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1426221_0 | Chinese Uprooted by a Dam | |
1426196_2 | -- about one-fiftieth. Estimating from travel time that the towns were 5,000 ''stadia'' apart, Eratosthenes concluded that the earth must be 50 times that size -- 250,000 stadia in girth. Scholars differ over the length of a Greek stadium, so it is impossible to know just how accurate he was. But by some reckonings, he was off by only about 5 percent. (Ranking: 7) Galileo's experiment on falling objects In the late 1500's, everyone knew that heavy objects fall faster than lighter ones. After all, Aristotle had said so. That an ancient Greek scholar still held such sway was a sign of how far science had declined during the dark ages. Galileo Galilei, who held a chair in mathematics at the University of Pisa, was impudent enough to question the common knowledge. The story has become part of the folklore of science: he is reputed to have dropped two different weights from the town's Leaning Tower showing that they landed at the same time. His challenges to Aristotle may have cost Galileo his job, but he had demonstrated the importance of taking nature, not human authority, as the final arbiter in matters of science. (Ranking: 2) Galileo's experiments with rolling balls down inclined planes Galileo continued to refine his ideas about objects in motion. He took a board 12 cubits long and half a cubit wide (about 20 feet by 10 inches) and cut a groove, as straight and smooth as possible, down the center. He inclined the plane and rolled brass balls down it, timing their descent with a water clock -- a large vessel that emptied through a thin tube into a glass. After each run he would weigh the water that had flowed out -- his measurement of elapsed time -- and compare it with the distance the ball had traveled. Aristotle would have predicted that the velocity of a rolling ball was constant: double its time in transit and you would double the distance it traversed. Galileo was able to show that the distance is actually proportional to the square of the time: Double it and the ball would go four times as far. The reason is that it is being constantly accelerated by gravity. (Ranking: 8) Newton's decomposition of sunlight with a prism Isaac Newton was born the year Galileo died. He graduated from Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1665, then holed up at home for | Here They Are, Science's 10 Most Beautiful Experiments |
1426233_0 | THREATS AND RESPONSES | Getting Ready for Combat |
1426199_5 | The idea is fairly simple. While areas of nearly 25,000 acres are needed to have a good chance at preserving most large forms of life, plants and insects can sometimes be preserved in plots of 25 or even 2.5 acres. In the Amazon, for instance, Dr. Wilson said, where the land is being savaged, ''You'll see hanging on the side of a ravine somewhere a patch a farmer hasn't farmed, one hectare, to maybe 10.'' Such a small area may not catch the eye of most conservationists, he said, but, he added, ''The entomologist and the botanist is likely to say, hold on a minute.'' A researcher, he said, may find species not found anywhere else, and such plots can grow, with care and reseeding of the surrounding area. ''You can do this in most parts of the world, in most developing countries, where a farmer or village elders would happily take a thousand bucks for you to set aside 10 or 100 hectares and even hire them to help with the reseeding,'' he said. But it is not just the developing world where biodiversity can be preserved, bit by bit. City parks may hold small wonders. Even at Walden Pond, in the midst of the Massachusetts suburbs, he said: ''Many of the species you find here are new to science. The basic biology of most of these things is poorly known or not known at all.'' In the Walden woods live two relatively unknown ant species in the genus Myrmica. ''They've been noticed, but not named or described,'' he said. As to the nematodes and mites, he said, lifetimes can be spent and careers can be made studying them. It is not, of course, entomologists, or even weekend naturalists, who need convincing about the richness of the forest floor. And there are many reasons to try to preserve biological diversity at the near-microscopic level and below. There is always potential economic value in new biochemical discoveries. There is real and present economic value in clean air and water, to which the plants and insects and microbes contribute. In fact, Dr. Wilson points out, the life of the planet is built on a foundation of tiny creatures. In ecological systems it is the giants that stand on the shoulders of mites. Finally, there is the simplest argument of all, that life itself, in all its variations, is astonishing and mysterious, | A Wild, Fearsome World Under Each Fallen Leaf |
1426046_1 | quickly determine whether the person is who they say they are, or whether they have purchased on the market, which we all know are available, a document that is falsified.'' In a test this summer, the system evaluated the passports of 225,000 departing passengers at the international terminal, he said, and picked up several forgeries. Under the current system, security experts say, no one who is checking ID's can be expected to know whether a license is valid. ''Somebody pulls out a driver's license from Colorado, and I see a picture, I see that it says, 'Colorado Division of Motor Vehicles,' or whatever, it says, and I say, 'Have a nice day,' '' Mr. Kinton said. The 50 states and various other agencies have issued more than 150 different licenses. The new system was built by Imaging Automation, of Bedford, N.H. It is already in use at border crossings and airports in Hungary, Finland and Sweden, and Britain has ordered the system for use in consulates to determine if people applying for visas are presenting valid documents, said the company's chief executive, William H. Thalheimer. Like the British government, the port authority is concerned with the security of ''breeder documents,'' counterfeit ID's that a traveler can use to persuade a government entity to issue another document that is valid. But the Imaging Automation equipment still raises problems, said Barry Steinhart, the director of the American Civil Liberties Union's program on technology and liberty. The first question, Mr. Steinhart said, was whether the system actually works, or is instilling a false sense of security among security personnel. Logan is testing face recognition technology, but has declined the civil liberties union's request for data on how well it works, Mr. Steinhart said. ''I certainly would want to see the evidence that it works, subjected to peer review,'' he said. ''We need to be very careful of war on terrorism profiteers in this climate, who are selling technologies that don't in fact make us safer,'' he said. He added that he had no information suggesting the Logan equipment was in that category. Another question is what would happen to the information after it is gathered, he said. A scanner at a boarding gate could generate an electronic passenger manifest, complete with stored images of the photographs on the license or passport, the moment the cabin door was closed. ''Whether it works or not, | At Airport In Boston, A Closer Look At ID Papers |
1426050_1 | modernization, and we need to learn how to exploit the forest without destroying it,'' Mr. Viana said. ''If we treat the forest like a garden, as a renewable resource, we will grow faster than if we cut it down.'' During the 1980's, Mr. Mendes, a leader of the rubber tappers' union, argued in favor of a similar approach to development, winning global renown as a symbol of conservation in the Amazon. But his campaign so offended ranchers, loggers and other businessmen who had always controlled power here that some of them eventually decided to have him killed. ''When Chico was still alive, to talk of defending the forest, the Indians and rubber tappers was seen as being against progress and the interests of the Amazon,'' said Senator Marina Silva. ''Fourteen years later, though, no one would have the courage to say such a thing, and even the most fierce critics of Chico Mendes agree that we have to have controlled development.'' Ms. Silva, 44, is perhaps the best example of the process Mr. Mendes set in motion. Born into a family of rubber tappers, she was illiterate until she came here to the state capital at age 17 to seek treatment for the malaria and hepatitis she had suffered while growing up in the jungle. Not long after she arrived, she met Mr. Mendes and then began to study history at the main university in this state of 600,000 people. She was elected to the Senate in 1994 and is now running for a third four-year term. ''I'm in politics because of Chico Mendes,'' she said. Both Ms. Silva and Mr. Viana are favored to win new terms in an election scheduled for Oct. 6. Recent polls showed Ms. Silva with a comfortable lead, and Mr. Viana was supported by 60 percent of those who responded. Late last month, however, the state electoral commission unexpectedly disqualified him from the race, endorsing opposition arguments that he was illegally using the emblem of the government, a tree, to promote his own candidacy. Mr. Viana immediately appealed the ruling, which he described as an attempt ''to win an election by decree that can't be won at the polls.'' Early this month, the federal electoral commission unanimously overturned the decision. Mr. Viana is now pressing the federal government to send election observers to polling places deep in the jungle, where he fears fraud may | A Brazilian Campaign That Is All About the Jungle |
1426087_0 | Two years have passed since Congress approved a $7.8 billion measure to restore the Florida Everglades. The bill commanded overwhelming bipartisan support and provided the framework for what could be the most ambitious environmental restoration project in history. This extraordinary undertaking, a joint project of the federal government and the State of Florida, is now at a critical stage. The Army Corps of Engineers, which will do the actual work, is drawing up its final ''programmatic regulations'' -- a legally binding road map that will guide the project well into the future. Meanwhile, Congress is facing important decisions about how much money to authorize for several specific pieces of the project that cannot long be delayed. The plan is also at a delicate moment in other ways. In recent months, a brisk cottage industry has developed among academics who say the project is fundamentally flawed. They contend that what's advertised as a restoration project is in fact little more than a multipurpose plumbing job aimed at providing more water for Florida's insatiable developers -- and that little can be done about it. It is true that the project is complicated and, in both engineering and ecological terms, no sure thing. In essence, it calls for capturing one trillion gallons of Florida's copious rainwater that now gets flushed out to sea, and rerouting it into the Everglades, where both flora and fauna are dying off from lack of fresh water. To that end, the corps plans to replace the flood control system it built a half-century ago with reservoirs to store the water, as well as new canals and levees to distribute it to the South Florida ecosystem and, in lesser amounts, to farmers and individual users. That's a formidable agenda -- and well worth the effort. As Marjory Stoneman Douglas, the legendary Everglades activist, once observed: ''The Everglades is a test. If we pass, we may get to keep the planet.'' But if we are to succeed, there can be no retreat from the project's fundamental purpose. As stated by Congress, that purpose is the ''restoration, preservation and protection of the South Florida ecosystem,'' meaning that nature -- not the cities, not the developers, not the farmers -- must this time have first claim to the water. The corps' draft regulations restate that general principle. As a practical matter, however, they give urban users, developers, agriculture and flood control equal | Decision Time on the Everglades |
1426013_0 | IT has been a long-cherished dream of the digital age: video on demand. That's the term used for the delivery of cinema-quality movies to television households, with each consumer choosing what to watch and when to watch it. But the technical challenges have been a deterrent. The main obstacle for cable systems has been creating and maintaining a sufficiently large database of movies. The problem for Internet systems has been network circuits too narrow to carry data files the size of movies, which can be four billion to nine billion bytes each. In the last year, though, a flourishing digital video-on-demand market has developed, thanks to the least probable of carriers: the United States Postal Service. Because of cost advantages and, in some cases, even an edge in speed, the Postal Service, FedEx and other physical delivery services now seem to be the dominant mechanism for bringing data-rich digital content, on demand, into the nation's households. The secret of the Postal Service's digital success is the DVD, a plastic disc that costs about a dollar each to manufacture in quantities of a thousand and only 37 cents to mail. The public's rapid embrace of the DVD format since its introduction in 1997 has been well documented, both in terms of sales of DVD player consoles and the discs themselves, which Hollywood and distributors have chosen to price as a for-purchase product -- as opposed to the rental-market economics on which the videocassette business was based when it emerged. And yet a brisk rental market for DVD's has also developed. Much of the rental activity is conducted by companies like Netflix, CafeDVD, QwikFlicks and DVD Avenue, all of which let customers choose their movies from Web sites, but deliver them as DVD's through the mail. (With most of these services, customers pay monthly subscriptions and receive other DVD's once they have mailed back the movies they have already watched.) If this system does not fulfill the immediate gratification implicit in the typical video-on-demand pipe dream, at least it is allowing real people to watch real movies of their own choosing. Andrew Odlyzko, the director of the Digital Technology Center at the University of Minnesota, says that the cost to the service provider of transmitting a data file the size of a typical DVD movie over the Internet could be nearly $20. What's more, a home user with a 56-kilobit-a-second modem could | DVD's have found an unexpected route to a wide public: snail mail. |
1427358_0 | Whether the comparison was Sontag's or the senator's, the assertion that the family of a 19-year-old in a serious car accident would not face the predicament of forgoing treatment or being crushed by debt is, unfortunately, dead wrong. Our 19-year-old son was catastrophically injured in a high-speed head-on collision when a van crossed the center line. We learned that families of a person with a severe head injury have options much like the ones the Domenicis describe. Brain injury creates a wide array of physical, mental and emotional impairments. Care for its mental and emotional consequences is limited, like care for mental illness. And although physically devastating injuries are covered, cost-containment pressures began almost immediately for us to ''give up'' on our son. Even though he made a strong recovery, health-insurance policies have painfully little coverage for the many rehab therapies needed for decades, if not for life. Marjorie M. Shultz Richmond, Calif. | When Politics Is Personal |
1427387_2 | very much on Ms. Shaw's mind. ''It's not like the production has moved on, as much as that the world has moved on,'' she said. ''Two years ago, we lived in a world where Greek tragedy had to justify its position, but that has changed now. What was marked yesterday is a televised shocking example of people coping with unimaginable horror. This morning, we rehearsed the scene where the messenger comes in and describes the deaths of Creon and Glauke. It is like what people lived last year: people saying simple things about a state of affairs that seems impossible to comprehend -- but we do have to comprehend it.'' For Ms. Warner, the play strikes an even more immediate chord. In a separate interview, and against a background of Prime Minister Tony Blair urging Britain to join the United States in any attack against Iraq, Ms. Warner said: ''We desperately need Greek plays. We need them when democracies are wobbly. I am living in a very wobbly democracy right now, whose Parliament has only just been recalled, and Commons may or may not have a vote about whether we go to war. Greece was a very new democratic nation, and a barbaric world was not very far behind them. They offered these plays as places of real debate. We can't really say the theater is a true place of debate anymore, but these plays remind us of what it could be.'' Ms. Warner, 43, and Ms. Shaw, 44, first worked together in 1988 on Sophocles' ''Electra'' for the Royal Shakespeare Company. Since then they have collaborated on a number of notable productions, including ''Hedda Gabler'' at the Abbey and Brecht's ''Good Person of Sichuan'' and Shakespeare's ''Richard II'' (with Ms. Shaw in the title role) for the Royal National Theater in London. In the mid-1990's, Ms. Warner directed Ms. Shaw in an interpretation of T. S. Eliot's poem ''The Waste Land'' that toured internationally. It was seen in New York in 1996 at a decaying theater, the Liberty, on West 42nd Street, before the area was redeveloped, and received glowing reviews. The two women also work separately, and lately, their independent careers have come into the foreground. Ms. Warner has focused on opera and on theatrical projects that are not based on texts, including the transformation of a near-derelict hotel near London's St. Pancras railway station into a performance | An Ancient Tragedy Lands in the Present, Pain Intact |
1427825_8 | to require the SAT. But a nice byproduct of their virtue, as Zwick points out, is that when the test becomes optional, candidates who choose to submit their results are likely to have high scores, so the school's average SAT score goes up, and U.S. News approves. And as Steinberg somewhat gingerly suggests, financial aid is increasingly used as a bonus system for luring away from the competition strong prospects who may not need the money, with the result that less funding is available for needy students who do not quite make the hot prospects list. One popular strategy for driving up yield rates is to accept large numbers of early applicants, who usually must promise to attend if admitted -- the system into which Harvard may have thrown a wrench. Even though early decision programs tend to favor students who can afford to commit themselves to one institution without waiting to compare financial aid offers, early decision programs have been aggressively promoted. Another technique for lowering the admission rate and raising the yield is to turn down good candidates who appear likely to go elsewhere. ''The more applicants Wesleyan rejected in April,'' as Steinberg puts it, ''the more impressed the editors at U.S. News would be.'' This motive may seem dishonorable, but on the other hand, admissions officers who admit lots of students unlikely to enroll could jeopardize a college's future by heightening the impression that good students do not wish to go there. There are many wonderful students at colleges that employ the techniques described in these books. But whether all the frenetic activity actually results in a worthier class each year is dubious. The process seems to be less about enhancing academic quality than about making sure that the college passes what one applicant calls the ''Bumper Sticker Test''; and the best way to do this is to keep up its statistics, including winning records for its sports teams, relative to the competition. As for the preposterous power of U.S. News, Shulman and Bowen tartly remark that ''while presidents universally dismiss the rankings as shallow and thoroughly flawed, many are (with the other hand) manipulating their schools' data in such a way that they can climb a notch.'' In short, like the business executives who have lately been in the news for inflating corporate earnings, academic administrators have every incentive to meet or exceed next year's targets | The Struggle of All Against All |
1422760_6 | landed on a roof and removed people stranded on the upper floors. The firefighters, whose department has no helicopter, saw the police as showboats taking risks. Afterward, the Port Authority, with the agreement of the Fire Department, decided to lock the roof doors as a security measure. On Sept. 11, some 200 people tried to get onto the south tower's roof but could not open the door. The police decided a landing was too dangerous. One pilot noted that he did not see anyone on the roof. The city studies did not consider the wisdom of locking roof doors in skyscrapers, and do not mention if such arrangements exist elsewhere. As the towers were burning, Randy Mastro, a lawyer who served as deputy mayor under Mr. Giuliani, was asked on CNN if the city had changed its approach since 1993. Indeed it had, he said. In 1993, Mr. Mastro said, ''There was no coordinated city response. There was no Mayor's Office of Emergency Management. Rudy Giuliani established that. It's been one of the hallmarks of his tenure. And unfortunately, there are circumstances like this one where that coordinated effort has to come into play and is coming into play now.'' The belief in the coordinated public safety efforts of the Giuliani administration turned out to be much like the belief in the unsinkability of the Titanic. Early in the crisis, the Office of Emergency Management had to be evacuated. It had been placed in the trade center complex by Mr. Giuliani, against advice that it was unwise to put an emergency center in a terrorist target. The Police and Fire Departments barely spoke on 9/11. They set up separate command posts. The firefighters stayed on the ground, 900 feet below fires that the police in helicopters were seeing up close. The two departments had not practiced helicopter operations for at least a year before the attack. Literally as Mr. Mastro was speaking, the police in the sky were urging that everyone pull back from the tower, saying that a collapse appeared inevitable. This message was sent over police radios, but went unheard by firefighters. As many as 100 of them were resting on the 19th floor of the north tower. ''A wall of firemen, shooting the breeze, as if we were in a park,'' said Deputy Chief Joseph Baccellieri, the commanding officer of the New York State Court Officers Association. | Investigating 9/11: An Unimaginable Calamity, Still Largely Unexamined |
1422814_2 | president. ''But unless you keep the law enforcement focus and add customer service and efficiency to it, you will kill aviation.'' Delta has been one of the most outspoken airlines about scrapping certain security procedures, like searching carry-on bags at the boarding gate. The chief executive, Leo F. Mullin, made several trips to Washington over the summer to talk with federal officials about overhauling parts of the system. He is pushing for the government to drop, among other things, a security tax of $2.50 a flight leg that was added to tickets in February. In addition, the airlines have told the government that they will not pay $750 million that federal officials had requested of them for next year's security budget. The industry actually came up with that figure last winter when Congress asked it for an estimate of certain security costs, but the airlines have since said they will pay only $300 million. The companies have also banded together to support the idea of a ''trusted traveler'' card. Adm. James M. Loy, head of the federal security agency, said yesterday at a Senate hearing that he backed the concept. But such a program should be put in place slowly, some security experts say, and it could be costly for the taxpayer. Moreover, any watering down of current procedures -- including removing random checks -- could have dire consequences. ''I think the industry is being shortsighted if in fact that is their view,'' said Jeff Schlanger, chief operating officer of security services at Kroll Associates, an international risk assessment company. ''A decrease of security in airports during preboarding might inevitably lead to additional situations.'' Many experts agree that security is better now than a year ago but still has a long way to go before being truly effective. Mr. Schlanger recommended that guards be taught how to ask more probing questions of passengers and to watch for suspicious behavior. George Novak, an airline safety consultant and program director at the Aviation Institute at George Washington University, said bag searches at the gate should be kept for now because there is a chance a bag could be switched or tampered with after the security checkpoint. But truly efficient measures will come only as technology slowly improves, allowing the government to use facial recognition, iris scans and rapid database searches to check passengers, he said. Throughout the summer, embarrassing incidents revealed that | The Strains Are Showing in Air Travel |
1422685_2 | called ''Pages of Expression,'' will be scattered on the ground between the two gates. Among those Mr. Gallucci will use is by 11-year-old Brannon King of Summerfield, N.C., who wrote: ''When tragedy struck at the Twin Towers, all of the heroes used their powers. They tried to rescue people in trouble, from all of the dirt, fire and rubble. These are the people who are heroes to me.'' Another North Carolina resident submitted a poem that asks: ''Can ashes fill a space, a place, a land until its heart bursts and comes apart? No, ashes float drift scatter then land, never fill, but still matter.'' Even the bases of the two gates are symbolic. One is in the shape of a pentagon, and the other is a stylized rendition of an airplane. ''The steel has been damaged and disfigured, has suffered massive desecration and yet, like the human spirit, has withstood total destruction,'' Mr. Gallucci wrote. More information about the project is available online at www.9-11sculptureproject.org. Mr. Gallucci's project has attracted considerable interest from artists and others in North Carolina. Curious visitors appear regularly to watch the sculpture take shape, or just to stare at the twisted steel. On Sept. 11 he is planning an open house so people can view the smaller of the two gates, which he said would be complete or nearly so. James McMillan, a sculptor who teaches art history at Guilford College here, turned up at the studio on a recent afternoon. He handed Mr. Gallucci an envelope containing his own Page of Expression, and then mused about the project. ''I see it as an attempt to extract some meaning from what still seems to have been a very unreal event,'' Mr. McMillan said. ''It's very hard to make a tangible representation of feelings that are this overwhelming. But this is what artists do, and this particular design is one that I think a lot of people will find very moving, maybe even comforting.'' Steel from the World Trade Center was carted across the Hudson River to a salvage and recycling company in Newark, where Mr. Gallucci spent weeks persuading managers there to give him some of it. He said: ''There were a few conditions. They wanted us to finish the project within a year, and to bring it to New York at some point. The most important was that no one could profit from | Steel From Fallen Towers Is Reborn in Sculptor's Hands |
1422646_6 | located all but 90 of their 2,000 clients, whose premiums the company continues to pay. The office's newest arrivals, in addition to a framed photo of Mrs. Espinoza's infant son, are two file drawers nearly full of thin manila files. ''Look at all we've got,'' Ms. Murray said. ''It's amazing.'' Intera Corp. His old long-distance phone bills had to be somewhere in the mess of files he had strewn across his carpet, Meyer Feig later recalled. He had been searching for several days. Without those bills, it would be impossible to apply for a $10,000 grant to help restore his business, Intera Corp., the computer staffing firm he had operated on the 18th floor of the south tower. Even if he found them, Mr. Feig remembers thinking last October, what would $10,000 do to help reconstruct a $900,000-a-year business? And how many other grants would he have to secure? Each one would require him to call grant or loan officers. He had already had his fill of business-recovery forums, consultations with his bank, number-crunching sessions with his accountant, and the hassle of coaxing business records from swamped phone and utility companies. ''When you first sit down with a grant application, it's like you're sitting down for a final exam or the SAT's,'' Mr. Feig said recently. ''Actually, it's really worse -- there's so much riding on it.' Mr. Feig was beginning to run the gantlet that many business owners had to survive after the towers' collapse. The city, state and federal governments, as well as private foundations and a microlender, were offering grants or loans. But each required a different application, and grant administrators were asking for documents that everyone knew had been lost. Business owners spent weeks obtaining original paperwork from various public offices. For Mr. Feig, the process became so arduous that on three occasions he resolved to quit applying. Eventually, however, he completed seven applications, driven to rebuild a business he had been operating on his family's behalf for five years. To date, he has received $45,000 in grants. He anticipates $53,000 more. But he said the biggest payoff had been helping other small businesses to secure their own grants. He has founded an association of former businesses of the World Trade Center, and the 75 members have come to believe, he said, that there is some peace of mind, if not strength, in numbers. Mr. Feig | For Towers' Refugee Businesses, a Year of Struggle and Change |
1422758_1 | East are preparing for a suicide attack or attacks against U.S. interests. At this time, we have no specific information as to where these attacks might occur. The U.S. intelligence community has concluded that the most likely targets of Al Qaeda attacks are the transportation and energy sectors and facilities for gatherings that would be recognized worldwide as symbols of American power or security. Examples of such symbols are U.S. military facilities, U.S. embassies and national monuments. In addition, U.S. intelligence has concluded that lower-level Al Qaeda operatives may view the Sept. 11 anniversary as a suitable time to lash out in even small strikes to demonstrate their worldwide presence and resolve. Accordingly, widely dispersed unsophisticated strikes are possible as well. The specificity of some of the information and analysis has contributed to the decision to close four U.S. embassies in Southeast Asia and to elevate our security at all overseas diplomatic and military facilities. The increased threat level is based on specific intelligence received and analyzed by the full intelligence community. This information has been corroborated by multiple intelligence sources. Last year at this time, United States intelligence discerned similar patterns of terrorist-threat reporting overseas. In addition, other recent events parallel terrorist activity that occurred in the weeks prior to last year's attacks. I want to emphasize that the recommendation made today was not made to move to the highest level of alert, an action that would have been triggered by specific, credible intelligence and analysis pointing toward an imminent attack on the United States homeland. At this time, most intelligence focuses on possible attacks on U.S. interests overseas. As attorney general, I have directed the joint terrorism task forces nationwide. There are joint terrorism task forces all across America in the various F.B.I. district offices. I have directed that they coordinate their local response with U.S. attorneys and local antiterrorism task forces. In addition, I have directed that all relevant information be shared with the joint terrorism task forces in order for federal officials to work effectively and cooperatively with state and local officials. As we have been forced to do in the past, today we once again call on the American people to remain alert but defiant in the face of this new threat. We are not, we are not recommending that events be canceled. Nor do we recommend that individuals change domestic travel plans or that | Transcript of News Conference by Ashcroft and Ridge on Increased Alert |
1427938_0 | Sensing an opportunity in the radio industry's slowness to adopt digital broadcasting, a number of chip makers and radio manufacturers have introduced products that use software in receivers to sharply improve the quality and reach of broadcasts transmitted in the analog format. The latest contributor to the trend, Motorola, plans tonight in Tokyo to announce the most powerful set of microchips yet for such receivers, which convert standard analog AM and FM broadcast signals into a digital format. So far, the radio broadcasting industry in this country has not agreed upon uniform digital technical standards, which has left over-the-air digital radio service to subscription-fee satellite services. Analog radio signals use electronic waves analogous to sound waves. Digital signals use electronic pulses that can be translated into the precise 1's and 0's of computer code. When radio signals are in digital form, they can be filtered, cleaned up and manipulated by software. The result is better sound fidelity and the opportunity to add features like deeper bass tones. Software-driven receivers can compensate for the complex interference patterns caused when signals are bouncing off of buildings or hills, and they can tune into channels more accurately. Some software can also reconstruct extremely weak signals, allowing listeners to travel farther from their favorite radio stations without losing touch. Motorola's design, which can combine information from more than one antenna, taking advantage of the trend to putting more than one antenna on a car, is said to be a major improvement. ''It's going to give measurably better performance, especially in the AM band,'' said Will Strauss, president of Forward Concepts, a market research firm in Tempe, Ariz. Motorola plans to release details about the new chip sets, which are based on the Symphony line of audio processors it introduced in 2000, during its Tokyo presentation. Motorola said that the first products incorporating the new Symphony chip sets would be radios going on sale late next year as replacements for standard car radios. Motorola also said that it expected some car manufacturers to begin supplying Symphony-equipped radios in new cars in 2004. Motorola said its new chips would allow the elimination of so many components in receivers that radios going on sale next year should cost the same or less than today's premium analog systems. One of the first adopters is expected to be Hyundai Autonet, which sells after-market radios and original equipment for both | As Digital Radio Stumbles, New Products Fill the Gap |
1427984_0 | No country in the world has been struck as hard by the AIDS epidemic as Botswana, an arid, thinly populated land of 1.6 million inhabitants in southern Africa. An astonishing 39 percent of the adult population is infected with H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS, prompting President Festus Mogae to warn, ''We are threatened with extinction.'' The plight of Botswana is a sobering example of what can happen when the AIDS virus is allowed to spread widely before an all-out effort is mounted to contain it. Once deeply embedded, it is difficult to root out, even with generous aid from international donors. Other lands where the virus is beginning to take off, including China, Russia and Eastern Europe, had better take note. The epidemic threatens to undermine the tremendous gains made by Botswana over the last three decades in converting itself from a poverty-stricken basket case into a model of stability, peace, democracy, good government and strong economic growth. Life expectancy has already dropped by at least two decades, from a peak of 67 years to 47 or less. Social indicators that had shown steady improvement have now stagnated or gone into reverse. The economy, which had been growing at almost 7 percent a year during the 1990's and reached 9 percent growth last year, could lose as much as three percentage points of growth annually because of AIDS. The virus spread easily because Botswana lies along major transportation routes, the population is very mobile, and social customs tolerate such risky behavior as unprotected sex, multiple sex partners and sex between older men and teenage girls, a recipe for passing the virus from one generation to the next. As in most countries, the government and the public were slow to respond because of ignorance and taboos about even admitting the presence of the disease. But in the last three years Botswana has mounted an aggressive and comprehensive campaign that includes testing, prevention, treatment and supportive care for stricken families. The government has won international praise for offering free cocktails of antiretroviral drugs to all its citizens and mounting perhaps the best program in Africa to prevent mother-to-child transmission. Botswana is putting up substantial money of its own to fight AIDS, roughly $30 million a year, and is relying on hefty additional contributions from the United Nations, the United States and other sources. Major pharmaceutical companies are providing antiretroviral cocktails at | A Nation Facing Disaster |
1428016_0 | A 21-year-old student from Bulgaria who had worked the summer in New Jersey was arrested at Atlantic City International Airport yesterday after federal screeners examining his backpack found a small pair of scissors embedded in a bar of soap and two box cutters inside a lotion bottle, the authorities said. The suspect, identified as Nikolay Volodiev Dzhonev, was taken into custody at the airport's only security checkpoint when an X-ray machine detected metal in his backpack and the screeners pulled him aside and found the scissors and box cutters, federal officials and the Egg Harbor Township police said. Mr. Dzhonev, who had a one-way ticket for an 8 a.m. flight to Myrtle Beach, S.C., on Spirit Airlines, was charged by the township police with possession of a prohibited weapon, but was being held for federal investigators and possible federal charges, said a township police spokesman, Lt. Ted Kammer. Judge Robert Switzer of Municipal Court ordered Mr. Dzhonev held in $100,000 bail and remanded to the Atlantic County Justice Facility at Mays Landing. Robert Johnson, a spokesman for the Transportation Security Administration, the federal agency in charge of screening at 123 airports across the nation, said that Mr. Dzhonev had arrived at the airport 10 miles west of Atlantic City at 4:45 a.m. and was the first of 85 passengers to check in for the flight, but that he was the last to go through the pre-boarding security checkpoint at 7:30. Mr. Johnson said in an interview last night that the way the scissors and box cutters were packed appeared to have been an effort at concealment. He said the man's one-way ticket, bought over the Internet in August, was also suspicious. But he said that Mr. Dzhonev, who had worked all summer at a convenience store in the Atlantic City area on a four-month student work-and-travel visa, told investigators that he had bought the one-way ticket because he planned to visit a friend in South Carolina before returning to Bulgaria. Mr. Johnson also said Mr. Dzhonev denied any effort at concealment, saying he had packed the items to prevent them from damaging other things in his backpack. ''It may have been innocent, but the fact is those are prohibited items,'' Mr. Johnson said. After Mr. Dzhonev's arrest, his luggage was taken off the airplane and the flight left on time with all the other passengers aboard, said Lynne Koreman, a | Man With Box Cutters Is Arrested at Atlantic City |
1421757_40 | steel, 44,000 windows and enough concrete to build a sidewalk from New York to Washington, D.C. When the job caught its stride, the buildings shot skyward, rising two or three floors every week. The steel in the central core always led the exterior walls by a few stories. The cranes, which stood in the core like praying mantises, hoisted themselves up, built another level of the steel skeleton below them and then lifted Robertson's perimeter columns into place before linking core and exterior with the lightweight trusses. Back when Robertson did his plane study, he overlooked the towers' resistance to fire. And now that construction was under way, the fireproofing that the Port Authority was using to protect the thin steel components only heightened the towers' vulnerability to fire. Instead of the heavy masonry that protects the steel of structures like the Empire State Building, the authority chose a newly invented lightweight, low-cost product called mineral wool, which is sprayed as a kind of slurry onto steel, where it dries and forms an insulating coating. The idea of fireproofing is to protect a building's steel from becoming too hot and buckling if a fire breaks out. But even during construction, the spray-on material had problems staying attached to the steel of the World Trade Center. Rain would often wash the fireproofing off. When it was attached to steel that was rusty, it would flake off even without rain. The Port Authority still insists that its inspections caught the problems and that whenever fireproofing fell off, it was reapplied. But doubts about the product, which was just then coming into widespread use, never went away. It didn't help matters when it became known that the contractor charged with applying the fireproofing, Mario & DiBono Plastering, was connected to the Mafia. John Gotti was later caught on tape explaining that Louis DiBono, the company's president, had to die for the sin of disrespect. DiBono's body was found riddled with bullets in the basement parking garage of the trade center in 1990. (''He refused to come in when I called,'' Gotti explained on the tape.) Port Authority officials have defended DiBono's work -- at least when it came to applying fireproofing. But decades later, in the mid-1990's, a Port Authority engineer named Frank Lombardi discovered that the thickness of the fireproofing on the trusses would have been inadequate to protect the steel even | The Height of Ambition |
1421759_7 | For the team, the violence of last year exposed the need for new instruments of cultivation, tools for interpreting raw data on world events. This is why this project devotes key space at ground zero to cultural institutes of learning, buildings designed by Richard Meier and Steven Holl. The group also decided that the ground-zero site should specifically address the teeming infrastructure that lies below the city's surface. Rejecting the classical Grand Central Terminal notion of the ''big room,'' Rafael Viñoly designed a transportation hub that distributes the circulation space in a series of switchbacks and visually celebrates the industrial grandeur of converging rail systems. The study does not address the design of a permanent memorial, apart from recommending alternative sites. Since there are no physical footprints remaining of the World Trade Center, we have proposed articulating them in a reconstructed landscape. Though the team agreed that ideas for a memorial must come from a public process, Maya Lin was asked for her thoughts on what might be done. About the rebuilding of the towers themselves, the group was especially divided. In the end, it was decided that one proposal would be published -- for two towers, identical in size to the original ones, with one foot in ground zero and one foot outside it. Two shapes -- place holders for buildings that might occupy these sites -- were inspired by a variety of sources, including a sculpture by Isamu Noguchi, two airport control towers by Bartholomew Voorsanger, an office building by Frank Gehry, a conceptual design for ground zero by Richard Dattner and a pair of candlesticks of unidentified authorship. The idea was to present an ''unauthored'' symbol, an image of collective imagination. The symbolism is mutable: people can project a variety of meanings on these shapes, and they are all equally valid. For me, they signify resilience and the civilizing conversion of aggression into desire. Finally, though the team did not fully endorse this idea, we present David Rockwell's rendering of a giant cybertheater over the New York Stock Exchange, which he calls the Hall of Risk. It is designed to educate the public about the social trade-offs caused by modernization. Adjacent to it, Guy Nordenson and Henry Cobb have designed an elegant broadcast tower that they fancifully imagine as the tallest structure in the world. Rather than shying away from ambition, this project embraces it with all | Don't Rebuild. Reimagine. |
1421701_0 | To the Editor: I wonder whether Pierre Hadot, whose opus ''What Is Ancient Philosophy?'' you reviewed on Aug. 18, has ever heard about the contributions of philosophers in ancient China and India. It looks as though the title of his book should have been ''What Is Ancient European Philosophy?'' V. K. Balakrishnan Orono, Me. | Light From the East |
1421758_0 | Spandrels To keep the towers from swaying in the wind, the exterior columns were linked with wide steel plates called spandrels. Each plane sliced through dozens of load-bearing exterior columns; in differently constructed buildings that might have caused the upper floors to tip over toward the entry hole, triggering an instant collapse. Instead, the spandrels and columns created a spontaneous arch over each hole, staving off the collapse. Hat Truss Each building was capped with a rigid structure called a hat truss, which bound the exterior columns to the core. After the planes hit, the hat truss helped to spread the load onto undamaged columns and prevent an instantaneous collapse. Stairwell Placement Unlike stairwells in some earlier high-rises, which were spread out, the stairwells in the towers were clustered together in the cores. When the plane hit the north tower, it severed all of the stairwells at once, making escape from the upper floors impossible. By chance, the plane hit the south tower where the stairwells were less tightly clustered; at certain points, the stairwell shafts separated to accommodate mechanical equipment; . One stairwell partly survived, and 18 people were able to use it to escape from the impact zone. Exterior Columns In a radical departure from the ''steel cage'' superstructure in traditional high-rises, the pinstripe columns running up each tower's facade were turned into load-bearing supports that would carry almost half of each building's weight. The rest of the weight was supported by thick steel columns in the buildings' cores. The lack of interior support columns probably accelerated the buildings' collapse. Floor Trusses Instead of heavy beams and girders, the floors were supported by trusses made of thin steel bars. The trusses were covered by spray-on fireproofing, which was probably knocked off by the impacts. In the extreme heat of the post-impact fires, the steel weakened, causing the trusses to soften and sag and then to either snap or tear away from the exterior columns. This probably triggered the buildings' collapse. Stairwell Walls The walls protecting the stairwells were made of lightweight gypsum board, often called Sheetrock. The impact of the planes caused many walls to collapse into the stairwells, creating blockages and allowing smoke and flames to enter. Masonry stairwells might have withstood the impact, enabling some of the roughly 1,100 people who initially survived in or above the impact zones to escape. | A Feat of Engineering, and Its Consequences |
1422054_1 | of modifications, but lately has dropped its objections. But behind the protests, Africa has been developing genetically modified foods of its own, with the help of countries like the United States that see them as an important development tool. Scientists at the front lines of Africa's biotechnology revolution, in Kenya, South Africa and Egypt, say they believe that their lab work will eventually help develop heartier crops for a continent that has always been a difficult place to farm. ''Biotechnology is a tool, one of many,'' said Christopher K. Ngichabe, a Kenyan scientist who is coordinator of the Association for Strengthening Agricultural Research in Eastern and Central Africa. ''We're not saying it's a panacea, but it can address some of our problems.'' There are plenty of problems when it comes to African agriculture. Pests and viruses wipe out harvests that are already some of the least bountiful in the world. Add to that difficult soil conditions and recurrent droughts, and one has a situation in which most Africans eke out a hand-to-mouth existence despite toiling long hours in the fields. Critics of the experimentation contend that much of Africa has neither the regulatory agencies nor the regulations required to ensure that biotechnological research does not harm the environment. Kenya is in the process of drafting a law dealing with genetically modified foods. South Africa has had regulations in place for five years, although they have not always been followed. Still, research continues in various parts of the continent to create more durable crops, plants that can stave off pests and disease and tolerate soil that is dry and lacking in nutrients. Besides sweet potatoes, scientists are trying to perfect cassava, a root that is a primary source of calories in Africa, that can withstand the cassava mosaic virus, and a high-tech version of corn, Africa's main staple, that would be less sensitive to the maize streak virus. They are also working on a cotton that is more resistant to insects. Already, bananas produced using plant-tissue culture are widely available in Kenya, and they grow faster and are heartier than other bananas. In 1999, a dozen strains of genetically modified sweet potatoes in tiny vials arrived in Nairobi from the United States, where they had been produced over several years by a team that included a Kenyan scientist, Florence Wambugu. Several rounds of research completed in Kenya have narrowed the most | Engineering Food for Africans |
1421973_0 | PUT down that SkyMall catalog. You do not need a juicer that has e-mail access. While you're at it, shove your cellphone, BlackBerry and other gadgets into the sock drawer. You can pick them up again on Thursday. That's the day after the anniversary of the terrorist attacks, a day that, among its many facets, lets us reflect on the mixed blessing of technology in our lives. There's no doubt that we should raise a glass to the ubiquitous silicon chip for its dedication, dependability and overall contributions on Sept. 11. Cellphone calls from 30,000 feet and more than 100 floors up let some of us hear our loved ones for the last time. The phones delivered continuing reports of heroism. They permitted those of us a proverbial million miles from ground zero to call to tell one another: that plane just crashed into my heart. Around-the-clock news updates -- on television, over the Internet and through wireless hand-held gadgets -- informed us on that day that our world was falling apart, and then that it would remain intact. For a few days, the one thing that seemed almost as important to us as kin was the constant flow of news. The trouble is, we have so often abused technology and let it dull our senses. And so, on Wednesday, consider observing a moment, if not a day, of data silence. Pull the D.S.L. connection out of that forearm vein. Listen. Slow down. Understand that whatever it is you think you need, you don't absolutely, positively need it overnight: *Do not instant anything. Your interpersonal relationships are not enhanced by setting a record for the sending and receipt of messages like ''Hi. How R U,'' or ''Insnt MssGng Is so kool!'' When the urge hits for interaction, get positively medieval: write a letter. Write it on something that the old-timers called paper. Use your own font. Handwriting has personality -- yours. Let ''instant'' be replaced by ''anticipation.'' *Do not call your orthodontist. If this sounds odd, you may not be familiar with the cellphone orthodontist principle. It comes into play when you are addicted to talking on the phone while driving but have run out of people to call. Eventually, desperate for anyone to talk to, you phone the guy who attached your braces in junior high and say: ''I love what you did with my teeth. Are you busy | It's Time to Turn Off Those Bells and Whistles |
1422031_0 | Many consumers have long been annoyed by junk or ''spam'' e-mail. But complaints have risen considerably over the last year, along with the number of unwanted messages. Consumer groups worry that the flood of get-rich-quick schemes, pornography, work-at-home opportunities and other unwanted offers could lead some people to abandon e-mail altogether. ''The situation is only going to get worse unless action is taken now,'' said Samuel A. Simon, chairman of the Telecommunications and Research Action Center. In a petition last week, Mr. Simon's group, as well as the National Consumers League and Consumer Action, urged the Federal Trade Commission to draft rules for e-mail marketers. The groups ask that e-mail senders be required to properly identify themselves and honor consumer requests to be removed from their contact lists, as telemarketers already must do. Vivian Marino PERSONAL BUSINESS: DIARY | A Fight Against Junk E-Mail |
1421869_2 | one case, a man in a recreational boat was trying out a new video camera on the Thames River near a long-established restricted zone around the Navy submarine base at Groton. In another instance, a man said he wanted to go fishing and tried to rent a boat from a Fairfield County marina that did not offer rentals. The man did not have any fishing gear and did not have a state-required boating safety certificate, one of nearly 200,000 issued by the state's Department of Environmental Protection to those who complete boating safety courses. The man was turned away and not heard from again, Captain Coccia said. ''He could have been up to criminal activity,'' he said. ''We've tried to raise the level of awareness. That's what we've tried to do with marinas and marine dealers. The auxiliary has fanned out to marinas and dealers.'' There are 700 members of the Coast Guard Auxiliary in Connecticut who have been trained on how to patrol various areas of the waters in Long Island Sound, what to look for and what to report as part of their regular responsibilities, said Bill Rock of Stratford, the auxiliary's assistant district staff officer for public affairs. On the day of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the auxiliary was mobilized to begin patrols of the Connecticut's 618 miles of shoreline within an hour's notice, he said. Mr. Rock said the advantage of having the eyes of additional auxiliary and other citizens on the waters for security purposes is the vast experience held by those who are regularly on the water. ''There are a lot of people who have been boating in a specific area for a long time, years before they may have joined the Coast Guard Auxiliary,'' he said. ''You have to be observant on the water because there are so many things that can happen.'' Noel Voruba of Orbit Marine in Bridgeport, a professional underwater diver and diving instructor with more than 10,000 dives during the last 40 years, said he had increased his vigilance along the waters and docks. Each day his boats leave from Captain's Cove Seaport to head into Long Island Sound with groups of novice scuba divers. ''I look at the docks to see who is walking down at the docks,'' Mr. Voruba said. ''I'd notice if anybody is loading something different than you would on a boat, like boxes | A Neighborhood Watch Along the Shoreline |
1421937_0 | THERE'S no way to be absolutely sure, but the Cuba Libre may be the only cocktail invented by a gang of bored revolutionaries. The scene was during the Spanish-American War, when Cubans were fighting for their independence from Spain with the help of the United States, which joined the fray after the sinking of the battleship Maine in 1898. Among the fighters who arrived on the island were some who had brought the newest, hottest soft drink along for the fight: Coca-Cola, first made in Atlanta in 1886. According to legend, during a lull in the fighting, an American soldier mixed his Coke with some rum, and just like that, a new drink was born. To toast their accomplishment, the Yankees and the Cuban freedom fighters lifted their glasses and said, ''Para Cuba libre!'' Then they had a few more. Over the years, that simple recipe for the Cuba Libre remained little changed: light rum, Coca-Cola, lime, ice. Repeat. (A Cuba Libra, its sister drink, is made with dark rum.) But not everyone is satisfied, especially those who like something slightly less sweet in the glass. (Rum is made from processed sugar cane, and Coca-Cola is not exactly sugar-free.) One of those dissidents is Isidro Gutiérrez, a native of Mexico who is a bartender at Town at the Chambers Hotel on West 56th Street. Mr. Gutiérrez cites a 1952 article from a Cuban newspaper suggesting that some turn-of-the-century Cubans drank a Cuba Libre with a decidedly different kick, one including cocoa beans, gin, bitters and a splash of cocaine. (In its early days, Coca-Cola also contained trace amounts of cocaine.) So Mr. Gutiérrez, who fancies himself something of a drink historian, decided to bring back that type of Cuba Libre -- minus the cocaine, of course. He also dropped the cocoa beans after he discovered they were a bit too bitter. Mr. Gutiérrez's drink is a pleasant surprise for anyone who ever swilled a few too many sticky sweet rum-and-Cokes and woke up regretting it. The Town Cuba Libre has a much lighter taste than the traditional one: the gin, the lime juice and the bitters add a dry, clean sharpness, cutting the sweetness of the Coke and rum and yielding a much less murky-tasting cocktail. It is also, like war itself, not for the weak of heart. ''The first time I made them I had seven,'' Mr. Gutiérrez said. | Free the Cuba Libre! |
1422053_2 | interviews with aging survivors of a Japanese massacre at a Philippine village, encounters with Korean women who worked as sex slaves for Japanese military units. ''I am very worried that Japanese young people are becoming very nationalistic,'' said Tatsuya Yoshioka, 41, who helped found Peace Boat almost two decades ago. About two-thirds of the passengers are college students and almost all are Japanese. Mr. Yoshioka, who combines liberal politics with the bouncy energy of a television talk-show host, voiced concern that declining economic prospects for young Japanese and fading memories of Japanese militarism could open the door for an aggressive new nationalism. Fresh from giving an on-board lecture about pending legislation to expand Japan's military reach, he said: ''The people who have direct experience of the war are almost gone. I read a survey where half of Japanese teenagers did not even know that Japan and the U.S. fought a war.'' Under the slogan ''reflect on past wars to build peace for the future,'' Mr. Yoshioka and Peace Boat's 50-member directorate hope to defuse nationalist sentiment over the Kurile Islands dispute by making yearly visits to the Russian-held islands. In so doing, the pacifists defy Japan's Foreign Ministry. Japan's government, which carefully rations out visa-free visits to the islands, opposed Peace Boat's plans on the grounds that an independent visit would bolster Russia's claim to the islands. The Foreign Ministry, which does not recognize Russian sovereignty here, asked Russia to block the visit. After the landing, a writer in Sankei Shimbun, a conservative Tokyo newspaper, denounced the liner as ''a boatload of anarchists'' who should have their passports confiscated. In less controversial ventures, Peace Boat's cruises in the Pacific have cast spotlights on the impact of mining and logging projects by Japanese companies and of past open-air nuclear tests by France. When the United States passed a law forbidding cruise ships that dock in Cuba from docking in the United States for six months, Peace Boat responded by retaining Havana but dropping Hawaii from its round-the-world cruises. When crossing the Pacific, the 518-foot ocean liner uses the ports of Vancouver in the north or Santiago, Chile, in the south. Ten years ago, when the Internet and CNN started to take hold in Japan, Mr. Yoshioka feared that international contact would become electronic, doing away with the need for Peace Boat trips. ''Now I realize there is a need for human | People-to-People Diplomacy on a Japanese Ship |
1420557_1 | years later,'' he wrote. ''Arguably, some lives were lost because judges signed secrecy agreements regarding Firestone tire problems.'' Lawyers say the proposal, which was widely discussed at the American Bar Association's conference in Washington last month, is likely to be influential in other federal courts and in state courts, which often follow federal practice in procedural matters. In South Carolina, the state's chief justice has expressed great interest in the proposal. The Catholic Church scandals are one reason for a renewed interest in the topic of secrecy in the courts, legal experts say. ''All reactions are going to be affected by the bureaucratic cover-your-cassock responses of the church hierarchy,'' said Edward H. Cooper, a law professor at the University of Michigan. But some legal experts and industry groups say the blanket rule is unwise. ''The judges of South Carolina, God bless them, have not evaluated the costs of what they are proposing,'' said Arthur Miller, a law professor at Harvard and an expert in civil procedure. He said the ban on secret settlements would discourage people from filing suits and settling them, and threaten personal privacy and trade secrets. Joyce E. Kraeger, a staff lawyer at the Alliance of American Insurers, said the current system, in which judges have discretion to approve sealed settlements or not, worked fine. ''There shouldn't be a one-size-fits-all approach,'' Ms. Kraeger said. Jeffrey A. Newman, a lawyer in Massachusetts who represents people who say they were abused by Catholic priests, praised the South Carolina proposal. Mr. Newman said he regretted having participated in secret settlements in some early abuse cases. ''It was a terrible mistake,'' he said, ''and I think people were harmed by it.'' Mr. Newman said a rule banning secret settlements, combined with the Internet, would create a powerful tool for lawyers seeking information on patterns of wrongful conduct. The impact of such a ban could be limited, however, if adopted only by federal courts. Most personal injury and product liability cases, and almost all claims of sexual abuse by clergy, are litigated in state courts. Several states have laws and rules that limit secret settlements, typically in cases involving public safety. Florida, for instance, forbids court orders that have the effect of ''concealing a public hazard.'' Experts say many of those limits are difficult to enforce, particularly when every party to a case is urging the judge to approve a settlement. Indeed, | Judges Seek to Ban Secret Settlements In South Carolina |
1420519_3 | concrete programs as opposed to supporting targets and deadlines that may never be met. Meanwhile, poor countries have been resisting efforts by American and European officials to link aid to steps on their part to fight corruption and improve human rights, delegates said. Today leaders urged the negotiators to find a compromise to ensure that the meeting produces a strong and memorable action plan. ''We have absolutely no choice,'' Jean Chrétien, the Canadian prime minister, said at a news conference. ''We must deliver.'' There was progress on a number of issues, including a compromise on protecting endangered animals and plants, which calls for a significant reduction in the rate of extinction by 2010. Delegates also agreed to phase out the use and production of chemicals that harm human health and the environment by 2020. But with battles over sanitation and energy still raging, some officials feared that the plan would not be completed by Monday, when more than 100 presidents and prime ministers will meet here to discuss strategies to reduce poverty and environmental degradation. ''From South Africa's point of view it's certainly a challenging process,'' said Alec Erwin, that country's minister of trade and industry. ''This is a massive negotiation.'' The ministers from Israel and Jordan expressed hope that their project would encourage other countries to work together, even under difficult circumstances. The pipeline will begin in Israel and run through Jordan. After it is built, the officials would like to build a canal to carry water from the Red Sea that would be desalted to meet the water needs of Jordan. The officials described it as a major step forward. Hopes that the two nations would work closely together have dimmed since they signed a peace accord in 1994. Relations have cooled since the current Palestinian uprising began two years ago. But today the ministers joked and laughed as they discussed the pipeline and considered other projects. They talked about how to revive the tourism industry in the region. They also talked, carefully, about the conflict that has battered Israel. Mr. Milo said he hoped that the Palestinians and Arab countries would work together in this project and others in coming years. Dr. Hazim el-Naser, Jordan's minister of water and irrigation, commented: ''People are saying that water will cause wars. We in the region, we're saying, 'No.' Water will enhance cooperation. We can build peace through water projects.'' | Israelis and Jordanians Cast an Accord Upon the Dead Sea's Waters |
1438673_0 | With patriotic fanfare, engineers fully closed off the Yangtze River, a crucial step toward completion of the Three Gorges dam and hydroelectric project. All the Yangtze's waters now pass through discharge channels. Electric production is to start next year as the reservoir is partly filled. The $25 billion project will displace more than a million people. Erik Eckholm (NYT) | World Briefing | Asia: China: Yangtze Closed For Huge Dam Project |
1438605_0 | A Connecticut judge yesterday unsealed hundreds of pages of court documents that include detailed evidence and incriminating statements by the eight men and women charged last month in the 1997 rape and murder of a 13-year-old girl in New Milford. The documents, filed by prosecutors, include transcripts of conversations in which some suspects confessed or implicated one another in aspects of the crime. Taken together, the documents, including arrest affidavits for the defendants, provide a vivid image of the death of the girl, Maryann Measles, as a savage revenge killing in which the attackers kidnapped and sexually brutalized their victim and then drowned her in a lake. Since the arrests on Oct. 15 and 16, the authorities have not discussed their case in detail, or offered any motive for the killing. But according to the documents, the defendants -- five men and three women -- killed Maryann primarily to prevent her from testifying that she had had sex with two of the men, both adults, who were likely to face statutory rape charges. Maryann had given a report to the police about one of the relationships just days before her disappearance. Those two men, Alan M. Walter Jr., 24, of New Milford, and Deaneric Dupas, 27, of Waterbury, are charged with capital murder and could face the death penalty if convicted. The three women had sought revenge against Maryann because she had had sex with their boyfriends, according to the documents. In a transcript of a Sept. 17 conversation with investigators, Mr. Walter admitted killing her after she was beaten and gang-raped. ''I, Alan M. Walter Jr., accidentally killed Maryann Measles on Sunday, Oct. 19, 1997,'' the statement began. ''A couple of days before Maryann was killed I found out from Dean Dupas that Maryann had filed rape charges against me.'' In the statement, Mr. Walter said he had hoped to scare Maryann by holding her head underwater. In the documents, other defendants gave statements placing themselves at the murder scene even as they disputed their roles in the crime. The papers were unsealed by Judge Alexandra D. DiPentima of State Superior Court in Litchfield, over the objections of defense lawyers. In her ruling, Judge DiPentima agreed with defense lawyers that some of the information in the documents might not be admissible at trial. But she ruled that unsealing the documents would not prevent a fair trial. Maryann, a troubled | Court Papers Depict Image Of Savagery In Girl's Death |
1443803_0 | CRUDE OIL FALLS. Prices fell as the market awaited the start of work by United Nations weapons inspectors who arrived in Iraq. In New York, oil for January delivery fell 65 cents, or 2.4 percent, to $26.11 a barrel. | THE MARKETS: COMMODITIES |
1443812_3 | site, www.customers-first.org, with useful information. Airports, meanwhile, are breathing more easily now that Congress and the T.S.A. have sent clear signals that the much-feared Dec. 31 deadline imposed by Congress for bomb-detection screening of all checked luggage will not be strictly enforced in airports where adequate detection equipment is not yet in place -- which includes most major airports. Some of those airports had been warning of potential four-hour backups as baggage piled up for inspection starting on New Year's Day. ''Actually, the holiday travel season doesn't look all that bad now,'' said Michael Boyd, an airline industry consultant who has been a vociferous critic of the T.S.A., which he has called a bloated bureaucracy that threatens to make domestic airports resemble ''the fall of Saigon'' after Dec. 31. Most airline Web sites also have useful holiday tips, especially for leisure travelers who haven't flown much under the new security regime and who don't want to hold up more experienced fellow travelers. The best, from my perspective, is by Southwest Airlines. Its ''Travel Tips From the Experts'' advises passengers to ''screen themselves'' before going to the airport. Among the tips: ''Frequent travelers know that wearing metal jewelry and big diver-type watches will set off the alarm at security. But now that the security-screen devices have been set to their ultrasensitive settings, even watches with minimal bits of metal are ringing the bells.'' Another good suggestion: Inspect baggage before packing because ''luggage you haven't used for a while may be inadvertently hiding some things'' like pocket knives that are prohibited in carry-ons and can cause alarms to go off loudly at checkpoints. Incidentally, passengers who like to have reliable information to plan travel in advance will be saddened to know that Consumer Reports Travel Letter is ceasing publication with its January issue, after 17 years. The proliferation of free, up-to-the-minute travel information on the Internet is a major reason the magazine is closing. ''There were a lot of difficulties bringing in subscriptions,'' said Gene Lomoriello, a spokesman for Consumers Union, which publishes the monthly advertising-free newsletter. The sort of detailed holiday-travel advice that is now copiously available online was what many subscribers bought the magazine for, he said, adding, ''The highest readership topics in that publication since 1999 were: worst economy seats, leisure air-fare bargains, how to get on-time flights and surviving holiday baggage wars at the airport.'' ON THE ROAD | Holiday Travelers Can Look to the Web for Advice |
1443867_0 | In the most severe crackdown yet on online piracy at a college campus, the United States Naval Academy has seized 100 computers from students who are suspected of having downloaded unauthorized copies of music files over the Internet. School officials confiscated the computers when students were in class on Thursday, an academy spokesman said yesterday. Students found to have downloaded copyrighted material could face penalties ranging from loss of leave time to court-martial and expulsion. The academy was one of 2,300 colleges to receive a letter from entertainment industry organizations last month requesting help in cracking down on unauthorized file swapping. The record industry largely attributes the decline in CD sales over the last 18 months to digital piracy, and has brought increasing pressure on institutions in a position to identify and discipline the downloaders. '' 'Theft' is a harsh word,'' the letter to colleges stated, ''but that it is, pure and simple. Students must know that if they pirate copyrighted works they are subject to legal liability.'' But one of the groups that sent the letter, the Recording Industry Association of America -- perhaps not wanting to appear too single-minded at a time when the nation is poised for a possible war -- took pains yesterday to distance itself from the actions of the Naval Academy. The other organizations were the Motion Picture Association of America, the National Music Publishers Association and the Songwriters Guild of America. ''We appreciate institutions who take intellectual property theft seriously,'' a spokesman for the recording industry association said in a written statement. ''However, we do not dictate what their enforcement policies should be, and, in this particular instance, we do not know the facts of the case.'' The computer seizures were first reported by The Capital, a newspaper in Annapolis, on Saturday. Universities have been grappling with how to stem the rapid flow of unauthorized media files across their networks ever since the birth of Napster, the program that popularized file swapping. Students have been quick to take advantage of the free, high-speed connections to the Internet in dormitory rooms to download music and movies, an activity that, in addition to being illegal, has slowed traffic on many university networks. At the urging of the recording industry, several university associations sent out their own letter last month prompting schools to re-examine their policies on file-sharing activities. Still, education officials said that most university | 100 Computers of U.S. Midshipmen Seized |
1443898_0 | To the Editor: I agree with your assertion in ''Airport Security, 14 Months Later'' (editorial, Nov. 19) that Congress should resist the temptation to extend the baggage-screening deadline for 30 of the nation's busiest airports by an entire year. One means to the end of screening all checked luggage is simply to reduce the number of bags that passengers are allowed to check. Instead of checking two bags, each passenger would be allowed to check only one. Passengers would be allowed to check more than one bag only if they pay a fee to defray the cost of checking additional baggage. Allowances could be made for people traveling with babies or with other special needs. Reducing this burden could potentially save billions of dollars in equipment and personnel costs and would make air travel safer and more convenient. It would save fuel as well. Is the two-bag-per-passenger standard carved in stone? MITCH ROBERSON New York, Nov. 19, 2002 | Rushed Airport Security |
1443946_0 | The project to build a railroad and roads through the demilitarized zone between the Koreas has been halted temporarily, according to the South Korean Defense Ministry. The North said it would not complete work on its side after the United Nations Command insisted on final word on which North Korean inspectors could go to the South to review progress. The North said only South Korea had the right to approve the names. Don Kirk (NYT) | World Briefing | Asia: Koreas: Delay In Transit Project |
1443787_4 | of their seats. I.B.M. has been working on a dashboard-mounted device that shoots a jet of cold water at sleepy drivers and, at the same time, rolls down windows, sounds an alarm and switches radio stations. The device detects drowsiness by asking the driver questions and monitoring the responses for speed and clarity. The company hopes to make the device an integral part of new cars within five years. Still, Mr. Hall said: ''There has traditionally been knee-jerk resistance in the automotive industry to safety changes, and this issue, I'm sure, is no exception. We need advocacy groups to increase awareness and lobby for the necessary changes.'' At last week's conference, the National Summit to Prevent Drowsy Driving, held in Washington at the National Academy of Sciences, Dr. David Dinges, an expert on sleep and body clocks from the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, said dozens of claims had been made for devices promoted as ''online monitors of drowsy driving.'' They include a sensor mounted on the roof of the car to detect when the driver's head falls over, a wrist sensor that monitors heart rate, a sleep watch that measures muscle activity, a device worn on the temple that registers eye blinks and electrodes that record brain waves. The problem, Dr. Dinges said, is finding something that works reliably for everybody, or nearly everybody, in nearly every situation. The head-droop sensor, for example, cannot tell the difference between a driver who is falling asleep or one who is changing the radio dial, glancing at a map or picking up a sandwich. To date, he said, the device that has proved most reliable in tests is an infrared gadget that detects slowly drooping eyelids, a hallmark of impending sleep. The device, developed at Carnegie Mellon University, pulses two wavelengths of infrared light off the face and bounces them back to a camera on the dashboard, which records a dark face with eyes shining like a cat's and can detect how open the eyes are. This ''co-pilot'' device, he said, works for nearly everyone, but it too has limits: it does not work as well in bright sunlight or with people wearing certain kinds of lenses. Nor will it work for those rare cases who can fall asleep with their eyes open. Also being used in some trucks is a tracking system that can detect lane deviations -- when the | When the Eyelids Snap Shut at 65 Miles an Hour |
1440578_0 | Proposals to protect mahogany forests and sea horses passed, but an effort to further control harvests of the Patagonian toothfish failed at a meeting in Santiago, Chile, attended by the 160 nations that are party to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species. Trade in bigleaf mahogany from Central and South America, where it grows naturally, will be strictly regulated. Trade in plantation-grown mahogany from Indonesia and elsewhere is not affected. Commerce in sea horses, collected for traditional medicine and souvenirs, will be regulated worldwide. But an effort to gain more protection for the toothfish, or Chilean sea bass, failed. James Gorman (NYT) | World Briefing | Ecology: Good News For Sea Horses |
1440429_1 | Now drones are starting to edge their way into civilian life as well, and not just in Alaska. They have been used in Hollywood to film high-flying action scenes, in Hawaii to look for the ripest coffee crops and in Japan to drop rice seeds into paddies. The drones face significant hurdles, however, before they can become commonplace in American commercial flight. The Federal Aviation Administration has no standard guidelines for the use of drones, so groups that want to operate them must wait months for waivers that permit only the narrowest of flight plans. And with price tags that can climb into the millions, civilian drones are often too expensive for those who could use them the most. But they make sense for Jim Maslanik, a University of Colorado professor who is leading a five-year study of the oceans and atmosphere around Barrow. The drones, built by Aerosonde, an Australian company, have already been used throughout the Pacific for weather monitoring. They can stay aloft for more than a day. They fly lower and more slowly than piloted planes, so they take more accurate readings. They can also operate in conditions too dangerous for pilots. ''These measurements aren't worth risking people's lives,'' Mr. Maslanik said. ''U.A.V.'s allow us to take them without putting anybody in harm's way.'' Unpiloted aircraft have been flying in one form or another since the days before Orville Wright took off from Kitty Hawk, N.C., on the first powered airplane flight, according to Tom Crouch, a senior curator at the National Air and Space Museum. But it was the development of the 24-satellite Global Positioning System in the early 1990's that allowed them to flower. Instead of operating in the tightly controlled airways flown by piloted craft, drones could now be guided -- and guide themselves -- to any point on the globe. Communications satellites like those of the Iridium network have also freed pilotless craft from their tethers. The drones had previously been controlled by radio, but that meant they had to stay in range of an antenna. By routing their chatter through satellites, transmitting data with satellite-enabled modems like those used for wireless Internet access in remote places, drones are free to roam. Lightweight materials like carbon fibers have also been a major factor. Drones need to be light to fly slowly and to stay aloft for long periods. So heavy aluminum and | Flying Solo, in the Extreme |
1440589_0 | Gov. James E. McGreevey signed a law yesterday intended to reduce bear attacks on humans by banning the feeding of black bears. This year, the number of incidents where bears tried, and sometimes succeeded, to break into homes to scavenge food has nearly doubled to 55. An estimated 1,900 black bears live in Sussex, Passaic and Morris Counties. The law also prohibits storing food or garbage in a manner accessible to the bears. The first offense will prompt a warning, the second offense may result in a fine up to $1,000. Stacy Albin (NYT) | Metro Briefing | New Jersey: Trenton: Anti-Bear Attack Law Signed |
1440274_0 | To the Editor: Re ''Menopause Without Pills: Rethinking Hot Flashes'' (front page, Nov. 10): It is important to emphasize the difference between treating symptoms and preventing future conditions. If a woman is experiencing severe hot flashes and other menopausal symptoms, treatment with estrogen is appropriate. She is likely to accept the very small increase in stroke risk to get a decent night's sleep. Preventive measures, however, have to meet a higher standard to ''do no harm'' because the patient is not sick. In my experience as an internist and geriatrician, most women will not need to take hormone replacement for symptom relief for more than a few years, and now we can encourage them to stop as early as symptoms permit. BARRIE RAIK, M.D. New York, Nov. 10, 2002 | The Ways to Confront Menopause |
1440233_1 | was done, potential employees had been identified and screened, and machines and personnel would be rolled out quickly. ''The number of places where there are really difficult problems is but a small handful, for a small percentage of the bags,'' the official said. The transportation secretary, Norman Y. Mineta, responded to a question with a statement released by a spokesman saying that all deadlines thus far had been met, that another key deadline, to replace all passenger screeners with federal employees by Nov. 19, would be met and that the checked baggage deadline would be met, too. ''From the beginning, the naysayers and skeptics had said it couldn't be done, but we've done it,'' Mr. Mineta said. ''And we'll meet the next goal, screening all baggage as required by the law, without wrecking the havoc that our critics predict.'' Airport managers are skeptical. They say that the agency has made terrific progress toward the goal set by Congress a year ago, but that the time is coming to acknowledge that the system is not yet in place. ''We will find on Dec. 31 or Jan. 1, for most passengers at most airports most of the time we will meet that deadline of 100 percent bag screening with explosive detections systems,'' said David Z. Plavin, president of the Airports Council International-North America. But for airports that do not have enough people or equipment to screen all the bags at peak periods, he predicted, some will be cleared to load on aircraft by unspecified ''other means.'' As laid out in the law, ''other means'' could be hand searches, but these take 8 to 10 minutes a bag, experts say. Sniffer dogs are faster, but the dogs cannot work more than a few minutes at a time. But some airport executives expect that in some places, some bags will be allowed through unscreened, at least in the early weeks of 2003. Mr. Plavin said Congress should allow exceptions to its deadline. House and Senate Republicans agreed on Monday on language for a new domestic security bill that would allow some exemptions. The Transportation Department is facing conflicting priorities. One is to meet the tight deadline placed on it by Congress, which fears suicide bombers on planes. Another is to maintain public confidence not only that air travel is secure, but also that security arrangements will not make flying impossibly cumbersome. Airport managers have | Airport Managers Say Deadline for Screening All Checked Bags Can't Be Met |
1440275_0 | To the Editor: Re ''Menopause Without Pills: Rethinking Hot Flashes'' (front page, Nov. 10): I took estrogen for more than 15 years after a severe bout of depression and hot flashes. Concerned about the possible negative effects of this therapy after such a prolonged period, I decided on an alternative approach. With the help of a doctor who specializes in alternative medicine, I have been using a compounded progesterone-based cream that has been adjusted until any symptoms disappear. Nutritional supplements have also been a very important part of my health program. As a result, I feel better at 72 than I did at 65. I strongly suggest that women who have been frightened by recent statistics on hormone replacement therapy or who are still suffering from discomforts of menopause seek out this alternative approach. MURIEL EAGLE West Paterson, N.J., Nov. 10, 2002 | The Ways to Confront Menopause |
1440255_2 | in men, declines, too, and, in women, estrogen levels plummet after menopause. The hypothesis was that the effects of aging -- shriveling muscles, thinning bones, increased body fat, especially in the abdomen, a loss of energy and enthusiasm, might be linked to hormone deficiencies, and, in particular, a lack of growth hormone. People who lack growth hormone -- for example, patients with a genetic defect or a tumor of the pituitary gland that prevents the hormone from being made -- have all these signs and symptoms of aging, and they are reversed when they take growth hormone injections. Sex hormones may also play a role, Dr. Blackman said. ''Sex steroids stimulate the growth hormone system,'' he said. ''At least in younger people, when one is awry, the other one goes down.'' In their study, the researchers tried to recreate in older people the hormone levels of a 20- or 30-year-old. They recruited 57 women and 74 men, with ages from 65 to 88, giving them hormones or dummy medications. The most striking results were in the men who took both growth hormone and testosterone. They gained almost 10 pounds of lean body mass and lost a corresponding amount of fat. They also increased their cardiovascular endurance, a measure of their ability to exercise. Men who took growth hormone alone gained seven pounds of lean body mass and lost a similar amount of fat but their endurance did not change. The women who took growth hormone, with or without estrogen and progesterone, gained a few pounds of lean body mass and lost five pounds of fat. In both men and women, sex hormones alone did not significantly change their body composition. Growth hormone appeared to be the major factor. The side effects, however, were serious, afflicting 24 percent to 46 percent of the men and women taking growth hormone and including swollen feet and ankles, joint pain and carpal tunnel syndrome, which is caused by a swelling of a tendon sheath over a nerve in the wrist. It, and the joint pain, might be caused by the drug's tendency to increase water retention, Dr. Blackman said. But Dr. S. Mitchell Harman, an author of the new study and director of the Kronos Longevity Research Institute, a nonprofit center that does research on aging, said it might be a result of growth hormone's effects in increasing tissue growth. In addition, half the | Growth Hormone Changed Older Bodies, for Better and Worse |
1440276_0 | To the Editor: The reason so many doctors ''turned on a dime'' and recommended that patients try to live without hormones after a study found that the risks outweighed the benefits is the threat of lawsuits (front page, Nov. 10). Most gynecologists who, like me, have large menopause practices, realize that the Women's Health Initiative study data leave many questions unanswered and that the increased risk of breast cancer, stroke and mild cardiovascular events to an individual woman using hormone replacement is tiny. But we know that if an untoward event occurs, we may well be sued, and this very much influences what we recommend to our patients. This mentality, which the medical legal climate has forced upon doctors, is another example of how defensive medicine adversely affects the doctor-patient relationship and ultimately the well-being of the public. DAVID M. BURKONS, M.D. South Euclid, Ohio, Nov. 12, 2002 | The Ways to Confront Menopause |
1440192_0 | Even now, many people in this remote patch of Andean cloud forest celebrate the day in 1997 when they burned down the mining camp and ran its owners out of town. ''We had tried for months to get them to listen to our concerns about things like contaminated water,'' said Alirio Ramírez. ''Once we had a pile of ashes, the mining guys were suddenly interested in talking. But by that point, the time for negotiations was over.'' Today, this village of 46 families is trying to reinvent itself as a shrine to ecotourism. But a growing number of villagers are questioning whether they took a wrong turn. True, a new bamboo lodging house now charges foreign travelers $28 a night each for a bed, three meals and guided tours of the forest. Village leaders boast of being able to find 40 kinds of orchids, rare varieties of hummingbirds and toucans and at least the tracks of jaguars, pumas, tapirs and bears. Environmental guides now list the mist-shrouded forests around here as an official ''hot zone'' of intense biodiversity. But for all the effort to develop a new economy, Junín and other villages in this region remain impoverished and isolated. Junín is part of a parish of 18,000 people scattered across several dozen communities in northern Ecuador. The village is cradled in a valley and surrounded by forests. The river here is clean and cold and remains the main source of drinking water. Most people live either directly or indirectly from small farming -- bananas, aloe, miniature oranges and cabulla, a cactuslike plant that produces fiber used in baskets. The town has no electricity, telephones or running water -- not even postal service. The mud road to the nearest town is so primitive that even four-wheel-drive trucks get bogged down in the rainy season. ''The ecologists love the nature here and they love the fact that it's so remote,'' said Tarquino Vallejos, who owns a small farm just outside of town. ''But the fact is that not one child in the community can go to secondary school. We don't have a school past sixth grade, and nobody here has enough money to send their child to another city.'' Only about three families here earn a living through ecotourism; the rest live largely through subsistence farming. While many people have deep fears about the impact of mining, many in the region argue | Ecotourism Is All Very Well, but $3 a Day Isn't |
1440277_0 | To the Editor: It is inappropriate to apply the findings in the Women's Health Initiative to withhold treatment for the symptoms of menopause (front page, Nov. 10). Women in the study were, on average, more than a decade older (63.2 years) than most women on hormone replacement therapy and, sadly, unhealthy. They were overweight; 50 percent were smokers or had smoked; and a third had high blood pressure. All of these factors put them at higher risk for all the conditions found to occur. Women would do better to watch their weight, treat their blood pressure and stop smoking to avoid heart attacks than to worry about the small risks found in the Women's Health Initiative. These small risks do not justify abandoning treatment of menopausal symptoms. MICHELLE P. WARREN, M.D. New York, Nov. 12, 2002 The writer is medical director, Center for Menopause, Hormonal Disorders and Women's Health, Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center. | The Ways to Confront Menopause |
1441888_0 | Alternatives to hormone replacement therapy like herbal remedies and dietary supplements to fight the symptoms of menopause seem to have mixed effects, a study being published today in Annals of Internal Medicine says. The authors, Dr. Adriane Fugh-Berman of George Washington University and Dr. Fredi Kronenberg of Columbia, said that some approaches showed promise, but that much more information was needed to evaluate their worth and potential dangers. The article was based on a review of 29 studies going back more than 30 years ago that looked at complementary and alternative medicine and their effects on menopausal symptoms like hot flashes. The approaches included various therapies and using foods and supplements high in phytoestrogens, herbs and vitamin E. Many methods appear to do little good, the study said. The researchers did find that soy foods, high in phytoestrogens like isoflavones, offer modest benefit for hot flashes. Isoflavone preparations appeared less effective, and their long-term safety is not established. ''Soy foods have been a staple of Asian cuisine for thousands of years and are presumed safe,'' the article said. ''Supplementing the diet with beans or bean products is a benign intervention. No such presumption of safety can be made for the isolated, often high-dose isoflavones'' sold over the counter. In general, the study said, herbal remedies do not appear effective, though they may need more time to produce results. One exception is black cohosh, described as perhaps the most popular herbal product. But it may increase the risk of breast and endometrial cancer, the researchers said. Slow and deep-breathing and relaxation exercises helped some women, the study added. VITAL SIGNS: REMEDIES | In Lieu of Hormones, Questions |
1441951_3 | to do. (This impression, incidentally, gives legs to the wisecrack currently being passed among business travelers that the acronym T.S.A. in fact stands for ''Thousands Standing Around.'') But don't get used to the calm. Business travelers looking ahead to trips this winter need to be prepared for some rougher times, several airport managers said, though Admiral Loy switched gears and said yesterday that the bag-screening deadline would not be strictly enforced at about a dozen big airports. Many other airport managers are now frantically trying to jury-rig a bag-screening system that will enable them and the T.S.A. to declare victory come Jan. 1 without at the same time bringing air travel to a virtual standstill. Starting Jan. 1, travelers will most likely encounter a baggage processing minefield, airport managers warn. About 1,100 of the eight-ton, S.U.V.-size explosive-detection scanning machines are supposed to be installed at airports (out of an estimated 6,000 that are needed). At best, these machines process 150 to 200 bags an hour, and flag 25 to 30 percent of those bags as false positives. Flagged bags then have to be opened and examined by hand. Supplementing the big machines will be about 6,000 table-top trace-detection devices, which require a screener to run a heated swab over a bag. When these machines were used on carry-on bags during the Olympics Games here last winter, processing time averaged 47 seconds a bag, according to a study by the Public Policy Institute of the libertarian Reason Foundation. Bags that the machines can't get to are likely to be opened and spot-checked by security employees. Airport managers say they don't have a clue yet how they're going to handle the inevitable pilferage problems when thousands of employees are given luggage-room access to passengers' belongings. So, many airport executives are braced for chaos. But most remain cautiously confident that, as Admiral Loy appeared to signal yesterday, the T.S.A. will help them figure out a way to control the damage and introduce flexible interim solutions to total baggage screening if the system does start breaking down in January. About 650 million passengers will pass though domestic airports this year, many of them checking at least one bag. The math is daunting, but a degree of optimism still prevails. ''The thinking is, If we don't get it right the first time around, we can come back after an interval and then perfect it,'' said | The Lull Before the Storm For the Nation's Airports |
1441898_1 | dissection has caused widespread self-loathing among growing girls and women of all ages, sometimes bringing on eating disorders that grow out of a poor body image. But yet another downside arises from the current ideal: difficulties in making babies. As Joann Ellison Rodgers, a medical correspondent for Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions and the author of a new book called ''Sex: A Natural History'' (Times Books, $32.50), points out, ''In the course of evolution, the female body deemed most attractive has been the one that is reproductively most successful -- that is, a woman who is neither too thin nor too fat.'' Evolution, she explains, favored men who could assess in those first moments the likelihood that a woman could come through childbirth and pass on good genes to mix with theirs. Infertility is common among women who are very thin and lack body fat, a source of estrogen. They are often deficient in the hormones needed for ovulation and the estrogen needed to prepare the uterus for a fertilized egg. As Dr. Rose E. Frisch, professor emerita at the Harvard School of Public Health, points out in ''Female Fertility and the Body Fat Connection'' (University of Chicago Press, $20), ''Something so small as a five-pound weight loss or gain around the threshold weight can turn menstrual cycles on or off.'' The brain says no to producing the hormones needed for ovulation, Dr. Frisch says, because ''underweight women do not have the relative fatness necessary to have a viable infant.'' An Impossible Goal Psychologists who treat eating disorders, especially the binge-and-purge syndrome bulimia, report that they often grow out of futile attempts to diet down to some perceived ideal. Dieters who cannot tolerate the prolonged deprivation suddenly fall off the wagon and gorge themselves, either swiftly regaining the weight or making the unhealthy discovery that purging (by forced regurgitation or excessive exercise) can prevent a binge from becoming body fat. An estimated 3 percent of young American women suffer from eating disorders, the National Institute of Mental Health says. The percentage may be five or six times as high among women of college age. Self-hatred is also a consequence of failed efforts to achieve a stick-thin figure. Experts who study body image report that among preadolescent and adolescent girls and young women, there is a growing dissatisfaction with appearance, which they link in part to the parade of reed-thin bodies in | Adding Some Heft to the Ideal Feminine Form |
1441929_0 | The New Buzzword For Airport Security Get ready to hear a lot more about ''biometrics,'' the buzzword for electronic verification of identity through biological characteristics of the iris, face or fingerprint. Biometrics will be the cornerstone of the proposed trusted-traveler (also known as the registered traveler) program long proposed by the airline industry and now supported by federal security officials, who had long resisted the idea. There's also widespread support among business travelers, who resent the secondary gate-area screenings and friskings that will be greatly reduced for those registered under a trusted-traveler program. In the recent Corporate Air Travel Survey by the International Air Transport Association, which represents the world's airlines, 81 percent of business travelers said they supported use of advanced biometric technology at airport security points. American Express Adds Loyalty Points The loyalty-points lottery continues apace. American Express said yesterday that clients buying airline tickets through its RezPort online travel service for small businesses would get triple Membership Rewards points for the first three months of paid enrollment. Fewer Laptops Make the Flight Because valuable possessions often pile up haphazardly at airport security checkpoints, some business travelers have been leaving their laptops at home, industry experts have noticed this year. The 2002 National Business Travel Monitor by Yankelovich Partners notes a statistical drop in laptop-toting that it defines as significant, based on personal interviews with 2,500 business travelers. Last year, 40 percent of respondents said they carried laptops on business trips. This year, it's 36 percent. On the other hand, 77 percent now carry cellphones, compared with 68 percent last year. And beepers are losing ground, down to 19 percent this year from 26 percent in 2001. A Dog in the Cockpit To Help the Pilot We are indebted to Ken Kaye, aviation writer for The Sun-Sentinel of Fort Lauderdale, Fla., for the following report on a joke making the rounds in the aircraft industry. It addresses new in-flight technology and its importance to the growth of air traffic capacity. ''In the airline cockpit of the future, only two crew members will be needed: a pilot and a dog,'' the joke goes. ''The pilot's job will be to assure passengers everything is under control. The dog's job will be to bite the pilot if he touches anything.'' JOE SHARKEY BUSINESS TRAVEL | MEMO PAD |
1441954_1 | agency's phrase for matching bags and passengers on each leg of a flight. In January, the agency began a simpler form of bag matching: making sure that on domestic flights, if a bag was put on a plane, the passenger who claimed it was also on board, at least for the first leg. That matching did not extend to connecting flights. Matching bags to passengers on international flights began in the 1980's. Mr. Loy spoke after a triumphant announcement by the transportation secretary, Norman Y. Mineta, that his department would meet the goal of federalizing all checkpoint security screeners by Tuesday, the anniversary of President Bush's signing of the Aviation and Transportation Security Act. Mr. Mineta spoke in the historic old terminal at Reagan National Airport, with a tableau of security screeners, state police officers and soldiers standing motionless behind him on risers, each clutching a tiny American flag. The crowd of government and contractor employees gave him an ovation. Mr. Mineta compared the hiring and training of 44,000 Transportation Security Administration employees this year to the Wright brothers' flight at Kitty Hawk. ''The American can-do spirit always prevails,'' he said. Asked later about using bag matching to meet the deadline for screening checked bags, an aide to Mr. Loy, Robert Johnson Jr., said that bag match was ''one of many layers,'' and that ''it will not be employed by itself.'' Officials said, though, that they were being intentionally vague about security precautions. Mr. Loy said he would not describe weaknesses so that they would not be ''laid out for the bad guys to take advantage of.'' His agency has not said which airports will fall short, and Mr. Johnson said that with a combination of stopgap measures, all airports would have adequate protection. How bag matching would do that was not clear. The technique has been used for years in Europe in an effort to foil terrorists, but after the Sept. 11 attacks many travel experts considered it inadequate. ''It obviously doesn't work with suicide bombers,'' said David Stempler, president of the Air Travelers Association. ''After a year, we would expect some kind of physical search of the bags,'' Mr. Stempler said. Airport executives have been saying for months that Mr. Loy's agency got a late start on the physical work needed to install massive bag scanning equipment and could not complete the work by the deadline laid out | Some Busy Airports to Miss Deadline for Scanning Bags |
1442003_0 | In a notable departure from the lumbering performance of many federal bureaucracies, the new Transportation Security Administration met its deadline today for replacing private security guards at all airport checkpoints with better-trained and better-paid federal officers. Hiring and training the roughly 45,000 passenger screeners is a notable achievement; in January, the T.S.A. had all of 13 employees. Deputy Transportation Secretary Michael Jackson, the key behind-the-scenes logistician, is among those who deserve credit. By all accounts, the new screeners are a more professional force than the often inattentive private guards previously hired by airlines. Only 15 percent of the new federal workers were recruited from private screening businesses, a testament to the sloppy practices of those companies. Unfortunately for Mr. Jackson and for Adm. James Loy, the former Coast Guard commandant who now heads the T.S.A., there is no time to celebrate today's milestone. The government faces an even more daunting mandate to start screening all checked baggage for explosives by year's end. This required manufacturing thousands of expensive machines that resemble cat-scan medical devices, and the hiring of more people to operate them and the alternative explosive-trace detection systems that are now in use at many airports. Already the government has announced it will not meet the year-end deadline at about 30 of the nation's busiest airports, including many that require construction projects to accommodate the bigger machines. Many airport operators have balked at the effort, and Congress itself has been reluctant to fund adequately the mandates it imposed on the T.S.A. Congress should resist the temptation to extend the baggage-screening deadline for these airports by an entire year. Many of the airports can be brought into compliance well before the end of 2003. The effective screening of all passengers and their bags will be the foundation of stronger aviation security, but the T.S.A. will still need to develop a more sophisticated passenger-profiling system. It must also address other areas of vulnerability, such as air cargo. At a time of persistent terrorist threats, Congress and the administration must also do more to upgrade railroad, trucking and port security. A sense of wartime urgency should not be confined to the nation's airports. | Airport Security, 14 Months Later |
1442566_0 | Representatives from the British and Irish governments and Northern Ireland's political parties are to hold their first talks today since the home rule Assembly created by the 1998 peace agreement was suspended last month in a dispute over continuing paramilitary activity by the Irish Republican Army while its political wing, Sinn Fein, sits in the power-sharing government. The province's Protestant unionists, as a condition for their return to government, are demanding that the I.R.A. move to disband. Warren Hoge (NYT) | World Business Briefing | Europe: Northern Ireland: New Talks To Start Today |
1437675_2 | tax increases is likely. While spending cuts can be harmful, raising taxes in a high-tax city like New York can also have negative repercussions. At least two principles should guide our consideration of potential tax increases: fairness and long-term competitiveness. The tax increase that comes closest to meeting both these criteria is restoration of the commuter tax, which would bring in more than $400 million a year. A commuter tax reduces the incentive for individuals who work in the city to reside in the suburbs, and it is also equitable, both because commuters have higher average incomes than city residents do and because it seems fair to have individuals who work here and use local services bear some of the costs. Increasing the city's tax on personal income is another option. Either increasing the base rate for high-income filers from 3.2 percent to 4.2 percent or adding a 10 percent surcharge for all filers would each raise about $550 million annually. The advantage to raising income taxes is that the increases fall most heavily on high-income residents, who are best able to pay. At the same time, however, many of New York's highest income residents are particularly mobile, and could continue to work in the city but avoid city personal income taxes by residing elsewhere. The city could also consider raising the property tax rate by 10 percent while loosening limits on property tax assessment increases that have pushed a disproportionate share of the burden onto owners of apartment and office buildings. The rate hike would increase tax revenues by roughly $1 billion a year, and loosening the assessment limits would over time make the property tax more fair. The city also needs to examine the structure of its business income taxes, which have not kept pace with long-term growth in corporate profits. There is certainly no question that taxes matter. But so do services. Dirtier streets, rising crime and dilapidated parks can be as much a disincentive to living or working here as rising taxes. Higher taxes may be necessary to keep an adequate level of services. Carefully choosing among possible tax increases can minimize the damage to the city's economy. By Abe Lackman Abe Lackman, who served as city budget director in 1994, is president of the Albany-based Commission on Independent Colleges and Universities. The severity of the budget crisis facing the city and state can best be | A Surplus of Ideas for a Budget Deficit |
1443643_0 | Discontent in France | |
1441459_0 | Ansley Johnson Coale, a demographer and former director of the Office of Population Research at Princeton University, died on Nov. 5 in Newtown, Pa. He was 84. Dr. Coale was an internationally recognized expert on population trends and the demographic statistics that document them. He directed the population center, an adjunct of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, from 1959 to 1976. He introduced techniques that overcame some longstanding uncertainties that arose from estimates based on raw data. The new methodology helped in gauging factors like mortality and fertility in populations for which only inaccurate or incomplete numbers are available. In collaboration with William Brass, he refined the techniques in the book ''Methods of Estimating Basic Demographic Measures from Incomplete Data'' (written with Paul Demeny, 1967). Dr. Coale's first influential publication was ''Population Growth and Economic Development in Low-Income Countries'' (with Edgar Hoover, 1958). That was followed by ''Regional Model Life Tables and Stable Populations'' (with Mr. Demeny, 1966). A native of Baltimore, Dr. Coale received his entire higher education at Princeton, graduating in 1939 in economics, earning his M.A. in 1941 and, after wartime service in the Navy, receiving a Ph.D. in 1947, the year he joined the faculty. He was the author of scores of articles on various demographic topics and helped write additional textbooks on the growth and structure of human populations, fertility in Russia and the decline of fertility in Europe. At the time of his death, he was a professor emeritus of economics and the emeritus William Church professor of public affairs. Dr. Coale is survived by his wife of 61 years, Sarah Campbell Coale; two sons, Ansley Jr. and Robert C.; and three grandchildren. President John F. Kennedy appointed Dr. Coale in 1961 to represent the United States on the Population Commission of the United Nations Economic and Social Council, which he did until 1967. Dr. Coale was also a past chairman of the committee on population and demography of the National Academy of Sciences, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society, which published his autobiography in 2000. He was a past president of the International Population Union. | Ansley Johnson Coale, 84, Expert on Population Trends |
1441383_1 | their signals. WFUV, which broadcasts at 90.7 FM, is sandwiched between the 8-watt WHCR (at 90.3 FM), and the 1,250-watt WFMU (at 91.1 FM). ''It would create static and make my signal unlistenable in areas where we've had very good reception for decades,'' said Ken Freedman, WFMU's station manager, who said he based his conclusion on an engineering report his station commissioned. WHCR sees a double threat on the horizon, with its neighbor on the other side of dial, Columbia University, also considering a Riverside Church antenna. Columbia, which broadcasts WKRC at 89.9 FM, lost its primary 830-watt antenna at the World Trade Center and applied in June to erect a 6,900-watt antenna at the church. The proposal is pending before the Federal Communications Commission. ''The interference, as it is projected, would be so substantial as to render our broadcasting moot,'' said James F. Watts, the dean of humanities and the arts at the City College. ''If their solution is to wipe City College off the air, we will pursue every legal recourse with the F.C.C.'' Under current F.C.C. rules, booster FM antennas are allowed as long as there is no ''actual'' interference with nearby stations. The F.C.C. gave WFUV permission to build the booster antenna in August. The appeal by the two stations that would be affected is pending. Fordham officials, who hope to begin construction of the $100,000 booster antenna before year's end, argue that it would take advantage of newer technology to silence interference. But if the antenna does interfere with other the stations, WFUV will be required to reduce its power. Devoted WFMU fans are keeping an eye on the bell tower. ''It would be very depressing if I couldn't listen to WFMU,'' said William Wolf, a software programmer who lives on West 110th Street, in part because of the good reception for WFUV, and who drives to his job in New Jersey. ''That and Howard Stern is all I listen to. It makes traffic a bit more tolerable.'' DENNY LEE NEIGHBORHOOD REPORT: MORNINGSIDE HEIGHTS Correction: November 24, 2002, Sunday An article in the Neighborhood Report pages last Sunday about radio station WFUV and its neighbors on the FM dial referred incorrectly at one point to a station favored by one listener, William Wolf. It is WFMU, not WFUV. The article also misidentified the Columbia University radio station at one point. It is WKCR, not WKRC. | Signal Performance: Turf War On the Left Side of the Dial |
1441312_7 | no supportable data saying cellphones contribute to accidents,'' insisted Mr. Carrellas of the National Motorists Association, who said state lawmakers should wait until a legislative study group on distractions reported its findings. ''Are you going to ban playing with the radio, talking to another passenger, or shaving in the car? I'd rather ban those than cellphones.'' James E. Katz, a professor of communication at Rutgers University who has written books on attitudes and cellphone use, said he thought the legislation was ''well-intended'' but unlikely to achieve its objective. ''It's the phone call and not the hand use of the phone that is the danger,'' he said. And, Dr. Katz added, ''People will additionally be distracted by looking around for the police while they talk and drive.'' That is because using a cellphone is like speeding, he said. Everyone is against it, but so many find it convenient. ''So it is with the mobile phone,'' Dr. Katz said. ''It seems like only a slight distraction; it's so easy to use; and you can do so much with it, it almost seems like a crime not to use it in the car.'' At the Vauxhall service area here, Mr. Miele was explaining how picking up his cellphone almost led to an accident six months ago. ''I took my eyes off the road for a second,'' he said, ''and I had to go to the right suddenly because there was a car crossing in front of me.'' Since then he has stopped the practice and now favors a primary ban. Mark Landesman, 41, an accountant from Marlboro, the first New Jersey municipality to pass a local ban, agreed, saying: ''I don't see why it can't be a primary law. I mean, the headsets really aren't a problem to wear and you just have to adjust to the law.'' Dennis C. McKithen, 40, of Trenton, who owns a janitorial service at Newark Liberty International Airport, carries a cellphone on each hip and has a voice-activated cellphone in his company's Cadillac Escalade EXT. He said he normally opposed too much government regulation. ''But sometimes it's necessary to put laws out there for the safety of people,'' Mr. McKithen said. So why did the Senate not make the use of cellphones while driving a primary offense? ''I think they don't want to alienate their constituents who might be against it,'' Mr. Miele said. ''It's always politics.'' | Say What? |
1439556_1 | in San Giuliano di Puglia, a town of fewer than 2,000 people. ''When one asks a mother, 'Where is your child?' and she says at school, it's the safest answer and it should be the safest place,'' Mr. Ciampi said. Italians have been asking why the school, built in 1953, collapsed. Blame fell as much on ill-advised renovations and government negligence as on the earthquake itself, which registered a magnitude of 5.4. Accusations mounted after the discovery of a 1998 seismic map that included San Giuliano among areas vulnerable to earthquakes. An earlier official map, drawn in 1981, classified the town as out of harm's way. Officials said the 1998 map never reached the proper authorities because it had bounced from agency to agency before ending up at a meeting early this year of regional leaders, who decided it needed more study. ''The scientists did their work,'' said Enzo Boschi, of the National Institute of Geophysics and Vulcanology, ''but, in Italy, ministers and governments change all the time and many things get moved around.'' But even Mr. Boschi conceded that the revised map might not have prevented the tragedy in San Giuliano. He said it would not be practical, or even possible, to rebuild all of Italy's structures. ''We have very old, beautiful buildings here, many with frescoes inside,'' he said. ''This isn't California or Japan.'' Most public officials agree, however, that Italy needs tougher building laws to safeguard future schools and homes against earthquakes. Michele Iorio, the governor of Molise, the region that includes San Giuliano, was in Rome on Thursday lobbying for those laws as well as for more emergency aid for his region. ''It makes more sense to say from now on we only build anti-earthquake buildings -- it only costs 15 percent more and it's worth it,'' Mr. Iorio said. ''Today, there is still no obligation for the regions to apply anti-earthquake regulations.'' There are other concerns. Although news reports have focused on the deaths in San Giuliano, more than 10,000 residents in the region are homeless. Hundreds of houses, their walls cracked or crumbled, were deemed uninhabitable. The Molise government estimated the quake's damage at $300 million and pitched tents to house the newly homeless as cold weather set in. In San Giuliano, teachers organized makeshift classrooms under the canvas tents. They wanted the town's children to get back to something like a normal routine. | Italians Study Ways to Safeguard Buildings Against Earthquakes |
1439596_4 | and laity. While some of those involved in Voice of the Faithful have been pressing for liberalizing changes for years, others say they are moderates or conservatives who only want a say in church governance. Of four Voice of the Faithful leaders interviewed around a dining room table in Indianapolis, two volunteered that they would favor the ordination of women -- a major liberal demand -- while one called that too radical for her. ''I am more conservative,'' said Lola McIntyre, a music professor at the University of Indianapolis. ''I just can't picture women priests.'' Another leader of the group is a retired therapist who left the priesthood in 1968, disheartened by the encyclical that maintained the ban on birth control. ''It's the first time in 34 years I've thought there was any real hope for Catholicism to be an expression of the gospel,'' said Jay E. Carrigan, the former priest who is now married, ''because the scandal may be sufficient to open things up.'' The Indiana group recently wrote to Archbishop Buechlein asking him to include a victim of sexual abuse on his lay review board. His reply, declining their request, concluded, ''I have heard your voice; however, there are other voices of the faithful that, as archbishop, I also listen to, and those voices are at odds in many instances with yours.'' The archbishop was not available for an interview, but his chancellor, Suzanne L. Magnant, a laywoman who has served in the position for 11 years, said that she saw no need for Voice of the Faithful. ''I'm puzzled why people think there aren't laypeople involved in the church, because there are, and there have been for 40 years,'' Ms. Magnant said. But Voice of the Faithful organizers say they want not only participation but a share of power. ''I've been a lector, a soccer coach, a greeter and a member of the parish council,'' said Ken Sauer, who is chief academic officer of the Indiana Commission for Higher Education. ''We've been active, but not on questions of how is the church to be run. Now we're asking, how do we change the structure of the church so that laypeople can be heard?'' Through most of American history, the laity has been excluded from church governance, with some exceptions. Early in the 19th century, lay trustees in some cities sought to recruit priests and bishops of their | Scandal Is Stirring Lay Catholics To Push Church for More Power |
1439214_1 | been imagining such attacks and considering ways to blunt them with the tools of antiterrorism and with medical science -- renewed vaccinations, new medicines, swifter diagnoses. But few of the resulting news reports and books, however informative, portray the immediacy of our predicament with the passion of Preston's new work. In an afterword he calls the book the third in a ''trilogy on Dark Biology.'' Throughout his trilogy, Preston has used a highly effective technique that seems simple but is artful and informed. He combines extraordinarily vivid descriptions of the pathological effects of infectious agents -- including gruesome but fascinating visits to the autopsies of afflicted people and animals -- with homely accounts of the ordinary routines of people who experience the infections and those who investigate them. With these methods, which blend terror, technology and trivia, he has probably done more than any other writer to establish a nation-wide imperative to think about infectious agents as global threats and potential weapons. ''The Hot Zone,'' the first in the trilogy, is a factual account that reads like a novel. Despite its frightening aspects, the outbreak of Ebola virus in monkeys imported by a research facility in Reston, Va., was not devastating, because the virus strain, now known as Ebola Reston, was unable to infect other hosts efficiently. Thus the outbreak was confined largely to the monkey colony. The second volume, ''The Cobra Event,'' is a fiction that reads like fact, an account of mysterious deaths from a fabricated infectious agent. Buttressed by detailed accounts of the real history, politics, technology and bureaucracy of bioterrorism, it had widely reported effects on national policy. After reading it, President Bill Clinton convened experts and government leaders to discuss its implications, and then readjusted his federal budget proposal to augment defenses against biological weapons. In this third installment, Preston returns to nonfiction to address what almost all analysts would argue is the most dangerous of the known biological agents. He teaches his readers about the chemical properties of the smallpox virus; how a single infected person (like a returning traveler in Meschede, West Germany, in 1970 -- but read bioterrorist in the post-9/11 world) can set off an epidemic; and what this horrendous disease can be like (in ''flat hemorrhagic smallpox,'' the skin ''darkens until it can look charred, and it can slip off the body in sheets''). We learn how the disease was | Borne on the Winds of War |
1439234_12 | to vomit!'' What comes through in an examination of the documents uncovered by Safe Minds is less a coverup than an impression of scientists anxiously watching over their shoulders as they work. One document, for example, records comments made by Robert Brent, a Philadelphia pediatrician who served as a consultant for the thimerosal study. ''The medical-legal findings in this study, causal or not, are horrendous,'' Brent said. ''If an allegation was made that a child's neurobehavioral findings were caused by thimerosal-containing vaccines, you could readily find a junk scientist who would support the claim with a reasonable degree of certainty. But you will not find a scientist with any integrity who would say the reverse with the data that is available. . . . So we are in a bad position from the standpoint of defending any lawsuits if they were initiated.'' More research is in the works. The C.D.C. is setting up a study of neurodevelopmental effects based in part on the Faeroe Islands model. The N.I.H. is financing studies of thimerosal metabolism in animals and children. (An early University of Rochester study was reassuring: it indicated that children eliminate thimerosal much more quickly than expected.) Clearly, a lot is riding on this research, and pressure is being brought to bear on both sides. Can the vaccine authorities accept a positive answer? Can the vaccine opponents accept a negative one? ''No one wants to think that harm might have been done,'' Halsey says. ''I don't want to think harm might have been done.'' American children still receive up to 20 vaccines in the first two years of life. The first symptoms of autism often appear between the ages of 12 and 24 months. Most autism experts say that the two facts are coincidental, but as a major California study recently confirmed, autism is being diagnosed in numbers far higher than ever before, suggesting that a nongenetic cause may be partly to blame. In some children, the behavioral traits of autism present themselves along with physical problems like sensory dysfunction and motor disorders that have rough correlates in the mercury-poisoning literature. For some parents, thimerosal provides a grand unifying theory that squarely points the finger at the government and vaccine makers. During much of the 20th-century, children suffered from an ailment called pink disease, which caused peeling skin on the extremities as well as regressive behavior. In 1948, a keen-eyed | The Not-So-Crackpot Autism Theory |
1439209_4 | of internees devising a new strategy for the I.R.A. Force was still favored to drive the British out but, to achieve something ''during our lifetimes,'' Adams called for a long war that, to retain the essential support of Catholics, meant open political activity as well. In this, Moloney says, lay the germ of the I.R.A.'s acceptance of a cease-fire 20 years later. Most of Moloney's book is devoted to the gradual evolution of this policy: years of nonstop bloodshed, some 3,600 deaths to date, a slow-motion World Trade Center in an area scarcely bigger than Connecticut; of tragicomedy, like the racehorse held by the I.R.A. for ransom, shot while trying to escape; and of stomach-turning cruelty on both sides (the ''Shankill Butchers,'' a Protestant gang who sliced their Catholic victims with cleavers, and the ''human bombs,'' beginning with a Catholic working for the army who was forced by the I.R.A. to drive a car bomb into a base and was then blown up). Moloney names a self-effacing hero, the Rev. Alec Reid, a Redemptorist priest who acted as a tireless go-between, and fills out the roles of other men of peace: the Northern-descended Irish prime minister, Charles Haughey, and the Nobel laureate John Hume, who risked his Catholic support to meet Adams and convey plans for an end to I.R.A. terrorism. Through the many and devious policy shifts that led to the 1997 I.R.A. cease-fire, Moloney traces what he calls the ''golden thread'' of consent implicit in the principles of nonviolence laid down by the mediator, and former United States senator, George J. Mitchell: there are two traditions in Ireland, as the flag acknowledges, and peaceful reunification can be achieved only by negotiation between them, meaning that a majority in Northern Ireland, as well as a majority in the Irish Republic, must first democratically agree. But Ireland also has two traditions of lawless violence, not one; and the terrorists of the loyalist side have not disarmed either, any more than the I.R.A. has -- and neither is likely to give up its weapons while the other side keeps its. A return to the sectarian battles of 1972 onward is still a possibility -- pessimistically, until the current generation of die-hards passes on. It takes two to make peace; one side cannot unilaterally cancel the hatreds of 30 violent years. Freelance, unauthorized terrorism by unreconciled I.R.A. and loyalist splinter groups goes | Bleeding Ireland |
1439417_4 | Hill, where in-state tuition is $3,856, outsiders pay $15,140. In some cases, out-of-state students may eventually be able to establish residency, to qualify for the lower in-state tuition. Each state has its own requirements, though many will demand proof that a student has had permanent ties for at least a year. Evidence of such links may include registering to vote, getting a driver's license or paying income tax. Of course, price is only part of any proper calculation of value when choosing a college. A student must ''fit'' the school in terms of many variables, including departmental and overall academic distinction, social life and the makeup of the student body, because students may learn as much from their peers as from their teachers. Some criteria are hard to judge. A school may have a star-studded faculty, for example, but how much of it is available to undergraduates? Still, price can be legitimately decisive, particularly if a student intends a career in a relatively low-paying field in which it would be hard to pay off heavy debts. While degrees from Ivy League and other expensive private schools still open many doors to the job market, the upper reaches of corporate, scientific and public life are full of graduates of public schools. ''The old-school-tie effect is nowhere near what it once was,'' Mr. Greene said. Many corporate recruiters seem to care little. ''I haven't noticed a distinct difference,'' said Dawn Towe, a recruiter for the Target Corporation. In fact, she said she finds that private-college students often harbor ''unrealistic expectations'' about their ability to rise quickly in retailing, where they may not have held even summer jobs. ''They want to be in charge of marketing'' almost from the outset, Ms. Towe said. Not surprisingly, the greater interest in public colleges has helped them become more selective, too. That means admissions are no longer almost automatic at many schools. What's more, it is often harder to get all the courses needed for graduation in the standard four years. About half the graduates at 100 public colleges covered by a recent Kiplinger's magazine survey took longer than that. Then there's the issue of financial aid. Families, especially those wrestling with college finance for the first time, may overlook one important factor as they compare costs: that private institutions can provide more aid in the form of grants, scholarships, loans and campus jobs than public | Personal Business; Suddenly, State Universities Have More Allure |
1439592_0 | In the few months since a study of a widely used hormone regimen found that its risks outweighed its benefits, the prevailing view of menopause has undergone a momentous shift. For decades, women have been told that the symptoms of menopause -- hot flashes and night sweats as well as vaginal dryness that could make sex a painful ordeal and libido a distant memory -- were burdens they should not have to bear. With hormone therapy, they would feel like the clock was turned back. At the same time, they could protect themselves against osteoporosis, and probably even reduce their risk of heart attacks and strokes. When the study, known as the Women's Health Initiative, was halted in July, many doctors changed their message. Try to live with your symptoms, these doctors now say. Or find other ways to deal with them. And forget about using hormones solely to protect yourself from diseases; there are other, better ways. It is an almost unheard of transformation of the medical landscape, said Dr. Barbara J. Turner of the University of Pennsylvania, who studies the pace of innovation. Doctors ''turned on a dime,'' she said. But it is impossible to tell how many patients turned with them, and what happened when they did. There is no obvious pattern of responses to the new reality. In interviews, gynecologists and internists say some patients have stopped taking hormones, only to resume their use when they find symptoms intolerable. Others say most women who stop taking the pills have little or no trouble. They note that even before the study was halted last summer, more than half of the women who started hormone therapy stopped it on their own within a few years. Still other doctors are devising their own methods of weaning women from the drugs -- suggesting they wear estrogen patches and gradually trim them down to nothing, or increase the interval between pills. In this, however, they are acting on their own. There are no practice guidelines, no rigorous studies on what works best. Eventually, the Women's Health Initiative will have data on how its participants fared when they were advised to stop taking their hormone pills. For now, the only data come from drug company sales figures, which show that many women taking Prempro, the hormone combination made by Wyeth that was tested in the study, have stopped, their number falling to | Menopause Without Pills: Rethinking Hot Flashes |
1439529_0 | FOR eight tumultuous weeks, the French and the Americans played a magnificently elegant diplomatic game. They feinted. They sparred. They shared their feelings and pledged their trust. But they never threatened. And they never leaked the secrets of their talks. In the end, just days after elections in which President Bush's party solidified its control of Congress, the two sides suddenly reached agreement on a resolution in the Security Council giving Iraq ''a final opportunity'' to disarm peacefully or face ''serious consequences.'' The six-page measure leaves the United States free to attack Iraq without Security Council authorization. But it accommodates the French demand for a two-stage process in which the Security Council has the chance to assess the seriousness of any Iraqi violation and to consider how to respond. In another compromise that would declare Iraq in ''material breach'' of its United Nations obligations, the United States changed the wording to allow United Nations inspectors to determine whether Iraq had violated its obligations. At times during the negotiations, it appeared there would have to be a winner and a loser. Mr. Chirac made clear he detested the Bush doctrine, which said the United States would be justified in using pre-emptive force. He felt that only the United Nations had the authority to decide what to do about Iraq. Mr. Bush said that if the rest of the world didn't have the courage to move against Iraq, the United States would do it by itself. But from the outset, France and the United States were determined to stick together. First, Mr. Chirac left open the possibility of military action against Iraq, even as he said the Security Council should have a late-in-the-game chance to disapprove of any use of force. Then, a few days later, in his speech to the United Nations General Assembly on Sept. 12, Mr. Bush left open the possibility that he was willing to work through the United Nations as an alternative to acting alone. For France, the bargaining that followed was not just a matter of pursuing its principles, but a chance for the center-right government of Mr. Chirac to negotiate directly and at the highest levels with the United States -- which it did, passionately and seriously. By accepting the tough approach of the United States on the need to rid Iraq of its weapons programs, the French helped shift the emphasis away from the | The World; France and America, Perfect Together |
1439300_4 | responses are necessarily brief -- sometimes just a preprinted sheet with boxes checked off (''Needs work in color,'' ''Needs work in line'') or a few handwritten sentences. John Gordon, who received his master of fine arts degree in painting from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, is the only teacher at his Gordon School of Art, which has about 2,000 correspondence students and 50 to 60 who study with him in his Green Bay, Wis., studio. He tries, he says, ''to have something personal to say to every student.'' (For the record, even in the finest art schools, teachers are not known for their lengthy commentary on student efforts.) Fees range widely. Art Instruction Schools has one two-year course that costs $2,300, while the Gordon School charges $220 for each of its 12 yearlong courses. Certificates are awarded after a program is completed, but they usually have no value beyond the reward of accomplishing a set of assigned tasks. The Art Instruction Schools, which was founded in 1914 to train illustrators for the growing printing industry, is accredited by the Distance Education and Training Council, which assures that it has met certain standards. But that does not mean credits will be accepted at a real college. Online Most online art courses are in graphic design, taken by people seeking a career change or in the field looking to learn new skills. But many of the same institutions also teach online courses in traditional fine arts, including drawing, painting, sculpture and printmaking. ''There are people who believe that online courses are just a high-tech version of correspondence courses,'' says Stephen J. Anspacher, an associate provost who deals with e-learning resources at New School University, which operates the Parsons School of Design in New York. ''They are wrong.'' His reasoning is that most online art classes are rigorous, offered through degree-granting institutions and taught by the same faculty members who teach at the institutions. One benefit of a bricks-and-mortar art class -- the exchange of ideas -- is also part of an online course, because students and teacher can communicate with one another by e-mail. ''The actual making of the work is still done in a traditional way,'' says Tom Hyatt, vice president for technology at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore. ''Putting work on the Web lets everyone in the class see it. The technology allows for a genuine | If You Can't Draw This ... |
1444284_2 | through space until your phone detects the radiation,'' she said. At the receiving end in cellphones, ceramics are used as passive devices to select the operating frequency so that people can receive messages meant for them rather than their neighbors. Only a few ceramic materials are known that meet the demands imposed by the wireless operating frequency, the required power levels and the type of application used, whether a base station or hand-held device. Dr. Vanderah said that only two ceramic materials are optimized for use with 900-megahertz base stations. For newer, 2-gigahertz and higher base stations, only one commercially available ceramic has the required properties, and it has a drawback: it requires the element tantalum as an additive, and tantalum is extremely expensive. One of the main research challenges in next-generation microwave ceramics is to understand the role of tantalum so that it can be replaced with a less costly element. Many people are working in this area, Dr. Vanderah said, but the search is hampered by the sketchiness of the basic data on materials, information that would help in creating tantalum replacements. Taki Negas, vice president and technical director at TCI Ceramics, a company in Hagerstown, Md., that produces ceramics for microwave infrastructure, said that lack of information had created roadblocks for him. All the ceramics in which his company specializes are made at high temperatures and cooled down for use, he said. But much of the thermochemical data documenting the process is missing. ''I waste a lot of time with experiments trying to decide what compounds are compatible with one another at high temperatures -- way before I get to actually make the ceramics,'' he said. Peter K. Davies, a solid-state chemist at the University of Pennsylvania, is researching new materials with potentially useful microwave properties, including ceramics in which tantalum is replaced by a less costly element like niobium. ''We have few guidelines,'' Dr. Davies said. Many of the ceramic materials used commercially were discovered accidentally, he said. ''We still don't know what it is about the chemistry and crystal structure that makes them have unique properties.'' The key to developing many of the materials is very small changes in chemical treatment or preparation, he said -- for example, doping them with particular substances that have a huge effect on their properties. ''It's that sensitivity that has complicated the production of new materials,'' he said. Dave | Science or Serendipity? Unlocking the Alchemy of Ceramics |
1444326_3 | educated traveling public, trained to arrive hours before flights to avoid the problems that previously bedeviled the system. In addition, airline agents said today, more people were flying earlier in the week to beat the usual crush. Since Sept. 11, the most anxious part of a trip for many air passengers has been the airports' obstacle courses of security checkpoints. But screeners won high marks today for efficiency and kindness that contributed to an increased sense of safety. ''I've been through security too many times when everyone is talking about their date last night,'' said Allyn Stewart, a film producer waiting at a checkpoint at Los Angeles International Airport. ''That doesn't fill you with a lot of confidence.'' The vigilance of screeners paid off in Atlanta, where a passenger was found with a handgun and two clips of ammunition in a carry-on bag. The man, who was arrested, told officials that he forgot the weapon was there, Mr. Johnson said. Many passengers said their early arrival was based not so much on protocol changes as on their experiences last year, when airports were still adjusting to security changes. Sheelagh Thomson, 36, of Westchester County, N.Y., said she was flying from La Guardia Airport to Atlanta on the same Delta flight she took last year. Then, she waited three hours to get through security. ''This year it was five minutes,'' Ms. Thomson said. ''It was great.'' Linda Dintenfass, 45, arrived at Reagan National outside Washington for a flight to Tampa, Fla., with the same expectations of delay. ''We didn't wait long at all,'' Ms. Dintenfass said. ''I've been traveling since 9/11, and I thought today was going to be terrible.'' Not all airports were stress-free. A snowstorm on Tuesday night delayed morning flights out of Logan International in Boston, and Los Angeles International had its usual morning lines of passengers awaiting clearance spilling outside Terminal 1. But even facing 30-minute waits, most travelers there held their complaints. ''They're checking everybody they can,'' said Sam West, a Southwest Airlines passenger en route to Lubbock, Tex. ''You just have to start early.'' Danna Sieverson, 37, a claims adjuster from Westminster, Calif., headed to Hawaii, was not so upbeat, annoyed after security personnel pulled her luggage from a bomb-detection machine. ''It was a waste of time,'' Ms. Sieverson said, complaining that the new technology should be able to distinguish a snorkel from a gun. | Thanksgiving Travelers Tell a Different Story, One With Shorter Lines |
1444248_4 | so we did just that, lining them up one by one in front of my Subaru's front tire. The tire crushed each hull perfectly, with an alarming pop. I could hear my mechanic asking me, ''What are these nuts doing imbedded in your radial tires?'' No matter. We lined up hulls in front of both tires. Then we pulled the nuts out of the crushed husks, rashly staining our fingers, and set upon the inner shells with hammers. ''You can use this stain to touch up furniture,'' said Patty Keener, an antiques dealer. ''I had a friend who always used to bring a black walnut to shows to rub on any nick.'' Almost every nut we hit opened to disclose kernels of white meat, too damp for easy picking. So, O.K., what's as warm as a tin roof? I stuck them in the oven, at 200 degrees, for 10 minutes. And we adjourned for the day, after polishing off the wine, the pork roast and a mountain of mashed potatoes. I promised to dry the rest of the nuts the next day, and then we could reconvene. That gave me a chance to do a little research. In our bumbling way, we had discovered the same imperfect methods used by the old-timers, like members of the Northern Nut Growers Association (www.nutgrowers.org) or my local extension agent, who told me about the milk truck loaded with 10,000 gallons of milk that drove up his lane, rolled over three bushels of painstakingly gathered nuts and obliterated them. A nut grower in Upton, Ky., told me a good trick -- toss the walnuts in a cement mixer with gravel to get the husks off. You can buy a Get Cracking nutcracker for $40.50 from Hammons Products in Stockton, Mo. (www .black-walnuts.com), or a good Hunts nutcracker for about $70 (www.nutgrowers .org), but they crack only one nut at a time. No one, it seems, has invented a way for small-scale growers to get these walnuts out of their shells. So the growers sell them to Hammons, for instance, for 10 cents a pound. Hammons whacks the hulls off with chains inside a cylindrical cage, cleans the nuts, cracks them between giant steel rollers and sells them for $8 a pound. Gourmet varieties go for $16 to $20 a pound. Who knows? Maybe some farmland could be saved if someone just came up with | First, Drive Your S.U.V. Over 1 Cup Walnuts |
1442781_0 | To the Editor: We seem to have forgotten that the word ''school'' comes from a Greek word for leisure (front page, Nov. 17). The notion of leisure from business or professional concerns, for the purpose of developing a mind as something valuable in itself, used to be at the heart of a liberal arts education. Now everything -- admissions, grades, degrees -- has become a commodity, and one must get as much as possible. So quantity has won out over quality. This is bad for education and ultimately for civilization. If we wish to return to quality, perhaps we should begin by disallowing more than one major. DENIS CORISH Brunswick, Me., Nov. 18, 2002 The writer is a professor of philosophy at Bowdoin College. | Do Triple Majors Stifle Curiosity? |
1442800_4 | of weapons, and plotted a new wave of attacks in the region. American and Moroccan officials have said that Mr. Nashiri had planned an operation earlier this year to blow up American and British warships in the Strait of Gibraltar, off the northern coast of Morocco. The plan was thwarted by Moroccan intelligence agents who traced intercepted telephone conversations and e-mail messages back to Mr. Nashiri. He was then in tribal areas of Pakistan, near the Afghan border. The plot appears to have resembled the attack on the Cole in October 2000, when a pair of suicide bombers in the Yemeni port of Aden slammed their explosives-laden boat into the flank of the docked destroyer, killing 17 American sailors. American officials said that Mr. Nashiri was believed to have paid for other terrorists to buy the boat used in the attack, and that he rented safe houses used in the plot. Before his capture, American officials had described Mr. Zubaydah, the former terrorist operations chief, as the most important Qaeda suspect in custody. Mr. Zubaydah, they have said, provided valuable information during grueling interrogations in the weeks after his arrest in Pakistan in March. But they acknowledged today that his information had grown stale in the eight months since his capture, and that intelligence agencies had been eager to find someone like Mr. Nashiri, who appears to have been at the heart of planning for fresh Qaeda attacks on the United States. The Bush administration has warned that new attacks on American soil may be imminent. The Federal Bureau of Investigation, which last week released a dire warning of ''spectacular'' attacks on American targets, reiterated previous warnings today in an alert to state and local law enforcement officials. It cited possible attacks using ''explosive-laden boats'' and scuba divers. The United States has confirmed that several midlevel Qaeda operatives are now being interrogated overseas, including Ramzi bin al-Shibh, who is suspected of being directly linked to the Sept. 11 terror attacks. Mr. bin al-Shibh, a young Yemeni, was apparently in close contact with the suicide hijackers in the weeks before the attacks. He is a central figure in the Justice Department's case against Zacarias Moussaoui, the French citizen who is the only person facing trial in an American court for involvement in the Sept. 11 attacks. Government officials have confirmed that, as first reported earlier this week in The Washington Post, | A MAJOR SUSPECT IN QAEDA ATTACKS IS IN U.S. CUSTODY |
1442762_2 | years. The records must be preserved ''in an accessible place'' for two years after they are written. Prosecutors say that under New York state law, a firm that deleted e-mail messages that it was required to maintain could be found guilty of falsifying business records. If the destruction of the e-mail messages was found to be intentional, the firm could face a felony charge. Wall Street firms have complained for years about the law requiring e-mail message retention, arguing that such messages should not be considered the type of communication that must be preserved. The firms have also said that complying with the law is impractical and an onerous financial burden. Regulators said they became aware that brokerage firm compliance with document retention rules was spotty when they started investigating analyst activities about one and a half years ago. Last November, the S.E.C. reiterated its view that e-mail messages are covered by the law and must be preserved. Last May, regulators at NASD advised several Wall Street firms that their compliance with the rule on e-mail message retention was unsatisfactory and began investigating those policies. If the firms are found by regulators to have mistakenly deleted messages that they were supposed to keep, they could face fines extending into the high six figures. If the firms destroyed the messages purposefully, penalties are more significant, including suspension or expulsion from the securities industry. Several securities regulators involved in the investigation said that bringing a case against a firm that did not retain all its e-mail messages would require a significant effort. It is unclear why Morgan Stanley's production of e-mail messages is viewed as unsatisfactory by regulators. But some regulators have expressed a desire to make evidence public so that disgruntled investors could use it for their own suits. Clients of Merrill Lynch and Salomon who lost money may have an easier time mounting civil cases to recover money because so many damaging e-mail messages from those firms have been made public by investigators. Regulators are also concerned that the firms that adhered to the law will wind up being punished far more than firms that did not comply. One regulator, who declined to be identified, said, ''There is some perversity in the fact that the firms that are getting hit pretty hard in the press and in terms of the sanctions are firms that had reasonably good record retention policies.'' | Regulators Say Morgan Stanley Did Not Keep E-Mail Records |
1442774_8 | accuracy of the transcript of their conference call. Novartis said the article was not intended to conclude that one product was better than the others. Instead, the company said, it was a review of the available medications in which the authors could suggest theoretical advantages. Mr. Beitler said that Intramed was unhappy with the manuscript that Dr. Logdberg produced and later gave the assignment to another writer. The article has not been published. A 1998 survey of named authors writing for some of the nation's top journals, including The Journal of the American Medical Association, which published the survey, found that 11 percent of the articles had been ghostwritten. Some experts think the practice continues to grow, even as the best journals take steps to prevent it. Wyeth hired ghostwriters in promoting the diet drug combination fen-phen, according to documents made public in litigation filed after it became evident that fen-phen caused a potentially deadly heart-valve defect. Evidence of ghostwriting has also surfaced in federal and state investigations of Warner-Lambert's marketing of Neurontin, an epilepsy drug, for more than a dozen unapproved uses. One document made public in a whistle-blower lawsuit against Warner-Lambert describes how Proworx, a company owned by the ad giant Omnicom, offered to help write journal articles about using Neurontin to treat pain. Proworx planned to recruit doctors to be the named authors of the articles, paying them a $1,500 fee. Omnicom declined to comment on the matter. Dr. Relman, the former editor of The New England Journal of Medicine, said there was no place in medical education for ad agencies. ''We don't get anywhere in medicine without objective data,'' he said. ''That's the coin of the realm. The whole purpose of medical research is lost if you don't tell the truth.'' The Right Results Finding the Positive In Medical Studies For Pharmacia and Pfizer's second run at proving that Bextra was effective against acute pain, the research firm Scirex headed to central Texas, where it recruited dozens of patients with impacted molars. In two studies, it reached just the conclusion that the drug makers' sought. But three doctors who reviewed the Scirex studies for The Times said the research was not persuasive. All three said that one of Scirex's conclusions was insignificant: that one dose of Bextra worked longer than a single dose of a medicine containing oxycodone and acetaminophen, a combination often sold under the | Madison Ave. Has Growing Role In the Business of Drug Research |
1442743_0 | The Department of Energy has given a $3 million grant to Dr. J. Craig Venter, leader of the private effort to decode the human genome, to develop the best possible approximation to an artificially created living cell. Under the grant, which was first reported by The Washington Post yesterday, scientists at an institute founded by Dr. Venter will try to synthesize the chromosome of a simple bacterium. The ability to create a living cell from scratch, by chemically synthesizing all its components, is far beyond present technology. But several years ago, Dr. Clyde Hutchinson of the University of North Carolina tried an alternative route to the same goal by taking one of the simplest known bacteria, Mycoplasma genitalium, and trying to define the minimum number of genes it needed to survive by stripping out all the unnecessary ones. Dr. Hutchinson reported in 1999 that the microbe could get by with as few as 265 genes, which could be thought of as the minimal set of genes needed for life. A piece of DNA containing these genes might in principle be synthesized and inserted into a cell that had also been assembled artificially, probably with bits and pieces from other cells. Dr. Venter, who helped lead the decoding of the M. genitalium genome in 1995, has now resumed Dr. Hutchinson's project at the Institute for Biological Energy Alternatives. In a statement, Dr. Venter said the hope was that ''we could potentially engineer an organism with the ideal qualities to begin to cope with our energy issues,'' perhaps one that could create hydrogen or absorb carbon dioxide. Whether this organism would be a new life form or a greatly modified bacterium could be debated, but Dr. Venter told The Associated Press, ''The description of this being a modification rather than making new life is probably correct.'' | Energy Dept. Finances Effort to Create Living Cell |
1437459_3 | machines. Conservative policy analysts said proposed curbs on fuel use were thus unrealistic and unjustified, while making countries more resilient to extremes of weather made sense for many reasons. One goal, Mr. Ebell said, should be to enable low-lying countries like Bangladesh to respond to typhoons the way Florida responds to hurricanes. There are also ways to foster development in poor countries that limit harm from climate change. Experts say that in semi-arid zones in Africa and Asia, agricultural assistance could improve farmers' ability to endure heat and drought. In some areas, adaptation is already under way. In the Himalayas, some communities, with the help of the United Nations, are installing alarm systems to warn of flash floods as expanding lakes of glacial meltwater grow to the bursting point in the next decade. Low-lying island nations, like the Maldives in the Indian Ocean, have been watching the slow rise of the seas for decades and have not only been planning to build storm barriers, but possibly to evacuate entirely at some point. The emphasis on adapting is a profound turnabout from the course set a decade ago after President George Bush and other world leaders signed the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Though that treaty and subsequent addenda contained vague commitments by industrial nations to help vulnerable countries adapt, the emphasis was always about curbing emissions to prevent dangerous changes in the climate system. Adaptation got support in New Delhi because it suits both the current Bush administration, which has tried to shift debate away from emissions reductions, and developing countries, which have expressed frustration at the developed world's inertia in limiting its own emissions and its delays in pledged aid. At the meeting, poorer countries did not quite say it was their turn to pollute but, led by the host country, they did demand the right to grow out of destitution, a path that will require vast use of existing fuel reserves -- mainly coal. Opening the plenary session last Wednesday, India's prime minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, said per capita use of such fuels by the world's poorest populations was a fraction of that of people in the industrial powers. Mitigating fuel use, he said, ''will bring additional strain to the already fragile economies of the developing countries.'' The adaptation issue also got support from a new scientific analysis, published Friday, suggesting that the only way to | Climate Talks Shift Focus to How to Deal With Changes |
1437399_2 | Americas, has become a big topic in local newspapers and among ordinary people. ''Our companies are not efficient enough to compete,'' said Tomás Iglesias, a retired accountant who now drives a taxi part time. Ordinary Ecuadoreans have experienced both the benefits and costs of greater global integration. In a bid to halt inflation, the government adopted the American dollar as its own national currency nearly two years ago. That policy stabilized prices. But because of the dollar's high value, imports from other countries soared and exports stagnated. Almost every country in Latin America has been hit by trade shocks. Colombia, once one of the world's biggest exporters of coffee, is now far behind Vietnam. Argentina, once a major wheat exporter, has been forced to switch over to soybeans. Various currency crises, meanwhile, have all but obliterated a free-trade zone that unites Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay. The regional trade group began to crumble when Brazil decided in 1999 to let its currency decline in value. That almost devastated Argentine exports to Brazil because the Argentine government kept its peso locked one-to-one with the American dollar. Regional trade imploded this year when the Argentine government defaulted on foreign debt worth about $140 billion and the peso collapsed. DESPITE the disruptions, there are good reasons to believe that more free trade and openness ultimately offer more security. The two Latin American countries that have so far weathered the current global economic slowdown -- Mexico and Chile -- are also the most open. Mexico, of course, has been part of the North American Free Trade Agreement for eight years. Chile has arduously liberalized its economy for years and is now close to signing a bilateral free-trade deal with the United States. The problem is that a pan-American free-trade zone would cover more than trade. It would also affect ground rules for doing business, like sanitary regulations for food imports and enforcement of labor and environmental rules. Many Latin Americans fear that the United States wants to impose its system on them, and they are correct. But it is worth remembering that the United States has taken its own lumps: when California decided to phase out the use of a gasoline additive containing methanol, the Canadian manufacturer of the additive sued, citing investor-protection measures in Nafta. The United States government now wants to make it harder for companies to make such claims. ECONOMIC VIEW | Outside Halls Of Power, Many Fear Free Trade |
1439041_0 | India is well on its way to becoming a global economic superpower. Its economy has significantly outpaced much of Asia in recent years, its internationally competitive information technology and pharmaceutical industries are projected to grow dramatically this decade, and the country's purchasing power is now the fourth largest in the world, after the United States, China and Japan. But much of this progress will be threatened by AIDS. India already has at least 4 million people living with H.I.V., and the United States National Intelligence Council predicts that the number of people infected in India could jump to between 20 million and 25 million by 2010. There is still time, however, to prevent a widespread AIDS epidemic in India. H.I.V. infection rates are low -- less than 1 percent of the adult population is infected. Having failed to prevent enormous human suffering already experienced in Africa, the international community has an opportunity to support India's efforts to stem its AIDS crisis before it's too late. The humanitarian imperative for action is undeniable. But there are other reasons for the West to be concerned about India's future. It is the world's largest democracy and a crucial ally in an unstable region. With one of the largest scientific and technical work forces in the world, it is also an increasingly important business partner for many countries. India's leaders are well aware of the risk AIDS poses -- they are beginning to speak out, breaking powerful and longstanding taboos about discussing sex, drug use and this disease. The prevention efforts being made here are already starting to show measurable results. In fact, with its vast human resources and burgeoning pharmaceutical industry, India may be one of the developing nations best positioned to contain the epidemic and offer global leadership in confronting AIDS. By vigorously pursuing H.I.V. prevention, and by marshaling its impressive scientific research sector to develop the vaccines, microbicides and treatments that could help stop the epidemic worldwide, India can make a significant contribution well beyond its borders. Over the years, I have developed close professional and personal ties to India. India's rapidly growing software sector has made the country a critical partner to many American companies, including Microsoft. India's teachers, scientists and business professionals are laying the foundation for extraordinary economic and social change that would be threatened by AIDS. Much more needs to be done now to reach the populations | Slowing the Spread of AIDS in India |
1441710_0 | OVER the last decade, the news about world hunger has not been all bad. On the plus side, the number of people who are chronically undernourished or starving dropped by 20 million during the 1990's, according to a recent report from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization. On the minus side are two grim facts: the overall number is still huge -- 840 million -- and the strong gains in a relatively small number of countries, notably China, must be measured against a steady slide in the 47 worst-off countries. These are mostly in Africa, where the ranks of the hungry grew by 96 million. At the moment, the news is particularly disheartening. The World Food Program, a United Nations agency and the world's largest food distribution organization, ''has probably never had as many serious challenges as we have today,'' said James T. Morris, the executive director of the agency. As a matter of perspective, it should be noted that the percentage of undernourished people in most developing countries has actually decreased, while the absolute number has risen largely as a result of population growth. And while prospects are bleak in sub-Saharan Africa, Central America and the Middle East, both the prevalence and the amount of undernourished people have been reduced, in some cases drastically, in West Africa, Southeast Asia and South America since the 1990's. But droughts and famines unfold almost in slow motion, and emergency relief must often wait until after the effects of a food shortage become evident and intrusive. In the interim, the suffering worsens. ''Those disasters that receive the highest profile, the most attention in the media, receive the most support,'' Mr. Morris said. ''It's not surprising. The more the world knows about what's going on, the more the world responds.'' Donors in the United States have responded to crises in Africa for years, but there are indications that fatigue is setting in. It is the wrong moment. An extraordinary famine is threatening six nations in southern Africa, where more than 14 million people could face starvation in the next year. Though primarily a result of years of drought alternating with devastating floods, this current drought, the worst in a decade, hits a rural population already decimated by the H.I.V.-AIDS epidemic. In the countries facing mass starvation -- Lesotho, Malawi, Mozambique, Swaziland, Zambia and Zimbabwe -- an infection rate of one in five people | Flash Points Loom In War on Hunger |
1441710_4 | third of Eritrea's population -- are said to be threatened by the current crisis. North Korea's long slide into widespread malnutrition began in 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed and its satellite states stopped providing food and economic aid. Since 1995, floods, droughts and tropical storms have multiplied the country's misery, and it is widely thought that barring political, economic and agricultural reforms, it will be years before North Korea will be able to feed its citizens. Between 1994 and 1998 at least two million North Koreans were reported to have died from starvation and related diseases. According to the most recent World Food Program studies, at least 45 percent of children under 5 are malnourished, while four million school-age children are also severely underfed, impairing their capacity to grow physically and mentally. THE United States, a longtime principal donor, has diverted substantial food aid from North Korea to meet demands in Afghanistan, and other countries are also scaling back donations. Neither the recently exposed attempts of North Korea to develop a nuclear weapons program, nor the longstanding suspicions that food aid is hoarded by the government, are likely to improve the situation. Though agricultural production is up for the second straight year, North Korea is more than a million tons short of its minimum food needs. The slump in grain donations forced the World Food Program, which has been feeding about a third of the country's 23 million people, to begin halting food aid in September to millions of malnourished women, children and older people. By the end of the year, about three million people will be cut off from aid, and another 1.5 million are expected to follow early next year. ''We simply no longer have the resources to do the things we need to do,'' Mr. Morris said. The problems in Afghanistan are also manifold, despite the surprising success of aid efforts over the last year and a pronounced recovery in agricultural production in some areas. Roiled by two decades of war and scorched by a four-year drought, the country is mired in an extended crisis, its rural economy in a shambles and its essential services all but nonexistent. The years of drought have had a damaging effect on range vegetation, thinning critical livestock herds as much as 60 percent since 1998. The unanticipated return of almost two million refugees since last year has outstripped both the | Flash Points Loom In War on Hunger |
1441840_2 | ''I had a personal ambition to sail on that boat,'' Ellison said. ''But the fact of the matter is that my personal goals and ambitions have to take second place to the team's goal to win.'' Ellison is leaving Auckland for three weeks to tend to Oracle business. When he gets back in December, Dickson swears that his boss will be back on the boat. ''You'll certainly see more of Larry on board,'' he said. The other big winner of the quarterfinals has been the Swiss team Alinghi, helmed by Russell Coutts, the two-time America's Cup-winning New Zealander. Alinghi advanced to the semifinals when the Italian team Prada, trailing by 3-0 in the four-of-seven-race series, forfeited the remaining race of the round. Patrizio Bertelli's Prada team decided it would rather get to work on its boats before the repechage round than try to fight from three down. The Italians have put a new bow on their second boat, ITA-80, and they will have an extra few days of two-boat testing to figure out if their new yacht is faster than their old one. For Alinghi, it was another impressive performance. Though the Russell Coutts-helmed boat won its final two races over Prada by only eight seconds, Coutts was nearly always in the lead and seemed at times to be toying with his Italian rival. Alinghi does not race again until Dec. 12, so the team will be well-rested going in the semifinals and will have plenty of time to try new tricks to make its already fast boat go faster. The mood at the Alinghi camp is noticeably relaxed. After the Prada announcement, Coutts and his tactician, Brad Butterworth, went out at HQ, a pub near Viaduct Harbor. And Ernesto Bertarelli, the reclusive syndicate head, emerged from his yacht Vava to take his first questions of the Vuitton Cup. ''The reason I haven't come here is I didn't think it was necessary,'' he told a group of reporters who asked him where he had been. ''I am obviously more than just a crew member, but I enjoy staying in the background and doing my job as navigator. My management is about delegation, and it's proving to be working. ''I'm really enjoying it,'' he said of his experience in the Hauraki Gulf. ''I wouldn't do it if I didn't. It's expensive enough and there are other things to do.'' YACHT RACING | Team Conner and Swiss Advance in Impressive Fashion |
1441794_0 | ''It's important to remember that cellphones are glorified radios. They're subject to interference from a lot of things, from building walls to sunspots to the weather. There will always be a tradeoff between mobility and call quality.'' TRAVIS LARSON, a spokesman for the wireless industry's main trade group. [A17] | QUOTATION OF THE DAY |
1441783_1 | ''He had a little knife, a switchblade.'' Ms. Arnon said the suspect would probably not have made it inside the cockpit. ''Our cabin doors are locked,'' she said. Turkey's state-run news agency, Anatolia, identified the suspect as Tevfik Fukra, a 23-year-old Israeli Arab. Mr. Fukra was led off the plane and taken into custody, and officials said he was being interrogated by Turkish officials trying to determine the motives behind the attack. The attempted hijacking is unusual for El Al, which is widely regarded as the world's most heavily guarded airline. Passengers entering El Al planes are subject to extraordinary security checks, which sometimes include body searches and the dismantling of their electronic equipment. Luggage is often placed in decompression chambers to check for altitude-sensitive bombs, and cockpit doors are locked during the flights. Armed guards oversee the airports, and undercover air marshals fly aboard the aircraft. Though the airline has been the target of numerous attacks, including several assaults on its airport counters around the world, the last successful attempt to commandeer an El Al plane was in 1968. The hijacking ended peacefully after 39 days, when 12 Israeli passengers were swapped for 15 Palestinians held in Israeli jails. The last attack on the airline came last July 4, when a gunman killed two people at the El Al counter at Los Angeles International Airport before El Al guards shot him dead. The attempted hijacking comes after a flurry of recent threats by suspected members of Al Qaeda that the group is planning fresh attacks. It was unclear tonight whether the suspect was acting alone or as part of a larger plot. After the plane landed, security officials held the passengers as officials X-rayed all of their luggage. They emerged about three hours after the flight's scheduled landing. Gil Barzilay, a 34-year-old Israeli businessman, said he watched the suspect rise from his seat in the coach cabin and ask a flight attendant for a glass of water. ''I saw him running for the pilot's cabin,'' said Mr. Barzilay. ''Two security people got him and pulled him to the floor. We were asked to sit in our places. Afterward, from where I was sitting, all I could see were his legs on the floor.'' Adiv Alwan, a 59-year-old former journalist, said: ''It took only a minute. The security men were very quick. They fully controlled him.'' Mr. Alwan said he | Attempted Hijacking Foiled Aboard an Israeli Airliner |
1441695_3 | in efficiency and less spoilage. But a partnership with Hewlett-Packard to develop the technology fizzled as the enormous undertaking grew increasingly expensive. ''Before we got very far, we had to start over,'' said David Prendergast, vice president for technology at America's Second Harvest. The nonprofit now works with AidMatrix, a spinoff of the i2 Foundation, on a system that it will roll out in December (i2 provides supply-chain-management software to businesses). Mr. Prendergast said the experience had been painful but instructive. ''Three years and thousands of hours later, we're getting ready to put something out that may actually do that,'' he said. ''But it's not simple.'' Perhaps the most important lesson for nonprofits, they say, is what companies have learned: clicks must be integrated with bricks. Online giving is still a tiny percentage of giving overall, but donors now expect to find and be able to use the online arm of a nonprofit organization. Just as shoppers might browse styles at a site for Victoria's Secret but buy from a catalog, donors might want the Web site to offer information on the causes they are interested in and the ability to donate. And the Internet is paying off for nonprofits in many ways that have already proved useful to businesses. E-mail is much cheaper, for example, than direct mail, and so the A.S.P.C.A. can reach far more members and donors than ever before. Instead of communicating with 40,000 people week to week for fund-raising and advocacy, it can reach 250,000 with little additional cost. And the ability of computers to sift through vast data and cut through inefficient marketsis showing promise. The Network for Good, which calls itself an e-philanthropy portal, connects donors and volunteers with nonprofit groups. It was created last year by AOL Time Warner, Cisco Systems and Yahoo. Set up as a nonprofit, the network tries to pick up transactional costs as part of its operating costs, giving donors the ability to pay those costs -- usually a few dollars -- themselves. Stephen Sigmund, a spokesman for the AOL Time Warner Foundation, said that 35 percent of donors now paid the transactional costs, too. For the last six months, the site has attracted $1 million a month in donations, he said. ''We have definitely benefited from the failures of some of the folks who have come before us,'' said Ken Weber, acting president and chief operating officer | After the Non-Revolution, Nonprofits Tiptoe Online |
1439931_1 | anger management course and get a grip. But what many people don't realize is that the human brain comes hard-wired for anger and rage. There is strong recent evidence from neuroscience that people share this ancient emotional neural circuitry with all kinds of animals. For example, one can experimentally induce rage in animals by selectively stimulating the amygdala, which is part of the limbic system, the center of the brain's emotional network. In humans, destruction of the amygdala leads to a state of docility and hypersexuality called the Kluver-Bucy syndrome. An intriguing clue to how the brain may process rage comes from a recent brain imaging study of convicted murderers. Using a PET scan, which measures glucose metabolism in neurons, Dr. Adrian Raine at the University of Southern California, compared a group of impulsive murderers with premeditative murderers. In this preliminary study, yet to be replicated, he found that impulsive murderers had significantly lower activity in the prefrontal cortex than premeditative murderers. Those who committed planned murder had equivalent prefrontal cortical activity to the normal subjects in a control group. The prefrontal cortex, a brain region just behind the eyes, serves an executive function, integrating information and inhibiting emotional impulses that arise from deeper brain centers like the limbic system. So it may be that violent impulsive murderers are less able to resist their own impulses. Cold-blooded killers, in contrast, are as able as other people to control their violent impulses; they just choose not to. After a few minutes, Michael's rage evaporated. Then he was able to explain that he had been suddenly overtaken with an irresistible and violent fury. And this all happened before he was even aware of the reason for his rage. Michael's experience disproves the common assumption that we have to understand something consciously before we can have feelings about it. In fact, Dr. Joseph LeDoux, a professor of neuroscience at New York University has shown that emotions can be rapidly processed by limbic brain networks that operate outside consciousness. The problem in understanding rage is that it represents a final path of many causes. Like body temperature, rage can be a normal response to certain environmental stimuli or a sign of serious underlying disease. In Michael's case, the rage is characteristic of his narcissistic personality. Acutely aware of how others perceive him, he is always scanning the world for insults and is quick to | Beyond Anger: Studying the Subconscious Nature of Rage |
1440024_1 | Greco, a Waterbury lawyer, has deteriorated so badly that the nuns, from Religious Teachers Filippini, are not sure what to do with it. In February, church officials announced that the archbishop of Hartford, Daniel A. Cronin, had approved a $10 million restoration project and $25,000 to kick things off. But those plans stalled a few months ago, when the superior of the Filippini order underwent shoulder surgery, and will remain so until the new superior has caught up with her other responsibilities, said the Rev. Augustine Giusani, Holy Land's spiritual director. After years of false starts and canceled fund-raisers, the solution probably lies somewhere between restoring the park, still one of the best-known religious parks in the Northeast, and razing it, local church officials say. Like Mr. Tata, many people in heavily Roman Catholic Waterbury -- nearly half the city's 107,000 residents belong to the church -- keep fond memories of visiting Holy Land as children. Like him, they want its glory restored, even if it means donating money or a little muscle to a major cleanup. But, pounded by weather and vandals into a rusting mush, Holy Land's plaster-and-wire caves, crumbling arches and welded-water-heater recreation of a mini-Jerusalem streetscape virtually defy rehabilitation. Father Giusani favors turning the park into a modest shrine that would include some original Holy Land icons, such as Mr. Greco's handmade Stations of the Cross, now in the basement of an adjacent chapel, as well as a new shrine to the Virgin of the Revelation. ''It's important to refurbish it, because so many people visited it before and it helped them understand their faith and understand who Christ was,'' Father Giusani, 80, said at the rectory of St. Ann Parish in Bristol, Conn. Local artists have spoken up in favor of a modest Holy Land gallery -- a tribute to a tribute. Others think the hilltop should be bulldozed and replaced with a municipal park. If the nuns have a plan, they are not saying so publicly. Earlier this month, a woman who answered the telephone at the Filippini offices here hung up on a reporter asking about Holy Land's future. Sister Lucille Pezzlo, who lives in the church-owned home adjacent to the park, also declined to comment. The windy hilltop was once so popular that even now, 18 years after it closed, more than 150 people a year phone the Waterbury Region Convention and | A Sight That Inspires Ambivalence; Ruins of a Religious Park Await Restorers or the Bulldozer |
1439924_3 | exploring east across the Great Plains, with confirmed sightings or roadside carcasses in Nebraska, Kansas, North Dakota, Iowa and Minnesota. Within the past decade, a thriving population has established itself in the Black Hills of South Dakota. Depending on where they live, mountain lions are also called cougars, pumas, panthers and catamounts. ''They will eventually get to New Jersey,'' or at least close, said Dr. Paul Beier, a professor of wildlife ecology at Northern Arizona University, who has extensively researched mountain lions. ''You need them back in the East because you got too many deer,'' he said. ''They are part of a healthy ecosystem.'' Scientists have had to revise their understanding of mountain lion behavior since the 1990's, when the rate of human deaths began to spike. Once thought to hunt only at dawn or dusk, the cats began to attack suburban deer in midafternoon. Supposedly averse to humans, a threat only to solitary children, they began to stalk adults and even groups. One attack in particular shook up the experts, said David H. Baron, an environmental writer who is working on a book, ''The Beast in the Garden,'' about mountain lions in and around Boulder. In 1991, about 20 miles from here, an 18-year-old man was killed while jogging at midday about 200 yards from a high school. ''This was the attack that wasn't supposed to happen,'' Mr. Baron said. ''This was the first adult to be killed and consumed by a healthy full-grown lion in at least 100 years. Since then, many public officials have been afraid the next death could happen at any time.'' Pete Taylor, lead ranger for the Open Space and Mountain Parks Department in Boulder, does not disagree. ''I think it is going to happen in town,'' said Mr. Taylor, who responds to mountain lion sightings in parks and backyards nearly every month. ''It took me eight and a half years to see five lions in Boulder. I have seen six in the last 18 months. We are either getting more lions or the lions are getting more used to us.'' Still, attacks here and across the West remain rare, much less common than fatal lightning strikes, bee stings or spider bites. ''My question has been 'Why don't they hunt people more often?' '' said Tina Ruth, a wildlife biologist who has studied mountain lion behavior in Montana, New Mexico, Florida and Texas. ''We | Deer Draw Cougars Ever Eastward |
1442348_0 | A star of anti-globalization has fallen. José Bové, the sheep farmer and convicted vandal whose mission is to save France from fast food and free trade, is to serve 14 months in prison after the country's highest court today threw out his appeal. The media-savvy Mr. Bové, 49, protests against globalization at economic summit meetings and is sometimes likened to the French cartoon hero Astérix, leading defiant Gauls against today's Romans. He attracted worldwide attention three years ago when he led a group of French farmers in smashing windows in a McDonald's in Millau, near his home in southern France. Later that year, he attacked a field of genetically modified rice at a research station near the southern city of Montpellier. He was sentenced to six months in prison, and it was an appeal of that sentence that France's Supreme Court of Appeal in Paris rejected today. As someone who supplies sheep's milk to makers of Roquefort cheese, he also has opposed American trade tariffs against French luxury foods and multinational corporations. The court's decision means that Mr. Bové must also serve a separate eight-month sentence for a similar attack on gene-modified crops in France in 1998. He also faces a $7,600 fine. His fall actually began earlier this year when he served six weeks in jail for the McDonald's attack. After the ruling today, Mr. Bové vowed to fight imprisonment by asking President Jacques Chirac for a presidential pardon. ''Of course we cannot ask him to overturn the verdict, but he has the power to stop the sentence being applied,'' Mr. Bové said in a statement. Reached briefly by phone, Mr. Bové said he was surprised by the verdict. Asked whether he would go to jail, he replied: ''We'll see. Now is the time for mobilization.'' Genetically modified crops are common in the United States. But the French, like many other Europeans, remain suspicious of using the new genetic technology in agriculture. Last July, rejecting appeals from the United States, the European Parliament voted to put labels on all foods from European Union countries that contain even the smallest amount of a genetically modified substance. The United States had argued that stricter labeling by the European Union would hurt competition, disrupt trade and alarm consumers unnecessarily. But opponents insist that genetically modified products could lead to the uncontrollable spread of modified genes and harm insects and humans. Opinion polls | Prison Looms for French Farmer, an Anti-Globalization Gadfly |
1442348_1 | of Roquefort cheese, he also has opposed American trade tariffs against French luxury foods and multinational corporations. The court's decision means that Mr. Bové must also serve a separate eight-month sentence for a similar attack on gene-modified crops in France in 1998. He also faces a $7,600 fine. His fall actually began earlier this year when he served six weeks in jail for the McDonald's attack. After the ruling today, Mr. Bové vowed to fight imprisonment by asking President Jacques Chirac for a presidential pardon. ''Of course we cannot ask him to overturn the verdict, but he has the power to stop the sentence being applied,'' Mr. Bové said in a statement. Reached briefly by phone, Mr. Bové said he was surprised by the verdict. Asked whether he would go to jail, he replied: ''We'll see. Now is the time for mobilization.'' Genetically modified crops are common in the United States. But the French, like many other Europeans, remain suspicious of using the new genetic technology in agriculture. Last July, rejecting appeals from the United States, the European Parliament voted to put labels on all foods from European Union countries that contain even the smallest amount of a genetically modified substance. The United States had argued that stricter labeling by the European Union would hurt competition, disrupt trade and alarm consumers unnecessarily. But opponents insist that genetically modified products could lead to the uncontrollable spread of modified genes and harm insects and humans. Opinion polls in Europe consistently show widespread public opposition to their use. Still, France grows experimental genetically modified crops on about 100 sites under the supervision of the Farm Ministry. Mr. Chirac is unlikely to intervene, although he praised Mr. Bové at the time of the attack on the Millau McDonald's. Mr. Chirac said that he too hated McDonald's food. But standing in front of the law courts in Millau today after the decision, Mr. Bové, who is a farmers' union leader, portrayed his struggle as one of workers' rights, calling the sentence ''a serious violation.'' Lawyers for Mr. Bové argued in court that fear of health risks from the crops constituted a ''state of necessity'' that allowed citizens to take the law into their own hands and destroy them. But the court sided with the state attorney, who argued that no ''state of necessity'' existed because there had been no imminent threat to Mr. Bové's health. | Prison Looms for French Farmer, an Anti-Globalization Gadfly |
1444106_1 | at her community college in Des Moines. ''There's not much they can do to stop you.'' Nevertheless, university administrators are trying, spurred on in part by a barrage of letters from entertainment companies notifying them of student abuses. Many entertainment concerns have hired companies to search popular file-trading networks for unauthorized files and track them to their source. More pragmatic motivations, like the expense of large amounts of university's network bandwidth being absorbed by students' proclivity for online entertainment, are also driving the renewed university efforts. Schools have closed off the portals used by file-trading services, installed software to limit how much bandwidth each student can use, and disciplined students who share media files. But nothing, so far, has proved entirely effective. ''It's an ongoing battle,'' said Ron Robinson, a network architect at Bradley University in Peoria, Ill. ''It's an administrative nightmare trying to keep up.'' In a typical game of digital cat-and-mouse, Mr. Robinson said one of his first moves was to block the points of entry, or ports, into the network used by popular file-trading software like KaZaA. But the newest version of the KaZaA software automatically searches for open ports and even insinuates itself through the port most commonly used for normal Web traffic, which must be kept open to allow some e-mail reading and other widely used applications to take place uninterrupted. Even without KaZaA's help, students say they can easily use so-called port-hopping software to find a way past the university's blockades. So Mr. Robinson has rationed the amount of bandwidth that each student can use for file-trading activities. Software with names like PacketHound, from Palisade Systems, or Packet Shaper, from Packeteer, enable network administrators to distinguish data that comes from the file-trading services and sequester it from the rest of the Internet traffic. But there are ways around that, too. To limit the amount of data each student can download, administrators typically link a student ID to the computer in a dormitory room. To exceed those limits, some students find computers registered to others and use them to conduct their activities. That practice has surfaced recently at Cornell University, where the number of complaints from copyright holders about unauthorized downloading in recent months has stayed at the same level as last year, but the number of students who were found to have been unwittingly downloading for others has risen, according to university officials. About | Students Learning to Evade Moves to Protect Media Files |
1444025_4 | emergency rule, the Maiyas had their workers prepare food mixes. The offerings of MTR Foods have since grown to include a variety of snacks, pickles, ice creams and ready-to-eat vegetarian dishes, competing in the highly segmented food market with products from multinationals like Hindustan Lever and Nestlé. In 2000, MTR Foods sold a 20 percent stake to the Magnus Capital Corporation, a Mauritius-based venture capital fund owned by expatriate Indians in Singapore. That stake dropped to 14 percent as the company issued additional shares to sell the 28 percent stake to J. P. Morgan. The rest is held by the Maiya family. The packaged-foods business is giving the same attention to quality and detail that made the restaurant a celebrated brand. MTR Foods is based in a pink building in a quiet Bangalore suburb. For the last year it has been busy upgrading its seven factories to snare the food standards certification. Among the changes, single entries have replaced multiple entry points, a changing room was built for employees, and uniforms are sterilized daily. ''We were perhaps the first Indian restaurant in history to introduce the steam sterilization method in our restaurant, in 1951, and we now have become the first food company to receive the demanding certification,'' Mr. Maiya, an engineer by training, said. To make the factory 100 percent microbe-free daily, the company adopted a technology developed by India's defense laboratories. MTR Foods integrated this technology so well that the company was awarded a contract to supply ready-to-eat foods to Indian soldiers. Lately, Mr. Suresh, the new chief executive, has been busy lining up recipe trials in the first MTR fast-food restaurant-cum-store in Bangalore. Two more such enterprises are set to open here this month followed by about 10 more in Indian cities like Delhi, Bombay and Chennai by March. MTR Foods is expecting sales of about $26 million in the current fiscal year, which ends in March, up from $8.95 million in the year ended in March 2000. Mr. Suresh said MTR's aim was to have revenue of 5 billion rupees ($104 million) in five years, with 20 percent coming from exports. Such numbers are music to the ears of Mr. Ahuja of J. P. Morgan Partners Advisers, who has some numbers of his own. ''The developed markets, especially the United States and the United Kingdom, are extremely large,'' he said, and sales of packaged foods in | An Indian Food Company Expands |
1444101_4 | ''Fields are more likely to be left fallow and smaller areas kept under cultivation,'' the United Nations said. ''Weeding is neglected, infrastructure (such as fences and irrigation ditches) falls into disrepair, and pest control becomes too expensive.'' And, Dr. Piot said, ''communities become less resilient and weaker to start planting the seeds when the rains return.'' In particular, AIDS has devastated 20- to 45-year-olds in Africa. This change has created a new demographic picture seen only in wars, and then only among men. Dr. Piot and other experts have long predicted that AIDS would have a destabilizing effect on society beyond the creation of millions of orphans. Dr. Piot described success in fighting H.I.V., where it has occurred, to prevention programs that have fostered a number of behavioral changes: postponing the age of first sexual intercourse; increasing the use of condoms; having fewer sex partners and fewer encounters with prostitutes; and improving education and access to H.I.V. tests. The minimum spending needed to make prevention programs effective in low- and middle-income countries, the United Nations has estimated, is $10.5 billion between now and 2005. Dr. Bernhard Schwartlander, a World Health Organization epidemiologist and an author of the report, said that delaying introduction of strong prevention measures for just one year could lead to five million deaths, and that prevention could avoid 29 million of the 45 million infections expected in the next few years. As AIDS has exploded in countries like Indonesia, whose infection rates had been low for many years, experience has taught that ''no society can be safe from major epidemics,'' Dr. Schwartlander said. As for the good news, Dr. Piot said, it is that in some areas, ''prevention efforts are bearing fruit.'' The prevalence of H.I.V. among teenagers in South Africa has declined by 25 percent, to 15.4 percent in 2001 from 21 percent in 1998. And in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, infection levels among 15- to 24-year-old women attending prenatal clinics dropped to 15.1 percent in 2001 from 24.2 percent in 1995. But similar trends are not evident elsewhere in Ethiopia. Prevalence rates appear to be stabilizing in Cambodia, the Asian country with the highest such H.I.V. numbers, and in the Dominican Republic. ''It is too early to cry victory, because the prevalence rates are still extremely high'' in too many countries, Dr. Piot said. ''Still, it is an encouraging sign that prevention does have an impact.'' | Women With H.I.V. Reach Half of Global Cases |
1444100_1 | let off clouds of smoke, marched from the Montparnasse area into the heart of the chic Seventh Arrondissement. The official estimate by the police put the crowd at 30,000; union organizers estimated it at 50,000 to 80,000. ''We are saying no to privatization in public service,'' said Thierry Victoire-Feron, a postal worker who earns only $1,200 a month after 20 years on the job. ''As civil servants we will no longer have jobs for life. We have to keep our tradition of strikes. It's a French thing to do.'' Late fall is strike season -- the time of maximum disruption and, therefore, impact -- and France is not the only European country that has been hit. Thousands of British teachers and municipal workers today joined striking firefighters in Britain's worst labor dispute in years. More than 20,000 people marched in Rome today to support the demands of Fiat Auto's metalworkers. Today's actions in France followed a strike Monday by truck drivers who set up dozens of roadblocks throughout the country. The blockade, which was far smaller than those in the 1990's that paralyzed borders, closed gas stations and halted food shipments, dissolved after the security police moved in and after some unions reached a settlement. The five-month-old center-right government has angered unions and worried workers with plans to privatize state-run companies, reform the costly pension system and cut spending. Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin has already caused discontent by taking measures like making it easier for employers to dismiss workers. The strikes may further erode business and consumer confidence and hurt production in France, which is Europe's third-largest economy. The nation's lagging economic growth and rising unemployment rate have eroded sympathy for public sector workers. ''France is a fascinating laboratory because it is trying to strike a balance between the public and the private sector,'' said Bertrand Vannier, the editor in chief of France Inter, the largest domestic public radio station, which weathered a technicians' strike that ended last week. ''On one hand, we French are proud of our public services, so there is a real sympathy for those in the public sector. On the other hand, at a time when the economy is less good and public service workers have job security, they lose sympathy when they go on strike.'' Indeed, commuters at the Gare du Nord were unhappy. ''I find this strike completely ridiculous,'' said Serge Levaton, 70, a | Strikes Jolt France, but It Has Seen Worse |
1444028_0 | To the Editor: Re ''Designers Draw Praise for Trade Center Ideas'' (news article, Nov. 22): I was glad to hear of the creativity of the new design proposals for the World Trade Center site. A suggestion: The tallest new building could contain a full-length atrium or external vertical channel. Fix a mirror at the top of the shaft, positioned at an angle such that, at noon on Sept. 11 of each year, a single shaft of sunlight shines directly through the atrium onto a garden at ground level. Let nature itself commemorate. VIN CRESPI University Park, Pa., Nov. 23, 2002 | A Shaft of Sunlight |
1438176_3 | to take estrogen were less likely to develop Alzheimer's disease. One problem is that women who take hormones after menopause are different from those who do not take the drugs. Hormone users tend to be more educated, for example, and healthier. Some of the very features that make them likely to take hormone therapy are also features that, independently, are associated with a lower risk of Alzheimer's disease. Scientists use statistical adjustments to try to correct for the differences between hormone users and nonusers, but they can never be sure they have succeeded. ''The danger is that it is not the use of hormones that is driving this relationship, but it is being the kind of woman who uses hormone therapy,'' Dr. Breitner said. ''There is no way you can get around that except by doing a randomized controlled trial,'' in which women are randomly assigned to take, or not take, the drugs. Such studies of estrogen and Alzheimer's risk are now under way. In fact, it was observational studies that helped convince medical experts -- incorrectly, as it turned out -- that estrogen protected women from heart attacks and strokes. Such studies can have other drawbacks as well, and some occurred in Dr. Breitner's study. For example, its conclusions were based on just 88 women who developed Alzheimer's in the study period. The researchers subdivided those women into hormone users and nonusers and, among the users, into those taking hormones currently and those who took them previously. They also took into account the duration of the drug therapy. The number of women who fell into any of these groups was small, making the study's conclusions less certain. In addition, about 20 percent of the women declined to participate. It is possible, said Dr. James Robins, a professor of biostatistics at the Harvard School of Public Health, that they might have included a disproportionate number of women in the early stages of Alzheimer's. Their exclusion may have altered the study's results if they were also more likely -- or less likely -- than the others to be taking hormones. Even determining who took estrogen, and when, can be fraught with difficulty. Dr. Norman Relkin, a neurologist at Cornell Medical School, noted, for example, that the researchers ascertained hormone use by asking the study subjects. ''Even a small number of women making a misrecollection could bias the results,'' Dr. Relkin said. | Study Suggests Long-Term Hormone Therapy May Reduce Alzheimer's Risk for Women |
1438129_2 | of a woven floor mat and a scratched-up table leg. An even blurrier picture of someone's orange vest, shot at point-blank range in Halifax. Ms. Devos hoped to find patterns, like similarities in airport décor. A lot of airport interiors have gray and pink color schemes, she observed. She expected to see pictures of security guards doing their jobs, and she looked forward to getting lots of pictures of ''people with tension discernible on their faces.'' She hoped for voyeur and ''trapped traveler scenarios.'' Her plan was to keep contributors informed on her Web site, www.insecuritiesproject.com, and then, when she had accumulated 50 photographs or so, to have an exhibition of 3-by-4-foot blowups of some of the photographs with text addressing broad cultural and social patterns. Then airport security stepped in. What was the problem? It was not that Ms. Devos had photographed airport screening machines and guards or that she was being irreverent about security. The problem, it turned out, was with the screeners. The practice of making tourists take snapshots to prove their cameras aren't weapons goes against American and Canadian policy. In Canada screeners can make you turn on electronic devices, like cellphones, laptop computers and digital cameras, and they might make you put your camera and film through the X-ray machines, said Tony Hahn, a communications advisor at Transport Canada, which regulates airline policy, but ''they never would ask you to take a picture.'' Well, maybe not never. ''We're aware that this happens,'' Mr. Hahn said. But that is just ''the individual screener being overzealous.'' By the end of the year, he said, it should all be sorted out. The Canadian government will take over all airline security. It's the same story in the United States. According to national guidelines, ''a screener cannot ask you to take a photograph to prove it's a camera,'' said Dave Steigman, a spokesman for the Transportation Security Administration. The fact that some screeners do, he said, simply indicates that security is a little chaotic right now, a mishmash of public and private screeners. But by Nov. 19, Mr. Steigman said, all will be sorted out. The Transportation Security Administration expects to have 32,000 national screeners at 429 different airports for all scheduled passenger airlines in the United States. Then, Mr. Steigman said, you will see less and less of people taking pictures at security checkpoints. ''Bad news that it will | Say Cheese, For Airport Insecurity And for Art |
1438769_0 | To the Editor: Re ''Longing for a Sept. 10 Skyline; Some Vocal Groups Call for Restoring the Twin Towers'' (news article, Nov. 2): Rebuild the old towers, put up new ones, design something innovative and breathtaking. Lay out a splendid park and public space with nightly beams of light, but do something. For those of us who look out of our windows each morning and have to stare at that big hole in the sky, the arguing and the debating and the endless talk are becoming painful and angering. Pataki, Bloomberg, Bush, Giuliani: Shame on you. It's over a year, and the bickering goes on and on. And do I have an opinion on what should replace the twin towers? Of course I do. I'm a New Yorker; inspire me, excite me, make me proud, but get it done. RICHARD J. ROTHSTEIN New York, Nov. 5, 2002 | Downtown: Just Do It! |
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