned that "the adverse consequences of delaying fundamental reform" in state industries "and not making a stronger commitment to the market would be felt most strongly in the first part of the next century and could jeopardize China's hopes for sharing in the general rise in East Asia's prosperity in the first decades of the next century." Workers Vent Fury On a Statue of Mao Here in Shenyang and all along the industrial spine of northeastern China, hundreds of thousands of workers have been sent home from state-owned industries whose products are unwanted or uncompetitive. The euphemism for these layoffs is "taking a long vacation" -- without pay. "Some workers tried to set a statue of Mao Zedong on fire with gasoline," said Xu Ping, 30, an industrial engineer. "That's how angry they were. People with families are seeing their livelihoods disappear and they are asking, 'What kind of workers' state is this?' " The answer seems to be that it is a state in transition -- "poised awkwardly," as Ambassador Roy put it recently, between a Marxist centrally planned economy and the "socialist market economy" that Mr. Deng set as a national goal. Where Mr. Deng emphasized the need to take risks with the economy, his designated successor, | With Deng's Influence Waning, Privatizing of China's State Industries Stalls |
769478_2 | given the huffing and puffing of the great "cola wars," it's a wonder no one has thought up the "premium" angle before. DRUGS The Menopause Market Menopause has clearly arrived as a hot topic. Why? Because all those baby boomers are hitting the relevant age, of course; out of sight, out of mind. And, yes, it's a hot business topic too, as drug makers hover hungrily at the gates to this life passage. So when news came last week -- from The New England Journal of Medicine, of course -- that estrogen therapy lifts the breast-cancer risk by at least 30 percent, drug makers watched carefully. Many experts say the cancer risk is more than offset by estrogen's protection against osteoporosis and heart disease -- a view sure to be embraced by American Home Products, which last year sold nearly $1 billion worth of Premarin, the leading estrogen. It gets complicated, though, for Merck is nearing the market -- a market that will bulge in a few years -- with a drug that treats osteoporosis without hormones. For women caught in this vise, this means the added assault of marketers confusing them even more. MEN AT WORK Father? What's a Father? At the risk of sounding like a greeting card: What is a father? (This being His Day, you were naturally wondering this, weren't you?) Don't get soppy or philosophical, though; we're talking statistics, just statistics -- offered by Catalyst, a research group aimed at helping women in business. Does Dad bring home the bacon to two children and stay-at-home, slipper-bearing Mom? A mere 3.1 percent of families fit this cuddly mold in 1993. Fully 10 percent of American husbands are "designated homemakers" (no relation, presumably, to designated hitters), up from 2 percent in 1986. And among households with working parents, those headed by single fathers are increasing fastest. Still, Child magazine, which tracked "father-friendly" companies in 1992, stopped the next year because so few qualified -- or even cared. O.K., back to the football game (or whatever season it is). CYBERSPACE Between Consenting Computers On the Senate floor last week, Jim Exon of Nebraska waved a blue binder with a red label reading "Caution." Mr. Exon was shocked to find this "disgusting material" on the Internet, and he and most of the rest of the Senate don't want your children to see it. (Don't ask how many senators sneaked | DIARY |
769651_0 | Governments across the Pacific have condemned France over its plans to resume nuclear testing in Polynesia this fall, with diplomatic protests and calls for consumer boycotts heard from Australia to New Zealand to the tiny island nations of the southern Pacific. Prime Minister James Bolger of New Zealand has described the resumption of nuclear testing by the French as "the arrogant action of a European colonial power," and Prime Minister Paul Keating of Australia has accused France of "environmental vandalism." Australia and New Zealand have announced that they are freezing all cooperation with France on defense issues, although Government officials in both countries acknowledge that their protests are unlikely to stop France from carrying out the tests. The police in the western Australian city of Perth say they believe that anti-nuclear protesters were responsible for an arson fire today that destroyed the offices of an Australian plastic surgeon who represents France in the city as an honorary consul. The building, which earlier in the week had been splashed with red paint and anti-nuclear graffiti, began to burn after a loud explosion was heard at about 4:30 A.M. No one was injured in the fire, which the French Embassy in Canberra, the Australian capital, described in a statement as a "criminal act." The governments of the tiny island nations that border French Polynesia have been bitter in their criticism of France's newly elected President, Jacques Chirac. And many of those countries will be represented on a 15-nation delegation led by Australian's Foreign Minister, Gareth Evans, that is traveling to Paris in the next several days to protest the French move. Prime Minister Keating said that the delegation "will express our condemnation of this decision by the Government of France, and let them know that it is in their best interests, as well as ours, not to proceed." Mr. Chirac announced on Tuesday that France would conduct eight nuclear weapons tests beginning in September, ending a three-year moratorium begun under his predecessor, Francois Mitterrand. Mr. Chirac said that the tests would end next May in time for France to sign an international test ban treaty. The resumption of French nuclear testing at Mururoa Atoll in Polynesia almost certainly means a new confrontation between the French Government and Greenpeace, the environmental group that was the target of French secret agents who blew up the Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior in 1985 in Auckland, New | French Plans For A-Tests Incite Anger |
769593_0 | International 3-15 RUSSIAN HOSTAGE CRISIS Russian troops failed twice to take the hospital complex where Chechen fighters held hostages, and negotiations with the Chechen fighters resumed. 1 G-7 LEADERS WARN YELTSIN The leaders of the seven leading industrial nations warned President Boris N. Yeltsin of Russia concerning the military campaign in Chechnya and the sale of nuclear reactors to Iran. 1 FAILED PROMISE IN CONGO Years of corrupt Marxist leadership and a bloody democratic transition marked by urban ethnic warfare have left Congolese bitter and impoverished. 3 HAITI RESISTS EXPANDED POLICE The Haitian Government is resisting plans by the Clinton Administration to double the size of the country's new police force and to send additional trainees to the United States. 4 REFORM AT RISK IN CHINA The last great task of Deng Xiaoping's era of economic reform, the restructuring and privatizing of China's huge state-owned industrial sector, is under assault at a time when he appears to be too infirm to respond. 8 BOSNIAN OFFENSIVE SLOWS The Bosnian Government's most ambitious offensive in three years of war slowed after making limited headway over the previous two days. 12 A new terror campaign by drug traffickers feared in Colombia. 6 Pacific governments condemned France on nuclear tests. 9 Iraqi troop mutiny reveals problems for Saddam Hussein. 11 National 16-22 IN SEARCH OF A CONSPIRACY Investigators hoped that Shelley Shannon, an admitted anti-abortion terrorist, would shed light on a nationwide conspiracy, but instead things are less clear-cut. 1 THE EDUCATION OF FATHER Social service agencies, churches and policy makers are putting a new emphasis on encouraging fathers to take roles in their children's lives. 1 MOYNIHAN'S MOMENT The debate over welfare policy is made for Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, but his enthusiasm for the fight is muted. 1 TENNIS AND TENSION A proposal to put a statue of Arthur Ashe, the tennis player, has brought protests from both blacks and whites in the Virginia city. 16 LOOKING FOR A LEVEL FIELD The company at the center of a major Supreme Court decision on affirmative action got tired of competing against four others that all qualified as "Disadvantaged Business Enterprises." 16 RESTLESS UNDER THE MICROSCOPE In Kingman, Ariz., a focal point of the investigation into the Oklahoma City bombing, suspicion and intrigue are in the air. 16 LIMITS FOR DEFENSE LAWYERS The indictments of several lawyers on charges they aided the Cali drug | NEWS SUMMARY |
768483_0 | Last month, the Clinton Administration used every diplomatic weapon at its command to secure permanent extension of the treaty limiting the spread of nuclear weapons. The treaty not only commits nonnuclear countries to refrain from developing weapons. It also commits countries that have the bomb to move toward a comprehensive test ban and eventual nuclear disarmament. At the time, some nonnuclear states worried that the five declared nuclear powers -- the United States, Britain, France, Russia and China -- would not keep their end of the bargain. Decisions now pending in Washington and Paris will demonstrate whether those worries were justified. To gain extension of the nonproliferation treaty, the five declared powers pledged to finish negotiations on a test ban treaty by next year. The Clinton Administration defined a comprehensive test ban as permitting only extremely low-yield underground tests. But Pentagon officials are pressing the White House to revise its negotiating position to permit more powerful explosions. They argue that higher-yield tests produce information that is needed to assure the safety and reliability of America's nuclear weapons. Experts at the Energy Department, which has primary responsibility for nuclear testing and manages the nuclear weapons labs, do not agree. Higher thresholds would be easier for nuclear powers like France to accept. But nonnuclear countries taking part in the negotiations would rightly see them as undermining the comprehensive test ban principle and might well refuse to go along. Advocates of the higher threshold hope to persuade President Clinton before he meets France's new President, Jacques Chirac, in Halifax this week. Mr. Clinton should reject their recommendations. Meanwhile, Mr. Chirac faces a critical nuclear decision of his own. Last week his defense advisers recommended that France resume underwater nuclear tests in the South Pacific, which have been suspended since 1992. Mr. Chirac has been noncommittal on the testing issue. The United States, Britain and Russia, though not China, have voluntarily suspended their testing programs as they negotiate toward a comprehensive test ban. For France to resume testing now would be a sign of contempt toward the nonnuclear countries and would further set back the test ban talks. Washington and Paris ought to reread the commitments their representatives made only a month ago when more than 170 countries approved extension of the nonproliferation agreement. To turn around now and seek more and bigger nuclear weapons tests would be a betrayal of the treaty. | Nuclear Commitments |
770173_1 | to criminal activity. Joseph Sullivan, the head of the American Interests Section in Havana, which serves as a liaison office between the Cuban and American Governments in the absence of diplomatic relations, met with Cuban officials late today in what American officials described as a last-ditch effort to persuade Cuba to extradite Mr. Vesco. CNN reported today that the Cuban President, Fidel Castro, had said in a private dinner on Sunday with the network's executives and journalists that it would be "immoral" to extradite Mr. Vesco and make him a "pawn of U.S.-Cuba relations." Mr. Castro was quoted as saying that Cuba would conduct its own investigation of Mr. Vesco. American diplomats say Mr. Vesco must have done something to run afoul of Mr. Castro or his brother, Raul, the head of the Cuban military, because for years Mr. Vesco had been free to conduct his business dealings with their unofficial blessing. Rafael Dausa, a Foreign Ministry spokesman, said Mr. Vesco has been charged with being "a provocateur or agent for foreign special services," although he refused to specify which country's special services Mr. Vesco was believed to be serving. In recent interviews, American diplomats, intelligence experts and law enforcement officials said that during his years in Cuba, Mr. Vesco has been heavily involved in drug trafficking, money laundering and smuggling American goods into Cuba. Administration officials said Cuba declined to turn over Mr. Vesco even though they had complied with Cuba's request to provide information about the numerous indictments Mr. Vesco faces in the United States. They include a 1976 indictment handed down by a Federal grand jury in New York for siphoning off more than $200 million from a Geneva-based mutual fund and a 1973 federal indictment in Washington for making an illegal $200,000 contribution to the re-election campaign of President Richard M. Nixon. In addition, a Federal grand jury in Jacksonville, Fla., indicted Mr. Vesco in 1989 for conspiring with Carlos Lehder Rivas, a Colombian drug cartel leader, to smuggle narcotics. Ten days ago, prosecutors in Tallahassee, Fla., unsealed a 1984 indictment that charges Mr. Vesco with cocaine trafficking. One senior State Department official said that after Mr. Vesco was arrested, an official in the Cuban Foreign Ministry told the American liaison office in Havana: "We have him. Are you interested in him?" The Clinton Administration read this as an offer to hand over Mr. Vesco if | Cuba Tells U.S. It Will Not Extradite Fugitive Financier |
770124_0 | Cuba to Hold Vesco The Cuban Government said it does not plan to extradits Robert L. Vesco, the fugitive financier, to the United States. Page A8. Gas Guzzlers in the Kitchen Most of the 180,000 refrigerators in New York City public housing are to be replaced over the next nine years for more efficient ones. Page B1. Strawberry Joins Yanks Five years after leaving New York and the Mets, Darryl Strawberry has agreed to a contract with the Yankees. Page B11. | INSIDE |
770084_6 | and that unhappiness registered itself as a high score on the aggression scale," Dr. Bremner said. What Dr. Bremner's study and other reports found that does conform to stereotypical notions of the male hormone is that testosterone is profoundly important to a man's sex drive, though not to his mechanical abilities in bed. Hypogonadal men report a sharp drop in sexual interest, which testosterone replacement quickly restores. The androgen may also play a role in female sexuality, and a growing number of menopausal women are asking that testosterone be added to their hormone replacement regimen to restore a lackluster libido. But the data linking sex drive and testosterone in women are fiercely debated. Testosterone therapy also appears to give men and women more energy, vim, the desire to leap out of bed in the morning and embrace the demands of the day with can-do concentration. That zestiness is not the same as aggression, which if anything is often accompanied by poor concentration and underlying malaise, researchers said. If testosterone qua testosterone is not the demonic potion of legend, its yangian counterpart, estrogen, may not be so innocent. Reporting last month at the annual meeting of the American Pediatric Society, Dr. Jordan W. Finkelstein, Dr. Howard Kulin and their colleagues at Pennsylvania State University said that they compared the effects of giving estrogen therapy to girls who suffered from delayed onset of puberty with that of giving testosterone to boys who likewise were late in sexually maturing. The girls showed earlier and larger increases in aggression than did the boys, until the boys received the last and highest dose of testosterone. The researchers propose that for both sexes, the cause of the teen-age spike in aggressive and very likely insolent behavior is estrogen. As scientists only lately are beginning to appreciate, most of the effect of testosterone on the brain is paradoxically estrogenic in nature. That is because the brain is rich in the enzyme aromatase, which converts testosterone into estrogen. The newly transformed hormone then acts on the nerve cells of the brain through estrogen receptors, proteins designed specifically to link up with it. A male's brain also has some receptors for testosterone, but they are far fewer in number or distribution, and the converting enzyme aromatase does not leave much testosterone around to hook up with these androgen receptors anyway. Thus, in both boys and girls, as they reach | Does Testosterone Equal Aggression? Maybe Not |
770121_0 | Outside Ballroom C and D at the Grand Hyatt Hotel in Manhattan, where the Catholic Theological Society of America was holding its 50th annual meeting earlier this month, hung a photograph of the group's first gathering, in late June 1946 at the same hotel, then called the Commodore. All in the photo were men, all were priests, and all were dressed in black clerical garb. Inside the room, those attending this year's plenary sessions looked very different. About a third were women, and most of the men, whether priests or not, wore the standard attire for academic conventions: suits or blazers, ties or sports shirts. The theologians' changed appearance was itself revealing of how Roman Catholic theology, once the very model of timelessness, is said to have changed more in the last 50 years than in any other half century since the Middle Ages. From a discipline tightly bound to church authority and operating in the isolated clerical culture of Catholic seminaries, it has become a discipline centered in the university and deeply influenced by feminism and a wide range of other intellectual currents. Fifty years ago most members of the Catholic Theological Society were seminary professors who shared as a common theological framework modern textbook versions of the medieval thought of Thomas Aquinas. They saw their task largely as one of clarifying, justifying, explaining and applying official church pronouncements. Today, everyone at this year's meeting seemed to agree, the center of gravity of Catholic theology has shifted from the seminary to the university and, increasingly, from the clergy to lay people. And the influx of women, who now constitute 20 percent of the society's membership (half of them are nuns), has made feminist concerns prominent at meetings like this one, which had sessions on "Black Catholic Theology" and "Hispanic/Latino Theology." The society's new president is Sister Elizabeth A. Johnson, a professor at Fordham University in New York and author of "She Who Is" (Crossroad, 1992), an award-winning book exploring classical Christian sources and doctrines that could justify referring to God as female. Women and lay people were both admitted to the society in 1965, in the tumbling of one of many barriers that fell during the Second Vatican Council, from 1962 to 1965. The society's first Protestant speaker was in 1962, its first Jewish and Eastern Orthodox speakers in 1964. Although priests are probably still a majority, Professor Johnson | 50 Years of Catholic Talk: New Faces and New Ideas |
766217_0 | These are busy days at Vical Inc., a small biotechnology company here. Using a second-generation approach to biotech drug development known as gene therapy, Vical is collaborating with industry giants like Merck & Company and Baxter International Inc. to develop everything from a vaccine for hepatitis to treatments for cancer, hemophilia and cystic fibrosis. Two of its cancer treatments recently produced encouraging results in clinical trials, and there has just been a breakthrough with a flu vaccine. Across town, things are also hopping at Viagene Inc., one of the first gene therapy companies to attract a deep-pocket buyer. In April, the Chiron Corporation agreed to pay about $113 million for Viagene in a deal that amounted to a big vote of confidence in the company's quest for vaccines to combat cancer and viral diseases, including AIDS. Gene therapy -- the revolutionary concept that disease can be treated with the body's own genetic material -- is alive and well, and not just in San Diego. The 20 or so gene therapy companies around the country still face daunting technical, safety and financial hurdles. Yet they are edging closer to unlocking the therapy's vast potential to correct genetic defects and, in theory at least, treat almost every disease known to man. Barely five years old, the therapy involves the injection of DNA into human cells, with the goal of replacing damaged genes or producing proteins that stimulate the immune system. Industry executives say they are confident of winning Government approval by the end of the decade for the first of what could be a steady stream of potent drugs. "Compared to two years ago, when this was something wonderful for the 21st century, there are now some products in clinical trials and progress is being made," said Dr. Alain B. Schreiber, president and chief executive of Vical. "This is no longer a pipe dream." Indeed, a number of developments, on both the research front and the business side, are speeding the transition from laboratory vision to doctor's shelf: * Big drug companies like Bayer, Rhone-Poulenc Rorer and Sandoz, in addition to Baxter and Merck, are pouring money into joint development deals with the fledgling companies, including Applied Immune Sciences of Santa Clara, Calif., Somatix Therapy of Alameda, Calif., and Systemix of Palo Alto, Calif. * About 100 products are undergoing trials. Viagene's AIDS therapy is in the second of three phases of | Bottling The Stuff Of Dreams |
766071_0 | The military satellite navigation system used to pinpoint the locations of missiles and submarines, as well as soldiers and travelers, should be adapted to emphasize civilian and commercial needs, according to a study released today. Civilian use of the system, the Global Positioning System, now exceeds that of the military, and the Federal Government should encourage further use by removing some restrictions on it and encouraging more international participation in planning uses of the technology, said the report by two independent study groups. The system uses 24 Earth-orbiting satellites that transmit timed radio signals giving their locations. Using signals from any four satellites, a receiving device on Earth can compute its location to within a few hundred feet or less, day or night, regardless of weather. While the system is used by the military to tell troops, tanks or aircraft exactly where they are, it is also increasingly being used by civilians for tasks like tracking truck fleets, surveying property and guiding hikers. The report said commercial use of the system now generated about $2 billion a year in business, but this figure is expected to grow to more than $30 billion by 2005. Having the Government maintain control over the system and assuring the world that location signals from the satellites will remain free for all to use will benefit the United States in the long run, the report said. Such a stable, open-access system should assure that the United States remains the world leader in the technology and that American businesses maintain their edge as suppliers of billions of dollars in related equipment and services, the report said. "G.P.S. is becoming a de facto international utility, and it is in the U.S. interest to encourage the further diffusion and acceptance of G.P.S. in this capacity," said the report by a panel headed by former Defense Secretary James R. Schlesinger, now chairman of the Mitre Corporation. The study, sponsored by the Defense Department, was ordered by Congress and prepared by committees from the National Academy of Public Administration and the National Research Council, an arm of the National Academy of Sciences. "There is an exploding market in G.P.S. services, a market that is doubling every two years," Dr. Schlesinger said at a news briefing. "G.P.S. is a technological marvel that has changed in ways no one imagined and evolved beyond its original uses." The report recommended that the system, | Civilian Uses Are Proposed For Satellites |
736706_2 | death by 1,000 nicks. Sometimes you ask yourself, why do you even bother to work?" Despite the sense of resignation brought on by family burdens, Mr. Koffi and Mr. Nguessan, like more and more urban dwellers throughout West Africa, are making personal decisions that experts say could have a profound effect on the future of a region with one of the world's highest birth rates. Rather than having children early and often, they are deliberately postponing parenthood. "Our parents made the mistake of having a multitude of children, believing that wealth comes from great numbers," said Mr. Nguessan, a 30-year-old who has remained single and childless. "That was a mistake that many of my generation have decided they must avoid repeating. In a life where the only thing that counts anymore is money, young people are beginning to see children as a handicap." Development experts say that changing attitudes like this, a consequence of rising urbanization, offer a glimmer of hope that a continent whose population growth is galloping dangerously out of control can be slowed. "It is certainly true that more and more young people are saying that they don't wish to have children soon," said Brigitte Imperiale, a World Bank official who works on population and health issues here. "Where I still have doubts is in the follow-up. Do these youths have the means to stick to their intentions?" While the average number of children born to each mother in this country has fallen to about 6.5 from 7.4 in the last 25 years, Ms. Imperiale said that only about 3 percent of the population regularly used modern birth control methods. With little being spent on family planning efforts, the population of the Ivory Coast, a country the size of New Mexico, is expected to balloon to 34 million from the present 13 million in the next 30 years. Perhaps the stiffest challenge for those who would rein in population growth, however, is the heavy weight of tradition here and throughout this region. For many, fecundity remains an age-old sign of wealth and well-being. "I didn't want to have more children, but my husband's parents insisted that it wasn't right to stop at one," said Aminata Diarra, a 24-year-old customer of Mr. Koffi who was pregnant with her second child. "You tell them that you can't afford a large family, and they tell you that it is God's | Abidjan Journal; Does Sharing Wealth Only Promote Poverty? |
736834_0 | State and local governments are increasingly challenged by budget cuts and public skepticism of their ability to perform effectively. To demonstrate that the public sector can solve critical social problems, in 1986 the Ford Foundation and the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard established the annual Innovations in State and Local Government Awards. The program's 80 winners, each of which received a Ford Foundation grant of $100,000, have included programs that automate traffic control, counter domestic violence, encourage police officers to live in inner-city neighborhoods, and mine landfills for recyclable materials. Over 80 percent of the winning programs have expanded or been copied around the country. The Op-Ed page asked five of the 1994 winners to explain how their programs have saved taxpayers money, streamlined services and found creative uses for new technologies. You've found the perfect location for your new business. It's close to major suppliers and transportation routes and the seller is asking a fair price. Just one problem: the property is contaminated. Under the Federal Superfund law, buyers can be held responsible for cleaning up toxic wastes left by previous owners -- a considerable risk to those wanting to develop property with a history of industrial use. So in 1988 Minnesota created the Voluntary Investigation and Cleanup program to encourage recycling of contaminated property. If landowners or prospective buyers are willing to investigate and clean up contaminated property, our staff reviews their plans and advises them on assessing environmental problems (often no cleanup is required). If we approve the plans, the state pollution control agency will give the prospective developer liability waivers. How has the program worked? When the Park-Nicollet Medical Center, situated on an old solid-waste dump in a Minneapolis suburb, wanted to expand in 1990, we helped resolve liability problems so that the developer could get financing. Then the new owner removed acidic wastes from the site, stopped a flow of contaminated ground water and controlled a leak of methane gas from the old dump. The Voluntary Investigation and Cleanup program has had success at nearly 500 sites around Minnesota, many of them in urban areas where the "recycled" land boosted job growth and the tax base. And although the Minneapolis-based program has evolved into a 20-person staff with an annual budget of more than $1 million, the taxpayers pay almost nothing because we charge developers for our costs (the fee is usually | Government Works! 5 Success Stories; Recycling Dumps |
738339_1 | the Village Hall," she said. "But they didn't want to hurt my feelings. They were terribly nice about it." Women have long played various supporting roles in the Church of England, and in the late 1980's were given the right, as deacons, to perform ceremonies like weddings, baptisms and funerals. But it was not until the Church of England finally followed the precedents of other churches in the Anglican Communion, like the Episcopal Church in the United States, and voted to accept women priests, that women were allowed to take on the role of parish vicar and to administer the sacrament of holy communion. Many of those in the Church of England who oppose women priests have formed a group called Forward in Faith, which claims a membership of 45,000. The group predicts that in the next several years, 1,000 of the more than 10,000 active Anglican clergymen will either resign or convert to other denominations, figures sharply disputed by the church. The arguments against women priests, on the grounds of Scripture and church tradition, are all too familiar to Mrs. Stoker, who serves in the long shadow of the generations of men who came before her. "At my church there were no women in the choir, no women doing the readings, no women doing much of anything," she said of her childhood parish in Somerset. "Although my mother did do the flowers." When, as an undergraduate at Leicester University, she declared her career choice -- priest -- she was told that the best she could hope for was deaconess, a lay job. And that's what she became. She was appointed deacon at the Seer Green parish two years ago. In the beginning, much of her time was spent organizing a rotating list of two dozen clergymen to help her with the parts of the service she was forbidden to perform. "I would do the preaching," she said, "and they would do the communion." Members of Mrs. Stoker's congregation say she brings a noticeable difference to the job, which requires the vicar to be part social worker, part drop-in therapist, and part public figure. While her predecessors answered mainly to "Father," Mrs. Stoker encourages everyone to call her "Jo," and tries to show that people like her can be normal as well as compassionate. "People need to find you approachable, particularly because so many of the clergy are" -- she | Seer Green Journal; Anglican Reformation: Vicar as Working Mother |
737800_2 | public projects to help build the bus station, subway and international airport for Sao Paulo, the nation's largest city and also the largest in the Southern Hemisphere. Today, the Constran construction company is Brazil's third biggest. Another key holding of his group is Banco Itamarati, one of the country's larger private banks. His interest in a railroad dates to the 1970's, when the Government offered tax breaks and low-interest loans for investors willing to risk farming in the Amazon region. Mr. de Moraes started buying land in western Brazil, then a wilderness of tropical savanna and rain forest. Today, he is the world's largest soybean farmer, with farms and ranches that together nearly equal the area of Rhode Island. In the 1980's, when rising world oil prices persuaded Brazil to turn to sugar-cane alcohol for fuel, Mr. de Moraes took advantage of Government subsidies to plant sugar cane. This year, he will open one of the world's largest sugar mills. "Brazil is very similar to the United States in the 1920's," said Stephen Charles Kanitz, a Sao Paulo business consultant who surveys the nation's 500 largest companies. "Olacyr is one of those old-time tycoons who explores the virgin fields -- which in Brazil's case was the midwest and soybeans." In the western region of this country, soybean harvests are greater per acre than in the American Midwest. Last year Brazil, a legendary coffee producer, exported more soybeans than coffee. Yet Brazilian soybean growers still find themselves at some disadvantage. They complain that growers in the United States can get their soybeans to port for $10 a ton. Faced with bad roads and high trucking costs, Brazilian growers pay $70 a ton. Returning to his map, and to his project, which is often called "The Soy Railroad," Mr. de Moraes promised, "I can cut freight costs in half." He envisions freight trains stretching up to half a mile hauling soybeans, grain and tropical timber from this new breadbasket in Brazil's heartland to Sao Paulo's Atlantic harbor, Santos. On their way back, trains would bring fuel, fertilizer and general cargo for the growing new western cities -- Rondonopolis, Cuiaba and Porto Velho. Last year, grain harvests totaled 13 million tons in the region straddling the initial 200-mile stretch of railroad under construction. Although the railroad's dirt track bed already cuts across 150 miles of table-flat savanna and grain fields, work on the | Building a Railroad Deep Into Brazil |
736662_1 | Senate on Tuesday night. Organizers said they had already written to the International Olympic Committee and to a number of athletes as well as to Newt Gingrich, the Speaker of the United States House of Representatives, who is from Georgia. The Atlanta Plus group includes women's groups from France, Belgium, Germany and Sweden and is now seeking support in Canada and the United States. "This fight is new and it will be tough," said Anne Marie Lizin, Belgium's former minister for European affairs and an Atlanta Plus organizer. "But nothing will discourage us." The next stage, the organizers said, was to mobilize sports federations and to pressure the large corporations that are sponsors for the Atlanta Games. At the meeting in the French Senate, speakers said that throughout Europe, politicians and teachers were becoming sensitized to the issue of the growing discrimination against women by Islamic fundamentalists because they see it happening among immigrants at home. At schools in France, Belgium, Germany and the Netherlands, a number of Muslim immigrants in recent years have begun insisting that their daughters not participate in sports. Atlanta Plus members say that Iran is the only country they know of that has explicitly banned women from most sports but that others are doing so quietly, including Pakistan and Kuwait. Chahla Chafiq, an Iranian sociologist, said that in Iran women can participate only in those Olympic sports in which they can wear head-to-toe robes and veils. "They are just allowed to do archery, equestrian sports and skiing," said Chafiq who has recently published the book "Women and the Return of Islam." According to the 1992 Olympic yearbook, of the 169 countries that sent athletes to the Barcelona Summer Games, 34 had no female participants. Atlanta Plus members said they were aware that among these 34, some delegations had only half-dozen or even fewer men because they said they lacked talented athletes or funds. "But others had the funds and clearly barred women," said Linda Weil-Curiel, a Paris lawyer, citing Iran, Kuwait, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. In 1992, the largest all-male delegations were Iran with 40, Qatar with 31, Pakistan with 27 and Kuwait with 36. Of the 9,959 athletes listed as participating in the 1992 Summer Games, 2,851 were women. In Algeria, where Islamic fundamentalists are waging an open war against the Government, scores of women's sports teams have been | Muslim Women's Exclusion Is Target of New Campaign |
739255_3 | of the United States. For more than 20 years, as he made his annual tours of the Arctic whaling grounds, he saved iced-in crews and shipwrecked sailors and starving settlements. Though a hard-drinking man, he condemned the ravages that alcohol inflicted on Eskimo villages and he vigorously fought the rum runners. But the deed that most captured the imagination of the students at J.H.S. 226 was Captain Healy's effort to ferry more than 500 reindeer from Siberia, along with people to train starving Alaskan hunters to become herdsmen. One student, Yagita Singh, wrote, "People should recognize him for what he did and how he helped get food to others." Another, Rodeyah Hosein, showed excellent penmanship in writing, "Captain Mike Healy saved North American Eskimos from starvation by bringing reindeer from Siberia." THEIRS were among more than 700 letters the students have sent to Coast Guard officers, newspapers and elected officials, urging that a ship be named for their hero. None, however, referred to Captain Healy's humiliation toward the end of his career, when he stood accused before a court martial. "The fact is, we haven't discussed too much about that," said Mr. Breidner, the teacher. But Robert Browning, the chief historian of the Coast Guard, knows the whole story very well. He explained that the captain was brought up on charges of "tricing up" some of his crewmen. He said that "tricing," a practice in which a man was trussed and suspended from a beam, had been an acceptable naval punishment during much of Captain Healy's career. "Maybe he couldn't keep up with the new changes, but there's some evidence to show he may have been targeted by younger officers who wanted to get rid of him and pave the way for promotions," said Mr. Browning, who has also recommended naming a ship for Captain Healy, who was assailed during his trial by prohibitionist organizations. In the end, he was found guilty and suspended without pay. Four years later, in 1900, he took up his command again, retiring in 1903 and dying a year after. And that is where this story might have ended if not for the children of J.H.S. 226. Next month, which happens to be Black History Month, some Coast Guard officers are expected at the school. A new icebreaker is due to be commissioned soon after. Maybe the officers will bring some news. ABOUT NEW YORK | At School, Black Pride In a Seafarer's Exploits |
739223_0 | Many elevated expressways, bridges and buildings collapsed in the earthquake in Kobe, Japan, last week because of fundamental flaws in engineering design, two American experts who inspected the damage said yesterday. The Japanese rely on brute strength in structural engineering, the experts said. Support columns, especially those used to hold up roadways and train tracks, tend to be huge and brittle. When the ground shakes, the columns are meant to stand firm and resist collapse. American engineers take a different approach, the experts said. Support columns are smaller and more flexible, or ductile, which means they may deform and sustain damage but they do not collapse. While newer Japanese buildings incorporate the American approach, those built before 1983 and most elevated roadways followed the brute strength approach, the experts said. The Japanese approach works as long as ground motions occur in a range that has been anticipated, they explained. But the ground motions in last week's earthquake were twice as large as expected and thousands of structures could not withstand them. The American experts, Dr. Nigel Priestley and Dr. Frieder Seible, both professors of structural engineering at the University of California at San Diego, expressed their views at a news conference at the San Diego campus yesterday. They inspected damaged structures in Japan for three days with Dr. Greg MacRae, an assistant professor of structural engineering at the University of Washington in Seattle. "It was quite awe inspiring," Dr. Priestley said. "You would walk for seven miles and their freeways were so heavily damaged, 80 percent of the columns failed." Every structural column is made of similar components, Dr. Priestley said. Vertical steel bars are embedded in concrete, which is then wrapped with horizontal bands of steel to contain the column. This structure is then covered with more concrete. In building transportation columns, the Japanese tend to go for strength, Dr. Priestley said. One of their columns is typically 50 percent larger in diameter than a column used to support a California overpass, he said. The Japanese feel that the bigger a section is, the stronger it is, he said, and tend to use fewer horizontal steel bands to contain the column. If a California freeway column were to have 100 horizontal bands, a Japanese column might use 20. "The Japanese columns will perform well during an earthquake that behaves according to their design criteria," Dr. Priestley said. "But last | Brute Strength Couldn't Save Kobe Structures |
739209_0 | Defense Secretary William J. Perry said today that the United States had considered and dismissed the idea of bombing a nuclear reactor in North Korea last year to cripple its ability to develop nuclear weapons. Defending the nuclear agreement with North Korea against a wave of Republican attacks, he told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that the Administration had considered "going in and taking out the nuclear reactor" before deciding that economic sanctions were the best way to put pressure on the North to abandon its nuclear arms program. "I can tell you flatly that we know how to do that," Mr. Perry said of a military strike. "But on consideration, I did not recommend that course of action to the President." Pentagon officials said one reason they rejected an air strike was that they feared North Korea's 1.1 million-member army might quickly respond by leveling Seoul, the South Korean capital. Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina, presiding over his first hearing as head of the committee, led the Republican charge, but with far less sting than he usually uses against the Clinton Administration. Known for his combativeness, Mr. Helms was remarkably restrained and occasionally even traded friendly quips with Secretary of State Warren Christopher. Nonetheless, he chided the Administration for not submitting the North Korea agreement to Congress for ratification. The Republicans also criticized the Administration for promising to help provide North Korea with $4 billion worth of light-water nuclear reactors and $500 million in oil. In exchange for those inducements, North Korea has pledged to freeze, and ultimately dismantle, its nuclear program, which was geared toward building nuclear weapons. Voicing the Republicans' concern that North Korea was being rewarded for mounting a nuclear threat, Senator Craig Thomas, a Wyoming Republican, said, "If you're the child that doesn't behave, you're the one that gets the biggest presents, and that's troubling to many of us." Appearing alongside Mr. Perry, Mr. Christopher assured the senators that Japan and South Korea would provide "the lion's share" of the financing for the light-water reactors. He said the United States would contribute $20 million to $30 million a year to pay for the oil and otherwise finance the agreement. Mr. Perry and Mr. Christopher also explained that it would be far harder for North Korea to obtain weapons-grade nuclear fuel from the light-water reactors than from its existing reactors. The Republicans also repeatedly attacked | Administration Defends North Korea Pact |
739175_0 | Most of the crops America's farmers raise each year are eaten. But the country's agribusiness is hoping that the small portion that is not consumed can be turned into a new wave of profitable nonfood agricultural products. Many of the recent innovations, like corn-based golf tees and biodegradable pens, are relatively inconsequential novelties. But others, like new lubricants, fuel additives, and inks, make up the advanced guard of products that could eventually earn billions of dollars annually for farmers and agribusinesses while benefiting the environment. "The 1990's may be witnessing an historic turnaround in the fortunes of plant matter," said David Morris, an economic development specialist at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance in Minneapolis who has studied the potential for using materials derived from plants instead of fossil fuels like oil and coal. No one expects a return to the early days of this century, when scientists like Thomas Edison and George Washington Carver were famous for their research into new industrial uses for crops and industrialists like Henry Ford not only wanted to run cars on soybean oil but also to build steering wheels and other parts from soybean-based plastics. World War II and the cheap oil era that followed dramatically highlighted the attractions of fossil fuels, which have a higher energy content by weight and volume, and are easily processed into a variety of wondrously durable plastics and fibers. Nor is the rebound going to put any oil companies out of business. Farmers would satisfy only a small fraction of the demand for gasoline, fuel oil, plastics and other petroleum-based products even if every bushel of every crop planted last year went to such uses. Even enthusiasts like Mr. Morris concede that the rebound is starting from a very low base: Fewer than 10 million tons annually of plant matter other than wood go into industrial and construction products in the United States, compared with roughly 175 million tons of petroleum and coal and 300 million tons of inorganic minerals like sand, salt and iron ore. About 6 million tons of corn go into fuel and about 450 million tons of plants end up as food or animal feed. Still, growing industrial use of crops could slow the nation's increasing dependence on oil and other raw materials imported from politically unstable areas like the Persian Gulf. A Department of Energy study last year concluded that 19 of the | Crops Holding Promise Beyond Food |
739175_4 | pound to produce. Cargill has figured out how to make polylactic acid for as little as $3 a pound in Savage. It has designed a production line for its plant in Blair, Neb., that should be efficient enough for Cargill to make up to 300 million pounds annually for sale at about $1 a pound. "It looks and functions just like a plastic but has the added advantage of degrading completely when disposed of," said Patrick Gruber, a general manager at Cargill. "This could be the first renewable polymer product to break into a classic petrochemical product stream." Cargill said various Eco-Pla formulations could be used as paper coatings, fast-food containers and cutlery, disposable diapers and trash bags. Among those on the record as interested is the Packaging Corporation of America, a large manufacturer of packaging material for fast-food companies. "We see a lot of interest from our customers in biodegradability," said Gordon Putz, vice president of marketing for the Packaging Corporation. He said the company aimed to have Eco-Pla products by 1997. Because plant chemistry was so neglected as oil and other hydrocarbons came to dominate the economy, researchers say the area is now ripe for innovations like Eco-Pla. And that is without even factoring in the new tools of biotechnology, which make it easier for researchers to manipulate plants to produce bigger quantities of valuable substances or variations on naturally occurring compounds. But even if the new products eventually begin selling in sizable enough quantities to have a significant impact on the overall demand for major crops, it is by no means clear that farmers will capture many of the benefits. Demand will have to rise faster than their ever-increasing productivity to raise prices. That explains why many farmers are more interested in specialized strains of their crops, like Pioneer Hi-Bred International Inc.'s new varieties of soybeans that are low in saturated fat, than new end uses. These hybrids could be sold at premium prices to food processors trying to create healthier products. But others see new uses as a means for getting better returns. Robert Schemel, who grows corn, soybeans and sugar beets on 3,000 acres in southern Minnesota, is chairman of a new farmers' cooperative that is raising money to build a processing plant to make Environ for Phenix Biocomposites. Once the plant is running, Mr. Schemel said, the farmers who own it will get up | Crops Holding Promise Beyond Food |
734999_4 | they use part-time faculty because they want greater flexibility," she said. "But the reality is that these people are just hired over and over again. What they really want is not to pay health benefits and life insurance and so on. It's just exploitation." Professor Schuster said the nationwide proportion of part-time college faculty members, also known as gypsies or nomads, had risen to the current 40 percent from about 33 percent in the mid-1980's and 22 percent in the early 1970's. By the year 2008, he calculated, nearly half the 595,000 full-time college faculty members in the nation are likely to retire. But he said it appeared clear from current trends that not all would be replaced by full-time teachers. As college faculty hiring has slowed sharply, the number of people seeking jobs in higher education has risen, said William Zumeta, a professor at the graduate school of public affairs at the University of Washington. "In the last five years or so the numbers of Ph.D.'s granted in this country has jumped by about 5,000 a year, up from about 33,000, where it was for a long time, to about 38,000," Professor Zumeta said. "More people are seeking fewer jobs." These job-seekers make up 15 percent to 20 percent of part-time faculty members, said Howard Tuckman, dean of the college of business at Virginia Commonwealth University, who has written books on part-time faculty members. Dr. Tuckman has dubbed them part-mooners, as opposed to full-mooners, who may have a full-time job in another field, as lawyers or businessmen or journalists, or may be spouses of full-time faculty members or writers who are happy with a part-time teaching job. Some institutions, like junior colleges, rely more heavily than others on part-time faculty members. At California State University at San Bernardino, Ms. Imbarrato is one of 237 part-timers on a faculty that totals 626. At Pomona College last semester, she was one of just 20 part-timers on a faculty of 180. Though part-time faculty members may bring high qualifications and enthusiasm to their jobs, an increasing reliance on their work could do long-term damage to academic institutions, said Emory Elliott, the former head of the English department at Princeton University, who now teaches English at the University of California at Riverside. "A pretty important shift has happened in the last five years that is clearest in California," Professor Elliott said. "The senior | Part-Time College Teaching Rises, as Do Worries |
735019_0 | PSYCHIATRY is reaching into the cradle, with the publication in November of the first mental health diagnostic manual for problems in infants and toddlers up to 3 years old. The manual, its authors say, fills a gap left by the focus of other diagnostic systems on older children and adults. It allows psychiatrists and pediatricians to spot the beginnings of behavioral difficulties that might become more serious if ignored. The authors also say the manual can help allay the worries of overly anxious parents, who may worry too much about their baby's fretting or poor sleeping. The diagnostic categories specify when such problems are to be expected and when they may be the start of a developmental disorder. "I feel as a pediatrician that it's important to catch these things early," said Dr. T. Berry Brazelton, of Harvard Medical School, commenting on the new manual. "There's so much plasticity in an infant's brain; their neurological system can make up incredibly for deficits if we help parents get back on track, understanding and handling their babies better." The problems covered range from standard diagnoses that look very different in infants than in older children or adults, like "traumatic stress disorder" and depression, to "regulatory disorders," a new category that includes symptoms like hypersensitivity, underreactivity and poorly coordinated movements. "This fills in a missing piece in psychiatric diagnosis," said Dr. Stanley Greenspan, a psychiatrist in the pediatric department of George Washington University Medical School in Washington and co-chairman of the group that labored for seven years on the manual, sifting through research findings on child development and psychopathology. "Infant mental health is a relatively new field, as is our understanding of the differences between healthy adjustment and problems in these early years," Dr. Greenspan added. The diagnoses are made in a series of three to five sessions of about an hour each. In addition to taking a history, the sessions include observing the baby interacting with the person caring for itand administering tests of temperament, language and motor skills, sensory reactions and cognitive and emotional abilities. Although psychiatrists are familiar with the signs of post-traumatic stress in children, for example, "it looks so different in infants, you might miss the diagnosis completely," said Dr. Greenspan. "In infants and toddlers a trauma can derail language development, something that does not happen in older children," he added. "A child can lose the ability to | At Last, a Psychiatric Manual On Children Too Little to Talk |
734961_0 | To the Editor: I was horrified to read that Republicans are drafting a bill to switch cash grants of up to $446 a month for children with chronic illnesses and disabilities to a less flexible medical voucher system (front page, Dec. 29). So many expenses in raising children with disabilities cannot be categorized as medical. The bill's sponsors, including Newt Gingrich, have a myopic view of cost control without caring about ramifications. Those parents concerned enough to care for their disabled children at home deserve some financial support as an alternative to more expensive institutionalization. Why don't these politicians pick on someone their own size? Like grown, able-bodied, working men who dodge child-support payments. It is the responsibility of strong, able-bodied adults like us to see that the disabled and their families are protected. MARGERY B. ROTHENBERG Monsey, N.Y., Dec. 30, 1994 The writer is on the board of Rockland Independent Living Center. | Why Must Congress Pick On Disabled Kids? |
740654_3 | Nigeria, those nations had pointed to the combination of American insistence on a right of withdrawal from a comprehensive test ban and the demand that the Non-Proliferation Treaty be made permanent as evidence of the nuclear powers' hypocrisy. A conference at which the 170 signers of the treaty are to vote on its extension is scheduled to begin at the United Nations on April 17. But the differences among the participants are so sharp that they remain at odds even about the rules under which they should proceed. The steps announced by the White House today won praise from arms-control advocates and from the members of Congress who have been most active in seeking to curb nuclear testing. Senator Mark O. Hatfield, the Oregon Republican who was a sponsor of the law that helped force an end to United States underground tests in 1992, called the announcement "welcome news." But the arms-control advocates raised concern about just what kinds of low-level nuclear tests the Administration might still pursue as it seeks to insure that its existing arsenal remains safe and effective. At the same time the White House was taking steps to defend its decision from other expected complaints that it would unwisely limit American options. If a comprehensive test ban proved hostile to American interests, Mr. Lake said in his speech, the United States could still withdraw from the accord even if it did not contain the specific escape clause the Administration has sought. The United States last conducted an underground nuclear explosion on Sept. 23, 1992. While the law passed by Congress would have permitted 15 more such nuclear tests after Mr. Clinton took office, the President announced in July 1993 that he had decided instead to impose a temporary moratorium, which he renewed last year and again today. As presented by the White House, the American willingness to hold off on nuclear testing remains conditional on the willingness of other powers to follow suit. Yet while China has conducted three nuclear tests since the American moratorium began, the White House has chosen each time merely to condemn them, and Administration officials said today that they could not imagine that more tests by the Chinese would persuade Mr. Clinton to resume American testing. The officials left open the prospect that Mr. Clinton's stance might change if Russia or perhaps France violated their declared moratoriums and resumed nuclear testing. | U.S. IN NEW PLEDGE ON ATOM TEST BAN |
740583_5 | of its waters. Last November, the Canadian Pacific Fleet assigned a destroyer to carry out surveillance of the coastal waters and to make seizures and arrests. None have yet been made. Anti-submarine planes have broadened the sweep of the surveillance. And later this year the fleet is to be augmented by six marine coastal vessels. "The cold war is gone, and this is one aspect of what I would call the reorientation of priorities," Rear Adm. Bruce Johnston, the Pacific Fleet commander, said in an interview. "Experience will tell us whether we need to do more or less. So it's walk before you can run, to a degree." Fishing operations appear to be the main cover for drugs coming in by sea, in part because narcotics-sniffing dogs are thrown off the scent of drugs by the fish. Canadian fishermen are sometimes lured into smuggling by the easy money. "We've arrested some greedy fishermen who have tried to supplement their income with a bit of midnight work," said Sergeant Wilkes of the sea interdiction unit. Others pretend to be fishermen. "One of the things we clue in on is whether their boats are properly rigged," he said. But most arrests result from tips, and the Mounties have begun a public-awareness program to urge people to report suspicious signs of drug trafficking. These include vessels that ride low in the water or have additional fuel containers; cash payments for repairs; truckers who are vague with their destination or departure points; or new bank accounts by out-of-towners with an almost immediate transfer of large amounts of money. "It takes years to put together a big shipment, and there should be lots of indicators along the way that something's going to happen," said Constable Anne Clarke, the program's coordinator. Indeed, it was a tip from the British authorities and American and Canadian military cooperation that resulted in one big seizure two years ago. A 78-foot pleasure yacht picked up 10 tons of hashish at Karachi, Pakistan, and was tracked across the Pacific. The Mounties were waiting when the yacht reached the western coast of the Queen Charlotte Islands and dumped its illicit cargo on an isolated beach. The hashish shipment mystified both American law-enforcement officials and the Mounties because the drug is popular in Europe but little used in North America. "Where was it going? Mr. Parks asked. "It's an absolute puzzle to us." | Smugglers Shipping Drugs From Asia Through Canada to U.S. |
740689_9 | prey early in a chase, an ungulate easily outruns themup. "They've got to work for their living, no question," said Dr. Mech. Wolves also must deal with competition from other big predators. Coyotes tend to follow wolves and move in on their kills, for which the penalty is usually instant death. Both Dr. Mech and Mr. Bangs expect the coyote population of Yellowstone, a major existing threat to the region's sheep flocks, to be substantially reduced by conflict with wolves. Studies in Alaska, Canada and Glacier National Park have found that when grizzly bears and wolves come into contact, the two come out about even, on average; bears usurp some wolf kills, for instance, but wolves kill some bear cubs. The mountain lion, or cougar, appears to be the wolf's chief rival. Recent studies of wolf-lion interactions in Glacier National Park suggest that although cougars kill at least as many big prey animals as wolves and possibly more, wolves dominate cougars in direct encounters. Wolves routinely follow lion tracks to steal lion kills or confront them aggressively, and wolves have chased cougars up trees and also killed them, according to studies directed by Dr. Maurice Hornocker, an expert on cougars. He is the director of the Hornocker Wildlife Research Institute, a private organization affiliated with the University of Idaho in Moscow. Cougars, once nearly wiped out by human exterminators, have re-established themselves naturally throughout the former range of wolves in the West, including Yellowstone. What will happen once the two of them are together in a relatively small area hemmed in by human habitation? Dr. Mech, saying that the first line of defense for both species is mutual avoidance, does not expect many problems. Mr. Bangs believes wolves may displace lions from lower areas, where lions now hunt but which wolves would call home, to higher, rockier country that is the lion's natural terrain. But what happens when the prey species concentrate in lower elevations in winter? Will wolves displace lions into inhabited areas, where they might come into conflict with people and prey on livestock? There is some evidence of this displacement in the Glacier area, said Dr. Hornocker. "I feel we have an opportunity here for the first time in 100 years to document the interaction of these two big predators," he said. But, he said, he is frustrated because he has not been able to secure funds | Wolf's Howl Heralds Change for Old Haunts |
735923_0 | World Economies | |
734750_0 | Indians are prime-time subjects tonight, as PBS focuses on the dire condition of a few native South Americans and the Discovery Channel looks back at the bitter histories of native North Americans. "The Tribe That Time Forgot" refers to the Arara people of the Brazilian Amazon. Long thought to be extinct, they made the newspapers in 1976 when three government prospectors in the Amazon rain forest were found dead. The arrows identified the killers as Arara. The narrator describes the condition of the bodies: "Two of the prospectors' heads were found on poles. The eyes were glazed with beeswax and a two-foot bamboo flute was inserted through each skull, transforming it into a musical instrument. Parts of the prospectors' bodies had been eaten." In 1993 "Nova" sent a two-man film crew and an anthropologist who spoke the Arara language on the difficult journey into Arara territory. They went bearing gifts and were received peaceably. As shown tonight, they found a community of about 100 people who subsist largely on hunting, much as their ancestors did for thousands of years, placating the same animal and forest spirits. This is a respectful look at a relatively simple society, communist in the sense that everything, including sexual partners and children, is to some degree shared. The camera follows the men on a hunting expedition for monkeys and birds, then shows the women preparing an alcoholic beverage to refresh the returning providers and inspire everyone for a night of sex play. The program's message is that Arara existence, along with the rain forest itself, is endangered by mining and industrialization. Despite the fearsome-looking body painting and the bits of wood through pierced nasal septums, the Arara come through as far more threatened than threatening. Native peoples' encounters with whites of European extraction are also the subjects of "How The West Was Lost," an Indian view of American history. Its second season on the Discovery Channel, made up largely of repeats from last year, begins tonight with two new episodes: "Divided We Fall" tells of the destruction of the Iroquois Confederacy as a side effect of the American Revolution; "The Trail of Tears" is an account of the forced removal of the Cherokee Nation from its lands east of the Mississippi. Relying on old photographs and interviews with descendants of tribal leaders, who tend to draw on oral traditions, new programs also tell of the | When America Chased Its People Off the Land |
738621_1 | rebels; the mountainous area has a long history of resistance to Russia. 6 TOUGH LEGACY IN BOSNIA The commander of the United Nations forces in Bosnia has finished his stint, leaving behind a somewhat safer capital but difficult relations with the Bosnian Government. 6 PEACEKEEPING IN SINAI The role of American peacekeepers in the Sinai Peninsula, carrying out the treaty between Israel and Egypt, is being studied in light of recommendations for peacekeepers in the Golan Heights. 3 STANDOFF IN MEXICO Protests have died down in the state of Tabasco in Mexico, but it was unclear how the dispute over an election for state governor would finally be resolved. 12 Ireland sees progress in the Northern Ireland peace effort. 4 A setback in the rift between Buddhists and the Pope. 13 Eritrea's leader said he welcomes American aid and involvement. 11 An inquiry in India over deaths in a snowstorm in Kashmir. 12 National 14-24 THE PRESIDENT'S BALANCING ACT Bill Clinton will propose an increase in the budget for enforcing immigration laws and is leaning toward increasing the minimum wage, Administration officials said. 1 A ROUSING DEMOCRATIC REVIVAL Democrats came together, for now, as they installed their new chairman and greeted the President with chants of "Six more years!" 1 A PORTRAIT OF TURMOIL The portrait of Qubilah Shabazz that has begun to emerge since she was arrested on charges of plotting to kill Louis Farrakhan is complicated and incomplete. 1 WHO'S ON FIRST? EVERYBODY The major league baseball teams are searching for replacements for their striking players. Except for the Baltimore Orioles, which refuses refuses to go along, the teams are grabbing players wherever they can find them.1 'A CONVOCATION FOR PEACE' Abortion rights advocates prepared to mark the 22d anniversary of the Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade decision with warnings that increased violence has threatened women's access to abortion. 14 PAYING RESPECT TO TWO BOYS The lake in South Carolina where officials say Michael and Alex Smith were drowned by their mother has become a shrine. 14 People v. Simpson: Marcia Clark, for the prosecution. 16 Metropolitan 25-31 WHITMAN'S NEWEST TAX CUT Gov. Christine Todd Whitman has outlined a proposed state budget that promises a third income tax cut: just how much, the Governor will reveal tomorrow in her formal budget address. 1 Obituaries 33 Dr. Bernard L. Oser, biochemist who raised food safety awareness. Neediest Cases 27 | NEWS SUMMARY |
738398_1 | But future journalists with an interest in Israel and historians who want to understand a crucial period in its history would be well advised to read it. Mr. Frankel, a Pulitzer Prize winner and The Washington Post's man in Jerusalem from 1986 to 1989, owes part of his success to the intrinsic fascination of the country and the region. He owes still more to nearly 25 years' personal experience with Israel and Israelis, going back to his school days. As a journalist, an American and a Jew in a country uncommonly receptive to all three, Mr. Frankel looks at Israel as outsider and insider alike, with all the benefits that go with both perspectives. Israel, as Mr. Frankel sees it, is still the Promised Land of Jewish history. But the ebb and flow of ancient faith and modern hopes increasingly make it a Promised Land in transition. At the same time, it is a recognizable descendant of both Athens and Sparta, as close as the modern world gets to a classic Greek city-state, in the same inimitable Mediterranean landscape. Mr. Frankel's argument resonates with two other books, each useful background to his own, but essential to the really serious student of modern Israel. The first is Thucydides' "History of the Peloponnesian War," with its unequaled examination of how contentious little democracies behave under pressure. Even after 2,400 years, the cast of characters would fit easily in most Israeli Cabinets. The other, of course, is the Hebrew Bible, whose centrality was reaffirmed as recently as mid-December in a Knesset debate on the proper reading of II Samuel 11. At issue was the appropriateness of King David, conqueror of hearts and territory, as a role model for the current Government. Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, co-winner of the 1994 Nobel Peace Prize, took the negative. The religious opposition took the affirmative. Mr. Frankel excels on the statics and dynamics of a society subject to both tectonic stress and future shock. His discussion of Israel's political brew of ethnicity, religion and graft, for example, might bring tears to the eyes of a Chicago alderman. He is equally shrewd, even memorable, on the implied sadomasochism in the official relationship between Israelis, who look to American Jews for money, arms and access in Washington, and American Jews, who look to Israel for their self-regard. He scores again on the gulf war, noting how the combination of | Peace: Unimaginable or Unstoppable? |
738562_3 | islands and onto the mainland a dozen miles away. If global warming leads oceans to rise a few feet, much of Bangladesh may simply disappear. China is the great historical chronicler in the region, and its records go back for thousands of years in recording hundreds of thousands of people at a time killed by earthquakes or floods or changes in the courses of rivers. At the beginning of the 1960's a famine killed 30 million Chinese -- it was the worst famine in world history -- and as recently as 1976 an earthquake in the northern Chinese city of Tangshan killed 240,000 people by official count and perhaps several times that number. Yet Japan has traveled a long way from its Shinto roots as a nation of nature-worshiping rice farmers. Beginning with the Meiji Era a century ago, when Japan began its frantic and furious effort to modernize, every effort has gone into building skyscrapers and bridges and (supposedly) quake-proof freeways. Instead of keeping in harmony with the dragons of nature, engineers sought dominance. "We're exposed to a severe natural environment, and we're probably more aware of natural hazards than Americans are," said Yozo Fujino, an earthquake expert and engineering professor at Tokyo University. "So we've been paying extra to try to get more safety, but the quake shows that our procedures weren't adequate." Still, in some ways the engineers succeeded. There has been a good deal of second-guessing and recrimination about the collapse of buildings and bridges that were not supposed to collapse, but the fact remains that an exceptionally violent temblor took a region with millions of people, with enough strength to heave railroad cars on their sides, and 99.9 percent of the population survived. Japanese engineers have developed not only bullet trains that travel as fast as 170 miles an hour, but also a system whereby seismographs automatically dispatch computerized instructions to halt the bullet trains at the first sign of an earthquake. In Osaka, near the heart of the quake, the gas company has installed meters that instantly shut off the gas supply at the first seismic jolt. Japanese engineering was humiliated only because of its own exceptionally high standards. Remembering Old Boasts Still, the humiliation is there. The Japanese newspapers are full of self-mocking recollections that after the Los Angeles earthquake a year ago Japanese said that freeways here could never collapse. The nation | The World: Japan's Nature; A People Tremble in Harmony With the Land |
738700_1 | independent analysts say that the disruption in Irish politics that resulted in the ouster of Albert Reynolds as Prime Minister in December has not slowed the effort to find a peaceful settlement to the 25-year-old struggle in the British province of Ulster. The immediate goal of the Irish and British Governments is to create conditions by which Sinn Fein would take part in full peace talks. During the political crisis here last month, Mr. Reynolds warned that his removal would endanger the peace effort, which even his opponents concede he did much to advance. But there is so far no evidence that the effort is crumbling. Sean Donlon, a former Irish Ambassador to the United States and now Mr. Bruton's chief adviser on Northern Ireland, began work this week. Although he has a reputation for hostility to the I.R.A. and Sinn Fein, those groups have not attacked him publicly, and have indicted that they will work with him. Mitchell McLaughlin, a senior Sinn Fein official, was quoted in an interview in The Belfast Telegraph as having said: "John Bruton is reflecting a different attitude in Government than he did in opposition. It's early days, but our experience is that we have as good contacts, if not better in some respects, as we had in the previous administration." Mr. Bruton, unlike the more ebullient Mr. Reynolds, has said little publicly on the peace effort. But he was quick to note this week the change in tone between the British and Sinn Fein on the arms issue. After a meeting in Belfast between officials of the two sides, Sinn Fein said for the first time that it had influence with I.R.A. military commanders on the disarmament issue. Britain welcomed this change, and made one of its own, agreeing for the first time with the Sinn Fein demand that the disarmament issue was not a "precondition" for broader talks, although it had to be solved. Officials involved in the disarmament issue have not publicly suggested how it might be solved. Britain is not insisting that the I.R.A. surrender its entire arsenal, which is estimated at 100 tons of weapons, including explosives. But Britain is apparently adamant that there be verifiable destruction of the explosive Semtex. One way to verify destruction of explosives would be to have neutral experts witness it. These could come from the United Nations, the United States or another country. | Progress Is Reported In Irish Talks For Peace |
738589_0 | To the Editor: I was delighted that Laura Shapiro bothered to review only a few pages of my book "The Tomato in America: Early History, Culture, and Cookery" ("Book Salad: Sometimes Food Is a Character, Sometimes Just a Fashion Accessory," Dec. 25). As she evidences no knowledge about the introduction and adoption of the tomato in America, she would only have botched the review further had she proceeded. She begins her roundup by wondering if the books that she intends to review hoped "to become the literary equivalents of the great food movies." While this demonstrates a fertile imagination on her part, I can assure her that I do not expect "The Tomato in America" to be coming soon to the local movie theater or corner video store. She then proceeds to accuse me of making a "slip-up" regarding Mac Gregor's and Flavr Savr varieties of tomatoes. If the book concerned bio engineering in the late 20th century, her comments would be appropriate. As the book essentially ends with the adoption of the tomato into American cookery in the mid-19th century, the reader would be wise to toss Ms. Shapiro's shallow review into the dustbin labeled "super ficialities that really are atrocious." ANDREW F. SMITH Brooklyn | 'The Tomato in America' |
738507_0 | IN THE EARLY YEARS OF THE Cuban revolution, Havana's landmark Coppelia ice cream parlor served 54 flavors. Fidel Castro boasted that this impressive array surpassed even the selection offered by that Yankee capitalist enterprise Howard Johnson's. But with Cuba now in severe economic straits, visitors to the open-air Coppelia are lucky to find two flavors. "Strawberry and Chocolate," the latest work of the 66-year-old Tomas Gutierrez Alea, Cuba's foremost director, has its key scene at the ice cream parlor, where a gay intellectual named Diego (Jorge Perugorria) contrives to pick up a heterosexual Communist militant, David (Vladimir Cruz). The film, which opened here on Friday and will be shown at the Sundance Film Festival this evening, chronicles their unlikely friendship in a controlled society where respect for diversity, be it of ice cream flavors, sex or ideas, has often been hard to come by. Caryn James of The New York Times, reviewing "Strawberry and Chocolate" at the New York Film Festival last fall, called the movie a "breezy charmer about a relationship shaped by severe political struggle." In Cuba, thousands of homosexuals were sent to concentration camps in the late 1960's, together with others deemed deviant by the Castro regime. Echoing the slogan on the gates of Auschwitz, the camps were emblazoned with the words "Work will make you men." Though the camps were shut after a few years, the subsequent purges of homosexuals from the ruling Communist Party were condemned by intellectuals like Jean-Paul Sartre and Susan Sontag. In 1980, when angry mobs at officially organized rallies denounced gay men and women as "scum," many homosexuals were among the 125,000 Cubans who fled in the Mariel boatlift. Cuba is the only country in the world to have quarantined homosexuals and others who test positive for H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS. So it is a bit surprising that the first Cuban film to go into general release in the United States is also the island's first with a gay hero. (It is also Cuba's submission for the foreign film Oscar.) Set in the period between the dismantling of the notorious camps and the Mariel boatlift, "Strawberry and Chocolate" is intended to be a universal plea for tolerance, its director says. "It's not strictly a film about homosexuals," Mr. Gutierrez Alea said in an interview in New York. "It is about the intolerance and incomprehension of those who are different. | In Totalitarian Cuba, Ice Cream and Understanding |
739936_0 | To the Editor: Robert M. Lilienfeld and William L. Rathje offer a holy grail with no road map ("Six Enviro-Myths," Op-Ed, Jan. 21). Exhorting us to "use less," they suggest that recycling is "one of the least important things we can do" for the environment. To the 6,500 communities with curbside recycling programs, recycling is one of the most important things their citizens do. Not only does recycling reduce the use of landfills, but it also reduces the use of finite natural resources. The glass container industry, for example, recycles about 35 percent of the bottles and jars it sells in this country. And unlike other packaging materials, glass containers are made from plentiful, domestic raw materials. Glass recycling reduces energy use at our plants. Mr. Lilienfeld and Mr. Rathje criticize glass containers in an elaborate formulation, "carrying capacity," which compares the package's weight to the weight of the fluid. No landfill has ever filled up by weight. We agree, in principle, that we should all "use less stuff." The glass container industry is prepared to manufacture reusable bottles when a market develops for them. The proponents of reuse -- and other advocates for plastic packaging -- fail to mention the significant environmental impact of hydrocarbon-based packaging, which is usually from foreign sources. These products are neither reused nor recycled. LEWIS D. ANDREWS JR. Pres., Glass Packaging Institute Washington, Jan. 24. 1995 | Benefits of Recycling Are Not Mythical |
736158_0 | THE personal computer has become the modern equivalent of the soap box, reference library, bully pulpit and town hall, allowing anyone with access to a modem and a phone line to participate in politics to a degree never before possible on such a scale. The convening of the 104th Congress last week appears to have accelerated the phenomenon of electronic democracy, which has been spreading along with the personal computer. Electronic democracy is far from perfectly democratic, given the high relative cost of computer equipment, phone service and information fees. Recent demographic surveys of the Internet reveal an electronic citizenry that is predominantly white, male, educated and well to do. But there are countless resources available to those who want to make the effort to keep tabs on the new Congress, a new Governor or a new City Council. Computer-based communications allow individuals and grass-roots activist groups to be almost as politically connected as lobbyists and political action committees. The resources include local computer bulletin boards; electronic discussion groups; mailing lists; live on-line forums and chat lines, and electronic publishing centers known as gopher, F.T.P. and Web sites. Each of the major commercial on-line information services maintains an extensive political data base and forums where one can study and debate the issues of the day. Because they confer the ability to send and receive electronic mail, these electronic services hold the promise of putting constituents in more immediate touch with government. It is still unclear how many members of the 104th Congress are connected to an E-mail system. Only a few dozen of the members of Congress have their own electronic mail addresses. The computer wires have been hissing lately with discussions of what Newt Gingrich calls his "nutty idea," proposed last week, of a possible "tax credit for the poorest Americans to buy a laptop." In a country where tens of millions of adults are functionally illiterate, Mr. Gingrich's notion that everyone must become computer literate seems eerily disconnected. Likewise, the Clinton Administration's goal of connecting every classroom in America to the Internet by the year 2000 seems overly ambitious when many schools cannot afford books or phone lines. Then again, perhaps this analysis is evidence of what Mr. Gingrich last week called "a pervasive cynicism in the culture of Washington." "What this is going to do," Mr. Gingrich said, referring to a new system for distributing Government information | Exploring New Soapboxes for Political Animals |
736099_0 | Shares of the Lotus Development Corporation shot up yesterday after a trade publication reported that the company was holding discussions with AT&T about a possible acquisition. The shares jumped as much as 7.5 percent, before settling at $42, up $2, in Nasdaq trading. The activity was set off by a report in PC Week that said that talks between AT&T and Lotus toward an acquisition were under way. The report also noted that Lotus was close to signing a deal with Nippon Telegraph and Telephone in Japan to sell Lotus Notes, its groupware software, on a commercial N.T.T. network, much like the deal Lotus signed with AT&T last year. Groupware is a type of software that lets groups of workers collaborate on a common document by tracking the document's location and its history of revisions. Spokesmen for both Lotus and AT&T declined to comment on the report. But a Lotus executive, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said that no such deal was in the works. Rumors of an impending takeover of Lotus, a $1 billion software maker, have been floating around the industry since the summer, when the once high-flying company stumbled in sales of its core desktop applications software. In recent months, Lotus shares have risen on speculation that it would be acquired by either AT&T or the Oracle Corporation. A merger with AT&T would make sense, analysts said yesterday. Lotus, despite slowing sales of its core desktop applications software, continues to show strong growth in its communications software business, particularly in sales of its highly regarded Notes groupware product. Last March, Lotus and AT&T signed a deal in which Notes would be made available over a commercial AT&T network for customers, a deal that later prompted talk that the two companies might come together. Analysts point out that Lotus has a chance to make Notes an industry standard but it needs to sell far more copies of the product to achieve such status. With competitors like Microsoft aiming straight for the Notes market, Lotus's opportunities to gain an insurmountable lead grow smaller and the vast resources of AT&T could speed up the process, one analyst said. But despite the closeness of the two companies, some analysts remain skeptical. "Because Lotus Notes is so important to the future of AT&T, a deal like this makes business sense," said Paul Johnson, an analyst with Robertson Stephens in New | Takeover Report Spurs Lotus Shares |
736119_5 | length of the show was cut, and it was frequently pre-empted. And he was required to alternate with student hosts (at least one of whom he accused of playing a tape off-speed). Then last spring, he was badly injured when he fell through a trap door in a health-food store. For several weeks, he was host of the show from his bed with the help of student engineers. But he said he was told he would be replaced if he could not return to the station. So Mr. Zucker got friends to take him there in a wheelchair. Mr. Pierce, 21, the former station manager, said students had complained about Mr. Zucker for years but the problem became urgent when student interest in opera seemed to increase last year. In one case, Mr. Pierce said, Mr. Zucker alienated a student who had been the host of an opera show on a closed-circuit Columbia station by putting her on the air and grilling her about her favorite soprano and her own vocal range. "She told us she would never return to the station," Mr. Pierce said. "We had other students who wanted to intern with him, but we just decided we weren't going to risk losing more people because of Stefan." Mr. Zucker denies ever having disparaged or intimidated students -- except maybe once during the heat of a fund-raising drive when on the air he called the people answering the phones "brain dead." He said he apologized immediately afterward. "They were doing a woefully inadequate job," he said. "But I did use the unfortunate term 'brain dead,' a term I have used about myself on the air." As for calling a student "yummy," he said he had "intended to be cute or gallant." No complaint was filed. He insisted he had worked well with many students. "I'm not somebody who belittles people." Many of Mr. Zucker's admirers wonder why the station could not work out its differences with Mr. Zucker -- or if that were impossible, why it could not simply treat him as an exception to its rules. "I can understand that a college radio station wants to give broadcast opportunities to its students," said Ira Lieberman, a violinist with the Metropolitan Opera, who used to listen to "Opera Fanatic" with his wife, Linda Seay, a soprano with the Lisbon Opera. "But students also need examples of inspired broadcasting." | Curtain Falls on Opera Radio Show; Listeners Mobilize After the Loss of Their Favorite 'Fanatic' |
736019_5 | Newark had to go to Philadelphia or other points in the Northeast to take on fuel because the pumping machinery at Newark was knocked out.Some American flights were sent to Kennedy, where passengers were put on buses. One passenger, Ted Horoschak of Los Angeles, was calm as he contemplated the cancellation of his 3:15 American flight to Los Angeles. "American will pay for me to take a taxi to J.F.K. for a 4:20 flight. I'll just call my wife and tell her to pick me up an hour later." But John Davies of Santa Barbara, Calif., said he was on the "trip from hell." His Sunday flight from Los Angeles to Newark was canceled because of rain storms. "So I took the red eye," he said. He checked into the airport Marriott this morning, "and the power went out while I was in the shower." USAir, with 54 flights daily at Newark, was able to hand-write tickets and hand-carry baggage in the chill of the terminal buildings for much of the day. But after 4 P.M., as darkness approached, "we basically shut down everything," said Paul Turk, the airline's director of media relations. About 3,000 passengers were rerouted, many to Philadelphia, he said. As for other airlines, Joan Brown, a Federal Aviation Administration spokeswoman, said Kennedy handled international flights for Scandinavian Airlines, Lufthansa, Northwest and American, and La Guardia handled domestic flights for Northwest as well as American. At La Guardia, there was confusion as rerouted passengers scrambled to locate the special Carey charter buses that would take them to Newark, in some cases to find their cars and in others to find awaiting relatives and friends. At the American Airlines terminal, passengers crowded into the baggage office looking to find out what had happened to their luggage and to learn how they were to complete their travels. A transportation representative for Carey buses, Julio Pla, said that, as of 5:30 this evening, four special charter buses, filled to capacity with 48 passengers each, had departed from La Guardia for Newark. "It's been a mess here today," Mr. Pla said. "A lot of people are very, very, very confused. And it is even more confusing due to the fact that they have no vouchers saying they are going to Newark. It's very hard to determine who should actually be on the buses. They just get on. I really don't know | NEWARK AIRPORT IS CLOSED AS CREW CUTS POWER LINES |
738074_0 | Nearing the end of an 11-day journey through Asia and Oceania, Pope John Paul II sought today to quell a debate among Catholics here over the ordination of women and said women's role in society was specially tied to motherhood. But while accusing his many feminist critics of misunderstanding the Vatican's views, he told a gathering called to honor a nun who fought the male-dominated Australian church hierarchy that "the church stands firmly against every form of discrimination which in any way compromises the equal dignity of women and men." The Pope arrived here Wednesday from Papua New Guinea and leaves Friday for Sri Lanka, where Buddhist monks have threatened to protest his references to their faith as a form of atheism. Earlier on his tour, at a huge Mass attended by a record four million people in the Philippines and among the relatively new Catholics of Papua New Guinea, the Pope has been met with unquestioning exuberance. But Australia's Catholics, numbering less than one in three of the 17.8 million population, seem far closer to their American counterparts in questioning Vatican dogma and rejecting those parts of it they see as irrelevant to modern life. "There is a sense among many Catholics that while they appreciate the powerful symbol of the Pope, they feel he does not really understand the conditions that they experience as church people in a democratic and secular society," said the Rev. Paul Collins, a Catholic priest and broadcaster here. "They value the Pope as a symbol of the church's unity, but they make their own decisions about the ideals upon which he insists," he said. "Clearly, his authority is limited by what church people will accept and believe." The focus of the Pope's two-day visit to Sydney was his beatification tonight, before some 200,000 people at a horse-racing track, of Mother Mary MacKillop, a 19th-century Australian nun who formed the Josephite order of nuns and was briefly excommunicated in 1871 for refusing to bow to the control of bishops. But at a different ceremony before pronouncing Mother Mary blessed, the precursor to sainthood, the Pope re-emphasized his views on the role of women and women's ordination. "Among the pressing issues facing the people of God in Australia there is the need for an understanding of the dignity and mission of woman, in the family, in society and in the church, which is faithful to | Pope, in Sydney, Defends Vatican's Ban on Ordaining Women |
736514_0 | Firing a volley in a war over biotechnology patents, Schering A.G., the German drug maker, said yesterday that it had been awarded exclusive rights to a process being used by Biogen Inc. The announcement sent shares of Biogen tumbling. A spokesman for Schering in Frankfurt said the company and Stanford University had received on Dec. 27 a United States patent that gave Schering exclusive rights to produce beta interferon, an immune system hormone, from Chinese hamster egg ovary cells. The spokesman, Ralf Harenberg, said the patent could block Biogen, a biotechnology company based in Cambridge, Mass., from making its version of beta interferon for the treatment of multiple sclerosis, the nerve disease. Shares of Biogen fell $6.875, or 16 percent, to $35.375, in heavy Nasdaq trading yesterday. Biogen has been making beta interferon from Chinese hamster egg ovary cells under a number of patents and plans to seek Food and Drug Administration approval for the multiple sclerosis treatment in the next few months. Although the patent dispute is unlikely to influence the F.D.A.'s decision, the Schering announcement raises the specter of lengthy lawsuits, analysts said. "Investors are reacting to the uncertainty," Linda Miller, a biotechnology analyst with Paine Webber Securities, said. Peter Ludwig, a patent lawyer with Darby & Darby in New York, said the Schering patent made "extraordinarily broad claims." He added, "This could be a roadblock to Biogen's commercialization of a beta interferon product." James R. Tobin, president of Biogen, said, "We have our own patent portfolio," which includes patents issued in the United States and Europe. He said Biogen had just received a copy of the Schering patent and could not comment. "Until you look at the patent and figure what it covers and doesn't cover and what the geography is, we have no idea what they are talking about," Mr. Tobin added. Teena Lerner, an analyst at Lehman Brothers, said the Schering patent was part of "an ongoing conflict, particularly in Europe, between Biogen and Schering, in which Biogen is trying to position itself to block Schering." She added: "If you are Schering, you need ammunition so you can trade and say, 'Get off my back.' There is a lot of poker playing here and a lot of legal posturing." Ms. Lerner said Schering was at least four years behind Biogen in being able to use the Chinese egg technology to introduce a product. Peter Drake, | Biogen's Share Price Drops In a Running Patent Battle |
736417_0 | In a study that further muddies the issue of whether electrical transmission lines affect human health, researchers have found that electric utility workers exposed to high levels of magnetic radiation face a greater risk of dying from brain cancer than workers exposed to lower levels. But no general association was found between exposure to the radiation and deaths from leukemia. The scientists noted that both findings differed from those of other recent studies, which have found a significant risk of leukemia in people exposed to magnetic fields but a weaker association between exposure to the fields and brain cancer. Because of the inconsistencies, the question of whether low-frequency electromagnetic radiation causes cancer "remains unresolved," says the new study, which was released yesterday. It is being published on Sunday in the The American Journal of Epidemiology. The study was conducted by Dr. David A. Savitz and Dr. Dana P. Loomis, epidemiologists at the School of Public Health of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Low-frequency electric and magnetic radiation is emitted by all kinds of everyday electrical conductors, from appliances and household wiring to high-energy transmission lines. Over the last 15 years, some studies have suggested some risk of cancer from the radiation while others have not. The latest study, one of the most extensive, covered 138,905 men who worked full-time for at least six months over 36 years at five large electric utility companies in various parts of the country. Of the 20,733 who had died, 164 died of leukemia and 144 of brain cancer. A sample of 2,842 active workers was grouped occupationally, and their exposure to magnetic radiation on the job was measured. Then these exposure scores were assigned to all workers in the study, by occupational group, and the results were compared with the cancer death rates. Overall mortality from leukemia, brain cancer and most other causes of death was lower than in the general population. This reflects the selection of relatively healthy men as employees, Dr. Savitz said. But within the study group, workers with the highest exposures to magnetic radiation died from brain cancer at 2.5 times the rate of men with the lowest exposure. Except for electricians, no statistically significant difference in death rates from leukemia was detected. The cancer risk factor found in the Savitz-Loomis study and earlier studies is much lower than that for cigarette smoking -- "miles and miles | New Study of Electromagnetism Clouds Hunt for Cancer Link |
737599_0 | THE recently reported finding that various forms of hormone replacement therapy can lower the risk of heart disease in postmenopausal women has answered many concerns about the safety and effectiveness of taking estrogen and progesterone in middle age, but it has also raised important new questions, according to Dr. Bernadine Healy, former director of the National Institutes of Health. In an editorial in today's issue of The Journal of the American Medical Association, in which details of the study are also published, Dr. Healy wrote that "after a half century of conflicting data, we can affirm with growing confidence that, at the very least, estrogen reduces key cardiovascular risk factors in women at a time when they become especially vulnerable to heart disease, namely, after 50 years of age." Furthermore, she noted that the study showed that when progesterone was added to the formula, to prevent uterine cancer, the estrogen benefits to the heart were not lost. The study's findings were first reported in November at the annual meeting of the American Heart Association. Previous studies had found that in postmenopausal women who still have a uterus, supplementary estrogen, if taken alone, resulted in a ninefold increase in the risk of developing cancer of the endometrium, the lining of the uterus. Gynecologists now recommend that progesterone be included in hormone replacement therapy, but it was feared that this addition would negate the estrogen's benefits to the heart. The new study confirmed that estrogen alone is hazardous to the uterus, although it is still the preferable postmenopausal therapy for a woman whose uterus has been removed by hysterectomy, because it has the most beneficial effect on cardiovascular risk. This most carefully designed study of hormone replacement was conducted over a three-year period at seven clinical centers among 875 healthy women from 45 to 64 years old. It showed that all the tested regimens, with or without progesterone, reduced women's cardiovascular risks. The greatest benefit to the heart, after estrogen taken alone, was observed when a little-known form of natural progesterone, called micronized progesterone, was administered for 12 days of each month along with daily low-dose estrogen. A slightly less striking benefit was seen when low doses of estrogen (Premarin) and a synthetic progesterone, medroxyprogesterone acetate (Provera), were given daily. The study was sponsored by the National Institutes of Health. Contrary to "a recurrent concern," Dr. Healy said, the new study showed | Hormone Replacement Study Answers Questions, but Not All |
737751_0 | Well-stocked stores in this border town seem to support the official fib that Paraguay, a thinly populated farming nation, is Latin America's largest per capita consumer of scotch whisky, American cigarettes and French perfumes. But Paraguay has a long and open tradition of smuggling, and nowhere is it more prevalent than in this town, where the international border is an unpatrolled strip of grass and Paraguayan shop clerks long ago learned to speak Portuguese, the language of their bargain-hunting Brazilian neighbors. The contraband is not only in run-of-the-mill luxuries. This nation of 4.5 million people now probably ranks as Latin America's largest per capita importer -- and exporter -- of Andean cocaine. "Before they used to smuggle soy beans and coffee," said Raimundo Louzada, the police chief in Ponta Pora, Pedro Juan's Brazilian sister city. "Now the traffickers have moved to cocaine." With 10 agents at his disposal, Mr. Louzada patrols a 450-mile stretch of land border, roughly half the length of the Mexico-United States border. "There is no way to check the border," he said. Paraguay seized only 100 pounds of cocaine in 1994. But for so small an amount there were a lot of fireworks. In September, a quiet tree-lined residential street here was shaken by automatic weapons fire. When the shooting stopped, two traffickers were wounded and another was dying. Weeks later, a carload of gunmen in an upper-class neighborhood of Asuncion ambushed the head of the country's anti-drug efforts, a former general named Ramon Rosa Rodriguez, wounding him and killing his driver. Then, the police said, as the wounded official was being driven to the hospital in a National Anti-Drug Secretariat jeep, a subordinate sitting in the back pulled out a pistol and fatally shot him in the back of the head. "I will catch them -- they are the pets of the Yankees," Paraguay's President, Juan Carlos Wasmosy, said the next day, apparently referring to American-trained drug agents suspected of taking part in the killing. National confusion over the killing heightened on Dec. 5, the day a military judge interrogated the main suspect, Capt. Juan Ruiz Diaz. In a 12-hour deposition, this American-trained veteran of the nation's top anti-drug agency described Paraguay's cocaine trafficking rings, naming a state governor, several prominent businessmen and a large chunk of the military high command. While some people dismissed the list as a red herring dreamed up by a | Pedro Juan Caballero Journal; Where Contraband Has Thrived, Cocaine Arrives |
737563_0 | He is retired now -- no more of the murderous gangland mayhem the Federal Government says he used to mastermind. He is, his son says, "somewhat frail." But not too frail to put on a trimly tailored tuxedo and celebrate with 300 friends and relatives: Joseph Bonanno is 90 years old today. Actually, Mr. Bonanno had his revelry a few days early. On Saturday, Mr. Bonanno's three children rented a ballroom in Tucson, Ariz., 2,070 miles from the scenes of what the Government says were major crimes like attempted murder, gambling and narcotics trafficking. Over salad and filet mignon, Mr. Bonanno's children and grandchildren gave testimonials to the man who prosecutors say parlayed a small bootlegging operation into one of New York City's major crime families. Then there was cake, sliced from a confectionery-scale Leaning Tower of Pisa. (The real thing was engineered by a Bonanno.) "It was a private family-and-friends party," said one of Mr. Bonanno's sons, Salvatore, who is 62 and is known as Bill. "At least, when you compare that to my wedding, which had 3,000 people, I thought it was a small affair." Sitting on folding chairs around the tables in the ballroom were people from walks of life far removed from those in which Mr. Bonanno is said to have made his name. There were priests and biographers, an actor who had appeared in the film "The Godfather," even a college instructor. "He's been a wonderful, intelligent, loving godfather to us all," the instructor, Russ Andaloro of Pima Community College, told The Arizona Daily Star. Salvatore Bonanno said 150 invitations were mailed. As the R.S.V.P.'s made clear, almost no one said no. "We were running about a 97 percent acceptance rate," he said. "The mistake I made, instead of addressing it to Mr. and Mrs., I just put 'and family.' We had fours and threes and fives." The Daily Star had a story and two photographs about the party on the front page of its Monday issue. Yesterday, it ran another story, also on the front page, saying that more than 100 readers had called to complain that the Monday coverage "glorified Bonanno." Some callers, the article said, were upset to read that Gov. Fife Symington of Arizona and Senator John McCain, an Arizona Republican, had sent birthday greetings. (Governor Symington's press secretary said his message had been a machine-signed form letter, while the note | A Man Reviled and Revered; Family and Friends Fete Joseph Bonanno on 90th Birthday |
734526_0 | MOST people ponder the cosmic, big picture issues early in life, at least by the end of high school or college. Certain questions -- Does Bigfoot make a noise in the forest when there's no one around to hear? Does God exist, and if so, how do you explain velvet paintings? -- just don't seem to come up once you move out of a dorm and away from the philosophical ambience created by really loud music and mass quantities of cheap beer. But just because the cosmos looks hazier off campus does not mean it does not exist. If anything, questions of values and ethics loom larger as they become less abstract. Every day, in communities and on the job, people make ethical decisions, by design or by default. The problem, says Rushworth M. Kidder, author of the new book "How Good People Make Tough Choices" (William Morrow, $22), is that few people are prepared for the types of ethical challenges they face. Americans lack "ethical fitness." We have, Mr. Kidder contends, let the analytical muscles that help us traverse life's moral mazes go flaccid. Is Mr. Kidder, a former journalist and English professor who now teaches ethics in corporate settings, yet another one of those curmudgeons the intellectual right seems to produce in infinite supply, railing against secular humanism, multiculturalism, hip hop music and complaining that nothing's been the same since Athens fell? Happily not, although if asked, he will run quickly down a laundry list of incivilities. He can cite polls depicting a decidedly casual attitude toward cheating among high school and college students, an attitude his corporate clients confirm among their younger hires. And, yes, he thinks things are probably worse than they were 50 years ago. "Look what's happening: violence, the streets, teen pregnancies. Sure, we're going to hell in a handbasket," he said in a telephone conversation from his home base, the Institute for Global Ethics, in Camden, Me. He notes surveys that show many Americans think the nation is in a decline. But whether the decline is new or more significant than previous spiritual crises is irrelevant, almost a distraction. Even if American values and ethics are exactly the same as they were half a century ago, the context in which they are exercised -- or not -- has changed dramatically. Seemingly small decisions can have immense consequences. "The capacity for technology to leverage | At Work; Toning Those Moral Muscles |
734527_0 | MOST people ponder the cosmic, big picture issues early in life, at least by the end of high school or college. Certain questions -- Does Bigfoot make a noise in the forest when there's no one around to hear? Does God exist, and if so, how do you explain velvet paintings? -- just don't seem to come up once you move out of a dorm and away from the philosophical ambience created by really loud music and mass quantities of cheap beer. But just because the cosmos looks hazier off campus does not mean it does not exist. If anything, questions of values and ethics loom larger as they become less abstract. Every day, in communities and on the job, people make ethical decisions, by design or by default. The problem, says Rushworth M. Kidder, author of the new book "How Good People Make Tough Choices" (William Morrow, $22), is that few people are prepared for the types of ethical challenges they face. Americans lack "ethical fitness." We have, Mr. Kidder contends, let the analytical muscles that help us traverse life's moral mazes go flaccid. Is Mr. Kidder, a former journalist and English professor who now teaches ethics in corporate settings, yet another one of those curmudgeons the intellectual right seems to produce in infinite supply, railing against secular humanism, multiculturalism, hip hop music and complaining that nothing's been the same since Athens fell? Happily not, although if asked, he will run quickly down a laundry list of incivilities. He can cite polls depicting a decidedly casual attitude toward cheating among high school and college students, an attitude his corporate clients confirm among their younger hires. And, yes, he thinks things are probably worse than they were 50 years ago. "Look what's happening: violence, the streets, teen pregnancies. Sure, we're going to hell in a handbasket," he said in a telephone conversation from his home base, the Institute for Global Ethics, in Camden, Me. He notes surveys that show many Americans think the nation is in a decline. But whether the decline is new or more significant than previous spiritual crises is irrelevant, almost a distraction. Even if American values and ethics are exactly the same as they were half a century ago, the context in which they are exercised -- or not -- has changed dramatically. Seemingly small decisions can have immense consequences. "The capacity for technology to leverage | At Work; Toning Those Moral Muscles |
736926_0 | Growing up amid the quiet farm lands of Grafton, W.Va., David Austin remembers lying on his back in fields near his house, listening and watching for airplanes. He had no idea where they were headed or what kind they were. With a well-developed interest in World War II aircraft and the Korean War still under way, he let his imagination fill in all the necessary blanks. Decades later, with no small amount of patience and persistence, those boyhood flights of fantasy have been realized, in the hangar of Latrobe Air Business, the flying school and aircraft company he operates here at the Westmoreland County Airport, just east of Pittsburgh. Over the last three years, Mr. Austin, 53, and another local warplane enthusiast, John K. Lloyd, have bought five Russian-made MIG fighter jets from the Polish Government. Each cost them under $50,000, Mr. Austin said, but required months of tedious negotiations involving an exotic-car dealer in Germany, a computer expert in Poland and the United States State Department and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. "I just hate to see them disappear," Mr. Austin said today, standing beside the MIG-15 that he and Mr. Lloyd bought for themselves. They have sold the three others and a later-model MIG-17 to other people. "Twenty years down the road, if we're not careful, there won't be any of these flying," Mr. Austin said. "Eventually, our Government may even outlaw flying them altogether. That would be a tragedy -- not a national tragedy but a personal tragedy." Among the first fighter jets built by the former Soviet Union, the MIG-15 became an early icon of the cold war, distinctive for its stubby shape, open-jawed air-intake snout and its friskiness. The MIG-15 could climb to 35,000 feet within a minute and reach speeds approaching 700 miles an hour. By the late 1950's, as many as 40 nations, including the Warsaw Pact members and China, flew the jets. Later, they became mainstays of many other air forces, like those of Cuba, India and Egypt, which used them in the Six-Day War with Israel in 1967. But rarely have the military esoterica that Federal agencies in the United States must approve for import included any of the old MIG's. Jack Killorin, a spokesman for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, said military planes from other governments came into the country "relatively infrequently." Even so, Mr. Austin, | Latrobe Journal; Bringing In Some MIG Fighters From Cold War |
737161_0 | To the Sports Editor: Anna Huntington's "Women's Team Swears Like . . . Well, Sailors," (The Times, Jan. 8) was an interesting insight into the life and times of a modern America's Cup crew. Aside from having a women's team, which I applaud, much of what she reports seems strange to this alumnus of three America's Cup campaigns (1958, 1967 and 1970). I do not recall a code that obliged our crews to acquire hangovers and then talk about them; neither flatulence nor sexual conquests were normal topics of conversation. We did not swear at each other, but Harry Sears's "you great goat" served as a powerful reprimand. WALLACE E. TOBIN 2d Portland, Me. | Sailing in the 90's |
736931_2 | through data, including a yearly survey by the National Institute of Justice on domestic crime, Dr. Gelles has distilled 10 factors most common in the profile of men whom the surveys define as "severely abusive." Many of the factors are economic. Severely abusive men are more likely than their nonabusive peers to be unemployed or to hold blue-collar jobs, or to have total family incomes of less than $15,000 a year. They are likely to be from 18 to 30 years old, to use illicit drugs like cocaine or engage in binge drinking and to have dropped out of high school. As children, these men often saw their father hit their mother or came from neighborhoods with high levels of violence. They are abusively violent toward their children, and, in half the cases, their violence against their wives was serious enough that the police had been called at least once in the preceding year. And, Dr. Gelles said, such men are often not married to their partner or have separated from her, and the partners come from different religious or cultural backgrounds, "For men with 7 or more of these 10 factors, the rate of extreme violence is 17 times higher than average," Dr. Gelles said. "Even so, among such men, 4 in 10 will not be abusive." Apart from these factors, emotional dynamics are at play when it comes to just what pushes a violent man over the line to kill. A 1982 study of men who killed their wives or companions found that the single most common reason the men gave was feeling rejected or unable to control what their mate did. More than half of the killers, the study found, were living separately from the victim at the time of the killing. For the others, a walkout or threat of separation was the provocation, one they took as an intolerable rejection. Such men, who have a history of extreme violence with their wives, fit one of two psychological patterns, according to work by Dr. Amy Holtzworth-Munroe, a psychologist at Indiana University. One type is men who become extremely jealous and obsessed by fears that their partner will leave them; the trigger for violence is some sign of abandonment. The other type is men who use fear to control their wives. These men are the most brutal, using extreme violence in a calculated campaign of terror. Beyond these | An Elusive Picture of Violent Men Who Kill Mates |
736916_4 | of Belfast newspapers, he is "familiar with the thinking" of one of the major Protestant paramilitaries, which means that he functions as their above-ground counselor. He worked long hours to bring them around to the idea of their own cease-fire. "Naturally, Protestants are frightened. Up to now, they've been left out of the process. Have you ever been outside closed doors when people inside are talking about you? You're fearful, right? So you pull down the shutters. It's called paranoia." The cease-fires are a bit ragged but, as of early January, are still holding. The British Government and Sinn Fein, the I.R.A.'s political arm, have held several rounds of "exploratory" talks but achieved no breakthrough. On New Year's Eve, Catholics and Protestants met on the "peace line" separating their neighborhoods to drink Champagne. But terrorists on both sides still administer "punishment beatings," dragging young men said to be lawbreakers out of their homes and smashing their legs with iron bars and baseball bats. It's a method of maintaining control in neighborhoods that remain off-limits to the police. Both groups still extort money from bars and small businesses and sell drugs to finance operations, though not, they claim indignantly, near schoolyards. But the bombs and the bullets are for the most part absent. As people here understand only too well, a cessation of hostilities is not the same thing as permanent peace. For that, a series of immediate hurdles has to be somehow surmounted: Will the I.R.A. and the paramilitaries hand over their guns? Will prisoners on both sides, who are jailed for criminal offenses that the groups regard as political, be released? How will a neutral and effective police force be set up? How can a local assembly be established that is acceptable to both Catholics and Protestants? How much of a role can Dublin play in the affairs of the province? And, at the end of the day, there must be a determination that Ulster's sovereignty lies either with London or with Dublin. How can these seemingly irreconcilable positions be squared? The devil doesn't lie in the details but in the grand design. It's a matter for Solomon, as exacting a charge as deciding the provenance of the disputed baby -- except that in this case both mothers would prefer that the child be cut in two than that it fall into the arms of the other. AT THE | Protestant and Paranoid in Northern Ireland; By John Darnton |
736906_0 | To the Editor: My wife and I have been commercial airline passengers since the DC-2, but never had this experience. We purchased round-trip tickets on Delta from Los Angeles to Kennedy International to Pisa, Italy. We left the West Coast on Delta Flight 1982 on Sept. 25, 1994, and arrived in Rome on Delta 148 on Sept. 26. We checked in at Alitalia for Flight 1106 to Pisa. Our luggage had been checked through and was on the plane to Pisa. Although we had confirmed reservations, we were told that no seats were available for us. I discussed this matter with Alitalia personnel, but to no avail. We found that the Alitalia flight to Pisa was being held up for a delayed Alitalia flight from New York. My wife and I sat for 20 minutes at the Alitalia gate and then 12 Alitalia passengers from Kennedy arrived and were put on our flight. Our luggage was taken off and we were told we would have to take a later plane. When I reiterated that we had confirmed reservations, their purser said, "You must understand you are Delta passengers and we take care of our Alitalia passengers first." So we were left in the Rome airport. I contacted the Delta representative who said this was not the first time Alitalia had done this but Delta had no control over this type of situation. He upgraded our return tickets. I rented a car to drive to Pisa and return to Rome for our Delta flight home. This trip was part of our 52d wedding anniversary celebration. HERBERT S. WEINTRAUB Atherton, Calif. Benito Frisoli, a consumer relations supervisor for Alitalia, responds: It is our policy to accept passengers booked on flights regardless of the trans-Atlantic carrier. At times, an existing overbooking situation may be perceived subjectively by the passenger as "second-class treatment," but this is definitely not the case. We are reponsible for reprotecting on the next available flight or, if this is not possible, for providing denied boarding compensation. In addition, where a passenger feels he or she has a claim, it is the passenger's responsibility to notify our office to seek adjustments. If Mr. Weintraub had contacted us, we would have offered an explanation and extended any due compensation. | Getting to Pisa |
739814_0 | In an extraordinary statement reflecting the deep concern in many religious circles over sexual misconduct by the clergy, leading officials of the Episcopal Church disclosed yesterday that Bishop David E. Johnson of Massachusetts, who committed suicide two weeks ago, had been involved in several extramarital affairs throughout his ministry. The statement, signed by the church's top official, Presiding Bishop Edmond L. Browning, said some of the relationships "appear to have been of the character of sexual exploitation." Bishop Johnson's successor, Bishop M. Thomas Shaw, who also signed the statement, said that no formal charges against Bishop Johnson had been filed with the church but that women had come forward to tell of extramarital affairs. He said he could not speak further on that subject in order to protect the women's identities. The Episcopal Church defines sexual exploitation as a person using his ecclesiastical authority "over another person to use that person or abuse that person," said Jay Cormier, spokesman for the Massachusetts Diocese. He said the persons with whom the Bishop was allegedly involved were adult women. Bishop Shaw said church officials believed that "the only way we can go forward in the healing process is if the truth is known and the truth is shared as much as possible." He said Bishop Johnson's family approved the statement's release. The statement on Bishop Johnson comes in the middle of growing concern within Protestant denominations and the Roman Catholic Church over sexual abuse by clergy of children and sexual involvement between clergy and parishioners. Over the past decade, highly-publicized lawsuits were filed by people saying they were victimized either as children or adults by sexually predatory clergy. In many cases, the complainants charged that church authorities had become aware of these instances, but did not move to help the victims nor to discipline the clergy involved. The statement on Bishop Johnson said that while some persons "suspected such behavior" on his part, "unfortunately no one possessed the factual information necessary to have made these situations known in any venue where appropriate action could have been taken." The Rev. Edward Rodman, who worked closely with the Bishop, said that people began to tell of instances of sexual harassment after the Bishop's suicide. "One of the problems was that since the Bishop is the person responsible for adjudicating matters of sexual misconduct, people couldn't go to him with their problems," Mr. Rodman said. | Episcopal Church Reveals Sexual Misconduct by Bishop |
740165_1 | to truck farmers, many of whom make field-fresh produce available at local vegetable stands all summer. Home gardeners can concentrate on the crops they can grow best. Catalogue pictures are ever so tempting. Every year more new vegetable varieties are offered with promises of better flavor, higher yields and that wonderful overworked phrase, "Improved." In many cases, this improvement is valid. Take carrots for instance. Much of the research on that vegetable is being done by the United States Department of Agriculture. According to the Agricultural Research Service, 30 years ago carrots contained only about 70 parts per million of carotene, a source of vitamin A. Now, it's 120 to 160 parts per million. It is expected that by the turn of the century, the carotene in carrots may be tripled. A trend now for salads is to use the mesclun mix, an assortment of greens that need only a tasty dressing before being set on the table. Sometimes shoppers buy several sorts of greens to make their own mixes, but many retailers now package the mix for you. Or you can grow your own. Johnny's Selected Seeds, Albion, Me. 04910-9731, for example, offers a mesclun mix in its 1995 seed catalogue. The greens can be either mild or spicy, and the catalogue suggests sowing a short row or small patch every two weeks for a continuous supply through the summer. It also notes that the seed mixture can be grown in window boxes. Harvesting begins in about three weeks, in most cases involving just clipping the plants with scissors to allow them to regrow. Home gardeners like to save space to grow tomatoes, too. In fact, this may be the most popular grow-your-own-at-home vegetable. Many old stalwart varieties still exist, particularly the Homestead, which has been a consistent offering in catalogues for years. Newcomers to look for this year have promise of disease resistance and fast maturity. At the top of this list is Better Bush Improved (Park Seed Company, Greenwood, S.C. 29647-0001). The plants are stocky and should do well in containers. Two other tomato newcomers to look for are Super Tasty, a hybrid that is said to be especially productive (Burpee) and Yellow Brandywine, with good flavor (Johnny's). Garden centers may also have tomato seedlings of Super Boy Hybrid 785, which is described as "excellent for making salsa." Peppers are to the fore this season as well, | Balancing Space, Variety and Vegetables |
740207_0 | ON a raw Saturday morning last month, Marsha Bacon Glover left her home in White Plains and drove to the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in Manhattan. When she walked into the cavernous Gothic church, Ms. Glover, a corporate lawyer at Kraft General Foods in White Plains, was a part-time Episcopal deacon. When she stepped out into the pouring rain that afternoon, she was a newly ordained priest. The ordination of Ms. Glover is a striking example of a newly emerging trend in the Episcopal Church toward what she calls "bivocational clergy." She said she intended to pursue her legal career and her church vocation with equal dedication. Begun in 1892, St. John the Divine seems more a product of the Middle Ages, with artisans still carving stone gargoyles behind scaffolding, peacocks strutting around the 13 acres of gardens and buildings, homeless people interacting with tourists -- a world inside a cathedral close. But the December ceremony in this "mother church" of the Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of New York gave these ancient images a very modern twist. In the dramatic opening procession, punctuated by incense bearers and bishops in their distinctive hats, Ms. Glover was flanked by three women and one man from her ordination class. In the Episcopal Church, a priest may be a man or a woman and may be married. Of the five ordained, two besides Ms. Glover plan to be bivocational priests, one with a simultaneous career in teaching and a second in hospice and church-related work. Twenty-five miles north of St. John the Divine, the picturesque and comparatively tiny Church of St. Mary the Virgin in Chappaqua lost its full-time rector in October. It received a temporary replacement this month. Between October and her December ordination, Ms. Glover, as part-time deacon, helped out with St. Mary's parish work and with those parts of the Sunday morning service that did not require a priest. The day after her ordination, she was able to officiate at communion, to the delight of an overflow pre-Christmas congregation of families, many with young children. Some of those families had traveled to Manhattan for the two-hour ordination ceremony and reception that followed, and the St. Mary's choir was one of two featured in the service. On the Sunday before Ms. Glover's ordination, the communion service had been performed by the Rev. David Rider, a priest, parish member and | A Corporate Lawyer Is Ordained and Doubles as a Priest |
740059_0 | THE City Council voted last week to allow a developer to raze most of what remains of what once was Mount St. Florence, a Roman Catholic convent and girls' school that has been in the city since 1874, to make way for a 174-unit single-family-home development. Sitting high on a hill overlooking the city, with a view of the Hudson River from the tops of the buildings, the school has become the center of a local controversy in recent months, pitting the developer, Chapel Hill Development Corporation of Peekskill, against a local preservation group. Of particular concern to those attending the meeting Monday night was the fate of a 16,000-square-foot chapel, which has 55 German-made stained-glass windows and an altar with a 25-foot-high marble canopy. Some people suggested turning it into a recreation or community center, but the Council and the developer have said they do not believe such a solution is feasible. And the chapel, along with several other buildings, is scheduled to be demolished -- although the altar and windows are to be saved. At one time, Mount St. Florence was a sprawling residential facility for young girls who were referred by the New York City court system. It was run by the Sisters of the Good Shepherd and covered 120 acres of rolling hills and farmland. Over the years, the school has been reduced to a complex of eight buildings, built between 1865 and 1957. In 1986 it was sold to the Mount Florence Group developers, who built a a town-house and garden-apartment condominium development known as Chapel Hill Estates. The original plans called for a total of 566 units, some of which were to have been created in the existing school buildings. But with the collapse of the condominium market in the late 1980's, those plans were halted in 1992 after 48 apartments and 99 town houses had been completed in the condominium development. Last April, Marvin Hellman and Icek Cywiak, principals of Chapel Hilld Development Corporation, bought the property from a subsidiary of Fleet Bank for $1.25 million, including back taxes. Max Pesach, managing agent for Chapel Hill Development, said that he was now in the process of finishing 32 additional apartments that already had their foundations in place. In addition, he said he planned to demolish most of the school buildings and build 174 single-family homes. The two-, three- and four-bedroom houses will be | In the Region/Westchester; Peekskill Council Approves Razing Girls' School |
740206_3 | minds" can be known "only through the great books." But Professor Strauss's appeal to conservatives also comes from his being what they describe as a democratic elitist. The Straussians cite one sentence of his as a key to his thinking: "Democracy," he wrote in a 1959 essay, "is meant to be an aristocracy which has broadened into a universal aristocracy." He seemed to be saying that, yes, he was an elitist, but everybody else can be one, too. He acknowledged that "aristocracy is unjust." At the same time, democracy, by putting power into the hands of ordinary people, was a dangerous exercise. The way out was to instill "virtue" in every individual by means of the study of the great books. The second Strauss sentence cited by the Straussians is this one: "We are not permitted to be flatterers of democracy precisely because we are friends and allies of democracy." The attempt here is to show that Professor Strauss, while a critic of democracy, also felt, like Winston Churchill, that it was the worst of all systems -- except for all the others. His concern perhaps stemmed from an event of great personal importance to him: the failure of the Weimar Republic in Germany, where Professor Strauss grew up, to survive the demagoguery, mobocracy and anti-Semitism of the Nazis. A good deal of his scholarly life was spent in an attempt to fathom the reasons for this, and that complicated quest led him to a lifelong scrutiny of the same great books that he recommended to others, moving backward from Rousseau and Locke to Spinoza and Machiavelli and, finally, to the Greeks. Professor Strauss's thinking is not easy to grasp. For example, he quarreled with the Enlightenment's faith in the power of institutions to reform human behavior. But his former students maintain that he also remained powerfully attached to the Jeffersonian idea that certain truths were self-evident. The greatest evil, he believed, did not lie in unalienable rights. The danger came from romantic and rationalist critics of the Enlightenment like Rousseau, Nietzsche and Heidegger, all of whom believed that a certain intuitive passion was a truer guide to life than reason. When this was fused with traditional German anti-Semitism, Professor Strauss believed, its culmination was in the Holocaust. These would not seem to be especially conservative ideas. But Professor Strauss became a conservative hero, and a liberal villain, because his | The Nation; A Very Unlikely Villain (or Hero) |
740164_1 | to truck farmers, many of whom make field-fresh produce available at local vegetable stands all summer. Home gardeners can concentrate on the crops they can grow best. Catalogue pictures are ever so tempting. Every year more new vegetable varieties are offered with promises of better flavor, higher yields and that wonderful overworked phrase, "Improved." In many cases, this improvement is valid. Take carrots for instance. Much of the research on that vegetable is being done by the United States Department of Agriculture. According to the Agricultural Research Service, 30 years ago carrots contained only about 70 parts per million of carotene, a source of vitamin A. Now, it's 120 to 160 parts per million. It is expected that by the turn of the century, the carotene in carrots may be tripled. A trend now for salads is to use the mesclun mix, an assortment of greens that need only a tasty dressing before being set on the table. Sometimes shoppers buy several sorts of greens to make their own mixes, but many retailers now package the mix for you. Or you can grow your own. Johnny's Selected Seeds, Albion, Me. 04910-9731, for example, offers a mesclun mix in its 1995 seed catalogue. The greens can be either mild or spicy, and the catalogue suggests sowing a short row or small patch every two weeks for a continuous supply through the summer. It also notes that the seed mixture can be grown in window boxes. Harvesting begins in about three weeks, in most cases involving just clipping the plants with scissors to allow them to regrow. Home gardeners like to save space to grow tomatoes, too. In fact, this may be the most popular grow-your-own-at-home vegetable. Many old stalwart varieties still exist, particularly the Homestead, which has been a consistent offering in catalogues for years. Newcomers to look for this year have promise of disease resistance and fast maturity. At the top of this list is Better Bush Improved (Park Seed Company, Greenwood, S.C. 29647-0001). The plants are stocky and should do well in containers. Two other tomato newcomers to look for are Super Tasty, a hybrid that is said to be especially productive (Burpee) and Yellow Brandywine, with good flavor (Johnny's). Garden centers may also have tomato seedlings of Super Boy Hybrid 785, which is described as "excellent for making salsa." Peppers are to the fore this season as well, | Balancing Space, Variety and Vegetables |
740182_6 | colonies like Dominica, St. Lucia, Martinique and Guadaloupe. But a quota was set on bananas grown in the United States and Latin America, called dollar bananas. The quota limited duty-free imports to two million tons a year, a level that has since been raised to 2.56 million tons. Beyond that amount, heavy duties are imposed. The policy brought out the ire of the Germans, who consume almost a pound of bananas a person a week, twice as much as the British. Germans say the fruit from the former European colonies is of lower quality than Latin American bananas. In a more extreme argument, they have said that the barriers to bananas could produce a large new inflow of cocaine into Europe, as some Latin farmers are forced to turn to raising coca leaves, the raw material of cocaine. In any event, while the change in the import policy appears to be benefiting the small farmer in the former European colonies with increased sales, most of the added expense to the consumer is winding up in the pockets of European middlemen. A study by the World Bank found that European consumers are paying $700 million extra a year because of the new banana policy, and that $400 million goes to the middlemen, with only $300 million going to farmers. MR. KANTOR's recent letter is the result of an investigation by the United States trade office that began last October, after Chiquita and the Hawaii Banana Industry Association filed a complaint under Section 301. The office has also told four Latin American countries -- Colombia, Costa Rica, Nicaragua and Venezuela -- that they could be subject to sanctions as well. After successfully complaining to GATT about the European restrictions, the four worked out individual agreements with the European Union about the control of their banana exports. The agreement essentially allows their farmers unlimited duty-free exports to Europe, while controlling the amount that American producers in their countries can ship, an arrangement that hurts American interests, the trade office said. With sentiments divided as much as they are in Europe, few bureaucrats in Brussels want to see the issue reopened and fan the flames of a trade battle. "This is one of those things that can get out of hand," one commission official said. "So why is the U.S. threatening a trade war over what is not of major economic importance to them?" | Lowly Banana Has a High Profile in a Trade Dispute |
739969_1 | mention of the old classics had us smacking our lips -- in December! She's tired of my experiments with green, striped, purple, white and red-and-yellow tomatoes. "Let's just have some regular tomatoes," she said, waving the new Burpee catalogue in my face. Mr. Ball, of course, falls head over heels for a new hybrid every year. He has to. If Burpee didn't claim to have a tastier, more disease-resistant tomato for 1995, we'd be outraged. What would Janice and I have to argue about? Last year, Mr. Ball was touting Heatwave as the hybrid miracle, due to its ability to continue to flower and set fruit in the hottest weather; in my opinion, it wasn't worth eating. Who knows? Maybe Super Tasty really is super tasty. I dare you not to try it. (W. Atlee Burpee & Company, 300 Park Avenue, Warminster, Pa. 18991; (800) 888-1447.) This is the time of year for the tomato-obsessed to try to choose which seeds to order -- from literally thousands of varieties. There are even catalogues that cater almost entirely to tomatoes. The Tomato Growers Supply Company, in Fort Myers, Fla., offers 250 varieties. It was started 11 years ago by Linda and Vince Sapp, whose personal favorites include Brandywine, Great White (really big and really sweet, they say), Green Zebra (a tangy green-and-yellow striped heirloom that's a favorite of mine, too) and Black Prince. "It's a Siberian tomato that's about the size of a tennis ball," Mrs. Sapp said. "It's really sweet and juicy, but also acid. Some call it a rich, smoky taste. The flesh is a mahogany color. And it's really prolific." (The Tomato Growers Supply Company, Box 2237, Fort Myers, Fla. 33902; (813) 768-1119.) Totally Tomatoes, in Augusta, Ga., offers about 300 varieties. It's part of the 125-year-old seed company R. H. Shumway, which was bought about 10 years ago by, naturally, a tomato lover, Wayne Hilton. "Our family favorite is Amish Paste, an heirloom out of Lancaster County, Pa.," Mr. Hilton said. "We like it for slicing as well as paste. I don't like as juicy a tomato as most people, and this one isn't as acidic as most red tomatoes." Mr. Hilton credits the Seed Savers Exchange, in Decorah, Iowa, for introducing him to many old heirlooms. Seed Savers offers 3,000 tomato varieties to members, and this year, for the first time, it is selling two dozen | Tomato Talk: You Say Big Beef, I Say Brandywine |
740167_1 | to truck farmers, many of whom make field-fresh produce available at local vegetable stands all summer. Home gardeners can concentrate on the crops they can grow best. Catalogue pictures are ever so tempting. Every year more new vegetable varieties are offered with promises of better flavor, higher yields and that wonderful overworked phrase, "Improved." In many cases, this improvement is valid. Take carrots for instance. Much of the research on that vegetable is being done by the United States Department of Agriculture. According to the Agricultural Research Service, 30 years ago carrots contained only about 70 parts per million of carotene, a source of vitamin A. Now, it's 120 to 160 parts per million. It is expected that by the turn of the century, the carotene in carrots may be tripled. A trend now for salads is to use the mesclun mix, an assortment of greens that need only a tasty dressing before being set on the table. Sometimes shoppers buy several sorts of greens to make their own mixes, but many retailers now package the mix for you. Or you can grow your own. Johnny's Selected Seeds, Albion, Me. 04910-9731, for example, offers a mesclun mix in its 1995 seed catalogue. The greens can be either mild or spicy, and the catalogue suggests sowing a short row or small patch every two weeks for a continuous supply through the summer. It also notes that the seed mixture can be grown in window boxes. Harvesting begins in about three weeks, in most cases involving just clipping the plants with scissors to allow them to regrow. Home gardeners like to save space to grow tomatoes, too. In fact, this may be the most popular grow-your-own-at-home vegetable. Many old stalwart varieties still exist, particularly the Homestead, which has been a consistent offering in catalogues for years. Newcomers to look for this year have promise of disease resistance and fast maturity. At the top of this list is Better Bush Improved (Park Seed Company, Greenwood, S.C. 29647-0001). The plants are stocky and should do well in containers. Two other tomato newcomers to look for are Super Tasty, a hybrid that is said to be especially productive (Burpee) and Yellow Brandywine, with good flavor (Johnny's). Garden centers may also have tomato seedlings of Super Boy Hybrid 785, which is described as "excellent for making salsa." Peppers are to the fore this season as well, | Balancing Space, Variety and Vegetables |
740260_0 | The Irish and British Governments failed this week to resolve serious differences on a plan they hope will eventually allow representatives of the Irish Republican Army to take part in full-fledged peace negotiations on Northern Ireland. But Gerry Adams, the leader of Sinn Fein, the political wing of the I.R.A., which has accused the British of delaying approval of the plan, said the organization's attitude was "positive and pragmatic," although the Sinn Fein goal was still "some new Irish jurisdiction" to replace British rule in Northern Ireland. After his first formal meeting with the new Irish Prime Minister, John Bruton, Mr. Adams said they had a "good relationship" and that Sinn Fein still wanted to sit at a negotiating table with officials of Ireland, Britain and the other interested parties in Northern Ireland. On Thursday, after a five-hour meeting in London, the Irish Foreign Minister, Dick Spring, and the British Secretary for Northern Ireland, Sir Patrick Mayhew, failed to overcome their differences on the framework by which Sinn Fein can join full talks on Northern Ireland, although they said they made progress, and other officials said an agreement should be reached by mid-February. The differences are over two issues. The first concerns the Irish constitutional claim to sovereignty in the six counties of Northern Ireland versus the British law that partitioned the country in 1920, making Ulster an integral part of Britain. The second issue concerns what are called cross-border institutions linking Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic. Regarding the constitutional question, the Irish have tentatively agreed to alter their constitutional claim to Northern Ireland, but the British are said to want explicit language put in the Irish Constitution that would guarantee that the Protestant majority in Ulster would not be subsumed in a united Ireland without its consent. Similarly, the Irish want changes in the British law that established partition. The cross-border institutions to be included in the framework drew heavy criticism last week from James Molyneaux, head of the Ulster Unionist Party. Mr. Molyneaux and other Protestant leaders feel that such institutions effectively create joint authority over Northern Ireland by Dublin and London, and, as such, are a step toward a united Ireland. The haggling in recent weeks has been over what kind of power such institutions would have in areas like tourism, agriculture and fisheries, and whether they would be autonomous or subject to some legislative authority. | Ireland and Britain at Odds Over Ulster Talks |
740168_1 | to truck farmers, many of whom make field-fresh produce available at local vegetable stands all summer. Home gardeners can concentrate on the crops they can grow best. Catalogue pictures are ever so tempting. Every year more new vegetable varieties are offered with promises of better flavor, higher yields and that wonderful overworked phrase, "Improved." In many cases, this improvement is valid. Take carrots for instance. Much of the research on that vegetable is being done by the United States Department of Agriculture. According to the Agricultural Research Service, 30 years ago carrots contained only about 70 parts per million of carotene, a source of vitamin A. Now, it's 120 to 160 parts per million. It is expected that by the turn of the century, the carotene in carrots may be tripled. A trend now for salads is to use the mesclun mix, an assortment of greens that need only a tasty dressing before being set on the table. Sometimes shoppers buy several sorts of greens to make their own mixes, but many retailers now package the mix for you. Or you can grow your own. Johnny's Selected Seeds, Albion, Me. 04910-9731, for example, offers a mesclun mix in its 1995 seed catalogue. The greens can be either mild or spicy, and the catalogue suggests sowing a short row or small patch every two weeks for a continuous supply through the summer. It also notes that the seed mixture can be grown in window boxes. Harvesting begins in about three weeks, in most cases involving just clipping the plants with scissors to allow them to regrow. Home gardeners like to save space to grow tomatoes, too. In fact, this may be the most popular grow-your-own-at-home vegetable. Many old stalwart varieties still exist, particularly the Homestead, which has been a consistent offering in catalogues for years. Newcomers to look for this year have promise of disease resistance and fast maturity. At the top of this list is Better Bush Improved (Park Seed Company, Greenwood, S.C. 29647-0001). The plants are stocky and should do well in containers. Two other tomato newcomers to look for are Super Tasty, a hybrid that is said to be especially productive (Burpee) and Yellow Brandywine, with good flavor (Johnny's). Garden centers may also have tomato seedlings of Super Boy Hybrid 785, which is described as "excellent for making salsa." Peppers are to the fore this season as well, | Balancing Space, Variety and Vegetables |
738843_1 | Normandy 55 miles northwest of Paris, and named him to a inactive one in Mauritania. The act stirred up Gallic passions against Rome and aroused the French left at least as much as the campaign for the presidential elections next spring, in which the leftdoes not yet have a candidate who appears to have a chance of winning. At 59, Bishop Gaillot looks like a balding, bespectacled choirmaster innocent of the ways of the world. Conservative critics saw him as a relentless publicity-seeker and were angered by his expressions of pacifism during both the cold war and the fight to expel Iraq from Kuwait in the Persian Gulf in 1991. But today belonged to the Bishop and his admirers, to whom he waved goodbye, without bishop's miter or crosier, opening his cathedral wide for the cameras and several hundred reporters. Florence Roux, a young Parisian woman who took a chartered train from Paris to support the Bishop, said, "The victimization of the weak is the biggest problem in our society today, and we need people like him who are not afraid to speak up." Jacqueline Courtault, a social worker who attends Mass regularly, said: "The French left is in a crisis. Here is a man who has given up everything he had to save the lost sheep of our society, and I want to show him we're there for him today." The French church has had a strong socialist wing since the 19th century movement begun by Felicite de Lamennais, a priest who finally broke with the church. French bishops have struggled with Rome for centuries, but like Bishop Gaillot, usually without breaking with it. To many French Catholics on the left, the "Polish Pope" -- John Paul II -- and his more conservative doctrine seem worlds apart from what they consider Bishop Gaillot's attempts to make the church relevant to modern European life. "In France, less than 10 percent of Catholics practice their religion regularly," said Rene Remond, a leading French historian. "More and more French people are distancing themselves from the church, and the Gaillot affair will stretch the tie a little more, not only among the nonpracticing." A public opinion poll published Wednesday said 64 percent of the French who were asked disapproved of the decision, though only 47 percent of the Catholics who regularly went to Mass were against it. Bishop Gaillot was critical of his | Thousands Protest the Dismissal of a Leftist French Bishop |
738870_0 | FOR more than a decade, agricultural scientists have been tinkering with the genes of plants in hopes of making them more naturally resistant to diseases and pests. Now a San Diego-based biotechnology company has received what appears to be a broad patent covering a method for making crops unappetizing to insects. The patent for the Mycogen Corporation covers bacillus thuringiensis, a soil-based bacteria better known as Bt. This bacteria manufactures proteins that can cause an insect's stomach to explode, but apparently do not harm humans. The bacteria is now sprayed on crops as a biological insecticide, but researchers have been figuring out ways to get plants themselves to start producing the proteins. First, scientists tried injecting unadulterated Bt genes directly into plant cells and then growing plants from those cells. But the new plants contained the Bt protein at disappointingly low levels. "The problem was that, to a plant cell, Bt genes look very unfamiliar," said Mike Adang, a professor of entomology at the University of Georgia and a consultant to Mycogen. So Professor Adang and his colleagues set about trying to make a Bt gene look more like a plant gene. A Bt gene is essentially a string of DNA with hundreds of building blocks known as nucleotides. The researchers found they could substitute certain nucleotides with others to make the bacteria gene look more like a plant gene, without changing the protein that gene produces. "We rebuilt the whole gene by changing about 10 percent of the nucleotides, but we kept the protein exactly the same," Professor Adang said. "That was the eureka." About 50 Bt strains produce different types of proteins. Each of the proteins is harmful only to certain bugs. So far Bt proteins have been effective against caterpillars, mosquito and fly larvae, beetles, and nematodes. Several companies, including Mycogen, Monsanto, Ciba-Geigy, and Calgene, have applied for Government approval to market crops that contain Bt proteins. Such crops are expected to become available commercially in 1996. Carl J. Eibl, general counsel at Mycogen, said the patent broadly covered any method of modifying Bt gene sequences to make them resemble plant genes. Despite the patent's breadth, Mr. Eibl said he did not anticipate troubles similar to those that have plagued Agracetus, a W. R. Grace subsidiary whose wide-ranging patent covering transgenic cotton was revoked last month by the Patent Office following industry protest. Agracetus is appealing the | Patents; A Biotechnology Company Uses Bacteria to Make Crops Unappetizing to Certain Insects |
738741_0 | World Economies | |
738746_0 | In this instance the White Rabbit was a draft of air coming out of the ground in the gorges of Ardeche, nearly 100 miles north of Avignon, France. Two men and a woman exploring the gorges promptly started clearing the debris covering a small hole leading to a larger space. Six days later, on Dec. 24, the three crawled through the narrow 21-foot tunnel they had made and into a sight as extraordinary as that which greeted Alice on her journey down the rabbit hole. "It was a great moment," one of them said. "We all shouted and yelled." What they saw, after lowering themselves on a rope through the ceiling of a great cavern, were hundreds of Stone Age paintings. Drawn in yellow ochre, charcoal and hematite are rhinoceroses, horses, bears, mammoths, a slouching hyena and the Paleolithic era's first recorded paintings of owls and a panther. Sealed from the depredations of moisture, animals and humankind for thousands of years, they looked fresh from their makers' hands. Sometimes the White Rabbit is a story: Homer's Odyssey led Heinrich Schliemann to ancient Troy. Sometimes, as with those who found the tomb of Tutankhamun, it is simple stubbornness. A search for treasure sent four French lads tumbling toward the caves of Lascaux. Last month, in Ardeche, it was that sudden, unexpected breath. | Mammoths in the Rabbit Hole |
740406_1 | fares on flights starting or ending in Denver by an average of $40, to offset the much higher costs of operating at the new Denver International Airport. The increases will take effect on March 6. Frontier Airlines has said it will raise round-trip fares by $30 beginning on March 1. The Denver airport, which cost $4.2 billion to build and faced long delays in opening, is scheduled to open on Feb. 28, with airlines having to pay much higher rents, landing fees and other costs than they did at the city's old airport, Stapleton International Airport. Airlines often pass on higher operating costs to customers in the form of fare increases, but usually those costs have been related to more expensive fuel, as during the Persian Gulf war. A spokesman for United, Tony Molinaro, said most ticket prices would rise by about 6 percent, though the increase of $40 on some discount tickets would amount to 7 to 8 percent. The fares for passengers on connecting flights through the airport will not be affected. "United regrets that it is necessary to open the new airport with new fares," the airline said, "but it is absolutely essential in light of the cost we will be incurring." United said it would pay, for example, $210 million a year to operate at the airport, about $160 million more than it paid at Stapleton. Mr. Molinaro said $210 million was nearly half the total amount that United paid to operate out of all the other airports it used in the United States. United is by far the busiest airline serving Denver, handling about 50 percent of the traffic and moving 20 million passengers a year. Continental is the second-largest carrier in Denver, while American accounts for a much smaller number of passengers there. When the higher fares take effect, a round-trip, seven-day advance purchase fare between Boston and Denver will rise to $704 from $664, an increase of 6 percent. The 14-day advance purchase fare between Denver and New Orleans will rise to $552 from $512, an increase of 7.8 percent. The opening of Denver International Airport has been plagued by repeated delays, because of problems with its computerized high-speed baggage handling system. In an attempt to open the airport, the Mayor of Denver, Wellington Webb, decided last fall to spend about $50 million to build a conventional luggage sytem using tractors and carts. | Air Fares For Denver Will Rise |
735806_21 | competitive. But so does New York State. And both are trying to squeeze down to be competitive with the region to keep jobs and expand what we have. And the only way of getting there is by having clear priorities about what we have to do, not what we want to do, and then try to boost productivity, so we can do more with less. Nyman: We need, on a national level, to stop having babies. And what has disturbed me most about this, and I see it in my own community, are all of the monies that pour in here for the teen-age-pregnancy programs. You are picked up. You are driven to school. You are driven to a part-time job that we pay for. You go to a seminar group. They have a newsletter in Nassau County for pregnant women and teen-age mothers. We ought to just stop having the babies, and not only from a moral and human perspective but from an economic perspective, and then you don't have to worry about the jobs programs and the transportation programs. Bredes: You look at any of the countries that have reduced their birthrates, and I think the lessons are transferable. It's those countries that have provided education for young women, have provided something outside of home life, provided a transcendence outside of pregnancy, that have been able to reduce birthrates. That's what we need to do among the most impoverished in our communities. Some girls are going to have babies anyway, and they need some kind of support system. And it's mostly not-for-profit contract agencies that provide that. But I don't think that's the future we want to hold out for anybody. Lazio: One of the frustrating things about unwed pregnancies is that when women go out, young women go out, and men are too often off the hook on this. You have women who have children and go off to get their own apartment, because they qualify for it, and they cannot teach the children the skills that they need to compete in the world. They don't know how to open a checking account, how to build a resume. We expect people to be able to do that and to go out and get a job. And that is something that some on the right need to be sensitive to. And I think on the other side you | Assessing Effects of Impending Cuts in Government Services |
735546_0 | The new Irish Government, formed last month under Prime Minister John Bruton, is expected to delay action on two of this Roman Catholic country's most emotional issues: divorce and abortion. The Government of Albert Reynolds, deposed in a scandal over the handling of the extradition of a Catholic priest accused and later convicted of child molestation in Northern Ireland, had planned to consider changes in divorce and abortion laws in the spring. There had been tentative plans to hold a referendum on divorce, which is banned by the Constitution, and to legalize the distribution of information on foreign abortion clinics. Abortion in Ireland is legal only when the life of the mother is threatened. But in recent days it has become evident, officials confirm, that there will be no referendum on divorce until June at the earliest, and that action on abortion information will probably be delayed until summer. Politicians and analysts say the Government is delaying because of some opposition to change in Mr. Bruton's Fine Gael party, which is rooted in rural areas where liberalization of divorce and abortion have less support than they do in urban areas. One of the first polemic shots in the renewed debate on divorce was fired over the holidays by the Primate of Ireland, Cahal Cardinal Daly, who said the church would continue to oppose even limited legislation to allow divorce. Church opposition to divorce in a 1986 referendum helped defeat it by 2 to 1. Cardinal Daly said in an interview that any relaxation in the constitutional ban would lead to widespread divorce. Proponents of divorce argue that there are now 70,000 separated couples in this country of 3.5 million people, 95 percent of them Catholics. The last Government passed laws to protect property rights of divorced people, and some of these are now under judicial review. Fine Gael and Mr. Bruton's coalition partners, Labor and the Democratic Left, both favor an end to the ban on divorce. But proposals that the Government actively support legal divorce have run into controversy, particularly over whether the Government should spend public money to persuade the public to vote yes. The chief opposition party, Fianna Fail, is also on record as supporting a divorce law and is not expected to present strong disagreement. Current polls show that the public favors a change in the law, but that was also the case before the referendum | Irish to Delay Vote to Allow Divorce |
735688_4 | comfortable announcing his disabilities: "You're a misunderstood minority, and you have to deal with people who have some strange ideas about what it means to be learning-disabled. But there is a movement now, and it helps to know that you are not the only one." It may help affluent students more than poor ones, though, and white students more than minorities. Some educators worry that those getting special accommodations are disproportionately white students from families that can afford elaborate testing, special programs and tutoring. Furthermore, disability specialists say, some black students are reluctant to ask for special accommodation, fearing that it could create a perception that they are second-rate students admitted only because of affirmative action. And while few professors will admit it publicly, some -- particularly on campuses where are no formal programs for learning-disabled students -- still believe that learning disabilities are just an excuse for not-very-bright students who will not buckle down to work. Their skepticism is fed by the general scientific murkiness surrounding the causes of learning disabilities and their neurological bases. Generally, students are diagnosed as learning-disabled when tests show a serious discrepancy between their intellectual capacity and what they are able to achieve. Some disabilities are specific to particular areas: an individual may have trouble only with processing written language, or numbers, or speech. Others, such as attention deficit disorder, are more pervasive, making it difficult for the student to stay focused and attentive. While none of these conditions are new, it has been little more than a decade since they began to be diagnosed widely. The generation now in college is the first to include many students diagnosed as young children. Many of them succeeded previously within a cocoon of support, since Federal law -- specifically, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, or IDEA -- requires that public schools develop an individualized plan for each disabled student, and conduct periodic meetings and evaluations to make sure the child is getting the appropriate services. "There's been a ripple effect," said Loring Brinckerhoff, director of the LD Support Services office at Boston University. "Many of these students were diagnosed when they were much younger, and became accustomed to the special education services mandated under the law, so they come to higher education expecting the same level of services." But the law covering college students is quite different. "In college, there has to be self-advocacy by | For Learning Disabled, New Help With College |
735118_1 | percent default rate. The default rate among graduates who took loans is about 6 percent and did not increase appreciably during the recession. The more education individuals receive, the less likely they are to default. The doubling of the default rate in the 15 years before 1992 was due almost exclusively to the increase in borrowers at "schools" offering short-term training, hundreds of which have been eliminated from the loan program in the last two years. These ripoff artists left their students with few or no skills and large debts. College graduates get skills, they get jobs, and they repay their loans. Mr. Lipsky notes that banks make a huge profit on student loans, but does not state that under the Student Loan Reform Act of 1993, most loans will be made by the Federal Government directly to students, with no subsidy going to the banks. As of next July 1, 40 percent of all student loans will be made in this fashion. Mr. Lipsky praises President Clinton for creating a program that allows students to "pay off loans in proportion to their incomes," but criticizes him for not making the plan retroactive. Such a repayment plan was just implemented by the Department of Education and is available for students who have graduated. Information may be obtained from (800) 433-3243. The Department of Education study showed that the average borrower spent 5 percent of income paying off college debts the year after leaving school. However, 8 percent of borrowers were spending more than 10 percent of their income repaying their student loans. It is these students who are facing serious problems, and who are the folks policy makers should worry about. Mr. Lipsky repeats the canard that colleges use availability of Federal aid as an excuse to raise tuition, which stimulates more borrowing. But borrowing increases whenever Congress makes more people eligible or raises loan limits, as it has several times in the last 30 years. This pattern holds, whether tuitions are rising at a rate lower than inflation, as in the 1970's, or higher than inflation, as in recent years. Most borrowers find that Federal student loans make it possible for them to attend college, and the vast majority of graduates repay their loans on schedule, without complaint, grateful for the opportunity they received. TERRY W. HARTLE Vice President, Govt. Relations American Council on Education Washington, Dec. 30, 1994 | Student Loan Program Tells a Success Story |
737238_0 | In the year since the deadly Northridge earthquake, this disaster-hardened city has become aware of a frightening new danger: the fragility of the steel-frame buildings that at first seemed to have survived the shaking unscathed. And despite months of urgent laboratory testing as the extent of their mostly hidden cracks and fissures became clear, no one yet knows how to make the weakened buildings safer. Worries that the buildings could fracture or topple have been compounded by new warnings from seismologists that particularly strong or unusual ground motions in a future earthquake could threaten structures previously thought to be relatively safe. Suddenly, one of the most earthquake-ready cities in the world finds it may face a greater danger of damage than planners had imagined. As 4:31 A.M. on Tuesday -- the anniversary of the earthquake in the city's Northridge neighborhood -- approaches, a host of government agencies have issued reports on an extensive recovery effort involving multibillion-dollar Federal aid packages. But the city, in its own comprehensive report, acknowledged that it was stumped by the problems with the steel-frame buildings, which are considered the most earthquake-proof because of steel's ability to bend and sway but not break. "Even though nothing collapsed, the performance of the frames and the connections wasn't what was expected," said Nestor Iwankiw, a structural engineer who is studying the problem of steel-frame buildings for the city. "We don't know why certain things happened and didn't happen." More than 92,000 buildings were damaged in the earthquake, which measured 6.8 on ground-motion scales and caused 57 deaths and 8,000 injuries, according to the city's tally. Most of the damaged buildings were brick, concrete or wood. The city's 1,000 steel-frame buildings, able to bend and sway with the tremors, seemed at first to have withstood the shaking as they had been designed to. Then steel workers in the hills above the city reported an unexpected problem. There were fissures between columns and beams in two unfinished buildings at the Getty Center for the History of Art and Humanities, which was under construction at the time of the quake, said Karl C. Deppe, an official with the city's Department of Buildings and Safety. "This helped to clue us in to the fact that there was a real problem," he said. "Two engineers had also found buildings with uncommon fractures, and we said, 'Gee, this is unusual.' But as it unfortunately | Los Angeles's Steel-Frame Buildings: Quake-Proof or Not? |
737336_0 | World Economies | |
739084_3 | common. The real key to the magic of the Web, though, is hyperlinking. It works like this: a person is browsing through a document on the Web -- on Civil War battles, for example -- and comes across a highlighted reference to a related document. It does not make any difference whether the document is stored on the same computer or on a computer halfway around the world. Before the Web became popular, finding out about the related document, let alone getting to it across the Internet, required skills that make the Dewey Decimal System seem self-evident. The Web, in contrast, makes it relatively simple for the author of a document to forge a link between the documents (or pictures, or sound files or what have you) and embed all the necessary navigation commands invisibly in the highlighted text. Suppose, then, that one is reading the document on Civil War battles and sees the word "Merrimac" highlighted. Using the mouse pointer, the reader clicks on the word and in a few seconds is connected to a computer containing lists of other documents related to the Confederate ironclad ship. Within that list, in turn, are links to more related documents. Depending on the imagination of the reader, the path might lead to a discussion of nuclear-powered submarines, or to a biography of Alfred Nobel, who was an apprentice to the Swedish engineer who designed the Merrimac. With just a few clicks of the mouse, the reader can leap from computer to computer, connecting ideas, gathering resources, either pursuing a specific idea or allowing himself or herself to be swept along on the currents of serendipity. The software that made such point-and-click excursions possible is called a Web browser. The best-known browser is Mosaic, originally developed at the National Center for Supercomputer Applications (N.C.S.A.) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Mosaic quickly became the most popular Web browser for three reasons: it was the only browser available, it was free, and it worked on Windows and Macintosh personal computers as well as the Unix work stations that were the chariots of choice for early Internet gladiators. The fact that it was a brilliant work of software coding was a happy bonus. Since Mosaic appeared in 1993, nearly two dozen rival browsers have become available. A discussion of some of the leading ones will be included in a subsequent column. PERSONAL COMPUTERS | Making It Easier to Enter the Web |
739064_3 | of ice, droplets and trace chemicals like sodium, a small part of the beam's light is scattered back toward the earth, where a 14-inch-diameter telescope in the laboratory gathers it and pipes it to an array of detectors. Substances differ in how well they scatter different wavelengths of beam light, so multicolored laser beams probe different constituents of the atmosphere. Observations are expected to show how stratospheric ice crystals change in size and shape as the ozone hole is created, and how various crystal types affect ozone destruction. The laser probe will also track the chemical steps driving the process at various altitudes. Despite their efforts to automate part of the measuring processes, the team must leave behind one of its members, Paul J. Charpentier, to nurse the complex lidar throughout the long, dark winter. Although the National Science Foundation plans to build a new Clean Air Facility, for which the prefabricated components are already at the South Pole, the agency lacks funds to erect it, and conditions in the old building, which stands on stilts above the ice, are proving to be difficult. The lidar laboratory is overheated, and the scientists must leave a window open to cool the apparatus. Scientists labor in shifts to alternately fan or warm components of the laser that are so sensitive to temperature change that a variation of 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit alters results by 20 percent. The experiment has also suffered the effects of power shortages and brownouts created by growing numbers of scientists and support personnel at this crowded station. The South Pole electrical plant is operating at peak capacity, but power demands are forcing station residents to turn off washing and drying machines, curtail microwave cooking, turn off office lights and take other emergency measures. This is creating conflicts. The University of Illinois laser apparatus draws about 7,000 watts of power, but another big consumer of power has been an educational television project called "Live from Antarctica." The four-part broadcast series, sponsored by the National Science Foundation, featured live segments and direct communication between scientists here and schoolchildren in the United States. This month the producers of the program asked station officials to increase the availability of electrical power by closing down the laser lidar experiment for 48 hours. But Dr. Papen and Dr. Gardner refused, saying that critical data would be lost. The brownouts continued. The University of Illinois lidar | Laser at South Pole to Track Ozone Depletion |
809261_0 | A computer E-mail message listing "75 reasons why women should not have freedom of speech," which was sent as a prank by four freshmen at Cornell University to 20 friends, has ricocheted through the Internet, provoking thousands of angry messages to Cornell from campuses around the country. Cornell has charged the students -- Evan Camps of Bethesda, Md., Rikus Linschoten of Newport Beach, Calif., Pat Sicher of San Juan, P.R., and Brian Waldman of Massapequa, L.I. -- with sexual harassment and misuse of computer resources, said the university's judicial administrator, Barbara Krause. Ms. Krause said the charges stemmed from lines like, "If she can't speak, she can't cry rape," and, "Of course, if she can't speak, she can't say 'no.' " The message also contained vulgarities about oral sex, she said. David Lambert, the university's vice president for information technology, said that this was not the first time offensive material had appeared on the Cornell network, but he added that the university had never before had such a wide response to the message that the four students sent last month. Students and faculty members at many colleges, from Harvard to Stanford, have contacted Cornell's administration to lodge complaints. The four students said they had been receiving 50 to 60 threatening responses a week. Cornell's vice president for university relations, Jacquie Powers, said, "There were threats from various groups to try to crash our system." Mr. Lambert said his department had been virtually overwhelmed by phone calls and E-mail. After receiving nearly 1,000 messages, he said, he stopped reading his E-mail. By treating the incident as a case of sexual harassment, the university has run into an escalating debate about free speech on the Internet. Many private universities have speech codes that prohibit racist or sexist language and have applied these codes to campus computer networks. But Cornell does not have such a code, nor does it control the content of its computer network. Ms. Krause said the university brought charges against a student only if his or her speech constituted harassment against a specific individual who complained that the message was directed at him or her. The sexual harassment complaint might be difficult to pursue, she added, because it was not made by any of the 20 original recipients. The university's sexual harassment guidelines require that for a violation to be found, one of the original recipients must file the | Cornell Charges 4 Students in E-Mail Prank |
809260_2 | too drastic in the Republican plan and that some of the savings would go to a tax cut for the wealthy. But as the year progresses, interest rates would probably reverse direction, Mr. Crandall and others said, as the effects of a slight reduction in Government spending and the absence of off-setting tax cuts worked their way into the economy and slow it down. Bond traders like slow growth because they believe that means inflation will remain in check. A stalemate on the budget is also likely to slow moves by the Federal Reserve to cut short-term interest rates, which would help spur economic growth. Recent data, including yesterday's weak retail sales report for October, suggest that the pace of economic activity is slowing in the fourth quarter. Under other circumstances, analysts said, the numbers might be sufficient to persuade the Federal Reserve, whose policy makers meet in Washington today, to cut short-term interest rates immediately. But the continuing uncertainty about the budget effectively rules out that option, the analysts said. In a report sent to clients last night, Mr. McKelvy and other economists at Goldman Sachs said: "We believe that Fed officials will wait for the outcome of the budget debate before easing monetary policy further. More important, the implications of no budget deal for economic growth and inflation suggest that the next round of easing would not be the last." Efforts to curb Government spending have been applauded by Wall Street in the past, and the current effort has been taken particularly seriously, if only because it is led by a Republican-controlled Congress. At least some of the recent drop in interest rates has been due to a perception on Wall Street that momentum in Washington to balance the budget was building. But economists say the positive impact has been less than what Republican leaders in Congress claim. In 12 months, long-term bond yields have fallen by nearly two full percentage points, to 6.28 percent yesterday. BATTLE OVER THE BUDGET: THE MARKETS Correction: November 16, 1995, Thursday An article yesterday about the impact of the Government's partial shutdown on the Securities and Exchange Commission misstated the size of a securities registration fee. It had been one twenty-ninth of 1 percent of the value of the registered securities -- not one twenty-ninth of the securities' value; yesterday it dropped to one-fiftieth of 1 percent, not one-fiftieth of the value. | Wall St. Tries To Handicap Budget Fight |
811857_2 | scores of unopened tombs, plus the vast tumulus, 260 feet high and built by 700,000 workers, that encloses the emperor, his wives and architects (buried there to assure their silence about its treasures). Old records say the mausoleum contains a throne room, a copper dome showing the sky, a relief map of China with rivers flowing with mercury, all said to be guarded by booby traps. Because Chinese excavators are not sure their skills are equal to the challenge of toxic mercury, an assault on the tumulus is being deferred. Diggers have ample work, meantime, at innumerable tombs near Xian, China's imperial capital for 1,100 years. The very best finds, all dug since the 1960's, are in a new Provincial Museum, opened in 1991, as awesome as it is uncelebrated. Here in pristine condition are regiments of Tang horses, exquisite bronzes, two miniature armies and vivid frescoes. Abetting the boom is a 1991 law requiring surveys and salvage work before breaking ground on major engineering projects. Thanks to oil discoveries in Xinjiang Province, this has given archeologists funds for long-delayed campaigns. For the first time major joint projects are underway with American, French and Japanese scholars, in half-buried Silk Road cities in the Taklamakan Desert and the Caves of the Thousand Buddhas in Dunhuang. This has been accompanied by a revision of old dogmas. No longer are Western explorers like Sir Aurel Stein vilified simply as plunderers. From the turn of the century until the 1930's, Britain's Stein and Sweden's Sven Hedin, among others, were the first to draw the world's attention to the ancient riches in China's deserts and caves, thus opening the way to today's golden age. In a country where the market mentality thrives, it is the Chinese themselves who have plunged into the swelling antiquities trade. New and tough laws have not deterred wholesale plunder. Artworks are readily smuggled by boat to Hong Kong, where in 1994, according to the current Archaeology magazine, customs officers seized 500 Han and Tang figurines worth $5.7 million. With 350,000 tomb sites, China is an easy target for pillage. "To be rich," instructs a peasant saying, "dig up an ancient tomb; to make a fortune, open a coffin." In today's China, the past is but one more bonanza, and China's still-buried wonders may be to the next century what Greek and Egyptian treasures have been to ours. KARL E. MEYER | Editorial Notebook;China's Golden Shovels |
811815_2 | available a lot of relevant information," Dr. Gordon J. MacDonald, Medea's chairman and a geophysicist at the University of California at San Diego, said in an interview. The new reconnaissance effort is run for Medea by the National Reconnaissance Office in the Pentagon and is coordinated by the Central Intelligence Agency, which is apparently pleased with the broadening of its responsibilities. "It's an exciting new issue to engage in," said a senior Federal intelligence official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. "Modest amounts of resources are producing interesting results. The other thing that makes it interesting is the high-level interest. It makes any producer enthusiastic if you've got eager customers." The program is very different from the related effort to mine old spy-satellite photos for environmental data, a process the Clinton Administration recently began. That effort, featuring photos originally taken for military reasons, is often hit or miss in terms of ecological relevance. In contrast, the new effort directly targets nature and its subtleties. So too, the program is different from recent intelligence gathering that studies natural phenomena for clues to the deeper roots of war and focuses on such things as drought, population growth and lack of arable land. Medea scientists say spy satellites have several advantages over standard environmental studies. Coverage is wider and cheaper than that done by armies of scientists on the ground and can aid in spotting trends. Moreover, spy satellites can often assess faraway areas virtually inaccessible by other means. The scientists add that spy satellites are better than civilian remote-sensing craft, like Landsat or Spot, which orbit the earth for the United States and France, respectively. Military craft can zoom in on ground targets, letting scientists learn more. Moreover, they say, these spy images can often aid civilian analyses. "You can use the intelligence assets to make the interpretation of the civilian ones much more accurate," said Dr. Dozier of the University of California at Santa Barbara. By definition, the vision of spy satellites is far more penetrating than civilian ones, though Medea scientists are barred from discussing such differences. It is well known that spy satellites not only take color and black-and-white photos but readings in hundreds of different parts of the electromagnetic spectrum, using such instruments as space radars to see through forest canopies and desert sands. Since the cold war's end, policy makers in Washington have heatedly debated how | U.S. WILL DEPLOY ITS SPY SATELLITES ON NATURE MISSION |
807183_0 | From her Silicon Valley office, a 30-year-old graphic designer frequently uses her company's Internet access to look for a new job, perusing the listings on the World Wide Web as she would the newspaper classified ads. She then clicks her way from one favorite home page to another, including a brief stop to check out surfing conditions in nearby Santa Cruz. Surfing the Net, it seems, can make the desktop computer anything but an employee productivity tool. They shouldn't have given me Netscape if they didn't want me to browse the Web," said the woman, only half-joking. (She spoke on the condition of anonymity, for obvious reasons.) "When things slow down, I cruise around, when I probably should be doing something else." Oh, what a tangled web, this Internet. Log on at work for a legitimate reason, and before you know it you're caught up in something far more captivating than whatever it was you were supposed to do. Which is why some companies -- even some of the most technology-savvy -- have started to limit employees' Internet time and access. Network administrators at Lockheed Martin Technical Aircraft Systems in Fort Worth, for example, recently discovered that several employees with Internet privileges had been making visits to sports sites on the World Wide Web, along with other, seamier destinations that the officials declined to discuss. All this was done on Lockheed time, using company Internet accounts. "We looked at some data two or three weeks ago that showed there was significant abuse going on," said a Lockheed network technician, Frank Williams. Mr. Williams said the company took disciplinary action against the workers, whom he would not identify, and began monitoring all employee Internet activity. Lockheed is by no means the only place where managers are concerned that frivolous net surfing could waste time, run up access fees or clog internal computers. Pepsi-Cola North America, based in Somers, N.Y., saw the potential for abuse when it began connecting employees to the Net earlier this year, and quickly rewrote its policy on employee use of company equipment to include Internet use. Superfluous surfing "may be cause for disciplinary action and/or termination," warned a document distributed to all employees. "You can burn a lot of time on the Internet," said Jerry Gregoire, Pepsi's vice president of information systems. "We wanted to make sure people knew what our expectations were." So far, no Pepsi | Finding On-Line Distractions, Employers Strive to Keep Workers in Line |
810302_0 | The Federal Aviation Administration authorized airports across the nation yesterday to ease parking bans and vehicle inspections imposed last month to guard against terrorist attacks. But New York's major metropolitan airports did not immediately do so, and other measures in the tightest airport security since the 1991 Persian Gulf War remained in effect across the country. The F.A.A. has advised air carriers and airport authorities that they may modify parking restrictions, based on a reassessment of information from law-enforcement and intelligence agencies," said a spokeswoman for the aviation agency, Sandra Allen. She said bans on parking, particularly near terminals, and inspections of cars, trucks and vans could be changed or even eliminated by the airports under the agency's directive. But Ms. Allen emphasized that all other security measures would continue. These include random, time-consuming checks of travelers' identities requiring the matching of photo-identity cards and names on airline tickets, occasional questioning of passengers and close inspection of all luggage. She declined to say if the relatively modest changes in security measures imposed amid terrorist threats in August and intensified in October meant a diminished threat of terrorism, which has worried airlines, airport operators, Federal and local law-enforcement officials and travelers for months. But Ms. Allen said the changes in security measures, which had led to delays and inconvenience for thousands of travelers, had "absolutely nothing" to do with the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays, during which millions will be taking flights. The lifting of parking bans and vehicle inspections was optional, the F.A.A. said. But most of the nation's 500 busiest airports were expected to ease them, making thousands of parking spaces near terminals available for the first time since early October and easing life for travelers who drive to airports. At Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport, officials yesterday reopened about 1,400 one-hour parking spaces near the terminal. At Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport, a ban on parking within 300 feet of the terminal was removed, making hundreds of spaces available, and inspections of all vehicles were dropped. At St. Louis International Airport, a police spokesman, Officer Mike Helldoerfer, said security had been lowered in response to the notice, but he declined to say what the changes entailed. But New York's major airports -- Kennedy International, La Guardia and Newark International -- declined, at least immediately, to ease parking and inspection restrictions, said officials of the Port Authority of New York and New | F.A.A. Lets Airports Ease Some Security Measures |
808408_12 | Mr. Roth is, of course, in many ways, the state's reigning laureate, with New Jersey -- particularly Newark and its environs from the 1940's and 50's -- serving as the background for many of his self-mirroring characters, if not the setting for the books. Indeed, the progenitor of the current spate of Jersey fiction is probably "Goodbye, Columbus" (1959), the title novella from Mr. Roth's first book of fiction, which established his reputation and won the National Book Award. This coming-of-age tale about a romance between an earnestly intellectual Jewish man from working-class Newark and a spoiled college student whose family had escaped the city for the nouveau riche suburbs, dealt with many of the themes that American writers have spent the last 35 years exploring: suburbanization, ethnic assimilation, class consciousness. It also established the home-and-lawn-owning life, particularly the kind that has since proliferated in New Jersey as a dubious objectification of the American dream. Mr. Roth, naturally, foresaw little, if any, of this. "In the beginning it simply amazed him," he wrote about the young author of "Goodbye, Columbus" in a preface to the book's 30th-anniversary edition, "that any truly literate audience could seriously be interested in his store of tribal secrets, in what he knew, as a child of his neighborhood, about the rites and taboos of his clan -- about their aversions, their aspirations, their fears of deviance and defection, their underlying embarrassments and their ideas of success. . . . What did the tiresome tension between parents and children in lower-middle-class Jewish Newark -- arguments about shiksas and shrimp cocktail, about going to synagogue and being good -- have to do with Shakespeare and the stoicism of Seneca, or, for that matter, with all the abundance of the unimaginable life to come?" But it had a lot to do with those things, and of course this is what literature has frequently accomplished; the imagination often shows the real world the way, which in this day and age, perhaps, judging by contemporary fiction, goes through New Jersey. As it happens, that's not a bad thing. "What makes New Jersey so interesting," said Mr. Katz, the mystery writer, "is that there's only one reason to live here, and that's to raise a family. It's not particularly pretty. It's not particularly cheap. It's not particularly culturally interesting, even. It's got at its center this whole notion of the drama | To See Ourselves As Writers See Us |
808601_0 | An influential group of experts in Roman Catholic church law has concluded that ordaining women as deacons in the church would be in keeping with Catholic theology and past practice. The group, the Canon Law Society of America, gave a cautious endorsement of such a step as "desirable" for the United States. Catholic Church officials have periodically raised the question of ordaining women as deacons in an effort to re-examine church teaching on women and ordained ministry without running athwart Pope John Paul's unequivocal opposition to female priests. The Pope and the Vatican have carefully refrained from ruling out ordination of women to the diaconate, even in major pronouncements against ordaining women to the priesthood. The study was approved by the Canon Law Society at its annual meeting last month in Montreal. The society, an influential organization of priests and lay scholars who serve on church tribunals and advise individual bishops on church policies, concluded, "Women have been ordained permanent deacons in the past, and it would be possible for the church to determine to do so again." The study said that a frequently cited biblical reference to "Phoebe, a deaconess" in Paul's Epistle to the Romans did not indicate a regular church office, which was yet to evolve. By the third century, however, "there clearly were women deacons," the study said, adding that a majority of scholars, although not all, believe that these deaconesses were ordained and considered clergy in a manner parallel to men. Within Catholicism, ordination to serve as deacons is considered part of the same sacrament of Holy Orders as ordination to the priesthood. In much of the church's history in the West, ordination as a deacon was a preliminary to becoming a priest. In the 1960's, the church restored the office of permanent deacon and opened it to married men. The Canon Law Society study said that opening this permanent diaconate to women as well would require relatively few changes in church law, and need not be done on a churchwide basis. The study noted that local cultural factors were always important in decisions to ordain women as deacons in the early centuries, and that cultural changes in the role of women in the United States had already been cited by the nation's bishops as requiring new approaches in the church. Deacons are authorized in Catholic Church law to preach at liturgies, to administer baptism | Expert Panel on Catholic Church Law Backs Women as Deacons |
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