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1652591_0 | The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, embarrassed by a recent series of security gaffes, agreed yesterday to spend an additional $105 million to try to make its three major airports safer and to speed the journey from the curb to the gate. The bulk of the money, $80 million, will go toward strengthening the borders of the airports --Kennedy International, La Guardia and Newark Liberty International -- by installing new systems for detecting intruders. An additional $14 million will be spent to install closed-circuit camera systems, similar to those used to spot cheaters in casinos, at all security checkpoints. The most noticeable and, probably, most welcome changes would be for customers of Continental Airlines at Newark's Terminal C, where passengers must now go through a three-step process to check in: ticketing, luggage scanning and personal screening. Under the proposal approved by the authority's board of commissioners, Continental would move the existing luggage scanning machines behind the ticket counters, where bags will receive more scrutiny, said William DeCota, the director of aviation. Within 90 days, Mr. DeCota said, Continental should also install three new machines to scan luggage at the check-in counter before the bags move onto the larger machines behind the scenes. Those smaller screeners should be able to sense whether anything inside is likely to explode, Mr. DeCota said. Because the machines are more sensitive than those currently in use, he said, only about 1 percent of the passengers will require a more thorough search at check-in. Anthony Coscia, the chairman of the Port Authority, said the security enhancements would put the agency ''literally at the front of the class'' in providing safe air travel. But, he added, ''I caution everybody about thinking that we have solved the problem. Everyone in this system has to do a lot more.'' The Newark airport has lately been plagued by security lapses, the most recent coming two weeks ago when a butcher knife in a woman's purse went undetected by screeners in Terminal A. In December, a fake bomb used to test security in Terminal C slipped by the screeners and wound up on a flight to Amsterdam. Mistakes like those left Port Authority officials fuming about the federal Transportation Security Administration, which supervises the screening of passengers and baggage at airports. In October, Mr. Coscia wrote to Rear Adm. David Stone, chief of the administration, demanding improvements to | Port Authority to Improve Airport Security Inspections |
1652673_0 | Leaders of the global Anglican communion have asked the Episcopal Church U.S.A. and the Anglican Church of Canada to withdraw their representatives temporarily from a key governing body of the denomination, in an unprecedented move to avoid a schism over the American church's consecration of an openly gay man as a bishop and both churches' blessing of same-sex unions. The Rev. Jan Nunley, a spokeswoman in New York for the Episcopal Church, said no decision had yet been made on the request. She said the church's presiding bishop, the Most Rev. Frank T. Griswold, would talk to the three representatives to the Anglican governing body next week about it. Canon James Rosenthal, of the Anglican Communion Office in London, said no response had been received from the North American churches. While they have been asked not to attend the meeting of the Anglican Consultative Council in June, the American and Canadian churches may be invited to send guest representatives to explain their stance on homosexuality. ''No one has ever actually heard, clearly, what their position is,'' Canon Rosenthal said. The request was in a communiqué at the end of a weeklong meeting in Newry, Northern Ireland, that involved nearly all the primates of national and regional churches that constitute the Anglican communion, whose 77 million members worldwide share a common heritage in the Church of England. The annual meeting was regularly scheduled, but the main task facing the 35 primates who attended was fashioning a response to a report last fall that examined the North American churches' decisions on homosexuality, their impact on the global communion and the options of continuing as one denomination in light of fierce opposition among many other national churches to the moves. The request to withdraw representatives from the June meeting was meant to appease critics, including many bishops in Africa, Asia and Latin America, who wanted a sharper rebuke of the North American churches than the fall report offered, members of the Episcopal clergy and experts on the church said. Before the Newry meeting, many members of the clergy worried that the conservative bishops might walk out in protest of what they had criticized as the communion's lenient handling of the North American churches. But another part of the communiqué also buys the North American churches time to respond to the report's recommendations, like reconsidering the decisions on homosexuality, without facing graver threats. ''This | Anglican Leaders Seek Move to Avoid a Schism |
1652623_0 | INTERNATIONAL A3-12 Bush Prods Russia On Democratic Effort President Bush expressed concern over Russia's commitment to democracy in a tense encounter with President Vladimir V. Putin. Mr. Putin refused to yield. Mr. Putin said he would listen to some ideas but not comment on others, and that debating ''whether we have more or less democracy is not the right thing to do.'' A1 Pope Undergoes Tracheotomy Pope John Paul II underwent a tracheotomy to ease breathing problems, a serious turn for the worse in the health of the already fragile, 84-year-old spiritual leader. The pope was rushed to the hospital with what was described as a new bout of the flu, fever and spasms of the larynx , the same ailments that had forced his first hospitalization on Feb. 1. A1 Palestinian Cabinet Approved The Palestinian parliament overwhelmingly approved a new cabinet composed mainly of professionals rather than politicians. Prime Minister Ahmed Qurei and Deputy Prime Minister Nabil Shaath, formerly the foreign minister, were among the few who survived a radical pruning of Arafat loyalists. A3 Dozens Killed in Rebel Attacks Insurgents unleashed a wave of attacks across Iraq, killing at least 25 people and injuring dozens. In the most lethal assault of the day, a suicide bomber detonated a car packed with explosives at police headquarters in Tikrit, killing at least 10 Iraqis and wounding at least 35. A9 Syria to Pull Out of Lebanon Syria announced it would move its military forces in Lebanon to an area near the Syrian border and, eventually, out of Lebanon altogether. Critics of Syria's role were wary, particularly over how significant any troop pullback would be and whether it would do anything to resolve other deep entanglements in Lebanon. A9 NATIONAL A14-20 Kansas Attorney General Seeks Abortion Records Attorney General Phill Kline, a Republican who has made fighting abortion a staple of his two-year tenure, is demanding the complete medical files of scores of women and girls who had late-term abortions, saying he needs the information to prosecute criminal cases. A1 Church Moves to Avoid Schism Leaders of the global Anglican communion asked the Episcopal Church U.S.A. and the Anglican Church of Canada to temporarily withdraw their representatives from a key governing body of the denomination, in an unprecedented move to avoid a schism over the American church's consecration of an openly gay man as a bishop and both churches' blessing of | NEWS SUMMARY |
1650558_0 | Some of the world's leading tropical biologists are calling for a halt to oil company road-building projects in and around Yasuní National Park in Ecuador, an Amazon tract harboring an extraordinary array of plant species and rare wildlife. In letters this week to the Ecuadorean government and to oil company officials, the biologists said a 33-mile road planned by the Brazilian company Petrobras and approved last summer by Ecuador would create ''a completely new artery through primary rain forest into a virtually undisturbed part of the park.'' The signers included the primate specialist Dr. Jane Goodall and the evolutionary biologist Dr. E.O. Wilson. The park, twice the size of Rhode Island, was created in 1979 and designated a United Nations Biosphere Reserve in 1989. One oil road was built into the park a decade ago, and in 2000 a study by biologists from the University of California, Davis, showed that it tripled hunters' access to rare woolly monkeys. ''There clearly are viable alternatives, such as directional drilling or roadless methods, that can allow one to access remote oil reserves without severely degrading one of the great jewels of the Amazon,'' said Dr. William F. Laurance, a biologist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama and president-elect of the Association for Tropical Biology and Conservation, the largest scientific group promoting research in the field. The group voted unanimously last month to ask Ecuador to cancel its approval of the road. ''It's difficult to overstate the importance of Yasuní,'' Dr. Laurance said. ''It's arguably the biologically richest real estate on the planet,'' he sdded. ''You can hardly walk 50 yards in any direction without tripping over some rare plant or an endangered species. Where else can you find 300 species of trees in an area no bigger than two football fields?'' The letter sent this week also complained about roads being built north of the park in a drilling area called the Edén-Yuturi field, which is being developed by Occidental Petroleum. Occidental has spent more than $900 million to seek and tap reserves north of the park. It said yesterday that its road network would not enter the park and was not linked to the outside world so it could not be a conduit for rogue loggers or settlers. Petrobras said at first it had not planned an access road through the park, but changed its mind after specialists on a | Biologists Oppose Road Planned by Oil Company in Ecuador Park |
1650675_0 | Responding to widespread indignation at the shooting death of an elderly American nun on Saturday, the government ordered 2,000 soldiers deployed to the Amazon jungle state of Pará. The nun, Sister Dorothy Stang, was known throughout the region for her work with the poor and landless and for her efforts to preserve the rain forest. The government action comes as disputes about land use and ownership in the world's largest tropical forest are intensifying as the result of new regulations meant to limit deforestation and land speculation. News of the deployment coincided with the killing of another environmental activist on a list of 140 people whose lives have been threatened by logging, ranching and mining interests in the region. Larry Rohter (NYT) | World Briefing | Americas: Brazil: 2,000 Troops To Amazon Region |
1647270_0 | Despite a fresh warning on Thursday from the Irish Republican Army not to ''underestimate the seriousness'' of its actions, the group's decision to withdraw from peace negotiations in Northern Ireland is not expected to lead to a resumption in violence, government and law-enforcement officials said. ''We are clear that the I.R.A. has the capacity, it has the capability,'' said Hugh Orde, Northern Ireland's chief constable. ''But I don't think they have the intent to go back to war or armed struggle. We continue to monitor that daily.'' Few questioned Mr. Orde's assessment, and there was nothing in the I.R.A.'s statement, printed Wednesday night, that would indicate that it planned a return to violence. There was little doubt, however, that the I.R.A.'s announcement that it would withdraw its offer to decommission its weapons, a critical linchpin in the Northern Ireland power-sharing agreement, threw the peace negotiations into even deeper turmoil. If anything, the I.R.A.'s withdrawal from the negotiating table served to underscore how positions had shifted and hardened on all sides since the I.R.A. was accused by the police of a $50 million bank robbery in Northern Ireland in December. The I.R.A. has denied any involvement in the robbery, a position that has been repeated often and loudly by Sinn Fein, the I.R.A.'s political wing and the largest Roman Catholic party in Northern Ireland. In a statement delivered to Irish national radio late Thursday, the I.R.A. said the British and Irish governments were ''trying to play down the importance of our statement because they are making a mess of the peace process.'' ''Do not underestimate the seriousness of the situation,'' he added. Without offering any public evidence or making any arrests, Mr. Orde has said the I.R.A. was responsible for the bank robbery, an accusation supported by Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain and the Irish prime minister, Bertie Ahern. Mr. Ahern, seeking to defuse the crisis, said he did not read the I.R.A. statement in a ''negative fashion.'' ''They are saying what is a fact -- that negotiations have broken down,'' he said. ''Everything is off the table and that's the normal course of negotiation.'' | I.R.A. Delivers New Warning On Ulster Talks |
1647008_4 | time. But continuing past practices can prolong the use of misleading poverty counts that are not comparable across countries. Clearly, there is a need for Latin American countries, which usually measure poverty by income rather than consumption, to collect reliable household consumption data because consumption is a better measure of living standards. The herculean measurement problems aside, careful research by Shaohua Chen and Martin Ravallion of the World Bank indicates that much progress has been made toward the goal of halving poverty in China and India. But, they found, little progress has occurred in Latin America and Africa, and the former Soviet states are slipping into deeper poverty. Because China and India accounted for 60 percent of the world's poor in 1990, the goal of halving poverty may be achieved a decade from now, even while many regions see no progress. Despite the progress in China and India, 18 percent of the world's population still somehow survives on less than $1 a day. The United Nations has recently held a number of brainstorming sessions to gather proposals for the secretary general's report to the General Assembly on achieving the development goals, which will be delivered next month. An essential prerequisite is to improve poverty statistics and ensure their integrity. Although the process of setting a poverty line is necessarily political, the task of measuring poverty should be insulated from political influences. The World Bank, however, is an inherently political institution. Yet no other international body currently has the expertise or resources to monitor worldwide poverty, so it is important for the next president of the World Bank to value and protect the impartiality of the statistical and research staff. The U.N. could also help by working with statistical agencies around the world to develop uniform standards for poverty surveys and then to ensure that their data are adequately documented and publicly archived. To this end, the U.N. could restart its Household Survey Capability Program, which supported statistical offices in developing countries in the 1980's. This may not be a cause that celebrities are ready to line up for, but improving poverty data will put the world in a better position to monitor progress and evaluate poverty reduction strategies by the time the poverty line is moved up to $2 a day. Economic Scene Alan B. Krueger is the Bendheim professor of economics and public affairs at Princeton University. E-mail: akrueger@princeton.edu | The U.N. aims to cut poverty in half, even as the experts wonder how to measure it. |
1646978_0 | The Irish Republican Army announced on Wednesday night that it was withdrawing from peace negotiations in Northern Ireland and rescinding its proposals to disarm and cease paramilitary activities, because of what it called false accusations and bad faith by the British and Irish governments. ''At this time it appears that the two governments are intent on changing the basis of the peace process,'' the group said in a statement released to a newspaper in Northern Ireland and signed P. O'Neill, the pseudonym signifying officially sanctioned positions. ''We do not intend to remain quiescent within this unacceptable and unstable situation. It has tried our patience to the limit.'' The I.R.A., which wants Northern Ireland to join the Irish Republic and is the largest and most organized paramilitary group, did not indicate that it would return to the brutal violence that has claimed most of the 3,000 lives lost in Northern Ireland's 30-year conflict, or that it would end the cease-fire that it says it has upheld since 1997. But the statement comes after two turbulent months highlighted by a failed intervention by the British and Irish governments and an enormous bank robbery in Belfast, which plunged the already fragile negotiations to their lowest point since the landmark 1998 Good Friday peace accord. Under that measure a local legislature was set up to share power between Roman Catholics and Protestants, but the assembly has been suspended since 2002 because of allegations of I.R.A. activity. Pressure has intensified on Sinn Fein, the political party linked to the paramilitary group, since Northern Ireland's police chief accused the I.R.A. of stealing $50 million from a Belfast bank in December, a charge both groups have denied. Prime Ministers Tony Blair of Britain and Bertie Ahern of Ireland have both blamed the I.R.A. for the robbery and, as a result, for the impasse in the political negotiations, despite the failure of the police to produce any direct evidence linking the paramilitary group with the crime. A typically mild-mannered Mr. Ahern directly confronted his fellow parliamentary colleagues from Sinn Fein across the floor of the Parliament's debating chamber last week. And Mr. Blair, after meeting with Mr. Ahern and the Irish and Northern Irish police chiefs on Tuesday, said that ''the obstacle now to a lasting and durable settlement in Northern Ireland is the continuing paramilitary activity and criminal activity of the I.R.A.'' ''It has got to stop | I.R.A. Says It Will Quit Peace Negotiations in Northern Ireland |
1646976_0 | In the department of unlikely juxtapositions, this one has to be right up there: an artificial tropical lagoon built on a former Soviet air base in a small town in Germany that looks like something from ''The Spy Who Came In From the Cold.'' But here in Brand, a place of no discernible distinction about an hour's drive from Berlin, Colin Au, a businessman from a small town in Malaysia, has bought a gigantic hangar where dirigibles used to be built. He has converted it into a sort of Prussian tropics, complete with a rain forest of about 40,000 imported plants, a Balinese gate, Indian dancers and a ''South Sea'' beach. ''Mr. Au built cruise ships,'' Kathrin Schaffner, the public relations manager of the Tropical Islands Resort, said as she gave a tour of the forest, the lagoon and the stage where dancers from India, Borneo, Thailand, the Philippines and China perform. ''He spent time in Germany and he realized that it's so cold, so he had the idea of bringing tropical weather to Germany.'' Actually the publicity brochure puts this just a bit differently: ''Mr. Au developed the idea of Tropical Islands: a protected area with all-season sunshine and good weather, similarly a tropical island, with culture, music, meals and drinking, recovery, rain forest, lagoon etc.'' A friend of Mr. Au's from Hamburg told him about the giant hangar in Brand, which a company called CargoLifter AG. had been using to develop an 853-foot dirigible for air freight. But the company went bankrupt in 2002, Mr. Au bought the hangar, and two years and about $85 million later, there it is. On gray days, which are many here in winter, pale-skinned people cavort in the lagoon, walk through the rain forest and eat Asian noodles (or bratwurst and fries), while on a nearby stage colorfully costumed women from Asia dance gracefully. Mr. Au, who was traveling and not available for an interview, has staked a lot on this project, but he ought to know what he is doing. His ventures include cruise lines and resorts and casinos from Australia to Connecticut, where was an investor in the Foxwoods Resort and Casino. He hired about 650 people to run Tropical Islands, from horticulturalists to dancers, and he keeps the place open 24 hours a day. He gets curious retired folks during the day and partygoers at night, some of whom | It's Germany. Dead of Winter. And It's 95degrees in the Lagoon. |
1648575_2 | around its cushions. Mr. Parzybok told the show's organizers that he was inspired by the way the company's headquarters on Water Street brushed up against an elevated highway. The company has a long history of supplying the car industry, yet the highway is now encroaching on its turf, he said. The organizers borrowed the show's concept from a similar display in Troy, N.Y., in 2001. Denise Markonish, Artspace's curator, wanted to replicate it with industries that were peculiar to Connecticut: gunmakers, quarries and old-line businesses that once catered to the horse-and-carriage trade but now make parts and accessories for the automobile. Ms. Markonish and Helen Kauder, Artspace's executive director, asked artists to spend three weeks or more on their assignments, more time than was required of the artists in Troy. ''We really hoped we'd become part of the enterprise, going to meetings, and that people would know why they were there,'' said Ms. Kauder, a former investment banker who has run Artspace since 1998. In the end, Ms. Markonish identified 13 willing companies in the New Haven area, from giant manufacturers like the United States Surgical plant in North Haven, Conn., part of publicly traded Tyco International, to tiny outfits like Tower Optical in Norwalk, a family-owned, eight-person operation. She then prepared summaries of each company's operations and asked the artists to rank them in order of preference. In a couple of cases, she noted ''shop skills a plus'' or warned that welding experience would be handy. The most popular choice proved to be Vespoli USA, a young company on the Quinnipiac River that makes lightweight carbon racing shells for crew enthusiasts. Chakaia Booker, a New York artist whose recycled rubber-tire creations were exhibited at the Whitney Biennial in New York in 2000, was eager to compare the malleability of carbon to that of rubber, her usual medium. The material was not easy to work with, she said, ''but it has very good possibilities.'' For the show, she created 12 sinewy wall hangings. Each consists of molded black carbon encased in a peeling coat of resin. The pieces echo earlier works by Ms. Booker in which worn industrial materials evoke scarred flesh. Ms. Miller, from Guilford, Conn., who initially coveted Vespoli too, had a very productive stint at Sargent, the hardware manufacturer (her No.3 choice). She constructed locked boxes fraught with mystery, including one to guard a glittering scrap-metal necklace | When A Factory Is a Foundry For Art |
1648758_0 | The open-source movement, which has encouraged legions of programmers around the world to improve continually upon software like the Linux operating system, may be spreading to biotechnology. Researchers from Australia will report in a scientific journal today that they have devised a method of creating genetically modified crops that does not infringe on patents held by big biotechnology companies. They said the technique, and a related one already used in crop biotechnology, would be made available free to others to use and improve, as long as any improvements are also available free. As with open-source software, the idea is to spur innovation through a sort of communal barn-raising effort. In their paper, being published today in the journal Nature, the researchers said that they had modified three types of bacteria so they could be used for transferring desirable genes into plants and that they had inserted genes into three plants -- rice, tobacco and Arabidopsis, a weed often used in lab experiments. The new technology-sharing initiative, called the Biological Innovation for Open Society, or BIOS, is the brainchild of Richard A. Jefferson, chief executive of Cambia, a nonprofit Australian research institute. Both Cambia and BIOS are supported by the Rockefeller Foundation. The people behind the initiative say that patents covering the basic tools for genetically engineering plants -- which are controlled by companies like Monsanto, Syngenta and Bayer CropScience -- have impeded the use of biotechnology in developing countries and also in smaller-acreage crops, like vegetables, in the United States. The issue has become a larger one in recent years as agricultural research has increasingly shifted from a public-sector activity involving governments and universities to a private-sector one led by companies. Gary Toenniessen, director of food security at the Rockefeller Foundation in New York, said Dr. Jefferson ''has come up with two technologies that basically engineer around two of the tools that the companies really have control of and that are a major constraint to applying biotechnology to crop improvement.'' Spokesmen for Monsanto and for Syngenta, a European company, said they welcomed public innovation and had made contributions of data and technology to help improve crops in developing countries. But Dr. Toenniessen said there was often red tape involved and the process did not always work. He said, for instance, that specialists in some Asian countries want to grow varieties of insect-resistant rice developed at American universities. But that cannot | Open-Source Practices for Biotechnology |
1648730_2 | 10 page images in the space that it would take to store one digital photo. Xerox researchers believe the technology will be useful for just about anyone with a job that requires research in the field. The theory is that someone attending a trade show or conference, for example, could capture and store pertinent documents in their cellphone. Mr. Dance reasoned that most people are unlikely to want to view those images on the tiny screen, and will instead transfer them to a computer, where they could be converted into editable text using optical character recognition software, which is often included with desktop scanners. Others might want to send a document image as an MMS message to a business associate or family member. Paul Withington, a manager with the research firm IDC who has seen the technology in use, envisions both personal and business applications, especially in professions still dependent on paper. An architect visiting a construction site, for example, could jot notes on a blueprint, photograph them and send the image to colleagues as an e-mail attachment, or directly to a fax machine. An insurance agent could document a contract in the field and download it later to a computer for archiving. ''To my mind, any mobile professional who spends a lot of time on the road would have an application,'' Mr. Withington said. ''It's one of those products that doesn't need a critical mass of users to become useful,'' he added. ''That's because the image is independent of any particular phone or software application.'' Xerox researchers are also working on complementary technology for cataloging these and other digital images. Although it's part of a different research project that hasn't come to fruition, the technology will sort through and group images using histograms, which chart the pixels associated with a particular part of a digital photograph. In some instances, text descriptions will be tied to these histograms. One possible use might be field research: a student could take a picture of an object or animal, and then check the compressed image against a search engine for more information about its identity. The Xerox mobile document imaging projects were actually born a half-dozen years ago as an offshoot of work the company's scientists were doing with videoconferencing cameras. Several factors made it difficult to apply the technology to mobile applications, including the amount of memory available in cellular phones. The | Cellphones Get a New Job Description: Portable Scanner |
1651911_1 | the Middle East on Air France flights out of Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris. Code-sharing arrangements allow passengers of one airline to book through to destinations served by a partner airline, using a single ticket. The destinations in France include Biarritz, Bordeaux, Marseille, Montpellier, Nantes, Strasbourg, Lyon, Nice and Toulouse. Other destinations are Vienna, Dubai and Porto, Portugal. The arrangement also extends Air France's reach in the United States to 21 additional destinations on Continental flights out of Houston and Newark. FUELING BUSINESS JETS -- In another indication of the sharp growth in the use of corporate jets, the Business Jet Center at Oakland International Airport in California, which serves corporate aviation in the Bay Area, completed construction of a facility that increases capacity for storing aviation fuel by 300 percent. ''Our customer base is increasing rapidly,'' said Sheila Opitz, the general manager of the Business Jet Center, which also recently completed a $4 million renovation of its executive terminal. Meanwhile, Bombardier said yesterday it increased aircraft deliveries last year to 329, from 323, and cited increased demand for business jets. In all, business jet deliveries were up 44 percent over the previous year, the manufacturer, based in Montreal, said. AMERICAN ADDS FLIGHTS -- American Airlines, the operating unit of AMR Corporation, citing rising passenger demand, said that it and its regional affiliate, American Eagle, were adding 12 daily flights from airports in the New York area. These include five flights between La Guardia Airport and Atlanta starting June 9, five between La Guardia and Charlotte, N.C., starting May 1 and two between Kennedy International and St. Louis, also starting May 1. BUSINESS MEETING FAVORITES -- According to a new survey of 900 professional meetings planners by Yesawich, Pepperdine, Brown & Russell, the five favorite cities in the United States for corporation and association meetings are San Diego; Orlando, Fla.; San Francisco; Chicago; and Phoenix. The top five criteria for choosing a destination, according to the study, are the ability to make the agenda relevant, hotel-resort convention support staff, room rates, accessibility of destination by air, and cost of food, drink and entertainment. REGISTERED TRAVELER PROGRAM -- Orlando International Airport in Florida will be the site of the first attempt to expedite security check-in for registered travelers. Participants will receive expedited clearance after completing an application and providing biometric data like fingerprints and iris identification. JOE SHARKEY BUSINESS TRAVEL | MEMO PAD |
1651999_4 | Inter-American Dialogue. ''It builds a great resentment and rage that things so essential to people, like water, like electricity, are not being delivered in a fair and equitable way. That's a formula for rage that leads to mobilization, and that's why we're seeing a convulsed region.'' In Uruguay, a referendum in October guaranteed public control over water resources, enshrining water as a ''basic human right.'' In Chile's central valley region, 99.2 percent of voters in a plebiscite in 2000 rejected privatization of the state-run water company. (The government privatized anyway.) In Argentina, another French water provider was tossed out in 1998, while Ecuador's government has repeatedly failed to privatize telecommunications and electricity generating companies. In Peru, protests against plans to privatize electric utilities have been persistent, while as far north as Nicaragua and Mexico, activists have fought efforts to battle privatization plans for water systems. The battle surrounding Aguas del Illimani, which provided water for El Alto, is revealing of the anger over privatizations that many here say they were never consulted about and never asked for, but were put in place as a condition for loans from the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. Indeed, Aguas del Illimani was not the first company to get a taste of Bolivians' fury. In 2000, in the midst of angry demonstrations, the state annulled a contract with Bechtel, a multinational based in San Francisco that had doubled fees on being granted the concession in Cochabamba. In 2003, in the face of protests and instability, a consortium of companies signaled that it had all but called off a $5 billion pipeline project to transport natural gas to the Pacific, from where it would have been shipped to the United States. Under continuing pressure, the government of President Mesa is now moving forward with legislation that would raise taxes and increase government control of energy projects in Bolivia. So the stage was set for the outburst against Aguas, which grew out of a decision by Mr. Mesa to raise subsidized fuel prices on Dec. 30, even though the company did not seem a likely target before now. The Bolivian government had in fact welcomed Aguas in 1997 to turn around an inefficient public system that provided water to El Alto and the adjacent capital, La Paz. After it arrived, Aguas says it met its contractual obligations and expanded services, and even government officials concede | Latin America Fails to Deliver On Basic Needs |
1651883_2 | Ms. Katz said, who receives her order two days after she places it. Even if you have outsourced most of your work cross-country to make your company look bigger, the Internet makes it easy to create a virtual water cooler around which to congregate. Using tools from office.com, for example, work teams can gather and communicate virtually. At the Web site, anyone can create a group of colleagues, then share address books, calendars, to-do lists and documents. Colleagues who are online can collaborate on a shared document and relay their comments in real time using the site's instant messaging feature. The basic services are free but limited. The no-cost tools allow only two people to join a single group and let the member create an address book with just 50 contacts. Monthly subscription plans ranging from $5.95 to $34.95 increase those capacities substantially. For an additional fee, users can fax documents from the computer, without a dialup connection. Once those reports are finished, business owners can distribute printed copies without leaving home. Using a Windows-only software plug-in from mimeo.com, customers specify the type of paper, color and binding that they want their document to contain. The document is then uploaded to the Mimeo site, and the company prints and mails the finished copies. Besides printed communications, new services and devices can make a one-person business sound as if it is bustling. The $695 TalkSwitch 24 PBX system from Centrepoint Technologies provides businesses with music on hold, four extensions and automatic call forwarding to eight outside numbers. Housed in a 7-by-8-inch box, the system plugs into standard phones, and is configured using a PC. It can hold 30 minutes of messages, or up to 4.5 hours with additional flash-memory modules. Incoming calls can be routed to up to nine phone numbers. If the person still does not answer, a message is recorded and a call is automatically sent advising the owner that a call is waiting. Mr. Manasra, the Chitchat owner, needed a phone system because he needed a rest. Not only was he the owner, but he was also the telephone support representative, taking calls at all hours. At first, Mr. Manasra hired a Texas customer service company to pick up the messages, but that cost him $1,000 a month. To cut expenses, Mr. Manasra switched some of his phone operations to angel.com, a Web-based, voice-activated service that gives callers | It's Just Like Oz, With You Behind the Curtain |
1651936_0 | AN unsuspected bit of good news related to the Indian Ocean tsunami was revealed this month when the International Maritime Bureau released its annual report on pirate attacks against international shipping. The new figures showed a 27 percent decline in 2004, to 325 incidents from 445 in 2003, and noted that there had not been single attack in the pirate-infested waters off Sumatra since the earthquake. Now, while these figures show an improvement, the positive trend should not distract us from the huge threat that piracy, and its connection to terrorism, pose to the global economy. Piracy did not disappear with the killing of Blackbeard. I found this out the hard way in 1992 when pirates boarded my sloop as I was crossing the South China Sea. After suffering a beating, I was able to escape. But many others have not been so lucky. Last year, according to the maritime bureau, some 400 crew members and passengers were killed, injured, held hostage or remain missing as a result of attacks. Every year the pirates are better organized, ambushing ships with military precision and firepower. Merchant vessels are the lowest-hanging fruit of global commerce, slow and vulnerable to attack. Hauling 90 percent of world trade, these lumbering beasts file through the world's choke points -- the Suez and Panama Canals, the Bab el Mandeb (the entrance to the Red Sea), the Straits of Gibraltar and the Malacca Strait between Indonesia and Malaysia. It is the Strait of Malacca, the shortest sea route connecting the Indian and Pacific Oceans, that has maritime and intelligence authorities most worried. The passage, 600 miles long but just over a mile wide at one point, is the conduit for 50,000 ships a year, carrying a third of the world's commerce and half of its crude oil. Despite the global decline in the number of reported attacks (many experts feel that there are hundreds more each year that go unreported), the number of attacks in the Malacca Strait increased last year to 37 from 28 in 2003. And, while many raids are likely carried out by crime syndicates, there is evidence that many have been the work of the Free Aceh Movement of northern Sumatra, an Islamist separatist organization that has been fighting to gain independence from Indonesia since 1976. While the United States does not officially call the group a terrorist organization, the Indonesian government does. | The Next 9/11 Could Happen at Sea |
1652834_0 | All it takes is a visit to the Museum of Modern Art to remember that ordinary things like chairs or bottle openers can be beautiful. Which brings us to the other side of the design world, where some ordinary things can be extremely ugly. High on that list of dreadful objects are cell phone towers, all 170,000 of them. Scan almost any horizon these days and you see a tall tower making its mark on the skyline. Many are needed for the 175 million cellphone subscribers in this country. Some are being built on speculation -- because cellphone companies pay handsomely to cover new territory. Whatever the reason for this spreading plague of towers, it's clear that the people building them aren't too worried about how they look. Many are steel needles 90 to 200 feet high. They have gizmos attached at odd angles in a manner reminiscent of a sole electrical receptacle serving a whole roomful of appliances. The word sky-clutter comes to mind here. Some builders have apparently tried to make their towers fit into the landscape. So far, those results can be even more appalling. Some construct giant metal trees -- monster trees, trees a Trump Tower could look up to. One fake fir on the Garden State Parkway is so big it looks like an alien growth fed by a New Jersey sludge pile. Near Lake George in upstate New York, neighbors are battling a tower-tree they call the Frankenpine. There are imitation oaks out there, phantom magnolias and mock palms that fool almost no one. In the Arizona desert sits one particularly tall tower disguised as a cactus. It probably looks real if admired from Wyoming. The design of these towers is increasingly important because local communities have less and less control over where or how they're built. If somebody wants to add a tower to the historic town steeple, it's much easier these days. It's a lot harder to claim that the view is being spoiled if a transmitter is fitted onto a church spire (the proceeds can go to the church), and it's almost impossible to stop a tower by claiming that it threatens the health of either humans or birds. Some communities fight the towers with zoning rules or local lawsuits. But as Professor Richard Smardon, chairman of the environmental studies faculty at SUNY-Syracuse, explains, the courts and the Federal Communications Commission | The Cell Tower Blight: Text-Message Calder, ASAP |
1652847_2 | bullied or ostracized by the time they reach middle school. Dr. Sandra L. Harris of Rutgers University, a pioneering educator and researcher in autism, said advances might have fed false hopes. ''The intellectual skills of some of these children may lead people to expect more than is possible socially,'' Dr. Harris said. ''They miss so much nuance that it can't be fixed in a 100-percent way. That was the hope. Now we know it's more elusive than that.'' Christine Grogan, the director of a school for autistic children in Paramus, N.J., urges educators to be cautious about what they promise parents, adding, ''There are many people in the field giving false hope'' about whether remaining in the mainstream is realistic for more than a tiny number of children over the long haul. Virtually nothing in the social arena comes naturally to autistic children. They must be taught how to have a conversation. To show empathy by asking questions. To resist arcane topics that do not interest others. Not to talk too loudly or to stand too close to the other person. To master the vocabularies of sports and flirting. Even those with I.Q.'s above average struggle to read body language or to imagine what other people are thinking. If they learn a joke, they may tell it a dozen times. They are too literal-minded to understand white lies and too rule-bound to understand they should not tattle. They overreact to routine teasing and invite ridicule by carrying their books over their heads or accepting a dare to kiss a girl. Faux pas that go unnoticed in the early grades later turn a child into a pariah. ''Kids have very short memories when they're young,'' said Terese Dana, one of a growing number of behavioral therapists and psychologists who are making a career of teaching social skills. ''They are much less forgiving as they get older.'' Experts say it is possible to teach autistic children to be more interpersonally aware, just as it is possible to teach their peers to be more sensitive. All of Ms. Dana's clients, including Ms. Singer's son, have made significant improvements. But these children do best at an age when parents still organize their social lives and before having a one-on-one school aide becomes embarrassing. Social skills training was critical for Jake Exkorn, 8. Right now Jake is indistinguishable from his peers in a small private | As Autistic Children Grow, So Does Social Gap |
1649921_0 | FOR families whose garage has room for another retro-style vehicle -- perhaps to park alongside one of the recent revivals of the vintage pony car, pickup truck or Le Mans racer -- Toyota is bringing back the look of its classic S.U.V. The FJ Cruiser, a flashback to Japan's 1960's-era interpretation of the Jeep, will add a tough-looking off-road machine to the low end of Toyota's sport utility offerings. The truck, introduced last week at the Chicago auto show, will go on sale early next year at a price expected to start in the low $20,000 range. The company said positive response to a design study introduced at the 2003 Detroit auto show prompted it to build the production version. The '07 model retains much of the look of the concept vehicle, which was done by Calty, Toyota's California design studio. While the truck is strongly reminiscent of the original FJ40, there is nothing retro about its drivetrain, a 4-liter, 245-horsepower V-6 paired with a 5-speed automatic transmission. It will be built in Japan on a shortened 4Runner chassis. JIM McCRAW | Recycled Design For a New S.U.V. |
1649922_0 | An American nun and environmental activist was shot to death in the Amazon jungle on Saturday, heightening tensions between land speculators and peasant settlers in the region and bringing a government pledge to crack down on lawlessness. The nun, Sister Dorothy Stang, 74, was shot four times in the chest and head by a pair of gunmen while visiting a remote rural encampment near the Trans-Amazon Highway in Pará State. She was renowned throughout the Amazon region for her work with the poor and landless and for her efforts to preserve the rain forest. Officials view the attack as a challenge to the authority of the government, which has faced resistance from loggers and land speculators in the region over new land-use and ownership regulations. Immediately after the killing, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva ordered two members of his cabinet and a special police investigative unit to the area. ''Solving this crime and apprehending those who ordered and committed it is a question of honor for us,'' Nilmário Miranda, the government's secretary for human rights, told reporters late on Saturday before heading for the region. ''This is intolerable. We cannot permit impunity in a case like this.'' A spokesman for the American Embassy in Brasília said officials there were following the case and were awaiting additional information once the new workweek begins and weather improves in the region. ''We trust there will be a full investigation by the police,'' he said. Sister Dorothy was a native of Dayton, Ohio, and belonged to the order of the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur. She had lived and worked in the Amazon region since the early 1970's, focusing on organizing and educating peasant groups about issues that included land tenure and the economic and environmental benefits of avoiding deforestation. ''This is a terrible, tremendous loss,'' Paulo Moutinho, coordinator of the Institute for Environmental Research in the Amazon and a longtime associate of Sister Dorothy, said in a telephone interview on Sunday. ''She was an extremely important person, a spokesman for the sustainable development movement with a capacity for leadership as big as that of Chico Mendes,'' the internationally known rubber tapper leader killed in 1988. In an interview late in 2001, Sister Dorothy complained that she was constantly receiving death threats, which she attributed to loggers and land speculators. But she had tense relations with the local police, who viewed her | Brazil Promises Crackdown After Nun's Shooting Death |
1649997_3 | interested in philosophy because of two things,'' he said. ''One is that I was never satisfied with the answers that were given to questions, and it seemed to me that philosophy was an attempt to get down to the bottom of things.'' ''The other thing,'' he added, ''was that I could never make up my mind what I was interested in, and philosophy enabled you to be interested in anything.'' Those interests found expression in a small and scrupulous body of work that tries to make sense of free will, desire and love in closely reasoned but jargon-free prose, illustrated by examples of behavior (philosophers speak of the ''Frankfurt example'') that anyone would recognize. ''He's dealing with very abstract matters,'' said Sarah Buss, who teaches philosophy at the University of Iowa, ''but trying not to lose touch with the human condition. His work keeps faith with that condition.'' Mr. Frankfurt's teaching shares with his prose a spirit Ms. Buss, who was once his graduate student, defines as, ''Come in and let's struggle with something.'' ''He was very willing,'' she added, ''to say, 'I just don't understand this.''' The essay on [bull] arose from that kind of struggle. In 1986, Mr. Frankfurt was teaching at Yale, where he took part in a weekly seminar. The idea was to get people of various disciplines to listen to a paper written by one of their number, after which everyone would talk about it over lunch. Mr. Frankfurt decided his contribution would be a paper on [bull]. ''I had always been concerned about the importance of truth,'' he recalled, ''the way in which truth is foundational to civilization and the various deformities of it that were current.'' ''I'd been concerned about the prevalence'' of [bull], he continued, ''and the lack of concern for truth and respect for truth that it represented.'' ''I used the title I did,'' he added, ''because I wanted to talk about [bull] without any [bull], so I didn't use 'humbug' or 'bunkum.''' Research was a problem. The closest analogue came from Socrates. ''He called it rhetoric or sophistry,'' Mr. Frankfurt said, ''and regarded philosophy as the great enemy of rhetoric and sophistry.'' ''These were opposite, incompatible ways of persuading people,'' he added. ''You could persuade them with rhetoric'' -- or [bull] -- ''with sophistic arguments that weren't really sound but that you could put over on people, or you could | Between Truth and Lies, An Unprintable Ubiquity |
1648133_4 | Americans for Legal Reform, were charged with disorderly conduct after telling lawyer jokes outside a Nassau County courthouse. The two are heading to court today and have planned a rally outside the Nassau County Courthouse to protest the charges. B4 FASHION B6-7 SPORTSMONDAY D1-12 Patriots Win Super Bowl The New England Patriots won their second consecutive Super Bowl and third in four years, defeating the Philadelphia Eagles, 24-21. The team joins Dallas as the only National Football League teams to win a cluster of titles in such a short span. A1 Carter to Rehabilitation Quincy Carter, the Jets' backup quarterback who was signed last summer amid reports that he had failed a drug test, left the team in the middle of its playoff run to enroll in a drug rehabilitation program, according to people who have been briefed on his status. D7 ARTS E1-10 Ethiopia Celebrates Marley Bob Marley fans gathered in Meskel Square of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the reggae singer's birthday. A concert was held in his honor, featuring his wife, Rita, his sons and numerous other admirers including the singer Lauryn Hill, Angélique Kidjo from Benin, and drummers from Burundi. E1 BUSINESS DAY C1-8 Trading Activity Questioned The United States attorney's office in Manhattan is investigating traders on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange for cheating customers through illegal practices that were already under scrutiny by the Securities Exchange Commission, according to someone who has been briefed on the investigation. C1 Google Unit Under Scrutiny Orkut, a Web site of online communities created and run by Google, includes dialogues that advance hatred toward certain groups. The site has the potential to tarnish Google's name and underscores the risks the company faces as it expands into new Internet businesses. C1 Battle Over Software Piracy The Supreme Court is scheduled to hear a case pitting copyright holders against the makers of file-sharing software. The conflict has become a public relations battle between copyright owners, who say they are threatened by digital piracy, and technology advocates opposed to controls on the copying of digital media. C1 Business Digest C1 OBITUARIES B8 Gnassingbé Eyadéma President of Togo and Africa's longest-serving ruler, he was 69. B8 EDITORIAL A20-21 Editorials: Building on Iraq's election; deadly trains; why felons deserve the right to vote; the flu shot supply. Column: Bob Herbert. Autos D13 Bridge E8 Crossword E8 | NEWS SUMMARY |
1648145_0 | M.I.A. was raised in Sri Lanka and lives in London, and she has established herself as one of hip-hop's most exciting new voices, rapping and chanting and sometimes singing over hard-thwacking electronic beats. Sounds exotic, right? Yet the thrill of her hugely anticipated sold-out concert at the Knitting Factory on Saturday night wasn't the thrill of the new -- it was the thrill of the familiar. M.I.A. has a keen ear for the various mutations of hip-hop that fill clubs on both sides of the Atlantic, and she scrambles these styles in a way that sounds both fresh and inevitable. Some new acts take a while to sink in, but M.I.A. makes sense from the first time you hear her. And for 45 minutes on Saturday night, she made wildly entertaining sense, playfully calling out her playground-ready couplets (''Somewhere in the Amazon/They're holding me ransom''; ''Pull up the people/Pull up the poor'') while bouncing her slim limbs in time to the beat. Backed by Diplo, her D.J., she rode tracks new and old, bringing together old-fashioned electro and futuristic dancehall reggae, London grime and Atlanta crunk. Maybe that's why her music sounds somehow inevitable: because sooner or later, these like-minded genres were bound to find one another. Late last year M.I.A. and Diplo released ''Piracy Funds Terrorism Vol. 1,'' an excellent unlicensed mixtape that paired her vocals with a smartly curated set of beats, most of them from other people's songs. (That's why it's not available in stores.) The mixtape helped earn M.I.A. a fanatical cult of listeners, even though her debut album, ''Arular'' (XL), won't be released until Feb. 22. It's great fun to watch M.I.A.'s cult expand, and it will only expand further once there's an actual album for people to buy. ''Arular'' has a loose, infectious energy, and it seems likely to appeal to the indie-rock fans who tend to ignore similarly adventurous beat-driven albums when they come from, say, dancehall reggae producers -- indie bloggers didn't exactly flock to Stephen (Lenky) Marsden's sublime ''Dreamweaver'' compilation -- or even foul-mouthed American rappers (Ms. Jade's ecstatic debut album, ''Girl Interrupted,'' is currently languishing in a bargain bin near you). Part of M.I.A.'s appeal is that she borrows from rough-and-tumble, slightly-out-of-control urban genres while leaving behind the parts that may make hip listeners feel uncomfortable: gunplay and crude sex jokes and drug-dealer boasts and all the rest of it. | Hip-Hop Review; Give Them What They Want but Keep It Sort of Cool |
1649654_1 | send all my messages sequentially through three separate filter systems. Then I must remember to check the three junk folders to see what failed to get through that should have. Recipient pays. Do not despair. We can now glimpse what had once seemed unattainable: stopping the flow at its very source. The most promising news is that companies like Yahoo, EarthLink, America Online, Comcast and Verizon have overcome the fear that they would prompt antitrust sanctions if they joined forces to reclaim the control they have lost to spammers. They belong to an organization called the Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group, formed only last year. It shares antispam techniques and lobbies other e-mail providers to adopt policies that protect the commons. Civic responsibility entails not merely screening incoming mail to protect one's own customers but also screening outgoing mail that could become someone else's problem. Carl Hutzler, AOL's director of antispam operations, has been an especially energetic campaigner, urging all network operators to ''cut off the spammer's oxygen supply,'' as he told an industry gathering last fall. And those operators who do not ''get smart soon and control the sources of spam on their networks,'' he said, will find that they ''will not have connectivity'' to his provider and others who are filtering outgoing e-mail. He did not spell out the implications for customers, but he doesn't need to: we can select a service provider from the group with a spam-free zone, or one that has failed to do the necessary self-policing required for joining the gated community and is banished to the wilds of anything-goes. One measure backed by advocates like Mr. Hutzler is already having a positive impact: ''Port 25 blocking,'' which prevents an individual PC from running its own mail server and blasting out e-mail on its own. With the block in place, all outgoing e-mail must go through the service provider's mail server, where high-volume batches of identical mail can be detected easily and cut off. Internet service providers are also starting to stamp outgoing messages with a digital signature of the customer's domain name, using strong cryptography so the signature cannot be altered or counterfeited. This is accomplished with software called DomainKeys, originally developed by Yahoo. It is now offered in open-source form and was recently adopted by EarthLink and some other major services. A digital signature is what we will want to see on all | How to Stop Junk E-Mail: Charge for the Stamp |
1649736_4 | to introduce legislation this month that would all but end the practice of letting public lands in the Amazon be occupied by private interests and then sold. Instead, companies and individuals would be granted concessions to lots for fixed periods, during which logging and other activities would be permitted but strictly monitored and controlled. ''Obviously you can't put a cop behind every tree,'' Paulo Adario, the Amazon campaign coordinator for Greenpeace, said in a telephone interview from Manaus. ''But you can take steps to bring activities that are now clandestine into a regulated, legalized system, if you can just get this proposal through Congress without it being modified too much.'' An initial draft of the government proposal was leaked to the Brazilian press last year and was portrayed as handing the jungle over to rapacious commercial enterprises, mostly foreign ones. Environmental groups say that was a politically inspired mischaracterization of the measure, whose ultimate success would depend on the government's ability and willingness to compel compliance. ''The underlying intent is to be able to govern timber extraction, but it's not clear to me that a concession system will be able to do that,'' said Stephan Schwartzman of Environmental Defense, who visited the area of conflict last month. ''We know, for example, that timber concessions in Indonesia have done nothing for the forest or local indigenous communities.'' The government's environmental agency has always complained that a chronic lack of money and manpower prevents it from enforcing laws that, though they look tough on paper, are widely ignored. ''The timber harvest itself starts in June,'' with the arrival of the Amazon dry season, Mr. Adario said, ''so we are going to have to wait to see if we have a legal harvest this year.'' ''Everybody is positioning their tanks,'' he said. ''The real combat is from here on in.'' -------------------- American Nun Killed in Jungle BELEM, Brazil, Feb. 12 (Reuters) -- A 74-year-old American nun was shot to death early Saturday in the Amazon rain forest, where she had worked for a decade to defend human rights and the environment despite frequent death threats, the federal police said. The missionary, Dorothy Stang, was shot three times at point-blank range at an isolated agricultural settlement in dense jungle in Para State, the police and coworkers said. Only weeks ago, she warned federal rights authorities that she faced continual death threats for her work. | Brazil, Bowing to Protests, Reopens Logging in Amazon |
1649419_2 | rum. There are also no roads -- the Bitter End is accessible only by boat. Most guests fly to San Juan, then take a half-hour puddle jumper to Beef Island Airport on Tortola, followed by a 45-minute ferry to the resort. The Bitter End -- so named as the last outpost of civilization before the open waters of the Atlantic -- was first developed in the 1950's by Basil Symonette, a British yachtsman who built a shorefront pub and several cottages for charter captains. In the early 1970's, the Hokin family of Chicago bought it as a private family retreat. They gradually expanded it into a self-contained complex. The Hokins continue to control the Bitter End, although in January they sold an interest to the Grand Heritage Hotel Group, which plans several major upgrades but promises to retain the resort's rustic feel. Upon arrival, guests receive a bamboo folder full of information on the Bitter End's programs. Included in weekly packages are day trips to destinations such as Norman Island (supposedly Robert Louis Stevenson's inspiration for Treasure Island) and the Baths, a set of massive boulders forming grottoes and caves. Our favorite was Anegada, a sparsely-inhabited atoll with an open-air restaurant serving succulent fresh lobster. Guests can also sign up for hourlong guided snorkeling tours of local coral reefs, or for sunset cruises aboard the Paranda, the resort's 48-foot catamaran. The Bitter End's highlight, for most visitors, is the unlimited use of an endless variety of vessels: large and small sailboats, dinghies, kayaks, windsurfers, kite boards, rowing shells and more. Cheerful young members of the staff at the water-sports desk provide maps of the North Sound, with suggested routes around Prickly Pear Island, Saba Rock and Necker Island (owned by Sir Richard Branson). Beginners can take a free Sailing 101 course with classroom and dockside demonstration, or sign up for a series of lessons at the Nick Trotter Sailing and Windsurfing School. There's also a scuba shop, Kilbride's, which offers certification courses and schedules daily dives. During holiday weeks, the Bitter End runs a free kids' camp from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. During our stay, the energetic and experienced counselors supervised sailing, tubing and kayaking; they also ran swimming races, diving contests and arts and crafts programs. They even were hosts to a Parents' Night Off, where they took a pontoon boat of kids out for a sunset cruise, | At an Island Sailing Resort, Nobody Jumps Ship |
1651119_2 | companies build their defenses against lawsuits filed by patients or their survivors. Merck is already a defendant in hundreds of such suits, with some cases expected to go to trial this spring. The panel was far more comfortable with the safety of Celebrex, particularly at low doses, than with that of Vioxx or Bextra. Still, it rejected Pfizer's insistence that there was little evidence that either Celebrex or Bextra caused heart problems. Dr. John LaMattina, Pfizer's president of global research and development, said that all pain relievers, with the possible exception of naproxen, seemed to increase the risk of heart attacks. He said doctors should have a ''good handle'' on the risks of pain medications after the advisory meeting. Dr. LaMattina also pledged that Pfizer would not advertise Celebrex or Bextra in the coming weeks. ''Then after that,'' he said, ''we will discuss with F.D.A. what we should and shouldn't do.'' Most panelists were adamant that the drugs not be advertised unless the advertisements were written by the F.D.A. or an independent group. Dr. Jenkins of the F.D.A. said it did not have the power to ban advertising. But Dr. Wood said that it was unlikely a company would defy the committee's wishes. ''It would be a brave company that would start an advertising campaign for these drugs,'' he said. Dr. Jenkins said that ''we heard the message that the committee thought Vioxx had a cardiovascular risk that was perhaps larger or better documented than the others.'' If Merck officials want to reintroduce Vioxx, he went on, ''we'll welcome them to come talk to us about the various paths forward.'' The panel's divided votes on Bextra and Vioxx make interpreting its advice on those drugs more difficult, Dr. Jenkins said. The drug agency convened the panel in September after the Vioxx withdrawal, in the face of concerns that Celebrex and Bextra might have similar risks. Celebrex, Bextra and Vioxx were developed because older pain pills cause ulcers in 1 percent to 4 percent of users. Vioxx was eventually shown to halve the risk of ulcers, compared with older pills. Neither Celebrex nor Bextra have ever been proven to be easier on the stomach. Shortly after the drugs' approvals, studies began to show that they might cause heart attacks and strokes. The panel had to consider which was worse. Ulcers, whose frequency has declined sharply in the past 20 years, are | F.D.A. IS ADVISED TO LET PAIN PILLS STAY ON MARKET |
1649024_0 | IN the early 19th century, received chemical wisdom held that organic compounds were beyond the creative powers of the laboratory's furnaces and alembics -- that they could be fashioned only by the vital forces in living beings. Then, in 1828, while trying to do something else, Friedrich Wöhler discovered that urea, an organic compound of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen, could be made from inorganic ingredients. His successors found that this new synthetic chemistry could produce not only all the organic molecules used in nature, but also organic molecules of which nature had never dreamed. Artificial dyes became a major industry; in World War I, so did poison gases. From plastics to detergents to fabrics to fertilizers, synthetic chemistry went on to change the world. A similar transition is now under way in biology. Until recently biologists worked with the components they found in nature. They might swap genes from creature to creature, but they did it by cutting and pasting nature's originals, rather as an editor might move bits of prose with a click and a drag. Now the biologists are getting keyboards to go with their metaphorical mice -- technologies that allow them to write genes and genomes from scratch, to alter and surpass nature's vocabulary. The scientific, commercial and destructive possibilities of this synthetic biology are easily as great as those once offered by the transformation of chemistry. But they will make themselves felt far more quickly, raising ethical and moral questions that many biologists have been poorly trained to handle. The ability to design genomes and their components holds great practical promise. Late last year the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation gave $42.6 million to a project at the University of California, Berkeley, that is rewriting bacterial genomes in an effort to produce the malaria drug artemisinin at a small fraction of today's costs. Companies that synthesize genes to order -- send them a sequence and a credit card number and they'll mail you a gene -- look to have a rosy future. To keep things safe, they check the sequences requested against databases of pathogenic genes, to make sure nobody is building anything nasty. But as the technology drops in price and spreads in availability, the possibility that someone, somewhere, will synthesize something like smallpox will grow ever greater. The genome sequences of pathogens, as of all sorts of other organisms, are piling up on | Biology's New Forbidden Fruit |
1652149_0 | While New York basks in the orange glow of ''The Gates'' in Central Park, some Colorado residents are idly wondering when the artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude might turn their gaze back on them. In the ''artworks in progress'' section of the artists' Web site, www.christojeanneclaude.net, the only project listed besides ''The Gates'' is ''Over the River,'' a plan to suspend several miles of shimmering fabric panels above a stretch of the Arkansas River in Colorado during a summer. Now that ''The Gates'' is completed and on display, the question for many is, what next? To people in Colorado, it may have seemed that their state was left in the dust when Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced ''The Gates'' project in January 2003 and vowed to help expedite it. Up to that point, equal attention was being devoted to the two plans, which, like all Christo projects, entail arduous quests for political permits and funds. (''The Gates'' cost more than $20 million, which the artists say they bore exclusively themselves.) ''Because Christo got involved in other projects, we haven't heard from these folks in probably two years,'' said Roy Masinton, field manager for the Royal Gorge office of the federal Bureau of Land Management in Canon City, Colo. ''We don't know the status -- if this is next to go. You just never know until he makes some commitment.'' ''At best, we're looking at 2008 if he came in tomorrow,'' Mr. Masinton said of Christo. Christo and Jeanne-Claude were unavailable this week for comment on the project, but their employees affirmed that ''Over the River'' was still in the works. ''Why would they NOT go ahead?'' Jok Church, the Webmaster for the artists, said in an e-mail message. ''This process can take many, many years. 'The Gates' took 26 years of bureaucracy.'' Harriet Irgang, a spokeswoman for the artists who is working in a temporary press trailer at Central Park, said: ''They were moving forward on 'Over the River' when suddenly the mayor of New York approached them and said that he was a big fan and wanted to make this happen. It was not that they didn't love 'Over the River' anymore.'' But it takes more than love to get several miles of the Arkansas River covered in metallic fabric for a two-week period in summer. It takes cutting through reams of red tape as federal, state and local officials review | Colorado Still Waits For Its 'Gates'; As New York Took Priority, The River Project Was Held |
1652222_2 | or six years, a new 16-story Law School and five-story campus center would be built, the library would be expanded into an eight-story structure and the Amsterdam Avenue parcels would be sold or leased. The plan outlines the potential for a 47-story apartment building and 26-story dormitory at 60th Street and a 57-story, 621-foot apartment building at 62nd Street. This would be 222 feet higher than the nearby Alfred condominium, which occupies the only part of the superblock that Fordham never controlled, as it was the site of Power Memorial Academy until 1984. The north tower would present one of the starker architectural expressions in New York of the gulf between classes: a luxury skyscraper opposite Amsterdam Houses, a modestly scaled public housing project. ''It's one of the ironies of the situation in which we find ourselves,'' Father McShane said, ''that the sale of the parcels on the Amsterdam Avenue end will enable us -- we believe, and believe strongly -- to be more effective in our mission'' of inculcating students with a sense of duty to address social injustice and remember the poor. Financing for the expansion would come from fund-raising, additional tuition from increased enrollment and borrowing through bonds. The goal of the development deal is to create an endowment that will generate enough income to cover two-thirds of the debt service. University officials would not say how much they expected to earn from a sale or lease. ''We're seeing more and more of this: The use of real estate development to underwrite not-for-profit programming,'' said Hope Cohen, the chairwoman of Community Board 7, adding that the concept warranted greater examination as a matter of public policy. Under the second phase of Fordham's expansion, which would probably not be finished before 2025, the old Law School would be razed and replaced by a 21-story dormitory. Two near-twin buildings of 35 and 36 stories would rise on Columbus Avenue, flanking a new campus entrance. These would include dormitory space on the upper floors and would be shared by Fordham College, the School of Business and the Graduate Schools of Social Service and Education. Alexander Cooper of Cooper, Robertson described the proposal as ''the most New York solution'' because it concentrated building density on the corners and around the perimeter of the block, preserving a verdant enclave in the middle. Father McShane said, ''We want to make sure we maintain | Cramped Fordham Plans to Expand at Lincoln Center, Mostly Skyward |
1652233_0 | In his first public remarks on the murder of an American nun in the Amazon on Feb. 12, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva promised that his government ''will not rest until the killers are caught.'' Mr. da Silva had been criticized for failing to attend the funeral of the nun, Dorothy Stang, or send a senior government minister as his representative. ''The Amazon is ours, and we are going to take charge of our territory, with sovereignty and without vacillation,'' he said during a radio program. Three suspects are in custody in the case, and others are being sought. Larry Rohter (NYT) | World Briefing | Americas: Brazil: President Vows Hunt For Nun's Killers |
1648275_1 | more suggestive than conclusive, and that it did not mean that unresponsive people with brain damage were more likely to recover or that treatment was yet possible. But they said the study did open a window on a world that has been neglected by medical inquiry. ''This is an extremely important work, for that reason alone,'' said Dr. James Bernat, a professor of neurology at Dartmouth. Dr. Bernat said findings from studies like these would be relevant to cases like that of Terri Schiavo, a Florida woman with brain damage who has been kept alive for years against her husband's wishes. In that case, which drew the attention of Gov. Jeb Bush and the Legislature, relatives of Ms. Schiavo disagreed about her condition, and a brain-imaging test -- once it has been standardized -- could help determine whether brain damage has extinguished awareness. The patients in question have significant brain damage. Three million to six million Americans live with the consequences of serious brain injuries, neurologists said. An estimated 100,000 to 300,000 of them are in what is called a minimally conscious state: they are bedridden, cannot communicate and are unable to feed or care for themselves, but they typically breathe on their own. They may occasionally react to instructions to blink their eyes or even reach for a glass, although such responses are unpredictable. By observing behavior in a bedside examination, neurologists can determine whether a person is minimally conscious or in a ''persistent vegetative state'' -- without awareness, and almost certain not to recover. In the study, a team of neuroscientists in New York, New Jersey and Washington, D.C., used imaging technology to compare brain activity in two young men determined to be minimally conscious with that of seven healthy men and women. In a measure of overall brain activity, the two groups were vastly different: the two minimally conscious men showed less than half the activity of the others. But the researchers also recorded an audiotape for each of the nine subjects in which a relative or loved one reminisced, telling familiar stories and recalling shared experiences. In each of the brain-damaged patients, the sound of the voice prompted a pattern of brain activity similar to that of the healthy participants. ''We assumed we would get some minimal response in these patients, but nothing like this,'' said Dr. Nicholas Schiff, an assistant professor of neurology and neuroscience | New Signs of Awareness Seen In Some Brain-Injured Patients |
1646821_0 | To the Editor: There is a simple and effective way of dealing with junk e-mail: tax it. The revenues would easily finance the war on terrorism, ensure the future of Social Security and cover the expenses of reversing global warming. Paul Nordberg Ipswich, Mass., Feb. 1, 2005 | Fed Up With Spam, and Fighting Back |
1652468_0 | A volunteer patrolling a rain forest reserve near Rio de Janeiro was killed by a shotgun blast Tuesday night, and environmentalists blamed poachers for the killing. Colleagues of the slain man, Dionisio Julio Ribeiro, told Brazilian news services he had been threatened by trespassers in the Tingua nature reserve, part of a patchwork of remnants of Brazil's Atlantic rain forest, 93 percent of which has been destroyed. The killing occurred as federal troops tried to restore order in the Amazon state of Pará after the Feb. 12 murder of Sister Dorothy Stang, an American nun working with peasants who had clashed with illegal loggers. Andrew C. Revkin (NYT) | World Briefing | Americas: Brazil: Environmentalist Gunned Down |
1650401_3 | role in their interrogation. Bureau officials said they knew of no such discussions and would oppose any move to involve the F.B.I. Other possibilities include more active efforts to hand over some of the detainees to third countries. Neither the C.I.A. nor the F.B.I. would comment for this article, and the current and former intelligence officials who agreed to discuss the issue would speak only on condition of anonymity. None would say where the detainees were being held, or describe the interrogation methods used on them. But all of the officials described deep frustration within the C.I.A. about its role as custodian of the detainees. While some of those in American detention, particularly Mr. Zubaydah, are said to have provided useful intelligence during their first months in captivity, no more than a handful of those still in C.I.A. custody are seen as possessing much intelligence value. ''No one has a plan for what to do with these guys,'' a former senior intelligence official said, ''and the C.I.A. has been left holding the bag.'' Any change would be a significant one for the C.I.A. The agency's authorization to use coercive interrogation methods has been spelled out in a series of documents, most still highly classified, the former officials said, including a narrow definition of torture in a Justice Department legal opinion issued in August 2002. But some former intelligence officials said the C.I.A.'s latitude in conducting interrogations had been reduced significantly and might have been scaled back by the agency itself in response to the White House's repudiation last summer of the 2002 opinion and its decision in December to issue an opinion that broadened the definition of torture, putting a wider range of interrogation methods off limits. Abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq have focused Congressional and public scrutiny on the possibility that the agency engaged in excessive force in interrogations. It has long been known that F.B.I. agents and behavioral science experts took part in interrogations of detainees at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. F.B.I. agents have also taken part in interviews of high-level detainees in Iraq and spent months questioning Saddam Hussein at an undisclosed site near Baghdad. But until now, the F.B.I. has been unwilling to assign agents to routinely interview high-value detainees in C.I.A. custody. After the Sept. 11 attacks, senior F.B.I. officials urged the bureau's director, Robert S. Mueller III, to keep agents out of | C.I.A. Is Seen as Seeking New Role on Detainees |
1650889_3 | Bronx-Whitestone was stable, but its pendulum-like movement alarmed drivers and pedestrians and Mr. Moses ordered it stiffened. ''He felt that the risk of losing motorists and therefore revenue far outweighed what the engineers said and that this perception of instability was unacceptable,'' said Darl Rastorfer, the author of ''Six Bridges: The Legacy of Othmar H. Ammann'' (Yale University Press, 2000). In 1940, diagonal stiffening cables were installed on the bridge. In 1946, two steel trusses were erected on the sides of the bridge to stiffen it more. The trusses resulted in the elimination of the pedestrian walkways and the widening of the bridge from four to six lanes of traffic. Bridge enthusiasts lamented that the installation of the trusses marred the bridge's aesthetic qualities. ''It ruined the view of the skyline of Manhattan,'' Professor Petroski said. As if those changes were not enough, engineers installed one more device -- a counterbalance known as a mass damper -- to the underside of the bridge in 1986 as yet another component for stability. Finally, an increase in traffic -- from 6.3 million vehicles in 1940 to 45.2 million last year -- has added stress, although the weight of the bridge itself is the greatest concern for engineers. As a result of all this, the bridge has become too heavy and increasingly vulnerable to wear and tear. ''Every time we added features, we were adding to the weight of the bridge,'' Mr. Ascher said. To increase the bridge's longevity, engineers looked for ways to make the bridge lighter, while maintaining its ability to withstand wind. They also recruited help from engineers at two universities. In December 1998, Canadian scientists attached devices to the bridge to measure wind and vibration. Over two years, the data was transmitted to the University of Western Ontario. Researchers there also built miniature models of the bridge made of ''aluminum and some balsa wood and some plastic and some piano wire,'' according to J. Peter C. King, a civil engineer who directs the university's wind-tunnel laboratory. The models were put in a 200-foot-long wind tunnel, which simulated average winds of 140 miles an hour and gusts of 210 miles an hour. The latter figure would represent winds stronger than a devastating hurricane. Dr. King concluded that replacing the concrete deck with lightweight steel, removing the trusses and re-evaluating the need for the mass damper could yield more sophisticated ways | A Bridge Too Fat; Bronx-Whitestone Is Set to Lose 6,000 Tons |
1649336_1 | sends a draft of guarantee language to a player's representative and the representative sends it back with the word steroids crossed out, it would not be farfetched to think that someone should be suspicious. But, the Yankees said, it wasn't like that. ''There were at least 20 changes made,'' Trost said in reference to the guarantee-language provision in Giambi's contract. On the telephone a day earlier, Trost said he couldn't discuss Giambi's contract specifically. On this call, he discussed it specifically. ''Our contracts cover things in different ways,'' he said, batting second. ''There is a provision in his contract that says he will not be paid if he uses or abuses any illegal substances. The idea that we removed steroids is so far from the truth. The word steroids that was taken out was illustrative,'' he said. In other words, Trost was saying that the word was meant to be part of a contract provision aimed at substances including but not limited to steroids. Nevertheless, the word steroids was in the original draft of the Giambi contract and then taken out, and the Yankees are not denying that. Rubenstein suggested that the Yankees fax copies of the relevant pages of the contract to me so that I could see what they were talking about. They couldn't do that, they said; the contract was confidential. Then read the relevant paragraphs, Rubenstein suggested. So Trost read two paragraphs, or parts of paragraphs, of the guarantee language dealing with elements that could deprive Giambi of his salary. That is what a guarantee-exclusion provision is -- a list of activities (sky diving, for example) that would render a contract void if a player could not play as the result of one of those activities. Last winter, Aaron Boone hurt his knee playing basketball, a prohibited activity in his guarantee language, and the Yankees later released him, paying him only one-sixth of his contract. In Giambi's contract, he would not be paid, for example, if he couldn't play because of physical impairment or mental incapacity ''directly due to or approximately caused by'' a series of circumstances including ''the intentional use or abuse of any type of illegal substance.'' After completing his reading, Trost remarked, ''To say we didn't cover steroids is absolutely fallacious.'' Then it was Cashman's turn. ''Modifications take place in almost every contract,'' he said. ''It's rare when an agent takes our initial | Yankees Can't Smooth Over Deal They Helped Rub Raw |
1649281_0 | Anxieties over the United States economy have receded and worries about the political backlash have ebbed. But India's $17 billion outsourcing industry has a new dread: the poor infrastructure in the country's crowded cities is taking a big toll and may even curb the growth of the fast-expanding industry. Inadequate roads, a shortage of hotel rooms, inadequate power, traffic jams, too few overseas flights and high telecommunication fees are all becoming major concerns. They were the main topic this week at the annual meeting of India's outsourcing industry trade group. ''Shortcomings in the environment are hurting company bottom lines by 1 to 2 percent annually,'' Kiran Karnik, president of the group, the National Association of Software and Service Companies, or Nasscom, said in an interview. ''You pay a price when you have to bus thousands of employees to work, run your own generators to make up for power shortages, and pay exorbitant rates because hotel rooms are scarce.'' As companies performing outsourced white-collar work in low-cost India add thousands of skilled, English-speaking employees each quarter to meet the swelling demand, the growth puts increasing pressure on the already-creaky infrastructures. And growth is projected to continue at a rate of 25 percent to 30 percent a year in the next few years. Nasscom has been prevailing upon the government to make big investments in infrastructure across the board, Mr. Karnik said in a press briefing before the conference. It has already eased the air travel situation a bit by letting private Indian airlines fly abroad -- formerly a monopoly of the state-owned airlines -- and by giving landing rights to more foreign airlines. But by all accounts, infrastructure in India is much worse than in China, where the government is building huge expressways, office and residential townships, and some 33 office parks. In the meantime, larger outsourcing companies have taken matters into their own hands. Two Indian software and back-office giants, Wipro and Infosys Technologies, for instance, both based in Bangalore (population seven million), have built suburban campuses with luxuriously landscaped gardens, modern office buildings, food courts, gyms, swimming pools, supermarkets and clothing stores. They run their own bus services to ferry employees and operate generators to meet their energy requirements. Infosys is also building a 500-room hotel in its campus for visiting employees, customers and guests. With the hotel squeeze particularly bad in Bangalore, and room rates more than doubling | Gridlock on India's New Paths to Prosperity |
1651559_2 | their prison terms, parole or probation, the sponsors said. The Sentencing Project said its study was the first to survey how frequently felons were denied voting rights in states with restrictive policies. It examined 14 states that do not automatically restore voting rights to felons after they complete their sentences. Those states are Alabama, Arizona, Delaware, Florida, Iowa, Kentucky, Maryland, Mississippi, Nebraska, Nevada, Tennessee, Virginia, Washington and Wyoming. The study found that Florida, with 48,000 felons returned to voting ranks, was the only state where a significant number had their voting rights restored, but only after extended court battles there. The report blamed long and confusing waiting periods before felons can seek voting eligibility, inadequate data in state records systems, and arbitrary standards. Some states, like Florida and Kentucky, employ ''character tests'' that allow state officials to ask felons about their drinking habits or to require them to submit letters of reference in applying for voting rights, the report said. ''What we found is that the procedures in many states for restoring felons' voting rights are so little used and so cumbersome that the possibility of getting restored voting rights for many of these people is just illusory,'' Marc Mauer, the assistant director of the Sentencing Project, said in an interview. Several officials involved in state voting procedures did not dispute the study's findings but said they were taking steps to make it easier for felons to register when allowed by state law. Meredith Imwalle, a spokeswoman for the National Association of Secretaries of State, said a continuing overhaul of state voting databases should help to ease the problem by linking voter rolls in many states to criminal and corrections records. In Mississippi, a state singled out by the Sentencing Project, a felon guilty of murder, rape or a number of other crimes that result in disenfranchisement must appeal to the governor or the Legislature to regain the right to vote. ''I would say that it is rare for that to happen, as the numbers in this study seem to reflect, so it may in fact be easier for a felon to regain the right to vote in other states,'' said David Blount, a spokesman for the Mississippi secretary of state's office. But Mr. Blount said Mississippi, like some other states, was limited in its options because it would take an amendment to the State Constitution to change the procedure. | Confusing Rules Deny Vote To Ex-Felons, Study Says |
1646468_0 | For years, Rebecca Koladycz traveled all over Latin America for the International Planned Parenthood Federation, visiting the organization's affiliates -- and mangling the Spanish language. In her first week on the job, she had an especially grueling trip to Peru. As an icebreaking exercise in a group meeting, people were paired off with colleagues they had never met and were asked to interview them. Then they had to introduce their partners to the other participants and reveal a few facts about them. Alas, Ms. Koladycz's Spanish was not up to the task. Grasping only fragments of what her colleague told her, she stood up, palms sweating, and winged it. ''I gave him an extra child he didn't have, and as I continued to talk about him, he just looked at me with a blank stare,'' she said. On that trip, and countless others, she cried herself to sleep after an exhausting day of desperately trying to understand and be understood. By studying reports and taking language classes in New York she had been able to master the technical language she needed for her job. ''But if a group went out to lunch and started chatting about their families and other interests, I just had such a hard time,'' she said. Realizing her linguistic clumsiness was holding her back professionally, Ms. Koladycz enrolled in a Spanish-language immersion program in Guatemala, where she stayed with a family and studied for seven hours a day with a private tutor for two weeks. Since that trip, her confidence in her ability to navigate any situation has soared. ''Before, I always preferred to communicate by e-mail so I could look up words,'' she said. ''Now, I don't hesitate to pick up the phone.'' Americans have always had a reputation for linguistic laziness, and since much of the business world is willing to conduct business in English, their deficiency tends not to hold them back. But an increasing number of Americans realize that going the extra step to hone skills in a foreign language can provide a professional edge or grease the wheels of deal-making. They are dusting off their high school Spanish, French or German, and the most ambitious of them are plunging into immersion language courses like the one taken by Ms. Koladycz. These programs have proliferated throughout the world and come in all sizes, lasting from a few days to several weeks, emphasizing | Don't Speak the Language? Live With the Locals |
1646566_0 | To the Editor: Re ''Space Probe Makes Science Fiction Wonders of Childhood Real'' (Jan. 25): The article reminds me of how silly it is to cut back on unmanned space exploration to begin manned programs. If NASA shuts down its manned flight programs it can focus on promising robotic and remotely controlled machines like the Cassini-Huygens probe. The technology of remote-controlled vehicles and probes has come a long way, but the opportunities for development are mind-boggling, not just in space flight, but in undersea, medical and military applications. CRAIG WELLMAN Newark, Del. | Visiting the Cosmos, From Home |
1646606_3 | to shut down illegal advertising from six companies accused of profiting from thousands of X-rated spam e-mail messages. But so far, the spam trade has foiled most efforts to bring it under control. A growing number of so-called bulletproof Web host services like Mr. Gillespie's offer spam-friendly merchants access to stable offshore computer servers -- most of them in China -- where they can park their Web sites, with the promise that they will not be shut down because of spam complaints. Some bulk e-mailers have also teamed with writers of viruses to steal lists of working e-mail addresses and quietly hijack the personal computers of millions of unwitting Internet users, creating the ''zombie networks'' that now serve, according to some specialists, as the de facto circulatory system for spam. ''We've thrown everything but the kitchen sink at this problem,'' said Chris Smith, the senior director of product marketing for Postini, a company that filters e-mail for corporations. ''And yet, all of these efforts have yet to make a significant dent.'' Mr. Smith was speaking in a conference call with reporters last week to discuss Postini's 2005 e-mail security report, which echoed the bleak findings of recent academic surveys and statistics from other vendors that filter and monitor e-mail traffic. A survey from Stanford University in December showed that a typical Internet user now spends about 10 working days a year dealing with incoming spam. Industry analysts estimate that the global cost of spam to businesses in 2005, in terms of lost productivity and network maintenance, will be about $50 billion ($17 billion in the United States alone). And the Postini report concluded that most legislative measures -- in the United States, Europe and Australia -- have had little impact on the problem. The American law requires solicitations to be identified as such in the subject line and prohibits the use of fake return addresses, among other restrictions. But the real soft spot in the American law, critics have argued, is that it puts a burden on recipients to choose to be removed from an e-mailers list -- an ''opt out'' feature that bulk mailers are obligated by the law to provide. (The European and Australian systems requires bulk mailers, in most cases, to receive ''opt in'' authorization from recipients.) While a law-abiding bulk mailer under the American law might remove a person from its list, critics say, the scofflaw | Law Barring Junk E-Mail Allows a Flood Instead |
1647739_3 | contract with 3 percent annual raises each year. It also wants increases in pension and welfare benefits. In its final offer on Dec. 17, the company offered a lump-sum payment of $750 in the first year of a three-year contract, with 2 percent increases in the second and third year, and it did not meet the union's pension and welfare demands, according to Fred Gaffney, the vice president for the bargaining unit, International Longshoreman's Union Local 1814, and a 24-year veteran of the plant. Mr. Brainard said he would not discuss the terms of the final contract or details of the negotiations. ''The company wasn't reducing anything that the current union members have,'' he said. He explained that the company was facing increasing costs of energy, raw materials and employee benefits, forcing it to cut costs wherever possible. ''It's very difficult for our industry to pass those increases along to our customers,'' he said. American Sugar Refinery, like the rest of the sugar industry, has also had to grapple with a decline in the consumption of sugar, particularly cane sugar, which has had to compete with beet sugar, high-fructose corn syrup and other sweeteners. In addition, pressure is rising to roll back import quotas and price supports. But the union believes there is something more nefarious at work: a hardball effort to cripple labor. The majority owner of the plant is Florida Crystals, the agricultural conglomerate based in West Palm Beach, Fla., and led by the prominent Fanjul family of Palm Beach, Fla. Florida Crystals, in partnership with Sugar Cane Growers Cooperative, bought the plant in 1998, becoming the latest in a long series of owners during the 20th century. Nearly all the 500,000 tons of raw sugar shipped to the plant each year for processing comes from the Fanjuls' sugar cane fields in Florida, Mr. Brainard said. ''These guys are basically like the king of the hill with all the subsidies -- and we can't get a nickel,'' Mr. Forcelli said. In late December, a strike by workers at a Florida Crystals sugar plant in Okeelanta, Fla., collapsed after four days when scores of union members crossed the picket line alongside temporary workers. Fearing they would permanently lose their jobs in a region with high unemployment, the union accepted a contract with fewer benefits than the old one. ''They're tough, they are tough,'' Louis Pernice, president of Local 1814, | Out of Sight, Out on Strike |
1647592_5 | not dealing with a mythological figure -- in the 1820's, ''British scholars at the Asiatic Society in Calcutta still thought that the Buddha had been Egyptian or Ethiopian, or perhaps was another name for the Norse god Woden'' -- but a human being who had lived once upon a time in India, as real as Plato or Aristotle. Likewise, Mishra delights in finding echoes of Buddhist thought -- conscious or otherwise -- in the words of Western writers as disparate as David Hume (''The mind is a kind of theater'') and Oscar Wilde (''In this world there are only two tragedies, one of not getting what one wants, and the other of getting it''). In the final chapters of ''An End to Suffering,'' Mishra leaves his Himalayan village and goes down into the world -- first among the towns and cities of India, plagued with poverty, religious strife and social breakdown, and then to Europe and America. Arriving in London, the first Western city he has ever visited, he is overwhelmed by the sight of commuters pouring wordlessly out of an Underground station, ''looking neither left nor right, as if impelled by a great inner panic.'' Here, it seems, is a society aching for the Buddha's balm; it may be no coincidence that the sage's first lay followers, in the 6th century B.C., were members of India's rising commercial class. But Buddhism, Mishra recognizes, is ''not easily practiced in the modern world,'' where almost everything is ''predicated on the growth and multiplication of desire, exactly the thing that the Buddha had warned against.'' In the United States, particularly, ''as Alexis de Tocqueville had noticed in the early 1830's, individual self-interest was the very basis of the brand-new commercial and industrial society that Europeans had created in the seemingly unlimited spaces of the New World.'' And yet Buddhism has taken root and flowered here. Perhaps, Mishra suggests, it is beginning to play -- though still in a small way -- the role Tocqueville foresaw for religion in America, as a moderating influence on society's worst excesses and strains. Given the scope of its ambitions, ''An End to Suffering'' could easily have become a disorganized ramble. But Mishra's book is in the best tradition of Buddhism, both dispassionate and deeply engaged, complicated and simple, erudite and profoundly humane. Adam Goodheart is the C. V. Starr Scholar at Washington College in Chestertown, Md. | Philosopher King |
1653191_2 | a leading global online career site, joined with two Web sites -- Idealist.org, which matches people with nonprofits, and boardnetUSA.org, which connects nonprofit boards with potential members -- to start an online volunteer center that allows users to search for opportunities. A poll released in January by Monster showed that 66 percent of its users planned to seek volunteer work in 2005, up from 54 percent last year. Ami Dar, director of Idealist.org, said traffic at the site had doubled in two years and was now about 35,000 visitors a day. Human resource professionals say volunteer experience is invaluable for recent graduates without experience in their chosen fields. In fact, lack of experience is the No.1 complaint of recent graduates searching for jobs at the online career network CollegeRecruiter.com, which has about three million visitors a month. ''Graduates and students say they can't get an internship, a part-time position, anything,'' said Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter's president. ''We tell them to spend the time volunteering. Employers don't care how much you were paid to work; they want to see evidence you can perform the job.'' A few months ago, Jill A. Searing, vice president for human resources at Advanced Health Media, a medical marketing firm in Union, N.J., that coordinates speaker programs, hired a college graduate without any experience, on the basis of the woman's record of volunteering. ''She volunteered as a student for an organization that did drug and alcohol prevention for teens and became their youngest board member,'' Ms. Searing said. ''She also ran fund-raising programs for a cancer research organization. It showed me she was a very dedicated person and she had developed skills in planning she wouldn't have had otherwise. Absent that, we wouldn't have considered her.'' Skills honed or expanded through volunteer jobs can give internal candidates an advantage when vying for promotions; it also helps build the résumés of those wanting to switch careers. Two and a half years ago, Renee Martinez, an assistant customer service manager at the Denver office of Safeco, a property and casualty insurer based in Seattle, applied for her current position but was turned down and told she needed stronger presentation and communication skills. Because Safeco strongly encourages its employees to volunteer as a personal development tool, Ms. Martinez, a mother of three, joined the board of a support organization for young parents. Being on the board forced her to work | Doing Well in Your Career By Doing Good Outside It |
1653055_9 | York City area. In second place was Nassau, with 52.1 percent, followed by Westchester with 53.6 percent. In Bergen County, N.J., 55 percent of residents reported being overweight or obese. In Hudson County, the numbers were about the same, with 56 percent reporting that they were overweight or obese. The other four boroughs of New York City did somewhat worse than the suburbs, with 62.7 percent of Bronx residents reporting that they were overweight, 58.6 percent of Brooklyn residents, 57.7 percent of Staten Island residents and 57.6 percent of Queens residents. Suffolk County had an obesity rate similar to most of New York City, at 57 percent. In a related question -- whether people had engaged in any leisure-time physical activity or exercise during the preceding 30 days -- Westchester came in at the top, with only 20 percent saying they had been sedentary, followed by a tie between Manhattan and Suffolk, both with 21.7 percent sedentary residents. Next came Bergen, with 24 percent; Nassau, 24.4 percent; and Staten Island, 26.2 percent sedentary. Many suburban dwellers say they would like to integrate exercise into their routines but find themselves stymied by a suburban terrain that doesn't lend itself to walking. For Stephanie Brody, an investment banker, moving to Scarsdale, N.Y., six months ago from the Upper West Side was the right decision for her four children -- 5-year-old twins, a 3-year-old and a baby. But she sees an exercise divide between adults and children: The adults, she suspects, get less, while the children get more. In Manhattan, she said, taking her children to play in Central Park could be a headache. ''You can't go to Central Park with three or four kids as easily as opening up the door to your backyard and calling up the kid next door to go out and play.'' But her new street doesn't have sidewalks, making it hazardous to go out for a walk with the baby in the stroller. She tries to walk her children to school when possible. ''You want to teach your kids that walking is something that is part of their normal existence,'' she said. ''You have to go out of your way to instill that here.'' Likewise, Ms. Lazarus in Millburn reluctantly confirmed many of the sprawl study's conclusions, if only anecdotally. Her family now has a yard, graced by two towering pine trees, and she likes looking out | Where You Live Can Hurt You |
1650090_1 | With good reason, apparently: more than a third believe it is either ''somewhat'' or ''quite'' common for business travelers to submit expense accounts with ''one or more completely false or bogus charges.'' But most road warriors also disapprove of such fraud. Those in the United States expressed the strongest support (77 percent) for careful audits of expense reports and receipts, while 72 percent in Britain agreed, as did 70 percent in Germany and 64 percent in France. For all their stepped-up vigilance, companies do seem to be loosening up on restrictions against traveling in style. In a survey conducted by the National Business Travel Association and the Travel Industry Association of America, the proportion of corporate travelers who reported their employers restricted the class they could travel on fell to 50 percent last year from 56 percent in 2002. The decline reflected a better economy and ''a departure from severe travel restrictions'' put into effect after the 2001 terrorist attacks, the survey said. UPGRADE UPHEAVAL -- As turmoil churns through airline elite-status programs, with many top-level members complaining that upgrades on major airlines have become more elusive this year, Continental Airlines is changing its upgrade policy to favor those who pay the highest coach fares and check in earliest online. Effective March 16, Continental said, priority for upgrades will be given to OnePass elite members traveling on full economy fares, based on elite status and time of check-in. Next in line will be those traveling on fares less than full economy, with priority based on elite level, then fare paid, and then time of check-in. The policy for companion travelers accompanying Platinum Elite members also is changing. Companion upgrades will be sorted by the status level of the elite member and by the time of check-in. For instance, Continental said in an e-mail message to its elite members, passengers accompanying a Platinum Elite member will be upgraded only after all other Platinum Elite members have received upgrades. SHOPPERS' PARADISE -- Airport Revenue News, a trade publication, has announced the results of its annual survey of airport shops, restaurants and other retailers. Among large airports, Cincinnati-Northern Kentucky International Airport was rated first in overall concessions; Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport ranked first in best concession design; Orlando International Airport was first in customer service; and Newark Liberty International Airport ranked first in a category for unique retail services. JOE SHARKEY BUSINESS TRAVEL | MEMO PAD |
1673639_0 | President Bush called Wednesday for patience in assessing the progress of Iraq and other nations toward democracy. He said the United States had gotten off to a rocky start after its independence and that it could take years for newly free countries to establish the institutions necessary for stability and prosperity. Speaking to the International Republican Institute, Mr. Bush said the American Revolution had been followed by ''years of chaos,'' and that the first effort to develop a governing charter, the Articles of Confederation, had ''failed miserably.'' ''No nation in history has made the transition from tyranny to a free society without setbacks and false starts,'' Mr. Bush said. ''What separates those nations that succeed from those that falter is their progress in establishing free institutions.'' Mr. Bush has been criticized for underestimating how difficult it would be to stabilize and rebuild Iraq, and his remarks amounted to an argument as to why the transition from tyranny to democracy there and elsewhere is inherently challenging and prone to setbacks. Mr. Bush listed a widely agreed upon set of prerequisites for success, including freedom of speech and assembly, a market economy and the rule of law. He added another, freedom of worship, ''because respect for the beliefs of others is the only way to build a society where compassion and tolerance prevail.'' Mr. Bush used the speech to continue his gradual reversal from a central commitment of the 2000 presidential campaign: that he would never use the United States military for what he called ''nation building.'' On Wednesday night, he celebrated the military's nation-building role, saying that while ''the main purpose of our military is to find and defeat the terrorists overseas,'' members of the armed forces are ''also undertaking a less visible, but increasingly important task: helping the people of these nations build civil societies from the rubble of oppression.'' Aides to Mr. Bush have said that his change of view began early in his first term, during a visit to Kosovo. But even then, he seemed to draw limits on what kind of nation-building activities he thought were appropriate. On Wednesday, he celebrated the military's participation in actions that are normally considered civilian. In Afghanistan, he noted, ''Provincial Reconstruction Teams'' were ''helping the Afghan government to fix schools, dig wells, build roads, repair hospitals, and build confidence in the ability of Afghanistan's elected leaders to deliver real change in | Bush Says Patience Is Needed As Nations Build a Democracy |
1672020_0 | A large new study is providing good news about long-term survival for women with breast cancer. Standard chemotherapy and hormone treatment work even better than researchers had expected, the study found. For middle-aged women with an early stage of the disease, combining the treatments can halve the risk of death from breast cancer for at least 15 years. For instance, a woman under 50 with a tumor big enough to feel, but not invading her lymph nodes, would have a 25 percent risk of dying of breast cancer in the next 15 years if she had surgery but no drug therapy. Adding both chemotherapy and hormone treatment would drop her risk to 11.6 percent. Among the most important findings was that a certain type of chemotherapy, already widely used, was most likely to save lives. It included six months of the drug Adriamycin, also called doxorubicin, or a related drug, epirubicin. Though the drugs cause hair loss and nausea, and in some cases heart problems, in the long run their benefits outweighed the risks, the studies found. The greatest gains in survival came when the treatment also included five years of tamoxifen, a drug that blocks the effects of the hormone estrogen, which can feed some tumors. But tamoxifen helps only women with estrogen-sensitive tumors, about 60 percent. ''I think women should feel very encouraged by the progress that has been made,'' said Dr. Sarah Darby of Oxford University, an author of a 30-page report on the work that is being published today in The Lancet, the British medical journal. ''Mortality rates are falling in the U.S. and the U.K., and are starting to fall in some other countries.'' The study proves that drug therapy deserves credit for the dropping death rates, Dr. Darby said. The findings come from an analysis of 194 studies involving 145,000 women in two dozen countries -- the largest analysis ever of research results in cancer, and also one of the longest, with 15 years of follow-up in many cases. The analysis was paid for by the British government, not drug companies. The women in the studies all had relatively early cancers. Some were confined to the breast and some had spread to nearby lymph nodes, but none had reached other organs. All the women had surgery, and some had radiation. Some had no drug treatment, but others had chemotherapy or hormone treatment, or both. | Therapies Cut Death Risk, Breast-Cancer Study Finds |
1672038_1 | and terrorists,'' Mr. Rumsfeld said. ''It is increasingly clear that they can be effectively combated and are being combated only by close cooperation among nations.'' The visit with the president on Thursday was the high point of a unusual weeklong lobbying effort by the nations' leaders who traveled around the United States and to Washington. At the same time, the World Bank released a report prepared at the request of the United States and the countries, showing the benefits of the trade agreement for all signatories but warning that on its own Cafta ''is unlikely to lead to substantial economic development.'' According to the report, Cafta would increase the levels of trade and should promote greater levels of foreign and domestic investments. Especially attractive for foreign investors would be the changes in regulations covering trade in services, government procurement and intellectual property rights in Central American countries and the Dominican Republic. But to ensure substantial gains in development, the report said, these countries would have to make major investments in ports, roads and education. Creating a free trade zone for textiles stretching from North Carolina through El Salvador is part of the allure of Cafta. Textile exports are larger now than the region's shipments of traditional products like coffee and sugar. This week the administration won support for Cafta from a United States textile trade association but it has failed to crack the opposition of the sugar industry. Even with this top-level push, Cafta faces an uphill battle. The administration does not have the votes to pass the trade pact even though the agreement was signed a year ago. Democrats say they want the administration to renegotiate the accord to include labor and environmental provisions, saying that workers need greater assurances that trade will not undercut them. Others said they want the administration to come up with a clearer vision of how the United States can be more competitive. Some Democrats have questioned why the administration is putting such an emphasis on a trade deal with six small, mostly impoverished countries when the United States' major trade problems and disputes are with China, Europe and Japan. The administration views such talk as protectionism and says Cafta will increase American exports of manufactured goods and agricultural products. The agreement would eventually eliminate or cut tariffs on American exports to the region while making permanent the tariff-free status of the Cafta countries. | A Push for a Central American Trade Pact |
1670579_1 | Specifically, Mr. Suozzi, who supports abortion rights, wants to funnel $3 million over the next three years into a plan for education and prevention programs and for homes for pregnant women who want to give birth, said Judith A. Jacobs, a Democrat who is the County Legislature's presiding officer. ''I believe he believes in this strongly,'' she said. ''He has always been pro-choice, but always felt that more needs to be said.'' Like Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, who gave a speech in January saying that the opposing sides in the debate over abortion should find ''common ground,'' Mr. Suozzi's remarks could be seen as an attempt to reach out beyond the traditional core of Democrats who support abortion rights. Many politicians believe Mr. Suozzi, who has attacked the excesses of state government with his Fix Albany campaign, is now exploring the possibility of challenging Attorney General Eliot Spitzer for the Democratic nomination for governor in 2006. Arda Nazerian, Mr. Suozzi's chief of staff, declined to comment on the speech and said that Mr. Suozzi was unavailable for an interview. An e-mail message to county legislators from the county executive's staff characterized the speech as ''a major social services speech addressing plans to provide enhanced services to help prevent and provide alternatives for unintended pregnancies.'' Weighing in on the divisive issue is not new for Mr. Suozzi. When he was the mayor of Glen Cove, he helped to find a location for Momma's House, a nonprofit group that assists pregnant women and single mothers. JoAnn Smith, the interim president and chief executive of Planned Parenthood of Nassau County, said she hopes Mr. Suozzi ''is going to say that he realizes the importance of prevention of unintended pregnancies and the great need for access to family planning care and to information about sexuality.'' ''So many people fall through the cracks these days,'' she said. Describing herself as ''pretty hard-core pro-choice,'' Lisanne Altmann, a Democratic county legislator, said that Mr. Suozzi might also talk about enhanced adoption opportunities. Politically, Ms. Jacobs said it was hard to tell where the speech ''fits into everything'' in Mr. Suozzi's future. ''You know, there's been discussion about governor,'' she said. ''The papers have been filled with it. He said, 'Look, I'm interested in being county executive and that's what I'm running for,' but, you know, everyone knows he's ambitious, he's young, he's vibrant, he's vital. Anything's possible.'' | Suozzi to Ask for Funds to Help Prevent Unwanted Pregnancies |
1670568_1 | the company's clinical trials. A cancer specialist by training who is invariably described as smart, friendly, level-headed and attuned to the feelings of patients, she is one of the few women in the uppermost echelons of the pharmaceutical business and on Fortune magazine's list of the 50 most powerful women in business. ''Not many people can say, 'I've made my mark saving people's lives, growing the world's biggest biotechnology company and people still like me,''' said Kurt von Emster, a partner at MPM Capital, a biotechnology investment company. With the company's recent successes in clinical trials, the 66 percent increase in Genentech's stock price since mid-March has made it the most highly valued biotechnology company. It still trails Amgen in revenue: $4.6 billion last year, compared with Amgen's $10.6 billion. But Genentech's $77.2 billion market capitalization is now slightly higher than that of Merck, a conventional drug company with five times the revenue that was once the paragon of pharmaceutical innovation. Dr. Desmond-Hellmann, 47, deflected any praise and credited her whole company. ''I have to say I'm humbled by all the success,'' she said this week in an interview at Genentech's sprawling and expanding campus overlooking San Francisco Bay. ''It makes me more anxious.'' But she is not so humble about Genentech's ambitions. ''One of our goals is to rewrite the medical textbooks,'' she said, by producing drugs ''so revolutionary, so different, that you have to get your eraser out.'' So far the company has done that in treating cancer. Rituxan, for non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, developed with Biogen-Idec, approved in 1997, was the first cancer drug using a technology called monoclonal antibodies. It has become the world's best-selling cancer medicine. Herceptin, for breast cancer, is the exemplar of so-called personalized therapy -- aimed at the 25 percent of patients whose tumors have a particular genetic characteristic. And Avastin, approved for colon cancer, is the first approved cancer drug that works by choking off the blood supply to tumors. Two of the recent successful trials showed it also worked against lung and breast cancer. The third recent trial, actually two trials combined, showed that Herceptin, now used for advanced breast cancer, also works at an earlier stage of the disease. Dr. Desmond-Hellmann said that inside Genentech, little attention is paid to her gender. She and another female executive, Myrtle S. Potter, the president for commercial operations, are on the six-member executive committee. | She's Winning Her Drug War |
1675397_2 | earmarks than others because they receive more generous supplementary funds from the federal government on top of their grants. Those extra funds, known as overhead, can be used by universities to subsidize activities not directly supported by grants, like hiring administrators. Analyzing differences in lobbying expenditures stemming from differences in overhead rates with a statistical technique called ''instrumental variables,'' Professors de Figueiredo and Silverman found that a $1 increase in lobbying expenditures is associated with a $1.56 increase in earmarks for universities in districts that do not have a senator or congressman on the crucial Appropriations Committees, and more than a $4.50 gain in earmarks for universities with a representative on one of the Appropriations Committees. Even among universities that do not lobby, those that have a congressman or senator on the Appropriations Committees tend to be awarded more earmarked funds. A university's fortunes also tend to rise or fall when senators from its state join or exit the Appropriations Committee. For example, the year after Senator Lauch Faircloth of North Carolina, a member of the committee, was defeated by John Edwards, who did not become a member, earmarks to universities in North Carolina fell by half. Unlike lobbying efforts and political factors, a university's academic standing, as measured by the National Academy of Science's ranking of departments, is not related to the amount of earmarked funds it receives. A. Abigail Payne, an economist at McMaster University in Canada, has studied how earmarks affect the quantity and quality of academic research, inferring quality from the number of times research studies are cited by subsequent studies. She concludes that ''earmarked funding may increase the quantity of publications but decrease the quality of the publications and the performance of earmarked funding is lower than that from using peer-reviewed funding.'' Indications are that academic earmarks crowd out spending on competitive peer-reviewed grants, at least in the short run. The competitive merit-based system that has financed most academic research since World War II is probably one reason the United States has been pre-eminent in science and higher education. If academic earmarks continue to grow at an exponential rate, this system could be in jeopardy. Slowing the growth of academic earmarks would require a concerted effort by American universities to shun the practice, or a new consensus in Congress to finance academic research only through the competitive merit-based process. The Association of American Universities, a | The Farm-Subsidy Model of Financing Academia |
1672239_1 | workers labored into the night yesterday, carefully removing the unstable parts of the wall, one section at a time. ''We could just push this thing over onto the Henry Hudson and make a mess, which we don't want to do,'' said Mr. Burney. ''We're doing this as gingerly as we can.'' After the demolition, about half the wall will remain, he said. Engineers have placed motion sensors along the rest of the wall to detect any vibrations. ''We haven't seen any motion yet,'' Mr. Burney said. ''If we continue to see no motion, we'll be confident the wall is stable.'' At a midday news conference, Mr. Bloomberg said he expected the highway traffic to be ''back in business at an adequate level'' by Monday. He said that engineers had not determined what caused the collapse of the privately owned wall. ''We have big equipment cutting back the dirt to reduce the angle of the slope, so that nothing slides, and our plans are then to put barriers up in case any rocks do fall down,'' the mayor said. In addition to keeping the slope under 45 degrees, workers will place plastic sheets over the exposed dirt to keep out moisture, Mr. Burney said. On Thursday, the city's Department of Environmental Protection shut off a water main running along Riverside Drive. Some residents of 1380 Riverside Drive, an apartment tower south of the collapse, were not allowed to return home last night. About 10 workers from the Design and Construction Department were at the site, along with workers from two contractors, Grace Industries and the Trocom Construction Corporation. Even after the dirt is cleared away and the remainder of the wall stabilized, rebuilding the wall will be costly and technically difficult. Hoe I. Ling, a geotechnical engineer at Columbia University, said the methods used in 1908, when the wall was built, fall far short of modern standards. ''Nowadays, we would not allow a retaining wall to be this high,'' he said. A redesign of the wall might include horizontal layers of polymer sheets, as well as steel and concrete stakes driven into the soil, all to enhance the structure's integrity. While engineers were reluctant to speculate on the cause of the collapse, several noted that the composition of the soil -- whether it is granular, like sand, or more cohesive, like clay -- could affect the extent to which it absorbs | City Pushing To Clear The Debris By Monday |
1671313_2 | this technology, we can start to understand what is an event and what is normal. We're recognizing more and more how different processes in the environment operate at different frequencies. To comprehend that, you need to take measurements all the time.'' Scientists hope to learn more about soil contaminants, land changes, water flow, invasive species, ocean cycles, continent formation, the places atmospheric carbon are stored, the reasons that volcanoes erupt and the ways viruses and gene fragments move through the environment. Motes have custom-designed computer chips and sensors and are wireless and powered by batteries or solar cells, allowing scientists to use them in remote places and to move them around. Networks of them, and their larger cousins, are envisioned as dotting swaths of North America and running through the waters of the West Coast from California to Canada. Some sites are to be permanent, with networks recording data for long periods, unlike summer field studies or two-week ocean research voyages. Such continuity is considered vital for better understanding how humans are altering the planet. ''It's a sea change across a whole range of fields,'' said Dr. Robert S. Detrick, a senior scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution on Cape Cod. ''The objective is long-term investigation of temporal, climate or human impact. It's a big change.'' Behind the new wave lies the miniaturization of electronics and the development of new materials that allow ever smaller radios, computers, sensors and batteries. Another factor is the National Science Foundation, a federal agency that finances basic research at colleges and universities. In the past few years, officials and experts say, the science foundation has spent more than $100 million to foster planning and research on the new sensor networks, and it foresees more than $1 billion in large ecological projects, mainly observatories. ''You've got a convergence in these very quickly advancing technical areas,'' said Dr. Filbert J. Bartoli, a program director at the science foundation. ''That gives you an opportunity for really impressive advances in sensor systems.'' The Defense Department is another factor. In the 1990's, its Advanced Research Projects Agency financed university scientists to shrink computerized modules for many kinds of sensors down to Lilliputian size -- in one case smaller than a penny. The team named them motes and smart dust. Demand for the devices grew so fast that in 2002 the leader of the group, Dr. Kris Pister of | A Web of Sensors, Taking Earth's Pulse |
1671423_2 | with the hostess. ''If you stand there and look disappointed enough, she'll take your card and swipe it,'' said Patricia Herrmann, a senior, who got in fair and square on Wednesday as a guest. Yale officials credit Alice Waters, the innovative chef from Berkeley, Calif., for dreaming up the sustainable food project four years ago when her daughter Fanny became a freshman at Yale and they discovered the steam tables. Early on, the like-minded people Ms. Waters recruited to get the project off the ground turned a vacant lot into a lush vegetable garden that doubles as their laboratory and helps students ''get their hands dirty,'' said Melina Shannon-DiPietro, an associate director of the project. The group also oversaw a composting experiment to see if students would pitch in by scraping their plates. The three-meal-a-day rollout came in September 2003, just in time to make sure that hundreds of tailgaters at that year's home Harvard-Yale football game feasted on grass-fed burgers and organic beer. The ever-changing menu reflects Ms. Waters's philosophy that people and communities thrive when meals consist of locally produced, seasonal ingredients, rather than food that is shipped long distance or processed so it keeps. She also advocates using organic ingredients and production methods that keep the environment sound. On Friday, she said she would still like to see the approach become ''part of the experience of every child who goes to Yale.'' At Yale, the project's two associate directors, Josh Viertel and Ms. Shannon-DiPietro, both 27 and friends from their Harvard undergraduate days, try not to be doctrinaire. Students are offered fair-trade coffee -- hoping to provide higher wages to the laborers who pick the beans -- hormone-free and antibiotic-free milk from cows that are allowed to graze, and fresh-cut potato chips from organic potatoes grown in Connecticut. But diners can also gorge on Hershey's chocolate syrup, sodas and sports drinks. ''There'd be a rebellion if they ran out of blue Gatorade,'' Ms. Herrmann said. Mr. Viertel, who worked as a shepherd and farmer before coming to Yale, said the philosophy is to add rather than to take away. ''We don't want students to feel that eating well is suffering,'' he said. Of course, there are adjustments. Tori Truscheit, a Berkeley College resident, said she now grasps how quickly the growing season for corn and tomatoes fades ''when it's winter and you're eating squash all the time.'' | A Dining Hall Where the Students Try to Sneak In; Cuisine at Yale's Berkeley College Puts a Healthful Flair Into Institutional Fare |
1674538_4 | the seat of the Episcopal Diocese of New York. ''We had started on a plan to repair the wall well before the collapse.'' After the collapse, workers removed trees that might have put pressure on the section that gave way, Mr. Katz said. They also shored up the wall with dirt. The cathedral plans to replace the wall, which was built before 1915, with a modern reinforced-concrete structure that will cost ''several millions of dollars,'' Mr. Katz said. It is awaiting a required city approval for a stone facade that will cover it. On 153rd Street near Broadway, a stone wall alongside the Trinity Church Cemetery and Mausoleum, established in 1842 and the burial site of the wildlife artist John James Audubon, has several trees sprouting from wide gaps in it. ''These trees are not supposed to be growing there,'' said Professor Ling of Columbia, who examined the walls at the request of The Times. ''As the roots become bigger and bigger, they will push the stones away. The worst-case scenario is that the stones start falling down.'' He added: ''This is probably the first wall that I've seen with trees there. This is rare.'' In the last two months, Trinity Church, the Episcopal parish at Broadway and Wall Street, hired an engineering firm, the LZA Technology Division of the Thornton-Tomasetti Group, to assess the wall at the cemetery. ''I go there on a regular basis, and I don't know that I've seen anything that would indicate the trees have caused an unsafe condition,'' said John J. Ambrosini, the director of facilities for the parish. ''But we do hire consultants and experts on this area to advise us on that.'' In other parts of the city, fragile retaining walls can be annoyances and may pose safety risks. Southeast of Crotona Park, in the Bronx, a 10-foot-long wall, painted battleship gray, holds in the bare dirt yard between 1464 Southern Boulevard, a vacant shell of a building, and 1466 Southern Boulevard, where Heather Calderon, 29, lives on the ground floor. The wall is covered with seemingly haphazard patches of concrete. Two plastic pipes protrude from its surface. Weeds line the base of the wall, where the concrete surface has broken away from the rough stone and mortar beneath. ''I've seen small pieces fall from the wall,'' Ms. Calderon said. ''Water leaks out when it rains. There's a lot of dirt in | In Exam of 126 Walls, Cracks, Bulges and Leaks |
1674472_4 | is widely accepted and even considered a smart career move by many job seekers and employers. While she finds nothing unethical about helping a job seeker put together a résumé, she says that hiring someone to write the document blurs the line between what is and is not original work. Mr. Hansen, who in addition to his jobs Web site offers an online writing service called Quintessential Résumés and Cover Letters, said, ''It's possible to create a flawless document and a false image.'' ''When hiring a résumé consultant, my advice is consider credentials and testimonials. I've seen people pay a lot of money and get an inferior product. Above all, buyer beware.'' That has not been a problem for Mark Shelley, 41, a vice president for sales support at Harcourt Achieve, an educational publisher in Austin, Tex., who has stuck with the same résumé service since he graduated from college in 1988. Mr. Shelley, an English major, said he was not good at assessing his own skills or writing business cover letters. ''It's very difficult as an individual to be objective about your own career,'' he said. ''To have a skilled outsider look at your work from an objective point of view is helpful.'' John Challenger, chief executive of Challenger, Gray & Christmas, an outplacement firm based in Chicago, said the typical job searcher focused too much attention on résumé and cover letters. He says he has found that ''wordsmithing'' cover letters to match every ad is a not a good use of time and that résumés do not always open doors. The reality, he says, is that many cover letters go unread and that résumés are often put into large databases and eliminated if they do not contain certain words or phrases. He encourages job seekers to network, respond to job ads and even try phoning potential employers directly. Still, most employees will use résumés and cover letters as their introduction to future employers. And specialists say that sample résumés and cover letters can be useful to inspire ideas for individualized documents. The University of Texas career services Web site offers a clear warning to students and alumni about copying material. ''Please do not copy the letters verbatim,'' it said. ''Copying these letters could have a negative impact if your classmates use the same letter to the same organization. This has happened. So don't let it happen to you.'' | Want Your Letter to Stand Out? Here's a Tip: Write It Yourself |
1674464_1 | product can be cut into tiny pieces without becoming a watery mess. That chopability led the company to name the product the Fresh Salsa, aimed at customers who prefer to top their tortilla chips with a condiment that approximates the look and feel of newly picked tomatoes, rather than marinara. Burpee, based in Warminster, Pa., was certainly aware of the nation's growing appetite for salsa before proceeding with the product's development. From 2001 through 2003, annual sales of Mexican sauces -- a category that includes salsa, picante sauce and taco sauce -- grew more than 5 percent, to $935 million, according to the research company Mintel Consumer Intelligence. To broaden the Fresh Salsa's appeal beyond devotees of Mexican cuisine, Burpee also decided to emphasize the tomato's suitability for bruschetta, another dish in which firm tomato cubes are desirable. Once Mr. Ball gave the go-ahead, extensive testing on the Fresh Salsa plant commenced at locations nationwide, to ensure that the tomato could grow in various climates. Fertility tests were conducted to check whether the ''mother'' fruit -- those from which the seeds are culled and sold -- could produce in adequate numbers. (The Fresh Salsa mothers usually produce 100 to 500 seeds a tomato.) Researchers also monitored ''seedling vigor,'' an industry term referring to how many germinated seeds turn into actual plants. Mr. Ball said the original Fresh Salsa tomato was developed by California Hybrids, a company under contract with Burpee, but he would not divulge exactly where the mothers were being raised. ''A good farming location is every bit like a mine,'' he said, noting that the best fruits and vegetables will grow in only a handful of ''meteorologically stable'' places. The Fresh Salsa seeds, which sell for $4.95 for a pack of 30, have been available from Burpee's mail-order catalog since January. The time from planting to harvest is about 75 days; Mr. Ball said that gardeners who sow the seeds by the end of May should be digging into homemade salsa around the start of the college football season. Alas, pigskin fans who don't grow their own will have to settle for store-bought salsa, because Burpee has no plans to market the product to industrial customers. The Fresh Salsa tomato may be able to withstand a chef's knife, but it's still no match for the giant processing machines at a Tostitos or Old El Paso factory. THE GOODS | Put This on Your Tortilla Chip |
1674651_12 | one point her parents found her curled in a ball in the laundry room, her eyes crammed shut and her hands over her ears. Sehic mentioned to Maury's parents that the strep might be the cause of her symptoms. She prescribed a longer course of antibiotics, to eliminate any lingering strep bacteria, which might signal the body to create more antibodies. The O.C.D. went away. A year and a half later, Maury got strep throat again, and the O.C.D. symptoms returned. She is now taking prophylactic penicillin, an approach that is also controversial. ''It is not proven that it will help her, but it is likely that it will, so we are trying,'' Sehic says. As Pandas was becoming widely known, and as doctors began using antibiotics as a first salvo against obsession, there was ever more research under way. Swedo was a co-author of 30 journal articles between 1998 and 2005. Across the country other lab groups took up the subject as well, and there are dozens more publications in which Swedo played no role. Some of these merely confirmed the existence of the subgroup Swedo had described. Other studies were designed to take knowledge of Pandas to the next level -- from description to proof. What Swedo had done was identify a group in which two things were true: O.C.D. developed suddenly, and the children had evidence of recent strep. But that does not prove that the strep caused the O.C.D. Nearly all of science is a search for cause and effect -- that A made B happen, that C made B stop. The bane of all science is coincidence. For example, a notable percentage of children develop their first signs of autism soon after a vaccination, and it is tempting to blame the shot for the symptoms. But autism as a rule tends to show itself during the years when children are also scheduled to receive fairly regular immunizations. So the odds are good that the two events will be temporally linked. Separating correlation from causation is where every research road becomes bumpy. ''It's been more complicated to follow up on this than we ever thought it was going to be,'' Rapoport says. There have been studies with results that were remarkably clear-cut -- the plasmapheresis trials, for instance. Plasmapheresis, also known as therapeutic plasma exchange, is essentially a cleansing of the blood, somewhat like dialysis. If | Can You Catch Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder? |
1674487_0 | AS an object of modern surveillance, e-mail is both reassuring and troubling. It is a potential treasure trove for investigators monitoring suspected terrorists and other criminals, but it also creates the potential for abuse, by giving businesses and government agencies an efficient means of monitoring the attitudes and activities of employees and citizens. Now the science of e-mail tracking and analysis has been given a unlikely boost by a bitter chapter in the history of corporate malfeasance -- the Enron scandal. In 2003, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission posted the company's e-mail on its Web site, about 1.5 million messages. After duplicates were weeded out, a half-million e-mails were left from about 150 accounts, including those of the company's top executives. Most were sent from 1999 to 2001, a period when Enron executives were manipulating financial data, making false public statements, engaging in insider trading, and the company was coming under scrutiny by regulators. Because of privacy concerns, large e-mail collections had not previously been made publicly available, so this marked the first time scientists had a sizable e-mail network to experiment with. ''While it's sad for the people at Enron that this happened, it's a gold mine for researchers,'' said Dr. David Skillicorn, a computer scientist at Queen's University in Canada. Scientists had long theorized that tracking the e-mailing and word usage patterns within a group over time -- without ever actually reading a single e-mail -- could reveal a lot about what that group was up to. The Enron material gave Mr. Skillicorn's group and a handful of others a chance to test that theory, by seeing, first of all, if they could spot sudden changes. For example, would they be able to find the moment when someone's memos, which were routinely read by a long list of people who never responded, suddenly began generating private responses from some recipients? Could they spot when a new person entered a communications chain, or if old ones were suddenly shut out, and correlate it with something significant? There may be commercial uses for the same techniques. For example, they may enable advertisers to do word searches on individual e-mail accounts and direct pitches based on word frequency. ''Will you let your e-mail be mined so some car dealer can send information to you on car deals because you are talking to your friends about cars?'' asks Dr. Michael Berry, a | Ideas & Trends; Enron Offers An Unlikely Boost To E-Mail Surveillance |
1671168_3 | aluminum finishes does not necessarily mean there is more metal in the car, any more than the return of chrome to auto exteriors did. New techniques for exactly matching colors and patterns make it possible to produce plastic interior trim pieces that look like aluminum or other substances. Industrial surfaces -- like the raised pattern of diamond-plate steel or the polished swirls of vintage instrument panels -- are frequently, and convincingly, imitated. New finishes are applied by new methods. ''Manufacturers are taking advantages of advances in both film and graphics,'' said Mr. Vasilash. ''What we're talking about is basically printing an image onto a piece of polymer.'' Lincoln is choosing materials it hopes will reach a new type of customer -- a younger, wealthier group than, say, Ford buyers. Aluminum and lighter shades of wood on the 2006 Zephyr, for instance, are thought to appeal to those who also like designs from Apple, Swatch, Banana Republic and Kenneth Cole. ''We are aiming for a crispness and look of technology in materials,'' Mr. Reichman said. Only recently have drivers encountered details like the tortoise shell effect on the steering wheel of Chrysler's 300. The material evokes eyeglasses as well as 1930's cigarette cases, lighters and pipes. Not every driver will catch such references. Even the appeal of leather is not universal. Mercedes-Benz responded to the concerns of animal rights advocates by announcing it would offer leather-free versions of its cars. Mr. Chergosky, the Scion designer, pointed out that leather and wood have traditionally been used to distinguish luxury models from midprice cars, but techniques that have made it possible to replicate wood or metal at lower cost have removed the distinction. ''The luxury buyer sets the material trends in the automotive world,'' he said. ''Wood will always play a part,'' Mr. Chergosky said. ''But we are moving from traditional burl to modern grained wood, figured maples and ebonies. The new woods let you feel the grain and the high gloss -- the woods are more like in Scandinavian furniture or the rosewood in an Eames chair.'' Now the market is ripe for someone to introduce a new luxury material. ''Ten years ago it was metal,'' Mr. Chergosky said. ''Next is what? Recycled something? Cork? Copper?'' ''The next big idea is out there. It will be an honest application of a familiar material in an unconventional way.'' Autos on Monday | Design | AUTOS ON MONDAY/Design; A Wealth of Materials That Say 'Material Wealth' |
1671178_1 | cases, entire nations will disappear; a harbinger of this is Tuvalu in the Pacific, whose government has asked Australia and New Zealand to accept its citizens as the sea swallows their island. What we can do to prevent this is limited: the world's oceans have an enormous amount of what is called thermal inertia -- a phenomenon that means that the effects of climactic changes are manifested very slowly. The cumulative impact of the past 150 years or so of greenhouse gases emitted during industrial development is only now starting to warm the planet, and that warming will continue long after we have created sensible policies to reduce greenhouse gases. So no matter what we do, a wave of climate change exiles is inevitable. One option for dealing with this is to tighten our borders and inure ourselves to the exiles' cries for help. A more sensible, and just, approach is for the top greenhouse gas emitters -- including China and India -- to grant entry to the up to 200 million people who could lose their homes to rising seas by 2080. How many should go where? Under our formula, the top cumulative emitter, the United States, would absorb 21 percent of the climate-change exiles a year; the smallest of the 20 major emitters, Venezuela, would absorb less than 1 percent. If such a program were to start in 2010, the United States, for example, would have to be prepared to accept 150,000 to a half-million immigrants a year for the next 70 years or so (to put that in context, the United States now has one million legal immigrants annually). Accepting these immigrants could actually benefit the host countries; many of them face a demographic crisis with a shrinking labor force and growing numbers of retirees. The rising tide from climate change will not create the same conditions everywhere. While people in rich countries would generally be able to protect themselves and their property with seawalls, insurance and good warning systems, the effect of warming will be calamitous for poor countries. A solution like the one we've suggested may be a relatively painless, yet humanitarian way to deal with one of the devastating effects of a warming planet. Op-Ed Contributors Sujatha Byravan is the president of the Council for Responsible Genetics. Sudhir Chella Rajan is the head of the Global Politics and Institutions Program at the Tellus Institute. | Before the Flood |
1671242_0 | Richard Wagner set his fantastical world of Valkyries, gnomes and giants along the Rhine, not the Amazon. But this is a city with a long history of thinking large and even outlandishly, which is how the Amazonas Opera Festival here has ended up staging Wagner's sprawling four-part ''Ring of the Nibelungen'' cycle in the heart of the world's biggest rain forest. Adding to the grandeur and novelty of the occasion is the fact that the site chosen for the performances is the celebrated Teatro Amazonas, a short stroll from the river. In Werner Herzog's film ''Fitzcarraldo,'' the title character undertakes a mad journey across the Amazon in hopes of reaching Manaus in time to see Caruso sing at the lavish opera house that the local rubber barons have built to entertain themselves. ''I've done a lot of 'Rings,' and this is definitely not your ordinary situation,'' said Maria Russo, a soprano originally from Rome, N.Y., who has been cast as Brünnhilde. ''It's extreme, and when I first came to Manaus in 2002, it was definitely a very big new experience for me. Even now, it sometimes seems amazing that we are actually doing this here.'' In fact, the two complete stagings of the cycle, which began Saturday night and are scheduled to conclude on May 19, mark the first time that Wagner's most renowned and challenging work has been produced and performed in Brazil. The significance of the event has thus attracted opera devotees not just from Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, nearly 2,000 miles to the south, but also from Europe and North America. Jonathan Evans, for example, is a 22-year-old student from Winter Haven, Fla., who has been an opera buff since he turned 13. He was on an Amazon cruise with his parents, Jim and Sonya, when they learned of the festival and its ambitious program and jumped at the opportunity to see Wagner along the great river. ''I've got a 'Ring' recording, the Met version with James Levine and Kathleen Battle,'' he said. ''But to be able to actually see part of the cycle in this incredible place, and for only $20 a ticket'' -- the best seats in the house -- ''how can you pass that up?'' Compared with ''Ring'' cycles staged in Europe or North America, the version being performed here is, of necessity, both low-budget and low-tech. Even with corporate sponsors, the | Adventures in Opera: A 'Ring' in the Rain Forest |
1669563_0 | Genetically modified rice could bring huge benefits to Chinese farmers, lowering their costs, improving harvest yields and greatly reducing the use of pesticides, according to a report published in the journal Science last week. The study, conducted by American and Chinese scientists who have long backed the crops, comes as the Chinese government is deciding whether to approve the sale of genetically modified rice, which would make China the first nation to adopt biotechnology crops in one of the world's leading food staples. It also comes just weeks after Greenpeace advocates said that a group of ''rogue scientists'' experimenting with genetically modified rice illegally allowed the rice to seep into the food system. Backers of genetically modified crops -- who insist there is no scientific proof of health threats -- hope that if China approves the altered rice, that endorsement might alleviate health and environmental concerns. In China, genetically modified rice is approved for use only in designated experiments. Greenpeace advocates said two weeks ago that they had purchased bags of the rice in seed markets, and called on the government to stop the rice from spreading more widely into the food supply. Greenpeace said the rice could possibly be harmful, as its long-term effects were unknown. The Chinese government said it was investigating whether the rice entered the food supply in Hubei Province, a rice-producing region. The Science study did not address whether genetically modified rice could be harmful to people if eaten. But it did say the rice was probably better for farmers: genetically modified rice cut pesticide use by as much as 80 percent. The altered rice has a gene that acts as its own insecticide. Reduced pesticide use would allow farm incomes to rise, the study said. ''We estimate that if 90 percent of the farmers plant G.M. rice, then the annual agricultural income of China will increase by $4 billion,'' said Huang Jikun, an author of the paper and the director of the Agriculture Policy Research Center at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing. Some experts, however, say the Chinese government may not approve genetically modified rice this year because of safety concerns. ''They are trying to be very thorough in their investigation,'' said Carl Pray, an author of the Science study. INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS | Modified Rice May Benefit China Farms, Study Shows |
1669511_4 | five years, and once it does, it's hard to get rid of. Why don't we prevent that by doing routine maintenance with Rituxan?'' I eventually won that round. Q. Did some of your doctors really consider you the patient from hell? How did this happen? A. Some felt that way. Sandra Horning was supportive, and whenever Terry and I convinced her of an idea, she tried to help. For instance, we argued very strenuously that they should use a modern microbiological technique, P.C.R., polymerase chain reaction, to keep track of the number of cancer cells in my blood. With P.C.R., diagnosticians can detect when cancer cells are increasing. What they normally use is CT scans, which detect problems much later on. P.C.R. is far more sensitive. My doctors initially disagreed. P.C.R. costs thousands for every test. We won that one, too. We now test my blood with P.C.R. every other month and go back to Rituxan, when it finds cancer cells are increasing. Q. Did you have radiation therapy? A. At first, I didn't want to. Who wants a Hiroshima dose of radiation? Sandra Horning countered, ''If a few cancer cells have survived everything else we've done, radiation will be an alternative kill mechanism.'' So we did what scientists call decision analysis. You ask, What can happen and what are the survival odds? I'd ask her questions and she'd give me her best information. At the end of the calculations, we figured that radiation boosted my survival chances by about 20 percent versus the side effect of a 5 to 7 percent chance of leukemia, delayed 5 to 10 years. This was a no-brainer. Once I understood the odds, I was willing to stand in front of a cyclotron, smile and welcome every killing ray. Q. How's your health today? A. I'm four years out and still kicking. Not long ago, we celebrated my 60th birthday. At Stanford, they've modified some of the protocols that Sandra Horning, Terry and I designed for my case. What I've learned is that cancer shouldn't be treated with a one-size-fits-all protocol. You need to be able to negotiate and individualize. Now, I was lucky. I had good health insurance and access to Stanford University Hospital, the exact right place for this lymphoma. Also, I was a Stanford professor. I could approach the docs and say, ''Professor to professor, this is what I think we | Lessons of Climatology Apply as a Vicious Front Moves In |
1669617_0 | To the Editor: The Danish study finding no relationship between cellphone use and brain tumors comes as no surprise (''Disconnecting Phones and Tumors,'' April 26). From what I've observed of most users -- be they driving; riding on trains, buses or planes; walking down the street; or in places like libraries, theaters and art galleries, even houses of worship -- it's a simple matter: no brains, no risk of brain tumors. Jerry Buerer Wausau, Wis. | No Cellphone Surprise |
1669628_1 | of millions of dollars from the government to address the security concerns. The decision by the Wall Street firm of Goldman Sachs to shelve plans for building a headquarters near ground zero was another setback. And to this day, three and a half years after the destruction of the two towers, a number of the architects, engineers and designers involved in the rebuilding effort have complained privately that a lack of creativity and communication still besets the project. In an interview, Mr. Rampe said his decision to resign -- he will take a job with Ace Ltd., an international insurance company -- was unconnected to the recent developments with the project. And several state officials and others involved in the rebuilding said that his exit had been rumored for months, but that its timing was less than ideal. ''If I felt that things were off-track, they would have to take me kicking and screaming out of here,'' Mr. Rampe said. But the news of the turnover at the top of the agency in charge of ground zero's rebuilding surprised and concerned many. Mr. Rampe's resignation will be ''a blow to continuity, until we know who is going to take charge, and where we go from here,'' said Thomas Rogér, a member of the development corporation's Families Advisory Council, whose daughter Jean was a flight attendant on the plane that hit the north tower. Others were struck that Mr. Rampe would depart at such a precarious time for the Freedom Tower and the entire redevelopment effort, given its importance to Mr. Rampe's political patron, Mr. Pataki. ''This resignation has come too soon,'' said Frederic M. Bell, executive director at the New York Chapter of the American Institute of Architects. ''It's going to be hard for someone new to understand the critical intersection of the memorial and the cultural facilities, and how to make that happen in real time.'' The recent confusion about security concerns had led to considerable finger-pointing among state and city officials. And yesterday, with Mr. Rampe's resignation, the question of blame flared again. Sheldon Silver, the New York State Assembly speaker, criticized Mr. Pataki and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg for what he called ''a total lack of coordination, a lack of leadership'' in the rebuilding effort, saying City Hall and others had been too distracted by their efforts to build a stadium in Manhattan. And Senator Charles E. | A Top Official At Ground Zero Quits His Post |
1676640_0 | Even the government of Brazil seemed shocked by the news that despite efforts to curb deforestation -- including a $140 million package of conservation measures announced last year -- the destruction of the world's largest tropical forest, the Amazon, proceeds apace. In the 12-month period ending last August, farming and logging, much if it illegal, destroyed 10,000 square miles of forest, an area almost the size of Massachusetts. This was the biggest one-year loss since 1995, when the Amazon shrank by about 11,000 square miles. Most of the Amazon lies in Brazil, but its destruction has been a matter of global concern ever since the 1980's, when satellite photographs documenting widespread burning of the forest first appeared. Like tropical forests everywhere, the Amazon is a storehouse of biodiversity, a source of medicines and an important antidote to global warming. Healthy forests absorb greenhouse gases. Blazing forests increase them. The struggle to save the Amazon has claimed many victims, notably Chico Mendes, an environmentalist shot to death by two ranchers in 1988, and Dorothy Stang, an American-born nun and advocate for the forest and for peasant farmers who was gunned down earlier this year. Brazilian authorities have been intermittently responsive, setting aside forest preserves, ending subsidies to cattle ranchers and passing laws requiring landowners to leave much of their forest land untouched. But the Amazon seems largely immune to law, especially in a country where there are not nearly enough police to enforce the rules, where economic growth seems to supersede everything and where powerful local politicians tend to have more influence than the national government. Right now, for instance, the biggest single threat to the Amazon is the explosive growth of soybean farming in the state of Mato Grosso on the forest's southern fringe, fueled mainly by soaring demand in China and Europe. As it happens, Mato Grosso's governor, Blairo Maggi, is also its soybean king -- o rei da soja -- who has been quoted as saying that a 40 percent increase in deforestation in Mato Grosso ''doesn't mean anything at all, and I don't feel the slightest guilt over what we are doing here.'' There are people in the Brazilian government, in particular its environmental minister, Marina Silva, who believe there are better ways to assist Brazil's economy than by turning a valuable rain forest into cattle feed, which is essentially what Mr. Maggi is doing. But they | The Amazon at Risk |
1676637_0 | The next trade dogfight is gearing up on Capitol Hill, this time over a trade pact with six Central American countries that altogether have a combined economy smaller than Connecticut's. The Central American Free Trade Agreement, or Cafta, would open up trade between the United States and El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica and the Dominican Republic. It's far from a perfect trade pact, if any such thing ever existed. But Cafta still deserves to be approved. Opponents include many Democrats, labor unions and America's sugar industry, and some of their arguments are much better than others. One of the most powerful lobbying groups, the sugar industry, complains that Cafta would bring 109,000 tons of sugar imports into the country every year to compete with the local product. This is true, and to that we say, ''Bring it on.'' The American sugar beet industry is one of the most coddled farm sectors in the world, and that's saying something. American consumers are paying inflated prices for sugar, and it is unfortunate that Cafta won't do more to redress that situation. As it is, the new Central American sugar would account for only 1 percent of consumption here. A complaint that is far more worrisome is that the Bush administration didn't push the Central American countries to link labor rights more forcibly to the trade agreement. The pact does include a provision for fining countries that are not enforcing labor laws, but the administration could have done better. Nevertheless, Cafta would still be a win for Central American workers. More factory jobs in these poor countries would do wonders to provide low- or no-income people with options. Denying poor people in Central America the benefits of better access to the American market is certainly not the way to lift them out of poverty. The most compelling argument against Cafta, however, is that it would siphon away American manufacturing jobs to Central America. That is happening anyway -- industries like textile manufacturing will continue to migrate to lower-wage nations. The economic reality of our increasingly interconnected world is that countries are best off if they lower trade barriers and try to specialize in producing the goods in which they have a comparative advantage. Places like the United States and Europe have no business trying to compete with El Salvador over who can make the cheapest T-shirts. Poor countries have low-wage labor | A New Battle Over Free Trade |
1676569_0 | As long as I was in Nova Scotia, I went looking for dories, old-fashioned boats built on this island for cod fishing on the Grand Banks. I hadn't come to Nova Scotia for dories. I was on the island to attend a meeting about tsunamis, and the drive from Halifax to Lunenberg was a side trip to indulge an interest in old wooden work boats. The dory connection goes back a few years, when I started thinking about buying or building one of these sturdy high-sided fishing and work boats with a long history in the Northeast. A 15-foot dory can hold two men and 2,000 pounds of cod, and handle rougher seas than I would ever want to row in. Dories were used up and down the Northeast coast for all sorts of fishing and work. The romance of a sturdy fisherman in rough seas is captured in Winslow Homer paintings, including ''The Fog Warning.'' Those are halibut, not cod, in the boat, but the boat is a classic dory. My fascination came from nostalgia and a distaste for modern technology on a grand and small scale, from factory-size trawlers that catch and freeze cod by the hundreds of tons, to jet skis and noisy outboard motors. Even worse are the electronic shadow versions of reality that distract from direct contact with the world. Not that I or anyone else would use such a boat for its intended purpose. Any work boat is motorized today, and there aren't enough cod for fishing the Grand Banks. There are rowing and sailing dories around, used for fun, and often built in garages by amateurs. In short, they are the technological equivalent of an endangered species that lives only in zoos, having lost its habitat. One old boat zoo is the Fisheries Museum of the Atlantic here. It has several sailing ships at the dock, and on the second floor, near a memorial room for fishermen lost at sea, a 15-foot dory is set up with all its old tackle, including tubs of fishing line with multiple hooks, all pulled in by hand. I would have spent some time poring over the boat even if there was nobody to talk about how it was used. But sitting next to it was Capt. Matthew Mitchell, whom the museum calls its ''shore captain.'' He started fishing for a living at age 14. In the | The Fish Are Few and the Fishermen Fewer, but the Dory Will Not Die |
1676561_0 | THE CLAIM -- Hair dye causes cancer. THE FACTS -- Hair salons everywhere can reassure their graying customers. For more than 30 years, scientists have warned that potent chemicals in hair dyes heighten the risk of developing cancer, but new research may now help to put those fears to rest. Much of the concern stems from studies conducted in the 1970's that showed that some ingredients in hair dyes could damage human cells and cause cancer in animals. Sales of the products began to slip when later studies found higher rates of breast, bladder and other cancers in people who dyed their hair regularly. But last week, a report in The Journal of the American Medical Association looked at 79 relevant studies and concluded that the evidence for a link was weak. In the studies, even people who colored their hair frequently or used strong permanent dyes that were thought to pose the most danger had no elevated risk of breast or bladder cancer. The researchers found a ''borderline increase'' in the risk of blood-related cancers, which include leukemia and non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. But they said the link was ''too weak to represent a major public health concern.'' Part of the reason for the range of findings over the years may be that the content of hair dyes has gradually changed. Some potential carcinogens were stripped from all dyes in the 70's, and others are used today only in minute quantities. THE BOTTOM LINE -- The evidence of a link between cancer and hair dyes is weak. ANAHAD O'CONNOR Really? | REALLY? |
1673280_0 | A day after the Bush administration warned North Korea against conducting a nuclear test, South Korea said Monday that it saw no clear evidence that the North was preparing to explode a weapon. Officials in South Korea, which resumed bilateral talks with North Korea on Monday, said they had not changed their position toward the North, rejecting for now harsher punitive actions sought by Washington. On Sunday, Stephen J. Hadley, President Bush's national security adviser, said the United States had seen ''some evidence'' that the North Koreans were preparing for a nuclear test and warned of penalties. ''Our government has made it clear there is not any evidence that North Korea would make a test in the future,'' said Lee Kyu Hyung, the spokesman for the South Korean Foreign Ministry. Song Min Soon, the deputy foreign minister and South Korea's lead negotiator on the North Korea nuclear issue, said in an interview with a South Korean news agency, Yonhap News, that the possibility of a nuclear test ''can range from one-tenth of 1 percent to 99 percent, and it looks as if Hadley's remark was made taking into consideration the most extreme circumstance.'' As Washington tries to unite participants in the six-party talks over the North's nuclear program -- stalled since last June -- fundamental differences have hardened. While the United States and Japan favor tougher measures, South Korea and China do not. Russia tends to share the South Korean and Chinese views. After North Korea declared last week that it had extracted weapons-grade fuel from a nuclear reactor, South Korea and China dismissed punitive options like economic sanctions. On Monday, in the first bilateral talks involving the two Koreas since summer, the South said it was prepared to offer a new proposal if the North returned to the six-party talks. But South Korea did not provide details. The offer underscored the fact that South Korea, though an ally of the United States, shares China's softer approach toward North Korea. In recent years the South has increased political, cultural and economic exchanges with the North to prevent a total collapse of the Communist government and nudge it toward Chinese-style reforms. For Seoul, managing its growing ties with the North and its alliance with an American administration hawkish on North Korea has become increasingly delicate. South Korean officials tend not to criticize Washington openly, as the Chinese do, but privately express | South Korea Says It Doubts That the North Plans an A-Test |
1673314_5 | breast cancer but not her chance of surviving it. The national study had a long and thorny path. There had been hints that women on low-fat diets might have better survival rates. Japanese women, for example, not only have a lower risk of getting breast cancer but also have better survival rates than Americans have. But other studies that followed women after their diagnoses found no effect of diet on cancer recurrence. And it was not clear why fat in the diet should matter, Dr. Chlebowski said, adding that there is no theory to explain why the fat a woman eats would lead to the recurrence of cancer in her breast. The best way to find out whether fat in the diet makes a difference would be to randomly assign thousands of cancer patients to follow, or not follow, a low-fat diet. But many investigators questioned whether it would even be possible to do such a study. Would women really adhere to their assigned diet for years on end and, in particular, would they stay with a diet so low in fat? Starting in 1983, the cancer institute began pilot studies asking whether a diet study was even feasible. They found that women would adhere to a low-fat diet and the formal randomized study began in 1994. It enrolled 2,437 postmenopausal women with early stage breast cancer. Of them, 975 were assigned to a diet so low in fat that, Dr. Chlebowski said, it was about as low as possible without being a vegetarian diet. They consumed on average 33.3 grams of fat a day. The 1,462 women in the control group, who were instructed to follow their usual diet, consumed 51.3 grams of fat a day. Not only was there a reduction in recurrence rates with the low-fat diet but also, to their surprise, the investigators noticed that women whose tumors were not fueled by estrogen appeared to have a better response to the diet than those whose tumors were fueled by estrogen. But statisticians questioned whether the difference between the two groups was not significant. Nonetheless, said Dr. Kramer, the result was ''biologically important'' because it indicated that diet could make a difference in cancer recurrence and that if it did, it affected both groups of women about the same. That meant its effect, if real, had nothing to do with estrogen, raising questions of why it occurred. | Study of Breast Cancer Patients Finds Benefit in Low-Fat Diets |
1675585_0 | At the bottom of the mountainous dunes once traversed by traders and pilgrims on the ancient Silk Road, Wang Qixiang stood with a camera draped around his neck. He was a modern-day pilgrim of sorts, a tourist. He and his wife had traveled by train more than 2,000 miles from eastern China to the forbidding emptiness of the Gobi Desert to glimpse at a famous pool of water known as Crescent Lake. They came because the lake has been rapidly shrinking into the desert sand, and they feared it might soon disappear. ''It is a miracle of the desert,'' said Mr. Wang, 67. In this desert oasis where East once met West and that is home to one of the world's greatest shrines to Buddhism, the water is disappearing. Crescent Lake has dropped more than 25 feet in the last three decades while the underground water table elsewhere in the area has fallen by as much as 35 feet. An ancient city that once served as China's gateway to the West, Dunhuang is now threatened by very modern demands. A dam built three decades ago to help local farming, combined with a doubling of the population, have overstressed a fragile desert hydrology that had been stable for thousands of years. ''I would call it an ecological crisis,'' said Zhang Mingquan, a professor at Lanzhou University who specializes in the region's hydrology. ''The problem is the human impact. People are overusing the amount of water that the area can sustain.'' Here as elsewhere in western China, the country's poorest region, the emphasis in recent decades has been on economic development at all costs. Isolated by the desert, Dunhuang has virtually no industry, so agriculture has dominated the local economy. In the 1970's, the government dammed the Dang River, which once flowed past the city, to provide better irrigation for farmland and to help relieve poverty. Farming did improve, but in a fashion that brought a larger burden: a desert oasis that had fewer than 100,000 people before the dam now has roughly 180,000. As more people arrived, the underground water table that is the city's main source of drinking water started dropping. The pressure now to preserve Dunhuang is amplified by the growing recognition of the city's major cultural and historic significance. The nearby Mogao Caves, painted with murals dating to the fourth century, were built by the monks who helped | A Crescent of Water Is Slowly Sinking Into the Desert |
1675608_0 | INTERNATIONAL A3-11 Bolton Confirmation Vote Delayed by Democrats Democrats forced the Senate to postpone a vote on John R. Bolton as ambassador to the United Nations, demanding that the White House first hand over classified information about Mr. Bolton's conduct that it has refused for weeks to provide. A1 Sectarian Violence in Iraq The violent deaths of a number of Sunnis is raising concerns that the bloodshed in Iraq may be shifting toward sectarian killings. A10 Iraq's defense and security ministers, in an effort to strike back at an insurgency that has hobbled the new government, said they would deploy thousands of troops to stage a search-and-arrest operation in Baghdad. A10 Iran on Track for W.T.O. The World Trade Organization announced it would start talks to admit Iran as a member, a reward for Tehran's agreement to continue to freeze its nuclear activities. A6 Abbas Meets With Bush President Bush praised the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, for what he called his commitment to democracy, and then reiterated that Israel had obligations it must fulfill as both sides work toward a peaceful future for the Middle East. A6 India's AIDS Challenge AIDS advocates warn that the threat of an AIDS pandemic in India, if not immediately tackled, could lead to greater devastation than that suffered by many African countries. A3 U.S. Embassy in Jakarta Closed The United States Embassy in Jakarta was closed because of what officials described as an unspecified security threat. But a Western counterterrorism official and a private security analyst said the decision was made after a diagram of the embassy and details of how to carry out an attack were posted on a Web site. A3 British Union Ends Boycott The largest university teachers' union in Britain, after hours of passionate and sometimes angry debate, voted in an emergency session to overturn its contentious boycott of two Israeli universities. A6 NATIONAL A14-21 Guards Mishandled Koran, Guantánamo Inquiry Finds An American military inquiry has uncovered five instances in which guards or interrogators at the Guantánamo Bay detention facility mishandled the Koran but found ''no credible evidence'' to substantiate contentions that the Islamic holy book was ever flushed down a toilet, the chief of the investigation said. A1 Legal Setback for DeLay Group A Texas judge ruled that the treasurer of a political action committee formed by Representative Tom DeLay, the House majority leader, broke campaign finance laws as | NEWS SUMMARY |
1672676_2 | full answer may prove complex. But the basic principles of a collapse are not hard to grasp. In structures of all types, water is public enemy No. 1. It seeps through hairline cracks and scampers by capillary action in any direction. At Castle Village, for instance, water seepage behind the wall could fatten the slope, while decreasing friction between soil particles. The whole mass would muscle against the stone wall. Meanwhile, the stone itself erodes. Constant water infiltration and freeze-thaw cycles fracture and weaken rock over the years. Even in steel structures, water causes havoc. It finds its way to columns and beams, rusting them and turning the steel to dust -- and the structure along with it. New Yorkers might take comfort in knowing that water has tormented the greatest of builders. ''Rain is always prepared to wreak mischief,'' wrote the 15th-century architect Leon Battista Alberti, ''by its subtlety it infiltrates, by softening it corrupts, and by its persistence it undermines the whole strength of the building, until it eventually brings ruin and destruction on the entire work.'' Whether rain-ravaged or otherwise, falling-down structures have a lively history. In 1902, the 324-foot-high Campanile of San Marco in Venice crumbled without warning. The brick-and-concrete structure was said to have been struck numerous times by lightning. (The tower was rebuilt, but with a modern structure.) Closer to home, in 1978, the roof of the Hartford Civic Center Arena caved in, hours after 5,000 people had been in the building cheering on a basketball game. Ice, snow and its unusual roof structure were blamed. Then there are more obvious triggers of collapse. Two years ago, the wall of a four-story Crown Heights apartment building sheared off, exposing residents' bedrooms en plein air like a theater set. A contractor, excavating next door, had dug too deeply and dislodged the building's foundation, officials said, sending the brick wall toppling into a construction pit. By some lights, all architecture is subject to unremitting decay. ''From the time a building is completed,'' lamented Architectural Record in 1949, ''its destruction begins.'' You find a scuff here, a dent there; soon the facade's in pieces, the roof needs work and the dump trucks pull up to the curb. Especially in New York City, where the walls are often a century old and the climate can be bruising, we inhabit our city only with a ceaseless, rearguard action of | What Goes Up |
1672363_1 | unchanged from the day in 1797 when the last doge took off his hat. We start with Venice because Venice is our home. The information network was born there, at almost precisely the moment that Columbus stepped into the New World. That event precipitated the slow decline of Venice as a maritime power. The opening of Atlantic trade routes eventually enabled Genoa to overtake Venice as a center of international trade. But in 1490, two years before the Italian explorer sailed into the Caribbean, something occurred in Venice that would transform the relationship of European minds to the world. Aldus Manutius founded the Aldine Press. Whether you are reading these words on the printed page or on a computer screen, your access to them is a consequence of that event. While Gutenberg is fairly credited with the invention of movable type, it was Manutius who devised the first mass-distribution system of the information age. The technology of humanism stems from him. Smaller typefaces, reduced page sizes, longer print runs, bulk marketing to universities: such innovations produced more than books. They also produced literacy. People had to learn how to read the texts they could now afford to buy. Literacy, in turn, produced independence of mind. People of moderate means now had access to the ideas of Aristotle, Plato, Herodotus, Aristophanes and other classical authors who made up the core of Aldine's list. The Inquisition was not pleased, but the Venetians didn't care as long as the inquisitors agreed to pay for all the books they planned to burn. But the inner life needs more than books. It also craves what psychologists call implicit learning: the attainment of insight that occurs when we're not consciously focused on an object of study. Implicit learning is contingent on context, or situation. Fleeting stimuli from the outer world gives rise to enduring perceptions from within. The Romantics celebrated the natural environment for its power to induce insight. Quite a few of them reviled cities for presenting so many distractions that reflection becomes impossible. The truth is that certain kinds of learning benefit from the distractions that cities offer. The concept of the flâneur, or city wanderer, is based upon this principle. While taking in the sights of Berlin, Paris or Vienna, the flâneur is secretly spying on the self. ''Death in Venice'' is a great spy story. Aroused by a ''personal and lyrical experience'' | The Empire Strikes Back |
1672363_2 | turn, produced independence of mind. People of moderate means now had access to the ideas of Aristotle, Plato, Herodotus, Aristophanes and other classical authors who made up the core of Aldine's list. The Inquisition was not pleased, but the Venetians didn't care as long as the inquisitors agreed to pay for all the books they planned to burn. But the inner life needs more than books. It also craves what psychologists call implicit learning: the attainment of insight that occurs when we're not consciously focused on an object of study. Implicit learning is contingent on context, or situation. Fleeting stimuli from the outer world gives rise to enduring perceptions from within. The Romantics celebrated the natural environment for its power to induce insight. Quite a few of them reviled cities for presenting so many distractions that reflection becomes impossible. The truth is that certain kinds of learning benefit from the distractions that cities offer. The concept of the flâneur, or city wanderer, is based upon this principle. While taking in the sights of Berlin, Paris or Vienna, the flâneur is secretly spying on the self. ''Death in Venice'' is a great spy story. Aroused by a ''personal and lyrical experience'' while visiting Venice in 1911, Thomas Mann set out to discover what he wanted and why he wanted it. He imagined that he wanted classicism, a style that stands for the official reality of the public realm. Like Palladio's facade for the church of San Giorgio Maggiore, classicism represents the restraint of feeling by harmonious proportion. Mann was less than careful in choosing what he wished for, however. The classical facade turned out to be a doorway to the realm of unmanageable passion where his protagonist would meet his death. The entrance into Venice opens a secret doorway into the self, and though Mann felt compelled by social convention to give his story the appearance of a tragic ending, there is no evidence that he regretted walking through the door. So perhaps he chose carefully after all. The story can also be read as a guidebook, a Baedeker of the threshold between our inner and outer worlds. For every step Mann takes in the world of reality, his private eye surveils an equal measure of his psyche. Punching through the membrane of the reassuringly familiar, the spy uncovers a previously hidden recess of the world within. The result is a | The Empire Strikes Back |
1672434_9 | surf, eat, sleep and wait to surf some more. In the morning the waves were mediocre and the water crowded, and the vibe around La Tica became surly. So we headed north to the fishing village of Astillero, where we hired two fishermen to deliver us to a remote beach. Even there, though, we ran into another group of Americans from a surf camp. We had the captain take us to another spot, and we got an hour alone on a big, unpredictable reef break. The next morning we went searching for an empty beach but were turned back by an armed guard and then by a dirt hill too steep for the microbus, and we settled instead for watching a cockfight in a small village we'd stumbled across. On our final day, we returned to Popoyo. Some of the residents of La Tica had moved on toward El Salvador, and as we were waxing our boards we saw a dozen surfers get out of the water. We paddled out to find only three others in the lineup. For the first time since we'd been in Nicaragua, there was no wind. The waves bulged out of the ocean like blown glass, so clean and symmetrical that you stopped in midpaddle, not wanting to ride or disturb them, but just watch them collapse effortlessly into foam as the droplets of spray rose off their backs like bubbles in champagne. John and Rich and I traded waves for an hour with the other three, dropping down the glassy faces and carving toward shore. It was the session you dream of when you set out for waves, where everything converges just right, and then, like a perfect wave or a mirage, dissipates the moment you catch it. Before long, the guys over at La Tica saw what we were getting, and their surfboards glinted in the sun as they crossed the beach to join us. But that was all right because we had to get on the road and make it to the airport anyway. I took a wave to shore and headed home. I was happy to know that the wave is out there, somewhere, that the elusive and receding green light still shimmers across the water, and that though you can never possess it completely, if you're willing to chase it you might one day get close enough to touch it | In Nicaragua, Chasing the Unsurfed Wave |
1672789_4 | accusing him of reneging on his promises to upgrade the apartments and make other improvements. Mr. Sonn had an apartment in the complex until he died in a plane crash in 2002. It was during the conversion that the new co-op shareholders first raised concerns about the wall they were inheriting, residents said. An engineering firm, Mueser Rutledge Consulting, made repairs, pinning the wall back to prevent it from shifting. Over the last decade, as minor repairs were performed to keep the wall's rocky surface from crumbling off, concerns were repeatedly raised. On July 13, 1998, Mr. Nadal, who works for the managing agent hired by the board, told the board that a structural engineer had ''determined that the wall is stable,'' according to minutes. ''The board approved a proposal to remove the vines and other foliage that may be causing damage to the wall and that inhibits a thorough inspection of the structure,'' according to the minutes. Soon after, an architectural firm concluded that the wall was ''in good condition'' but noted that ''some repair work is needed on parts of the wall and drainage system,'' according to minutes dated Oct. 22, 1998. Douglas Cutsogeorge, an officer at the firm, Cutsogeorge, Tooman & Allen Architects, declined to comment yesterday. Worries about the wall persisted. In April 1999, members of a local civic group, the West 181st Street Beautification Project, complained that large chunks of stone had struck parked cars. The co-op set up a scaffolding to protect pedestrians from falling debris. A co-op newsletter dated July 28, 2000, noted the board's intention ''to do some work'' on the wall. ''Sounding tests will be performed to determine weak spots, and loose mortar will be removed and replaced with new,'' it stated. About two years later, a third firm, specializing in geotechnical engineering, won a contract to monitor the wall. Last year, the firm, Langan Engineering and Environmental Services, installed a new drainage system behind the wall. Last month, the firm issued a dire warning. On April 28, residents received a letter detailing breaches in the wall, large sinkholes formed by water leaks and ''substantial movement'' in the section that ultimately collapsed. The firm approached the city on Wednesday about closing part of Riverside Drive to repair the wall, and scheduled a meeting at the site for Friday. The firm's president, David T. Gockel, did not respond to calls last week. | Officials Hope To Reopen 2 Traffic Lanes At Collapse Site |
1672778_0 | A drug now used to treat breast cancer might be able to prevent prostate cancer in men with a precancerous condition, doctors said here Saturday. Another study suggested that the widely used cholesterol-lowering drugs called statins might stave off breast cancer. But experts cautioned that more studies were needed before the drugs were prescribed to prevent prostate and breast cancer. ''We are not ready to recommend statins for those patients who do not have lipid abnormalities,'' said Dr. Vikas Khurana of Louisiana State University, an author of the statin study, referring to people with high cholesterol. The findings were discussed here at the annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology, a group of cancer specialists. The group, which is dedicated mainly to treating cancer, has recently acknowledged that preventing cancer could be every bit as important. The statin study analyzed the medical records of 40,000 women in the database of the Veterans Affairs medical system. It found that women who used statins were only half as likely to develop breast cancer as those who did not. But such studies looking back at medical records are not as reliable as clinical trials. The prostate cancer study was a randomized clinical trial involving 514 men with precancerous lesions analogous to polyps for colon cancer. The condition is called prostate intraepithelial neoplasia, or P.I.N. No effective treatment exists for the problem, which can be diagnosed only by a pathologist who examines prostate tissue removed in a biopsy. The condition does not always lead to prostate cancer, but men who have it are advised to undergo periodic blood tests and biopsies. In the study, 24.4 percent of those men who got a once-a-day tablet of toremifene developed prostate cancer after one year, less than the 31.2 percent of those who got a placebo. Toremifene is a breast cancer drug that is somewhat similar to tamoxifen in that it blocks the action of the hormone estrogen. Prostate cancer growth is fueled by the hormone testosterone and many treatments for the disease block that hormone. But those treatments, effectively chemical castration, cause loss of libido and other side effects. There is evidence that estrogen, normally thought of as the female hormone, also helps fuel prostate cancer growth. Dr. Mitchell S. Steiner, while he was professor of urology at the University of Tennessee, theorized that blocking estrogen might provide a treatment or a preventative with | Studies Find 2 Drugs May Prevent Cancer |
1672461_0 | In 2002, the Los Angeles architect Richard Neutra's landmark 1963 Palm Springs Modern Maslon House was bought for $2.45 million, then bulldozed within a week by its new owner. Mies van der Rohe's iconic glass-fronted Villa Tugendhat, completed in 1930, was restored in the mid-80's, but the restoration did more harm than good. Alvar Aalto's 1964 Kaufmann Conference Center, near the United Nations, narrowly escaped gutting by its Japanese owners, who hoped to turn the building into offices. And in Beirut, some of the midcentury towers along the formerly glamorous Corniche are still in disrepair. Modern architects dreamed of a radiant future, but their buildings have become an increasingly fragile record of the past. Is Modernism disappearing from the landscape it made? | Rescuing Modernism |
1670265_0 | Dr. Robert N. Colwell, a forester and specialist in remote sensing who helped adapt the military's aerial image-reading techniques to forestry, mapmaking, land planning, agriculture and other fields, died on April 14 in a hospital in Walnut Creek, Calif. He was 87 and lived in Walnut Creek. The cause was respiratory failure, his family said. Dr. Colwell, who was trained in plant physiology, taught at the University of California, Berkeley, for five decades. His interest in aerial images began in World War II, when he interpreted photographs in the South Pacific and taught others to do the same for naval intelligence. In the 1960's, using radar, infrared and other systems carried by satellites, he was able to accumulate vast amounts of biological data, detecting diseases in crops, moisture levels in soil and insect infestations in orchards and forests. In the 1970's, Dr. Colwell was a technical adviser for Project Radar Amazon, or Radam, in which Brazilian scientists used satellite-directed radar to help map a large area of the Amazon basin, despite the nearly constant rain and clouds that hampered ordinary aerial surveys. Dr. Dennis E. Teeguarden, an emeritus professor of forestry at Berkeley, said Dr. Colwell had been a ''productive and visionary scientist'' who had ''correctly foreseen the space program would be an incredible platform to supply information, greatly extending the power of remote sensing.'' In 1969, Dr. Colwell was appointed associate director of the Space Sciences Laboratory at Berkeley and coordinated a multicampus study of California's crops and natural resources using satellite images. In 1983, he edited the second edition of the ''Manual of Remote Sensing,'' a standard work in the field. Robert Neil Colwell was born in Star, Idaho. He earned his undergraduate degree and doctorate at Berkeley before joining the faculty there in 1947. He was appointed professor in 1957 and retired as an emeritus professor in 1983. Dr. Colwell attained the rank of rear admiral in the Naval Reserve and received the Bronze Star and Navy Commendation Medal. He was a remote-sensing consultant to the Bureau of Indian Affairs. In 1977, President Jimmy Carter awarded him the Legion of Merit. His wife, the former Betty Louise Larson, died in 2000. Dr. Colwell is survived by a daughter, Nancy Colwell Coronado of Benicia, Calif.; three sons, Dr. Arthur, of Lakeport, Calif., Dr. John, of Ann Arbor, Mich., and Robert, of Vienna, Va.; a sister, Arlene Tallman of | Robert N. Colwell, 87, Forester Who Studied Land From the Air |
1670313_3 | led by Dr. Bruce A. Wielicki of NASA's Langley Research Center in Virginia reports that measurements from the agency's Aqua satellite show a slight decrease in the amount of light reflected off Earth since 2000, which corresponds to a brightening on the surface. The NASA findings conflict with measurements, reported last year, suggesting that Earth had resumed dimming since 2000. Those measurements looked at the illumination of the dark side of the Moon by light reflected off Earth. Dr. Philip R. Goode, a professor of physics at the New Jersey Institute of Technology who was one of the researchers behind last year's report, said it was not clear why the findings differed so markedly. ''We've been working with them to understand the origins of the differences,'' Dr. Goode said of the Wielicki group. Dr. Wielicki said his data supported a report last month by a team led by Dr. James E. Hansen of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York. In a paper published on Science's Web site, Dr. Hansen and his colleagues said much of the excess heat generated by global warming has been stored in the oceans. Even if no more greenhouse gases are added to the atmosphere, they said, Earth will continue to warm by 1 degree Fahrenheit over the coming decades, as the heat in the oceans is released into the air. Dr. Wielicki said the amount of energy coming from the Sun matched the gain in heat in the oceans reported by Dr. Hansen. ''It is consistent with the ocean heat storage that the oceanographers are seeing,'' Dr. Wielicki said, ''and it is consistent with the climate models' predictions of what the heat storage should be.'' Dr. Robert J. Charlson, a professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Washington and an author of a commentary that accompanied the three papers, said, ''This set of papers, taken together, calls attention for more emphasis on research in these topics.'' But he added, ''Unfortunately, impediments have come up.'' Four years' worth of data from the Earth Radiation Budget Satellite is unanalyzed, he said, because there is no money for scientists to work with it. Another satellite, the Deep Space Climate Observatory, which was scheduled to be launched on a space shuttle, awaits in storage. Proposed budget cuts in earth science research at NASA could limit the analysis of data from other satellites, Dr. Charlson said. | Earth Has Become Brighter, but No One Is Certain Why |
1669235_4 | and chairman of the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation. ''I wish they had called attention to the seriousness of the problems earlier, rather than at this late stage.'' All of the principals involved at ground zero, from the politicians to the builders, remain keenly determined to make the Freedom Tower as secure as possible. But the degree of concern about the site's vulnerability clearly varies, and almost everyone involved in the rebuilding effort wonders if there ever could be a perfect formula for balancing security needs with civic ambitions at a site that has been attacked twice. The police, for their part, want the tower built to conform with security criteria based on standards used by the Department of Defense and other federal agencies, which would require the Freedom Tower to be as much as 100 feet away from the street. The site plan now calls for a minimum distance of 25 feet. The desire for greater distance is based on an analysis of the impact of a large blast. Over the last year, according to state officials involved in the project, security specialists at the Police Department suggested some provocative but relatively impractical ideas: ideally moving the Freedom Tower some 200 feet away from the street, for example, or moving the tower to another part of the site altogether. A government official involved in the security deliberations, echoing others, suggested that ''basically nothing can satisfy'' the police. But the official also acknowledged that the Freedom Tower inescapably required a security plan unlike that for almost any other building in the United States, given the site's hallowed ground and history. ''Here's the dilemma,'' the official said. ''If you put too much security into the building, it's going to look like Fort Knox and no one will rent it. If you don't put enough, it could end up with catastrophic results, not only catastrophic for the tower but for the surrounding buildings as well.'' Referring to the current battle over security, the official said, ''What is going on is the argument over those issues.'' The arguments over the months have included thinking imaginatively about security. Last summer, government officials at ground zero spoke with former security specialists from MI-5, Britain's domestic intelligence service, who advised that future attacks by terrorists would most likely come not in the form of a truck bomb, but rather with biological or chemical weapons. ''These guys were | SECURITY ISSUES FORCE A REVIEW AT GROUND ZERO |
1669040_1 | treated sewage effluent. The plan seemed simple enough, and in 2002 the New York City Department of Environmental Protection agreed to earmark millions of dollars for the so-called ''sewage diversion'' project. With County Executive Andrew J. Spano also expressing support, the project seemed destined to win approval from the county board of legislators. Three years later, its prospects seem bleak. Stalled by charges of environmental racism and beset by political infighting, it has not generated much action either by the governor's office or in New York City's environmental circles, even though water quality is at stake. Yorktown, meanwhile, remains reliant on an ever-creakier treatment plant, and the federal Environmental Protection Agency, concerned about persistent problems at the plant, has urged bickering local officials either to proceed with diversion or spend millions on an upgrade. Among those being urged to act is Linda G. Cooper, Yorktown's supervisor. She supports the diversion plan and is fighting for its future. ''One never says never,'' she said, ''but this could be it.'' The Yorktown facility is one of more than 100 treatment plants in the watershed, a 1,972-square-mile network of rivers, reservoirs and aqueducts that extends 125 miles north and west of the city. On a normal day, when the plants are not battling otherworldly storms and raw-sewage overflows, they are treating waste and dropping the effluent into the watershed. But the Environmental Protection Agency says even treated waste can generate trace amounts of suspected carcinogens and encourage outbreaks of waterborne diseases like giardiasis or cryptosporidiosis. In addition, new research by scientists in the United States and Britain is raising questions about the impacts of long-term exposure to pharmaceuticals, insect repellent and other products that make their way into human waste, flow into sewage treatment plants and wind up in the water supply in trace quantities. Some scientists have cautioned against overplaying these threats. Runoff from streets and parking lots poses a bigger challenge than sewage treatment plants, they argue, and it would not make sense to raise serious alarms about the impacts of tiny amounts of Prozac or bug spray when so little is known. But experts starting with New York City's watershed inspector general, James M. Tierney, have argued for years that removing treated waste from the water supply is good public policy. And the top priority, all along, has been getting rid of the Yorktown plant, the largest and most troubled | Waste Not Wanted |
1669238_1 | in many towns. The towers, sometimes disguised as fir trees, cacti or flagpoles, were once confined mostly to sparsely populated stretches of highway or industrial zones. More are being planted in residential areas as the wireless companies -- responding to subscriber demands -- race to build their networks for seamless coverage. But many suburbanites would rather put up with bad cellphone service than allow the structures in their midst. In fact, many dead spots in the nation's wireless networks persist not from technological limitations but from community resistance to the towers. ''We are very cranky and frustrated,'' said Robert Pierson, the deputy mayor of Mendham Township, a pre-Revolutionary War town in northern New Jersey. Ed Donohue, a lawyer based in Washington who has represented wireless carriers in several cases, estimates that more than 500 cell tower disputes around the country have ended up in court. As carriers expand their networks to cover more residential areas, they are invoking the federal telecommunications law, which allows them to ask either a state or federal court to overturn a local zoning decision to reject a tower if that decision has the effect of prohibiting the provision of cellphone services. The federal law prohibits towns from rejecting a transmission tower on the grounds that it poses health concerns, because there is no conclusive evidence the transmissions harm people at the levels allowed by the Federal Communications Commission. The carriers, more often than not, are winning the legal skirmishes. Of course, even the resisters depend on cellphone service. ''No one can drive down to the corner to buy milk without calling five people,'' said Nancy Moorthy, who lives in Bedminster, N.J., not far from Mendham Township, and has been fighting the installation of a cell tower near her home for nearly 10 years. The problem, says Laura Altschul, director of national siting policy at T-Mobile, is people ''want the service, but they don't want the facility near where they live.'' ''Five years ago, the network truly was for mobility, and very few people were using cellphones once they got inside their homes,'' she said. ''But now we're seeing that we do need to move closer into the residential areas.'' That shift in expectations for the nation's cellular network has created ''a train wreck between national public policy and individual, highly local questions,'' Ms. Moorthy said. ''The way the statute's worded, the carriers have many towns | First Come Cellphone Towers, Then the Babel |
1671739_0 | THERE was a time, before the advent of fanny packs, messenger bags and the man-purse, when you knew what a wallet stood for. In the 1960's my father's scuffed brown leather wallet contained all the important things a man needed to navigate the world: cash, his driver's license and a claim check to retrieve the radio from the repair store. Then credit cards took over the world. Nowadays a wallet is a beast of burden, swollen with Visa, MasterCard, American Express and Discover, not to mention cards for automated teller machines, insurance plans and employee ID scanners. Put one of those bloated wallets into a back pocket, sit on it, and you will look like my husband. One of his shoulders is about two inches higher than the other. ''Have you seen my glasses?'' he asked the other night. ''They're next to you on the table,'' I said. Slowly, he swiveled the entire top half of his body until the eyeglasses came into view. As his fingers closed around them, he winced. He looked as creaky as the Tin Man headed to Oz. ''Should I get the oil can?'' I asked. ''Neck hurts,'' he said, careful not to move his lips. It wouldn't take a genius to suspect a connection between his neck problems and his wallet. My hunch was confirmed by a spokesman for the American Chiropractic Association, who said fat wallets -- already notorious for causing the leg and lower back pain known as sciatica -- are bad news for the whole musculoskeletal system. ''Does your husband sit for a long time on his wallet?'' asked Dr. Jerome F. McAndrews, the national spokesman for the association. ''All day,'' I said. ''Then it's possible his neck pain is related to the wallet,'' Dr. McAndrews said. ''The minute you force one side of the pelvis forward from having that thick wallet in a pocket, you are rotating virtually every vertebra in the spine. The vertebrae above compensate for the rotation so that he can sit up straight instead of leaning over like the Tower of Pisa.'' ''He does lean,'' I said. ''He could have vertebrae rotated all the way up the neck, and could have effects anywhere along the way,'' Dr. McAndrews said. The best cure I could think of was to go online to buy something more neck-friendly than the typical department store wallet. But what? My husband is | Like a Girdle for Your Credit Cards |
1671885_2 | Cham Prasith, the Cambodian minister of commerce who reached the deal with Washington in 1999, said the benefits had gone beyond anyone's expectations. ''We are extending our labor standards beyond the end of the quotas because we know that is why we continue to have buyers,'' he said in an interview. ''If we didn't respect the unions and the labor standards, we would be killing the goose that lays the golden eggs.'' And despite the still-unexplained killings last year of the charismatic leader of the garment workers' union and, later, one of his lieutenants, Cambodia's gamble on labor rights appears to be succeeding in keeping a $1.5 billion apparel industry afloat. Sixteen large plants are scheduled to begin production this year, more than replacing about a dozen factories that have failed. The surge in China's clothing exports has taken business from rich and poor nations alike. In the United States and Europe, the domestic lobbies for the textile and apparel industries are powerful enough that they have prodded their governments into considering temporary limits on Chinese products. But smaller developing countries like Cambodia are without such defenses in the face of the Chinese steamroller. So in addition to taking steps at home, Cambodia, Bangladesh and 11 other poor countries are asking Congress to enact a law that would remove all duty on their apparel exports to the United States and give them a slight edge in competing against China and greater hope of staying in business. Muhammad Yunus, the Bangladeshi banker who invented microcredit loans, has personally appealed to lawmakers in Washington to approve the bill -- saying that for many young Asian women, the choice in today's world is either a job in a garment factory or a life on the streets as a prostitute. Neb Vicheka, a 31-year-old union shop steward at the Sportex factory here, knows the truth of Mr. Yunus's warning. She is one of the 250,000 garment factory workers in this country, most of them female, and she has seen young women laid off from factory jobs end up as hostesses in Phnom Penh's karaoke bars or beer gardens, a variant of prostitution. A veteran of Cambodia's young labor movement, Ms. Neb represents a modern alternative. She has worked in the garment industry since the first factories opened in 1998 and now earns $90 a month in a country where $45 is considered a living | Low Cost and Sweatshop-Free |
1671901_0 | The environment minister, Dick Roche, issued licenses for the excavation of archaeological sites around the Hill of Tara, effectively approving construction of a highway that will run adjacent to Tara, the 4,000-year-old site that is the burial place of 140 kings. Hundreds of historians and archaeologists, and the government's cultural advisers, have campaigned against the roadway's path, and its planners would have been forced to explore an alternative route if Mr. Roche had withheld the licenses. Brian Lavery (NYT) | World Briefing | Europe: Ireland: Approval For Highway Near Ancient Site |
1671891_0 | About 350 French surgeons have gone off for a week to Camber Sands, a beach resort in southeast England, to demand higher operating fees and to protest rising insurance premiums in France. French health care has long been the envy of the British, who complain of long waits to see a doctor and of poor hospital conditions. But the French surgeons, who plan to continue the protest until tomorrow, say those who provide lesser medical services, like radiologists, are often better paid. John Tagliabue (NYT) | World Briefing | Europe: France: Surgeons Protest On The English Seaside |
1673413_0 | In this supermedicated nation of ours, it is heartening to learn that dietary changes can also have an impact on cancer. People have long suspected that diet plays a role in malignancies, but they lacked definitive proof that changing one's diet could reduce the risk of cancer. Now, for the first time, a large study has shown that breast cancer patients may be able to reduce the chances that their tumors will return by following a stringent low-fat diet. Although some scientists doubt that the findings are robust enough to warrant great confidence, any breast cancer patient who can forgo the pleasures of fatty foods would probably be wise to do so. The researchers studied some 2,400 postmenopausal women who were healthy after receiving standard treatments for early breast cancer, including surgery, radiation and chemotherapy or hormonal therapy. Some women were counseled to follow a very low-fat diet, and others to eat a balanced diet. After five years, only 9.8 percent of those on a low-fat diet had a recurrence of cancer, compared with 12.4 percent on the balanced diet. That was a statistically significant difference but barely so, causing some scientists to exult that diet had finally been proved beneficial and others to lament that the proof seemed mighty slim. The greatest effect was found in women whose breast cancers were not fueled by estrogen. The findings will need to be confirmed by additional studies, but even before any more results are in, it may well make sense for breast cancer patients to follow a low-fat diet. There is little likelihood of harm, and low-fat diets may have health benefits beyond any impact on cancer. Editorial | Diet as a Treatment for Breast Cancer |
1673457_0 | THEY can attack at any moment, appearing as if from nowhere, leaving the victim bloodied and battered if he survives at all. There is no remorse, no mercy, no way to stop the primordial urges once the assault begins. But enough about the animal rights faithful, let's talk about the black bears of New Jersey. We jest, of course. The animal rights groups aren't necessarily any more ferociously committed than their armed opponents in muddy camouflage. ''We have science on our side; all they have is fanaticism,'' said Eric Bunk, who describes himself as Northern New Jersey director of United Sportsmen of America, the group led by rock's wild man, Ted Nugent. ''These are people who don't understand that food doesn't originate in Styrofoam packages and who believe meat grows on meat trees.'' So maybe the folks at NJN, New Jersey Public Television, should have been more prepared for armed warfare when they decided in January to broadcast a documentary, ''Bears: Too Close for Comfort,'' about bear hunting, an issue that is now as much a New Jersey staple as indicted politicians and greasy diners. Still, about three months after the documentary was withdrawn before it was even shown on the air, both sides are still going at it, a reminder that when it comes to going wild, wildlife has plenty of competition. Our tale began back in 2002 when Tom Phillips, a filmmaker from Holmdel, and his business partner, Steve Marchand of Manalapan, decided to put together a documentary on the black bears that were increasingly wandering into backyards, swimming pools and living rooms in America's most densely populated state. Soon to come was a December 2003 hunt that killed 328 bears. Mr. Phillips said he began the project as an animal lover opposed to hunting. But when the film was completed, Lynda Smith of the antihunt Bear Education and Resource Group in West Milford was appalled, she said. ''I told Tom that I watched it in tears,'' she said. ''It's antibear propaganda repackaged in 'Blair Witch' style.'' She sent out an urgent appeal to allies to try to torpedo the show. And some people who had been part of it raised factual and technical issues. NJN pulled the show pending further review, saying it did so because of questions about quality and accuracy, not politics. Now it's back, slightly edited and scheduled to be shown Saturday on the | Beasts Rearing Up On Two Legs |
1673874_0 | The secretary of homeland security, Michael Chertoff, said on Thursday that he would ask European leaders to share more data about air passengers and cargo headed to the United States, arguing that providing such information could increase privacy and avoid travel delays. The objective, Mr. Chertoff said as he prepared for his first official overseas trip next week, is to use the data to identify people and goods that do not pose a security threat so they can move easily into and around the United States. ''It would be possible, with the proper security vetting, with the proper technology, with the proper travel documents, with the proper tracking of cargo, to move relatively freely from point to point all across the globe,'' Mr. Chertoff said in a speech at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. For people and cargo outside that ''security envelope,'' he said, ''We could focus our resources in terms of the kind of in-depth analysis and the kind of in-depth vetting that is necessary to make sure bad people can't come in to do bad things.'' The remarks by Mr. Chertoff, who leaves for the Netherlands, Britain and Belgium on Sunday, comes as tensions with European nations increase over the still-expanding push by the United States to screen who and what is crossing the nation's borders. Many European leaders believe the effort is so ambitious that it threatens Europeans' privacy rights and could cause widespread flight delays from Europe. The United States is already demanding that European nations start issuing new passports by October that include fraud-resistant biometric data, like digitally recorded fingerprints or photographs. The United States also wants airlines to provide more passenger data -- like each traveler's destination and home address -- about an hour before flights take off for the United States, instead of shortly after departure. By doing so, United States officials hope to avoid diverting planes en route because suspicious names turn up after takeoff, as has occurred twice this month. But some European travel officials say the change could result in passengers sitting for an hour on already loaded planes. United States officials even want detailed passenger data for flights from Europe that simply pass through the nation's airspace, information now provided at times by airlines in Canada or Mexico. For cargo, Mr. Chertoff said the United States would like more details, like who had access to | More European Air Data Sought by Security Chief |
1673912_1 | sea level caused by the melting of ice and snow in other parts of the world. The finding also matches expectations that the earth's warming temperatures would increase the amount of moisture in the air and lead to greater snowfall over Antarctica. ''It's been long predicted by climate models,'' said Dr. Curt H. Davis, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Missouri and the lead author of a paper that was published on the Web site of the journal Science yesterday. ''This is the first observational evidence.'' The accumulation occurring across 2.75 million square miles of eastern Antarctica corresponds to a gain of 45 billion tons of water a year or, equivalently, the removal of the top 0.12 millimeter of the world's oceans. ''This is the only large terrestrial ice body that is likely gaining mass rather than losing it,'' Dr. Davis said. The data, from two European Space Agency satellites, cover 1992 to 2003, but because the satellites do not pass directly over the South Pole, they did not provide any information for a 1,150-mile-wide circular area around the pole. Assuming that snow was falling there at the same rate seen in the rest of Antarctica, the total gain in snowfall would correspond to a 0.18-millimeter-a-year drop in sea levels. The data also deepen a mystery: Satellite measurements show that the level of the world's oceans has been rising about three millimeters a year in recent years, and scientists cannot figure out where all of the water is coming from. Because water expands when it warms, the rise in global temperatures by itself causes sea levels to rise about one millimeter a year. The melting of glaciers in Greenland, Antarctica and elsewhere appears to account for another millimeter or so. That leaves ''at least a missing millimeter a year to explain,'' said Dr. Robert Thomas, a glaciologist who works with NASA. ''This is perhaps another reason to suggest the information that Curt has presented doesn't include the entire picture.'' Dr. Thomas said that there could be as-yet-unseen melting of ice along the edges of Antarctica, where the satellites could not map the steeper coastal topography. The new study is ''another piece of the puzzle that we're still putting together,'' said Dr. Waleed Abdalati, head of the cryospheric sciences branch at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., who was not involved in the research. | Warming Is Blamed for Antarctica's Weight Gain |
1674916_2 | security. The technology is available, he said. ''It's a question of the decision to deploy it and to try to balance that with legitimate privacy concerns,'' he added. ''We haven't put it out yet because people are still hand-wringing about it.'' Steve Elson isn't exactly hand-wringing. Let's just say he is mighty skeptical. A former Federal Aviation Administration investigator, Mr. Elson led the agency's red team of undercover agents who poked around airports looking for -- and finding -- holes in security. ''Backscatting has been around for years,'' he said. ''They started talking about this stuff back during the protests when they were grabbing women. Under the right circumstances, the technology has some efficacy and can work. That is, provided we're willing to pay the price in a further loss of personal privacy.'' He isn't. ''I have a beautiful 29-year-old daughter and a beautiful wife, and I don't want some screeners to be looking at them through their clothes, plain and simple,'' he said. Like many security experts, Mr. Elson argues for a sensible balance between risk management and risk reduction. On numerous occasions since the 2001 terrorist attacks, he has led reporters on test runs at airports, showing how easy it is to penetrate security throughout the airport. Thwarting body-scanning technology would be simple, he argues. Because of concerns about radiation, body scanners are designed not to penetrate the skin. All that's needed is someone heavily overweight to go through the system, he said. I won't quote him directly on the details; suffice it to say he posits that a weapon or explosives pack could be tucked into flabby body folds that won't be penetrated by the scanner. Homeland Security has not identified the airports that will test backscatters. More than a dozen have been selected to test various new technologies. One maker of backscatters is Rapiscan Security Products, a unit of OSI Systems Inc. ''Since the Russian plane tragedy, which is suspected due to suicide bombers, the interest has heightened for these needs, especially for the body scanner,'' Deepak Chopra, the chief executive of OSI Systems, recently told analysts. Mr. Scannell, the privacy advocate, scorns that reasoning as alarmist nonsense. He does see one virtue, though, for some airport screeners if backscatting technology becomes the norm. ''They'll be paid to go to a peep show,'' he said. ''They won't even need to bring any change.'' ON THE ROAD | Airport Screeners Could Get X-Rated X-Ray Views |
1674980_1 | their vision, the activity in Cluster N disappeared. Cluster N is near a visual pathway that transmits information from the retina to other parts of the brain, so the researchers suggest that the cluster is probably processing visual information as well, although at much lower light levels. Stars are very dim, of course, so the cluster could be processing the light from them. But there's no light from the earth's magnetic field, right? True, but other researchers have presented evidence that the magnetic field affects the light sensitivity of parts of the retina, so that birds sense the magnetic field as visual patterns. If so, they may process them through Cluster N as well. Whales and Weather Strandings of dolphins, whales and other cetaceans are sad events (they are usually fatal), but they are mysterious as well. Many theories have been put forth as to why they happen, but no one really knows. Researchers in Australia have taken another approach to studying them, looking for patterns in reports of strandings in southeastern Australia over eight decades and comparing them to changes in weather and oceanographic conditions over the same period. The researchers, from the University of Tasmania and other institutions, looked at 639 events from 1920 to 2002, most involving a single animal. Their findings, reported in Biology Letters, show that strandings peak every 11 to 13 years. These cycles correspond well to periods of persistent westerly and southerly winds, which may have two consequences for cetaceans. First, they may cause more and stronger storms that cause animals to become disoriented and beach themselves. Second, they may drive colder, more nutrient-rich waters toward the Australian coast, causing phytoplankton blooms and similar events that may bring more cetaceans closer to the coast, increasing the likelihood of strandings. The researchers say that at the very least, by identifying the links between strandings and climate patterns, it may now be easier to focus on more specific possible causes in future studies A Rare Sight on Everest Two snow leopards have been spotted on the Nepalese side of Mount Everest, the first confirmed sightings of the cats on the mountain in more than three decades. The animals were photographed by Som Ale, a doctoral student in biology at the University of Illinois and previously with Earthwatch Institute, the environmental education group. Mr. Ale, who has searched for snow leopards for 15 years, saw tracks | OBSERVATORY |
1674980_2 | looked at 639 events from 1920 to 2002, most involving a single animal. Their findings, reported in Biology Letters, show that strandings peak every 11 to 13 years. These cycles correspond well to periods of persistent westerly and southerly winds, which may have two consequences for cetaceans. First, they may cause more and stronger storms that cause animals to become disoriented and beach themselves. Second, they may drive colder, more nutrient-rich waters toward the Australian coast, causing phytoplankton blooms and similar events that may bring more cetaceans closer to the coast, increasing the likelihood of strandings. The researchers say that at the very least, by identifying the links between strandings and climate patterns, it may now be easier to focus on more specific possible causes in future studies A Rare Sight on Everest Two snow leopards have been spotted on the Nepalese side of Mount Everest, the first confirmed sightings of the cats on the mountain in more than three decades. The animals were photographed by Som Ale, a doctoral student in biology at the University of Illinois and previously with Earthwatch Institute, the environmental education group. Mr. Ale, who has searched for snow leopards for 15 years, saw tracks of two others as well. The leopards were spotted in Sagarmatha National Park, which encompasses the Nepalese portion of Everest and was established 29 years ago to conserve habitat for snow leopards and other animals. There are thought to be only 300 to 500 snow leopards in Nepal, and perhaps 5,000 across Central Asia. Red-Bellied Piranha Is Really Yellow The red-bellied piranha of the Amazon has a reputation as a fierce and fearsome fish. It has been thought to hunt its prey in packs, and with its sharp teeth can make short work of a victim. But as Dr. Anne E. Magurran of the University of St. Andrews in Scotland has shown, that image may be a bit overblown. The piranha, she suggests, may really be a wimp, gathering in groups for protection rather than for hunting. Dr. Magurran and a colleague, Dr. Helder Queiroz, began research in the Mamirauá Reserve in Brazil, thinking that they would learn more about how piranhas hunt. ''We started off with the premise that they school as a means of cooperative hunting,'' she said. If that were the case, the researchers would have expected to find certain fish associating with others, as the principle | OBSERVATORY |
1674917_2 | executive at CrystalSev, a large sugar and ethanol conglomerate that is putting the finishing touches on a $10 million ethanol terminal at the port of Santos. ''People have money to invest, and both domestic and external demand is on the rise,'' added Mr. Biagi, whose family has been in the sugar business since 1920. ''All the ingredients are there.'' Not long ago, ethanol's future did not look so bright. In the heyday of the government's pro-alcohol campaign in the mid-1980's, ethanol-only cars accounted for almost 90 percent of new-auto sales in Brazil. But domestic ethanol consumption started declining steadily in 1990, when a poor cane harvest and high sugar prices caused an alcohol shortage that enraged drivers, prompting many to switch back to cars powered by gasoline. Then, three years ago, Volkswagen began selling cars in Brazil that run on either gasoline or ethanol, or any combination of the two. Lured by the low cost of alcohol -- it sells for almost half the price of gasoline -- Brazilians have been buying these so-called flex-fuel cars in droves, helping to revive the domestic ethanol market. Today, all major automakers in Brazil offer these hybrid vehicles, which now represent 33 percent of new-car sales, a figure that some analysts predict could reach 80 percent by the end of next year. Thanks to the popularity of flex-fuel engines, domestic ethanol consumption is expected to jump 50 percent in the next five years, meaning that a growing percentage of the country's annual cane crop will be used to make fuel. This season, for example, a record 57 percent of the harvest is expected to go to ethanol production, up from less than half in recent years, according to Datagro, a sugar and ethanol consulting firm based in São Paulo. ''People used to say that our only chance to sell more ethanol was to increase exports,'' said Eduardo Pereira de Carvalho, president of Unica, the country's largest association of sugar and ethanol producers. ''That changed overnight with flex-fuel cars.'' Because no other country has an ethanol distribution network as extensive as Brazil's, it is unlikely that flex-fuel cars will become an international trend any time soon. But with world oil prices hovering around $50 a barrel, governments around the globe are looking for ways to replace gasoline with ethanol. Almost a dozen countries, including Canada, Sweden and the United States, have already begun blending | In Brazil, Sugar Cane Growers Become Fuel Farmers |
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