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1674928_0 | On Monday, one year and a day after becoming prime minister of India, Manmohan Singh traveled to Ranthambore National Park, the celebrated sanctuary of India's national animal: the tiger. The visit to Ranthambore was less a warm and fuzzy photo opportunity than an attempt to take on a budding political crisis. The tiger, as endangered worldwide as it is iconic in this country, is vanishing from India's tiger parks. With a growing and lucrative market for everything tiger -- from skin to bone to the tiger's penis, used in Chinese traditional medicine -- tiger poachers have evidently made a run on several government-protected parks. A handful of poaching networks have been nabbed here in the capital in recent months, and their bundles of tanned tiger skins displayed to news media hungry for as much tiger-poaching information as possible. Most startling of all, a federal law enforcement inquiry found earlier this month that there was not a single tiger left at another famous Indian tiger reserve, Sariska. At least two or three poaching networks were operating in the park, the probe found, raising the possibility of collusion by forest guards. Even in Ranthambore, the jewel in India's tiger sanctuary crown, 18 tigers are missing, according to news reports. In fact, the tiger is among several endangered species in peril across the country, largely because of pressures on land and water. But the tiger, because of its symbolic potency, is the one that has seized the imagination of the country and, now, the attention of the prime minister. ''Reports of the decline in the tiger population have once again alerted us to this grim reality,'' Mr. Singh said in a speech in April, adding, ''Our government will take all the required steps to protect the tiger and other endangered species.'' Mr. Singh ordered the federal investigation into Sariska. He appointed a tiger task force to draft a conservation policy. Earlier this year, a meeting of the National Board of Wildlife, which he leads, was convened for the first time in 17 months. His office has even dangled the possibility of creating a special law-enforcement unit assigned to wildlife protection. India, as a signer of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, could face punitive measures if fails to do its part to curb the illegal trade in tigers. The tiger task force called last Thursday for tougher measures to control poaching. | India's Political Spotlight Burning Bright on Endangered Tigers |
1674968_2 | ago. The American system of higher learning seems to have become a great equalizer. In fact, though, colleges have come to reinforce many of the advantages of birth. On campuses that enroll poorer students, graduation rates are often low. And at institutions where nearly everyone graduates -- small colleges like Colgate, major state institutions like the University of Colorado and elite private universities like Stanford -- more students today come from the top of the nation's income ladder than they did two decades ago. Only 41 percent of low-income students entering a four-year college managed to graduate within five years, the Department of Education found in a study last year, but 66 percent of high-income students did. That gap had grown over recent years.''We need to recognize that the most serious domestic problem in the United States today is the widening gap between the children of the rich and the children of the poor,'' Lawrence H. Summers, the president of Harvard, said last year when announcing that Harvard would give full scholarships to all its lowest-income students. ''And education is the most powerful weapon we have to address that problem.'' There is certainly much to celebrate about higher education today. Many more students from all classes are getting four-year degrees and reaping their benefits. But those broad gains mask the fact that poor and working-class students have nevertheless been falling behind; for them, not having a degree remains the norm. That loss of ground is all the more significant because a college education matters much more now than it once did. A bachelor's degree, not a year or two of courses, tends to determine a person's place in today's globalized, computerized economy. College graduates have received steady pay increases over the past two decades, while the pay of everyone else has risen little more than the rate of inflation. As a result, despite one of the great education explosions in modern history, economic mobility -- moving from one income group to another over the course of a lifetime -- has stopped rising, researchers say. Some recent studies suggest that it has declined over the last generation. Put another way, children seem to be following the paths of their parents more than they once did. Grades and test scores, rather than privilege, determine success today, but that success is largely being passed down from one generation to the next. A nation | The College Dropout Boom |
1674892_6 | deforestation continued. Even after the United States arrested General Noriega in 1990, conditions were initially unsettled and Chagres and smaller watershed parks were not adequately protected. But then things began to change. Dr. Heckadon, who became the nation's first environment minister, said one important step came when leading Panamanian bankers decided to stop financing cattle ranchers who cut down forest for pasture. ''That withdrew the oxygen of the fire of slash and burn,'' he said. And with the canal turnover in 1999, government agencies acted again to expand protected watershed areas. Now, Mr. Alvarado says that only negligible amounts of watershed are lost each year to deforestation. But others say that official agencies do not have enough money or staff to patrol the parks as closely as they wish and that, as a result, logging and burning is continuing, even if on a smaller scale. ''With the chain saw these guys can do anything,'' Dr. Heckadon said. ''They look at a mahogany tree and they cut it on the weekend, saw it in slabs, get it on someone's pickup. It's a problem.'' Dr. Stallard said: ''There are constant threats on the park boundaries. There is always chipping at some border.'' So the canal authority and other agencies have also begun community efforts to educate rural Panamanians about the importance of preserving the forest landscape. ''We now employ people the old canal would never imagine it would -- social workers for example,'' Mr. Alvarado said. ''We work with the communities. We work with the schools.'' Meanwhile, efforts are also under way to restore damaged landscapes. A.C.P. has begun a program called the Native Species Reforestation Project -- a cooperative arrangement with the Smithsonian, the Yale University School of Forestry, the International Development Center at the Kennedy School at Harvard and other universities and agencies to study ways to protect the canal watershed and restore its native vegetation. The scientists are learning as they go, because little is known about reforesting tropical rain forests, said Dr. Mark S. Ashton, a professor of forest ecology at Yale. Dr. Ashton said in an e-mail message that scientists hoped to restore the landscape in ways that protected the watershed, enhanced biodiversity and identified trees and other plants that could be grown and harvested sustainably, replacing slash-and-burn farming as a source of income. But the effort, known by its Spanish acronym, Prorena, is complicated by the | To Save Its Canal, Panama Fights for Its Forests |
1674927_2 | are already celebrating. On Friday night it was a gathering of leftists. They wore badges and carried balloons declaring that to love Europe is to vote no. They bought $5-a-bottle merlot made by a cooperative in the area with custom-designed labels that said no. They sang along to Edith Piaf's ''Non, je ne regrette rien.'' (''I regret nothing.'') They chanted, ''No, no, all together, all together,'' as speaker after speaker told them they were right. A handful of workers from the local IBM factory told stories of jobs that had moved to places like Slovakia, the Philippines and China. ''This is a democratic insurrection,'' José Bové, the sheep farmer and union leader who is France's most visible opponent of globalization, told the cheering crowd. He proposed what he called an ''amusing action'' for the day after the referendum: he said all French voters should take the copies of the constitution that they received in their mailboxes, ''put them in envelopes and send them back'' to President Chirac. The rally was one of dozens of events scheduled for the frenzied final days of the national referendum campaign. Mr. Chirac's center-right government has joined forces with the Socialist Party and other mainstream political parties, France's business establishment and most of the political and economic elite of Europe in a desperate, last-ditch effort to turn the tide. As election day approaches, the issue has seized France. The major newspapers have published thick sections with major excerpts from the constitution, along with commentary, and debates on the issue dominate radio and television. Political figures and the major parties have churned out DVD's urging voters to vote yes. Five of the country's 10 top nonfiction best sellers deal with the constitution. The desperation of the ''yes'' side has made strange bedfellows, including a joint campaign appearance by two rival presidential hopefuls: Nicolas Sarkozy, the leader of the center-right party UMP, and François Hollande, the Socialist Party leader. Much of the elite has spoken of the constitution's defeat in apocalyptic terms. Mr. Chirac has said that France ''would cease to exist politically in the bosom'' of Europe if France votes no. Some 100 French business leaders have issued a manifesto saying that while a no vote would not cause immediate economic trauma, it would be ''a grave error'' for France in the long term. Mario Monti, the European Union's former competition commissioner, has warned that a | In Southern France, Strong Opposition to Europe Treaty |
1675014_4 | Hayes added that majors in fields related to national security, from computer science to engineering, are also having a good year. Even manufacturing companies, which for years have done nothing but shed workers, are picking up graduates. At Wichita State, where job prospects depend heavily on the aerospace companies nearby, Jill M. Pletcher, director of career services, said she was ''guardedly optimistic.'' Prospects are improving noticeably all the way down to graduates with liberal arts degrees, who typically have the most difficult time finding a job. Starting salaries for liberal arts majors are expected to increase by 4 percent, after a decline of 1.4 percent last year, according to a survey by the college and employer association. Companies are even hiring some of the graduates they shunned in the lean years. Jonathan Narveson, 24, was lucky to have a job offer when he graduated from the University of North Carolina in 2003. It just was not the computer industry job he really wanted. He did about 25 interviews with 15 companies and ended up as a salesman for Newell Rubbermaid in Charlotte, N.C. But last year, with the labor market tauter, Mr. Narveson was able to align his career with his aspirations, taking a job as a consultant in the financial services operating unit of Accenture. These days, he happily wields the appropriate consulting firm lingo. ''From a career acceleration standpoint, this is a great steppingstone,'' he said. After three high-strung years, Mr. Luzader at Purdue said, ''There seems to be less anxiety on the student grapevine about opportunities.'' Interest in graduate study, a typical indicator of graduates' concerns over getting a job, has declined in some areas. For instance, the Law School Admission Council expects there will be 4.8 percent fewer applicants to law schools this year. Some graduates seem to be starting to feel comfortable again about navigating the job market, and life, at their own pace. Dennis A. DiTullio, who will graduate in June from Ohio State University, plans to work a couple of years at his fraternity, Phi Gamma Delta, teaching leadership courses at chapters around the country, before plunging into the job market. ''I want to move around a little bit; see the world before I plop down in my cube,'' Mr. DiTullio said. ''I still get to be around college campuses. I don't have to wake up one day and suddenly mature a lot.'' | First Jobs Come Easily for Many but After That ... |
1673012_0 | To the Editor: Despite what Thomas L. Friedman says about American students' lack of math and engineering prowess, what I've noticed most about new hires who are recent college graduates is that they can't write very well. In many jobs, the inability to produce coherent business correspondence is a much bigger handicap than the inability to do math. One must be able to demonstrate -- in writing -- that one is an intelligent, well-educated individual with problem-solving skills. Sara Palmer Gillies Monroe, Ore., May 13, 2005 | America's Fading Competitive Edge |
1670121_1 | they have agreed only on elements of it. They have until September 2006 to get things under way or risk forfeiting the money, though even if the money comes through, is there time to install a new system by the November election that year? New York City, for instance, has to replace 7,639 machines -- a process that John Ravitz, head of its elections board, had wanted to phase in beginning last year. The state has not even chosen the technology or the machines and vendors yet, though Albany is crowded with lobbyists trying to help out. ''The likelihood of a Florida debacle grows ever more near,'' said the city's corporation counsel, Michael A. Cardozo. There are some substantive disagreements between Democrats and Republicans on voting reform. They differ on matters of voter identification and paper balloting, for instance, with the Democratic-led Assembly generally in favor of laying out prescriptive language in the legislation, while the governor and Republican-led Senate prefer to leave many decisions to local election boards. These are familiar policy issues in Albany that the two sides generally resolve. But then there is politics -- ''raw politics,'' says Barbara Bartoletti, legislative director of the state League of Women Voters. IT is clear that the state's application for its federal aid has stalled in part because of a partisan dispute over the state Board of Elections. Election reform transforms the board into a power center. And Democrats complain that Republicans have grabbed control, since two of the four commissioners are Republicans as is one of two executives. The second executive position is vacant. ''The board is supposed to be nonpartisan but for almost two years it's been run by executive fiat,'' complained Assemblyman Keith L.T. Wright, a Manhattan Democrat and co-chairman of a conference committee on election modernization. ''That's what's looming over this.'' Says his Republican counterpart, Senator John J. Flanagan of Long Island: ''Do I think it's an issue that needs to be addressed? Absolutely,'' he said. ''Democrats are saying the Republicans are dominating this. It's the perception.'' The executive director, a Democrat, resigned 21 months ago. The deputy executive director, Peter S. Kosinski (a Republican) was designated for the top job. But because he earned more as the deputy, he wanted a raise, which requires legislation. The Assembly recently approved a measure with the raise. But the Senate has not yet, and its inaction maintains the | Albany Keeps Back Burner Very Crowded |
1669454_0 | In a merger of the nuclear disarmament and antiwar movements, several thousand protesters, including a group of survivors of the atomic bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, marched through Midtown yesterday and rallied in Central Park to call for the end of nuclear proliferation and the withdrawal of United States troops from Iraq. The impetus for the event was a conference at the United Nations, scheduled to begin today, to review the flaws in the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. Organizers said they hoped the rally would help resuscitate the faded antinuclear movement. ''We feel it is important to continue our focus on ending the war in Iraq and strengthening our movement by making the connection to nuclear disarmament,'' said Leslie Cagan, national coordinator of United for Peace and Justice, which helped to organize the march with Abolition Now!, a coalition of nuclear disarmament groups. ''Given that the Nonproliferation Treaty conference is going on, we thought it was the right time to make that connection and re-energize opposition to nuclear weapons.'' While the turnout was a fraction of that of antinuclear rallies in the early 1980's, the event drew a diverse array of participants from around the country and the world, most notably a contingent of hundreds from Japan, including the mayors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and about 35 survivors of the atomic bomb attacks. Among them was Sunao Tsuboi, 80, who was a university student in Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945, when that city was destroyed by the first atomic bomb attack. He described how his entire body was burned and said that the aftermath of the bombing was ''a living hell on earth.'' The radiation left him with numerous illnesses, Mr. Tsuboi said, including cancer. ''I'm here for the abolition of nuclear weapons,'' he said in an interview through an interpreter. ''And I want all the nations to keep the promise of the Nonproliferation Treaty.'' Yuko Nakamura, 73, who wore a necklace of colorful origami cranes, said she was working in a factory about 13 miles from the blast and suffered the effects of radiation. ''Don't let the children go through that nuclear suffering,'' she said. ''This is not the children's fault. It's the adults' fault. I really care for the future of children.'' With the end of the cold war, organizers said yesterday, many people believed that the nuclear threat had ended, too. But, they said, most of the | On Eve of Nuclear Meeting, Thousands Stage a Protest |
1671001_5 | in the face, and you got to put something out there.'' At airports, similar shortcomings in technology have caused problems. The Transportation Security Administration bought 1,344 machines costing more than $1 million each to search for explosives in checked bags by examining the density of objects inside. But innocuous items as varied as Yorkshire pudding and shampoo bottles, which happen to have a density similar to certain explosives, can set off the machines, causing false alarms for 15 percent to 30 percent of all luggage, an agency official said. The frequent alarms require airports across the country to have extra screeners to examine these bags. Quick Action After 9/11 Because the machines were installed under tight timetables imposed by Congress, they were squeezed into airport lobbies instead of integrated into baggage conveyor systems. That slowed the screening process -- the machines could handle far fewer bags per hour -- and pushed up labor costs by hundreds of millions of dollars a year. At busy times, bags are sometimes loaded onto planes without being properly examined, according to several current and former screeners. ''It is very discouraging,'' said a screener who worked at Portland International Airport until last year, but who asked not to be named because he still is a federal employee. ''People are just taking your bags and putting them on the airplane.'' Equipment to screen passengers and carry-on baggage -- including nearly 5,000 new metal detectors, X-ray machines and devices that can detect traces of explosives -- can be unreliable. A handgun might slip through because screeners rely on two-dimensional X-ray machines, rather than newer, three-dimensional models, for example. The National Academy of Sciences recently described the trace detection devices as having ''limited effectiveness and significant vulnerabilities.'' As a result, the likelihood of detecting a hidden weapon or bomb has not significantly changed since the government took over airport screening operations in 2002, according to the inspector general at the Department of Homeland Security. Transportation security officials acknowledge that they cannot improve performance without new technology, but they dispute suggestions that no progress has been made. ''We have created a much more formidable deterrent,'' said Mark O. Hatfield Jr., a spokesman for the Transportation Security Administration. ''Do we have an absolute barrier? No.'' Counting machinery and personnel, aviation screening has cost more than $15 billion since 2001, a price that Representative John L. Mica, Republican of Florida, says | U.S. to Spend Billions More To Alter Security Systems |
1671010_1 | seats, and the party's president, Gerry Adams, was easily re-elected in the Roman Catholic neighborhood of West Belfast. His party's performance confounded theories that voters might punish Sinn Fein for recent crimes attributed to the I.R.A., including the robbery of $50 million from a Belfast bank last December and the killing of a man in a bar fight in January. The election ''was about getting the Good Friday Agreement and the peace process back on track,'' Mr. Adams told cheering supporters under the chandeliers and stained-glass windows in Belfast City Hall. ''When others were negative we gave hope.'' The Social Democratic and Labor Party, the moderate Catholic group that initiated the Northern Irish peace process, maintained its three seats. The party's leader, Mark Durkan, comfortably took the seat being vacated by John Hume, the retiring Catholic leader who shared the 1998 Nobel prize with Mr. Trimble. Another candidate, Alasdair McDonnell, became the first Catholic to be elected in south Belfast after running unsuccessfully for 28 years. Counting of votes in elections to the province's local councils, which also took place on Thursday, will not begin until Monday. Earlier, Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain and Prime Minister Bertie Ahern of Ireland pledged to refocus on Northern Ireland's problems regardless of the election results. ''Now the elections are over it is time to get on with this vital project,'' Mr. Ahern wrote in a message to Mr. Blair. But the existence of the I.R.A., and Mr. Paisley's refusal to talk to Sinn Fein until the paramilitary group has dissolved, is a difficult hurdle to clear. Mr. Paisley, 79, recently said that the 1998 peace deal was ''finished completely'' and ''only paper.'' In concession speeches, moderate candidates said the 1998 agreement had further segregated Northern Ireland, even as it ended the fighting among the I.R.A., Protestant paramilitaries and the British Army that claimed more than 3,000 lives. Many unionists, mostly Protestants who want Northern Ireland to remain part of Britain, now feel that the pact gave too much power to nationalists, who are Catholic and want Ulster to join the Irish Republic. ''During the period when there was bloody violence, there was an urge towards the middle for some people,'' said Richard English, a professor of politics at Queens University in Belfast. Now, each community has retreated back into itself, he said. ''You can enjoy being sectarian without people dying for it.'' | Hard-Liners in Northern Ireland Gain in British Voting, Leaving Peace Pact in Jeopardy |
1670649_7 | stern kindness toward humanity, for all his efforts to lessen the burden of human suffering, Thanatos seems to be the embittered way in which he universalized his parlous inner state. It hampers the understanding to read ''Civilization and Its Discontents'' without taking into consideration all these circumstances. If Freud has taught us anything, it's that any evaluation of authority has to examine the condition of those who stand behind it. As for repairing to ''Civilization and Its Discontents'' to gain essential elucidation of our own condition, the work seems as severely circumscribed by its time as by its author's situation. Today, Freud's stress on the formative effect of the family romance seems less and less relevant amid endless deconstructions and permutations of the traditional family. His argument that society's repressions create unbearable suffering seems implausible in a society where permissiveness is creating new forms of suffering. His fearless candor about sex appears quaint in a culture that won't stop talking about sex. And a great many people with faith in the inherent goodness of humankind believe that they are living according to ideal sentiments, universal principles or sacred commandments, unhampered by Freudian skepticism. Yet there are, unquestionably, people for whom Freud's immensely powerful ideas are a permanent condition of their lives. Behind the declaration of ideal sentiments, universal principles and sacred commandments, they see a craven sham concealing self-interest, greed and the wish to do harm. Neither of these two groups will ever talk the other out of its worldview. In this sense the conflict is not between the Islamic world and the ''liberal'' West; it is between religious people everywhere and people who, like Freud, see faith as an illusion, a set of self-deceiving notions about life. To put it another way, Freudianism is not a science; you either grasp the reality of Freud's dynamic notion of the subconscious intuitively -- the way, in fact, you do or do not grasp the truthfulness of Ecclesiastes -- or you cannot accept that it exists. For that reason, the most intractable division in the world now is between those who believe that the subconscious plays a fundamental role in human life, and those who don't. That's the real culture war, and maybe even the real clash of civilizations. ESSAY Lee Siegel is the book critic for The Nation, the television critic for The New Republic and the art critic for Slate. | Freud and His Discontents |
1676500_5 | vote in a referendum. The only other rejection was in 1969, when de Gaulle proposed a measure to renovate the Senate, create regions and seek support after the student uprisings of May 1968. De Gaulle pledged to leave office if the ''no'' won, and when it did by a small margin, he resigned the next day. While Mr. Chirac said he would not resign, there has been intense speculation, even in his party, and the media in recent weeks that rejection of the constitution would prompt him to fire Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin, whose popularity is at an abysmal 21 percent. Dominique de Villepin, the interior minister and former foreign minister, is considered a front-runner to replace Mr. Raffarin, and one close confidante said Mr. de Villepin had been quietly assembling a staff and anticipating a cabinet shuffle. Other contenders include Defense Minister Michèle Alliot-Marie, and Nicolas Sarkozy, the head of Mr. Chirac's party but also Mr. Chirac's political foe. The referendum polarized France, with extremes of both the left and the right aligning in the no bloc and the center-right and most of the Socialist Party in the yes camp. The schism was borne out in and around Paris, where wealthy neighborhoods seemed to vote yes, while poor neighborhoods voted no. At a preschool turned polling place in the wealthy Paris suburb of Neuilly, 83 percent voted yes. That is the territory of Mr. Sarkozy, who was once mayor there. ''It's like building a house, you don't stop halfway,'' said Omar Bentchakal, the retired head of a small painting company, as he cast his ballot there. ''It would be unfortunate if we were the country who laid the first stone, but that we wouldn't be there to put in the last one, that we're not following through. I would be hurt, really, if we voted no.'' At the polling place at the Karl Marx primary school in downtown Bobigny, a working-class suburb of Paris, by contrast, there was no sense that Europe's future hinged on the constitution. With 18 percent unemployment and a large ethnic Arab and African population, 72 percent of the voters there said no. Bernard Birsinger, the suburb's Communist mayor, accused Mr. Chirac of fear-mongering and dissembling when he predicted political and economic doom for France if the country rejected the constitution. ''We are already in a Europe of unemployment and regression,'' said Mr. Birsinger, adding, | FRENCH VOTERS SOUNDLY REJECT EUROPEAN PACT |
1676487_0 | Far north of Khartoum, where modern steel bridges cross this legendary river, the architecture goes way back in time -- thousand-year-old temples, towering pyramids, elaborate cities from civilizations that lived and died and were then buried by the surging sand. The uncovering of these ancient wonders has proceeded slowly but steadily over the last century as archaeologists have sifted through the earth for clues of the great Nilotic cultures that once flourished in Sudan. That methodical search has picked up in pace of late. In fact, it has turned into a frenzied relic hunt. Archaeology is not a field that one associates with haste. What has lasted thousands of years will be there tomorrow or next month or next year. But that is not true along some stretches of this riverbank, where construction crews are beginning to arrive, and some fear ancient treasures might be lost forever. Sudan is preparing to build a giant dam at the Nile's fourth cataract, a point where rocks interrupt the river's flow, and white water swirls. The project risks submerging some of Sudan's lofty past even as it promises to be a foundation for the future. The Nile is and always has been everything to Sudan. Without it, livestock would die of thirst, agricultural land would dry up and the people, too, would surely perish. The river is more than the country's lifeblood, though. The Nile offers beauty, stark contrast to the harsh desert climate that creeps southward, as well as pride to a country that often feels ganged up on by the rest of the world. A boat trip up the Nile, near the sixth and final cataract, reveals a Sudan of chirping birds, little known islands, fishermen plucking perch after perch from its depths. There are no signs of the conflicts that have so severed this country. The new dam, which will produce 1,250 megawatts of electricity, is expected to cost $1.8 billion. Once it is finished in 2008, the Merowe Dam will roughly double Sudan's power supply and will help irrigate land that is now barely arable. Sudan's leaders see it as a symbol of the country's future. ''Our battle against poverty starts from here,'' President Omar al-Bashir said in March during a visit to the dam site, 215 miles north of Khartoum. But modernization comes with a price. The dam, which experts say is the largest hydropower project under development | A Race to Save Sudan's Past From Progress |
1676435_1 | The newspaper went on to say that, that week alone, new infrared technology had allowed researchers ''to make a series of astonishing discoveries, including writing by Sophocles, Euripides, Hesiod and other literary giants of the ancient world.'' Immediately, phone lines were buzzing and e-mail was flying. Important discoveries from the collection are generally announced in academic journals and on the Oxyrhynchus Web site before the world at large hears about them. But no such announcements had been made; few people, if any, seemed to know what in fact was going on. At Oxford, Dr. Dirk Obbink, a lecturer in Greek literature and papyrology who directs a project that among other things puts images of the papyri on the Internet, took the unusual step of issuing a statement that tried to put some of the assertions in context. ''The article surely should not have said (if it did) that all the papyri had been discovered yesterday, only that we made significant (and sufficiently exciting) advances,'' the statement said. As is so often the case with British newspapers, the Independent article turned out to be both true and not true. It was right to say that new technology was indeed making it easier, in some cases, to read the Oxyrhynchus material, and that new discoveries were being made. But it was not right to say that the technology had just been discovered, or that it was functioning as a sort of Rosetta stone, or that so many new revelations were emerging as to herald ''a second Renaissance.'' ''This stuff has been coming out for years now, and some of the things mentioned in the Independent story are months or years old,'' said Dr. James Romm, an associate professor of classics at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y., and the director of its classical studies program. He called the article ''very much overhyped'' in a field where any public attention at all is rare. ''I'd love to know who first talked to whom in order to generate such good P.R,'' Dr. Romm said in an interview. ''There is material coming out from those authors, but it's coming out in dribs and drabs.'' The technology in question, developed at Brigham Young University in Utah, uses a digital camera with a series of ultraviolet and infrared filters. It can increase the contrast between text and background and so is particularly useful in reading texts written on | Historical Discovery? Well, Yes And No |
1676285_0 | To the Editor: Here's an idea to create an additional incentive for elite colleges to recruit working-class students: Why doesn't U.S. News & World Report revise its highly influential rankings to give greater weight to economic diversity in the student body as a measure of the academic quality of the institution? Most people who use the rankings just jump to the list. They won't notice that methodological change, but they and certainly the colleges will notice if their ranking drops. It's a simple change that could help lead to a stronger meritocracy in this country by giving more Americans the chance to pursue that crucial college degree. Izzat Jarudi Washington, May 24, 2005 | Life Without a College Degree |
1676163_1 | completed a $5 million restoration of the tower in 2003. And the reporter's remark, recorded by an engineering student for a thesis that was republished by bayridge.com, a community Web site, seemed like ancient history last week. It was then that the Coney Island Development Corporation, charged with promoting business development in the neighborhood, announced the winner of the international competition it sponsored with the nonprofit Van Alen Institute to design a shopping and visitor center that would sit at the base of the jump. The contest, part of the city's wider plans to turn Coney Island's worn stretch of rides and concession stands into a glossy recreational destination, attracted more than 850 entries from as far as China and Australia. Fifty-four came from Brooklyn. The winning design, from a team in London, features a 30-foot matrix of light bulbs and translucent walls, wrapped around a souvenir shop, an exhibition space, a bar and a restaurant. Joshua Sirefman, president of the local development corporation, said last week that the new center, called the Parachute Pavilion, was intended to strengthen the entertainment district, from the parachute jump and KeySpan Park at the western end to the New York Aquarium in the east. The plan would not involve reopening the jump as a ride, but it would return the structure, once one of Coney Island's most popular attractions, to a central place after a history of ups and downs. The 262-foot-tall tower, originally designed to train military paratroopers, opened as a ride at the 1939 World's Fair in Flushing Meadows, Queens. After the fair, the owners of Steeplechase Park bought it for $150,000 and moved it to Coney Island. The park shut down in 1964, and the parachute jump stood unused on an increasingly desolate stretch of land. The Landmarks Preservation Commission's decision to designate the tower a landmark in 1977 was overturned, but the status was restored in 1989, and it stuck. Through it all, the tower has become one of the city's most recognizable tall structures outside Manhattan, known in some quarters as Brooklyn's Eiffel Tower. All that history was daunting for contest entrants. ''Being that it's next to the parachute jump, which is an international icon, it's a really interesting design challenge,'' Mr. Sirefman said, ''because it has to be able to stand on its own and also work in the larger context.'' JAKE MOONEY NEIGHBORHOOD REPORT: BROOKLYN ICONS | Famed for What's Up Above, Fixing What's Down Below |
1674801_1 | hope more than a final contract for exactly what will be built on this crucial site. Thus, it is easy to say the proposal for a dual-museum complex unveiled last Thursday by the respected Norwegian architectural firm Snohetta looks promising in almost every way. The firm has created a shimmering version of a structure that could someday serve as a starting point for visitors and a buffer between the street life of the city and the quiet memorial at ground zero. Snohetta has made an admirable effort to follow the many political, artistic and technical masters controlling this space. The real difficulty may be that the firm has not yet pleased the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which owns the site and which wants the museum to add up to 40,000 square feet for vents and mechanical equipment. If there is any discomfort about the Snohetta design at this point, it is that the building seems to have swelled to the space available. Adding another layer could overwhelm Santiago Calatrava's winged transit center or the Frank Gehry building or perhaps even the memorial itself. On a more basic level, those in control of this site -- mainly Gov. George Pataki and the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation -- still have to be extraordinarily cautious about the kinds of exhibitions created for the Snohetta structure. The Drawing Center sets the right tone at this site, but the main tenant, the International Freedom Center, presents as much hazard as promise. So far, organizers of the center have said they want to focus on the idea of freedom as a global phenomenon -- with heroes like Ghandi, Nelson Mandela, Susan B. Anthony, Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln. There will be pressure to narrow the scope of the museum down to a paean to this White House and its stated values. The hard part will be leaving the museum's purpose indeterminate enough to allow visitors to let their own imaginations and emotions shape their experience while making it determinate enough to gratify all the parties that have been interpreting Sept. 11, 2001, in their own terms. In a way, this building does an excellent job of embodying that conflict. It looks beautiful, a lovely way to get from the train station to the memorial. Yet, the political struggles that are shaping the whole site will be repeated over what goes on inside. | Culture for Ground Zero |
1667772_0 | Parents who are asked to sign consent forms allowing researchers to enroll their children in medical studies often have a poor idea of what they are agreeing to. But when the forms are redesigned and rewritten using graphics and simpler language, the understanding increases, a new study finds. Writing in The Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine, researchers from the University of Michigan said many consent forms were written well beyond the eighth-grade reading level called for in federal guidelines. But even material at that level may pose a problem for the estimated 95 million Americans with poor reading skills. ''How can we present the information in a better manner?'' asked the lead author of the study, Dr. Alan R. Tait. To gauge how well consent forms were understood, the researchers asked families of children having elective surgery to consider forms for a supposed drug study. Although the parents knew the drug study was not real, they were approached at the same time and in the same manner they would have been under ordinary circumstances. The forms asked permission to experiment with children using a drug intended to help them with postoperative nausea. Some families received standard consent forms, saying, in part, ''Postoperative care will be managed as usual.'' In the reader-friendly version, that part read, ''The care after the operation will be the same for children who are not in the study.'' When the researchers interviewed the families to see how well they understood issues like the purpose of the study and its risks and benefits, they found that those who had been given the modified forms did much better. Shown both forms, more than 80 percent said they preferred the modified one. VITAL SIGNS: TESTING | Consent Forms in Plain English |
1667789_1 | ''Over the last three and a half years, we have spent billions of dollars creating a Soviet-style centralized bureaucracy that has resulted in great inefficiencies and inflexibility, with little improvement in screener effectiveness,'' Mr. Mica, a long-time critic of the agency, said in a statement last week. In its reply, the agency said that it needed more money to improve performance with better technology, like new machines for detection of explosives. Meanwhile, ''we will continue to seek incremental gains in screener performance through training, testing and management practices,'' the agency said. Over the years, this column has reported regularly on the T.S.A. Follies, with enthusiastic assistance from perplexed business travelers. In Congress, partly as a consequence of audits that showed heavy spending by the agency on frills like parties and fancy offices, there are calls to scale back the agency's scope and perhaps replace its screeners with employees from private companies. Bureaucratic rigidity aside, frequent fliers have plenty of other complaints about the agency. For example, they protest that rules keep changing, with haphazard, inconsistent and sometimes rude enforcement at checkpoints. Personal searches such as poking infants in swaddling clothes or forcing octogenarians to wobble from their wheelchairs often appear to be unnecessary, they say, and are sometimes downright intrusive. Remember the outcry last year from female travelers subjected to invasive body pat-downs after reports that two female Chechen terrorists might have blown up a pair of Russian airliners? Travelers also worry about theft from checked bags -- more than two dozen of the agency's screeners have been arrested on theft charges in the last two years -- and they react with a mixture of bewilderment and resentment to the agency's Catch-22 policy on taking off your shoes. You do not have to remove them, the policy says, but if you do not, you will be ordered off to the secondary inspection area, where you do have to take them off. Let's have a look at the most recent refinement of the agency's list of prohibited items. Last week, it extended its ban on liquid-fuel and butane lighters in checked luggage to cover carry-on bags as well, while continuing to permit safety matches. A minor change, perhaps, but it created a strong reaction. ''They take my lighter away but allow me to have matches?'' asked Burt Wolf, a broadcast journalist who roams the world producing reports for public television on | More Baggage Taboos, but Little Security Enhancement |
1667759_0 | Good news for cellphone users: a new study published in the April issue of the journal Neurology shows no connection between cellphone use and the risk of developing a brain tumor. A Danish survey of 427 people with brain tumors and 822 with no tumors found no difference in their frequency of cellphone use or the number of years they had used a cellphone. In addition, in the patients who had brain tumors, there was no correlation between the location of the lesion and the side of the head they usually used for talking on the phone. One strength of this study is that researchers checked phone company records to confirm the reports of their subjects. This eliminates the problem of ''recall bias'' in which people, especially those with serious diseases of unknown cause, attribute their disorder to some previous activity and then unknowingly exaggerate the extent of their participation in it. Although the radio frequency fields emitted by cellphones do not have enough energy to cause cancer by breaking chemical bonds or causing DNA damage, some people have suggested that the telephones may cause damage by a thermal process that promotes tumor growth. This study shows no such effect, confirming the results of earlier epidemiological surveys. Dr. John Boice, scientific director of the International Epidemiology Institute in Rockville, Md., and a co-author of the study, said, ''The most dangerous thing you can do with a cellphone is to use one while you're driving a car.'' | Disconnecting Phones and Tumors |
1667916_0 | The plaza around the building nicknamed the Gherkin, a prize-winning skyscraper in the financial district in London, has been cordoned off after one of its giant glass panels plummeted from the 28th floor to the street. Officially opened last May, the 34-story, 600-foot missile-shaped building, formally known by its address, 30 St. Mary Axe, is a creation of the architect Lord Norman Foster. The structure is made of 5,000 glass panels, 744 of which open. A spokeswoman for the building said that the incident, on April 18, happened early in the morning, and no one was hurt. ''It was one of the opening panels that fell out,'' she said. ''At the moment a full investigation is under way to check all the other windows.'' Lord Foster's Millennium Bridge, a footbridge across the Thames from St. Paul's Cathedral to the Tate Modern, became known as the wobbly bridge and was closed immediately after opening in June 2000. Suspension system problems caused it to sway under the first crowds. After a $10 million repair, it bridge reopened in February 2002. PAM KENT | Arts, Briefly; In a Pickle |
1664777_0 | CONSIDER the awkward decision confronting the admissions director of a highly selective university that is trying to move forward in the academic pecking order (one of, say, 50 institutions that would have landed in the top 10 this year, except for various flaws in the rankings formula). On the director's desk sit the folders for two applicants. They have almost the same credentials, but one is just a little better than the other. She has a 4.2 grade point average, the other just a 4.0. She attained a combined score of 1580 on her SAT's, the other only 1440. Her family has an annual income of $500,000, the other's only $30,000. Now, as in the past, both students would be admitted. Years ago, the financial aid packages for these students would have been tailored in a way that would strike most people as just: the low-income student would have received a large aid package and the high-income student no aid at all. And both would probably have enrolled. No longer. Now, the slightly better-qualified student is likely to be lured elsewhere unless the director can match the substantial merit scholarships she has been offered by other institutions. But coming up with extra money for her means having to offer a much smaller aid package to the slightly less well-qualified applicant, notwithstanding her family's economic need. In brief, universities' traditional commitment to need-based financial aid is under siege. Why this change? In large part, it is a result of the sharp growth in the economic rewards of having a degree from an elite institution. The steep rise in overall earnings inequality over the last three decades has occurred in virtually every industry and occupation. Even among entry-level jobs, a handful of elite positions now pay several times as much as the average job in each category. Competition for these jobs is fierce. For every starting analyst's position posted by J.P. Morgan, for example, the firm receives mail sacks full of applications. Employers in this situation seldom find time to interview applicants who did not graduate from an elite university. Ambitious high school students have responded by applying in record numbers to the nation's most selective universities. But there is no greater number of slots in these institutions than before. And as the many thousands of highly qualified applicants whose rejection letters arrived two weeks ago can attest, the admissions hurdle at | The intense competition for top students is threatening financial aid based on need. |
1664869_1 | the church's softening stance on gay marriage. In the last year, about a dozen churches have broken with the Episcopal Church USA, the American arm of Anglicanism, and joined Anglican dioceses in Africa and South America whose leaders still view homosexuality as an abomination. Many other churches have split in two, or have joined networks of dissenting churches within the national church. At the same time, the Episcopal Church USA faces growing opposition in the international Anglican Communion for its position on sexuality. On Wednesday, the American church's executive council decided not to send voting delegates to the annual world meeting of Anglicans in June, obeying a request that the global council of the church had made to pacify angry Anglican leaders in many countries. The global leadership had asked the American church to send nonvoting delegates instead to explain the church's position on homosexuality, and the American church said on Wednesday that it would do that. ''Voluntarily withdrawing an Episcopal representative at this meeting, while it's a difficult thing to do, should be very warmly received,'' said the Rev. William L. Sachs, director of the Episcopal Church Foundation, an independent group that follows trends in the church. To address the American church's internal ferment, the global leaders, or primates, also called for the archbishop of Canterbury, the church's worldwide head, to create a panel to hear disputes between American churches and their bishops. But that panel has not been created yet. This has left the six churches in Connecticut with what they say is an unpalatable option: reporting to an alternative bishop chosen by Bishop Smith. No organization, including the Episcopal Church USA, keeps track of the number of parishes that split or leave because of theological differences with the mother church. But in the last few weeks, members of an Episcopal church in Tempe, Ariz., left to form their own church, the third-largest church in Alabama split, and on Sunday members of the biggest parish in the Diocese of Eastern Kansas are expected to vote to quit the Episcopal Church USA. Ronald McCrary, the rector of the Kansas church, Christ Episcopal in Overland Park, said, ''From my vantage point it seems like the pressure is building for congregations to act, and therefore the pace and frequency of parishes coming to a conclusion to separate from the Episcopal Church is picking up.'' In Connecticut, as elsewhere, discontent among conservative | Connecticut Episcopalians Defy Bishop Over Gay Issues |
1664716_8 | all this?'' A Museum Waiting to Spread Its Wings WHEN Edwina von Gal went to Panama two years ago to help create a park for the $50 million museum of biodiversity designed by Frank Gehry and Bruce Mau, she imagined a park for the people. ''It has to be free, with no lock on the gate,'' Ms. von Gal said last month as the sun set over Fort Amador, the old military base that once guarded the edge of the Panama Canal. Inside the old officers' quarters, an exhibition showed off the plans for the museum, whose bent and curving pieces of metal bear Mr. Gehry's signature. But unlike his Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, this museum is as colorful as a macaw. Its red, yellow and blue angled metal roof, below, looks like some phantasmagoric bird about to take flight. But the museum is having trouble getting off the ground. The pilings have been driven, but construction has been suspended for months. A $40 million loan promised by a previous administration has been stalled by the current government, which says the country's $1 billion debt may change the financing. The Gehry museum, its supporters say, would put Panama on the map, turning a debt-ridden country into a tourist destination. ''It's a unique fusion of science and art,'' said George R. Angehr, a tropical biologist from the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute and the curator of the museum. The amazing diversity of Panama's rain forests, second only to the Amazon, will be represented inside the museum by exhibitions designed by Mr. Mau. It is up to Ms. von Gal to bring some of those revelations outside, even if it is as simple as a frog pond, which Mr. Gehry designed as a reflecting pool, wiggling out from the building and ending in a public plaza. Ms. von Gal envisions a corutu, a great canopy tree planted there for shade. Most of the plants will be native, to help people appreciate the treasures they are all too likely to chop down. ''But we're not trying to put in a rain forest,'' she said. ''The whole idea of the park is that it's a bridge to the real thing. Out here, people will be able to touch and smell plants most suitable to urban gardens. ''I want to keep the park strictly ornamental, but at the same time highly sustainable. ANNE RAVER NATURE | Panama Calling To Preserve Its Edens |
1662960_2 | a formal call on the I.R.A. to disband at a time when Northern Ireland's peace efforts are stalled and its power-sharing authority is suspended. He delivered his statement, which some critics said was intended to strengthen his position as a candidate for Parliament, after the I.R.A. was blamed in two crimes in Belfast, a $50 million bank robbery last December and the killing in January of Robert McCartney, a Northern Ireland Catholic. These incidents have threatened to discredit Sinn Fein and its hitherto successful efforts to build political support in Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic. Mr. McCartney's sisters have pressed to bring his killers to justice. The campaign culminated in a visit to Washington last month, when United States politicians, including President Bush, met with the sisters but snubbed Mr. Adams. The killing hurt the standing of the I.R.A., once seen as defenders of Northern Ireland's Catholics against their British rulers but now depicted as criminals by many former supporters. ''Our struggle has reached a defining moment,'' Mr. Adams told I.R.A. fighters. ''I am asking you to join me in seizing this moment, to intensify our efforts, to rebuild the peace process and decisively move our struggle forward.'' The I.R.A. had no immediate response. Mr. Adams himself is widely held by his critics and others to command senior rank in the I.R.A. But he has not acknowledged that in public. In February, the I.R.A., which supports one Irish state free of British control, left peace talks in Northern Ireland. It also rescinded offers made last December to disarm and cease paramilitary activities. Some specialists in Irish politics said Mr. Adams was trying to return to the situation last December when the offer to disarm and Protestant demands for photographic evidence of the destruction of I.R.A. arms were under negotiation. ''You have to say, ideologically, that it is selling the same horse twice,'' said Paul Bew, professor of politics at Queens University, Belfast, referring to Sinn Fein's tactics. But the Rev. Ian Paisley, a hard-line Protestant leader in Northern Ireland, insisted that Sinn Fein had placed itself beyond negotiations. ''There is no place in any democracy for terrorists and no place for I.R.A./Sinn Fein,'' he said. In London, Prime Minister Tony Blair's office said the ''key will be what the I.R.A. does as a result.'' In Dublin, Prime Minister Bertie Ahern said Mr. Adams' statement was ''significant and has potential.'' | Sinn Fein Leader Offers I.R.A. an 'Alternative' to Violence |
1662930_4 | the printer. A user who has routed documents to the printer enters a code to start printing. The cost per page, if any, is determined by the hotel. FedEx Kinko's, which has 1,200 stores in the United States and 10 other countries, can print documents from a number of sources, including floppies, CD-R's and U.S.B. flash drives. Some stores allow you to plug your laptop directly into the printer. Stores usually charge by the minute for computer rental, plus a charge for each copy printed. Windows users have the option of downloading software at fedexkinkos.com/fpkf. An application there called File, Print FedEx Kinko's installs a special printer driver that routes your job to any FedEx Kinko's office. You can pick it up there or have the documents delivered by Federal Express. This service can be used for bound or unbound black-and-white or color documents. Prices start at 8 cents a page for short runs, with a $1 minimum. One advantage to FedEx Kinko's and other remote printing services is that you can route documents before you leave your office, or have a colleague upload them for you to pick up. This can save shipping charges and space in your luggage if you need multiple copies of large documents. Some independent copy shops offer printing services, as do many Internet cafes, which are easy to find in cities outside the United States. The Fax One time-tested method for obtaining documents while on the road is to fax them to your hotel or to a machine at a copy shop, Internet cafe, shipping store or other location. This is a quick-and-dirty approach: a fax machine will degrade the quality of the print compared with a laser or inkjet printer and, of course, it won't be in color. Both Windows PC's and Macintoshes come with software for sending a fax through the machine's modem, but you'll need to connect the computer to a standard phone line. For instructions, type ''fax'' into the Help window. There are also Internet fax services that you can use if you are connected to a hotel's broadband service or if you are at a WiFi hotspot. Most such services, like eFax (efax.com) and J2 (www.j2.com), allow for incoming faxes and charge a monthly service fee, as well as by the page. Fax1.com has a pay-as-you-go service that costs 12 cents a page in the United States and Britain; | Printing on the Road: Portable Solutions |
1664479_2 | 10 new members last year -- France has become more anti-European. ''The French believe that their system is the best and that they are the center of the universe,'' Bernard Kouchner, the Socialist former health minister and one of the most popular political figures in France, said in a telephone interview. ''It's not true. They don't realize they are like an old ship sinking slowly in the sea.'' The constitution has been transformed into a repository of all the fears of the French today. Some are convinced that the constitution will unfairly strengthen the power of the new countries of the union. Nearly 70 percent of farmers are opposed, for example, according to a poll in mid-March, because they see the European Union taking away precious farm subsidies. Others fear that accepting the document will further damage the ailing French economy and increase unemployment -- 10 percent in January -- by moving jobs to places like Poland. ''For the past 25 years unemployment has been the French public's foremost concern and their prime voting motivation,'' said a recent editorial in the left-leaning newspaper Libération, in explaining mounting opposition to the vote. Others want to use the referendum to register general opposition to the French government. But even François Hollande, head of the Socialist Party and a potential presidential candidate in 2007, asked voters at a rally in Marseille last month to set aside politics and vote yes for the good of the country. Addressing ''all those who are suffering'' from the policies of the Chirac government, he said: ''You want to punish, you want to express your anger, you want to register your discontent and you are right. But do not make Europe the sacrificial lamb when the government is to blame. Europe deserves better.'' Then there is the group of 95 mayors of towns in Haute-Saône, in eastern France, who have threatened to refuse to hold the elections in their towns. They are protesting the latest decision by the Ministry of Education to close some schools to reflect demographic changes. Concern about the referendum was widely seen as the reason the Chirac government decided to raise the salaries of unionized civil servants by eight-tenths of 1 percent last month. The move was seen as a display of solidarity with the government workers and a transparent ploy to get them vote yes next month. Just a month ago, civil servants | The Continental Dream: Will the French Shatter It? |
1664535_1 | from war to peace. The needs are many -- and immediate. More than three million civilians, displaced by violence, can now return to southern Sudan and rebuild their lives. Two million of them need food aid. If people are not fed, if former soldiers are not reintegrated or retrained, peace will quickly unravel. The billions pledged this week can help. But hungry people cannot eat pledges. Through long and bitter experience we've learned that donor pledges often remain unfulfilled. In Cambodia, Rwanda, Liberia and elsewhere, a large percentage of promised funds failed to materialize, and many lives were lost as a result. For example, in 1992, donors pledged $880 million for Cambodian war rehabilitation; three years later, only $460 million had been delivered. Nearly a year after donors promised $1 billion to deal with the devastation caused by the 2003 earthquake in Bam, Iran, less than 20 percent of the money had been delivered. Clearly, we must do better in Sudan. I urge donors to convert their generous pledges into cash without delay. And I urge the public to hold them accountable for their promises. This time, let us keep our commitments, and not turn a blind eye to a whole generation of Sudanese who have earned this peace and desperately need it. In Darfur, rations at camps already have been cut -- and soon Sudan's rainy season will begin, making aid more difficult and costly to deliver. In a matter of weeks we will run out of food for two million people. No one really knows how many people have died in Darfur since the conflict began, but some analysts estimate it could be 300,000 or more. If the situation deteriorates further, up to four million people -- two-thirds of Darfur's population -- may need food aid by summer's end. But more than food aid is needed -- we also need to hold the perpetrators of violence in Sudan accountable. The International Commission of Inquiry, which I appointed at the request of the United Nations Security Council, has amply documented the murder, mass rapes, abductions and other atrocities committed in Darfur, as have many others. We know what is happening in Darfur. The question is, why are we not doing more to put an end to it? Last summer, the Security Council, the United States and the European Union all said Darfur was their top priority. But it was | Billions of Promises to Keep |
1664457_5 | in the United States don't know which varieties they are buying, unlike their counterparts in Europe, where retailers must identify the kinds they sell. At least clamshell containers, introduced by Driscoll in 1989 and widely adopted by other companies, carry brand labels, an imprecise but still significant indication of quality. In one encouraging move this year, Driscoll instituted a program for its growers in Southern California, ''Pay for Quality,'' that measures the sweetness of their berries and pays them more for better fruit. And Beach Street Farms, based in Watsonville, has been test-marketing a premium line, Brown Sugar, using high-quality varieties like 770-506 and Cal Giant 3. Specialty growers of old-fashioned varieties are vanishingly rare in California. In Watsonville Nicholas Soto raises half an acre of tiny-fruited, intensely fragrant wild strawberries called fraises des bois in France. A different species from common strawberries, they have been cultivated in Europe since the Middle Ages, but they are delicate and small, an impossible combination for commercial growers. As Mr. Soto explained on a pleasant April morning, it takes 45 minutes to pick one crate of 12 three-ounce baskets, which he sells for as much as $50. He raises two varieties from seed, red- and white-fruited, with similar flavor. Despite the berries' perishability, he flies a few crates to New York, where they go mostly to fancy restaurants. The longtime desire of strawberry lovers for a larger berry with a wild aroma has materialized in the French Mara des Bois variety, now starting to be grown in California. It is small- to medium-size and deep red, with soft, melting flesh; when dead ripe, it's candy-sweet and has a fantastically intense wild fragrance. Although some take it to be a hybrid of wild and cultivated strawberry, it is actually an inspired cross of four older cultivated varieties introduced in 1991 by Marionnet, a French nursery. It's the predominant high-end strawberry at French markets. The Chino family, legendary for its secrecy and superb produce, grows half an acre of Mara des Bois organically in Rancho Santa Fe, an affluent suburb of San Diego; they sell at their chic farm stand and to the restaurants Spago and Sona in Los Angeles and Chez Panisse in Berkeley. Word is spreading: Driscoll is using the variety in its breeding program, and a commercial nursery, Sierra-Cascade, is propagating larger numbers of the plants for local growers in Southern California. | Strawberries and Dreams |
1666067_4 | which rivals the Yangtze River Delta around Shanghai as one of China's two main export powerhouses. Henry Zhang, the general manager of the Shishi Hengyi Textile Product Trade Company in Shishi City in east-central China, said that his factory had already noticed an improvement. The factory was blacked out two days a week in 2003, a day a week last year and this year, none at all. ''This year, we have no problems,'' he said. But blackouts have been a serious problem for years here in Guangzhou, the biggest city in the Pearl River Delta, and they are worse this spring as oil-fired plants have shut down, though coal-fired power plants have kept running. Diesel generators have become a necessity for factories across much of China in the last few years, as electricity demand has soared past supply, and they have helped turn China into the world's second-largest oil importer, after the United States. Factories receive priority in diesel shipments, and 19 representatives of companies from across China said in separate interviews at the trade fair here that they had not had trouble buying enough diesel to refill their fuel tanks periodically. Yet the generators are costly in many ways. The diesel alone costs two to three times as much per kilowatt generated as electricity from power plants, managers complain, and on top of that are labor costs for maintenance and operation as well as the cost of the generator and the cost of space to put the generator and its fuel tank. The generators, particularly older, domestically manufactured models, also rank among the biggest polluters in a country with some of the worst air pollution. Generator sales are an important barometer of long-term business confidence in the national power grid. But while China has moved ahead of the United States to become the world's largest market for industrial-size generators, there are signs that some businesses are hoping the country's overburdened power stations will catch up. At Cummins Inc., generator sales surged last year but have evened out at that high level so far this year, said John Watkins, the president of the company's East Asian operations. INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS Correction: April 22, 2005, Friday An article in Business Day on Tuesday about shortages of diesel fuel and electricity in China misstated the country's ranking among oil users. It is the second-largest consumer, after the United States, not the second-largest importer. | Great Engine of China Is Low on Fuel |
1665988_3 | diabetes, Japanese health officials told Dr. Seidell. According to Dr. Kaufman, ''By 2010 more than half the people in the world with diabetes will be Asians.'' Traditionally, in developing countries, the poorest people have been the thinnest, a consequence of hard physical labor and the consumption of small amounts of traditional foods. But when people in poor countries migrate to cities, obesity rates rise fastest among those in the lowest socioeconomic group, Dr. Seidell reported. Dr. Mickey Chopra, public health specialist at the University of Western Cape, South Africa, attributes the rise in obesity in middle-income and lower-income countries to dietary shifts ''toward highly refined foods and toward meat and dairy products containing high levels of saturated fats, together with reduced energy expenditure.'' In other words, as people in developing countries trade their traditional diets, heavily based on vegetables and grains, for processed and animal foods, and expend less energy to move themselves and do their daily work, it is all too easy to overconsume calories. China is a prime example. Urbanization has led to changes in diet and increasingly sedentary lives, replete with sugary soft drinks, cheap vegetable oils, motorized vehicles and televisions in the home. In the last eight years, the proportion of Chinese men classified as overweight, with a body mass index over 25, has risen to 15 percent from 4 percent, and the proportion of overweight Chinese women has doubled to 20 percent from 10 percent. ''Dietary transitions that took more than five decades in Japan have occurred in less than two decades in China,'' Dr. Chopra wrote in The Bulletin of the World Health Organization. He attributed this rapid shift largely to the growth of multinational food companies that have added sugar, fats and oils to agricultural products. The market value of these processed foods is now three times as great as the farm value, and foreign exports to countries like China represent a major source of income and growth for food producers. Similar trends have been noted elsewhere. ''Mexicans now drink more Coca-Cola than milk,'' Dr. Chopra noted. Dr. Adam Drewnowski, director of the Center for Public Health Nutrition at the University of Washington, said, ''Food is becoming globally cheaper, and what's becoming cheapest is calories,'' especially calories from sugar and fat. In Brazil, for example, ''It costs a mere 4 cents to produce a pound of sugar,'' Dr. Drewnowski said. ''You can consume | As America Gets Bigger, The World Does, Too |
1666046_5 | and state, is strictly enforced in many countries in Europe. In 2004, the campaign by some European governments, supported by the pope, to include a reference to Europe's Christian heritage in the draft European Union constitution failed. Later last year, Rocco Buttliglione, a former Italian minister, was rejected for a top post in the European Union for his opinions that homosexuality is a sin and that women would be better off at home. In 2002, the European Union adopted a report urging its members to ensure access to contraception, a move that Cardinal Alfonso López Trujillo of the Vatican's Pontifical Council for the Family denounced as ''a dark and sad moment for this great Europe.'' There is growth in Christianity on the Continent, but it tends to be among immigrants from Asia, Africa and Latin America, who are often drawn to churches described as evangelical, Pentecostal or charismatic. At 7 a.m. six days a week, a windowless basement of an office building in a working class part of Paris is filled with Filipino men and women, most of them domestic workers. They have come to celebrate a charismatic -- but not Catholic -- mass with a Filipino priest, the Rev. John Donn Bautista, who is married and the father of six children. The room -- furnished with an altar and plastic stools as well as computers, a fax machine and file cabinets -- does double duty as a chapel and the church headquarters. The trend toward churches like these frustrates and even angers many traditional Catholic clerics. ''We're seeing the super-marketing of religion,'' said the Rev. Jacques Anelli, director of the National Vocation Service of the French Catholic Church. ''People consume, and when they don't find an institution they agree with, then they go somewhere else. Bad variations must not make us abandon what we are. The relationship with God must not be done like petty commerce.'' But for Catholics who want more, this sort of church is a welcome haven. ''When I came to France, I wanted a church that gave me a sense of belonging, a sense of security,'' said Cory de Jesus, a 45-year-old housekeeper from the Philippines who plays the drums and sings at the church's Sunday mass in a larger hall. ''I have a sense of the sacraments here that I didn't get as a Roman Catholic.'' TRANSITION IN THE VATICAN: CRISIS OF THE FAITH | Europeans Fast Falling Away From Church |
1666022_0 | Dr. Richard Henry Popkin, a historian of philosophy and its particular tradition of skeptical thought, died on Thursday at a hospital in Santa Monica, Calif. He was 81 and lived in Los Angeles. The cause was complications of emphysema, his family said. Skepticism, a hallmark of Western philosophy since ancient Greece, is an attitude of systematic questioning, not philosophical dogmatism or zealotry. Dr. Popkin wrote a history of skepticism that appeared in 1960. It included thinkers like Descartes and Spinoza as it went through editions and revisions. He expanded the work to ''The History of Scepticism From Savonarola to Bayle,'' now in its second edition, published by the Oxford University Press in 2003. The author documents an era pivotal to Western thought, an age of doubt as well as faith. Besides numerous articles and book chapters, Dr. Popkin wrote and edited 36 books, often in collaboration with others. Among the many still in print are a paperback, ''Spinoza,'' published in England last year, as well as ''Third Force in 17th-Century Thought'' (1991) and ''Skeptical Philosophy for Everyone'' (2001), written with Avrum Stoll. He was the editor of the Columbia History of Western Philosophy, published by the Columbia University Press in 1999, and ''Jewish Christians and Christian Jews: From the Renaissance to the Enlightenment'' (1993). Also in print is ''Scepticism and Irreligion in the 17th and 18th Centuries'' (1993), which he edited with Arjo Vanderjagt. Forswearing philosophy for a spell in the 1960's, Dr. Popkin joined the chorus of doubters who prominently disputed the Warren Commission Report on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. In an article in The New York Review of Books and in a paperback he argued that the commission's single-assassin solution was not just implausible, but also impossible in terms of the commission's evidence. The book, ''The Second Oswald'' (Avon, 1966), promptly came under attack. Eliot Fremont-Smith, in a review in The New York Times, called it ''a very hasty book, but fascinating reading.'' At his death, Dr. Popkin was working on a book about Rabbi Isaac of Troki in Lithuania, who composed a polemic against Christianity in the 16th century, and a collection of essays on philosophical skepticism. Dr. Popkin was born in Manhattan. He graduated in 1943 from Columbia University, where he also received a master's in 1945 and a doctorate in 1950. He started teaching philosophy as an instructor at the University of | Richard Popkin, 81, Historian Of Philosophy and Skepticism |
1666457_0 | American Prometheus The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer By Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin Illustrated. 721 pages. Alfred A. Knopf. $35. 109 East Palace Robert Oppenheimer and the Secret City of Los Alamos By Jennet Conant Illustrated. 425 pages. Simon & Schuster. $26.95. Dec. 31, 2025, is the date inadvertently listed by Amazon.com for the publication of one forthcoming study of J. Robert Oppenheimer. It's a mistake (the book is actually due this summer), but a revealing one. The cavalcade of Oppenheimer studies is vast and unabated. Anyone who ever knew the man and could put ink to paper has weighed in on him, or so it seems. And those firsthand accounts continue to be parsed, dissected and analyzed, sometimes by scholars willing to devote decades to the task. In this midst of such voluminous scholarship, how can Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin's ''American Prometheus'' purport to be ''the first full-scale biography''? The reason, beyond its having the best title, is its span. Oppenheimer's life has often been studied in fragments: scientific (his career as a physicist, among colleagues like Enrico Fermi and Albert Einstein), historic (presiding over the birth of the atomic bomb at Los Alamos), political (the harassment and humiliation of a government investigation during the McCarthy era), moral (questioning the consequences of his breakthrough) and personal (piercing blue eyes, much magnetism, just as much hubris). These authors compile all of it under a single roof. Their book has such range that it connects a trauma that 14-year-old Robert experienced at summer camp with the self-destructive stoicism he would eventually demonstrate on the witness stand. ''American Prometheus'' is a work of voluminous scholarship and lucid insight, unifying its multifaceted portrait with a keen grasp of Oppenheimer's essential nature. What did he do upon finding himself in a Capitol Hill elevator with Senator Joseph McCarthy, the embodiment of Oppenheimer's comeuppance? ''We looked at each other,'' the physicist told a friend, ''and I winked.'' ''American Prometheus'' sees the full implications of such a gesture: charm and bravado on the surface, Dostoyevskian darkness underneath. It traces Oppenheimer's arrogance to the kind of upbringing that would give him his own sloop at age 16 (he named it for a chemical compound) and lead one of the oral examiners of his doctoral thesis to say: ''I got out of there just in time. He was beginning to ask me | The Physics, Philosophy and, Literally, Dirty Laundry of Robert Oppenheimer |
1665672_2 | the top.'' ''Or at least no one was listening at the Vatican,'' he said. ''That is what we want to change most of all,'' he added. Like many matters facing the church, the liberal-conservative divide is not clear-cut: some liberals make the case that the conservative viewpoint dominating the Vatican and the College of Cardinals does not reflect ordinary Catholic life, and is one reason for declining church attendance in developed countries. But conservatives note that liberals do not represent all Catholics, particularly among the most devout. Liberal groups themselves face contradictions. Although they say they represent Catholics around the world, their movements are based primarily in the United States and Europe, where church attendance is declining. In the third world, where the church is growing fastest, many Catholics remain deeply conservative, especially on sexual morality. But even among the cardinals, easy definitions of liberal and conservative do not always fit. In the third world, many cardinals are conservative on sexual issues. In Latin America, many strongly oppose liberation theology, but are outspoken on poverty and social justice. In Italy, one strong contender for the papacy, Dionigi Tettamanzi, the archbishop of Milan, is by most standards a conservative, especially on sexual morality, and is close to the conservative lay group Opus Dei. But he has sympathized with antiglobalists, and is outspoken on the need to find common ground with Muslims. One progressive cardinal said the real divide in the College of Cardinals was simply between those who favored discussing delicate topics, like bioethics or sexual morality, and those who wanted them declared settled and off limits. Still, several activists said they believed that the reality of the church would force some changes. Sister Christine noted that the dire shortage of priests and seminarians would have to be confronted. She said she hoped support would grow for the idea of married priests, and for allowing the ordination of women as deacons and someday priests. ''In the long term, our faith is with the Holy Spirit,'' said Linda Pieczynski, spokeswoman for Call to Action, based in Chicago, the largest Catholic reform group in the United States. ''It's not with the individual men who govern the church.'' ''Jesus said the Spirit will always be with us,'' she added. ''How else could the church have lasted for 2,000 years given the terrible leadership it has had at times?'' THE TRANSITION IN THE VATICAN: THEOLOGY | On the Sidelines, Catholic Liberals Still Seek a Ray of Hope |
1665381_7 | expression of the contrasting position -- that melancholy confers special virtues -- appears in the ''Problemata Physica,'' or ''Problems,'' a discussion, in question-and-answer form, of scientific conundrums. It was long attributed to Aristotle, but the surviving version, from the second century B.C., is now believed to have been written by his followers. In the 30th book of the ''Problems,'' the author asks why it is that outstanding men -- philosophers, statesmen, poets, artists, educators and heroes -- are so often melancholic. Among the ancients, the strongmen Herakles and Ajax were melancholic; more contemporaneous examples cited in the ''Problems'' include Socrates, Plato and the Spartan general Lysander. The answer given is that too much black bile leads to insanity, while a moderate amount creates men ''superior to the rest of the world in many ways. '' The Greeks, and the cultures that succeeded them, faced depression poorly armed. Treatment has always been difficult. Depression is common and spans the life cycle. When you add in (as the Greeks did) mania, schizophrenia and epilepsy, not to mention hemorrhoids, you encompass a good deal of what humankind suffers altogether. Such an impasse calls for the elaboration of myth. Over time, ''melancholy '' became a universal metaphor, standing in for sin and innocent suffering, self-indulgence and sacrifice, inferiority and perspicacity. The great flowering of melancholy occurred during the Renaissance, as humanists rediscovered the ''Problems.'' In the late 15th century, a cult of melancholy flourished in Florence and then was taken back to England by foppish aristocratic travelers who styled themselves artists and scholars and affected the melancholic attitude and dress. Most fashionable of all were ''melancholic malcontents,'' irritable depressives given to political intrigue. One historian, Lawrence Babb, describes them as ''black-suited and disheveled . . . morosely meditative, taciturn yet prone to occasional railing.'' In dozens of stage dramas from the period, the principal character is a discontented melancholic. ''Hamlet'' is the great example. As soon as Hamlet takes the stage, an Elizabethan audience would understand that it is watching a tragedy whose hero's characteristic flaw will be a melancholic trait, in this case, paralysis of action. By the same token, the audience would quickly accept Hamlet's spiritual superiority, his suicidal impulses, his hostility to the established order, his protracted grief, solitary wanderings, erudition, impaired reason, murderousness, role-playing, passivity, rashness, antic disposition, ''dejected haviour of the visage'' and truck with graveyards and visions. ''Hamlet'' | There's Nothing Deep About Depression |
1665526_1 | ''Get rid of those unwieldy land lines of your grandmother and her generation and go wireless!'' Now, I'm the first one to admit that the only reason I passed any science course of any kind was because Mike DeSantis (we sat alphabetically -- Davitt, DeSantis) sat next to me for four years and would do things like slip me the periodic table of elements drawn on a wrapper from a pack of Topps baseball cards. So, yes, I am a techno-ignoramus. The Stevens Institute of Technology has a hung photo of me labeled ''philistine.'' But I do have a few questions for the more telecom literate. With television, we put up with fuzzy pictures and lost stations (you just couldn't get a clear ''Million Dollar Movie'' or anything on Channel 9 in Carlstadt) for decades while our homes used antennas sticking from our roofs. When cable came, we thought we'd found the Promised Land. Our phones were just the opposite. Anchored securely to the wall and supported by endless miles of wire, they worked fine for the most part, just fine. Granted, there was the occasional errant wire cut by a less-than-diligent New Jersey Telephone employee and there went Mom's conversation with Aunt Shirley in Boca. Other than that -- few complaints. And the idea now is to toss out that hard wire and embrace the dropped call and fuzzy conversations of cellular and wireless right in your own home? ''C'mon,'' they scream at us, ''no one has a land line in Norway anymore.'' Here in Glen Rock the citizens are planning to storm the town Bastille and drag the members of the council into the streets to give them the Marie Antoinette treatment -- ''Let them eat headsets!'' -- because there is a consideration of erecting a tower for ''better wireless reception.'' Oy! The whole thing smacks of idiocy. We got better television reception when cable arrived, and now we're supposed to buy the idea that our phones (and, it follows) our lives will be better when we worship the same technology we just got finished throwing out? Who do these snake oil salesmen think they're kidding? I don't like the whole setup. I don't like the cellphone companies. And I still can't figure out how these ''providers'' (don't you just love the imagery?) slipped the charge for incoming calls past our ever-alert New Jersey delegation to Congress. Can | Synergy? Whatever |
1662337_1 | of sexuality and the so-called sanctity of life dovetailed with the values of the growing evangelical movement in the United States. And over the last few years, conservative Catholics and Protestants have forged a powerful political alliance now shaping American politics. ''In terms of the goals of our organization, this pope was a vital force on two different fronts: he was a peerless defender of life, marriage and the family, and his leadership helped bring about the collapse of communism,'' said Beverly LaHaye, chairwoman of Concerned Women for America, an evangelical lobbying group in Washington. Evangelicals said they saw the pope as a leader, much the same way devout Catholics did. ''He seems to be a spiritual leader for the rest of the world, too,'' said Mark Wells, 47, of Algonquin, Ill., as he left services at Willow Creek Community Church near Chicago, one of the country's largest churches. ''He's kind of like the president. Everyone looks up to him as a moral leader.'' At the Arlington Street Church in Boston, a Unitarian Universalist congregation, George Whitehouse, the minister at large, told the 150 or so people gathered on Sunday morning that John Paul's greatest legacy was ''his work for peace and justice.'' But Mr. Whitehouse said he disagreed with the pope's stands on just about every other issue, including his handling of the Catholic clergy sexual abuse scandal that shook Boston and his refusal to ordain women. Muslims remembered a different pope: one who preached tolerance of Islam in surprisingly tangible ways, they said. For example, John Paul was the first pope to enter a mosque when he visited the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus, Syria, in 2001. Imam Hassan al-Qazwini of Detroit, who leads the Islamic Center of America, the country's largest mosque, said that in December 2001, the pope called on Catholics to fast with Muslims on the last Friday of the holy month of Ramadan. John Paul apologized, at another time, for the violence of the Crusades. ''We Muslims also feel we lost a great friend and supporter in the Vatican,'' Imam Qazwini said. Like others at the Islamic Center of Washington who spoke after midday prayers, Mateen Tahir, 33, said he appreciated the pope's efforts to teach that Islam was a peaceful religion, especially as some other Christian leaders vilified the faith. ''The next pope, I hope he will follow what John Paul II did,'' Mr. | People of All Faiths Recall Pope With Fondness |
1662350_5 | at the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate at Georgetown University, said the priest shortage is global: ''Relative to the rest of the world, the United States is in very good shape. South and Central America are very Catholic cultures, but people wait years to get their babies baptized. They may see a priest only once a year. They don't have access to the sacraments the way we expect to. If Americans can't get communion on Sunday, we think there's something drastically wrong with our church.'' While the church has grown by a quarter of a billion people during John Paul's 26-year papacy, the number of priests worldwide is about 400,000 -- almost exactly the same as when he started his globe-trotting evangelization campaign. Where should the church send newly ordained priests when they are needed everywhere? Bishop Ricardo Ramírez, who serves the priest-poor diocese of Las Cruces, New Mexico, said, ''I've asked my bishop friends in Mexico to send me priests, and they say, 'We'll keep you in mind, but right now our dioceses are growing and our cities are growing and we need all the priests we are getting.''' Another challenge facing a global church is how much autonomy priests and bishops should be given to adapt church teaching and liturgy to their own cultures. After the second Vatican Council of the early 1960's, the plan was for greater regional autonomy from Rome. But John Paul recentralized church authority. When the bishops from Asia held a synod in Rome in 1998, some of them confronted their colleagues in the Vatican with the autonomy issue, said the Rev. Peter C. Phan, a professor of Catholic social thought at Georgetown University. The bishop from Japan asked what was the point of composing all liturgical texts in Latin, then sending them to be translated to Japan, only to send them back to Rome for approval by Vatican officials who could not read Japanese. ''The second thing on their minds is married clergy,'' Father Phan said. ''They have been asking for the possibility of married clergy because in Asia the number of priests is small. And Rome simply does not answer.'' The question of whether local culture can be integrated into church practices, and if so how much, goes back to the 15th century, Professor Thompson of Fordham said. With the centralization of authority in the Vatican under John Paul, how | A GLOBAL AGENDA |
1662069_4 | There are just under 24,000 diocesan priests on active duty today, down by one-fifth from 1990, and many of those active priests are well beyond retirement age. Georgetown University's Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate reckons that more than one-quarter of American priests are now over 75, and in five years the figure will be nearly 40 percent. Though the priest shortage is a worldwide phenomenon, the pope has reaffirmed that the church will not consider allowing priests to marry or the ordination of women as priests. Though popular with traditionalists, this policy has disappointed many American Catholics, priests included, who have petitioned the church to open the issue for discussion. One researcher estimates that one priest in five is now circuit-riding to two or three or four churches each weekend so that parishioners may participate in the sacrament of the eucharist, which only a priest can provide. Deacons and lay Catholics have stepped into the void, taking up as many parish responsibilities as they are allowed. Last year, for the first time, lay parish administrators outnumbered priests, and the practical reality is that many United States parishes are effectively being run by female parish administrators. Lay movements of all kinds are proliferating. Opus Dei, a conservative movement of clerics and laity, has been gaining in numbers and influence in the United States with the help of the pope, who declared it a ''personal prelature,'' making it answerable only to Rome. Meanwhile, the sexual abuse scandal and the hierarchy's secretive handling of it have given rise to the Voice of the Faithful, a mobilization of Catholics who have demanded greater public accountability and more lay input in church affairs, so far to little effect. Sister Christine Schenk, director of FutureChurch, a Cleveland-based group that advocates opening ordination to women, said, ''There is a sense of people feeling dispirited -- not only the laity, but twice as much by the bishops -- because so many of those bishops are caught in the middle,'' dealing daily with problems in the priesthood but powerless to make any significant changes. In his role as law-giver, clarifying church teaching in the post-Vatican II era, John Paul II issued a record-breaking number of encyclicals, apostolic letters, rules for liturgy, a revised code of canon law and a new Catechism of the Catholic Church -- many of them cutting off innovations that had been gaining popularity | His Flock; Catholics in America: A Restive People |
1662171_5 | Gibson, an American journalist who has worked in the Vatican and wrote ''The Coming Catholic Church.'' ''This College of Cardinals is so diverse, from so many different places, and they have no love for the Italians,'' Mr. Gibson said. ''The Italians put a lot more stake in the Italian claim to the papacy than everyone else does.'' It is highly unlikely that the conclave will choose an American. Given the United States' powerful military and economic presence in the world, the College of Cardinals will probably avoid giving it the papacy as well. In addition, many cardinals regard the sexual abuse scandal as an American problem, even though clergy abuse scandals have erupted in other countries, including Australia, Austria, Ireland and the Philippines. But even influential American cardinals acknowledge their slim chances of becoming pope. ''An office like the papacy needs to be free,'' Cardinal Francis George, the archbishop of Chicago, said to reporters in Rome in 2003. ''And to some extent, even the appearance of being in some sense captured by, as we say now, the world's only superpower, would not be helpful to the mission of the church.'' Age, which is often a factor, could be once again. Given John Paul's lengthy pontificate, the cardinals may be inclined to choose a slightly older pope, in his mid- to late 70's, in order to avoid another long reign. Cardinal Angelo Scola of Venice, 63, and Cardinal Christoph Schönborn of Austria, 60, both considered rising stars, are said by many church experts to be too young. But just as many Vatican observers say that given the long infirmity of John Paul, they will look for a youthful candidate, one who can reinvigorate the office, ruling out someone like Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger of France, who is 78. Perhaps the most important and most intangible question the cardinals in the Sistine Chapel will ask themselves is, ''What qualities does the church now need in its next pope?'' John Paul was a charismatic, globe-trotting pastor, but he paid little attention to tending the church bureaucracy. As evidence, some church experts point to the Vatican banking scandal and the failure to remove or discipline sexually abusive clergy members. Some cardinals may want to look to an experience church administrator from inside the Curia, like Cardinal Bertone, Cardinal Re or Cardinal Darío Castrillón Hoyos, who, as a Colombian, would also have the advantage of embodying | Challenge Posed in Selecting a Successor |
1662176_8 | the code in 1994 with leptin, a protein found to be lacking in some obese rats. When injected with leptin, the rats became thin. Amgen, the big biotechnology company, invested millions in leptin research, but the rodent results could not be duplicated in humans. More recently, Regeneron hoped it had a winner in Axokine, a genetically engineered version of a human protein that signals the brain to stop eating. But the company placed Axokine on the back burner last year after patients developed antibodies against the protein, blocking its effectiveness. GlaxoSmithKline, meanwhile, is still smarting from the defeat of one of its promising weight-loss drugs, called 771. In February, after 14 years of development and millions in costs, the company announced that it would no longer pursue the drug because it simply had not worked in clinical trials. ''We get to the point that, after years of blood, sweat and tears, we're left with tears,'' said Dr. Kenneth Batchelor, a scientist who directs metabolic disease research for Glaxo. But the company is now trying several other ideas, still hoping to solve the human metabolic puzzle. At Boston University, Dr. Corkey and four other scientists have formed their own small company, AdipoGenix. They hope to outwit the metabolic system by locating a drug that attacks fat cells directly, bypassing all the circuitry. The idea is intriguing enough that Johnson & Johnson has agreed to invest, in a deal worth up to $60 million if all benchmarks are met. The temporary offices of AdipoGenix are within walking distance of the Boston Medical Center. That is also where the company gets the bulk of its raw material: fat harvested from surgical patients. Most of those patients have undergone gastric bypass surgery or paniculectomies, in which doctors cut away excess fat and sagging abdominal skin from people who have lost lots of weight. ''People are so happy to give us their fat,'' Dr. Corkey said. In the operating room, the fat is transferred to a sterile water bottle, then placed in an insulated cooler for the short trip to AdipoGenix's labs. There, the company has been testing what happens when fat is mixed with each of 41,000 chemical compounds from Johnson & Johnson's library or from AdipoGenix's smaller collection of compounds. Under a microscope in AdipoGenix labs, fat cells normally look like big round globes. But Dr. Corkey said that some of the compounds | Drug Makers Race to Cash In on Fight Against Fat |
1661860_0 | To the Editor: As a partly disabled senior citizen, I embarked on a South American cruise in February. I do not negotiate steps well anymore. When I, walking with my cane, first entered the dining room, the headwaiter saw me and helped me up the one step -- doing so when I entered and left for the entire cruise. The ship, the Marco Polo, also had accessible restrooms in several public areas. The Marco Polo (Orient Lines) has a connection with Norwegian Cruise Lines, which was covered in the article. Phyllis Vail Port Jervis, N.Y. | DISABILITIES AND CRUISING |
1662162_5 | at his installation on Oct. 22, 1978 -- had a special meaning. In June 1979, millions turned out for the pope's first visit to his native Poland, masses of people acting independently of the Communist government and gaining a liberating sense of their own autonomy. In retrospect, the visit was widely seen as a detonator of the Solidarity labor movement's challenge to Poland's Communist government in 1980 and ultimately of the changes that swept the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe a decade later. Traveling widely -- through Europe, Africa, the Americas and Asia -- the pope electrified vast crowds with a populist blend of showmanship, evangelism and impassioned appeals for human rights, peace, disarmament and justice for the poor and the oppressed. On that first papal visit to Poland, he scolded the officially atheistic Communist government for treating people ''merely as a means of production.'' He went to Brazil and chastised the military junta in power. ''Violence,'' he said, ''kills what it intends to create.'' He went to Ireland and confronted zealots of the Irish Republican Army and their Protestant foes: ''On my knees I beg you to turn away from the path of violence and to return to the ways of peace.'' He went to Japan and mourned: ''To remember Hiroshima is to abhor nuclear war. To remember Hiroshima is to commit oneself to peace.'' He went to Auschwitz and asked, ''How far can cruelty go?'' And he went to the United Nations in New York and spoke to world leaders of peace for ''all the men and women living on this planet.'' An Intensely Physical Presence People everywhere found the pope's presence intensely physical. Not content to wave from a passing limousine, this man with the ruddy face and glowing eyes would jump out and plunge into the crowds, hugging, kissing, grasping and talking to people; singing, smiling, winking and reaching out with his quarry-worker hands to touch and bless them. Chiefs of protocol winced. Security men were horrified, fearing the kind of attack in which he was shot in St. Peter's Square in 1981. Aides of all kinds grew exhausted trying to keep up with him. But he was determined to take his message from St. Peter's around the globe. Over the quarter century of his papacy, the pope traveled to 129 countries on 104 trips abroad. He visited and revisited Poland and made many trips through | Pope John Paul II, Church Shepherd And a Catalyst for World Change |
1662162_16 | promulgated in 1917 and rendered out of date by many of Vatican II's reforms. In 1992, he also approved a new ''universal catechism'' to guide church leaders around the world in presentations of Catholic beliefs. Both documents set firm limits on what were seen as ambiguities and invitations to further change in the documents of Vatican II. To remove what he called lingering doubts, in May 1994 he reaffirmed church doctrine that women could not be ordained as priests and said the matter was not even open to debate. The Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which oversees church teaching, went further in 1995 by declaring that the doctrine of ordaining only men as priests was ''infallibly'' taught -- a designation reserved for teaching on faith and morals that is considered irreversible, free from error and requiring full assent from the faithful. The pope carried these church views onto the world's stage. In 1994, as 180 countries planned a United Nations conference in Cairo on the potentially catastrophic population explosion projected for the 21st century, he orchestrated a campaign against draft proposals favoring abortion rights, contraception and other measures endorsed by feminists and population experts. The campaign -- the Vatican's most concerted in years on international policy and the pope's most heartfelt since his crusade against Communism -- put a heavy strain on his relationship with President Clinton, who favored safe legalized abortion and efforts to stabilize a global population that experts said could grow to 8.5 billion from 5.7 billion in 35 years. The Cairo conference adopted a strong declaration endorsing family planning and giving women more control over their lives to help stabilize populations. But the Vatican shaped the language so that it did not enshrine any universal right to abortion and excluded abortion as a means of family planning. In 1995, the pope appeared to be at pains to stress his support for women's rights. He credited the women's movement with positive achievements and offered an apology for injustices against women in the name of the church. But Vatican comments on the Fourth World Conference on Women, held in Beijing, signaled no major changes in church teaching that portrayed women as mothers, educators and mainstays of the family. In a key appointment, John Paul placed Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger at the head of the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. A theologian who had | Pope John Paul II, Church Shepherd And a Catalyst for World Change |
1661723_2 | I discovered that men get checked cotton or black nylon, while women are offered floral patterns, the last thing you would want to display in a cool spa hotel. [Suzy, let me take you shopping! There are so many modern, ''gender-neutral'' toilet kits out there -- from Tumi to Brics to Henri Bendel, whose brown-and-white stripe is a classic. All flower free.] Money belts, by contrast, are pallid beige nylon fanny packs that would fit much better with Calvin Klein men's underwear than with anything women wear (except, perhaps, a pink leisure suit). There are vast areas of modern life in which industrial designers seem to confuse fashion, in its most frivolous sense, with creativity. No doubt the same person who invented twee tea cozies for old-fashioned telephones is behind my mouse pad covered with Claude Monet's ''Water Lilies.'' [Find a groovier museum gift shop. Or just call Hermès.] Who is the culprit who has started to make those simple yellow Post-its in shocking pink (too dark to read your writing)? Or clear plastic folders in pastel shades? Or functional stacking boxes with floral decoration? And my delightfully old-fashioned nondigital Roberts radio in an unfunky shade of powder blue? Of course, there is some superb (and mighty expensive) industrial design. But the scarcity is suggested by the fact that in Florence, where Ferragamo has a string of hotels, the company has now opened a store where you can buy a simple soap dish (not in bubblegum pink plastic) rather than concealing it in your luggage. In this post-Minimalist era, ''utilitarian'' often seems to have become a useless word. When I wanted a bar stool for the kitchen, I had a struggle to find one without a whimsical orange leather seat. The iMac seemed quite witty when it first came out in bright colors. Now it just looks dated. [Please see the iMac G5.] I long to find an ironing-board cover in plain cream cotton, and a dress cover that is not nylon. [Suzy, come to New York, and I'll take you to Holdeverything.] The taste level of what we in Britain call wastepaper baskets makes you want to use them to throw up in. [I have two words for you in Britain: Terence Conran.] And, on second thought, I had better hang on to my drab plastic computer cover. Who knows how offensive the new one in shell pink with | Us&Them; Digital Rage |
1663429_1 | and television sets from China have dominated the shelves of American retailers for years, these and newer products like portable electric lamps and even radio navigation equipment are being shipped in growing quantities to countries ranging from Britain and Spain to Brazil and Indonesia, according to recently released Chinese customs data. At the same time, China is entering global markets in which it previously played little role. It is becoming a large exporter of commodities like steel and chemicals, with steel exports nearly quintupling in the first two months of 2005 compared with a year ago. China is importing fewer cars and less heavy machinery as more of these are made in China, and companies make plans to export more cars and machinery. By keeping China's currency tightly pegged to the dollar, which has declined in the last three years, Beijing authorities have made Chinese goods even more competitive in countries using currencies like the euro that have appreciated rapidly against the dollar. This has helped China export more, while discouraging businesses in China from importing. But China's currency policies have angered Washington, where the Senate is considering a bill to impose a 27.5 percent tariff on Chinese exports unless Beijing revalues the renminbi, currently pegged at 8.28 to the dollar, within six months. While the bill is not expected to become law -- the Bush administration is strongly opposed -- consideration of the proposal shows growing attention in Congress to the trade relationship. This week, the Bush administration began considering whether to place restrictions on textile imports from China; European Union officials have set up import alert levels, which could result in restricting Chinese textile imports. The Commerce Department plans to release trade figures on Tuesday, and experts expect that the nation ran another big deficit in February with China. But statistics already released by Beijing show that Chinese exports to the United States climbed 36.8 percent in the first two months of this year, while American exports to China fell by 9.7 percent. Chinese exports to many other countries rose even faster, while its total imports increased by only 8 percent. Exports to Britain rose this year by 42 percent; to Germany, 44 percent; to Canada and Italy, 59 percent; and to Spain and Indonesia, 75 percent, compared with the period last year. So much freight is leaving Chinese ports that exporters struggle to find ships and containers | Made in China. Bought Everywhere.; As Trade Surplus Balloons, So Does Talk of Protectionism |
1663374_1 | ensure that the Palestinians succeed in bringing jobs and stability to Gaza when Israel withdraws from that region. ''We need to have institution-building, and there needs to be an international effort that encourages and fosters economic vitality so that a government which does emerge in Gaza will be able to better speak to the hopes of those who live in the Gaza,'' Mr. Bush said. ''And success in the Gaza will make success on the West Bank easier.'' The president said it was encouraging to see the Iraqis setting up an elected government, but said Americans should be patient about the pace at which democracy spreads throughout the Middle East. ''There's got to be a certain realism about how fast things can possibly happen, given where different nations have started from,'' he said. In his 47-minute session with reporters in his conference room on Air Force One, Mr. Bush spoke at length about his admiration for the late pope and about his own faith. ''I think a walk in faith constantly confronts doubt, as faith becomes more mature,'' Mr. Bush said when asked if he ever confronted doubts in his own faith. He said that despite reluctance even within his party to address Social Security, he was still optimistic that he could persuade Congress to act this year to add investment accounts to Social Security and bolster the retirement program's long-term financial condition. ''I happen to believe that not dealing with the problem will create political consequences when the public realizes how serious the problem is,'' he said. Mr. Bush is to meet at his ranch here on Monday with Mr. Sharon in an effort to nurse along progress toward a lasting accommodation between the Israelis and Palestinians. Israeli and American officials say the settlement issue has been simmering for months, with the United States willing to look the other way while Israel expands its settlements in order to ease pressure on Mr. Sharon while he carries out the Gaza withdrawal. But that approach has shifted in recent weeks, after Israel announced plans to proceed with 3,500 housing units in a bloc east of Jerusalem that, if built, would cut north-south links between Palestinians living in the West Bank. As a result, ''there has been a little bit of a push-back,'' a senior administration official said Friday. Aides to Mr. Sharon are attaching enormous importance to the visit to Crawford, | Settlement Dispute on Bush-Sharon Agenda |
1663482_2 | steps to exploit reserves of natural gas. China has also accused Japan of approving new history textbooks that gloss over the slaughter of millions of innocent people during Japan's World War II-era occupation of China. Beijing objected to recent moves by Japan and the United States to expand military cooperation and sharply criticized the two nations for pledging jointly to defend Taiwan if China were to attack it. Last week, Beijing made clear that it was not prepared to support an overhaul of the governing structure of the United Nations, effectively delaying consideration of plans to promote Japan and several other major countries to permanent membership on the Security Council. Japan has often criticized China for fanning the flames of nationalism by ignoring the changes Japan has made since the war and encouraging hatred of Japan in the state-controlled media. The Chinese Communist Party emphasizes its nationalist credentials and often allows civilian groups to organize activities directed against foreign nations viewed as encroaching on China's interests. This has led to charges that China fans xenophobia to shore up support for the Communist Party. Police occasionally allow small anti-Japan protests in front of Japan's embassy in Beijing. But Saturday's demonstration was by some estimates the largest to be held in the capital since a massive outpouring an anti-American sentiment in 1999, after the United States bombed China's embassy in Belgrade during the war against Serbia. Washington said the bombing was a mistake. The main purpose of the latest protest was to appeal for Chinese to stop buying Japanese goods. It is unclear how much impact such appeals will have on a society awash in Japanese goods. The Zhongguancun area where the protests took place is filled with stores selling Sony televisions and camcorders, Canon printers and Toshiba computers. Some protesters said they had the responsibility to raise awareness of Japan's past crimes and compared their current campaign to the May 4, 1919, movement, which also protested the actions of Japan and other foreign powers seen as encroaching on Chinese territory. ''This is our May 4 movement,'' said Wei Bing, a graduate student in computer sciences. ''We demand that Japan recognize its crimes.'' The legacy of that May 4 event has been a double-edged sword for the authorities. Intense nationalist passion has often been turned against China's domestic government if it is viewed as too weak or corrupt to defend Chinese interests. | In Rare Legal Protest, Chinese Seek Boycott of Japan Goods |
1663703_0 | Because the mills of bureaucratic procedure grind exceedingly slow and fine, the bitter struggle over a proposed cement plant on the east bank of the Hudson River just south of Hudson, N.Y., is now well into its sixth year without a resolution. On one side is St. Lawrence Cement, a Canadian-based company with majority Swiss ownership that wants to close an old cement plant west of the river and build a giant new plant that would announce itself with a 40-story smokestack and dominate an 1,800-acre tract (including a 1,200-acre limestone quarry) running to the town's waterfront. On the other side is a growing cohort of determined citizens organized by three advocacy groups -- Scenic Hudson, Friends of Hudson and the Olana Partnership -- who argue that the plant would unleash a plume of pollutants, damage the region's considerable scenic and cultural resources and discourage the small businesses, tourists and second-home residents the local economy has increasingly come to depend on. These critics also regard as inflated the company's claim that the plant will create many new jobs -- especially if St. Lawrence closes the old plant once the new one is built. And in the middle, as is always the case when a big new plant seeks permission to build, is New York, in particular Gov. George E. Pataki, whose government must approve the necessary permits. Until now, the opponents have focused most of their pressure on the State Department of Environmental Conservation, which last fall ordered a series of judicial hearings on various critical issues surrounding the plant, as mandated by environmental law. This process could go on for some time. Last month, however, Scenic Hudson and its confederates opened a second line of attack, filing a detailed brief with New York's secretary of state. The brief asserts that the plant would violate at least a half-dozen protections for scenic resources, as well as air and water quality, provided by the state's coastal management plan. The company had claimed in an earlier application that the project was fully consistent with that plan. A ruling from the secretary, Randy Daniels, is expected soon. A negative decision would deal the project a heavy blow because the Army Corps of Engineers could not then issue important permits without which the company cannot proceed, whatever the outcome of the other reviews. St Lawrence could appeal the ruling to the United States Department | Decision Time On Cement |
1663842_0 | Here's my prophecy about the next pope: He will allow married men to become priests. This is simply a matter of survival: all over the world, the Catholic Church is running out of priests. In the United States, there was one priest for every 800 Catholics in 1965, while now there is one for every 1,400 Catholics -- and the average age is nearly 60. In all the United States, with 65 million Catholics, only 479 priests were ordained in 2002. The upshot is that the Catholic Church is losing ground around the world to evangelical and especially Pentecostal churches. In Brazil, which has more Catholics than any other country, Pentecostals are gaining so quickly that they could overtake Catholics over the next decades. No one understands the desperate need for clergy more than the cardinals themselves. In fact, John Paul II himself laid the groundwork for an end to the celibacy requirement. Few people realize it, but there are now about 200 married priests under a special dispensation given by the Vatican to pastors of other denominations -- Episcopalians, Lutherans and so on -- who are already married and wish to convert to Roman Catholicism (typically because they feel their churches are going squishy by ordaining women or gays). ''It's really kind of a nonissue,'' the Rev. John Gremmels, one of those married Catholic priests, in Fort Worth, told me of his status as a father of the usual sort. The Vatican also permits Eastern Rite Catholics in places like Ukraine and Romania to have married priests. That was part of an ancient deal: they would be Catholics and accept the pope's authority, staying out of the Orthodox Church, and in exchange they would be allowed married clergy and liturgies in local languages. Polls show that 70 percent of American Catholics believe priests should be able to marry. David Gibson, author of ''The Coming Catholic Church,'' quotes Cardinal Roger Mahony as telling him that it's reasonable to raise the issue and adding: ''We've had a married clergy since Day 1, since St. Peter.'' It's true that St. Peter, the first pope, was married, and so were many of the apostles and early popes. But then Christians began to put more emphasis on chastity, with Tertullian describing women as ''the gateway to the devil.'' Origen of Alexandria, the great third-century Christian philosopher, castrated himself. And Hugh of Lincoln, a 12th-century | Let Fathers Be Fathers |
1663863_0 | Mass demonstrations here against Japan turned unruly late Saturday afternoon, with scattered vandalism and confrontations with the riot police intensifying what began as a fully legal and generally peaceful student-led protest. Several hundred protesters tried to storm the residence of the Japanese ambassador in Beijing, hurling bottles and rocks into the walled compound before riot police broke up the confrontation, witnesses said. Crowds defaced billboards advertising Japanese electronics products, shattered windows at a Beijing branch office of the Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi, and threw rocks into a Japanese restaurant, but thousands of ordinary police and paramilitary units in full riot gear kept the violence from spreading. The New China News Agency estimated that 10,000 demonstrators joined a march calling for a boycott of Japanese goods in Beijing's high-tech and university district earlier Saturday, making it one of the largest protest events authorized by the Chinese government in years. Subsequent gatherings at the Japanese ambassador's residence and the Japanese Embassy appeared to have been organized without official approval and were considerably more tense, with the police closing off many roads and busing in reinforcements to maintain order. The violence prompted an official protest in Tokyo by Japan's vice foreign minister, Shotaro Yachi, who asked the Chinese minister to Japan, Cheng Yonghua, to strengthen security, Reuters reported, citing the Kyodo news agency. Resentment against Japan runs deep in Chinese society, with an overwhelming majority expressing the view that Japan has not fully atoned for its World War II-era aggression against China. Even minor disputes can provoke mass discontent, especially when the government sends signals, as it has in recent days, that it will allow some public political expression. ''Our generation believes that China must stand up for its rights and stop being soft on Japan,'' said Li Jiangchuan, a student who joined the march. ''Japan should stop lying about history and tell the truth.'' Beijing, which enforces a strict code of social stability, almost never gives permission for protesters to march on the streets of the capital. A widening wealth gap, land seizures, corruption and other issues cause regular disturbances around the country, but the police usually move quickly to disperse participants and arrest organizers. But relations between China and Japan, Asia's two leading powers, have sharply deteriorated in recent months, at least temporarily easing Beijing's vigilance against grass-roots political activity. In recent weeks, the two nations have taken steps to secure their | Riot Police Called In to Calm Anti-Japanese Protests in China |
1663558_4 | fish, by a thousand sharp, blessed little teeth.'' As the Fe em Deus approaches the Serra do Divisor, near the Peruvian border, bitterness infects Campbell's mood. He sees ghosts everywhere: in tapped-out rubber plantations, dirt-poor encampments of naïve colonists, abandoned homesteads, burnt cattle pastures and a sanctuary for the few indigenous people whose ancestors managed to survive Eurasian diseases, slavers and the rubber boom and bust. The forest is being cleared, bit by bit, and most of the Indians who once thrived along the seasonally flooded life-giving forest are gone, along with their languages, cultures and economies. Campbell meets settlers along the Rio Moa who have forgotten the names of plants and animals. ''Names are power,'' he writes, and only strangers, who don't understand the forest, live there now. And that will be its undoing. ''It's hard for people to love a place that is not defined in words and thus cannot be understood. And it's easy to give away something for which there are no words, something you never knew existed.'' This is Campbell's central thesis, it's a rationale for basic research, and it's a good argument for cultivating ecological citizenship -- in which members of society feel a sense of duty toward the natural communities they inhabit. Campbell is himself somewhat enigmatic until journey's end, when -- upon watching a rancher set the forest on fire to create pastureland -- his bitterness flowers and fruits. Now the melodrama rips. ''This is the immolation of Eden,'' he writes. The burning ''wounds my hope, the hope that has always fed my science.'' He spots a single sapling survivor through the smoke, approaches, and with three swift swings of the ax, ''I take its life.'' Why? To put it out of its misery, like a crippled horse. But also because its leaves would be specimens. ''Specialists will . . . record that it existed. At least this tree will have a name.'' I can't decide if Campbell's sanctimonious outburst is seemly or not (especially since the tree turned out to be rare only locally). But all seemliness aside, the current rate of Amazonian deforestation is -- incredibly -- more than 9,000 square miles a year. Elizabeth Royte is the author of ''The Tapir's Morning Bath: Mysteries of the Tropical Rain Forest and the Scientists Who Are Trying to Solve Them'' and the forthcoming ''Garbage Land: On the Secret Trail of Trash.'' | Across the River and Into the Trees |
1663833_2 | -- developments the Bush administration cites in lobbying against plans to loosen restrictions on arms sales to China. 1 The number of teeth that the earliest known senior citizen had left at the end of his life, according to a report in Nature. Scientists studying the fossilized skull of a man who lived in the Caucasus 1.7 million years ago said he had lived for at least two years with nothing but his left canine to chew with -- a sign, they said, that primitive humans were compassionate and took care of their elders. The man could not have survived that long, the researchers said, without help from younger, healthier fellow Homo erectus hunters, in an era when raw meat was the staple food and few lived to be his age (about 40). Other scientists said the compassion hypothesis was a bit of a stretch and that more evidence would be needed. 54 Number of nations sending teams to Saudi Arabia to compete in the first Islamic Solidarity Games, which opened last Friday in Mecca and run until April 20. The games, also called the Muslim Olympics, feature 18 individual and team sports and some 6,500 athletes, all of them male. Saudi Arabia is footing the entire cost of the games, estimated at $21 million, in the hope of broadening the world's image of the kingdom beyond oil, religious fundamentalism and regional conflict. Admission to all events is free, but strict Saudi visa requirements mean that only a handful of foreign spectators will attend. 48 The percentage of United States imports made up of the products and services of American companies' foreign operations, as of January. In a sense, the United States gets nearly half its imports from itself. The country has defied expectations by continuing to post record trade deficits despite the weak dollar, which ought to narrow the deficits by making American exports more attractive to foreign buyers while raising the prices of foreign goods here. Oil, which trades globally in dollars, is a big reason why the deficits have not narrowed. But so is a growing tendency to assemble American finished products out of parts and components made overseas, often by American companies. This trend, which involves the interests of importers, exporters and domestic manufacturers, complicates any effort by Washington to shape a policy to reduce the trade deficit without doing American companies more harm than good. | The World; PRIME NUMBERS |
1668217_1 | sequestered by their parents against the remote threat of abduction. But a new front is opening in the campaign against children's indolence. Experts are speculating, without empirical evidence, that a variety of cultural pressures have pushed children too far from the natural world. The disconnection bodes ill, they say, both for children and for nature. The author Richard Louv calls the problem ''nature-deficit disorder.'' He came up with the term, he said, to describe an environmental ennui flowing from children's fixation on artificial entertainment rather than natural wonders. Those who are obsessed with computer games or are driven from sport to sport, he maintains, miss the restorative effects that come with the nimbler bodies, broader minds and sharper senses that are developed during random running-around at the relative edges of civilization. Parents will probably encounter Mr. Louv in appearances and articles leading up to the publication next month of his seventh book, ''Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder'' (Algonquin Books). The book is an inch-thick caution against raising the fully automated child. ''I worked really hard to make this book not too depressing,'' Mr. Louv (pronounced ''loov'') said last week from his home in San Diego. He urges parents to restore childhood to the unplugged state of casual outdoor play that they may remember from their own youth but that few promote in their offspring. ''It's society's whole attitude that nature isn't important anymore,'' said Mr. Louv, 56, who has two sons age 17 and 23. Dr. Donald Shifrin, a pediatrician in Bellevue, Wash., and a professor of clinical pediatrics at the University of Washington in Seattle, said he sees the signs every day of the syndrome Mr. Louv describes in his book. His patients now arrive with fewer broken arms from falling out of trees (soccer and lacrosse injuries are most common) and more video games, cellphones and hand-held computers. ''We have mobile couch potatoes,'' Dr. Shifrin said. ''The question is, Are we going to turn this around with more opportunities for kids to interact with nature?'' Even if parents think their children get too much screen time and not enough safari time, many have no idea what to do about it. ''It's absolutely a phenomenon that nobody knows how to break,'' said Mark Fillipitch, 40, a manager for a Caterpillar dealer and the father of four children -- 10-year-old triplets (two boys and | Growing Up Denatured |
1666662_5 | dance floor. The cover charge ranges from $5 to $20. Sunday 9 a.m. 9 -- What's the Buzz? The buzz about Buzz Café (905 South Lombard Avenue, 708-524-2899) is that it's a community-minded gathering spot in the Harrison Street Arts District. Paintings and drawings by local artists cover the green and purple walls, artists sketch at tables while sitting on brightly painted second-hand chairs, and children and reading groups curl up on comfy sofas in the back. In addition to the daily breakfast items, Sunday brunch entrees includes frittata, quiche, French toast and crepes ranging from $5.50 to $5.95. For a small extra charge, order items with organic ingredients -- eggs, milk, bacon and sausage from a nearby farm. 10:30 a.m. 10 -- A Designer Zoo Design -- specifically zoo design -- is a major claim to fame for the 70-year-old, 216-acre Brookfield Zoo (31st Street and First Avenue, Brookfield; 708-485-0263), about seven miles southwest of Oak Park. Brookfield was among the first to place several species together in indoor ''immersion'' settings resembling their natural environments. The zoo's Tropic World features South American, Asian and African animals, including birds, otters, monkeys and apes, in a huge simulated indoor tropical rain forest, complete with waterfalls, orchids and even thunderstorms. Other highlights include the Dolphinarium, Living Coast (fish, sharks, penguins), Wolf Woods and Habitat Africa. Admission is $8, $4 for children ages 3 to 11 and adults age 65 and over. THE BASICS Visiting Oak Park Taxis to Oak Park from O'Hare and Midway airports cost $20 to $35 and take 20 to 30 minutes. Oak Park is about a 20-minute ride from downtown Chicago on the Green Line elevated train or the Metra Union Pacific West Line commuter train. Situated in the Frank Lloyd Wright Historic District, the Write Inn (211 North Oak Park Avenue, 708-383-4800) is a quaint brick hotel built in 1926, with 50 rooms and 15 suites furnished with 1920's antiques; rates are $75 to $162 a night. The 77-year-old Carleton of Oak Park (1110 Pleasant Street, 708-848-5000) is a full-service hotel with a ballroom, library and two restaurants. It has 129 rooms, including 17 suites, with rates from $128 to $208. It has an adjacent modernized 1950's motor inn with 25 rooms, ranging from $90 to $100. On May 21 and 22, the Frank Lloyd Wright Preservation Trust is sponsoring Wright Plus, a weekend of activities including | 36 Hours | Oak Park, Ill. |
1665962_0 | To the Editor: Re ''Let Fathers Be Fathers,'' by Nicholas D. Kristof (column, April 10): The gift of apostolic celibacy in the priesthood in the Latin rite of the Catholic Church goes back to its apostolic origins, and the married clergy have always been a pastoral exception. The church has always had the priests it needs through the ebbs and flows of its growth without recourse to changing the infallible teaching on the priesthood's being male or the millennial-old Latin tradition of apostolic celibacy, which has produced great saints throughout its history. The church in the world is indeed undergoing a ''thoroughgoing transformation,'' with growth by the tens of millions in Africa and Asia who don't worry about the ordination of women or married priests and adhere to traditional teaching. The church in Europe and the church in the United States may indeed be in ''irreversible decline'' unless they return to loyalty to perennial church teachings on marriage and sexuality. (Rev.) C. J. McCloskey III Chicago, April 10, 2005 The writer is a research fellow at the Faith and Reason Institute. | As Cardinals Meet to Elect a Pope |
1665880_0 | Everything in life has happened early for Uri Berenguer. When he was 3, doctors in his native Panama wanted to amputate his right leg because of cancer. When he was 17, he started broadcasting occasional Red Sox games on a Spanish-language radio network in New England. And when he was 20, he was on the air full time as, the network says, the major leagues' youngest play-by-play announcer. He ran track in high school, but never in a race longer than 600 yards. On Monday, three weeks short of turning 23, he will run in the Boston Marathon. He will be part of the Dana-Farber Marathon Challenge, which has raised almost $23 million for cancer research since 1990. Berenguer, as a cancer alumnus, is giving back to the people who saved his leg and, he says, his life. This unusual story owes much to a stubborn mother. Daisy Berenguer refused to allow Panamanian doctors to amputate her son's leg and instead brought him here to the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. ''I remember everything,'' Berenguer said in an interview. ''I was very scared at first. I had this huge tumor that shattered my hip and thigh bone. I had an eight-hour operation at Dana-Farber. When I woke up, my mom was crying so hard. She didn't speak English, and she didn't know if they amputated the leg. They didn't.'' Dr. Lindsay Frazier has overseen his care all these years. ''He didn't need amputation,'' she said, ''but we found he did have a rare cancer that can affect the bones, liver and lungs, and it proliferates. He needed chemotherapy and radiation. The cancer can go away for a month or six months or a year and then show up somewhere else. He had four or five returns. ''His family moved here. They didn't have much money, and they lived in the projects until he made enough money from baseball and bought them a house a year ago. ''It's been at least five years since his last incident, and I see him only once a year now. The disease burns itself out. If it doesn't kill you, it goes away.'' Years ago, Berenguer and other young patients from Dana-Farber, accompanied by older partners, joined the Boston Marathon with a mile to go. In recent years, he became one of those partners. Now he will be the first former patient and former partner to run | A Mother's Stubbornness Provides a Reason to Run |
1665878_0 | Deborah Blau, a graphic designer, rode into Union Square on her bicycle yesterday morning, carrying a disemboweled VCR in the handlebar basket. She pulled up to a bright red truck full of discarded electronic equipment -- cords, circuit boards and old television sets -- and added the VCR to the pile. ''I knew it was a dead VCR,'' she said. ''I was using it to prop up my TV.'' Ms. Blau was among a steady stream of New Yorkers bringing out their dead and not-so-dead electronic equipment for a recycling drive organized by the Lower East Side Ecology Center, a nonprofit group. Like many others, she had been holding on to her donation for a while. In New York, it is legal to put computers and other electronic equipment out for regular bulk-trash collection, even though they can contain lead, mercury and other toxic chemicals. Many people realize that throwing a cathode-ray-tube monitor out with the trash is probably not a good idea, but they know of no other options. So in 2003, the ecology center began organizing recycling drives, inviting people to dump their old electronics at one site on a particular day. Since then, it has collected more than 100 tons of equipment, according to Christine Datz-Romero, one of the center's a founders. Fifty-two of those tons were collected last fall during a citywide drive sponsored by the Department of Sanitation and coordinated by the ecology center, she said. The center is planning two more electronics recycling days this year, one on the Upper East Side, the other in the West Village. Yesterday, the red truck, from Supreme Computer Recycling of Lakewood, N.J., was parked at the northeast corner of Union Square, where several volunteers waited. Within two hours, monitors, laptops, motherboards, typewriters, VCR's, televisions, stereos, copying machines, fax machines, cellphones, rotary phones, remote controls, calculators and a whole nest of mice were coming together in piles, cocooned in yards of stretch wrap and stacked in the back of the 28-foot truck. It was a Luddite's dream come true. The truck would later return to New Jersey, where the recycling company tests the equipment to determine what is salvageable and can be resold. The unsalvageable stuff will be broken down into scrap metal or sent off to companies that specialize in recycling certain materials, said Mitch Runko, director of operations at the company. But before the truck left | From Rectories and Rec Rooms, for the Environment's Sake |
1665868_0 | A scholar has suggested that ''Laocoön,'' a fabled sculpture whose unearthing in 1506 has deeply influenced thinking about the ancient Greeks and the nature of the visual arts, may well be a Renaissance forgery -- possibly by Michelangelo himself. Her contention has stirred some excitement and considerable exasperation among art historians in the Classical and Renaissance fields. Many other challenges to accepted attributions have faded quickly into oblivion. The scholar advancing the theory, Lynn Catterson, a summer lecturer in art history at Columbia University, presented her argument in a talk at the university's Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America on April 6. Maneuvering through a wealth of material -- including Michelangelo's drawings, records of his banking activity and his acknowledged reputation as an avid seeker of renown and wealth -- she said, ''He had the motives and the means.'' The strikingly naturalistic sculpture, 951/2 inches tall, depicts a deadly attack on the Trojan priest Laocoön and his two sons by writhing sea snakes dispatched by Athena -- or, some say, Poseidon -- after Laocoön warned against admitting the Trojan horse during the siege of Troy. It resides in the Vatican Museums in Rome. In a telephone interview, Dr. Catterson cited a pen study by Michelangelo dating from 1501 depicting the rear of a male torso that resembles the back of the ''Laocoön'' -- and Michelangelo's documented finesse at copying. ''That the Laocoön was carved by Michelangelo explains why then, and why now, its effect is mesmerizing,'' she said. Richard Brilliant, Anna S. Garbedian emeritus professor of the humanities at Columbia and an authority on classical antiquities -- his works include ''My Laocoön: Alternative Claims in the Interpretation of Artworks'' (University of California Press, 2000) -- said that Dr. Catterson's contention was ''noncredible on any count.'' For one thing, he said, ''she made absolutely no reference to ancient sculptures that could be related to the 'Laocoön,''' including a large body of ancient fragments found just before World War II at Sperlonga, a site near Rome where Tiberius had a luxurious villa, that refer specifically to episodes of the Trojan war. Some scholars have also found fault in relating the ''Laocoön'' to the Michelangelo drawing of a torso, now at the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford. ''To my eye, the Michelangelo drawing does not bear a close resemblance to the torso of the Vatican Laocoön,'' said Katherine E. Welch, an associate professor | An Ancient Masterpiece Or a Master's Forgery? |
1664218_5 | Colorado. ''Wholesale poisoning probably whacked them,'' Dr. Copeland said. There are none in Michigan, the Wolverine State, he added. Because they are secretive and so little is known about the wolverine, humans have filled in the gaps with myth. The wolverine has earned names like ''devil bear'' and was believed by some tribes to be a spirit animal that connected the living and the dead. Female wolverines give birth to three or four tiny helpless white kits each winter in a multichambered den they excavate in the snow in high mountain cirques. They are fiercely protective and work hard in harsh conditions to find enough food to sustain their offspring. The high country is where wolverines become controversial. Winter recreation -- including backcountry skiing, helicopter skiing and snowmobiling -- is a fast growing pastime in the Rockies, and people often invade the redoubts where wolverines make their dens. ''We're seeing increases in winter recreation from people in areas so remote now that never had activity before,'' said Stephen Hoffman, executive director of the Predator Conservation Alliance, a conservation group in Bozeman, Mont. ''Because of the intrusion,'' Mr. Hoffman said, ''they may abandon their den and move their kits.'' They are sensitive to intruders. In one case documented by Mr. Krebs wolverines abandoned their den because of a heli-skiing operation, in which skiers are dropped by helicopter on remote mountaintops. Dr. Copeland inadvertently caused two wolverines to move their dens during a study by coming too close. Fragmentation of habitat is also a concern. No one knows how the widely scattered wolverines stay in touch with one another, and there is worry that logging, roads, homes and other development may cut them off from the rest of the population. Conservationists have petitioned twice for wolverines to be listed as endangered, concerned that even though little is known about them, decisions are constantly being made governing their well-being. Montana, for example, still allows trappers to take a dozen wolverines a year even though their numbers are unknown and their fur has little value. There is a small market for wolverines that are mounted by taxidermists. Montana and Alaska are the only states that allow trapping. While the wolverine's range has shrunk considerably in the last half century, Dr. Copeland argues that at this point there's not enough data to show that the wolverine needs federal protection. ''The only scientific answer is, I | Truth in the Wild: A Great Dad That Wanders Wide |
1664260_0 | Beeping electric carts, a procession of refreshment wagons and a symphony of cellphone chatter could not deter Evens Tremblay. He wanted a nap. On Feb. 26, Mr. Tremblay, a Canadian telephone company employee, was en route from his home in Montreal to Sydney when he saw a sign near Gate 70 of Vancouver International Airport's international departures terminal: MetroNaps. The cost was 15 Canadian dollars ($12.20) for 20 minutes. Near the sign were three giant, bulbous fiberglass helmets with contoured chaise longues protruding from them. He circled one and poked it. Offered a free 10-minute trial, he soon had his upper body inside one of the hoods and his head encased in earphones playing New Age music. A black visor concealed his torso. All you could see of him were his legs and sneakers. Anyone who has been flying for hours, especially on a long flight to or from Asia, may well crave a nap. About 15 million people a year travel through Vancouver International Airport, which is the closest major North American city to Asia. About a third of those passengers are connecting to other flights. Many airlines have introduced sleeping accommodations for first-class and business customers, with chairs that recline almost flat or convert into beds. At the same time, however, some businesses are cutting costs by having their employees fly in economy class, even on long flights. For those travelers, napping in airports may be a necessity, not a frill. And not just any nap will do. ''Naps sitting up are not as deep and refreshing as naps lying down,'' said David F. Dinges, a sleep specialist at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. ''For a nap to be effective, you have to give up antigravity pressure,'' he said. Mr. Tremblay , in fact, seemed to be resting comfortably in his MetroNaps pod, his feet pointing skyward. ''If you're watching the customer, sometimes you'll see their feet tilt even more sideways,'' said Arnette Espiritu, a MetroNaps manager who is in charge of the pods in Vancouver's airport. ''That means they're fully relaxed. But mostly you can just tell because they're really still. Most people fidget at first to find their position,'' she said. Mr. Tremblay's feet twitched slightly as a noisy electric cart went by. Johan Leung, an attendant for MetroNaps, keeps an eye on customers' luggage while they rest and then offers them a mint | Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep, in a Pod at the Airport |
1664252_0 | A knitted bag holds a weakened heart, helping it pump blood. Electricity flows through the threads of a battery-powered fleece jacket, keeping the wearer warm. Carbon fibers are braided into structures that look like mushrooms, but are actually prototypes of automotive engine valves. Other fibers are shaped into bicycle frames and sculling oars. Textiles are no longer just the stuff of clothing, carpets and furniture covering. Made of high-tech threads, they can also be found in lifesaving medical devices and the bodies of racing cars. One architect is proposing building a skyscraper out of carbon fibers. ''I think there's more areas that are using textiles than there were before,'' said Matilda McQuaid, head of the textiles department at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, where 150 items showing the advances of materials science are on display in a show called ''Extreme Textiles: Designing for High Performance.'' In fact, textiles have long been used for more than clothes and rugs, said Dr. Peter Schwartz, head of the textile engineering department at Auburn University. ''The Romans used jute fabrics for road stabilization,'' he said. Many textiles are never seen, like those that are embedded in the rubber of automobile tires. ''Not many people are quite aware of it,'' said Larry Q. Williams, business director of Invista, a company that makes a polyester fabric used in tires. ''It's the polyester that's forming the shape of the tire and holding it together.'' Otherwise, a tire ''would immediately blow apart,'' Mr. Williams said. ''Textile reinforcement of tires has existed as long as pneumatic tires have been built.'' Cotton textiles were used initially, followed by rayon and then nylon. But nylon had the problem of ''flatspotting'': when a car was parked for a while, the section pressed against the ground would harden and roll bumpily until the tire warmed up. In the 1970's, polyester replaced nylon, and continual improvements in the textiles explain in part why tires now often last 80,000 miles instead of 10,000 to 15,000 miles. Threads made of a wide variety of new materials, including metals, carbon fibers and high-strength materials like Kevlar, have further widened the use of textiles. Chemical coatings stiffen them or add additional properties like fire resistance. ''The uses are increasing in the high performance sector,'' Dr. Schwartz said. ''People are looking at new polymers for fibers.'' For example, fibers that are more efficient at absorbing energy could lead to | Knit a Building, Weave a Bike: 'Extreme Textiles' Come of Age |
1664220_1 | in rehabilitation programs. A recent study at the Mayo Clinic shows that women are less likely than men to participate in postcoronary exercise and health-improvement programs. Among 1,821 men and women studied who had heart attacks from 1982 to 1998, the women's participation rate in rehabilitation programs -- 38 percent -- lagged far behind the men's rate of 67 percent, the study found. This in turn increased the women's risk of having second and often fatal heart attacks. Thus, among the men and women who took part in cardiac rehabilitation programs, the survival rate after three years was 95 percent, while the survival rate for nonparticipants was only 64 percent. For much of the 20th century, heart disease was considered mainly a disease of men middle-aged and older. For many, especially those who smoked, the first symptom was sudden death from a heart attack. Many victims were working men in their 40's and 50's with families that were devastated by the loss. Much research was done, mostly among men, to identify risk factors and find ways to control them. Gradually, the studies revealed that besides smoking, a person's risk of a heart attack was increased by high cholesterol, high blood pressure, Type 2 diabetes and obesity, along with a diet rich in animal fats and sedentary living. Further studies (again, mostly among men) showed that by controlling such factors, the risk of heart disease and sudden cardiac death could be greatly reduced. In fact, the era of preventive medicine was born with the diagnosis and treatment of coronary risk factors. But along the way, heart disease in women was sorely neglected, even though more women than men have died of cardiovascular disease in the United States since the mid-1980's. And while the mortality rate in men has dropped significantly since 1980, in women the death rate from this disease has continued to rise for most of the last quarter century. Today, cardiovascular disease is the No. 1 killer of American women. Half a million women die of it each year, more than the next seven causes combined. If these deaths were evenly distributed, every minute of every day, a woman in this country would die of heart disease. Heart disease in women tends to become apparent about 10 years later than in men. The risk to women generally remains low until after menopause, a pattern that fostered the belief, now | Women Struggle for Parity of the Heart |
1664220_2 | pressure, Type 2 diabetes and obesity, along with a diet rich in animal fats and sedentary living. Further studies (again, mostly among men) showed that by controlling such factors, the risk of heart disease and sudden cardiac death could be greatly reduced. In fact, the era of preventive medicine was born with the diagnosis and treatment of coronary risk factors. But along the way, heart disease in women was sorely neglected, even though more women than men have died of cardiovascular disease in the United States since the mid-1980's. And while the mortality rate in men has dropped significantly since 1980, in women the death rate from this disease has continued to rise for most of the last quarter century. Today, cardiovascular disease is the No. 1 killer of American women. Half a million women die of it each year, more than the next seven causes combined. If these deaths were evenly distributed, every minute of every day, a woman in this country would die of heart disease. Heart disease in women tends to become apparent about 10 years later than in men. The risk to women generally remains low until after menopause, a pattern that fostered the belief, now known to be untrue, that taking postmenopausal hormones would continue to protect women's hearts. By age 75 and beyond, the percentage of women with diagnosed heart disease exceeds that of men. The same pattern applies to heart disease deaths. Knowing Your Numbers To Dr. Lori Mosca, director of preventive cardiology at New York-Presbyterian/Columbia hospital, these data scream out a critically important message. Women, she says, ''must know their numbers, including their blood pressure, cholesterol, glucose levels and body mass index, as well as their overall risk level for heart disease.'' She adds that women also must ''take charge'' and not rely on their doctors to order the tests that can provide them with the data that may suggest a need to change their habits or to get protective medication. Doctors should routinely check a patient's blood pressure, no matter what the reason for the medical visit. High blood pressure is on the rise in America, thanks to expanding waistlines. A reading of 120 over 80 or lower is ideal. Losing excess weight, reducing dietary salt and exercising regularly can help. If necessary, dozens of pressure-lowering prescription drugs are available. And no matter what kind of doctor a woman sees on | Women Struggle for Parity of the Heart |
1666249_3 | silk plants and $13,861 on lamps and other items as ''equipment and tools,'' instead of ''enhancements'' as they had been described on the first invoice, the report said. To avoid a $2,500 cap on purchases made with a special agency buying card, it said, the project manager and two other agency employees also routinely split up the transactions into as many as 22 pieces, hiding the purchase of leather briefcases, loveseats, armoires and coffee pots. The agency project manager also approved the installation of nine microwave ovens, four ice makers and 10 refrigerators, including two high-priced Sub-Zero models, for the center, the report said. It called the expenditures wasteful, even if the building was used by more people during emergencies. When some agency staff members objected to the spending practices, the audit says, they were told, ''I'll give you the money, just do it,'' because ''the culture at T.S.A. is the mission supersedes the process.'' The report on agency measures to prevent theft of jewelry or other valuables from airline passengers' baggage said that since January 2003, 37 baggage screeners had been fired for theft. The agency has also paid $736,000 to settle claims about missing items. The inspector general said he could not estimate how many times thefts had occurred or divide blame between agency screeners and other airport or airline employees who also have access to bags. He urged the agency to install video cameras to try to prevent such crimes. The third report, on the effectiveness of screening to detect weapons or explosives, found that there had been no major progress since a 2003 inspection in the rate at which agency workers caught undercover investigators carrying fake weapons or explosives. Hundreds of tests were conducted at 15 airports from November through February. Actual results were not disclosed, as they are classified, but Representative Mica said they were extremely disappointing. ''The lack of improvements since our last audit indicates that significant improvement in performance may not be possible without greater use of technology,'' the report says. It was referring to machines that more thoroughly screen passengers for explosives before they enter a secure area, instead of a metal detector check, as is now most often done. Agency officials said they agreed with this conclusion, adding that until they can buy new equipment, ''we will continue to seek incremental gains in screener performance through training, testing and management practices.'' | Transportation Security Agency Criticized |
1666261_0 | China's foreign minister called Tuesday for an end to anti-Japanese protests, the first signal that the leadership may no longer welcome the sometimes violent demonstrations that have underpinned a new and more confrontational approach to Japan. The minister, Li Zhaoxing, told a meeting of the Communist Party's propaganda department attended by 3,500 people that government, military and party officials, as well as ''the masses,'' should stay off the streets, state media reported. ''Cadres and the masses must believe in the party and the government's ability to properly handle all issues linked to Sino-Japanese relations,'' Mr. Li was quoted as saying. ''Calmly, rationally and legally express your own views. Do not attend marches that have not been approved. Do not do anything that might upset social stability.'' Mr. Li's comments, carried on national television, amounted to the first direct call by a top official to wind down the protests by tens of thousands of urban residents. The demonstrations have continued on three successive weekends, becoming China's most sustained street protests since the pro-democracy uprising of 1989. Until now, the protests have enjoyed at least tacit approval from the central government. Although none of the major marches in Beijing, Shanghai and several other cities received formal permits, the police had not made consistent efforts to prevent them or to arrest people responsible for vandalizing Japanese diplomatic missions or private property in the marches. In recent public appearances, Mr. Li refrained from criticizing protesters and accused Japan of instigating the protests by provoking China on issues including territorial disputes, distorted history textbooks and visits to Tokyo's war shrine. Mr. Li reiterated that Japan must take responsibility for the unrest because it has continued to whitewash the history of its World War II-era occupation of China. He rejected calls by the Japanese government for apologies or compensation for damaged Japanese property. But his appeal to rein in the protests most likely reflects the views of top leaders, who may have concluded that little is to be gained from further protests and that social stability is at some risk if they continue unchecked. ''Cadres must resolutely implement the major policies of the central party leadership and resolutely safeguard overall political stability and unity,'' he said. The suggestion that officials must ''resolutely implement'' leadership decisions hints at a possible divergence of opinions over how to manage the protests. In Communist history, unclear or contradictory orders from | Chinese Official Orders End to Anti-Japanese Demonstrations |
1662839_1 | chemical compounds will not be listed separately on ingredient labels. Instead, they will be lumped into a broad category -- ''artificial flavors'' -- already found on most packaged food labels. ''We're helping companies clean up their labels,'' said Senomyx's chief executive, Kent Snyder. Senomyx, based in San Diego, uses many of the same research techniques that biotechnology companies apply in devising new drugs. Executives say that a taste receptor or family of receptors on the tongue or in the mouth are responsible for recognizing a taste. Using the human genome sequence, the company says, it has identified hundreds of those taste receptors. Its chemical compounds activate the receptors in a way that accentuates the taste of sugar or salt. It is still experimenting to determine the most potent compounds, its chief scientist, Mark Zoller, said. While food safety experts applaud efforts to reduce salt, MSG and sugar, they expressed concerns about the new chemicals, saying that more testing needed to be done before these were sold in food. But Senomyx maintains that its new products are safe because they will be used in tiny quantities. Kraft, Nestlé, Coca-Cola and Campbell Soup have contracted with Senomyx for exclusive rights to use the ingredients in certain types of food and beverages, although the companies declined to identify those categories. Elise Wang, an analyst at Smith Barney, said that Kraft was planning to use Senomyx's sweet flavoring to reduce the sugar in powdered beverages like Kool-Aid by one-third. Campbell Soup, she said, is looking at cutting sodium levels by a third with the salt flavoring. ''There's applicability for our soups, sauces and drinks like V8,'' a spokesman for Campbell, John Faulkner, said. A Kraft spokesman declined to offer specifics on the company's relationship with Senomyx, but said that Kraft was committed to reducing the sugar and salt levels in many products. Nestlé and Coke also declined to comment. Senomyx's salt enhancer, in particular, has the potential to be a boon to the food industry. For years, corporate scientists have been looking in vain for ways to reduce sodium levels in packaged food without losing flavor. ''It's a real challenge,'' said Christine M. Homsey, senior research food scientist at Food Perspectives, a consulting firm in Plymouth, Minn. ''Nobody's come up with anything even close to ideal.'' The Center for Science in the Public Interest, an advocacy group based in Washington, is seeking to get | Sugar and Spice, and Biochemistry; Food Companies Test Flavorings That Can Trick the Taste Buds |
1662737_0 | Despite public abhorrence in Europe of all things genetically modified, European officials say they will let the United States take the lead in untangling how unapproved corn entered Europe over the last four years. Syngenta, the Swiss biotechnology company that produced the corn, said late in March that it had inadvertently mixed up two types of its genetically modified corn. One type, known as Bt-11, has been legal for years in both the United States and Europe. But a similar strain, Bt-10, has never been tested or approved. The main difference between the two strains is that the unapproved one contains a gene that confers resistance to the antibiotic ampicillin. Environmentalists fear that introducing it into the food chain could increase resistance to antibiotics. The European Commission, the executive arm of the European Union, said Friday that it thought about 1,000 metric tons (1,102 tons) of an unauthorized strain of corn entered union countries in the forms of animal feed, corn flour and corn oil. Syngenta discovered its mistake in December, but informed the Europeans only last month, after a report in the journal Nature. A spokesman for the European commissioner for health and consumer affairs, Philip Tod, said on Monday: ''The commission has written a letter of protest to Syngenta, also asking for their cooperation in tracking down the Bt-10 corn in Europe, but beyond that we are not planning any other measures. It's a matter for the U.S. authorities.'' Syngenta, based in Basel, Switzerland, said farmers produced 165,000 tons of the unapproved Bt-10 strain of corn on 37,000 acres in the United States from 2001 through the end of last year, thinking that they were producing Bt-11, its approved cousin. Both strains have a protein that is toxic to the European corn borer. In mid-December, the company discovered the error while conducting tests, a spokeswoman, Sarah Hull, said, adding, ''We immediately notified the authorities.'' The United States Department of Agriculture consulted with the Food and Drug Administration and the Environmental Protection Agency to see whether a recall was warranted. The agencies decided against it, seeing no threat to humans, animals or plants. In Europe, officials were trying to figure out where the corn might have gone, Mr. Tod said, adding: ''We can't say whether or not the imports of this corn have stopped or not. Because this Bt-10 corn was labeled as the legal Bt-11 strain, we have | Europe Leaves Modified Corn Inquiry to U.S. |
1662810_1 | 14,000 people -- the report said that it had taken about twice as long to go down a single flight of stairs as had been projected by the current engineering standards for tall buildings. The buildings were only half full, investigators said, and if the attack had come at a time when they were filled to occupancy, the evacuation would not have been successful. Thousands more people were likely to have been trapped on the stairs, Mr. Sunder said. The report, issued by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, also formally confirmed what had long been identified as a significant failure on that day: the leaders of New York's Police and Fire Departments did not coordinate their efforts that morning. The investigation suggested that many of the rescuers died because they simply did not know what was happening around them. ''A preponderance of evidence indicates that a lack of timely information sharing and inadequate communications capabilities likely contributed to the loss of emergency responder lives,'' the report stated. It cited an interview with an unnamed firefighter who told the investigators, ''If communications were better, more firefighters would have lived.'' The findings were included in a draft final report from the institute, a branch of the United States Commerce Department that was given authority by Congress in 2002 to investigate the towers' collapse, the evacuation and the emergency response. The findings total some 10,000 pages, of which 3,400 were made public yesterday. The remainder will be released later in the spring, according to Mr. Sunder. The institute will make recommendations on improvements in the areas it studied. Building-code changes are decided by local governments, generally using model codes developed by technical experts who work with the insurance and real estate industries. In a presentation yesterday at a Times Square hotel, Mr. Sunder outlined the techniques used to project the sequence of events that led to the collapse of each tower. Although each building was hit by virtually identical planes, the south tower collapsed in 56 minutes and the north tower in 102 minutes. A combination of common factors shaped the course of events, he said. The planes plunged through the exterior curtain of each building and fragmented as they passed through the building, with parts emerging on the other side. The impacts killed hundreds of people instantly. In the north tower, American Airlines Flight 11, moving at 443 miles per | Staircases In Twin Towers Are Faulted |
1664146_2 | la carte'' in the practice of their religion, said Diana Gonya, 61, a retired insurance agent in Baltimore whose wedding 36 years ago was officiated by Pope Paul VI. Certainly there are problems. Fewer Americans these days send their children to Catholic schools. Mass attendance in the United States fell during John Paul's papacy. The church faces an acute shortage of priests. And the sexual abuse scandal continues to roil dioceses across the country. While few American Catholics say they expect doctrine to change markedly under the successor to John Paul, the transition has allowed them to dream a little about what their church could be. Broadly, they say they hope for a church that more readily embraces modernity. For some, it means that priests might be allowed to marry. For others, it could entail the arrival of women as priests. Most, polls show, would like to see a softening of the church's stance on birth control. After years of sexual abuse scandals, many look for a pope who will make ending the abuse a priority. ''If it wants to stay one of the major religions in this country, it needs to progress with the times and let women priests in,'' said Katie McDevitt, 20, a sophomore at Boston College, a Jesuit university. Ms. McDevitt says she attends church relatively regularly, and she recently went to a memorial Mass for John Paul. ''It needs not to be so sexist and patriarchal. There is a lot of emphasis on the wrong principles.'' American Catholics grieved for John Paul, as did their brethren all over the world, but a recent Gallup poll indicated that they think who the next pope might be matters less to them than to Catholics elsewhere, especially in Africa and Latin America, where the church has grown most robustly over the last two decades. There is a widespread acceptance among Roman Catholics in the United States that they can be out of step with the Vatican and still unequivocally call themselves Catholic. Mrs. Gonya said that her attitude toward the pope and the church hierarchy was something like people's feelings about their parents. ''We respect them for what they believe, but we have new information that takes us in different directions,'' she said. Mrs. Gonya and her husband, Gary, are enthusiastic lifelong Catholics. Mr. Gonya studied to be a priest in the 1960's. The couple proudly show photos | Catholics in U.S. Keep Faith, But Live With Contradictions |
1666988_1 | fuels,'' said Richard Kassel, a senior lawyer and director of the Clean Vehicles Project at the Natural Resources Defense Council in New York. ''It was a program that started with good intentions, but outlived its usefulness.'' A local law passed in 1991 mandated that 80 percent of the new cars and light trucks that the city buys each year be able to run on alternative fuels. Officials say the city has met that threshold every year, producing a collection of 3,300 alternative-fuel vehicles, most of them turning out to have been better ideas on paper than on the streets of New York. The alternative-fuel vehicles, about 40 percent of the 7,800 light-duty vehicles in the city's fleet, are scattered across the city and may not be easy to distinguish, except by their shortcomings. They include: $(6$)1,160 cars built to use both regular gasoline and compressed natural gas, which is far cleaner and has the advantage of being produced in North America, thereby lessening the city's dependence on foreign oil. However, with only 11 private or municipal filling stations in the city dispensing natural gas, the bifuel vehicles have been running almost exclusively on gasoline. $(6$)612 Ford Tauruses that run solely on ethanol. Their tanks can be filled only at the six Department of Sanitation depots equipped with special ethanol pumps. Drivers assigned to use these cars must know where those depots are, and never stray too far from them, which limits the vehicles' usefulness. And environmentalists say ethanol cars are not noticeably cleaner than those that run on gasoline. $(6$)175 dedicated compressed natural gas vehicles. Most are altered gasoline-powered cars. The gas tanks were removed by after-market shops and natural gas tanks were placed in their trunks, filling the space and making the cars somewhat unstable. The cars have not functioned anywhere near as well as expected. The alternative-fuel fleet also includes 123 vehicles that were supposed to run on methanol but never did because the city never purchased the fuel, and 347 all-electric carts that can reach a top speed of 35 miles per hour but cannot be used on city streets. The most recent additions, 882 new hybrid electric-gasoline powered cars, are the lone bright spot in the city's effort so far. They can get up to 45 miles per gallon in the city on unleaded gasoline and have very low emissions. Since 1991 the city has also | Out With the Old, in With the Hybrids; In New Laws, Big Step in Journey to Cleaner City Fleet |
1668490_1 | Pereira de Carvalho, president of Unica, Brazil's largest sugar industry association, said. ''And that opens the door for developing countries.'' Still, it is unclear how the European Union will respond to the ruling. Europe and the United States have argued that their subsidy reductions should be part of continuing efforts to liberalize agriculture under the Doha round of trade talks that began in 2001. Poor countries argue that they cannot wait for a deal, which is unlikely to come before the end of 2006 at the earliest. In Brussels, European Union officials criticized the latest ruling, but said they would take it into consideration as they set about overhauling their sugar export subsidy system, which costs some $2 billion a year and is being revamped for the first time in 35 years. ''We presented our case forcefully and I had hoped that the appellate body would take greater account of our arguments,'' Mariann Fischer Boel, the European agriculture commissioner, said. ''Naturally, I will take account of this verdict when I finalize the reform proposals we are due to publish on June 22.'' The European Union was already addressing its subsidies program because of the high price of sugar in Europe and because advocacy groups like Oxfam had long criticized it for its distortions of world markets. The European proposal envisions cutting the minimum price of sugar in Europe by a third and reducing the export subsidies. Roberto Azevedo, a senior trade official at Brazil's foreign ministry in Brasília, urged the European Union to comply with the ruling ''in the shortest possible time frame.'' Last month, the W.T.O. gave Washington until July 1 to get rid of $3.2 billion in annual subsidies to cotton farmers. The Bush administration has said that it will comply. Last year, a panel of W.T.O. experts found that the European Union exported about 4 million metric tons of sugar in 2001, the period under investigation, or about three times what global trade rules allow. The appeals court upheld those findings. Brussels appealed the W.T.O.'s decision in January, arguing that it did not directly subsidize more than 1.3 million metric tons of exports -- the ceiling set during an earlier trade round. The W.T.O., however, upheld an earlier ruling that found that farmers were able to sell another 2.7 million tons of sugar at artificially low prices on global markets because of Europe's sugar system. INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS | Europe Loses Sugar Appeal At W.T.O. |
1668760_2 | ample hydropower resources. Norway not only taxes its gasoline. Norwegians also pay automobile taxes as high as $395 a year for each vehicle, and in Oslo there is even a ''studded-tire'' fee of about $160 for vehicles with all-terrain tires that tear up asphalt more quickly in the winter. Then there are the taxes on new passenger vehicles that can increase the price of imported automobiles. Norway has no auto manufacturing industry aside from an experiment to produce electric cars, and economists have suggested that that has made it easier to limit automobile use in Norway because there is no domestic industry to lobby against such decisions as in neighboring Sweden, home of Saab and Volvo. Norway designed the duties to make large-engine sport utility vehicles much costlier than compact cars. For instance, a high-end Toyota Land Cruiser that costs $60,000 in the United States might run as much as $100,000 in Norway. Economists argue that gasoline prices and other auto taxes in Norway are not so expensive when measured against the annual incomes of Norwegians, among the world's highest at about $51,700 a person, or the shorter workweek of about 37.5 hours that is the norm here. (Norwegians also get five weeks of vacation a year.) The government frequently makes such arguments when responding to criticism over high fuel prices. ''We do not want such a system,'' Per-Kristian Foss, the finance minister, said in a curt response to the calls for lower gasoline taxes this month in Parliament. Other European countries have also placed high taxes on gasoline, and some like Britain and the Netherlands have gasoline prices that rival or at times surpass Norway's. In Oslo, as in other European capitals, there is ample public transportation, including an express airport train that whisks travelers to the international airport from downtown in 20 minutes. Yet Norway, with a population of just 4.6 million, differs from much of Europe in its breadth, with an extensive network of roads, tunnels and bridges spread over an area slightly larger than New Mexico. ''Rural areas without good public transportation alternatives are hit a little harder,'' said Knut Sandberg Eriksen, a senior research economist at the Institute of Transport Economics here who estimates the government collects about $2.4 billion in fuel taxes alone each year, or about $519 for every Norwegian. Some of the revenue supports Norway's social benefits. ''Our government has been grateful | The $6.66-a-Gallon Solution; Oil-Rich Norwegians Take World's Highest Gasoline Prices in Stride |
1662465_7 | consciousness much earlier'' than is sometimes portrayed in news media accounts, Dr. Fins of NewYork-Presbyterian said. Researchers know little about how to draw a person out of a minimally conscious state, which itself can last a lifetime. In one study of 124 brain-damaged patients, doctors in Philadelphia and New Jersey reported in March that amantadine, a drug for Parkinson's disease, appeared to speed recovery in some people. But the evidence was not definitive and will require confirmation, the authors wrote. Rehabilitation, such as it is, typically includes life support, if needed, and regular visits from medical staff, typically to change the patient's position in bed and to stimulate the senses with bright lights, noises, sharp smells and tastes, including lemon and chocolate. ''I always tell families that it's time and nature and God taking care of things, that what we do mostly is monitor the patients,'' said Dr. Childs. Dr. Joseph Giacino, a neuropsychologist at the JFK Johnson Rehabilitation Institute in Edison, N.J., has been following a group of brain-damaged patients with both oxygen-deprivation and traumatic injuries, and finds that the group with traumatic injuries -- if they become minimally conscious -- are far more likely to show signs of recovery than the others. ''There is a real separation between these patients and the others in terms of improvement in the first year,'' Dr. Giacino said. Ms. Schiavo showed no evidence of having ever entered a minimally conscious state, either in the early 90's or later, neurologists say. An EEG of her cerebral cortex showed almost no electrical activity, said a neurologist who examined her, and a dozen experts interviewed about her case agreed that an M.R.I. scan would have added no information. In Dr. Schiff's study comparing M.R.I. activity of minimally conscious with normal subjects, the researchers also found a striking difference. The overall rate of energy consumption was significantly higher in the normal brains than in the minimally conscious ones. This difference in idling speed may be crucial to maintaining conscious awareness, Dr. Schiff and others suggested. Because signaling between brain cells requires one cell to overwhelm the other, Dr. Schiff said, a lower idling speed may make the signaling threshold harder to overcome -- effectively damping activity throughout the brain. ''The idea is that maybe if you were to activate that substrate, you may cross the threshold and generate enough activity'' to produce more awareness, he said. | Inside the Injured Brain, Many Kinds of Awareness |
1662483_1 | they expected to travel more in the next six months than they did in the comparable period last year, while a little over half said their travel frequency would be about the same. RADIO-FREE PASSPORTS? -- Corporate travel managers are uneasy about the State Department's plan to introduce passports later this year that will have tiny radio tags for transmitting personal and facial-biometric information, to expedite processing of travelers through border controls and Customs checkpoints. The Association of Corporate Travel Executives has polled its members and found that ''93 percent of them are opposed to this,'' said Jack Riepe, a spokesman for the group. The reason is that radio frequency identification, or RFID, devices -- similar to radio tags used in inventory management of manufactured goods -- can broadcast ''the presence of U.S. citizens in crowds, in hotel lobbies, on trains or even on the street to those in possession of a fairly unsophisticated receiver,'' according to a statement by the group. The main concern is about politically motivated attacks on United States citizens abroad, but the devices ''could also be pinpointing likely targets for pickpockets and thieves,'' said Greeley Koch, the group's president. ''The problem is that anyone can activate these things,'' which can be read from as far as 100 feet away, said Bill Scannell, a consultant on privacy who is organizing opposition to the proposal on a Web site, www.RFIDkills.com. AUTOMATED CHECK-INS -- Domestic hotels are slowly following the lead of airlines in giving customers options for automated check-ins. Last year, Hilton Hotels tested self-service kiosks at several major hotels, and by year's end had them installed at 44 hotels. Hilton is now installing registration kiosks at all of its 175 Embassy Suites hotels. Others installing or testing kiosks are the Global Hyatt Corporation, which is putting them into 100 Hyatt Regency and Grand Hyatt hotels this year; Starwood Hotels and Resorts, which is installing kiosks in more than 100 Sheraton hotels; and Holiday Inn, a unit of Lodgian, which is testing a kiosk at its Gwinnett Center property in Georgia that will also allow guests to print out airline boarding passes. ''Initial expectations have been met that this is a viable means for customers to expedite check-ins,'' while still having access to personalized front desk service if desired, Thomas B. Spitler, Hilton's vice president for front office operations, said in an interview. JOE SHARKEY BUSINESS TRAVEL | MEMO PAD |
1667079_0 | Equity and Excellence in American Higher EducationBy William G. Bowen, Martin A. Kurzweil and Eugene M. Tobin University of Virginia Press, hardcover Review by Karen W. Arenson Since his retirement as president of Princeton in 1988, William G. Bowen has used his post as president of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to finance research about higher education and publish books that map out its condition, including critical and controversial issues like affirmative action and the role of sports. Mr. Bowen's newest book, written with two Mellon associates, continues in this tradition, wrestling with the virtual absence of the poorest students from selective colleges and universities. It is a timely volume, since Harvard and other top universities are grappling with how to admit more socioeconomically balanced classes. Young people from low-income families whose parents did not attend college amount to about 19 percent of the total population but only 3 percent of the 1995 entering class at the 19 elite institutions that the book explores in depth. The topic is broad, and so is the book's treatment of it, reaching back to pre-Revolutionary War America, when colleges offered subsidies to students ''from humble origins.'' Disadvantaged young people have long attended college in smaller numbers than the wealthy and the middle class, but that did not have the same ramifications in, say, 1920, when only 5 percent of all young adults attended college, as it does today, when about 60 percent do. In 1946, the Truman Commission on Higher Education described the country's failure ''to provide a reasonable equality of educational opportunity for its youth.'' Around the same time, the G.I. Bill of Rights unleashed a flood of World War II veterans into college classrooms, partly to avoid massive unemployment. But efforts since then have fallen short. The Pell Grant was created more than 30 years ago to help needy students attend college. But ''Equity and Excellence'' concludes that the continuing failure of many low-income students to attend college and graduate, despite ''this extraordinary economic incentive,'' is evidence of ''a serious supply-side block'' that threatens the excellence of higher education: poor students attend poor schools and are thus simply not ready for college, especially the most demanding ones. The book grew out of lectures that Dr. Bowen presented at the University of Virginia last year, and its conclusions are supported by new data about income and higher education. This includes evaluations of | Access Denied: Economics and the Elite |
1667158_1 | number without your written permission; set minimum security standards for companies that do store your Social Security number and require third party audits against that standard; prohibit companies from using your Social Security number as an identifier. Notification: Companies with information about you do not necessarily have to tell you when someone steals that information, except in California. Other states are considering emulating California, and Congress is contemplating a notification law. Some businesses oppose it, thinking it would reduce public confidence to make so many notifications. Of course, it might also make them work harder to protect information about you. When one company recently had lots of personal information stolen from its database, it waited months before telling anyone affected. A notification law or regulations by some agency like the Federal Trade Commission would have to include a very specific definition of what constitutes a data compromise and how long a company could wait before telling you about it. New Credit Confirmation: Some people have suddenly received second mortgage bills on equity lines for which they did not apply; somebody else did, using their identities and home equity. Thieves also commonly apply for new credit cards with stolen identities. One proposal to stop that is to allow you the option of denying anyone a look at your credit history without your having issued a notarized approval to the credit bureau. Online Banking: A phenomenon called phishing occurs when you receive an e-mail, apparently from your bank or other service provider, asking you to update your identities data (password or credit-card number). The e-mail gives you a link to the Web site for your bank or other service vendor. The site looks like the real thing but is a fake. As soon as you provide the data, your account is hit and the funds are transferred overseas. Thousands of Americans have fallen victim. Hong Kong recently required what is called ''two-factor authentication'' for online banking to prevent phishing; that means you have to use something in addition to a password (like a smart card or token). Here's why: with widely available software called L0phtCrack, you can guess almost any password in minutes. Opt-In Data Laws: Data-collection companies and data brokers know a lot more about you than you think, more than the government and more than credit bureaus. Who has received mail at your address? Have you had traffic accidents? What | You've Been Sold |
1667398_2 | thousands of criticisms (as well as insults, accusations and threats) of The Times's Middle East coverage, I'm still waiting for one reader to say the paper has ever been unfair in a way that was damaging to both sides. Given the frequency of articles on the subject, it would be hard to imagine that such a piece has not been published. In fact, I've seen a few myself. But to see them, I have had to suppress my own feelings about what is happening in Israel and Palestine. I can't say I'm very good at it. How could I be -- how could anyone be -- when considering a conflict so deep, so unabating, so riddled with pain? Who can be dispassionate about an endless tragedy? This doesn't exonerate The Times, nor does the fact that criticism comes from each side suggest that the paper's doing something right. But no one who tries to walk down the middle of a road during a firefight could possibly emerge unscathed. Critics will say The Times attempts nothing of the sort, that it has thrown in its lot with one side in the conflict. But let's keep motive out of this discussion. Neither you nor I know what the motives of the editors might be. Nor should their motives even matter. We can judge them only on what they do. Some things The Times does and does not do (apart from having extremely opinionated opinion pages, which color the way the rest of the paper is read but are not the issue under discussion today): It does not provide history lessons. A report on an assassination attempt on a Hamas leader in Gaza that kills nearby innocents will most likely mention the immediate provocation -- perhaps a Palestinian attack on an Israeli settlement. But, says the angered reader, what about the murderous assault that provoked the settlement attack? And, says his aggrieved counterpart on the other side, what about the ambush that preceded the assault? And so on back to the first intifada, and then to 1973 and 1967 and 1956 and 1948 -- an endless chain of regression and recrimination and pain that cannot be represented in a year, much less in a single dispatch in a single day. It eschews passion. If your cause needs good publicity -- as both the Palestinians and the Israelis definitely do -- conventional news story | The Hottest Button: How The Times Covers Israel and Palestine |
1667445_0 | ''Legal Issues in School Health Services,'' all 662 pages of it, is a popular read among school administrators in this wealthy town on the Long Island Sound. Parents, however, are more likely to be poring over Gary Mayerson's ''How to Compromise With Your School District Without Compromising Your Child,'' or ''Wrightslaw: Special Education Law,'' by Peter W.D. Wright and Pamela Darr Wright. Special education is a hot topic here, with school board meetings exploding into shouting matches over what services children are entitled to under federal law and parents spending thousands of dollars on appeals to force the school district to provide those services for their children. The parents say they have no choice: the district, one of the state's most affluent, is fighting just as hard to hold the line on skyrocketing special education costs. ''The sign outside Westport should say: 'Don't Move Here. We Don't Take Care of Special Ed,''' said Stanley Alintoff, a parent who said he has spent more than $100,000 challenging Westport's decision to revoke special accommodations his daughter was receiving because of a digestive disorder. With an estimated 5.7 million children in the United States qualifying for special education, similar struggles are playing out around the country. Federal laws aimed at protecting the disabled entitle those who qualify to a free and ''appropriate'' education tailored to their needs. But the definition of ''appropriate'' differs from town to town, leaving much to quarrel about. The battle is particularly intense in the suburbs, where wealthy, educated parents no longer see special education as a stigma or trap. They are pressing hard for services and accommodations to address their children's learning needs, from extra time on tests to tuition for private schools. But many suburban school districts are aggressively challenging some of the requests as indulgent interpretations of the law. In Hamilton County, Tenn., for instance, school officials spent $2.2 million on lawyers and expert witnesses to avoid having to reimburse Maureen and Philip Deal the $60,000 annual cost of providing their autistic son, Zachary, with one-on-one behavioral training. Administrators warned that giving in could have made the district responsible for $10 million a year in services for other children. In December, the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit sided largely with the parents. The district is reviewing its options. In Calaveras County, Calif., the Bret Harte Union High School District fought so hard | Amid Affluence, a Struggle Over Special Education |
1667140_0 | AT Tiger Leaping Gorge in the Yunnan Province of China, you can hear two forces of nature collide. The Yangtse, with the accumulated might of a 16,000-foot drop from its start on the Tibetan Plateau, hurls millions of tons of water from hundreds of tributaries between the Jade Dragon and Haba Snow Mountains. Squeezing through a geological weak point just 100 feet wide, it produces an ominous, bone-chilling roar. This is the doorway to northwestern Yunnan and the Three Parallel Rivers National Park, a World Heritage Site created by Unesco in 2003. The headwaters of the Yangtse, the Mekong and the Salween run side by side in deep canyons coming within 55 miles of one another. With its abrupt changes in altitude and unique mix of climates, the park has an astonishing 7,000 plant species and is among the most diverse temperate regions on earth, according to the Nature Conservancy. Near the region's center is Kawagebo, one of the most sacred mountains of Tibetan Buddhism in China and the place I was headed to on a recent visit. Originally I had planned to trek in Tiger Leaping Gorge, a spectacular two-mile-deep canyon with an old miners' trail clinging to one of its nearly vertical slopes. The trail was temporarily closed last August when a trekker was swept away in a landslide. So I drove to a different entrance and walked to the rapids on a paved road that the government had recently built. I was far from alone. Crowds of urban Chinese, many dressed in business suits, walked alongside me. They were among the tens of thousands of visitors, mainly Chinese, coming to see the gorge. Like me, they were keenly aware that the view may disappear in the relatively near future. A dam is under development in the Tiger Leaping Gorge area -- one of dozens of hydroelectric projects planned in the power-starved region. Construction may start as early as 2007. According to the Chinese government, 100,000 Naxi and other minority peoples will be displaced from their farms in the valley behind the dam if it is built. ''We worshiped the river when I was growing up,'' said Angela Cun, the young Naxi woman who accompanied me on the two-day drive from the gorge north to Deqin, the jumping-off point for Mount Kawagebo. While we chatted, we passed mud brick villages and Yi women in the fields wearing bright | The Natural and the Sacred in China |
1667073_0 | TIMOTHY B. LUZADER is director of the Center for Career Opportunities at Purdue and president of the board of the National Association of Colleges and Employers, which represents campus career advisers. He offers tips on getting your foot in the right doors. Q. What does the job market look like for new graduates? A. It's definitely on an upswing. Campuses are reporting increases in both the number of organizations visiting to recruit students and the number of interviews being conducted. They're targeting business, engineering and computer-related degree candidates. Also, the federal government is projecting in excess of 117,000 job vacancies. They're especially interested in graduates with degrees in public health, engineering, sciences, program management, accounting, business and law enforcement. Q. Has technology changed the rules? Is it better to correspond by snail mail or e-mail? A. Small companies often prefer a personalized process, while large companies and an ever-increasing number of midsize employers ask candidates to apply directly on their Web sites. One of my favorite sites is www.directemployers.com, a conduit to sites for companies like Abbott Labs, G.E. Ford Motor and I.B.M. It lists 200 or so companies that accept job applications online and explains the application processes. Q. Is there a winning design for a résumé? A. Absolutely. For students who have been active in extracurricular activities and have an internship or two under their belt, the traditional reverse chronological format will suit them fine. If the students have not been as involved and lack professional work experience, then a résumé that highlights the skills they would bring a prospective employer would be best. Q. What is the most common mistake students make? A. The biggest mistake in résumé writing is to not include an objective statement or to use an objective statement that is so vague it's meaningless. In one or two sentences, it should indicate the type of position they are seeking, the type of work setting and may include a brief statement of skills. But employers' biggest complaint about student candidates, by far, is that they don't do enough research about the company to which they are applying. VICTORIA GOLDMAN HOW TO . . . | Get a Job |
1667485_1 | to Vioxx. As lawsuits against Merck over Vioxx move toward trial, the documents could help plaintiffs paint a picture of the company that is at odds with Merck's public statements that it had no evidence of Vioxx's cardiac risks until last fall. Theodore V.H. Mayer, a lawyer for Merck, said that it had disclosed all information from clinical trials to the F.D.A. and that Dr. Scolnick's e-mail messages merely reflected his concern that the F.D.A. weigh Vioxx's benefits and risks fairly. The e-mail discussion between the Merck scientists reflected an honest scientific debate over the cause of the woman's death, Mr. Mayer said. Merck withdrew Vioxx in September after a different clinical trial found that the drug increased the risk of heart problems. More than 25 million Americans took Vioxx between 1999 and 2004, and at least 4,600 people or their survivors are suing Merck, claiming Vioxx caused their heart attacks or strokes. The first individual cases are scheduled for trial next month in Alabama and Texas, filed by the survivors of two men who the suits say died of heart attacks after taking the drug. Merck, the nation's third-largest drug maker, has said it plans to defend every suit. The company says it did everything reasonably possible over the years to determine whether Vioxx caused heart problems and to disclose the drug's risks to patients and doctors. The e-mail messages and other internal Merck documents, including the report of the woman's death, were provided to The New York Times by a person working with plaintiffs. The death of the 73-year-old woman -- who was not identified by name in the documents and whose identity has not been disclosed -- occurred during a 12-week clinical trial called Advantage that covered 5,500 patients. Clinical trials are at the core of the development of new medicines, providing data that enable the F.D.A. and doctors to weigh drug risks and benefits. Mr. Mayer said the doctors involved in the e-mail exchanges could not be certain whether the woman who died was taking Vioxx or an older painkiller, naproxen, that was used in the trial, because information about which participant was taking which drugs was kept confidential. But at the time, there was widespread concern within the company about the relationship between Vioxx and heart attacks as a result of troubling earlier research. During the Advantage trial, eight people taking Vioxx suffered heart attacks | Evidence in Vioxx Suits Shows Intervention by Merck Officials |
1667389_0 | Some prominent Roman Catholic priests, nuns and theologians who were investigated and disciplined while Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, was in charge of enforcing orthodoxy for the Vatican. Tissa Balasuriya Sri Lankan priest and scholar. At Issue -- Religious relativism, the view that no faith has a unique claim to truth and that no spiritual figure can claim to be the only savior. Father Balasuriya argued that the Roman Catholic Church and Christianity in general must go further to acknowledge the legitimacy of other faiths. He also criticized the church's exaltation of the Virgin Mary and challenged the Catholic belief in original sin. Sanction -- Father Balusiriya was ordered to sign a ''profession of faith'' accepting the policies of the church, specifically including the Vatican's policy against the ordination of women; he refused, and offered instead to sign a similar one without the clause on female priests. That document was rejected by the Vatican, and he was excommunicated in 1997; he reconciled with the church the following year. Emmanuel Milingo Was Archbishop of Lusaka, Zambia. At Issue -- Unorthodox practices and a marriage. Archbishop Milingo, the first native of Zambia to head the church there, began incorporating rites from traditional African religions into his masses, engaged in faith healing and exorcism, and performed as a singer and dancer. Forced to resign and move to Rome in 1983, he kept performing unorthodox ceremonies in Italy until formally ordered to stop in 1996. Finally, he made global headlines in 2001 by marrying a 43-year-old Korean woman in a mass wedding in New York held by the Rev. Sun Myung Moons Unification Church. Sanction -- Threatened with excommunication over the scandal, Archbishop Milingo returned to Rome, met with the pope, renounced the marriage and resubmitted himself to church authority and his vow of celibacy. Charles E. Curran American priest; was a professor of moral theology at Catholic University in Washington. At Issue -- Whether Catholics have a right to dissent publicly from church teaching on sexuality, medical ethics and other matters. Father Curran was a leading critic of ''Humanae Vitae,'' Pope Paul VI's 1968 encyclical forbidding contraception. Sanction -- His church license to teach Catholic theology was revoked in 1986. He now teaches at Southern Methodist University. Mary Agnes Mansour Was an American nun of the Sisters of Mercy. At Issue -- Abortion and political involvement. In 1983, Sister Mary was | The World; Off the Reservation |
1665193_1 | long, delicate tongue for a nectar snack. ''New Frontiers'' is the first episode in ''Deep Jungle,'' a great-looking three-part ''Nature'' series that begins tomorrow night on many PBS stations. The hour ought to be boring, since its subject is the high-tech tools of science: laser measuring sticks, three-dimensional forest maps, global positioning system tags, and infra-red and motion-sensitive cameras. (The other two episodes, to be shown on April 24 and May 1, are titled, with some promise, ''Monsters of the Forest'' and ''The Beast Within.'') But what viewers see are the results of this technology, and much of the photography is haunting, with an otherworldly aura. A gathering of bats, eight million strong, meet for something of a convention in a small section of forest for a couple of weeks. A small simian in Borneo leaps from tree to tree with a grace that makes Tarzan look like an amateur and the computer-assisted flying effects in ''Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon'' seem not quite magical enough. The hour is about the human researchers as well as the animals, and the normally serious, patient and restrained scientists sometimes behave with a little less than academic dignity. Flying over a forest canopy in a new mode of transport, Nalini Nadkarni of Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash., exclaims ''Wow!'' repeatedly, like a delighted teenager. Having captured the Sumatran tiger with motion-sensitive camera traps, Jeremy Holden, a naturalist, and Gavin Thurston, his camera operator, scramble so fast that they fall all over themselves like little boys at play. Kimberly Bostwick, an evolutionary ornithologist, playfully dances for the camera, imitating an avian courtship ritual. The show's subject, uncovering the secrets of the planet's tropical rain forests, is certainly vast. As the Scottish narrator, John Hannah, says, ''most of the jungle still remains a dark and mysterious place.'' In fact, some figures mentioned in the series are so astounding that they sound like mistakes: There are 10 times as many species in these jungles as scientists used to think existed on the entire planet. There can be more species of ants in one tree in the rain forest than in all of Britain. There are bound to be some sublime nature documentaries in television's future. 'Nature: Deep Jungle' On most PBS stations Sunday nights through May 1 (check local listings). Fred Kaufman, executive producer; William Grant, executive-in-charge. Produced by Thirteen/WNET New York for PBS. TELEVISION REVIEW | Oh, Those Dancing Birds And Long-Tongued Moths! |
1665261_5 | efforts in other parts of the world after unapproved varieties of corn, for example, leached into the food supply and black market biotech seeds were smuggled across borders. In the United States, genetically modified corn is a growing portion of the market, and modified soybeans are widely sold and well accepted. But the health and environmental concerns that crept up in the late 1990's have stalled the commercialization of biotech wheat. This week, Anheuser-Busch, the nation's largest beer maker and the No.1 buyer of rice, threatened to stop buying rice in Missouri if some farmers grew genetically modified rice in field tests. Yesterday, however, the company reached a compromise after the state pushed the farmers to grow the gene-altered crops 120 miles from other rice fields. Fears in Europe and America that the crops have not been sufficiently tested has spurred debate over the last seven years, but not in China, where biotech research, particularly on rice, is largely driven by government labs trying to improve crop yields and reduce pesticide use. But now, the government investigation, led by China's agriculture ministry, will examine Greenpeace's assertion that a group of ''rogue scientists'' have sold experimental varieties of genetically altered rice on the open market to consumers in Hubei. ''This is irresponsible and dangerous,'' says Sze Pang Cheung, a Greenpeace official who helped uncover the sales in Hubei and estimates that more than 1,000 tons of genetically engineered rice are on the local market. ''The government needs to act. If they cannot control G.E. rice even at the experimental stage, how are they going to control large-scale commercialization?'' Still, just a day after Greenpeace announced its findings, seed market officials in Hubei talked openly about the popularity of the ''anti-pest rice'' and admitted selling it at a premium price, saying they had recently run out of stock. Farmers and seed market officials here say the planting of biotech seeds is widespread in the region and has occurred for about two years. But they also say many farmers do not eat the rice they harvest. Some farmers think that anything that kills a field pest could also prove harmful to people. But the farmer holding the fistful of rice in his home says he and his family eat all the anti-pest rice he produces. ''Why not?'' he says with a broad smile. ''I don't believe the government would poison its own people.'' | China's Problem With 'Anti-Pest' Rice |
1665250_0 | Marriage anxiety has gripped much of the heartland, and in Oklahoma it has reached into the cellblock in perhaps the most unexpected permutation of the state's six-year effort to bolster wedded bliss. In the Joseph Harp Correctional Center, sprawling across the tawny plains 40 miles south of Oklahoma City, officials are running a six-part course on maintaining a healthy marriage, available for the last year or so to inmates in good standing. ''There are 600,000 Americans leaving prison in the next few years,'' the human services director, Howard H. Hendrick, said in explaining the effort to teach felons to be good spouses. ''And those guys are all coming to an apartment complex near you.'' In small workshops in prisons around the state, inmates, often with their spouses present, discuss problems like money and sex that underlie disputes within a marriage. If the examples cited might seem irrelevant to relationships separated by prison walls -- how, say, an argument about washing the dishes is really about power -- the inmates seemed at a recent session to have little trouble connecting to these or to deeper hidden issues like fear of abandonment. ''I had nobody,'' said Dunnino Moreland, 12 years into a life sentence for murder that began when he was 16. ''I'd been abandoned by my family, my friends, by everybody I ever knew. I was all alone in here, forever. And then I met Tammy, and now I have someone who I care about, who comes to see me on Sundays, who I can share a life with. But I'm afraid, we're all afraid, that maybe she won't come back some Sunday.'' Tammy Moreland leaned her head on the shoulder of the husband she had married just a few years ago, long after he went to prison. ''I'll be here while there's breath in my body,'' she said and then turned to explain to the class. ''This man, who has never touched me sexually, because of this situation that we're in, has treated me better than any man I ever met out there.'' She gestured vaguely toward the windows overlooking a grass yard ringed by concertina wire. Keen to keep traditional families together and battling high divorce rates, officials in more than 24 states have inaugurated marriage programs. The Bush administration has proposed to spend several hundred million dollars a year for five years on marriage, fatherhood and sexual-abstinence initiatives, | Prison Marriage Classes Instill Stability |
1665316_5 | government entity called the Projects and Contracting Office, which is overseen by another office in the United States Embassy in Baghdad called the Iraq Reconstruction Management Office, directed by Bill Taylor. Mr. Taylor said in an interview that the investment in training Iraqi security forces had already started to pay off, most notably during the Iraqi elections. ''If you want to add to something like security, you have to take the money from somewhere,'' he said. ''There's no easy cut,'' he said of the water projects. ''Every one of these projects is needed, Halabja as well as the others.'' According to embassy figures, as of March 30 there were 249 water and sewage projects -- 185 in progress and 64 completed -- financed by the Congressionally approved money across Iraq. A total of 92 projects have been canceled because of the shift of money to security, the embassy said. With his usual fine-grained recall, Mr. Nuradeen said his father, a guard at a local school, had once mentioned to him that in 1959 the central government in Baghdad had sent a team of engineers to Halabja to look for a water source. Although the engineers concluded that a water project was feasible and the visit was reported in the papers, political upheaval in Iraq prevented anything from getting done. But gradually, through two stints of exile in Iran that were wrapped around a stellar academic career, Mr. Nuradeen became captivated with the idea of bringing water to Halabja himself. The day after he learned that the American project had been canceled, Mr. Nuradeen drove up the rutted mountain road to the cave with the spring. The sections of salvaged pipe he had used to build a jury-rigged water supply line, 10 inches in diameter, meandered to one side. In several places, hissing sprays of water showed were rocks had fallen and punched holes in the pipes. A roaring waterfall tumbled hundreds of feet down craggy rock walls from the cave itself, but Mr. Nuradeen found a side entrance, took off his shoes and socks and waded through the icy water into the darkness. Deep in the cave, he sat down on an outcropping so close to a cleft where the water burst forth in a deafening stream that it looked as if he might be swept away. He sat there calmly looking at the water, and began singing to himself. | Security vs. Rebuilding: Kurdish Town Loses Out |
1659418_0 | OF all the indignities Laurie Chamberlain thought she might suffer while traveling -- brusque gate agents, security pat-downs, hours spent waiting out a snowstorm -- the last thing she expected was to be nearly undone by her plane ticket. After booking a business flight to Miami, Ms. Chamberlain, who works at a nonprofit firm in Washington, received a paper ticket in the mail. On the day of the trip, although she had no luggage to check, Ms. Chamberlain had to stand in a slow US Airways line at Reagan National Airport in Washington because of her paper ticket. She waited for more than an hour to check in with an agent as she watched passengers with electronic tickets zip through check-in at a kiosk. ''I didn't want it,'' said Ms. Chamberlain, who was at the back of the line, holding her ticket as if it were a summons from the Internal Revenue Service. ''There's no way that I expected to have a paper ticket.'' Paper airline tickets are quaint but occasionally annoying reminders of a time when computers didn't control all aspects of travel. Airlines still issue paper tickets in some circumstances, but most travelers don't want them -- though there are holdouts who prefer the security and comfort of paper. Ms. Chamberlain's paper ticket, it turned out, was issued because she paid for the flight with her boss's credit card. United Airlines, which provided one leg of Ms. Chamberlain's trip, issued the ticket as a security precaution required by the credit card company. It is not just heightened credit card and airline security that give rise to a paper ticket. Family members with different last names using frequent-flier miles can cause an airline to issue one. Or people connecting to different airlines that have no agreement to link their electronic tickets might also find themselves holding paper. And on international flights, paper tickets are still common. At major airlines like United and American, e-tickets, which exist only in the memory of an airline's computer system, now account for some 95 percent of all tickets issued. United Airlines's own survey of customers shows they are overwhelmingly in favor of e-tickets. And a J.D. Power study released this month found that passengers checking in at a self-service kiosk waited half as long for boarding passes as those checking in with an agent. While holders of e-tickets who also check luggage must | Holding a Paper Ticket, Bracing for the Irritation |
1659402_2 | ''You have to think differently when you use old materials,'' Ms. Flaherty, 30, said. Dressed in blue coveralls, she sat on a footlocker-size ''window seat,'' which she constructed from a found wood-frame window with a cracked pane, plywood planks and a couple of old industrial door hinges. She held up a length of snaggled oak flooring with an angry nail protruding from it and described, to the class's delight, an air-powered gunlike machine that can easily blow nails, even bent ones, out of boards. After removing the nails and sawing off the jagged ends, Ms. Flaherty said, ''You can cover gaps with pretty molding that you've found and plug the nail holes with wood fill.'' She says the effort knocks about 80 percent off the cost of a new wood floor. Like a lot of other Dumpster divers, Ms. Flaherty and Mr. Freilla -- who said he and his wife plan to buy and restore a home in the South Bronx using found materials -- practice the sport not only to conserve cash but also to decrease Earth-clogging waste. The instructors devised the course after they met at a mixer held by the New York City chapter of Green Drinks International (www.greendrinks.org), a network of career environmentalists with outposts from Melbourne to Minneapolis. Mr. Freilla preaches the importance of reducing waste, even if it means lending an unofficial hand to contractors during demolition. Ms. Flaherty suggests keeping a watch for building permits and construction-size Dumpsters. For those who do not own a car or truck, she points out, a folding shopping cart may serve as a hauling assistant. After a round of introductions -- the workshop included a housing developer and a former Californian who said she has ''long-range garbage vision'' and roams in knee-high boots -- the instructors declared it time to hit the streets. Ms. Flaherty, who had been out scouting that morning, led the way. ''You could do a New York kitchen with these,'' she said as her followers gathered around institutional gray ceramic tiles piled on a sidewalk about 10 blocks away. Finding no takers, she walked briskly to a fenced-off dead end overlooking the Gowanus Canal. An area of rampant illegal dumping -- despite community efforts to clean it up -- the canal and its shores, she said, often serve up good stuff. Slim pickings on this day, though, beyond a chipped square of slate. | Turning Trash Into Gold: A New Urban Alchemy |
1657440_0 | The Department of Homeland Security, trying to focus antiterrorism spending better nationwide, has identified a dozen possible strikes it views as most plausible or devastating, including detonation of a nuclear device in a major city, release of sarin nerve agent in office buildings and a truck bombing of a sports arena. The document, known simply as the National Planning Scenarios, reads more like a doomsday plan, offering estimates of the probable deaths and economic damage caused by each type of attack. They include blowing up a chlorine tank, killing 17,500 people and injuring more than 100,000; spreading pneumonic plague in the bathrooms of an airport, sports arena and train station, killing 2,500 and sickening 8,000 worldwide; and infecting cattle with foot-and-mouth disease at several sites, costing hundreds of millions of dollars in losses. Specific locations are not named because the events could unfold in many major metropolitan or rural areas, the document says. The agency's objective is not to scare the public, officials said, and they have no credible intelligence that such attacks are planned. The department did not intend to release the document publicly, but a draft of it was inadvertently posted on a Hawaii state government Web site. By identifying possible attacks and specifying what government agencies should do to prevent, respond to and recover from them, Homeland Security is trying for the first time to define what ''prepared'' means, officials said. That will help decide how billions of federal dollars are distributed in the future. Cities like New York that have targets with economic and symbolic value, or places with hazardous facilities like chemical plants could get a bigger share of agency money than before, while less vulnerable communities could receive less. ''We live in a world of finite resources, whether they be personnel or funding,'' said Matt A. Mayer, acting executive director of the Office of State and Local Government Coordination and Preparedness at the Homeland Security Department, which is in charge of the effort. President Bush requested the list of priorities 15 months ago to address a widespread criticism of Homeland Security from members of Congress and antiterrorism experts that it was wasting money by spreading it out instead of focusing on areas or targets at greatest risk. Critics also have faulted the agency for not having a detailed plan on how to eliminate or reduce vulnerabilities. Michael Chertoff, the new secretary of homeland security, | U.S. Lists Possible Terror Attacks and Likely Toll |
1654552_2 | things, it was the ethos of the school that was crucial: Are expectations high? Is there a nurturing -- and disciplined -- culture? It occurred to several of the editors that they had accepted a simplistic view of human nature. They had thought of humans as economically motivated rational actors, who would respond in relatively straightforward ways to incentives. In fact, what really matters, they decided, is culture, ethos, character and morality. By the 1970's, The Public Interest was publishing as many essays on these things as on quantitative social science. As Wilson wrote in 1985, ''At root, in almost every area of public concern, we are seeking to induce persons to act virtuously, whether as schoolchildren, applicants for public assistance, would-be lawbreakers, or voters and public officials.'' The contributors to The Public Interest could write intelligently about such broad moral subjects because not only were they public policy experts, but they were also careful readers of Jane Austen, Lionel Trilling, Tocqueville, Nietzsche and so on. This was before intellectuals were divided between academic professionals and think-tank policy wonks. It was about this time people started calling The Public Interest a neoconservative magazine. I'm not sure that word still has meaning, but if there was one core insight, it was this: Human beings, or governments, are not black boxes engaged in a competition of interests. What matters most is the character of the individual, the character of the community and the character of government. When designing policies, it's most important to get them to complement, not undermine, people's permanent moral aspirations -- the longing for freedom, faith and family happiness. That approach led to welfare policies that encouraged work and responsibility. It also led to what many derided as the overly idealistic foreign policies that are now contributing to the exhilarating revolutions we're seeing across the Middle East. Several of the original players are dead. Kristol, Glazer and Bell are in their 80's. A great young editor, Adam Wolfson, has done much of the heavy lifting, but he and his senior colleagues are calling it a day. The magazine will not outlive all its founders. I read through the back issues this week with growing sadness. The Public Interest will not be around as we reform entitlements and continue our debates on what it means to be American. All we'll have are the archives, at www.thepublicinterest.com. Op-Ed Columnist E-mail: dabrooks@nytimes.com | 40 Years Of Character |
1653882_0 | Last month, in the Amazon state of Pará in Brazil, gunmen stopped an American nun on the road and killed her. According to her traveling companions, the nun, Dorothy Stang, read to her killers from her Bible before she was shot. Sister Dorothy, born in Ohio but a naturalized Brazilian, had been an advocate for the rural poor since the early 1970's, helping peasants make a living by farming small plots and extracting forest products without deforestation. She also sought to protect them from criminal gangs after their land. The public murder of an American nun is not just a ghastly crime -- it's a message. Land-grabbers are telling the government that they run Pará. Brazil's government has fought back with resolve, but it remains to be seen whether the government is strong enough to prove Pará's land-grabbers wrong. Violence in Pará is not new, but it has intensified because a stretch of highway is about to be paved to create an all-weather road to carry products to markets. The value of land has suddenly soared, and land-grabbers are killing peasants and burning their houses to seize their property. They cut down trees for the timber and sell the cleared land to cattle ranchers or soybean farmers. In the days since Sister Dorothy's murder, the government has sent 2,000 troops to keep order in Pará, announced a ban on logging in 20 million acres along the new highway and established two more federally protected parts of the forest. The challenge will be to make these changes stick. The additional troops should not be a short-term gesture, but the start of establishing the rule of law. Enforcing forest protection will be difficult because loggers have long done as they pleased. It is also hugely important to establish clear land titles. Finally, the government must punish the killers of rural leaders like Sister Dorothy. Her church organization says nearly 1,000 rural campaigners were murdered from 1985 to 1996; as of last year, only five people were in prison for those deaths. Since Sister Dorothy's death, at least four more rural leaders have been slain. Brazil's leftist government seems eager to make Sister Dorothy's death a catalyst for change, but it must resist forces that have repeatedly proved stronger than the law. Editorial | Sister Dorothy's Killers |
1653960_2 | officials and industry leaders say is needed to reduce medical errors and promote better care. Doctors at the clinics of the University of California, Davis, grew accustomed to using e-mail for clinical purposes before the clinics introduced electronic medical records, said Dr. Eric Liederman, medical director of clinical information systems at Davis. The messaging ''gave them some comfort and facility with using the computer,'' he said. Early research at clinics at the university found that using e-mail improved the productivity of physicians, decreased overhead costs and improved access to doctors for patients, including those who still telephoned. ''There was a huge reduction in the number of calls,'' said Dr. Liederman, who is a big fan of e-mail exchanges. Doctors and insurers say online consultations can be especially useful for patients who have chronic conditions like diabetes, asthma and heart problems. They have been frequent users and being in touch can help them to comply with regimens to cope with their diseases. ''Patients love this stuff; I love this stuff; the staff loves this stuff,'' said Dr. Barbara Walters, a senior medical director at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center in New Hampshire. One benefit of online messaging -- perhaps because it can be done in a setting less harried than a doctor's office -- is that it gives patients a greater degree of control. ''The intelligence of our patients never ceases to amaze me,'' Dr. Walters said. ''Patients can describe what's going on with them, if given the chance and given the time.'' Since last year, several health plans -- Anthem Blue Cross, Cigna and Harvard Pilgrim -- have been paying Dartmouth-Hitchcock $30 for each online ''visit,'' Dr. Walters said. In some health plans, a co-payment by the patient reduces the insurer's share. The medical center gives participating doctors credits -- an e-mail consultation is valued at half an office visit -- that increases their pay. Blue Cross and Blue Shield plans in California, New York, Florida, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Colorado and Tennessee are beginning to pay doctors similar amounts ($24 to $30, including any co-payment) for online consultations. Blue Cross of California has made the program available to 160,000 of its 6 million health plan members. Last month, Empire Blue Cross and Blue Shield began testing the payment system with New York doctors at the Columbia University and Weill Cornell Medical Centers. Kaiser Permanente, the nation's largest nonprofit managed care company, has | Digital Rx: Take Two Aspirins And E-Mail Me in the Morning |
1656018_5 | of a deckhand. He and his wife, Cindy Lemas-Gillespie, 42, who is pursuing her own captain's license, bought their own boat five years ago; townsfolk christened the bow with Champagne. The Gillespies' 17-year-old daughter, Nicole, uses a wheelchair, and the Sea Hawk is specially designed for it. Unlike commercial crabbers, charter boat operators ''get to come home at night,'' Captain Tim noted. Along with the lumber mill, which closed three years ago, the harbor is the historic lifeblood of Fort Bragg. Its working docks creak like old spines, bearing nary a trace of the Fisherman's Wharf-style phoniness 170 miles south in San Francisco. Like the silent mill, the fishing and crabbing industries are a shadow of what they were, down to 25 or 30 boats from more than 200 a decade ago. Fred Zatkoff, for instance, a 90-year-old crabber and fisherman who retired at age 88, came to Fort Bragg in the 1940's from Detroit. ''Back East some guy came and painted a real good picture,'' he recalled. ''He said the ocean's full of silver.'' Then there were no fathometers, radar or hydraulic lifts for hoisting crab pots. Only compasses, watches -- and water. ''You fished by time,'' he said. Mr. Zatkoff, who is now the Buckminster Fuller of crab pots, experimenting with squares and octagons, reluctantly sold his boat, the Koritsa, last year after becoming disoriented in the valley of a wave. ''If you've been fishing long enough, you're nothing but a realist,'' said Frank Bender, one of many recently retired crabbers and fishermen whose livelihoods were made even more difficult by huge commercial trawlers bearing thousands of crab pots as well as newly strict limits on snapper and other rock fish. But the dangers of crabbing -- which have resulted in two deaths over the last 10 years in Fort Bragg alone -- are eclipsed by the adrenaline, said Mr. Bender, a Vietnam veteran and dockside Humphrey Bogart complete with a dangling cigarette. ''Fishing lets you dictate your own world, as much as nature allows you,'' he observed. ''Not a lot of people will go through this punishment to make a living, often not a good one. They tend to be danger-seekers, nonconformists, the socially alienated. I've given this quite some thought.'' At sea, he said, ''You have endless time to contemplate things.'' By noon, the Sea Hawk had reached its limit -- 10 crabs per person. A | Chasing the Jewels of the Sea |
1659326_0 | The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey issued a legal memorandum yesterday that could help preserve some of the surviving remnants of the World Trade Center at the future site of the transportation hub at ground zero. Preservationists, Sept. 11 survivors and relatives of victims have lobbied energetically to save as many remnants of the trade center as possible during future construction, given their historic value and their meaning to the families, since the remains of 42 percent of the victims have not been identified. The document says that the Port Authority will preserve ''to the maximum extent feasible'' the bases of 84 columns from the north tower and 39 columns from the south tower, and install a glass wall that will afford views of column bases obscured by the construction of a proposed platform at the terminal. The memorandum also proposes incorporating historic features of the E train subway platform into the new train station, designed by Santiago Calatrava. And the memorandum calls for other objects at the current site, including the steel beams shaped as a cross, to be removed and stored with other artifacts from the trade center. The Port Authority's document, which it called a final memorandum of agreement, was issued under a yearlong federal historical preservation review known as the Section 106 process, which came into play because $1.7 billion of the transit hub's cost would come from the federal government. Several groups that had participated in the negotiations received copies of the memorandum to sign. They included the Federal Transit Administration, the New York State Historic Preservation Office and the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation. ''We expect that the signatories will sign within 10 days,'' said Steve Coleman, a Port Authority spokesman. ''That would mean that we could proceed toward construction of the World Trade Center Transportation Hub.'' Yesterday, victims' relatives said they were studying the 20-page memorandum ''to see whether we should sign this or not,'' said Anthony Gardner, a representative of the Coalition of 9/11 Families, whose group was granted ''consulting party'' status as a signatory to the memorandum. ''As we understand it, this is a take-it-or-leave-it document,'' he said. But Mr. Gardner, whose brother, Harvey Joseph Gardner III, died on Sept. 11, said he was taken aback by the word ''request,'' in a crucial phrase asking non-Port Authority agencies to submit plans for construction activities that might damage trade center | Port Authority Details Efforts to Save Trade Center Remnants |
1659200_3 | was smaller in scale and therefore not comparable to the earlier studies. ''The trickle-down effect has not really taken place,'' Mr. Lakhani said. In a working-class enclave pressed against one of Karachi's high-toned neighborhoods, small girls filled up big buckets of water from a neighbor's tap and heaved it home on their shoulders. Only some houses here are connected to the city water supply. Those who can get water from their neighbors do so; others pay to have it trucked in. It is not that people here are unaware of Pakistan's economic boom. ''What's the change for us?'' said a laconic Ishtiaq Malik, 28. ''The rent has increased. The petrol price has increased. The electricity bill has increased.'' Like many of his neighbors in the crowded slum of winding muddy alleys, Mr. Malik came from a village in rural Punjab to make a living in the city. Today, as a gardener, he fetches about $85 a month. After rent and food and electric bill, he says, there is not much left to send home to his parents, landless peasants back in the village. Kaneez Gazar, a housemaid in her 40's who came to Karachi to escape the grinding poverty of her own village, offered a smile when asked about her country's economic growth. ''We earn, we eat,'' is how she put it. Between her own earnings and those of her two daughters, also housemaids, the family brings in about $100 a month. Half of that goes to rent. The prices of sugar and butter have gone up. She must buy water from a private tanker. With her heart ailment and her daughter's chronic cough, there are medical bills to pay. Hanging over her head is a $420 debt for an older daughter's wedding. Still, she says, life in Karachi has meant a measure of dignity. ''At least I'm feeding myself,'' she said. ''At least we get clothes and shoes.'' It is Pakistan's deeply stratified society that makes some analysts skeptical of how and when the spoils at the top will filter down to those among the 150 million Pakistanis who still barely scrape by. A study last December by the Social Policy and Development Center, a Karachi-based research institute, reported that of every rupee of economic growth, 34 percent went to the richest 10 percent of the population, and only 3 percent to the poorest 10 percent. It is Pakistanis | Pakistan Is Booming Since 9/11, at Least for the Well-Off |
1660148_2 | how to color a leprechaun's pot o' gold were concise, but they seemed almost otherworldly. The voice was coming from four ''audio enhancement'' speakers implanted in the ceiling. Ms. Gelman herself was kneeling by a group of children seated at a table. An iPod-size microphone that dangled around her neck transmitted the sound. ''I don't have to stress my voice anymore,'' said Ms. Gelman, who has a dozen years' voice-straining classroom experience. ''Cleanup time has been a pleasure. All I have to do is say it once.'' Osborn installed the system in two classes last week to try it out, said Clarita Zeppie, the principal. She explained that Rye's Midland Elementary, across town, had already wired all classrooms, kindergarten to fourth grade, and that teachers were raving about the system. It was developed by a Utah mother of two hearing-impaired children, whom she sought to help hear better in a mainstream classroom, said Martin Cicchino, a salesman for the Audio Enhancement company. But a funny thing was discovered when the system was installed: All of the students' scores on standardized testing began to increase. Mr. Cicchino attributes that to better hearing, but also to less goofing off, because a student never knows if the teacher is standing close by. Audio Enhancement uses infrared technology, similar to the beam in a television remote control, to transmit sound waves. Earlier school microphone systems relied on FM waves, which were plagued by interference. As with many inventions, this one has an unintended use. ''If I am reading a story and someone has to get up and go to the bathroom, they can still hear the story,'' Ms. Gelman said. Now there's a new spin on bathroom reading. Seeking Magic Flutes Three years ago, Hendrick Hudson High School in Montrose hired a dynamic new band director, Joseph J. Stamboni. He has been such a success that band enrollment has skyrocketed. That also means students have been clamoring for more music classes, and parents lobbying for more funding. Even though the district has just completed major renovations to the high school, Mr. Stamboni said, the music department, neglected in the past, remains in limbo. The band room, still in the sub-basement, has instruments in disrepair. The only recording system available to his classes, he said, is one he dragged in from home. Even worse than the physical shortcomings, however, is the dearth of learning possibilities. | What the City Folk Do, And Drama, Too |
1660279_0 | To the Editor: Re ''Security Report on U.S. Aviation Warns of Holes'' (front page, March 14): The government report restated a well-known concern: like many other parts of the national transportation system, general aviation must provide effective security protections. In this regard, it is important to note the work that the industry has done in recent years to bolster security. For example, general aviation has developed an airport watch program that encourages general aviation pilots to report suspicious activity to a toll-free number staffed by government officials. Aircraft manufacturers and salespeople now have procedures to report suspicious financial transactions during the purchase or sale of an aircraft. And the National Business Aviation Association has worked with the Transportation Security Administration on a T.S.A. program for security over personnel, facilities, aircraft and in-flight operations. The test program is in place at three New York area airports. Ed Bolen President and Chief Executive National Business Aviation Assn. Washington, March 14, 2005 | Protecting Aviation |
1660235_2 | been seeing an increase in fax sales for the last four or five years,'' said Paul Fountain, marketing product manager at Hewlett-Packard in San Diego. In 1994, Hewlett-Packard left the fax market, believing the predictions of impending obsolescence. But, Mr. Fountain said, ''We came back in 1998 because we realized the fax was not going away.'' While fax machines aren't as prevalent as computers in the workplace or home offices, Bill Young, a communications coach at the Strickland Group in New York City, said, ''The fax has important functions that e-mail simply hasn't been able to take over.'' Those would include reproducing signatures on documents like contracts, business proposals and medical prescriptions. CVS, a 5,300-store chain, relies on fax machines as the most common means of receiving prescriptions, said Todd Andrews, a spokesman in Woonsocket, R.I. ''The fax gives the pharmacist a written record of what the doctor ordered,'' he said. Faxing avoids misunderstandings that can occur when prescriptions are phoned in -- and it reduces or eliminates waiting time for customers who otherwise would deliver their prescriptions by hand. Of course, even with a fax, precise communication is still at the mercy of the doctor's handwriting. Another factor in the fax's favor is security. ''With a fax, you don't have to worry about computer hackers or someone stealing the password to the recipient's e-mail,'' Mr. Young said. ''As long as there's a person at the receiving fax ready to remove the paper, the message is confidential.'' (Some computers have the capacity to convert the image of an incoming fax to e-mail, but that method loses the privacy advantage.) Falling prices have helped to maintain the fax's popularity. ''The fax machine you would buy at Costco or Staples 10 years ago for the home office would typically cost about $200,'' Mr. Fountain said. ''Better machines are available today for $45.'' The $200 machine a decade ago would have been a stand-alone fax. Now, Hewlett offers the Fax 1050 -- a combination fax, copier and answering machine -- for $99. But faxes priced at $100 and less can have at least one drawback: they typically transmit and print at a rate of only about four pages a minute. More money buys more speed, among other things. One business model from Sharp is the FO DC525, which costs $3,000 and transmits and prints 20 pages a minute. COMMERCIAL machines are available for | The Fax Machine: Technology That Refuses to Die |
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