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1447313_0 | An article on Nov. 13 about the graphic arts in Cuba referred imprecisely to Cuban artworks sold in the United States. They are not banned under the American embargo on Cuban goods; like publications and other informational materials, they are exempt, and Americans who go to Cuba on authorized travel can buy them. | Corrections |
1445471_0 | Traffic crawling down expressways, shoppers thronging glittery new malls, and apartment prices taking the elevator are all signs that South Korea's economy is expanding this year at 6 percent, a growth rate second only to China among Asia's biggest economies. Breaking with the Japanese model of sacrificing consumers on the altar of trade surpluses, South Korea has made consumer spending a major engine for economic growth. But now some economists wish that Koreans would stop saying ''charge it'' quite so often. In the five years since the 1997 corporate debt crisis, household debt in South Korea has nearly doubled, hitting $326 billion this year. That figure is equivalent to 73 percent of gross domestic product -- up from about 50 percent three years ago and nearing the 79 percent level seen in credit-saturated America. In this nation of new borrowers, about one worker in 10 is now behind on credit card payments. ''It is true the household loans have jump-started the economy,'' said Jeon Yun Churl, South Korea's finance minister, in an interview in Seoul. ''But the government is coming up with various measure to reduce loans to households.'' Without raising interest rates, South Korean officials hope gradually to let the air out of what many analysts say is a bubble built on consumer borrowing and spending. Planners want to avoid a hard landing that could destabilize the economy, Asia's third largest, with its increasingly middle-class population of 47 million. In a series of steps announced in November, banks and credit companies have been instructed to set aside more reserves against the risk that customers will not pay and to cut back on the amount of cash they will advance to cardholders. The Financial Supervisory Service, the government's banking watchdog, said that all consumer lenders will be inspected and those that lend recklessly will be shut down. Already the credit-tightening measures have started to cool the overheated housing market in greater Seoul, home to almost half of the nation's population. But in a country imbued with Confucian notions of saving and frugality, the credit card binge has been revolutionary. The national savings rate has dwindled to 27.5 percent this year, from 33.4 percent in 1997, and the average adult South Korean now carries three credit cards. The mania has even trickled across the demilitarized zone into North Korea, where the authorities announced in November plans to start a service offering | South Korea's Bane, in One Word: Plastic |
1445606_2 | said. For example, an employee crossing the street might be typing so vigorously into a two-way pager that he would never notice an approaching bus. Would that employee be covered by workers' compensation? Probably, unless a company policy forbade wandering around typing into pagers, said Lawrence Lorber, a partner at Proskauer Rose in Washington. But nothing is certain, he added. ''I don't know that a lot of this has been addressed,'' he said. ''It's all new, so you're going to have very few reported cases.'' Cellphones create problems for more employers than do older forms of mobile communication, like CB radios. Those radios and tools like them are often used by truck drivers and others whose job it is to be on the road, leaving employers clearly responsible for any accidents caused by their drivers. Mobile phones, because they allow people whose job may be at a desk to work from a car -- even when their job is not to drive -- may make thousands of new companies liable. The Virginia lawsuit against Cooley Godward, the employer of the lawyer who ran over a 15-year-old girl, could help set a precedent in this fuzzy area. The lawyer, Jane Wagner, pleaded guilty to a felony and has already completed a one-year work-release program, according to her lawyer. Now the civil suit against the law firm is about to begin. Civil lawsuits against the employers continue independently of any criminal case against the individual employee, lawyers said. For example, the Smith Barney broker served less than a year in a work-release program after pleading guilty to manslaughter, according to his lawyer, John Waldron. Smith Barney settles the civil lawsuit in 1999, according to Edward R. Eidelman, a lawyer for the family of the victim. But no one is sure what companies must do to avoid or at least limit liability. Companies' lawyers do not want to rely on unpredictable juries and would prefer to know how to give clients reliable protection. In the Minnesota case, Renee Diane Rivera hit another car as she reached for her cellphone after her daughter paged her. The jury concluded that answering the call was not part of Ms. Rivera's job -- although the pager was provided by her employer -- and so her employer was not liable. Ms. Rivera was not charged with any criminal wrongdoing, according to one of her lawyers, Lawrence M. Rocheford. | Doing Business by Cellphone Creates New Liability Issues |
1445624_0 | A new school has opened in the tiny southern town of San Giuliano di Puglia, a month after an earthquake made a schoolhouse collapse, killing 26 pupils. A 27th died of injuries yesterday. The new school has canvas walls and ceilings to ease the nerves of residents, many of whom lost relatives in the disaster. The tragedy gripped the country and led to a national debate on school safety and the need for earthquake-proof buildings. The roof of an elementary school in Sicily collapsed yesterday after a small earthquake but nobody was hurt, as teachers evacuated the building after a prior jolt. Jason Horowitz (NYT) | World Briefing | Europe: Italy: New School Where Quake Killed Pupils |
1446531_0 | A biotechnology company will pay the government about $3 million to settle charges that it did not take proper steps to prevent corn that was genetically engineered to produce pharmaceuticals from entering the food supply. The company, ProdiGene, agreed to pay a civil fine of $250,000 and to reimburse the government for buying and incinerating 500,000 bushels of soybeans contaminated with the genetically modified corn. The fine is the first ever for violation of a permit for a field trial of a genetically engineered crop, government officials said yesterday. The incident has raised concerns among environmentalists and food companies about a fledgling area of biotechnology, implanting genes in crops to make them produce pharmaceuticals or industrial chemicals. Until now, genetic engineering has been used mainly to make crops resistant to insects or herbicides. Biopharming, as it is sometimes called, may one day be an inexpensive way to produce large volumes of certain proteins, like insulin for diabetes or antibodies to treat cancer, that are now made in vats of genetically modified cells. The technology may also be used to make vaccines that can be eaten rather than injected. But if such crops were to become intermixed with food crops, they could pose a health hazard and require huge food recalls. Officials of the Department of Agriculture and the Food and Drug Administration said yesterday that ProdiGene's corn never made it into food or animal feed. That, plus the fine, shows the system is working, they said. ''I think this demonstrates the rigor of our regulatory system,'' said Bobby Acord, administrator of the agriculture agency's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service. But a spokeswoman for the food industry, while applauding the fine, said concerns remained. ''The incident over all just reaffirms our concerns that something could go wrong,'' said Stephanie Childs of the Grocery Manufacturers of America, which represents food companies like Kellogg and General Mills. The organization wants pharmaceuticals to be grown in plants that are not used for food, but the biotech companies say that would be impractical. ProdiGene, a private company based in College Station, Tex., has been one of the most aggressive companies in the new field and already sells some industrial chemicals produced in genetically modified corn. It was accused of two incidents of possible contamination. In one case, soybeans were planted this year on a plot in Nebraska that was used last year to grow | Spread of Gene-Altered Pharmaceutical Corn Spurs $3 Million Fine |
1448361_5 | his most genocidal. During the so-called Anfal campaign of 1987-88, when tens of thousands of Kurds were slaughtered in mass executions or fumigated with lethal gases, the U.S. regarded Iraq as a bulwark against Iran. Even after the gas attacks were documented the U.S. continued to ladle out credits for Iraq to buy American grain and manufactured goods. Ms. Power's reporting turned up one State Department document that concluded, with spine-tingling diplomatic detachment, ''Human rights and chemical weapons use aside, in many respects our political and economic interests run parallel with those of Iraq.'' Human rights activists know their cause has perennially been ''aside.'' The Bush administration's enthusiasm for human rights would be more believable if it were less selectively applied. That does not mean we should ostracize countries whose cooperation we need in the war on terror -- Pakistan, Indonesia, Uzbekistan and others -- for their flagrant violations of basic human liberty. Despite what the purists say, engagement is sometimes a more effective weapon than sanctions. The critical thing is that fostering civilized behavior should be a priority up front in the design of our foreign policy, not an afterthought, a sop to bleeding hearts, or a pretext for something else. If the time comes when we attempt to overthrow the ruling order in Iraq, the administration could allay the misgivings of humanitarians by demonstrating some sensitivity in how we do it. Even Iraqis who secretly yearn for our help must worry about civilian casualties, about vicious factional reprisals and about a new regime staffed by some of the very thugs who have participated in Saddam's chamber of horrors. In Afghanistan, a demonstration project in building democracy is endangered because we have abandoned much of the country to the warlords. One big reason for the credibility gap is that promoting human rights, even more than promoting American security, depends on the cooperation of those bothersome multinational institutions this administration seems to loathe. Here's a test case to watch. The administration says it wants Saddam charged for his crimes by an ad hoc international tribunal. Good idea. If -- as Human Rights Watch proposes -- such a court has broad jurisdiction over atrocities committed in Iraq, not just license to try Saddam Hussein, it will send a strong message to opposition forces to forgo bloody reprisals during a coming war. Few expect such sophistication from an administration that recoils from | The Selective Conscience |
1448488_0 | The government proposed legislation granting transsexuals the right to be legally recognized and to marry under their chosen sex. Under the plan, the country's 5,000 transsexuals would also be given the right to birth certificates noting their new sex and could claim pensions at the appropriate age: 60 years for women and 65 for men. Britain is one of four European countries, along with Ireland, Andorra and Albania, that does not recognize sex-change operations; the United States does not explicitly do so, either. In July, the European Court of Human Rights granted two British transsexuals legal rights as women, ruling that the British law had violated their rights to privacy and family life. Sarah Lyall (NYT) | World Briefing | Europe: Britain: Proposal To Recognize Sex Changes |
1451658_0 | To the Editor: Re ''Keep the Ban on Pete Rose'' (editorial, Dec. 22): Deterrence, not punishment, is the paramount issue in Pete Rose's ban from baseball. Big-time sports and gambling have a mutual relationship in which one activity benefits the other. However, these worlds must never intersect lest the integrity of the game be compromised. The well-meaning clamor of fans to have Rose reinstated betrays a naïveté about the virulence of gambling and its potential to devitalize the game. Baseball must send a message to all participants that gambling is strictly prohibited. Allowing Rose in the Hall of Fame with a scarlet letter attached to his plaque is an equivocation in a place of verities. J. T. MASARYK Mesa, Ariz., Dec. 23, 2002 | A Plaque for Pete Rose |
1451625_0 | INTERNATIONAL A3-19 Declining Fertility Rates Reshape Europe's Future Italy, Spain, Sweden, Germany and Greece are now feeling the consequences of decades of low fertility rates: less-competitive work forces, surfeits of retirees and pension systems that will need to be cut back deeply. A1 New U.S. Radar for Qatar The United States military has set up a sophisticated ground-radar system in Qatar to help protect allied and American forces in the Persian Gulf region from Iraqi missile attacks, military officials say. These new radars are only used overseas in Germany and South Korea. A22 Israel Cuts Smallpox Effort Israeli officials said they had decided against vaccinating the entire population against the smallpox virus. But they said they were expanding the number of soldiers and health care workers who would be vaccinated to 40,000 or more. A23 Iraqis Cope in Violent Times Since the beginning of the Iran-Iraq war two decades ago, Iraqis have ricocheted from one crisis to the next. Now they find themselves bracing for another conflagration in which they have little voice. In response, they cling to what normalcy they can, defiant one minute and gloomy the next. A1 Zimbabwe's Economic Struggle Over the past two years, the government of Zimbabwe has redistributed nearly all of the country's white-owned farmland to poor black families and aspiring black commercial farmers. But the move has come at a price: the economy is collapsing. A18 Pope Speaks Against War In a Christmas message from St. Peter's Square, Pope John Paul II spoke out against the prospect of war in the Middle East and urged people not to succumb to the fears created by terrorism. A19 U.S. Allays Japan's Fears With Japan increasingly worried about North Korea's missile arsenal and nuclear bomb programs, the United States has offered assurances that its Aegis destroyers are capable of shooting down medium-range missiles, the Japanese Jiji Press news agency reported. A6 Japanese Make Transition A quarter-century after North Korean agents abducted her from a beach on her native island, Hitmi Soga, now 43, moved into her own house. Last week, in a symbolic break, Ms. Soga and the other Japanese returnees finally removed their North Korean loyalty badges. A7 France in Ivory Coast France is becoming more deeply enmeshed in a conflict in Ivory Coast. The complicated dispute in France's former colony -- once the most stable and prosperous country in West Africa -- is France's | NEWS SUMMARY |
1451610_2 | 31.3 million in 2050 from about 39.9 million now. According to the World Health Organization, Spain's fertility rate last year was 1.1, the lowest in Western Europe. Many provinces in Italy's wealthy, well-educated north have rates well below that. The rate in the province of Ferrara, which includes the city of Ferrara, has been under 0.9 for each of the years since 1986 that Italy's National Institute of Statistics kept track. Ferrara officials talk about the dearth of young children in the streets, the closing of elementary schools over the last decade and a pervasive sense that something is missing. ''There's a lack of energy,'' Deputy Mayor Tiziano Tagliani said in a recent interview here. ''The society is colder without children.'' Nationwide, Italy's fertility rate has been so low for so long -- under 1.5 since 1984 -- that the country offers an especially good glimpse into the dimensions and dynamics of the trend. For example, Italy now has the world's oldest population. The percentage of people 60 or older is 25, compared with 16 percent in the United States, according to the population division of the United Nations. The division's experts project that by 2050, if current trends hold, 42 percent of Italy's population will be 60 or older. Antonio Golini, a professor of demographics at the University of Rome, Sapienza, said that would be ''unsustainable, from a cultural and even psychological point of view.'' That sense of alarm was reflected in Pope John Paul II's first-ever address to the Italian Parliament in November. The pope said ''the crisis of the birthrate'' in Italy was a ''grave threat that bears upon the future of this country.'' In Italy, as in other West European countries, the low fertility rate is interwoven with an array of other issues -- immigration, for one. While many people and many politicians in Europe would like to clamp down on the rising tide of new arrivals over the last decade, they may be forced to accept it, simply to fill jobs and maintain levels of productivity. Europe stands out as the continent with the lowest fertility rates. The numbers are now starkest in East European countries like Bulgaria, Latvia and Ukraine, each of which had a rate of 1.1 in 2001, according to the World Health Organization. (Its figures sometimes differ slightly from those of individual countries, but provide a yardstick.) But the trend hit | Persistent Drop in Fertility Reshapes Europe's Future |
1450465_0 | To the Editor: ''They Rise, but Do They Soar?,'' by Witold Rybczynski (Op-Ed, Dec. 20), about the latest designs for the World Trade Center site, refers to ''repairing the Manhattan skyline.'' A skyline cannot be repaired or restored any more than we could ''repair'' the ''skyline'' of a garden that had lost a towering tree. The skyline is continuously changing and presents countless different forms depending on one's perspective. I understand the popular desire to have what we had before. But that is not possible. I understand, too, the desire for a New York City beacon that can be seen from the air or an approaching highway. Lower Manhattan may have that again one day, in time. However, one building does not a skyline make. ALFRED A. CHIODO Brooklyn, Dec. 20, 2002 | Trying to Fill A Horrible Void |
1449968_2 | Mass. The study, published today in The New England Journal of Medicine, had its origins a few years ago when the researchers, led by Dr. Rene Bernards, a professor of molecular carcinogenesis at the Netherlands Cancer Institute in Amsterdam, began searching thousands of genes from breast tumors. They were asking whether there was a pattern of gene activity that was associated with a good prognosis and another associated with a bad prognosis. The methodology for such searches was developed only recently, with gene chips. When material from tumors is washed over the chips, fragments of active genes stick to the chips. Using fluorescent dyes to show when they get a hit, researchers can see patterns and correlate them with a tumor's behavior. Their initial study led the researchers to focus on 70 genes that they identified in a small study. The study indicated that the genes' activity appeared to predict prognosis, but that needed confirmation. So they began the new study involving 295 consecutive patients at the Netherlands Cancer Institute. The women, aged 52 and younger when their cancers were diagnosed, had had standard treatments from 1984 to 1995. Doctors had stored tissue from the women's tumors. They knew which tumors had spread to the lymph nodes at the time of diagnosis. They also knew whether a woman's cancer spread throughout her body or whether she remained cancer-free after her initial treatment. And they knew who had died of breast cancer within a decade of diagnosis. ''We asked whether the gene signature would be able to predict disease outcome in these patients,'' Dr. Bernards said. ''The answer is very clear. It is so powerful that it is better than any of the known criteria used today in deciding if patients need further therapy.'' The women whose cancer cells indicated a good prognosis had an 85.2 percent chance of remaining free of cancer over the next decade and a 94.5 percent of surviving the decade. Those whose cancer cells indicated a poor prognosis had a 50.6 percent chance of remaining cancer-free and a 54.6 percent of surviving that time. Small tumors often had bad genetic signatures while large tumors often had good ones, throwing into question a common assumption about how cancers develop. It is often said that cancers start off unable to spread, but as they grow, they acquire this ability. ''That is based on a notion that tumors go | Breast Cancer: Genes Are Tied To Death Rates |
1449979_1 | stores or shopping malls, restaurants, barber shops, buses, taxis, elevators, libraries, gymnasiums, beauty salons or even in public toilets. Smoking is banned in most areas of hospitals, airports, banks and museums. In a land where cigarettes have long been the only vice widely practiced by Buddhist monks, it is now illegal to smoke in temples. Both the smoker and the establishment face potential fines -- $465 for the venue involved, $46 for the person who lights up. As antismoking laws take effect in the United States and Europe, Asia has become one of the biggest markets for American tobacco companies. In many places people seem not to have heard about the dangers of smoking, and heart disease is a growing cause of death in Asia. The World Health Organization says that apart from Singapore, Hong Kong and now Thailand, Asian countries have some of the world's weakest laws against tobacco. Despite its generally laissez-faire culture, Thailand has had success when it has mounted serious public health campaigns. In the 1970's it was a pioneer in promoting the use of condoms for birth control. Since the 1990's it has been held up as a model for combating the spread of AIDS. An antismoking lobby has been gaining momentum here over the past two decades and many public places were already no-smoking zones before the new law was passed. The Thailand Tobacco Information Center, a private monitoring group, said the number of smokers here has declined in recent years to about 12 million people, or 23.4 percent of the population. It said the percentage of male smokers had dropped from 48.8 percent in 1986 to 38.9 percent in 1999, the last year for which figures are available. The much-smaller proportion of women smokers declined in the same period, from 4.1 percent to 2.4 percent. The government recently announced plans to replace the black ''death notices'' printed on packs of cigarettes with color pictures and messages about cancerous lungs, premature aging, birth defects and impotence. ''Thailand's tobacco-control efforts are being hailed as among the most successful in Asia, with new regulations implemented every year,'' The Bangkok Post said in an editorial last month. ''How effective these regulations are when put to the test remains to be seen.'' The Public Health Ministry said it would soon be able to answer that question. It has already begun sending inspectors to air-conditioned restaurants for surprise visits. | Thais Impose Wide Ban on Smoking and, Surprise, It Works |
1450087_0 | AS an inexpensive, decentralized way to connect people around the world, the Internet presents a wealth of opportunities for students of foreign languages. From dipping into a chat room where the conversation is in Italian to skimming a magazine in Japanese or translating a word from Hindi, the Internet offers a trove of unorthodox but effective learning tools. For geographically isolated and busy people, one of the biggest obstacles to conquering a foreign language is finding people with whom to converse and to practice. The Internet can eliminate that obstacle, since people speaking all kinds of languages can be found on the Web at all hours. Beyond interacting with other people, the language student who ventures into cyberspace will find foreign radio and television broadcasts, free tutorials, reference and translation sites and countless ordinary Web sites in different languages. A year and a half after a trip to Florence inspired me to study Italian, I can say from firsthand experience that Internet chat rooms are an excellent complement to conventional academic studies. Yahoo Chat (chat.yahoo.com), for example, provides links to international chat rooms from Western Europe to the Pacific Rim to Latin America. To enter these rooms you need your own Yahoo user ID, which costs nothing and can be created in about five minutes. Once registered, you can use a standard Web browser to chat with thousands of other Internet users gathered in rooms for people from specific countries. There are hundreds of such rooms for countries all over the world. Chat rooms are simple to navigate. When you enter a room, you are brought together with 20 or so other chatters, usually grouped by topic, and you can type messages to one another. In the Italian chat rooms, everything is in Italian -- the ads, the buttons, even the messages telling you who has entered and left the rooms. As a newcomer to the language, I was able to study what people typed, learning new words and phrases along the way. If you have a Windows-based computer, you can go beyond using your keyboard in the Yahoo rooms. If your computer has speakers and a microphone, you can monitor public conversations that take place separately from the text chat you see on the screen, or, if you are daring enough, jump right into the mix. While chatting or observing in the public area of a room is useful, | For Foreign-Language Learners, the Web Unties Tongues |
1449967_1 | relieved the designers of any obligation to produce ponderous office buildings while freeing them to focus on a more imaginative treatment of the skyline and the trade center towers' footprints. To their credit, these new plans also reimagine downtown Manhattan as a hub of cultural activity. For the next six weeks, the public will be able to see these plans in person at the Winter Garden and on the Web at www.lowermanhattan.info. There is a lot to take in. One of the first questions people will ask is how these plans honor the footprints of the trade center towers. The answers are surprisingly varied. The Peterson Littenberg plan calls for a memorial garden. Norman Foster and his associates imagine stark, lifeless voids. The team headed by Richard Meier extends the footprints into the Hudson River. The plans presented by Studio Daniel Libeskind and the coalition of designers called United Architects make extensive use of the vast underground space that visitors now see after the cleanup at ground zero. The efforts to visualize a new skyline are no less exciting. The team called Think, whose plans were presented by Rafael Viñoly, envisions a pair of latticed towers rising into the sky, ''extending vertically the public realm,'' as Mr. Viñoly put it. Mr. Libeskind proposes an enormous tower, 1,776 feet high, whose highest stories would be public gardens. Skidmore, Owings & Merrill offers a ''vertical city'' whose towers seem almost to dance around the site. Perhaps most challenging of all is the skyline presented by United Architects, a half-corona of towers that lean against each other in the sky but remain open to the city grid below. New Yorkers have now been given what its citizens asked for all along, plans that are proud, bold and capable of helping us reimagine who we are in the wake of 9/11. The public's obligation is to visit these plans as often as possible and to take their aesthetic and cultural challenges seriously. The government's obligation -- specifically the corporation and the Port Authority, meaning the two states' governors, George Pataki and James McGreevey -- is to protect the scale and ambition of these plans against what are almost certain to be challenges from commercial and political interests. For everyone, the task is to seize the opportunity for which we have paid so dearly, and to grasp this rare possibility for civic and architectural triumph. | Visions for Ground Zero |
1450028_0 | The Interactive Advertising Bureau in New York, a trade group for sellers of online advertising, has adopted guidelines for the use of e-mail mailing lists by its members. The suggested guidelines for companies that provide e-mail lists include guaranteeing that every recipient on the list has agreed to receive e-mail from outside companies, agreeing to disclose the source of any address provided and assuring that recipients receive no more than the agreed-upon amount of e-mail. THE MEDIA BUSINESS: ADVERTISING -- ADDENDA | Online Advertisers Adopt Guidelines |
1449891_0 | AS an inexpensive, decentralized way to connect people around the world, the Internet presents a wealth of opportunities for students of foreign languages. From dipping into a chat room where the conversation is in Italian to skimming a magazine in Japanese or translating a word from Hindi, the Internet offers a trove of unorthodox but effective learning tools. For geographically isolated and busy people, one of the biggest obstacles to conquering a foreign language is finding people with whom to converse and to practice. The Internet can eliminate that obstacle, since people speaking all kinds of languages can be found on the Web at all hours. Beyond interacting with other people, the language student who ventures into cyberspace will find foreign radio and television broadcasts, free tutorials, reference and translation sites and countless ordinary Web sites in different languages. A year and a half after a trip to Florence inspired me to study Italian, I can say from firsthand experience that Internet chat rooms are an excellent complement to conventional academic studies. Yahoo Chat (chat.yahoo.com), for example, provides links to international chat rooms from Western Europe to the Pacific Rim to Latin America. To enter these rooms you need your own Yahoo user ID, which costs nothing and can be created in about five minutes. Once registered, you can use a standard Web browser to chat with thousands of other Internet users gathered in rooms for people from specific countries. There are hundreds of such rooms for countries all over the world. Chat rooms are simple to navigate. When you enter a room, you are brought together with 20 or so other chatters, usually grouped by topic, and you can type messages to one another. In the Italian chat rooms, everything is in Italian -- the ads, the buttons, even the messages telling you who has entered and left the rooms. As a newcomer to the language, I was able to study what people typed, learning new words and phrases along the way. If you have a Windows-based computer, you can go beyond using your keyboard in the Yahoo rooms. If your computer has speakers and a microphone, you can monitor public conversations that take place separately from the text chat you see on the screen, or, if you are daring enough, jump right into the mix. While chatting or observing in the public area of a room is useful, | For Foreign-Language Learners, the Web Unties Tongues |
1449910_2 | elegant, energetic Parthenon frieze is now split among the British Museum in London, which has more than half of the surviving slabs; the Acropolis Museum in Athens, which has most of the rest; the Louvre in Paris, which has one slab; and five other European museums, which have fragments. In several cases, pieces of a single slab are split between London and Athens. In a symbolic gesture last week, Italy announced a long-term loan to Greece of a small fragment of the frieze, depicting the foot of Peitho, goddess of persuasion. Sadly, even the most concerted efforts at cultural diplomacy and art restoration will never make the frieze whole. Portions were lost in various upheavals, including the conversion of the temple into a church in about 450 A.D. and a direct hit by a shell during a Venetian siege in 1687, when the structure was used by the Turks for military purposes. Moreover, the marbles long ago lost their pigments and the pieces of metal that were affixed to depict weapons and horses' trappings. They suffered further indignities in the 20th century: They were eroded and discolored in Athens by some of Europe's worst pollution and in London by a misguidedly harsh scrubbing in the late 1930's. Darkened and weathered in Greece, whitened in England, the ancient celebrants might look more like distant cousins than siblings were they to meet up at a family reunion. Still, art lovers and scholars would rejoice at the chance to see one of the world's most celebrated monumental artworks at least partially reassembled and, at last, well cared for. The Greeks are now trying to sweeten their pitch for the marbles in the British Museum. They have offered Britain major exhibitions of other ancient art. They have also stopped asserting ownership of the expatriate slabs, asking instead for the panels to be returned as a long-term loan. The reunited pieces would take their place in a new glass-enclosed Parthenon Gallery, which would crown a new museum to be built below the ancient temple. There is considerable doubt, however, that this museum-building project, some 25 years in discussion, will be completed in time for the 2004 Olympics. And this delay could provide Greece with an opportunity to sweeten its offer further. The Greeks should now agree to lend their signature treasure to the British Museum until the inadequate old Acropolis Museum is finally replaced by | Reassembling Sundered Antiquities |
1448178_1 | were due in Washington for the meeting on the Middle East were said to have been so upset about the delays in the drafting of the document map that they threatened not to attend. An official said the meeting was firmed up only today, with word that Mr. Bush would meet with the group. Administration officials assert that, contrary to the statements of European and Arab allies, they are highly concerned about rising perceptions that when it comes to the Middle East, the United States seems only to be offering talk of war and threats of pre-emptive military action. Secretary of State Colin L. Powell today introduced what he called a Middle East Partnership Initiative asking for a new effort to spread democracy and political reforms in the Middle East, including a campaign for more rights for women. However, Secretary Powell said the first part of the initiative contemplated adding only $29 million, which was approved by Congress last July, to the $1 billion that goes for foreign aid to Arab countries. He said that ''significant additional funding'' would be sought next year. ''The U.S.-Middle East Partnership Initiative is a bridge between the United States and the Middle East,'' the secretary said. He explained that its ''three pillars'' would be education, business and private sector reform and political reform that would include improved rights for women. At present, most of the $1 billion in foreign aid for the Arab world goes to a handful of countries, particularly Egypt, Jordan and the Palestinian Authority. Many experts say that if there was a war in Iraq, and some kind of an agreement between Israel and Palestinians, the United States would spend far more than $10 billion to reconstruct the region. State Department officials said the money in the new initiative would go to countries like Saudi Arabia and other Persian Gulf countries that are so rich they do not quality for foreign aid, but are considered to need social and political reforms. The United States aims to broaden the agenda in the Middle East beyond fighting terrorism, a senior official said. Work on the proposal for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is also seen by the administration as crucial to reassuring the Arab world that the United States has a positive vision beyond going to war to protect American interests. The proposal envisions a Palestinian state and an end to what it calls Israeli | U.S. Delay on Proposal For Mideast Irks Allies |
1373590_3 | the designs of the future.'' This call for design changes to prevent what the experts call progressive collapses -- chain reactions of failures that multiply the direct effects of triggering events like a bomb, a plane crash or a major fire -- is among the first recommendations to emerge from the six-month investigation of the trade center catastrophe by the team, organized by the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the American Society of Civil Engineers. The investigators also recommend that building designers consider the dangerous interaction between structural damage and fire, rather than the current process in which a building's structural strength and its fire protection are considered as nearly separate problems. That sort of interaction, the team believes, was instrumental not only in the collapse of the twin towers, but of 7 World Trade Center, a 47-story office building at the northern edge of the site. The recommendations come after months of poring over videotape, steel debris and trade center blueprints. Investigators have not arrived at an exact explanation of all the collapses, nor have they settled the vital question of whether any building could have withstood the attack and remained standing. But they have already seen enough evidence to conclude that progressive collapse played a critical role in magnifying the damage at the trade center, as it did in the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Building in Oklahoma City. The evidence includes determinations of how certain columns failed, how bolted connections gave way, how fireproofing was overwhelmed by the blazes, and just how the buildings finally gave way. A formal report on the investigation is expected this spring. But preparing initiatives for changes in building codes and engineering practices is something that could take many more months of research, and incorporating them into local codes nationwide could take years. The idea that disasters, whether natural or intentional, can have an impact on building codes has a long history, as illustrated by the California earthquakes in San Fernando in 1971 and Northridge in 1994, as well as the Oklahoma City attack. Just five years after the San Fernando earthquake, western states had incorporated lessons learned from the catastrophe into basic building codes. Both California earthquakes also led to the adoption in 1997 of national guidelines to reduce earthquake hazards to buildings, proposals that were incorporated into a national building code in 2000. In a vote scheduled for | New Rules Proposed To Help High-Rises Withstand Attacks |
1373565_2 | much more open about their policies. These institutional flaws, unfortunately, reach far beyond Boston. A culture of control and complacency reaches all the way to Rome. In the church, a pervasive authoritarian mentality hurts the clergy and laity both. Church staff members and parishioners unquestioningly accept clerical actions and decisions, even where children are involved. Bishops capitulate to Vatican expectations that they avoid public embarrassment at any cost, often by paying off victims. What can the church do to restore its moral authority and regain a respected voice in our national debate? It might start by establishing judicious policies to deal fairly and legally with facts and accusations, and committing publicly to a more open and collaborative model of governance -- including women and lay men at the highest levels, for instance. Such changes would be difficult under the current leadership, especially in the face of Vatican opposition. Fortunately, the Roman Catholic Church is more than its bureaucracy. There are many priests and pastors, and even some bishops, who share the bewilderment and anger of their congregations and are struggling with them for justice and reconciliation. And there is the strength of the laity itself. Letters, petitions and public demonstrations are not likely to make much of a difference; they are too easy for unrepentant bishops and Vatican officials to ignore. One approach that could force the church bureaucracy to listen is for all Catholics to withhold funds from diocesan and Vatican collections and organizations. This may seem severe, but at least in the short term, change requires this kind of jolt. Far-reaching reform can only take place when lay people have a more powerful voice in church decisions, on both the local and national levels. This does not necessarily mean that they must organize in opposition to their pastors, for many priests are allies in this struggle. It is merely to say that lasting institutional change will require the equal participation of the laity, priests, bishops and the Vatican itself. This crisis may mobilize Catholics to demand a greater role in the church, and in doing so they may strengthen its moral authority and enlarge its sense of responsibility. Better yet, it may help them to realize that the future of any religious tradition, no matter how ancient, is in the hands of all its believers. Lisa Sowle Cahill is a professor of theology and ethics at Boston College. | A Crisis of Clergy, Not of Faith |
1373472_3 | the designs of the future.'' This call for design changes to prevent what the experts call progressive collapses -- chain reactions of failures that multiply the direct effects of triggering events like a bomb, a plane crash or a major fire -- is among the first recommendations to emerge from the six-month investigation of the trade center catastrophe by the team, organized by the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the American Society of Civil Engineers. The investigators also recommend that building designers consider the dangerous interaction between structural damage and fire, rather than the current process in which a building's structural strength and its fire protection are considered as nearly separate problems. That sort of interaction, the team believes, was instrumental not only in the collapse of the twin towers, but of 7 World Trade Center, a 47-story office building at the northern edge of the site. The recommendations come after months of poring over videotape, steel debris and trade center blueprints. Investigators have not arrived at an exact explanation of all the collapses, nor have they settled the vital question of whether any building could have withstood the attack and remained standing. But they have already seen enough evidence to conclude that progressive collapse played a critical role in magnifying the damage at the trade center, as it did in the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Building in Oklahoma City. The evidence includes determinations of how certain columns failed, how bolted connections gave way, how fireproofing was overwhelmed by the blazes, and just how the buildings finally gave way. A formal report on the investigation is expected this spring. But preparing initiatives for changes in building codes and engineering practices is something that could take many more months of research, and incorporating them into local codes nationwide could take years. The idea that disasters, whether natural or intentional, can have an impact on building codes has a long history, as illustrated by the California earthquakes in San Fernando in 1971 and Northridge in 1994, as well as the Oklahoma City attack. Just five years after the San Fernando earthquake, western states had incorporated lessons learned from the catastrophe into basic building codes. Both California earthquakes also led to the adoption in 1997 of national guidelines to reduce earthquake hazards to buildings, proposals that were incorporated into a national building code in 2000. In a vote scheduled for | New Rules Proposed To Help High-Rises Withstand Attacks |
1373589_3 | senior Al Qaeda leaders were involved. It is unclear whether the communications represent a central command structure trying to control various elements of the organization or simply Al Qaeda members speaking to each other. American officials added that they were still not certain, for example, where Mr. bin Laden was, or even whether he was still alive. Other top Al Qaeda leaders who survived American bombing raids in Afghanistan have also proved elusive. While Al Qaeda's leaders are seeking a new haven, it is not clear that they have gathered in any one place yet that might serve as a new headquarters. But American counterterrorism analysts said the recently discovered Internet activity did provide strong evidence of efforts by Al Qaeda to rebuild after its dispersal in Afghanistan. The officials said that they had watched as new Web sites that they believe have real connections to Al Qaeda and are not hoaxes had popped up in recent weeks. United States intelligence has also tracked e-mail traffic that counterterrorism analysts said they believed showed efforts to re-establish communications between some members of Al Qaeda in Pakistan and operatives around the world. Some of the e-mail can be traced to border regions of Pakistan, where some Al Qaeda members may be operating under the protection of local tribal leaders. Investigators have been frustrated by their inability to track the Qaeda operatives who are picking up messages around the world. In many cases, they appear to read their e-mail in public places like airports and have thus stayed a step ahead of law enforcement authorities. In the investigation of the Sept. 11 attacks, investigators found that the hijackers communicated with each other in hundreds of e-mail messages often sent from public places like Kinko's or public libraries. So far, there is no sign of Mr. bin Laden or other top Al Qaeda leaders communicating with their followers. But Al Qaeda's presence in as many as 60 countries makes it important for the organization to find ways to communicate. Clusters of Al Qaeda followers have recently been active in countries outside of Central Asia, including Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia, Spain and Yemen. Some Al Qaeda fighters are also believed to have slipped out of Afghanistan into Iran. American officials believe that one of the benefits of the war in Afghanistan was to disrupt the terror network's ability to communicate from a central command center. | A Nation Challenged: The Terrorist; Al Qaeda May Be Rebuilding In Pakistan, E-Mails Indicate |
1373396_1 | tax on American high-fructose corn syrup used by the soft drink industry. Mexico's Congress created the tax in January to help the sugar industry battle a growing surplus amid repeated refusals by the United States to increase its quota on sugar from Mexico. A spokesman for the Mexican government said the tax would be suspended for seven months to allow more time to negotiate a deal with the United States that would grant Mexico greater access to America's sugar market. The dispute has been going on for more than four years, bogged down, in part, over differences as to what the North American Free Trade Agreement allows. Since Mr. Fox took office a year and a half ago, the only concrete result of the negotiations has been a thunderous growth in the nation's sugar surplus, which now stands at around 600,000 metric tons. Mr. Fox made the problem worse in the fall when he expropriated 27 dilapidated sugar mills and promised to keep them running to quell social unrest in the industry, the nation's second largest. In doing so, the government contributed to the sugar surplus without finding additional markets outside the country. So Mexico's Congress passed the corn syrup tax, arguing that the sugar industry was threatened by imports of American corn syrup, which enjoys greater access to Mexico's market than Mexican sugar does to America's. Within days, Mexican bottlers allowed their corn syrup inventories to run dry and canceled orders for more. In the two months since the law took effect, the sugar surplus is down by 50,000 metric tons. Congress estimates that without the corn syrup competition, the surplus could have dropped by 400,000 metric tons by 2003. It is unclear whether the nation's bottlers will now use corn syrup, which is much cheaper than sugar on the open market. What is clear is that some Mexican legislators view the decision as a slap on the wrist from the president, whom they see as incapable of brokering a deal with the United States. ''This is a unilateral decision, and a questionable one, because it doesn't explain how this government, in 15 months, has been unable to find a way to export more sugar,'' said Fidel Herrera Beltrán, a senator from the Institutional Revolutionary Party, who helped create the tax. ''If we didn't have the problem of corn syrup imports, we wouldn't be stuck in this terrible drama.'' | Fox Suspends Mexico's Tax On Fructose From U.S. |
1373536_0 | To the Editor: Re ''Vatican Weighs Reaction to Accusations of Molesting by Clergy'' (news artirdained.'' Then whom are the church authorities to ordain: people with heterosexual inclinations -- and then tell them that they cannot act upon their sexual feelings? It's time for married men and women to be allowed the opportunity to serve their church as priests. SUSAN GILBERT Exeter, N.H., March 3, 2002 | Trash Heap? Not in My Backyard |
1373471_3 | senior Al Qaeda leaders were involved. It is unclear whether the communications represent a central command structure trying to control various elements of the organization or simply Al Qaeda members speaking to each other. American officials added that they were still not certain, for example, where Mr. bin Laden was, or even whether he was still alive. Other top Al Qaeda leaders who survived American bombing raids in Afghanistan have also proved elusive. While Al Qaeda's leaders are seeking a new haven, it is not clear that they have gathered in any one place yet that might serve as a new headquarters. But American counterterrorism analysts said the recently discovered Internet activity did provide strong evidence of efforts by Al Qaeda to rebuild after its dispersal in Afghanistan. The officials said that they had watched as new Web sites that they believe have real connections to Al Qaeda and are not hoaxes had popped up in recent weeks. United States intelligence has also tracked e-mail traffic that counterterrorism analysts said they believed showed efforts to re-establish communications between some members of Al Qaeda in Pakistan and operatives around the world. Some of the e-mail can be traced to border regions of Pakistan, where some Al Qaeda members may be operating under the protection of local tribal leaders. Investigators have been frustrated by their inability to track the Qaeda operatives who are picking up messages around the world. In many cases, they appear to read their e-mail in public places like airports and have thus stayed a step ahead of law enforcement authorities. In the investigation of the Sept. 11 attacks, investigators found that the hijackers communicated with each other in hundreds of e-mail messages often sent from public places like Kinko's or public libraries. So far, there is no sign of Mr. bin Laden or other top Al Qaeda leaders communicating with their followers. But Al Qaeda's presence in as many as 60 countries makes it important for the organization to find ways to communicate. Clusters of Al Qaeda followers have recently been active in countries outside of Central Asia, including Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia, Spain and Yemen. Some Al Qaeda fighters are also believed to have slipped out of Afghanistan into Iran. American officials believe that one of the benefits of the war in Afghanistan was to disrupt the terror network's ability to communicate from a central command center. | A Nation Challenged: The Terrorist; Al Qaeda May Be Rebuilding In Pakistan, E-Mails Indicate |
1373387_0 | Intensely flavored, thin-skinned San Marzano plum tomatoes, named for the village of San Marzano sul Sarno but also grown elsewhere around Naples, are considered the best canned tomatoes. Experienced home cooks would not use any other in a pasta sauce. This prestige, unfortunately, has attracted unscrupulous shippers, who over the years have used the name on canned tomatoes produced elsewhere, even in the United States. But now, cans of genuine San Marzano tomatoes are starting to carry the official seals of the Italian government and the consortium of growers. San Marzanos are a bit more expensive than other canned plum tomatoes, by 50 cents to $1 a can, depending on the size. FOOD STUFF | The Real Tomato, You Can Tell By the Stamp |
1373621_1 | tax on American high-fructose corn syrup used by the soft drink industry. Mexico's Congress created the tax in January to help the sugar industry battle a growing surplus amid repeated refusals by the United States to increase its quota on sugar from Mexico. A spokesman for the Mexican government said the tax would be suspended for seven months to allow more time to negotiate a deal with the United States that would grant Mexico greater access to America's sugar market. The dispute has been going on for more than four years, bogged down, in part, over differences as to what the North American Free Trade Agreement allows. Since Mr. Fox took office a year and a half ago, the only concrete result of the negotiations has been a thunderous growth in the nation's sugar surplus, which now stands at around 600,000 metric tons. Mr. Fox made the problem worse in the fall when he expropriated 27 dilapidated sugar mills and promised to keep them running to quell social unrest in the industry, the nation's second largest. In doing so, the government contributed to the sugar surplus without finding additional markets outside the country. So Mexico's Congress passed the corn syrup tax, arguing that the sugar industry was threatened by imports of American corn syrup, which enjoys greater access to Mexico's market than Mexican sugar does to America's. Within days, Mexican bottlers allowed their corn syrup inventories to run dry and canceled orders for more. In the two months since the law took effect, the sugar surplus is down by 50,000 metric tons. Congress estimates that without the corn syrup competition, the surplus could have dropped by 400,000 metric tons by 2003. It is unclear whether the nation's bottlers will now use corn syrup, which is much cheaper than sugar on the open market. What is clear is that some Mexican legislators view the decision as a slap on the wrist from the president, whom they see as incapable of brokering a deal with the United States. ''This is a unilateral decision, and a questionable one, because it doesn't explain how this government, in 15 months, has been unable to find a way to export more sugar,'' said Fidel Herrera Beltrán, a senator from the Institutional Revolutionary Party, who helped create the tax. ''If we didn't have the problem of corn syrup imports, we wouldn't be stuck in this terrible drama.'' | Fox Suspends Mexico's Tax On Fructose From U.S. |
1375969_2 | Bronx district attorney, Robert T. Johnson, has been among the most assertive. ''What we would like the church to do,'' his spokesman, Steven Reed, said yesterday, ''is report to law enforcement allegations of sex abuse; allegations that a crime has been committed.'' ''We don't think it is in the best interests of the victims,'' Mr. Reed continued, ''to have these matters investigated internally.'' Mr. Morgenthau, Mr. Brown, Mr. Johnson and Charles J. Hynes, the Brooklyn district attorney, all favor amending the New York law to require members of the clergy to report suspected abuse of minors. Although there have been prosecutions of members of the clergy in pedophilia cases in New York and elsewhere, current and former prosecutors say there are many reasons why it has not been a high priority. Among them are the political unpopularity of pursuing the church and the difficulty of proving such cases. Without witnesses who come forward in pedophilia cases, prosecutors often do not pursue them, said Vivian Berger, a Columbia Law professor who is a former Manhattan assistant district attorney. It is always daunting, she said, for a prosecutor to take on a revered and politically powerful institution. ''Prosecutors have more than enough to keep them busy,'' she said. ''They don't go out looking for cases and when they do, they don't go out to bring cases against the church.'' Some prosecutors say there are less cynical reason why witnesses, and perhaps prosecutors, shy away from pursuit of priests who sexually abuse children. Robert M. Carney, the district attorney in Schenectady, said that ''when you have a person who is in a position of religious authority, people may be a little more unwilling to believe the person is a danger.'' Around the country the provisions of law have helped keep the church's secrets. Each of the 50 states has a law requiring certain people who learn of sexual or other abuse of children to disclose that information to the authorities. But the law is not consistent nationally on whether members of the clergy must make such reports. Jeff Anderson, a St. Paul lawyer who represents scores of people who say they were victimized by priests, said that 27 states do include members of the clergy among those who must report abuse of children they discover. Connecticut and New Jersey are among those states. The 23 other states, like New York, do not. But | In Many Investigations, the Church Is Often the Sole Authority |
1379240_0 | Negotiators meeting in Geneva to draft a global treaty curbing tobacco use wrapped up their fourth round of talks without making progress on any issues, including a ban on advertising, compensation for people with tobacco-related illnesses and incentives for tobacco farmers to shift to other crops. The treaty, which the World Health Organization wants to complete by May 2003, will be taken up again in October. Elizabeth Olson (NYT) | World Briefing | World: No Progress On Tobacco Curbs |
1379086_0 | The giant protests by displaced workers from state-owned factories in northeastern China have dwindled in recent days as officials responded with a dual strategy, meeting some of the workers' monetary demands while detaining several organizers and threatening still more demonstrators with arrest. In the rust-belt city of Liaoyang, in a dramatic example of the deepening conflict as China's state industries shrink or die under global competition, tens of thousands of workers from bankrupt factories have protested during the last two weeks, complaining of unpaid pensions and living allowances and official corruption. Today, the workers stayed home but residents reported that tensions remained high over the detention of four leaders. Exhaustion, chilly weather and fear that further protests might provoke stiffer sentences against the detained men have led many workers to pause for now, residents said. The local government has tried to defuse the anger by providing half the money that was owed to laid-off and retired workers in the city, in Liaoning Province, where more than half of state factory workers are said to have been laid off or forcibly retired. Officials have promised to pay the remaining back wages and pensions over the coming three years. During the last several days, workers debated whether to suspend the protests after an incarcerated leader, Yao Huxin, called his wife from the detention center and said he had been told that if the demonstrations stopped, the men might be released; but if illegal protests continued, the four would be dealt with harshly. Farther northeast, in Daqing, the site of legendary oil fields, a few thousand former employees are still gathering each day to complain of inadequate severance pay. Protests have taken place each weekday since March 1, at one point involving crowds of 30,000 or more, some witnesses said. In response, the Daqing Oilfield Bureau, a subsidiary of PetroChina, rescinded a large increase in the fees that severed workers must pay to keep their medical and old-age insurance. | Chinese Protests Ebb as Officials Talk Tough, but Give Ground |
1377239_0 | SUGAR DECLINES. Sugar prices fell on expectations of a bumper crop in Brazil, the world's largest grower. In New York, raw sugar for May delivery fell 0.19 cent, or 3.1 percent, to 6.03 cents a pound. | THE MARKETS: COMMODITIES |
1377249_1 | current scandal are bound to force hard choices, and the question of whether the church can continue to attract enough qualified candidates for the priesthood while barring women and married men is not likely to go away. The official newspaper of the Boston Archdiocese published an unprecedented editorial earlier this month questioning the celibacy requirement. Besides the damage done to the victims, the church has suffered for its failure to come to grips with this issue in other ways. Thousands of faithful priests now find themselves coming under an unfair and heartbreaking new kind of scrutiny. Estimates of the church's legal liability in sex abuse cases run as high as $1 billion. The Boston Archdiocese, which has had to pay out some $45 million to victims of Father Geoghan alone, recently announced it may have to sell off church lands. And some Boston parishioners have begun withholding contributions. While the hierarchy considers these internal church matters, society has its own clear obligation: protecting vulnerable children. Americans, both Catholic and not, should demand to see significant changes in leadership in archdioceses and dioceses where the church has mishandled abuse cases. When an organization is found to have a culture of tolerating illegal activity, accountability requires that the people at the top accept responsibility, in a manner that goes far beyond mere apologies. Accountability is the reason Kenneth Lay could no longer be in charge at Enron. The most direct step the government can take is to make clear that abuse by priests is a criminal, not a religious matter. District attorneys like Charles Hynes of Brooklyn and Stephanie Anderson of Portland, Me., have been admirably blunt in telling the church that it must cooperate with law enforcement. Now states that do not require church officials to report suspected child abuse must put such laws on their books. The New York Legislature is considering doing just that, adding the state to the 19 that currently make church officials, like doctors and social workers, ''mandatory reporters.'' The Legislature should not be intimidated by arguments that the proposed law would interfere with religious practices. New York could exempt, as other states do, information communicated in ''clergy-penitent'' conversations like those in confession. The church has long believed in giving civil government its due -- in ''rendering unto Caesar that which is Caesar's.'' One thing the church must be willing to render up is priests who | A Tragic Crisis for the Church |
1377265_0 | Here's a nice story about a priest: Once, in grade school, I was late, and afraid to go in and face the wrath of Sister Hiltruda. The charming Father Montgomery found me crying in the schoolyard and offered to bring me in. As I entered the classroom, holding his hand, I smiled triumphantly at a glowering Sister Hiltruda. She would not be able to utter a cross word to me, or raise a ruler. She and I both knew we were serfs in a feudal society where men made the rules and set the tone. As a Catholic and the daughter of a cop in Washington, I grew up caught in a triple play of patriarchal cultures. The church was run by men. The nation's capital was run by men. The law was run by men. Gradually, grudgingly, Congress, the White House and the police began to allow women into power. But the church hierarchy stubbornly persisted in its allergy to modernity, remaining a men's club, shrouded in hoary mists and incense. A monsoon of sickening stories lately illustrates how twisted societies become when women are either never seen, dismissed as second-class citizens or occluded by testosterone: the church subsidizing pedophilia; the Afghan warlords' resumption of pedophilia; the Taliban obliteration of women; the brotherhood of Al Qaeda and Mohamed Atta's mysogynistic funeral instructions; the implosion of the macho Enron Ponzi scheme; the repression of women, even American servicewomen, by our allies the Saudis. In Saudi Arabia Saturday, Dick Cheney did not press on human rights and democracy, as he might have in China or North Korea. We want oil and we want Saddam. At the same time, Saudi newspapers broke custom to criticize the religious police for letting 15 little girls die in a school blaze in Mecca. The police -- the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice -- stopped men who tried to rescue the girls or open the school gates, telling them ''it is sinful to approach'' the girls because they weren't wearing head scarves and abayas, the traditional robes, and there could be no exposure of ''females to male strangers.'' So even as our vice president was wooing Crown Prince Abdullah to visit President Bush's ranch in Crawford, the Saudi police were operating on the philosophy ''Better a dead girl than a bareheaded girl.'' Societies built on special privileges -- the all-male Saudi | Father Knows Worst |
1375077_7 | space would be infinitely curved, and as Dr. Wheeler likes to say, ''smoke pours out of the computer.'' Space, time and even the laws of physics themselves would break down at this cosmic dead end, called a singularity. Dr. Wheeler made it his mission to alert the rest of his colleagues to the paradoxical vision of physics predicting its own demise. Dr. Wheeler made Princeton the center of research in general relativity, a field that had been moribund because of its remoteness from laboratory experiment, in the United States. ''He rejuvenated general relativity,'' said Dr. Freeman Dyson, a theorist at the Institute for Advanced Study, across town in Princeton. It was not until 1967, at a conference in New York City, that Dr. Wheeler, adopting a suggestion shouted from the audience, hit upon the name ''black hole'' to dramatize this dire possibility for a star and for physics. The black hole ''teaches us that space can be crumpled like a piece of paper into an infinitesimal dot, that time can be extinguished like a blown-out flame, and that the laws of physics that we regard as 'sacred,' as immutable, are anything but,'' he later said in his 1998 autobiography, ''Geons, Black Holes & Quantum Foam: A Life in Physics,'' written with Dr. Kenneth Ford, a former student and the retired director of the American Institute of Physics. Moreover, Dr. Wheeler preached, the breakdown of physics could not be sealed away in a distant dead star. He pointed out that even space and time had to pay their dues to the uncertainty principle. When viewed on very small scales or in the compressed throes of the Big Bang, what looked so smooth and continuous, like an ocean from an airplane, would become discontinuous, dissolving like a dry sand castle into a mess of unconnected points and worm holes that Dr. Wheeler dubbed ''quantum foam.'' In a sense, black holes, or ''gates of time,'' as he later called them, were everywhere, under our fingernails, courtesy of the uncertainty principle, and thus so was the issue of where the laws of physics came from. By the 1970's Dr. Wheeler was ready to move on. Faced with mandatory retirement from teaching at Princeton, he moved to the University of Texas, where he turned to the very small, that is to say, the quantum, with the energy and eloquence that he had once lavished on | Peering Through the Gates of Time |
1375058_2 | their child will end up in the street. But the government generally does not pay for enhancements that parents view as crucial for their children -- special camps, visits with relatives, private health insurance, therapeutic recreation like horseback riding and hundreds of other things. And, of course, many parents do not want to leave their disabled child at the mercy of the government, with its ever-changing cast of administrators and fickle budgets. Yet if the disabled person has more than $2,000 in assets, the government claims them to cover its own costs, so leaving money to a disabled child in a traditional will does nothing. The government, though, has created a way around the $2,000 hurdle: parents can establish what is called a special-needs trust, using life insurance, real estate and other assets to create a fund that can pay for an enhanced life while leaving basic benefits like Supplemental Security Income intact. Such is the planning gantlet parents of disabled children must run. That's the easy part. Going through the financial planning process, parents say, forces them to confront difficult, draining questions, like: What, exactly, are our child's long-term prospects? Who might be willing to act as guardian? Should we expect our nondisabled children to care for their sibling? What about our own hopes for retirement? Like many parents, Susan and Albert Colacello put off facing those issues. Kevin makes procrastination easy; he is high-functioning for a child with Down syndrome, active and mischievous. ''You sometimes forget,'' Mr. Colacello, 40, said the other day, watching the boy wreak havoc in the living room like any other toddler. ''And then the reality sets in: someone's going to have to take care of him.'' An insistent aunt finally nudged the Colacellos toward a lawyer's office. So did the attacks of Sept. 11. ''We lost a really good friend,'' Mrs. Colacello said, ''and he had his affairs really in order. It made things so much easier for his family.'' Last month the Colacellos signed documents creating a special-needs trust and establishing guardianship. They achieved a measure of security but lost some dreams. ''This is a very necessary thing, but the reality of doing it really shatters your hopes,'' Mrs. Colacello said. ''It's just a constant reminder that Kevin is never going to be able to make decisions.'' And, she said, it is often jarringly at odds with the upbeat message that veterans | Lifelong Concerns For a Special Child |
1375225_0 | The Department of Agriculture has fined the Denver Zoo $700 over the death of a bear last fall. The female Asiatic black bear was killed by a male bear after years of fights between the two animals. The federal agency determined that the zoo had violated ''animal compatibility'' regulations by continuing to house the bears together despite the history of fights. An animal rights activist with the Rocky Mountain Animal Defense called the fine ''a joke.'' Mindy Sink (NYT) | National Briefing | Rockies: Colorado: Fine Over Bear's Death |
1375190_0 | To the Editor: Re ''Air Travel Revives as Fear Recedes; But Industry Experts Conclude That Security Gaps Remain'' (front page, March 10): Given that the highest risk of future airplane disaster comes from checked bags and that it will be several years before we can expect a high degree of safety from checked bags, why not just eliminate them? I travel frequently both domestically and internationally, never check bags, and if I have to travel with more than a carry-on bag, send my things ahead by post or overnight delivery service. These services pick up at your home or office, offer tracking information and insurance, and would likely cooperate with airlines to offer lower prices for this extra business, particularly since it would reduce airline expenses (and perhaps reduce ticket prices). It would speed up the airport experience, reduce heavy lifting and tips to porters, and make our flights safer. We'd all be winners. IVAN CIMENT New York, March 10, 2002 | Flying Safer (if Not Friendlier) Skies |
1375141_5 | recycle,'' said James Thompson Jr., the president of Chartwell Information Publishers, a San Diego company that tracks the waste industry. ''It will force communities and people to rethink the whole waste problem. The corner is turning right now, especially in the Northeast.'' The turning of that corner is when the biggest psychological unknown of Mr. Bloomberg's recycling experiment could have its test. Could recycling be brought back? Would ingrained habits be lost? Perhaps most important, would people feel different about it? ''Before, you were helping the planet, etc.,'' said Raymond De Young, an associate professor of environmental psychology and conservation behavior at the University of Michigan. ''But that argument may not carry as much weight as it did in the past, because of the way it was shut down. I can imagine people thinking that the city is being hypocritical, or that recycling is meaningless.'' On the other hand, he said, the mayor might also have opened a door to a new kind of learning curve about recycling, that talking about the intricacies of the pulp and plastics markets could make it even more relevant to residents. It might also raise the broader question of whether recycling really worked, not by the narrow measures of the market alone, but by the standards of what it set out to do: change the way Americans think. Environmentalists say that the psychological returns are mixed. Consumer packaging, after 30 years of supposed consciousness raising, is more profligate than ever. Twelve-mile-per-gallon Range Rovers prowl the streets. ''I'm not sure what the measure is of something working in our society,'' said Theodore Roszak, a professor of history at California State University at Hayward, whose book ''The Voice of the Earth'' (Simon & Schuster, 1992)., is considered one of the founding works of the field of eco-psychology, which examines the ways that people relate to the earth and its environment. Dr. Roszak said that recycling may in the end be a small thing because it hasn't changed much or a big thing because of what it may yet achieve. No one can tell yet, he said. ''Certainly recycling is not enough, but there is nothing we would gain by giving up the recycling effort either,'' he said. ''The one thing you can say is that it's something we have gotten in the habit of doing and it seems like a step forward from where we were.'' | Is Recycling's Future Behind It?; Bloomberg Puts Doing Well Ahead of Doing Good |
1376836_1 | be sold over the counter a year ago. Pharmaceutical companies have been aggressively promoting the pills, with one of them, Schering, placing eye-catching advertisements this month for its Levonelle tablets in magazines aimed at women, and in women's toilets in bars and nightclubs. The ad reads ''Missed pill. Ooops. Emergency contraception!!! Quick. Pharmacy. Buy Levonelle.'' It ends with the word ''phew.'' The company said it planned its campaign after surveys showed that only 40 percent of British women knew that the pill was now available from pharmacies. The price of the over-the-counter emergency contraception is $30. Under Britain's health care system, it can also be obtained free on prescription, but many women avoid taking the time to see a doctor because the pill is more effective the sooner it is taken after intercourse. The Tesco supermarket chain revealed Saturday that it was dispensing the pills free to women under 20 under a pilot project in Westonsuper-Mare and Clevedon, two towns in Somerset in western England. No proof of age is required, but pharmacy counter staff are asked to use their judgment. Nuala Scarisbrick of Life, a 35,000-member anti-abortion group, argued that the Tesco decision would increase teenage pregnancies by promoting promiscuity. ''This is giving the green light to teenage sex,'' she told the BBC. Simon Bilous of the North Somerset Teenage Pregnancy Clinic, which is coordinating the program, disputed the claim. ''In other countries in Western Europe, where they have much more liberal approaches to these issues, the numbers have dropped.'' Questions have also been raised about the pill's safety, particularly among teenagers. ''There is no data on subsequent fertility when a young developing body is exposed to such high doses of hormones,'' the Scottish Council on Human Bioethics reported last month. The High Court has granted a judicial review of a case brought by the national anti-abortion group, the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children, to halt the sales of the pills over the counter. A bill to stop the new practice was defeated in the House of Lords last year. The society is arguing that the pill is in fact a method of early abortion and violates an 1861 law barring the supply of any ''poison or other noxious thing'' with intent to cause a miscarriage. Family planning campaigners have warned that a ruling endorsing this view would call into question the legality of everyday birth control. | British Store Gives Women Emergency Pill, Igniting Debate |
1376882_1 | A3 Post-Coital Pills in Britain A decision by Britain's largest supermarket to give emergency contraceptives known as the morning-after pills free to teenagers has sharpened a national debate over efforts to curb youth pregnancy. Britain has the highest rate in Western Europe. A9 Indonesia Bans Journalist The Indonesian government has banned Lindsay Murdoch, a prominent Australian journalist, apparently because of articles that dealt with human rights issues. A8 NATION CHALLENGED A12-15 2 Americans Are Killed In Pakistan Church Attack Five people, including two Americans, were killed and least 40 people were wounded when two men walked into a Protestant church close to the American Embassy in Islamabad and threw several grenades. The attack appeared to be aimed at the Americans and at the government of President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan. A1 Problems for Nuclear Sensors Experts on nuclear terrorism say that even the latest detection technologies face forbidding odds. Ultimately, the experts say, all detectors are likely to encounter obstacles imposed by the laws of physics. Nonetheless, the federal government has sharply increased support for research into sensors that could detect nuclear weapons if they fall into the hands of terrorists. A13 Air Patrols Are Reduced The Bush administration has decided to stop round-the-clock patrols by fighter jets over New York, as well as daily patrols over a rotating group of other major cities, saying the terrorism threat on flights has been sufficiently reduced. Scores of fighters stand ready at 30 bases nationwide, but those numbers are likely to be reduced over the next few months, officials said. A13 NATIONAL A16-22 The Commander in Chief Is Still the Chief Politician President Bush has built into his schedule a carefully planned routine in which he regularly travels to support Republicans in House, Senate and governor's candidates in crucial contests, many in swing states that Mr. Bush needs to win re-election in 2004. The strategy contrasts with his post-Sept. 11 policy of staying above partisan politics during wartime. A1 Not in the Running Tipper Gore decided not to enter the race for Senate in Tennessee. In a statement, Mrs. Gore was vague about her reasons and did not rule out seeking office in the future. Representative Bob Clement said he would hold a news conference today to announce whether he would seek the Democratic nomination for the seat being vacated by Senator Fred Thompson, a Republican. A21 Primary Races in Illinois Three | NEWS SUMMARY |
1376868_2 | than 12 percent of the nation's schoolchildren now identified as disabled -- some with physical problems, but most with learning disabilities -- concern is growing that some students say they have learning disabilities just to win easier testing conditions. In recent years, half the states have enacted laws requiring that high school students pass standardized exams to graduate. High failure rates on the tests have prompted some states to delay putting them into effect or lower the score for passing. These so-called exit exams create a particularly tough hurdle for students with learning disabilities. When California gave its first exit exam last year, on a voluntary basis, 9 of 10 students with learning disabilities failed. Kyle failed the language and math sections, and because his handwriting was so bad, his essay questions were never scored. ''A lot of the questions made no sense to me,'' Kyle said. ''Some of the math was on things I've never learned.'' Kyle said he thinks he did better this year because his teacher, apparently on her own decision, read the questions to him. To earn his diploma, Kyle must pass the test by his senior year. Many states, including New York, already allow a broad range of options for disabled students. Instead of taking the regular test, they can give oral presentations or present portfolios of their work. But the clash between disability rights and educational standards is profound. States devised graduation exams to measure all students by the same yardstick. In contrast, the disability laws were designed to ensure that disabled children receive educations tailored to their needs. Moreover, there is little scientific data on precisely which accommodations help which learning disabilities. ''The equities here are not clear,'' said Lawrence Feinberg, assistant director of the group that administers the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the federal test that rates school performance. ''Standardized tests came in because of variations in testing and grading and the notion that it's only fair if you test everyone the same way,'' he said. ''It turns that whole idea on its head, if you treat some people differently because it's fairer to them.'' Many state education officials say that including disabled students in statewide testing is a good thing. ''A student who's tested is a student who's taught,'' said Kit Viator, an assessment official in the Massachusetts education department. Advocacy groups for the disabled do not disagree. But they | In Testing, One Size May Not Fit All |
1371646_0 | A NATION CHALLENGED | A Second Screening for Passengers |
1371710_0 | While many countries worry about a bulge in the number of restless young people with no jobs and too much time on their hands, the United Nations said today that the world's population is in fact steadily getting older everywhere. ''The changes that are going on are not paralleled in any century before the 20th century,'' said Joseph Chamie, an American demographer who directs the United Nations population division. ''We will see this trend accelerating in the 21st century.'' Mr. Chamie introduced figures show aging as pervasive -- not just confined to rich countries -- and likely to have profound implications on economies in all regions. If there were fears of instability generated by the idea of large numbers of unemployed young people becoming ready recruits for militancy or criminal activities, an older population raises other concerns. As the United States has already discovered, pressures mount on health care systems, health insurance plans and social security as well as private pensions. In poorer countries, some of these safety nets do not now exist. Sri Lanka, for example, has a rapidly aging population and free health care -- but no social security and few pension plans outside government service. The United Nations found that in richer countries, people over 60 now account for one-fifth of the population. Predictions indicate that the proportion will reach one-third by 2050. In poorer countries, only 8 percent of the population is over 60 now, but that is expected to rise to 20 percent by 2050. With more people living longer and families getting smaller in most countries, the fastest-growing age group in the world are people over 80, the United Nations found. That group is growing at 3.8 percent annually. United Nations demographers are riveted on a statistic they call the ''potential support ratio'': the number of people 15 to 64 who are available as workers to sustain the retirees. In 1950, the ratio was 12 to 1; in 2000, it was 9 to 1. By 2050, there may be only four working-age people for every person over 65 worldwide. On Tuesday, Secretary General Kofi Annan released a report on the abuse of the elderly, in advance of a conference in Madrid in April on issues facing the aging. It mentioned practices like ostracism, which occurs in some societies when elderly women are used as scapegoats for natural disasters, epidemics or other catastrophes. ''Women have | U.N. Report Shows Rapid Aging Of Populations Around Globe |
1371708_0 | The government is close to issuing a regulation that will require automakers to install tire-pressure warning systems in new cars and trucks starting with 2004 models, the Bush administration told a House subcommittee today. The rule is among tire safety measures ordered by Congress in 2000 after a spate of Ford Explorer rollovers were linked to the failure of Firestone tires. Investigation found that low pressure had contributed to the tires' shedding their treads. Dr. John D. Graham, administrator of information and regulatory affairs at the White House Office of Management and Budget, told the House panel today that the final rule mandating the warning systems would be written soon, probably within the next few weeks. It will give carmakers a choice of two systems to install: either a ''direct'' system, which calculates pressure by using a battery-operated measuring device on each of the four tires, or an ''indirect'' system, which infers pressure by calculating the difference in rotational speeds between wheels, using a computer in the vehicle's antilock braking system. Either way, the result will be reflected on a dashboard gauge, already in use in some high-end models. The rule will be phased in, Dr. Graham said. A current draft calls for at least 10 percent of all 2004 vehicles to be equipped with one of the two monitoring technologies. The phase-in would reach 100 percent with 2007 models. Of the two systems, many favor the indirect, because it is less expensive. The direct system is more precise and thus safer, Dr. Graham said, but there are safety benefits to an indirect system as well. ''From a tire safety perspective, the direct system is a superior system,'' he told the House Commerce Subcommittee on Commerce, Trade and Consumer Protection. But the indirect system, which depends on the antilock brakes, ''has the benefit of encouraging vehicle makers that don't currently offer antilock brakes to offer them in the future.'' Correction: March 2, 2002, Saturday Because of an editing error, an article yesterday about government plans to require tire-pressure warning systems in new cars and trucks gave an erroneous name in some copies for the House subcommittee to which the plans were outlined. It is the House Commerce Subcommittee on Commerce, Trade and Consumer Protection, not on Telecommunications, Trade and Consumer Protection. | New Rule on Tire Safety Is Near, Government Says |
1371618_1 | -- as high as 17.8 microteslas around the driver's left foot. A microtesla is a unit of measurement for magnetism. Citing recommendations by the National Institute for Working Life, a Swedish labor group, the magazine said that was about 80 times the level considered safe, which it defined as 0.2 microteslas. The Swedish findings were widely reported. But the labor group's standard is far more conservative than one set by the International Commission on Non-Ionizing Radiation Protection, a group of scientists who establish safety standards for various forms of electromagnetic radiation. The commission considers low-frequency radiation of less than 100 microteslas to be safe. Volvo said there was ''absolutely no scientific proof'' that the magnetic fields posed any risks and cited an article to that effect that was published this week by four Swedish professors. Still, it said it was seeking to develop ''a workable solution'' to reduce electromagnetic fields, possibly involving the addition of a ground cable. Hundreds of scientific studies have found no evidence of health effects from exposure to common electromagnetic fields, like those from cars and appliances. Riders on British electric trains are subjected to fields of about 60 microteslas. Hair dryers, electric shavers and power tools can emit short-range fields of up to 200 microteslas. Speaking of the Swedish magazine report, John Moulder, professor of radiation oncology at the Medical College of Wisconsin, said, ''There certainly is no obvious hazard.'' Magnetic fields generated by a car's electrical system have mainly been treated as a threat to sensitive electronic components, rather than to occupants. But fields generated by high-voltage lines have long been under scrutiny, after some studies indicated a weak correlation between living under power lines and childhood leukemia. Subsequent studies have not found direct links between electromagnetism and health risks. Although any electrical current generates magnetic fields, few systems in a car operate at a power level or frequency considered harmful. Automotive electrical systems are 12 volts, compared with the 100,000-plus volts of an overhead power line, and most are direct current, which creates a magnetic field generally considered harmless. In the three Volvos, the battery is in the trunk. The source of the magnetic field is a cable that runs along the side of the car from the alternator to the battery. The alternator intermittently recharges the battery with pulsating current, and when it does, a magnetic field is created in the cable. | Experts Cast Doubt on Report Finding High Magnetic Fields in Volvos |
1372975_2 | affected. Now, as these children live longer and the first wave is moving out of the teenage years, these problems can become more acute. The sometimes devastating effect of the virus on the brain, along with the stress of living with a long-term illness is running headlong into the emotionally turbulent adolescent years, when mood disorders like depression are most likely to appear. In September, the National Institute of Mental Health and the Office of Rare Diseases sponsored a conference on pediatric H.I.V. and mental health to highlight the problem and call for research. Though the meeting was disrupted by the Sept. 11 attacks, the organizers hope to develop a pediatric AIDS and mental health initiative by next year. ''There are not a lot of kids in this situation, but the population of H.I.V.-infected teens is growing and their needs are significant,'' said Dianne Rausch, deputy director of the Center for Mental Health Research on AIDS at the National Institute of Mental Health. The greatest concern has been for those who have grown up poor and exposed to drugs. The long-term effects of exposure to the drugs the mother was using only worsen any mental health and behavioral problems. Emotional problems may also have been inherited from parents who used drugs to medicate their own mental illnesses. Though little research has focused on this area, professionals who deal with these teenagers report high prevalence of problems like attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, learning disabilities, anxiety, depression and behavior problems. The Special Needs Clinic at the New York Presbyterian Hospital in Manhattan, one of the few centers in the country providing mental health services for children and families affected by H.I.V., reports that among current cases of teenagers, two-thirds receive psychiatric medication and two-thirds receive special education services. ''We are a mental health clinic, so we do not speak for the entire population of perinatally infected kids,'' said Dr. Jennifer Havens, director of pediatric psychiatry at the Children's Hospital of New York Presbyterian. ''The kids we see were born to substance-abusing women, were exposed to drugs in utero, did not get good prenatal care, had very disrupted lives and on top of that are living with a disease and one that affects the brain. Their problems are neuro, bio, psycho and social.'' Dr. Vicki Tepper, director of the pediatric AIDS program at the University of Maryland Hospital for Children in Baltimore, says | Rescued H.I.V. Babies Face New Problems as Teenagers |
1372980_2 | over the flying panel. ''We were just saying on the way over here that that's just something that can happen,'' said one man in the audience, Maurizio Zarini. ''It's not a problem.'' City officials are still bragging that the renovation was completed in record time and at a remarkably low cost. The project took 27 months and cost about $44,400 (or $18.50 per seat), less than half what some other similar projects in Europe have cost, said Milan's mayor, Gabriele Albertini. ''Maybe it's the world record, a sign of the Milanese efficiency,'' Mr. Albertini said in an interview. ''The inconvenience of a falling panel is a modest, isolated incident, and considering that all the rest of the structure works well, we shouldn't have any reason to reproach ourselves.'' After the accident, unions for the workers at La Scala issued a statement saying that the project had been rushed, without proper consideration for the safety of workers or audiences. The new granite and plaster theater, built on the site of an abandoned Pirelli tire plant in an industrial area on Milan's northern outskirts, was a public-private partnership jointly financed by the city and Pirelli. The opening of ''Salome,'' which was to have been on March 2, was postponed until March 5 because La Scala workers were striking to protest disciplinary action against two union members who told reporters that safety concerns had been ignored. ''We reject this hypothesis,'' that safety was not a priority, Mr. Albertini said. ''It's a calumny.'' Immediately after the accident, Pirelli similarly countered the workers' accusations: ''Everything has been done properly,'' the company announced. ''We'll try to understand what happened, but the theater is safe.'' Mr. Albertini also disputed suggestions that audience members should have been evacuated sooner, and that they could have been seriously injured or even killed. ''They didn't want to interrupt the show because it seemed like a useless precaution,'' he said. ''Yes, people could have died if it had fallen on people, but the people were moved. It would never have fallen in one piece, and it was very unlikely it would have fallen in big pieces. People of course would have been scared, but it's a modest risk.'' No official investigation is under way in any case, the mayor said, beyond the tests to help the theater figure out whether it can safely reinstall the panels, which, the architect, Mr. Gregotti, said | A Proud Renovation (Aside From That Falling Glass) |
1373001_1 | the emergence of a flourishing honey industry belies that notion. In little more than a decade, Argentina has become the world's leading exporter of honey, selling nearly 90,000 tons a year to foreign markets, with almost half of it going to the United States. The United States, however, has not greeted this with praise or support. Instead, responding to complaints of dumping by American honey producers (complaints that honey importers in the United States call unfounded), it placed tariffs of up to 66 percent on Argentine honey, effectively shutting it out of the market. The decision, which went into effect in November, has dealt a serious blow to an industry that earned $86.6 million in much-needed foreign exchange in 2000 and provides a livelihood to thousands of farmers. Though the Argentine government has done little to mount a defense or appeal, officials argue that Argentine beekeepers are being unfairly punished for being more efficient. ''What's really going on is that they don't want to buy from us,'' José Ignacio de Mendiguren, the new minister of production, said in an interview in Buenos Aires. ''Argentina is a large and very competitive exporter in the agricultural sector, but we're matched against agricultural economies in the United States and Europe that not only close their borders to us, but subsidize the same products that we make. ''If they really wanted to help Argentina, what they would do is not so much lend us money, but let us sell what we produce,'' Mr. de Mendiguren said of the Bush administration. ''This always happens. It happened with lemons too. Whatever Argentina is capable of exporting, we know that the United States will administer its own trade in such a way as to be able to protect its own producers at our expense.'' Argentina's position is largely shared by honey importers in the United States. Nicholas Sargeantson, president of Sunland International, an importer in New Canaan, Conn., said Argentine honey was ''of a very high quality,'' adding that some packers prefer it to domestic honey because it is cleaner. The Commerce Department ruling against Argentina illustrates ''the immense hypocrisy of U.S. trade law,'' he added. ''On the one hand, the U.S. advocates to the world to tear down trade barriers,'' he said, ''but on the other it has these wonderfully convenient dumping laws which enable domestic producers to bring a case against foreign suppliers any time | U.S. and Argentina Fight Over Honey |
1373087_0 | Congressional hearings in the House-Senate investigation of the government's handling of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks are likely to begin in late April or early May, a lawmaker said here today. Senator Bob Graham, the Florida Democrat who is chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, said in an interview that the joint panel was hiring staff members and working with federal agencies to identify documents it wanted to review and officials it wanted to interview. The Central Intelligence Agency, Federal Bureau of Investigation and other agencies have been asked to preserve documents that might be relevant to the panel's inquiry. Mr. Graham said he believed that the joint committee would make enough progress over the next two months to begin holding both public and closed hearings. The investigation is being conducted by a new panel made up of members of the House and Senate intelligence committees, and is being led by Mr. Graham and Representative Porter J. Goss, the Florida Republican who is chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. Mr. Graham said that the joint committee would try to balance the need to review the performance of the intelligence and law enforcement agencies before Sept. 11 with the need to propose reforms to stop such attacks. He said half of the hearings would be devoted to a review of American counterterrorism operations and programs dating back to 1985 and half would focus on possible reforms. He added that the panel hoped to have proposals aimed at removing the flaws in the government's approach to counterterrorism by the end of the summer. Mr. Graham and Mr. Goss were in Orlando today as co-sponsors of a conference bringing top intelligence, military and law enforcement officials from the federal government together with state and local law enforcement leaders to discuss how to improve coordination among them. One of the issues raised was how to provide state and local police agencies with more specific information when a terrorist threat warning was issued by Washington. Local officials have complained that national alerts have been so general and vague that they are virtually useless to officers on the beat. Robert S. Mueller III, the F.B.I. director, and other senior officials told the conference that they hoped to soon have an improved warning system that would provide local officials with more specifics about the potential threats, along with better guidance on the | Panel to Review Readiness Of Agencies Before Attacks |
1373118_0 | For the seventh time in eight days, a security alert prompted the evacuation of terminals at Los Angeles International Airport this morning, temporarily stranding thousands of travelers, delaying flights and causing wonderment all around. ''This has been a really bad week for us,'' said Nancy Suey Castles, a spokeswoman for Los Angeles World Airports, the city agency that runs the airport and three others in the area. ''This is highly unusual.'' Today's incident began about 6:15 a.m., when what appeared to be a grenade was found in the hand luggage of a passenger bound for Seattle on Alaska Airlines. Most of Terminals 2 and 3 were evacuated while a Los Angeles Police Department bomb squad, which has been getting a workout at Los Angeles International of late, removed the bag. It was blown up in a bunker specially built for that purpose in a remote part of the airport. Federal officials decided not to charge the passenger, whom they have not identified, because the device was a replica of a military grenade, with nothing inside it, said Cheryl Mimura, a spokeswoman for the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Ms. Mimura said the man told interrogators that he was unaware that his brother had packed the device into his luggage along with some art supplies. ''It doesn't seem like the individual intended to carry a real grenade on board,'' Ms. Mimura said. Nevertheless, the incident once again threw into turmoil the operations of the sprawling airport, which has handled an average of 140,000 passengers a day since Sept. 11, about 60,000 fewer than before the terrorist attacks. At least 21 flights were delayed today, and a handful canceled, as airlines faced a morning rush hour that included thousands of business travelers and people returning home after a weekend in Southern California. The number of evacuations has more to do with a more careful approach to security by guards and police than with anything else, officials here said. ''I think they're just being more cautious with screening processes,'' Ms. Mimura said. ''They're going to be a little more stringent than they were before.'' The latest rash of evacuations began a week ago, on Feb. 25, when there were two in the same day from the same Terminal 2. The first came after the detection of what appeared to be a dangerous chemical inside a box housing a computer; the second was ordered after | 7th Evacuation in 8 Days Snarls Air Traffic |
1373067_1 | boats sent here to patrol the harbor have left. Federal officials call port security the largest and most glaring weakness in the nation's security network. A presidential advisory commission concluded in August 2000 that ''the state of security in U.S. seaports generally ranges from poor to fair, and in a few cases good.'' In an interview on Thursday, Senator Bob Graham, the Florida Democrat who is chairman of the Intelligence Committee, called ports ''a clear area of serious vulnerability.'' Senior Coast Guard officials in Washington now talk urgently about the potential for terrorists to use ships as weapons. ''Ships can be used to transport terrorists or weapons of mass destruction,'' Rear Adm. Terry Cross of the Coast Guard said in February. ''They can be used as weapons, and they are going to try to blend in and look like regular traffic. We think it is important to publicly recognize how vulnerable seaports are.'' When the refineries asked to hire the off-duty police officers last fall, ''we didn't have enough people for all the requests,'' Chief Blanton said. Now, the refineries ''have slowly backed off,'' he said. Many of the off-duty officers have been replaced by private unarmed security guards. Before the morning of Sept. 11 had ended, Capt. Eric A. Nicolaus, head of the Port Arthur Coast Guard Station, requested more personnel and more boats to protect the refineries and the public ports, even though port security had been a low priority for the Coast Guard before then. ''We got two extra patrol boats,'' raising the total to five, Captain Nicolaus said, ''and we brought in about 100 reservists.'' With the extra resources, the Coast Guard began searching many ships before they docked, looking for unusual cargo or crewmen. Now, Captain Nicolaus said his Coast Guard crews remain at a high level of alert, but the two extra patrol boats have been sent back to their regular ports. The number of ships searched has declined, but he noted that local port pilots board each inbound ship to guide it in and would most likely notice anything amiss. In the fall, representatives of local, state and federal law enforcement agencies in the area began meeting every week to discuss security issues. Recently the meetings were cut back to every two weeks. Three major oil refineries lie within the city's jurisdiction, and more than a dozen others line the Sabine-Neches shipping channel | Tinderbox of a Texas Port Points to a Threat by Sea |
1376166_0 | Longtime clients, the federal government and even some of its own foreign affiliates abandoned Arthur Andersen yesterday, a day after the accounting firm was indicted for destroying Enron documents. Several of the firm's most loyal clients, including the Sara Lee Corporation and Abbott Laboratories from around its hometown, Chicago, said the time had come to switch auditors. Northeast Utilities and the Brunswick Corporation also said that they planned to replace Andersen, which faces a single count of obstruction of justice. Foreign affiliates of Andersen in Spain and Chile announced that they would sever ties with the firm, and several other operations, in Italy, Poland, Portugal and Switzerland, were considering similar steps. The federal government also announced that it would give no more work to Andersen or to Enron, the bankrupt company whose books Andersen had audited. With the defections at home and abroad mounting, lawyers and Andersen partners met in Chicago yesterday afternoon to try to work out a plan for survival. The indictment describes a concerted effort by Andersen to shred records related to Enron in the firm's offices in four cities: Houston, Chicago, London and Portland, Ore. Although the firm has conceded that documents were destroyed, it has indicated it intends to fight the Justice Department over what it considers a baseless criminal charge and has resisted filing for bankruptcy protection, which might scare off even more clients. In a statement issued last night, Andersen said the government's central allegation was ''false and wholly unsupported by the facts.'' It also said the indictment was ''riddled with factual and legal errors.'' Andersen also contended in its statement that there was no evidence that the firm's management in Chicago directed the destruction of documents in Houston. So far, the firm has not managed to find an acquirer, in large part because any potential acquirer fears inheriting Andersen's liabilities from its role in Enron's collapse. An acquirer might be willing to buy Andersen's assets out of bankruptcy court, however, because such a sale could limit transfer of liability. With its options dwindling, Andersen is under increasing pressure to reassure its clients and employees. ''The problem at this point in time is what action can they do to forestall'' more defections, said David E. Greene, chairman of systems and accounting graduate programs at the Kelley School of Business at Indiana University. ''If you were an employee at Andersen, what would they have | LONGTIME CLIENTS ABANDON AUDITOR |
1376160_2 | guarantee you. They will see it as an intrusion.'' Dennis Poust, spokesman for the New York State Catholic Conference, the lobbying organization for the state's bishops, said that as far back as anyone there could remember, the bishops have never taken a public position on whether priests and nuns should be required to report abuse. ''Whether a bishop said something to a legislator, I don't know,'' he said. He said the conference was not averse to such a law in general, but that it must be drawn so as not to intrude on the confessional or other priestly duties. Requiring members of the clergy to report possible abuse by their colleagues would probably be more than a simple matter of adding a few words to the existing New York law. That law refers to another statute, which defines an abused child as one who was harmed by a ''parent or other person legally responsible for his care,'' which can include ''any person continually or at regular intervals found in the same household as the child.'' Some lawmakers say that could apply to a leader of a religious congregation, though only under some circumstances; others say it would not apply at all. Experts on child abuse laws around the country say there is little evidence that such laws increase reporting, and they say that it is almost unheard of for anyone to be prosecuted for failure to report abuse. ''There isn't much evidence on the effectiveness of these laws, but they might prompt organizations to examine their own policies,'' said Teresa S. Collett, a professor at South Texas College of Law in Houston, who has written extensively on the issue. States began requiring the reporting of child abuse in the 1960's and 70's, and every state has a law that applies to at least some groups of people. New York enacted a law in 1973 that focused on doctors, nurses and other health care workers, and on school officials. It was amended in 1979, 1984, 1985, 1986, 1988 and 1989, adding dental hygienists, day care workers, prosecutors, police officers and others. Eighteen states, including New Jersey, Texas and Florida, require anyone who suspects child abuse to report it, according to the National Clearinghouse on Child Abuse and Neglect Information, a federal office. Eleven other states, including California, Connecticut, Pennsylvania and Ohio, have lists of ''required reporters'' that include the clergy, so | Some in Albany Want to Make Clergy Report Possible Abuse |
1376088_0 | To the Editor: Re ''Air Travel Revives as Fear Recedes'' (front page, March 10): One can hardly imagine the devastating effect of a commercial aircraft exploding over our nation's sky, yet, as you report, ''the Congressional goal of a more reliable bomb-detection system for baggage by the end of the year'' has been ''virtually written off.'' Flagging commitment to real change only months after a major incident has been a shortcoming of our nation's air security system for decades. Contrary to your statement that ''no airports have enough technology to thoroughly examine many checked bags,'' Salt Lake City International Airport has in place a comprehensive, multi-tiered screening system to examine every checked bag for explosives. By making Salt Lake City the first in the country to achieve 100 percent screening, we have proved we can fix this security gap without causing significant passenger delays. ROCKY ANDERSON Mayor Salt Lake City, March 12, 2002 | Safer Airports |
1378261_0 | To the Editor: It's worth noting that crisis played a key role in the inception of many ancient Greek plays. Sophocles' ''Oedipus Tyrannus'' took its cue from the devastating plague that struck Athens in the early years of the Peloponnesian War; Aeschylus' ''Oresteia'' from controversy over changes that had recently been made in Athens' Court of the Areopagus. The dire straits in which Athens found itself after the disastrous defeat of its Sicilian expedition provided the backdrop for both Euripides' ''Helen'' that year and Aristophanes' ''Lysistrata'' the following year. At the same time, these plays reinforce Anne Midgette's central theme. Despite their close ties to their own time and place, they engage us today precisely because they transcend the crises that loomed large in their creation and speak to issues that are timeless and universal. DAVID H. PORTER Saratoga Springs, N.Y. ART AND CRISIS | The Greek Response |
1378471_3 | in a recent position paper that there were many alternatives to the classic family structure. At the same time, groups representing single parents -- generally far better off economically than their counterparts in the United States -- have become a potent political force across Europe. Welfare policies in many countries are specifically intended to ensure that all children are given the same financial benefits and treated equally in the eyes of the law, whether their parents are married, living together, separated, divorced or single. ''They've taken the marital status out of it and focused on the children,'' said Kathleen Kiernan, a professor of social policy and demography at the London School of Economics. Policies enacted in the last two decades by many European governments include legislation ensuring that children born out of wedlock have the same inheritance rights as other children; financial grants to the children of single parents; and the removal, in Britain, of a special tax break for married couples and an increase in cash allowances for families with children. In Scandinavia, highly complicated living and custodial arrangements between partners, children and former couples, are common. ''We have little commitment to the institution of marriage, that's true, but we do have a commitment to parenthood,'' said Kari Moxnes, a 57-year-old professor of sociology at the University of Trondheim. ''It's not socially acceptable any more in Scandinavia to break the parental relationship.'' Most of the cohabiting couples she knows marry for only one reason, she said. ''If you have a sabbatical in the United States, you better get married,'' she said, ''because that's the only way your wife or husband is going to go with you for free.'' In deeply religious countries like Italy, few children are born to unwed parents -- just 9 percent in 1998. But even in Italy, the old rules are breaking down. Most couples live together before marriage, and in a country where children, and fecundity, are adored, it is no longer unusual or embarrassing to see a heavily pregnant bride strolling down the aisle. The new arrangements have thrown up all sorts of tiny awkwardnesses. ''We usually say husband and wife,'' said Amadeo Conde, a 37-year-old graphic designer in Madrid who has been with his companion, Dawn Broadbridge, for 14 years; their son, Maximilian, is 17 months old. ''We don't mind explaining, but it gets rather long to say to the doorman, 'the | For Europeans, Love, Yes; Marriage, Maybe |
1378439_1 | news media in recent weeks. But editors reversed that decision on Wednesday night, after the printing of this week's newspaper started, because of new instructions from the ministry that proscribed any reporting about the scandal as well as new signals that the government was determined to stand behind the charity. That night, the China Youth Development Foundation issued a statement calling charges against Project Hope ''a terrorist attack on the China Youth Development Foundation by vicious criminals.'' It is not clear whether the editors received specific orders to stop the print run, although the reporter at the newspaper did not believe so. The article was replaced by one about a corrupt local official, and the paper was on sale as usual on Thursday. Although officially owned by the government, Southern Weekend is by far the largest and most influential Chinese paper that consistently produces top-flight investigative journalism. Based in the freewheeling southern city of Guangzhou, the paper deals with topics that most of the government press will not touch, from AIDS in rural China to the crushing tax burden on farmers. Time and again, articles in the newspaper have drawn criticism from the powerful Ministry of Propaganda in Beijing, and since 1999 several editors have been dismissed for overstepping the limits deemed acceptable by the ministry. Specific directives from the ministry have become less common in recent years, editors say, making those limits hard to define. For example, editors have recently been reminded not to print stories that cause ''social instability'' or ''ideological confusion,'' but they are left to interpret those warnings on their own. Southern Weekend has far more leeway that most of China's liberal-leaning newspapers because it is owned by the influential Guangdong Provincial Communist Party. Its views are tolerated in part because as one of China's best-selling newspapers, it produces good revenues. The charges against Project Hope involve the illegal diversion of money donated to support childhood education into a variety of highly speculative investments. Project Hope receives large donations from American businesses and from Chinese communities in the United States. Editors' Note: April 3, 2002, Wednesday An article on March 24 reported a decision by China's most influential liberal newspaper, Southern Weekend, to halt the publication of a report on the misuse of funds at a large government-backed charity after pressure by the Ministry of Propaganda. While the charity, Project Hope, is officially nongovernmental, it must | Under Pressure, Chinese Newspaper Pulls Exposé on a Charity |
1379684_6 | building and the emergency lighting in the stairwells, escaped. More than 400 firefighters, police officers and other rescue personnel and dozens of tenants who stayed behind during the evacuation were also killed when the buildings finally collapsed. An estimated 2,830 people are considered dead or missing in the collapse. Against the Manhattan skyline, the gleaming towers looked nearly identical, except for the television tower atop the north tower. But the inquiry found that the forces that toppled them had distinct differences. Their basic structures before the attacks were extremely similar, even if they were not quite perfect twins. Each tower was supported against the downward force of gravity by a tightly arranged matrix of columns at its core and another palisade of columns, spaced just 40 inches apart, around its exterior. The core and perimeter columns were connected by lightweight, weblike floor supports called trusses at each floor. The trusses held up corrugated metal decks on which the concrete floors were poured. The same trusses provided lateral support for all the vertical columns, preventing them from buckling under the tremendous force of gravity. Wide plates called spandrels tied the exterior steel columns together, creating a rigid surface that could resist hurricane-force winds. These structural elements would become fateful as the jets plowed into the north tower at 8:46 a.m. and the south tower at seconds before 9:03 a.m. The report -- assembled with data collected at ground zero, in scrapyards, in laboratories, by analyzing more than 100 hours of videotape and by talking to witnesses -- turned up the greatest amount of detail on the south tower attack. The United Airlines jet, its wings slightly canted, angled into the south facade of the south tower, slicing through about 30 of the 59 exterior columns on that face. The immediate damage, probably including unseen devastation to the steel core, stretched from the 78th to the 84th floors. The impact of the plane, which had been traveling as fast as 586 miles an hour, was so great that it gathered office material like a snowplow and apparently forced it toward the northeast corner of the building. Parts of the plane came to rest there and others punctured the far wall, soaring as far as six blocks to the north before hitting the ground near the intersection of Murray and Church Streets. A fuel-fed fireball emerged from three sides of the tower and | A Nation Challenged: The Trade Center; Towers Fell as Intense Fire Beat Defenses, Report Says |
1379585_1 | been common in churches with non-celibate clergy, like the Anglican Church in Canada. It is possible that the Catholic Church seems to be a hotbed of illicit sex, not so much because of its policies on celibacy but because it is such a large and newsworthy institution. The more people you have working with children and adolescents, the more problems you are likely to have. A half-dozen Catholic priests who are pedophiles might appear like a newsworthy epidemic, even if they're scattered across the country; a half-dozen pedophiles at a half-dozen different and smaller institutions may get little or no publicity, even if they're all working in the same city. The image of sexually predatory priests has been created, at least in part, because of the same reason that New York City used to be considered America's crime capital. Because of its size, New York was bound to have more gruesome crimes than smaller cities, and those crimes got especially wide coverage in the national news media because of New York's prominence. The city's violent image disappeared when the news media shifted its focus from sensational individual crimes to the relatively low rate of crime by comparison with other cities. But no one has similar data for comparing sexual-abuse rates among different religious denominations or professions. There is abundant research, though, showing different rates of sexual predation between men and women. Women rarely commit sexual assaults and are less interested in casual sexual encounters than men. They're also not attracted to teenagers to the extent that heterosexual and homosexual men are. Men typically seek younger partners; women typically don't. How many teenagers have complained about advances from female teachers? There have been a few well-publicized cases of female high school teachers having sex with their students, but those make news because they're so unusual. In many parishes nuns spend more time with children than priests do, but how many nuns have been caught molesting altar boys or choir girls? Allowing women to become priests would create new temptations for adult sex in the rectory, but it's safe to predict that there would be fewer minors having sex with clergy. IT is also safe to predict that many Catholics would benefit from their listening and counseling skills. There are many female therapists who have far more empathy with their clients than male priests will ever have with their parishioners. While there | The Perils Of Reform At Church |
1377986_1 | these articles might be written by R. S.,'' the memo continued, referring to Mr. Scruton, ''we would do our best to get other journalists to join in.'' The Financial Times responded to the article by dropping a weekly column on country life that Mr. Scruton wrote for it. The Wall Street Journal, for which Mr. Scruton has written frequently, also said it was suspending his contributions for the indefinite future. Mr. Scruton insists that he has been the object of a smear campaign to silence him. ''This can be made to look like a scandal only because the private document was not phrased as carefully as it would have been, had it been intended for public discussion,'' he wrote in a response published by The Guardian. ''The real scandal is that it should have been stolen and used as part of your 'shut up, Scruton' campaign.'' Whatever the case, it is the latest and perhaps most bizarre chapter in the career of one of Britain's most prominent public intellectuals, a former philosophy professor, amateur composer and novelist who has written books on Kant, music theory and the aesthetics of architecture. Mr. Scruton is also one of the leading intellectual champions of the contemporary British conservative movement. Mr. Scruton, who taught philosophy for years at Birkbeck College of the University of London, was a co-founder in the 1970's of the Conservative Action Group, which helped pave the way for Margaret Thatcher's election as prime minister. His withering criticism of contemporary architecture is thought to have inspired Prince Charles, who conducted a public crusade against modern building practices. A self-avowed elitist, Mr. Scruton has published books including ''The Intelligent Person's Guide to Philosophy'' and ''The Intelligent Person's Guide to Modern Culture.'' He has also gone out of his way to cultivate controversy and champion unpopular causes, speaking out in favor of fox hunting, the fur trade and sexual taboos, while attacking feminism, ''narrow-minded'' liberalism and political correctness. Because Mr. Scruton is a longtime proponent of the free market and a critic of government regulation, it is not entirely surprising that he would support smoking and cigarette manufacturing. In 2000 he published a 60-page pamphlet for the Institute for Economic Affairs, a British think tank, attacking the ''transnational authority'' of the World Health Organization in its effort to ban cigarette advertising worldwide. ''Who or what is to control the bureaucrats appointed to control | Advocating Tobacco, On the Payroll Of Tobacco |
1377989_0 | Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly has ordered an overhaul of the way the Police Department uses computers and other technology after determining that its current systems were woefully inadequate and lagged behind innovations of other police agencies. This past week, Mr. Kelly took several steps toward upgrading the department's outdated technology, asking I.B.M., Deloitte Consulting and Merrill Lynch to evaluate its troubled systems, and removing the deputy commissioner, Ari N. Wax, who headed the Office of Technology and Systems Development. Although it is the nation's largest police force and has a budget larger than that of several states, the New York Police Department, unlike many other police forces, does not use computers installed in patrol cars to provide extensive information for officers responding to emergency calls. The department has also been slow to establish the use of hand-held wireless devices that allow officers on foot to check criminal histories and motor vehicle pedigrees. And Mr. Kelly has said that he is troubled by the lack of using e-mail messages, a routine function in most workplaces, for the majority of the department's 55,000 employees. ''We should be able to communicate with our employees,'' he said in an interview several weeks ago. This week, Mr. Kelly said he was seeking evaluations by I.B.M. and the other companies because he believed that quickly disseminating information to police officers and detectives on the street would help them do their jobs better and more safely. ''I think technology can help us to sustain the reductions in crime,'' he said. ''And what we're hoping this assessment does is take a look at where we are, where we should be going and how we can get there.'' Mr. Kelly, who in the past has reached out to the private sector for help in examining problems inside the department, said he has spoken to senior executives at I.B.M., Deloitte Consulting and Merrill Lynch and all were willing to help with the assessment at no cost to the city. He said a team was being put together, but its makeup and organization have not been determined. Mr. Kelly, who returned to the Police Department as commissioner in January after leaving in 1993, has served as undersecretary of the United States Treasury, United States Customs commissioner and director of global security for Bear Stearns. He said his concerns about the police department stem in part from his experience in the federal | Police Department Takes Steps to Modernize Its Technology |
1378008_0 | A dramatic tale of murder and mutiny on the high seas unfolded yesterday in Honolulu as the authorities accused a Chinese seaman of killing his captain and first mate and taking over a 195-foot Taiwanese fishing vessel that disappeared for three days last week in the vastness southeast of the Hawaiian Islands. In a case that could involve the death penalty and raise questions affecting American relations with China and Taiwan, federal prosecutors charged Shi Lei, a 21-year-old ship's cook, with seizing control of his vessel on March 14 after fatally stabbing the captain and mate in a struggle on the bridge. Two days later, as the commandeered ship plowed through a storm 200 miles southeast of Hilo on the Big Island, the crew overpowered the drowsy assailant, and later re-established radio contact with the owners and set a course for Hawaii. A Coast Guard cutter intercepted and escorted the ship to Pearl Harbor. Through interpreters, 27 crew members, speaking Mandarin and other dialects, told of scenes out of Joseph Conrad: the captain striking the cook who demanded to go home to China, the retaliatory knife attacks on the bridge, the captain's body hurled overboard, the mate's body left in a freezer. Besides the interviews with survivors, Edward H. Kubo Jr., the United States attorney for Hawaii, said that investigators had been given a letter, composed by the crew at sea, to communicate the horrors of the killings and of desperate hours under the dictates of an assailant armed with two knives from the mess. Appearing before Magistrate Judge Leslie Kobayashi yesterday in Honolulu, the suspect was assigned a lawyer, charged under a mutiny-and-murder complaint and ordered held without bail for a preliminary hearing next week, said Thomas Brady, the federal prosecutor assigned to the case. The complaint, signed by Paul G. Amoy of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, said the ship, Full Means II, which is owned by FCF Fishery Company of Taipei but registered under a flag of convenience in the Indian Ocean nation of Seychelles, was sailing hundreds of miles southeast of Hawaii on March 14 when the confrontation began. Approaching Capt. Chen Chung-She, the cook demanded to go home to China and, in response, was struck by the captain, the affidavit said. Later, it went on, Shi Lei went to the bridge and fatally stabbed the captain in the abdomen and the first mate, Li Da | Tales of Mutiny and Murder Unfold After a Missing Taiwanese Ship Is Found |
1374875_2 | Motors is offering optional running boards for its Safari and Astro vans made from plastics reinforced with nanoscale bits of clay. The new materials are stronger and lighter than the traditional polyolefin plastic panels they replace, which have been reinforced with calcium carbonate, talc or other minerals. Although the particles cost more per pound than do traditional reinforcements, the total price of the panels to G.M. is the same or lower because the nanoparticles make up less than 5 percent of the end product, compared with 30 percent or more for traditional reinforcement materials. G.M. and its partners in the development, Basell (a joint venture of BASF and Shell), Blackhawk Automotive Plastics, and Southern Clay Products (a subsidiary of Rockwood Specialties), are testing the use of the new composites in other portions of car exteriors and for use in dashboards. ''It's just a matter of building momentum,'' said Robert A. Ottaviani, group lab manager for materials and processes at General Motors Research and Development. ''The majority of our materials will be some kind of nanocomposite by the middle of the decade.'' Most researchers trace today's visions of a nanotechnology future to Dec. 29, 1959, the day the physicist Richard P. Feynman gave a lecture to the American Physical Society titled ''There Is Plenty of Room at the Bottom.'' By the conventional definition, nanoscale objects have dimensions below 100 nanometers. As Dr. Chou's space travel analogy implies, the potential products at that scale -- microscopic electronics, miniature power plants, miracle medicines -- seem like science fiction. When engineers venture into the world of nanoscale dimensions, they enter an alien environment of atomic and molecular forces that can sometimes produce unexpected results. Nucryst, for example, has discovered that nanoscale silver particles not only kill microbes, as silver has long been known to do, but also appear to reduce inflammation. Many of the current commercial applications do not require the kinds of uniform features and numbingly precise layouts that researchers know will be needed for future nanoproducts -- like sugar-cube-size devices capable of storing as much data as the Library of Congress. By comparison, current nanomaterials can have wide variations. The silica-coated clay particles in sunscreen products, for example, can range from 5 nanometers to 80. And stain-resistant fabrics like those used in Eddie Bauer's Nano-Care khakis are designed with surface fibers of 10 to 100 nanometers, according to Nano-Tex, the Burlington Industries | Tiny Technologies Slip Unseen Into Daily Life |
1379793_0 | To the Editor: I take issue with ''Brazil's Prized Exports Rely on Slaves and Scorched Land'' (front page, March 25). Forced labor is perceived in Brazil as an extremely serious problem because of its inherent evil and incompatibility with a fully democratic society. As such, it is aggressively combated by the authorities. It is also circumscribed to rare occurrences in remote locations, and Brazilian exports certainly do not rely on it. The article referred to timber and beef. The beef Brazil exports -- and the vast majority of what we consume -- does not come from the Amazon and is produced under rigorous quality and labor standards. As to mahogany, the Brazilian Environmental Agency has worked to stop the illegal harvesting and issued a ban last year on all such exports. RUBENS A. BARBOSA Ambassador of Brazil Washington, March 25, 2002 | Brazil's Exports |
1379805_0 | At first glance, plastics recycling looks like an economic and environmental success story. Consider, for example, that about 25 percent of the polyethylene fiber in Tyvek -- a DuPont product used in envelopes, disposable medical suits and insulation -- comes from jugs that once held milk or water. Fleece garments are increasingly made of old soda bottles. ''Plastic lumber,'' made in part from milk jugs, increasingly substitutes for wood in decking and outdoor furniture, and the Plastic Lumber Trade Association is testing the product for rot-resistant bridges. EvCo Research, an Atlanta company, is using recycled beverage bottles to make water-repellent coatings on boxes for shipping fruits and meats. The TEWA Technology Corporation of Albuquerque is using shredded plastic in asphalt. Yet few companies have achieved the economies of scale that could make recycling pay. Manufacturers say they cannot get a stream of high-quality material at a reasonable price. Recycling companies say they cannot guarantee such a stream until sales grow robust enough to drive down costs. ''It's a chicken-and-egg situation,'' said Gil Friend, president of Natural Logic, an environmental consulting firm in Berkeley, Calif. Two years ago, environmentalists, manufacturers and recyclers founded Business and Environmentalists in an Alliance for Recycling -- known as BEAR -- to jump-start plastics recycling. So far, it has only compiled data. ''We had a high objective, finding a way to recycle 80 percent of plastics,'' said the manager of the alliance, Edward T. Boisson, an environmental consultant in Pittsboro, N.C. ''We didn't get there.'' The results of the impasse are easy to spot. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, nearly 95 percent of the 24.2 million tons of plastic waste generated each year goes unreclaimed. Plastics already take up a disproportionate amount of landfill space, and the glut is likely to worsen: studies show that as many as 500 million computers will be discarded over the next five years. ''Billions of pounds of plastics will not be dealt with in an environmentally benign way,'' said Ted Smith, executive director of the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition, an environmental group in San Jose, Calif. Manufacturers acknowledge the problem. Beverage companies, although opposed to the spread of bills mandating return deposits on bottles beyond the 10 states that have such laws, are setting up their own retrieval programs. On Jan. 8, carpet manufacturers, environmental advocates and regulators signed the National Carpet Recycling Agreement, to promote carpet recycling. Electronics | Plastic Recycling Is a Work in Progress |
1379924_0 | Because of a production error, credits were illegible in some copies yesterday for a diagram showing structural causes of the collapse of the World Trade Center. It was made by Baden Copeland, Mika Grondahl, William McNulty, Sarah Slobin and Archie Tse of The New York Times. The source was a draft report by the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the American Society of Civil Engineers. | Corrections |
1371975_6 | what their spaces contained. The huge steel transfer trusses ran mostly through the fifth, sixth and seventh floors where the fires burned. The purpose of the trusses, which included zigzagging and horizontal members and were concentrated around the building's core, was to allow 7 World Trade to be built over two Consolidated Edison substations that already existed on that spot when the building went up in the late 1980's. Together the stations held 10 transformers, each about 35 feet high and 40 feet wide. Using the trusses to avoid having vertical structural columns pierce the transformers, the building was constructed around them like a hen sitting on a giant egg. ''We had to do design tricks to accommodate the existing Con Ed facility,'' said Mr. Cantor, the structural engineer. ''This building had an awful lot of transfers.'' Transfer trusses are a well-tested technique and are used in countless high-rise buildings, as well as in bridges around the world. Engineers say that transfer trusses, for most buildings, present no extraordinary hazard. But if there is an explosion, earthquake or long-burning fire, they can present a problem. In Oklahoma City, during the 1995 bombing of the Federal Building, a large transfer girder on the building's third floor gave way, helping to precipitate a progressive collapse that later analysis showed was responsible for most of the 168 deaths. After this attack, federal guidelines for buildings that would hold government agencies were changed, recommending that buildings be designed so that single-point failures did not cause a catastrophic collapse. Videos of the 5:28 p.m. collapse of 7 World Trade lend vivid support to the truss-failure theory. Roughly 30 seconds before the building goes down, a rooftop mechanical room starts to disappear, falling into the building's core. Then a second larger rooftop room sinks. The building then quickly collapses. Both rooms were above sections of the building held up by the trusses. Other video evidence shows fire concentrated in the floors containing the trusses and the fuel tanks. Dr. John D. Osteraas, director of civil engineering practice, Exponent Failure Analysis Associates, in Menlo Park, Calif., reviewed videos of the collapse, discussed it with other engineers and came to a similar conclusion; the fuel, the trusses and the fire brought 7 World Trade down. ''The pieces have come together,'' he said. ''Without the fuel, I think the building would have done fine.'' A NATION CHALLENGED: GROUND ZERO | Burning Diesel Is Cited in Fall Of 3rd Tower |
1373952_1 | college, and 4 out of 10 face unmanageable debts as they finish college and enter the job market, according to a report released today. The report, by the lobbying arm of State Public Interest Research Groups, a nonprofit organization that studies social policy, found that debt among students doubled between 1992 and 2000, when the average graduate left college owing nearly $17,000 in educational loans. The figures are not adjusted for inflation, which remained low in that period. Tracey King, an author of the report, said that higher education remained ''a great investment,'' increasing a graduate's income over the course of a lifetime by more than $1 million. ''At the same time,'' Ms. King said, ''students are having a hard time when they're graduating with all this debt and the payments are a high percentage of their income.'' The report, based on data from the Census Bureau and the Department of Education's National Center for Education Statistics, found that the share of students borrowing to finance their education rose substantially, to 59 percent in 1996 from 42 percent in 1992. During that period, federal financing through Pell grants shrank as tuition rose. Though Pell grants increased after 1996, the educational debt of graduating seniors jumped to $16,928 in 2000 from $9,188 in 1992. A third of students graduate owing more than $20,000 in education loans, and nearly half of all student borrowers graduate with credit card debts that average $3,176. By 2000, 64 percent of students relied on loans to help finance their education. The report defines an unmanageable educational debt as one draining more than 8 percent of a person's monthly income. The report said this was a standard definition used by the loan industry. Alyssa Ferree, a student at the University of California at Davis, said she had hoped to become a teacher or a social worker after graduating in 2004 with a degree in community and regional development. In California, New York and elsewhere in the country, school systems face a severe shortage of teachers, and the recruitment of fresh talent has been a priority of policy makers. But with her student loans set to reach $15,000 by graduation day, Ms. Ferree said she would have to aim for a better paying job after leaving college. ''When I entered college I knew I'd have debt,'' Ms. Ferree said, ''but I didn't expect it to be this much.'' | More Graduates Mired in Debt, Survey Finds |
1373877_0 | Axel Vervoordt is not like most antiques dealers. First, he sells many of his wares by appointment out of Kasteel van 's-Gravenwezel, a 14th-century castle outside of Antwerp, Belgium. Second, he sells contemporary art along with ancient artifacts and antiques. And he has a staff of nearly 100 who scour the world for antiques, do restoration work on art and antiques and make upholstered pieces for the interiors he designs. Mr. Vervoordt has a clientele that includes Bill Blass, Sting, Pierre Bergé, Henry Kravis and Bill Gates. He has sold things to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Getty Museum and to top American decorators like Thierry Despont, Peter Marino, Paul Weisman, Rose Tarlow and Juan Pablo Molyneux. What he is really selling is a certain taste. ''I suppose there must be others who sell contemporary art with antiques, but I can't think of anyone,'' Mr. Vervoort said. ''The secret is to make antiques seem contemporary. I have a different attitude. If the antiques are only there to show how rich you are, it doesn't work. I like things that are more understated, things that have a mystical power.'' A new coffee table book, ''Axel Vervoordt: The Story of a Style'' (Assouline, $70), written with Meredith Etherington-Smith of London, explains his philosophy. ''I wanted the book to tell why I'm mixing all these things,'' he says. ''I took a lot of time thinking about it. I'm expressing a philosophy.'' The photographs in the book, by Laziz Hamani, depict the interiors of his houses over the years, works of art and antiquities he has bought and sold and anything he finds inspirational like a canopic jar from Egypt, the lacquered head of a Japanese lohan or an old wall with peeling blue paint. ''Vervoordt often uses the Flemish word 'volledig' -- literally 'vol,' meaning full, and 'ledig,' meaning empty -- as shorthand for his philosophy of what constitutes the ideal surroundings for himself and for those he advises,'' Ms. Etherington-Smith writes. ''To him, a room should be a series of visual adventures in space. Spatial planes should be interrupted by the conjunction of very different, almost opposing, objects. These juxtapositions should inspire contemplation and thus a certain type of mental liberty.'' Or as Mr. Vervoordt put it: ''My taste spans centuries and cultures, and I seek in particular the tension between different objects and different cultures. It's to start a | A Preference For Mingling Old and New |
1377587_0 | To the Editor: Maureen Dowd (column, March 20) unfairly lumps the Roman Catholic Church with the Taliban, Al Qaeda and the leadership of Saudi Arabia. Before making such comparisons in the future, Ms. Dowd ought to keep a few things in mind: *The Catholic Church is hardly the only religious denomination that limits ordination to men. *The Catholic Church has historically taken a leadership role in this country in the education of girls and women. *The first female university presidents and hospital administrators in our country were largely (if not exclusively) Catholic nuns. *Today, lay and religious women occupy countless leadership roles in dioceses, Catholic charities and Catholic health and educational institutions throughout the country, probably in numbers greater than most corporations. DENNIS POUST Associate Director New York State Catholic Conference Albany, March 20, 2002 | Scandal in the Church: A Time of Anguish |
1377655_0 | A sports article on Tuesday about YES, the new cable sports channel, misidentified a client served by Zenith Media, a media buying company whose vice president was quoted analyzing the price for 30-second commercials on the channel's Yankee broadcasts. The client is Toyota, not General Motors. | Corrections |
1377061_2 | justice for destroying thousands of Enron documents, partnerships in Spain and Chile said they had begun to sever ties with the worldwide practice, and those in Italy, Portugal and Switzerland said they were considering doing the same. The intent of the negotiations with KPMG is to keep as much of Andersen's global network intact as possible, while insulating the foreign partnerships from Enron-related fallout. Andersen's mounting legal troubles effectively negated the possibility of a merger that would have included the United States practice, people involved in the talks said. ''We are continuing to work together to consider possible ways in which to combine our operations,'' said Mike Rake, chairman of KPMG for Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Any deal between Andersen and KPMG would require the approval of local partners in Europe, Africa, the Middle East, Canada, Asia and Latin America, and would require the blessing of antitrust regulators in those regions. Such a combination would create the world's second-largest accounting firm behind PricewaterhouseCoopers, with annual revenue of $16.5 billion. Nearly half of Andersen's $9.3 billion in annual revenue in 2001 came from the United States; the rest is split among the various regions with Western Europe accounting for the biggest chunk, at $2.9 billion. But the prospect of merging Andersen's international operations with another firm and thereby separating them from the American practice raises murky legal issues, lawyers said. Andersen partners outside the United States have maintained that their firms are separate legal entities and as such would not be liable for potential claims against Arthur Andersen L.L.P., the Chicago-based practice. Plaintiffs suing Enron and Andersen say that they will attack that argument. Steve W. Berman of Hagens Berman said he planned to add Andersen Worldwide, a Geneva-based company that encompasses the entire partnership, including the foreign affiliates, as a defendant in a class-action suit. Mr. Berman is representing Enron employees who lost money in their 401(k) accounts when the company collapsed. Legal experts said it was unclear whether the courts would treat Andersen as a loose band of affiliates, or as a firm that in essence acts as a global entity. Andersen Worldwide is a ''société cooperative,'' a structure unique to Switzerland that allows it to oversee member firms loosely. Each national firm, for instance, typically has an agreement with the Swiss parent that allows it to participate in the global network, including sharing revenue, marketing and | KPMG and Andersen Are Discussing a Deal |
1376987_4 | precise distance between a car in Los Angeles and one in San Diego to within the thickness of a particle of smoke,'' Dr. Watkins said. Variations in distance caused by gravity difference on earth produce data points for the gravity map. As the satellites move in their orbit, the first one senses a mass change caused by a mountain, glacier or swell of water in a deep ocean current. This mass pulls the first satellite a little toward it before it tugs the second spacecraft, slightly changing the separation between the two. After the first satellite passes an object below, it slows down slightly (because of the attraction), before the trailing spacecraft is similarly affected, again registering a slight change in distance between the two. These fine pulls and tugs on the spacecraft slowly sketch out a map of the masses below. Researchers said data from the $127 million mission -- $97 million coming from NASA and $30 million, including launching costs, from Germany -- would initially benefit ocean and climate research. Information from other spacecraft using radar or laser scanning to measure sea height, like the Topex/Poseidon satellite, can be combined with the gravity data to obtain better estimates of sea-surface temperatures that affect weather. For instance, if researchers notice a rise in water levels in the Pacific Ocean, it can be from heat expanding the water, a sign of future El Niño conditions. The water level rise, however, may also be because of winds deforming the ocean surface and pushing up a mass of water, a condition that Grace could spot. This additional data, therefore, can help improve the accuracy of weather and climate forecasting, scientists said. Tracing the gravity signature of moving masses can also help monitor the movement and changing size of polar ice, which is affected by global warming. ''You can determine, for example, if the sea level is rising because there is actually more water melting into it or if the water is expanding simply due to heating,'' Dr. Watkins said. Subtle gravity differences can also provide information about the structure of earth's interior, including the tectonic processes that continue to reshape the surface and move continents. Previous orbital studies have revealed an area of lower-than-normal gravity off the coasts of India, as well as a gravity-high area in the South Pacific, both possibly due to the structure of mantle material beneath the crust. | New Satellites to Map Gravity More Precisely |
1375408_5 | better off to stay together as a global firm,'' Mr. Robertson said. ''We do a lot of business through the global network.'' Partners in some European countries are considering going their own way. ''We are looking at a lot of alternatives, one of which is speaking with Deloitte, or KPMG or others,'' said Eves Van Durme, the marketing director for Andersen's operations in Belgium, which employs 1,200 people and generates $140 million in annual revenue, or about 1.5 percent of the firm's total. Likewise, partners in Poland are holding talks with several rivals, including Deloitte, said a person close to the firm, who asked not to be identified to protect his job. The discussions are separate from, but running parallel to, the talks being held in the United States, the person said. ''We are watching carefully what is going on in the United States regarding these negotiations,'' the person said. ''But ultimately our decision will be made independently.'' In Japan, the situation is different. Foreign auditors generally franchise their names to local partners who pay royalties worth 2 percent to 3 percent of revenue. The Japanese partner pays for the right to use the trademark, and the United States partner funnels clients to it. Andersen's partner is Asahi & Company. Aside from the legal complications involved in protecting an Andersen suitor from any claims arising from Enron's collapse, foreign partners are expressing other concerns. One issue involves striking a deal that would reflect the right balance between the relative sizes of local affiliates. Although Deloitte dwarfs Andersen on the global stage, ranking second to Andersen's fifth, in Poland, Deloitte is smaller, generating about 40 percent of Andersen's $80 million in annual revenue. Moreover, Andersen is a two-tiered system with a handful of partners dividing the spoils of the firm and the rest privy only to the profits of their local partnership, a structure that may complicate a merger, analysts said. Perhaps most daunting is the prospect of having any deal approved by the European Commission, which has frowned on efforts to reduce the number of big accounting firms to four from five. Ernst & Young and KPMG abandoned plans to merge in 1998 after scrutiny by the commission. Soon afterward, Karel Van Miert, the competition commissioner at the time, approved the merger of Price Waterhouse and Coopers & Lybrand. That deal reduced the number of big players to five from | Andersen Widens Effort To Find Buyer |
1375449_0 | Sales of personal computers and the chips that power them will increase this year after a steep drop in 2001, according to two reports scheduled for release today by the International Data Corporation, a market research concern. Citing better-than-expected demand in Western Europe and in American stores, International Data raised its projections for growth in unit shipments of desktop and notebook computers to 3 percent from 1.8 percent. Shipments should rise to 125.5 million, from 121.8 million, the company said. All regions of the world except Asia-Pacific surpassed expectations in the fourth quarter of 2001, setting the stage for a mild rebound this year, especially in the second half. In a separate report, International Data predicted that revenue from sales of personal computer chips this year would increase by 3.4 percent, to $37.6 billion, from $36.3 billion. But the report warned that weak demand among corporations, excess chip inventory and fluctuating prices would cause sales to fall through the first half of the year before swinging up in the last six months of 2002. Chris Gaither (NYT) | Technology Briefing | Hardware: Brightening Outlook For PC'S And Chips |
1375375_2 | high school degrees, more young graduates were still being hired. Employers apparently took advantage of this surplus in professional, technical and managerial workers by reducing wage offers. A steady drop in average pay for college-educated workers from the 1970's to the mid-1990's is evidence of this. In the late 1990's, wages for college graduates again began to rise. There may now be more demand for college graduates, but the data are not strong enough to justify a big expansion of higher education on economic grounds alone. It will have to be a matter of social justice, and this complicates the political prospects for increased university capacity and for financial aid. In the past, higher education has also grown mostly as a result of social forces, not in response to employer demands. The biggest expansions took place after World War II and again in the 1960's. President Harry S. Truman's G.I. Bill was intended to keep veterans in school and off the job market when there was no work for them in a still-militarized economy. In 1958 after the Soviets launched Sputnik, the government began a small college loan program, hoping to train more scientists. In this case, skill shortages did fuel a small growth in higher education. But the big university expansions of the 1960's were financed by states in response to political pressure from parents -- because there was no room in existing colleges for their baby-boom children. Policies in the Midwest illustrate how higher education capacity reacts to parents more than labor markets. States like Iowa, Minnesota and Wisconsin pay for high-quality public universities although these states get no economic benefit from the many graduates who leave the region for jobs elsewhere. Can parental pressure now spur further growth in higher education? An influential middle class demanded college expansion during the baby boom. But now the shortage of college seats is concentrated in rapidly growing states like California, Florida and Texas that can't (or won't) expand colleges fast enough. Many students in these states are the first in their families to finish high school. Their low-income and minority parents may not have the political influence to get legislatures to add the needed college capacity. This demographic and political imbalance will also affect the federal debate about scholarships. Some employers will plead for more graduates, but only parental pressure can ultimately win aid for higher education. LESSONS E-mail: rrothstein@nytimes.com. | Parents Play Crucial Role In Expanding Universities |
1375341_0 | WAS the Food and Drug Administration overly sensitive to the commercial interests of the tuna industry when it established guidelines on fish consumption and mercury contamination? Documents released this month by a watchdog group are raising that question as well as others about the decision-making that went into the agency's warning to pregnant women about which fish to avoid to reduce the risk of harming their fetuses. The documents, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act by the Environmental Working Group, include 1,000 pages of transcripts and other reports related to meetings and discussions that led to the January 2001 advisory that pregnant women not eat fish like mackerel and swordfish. Among them were three meetings the F.D.A. had with the U.S. Tuna Foundation, Chicken of the Sea, Starkist, Bumble Bee and the National Food Processors Association. The industry meetings in themselves were not unusual. However, the Environmental Working Group and at least one member of Congress are questioning whether undue weight was given to the industry's position, while the opinions of others, including consumer focus groups, were discounted. Earlier this month the F.D.A. itself acknowledged a need to revisit its own recommendations. In a rare move, just a year after its list was released, the agency announced a meeting of its Foods Advisory Committee to review mercury in seafood. ''We are going back because the Environmental Working Group report had some things in there that went to the process, and we wanted to be sure there isn't any question about that,'' said Joseph A. Levitt, director of the agency's Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition. The F.D.A.'s advisory warned pregnant women not to eat swordfish, king mackerel, shark and tilefish because of high levels of mercury contamination that could cause neurological defects or delays in mental development in their children. Mysteriously absent from the list was one of the most significant sources of mercury in the American diet, tuna. The F.D.A. said at the time it had identified those species of most concern to pregnant women, based on scientific evidence, the fact that Americans don't eat dangerous levels of tuna and a desire not to confuse women. ''We feel we have evaluated the science in an appropriate way, and our advisory is right on target,'' Michael Bolger, director of the division of risk assessment of the Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition, said last May. Besides, Mr. | Second Thoughts on Mercury in Fish |
1375645_1 | way to see if any contamination reaches taps or ground water used for drinking, but the program under which they are conducted, the toxic substances hydrology program of the geological survey, is slated to be eliminated under budget cuts proposed by the Bush administration, government officials said. The $14-million-a-year program was created in the Reagan administration, and its data are used by many state agencies and federal scientists. The Bush administration has instead proposed providing $10 million a year to the National Science Foundation for water quality studies. Federal officials, drug company scientists and private environmental campaigners all said yesterday that the Geological Survey program provided the first comprehensive concrete data on levels of antibiotics, hormones and other drugs in American waterways. Many of these substances fall through regulatory cracks because they are not defined as pollution under clean-water laws, and they are not all checked for environmental effects by the food and drug agency. In 1997, the F.D.A. followed Clinton administration efforts to streamline many regulations and greatly reduced the number of drugs for which environmental assessments were required. A review of hundreds of previous drug assessments turned up no instances where the compounds, once out of the body, had an adverse effect, agency officials said. Some categories were excluded from such assessments, including hormones, like estrogen, which are natural substances. ''They streamlined the process so much that it's virtually nonexistent for a lot of drugs,'' said Dr. Rebecca Goldburg, a senior scientist at Environmental Defense, a private lobbying and research group. Now, however, estrogens and similar compounds are increasingly the focus of research by the Environmental Protection Agency and many scientists because of hints that they alter sexual characteristics in fish and other aquatic species. ''As we look more at low levels of drugs, it appears that some of them have real biological effects in real situations,'' Dr. Goldburg said. About 40 percent of the streams in the study showed traces of estrogen or other reproductive hormones. Some drug company scientists said that one hurdle to assessing the effect of hormones -- like those in birth control pills -- is that the substances are also naturally produced by people, wild animals and some plants. ''It's hard to see what we'd be able to do about that,'' said Dr. James R. Hagan, the vice president of Glaxo SmithKline for corporate health, environment and safety. ''It's one thing to regulate | F.D.A. Considers New Tests For Environmental Effects |
1375585_2 | Explorer allow users to drag their favorite Favorites onto a bar on the browser window for one-click access. Windows users should go to the View menu while using Internet Explorer, then to Toolbars and to the Links option on a submenu. The Links toolbar can display a row of Favorites underneath the Address box. If the Links Toolbar option is checked but the toolbar is not visible, try placing your cursor on the area just below the Address bar; when the cursor changes into a double-headed arrow, click and drag downward to reveal the Links area. Once the Links toolbar is visible, you can click on the Favorites button at the top of the screen to display the files in the Favorites pane and then drag the Google icon or other Favorites to the Links toolbar. You can also drag Web addresses from the Address window right into the Links toolbar. The process is roughly the same on a Macintosh, although the Links toolbar is called the Favorites toolbar. If you are using Windows and Internet Explorer 5 or later, the Google site itself offers a free toolbar add-on that brings many Google search functions right to your browser window. You can download it at toolbar .google.com. Q. Now that the iOpener has been discontinued, are there any basic Internet devices on the market? A. Devices that let users send and receive e-mail and browse the Web but cost far less than a full computer are still around, though they are not as plentiful as they were a few years ago. Earthlink's MailStation (www.cidco.com/products/index .html), for example, is a simple line of e-mail appliances that range in cost from $30 to $200, plus a monthly service fee of $10 to $15. For those who want more than just e-mail, the New Internet Computer Company sells a stripped-down computer called a NIC that has no hard drive but can connect to the Web and handle Web-based e-mail and sites using multimedia. A NIC with a 15-inch monitor costs $330, works with a variety of Internet service providers and can be purchased at www .thinknic.com. The Internet Appliance Zone Web site (www.homenetappliance.com) has information and links about several kinds of Internet-enabled products. J. D. BIERSDORFER Circuits invites questions about computer-based technology, by e-mail to QandA@nytimes.com. This column will answer questions of general interest, but letters cannot be answered individually. Q & A | Wide-Screen or Boxy, TV Is a Numbers Game |
1375616_0 | Five months ago, Material ConneXion added FieldTurf, a synthetic lawn with ''dirt'' made of recycled tires and sneakers, to its collection. Billed as the ''closest to nature'' grass substitute, it was invented for tennis courts and picked up for other sports fields by teams like the Seattle Seahawks and the University of Nebraska Cornhuskers, whose Memorial Stadium in Lincoln is below. FieldTurf is soft, holds up in bad weather and drains faster than real grass, reducing skids, said John Ingram, the university's director of athletic facilities. The residential version is perfect for shady backyards; Alan Lemay, a customer service representative for FieldTurf, installed it at his home near Montreal. ''There are too many trees and no sun,'' he said. ''Last year, we had a drought for 50 days, and the watering police showed up and said, 'Why is your grass so green?' '' It is $5.50 a square foot for athletic installations; $10 to $12 to homeowners: (800) 724-2969 or www.fieldturf .com. ELAINE LOUIE | Greenery to Import If Drought Strikes |
1375599_0 | CAN new technology make calling customer service less frustrating? Enable call center representatives to answer your question quickly? Prevent you from getting disconnected, or lost in a thicket of voice-mail options? In an unmarked building here in a nondescript industrial park, one company, the electronic brokerage E*Trade, is trying to find out. Inside is an E*Trade call center with the latest technology for routing and responding to customer calls. More than 400 customer service representatives -- or associates, as the company calls them -- answer phones in spacious cubicles while wearing ID tags that proclaim, ''Customer Experience, Accountability, Innovation.'' As each call comes in, a representative's desktop software comes alive with customer data, including account information, recent transactions and inquiries, and links to promotional material that the customer has recently received. There is a smorgasbord of detail, all on one screen: Tax ID, Web User Name, Tier (based on total value of account assets and longevity as a customer), Time in Queue and so forth. If the customer has logged in to E*Trade's site, the representative can even see what page that person is on. ''You've got to create a huge tool set, a knowledge base,'' said Connie Dotson, E*Trade's spokeswoman, who was formerly in charge of the company's four call centers. ''There's no way you can do it without technology.'' If E*Trade's effort yields happier clients, it will be the exception that proves the rule, according to some analysts. Over the last few years there has been ''almost an inverse relationship between investment in call-center technology and customer satisfaction,'' said Michael Maoz, a vice president and research director at Gartner Inc., a technology consulting firm. Satisfaction has dropped because companies have applied technology to handle calls more cost-efficiently rather than to improve customer satisfaction, Mr. Maoz said. ''They don't know where you are and why you're stuck,'' he said. ''Less than 5 percent of companies today can provide an uninterrupted experience.'' Part of the challenge is matching resources to the task. Many of the nation's 70,000 call centers handle not just calls but also inquiries relayed through e-mail and online chat, while trying to sell additional products and services as well. Mr. Maoz said that new technologies like E*Trade's might improve the caller's experience, especially if that caller is one of the company's best customers. Among companies that use these systems, he said, ''what sets leaders apart are processes | Smarter Call Centers: At Your Service? |
1375687_1 | and humankind,'' the commentary carried an implicit threat of a retaliatory strike by North Korea. ''A nuclear war to be imposed by U.S. nuclear fanatics,'' it warned, ''would mean their ruin in nuclear disaster.'' The commentary did not specify how North Korea would respond, but it seemed to have been intended to play upon fears that North Korea does have the ability to fire missiles carrying nuclear warheads or biological and chemical weapons. It was largely because North Korea is suspected of developing such weapons that President Bush, in his state of the union address in January, named the country as part of an ''axis of evil'' that also included Iraq and Iran. The United States Central Intelligence Agency and South Korean defense analysts have long believed that North Korea has enough plutonium for one or two nuclear warheads. But North Korea signed an agreement in Geneva in 1994 under which it promised to stop trying to build nuclear weapons. North Korea threatened earlier this month to withdraw from the agreement if the Bush administration persisted with what North Korea called a ''hard-line'' policy that differed from the Clinton administration's approach. North Korea also renewed its complaints against delays in construction of two nuclear reactors promised in the 1994 agreement to fulfill its energy needs. In denouncing the Pentagon's nuclear proposals, the North Korean commentary made a rare mention of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima by the United States in August 1945 that preceded the Japanese surrender in World War II. North Korea generally ignores the role of the United States in ending World War II, preferring to credit Communist guerrillas with having ended Japanese rule over the Korean peninsula. ''If the U.S. intends to mount a nuclear attack on any part of the D.P.R.K. just as it did on Hiroshima, it is grossly mistaken,'' said the commentary, referring to North Korea by the initials of its formal name, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. Besides warning the United States, the analysis also seemed directed at South Koreans who have criticized what they see as an increased threat by the Bush administration against North Korea. Although South Korean officials have said the revisions in American nuclear strategy present nothing new, the opposition Grand National Party, a conservative group, has called on the government to protest strongly. The party of President Kim Dae Jung has demanded fuller explanations from Washington. | North Korea Denounces U.S. Nuclear Plan, Promises 'Response' |
1375699_0 | Leaders of two of the nation's most prominent industries, entertainment and technology, have begun publicly sniping at each other over how to stop consumers from illegally copying digital movies, music and television programs. The feud grows out of Hollywood's frustration with the illicit flow of copyrighted works over the Internet. Despite courtroom victories against Napster and others deemed to contribute to Internet piracy, millions of people continue to download free digital copies of everything from Jennifer Lopez's latest hit single to the Disney movie ''Monsters, Inc.'' Hollywood studios and record companies are now putting pressure on the makers of personal computers, DVD players and portable music players to come up with technology to prevent the machines themselves from playing copyrighted material if someone illegally downloads it or copies it to a blank compact disc. The technology industry is resisting, saying the proposal would slow innovation, hobble its products -- PC's might work more slowly, for instance -- and potentially stop consumers from making legal copies of CD's and other products they own. Besides, technology executives say, what Hollywood is asking for is not technologically feasible: no one has yet invented practical copy protection that could not be cracked. Michael D. Eisner, the Walt Disney Company chairman, told the Senate Commerce Committee on Feb. 28 that he was tired of being ''finessed.'' Citing leading technology companies including Apple Computer, Dell Computer, Microsoft and Intel, he suggested that they had failed to develop adequate protection for digital media because piracy helps sell computers. That brought an angry retort from Andrew S. Grove, the chairman of Intel. ''Is it the responsibility of the world at large to protect an industry whose business model is facing a strategic challenge?'' he said in an interview. ''Or is it up to the entertainment industry to adapt to a new technical reality and a new set of consumers who want to take advantage of it?'' The question of whose role it is to stop illegal copying has captured the attention of Congress. Lobbying by Disney and other entertainment companies is fueling support for legislation that would require computer and consumer electronics makers to develop a standard for copyright-protection technology, or adopt one imposed by the government. ''I believe if you say to these people, 'You get us a system by Dec. 31 or we'll do it for you,' you'll be surprised at how innovative they'll become,'' Mr. | Piracy, or Innovation? It's Hollywood vs. High Tech |
1379011_0 | State regulators have approved the construction of a third power plant at Bowline Point that will burn natural gas and oil and deliver 750 megawatts of electricity. The plant was cleared by the State Board on Electric Generation Siting and the Environment. Known as Bowline 3, the plant will join two 621-megawatt plants that went into operation in the early 1970's at a 257-acre station run by Mirant. Bowline 3 is one of several plants that had been proposed for Rockland County in the past two years. One plant stalled in a corporate merger, plans for two others have since been tabled, and the Ramapo Energy Project, a 1,100-megawat natural gas plant proposed for the scenic Torne Valley, remains under review. Randal C. Archibold (NYT) | Metro Briefing | New York: Haverstraw: Power Plant Cleared For Construction |
1378895_0 | The Republican-led State Senate announced plans today to pass a bill on Tuesday that would add members of the clergy to the list of people who would be required to report suspected child abuse. The Assembly introduced a similar measure today, but will not vote on it immediately, Assembly officials said. The Senate Republican leaders have typically backed the church's interests in Albany, and state lawmakers have been reluctant to interfere with the relationships between religious institutions and their congregants. In this case, the Catholic Conference did not plan to weigh in with an opinion on the bills, a spokesman said. Governor George E. Pataki has indicated that he supports a requirement for the clergy to report child abuse, a spokesman said. Eighteen states require anyone who suspects child abuse to report it, and 11 other states include the clergy on lists of those who are required to make such reports. In recent days, the state's pre-eminent Roman Catholic leader, Cardinal Edward M. Egan, has said that the Archdiocese of New York would remove from the pastoral ministry any priest who sexually abused a child, and would report allegations of abuse if the victim did not oppose such reporting. Both state bills require reporting regardless of the victims' wishes. Other bishops, including William F. Murphy of Rockville Centre, have said they would support such legislation as long as the confidentiality of the Catholic confessional is not violated. Both bills protect information received by a religious leader in his or her role as a spiritual adviser. The Senate bill, however, provides limits to that protection, specifically stating that if the same information is obtained outside of confession or counseling, it must be reported. Although both bills seek to fill a gap in the current law, which requires doctors, teachers, day care workers and others involved in the care of children to report suspected child abuse, and both expand the definition of child abuse to include acts committed by someone other than the child's parents, there are differences to be ironed out should both bills be approved. The Senate bill would require members of the clergy to report any instances of abuse in the last five years using the state's child abuse hot line. Such complaints are handled by Child Protective Services, which refers some complaints to law enforcement officials, said Senator Stephen M. Saland, the bill's principal sponsor. The Assembly would | Albany Bills Would Require Clergy to Report Any Abuse |
1378976_0 | Studying the ocean with ships and buoys is like reading a book by staring at single scattered letters. Buoys are stationary, so the information they collect lacks context; ships rarely take readings in the same place twice, so their data lack continuity. But this summer, engineers at Webb Research Corporation in Falmouth, Mass., will introduce a new tool to allow scientists to read the whole ocean: a sleek diving robot, cheap enough at $50,000 each to be dispersed by the hundreds and hardy enough to stay in the water up to five years. It zigzags at one knot through the top 5,000 feet of the ocean while communicating with scientists via satellite. Instead of a short-lived battery propulsion system like that of other small ocean robots, the glider taps an unlimited energy source: the difference between warm surface water and colder deep water. Only engine valves and the electronic scientific equipment use batteries. ''It's as close to perpetual motion as we can get,'' said David Fratantoni, a scientist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution who will test the first two off Bermuda. Called Slocum Gliders after Capt. Joshua Slocum, who in 1898 became the first to sail solo around the world, they can be outfitted with scientific equipment to track changes in temperature and salinity, chase currents and eddies, even listen to whales communicate and count microscopic plants. HANNAH FAIRFIELD | An Engine for a New Age of Ocean Research |
1373637_3 | of your windshield into an antenna.'' Or manufacturers could build an antenna into the surface of a boat's deck. The United States military has taken a similar approach by building metal antennas into the structural frame of airplanes. SkyCross, a company based in Melbourne, Fla., that has developed commercial applications for some military communications technology, is working to apply the concept to cars and perhaps buildings. When the antenna is structurally embedded in a car, it becomes ''a very effective radiator'' of electromagnetic waves, said Alan L. Haase, chief executive of Skycross. An antenna built into the walls of a building could do the same thing, he said. Skycross is also looking at technology that would allow it to ''print'' an antenna on the inside of a cellphone's case, Mr. Haase said. Integral's invention shows that plastic, hardly a cutting-edge material, still has plenty of untapped high-tech potential. Researchers have devoted much attention lately to conductive plastics, which, unlike Integral's material, do not require any metal to make them effective carriers of electric current. The technology is already being used to create moldable plastic batteries for electronic products. For example, NEC released a laptop last year with a lithium-polymer battery wrapped around the back of its screen. Blends of plastic and metal compounds similar to the one in Integral's antenna are often found in military equipment, where they act as shielding material to keep enemy sensors from spotting sources of electromagnetic energy. They can also shield people from energy sources in computers and other devices. Mr. Aisenbrey said that Integral's innovation was to tweak the blend to make it conductive enough for use as an antenna -- in effect, turning a barricade into a pathway. Experts on antenna design said that Integral's technology sounded interesting but that they would need more information to evaluate it. They noted that other researchers were also looking to novel materials as a way to boost antenna performance. Dr. David M. Pozar, professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Massachusetts and a researcher in the school's Antenna Laboratory, questioned Integral's emphasis on seeking to patent its technology. ''Patents in the antenna area, by themselves, do not ensure the success of a product, and it is usually very easy to circumvent patents'' in this field, Dr. Pozar said. Performance and price rather than patents are the keys to success, he added. WHAT'S NEXT | Shrinking and Rethinking the Old Vertical Antenna |
1373687_0 | ''EVEN if the economy is on the road to recovery,'' Alan Greenspan warned last week, ''the unemployment rate, in typical cyclical fashion, may resume its increase for a time.'' Mr. Greenspan, the Federal Reserve chairman, who will appear before the Senate Banking Committee today, did not mention that the lingering effects of high unemployment early in a recovery tend to be concentrated among the unskilled and minorities. This is true even though recessions are becoming more egalitarian. Such a pattern was evident in the early 1990's. The recession officially ended in March 1991, with the unemployment rate at 6.8 percent. But unemployment continued to rise for 15 months and did not settle below 6.8 percent again until the end of 1993. Moreover, the rate rose from 12.3 to 13.5 percent for high school dropouts in the year after the recession ended, while for college graduates it stayed at 2.9 percent. The ''jobless recovery'' mainly involved the less skilled. In part, unemployment remains high after growth resumes simply because more people actively look for work if they think their prospects are better. Having more active job seekers and fewer discouraged workers is not a sign of weakness. For this reason, economists often prefer to focus on the employment-to-population rate -- the fraction of the population that is working. Even with this measure, however, jobs often keep sliding after a recession ends. The employment rate did not hit bottom until nine months after the 1991 recession, and the slide was greater and lasted longer for less-skilled workers. The fraction of high school dropouts who were employed fell for three full years after the recession ended. Jobs are slow to recover at the end of a recession because employers are not sure if improved conditions will persist, so they expand work hours rather than hire new employees. Many employers also ''hoard'' skilled workers during a downturn because it would be costly to hire and train replacements when conditions improve. Neither reason, however, accounts for why job growth is particularly sluggish for the less skilled when the economy picks up. The economist Melvin Reder suggested a reason in 1955: in a downturn, many employers raise skill requirements for a given job, rather than cut pay. The less skilled thus find their job options even more limited until demand picks up smartly, while skilled workers take positions further down the job ladder. Lawrence Katz of | As recovery builds, the less educated go to the end of the employment line. |
1379993_3 | bath -- that Oddjob (as I've taken to calling him) has a natural affinity for water. He gets left in the wading pool on the lawn the next morning while we head for the beach (I know, I know), returning nervously in the dark to find him shivering and wrinkled like a 90-year-old, but otherwise happy as a clam. My dad was a ladies' man, siring three kids and taking off when the bill came due, leaving me singularly unfit for the heavy lifting of fatherhood. So how to explain the stirrings in my breast as the weeks pass without a sign of deadbeat Mom? Could I actually be softening a bit? Then one evening, Chris out for the night, I come back and he's gone. I turn into any parent with a missing moppet: panicked, hysterical, but nonetheless reluctant (with our ambiguous custodial status and my expired visa) to seek assistance just yet. Returning home from the search after midnight, bereft, I find him on the porch, grinning. He was hiding! What a huge joke! And then -- that awful pause before the lashing invectives -- he stiffens, eyes huge with fear (what have I done?), and drops like a stone, frothing at the mouth, head bang bang banging sickeningly on the concrete (what have I done?). Before I know it, the place is all flashing lights and burly, efficient guys in blue, and the kid's awake and screaming for me as he's poked and prodded. We are now officially in trouble. And yet with child services finally on the case, I'm more reluctant to give him up than I might have imagined. It's true he's a major pain, but he's ours, damn it; he's family (a fierce protectiveness rising unbidden from some primal gorge), and no one's taking him to one of those places, O.K.? Enter Grandma, now fortuitously moving back to Europe and willing to take him along. He slips a little paw into each of our hands for the long walk through the terminal, lays his head on my shoulder at the gate and whispers into my ear: ''You the good guys!'' Stifling the impulse to deny it, I hug him awkwardly, weeping and dimly aware that something is different. (''Don't cry, buddy.'') Something has changed. (''You my friend!'') The stone in my heart is gone. LIVES Simon Maskell is a writer living in Los Angeles. | An Unsentimental Education |
1380282_6 | ''I think it's completely explainable,'' Helen Schneider, director of the Center for Health Policy at the University of the Witwatersrand, said of the persistent questioning about AIDS. ''There's a very recent history of direct conspiracy against black people in this country.'' Besides that, she said, ''People can't cope. What you're seeing is this enormous struggle to come to terms with this problem.'' Health officials emphasize that they are still running a conventional AIDS program that focuses on preventing the disease, distributing condoms, treating opportunistic infections and providing AIDS drugs to pregnant women in the pilot sites. ''In a practical way, the debate within the A.N.C. really does not affect what we are doing,'' said Dr. Ayanda Ntsaluba, the director general of South Africa's Department of Health. ''I would have been more concerned if I got the impression that we were being diverted from the current program at government,'' Dr. Ntsaluba said. ''But a conscious decision has been taken to prioritize these programs, whatever debates are going on.'' Smuts Ngonyama, a spokesman for the party, said Mr. Mokaba speaks for himself, not the party, although many members share his concerns about the safety of AIDS drugs. Mr. Ngonyama said he could not stop Mr. Mokaba from promoting his ideas, even though some people believe he is damaging the party's reputation. ''How can you have a situation where you must ban ideas?'' Mr. Ngonyama said. ''We are coming from a situation in this country where organizations were banned, newspapers were banned, people were banned. Are we returning to that stage now?'' Mr. Mokaba said he supported the government's decision to promote condoms because they prevent sexually transmitted diseases. But he said he would continue to spread his message despite the cries of outrage from his critics. ''Always when the truth emerges, there are people who doubt,'' Mr. Mokaba said. Correction: April 24, 2002, Wednesday An article on March 31 about the AIDS epidemic in South Africa referred incompletely to Boehringer Ingelheim, a German company that makes an AIDS drug called nevirapine. While the company has indeed withdrawn its application to market the drug in the United States as a treatment to reduce the risk of H.I.V. transmission from pregnant women to unborn children -- also a major concern in South Africa -- the company retains F.D.A. approval to market nevirapine as part of a multiple-drug treatment for people infected with the virus. | An AIDS Skeptic in South Africa Feeds Simmering Doubts |
1380261_0 | To the Editor: Re ''As Global Lenders Refocus, a Needy World Waits'' (March 17), which discussed the policies of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund: Aid is more effective today at reducing poverty than ever before. Developing countries are making strong progress. The article missed these important trends. Since 1960, life expectancy in poor countries has increased 20 years, to the mid-60's, and adult illiteracy has dropped by more than half. Growth rates in poor countries are up, and the number of people in extreme poverty is falling. Many poor countries have improved their policies, built more effective institutions and strengthened governance, often with the advice and help of the international financial institutions. Countries as different as Mexico, Uganda and Vietnam are among the many that have made steady progress in partnership with the World Bank. Including China and India, population giants where the World Bank also played an important role, some 40 developing countries, home to more than three billion people, have had average annual per capita growth rates higher than the average for the rich countries during the past decade. Of course, there have been failures as well as success, and too many countries, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, have been left out. Yet the overall picture of development is surely one of success. Developing countries themselves are responsible for this improved performance. The World Bank has helped, through policy advice, dialogue, technical assistance and funding. Our aid has become more effective in recent years as a result of careful analysis and consistent action. This focus on better results is what good management is all about. NICHOLAS STERN Washington, March 19 The writer is chief economist and senior vice president for development economics at the World Bank. | The Effectiveness Of Global Lenders |
1380288_0 | Long Before Sept. 11, A Terrible Toll of One With more than 3,000 people killed in the terrorist onslaughts of Sept. 11, it is often difficult for those who did not know any victims to focus for long on the individuals among them. But it often took an effort to put aside the image of the lone victim of an attack by Palestinian terrorists in October 1985. In the hijacking of the Italian cruise ship Achille Lauro off Syria, the victim, Leon Klinghoffer, a 69-year-old New Yorker, was shot in his wheelchair and flung overboard. The four hijackers were captured two days later when an Egyptian jetliner carrying them was forced by American warplanes to land in Italy; there they were tried, convicted and sentenced to prison terms of 15 to 30 years. Two are still serving their sentences; the other two escaped in the 1990's. Also on the jetliner was Mohammed Abbas, the head of a radical faction of the Palestine Liberation Organization, who American law enforcement officials said had been the mastermind of the hijackings, but whom the Italian authorities freed. He left Italy but was later convicted there in absentia and sentenced to life in prison. He has never served any of his sentence, however. He is officially a fugitive, but the Klinghoffer family and its supporters maintain that he is no longer being sought. For Mr. Klinghoffer's two children, Mr. Abbas's continued freedom remains a source of agony. ''I feel it's unfinished because he's still out there and never served anything and he was the head honcho,'' Ilsa Klinghoffer, 44, a health administration consultant, said recently. ''He should feel some of the pain he's inflicted on people.'' But she and her sister, Lisa Klinghoffer, 50, an artist, said they had forced themselves to go on with their lives despite grief and bitterness over their father's fate. ''People say time heals all wounds, but it doesn't,'' Lisa Klinghoffer said. ''But I have a wonderful husband, an incredible son and a loving sister, and we try to make happy times for our family.'' Mr. Klinghoffer's wife, Marilyn, who was also on the Achille Lauro, died of cancer four months after he was killed. Both sisters spoke of their empathy for the relatives of the Sept. 11 victims. ''So many people are going to have the heartbreak we had, and it's just horrendous,'' Ilsa Klinghoffer said. No Peninsula Is | FOLLOWING UP |
1379997_6 | a grotesque humor in some of the faces that decorate the capitals, but there is again the need for closeness, for huddle, what seems almost a fear of space -- flowers, foliage, beasts, human heads jostle promiscuously together, not an inch is untouched by the chisel. A relief in a way to look upward from this to the Renaissance ceiling, coffered in blue and silver like an ornately spangled sky. From here it is a short walk to the Etruscan Gate, which anciently gave entrance to the city on the southwest. The stones of the arch have been replaced, but there are still the huge original cyclopean slabs at the base, filling the mind with the age-old question of how on earth the Etruscans managed, with the technical resources at their disposal, to get these enormously heavy blocks of stone into place. Deeply impressive too the sheer extent of the walls with which they enclosed their city; the outer ring is five miles in length, only a third of this enclosure being occupied by present-day Volterra. Proceeding north from the gate, one can follow the course of the later, medieval walls. These form a sort of terrace, affording superb views of the sweeping Tuscan countryside, across folded ranks of mountains to a distant gleam of the Tyrrhenian Sea. Leaving by the road that goes north to Pisa, you get one of the most amazing views that you are ever likely to see in your life -- the Balze, the ruinous and eroded cliffs of clay and sand, which year by year are slipping down into the ravines below, taking the Etruscan walls and the outlying buildings of the town with them. Great tracts of the ancient city of Volterra are buried beneath these landslides, which still continue -- an abandoned monastery leans perilously close to the brink. It is strangely like watching the city leak away in slow motion before your eyes. From arte povera to roast wild boar We drove to Volterra from our home near Lake Trasimeno, bypassing Siena. It would be quite a good day trip from Siena, or from Pisa if you are coming from the north. Buses from Siena run all day, and take a little over an hour to get to Volterra. From Florence, buses run every day but Sunday, and the trip takes two hours. The fare is $5.60 one way. For schedule | Volterra's Past Speaks In Its Stones |
1380034_3 | a voice that was new and could not be ignored. The score was completed by various musicians. Mozart's pupil and assistant Franz Xaver Süssmayr did the bulk of the work (with lapses for which he has been criticized ever since, though his is still the standard version, and it will be used by Kurt Masur for the Philharmonic performances). Curiously, the finished score was not delivered to Count Walsegg until December 1793, when he was at last able to put on a church performance in memory of his wife. But the work had been given in Vienna nearly a year earlier, in a performance for the benefit of the composer's widow, Constanze. It was thus embarked on its career as a concert piece. It was specifically suited to concert performance -- directed to human listeners, not to the ear of God -- because it expressed not so much hope and prayer as fear. This was something of immediate concern to anyone living in the late 18th century or since, the fear unanswered by all of Enlightenment philosophy. In a rational world, where the motions of the planets and even comets could be securely forecast, death alone remained unpredictable. This is where the Masonic color of the Requiem may have force, for Freemasonry in Mozart's time sought to revivify the stoicism of pre-Christian times. If death was indeed an extinction that could come at any moment, the best defense was a calm readiness. That is what Mozart to some extent conveyed in the Requiem (though fear looms larger). It is also what he recommended in a letter of 1787 to his father, Leopold, whom he wanted to fortify in the face of death: ''Since death, when we come to consider it, is seen to be the true goal of our life, I have made acquaintance during these last few years with this best and truest friend of mankind, so that his image not only no longer has any terrors for me but suggests, on the contrary, much that is reassuring and consoling.'' The consolations did not include those of the Christian religion. Nine years earlier -- when his mother had died on a visit to Paris with him, and he had had to break the news to his father -- his message had included prayer (''Let us say a devout paternoster for her soul'') and hope (''We shall see her again | The Invitation a Dying Mozart Could Not Refuse |
1374132_0 | Dr. Paul Carbone, a cancer researcher who was honored for his work involving Hodgkin's disease, chemotherapy and other aspects of the treatment and prevention of cancer, died on Feb. 22 in Singapore, where he had gone to encourage cancer research. He was 70 and lived in Middleton, Wis. The cause was apparently a heart attack, The Associated Press reported. Dr. Carbone was one of 16 winners of Albert Lasker Medical Research Awards in 1972, while he was with the National Cancer Institute. He was one of three doctors cited for contributions to the treatment of advanced Hodgkin's disease, a cancer of the lymph nodes. The other two were Dr. Vincent T. DeVita Jr., also of the National Cancer Institute, and Dr. Emil Frei III, a professor of medicine at Harvard. By 1972 advanced Hodgkin's disease had proved treatable by combination chemotherapy. The treatment that the three doctors developed and tested, commonly called MOPP -- for the four drugs mustargen, oncovin, procarbazine and prednisone -- had kept about 70 percent of patients alive and free of Hodgkin's disease five years after diagnosis. Dr. Carbone received other honors, including the American Cancer Society's Medal of Honor for Clinical Research. He was also known for his advocacy of early cancer detection and his work on the treatment of breast cancer, leukemia and other malignancies. His recent research included clinical studies of chemical means of preventing cancer. He was associate director for medical oncology at the National Cancer Institute, in Bethesda, Md., from 1972 to 1976 and held academic and administrative posts in medicine and oncology at the University of Wisconsin at Madison from 1976 to 1987. He was director of the University of Wisconsin's Comprehensive Cancer Center from 1978 to 1997. Dr. Carbone helped create the Wisconsin Cancer Council, the Wisconsin tumor registry and the University of Wisconsin's Center for Tobacco Research and Intervention. He was president of the American Society of Clinical Oncology and the American Association for Cancer Research. Born in White Plains, he attended Union College in Schenectady, N.Y., and received his medical degree from Albany Medical College. He is survived by his wife, the former Mary Iamurri, whom he married in 1954; three sons, Dr. David, of Franklin, Tenn., Paul John, of Chicago, and Matthew, of San Rafael, Calif.; four daughters, Dr. Kathryn Carbone of Adamstown, Md., Dr. Karen Traber of Wayne, Pa., Kimberly Carbone of Naperville, Ill., and | Paul Carbone, 70, Researcher Of Cancer and Its Prevention |
1374213_2 | been sharing with the government a written report -- prepared by its lawyers from Davis, Polk & Wardwell and Mayer, Brown & Platt -- describing the events last fall that led to the destruction of documents at the firm's office in Houston. It was not immediately clear whether Andersen could be charged in coming days or whether an indictment had already been handed up under seal by a grand jury. Sealed criminal indictments have been used in other white-collar cases, both for strategic and investigative purposes. Lawyers have already been told by Andersen insiders that 20 to 30 trunks full of documents were destroyed at the firm's Houston office. One Andersen insider, Michael Luna, has been interviewed by Andersen's lawyers and plaintiffs in civil lawsuits against the firm. Earlier this week, in a deposition taken as part of that litigation, Mr. Luna said that he was made aware of some of the document destruction. In his deposition, Mr. Luna said that another worker informed him in late October that an increasing number of documents had begun coming to Andersen offices from Enron, and that the papers were being shredded. The prospect of charges against the firm put a new complexion on the Enron debacle. Because the criminal investigation did not get into full swing until early this year, the fast work signals to potential defendants that the investigation is moving at a rapid clip and that the government is prepared to take swift action on portions of the case -- even if the larger investigation is months, or years, from completion. Potential defendants who may have hoped to drag out the inquiry may now feel greater pressure to cooperate, for fear that someone else facing potential charges might beat them to the prosecutors' door. The obstruction investigation began earlier this year after Andersen publicly disclosed that documents had been destroyed in its Houston office. Quickly, Andersen dismissed the partner, David Duncan, who was primarily responsible for the Enron account. Through his lawyers, Mr. Duncan has maintained that the document destruction was undertaken in response to an e-mail message from an Andersen lawyer in Chicago. Since then, Mr. Duncan has approached prosecutors, though he remains a target of the investigation and could face charges. Andersen was caught off guard largely because it had expected Mr. Duncan to bear the brunt of the criminal case. But the greatest significance of an indictment | U.S. Is Called Ready To Indict Audit Firm Over Enron Papers |
1372059_0 | Changes for the 2002 French Michelin red guide include the addition of three restaurants to the three-star category. Guy Savoy, long considered a three-star chef despite his ongoing two-star status, finally received the top award. The Paris restaurant that bears his name, two blocks north of the Etoile in the 17th Arrondissement, is known for modern, inventive, ever-changing cuisine. The others crowned with three stars are Ledoyen, a historic butter-yellow mansion at the east end of the Champs Élysées that houses a bright, elegant and modern restaurant where the Breton chef Christian Le Squer has been at the helm since 1998; and L'Arnsbourg, in the village of Untermuhlthal in the heart of the Vosges forest. Seven restaurants were upgraded from one star to two, while two were downgraded from two stars to one. Michelin added 38 restaurants to its one-star lineup, and took single stars away from 22. Among significant changes: the former three-star chef Roger Vergé regained his second star, lost in 1997, at the Moulin de Mougins in Mougins along the Côte d'Azur; Les Trois Marches in Versailles fell from two to one. Paris gained eight new one-star restaurants, including Angle du Faubourg, the modern new Right Bank restaurant run by Jean-Claude Vrinat, the owner of Taillevent. Significant losses -- from one star to none -- include Au Trou Gascon, Alain Dutournier's restaurant in the 12th Arrondissement, and in Lyon, two well-known places, La Tour Rose and Mère Brazier. PATRICIA WELLS | Travel Advisory; The Michelin Star Shuffle for 2002 |
1372256_0 | First, a calming note to those who grew to love it over the years: It's still there. And the landlord says it's there to stay. When the Italian restaurant Palio, on West 51st Street near Seventh Avenue, closed in January, many Midtown office dwellers worried that they had lost something spacious and special in their lives. It wasn't so much the grand upstairs dining room and its Tuscan food. Even though most people agreed that it was good, it was also a bit pricey and, in any case, could never compete with the sublime creations found at Le Bernardin, Palio's culinary big brother just across the atrium between 51st and 52nd Street. It was the bar they missed. But not the drinks -- although they were excellent -- or the always friendly bartenders, or even the highly appreciated bar menu. They missed the walls. ''There is a colorful, huge, four-wall, cathedral-ceiling-high mural depicting a horse race called the Palio, which is run in a little Tuscany town,'' said Joe Ferrer, the former executive editor of Time Inc. and a Palio regular. ''It is massive, energetic and somehow peaceful all at the same time, a wonderful setting for drinks or lunch,'' something he often enjoyed there. The mural was painted in 1985 by the Italian artist Sandro Chia as a part of efforts by the Equitable Life Assurance Society to gain cultural recognition and transform its newly constructed flagship building into a prime piece of real estate. To that end, they also commissioned works by artists like Scott Burton, Sol LeWitt and Roy Lichtenstein. But it is Mr. Chia's chaotic explosion of colors -- a reflection of the Piazza del Campo in Siena during the race -- that has grown closest to people's hearts. ''It is the setting for a jewel,'' said Pari Stave, curator of the Equitable Tower artwork. So there are no plans to move or sell the mural. Even though the future owners -- who hope to reopen the restaurant's doors by fall -- aren't required to keep the name, they must keep the mural. ''This is a great place for a bar,'' Ms. Stave said. ''And everyone knows paintings always look even better after a drink.'' IVAR EKMAN NEIGHBORHOOD REPORT: MIDTOWN | A Restaurant Says Ciao, but a Mural Is Forever |
1372426_3 | Boston; the one that struck the Pentagon took off from Dulles just outside Washington, and the jet that crashed in Pennsylvania left from Newark International. The agency is reluctant to talk about the criteria that lead to the inspection of baggage, but some of them have become well known -- paying for a ticket with cash instead of a credit card, or buying a one-way ticket to a far-off destination, for instance. (Investigators have said that at least some of the Sept. 11 hijackers paid cash for one-way tickets.) Since Sept. 11, the F.A.A. has broadened its criteria for selecting passengers whose luggage should be inspected. It has also broadened the standards for passengers to be given extra searches at gates, over and above the standard walk-through. Under today's standards, all 19 hijackers would meet the criteria for extra scrutiny, said the official familiar with aviation security. Congress has also approved stricter requirements for security personnel. But she and Mr. Mica agreed that the hijackings also showed the need for agencies to share intelligence and computer information. In late August, the Central Intelligence Agency told the Immigration and Naturalization Service that it should place two Saudi Arabians, Khalid al-Midhar and Nawaq Alhazmi, on its list of people who should be denied entry into the United States. The C.I.A. thought that both of them had associated with men who plotted to bomb the destroyer Cole in Yemen in October 2000. But Mr. Midhar and Mr. Alhazmi were already in the United States and being hunted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Even so, they used their real names in buying airline tickets and did not raise alarms. They were believed to be on the jet that struck the Pentagon. Mr. Mica said he would press for stricter, more sophisticated airport security. ''We do need to look at the criteria and go after the bad guys and not just objects,'' he said. Looking for objects might not uncover, say, a plastic toothbrush honed into a knife, he said. Stephen Push of Great Falls, Va., whose wife, Lisa J. Raines, was aboard the plane that flew into the Pentagon, called the latest disclosures about the hijackers ''very disturbing.'' Mr. Push said there was plenty of blame to go around, among the F.B.I., the immigration agency, the C.I.A. and airport-security workers. ''Sept. 11 didn't have to happen,'' he said today. A NATION CHALLENGED: SECURITY | 9 Hijackers Drew Scrutiny On Sept. 11, Officials Say |
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