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1660177_0 | I grew up inland. My experience with shipwrecks was limited to what I saw on ''Gilligan's Island.'' That changed 20 years ago when I woke to a foggy dawn on Long Beach Island, looked out my window and saw an empty luxury cabin cruiser beached in front of my house. In the time it took to telephone the police and run outside, a crowd had already gathered, and I learned about modern wrecks; scavengers passing by had already begun to strip the boat of fishing gear, navigational equipment and anything else of value that they could lay their sticky hands on. Tales vastly more interesting, and with a fascinating cast of characters, are told in ''New Jersey Shipwrecks: 350 Years in the Graveyard of the Atlantic'' by Margaret Thomas Buchholz (Down the Shore Books, $44). Boats have always gone down off New Jersey's barrier islands, and the sea remains a powerful adversary. Towering waves, blinding rain and creamy fogs still confound captains and crews, but rescue efforts have improved. Instead of brave surf men on patrol, waiting with block and tackle to wade into the unrelenting surf, we now have Coast Guard helicopters that wrestle with hurricane winds to locate the lost. Ms. Buchholz is a devoted New Jersey Shore historian. She has found more than a hundred historical photos and prints and assembled gripping first-person narratives when possible to offer engrossing stories that have nail-biting detail. Cargo ships sink under the waves, cruise ships burn and sailboats lose their sails and masts. Her characters rush to help the unfortunate victims of disasters, are thrown into the icy breakers, lose all but their lives or stand by in silent witness to what unfolds before them. Upon reading ''Shipwrecks'' you'll be unable to walk a vacation beach or pick up the smallest piece of flotsam without a mental tribute to the invisible history that preceded. Published in an oversize format, the book also includes a comprehensive list of ships and the dates they were lost that extends from the 1850's through the 1980's. Down the Shore Press has produced another testimony to a way of life by the seacoast that is all but forgotten. Christine Contillo BY THE WAY | Sea Glass, Starfish, Beached Ship |
1660344_3 | remained grounded for days afterward. The three Las Vegas flights, with a total of more than 100 passengers, ferried members of the Saudi royal family and staff members who had been staying at Caesar's Palace and the Four Seasons hotels. The group had tried unsuccessfully to charter flights back to Saudi Arabia between Sept. 13 and Sept. 17 because they said they feared for their safety as a result of the Sept. 11 attacks, the F.B.I. documents say. Once the group managed to arrange chartered flights out of the country, an unidentified prince in the Las Vegas group ''thanked the F.B.I. for their assistance,'' according to one internal report. The F.B.I. had interviewed many members of the group and searched their planes before allowing them to leave, but it nonetheless went back to the Las Vegas hotels with subpoenas five days after the initial flight had departed to collect further information on the Saudi royal guests, the documents show. In several other cases, Saudi travelers were not interviewed before departing the country, and F.B.I. officials sought to determine how what seemed to be lapses had occurred, the documents show. The F.B.I. documents left open the possibility that some departing Saudis had information relevant to the Sept. 11 investigation. ''Although the F.B.I. took all possible steps to prevent any individuals who were involved in or had knowledge of the 9/11/2001 attacks from leaving the U.S. before they could be interviewed,'' a 2003 memo said, ''it is not possible to state conclusively that no such individuals left the U.S. without F.B.I. knowledge.'' The documents also show that F.B.I. officials were clearly riled by public speculation stirred by news media accounts of the Saudi flights. They were particularly bothered by a lengthy article in the October 2003 issue of Vanity Fair, which included charges that the bureau considered unfair and led to an internal F.B.I. investigation that the agency named ''Vanitybom.'' Internal F.B.I. correspondence during the review was addressed to ''fellow Vanitybom victims.'' Critics said the newly released documents left them with more questions than answers. ''From these documents, these look like they were courtesy chats, without the time that would have been needed for thorough debriefings,'' said Christopher J. Farrell, who is director of investigations for Judicial Watch and a former counterintelligence interrogator for the Army. ''It seems as if the F.B.I. was more interested in achieving diplomatic success than investigative success.'' | New Details on F.B.I. Aid for Saudis After 9/11 |
1660092_1 | and other seasonal repairs on the 5,300 lane-miles of roads that the D.O.T. maintains in Nassau and Suffolk. Last year D.O.T. crews put down over 18,000 tons of asphalt to resurface and repair Long Island roads, but this third rough winter in a row hasn't helped to smooth things over. ''With the heavy snowfall and the heavy, heavy traffic, that's a lot of wear and tear,'' she said. ''We're always playing catch-up.'' She said D.O.T. crews peppered state roads on the Island with more than 56 tons of calcium chloride this winter, nearly 10 tons more than last winter. Town and village highway crews have also been scrambling to patch thousands of cracks and holes, some deep enough to swallow a wheel. And many have, to judge from sales at tire stores. ''More so the last couple of winters,'' Peter Giardino, a salesman at All Weather Tire in Huntington Station, said of seasonal business caused by pothole-punctured tires. The highway department budget for the Town of Huntington is up to about $7 million, nearly double what it was four years ago, according to the town highway superintendent, William Naughton. But he said Huntington's highway crews resurfaced much of the town's 800 miles of roads in the last three years, in an effort to stay ahead of the weather and damage from traffic. ''You can't let your guard down because you've had one easy winter,'' Mr. Naughton said. ''If you don't do it this year, you're going to pay more to do it next year.'' Some towns, like Huntington, will reimburse drivers who fall victim to a pothole on one of their roads. ''We get an occasional complaint,'' said Mr. Naughton, ''but people can submit a bill for damage.'' Mr. Naughton, who has been superintendent in Huntington for 18 years, also blamed trucks and today's larger and heavier vehicles for additional strain on local roads. Robert Sinclair, a spokesman for the Automobile Club of New York, said one tractor-trailer does more damage than 2,000 cars. ''There are far too many trucks,'' he said. The Town of Babylon is in the midst of a three-year, $25 million road repair and reconstruction project, which began in 2003, said John Miller, the town's commissioner of public works. He credited the preventive maintenance for minimizing the effects of this past winter on the 550 miles of town roads. Even so, more Babylon residents have reported | For Tires, Mean Streets |
1657303_1 | they must. It is a case study in human inventiveness, with occasional juvenile and petty passages, and the originators of these tips are happy to share them. ''They're an integral part of how people cope,'' said Prof. James C. Scott, who teaches anthropology and political science at Yale University, and the author of ''Weapons of the Weak,'' about the feigned ignorance, foot-dragging and other techniques Malaysian peasants used to avoid cooperating with the arrival of new technology in the 1970's. ''All societies have them, but they're successful only to the extent that they avoid open confrontation.'' The slow driver in fast traffic, the shopper with 50 coupons at the front of the checkout line and the telemarketer calling at dinner all inflict life's thousand little lashes. But some see these infractions as precious opportunities, rare chances for retribution in the face of forces beyond our control. Wesley A. Williams spent more than a year exacting his revenge against junk mailers. When signing up for a no-junk-mail list failed to stem the flow, he resorted to writing at the top of each unwanted item: ''Not at this address. Return to sender.'' But the mail kept coming because the envelopes had ''or current resident'' on them, obligating mail carriers to deliver it, he said. Next, he began stuffing the mail back into the ''business reply'' envelope and sending it back so that the mailer would have to pay the postage. ''That wasn't exacting a heavy enough cost from them for bothering me,'' said Mr. Williams, 35, a middle school science teacher who lives in Melrose, N.Y., near Albany. After checking with a postal clerk about the legality of stepping up his efforts, he began cutting up magazines, heavy bond paper, and small strips of sheet metal and stuffing them into the business reply envelopes that came with the junk packages. ''You wouldn't believe how heavy I got some of these envelopes to weigh,'' said Mr. Williams, who added that he saw an immediate drop in the amount of arriving junk mail. A spokesman for the United States Postal Service, Gerald McKiernan, said that Mr. Williams's actions sounded legal, as long as the envelope was properly sealed. Sometimes, small acts of rebellion offer big doses of relief. ''I've come to realize that I'm almost addicted to the sick little pleasure I get from lashing out at these things,'' said Mr. Kirk, 24, a | No Need to Stew: A Few Tips To Cope With Life's Annoyances |
1657125_2 | cellphone conversations. The capacity for such real-time, interactive communication has unquestionably aided military field operations, but researchers say the emotional and psychological impact on soldiers and their families is less clear. Just as television coverage during Vietnam brought shocking images of war into living rooms, so today's communications technology has the potential to immerse already anxious families in the raw experience of combat, while miring soldiers in domestic problems that distract from the mission. ''My wife is having problems with getting yard work taken care of without having to pay out the nose for it,'' a 29-year-old Army captain complained in a survey about whether deployment had resulted in ''marriage issues.'' Others reported haggling by e-mail or cellphone over money. The Internet enables soldiers to monitor their bank accounts from Iraq, a mixed blessing in the case of one soldier who discovered that her husband had used up her combat pay on Yankees tickets and a new boat. Families, too, can become so tethered to cellphones and e-mail that they have difficulty re-establishing normal routines at home, said Dr. D. Bruce Bell, a psychologist and an expert on military families, formerly with the Army Research Institute in Arlington, Va. This contrasts with previous wars when letters arrived infrequently, and separations provided opportunities for spouses to master new skills. Finally, there is the problem of technology misfires -- the Iraq cellphone network crashes or e-mail goes astray. These can bring on spikes of anxiety as family members leap to the worst possible conclusion. ''We've raised expectations of instantaneous communications to such an unreasonable level that when we can't connect, the technology ends up being a new source of stress,'' said Dr. Frederic Medway, a psychologist and a specialist in military and family separation issues at the University of South Carolina. The technology can also distort communication. Cellphones and e-mail artificially compress time and space, giving the illusion of chatting almost in the same room. But as the Murrays' experience shows, context greatly influences how people ''hear'' what's being said. Frequency and volume, moreover, don't necessarily contribute to better understanding. ''We are seeing a great deal of information overload in soldiers in Iraq and in their families,'' Dr. Ender said. Military communications science covers a vast terrain. Commanders must be able to communicate with frontline troops and supply lines, while keeping important information from the enemy. But they have a parallel duty | For Troops, Home Can Be Too Close |
1657125_3 | contrasts with previous wars when letters arrived infrequently, and separations provided opportunities for spouses to master new skills. Finally, there is the problem of technology misfires -- the Iraq cellphone network crashes or e-mail goes astray. These can bring on spikes of anxiety as family members leap to the worst possible conclusion. ''We've raised expectations of instantaneous communications to such an unreasonable level that when we can't connect, the technology ends up being a new source of stress,'' said Dr. Frederic Medway, a psychologist and a specialist in military and family separation issues at the University of South Carolina. The technology can also distort communication. Cellphones and e-mail artificially compress time and space, giving the illusion of chatting almost in the same room. But as the Murrays' experience shows, context greatly influences how people ''hear'' what's being said. Frequency and volume, moreover, don't necessarily contribute to better understanding. ''We are seeing a great deal of information overload in soldiers in Iraq and in their families,'' Dr. Ender said. Military communications science covers a vast terrain. Commanders must be able to communicate with frontline troops and supply lines, while keeping important information from the enemy. But they have a parallel duty to facilitate those troops' communication with loved ones because of demonstrated psychological benefits to morale and combat readiness. Studies of German military units in World War II showed that soldiers isolated from contact with family and the larger society were more likely to surrender. Such military concerns have led to significant communication innovation. The concept of the postcard as a short form of letter is believed to have originated in the War of 1812, when a commander worried about morale suggested that his men write greetings on scraps of paper, which he had delivered to their families. In World War II, the Army tried to speed up family-to-soldier communication with a system called V-Mail. Letters were photographed; the film then was flown to battlefronts for reproduction and distribution. But what soldiers and families gained in speed, they lost in privacy. Besides passing through many strangers' hands, V-mail was subject to military censorship. Real-time communication technology eliminates such controls -- an obvious concern for military leaders responsible for both security and the psychological well-being of troops and their families. The military has responded with increased training, essentially teaching self-censorship to keep details of military encounters confidential. For families, the advice is | For Troops, Home Can Be Too Close |
1654780_8 | who are gay, and our church continues to be very inclusive,'' said Sarah Vetter, pastor of Diamond Hill Methodist. ''My sense is that many churches are divided over this issue, and it's more unusual to find a congregation like ours that is unanimous in its approval and acceptance.'' National leaders of the United Methodist Church have made it clear they oppose gay marriage, said the Rev. Jeannette Bassinger-Ishii, the superintendent for the Connecticut New York District of the New York Annual Conference of the United Methodist Church. She said many church leaders in Connecticut are more liberal on the issue. At the United Methodist National Meeting to set policy in July 2004, conservative groups discussed an amicable separation of the liberal and conservative factions, the Rev. Bassinger-Ishii said. ''It's possible that conservatives just don't want to keep battling on this issue, and there may simply be an unspoken concern among conservatives that this issue will not go away and will ultimately resolve itself in a more liberal way,'' she said. ''Most churches don't even have the whole congregation on the same page.'' The Rev. Bassinger-Ishii, who has been a Methodist minister for 30 years, said that once conservative congregations get to know their gay members, a change takes place. ''My guess is that many of the rank-and-file in our pews, when they think of gays and lesbians, have so little contact that all they can think of is the most flamboyant in the gay pride parade, instead of looking at ordinary people who are raising children and holding down ordinary jobs and dressing the same way that most men and women dress, so when they see in their own congregation a couple they have learned to love, a lot of what they say goes out the window,'' she said. ''But we need to find a common ground to talk about this issue, and it needs to be a common ground that's not defined by the media or secular interests.'' Mr. Miscimarra of St. Paul's Episcopal in Darien saw a darker outcome. ''I think the last major problematic issue that came before the Episcopal Church was women's ordination,'' he said. ''People got comfortable with that, the newness of that, and it settled back in. I think, however, that with homosexuality and gay marriage, the liberal side would have suggested that the topic would have died down and gone away and people | A Debate Filled With Faith |
1654897_0 | At first, looking into that room is a jolt. One day, it's a reverberating mound of teenage chaos; the next, with its occupant off to college, it's a gaping, eerily silent hole -- a bed, a desk, a stray sock or a T-shirt on the floor. Then, inch by inch, the parents move in. First, it's the overflow books. Then it's a laptop, a yoga mat, a chair, a reading light. Four years pass, with occasional whirlwind visits by the absent scholar. Then comes graduation, and guess who's home -- to stay. Sixty percent of graduates head back to the nest, at least temporarily, according to MonsterTRAK, an online recruiter. The main reason, of course, is jobs, or lack thereof. This year's graduates, though, face the best entry-level job market in more than three years, says Challenger, Gray & Christmas, the outplacement firm. It notes recent government data showing that the jobless rate for those with a bachelor's degree or higher had fallen to 2.4 percent. Business graduates should have the best prospects, it said, especially those in fields like finance and marketing. Hubert B. Herring OPENERS: THE COUNT | Here Comes The Class of 2005. Can It Pay the Rent? |
1654901_4 | stepped into the middle ground 15 years ago with Campus Kids. His programs, in Hackettstown, N.J., Middlebury, Conn., and Port Jervis, N.Y., offer a Monday-through-Friday sleep-away experience; the campers return home by bus for the weekend. The camps cost $750 a week; the two in New Jersey and Connecticut are on the campuses of private schools, and the one in Port Jervis, offers a more rural setting. ''It's a lifestyle families really enjoy,'' Mr. Riddleberger said. The camps serve children from 7 through 15. Although he initially assumed that most children would use his camps as jumping-off points to more-traditional sleep-away camps, he said, many of the campers return year after year. ''Lots of teenagers want to go home on weekends, catch up on e-mails, go to the mall,'' he said. ''I don't think they're going home to spend weekends with their parents.'' Mr. Solomon of the National Camp Association, however, says he ''strongly recommends against such camps.'' He says it usually takes children until the second or third week to stop being homesick. If they're going back and forth between camp and home, he said, ''then no one settles in.'' Yet even at the more traditional camps, most parents still want some regular contact with their children. Companies like Bunk1 (www.bunk1.com) and eCamp (www.ecamp.net) have moved camp communication into the high-tech age, without, they say, interfering with the traditional rural nature of summer camp. Bunk1, for example, offers free Web sites to camps, then collects a fee of $10 a family. The fee gives parents password access to a page on the site that posts photographs of their children romping through their day. Bunk1 serves 2,000 camps, said Ari Ackerman, its founder and chief executive. Last summer, the company also introduced video clips on the Web sites. Bunk1 also supplies what it calls Bunk Notes: for $1 a message, parents can send e-mail messages that counselors print out and give to campers. Most camps do not allow campers to send e-mail, but that doesn't mean that parents have to wait for the regular mail to receive those awkward, handwritten letters. Bunk1 offers stationery with a bar code on top. The child takes the stationery to camp, then writes a letter. A counselor faxes it to a toll-free number, and a digital picture of the letter appears in the parents' e-mail. ''It's a one-way window into a child's world,'' Mr. | So Many Summer Camps, So Much Parental Angst |
1654983_0 | INTERNATIONAL 3-22 C.I.A.'s Antiterror Program The Bush administration's secret program to transfer suspected terrorists to foreign countries to be imprisoned and interrogated has been carried out by the Central Intelligence Agency, under broad authority that has allowed the agency to act without case-by-case approval from the White House, State or Justice departments, according to current and former government officials. 1 Authoritarian Arabs' Decline The entire Middle East seems to be entering uncharted political and social territory with a similar mixture of anticipation and dread. Events in Lebanon and Egypt, following closely on a limited vote for municipal councils in Saudi Arabia and landmark elections in Iraq as well as the Palestinian territories, all combined to give the sense that twilight is descending on authoritarian Arab regimes. 1 Sadr Associate Killed in Iraq A Shiite imam associated with the firebrand cleric Moktada al-Sadr was shot and killed by gunmen as he drove to a mosque in southern Baghdad, officials said. 14 The Iraq war has helped galvanize and embolden a group of mainstream British Muslims to find its voice and make demands. This group has lined up against the war and Prime Minister Tony Blair, opposed new restrictive anti-terror laws and warned of the dangers of Islamophobia. 4 Syria to Withdraw to Border President Bashar al-Assad of Syria told the Syrian Parliament that he planned to order a gradual pullback to Lebanese territory near Syria's borders. President Assad insisted that his ''gradual and organized withdrawal'' would fulfill Syria's obligations under a United Nations mandate and under the Taif accord, a 15-year-old agreement that was negotiated with Arab nations and that Syria has never put into effect. 20 NATIONAL 23-35 Shift in Medicare Benefit The new Medicare drug benefit passed a major milestone in recent weeks as a significant number of big insurance companies said they would offer prescription drug coverage to Medicare beneficiaries next year, defying the predictions of many industry experts. 1 F.E.C. Considers Web Logs Federal election commissioners are reluctantly preparing to consider how revamped campaign finance laws apply to political activity on the Internet, including, potentially, fund-raising e-mail messages and the work of influential political Web logs. 35 Struggle in Black Churches Conservative black clergy members who are looking to align themselves more closely with President Bush have created a tug of war inside black churches over who speaks for African-Americans. 23 Paid Time Off for Workers Various | NEWS SUMMARY |
1654652_0 | THE SOCIOPATH NEXT DOOR The Ruthless Versus the Rest of Us. By Martha Stout. 241 pp. Broadway Books. $24.95. Judging by book titles, Americans either envy their neighbors (''The Millionaire Next Door'') or fear them (''The Sociopath Next Door''). In some cases, they may very well do both. But just as most of us aren't having backyard barbecues with the trust-fund set, neither are we living down the street from dangerously ill people whose ruthless behavior constitutes a covert public menace. Despite the alarmist appeals of Martha Stout, a practicing psychologist and an instructor in the psychiatry department at Harvard Medical School, readers are unlikely to set down ''The Sociopath Next Door'' with a new awareness of a previously unrealized threat. Instead, they're apt to feel a new awareness of the ludicrous nature of pop psychology. Sound too harsh? Could the reviewer possibly be an amoral and heartless sociopath herself? Stout might like you to suspect so. Preying on the paranoid, her book is fodder for our worst -- not to mention most implausible -- suspicions. The nasty old lady who kicked your cat? She's not just myopic or embittered, she's sociopathic! And so is the brutish supervisor at work, the guy who publicly quashes your best suggestions. As Stout notes, again and again, sociopaths -- whose defining characteristic is the utter lack of a conscience -- might number as much as 4 percent of the population. That's 1 in 25 people, folks! Watch out! Wielding this statistic as if it were the latest headline (though a footnote cites studies dating from 1988 to 1997) and inspired, Stout tells us, by her reaction to the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, she tries -- and fails -- to accomplish three things. First, she wants to persuade mentally stable America of the imminent danger posed by its conscience-free citizens. (''Working with hundreds of survivors,'' Stout warns, ''I have become convinced that dealing openly and directly with the facts about sociopathy is a matter of urgency for us all.'') Second, she implores her readers to realize that sociopathy is not an enviable condition, despite its supposed allure. (''Would you or I, as individuals, be happier and better off if we could shed the limitations of conscience?'') Finally, she hopes to furnish the fearful with tools to minimize sociopathic destruction, providing tips, for example, on ''how to recognize the remorseless.'' Unfortunately, her list of | Ruthless People |
1654653_2 | swing wildly and hard. His big target was Thomas Jefferson, a man of ''intellectual superficiality and insincerity.'' The sage of Monticello, Croly argued, had created a government suited for a bucolic era. But modernity, the birth of the corporation, the closing of the frontier and technological advances had reshaped America and rendered Jefferson's governing vision obsolete. What America needed was centralization and efficiency, not antiquated state governments.+The inefficiency of state governments, he said, was ''one of the most fundamental of American political problems.'' Croly generally gets lumped together with the early-20th-century progressives, but his book often savaged these supposed comrades as outdated and stupidly old-fashioned. Croly accepted concentrations of power -- corporations, as well as a strong central government -- as immutable facts of modern life. Many of his fellow reformers, he charged, were clinging to an outmoded Jeffersonian affection for competition and equality. They wanted to dismantle the trusts and return to a marketplace dominated by small business. What's more, Croly claimed, these reformers continued to harbor an irrational attachment to state governments; instead of building a modern centralized nation, they focused on renovating the old state machinery. Progressives in the West, for instance, created the referendum, allowing citizens to vote specific laws up or down.+Croly, an unabashed elitist, preferred handing power to experts. In his polemical mode, Croly unfairly skewered the reformers' motives. The turn-of-the-century debates over the future of corporate capitalism resembled the current conflagration over gay marriage. There was no national consensus on the regulation of business then, just as there's no national consensus on same-sex unions now. Rather than wasting breath trying to persuade obstreperous Southern congressmen to back federal labor laws, the progressives plunged forward and passed reforms in the Northern and Midwestern state legislatures. Beginning with Robert La Follette's 1900 gubernatorial victory, Wisconsin raced farthest ahead in the nation, slashing railroad rates and passing laws on corruption and conservation. Devout believers in the new social sciences, the progressives invested near mystical power in empirical data, and this faith guided their federalism. As Louis Brandeis wrote in a famous 1932 Supreme Court dissent, states could serve as ''laboratories of democracy,'' control groups to test the value of particular policies.+Progressives believed that once the nation saw how successful these state-level reforms were, it would eagerly mimic them. Indeed, La Follete's administration became a trendy model. ''Outside the state, the 'Wisconsin idea' was rapidly becoming a | The Joy of Federalism |
1653640_0 | To the Editor: Re ''Venice Turns to Future to Rescue Its Past'' (Feb. 22): The article describes large-scale efforts to stop rising tides from flooding Venice. But the city is not only drowning, it is also crumbling. Numerous irreplaceable facades are deteriorating because giant cruise ships, which keep their engines running continuously while docked, constantly belch out corrosive fumes. The ships carry day-tripping tourists, who pour much-needed cash into the tourism industry that fuels Venice. But two local groups have found that the noxious fumes from these ships are playing a leading role in the decay of numerous important buildings. Until the damage from these fumes is addressed, Venice's future will remain in jeopardy. DR. MARK BERNHEIM Oxford, Ohio The writer is director of the Florence study abroad program at Miami University of Ohio. | An Ancient City in Harm's Way |
1653721_4 | special finances to help in the hiring and retention of women and minorities. About three years ago, it began to make special efforts to bring more women to the senior faculty, which is paying off. Penn was the only Ivy in 2003 that hired more women than men into tenured positions: it hired six women with tenure and five men. Across all the Ivies, women accounted for 25 percent of 117 tenured hirings that year. ''We realized that if we're bringing in men at the senior level, we had to bring in more women at the senior level,'' said Janice R. Bellace, associate provost at Penn. Brown University, as part of an initiative to hire 100 new faculty members, has designated 20 positions for expedited hiring, with the hope that many would be filled by minorities, a university spokesman said. The study also noted the sharp rise in faculty jobs that were not on the tenure track at all: to 7,792 slots in 2003 from 4,266 slots in 1993. The 83 percent increase far outstripped the growth in other faculty jobs. Such jobs represented less than a third of the Ivy faculty in 1993 but climbed to 45 percent by 2003. The nontenure-track jobs, which carry titles like lecturer, instructor or researcher, generally pay less and provide fewer benefits, if any. They are usually short-term, and involve heavier teaching loads, the report said, even though they often require a doctorate. Blacks and women hold higher proportions of these jobs than of the tenure-track positions. The data did not specify where these nontenure-track jobs were. But on some campuses, like Columbia, some of the growth has been in research jobs at medical centers. Other campuses have increased the number of lecturers in academic departments, a move that some criticize as cost-cutting at the expense of education. Correction: March 2, 2005, Wednesday An article yesterday about the failure of Ivy League colleges to increase hiring of minority-group faculty members misstated the number of non-tenure-track jobs in 1993 and the rise from 1993 to 2003. There were 3,743 such jobs in 1993, not 4,266; the increase was 108 percent, not 83 percent. In some copies, a chart with the article misstated the percentage of all 1993 faculty hires in the ''other'' category -- that is, nonresident foreigners of any race or ethnicity, American Indians, or unknown. It was 7 percent, not 13 percent. | Little Advance Is Seen at Ivies in the Hiring of Minorities and Women |
1657873_0 | The Pentagon has for the first time invited foreign allies into classified discussions that will shape America's military missions and combat forces for years to come, with the goal of identifying tasks that would become the responsibility of other nations and no longer the burden of the United States. Senior Defense Department and military officials say the effort is a significant departure for how America decides the size, shape and missions of its armed forces. The decisions could more closely bind America and its military allies in peacetime, the officials said, and allow them to operate more efficiently when conducting disaster relief, peacekeeping, stabilization and full-scale combat operations. The goal of revitalizing military alliances, and of forging new ones, is a central theme of a sweeping review of strategy, forces and missions now under way as required by Congress every four years. This Quadrennial Defense Review, or Q.D.R., to be completed by early next year, is shaped in this initial phase by guidelines laid out in a secret document, known as Terms of Reference and recently approved by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld. ''Generating coalitions or expanding alliances capable of conducting major military operations will require increased levels of security cooperation,'' says the classified document, which runs about 40 pages. ''The United States cannot win a conflict against terrorist-extremists unilaterally.'' Pentagon officials acknowledged that the focus on alliances could be cited by critics as an admission that the Bush administration did not do enough before the invasion of Iraq to secure worldwide support, or later to sustain contributions of allies as Iraq struggles to fight an insurgency and install a new government. ''Although the United States has historically preferred to act in concert with other states, it has also maintained the ability to act unilaterally if necessary,'' the classified planning document states. ''Today's problems, however, are such that the United States cannot succeed by addressing them alone. The Terms of Reference, therefore, propose that the United States develop new partnerships to address nontraditional challenges.'' Pentagon and military officials said the guidance had already prompted discussions with allies, including Britain, on how military burdens might be shared, with specific tasks to be assigned to specific allies. ''We are reaching out to some of our allies and partners as part of the Q.D.R., and talking with them about the kinds of contributions each of us might make in future coalition operations,'' a | Pentagon Invites Allies for First Time to Secret Talks Aimed at Sharing Burdens |
1657880_0 | Hands-On Science | |
1658312_5 | for the kinds of music, film and literature that require patience to enjoy fully. As we use these technologies to increase the pace and quantity of our experiences, we might find that the quality of our pursuits declines. Nevertheless, whatever ambivalence we might feel toward these technologies, we end up buying and using them anyway, not only because they make life more convenient but also because everyone else uses them and so we must as well. The traveling businessman without a cellphone will not have a business for long. Although there is no obvious political solution to the unintended problems created by our personal technologies -- we wouldn't want the government taxing our TiVo use -- there are possibilities for nonpartisan agreement about changing our use of them. Conservatives like to complain about the content of popular culture and yet champion an unregulated market that thrives on creating and supplying new wants. Liberals herald the power of individual choice yet fret about the decline of community and the power corporations often exercise over our politics and culture. Both might agree, then, that it is a good thing if parents discourage children from watching too much television. Both might find something beneficial in private entities enforcing civility in discrete spaces, like restaurants and theaters that ban cellphones, and an increase in public transportation providers who offer cell-free spaces, like the ''quiet car'' that Amtrak offers. As a society, we need to approach our personal technologies with a greater awareness of how the pursuit of personal convenience can contribute to collective ills. When it comes to abortion or Social Security, we avidly debate the claims of individual freedom against other goods. Why shouldn't we do the same with our private technologies? In the end, it does matter if we watch six more hours of television every week, and it does affect our broader quality of life if hollering into our cellphones makes our daily commute a living hell for our fellow citizens on the bus or a danger to other drivers on the road. Rather than turning on, tuning in and dropping out, we might perhaps do better, individually and socially, to occasionally simply turn our machines off. THE WAY WE LIVE NOW: 3-20-05 Christine Rosen is a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington and a senior editor of The New Atlantis: A Journal of Technology and Society. | Bad Connections |
1658537_1 | piece of property, the right to take his livestock to an old stone springhouse on the land, and he was doing nothing illegal. It was true. The title company had missed this title defect. They had to buy the rights back from the farmer for about $30,000. A couple of years ago, the accounting department conducted an audit on a subdivision we built in California and couldn't account for the furniture in a model home. Usually either the buyer of the model home also buys the furniture, or we sell it piecemeal to the public. We conducted an investigation and found that one of our project managers had stolen it. He had arranged for a truck to back up to the house, clean it out and take the furniture to his house. I wrestle about contacting the authorities in these cases because if the guy has a wife and kids, they'll have to fend for themselves if he goes to jail. This project manager said he thought we were making so much money that he was entitled to the furniture. Theft is a big problem, but what can be more maddening is the mendacity of government entities in some towns. I fully support preservationists who buy land to be set aside, which is the correct way to do it. But some towns think they can change zoning laws after we've applied for approval of a subdivision by coming up with spurious reasons why we can't build. Recently, we followed one town's regulations dictating the number of homes we could build on a parcel of land, and we completed a long approval process. Now, the town doesn't want any homes to be built, so we're in court. My brother is vice chairman of the board. When he and I started building homes, my father would say, ''What are you doing in that silly business?'' He was referring to the difficulty of dealing with regulations and the like. About six years ago I sold the 35-foot sloop that I used during 20 years of offshore racing. My buddies and I would go out about 12 weekends a year. One year we were racing in the Long Island Sound, heading toward Martha's Vineyard during the America's Cup race, and we sailed onto the race course. The Coast Guard came steaming out to us and told us to get off the course. I said: | Not Always Clear Sailing |
1658625_0 | When M. Brad Whitcomb became a forester for Allegany State Park 14 years ago, visitors would often ask where they might glimpse the elusive black bear. Today the bears are far more prevalent. Instead of advising people where to find them, he often has to teach people how to avoid them. ''We have to tell them: 'Please don't feed the bears. Don't try to take pictures of them with your kids in the foreground,''' he said. ''Some people just don't think.'' Others do not even need to travel to campgrounds, because bears are wandering -- for the first time -- into their backyards. New York's bear population is steadily rising, environmentalists said, and bears are thriving in nontraditional places, like fringe areas between forests and suburbs. The increase in population is due to a number of conditions, including a growth in the amount of forest land and the abundant food supplies in small communities. The large creatures, with their black silky coats and disarmingly cute faces, are creating a mix of fear and delight among the people in upstate towns and villages who are unaccustomed to living in bear country. ''We need a huge amount of public education to minimize the risks,'' said Paul D. Curtis, an associate professor in the Department of Natural Resources at Cornell University. Bear-related fatalities are extremely rare. But in 2002, a bear snatched a baby girl from a stroller in the Catskill Mountains and dragged her into the woods while neighbors gave chase. The baby was killed. ''I wouldn't say it's inevitable that something like that will occur again, but the risk increases,'' Professor Curtis said. Bears are far more likely to be nuisances, especially if they lose their fear of people. The State Department of Environmental Conservation recorded 985 nuisance complaints in 2003, roughly a 50 percent increase from two years earlier -- everything from continual sightings to break-ins. Bears are even known to eat farm animals. Officials in New Jersey suspect that a bear is responsible for killing a pony near a farm in the northern part of the state on Thursday. ''If a bear gets into trouble, it's almost always food-related,'' Professor Curtis said. Most of New York State's bear population, which various experts estimate at 5,000 to 9,000, is found in traditional habitats: the Adirondacks, Catskill and Allegany regions. But bears will travel hundreds of miles to find steady food, | Seen Any Bears? If You're in New York State, Take a Look in the Backyard |
1658411_0 | 'El Greco' Islip Art Museum, 50 Irish Lane, East Islip, (631)244-5402. Through April 3. The premise of this show is to compare eight contemporary artists to Domenikos Theotocopoulos, the 16th-century master known as El Greco, because, like him, they supposedly express their ''inner vision'' in opposition to current trends. The artists were selected by Joy Glidden, founding director of the Dumbo Arts Center in Brooklyn, who had the idea for the exhibition and was apparently inspired by the recent El Greco retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. But the concept is a tenuous thread on which to hang an art show. What are the current trends that these artists defy? Ms. Glidden's catalog essay does not say. Her pronouncement that contemporary art ''is the politics of the subconscious and it is an educated battle'' is hardly illuminating. Nor does the selection of work illustrate her contention that it represents a challenge to artistic conventions. Duchamp's urinal did that; this show does not. One artist is indeed inspired by El Greco, but not because both are iconoclasts. Kysa Johnson's chalk drawings use El Greco's paintings of the Immaculate Conception as the compositional framework for renderings of bacteria undergoing asexual reproduction. Stare at them for a while, and the El Greco underpinnings emerge. The images are both literal and metaphoric -- clever, subversive conflations of the biblical and the biological. El Greco's well-known anatomical distortions are somewhat reflected in Fritz Chesnut's portraits of grimacing karaoke singers. But far from expressing the spiritual dimension of ecstatic vision, as the master did, these images are studies in self-absorption and momentary emotional release. David Schild has a more interesting take on painterly expressiveness. His latex enamel pictures seem to melt within their urethane foam frames, as if someone had trained a blowtorch on them. The effect is both over the top and oddly subtle, leaving nothing but the sensual pleasure of color and texture surrounded by voluptuous form. 'Expo XXIV' B.J. Spoke Gallery, 299 Main Street, Huntington, (631)549-5106. Through April 3. This national juried show was selected this year by David Ebony, an associate managing editor of Art in America magazine, and includes work by 10 artists. In 1982, the first Expo featured only three. Having covered all 24 Expos, I can assure you that fewer was better. Here, with such a large roster, the exhibition is neither a conventional juried show, with one | Getting in Touch With That Inner El Greco |
1660547_5 | As things now stand, the project has no foreign financing and will be paid for entirely out of the government budget, unusual for a venture on so grand a scale. The previous administration had contacted the World Bank in hopes of securing its support, but those efforts fizzled after the bank did an analysis that turned out to be highly critical of a version of the plan that opponents say differs little from what Mr. da Silva is now proposing. ''The project would have little effect on the cost of emergency water supply during drought years,'' the report concluded. ''Secure supplies of household water for the entire northeast could be guaranteed by alternatives at a fraction of the cost of the proposed project.'' As originally conceived, the river transfer plan also envisaged replenishing the São Francisco with water from the Tocantins, a river that feeds into the Amazon basin, by reversing the course of a tributary and building a canal of about 200 miles through the heart of the country. Though that part of the project, seen as the most costly and least popular, has been delayed, it has not been canceled. ''This will be done in the future, but not before 2050,'' Mr. Gomes said. ''We have to have a hierarchy of priorities so that we don't have water going to waste before the users of it are in place.'' Spread over nine states and hundreds of thousands of square miles, the 50 million residents of the northeast are suspicious by nature and experience. Over the years, they have seen one project after another begun and then abandoned with a change of government, or witnessed others bring unexpected problems. For example, the Sobradinho Dam just west of here, built by the military dictatorship and inaugurated in 1978, was supposed to bring jobs and light to residents of the region. It did do that for some, but it also devastated fishing, blocked navigation and ended the cyclical flooding essential to agriculture along the banks of the river. ''The river commerce and shipping that used to animate the economy is dead, and you've got settlements two miles from the river bank that depend on water trucks,'' said Misael Aguilar Silva, the mayor of Juàzeiro and the son of a river pilot. ''The river is sick, and this project is only going to make it sicker. It's like forcing an anemic person | A Vast Brazilian Project for Water Diversion Is Greeted by Widespread Skepticism |
1654014_3 | interior of your architectural component.'' Build decks that naturally extend living space. Plan meandering walkways to lure visitors to hidden parts of the garden. Use an arbor or an archway as a doorway to an outdoor room. ''Decide how you intend people to enter the space, which will determine your lines of sight and circulation pattern,'' Professor Pregill said. ''How do you want people to move through the garden?'' I wanted people to move through the arbor without fear of head injuries. ''An arbor says entry,'' he said. ''It is a connection between the interior and exterior space. It scales down the sky, eliminating the openness of the sky to make for an effective transition into the house.'' This was a concept the ancient Greeks understood far better than I did. In Athens, the Stoics parsed the finer points of philosophy in the open air, sitting beneath a roofed colonnade in the marketplace. Later, Roman arcades shielded walkways throughout the city. ''Primarily it was a Mediterranean affectation because it was a response to trying to deal with good strong sunlight, and to connect a bright, warm exterior with an interior,'' Professor Pregill said. All I had to do was fast-forward a few centuries to recognize that a similar impulse propelled a do-it-yourself homeowner to build a fanciful trellised arch to welcome visitors to my house. ''It's a mess, architecturally, but there's something about the arbor that I like,'' I said. ''That tells you something,'' Professor Pregill said. ''Take a good look at it and understand what it is you like.'' Armed with a tape measure, paper and a pencil, I went outside. Careful not to stand beneath the arbor for too long, I determined that the size of the opening (with a width of 88 inches and a height of 74 inches) was unusual. One choice was to change the size of the opening and order a standard size suggested at sites like outdooraccents.com. But since my arbor also had been installed in a manner suggesting that the builder was suffering a fever dream -- metal bolts attached the trellis's sides to brick columns flanking the walkway -- it wasn't feasible to change the size without demolishing the columns. A second option was to order a custom-size arbor from a site like trellisstructures.com, a company in Massachusetts that will design a wooden garden structure from scratch and, if necessary, ship | Trouble Lurks Amid the Roses |
1654034_3 | new behaviors. The Washington, D.C., law, for example, not only requires that mobile phones be equipped with a hands-free accessory but also prohibits reading, writing and ''using personal communications technologies.'' Mr. Sundeen said it was hard to gauge whether any of the laws had helped to reduce the number of traffic accidents. ''It is difficult to determine what role, if any, a cellphone plays in most car accidents,'' he said. ''Even if you can correlate the exact moment of the crash with phone records, you don't know if it's the cause or not.'' David Strayer, a professor of psychology at the University of Utah who studies driver distraction, said laws like those in New York and New Jersey were well intentioned and ''not an unreasonable first attempt to solve the problem.'' But, he said, ''they make an error in assuming that it can be remedied by a hands-free cellphone.'' He added: ''The laws could very plausibly be counterproductive if they give people the message that a hand-held phone is unsafe but a hands-free phone is safe. You're encouraging people to engage in a type of activity that is no more safe than the old way of talking on a cellphone.'' Even before the New York law went into effect, studies indicated that it was the distraction of the conversation itself, not the act of dialing or holding the phone, that accounted for most of the increased risk. ''There is really good evidence from six independent studies from five different labs that have all come to the same conclusions,'' Dr. Strayer said. ''There is no difference between hand-held and hands-free cellphone use while driving.'' He continued: ''The main source of the interference is mental, cognitive. It turns out you're tuning out some important details about driving. When using a cellphone, peoples' eyes will go to a place or thing, but they won't see it. It won't register.'' Hall Smyth, an exhibition designer who lives in Pond Eddy, N.Y., and has an office in Queens, two hours away by car, said he had experienced the opposite phenomenon. ''If I need to attend to the driving, I fade out of the conversation,'' he said. ''But I can see you'd easily do it the other way.'' Mr. Smyth no longer uses a hand-held phone while driving, however, after an encounter with a New York City police officer. For months after the state's hands-free requirement | For Drivers, A Traffic Jam Of Distractions |
1655602_0 | 'A Land of Ghosts' ''The Braided Lives of People and the Forest in Far Western Amazonia'' By David G. Campbell Illustrated. 260 pages. Houghton Mifflin. $25. Far western Amazonia is, in every sense, the end of the line. For impoverished Brazilians seeking a new life, it offers a last chance at economic survival. For the region's few surviving Indian tribes, it is a vanishing homeland, stripped and burned by farmers, rubber tappers and cattle ranchers. For untold species of flora and fauna, the western Brazilian rain forest is an ever-shrinking reservation where humankind and nature play out a grim endgame. It is also breathtakingly beautiful and shockingly profuse, a paradise of biodiversity where the philodendrons grow as tall as a man, spiders can reach the size of a dinner plate and, after a rainfall, you can hear the stretching and bending of broad-leaved cecropia trees as they grow. It is a land of marvels, marvelously described and movingly evoked by the botanist David G. Campbell in ''A Land of Ghosts.'' Mr. Campbell has been making the long, slow canoe trip to the headwaters of the Rio Juruá, near the Peruvian border, for more than 30 years. Working with a Brazilian team, he painstakingly maps and inventories the plant species growing in neat 100-yard squares, hoping to explain what he calls ''one of the great and enduring conundrums of nature'': how the many species of the Amazon have evolved, and how they manage to coexist. It makes quite a change of scenery for Mr. Campbell, who, in ''The Crystal Desert: Summers in Antarctica,'' explored a land ''where form and light are distilled into a few simple, evocative phrases.'' Antarctica, he writes, is a ''biological haiku.'' The Amazon, by contrast, beggars the imagination and exhausts the resources of language. Just one of Mr. Campbell's squares contains 20,000 individual trees belonging to about 2,000 species, three times as many species as there are in all North America, and each tree constitutes its own world, an interdependent system of lichens, ferns, flowers, fungi, reptiles and mammals. Where to begin? Mr. Campbell asks rhetorically. Well, why not with the fearsome white-lipped peccary, beagle-size and deadly? Its flat, scissorlike canines administer death by slicing. Like Crips of the jungle, they roam in packs, clacking their jaws menacingly. They have tremendous team spirit, too. If one is wounded, the others will round on its attacker. If that | The Rain Forest, in All Its Endangered Variety |
1659655_1 | One time watching from our house, we saw a huge black bear crossing the river to go into the forest. Usually, though, we have to make sure we don't attract bears, so there is a certain degree of caution that we take with, say, the garbage. We have kids throughout the country, and they'll come up for family get-togethers and just to relax. There is plenty to do up here -- snowshoeing, cross-country skiing, hiking and fly fishing for trout. There's also all kinds of hunting, too, from partridge to bear. Chris is an artist, so she uses the wilderness as an inspiration in her work. The studio is on the lower level of the house, which has large windows overlooking the river. She paints landscapes and other scenes from the outdoors, including animals, and often incorporates material from nature in her work. As told to Amy Gunderson ON THE MARKET Information was provided by the listing companies. WHERE -- Tucson, Ariz. WHAT -- 4-bedroom house HOW MUCH -- $2.6 million Rattlesnakes and bobcats share a desert canyon with this 3,990-square-foot contemporary Southwestern house in northern Tucson. The property is 4.7 acres within a gated community. The house has a swimming pool with a waterfall, decks with mountain and city views, three full and two half bathrooms, a stone fireplace, granite counters, a three-car garage and rooms that can be used as offices or as media rooms. It was built in 2003. Agent: Janell Jellison, Long Realty Company, (520)918-5469,www.janelljellison.com. WHERE -- Westcliffe, Colo. WHAT -- 3-bedroom cabin HOW MUCH -- $599,000 This 2,290-square-foot cabin, overlooking the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, is surrounded on three sides by public land. The property is 187 acres with mountain lions, black bears, elk, antelope, mule deer and bighorn sheep. The cabin has solar power, two bathrooms, a wood-burning stove, a vaulted ceiling and a deck. Agent: Jack Canterbury, United Country-Wapiti Realty, (866)492-7484, www.westcliffecolorado.com. WHERE -- Lake Charles, La. WHAT -- 3-bedroom house HOW MUCH -- $389,000 Alligators are common in Contraband Bayou, where this 3,820-square-foot house has 124 feet of frontage and a boat dock. The bayou connects with the Calcasieu River and the Gulf of Mexico. The house is brick and on one level. It has a large marble-floored entrance hall, three bathrooms, an attached carport, a storage room, a formal dining room, a library and a deck that overlooks the water. The | Weekends With Wolves: Houses Where the Neighbors Bite |
1657583_2 | and a Jeffrey--Heller. ''That was a negotiation,'' Mr. Solomon said. Also in the early days, e-mail names were often limited to a small number of characters. Newer systems, of course, support much longer names. As the number of e-mail users grows, ''you want a longer naming convention that is more accommodating, to avoid some of the conflicts,'' said Nelson Cicchitto of Avatier Corp., which makes identity management software. In 1994, when e-mail was new, Deborah Veney married and took her husband's last name, Robinson. It's a decision she sometimes regrets. ''It wasn't so bad before e-mail became really popular,'' said Ms. Robinson, who works outside Washington. She worked at a large insurance company that employed six Deborah Robinsons. People trying to reach one of them called the switchboard, confounding the operators. At first, the company let people choose their own e-mail names, so she took DVR, her initials. Later, the company assigned her Deborah.Robinson. The others got numbers: Deborah.Robinson1. Only then did the magnitude of the problem become apparent. Ms. Robinson received hundreds of misdirected e-mails. ''I would get e-cards,'' she said. ''One of the Debbies had a person who liked to send cards, prayers and quotes of the day. I hate them, even when they're for me.'' Now, Ms. Robinson works at a small nonprofit organization, Communities in Schools, which helps at-risk children. She is RobinsonD. ''I love it,'' she said. ''I have my own identity. I don't get other people's e-mail. I get enough of my own.'' Still, given a choice, she would rather have the preferred name and receive everyone else's mail than worry about missing her own. The preferred-name issue is a sensitive one. With a service like America Online, Yahoo or Hotmail, people can pick their e-mail address, even though the most desirable ones are often taken. In most companies, a name is imposed upon an employee. This can provoke resentment over who is entitled to the best name. Is it the person with seniority? The one of higher rank? The one who complains most? To minimize hard feelings, companies should have a written policy, said Stephen Tobin of Entre Computer Services in Rochester, which manages computer networks. He suggests using distinguishing numbers when an e-mail name for a new employee is taken. That way, for example, JSmith would be eliminated in favor of JSmith1 and JSmith2. Alternatively, ''you could let the legacy names stay | Right Name, Wrong E-Mail In-Box |
1657650_2 | Church U.S.A. comprises 2.3 million of the 77 million Anglicans worldwide. Last October, an Anglican committee issued a report that urged the American and Canadian churches to adopt moratoriums on the consecration of openly gay bishops and the blessing of same-sex unions. But Bishop John Chane of Washington, D.C., said in a phone interview yesterday as the Texas meeting ended that the American bishops had agreed nearly unanimously to extend the moratorium to all prospective bishops. Singling out gay bishops would have ''placed an unfair burden on a group of people in this church, which would be the gay and lesbian contingent,'' said Bishop Chane, who holds liberal views on homosexuality. ''We believed that needed to be a burden shared by all of us in the church.'' In February, Anglican primates meeting in Northern Ireland intensified the pressure by asking the Episcopal Church U.S.A. and the Anglican Church of Canada not to send representatives in June to the next meeting of the Anglican Consultative Council, a major session of global church leaders. The American bishops who met in Texas did not decide whether to comply with that request, saying the decision would have to be made by the Episcopal Church's executive council, made up of bishops, priests and lay members. The Rev. Dr. Kendall S. Harmon, a conservative who is canon theologian of the Diocese of South Carolina, said of the bishops: ''They did not do anything they were asked to do. They punted.'' But the archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Rowan Williams, issued a statement yesterday welcoming the American bishops' actions, saying they had ''clearly sought to respond positively to the requests made of them'' in the Anglican committee's report last October and in a communiqué issued after the recent meeting of primates. The American bishops also pledged not to violate diocesan boundaries, and asked foreign bishops to do the same. Several conservative foreign bishops have recently intervened in American dioceses by taking authority over conservative parishes that no longer wish to be affiliated with their liberal bishops. Six Episcopal dioceses scheduled to elect new bishops in the next year will be affected by the moratorium on new bishops, said the Rev. Jan Nunley, a church spokeswoman. They are the Dioceses of Eastern Michigan, South Carolina, Southern Ohio, Southwest Florida, Tennessee and West Texas. Episcopal Church dioceses elect their own bishops, but the selections require approval by broader church bodies. | Episcopal Bishops Suspend Naming Any New Ones |
1656479_2 | for the poor, already account for one-fifth of the federal budget, and their share could double in a generation. Curbing such growth has been the aim of every reformer, and according to Cutler, it is the reason reform has failed. The Clinton team proposed to pay for universal coverage by limiting increases in spending (partly through mandatory caps). But limiting spending also meant limiting service. The proposed legislation was never put to a vote. Managed care was next at trying to contain costs. It succeeded for a while, until it became clear that Americans did not want health-maintenance organizations to limit their choices any more than they wanted the government to. Since then, reform has languished. The Medicare drug bill is suggestive of why. The Republican Congress promised restraint but then passed a hugely expensive law that barred Medicare from using its clout to negotiate prices with drug companies. The pattern has been failed efforts to control costs, followed by a void of new ideas. Cutler's approach is radically different. He says that most health-care spending is actually good. Spending has been rising, he says, because it delivers positive, and measurable, economic value, and because it can do more things that Americans want. Therefore, Cutler says, we should focus on improving the quality of care rather than on reducing our consumption of it. Rather than pay less, he wants to pay more wisely -- to encourage health-care providers to do more of what they should and less of what is wasteful. This, as it turns out, is exactly what some of the most innovative health-plan sponsors -- from Kaiser Permanente to General Electric -- are doing. To them, the Cutler approach of focusing on quality offers a way out of the void and possibly, over the longer term, an acceptable route to restraining costs. To understand how Cutler has upended conventional thinking, you first have to understand the political straitjacket in which health care has found itself. Health care ''lefties,'' as Cutler refers to some of his colleagues, favor a European system -- universal insurance financed by a single payer (the government) and some sort of rationing to hold down the screaming increase in high-tech procedures. Canada rations by limiting access: Ontario, with one-third the population of California, has one-tenth the number of open-heart-surgery facilities. While Cutler acknowledges the merits of such an approach, he also sees its problems. The | The Quality Cure? |
1658115_0 | To the Editor: The fury of ''Bullies of Belfast'' (editorial, March 12) is hard to fathom. You have seized on a murder committed by drunken members of the Irish Republican Army to unfairly mock its leader, Gerry Adams, and what remains of the Irish peace process. The references to ''a wave of crimes,'' ''growing fear and despair'' and cover-ups provided juice but not justice. The disbanding of the I.R.A. is effectively provided for in the 1998 Belfast agreement. Why is it unmentioned in this editorial? You claim that there is ''dancing around the promise to begin formal disarmament'' by I.R.A. and Sinn Fein leaders. The destruction of I.R.A. weapons began four years ago under Gen. John de Chastelain of Canada. But Britain and its loyalist allies cannot abide a peace process that would end the military and economic subsidy of the North. The International Monitoring Commission was created last year to bring the demilitarization process to a halt. Using tragedy to score cheap political points in this conflict is frequent and despicable. The murder of Robert McCartney has started a media frenzy. But it brings no comfort to those who mourn and want London and Dublin to restore a functioning democracy, justice and the rule of law. Michael J. Cummings Albany, March 12, 2005 The writer is a member of the national board of the Irish American Unity Conference. | The Irish Peace Process |
1658178_3 | their economies. Myanmar shares China's passion for hydropower to supply future growth. ''China seems to be doing this with impunity,'' said Aviva Imhof, director of Southeast Asia programs at International Rivers Network, a nongovernmental group in Berkeley, Calif. ''The Mekong is slowly being strangled to death. Why aren't the downstream governments challenging China's activities?'' The concern extends beyond environmental groups and fishermen. Ted Osius, until recently the State Department's regional environmental affairs officer and once a senior White House adviser to Vice President Al Gore, suggests that an unchecked China could turn the Mekong into an ecological disaster, akin to the Yellow River and the Yangtze River. ''China has a poor record on river protection,'' Mr. Osius said in a speech in Bangkok, noting that 80 percent of the Yangtze's historic flood plain has already been cut off by a dike and levee system. Today China's economic and political power along the Mekong is unrivaled. More than ever, it is being strengthened and extended through growing trade and diplomatic ties and its use of new multilateral tools, like the Asian Development Bank. The bank, a major lender for poverty alleviation, was until now dominated by Japan. China contributed to its capital fund for the first time in 2004 -- gaining more power over how the bank's loans are distributed. The impact was immediate. The bank added a new vice president, Jin Liqun, a former deputy finance minister in Beijing. Most important, the bank's grand plan for roads, bridges and a telecommunications network to knit southern China together with the five other Mekong River countries -- a plan 10 years in abeyance -- got a quick boost. Long-stalled work was suddenly under way on a 152-mile road from Yunnan Province across untamed territory to Houey Xai, a Laotian river town just a few hundred yards across the Mekong from Sri Sumwantha's village. Although relatively short, the road provides the vital link to China. A bridge is also in the works to replace the little ferryboats now used to cross the river. By the end of the decade, China could be connected by roads that cross the Mekong, head down to Bangkok and then run on to Malaysia and finally Singapore. ''China's donation gives them a seat at the donor's table,'' said Bruce Murray, the bank's representative in Beijing. ''When they give, donors always have a certain agenda.'' China's new clout can | In Life on the Mekong, China's Dams Dominate |
1658811_2 | ''There's a peace in my heart that the world never gave.'' Earlier in the day, she met with Prime Minister Wen Jaibao, telling him she wanted to ''address the many problems as well as the many opportunities that are affecting us in the Asia-Pacific region, and also around the world,'' according to a transcript of the meeting. The senior State Department official said she had told Mr. Wen and Mr. Hu that she hoped China would step up its efforts to persuade North Korea to return to the nuclear disarmament talks. The official said that she had even suggested that they use the formulation she employs on North Korea: that, by getting rid of its nuclear weapons program, it can gain the respect it wants and the assistance it needs. The official said Mr. Hu responded that China wanted ''a denuclearized Korean peninsula'' and ''will continue to work to bring North Korea back to the talks.'' China has suggested that it is unconvinced by American intelligence indicating that North Korea has as many as nine plutonium-based nuclear bombs and is aggressively pursuing a second method of producing uranium-based nuclear fuel. The United States is in a delicate diplomatic situation with China, wanting it to bring its economic and political leverage to bear on North Korea but worried by Beijing's military buildup. In South Korea, Ms. Rice had criticized the European Union for its plan to drop its arms embargo against China. The senior State Department official said, ''we don't want to see a situation where American forces face European technologies'' in an Asian conflict. But the official added that none of the tough language about China that Ms. Rice had been offering in other Asian capitals -- or her visit to the church -- seemed to have clouded the meetings with China's leaders. He said the planned visit was not discussed during her meetings with the president and the prime minister. Correction: March 22, 2005, Tuesday An article yesterday about the visit to China by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice misspelled the given name of the Chinese prime minister, who talked with her about the stalled negotiations over North Korean nuclear disarmament and other issues. He is Wen Jiabao, not Wen Jaibao. Correction: March 25, 2005, Friday An article on Monday about Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's visit to the Gangwashi Protestant church in Beijing for Palm Sunday services misstated | Rice Sounds a Theme in Visit To Beijing Protestant Church |
1655228_4 | what the I.R.A. are capable of. They butchered a man and slit his throat. I would be afraid, too.'' ''Republicanism is not what happened to Robert,'' she said. ''They can't call themselves republican if they did that. Certainly not murdering innocent people.'' Many Catholics in the McCartneys' neighborhood, a battle-scarred area called the Short Strand, have responded with surprising solidarity. On the day of the funeral for Mr. McCartney, a popular 33-year-old fork lift operator with two young sons, a thousand people turned up. Graffiti denouncing the I.R.A. popped up on walls, a first in a republican neighborhood; the markings were quickly erased, but quickly reappeared. Small photocopied posters with Mr. McCartney's photograph appeared on shop windows. ''No More Lies,'' one said. ''Shame on Them,'' said another. Last Sunday, the women held a rally in the neighborhood. Hundreds showed up, including politicians, and several speakers expressed outrage. The sisters held placards that read, ''Murdered -- Who's Next?'' ''If these men walk free from this, then everyone in Ireland should fear the consequences,'' Paula McCartney, 40, a Queen's University student, told the crowd, according to news reports. ''Justice must be done.'' The police said Friday that 10 people had been arrested so far but had refused to cooperate and were released. ''We need witnesses, and those witnesses need to be able to return to their own communities,'' said the Northern Ireland police detective superintendent, George Hamilton. The plea was indicative of the more troubled relationship that has developed between the I.R.A. and Catholics in Belfast's nationalist area since the Troubles wound down after the 1998 Good Friday peace agreement. Many people interviewed here say they feel indebted to the I.R.A., a private army, for fighting for Catholic rights and protecting them from Protestant loyalists, like the Shankill Butchers, who tortured and killed Catholics with butchers' knives. They acknowledge being increasingly disturbed by the I.R.A.'s criminal undertakings, acts of intimidation and extortion, and punishment beatings. Once mostly excused as necessary tools of war during the Troubles, such acts are now far harder to accept. ''There is a cynicism within the community,'' said Anthony McIntyre, who served 18 years in prison for I.R.A. activity and is now a dissident. ''One reason the I.R.A. existed was to protect people from the Shankill Butchers. Now I.R.A. members are plowing their violence in their own community.'' Everyone knows what happened on Jan. 30. Witnesses have talked | Killing in Beflast Puts I.R.A. on the Defensive |
1655127_4 | oversees baggage handling; some RFID specialists predict that the technology will spread more quickly in Europe and Asia, where decisions about technology investments rest primarily with airports, not airlines. Narita Airport outside Tokyo, for example, has been experimenting with the more sophisticated radio tags. It is now planning a test with Air France and KLM that would attach RFID tags to luggage flying between Amsterdam and Tokyo and between Paris and Tokyo. Eventually, domestic airlines may be forced to adopt RFID luggage tracking for security reasons. Radio tagging could help security officials quickly find individual bags for examination, even after they have been loaded on a plane. That has attracted the attention of the Transportation Security Administration, which is providing 75 percent of the $125 million going into building McCarran's new baggage management system. The first arm of the system is expected to begin operations in May. The airline most eager for the radio tagging has been Delta, which in recent years has tumbled toward the bottom of the annual rankings of how effectively airlines handle luggage. Delta, based in Atlanta, announced last June that it would invest $15 million to $25 million over two years to put radio tags on every bag it handles and to install electronic readers to scan the tags. The airline, which said it misdirected fewer than a million of the 80 million bags it handles in an average year, projected that the radio tag system would quickly pay for itself because the company spends $100 million annually dealing with luggage mistakes. Delta also predicted that the technology could provide a marketing advantage. ''It will be plainly obvious to the traveling public who has this and who doesn't,'' Robert Maruster, the Delta vice president in charge of the airline's hub in Atlanta, said last June. But Delta quietly put the project on hold last fall as it struggled to avoid bankruptcy. ''We're not walking away from it,'' said Benét Wilson, a Delta spokeswoman. ''We're just postponing it indefinitely. We felt we could use our resources in other areas.'' Mrs. Suckling, who was married in a dress she hurriedly bought at a mall, might suggest customer service. She said that filing a compensation claim for the lost luggage involved dealing with a rude and unhelpful customer service agent based in India whose accent was hard to understand. That process made her angrier than the lost luggage. | Radio Tags Can Find Stray Bags, But Can Airlines Afford Them? |
1655218_0 | To the Editor: Three important issues were not mentioned in ''Digital Rx: Take Two Aspirins and E-Mail Me in the Morning.'' First, physicians who elect to correspond with their patients by e-mail should make sure that they are complying with state statutes. E-mail messages are records, and state laws cover records. Second, many patients' e-mail accounts are issued by their employers. As a matter of policy, employers have the right to read and delete e-mail messages. Knowing this fact, do patients really want their questions, let alone their laboratory test results, available to others in the organization? Third, when insurers pay for online consultations, who are the real beneficiaries? There is no doubt that physicians should be using information technologies to enhance the quality of patient care, but they should not be lulled into a false sense of security by an easy-to-use and popular medium. David A. Sobel Richmond, Vt., March 2, 2005 The writer is a health care information security consultant. | The Digital Doctor Is In (the In-Box) |
1659861_0 | Bruce McM. Wright, a retired black judge in Manhattan who denounced what he called racism in the criminal justice system and created a furor in the 1970's by setting low bail for many poor and minority suspects, died in his sleep on Thursday at his home in Old Saybrook, Conn. He was 86. His death was announced by his wife, Elizabeth Davidson-Wright. Justice Wright, who retired at the end of 1994 from State Supreme Court, suffered a heart attack in March 2000. Justice Wright spent 25 years on the bench in both criminal and civil cases, gaining a reputation as a scholarly and provocative jurist who sprinkled his opinions with literary quotations. But it was in Criminal Court early in his judicial career that he found himself at the center of a storm over his out-of-court remarks and bail policies, which had the effect of releasing many suspects, some of them charged with vicious attacks on police officers. ''Turn 'Em Loose Bruce'' was the sobriquet supplied by the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association, which called him ''the best friend criminals ever had.'' At various times, Mayor John V. Lindsay, who appointed him to the bench in 1970, as well as Mayors Abraham D. Beame and Edward I. Koch and many other politicians, joined the chorus of denunciations. But civil libertarians, Legal Aid lawyers and others defended Judge Wright's use of bail as appropriate in the context of its statutory and traditional purpose: to assure the presence at trial of a defendant, who is presumed innocent until proven guilty. In setting bail, judges typically weigh a defendant's character, employment, finances and community roots. Also considered are any criminal record, possible danger to the community, the seriousness of the charges and the probable sentence that a conviction would carry, which, if severe enough, might raise the possibility of flight to avoid prosecution. While no records were kept on the bail practices of judges, Judge Wright's were not very different from those of his colleagues, lawyers familiar with the courts at the time said, but his decisions were monitored more closely by the police and reporters. Judge Wright insisted that bail should not be used punitively, to detain people for the sake of crime prevention or to coerce guilty pleas. He said his aim was to uphold the Eighth Amendment of the Constitution, which says ''excessive bail shall not be required.'' For some poor people, | Bruce McM. Wright, Erudite Judge Whose Bail Rulings Caused an Uproar, Dies at 86 |
1657075_2 | new aviation assessment, examining dozens of airline incidents both before and after the Sept. 11 attacks, makes clear that counterterrorism officials still consider the aviation industry to be perhaps the prime target for another major attack because of the spectacular nature of such strikes. The assessment, which showed that the F.B.I. handled more than 500 criminal investigations involving aircraft in 2003, will likely serve as a guide for considering further security restrictions in general aviation and other areas considered particularly vulnerable, the officials said. The report, dated Feb. 25, was distributed internally to federal and state counterterrorism and aviation officials, and a copy was obtained by The Times. It warns that security upgrades since the Sept. 11 attacks have ''reduced, but not eliminated'' the prospect of similar attacks. ''Spectacular terrorist attacks can generate an outpouring of support for the perpetrators from sympathizers and terrorism sponsors with similar agendas,'' the report said. ''The public fear resulting from a terrorist hijacking or aircraft bombing also serves as a powerful motivator for groups seeking to further their causes.'' The report detailed particular vulnerabilities in what it called ''the largely unregulated'' area of general aviation, which includes corporate jets, private planes and other unscheduled aircraft. ''As security measures improve at large commercial airports, terrorists may choose to rent or steal general aviation aircraft housed at small airports with little or no security,'' the report said. The report also said that Al Qaeda ''has apparently considered the use of helicopters as an alternative to recruiting operatives for fixed-wing aircraft operations.'' The maneuverability and ''nonthreatening appearance'' of helicopters, even when flying at low altitudes above urban areas, make them attractive targets for terrorists to conduct suicide attacks on landmarks or to spray toxins below, the report said. The assessment does not identify who might be in a position to carry out such domestic attacks. While law enforcement officials have spoken repeatedly about their concerns over so-called sleeper cells operating within the United States, a separate F.B.I. report first disclosed last week by ABC News indicated that evidence pointing to the existence of such cells was inconclusive. The question of how well the government is protecting airline travelers surfaced again last month after the disclosure in a Sept. 11 commission investigation that in the months leading up to the attack, federal officials received 52 warnings about Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden, some warning specifically about hijackings | SECURITY REPORT ON U.S. AVIATION WARNS OF HOLES |
1657043_4 | balance, large withdrawals for what he says were casino trips and even larger deposits from online winnings. His personal account on PartyPoker.com echoes his bank statement, with matching payments and deposits that are specifically for poker. Mr. Sandberg credits his success to two simple principles: know the odds, and don't play more than you can lose. ''It seems simple, but it's one of the biggest flaws of many poker players,'' he said. His goal is to enter the high-stakes poker tours and compete with his heroes. ''I want to get to the point where I'm the best in the world and play against those guys on TV,'' he said. ''I don't want to tell stories about playing with so-and-so once; I want to be doing it all the time.'' While Mr. Sandberg insists that he is not a compulsive gambler, and he seems to bet large amounts only when the odds are heavily in his favor, some experts fear that college-age gamblers are swallowing the hype of big-stakes poker without coming to grips with the dangers of addiction. ''With gambling on TV, there's been lots of glamorization, but not much responsibility,'' said Keith S. Whyte, executive director of the National Council on Problem Gambling. He called the gambling opportunities ''almost ubiquitous'' for the college-age crowd. ''The administrations don't do a good job of telling students how to get help,'' he said, ''the same way they're sending the 'prevention and responsibility' messages for alcohol, substance abuse and date rape.'' At the University of Pennsylvania, Dan Kline, the president of the poker society, says that everyone is playing poker. ''When we started this thing in 2002, about 10 people joined,'' said Mr. Kline, a junior. ''Now when we have a tournament, we'll get 500 people responding in a half-hour to our e-mail.'' A free tournament organized by the group last year attracted twice as many people as space would permit. This year's tournament, however, which offered $2,000 in donated prize money, was canceled by uneasy administrators, who had also canceled a fraternity-organized charity poker tournament in November, fearing the legal implications of offering prizes for gambling. Princeton has no explicit rules about gambling on campus, and has not taken steps to address it. ''This is something we, the administration, need to sit down and decide if there should be a uniform policy about it,'' said Hilary Herbold, the associate dean in charge | Ante Up at Dear Old Princeton: Online Poker as a College Major |
1656983_0 | IT makes sense that automakers borrow model names from the jaguar and impala to evoke speed and gracefulness, yet carefully avoid associating their products with a creature like the porcupine. But with all the antennas in some new cars -- high-tech luxury sedans may carry 18 or more -- it takes a major engineering effort to design vehicles that do not bristle with metal quills. Today's cars need a selection of antennas just to serve their entertainment systems (separate units for broadcast and satellite radio, and another to receive television programming); navigation units and cellphones use different aerials again. The count increases further with systems that employ a ''diversity'' antenna to improve reception. This design uses two or more individual antennas tuned to the same band, relying on a microprocessor in the radio to select the clearest signal. More antennas yet are required for cars equipped with telematics systems like OnStar or the Mercedes-Benz TeleAid. These systems offer concierge services and emergency notification in the event of a collision, using a second set of cellphone and global positioning satellite aerials to contact a call center. Keyless entry, security alarms and other functions controlled from the driver's key fob require one or more antennas, as do the short-range Bluetooth communications that link a driver's cellphone or handheld computer with the audio systems of some new cars to permit hands-free phone conversations. Direct-reading tire pressure monitors necessitate still more aerials to keep tabs on the inflation of each tire, including that of the spare in the trunk. Active cruise control systems, which maintain a preset distance to the car ahead (and can apply the brakes if the gap narrows too quickly), depend on a radar antenna mounted in the grille. Bumpers may carry a series of antennas that emit signals to measure the distance to nearby vehicles as part of a warning device intended to make parking less of a hit-and-miss affair. Each feature making use of a radio frequency input requires an antenna tuned to its particular signal, presenting a big challenge to the engineers who must find places to install all of this hardware. Adding to the complexity is a wide range of size and shape requirements, which change with the wavelength of the signal. Besides avoiding stickleback styling, incentives to strip antennas from the car's exterior and tuck them away include the potential to reduce wind noise and aerodynamic | As Cars Become More Connected, Hiding the Antennas Gets Tougher |
1656983_1 | or more antennas, as do the short-range Bluetooth communications that link a driver's cellphone or handheld computer with the audio systems of some new cars to permit hands-free phone conversations. Direct-reading tire pressure monitors necessitate still more aerials to keep tabs on the inflation of each tire, including that of the spare in the trunk. Active cruise control systems, which maintain a preset distance to the car ahead (and can apply the brakes if the gap narrows too quickly), depend on a radar antenna mounted in the grille. Bumpers may carry a series of antennas that emit signals to measure the distance to nearby vehicles as part of a warning device intended to make parking less of a hit-and-miss affair. Each feature making use of a radio frequency input requires an antenna tuned to its particular signal, presenting a big challenge to the engineers who must find places to install all of this hardware. Adding to the complexity is a wide range of size and shape requirements, which change with the wavelength of the signal. Besides avoiding stickleback styling, incentives to strip antennas from the car's exterior and tuck them away include the potential to reduce wind noise and aerodynamic drag. Drivers also appreciate the elimination of breakage by carwashes and vandals. Some of the earliest antennas in cars were wire loops hidden within the cloth tops of 1930's sedans, but with the advent of all-steel roofs the upright mast antenna became the preferred design. About 30 years later, carmakers tried hiding them again, integrating antennas into windshields or rear windows by applying wires to the surface or embedding them inside the glass. ''Those were simple antennas, and reception was poor,'' said Robert W. Schumacher, manager for integrated media systems at Delphi, a leading parts supplier. Recent designs use an embedded metal film of tin oxide -- thin enough to be transparent -- that can be electrically heated for defrosting, said Eric Walton, a research scientist at Ohio State University whose designs are used in some General Motors cars. Carmakers also hide antennas behind plastic panels that will not block signals, and in bumpers, parcel shelves, trunk lid trim, doors, under dashboards and in roofs. For its PT Cruiser convertible, Chrysler is experimenting with antennas in the roll bar. Mercedes-Benz puts the antennas for its keyless-entry system in the doors, center console, bumpers and windows. Antenna modules can also be | As Cars Become More Connected, Hiding the Antennas Gets Tougher |
1727709_0 | Far from the pulsing cities that symbolize modern China, this tiny hillside village of crude peasant houses seems disconnected from this century and the last. But follow a dirt path past a snarling watchdog, sidestep the chickens and ducks, and a small clearing on the banks of the Nu River reveals a dusty slab of concrete lying in a rotting pumpkin patch. The innocuous concrete block is also a symbol, of a struggle over law that touches every corner of the country. The block marks the spot on the Nu River where officials here in Yunnan Province want to begin building one of the biggest dam projects in the world. The project would produce more electricity than even the mighty Three Gorges Dam but would also threaten a region considered an ecological treasure. This village would be the first place to disappear. For decades, the ruling Communist Party has rammed through such projects by fiat. But the Nu River proposal, already delayed for more than a year, is now unexpectedly presenting the Chinese government with a quandary of its own making: will it abide by its own laws? A coalition led by Chinese environmental groups is urging the central government to hold open hearings and make public a secret report on the Nu dams before making a final decision. In a country where people cannot challenge decisions by their leaders, such public participation is a fairly radical idea. But the groups argue that new environmental laws grant exactly that right. ''This is the case to set a precedent,'' said Ma Jun, an environmental consultant in Beijing. ''For the first time, there is a legal basis for public participation. If it happens, it would be a major step forward.'' China's leaders often embrace the concept of rule of law, if leaving open how they choose to define it. For many people in China's fledgling ''civil society'' -- environmentalists, journalists, lawyers, academics and others -- the law has become a tool to promote environmental protection and to try to expand the rights of individuals in an authoritarian political system. But trying to invoke the law is risky. Chinese nongovernmental organizations, few of which existed a decade ago, have taken up the Nu as a major cause. But the activism on the Nu and other issues has provoked deep suspicions by the Communist Party even as a broader clampdown against such NGO's has | Seeking a Public Voice on China's 'Angry River' |
1727706_0 | INTERNATIONAL A3-21 Plan For Chinese River Raises Hard Questions The struggle over law touches every part of China. Now with a proposal for a series of dams that will produce more electricity than even the mighty Three Gorges Dam but would also threaten a region considered an ecological treasure, the Chinese government is faced with a dilemma of whether it will abide by its own laws. A1 Sudanese Refugees in Cairo About 3,000 Sudanese men, women and children have been squatting in a central square in Cairo, Egypt for the last three months, requesting the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees declare them refugees and relocate them to a better place to live. These people see themselves as refugees, fleeing a country that offered little hope for a better life, and yet the law does not consider them refugees. A3 Selling U.S. Policy to the World This past week, at a senior staff meeting, Karen P. Hughes, the under secretary of state for public diplomacy, outlined the limits of her team's success in promoting Iraq's elections to the world's news media. Ms. Hughes said her job, which is to improve the image of the United States and expand support for its policies abroad, is an uphill battle. A6 Libyan Court Orders Retrial The Libyan Supreme Court overturned the convictions of five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor who had been sentenced to death on charges of infecting hundreds of Libyan children with H.I.V. The politically charged case was sent back to a lower court for a retrial. The action raised hopes that the medical workers might eventually be freed. A6 Pope's Christmas Speech In his first Christmas address, Pope Benedict XVI prayed for peace in poorer, war-torn parts of the world as he warned the more comfortable that they ''risk becoming victims of their own intellectual and technical achievements.'' His message was received warmly and cheers seemed most enthusiastic when he continued a tradition started by his predecessor, John Paul II, sending Christmas greetings in 32 languages. A8 Oppostition Split in Zimbabwe Leaders of Zimbabwe's sole democratic opposition party, the Movement for Democratic Change, decided to expel their president, Morgan Tsvangirai, over the weekend, deepening an internal split that has brought the party to the brink of insignificance. It seemed unclear whether the expulsion would stick. A9 Sunnis Denied 10 More Seats Sunni Arab political leaders asked | News Summary |
1724798_3 | person to answer this question. It's not very convenient to comment on this.'' A link on Sina.com -- the third of the leading portals and the only one to carry even a headline about the incident -- to news from Dongzhou was a dead end, leading to a story about employment among college graduates. Even Caijing, a magazine with a strong reputation for enterprising reporting on delicate topics, demurred. ''We just had an annual meeting, and I haven't considered this subject yet,'' said Hu Shuli, the magazine's editor, speaking through an assistant. Further obscuring news of the events at Dongzhou, online reports about the village incident carried by the New China News Agency were confined to its Guangdong provincial news page, with the result that few who did not already know of the news or were not searching determinedly would have been likely to stumble across it on China's leading official news Web site. The government also arranged more technologically impressive measures to frustrate those who sought out news of the confrontation. Until Tuesday, Web users who turned to search engines like Google and typed in the word Shanwei, the city with jurisdiction over the village where the demonstration was put down, would find nothing about the protests against power plant construction there, or about the crackdown. Users who continued to search found their browsers freezing. By Tuesday, links to foreign news sources appeared but were invariably inoperative. But controls like these have spurred a lively commentary among China's fast-growing blogging community. ''The domestic news blocking system is really interesting,'' wrote one blogger. ''I heard something happened in Shanwei and wanted to find out whether it was true or just the invention of a few people. So I started searching with Baidu, and Baidu went out of service at once. I could open their site, but couldn't do any searches.'' Baidu is one of the country's leading search engines. ''I don't dare to talk,'' another blogger wrote. ''There are sensitive words everywhere -- our motherland is so sensitive. China's body is covered with sensitive zones.'' While numerous bloggers took the chance of discussing the incident on their Web sites, they found that their remarks were blocked or rapidly expunged, as the government knocked out comments it found offensive or above its low threshold. Some Internet users had trouble calling up major Western news sites, although those were not universally blocked. | Beijing Casts Net of Silence Over Protest |
1724547_0 | THE CLAIM -- Too much noise can increase the risk of a heart attack. THE FACTS -- Scientists have long suspected that too much exposure to everyday noise -- sirens, the din of the office, the jingle of an ice cream truck -- can increase blood pressure and take a toll on health. A few studies over the years have tried to examine the question more closely by looking for a link between long-term exposure to noise and a higher risk of developing heart problems. Almost all have found one. One study, for example, was published last month in The European Heart Journal. It examined the levels of work and environmental noise that 4,000 people -- half of them heart attack survivors -- were experiencing daily and found that chronic noise exposure caused a ''mild to moderate'' increase in the risk of heart disease. The effect was different for men and women. For women, environmental noise like the rumble and commotion of traffic had a far greater effect on the risk than working in a loud office. The opposite was true for men, though the reason was unclear. Still, studies supporting the link generally share one weakness. They show only a correlation, not a direct cause-and-effect relationship. But most have gotten around this problem by controlling for factors like genetics, smoking and age. One study even compared people who wore earplugs at work with their colleagues who did not and found that the earplugs had a protective effect. THE BOTTOM LINE -- Chronic exposure to noise is associated with a higher risk of heart disease. ANAHAD O'CONNOR scitimes@nytimes.com | REALLY? |
1724699_0 | To the Editor: Re ''Live Longer With Evolution? Evidence May Lie in Fruit Flies'' (A Conversation With Michael R. Rose, Dec. 6): Dr. Rose comments that ''evolution took us in hand, and we lived longer.'' He does not mention how the factors he discusses (we were smarter, deadlier, better fed) led to selection for longer lives. The biggest selective factor was apparently that women with surviving mothers tended to raise more children to maturity, leading to the spread of genes for greater postmenopausal survival as the grandchildren multiplied more than those without living grandmothers. This has been called the grandmother hypothesis. Dr. Gerald M. Levitis New York | All About Mother |
1724590_1 | It hurts it.'' Weighing the risk of small scissors and tools against that of bombs, he said, ''If you do the analysis, it is not even close.'' But the committee chairman, Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska, said he found that logic ''difficult to follow.'' Mr. Stevens proposed instead that the security agency reduce the number of bags that passengers may carry on board to one from two, giving the screeners fewer items to handle. The only other senator at the hearing, Daniel K. Inouye, Democrat of Hawaii, said; ''I could understand if some man or woman would want to bring on a knitting needle. I've seen a lot of ladies knitting. But I've yet to see someone cut paper dolls on the plane.'' The security agency's decision, scheduled to take effect Dec. 22, would allow scissors with blades of up to four inches long, as well as certain tools and other sharp objects, to be taken aboard planes. Two House Democrats, Joseph Crowley of New York and Edward J. Markey of Massachusetts, recently introduced legislation, called Leave All Blades Behind, that would freeze the list of prohibited items as it is now, though the security agency would be allowed to add items to it. ''T.S.A. should stand for Transportation Security Administration, not Take your Scissors Aboard,'' Mr. Markey said Monday. Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, Democrat of New York, introduced a companion measure in the Senate on Monday. Senator Stevens said at the committee hearing that he would co-sponsor the measure if it also reduced carry-on luggage limits. Mr. Hawley testified on Monday that there were thousands of items that could be used as weapons and that banning scissors and screwdrivers would not stop the threat. ''Pens, pencils, belts, credit cards, soda cans, bare hands and many more,'' he said. But scissors and screwdrivers seem to be a more obvious problem for some. Another witness, Patricia Friend, international president of the Association of Flight Attendants, testified holding a cluster of stainless steel shears, their bright plastic handles spread like a bouquet. She said she was questioned about them by the Capitol Police when she arrived for the hearing. But under the security agency's plan, Ms. Friend said, a terrorist could take ''any or all of these items into our workplace without any justification.'' Twenty-five flight attendants died on the four hijacked planes on Sept. 11, she said. Mr. Hawley did receive | Senators Criticize Decision to Allow Scissors on Planes |
1724569_0 | Ernest Schwiebert, an architect and planner whose lifelong passion for fishing led him to write influential books on piscatorial matters like how trout perceive insects -- all the better to make lures to catch them -- died on Saturday at his home in Princeton, N.J. He was 74. The cause was renal cancer, said his son, Erik. Legend has it that Dr. Schwiebert (pronounced SHVEE-bert) landed a 12-inch brook trout with his first cast when he was 5 and never stopped casting. His literary pièce de résistance, ''Trout,'' traced the sport to the ancient Greeks and Chinese, then meandered through 1,745 pages covering pretty much every conceivable topic of interest to anglers, from the anatomy of Salmoniform fishes to the idiosyncratic philosophies of those compelled to pursue them. In reviewing the book, which weighs in at 7 pounds, 5 ounces and has a bibliography listing 999 sources, William Kaufmann wrote in The Washington Post in 1979, ''Surely no fly fisherman in history can have fished more widely than Ernest Schwiebert has, and surely no one else has combined angling, artistic and writing talents to better advantage.'' As was his practice, Dr. Schwiebert himself drew hundreds of illustrations of fish and people for the book, reflecting the drafting experience he gained in earning two doctorates from Princeton, one in fine arts, architecture and planning and the other in the philosophy and history of architecture. He also worked 15 years for an architecture firm in Manhattan before deciding he would rather go fishing. Dr. Schwiebert's most original contribution to angling was his book ''Matching the Hatch,'' which he published in 1955 while still a student at Ohio State University. To fishermen, hatch refers to insect nymphs that have swum en masse to the surface and broken free of their nymphal shucks and are flexing their muscles before flying away. Dr. Schwiebert was one of the first to link artificial fly imitations to these evanescent adolescent insects. ''He really changed the way America thought about trout fishing,'' John Merwin, fishing editor of Field and Stream, said yesterday. Mr. Merwin noted that the book appeared just as the post-World War II generation was turning to fishing and other forms of recreation in great numbers, and said it was gaining new popularity with their children. For many of his readers, it is Dr. Schwiebert's sheer exuberance about fishing that most resonates. ''It is always the | Ernest Schwiebert, Who'd Rather Be Fishing, Dies at 74 |
1724555_3 | in whom. Some scientists, like Aaron Blair, an epidemiologist at the National Cancer Institute, see hints that environmental pollutants like pesticides, diesel exhaust in cities and workplaces and small particles in the air may instigate cancer. But, Dr. Blair says, there is a huge problem in following up on these hints because scientists need to figure out who was exposed to what and when the exposure occurred. Asking people is not much help. Most people do not know what they were exposed to, and even if they think they know, they often are wrong, he said. So Dr. Blair and his colleagues decided to try for the greatest possible rigor by focusing on one group, farmers, that is not only routinely exposed to pesticides that may increase cancer risk, but also keeps excellent records of exposure. The effort, a collaboration involving the cancer institute, the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences and the Environmental Protection Agency, began in 1993 and includes nearly every farmer and farmer's spouse in Iowa and North Carolina -- 55,000 farmers and 35,000 spouses. Investigators have been asking the farmers what pesticides and herbicides they used, when they used them and how much they used, and have been obtaining information on other risk factors like smoking. Then they use the medical records from tumor registries to determine who developed cancer and what type was developed. ''We're now just in the period of time where we can look at outcomes,'' Dr. Blair said. So far, the researchers have found a few associations, but nothing that is definitive. ''I would call it, at this stage, interesting leads,'' Dr. Blair said. ''None are large enough for any regulatory agency to take action or to say they are a human carcinogen. They are leads.'' They include, for example, a slightly higher rate of lung cancer and leukemia in farmers who used the insecticide diazinon and a possible increase in prostate cancer among farmers who used methylbromide to fumigate the soil. The investigators looked for an association between pesticides and herbicides and breast cancer, but they did not find one, Dr. Blair said, adding that one pesticide, atrazine, was under particular suspicion because it causes breast cancer in rats and has estrogenlike properties. Even if the study finds that some chemicals have increased farmers' cancer rates, it remains unclear what that means for the general population, where exposures are usually much | Environment And Cancer: The Links Are Elusive |
1724538_0 | Elective Caesarean sections have become more common in recent years, in part because many women and doctors believe that vaginal birth is a major risk factor for urinary incontinence. But a new study published in the December issue of Obstetrics and Gynecology has found no support for this belief. Researchers sampled 143 pairs of postmenopausal biological sisters. In each pair, one had had a vaginal delivery and one had never had a baby. They completed questionnaires concerning symptoms of pelvic floor disorders, and 101 of the pairs were given clinical evaluations for urinary incontinence. The results ran counter to the conventional wisdom: 49.7 percent of the women who had given birth suffered some urinary incontinence, but so did 47.6 percent of their sisters, reflecting a difference that was statistically insignificant. The researchers concluded that in postmenopausal women family factors were more associated with urinary incontinence than with having had a vaginal delivery. Dr. Gunhilde M. Buchsbaum, the study's lead author and an associate professor of obstetrics at the University of Rochester, said she doubted that these results would affect clinical practice. ''People have strong feelings and opinions about elective C-section one way or the other,'' she said. ''For that reason, I doubt that the findings of our study will change any minds.'' The authors acknowledged that they did not determine the age at which incontinence began, and that incontinence might occur earlier in women who delivered vaginally. The authors also pointed out that their finding pertained to white women only. VITAL SIGNS: HAVING A BABY | Risk and Reality in V-Births and C-Sections |
1724592_0 | The Personal Health column in Science Times on Nov. 29, about the rare lung disease lymphangioleiomyomatosis, or LAM, included outdated information on medical advice and treatment. While the symptoms may be more noticeable in pregnant women, there is no firm evidence that pregnancy makes the disease worse, as doctors believed in the 1990's, and advice to women considering pregnancy is now given case by case. Nor are postmenopausal women with a diagnosis of LAM routinely advised to have their ovaries removed or to begin hormone supplements; some recent evidence suggests that estrogen therapy may worsen the disease. | Corrections |
1726098_1 | the elements save for a hard roof and canvas side panels. This basic design became one of the industry's earliest crossover vehicles, the car-based station wagon; in 1929, Ford became the first automaker to use the designation, for a version of the Model A. Wood body framing continued in wagons into the early 1950's, but steel bodies became the norm as new postwar designs reached production. The appearance of wood has persevered, in the form of vinyl panels that look, sometimes, like the real thing. Plastics reduced cost and complexity for automakers while eliminating the frequent maintenance required of owners who wanted to keep their ''woodies'' looking new. From the 1950's on, the station wagon figured prominently in the family road trips that were becoming an essential part of the American experience. A growing middle class, with access to an expanding highway network, ventured off on long-distance vacations that, for many boomers and their parents, would live on in a lifetime of stories. Charles R. Stitzer, an environmental inspector from Richmond, Va., recalls just such a trip, watching America unfold in reverse with his older sister, Lynn, from the rear-facing seat of a 1967 Chevrolet Impala wagon. Accompanied by their siblings, parents and two grandmothers, the cross-country trip took three weeks. Each passenger was limited to three changes of clothes, packed in suitcases lashed to a homemade roof rack. Most of Mr. Stitzer's memories, however, involved the third-row seat. ''All the kids had to take turns in the dreaded rear-facing seat,'' he said. ''After about a week, the smaller kids got a reprieve because of their chronic car sickness. NASA could have used it to train astronauts how to fight nausea.'' ''On the positive side,'' Mr. Stitzer said, ''there's nothing at Disneyland quite as thrilling as traveling at 75 miles per hour on the Ventura Freeway looking up the nostrils of a big rig driver who is inches from your rear bumper.'' More than 35 years later, the the Stitzers inevitably recall the adventure at family gatherings. ''It was a life-defining trip for everyone in my family,'' Mr. Stitzer said. Not all station wagons were built or bought exclusively for family transportation; some came from the factory with high-performance engines and even four-speed manual transmissions. Now prized by collectors, these hot-rod wagons all seem to come with the same basic story: dad wanted a high performance coupe while mom would | AUTOS ON MONDAY/Collecting; With Wagons' Comeback, New Interest in Originals |
1726081_1 | is the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, said that more negotiations were needed, noting that ''on the toughest issues, it just kicks the can down the road.'' Other provisions in the declaration include a broad agreement to ban fishing industry subsidies that contribute to overfishing; special help for impoverished cotton-growing countries in Africa; and a plan for the United States, the European Union and Japan to provide several billion dollars a year in aid to developing countries to help them compete in global trade. With the exception of an end to cotton export subsidies, which is already moving through Congress, American commitments in the declaration will not require Congressional action until a comprehensive trade deal is ready for a vote. All of the W.T.O.'s 149 member nations and customs territories approved the declaration. The leaders of delegations from Cuba and Venezuela stood up in the last five minutes of the six-day conference to reserve the right to exempt their countries later from new rules being negotiated for service industries like banking, insurance and telecommunications. As with many trade agreements at the ministerial level, the declaration also papers over differences that could prove troublesome later. The agreement to end agricultural export subsidies by 2013, which was reluctantly accepted by the European Union, calls for a ''substantial'' part of these subsidies to be eliminated well before then, but does not specify what this means. Similarly, the ban on fishing subsidies does not define overfishing. And the agreement on cotton postpones the tricky question of how quickly the United States should lower its subsidies, which West African nations blame for depressing the prices that their farmers receive. Mr. Lamy said that the agreement left negotiators 60 percent of the way to finishing a round of negotiations that began four years ago in Doha, Qatar. Peter Mandelson, the European Union's trade commissioner, acknowledged that the Hong Kong declaration was far from comprehensive. ''If we didn't make the conference a success, we certainly saved it from failure,'' Mr. Mandelson said. Susan Schwab, a deputy United States trade representative, was more optimistic. ''The progress made today really lays the groundwork for a major negotiation going forward,'' Ms. Schwab said. Kamal Nath, India's minister of commerce and industry, especially welcomed a decision by rich countries to eliminate quotas and tariffs by 2008 on 97 percent of categories of goods from the world's 50 poorest nations. The | Trade Officials Agree to End Subsidies for Agricultural Exports |
1726522_2 | a number of sources. One is the double shock produced here by the fact that most of the Sept. 11 hijackers were Saudi and the subsequent wave of terrorism by Al Qaeda that struck this country. Suddenly, the ruling family had reason to push back against some of the more reactionary practices imposed by the powerful clergy. The huge national debt created by the Persian Gulf war in 1991 was another factor. The country needed to expand its economy, and many women here hold a great deal of idle cash. Finally, the rise to power this year of King Abdullah, a moderate, is widely viewed as significant. The women leading the movement for more rights are not presenting themselves as secular feminists. Rather, they are citing Koranic scripture for their demands, hoping to beat the clerics at their own game. When Saudi clerics say women should not drive, these women say the Prophet Muhammad spoke approvingly of a day when women could travel alone. They say women played crucial roles in the days of the prophet and that his wife, Khadija, was an important merchant. ''We have been insufficiently educated in our own religion,'' said Ghada Angawi, a personal coach for businesswomen who considers the Koran a vital weapon in the fight for women's equality. To make their point, leaders for women are acting with caution. Lama al-Suleiman, 39, one of the two women elected to the Chamber of Commerce, holds a doctorate from King's College in London and runs a company. Trilingual and sophisticated, she has gone around Jidda for years without covering her hair and greeted journalists from The New York Times at her house in jeans. For a photograph, however, she changed clothes, saying that, having entered public life, she did not want to give her opponents any excuse to discredit her. ''You have to melt the culture, not break it,'' she said. Ms. Sharif, the editor, made the same point. She said she kept the article about Ms. Suleiman and Nashwa al-Taher, the other woman elected, off the front page lest it attract too much attention. Maha Fitaihi, the wife of Jidda's mayor and a prominent women's activist, said, ''We don't want a civil war, we just want this to be an evolutionary change.'' Ms. Fitaihi learned firsthand the risks of overpublicizing her activities this year when she organized a basketball tournament for girls. Religious figures | Saudi Women See Changes, And Reasons to Expect More |
1726436_3 | City's historic district. The plaza's main feature is a fountain designed with the Mexican artist Vicente Rojo, a pool populated by more than 1,500 tezontle-colored pyramids. The water reaches halfway up the pyramids and will be kept in constant motion through a series of air injectors. Mr. Legorreta has conceived the plaza as a public space for art. Along with rotating exhibitions, it will house works by Rufino Tamayo, Miguel Covarrubias and Juan Soriana. A bas-relief by the muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros has been mounted in a small garden at one end. Over the last five years, the leftist city government has found common cause with Carlos Slim, the Mexican telecommunications magnate, the world's fourth-richest man, in its bid to revitalize the downtown area. Mr. Slim, who grew up in the old downtown, has been buying and restoring old buildings to encourage young people to move back to the city center. His Historic Center Foundation financed the Foreign Ministry's tower in the $190 million Plaza Juárez compound, and he is also turning nearby buildings into residential lofts. Striding through the complex this month with his son and collaborator, Victor, 39, Mr. Legorreta said he believed strongly in such mixed-use development. ''Human beings are interested in exchange,'' he said. ''To really live together, it has to be on different levels.'' ''It's very important that children live with their parents and their grandparents,'' he said. ''It's the same thing for different classes.'' Mr. Legorreta's work is most closely associated with that of the great Mexican architect Luis Barragán, whose emotional architecture of light and space drew from and transformed vernacular Mexican forms. While Mr. Barragán's work was largely for private patrons, Mr. Legorreta has embraced the public realm. His output has encompassed everything from factories to museums and libraries to hotels, private houses and public housing projects. ''Ricardo Legorreta, generous with spaces and with people, converted Barragán's poetics into prose,'' Miquel Adrià wrote in a largely favorable review of the architect's retrospective in the newspaper Reforma. For Mr. Adrià, an architect and editor of Arquine, a local architectural magazine, Mr. Legoretta's masterpiece remains the 1968 Camino Real Hotel in Mexico City. The hotel turned its back on the exploding city, creating a private and tranquil cloister in its gardens and patios, with a giant magenta latticework grille the only link to the street. ''He continues to explore a way of being,'' Mr. | A Modern Space in Mexico City's Historic Center |
1722470_4 | in October, a number that Sergeant Berry said surprised officers. ''It's force of habit, or people are just lazy,'' Sergeant Berry said about cellphone use. He said the department had not specifically targeted cellphone use. ''But officers on foot will see people talking while holding their phone, and they'll radio to the enforcement guys down the street,'' he said. At least one study supports the type of consistent policing Greenwich has adopted. The study, done by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety and published in 2004 in the journal Injury Prevention, found that drivers in New York cut their cellphone use immediately after the law was passed. But a year later, they began talking again, in numbers that matched their use before the ban was enacted. Hands-free devices are permitted in Connecticut, even though several studies have said any chatter on a cellphone is distracting and liable to cause an accident. An Insurance Institute study published in July concluded that drivers using cellphones are four times as likely to be involved in crashes serious enough to injure themselves. Whether the driver was talking on a hands-free device or a hand-held, the risk remained the same, the study said. Another study from the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute and the National Highway Traffic Administration tracked 100 drivers for one year, determining that cellphone use caused more crashes and near crashes than other types of distractions. Some people just turn off the phone. The cellphone of Nancy Mulroy, the spokeswoman for the Hartford Police Department, rang constantly whenever she was driving. For days after the law went into effect, she grabbed it out of habit, so now she keeps it off. ''I'd have to say to the person, 'Listen, I have to get off the phone, there's a state trooper right next to me,' and it definitely has taken some getting used to for everybody,'' she said. ''But now it's become a relief, because it gives me private time in my car.'' Two months into the new law, stories of distracted drivers still flow into police departments. The police at several departments told stories about drivers getting into arguments with passengers, eating, reading newspapers, maps and books, picking up water bottles and coffee cups, and, of course, talking on the phone. ''It's like any other law that comes out,'' said Sgt. Lowell DePalma of the Southington Police Department. ''Willing compliance is going to | Let It Ring, or the Call May Cost $100 |
1722536_0 | To the Editor: Bravo to the writer of the Nov. 27 letter ''Disabled Children and Compassion,'' which eloquently addresses the need for educators to inculcate basic human respect and tolerance for those who may certainly march to a different drummer. I would also like to state emphatically that contrary to the Nov. 20 letter ''Disabled Children and Discipline,'' special education teachers and parents most certainly do not advocate for the placement of all disabled students in mainstream classrooms. What we hope for is appropriate placements and well-trained, compassionate teachers who can facilitate this placement. Beth Rose Feuerstein Old Westbury The writer is a special education teacher at the Wheatley School. | School Placements For Disabled Children |
1722260_0 | We already know why the removal of PCB's from the Hudson River promises to be the largest and most complex environmental cleanup in history -- it has to do with the sheer volume of toxic material buried beneath an enormous, flowing river, and the delicacy of removing the mess without leaving a worse one behind. But does the project have to be history's most frustrating, too? It seems that every time a milestone is reached in the slow, unsteady march toward a cleaner river, the project goes awry. The latest example is the disclosure late last month of a confidential memo finding fault with the plan and casting doubt on whether the polluter, General Electric, intends to honor its historic agreement with the federal government to scrape the river clean. The memo was written by a coastal resources expert in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and sent to the Environmental Protection Agency. It was leaked to The Times by the environmental organization Riverkeeper, which brandished it as evidence that the cleanup was in danger of being fatally compromised by the party wielding the most control over its design and execution -- that is, G.E. The memo's author reached her conclusions by closely comparing the E.P.A.'s 2002 Record of Decision -- the agency's official order to G.E. to dredge up the Hudson PCB's -- with G.E.'s Interim Design Report, a 1,114-page document explaining exactly how the company intends to carry out this vastly complex operation. The memo highlighted several troubling points of disagreement between the Record of Decision, known as ROD, and the report. Most worryingly, it found that G.E. had concluded that it might have to complete the first of two planned phases of the project by placing a cap of clean sediment over the river's most toxic hot spots, not dredging them up, as the ROD demands. It also found that instead of actively restoring damaged habitat, G.E. planned to mainly let nature heal itself -- a dubious prospect. The memo declared that G.E.'s tactical deviations from the E.P.A.'s goals could further delay the long-stalled project and perhaps cause its ultimate failure. Riverkeeper and other advocacy groups vigorously seconded the memo's conclusions, while suggesting darkly that by not making the memo public, the E.P.A. was meekly conspiring to keep problems out of sight as it abetted a powerful corporate polluter's attempts to flout the law. ''What does this | A Troubling Memo |
1722215_0 | JOHN YANG doesn't make a searing physical impression. Dressed in a button-down flannel shirt and khaki pants, his glasses dangling on a string around his neck, he looks more like a New England professor than an intrepid New York photographer. If you spotted him pointing his Leica at the carved faces on the facades of Manhattan's tenements and row houses, you probably wouldn't break your stride. And while he majored in philosophy half a century ago at Harvard, he insists that the big thoughts should be left to great thinkers. But clearly Mr. Yang has a few of his own. To him, the evocative heads and decorative pediments he spent three years recording on the streets of Manhattan speak volumes about a turbulent era in the city's history. His mission is less to save them than to capture them, in all their eerie eccentricity. ''It wasn't because I wanted to document these things before they all disappeared, or anything like that,'' Mr. Yang, 72, said during a recent rainy-day interview at his studio in a brownstone in Midtown Manhattan. ''It had to do with the wonderful things they were -- and in some ways they were so wonderful because they were ephemeral.'' ''You can make your comments about preservation, change, time, memory, who the craftsmen were, who made these -- immigrants from Northern Europe and the British Isles at the turn of the century in New York,'' he said. ''And then you can talk about the portraits themselves -- the expressiveness of the portraits -- and to me, this was primary, this is why I took them.'' The photographs, shot between 1990 and 1993, are now having their first formal exhibition, a show at Urban Center Galleries titled ''Over the Door: Stone Faces From a Disquieting Age,'' organized by Mr. Yang and the Municipal Art Society, which oversees the gallery. The exhibition dovetails with the society's walking tours around the city, which focus on architectural details. But Elizabeth Werbe, the society's coordinator of programs and exhibitions, said she viewed the photographs as more than mere illustrations. ''These really are portraits,'' she said. ''Whether they're mythological characters or animals or cherubs, they all seem to have a lot of personality.'' It was that sense of human emotion -- suspicion, hostility, humor, stoicism -- that led Mr. Yang to spend three years documenting those ornaments. (Until 1990 he had mainly photographed panoramic | In Search of the Venus of 37th and Madison |
1722166_1 | those ships to determine whether any changes are necessary,'' said Julie Benson, a spokeswoman for both lines. And Dan Grausz, senior vice president for fleet operations of the Holland America Line said, ''We are looking into the specifics of that attack and assessing whether our procedures need to be revised.'' According to the International Maritime Bureau of the International Chamber of Commerce in London, www.icc-ccs.org, attacks on cruise ships are rare. Almost all similar attacks have involved cargo vessels. In the first nine months of this year, 61 pirate attacks or attempts occurred in Indonesia, 14 in Nigeria, and 10 and 7 in the Malacca and Singapore Straits, respectively. A rise in Somalia incidents in recent weeks has brought the number of attacks there to over 30 since March 15. There have been a smattering of robbery and piracy incidents on yachts in Jamaica (7) and Haiti (2), and one in the Dominican Republic. Maritime security experts say cruise ships do not make good targets because they carry too many people and are not easy to board. ''Not only do pirates prefer a ship with very few people to control, they also prefer a ship with very easy access from a small boat to a ship's deck,'' according to Kim E. Petersen, president of SeaSecure, a maritime security company in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. Cruise ships typically have very high freeboards, the distance from the water to the first open deck. Yet Mr. Petersen cautioned that high-profile vessels are ideal terrorism marks, and that the Seabourn incident may have been terrorism rather than piracy. ''The larger the ship, the bigger the target,'' he said. ''Smaller boats may be faster and more nimble and could have the means to escape a potential attack.'' Jeroen Meijer, a maritime security expert in Amsterdam with Control Risks Group, a business risk consulting firm used by several cruise lines, said that rather than looking at the ship's size, passengers should look at its itinerary. ''I would look at what ports the cruise is going to visit and what are the risks of walking into town,'' he said. ''That is more relevant than the piracy issue.'' He listed the Straits of Malacca; the region between Indonesia and Singapore; and the coasts of Bangladesh and Somalia as the areas of highest risk. The Travel Warnings listing on the State Department site, www.travel.state.gov, lists regional risks on land, while | After Attack, Cruise Ships Rethink Security |
1727224_7 | . We will have the dead at our councils.'' Stark declines to acknowledge the debt Christians owe their Islamic, Jewish, Greek, Roman, Hindu, Buddhist, Confucian and Taoist fathers. He fails to count all the ballots of the dead and does not really care to: in his eyes, the future not only belonged to Christianity --Christianity basically created the future. In the early years of the faith, he writes, ''the church fathers taught that reason was the supreme gift from God and the means to progressively increase their understanding of Scripture and revelation. Consequently, Christianity was oriented to the future, while the other major religions asserted the superiority of the past.'' Yet Christianity has never had a monopoly on rational theology or on a concern for the future. Greece and Rome came first, and without the classical principle of ''noncontradiction'' -- the idea that a faith could assert, for example, that ''Jesus is Lord'' and no one else is -- it would have been much more difficult, if not impossible, for Christianity to express its faith in doctrine. Judaism and Islam, meanwhile, have long histories of approaching scripture allegorically and critically. Stark quotes the Koran as evidence of Islam's supposed innate emphasis on fundamentalism: the text, the verse says, is ''the Scripture whereof there is no doubt.'' Many Christians, though, have taken the words of II Timothy -- ''all Scripture is inspired by God'' -- to mean that the Bible is inerrant. The fact that Jesus himself spoke so often in parables signals the nature and richness of the Jewish approach to theology and philosophy. Philo of Alexandria, a Hellenistic Jew, was a seminal interpreter of Scripture and tradition. His application of classical thought, logical rigor and literary criticism to Jewish texts foreshadowed and shaped the rationality Stark attributes to Christian thinkers. (Philo is not mentioned in the book.) Talmudic and Rabbinic Judaism are built on argument and reflection. Maimonides, who flourished under Islamic rulers, argued that the discoveries of science and philosophy could not be incompatible with the truths ordained by God (Maimonides is not mentioned either). In Islam, every verse of the Koran, meanwhile, is an ''ayah,'' or a ''sign,'' to ponder in order to recognize and understand the divine. One of the four basic ''roots'' in Islamic jurisprudence is reasoning. ''The Victory of Reason'' is more polemic than history, which is too bad, for Stark is on to | Tidings of Pride, Prayer and Pluralism |
1727387_0 | PHOTOGRAPHERS' JOURNAL | |
1727368_3 | an effect on children's health, why take it?'' The church that entered into the agreement with Nextel is a few hundred yards from the Meadow Pond Elementary School, and just down the road from Ms. Cassidy's home. Ms. Cassidy, a lawyer who has two children, one a Meadow Pond second grader, first named her group the Alliance of Residents Against the Church Cell Tower. But after its members learned that the school district is considering a Nextel proposal to lease space atop the lights at the John Jay High School football field for two cellphone towers, the group's name was changed to the Alliance for Radiation Free Schools. The school board may conduct a survey of parents before it decides on Nextel's proposal, said John Spang, the district's assistant superintendent of business. No matter. The next stop in the alliance's fight is town hall. ''When we go before the planning board,'' Ms. Cassidy said, ''we cannot base it on health effects, because in 1996 Congress took away the right of municipalities to stop cellphone towers on the basis of health effects. ''We will argue it based on the property values and the aesthetics and that there is no need for this. But the impetus behind all of us being in the room and putting our time and effort into fighting this is really the health effects.'' Legal Tanning Age Speaking of health effects, some Westchester teenagers will have to brave the early days at the beach with one less fashion accessory: a store-bought tan. This month, the County Legislature adopted a law that will prohibit children under 16 from using tanning beds and require 16- and 17-year-olds to have a note from a parent before they can use them. Martin Rogowsky, a Harrison Democrat, proposed the law in August after reading medical studies showing that tanning-bed use increases the risk of all types of skin cancer -- squamous cell, basal cell and malignant melanoma -- and that young people who use the artificial tanning lights run the greatest risk of skin damage. Young people ''are more susceptible to irreversible skin damage and are less likely to pay attention to the long-term health hazards of ultraviolet radiation,'' Mr. Rogowsky said in a written statement. ''Like what's done with cigarettes, this law is intended to put a roadblock up so that young people cannot frequently drop in at tanning salons.'' CROSS WESTCHESTER | A Massachusetts Moose, Munching Through Mahopac |
1727345_6 | planning group. He pointed to innovations that improved suburbs around Chicago and Portland, Ore., and in Florida. The Island still has ''a second chance to make things work,'' he said. Some newer suburbs have avoided the mistakes of the pioneers. On the outskirts of Washington, some counties have carefully coordinated housing and business development with a new commuter rail system. Long Island, meanwhile, is stuck with roads that Robert Moses designed to carry city residents to beaches and antiquated east-west railroad lines with large gaps in service. Even today, Levittown has no train station. Elsewhere, planners have fostered mini-communities where people can walk to work and shopping, forgoing cars and traffic. Such projects may now be coming to Long Island; the plan for the Heartland Town Square includes thousands of apartments, office buildings, stores and entertainment at the site of the old Pilgrim State Psychiatric Center in Brentwood. Older suburbs like Long Island face hurdles in fixing past mistakes. ''It's a midcourse correction,'' said Pearl Kamer, an economist for the Long Island Association, ''but the retrofit is very difficult.'' The predominance of two suburban icons, the single-family home and the private automobile, is at the root of housing and traffic problems, experts say. ''Old housing stock built around Ozzie and Harriet and the kids just doesn't do it anymore,'' said Robert D. Yaro, president of the nonprofit Regional Plan Association, which recommends policies for the New York City region. Census figures show that traditional couples with children under 18 now make up fewer than half of the Island's households. The rest are singles, couples without children and single parents. ''Our demography has changed dramatically since Levittown,'' Dr. Kamer said, ''but we have not kept pace in our mix of housing types.'' The transportation quandary, says Lisa Tyson, director of the Long Island Progressive Coalition, a liberal civic group, is that ''we've created a self-fulfilling prophecy that guarantees we'll be stuck in traffic.'' The lack of population density limits the ridership needed to pay for mass transit and to generate frequent service to make it convenient. Tired of Traffic Public attitudes, which for decades fended off tampering with the suburban way of life, are changing, some polls show. ''There's a general psychology shift for suburban residents,'' said James W. Hughes, dean of planning and public policy at Rutgers University. ''They're tired of development, tired about traffic and congestion'' and even are | Rethinking the Nation's First Suburb |
1727213_3 | had prepared him for this sort of battle, it was two ancient Greek philosophers. From Aristotle, Stockdale had learned that free will can exist within a state of imprisonment. From Epictetus, the influential Stoic, he had learned about our ability to shape experience by perception: as months of solitary confinement in leg irons and brutal beatings turned to years, Stockdale would remind himself that ''men are disturbed not by things but by the view that they take of them.'' Most of all, he became absorbed in his battles with his captors, whether that meant planting fake notes for guards to discover or gleefully ''tapping'' his tales of interrogation-room intransigence to his neighbors. Not long after he was finally released in early 1973, Stockdale said he had no intention of becoming a professional ex-P.O.W., yet his 2,714 days in captivity powerfully shaped the rest of his life. Stockdale drifted professionally -- not like the stereotypically disillusioned Vietnam vet, but in nevertheless unmistakable ways. He was given different peacetime commands, all of which felt like comedowns from his service in Vietnam, both as a commander and as an underground prison boss. ''In those jobs under life-and-death pressure, what I said, what I did, what I thought, really had an effect on the state of affairs of my world,'' he would later reflect. Stockdale retired from the Navy in 1979 to become president of the Citadel, a civilian military college in South Carolina, but quit a year later when the board blocked his efforts to rein in the school's out-of-control culture of hazing. (''When you've been tortured by professionals, you do not have to put up with amateurs,'' he told a friend, explaining his abrupt decision to resign.) Then came Stockdale's ill-fated foray into politics. His friend Ross Perot had assured him that he would be only a placeholder until he could find a suitable running mate for the 1992 presidential election -- a couple of weeks, Perot told him. Stockdale had spent longer blindfolded, naked on the floor, with an untreated broken leg in his cell in Vietnam. He figured he could get through this fine. He didn't. After delivering the unforgettable opening line in the vice presidential debate -- ''Who am I? Why am I here?'' -- Stockdale was reduced to a national laughingstock. Even then there was a whiff of tragedy, a sense that he deserved better, but he disappeared | The Lives They Lived; The Prisoner |
1725526_1 | won by Mike Sanderson, a New Zealander at the helm of ABN AMRO One, which arrived in Cape Town on Dec. 1. Sanderson and his crew of nine set a world record for a monohull, covering 546 miles in 24 hours. But it was hardly all smooth sailing. Sanderson said that in his e-mail messages, he often described their battles with the elements with the phrase, ''we've been firefighting all night.'' After the last time he wrote it, a nasty electrical fire broke out on board. The fire was extinguished, but he said he would be careful before using that phrase again. Such conditions make for tough sailing in any circumstances, but with a new class of boats, known as Volvo 70's, which, McDonald said, are ''more powerful, more complicated and more fragile'' than the previous Volvo 60's, ''it's really like learning a new set of rules.'' ''We had the 60's for 12 years,'' he said. ''You have to treat these new boats with a bit more respect; you can't push them around.'' The 70's feature 62 percent more sail area, said James Dadd, the Volvo's chief measurer. Bigger sails mean faster boats but less stability, so the 70's have added a canting keel, which can be positioned on the side opposite to the sail. ''It's basically like having four tons of guys hiking out on trapezes,'' said Dadd, who added that the new boats had the potential to reach speeds much greater than the previous class -- 32 to 35 knots, as opposed to 20 to 25. That is, when the keels are functioning properly. Pirates of the Caribbean, skippered by the American Paul Cayard, who won the round-the-world race then known as the Whitbread in 1998, said he was on the water only 16 hours before he realized the boat was not going to make it to Cape Town. A breakdown in the keel structure had threatened the watertight integrity of the boat. McDonald had a related problem on Day 18 -- what is known as a ''free Willy'' situation because of the keel's resemblance to a killer whale. It happened on a pitch-black night: a huge bang sent the crew scrambling to figure out what had happened, and as they responded, ''the boat simply heeled over out of control, practically capsizing!'' McDonnald wrote in an e-mail message. ''The keel wasn't going where we wanted it to go; | Rough Seas, Rough Sailing and a World of Challenges |
1725459_1 | from Bangladesh. Dipak Patel, Zambia's minister of commerce, trade and industry and the leader here of the coalition of least developed countries, said in an interview Friday night that discussions were focused on requiring each rich country to designate 90 to 95 percent of all categories of imports as free from tariffs and quotas for shipments from the poorest countries. By comparison, the United States currently exempts imports from the poorest countries from tariffs and quotas in 83 percent of its more than 2,000 import categories. Japan exempts them for 87 percent of its import categories and the European Union exempts them from tariffs or quotas for all categories except sugar, bananas, rice and arms. But poor countries complain that many categories currently free from restrictions involve goods they do not produce, like jet aircraft. Mr. Patel said that the least developed countries wanted more, notably a fixed date by which rich countries would move to allow duty-free, quota-free imports in 100 percent of their categories. Rich countries have only been willing to set this as an eventual goal. The European Union also found itself beleaguered on Friday: criticized for not going far enough to liberalize agriculture and for going too far in pushing poor countries to let multinationals into their markets for services. ''The emerging direction of the meeting is worrying,'' said Peter Mandelson, the E.U.'s trade commissioner, who fretted that ministers were ''going backwards'' in focusing on a limited deal here instead of pursuing a more ambitious agenda. Nonetheless, Pascal Lamy, the director general of the W.T.O., is coordinating efforts to reach the four-part deal. He has even been given the task by ministers of submitting draft language linking tariffs on manufactured and agricultural goods, and separate draft language setting a date, most likely 2010, for an elimination of agricultural export subsidies. But achieving even this limited deal here could be difficult. Vested interests remain opposed to a deal on each of the pending issues. W.T.O. rules also give each member country and customs territory a veto that could bring proceedings to a halt. Various countries have threatened to use their veto to support their objections to everything from American cotton subsidies and European sugar policies to banana exports from Central America. A particularly acrimonious dispute has broken out over the extent to which countries should be required to let foreign competitors into their markets for services like | Trade Officials Haggle on Issues From Lower Tariffs to Cotton Subsidies |
1728053_7 | of a class of bacteria that already exists in the digestive systems of most healthy people. The company has sponsored four studies showing that among people who are irregular, consumption of one four-ounce container of Activia yogurt a day leads to as much as a 40 percent reduction in the amount of time it takes food to exit the digestive system. People with constipation or other digestive maladies may have a shortage of beneficial bacteria as a result of improper diet or heavy use of antibiotics, which tend to kill good bacteria along with the bad. ''We are saying that, after two weeks, Activia naturally regulates your digestive system,'' said Andreas Ostermayer, Dannon's senior vice president for marketing. Scientists say that healthy bacteria, or probiotics, can be effective in helping to alleviate minor intestinal disorders, but certainly are not a cure-all remedy and may not work for everyone. The yogurt is already a blockbuster product for Groupe Danone in Europe and Asia. The company says sales of the product, which was introduced in France in 1997, have grown by 24 percent a year from 2000 to 2004 and it is now its fastest-growing product, representing 4.1 percent of Groupe Danone's 2004 sales of $16.2 billion. Mr. Ostermayer said that Dannon waited to release the product in the United States until the company had done extensive testing and believed it could get the marketing right. The company spent the last two years doing consumer tests and going to medical conferences to educate doctors about the benefits of probiotic bacteria. The Elations Company is also trying to foster a greater awareness among doctors of its particular ingredients. The company is promoting the findings of a recent arthritis study that was done independently and without involvement from the company. The study, funded by the National Institutes of Health, the government's main vehicle for conducting medical research, showed that glucosamine and chondroitin were effective in treating pain associated with osteoarthritis of the knee. Mr. Hartman, the Seattle consultant, said that while functional foods had always been a great idea, the category is an enigma. ''It hasn't been nearly as successful as people thought it would be,'' he said. But Mr. Hartman added that if a manufacturer could crack the code, getting the product and the marketing right, the opportunity to appeal to the millions of Americans looking to food for health solutions was ''huge.'' | Eating Your Way to Health; Companies Are Marketing Fortified Foods to the Drug-Wary |
1721877_1 | a serious criminal matter and that's the way we're treating it." Beginning about 9:50 a.m. on Friday, five calls were received in various locations from a caller who said bombs had been placed in courthouses and judicial buildings across the state, Mr. Boyle said. He would not say whether there was one or more callers or who received the calls, although at least one call was made to the office of Gov. M. Jodi Rell. ''I don't know the exact wording but there was some kind of reference to judicial buildings,'' said Judd Everhart, a spokesman for Governor Rell. A federal official in Washington said investigators believe one person called six courthouses and the governor's office making a ''nondescript'' threat that bombs would go off at 2 p.m. The calls were received at courthouses in New London, Danielson, Danbury, Middletown, Manchester and New Britain, said the official, who is involved with anti-terrorist efforts and asked not to be identified because Connecticut officials were leading the investigation. Mr. Boyle said that the threats were not confined to specific courthouses. ''That's what required a sweep of all the courthouses in the state,'' he said. The state's judicial branch made the decision to evacuate its 45 court facilities, Mr. Boyle said. Investigators and dogs also searched federal courthouses in Bridgeport, Hartford and New Haven, but those buildings remained open. ''There's no threat to federal courts that we are aware of,'' said John F. Bardelli, the United States marshal for the district of Connecticut. ''We just took precautionary steps.'' A bomb threat also prompted the evacuation on Friday of a Continental Airlines flight that had just left the gate at Newark Liberty International Airport, en route to Pittsburgh, representatives of Continental and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey said. Flight 2499, with about 20 passengers aboard, had left the gate around 12:30 p.m. when a flight attendant detected a threat, said Martin DeLeon, a Continental spokesman. Another person who had been briefed on the plane episode said a threatening message was found on a bathroom mirror. Federal agents searched the plane for about an hour and interviewed the passengers before allowing them to retrieve their luggage. No devices were found but the flight was canceled and the travelers had to make other arrangements. Mr. Boyle said he did not believe that the threats in Connecticut and at the airport were connected. | Bomb Threats Force Closing Of Courts In Connecticut |
1721932_0 | To the Editor: Re ''Significant Changes in Air Passenger Screening Lie Ahead'' (news article, Dec. 1): It is silly to go back to allowing small scissors and other similar sharp objects in carry-on luggage. After all, people are traveling only for a few hours. Arts and crafts projects and minor repair jobs can wait until they get to their destinations. James McCullough Girona, Spain, Dec. 1, 2005 | Sharp Objects Permitted? |
1721509_1 | illegal even to advocate needle exchanges. The price of this shortsightedness will be AIDS epidemics that spread into the general population. Unaids reports that a small handful of places are making some progress. Zimbabwe, despite all its problems, is seeing a lower rate of AIDS in pregnant women: from 26 percent in 2003 down to 21 percent in 2004, apparently in large part because of the increased use of condoms. Kenya and Burkina Faso have also apparently reduced the prevalence of the disease. And in Caribbean countries, the area with the second-worse AIDS problem, after Africa, the AIDS prevalence is stable or dropping. It's heartening to see that work with community groups, the promotion of consistent condom use and less risky sexual behavior, and the expansion of testing can make a difference. Yet bright spots are few. The world has finally increased AIDS spending, much of it too recent to be reflected in the report's data. But the increases are not keeping up with the disease, and funds aren't being spent effectively. A new study of programs in six key countries reports that efforts to save lives are undermined by bureaucratic infighting, government indifference, a lack of training and corruption. The World Health Organization set a goal of having three million people outside rich nations on treatment by the end of this year. The world will fall about two million short. Even cheap and easy programs to prevent mother-to-child transmission reach only a small percentage of those who need them. Despite the lags, AIDS treatment will reach more and more people -- many countries are just now getting started. But their success depends on the largess of wealthy nations. The leaders of rich countries who met in Scotland over the summer pledged that by 2010, everyone in the world needing AIDS treatment would get it. But at current financing levels, that goal is doomed. The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, which is carrying out most of these programs (President Bush's program focuses on only 15 countries), is running so short of money that its officials don't know whether it will start a new round of grants in 2006. The United States, which has consistently pledged to contribute a third of the Global Fund's budget, is not doing so. Mr. Bush has asked Congress for far less than he has promised. Congress has added money, but is now | The State of AIDS |
1721467_0 | Scientists say they have measured a significant slowing in the Atlantic currents that carry warm water toward Northern Europe. If the trend persists, they say, the weather there could cool considerably in coming decades. Some climate experts have said the potential cooling of Europe was paradoxically consistent with global warming caused by the accumulation of heat-trapping ''greenhouse'' emissions. But several experts said it was premature to conclude that the new measurements, to be described today in the journal Nature, meant that such a change was already under way. The currents, branching off from the Gulf Stream, are part of an oceanic system that disperses tropical heat toward the poles and makes Northern Europe far warmer than its latitude would suggest. Warming, in theory, could stall the salty, sun-heated, north-flowing currents by causing fresh water to build up in high-latitude seas as ice melts and more precipitation falls. The scientists, from the National Oceanography Center in Britain, measured sea temperature, currents and other conditions across the Atlantic from the Bahamas to Africa last year and found a 30 percent drop in the flow of warming waters since a similar set of measurements were taken in 1957. The team, led by Harry L. Bryden, wrote that even though they had measurements from only 5 years out of the past 50, the pattern of change seen at various depths supported the idea that the shift was a significant trend and not random variability. They also cited independent measurements of a long-term decline in the flow of water between some Arctic seas and the North Atlantic as evidence that a slowing of the overall Atlantic circulation was under way. In an accompanying commentary in Nature, Detlef Quadfasel of the University of Hamburg, who was not involved with the British study, said it provided ''worrying support for computer models that predict just such an effect in a world made warmer by greenhouse-gas emissions.'' Other scientists were more cautious. Gavin A. Schmidt, a climate modeler at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration Goddard Institute for Space Studies, said that the estimated decline in ocean circulation should have produced a perceptible decline in surface temperatures, but that no such dip had yet been measured. Robert Dickson, of the British Center for Environment, Fisheries and Aquaculture Science, said that given the complexity and variability of the seas, much more data was needed to determine whether a slowdown was | Scientists Say Slower Atlantic Currents Could Mean a Colder Europe |
1721502_0 | The Transportation Security Administration is making some of the most significant changes in the screening of airline passengers since procedures were revamped after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. The changes include a new type of random search, a revision of the pat-down process and the end of a ban on small scissors and certain other sharp tools in carry-on luggage. The goal of the changes, which will be announced Friday and go into effect on Dec. 20, is to try to disrupt the now-familiar routine associated with security screening, a routine that federal officials fear would-be terrorists may have studied to figure out ways to circumvent it. ''We don't want the predictability of the system to be used against us,'' said Yolanda L. Clark, a security agency spokeswoman. ''So we are introducing an element of randomness that makes it more difficult to manipulate.'' Ms. Clark and other officials from the Department of Homeland Security declined to discuss the changes, saying they would be unveiled in a speech by Kip Hawley, the assistant secretary for homeland security who oversees the security agency. A five-page summary of the new policies was obtained Wednesday by The New York Times. The summary document says the elimination of the ban on metal scissors with a blade of four inches or less and tools of seven inches or less -- including screwdrivers, wrenches and pliers -- is intended to give airport screeners more time to do new types of random searches. Passengers are now typically subject to a more intensive, so-called secondary search only if their names match a listing of suspected terrorists or because of anomalies like a last-minute ticket purchase or a one-way trip with no baggage. The new strategy, which has been tested in Pittsburgh, Indianapolis and Orange County, Calif., will mean that a certain number of passengers, even if they are not identified by these computerized checks, will be pulled aside and subject to an added search lasting about two minutes. Officials said passengers would be selected randomly, without regard to ethnicity or nationality. What happens next will vary. One day at a certain airport, carry-on bags might be physically searched. On the same day at a different airport, those subject to the random search might have their shoes screened for explosives or be checked with a hand-held metal detector. ''By design, a traveler will not experience the same search every time | Significant Changes in Air Passenger Screening Lie Ahead |
1725647_0 | To address problems brought to light by the SARS outbreak in 2003, federal health officials have proposed regulations that would make it easier to contact travelers exposed to infectious diseases. The changes, proposed Nov. 30 by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, would require airlines and cruise lines to ask passengers for more detailed contact information and retain it for 60 days. It could then be transmitted electronically to the C.D.C. within 12 hours of a request. ''There isn't really one place where air carriers or ship lines record all the information that would be necessary to contact a passenger in the case of a public health event,'' said Ram Koppaka, associate director for policy and preparedness at the center's Division of Global Migration and Quarantine. During the SARS outbreak, the agency found that flight manifests were not retained long enough to figure out who was seated next to someone who later became ill. Then these records were often submitted to the C.D.C. separate from passenger contact information. The government is soliciting public comment on its proposal. An organization that plans to provide feedback is the Air Transport Association, an airline trade group. The C.D.C. estimates that its new rules could cost the airlines more than $100 million a year. The proposal is at www.cdc.gov under Quarantine in the A-Z Index. SUSAN STELLIN ADVISORY: TRAVEL NOTES | Finding Travelers Exposed to Disease |
1725970_0 | To the Editor: Hauling trash to distant dumps is an important topic (''A Long, Long Haul From the Curb,'' Dec. 4). The research of our civic organization, Citizens for a Livable Environment and Recycling, suggests that we are better off looking at trash from the perspective of recycling. Much trash now hauled away could be recycled. Special sorting centers would separate mixed items for recycling (similar to the postal service and freight companies). Recycling can handle some two-thirds of our regular trash. (Other items require special handling, such as discarded automobiles, obsolete computers and solvents.) Virtually all trash accepted for incineration could be recycled and composted with indoor systems, as we discovered in industrial documents and governmental reports. Recycling disposal is cost-efficient compared with other methods. Moreover, trucks travel shorter distances to recyclers or sorting centers. And recycling responds to the popular desire to conserve. Gordon Gibson Huntington The writer is executive director, Citizens for a Livable Environment and Recycling. | Recycle Trash, Don't Incinerate It |
1724499_0 | Six animal rights activists were arrested on Saturday, the last day of New Jersey's black bear hunting season, according to state environmental officials. The arrests occurred during a protest at Wawayanda State Park in Vernon after protestors left a confined area established by the police, said Martin McHugh, director of the state's Department of Environmental Protection Division of Fish and Wildlife. The officials said 297 bears were killed during the six-day hunt. John Holl (NYT) | Metro Briefing | New Jersey: Vernon: Six Arrested At End Of Bear Hunt |
1724495_2 | gave inaccurate information to higher authorities before getting approval, however, security forces would generally be expected to close ranks and defend one of their own leaders rather than accept responsibility for mistaken killings. It would be especially notable if the detained commander worked for the People's Armed Police, which was reported by villagers to have deployed troops in the area. Civilian government officials generally have no power to detain or bring charges against military officers. In many such cases, President Hu Jintao, who has the top civilian, military and Communist Party titles, might be expected to be consulted before conflicts between civilian and military officials could be resolved. Since the large-scale killings to put down a democracy movement in Beijing in 1989, Chinese authorities have invested heavily in training and equipping riot police to suppress protests without the use of lethal force. Since that time, shootings of unarmed demonstrators have been unusual. China had 74,000 mass incidents of unrest in 2004, according an a police tally. While some of them resulted in deaths and a few led to local declarations of martial law, very few involved police or paramilitary troops opening fire on civilians. The Dongzhou incident involved sustained protests over the construction of a large power plant, which appeared to have coal-fired and wind-driven turbines. Some residents had complained about the amount of money they received for ceding their land to the government for the plant, while others said a reclamation project connected with the wind turbines would hurt fishing the area. Government officials issued no statements about the shootings until four days after they occurred, leaving villagers to provide their own accounts to Hong Kong and Western media. Local villagers still maintain that a number of people remain missing or unaccounted for, but it is possible the authorities arrested people for participating in the protest. Several Guangzhou newspapers have had reports about the matter, but national newspapers and Web sites have not even carried the New China News Agency report, suggesting extreme sensitivity on how people will react to the shootings. Murray Scot Tanner, an expert on China's security forces at the Rand Corporation, said Monday that the detention of a commander could signal fears that Chinese press reports about the incident may not be treated as credible. He said the authorities are highly reluctant to assign blame to police or paramilitary troops and almost never do so. | MILITARY OFFICER TIED TO KILLINGS IS HELD BY CHINA |
1724387_1 | Latin America and Africa, industry groups in textile-producing states and their political allies in Congress oppose the elimination of duties on garments from Bangladesh, a poor nation that is one of the world's largest exporters of clothing. Industry groups and some Southern politicians also oppose deep cuts in cotton subsidies that help American farmers compete with producers in the poorest sub-Saharan countries, like Mali and Chad, though some limited cuts have been made. The United States did support an initial agreement this past Tuesday to allow poor nations greater access to generic drugs in health crises. But American officials have been calling for a stronger focus here on the W.T.O.'s longer-term goal of removing barriers to global farm trade, and not just discussions on trade with poor countries. The agriculture negotiations have stalled, largely because of a reluctance by the European Union to accept steep cuts in domestic subsidies. Trade officials met in Geneva in November, but failed to broker a deal on subsidies ahead of the Hong Kong meeting. Those talks ended with a warning that failing to move ahead on agriculture risked jeopardizing the progress made in other trade discussions since July 2004. The White House trade representative, Rob Portman, said on Friday that ''Hong Kong will not be a time for us to make some major breakthroughs that the United States had hoped for, but we do hope that we can make incremental progress and establish building blocks that would go toward even more progress early in the new year.'' He added that the United States was moving to address West African concerns about cotton subsidies, and that the United States expected some form of duty-free, quota-free access to be agreed upon for many goods from the poorest countries. The European Union began allowing duty-free, quota-free imports in 2001 for most goods from these nations, and is now offering to eliminate its remaining barriers by 2009 on the imports of bananas, sugar and rice. Japan is also offering a broad elimination of quotas and duties on imports from these countries, although it is seeking exemptions for rice and shoe imports. Depending on what definition or threshold is used for the world's poorest countries, 32 to 49 such countries could benefit. The Group of 7 leading industrial nations, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund are all preparing plans to provide extra aid to help these countries' | Trade Talks Now Expected to Focus on Exports of Poorest Nations |
1726311_1 | without actually agreeing on any services. But the declaration does require the elimination of industrial nations' tariffs and quotas on almost all exports from the world's poorest countries and does resolve disputes over cotton and other issues among developing countries that had led to the collapse of talks at the last W.T.O. conference two years ago in Cancún, Mexico. The lengthy document produced here showed significantly more progress than anyone had expected when ministers from the 149 nations and customs territories in the W.T.O. convened here last Tuesday. It also allowed the ministers to avoid another collapse of talks. What changed in the 30 hours over the weekend was the weaving of a series of deals -- all night, in marathon talks. The European Union, faced with blame for a collapse in negotiations, changed course and put forward a crucial proposal on agriculture. India, a champion of the developing world since the days of Mohandas K. Gandhi and now a computer programming power as well, played an important intermediary role in persuading poor countries to accept portions of the agreement calling for freer trade in services like telecommunications and banking. And Venezuela, forced to decide whether it would bring the negotiations to a dead halt over its objections to the provisions on services, backed down at the last moment and allowed the Hong Kong Declaration to be approved by consensus. ''Real progress was made,'' said a cheerful Susan Schwab, a deputy United States trade representative, on Sunday night as the ministers prepared to give final approval. Just a day earlier, Ms. Schwab was decidedly unhappy about the state of the conference. Talks with the European Union were going nowhere and acrimonious disputes were developing that pitted rich countries, especially the United States and the Europeans, against poor countries, many of them in the Southern Hemisphere. ''There are a range of points where this could go off the rails,'' Ms. Schwab said over lunch. ''The obvious dynamic everyone is worried about is this turning into another Cancún, with a North-South dispute.'' The most contentious issue was an effort by a group of developing countries to restrict negotiations on the opening of international competition in services. Beginning Thursday evening, a coalition led by South Africa, Kenya, Jamaica, Venezuela and Cuba had been demanding changes in a proposed text to make it easier for countries essentially to opt out of the talks on | Orthodoxies On Trade Worn Down In Marathon |
1727802_2 | Some scientists argue that recycling is essential. At a recent Washington forum on nuclear waste and its possible uses, Phillip J. Finck, deputy associate director of the Argonne National Laboratory, an Energy Department complex, said that by 2010, long before Yucca Mountain can open (if, indeed, it ever does), the United States would have more than the 70,000 metric tons of fuel that will fit there. Moreover, Mr. Finck argued, without recycled fuel, the world will have to rely on finite reserves of uranium. At the forum, sponsored by the Foundation for Nuclear Studies of Washington, Ernest J. Moniz, a physics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a former under secretary of energy, said that if the world built enough reactors to provide energy without contributing to global warming, a new Yucca Mountain would be needed every three and a half years. But Professor Moniz and others expressed caution about reprocessing. Frank N. von Hippel, a physicist at Princeton, said that a new generation of reactors would cost tens of billions of dollars and that it would be a long time before it was clear that reprocessed fuel was needed. The fuel to be reprocessed would be too radioactive to move very far; hence the idea was that the reprocessing plant would be adjacent to the reactor. Ivan Oelrich, vice president of the Federation of American Scientists, said that building scores of new reactors, with a reprocessing plant adjacent, was unlikely, and that while opening Yucca would be hard, switching to this kind of reprocessing was ''trading one difficult political problem for an impossible problem.'' Still, concern over global warming and the increase in natural gas prices have given hope to nuclear advocates, who want new waste techniques as well as new reactors. The reprocessing strategy is subtle -- to extract more use out of used fuel and to reduce the heat created by waste that cannot be recycled and still has to be buried. The heat is not a problem in the first few decades, when a repository could be left open for ventilation. The harder time is the next 1,500 years, when heat would be given off by longer-lived radioactive materials, mostly a category called actinides, and also the isotopes that are created as those actinides go through radioactive decay. Heat, not volume or weight, determines the physical capacity of Yucca or any other underground repository, | Scientists Try to Resolve Nuclear Problem With an Old Technology Made New Again |
1727882_0 | Promising but With Problems As the world produces more of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide, scientists are looking for ways to get rid of it. The idea is to create a ''sink,'' a means of storing the gas that will sequester it from the atmosphere permanently. While there are many proposals of how to do this (including underground or ocean storage), perhaps the most promising sink is a natural one, a tree. The idea is simple: plant large expanses of fast-growing trees, which will take in carbon dioxide and, through photosynthesis, convert it into the tissues that make trunks, branches, leaves and roots. But trees also use a lot of water and nutrients. So while they may help solve one problem, they can create others, according to a study in the current issue of the journal Science. The research, by Robert B. Jackson of Duke University and colleagues, combined field data from existing tree plantations around the world and computer modeling to gauge the effect of plantations on stream flows and soil. The study also looked at whether plantations would have enough of an effect on climate to offset any water-related problems, by producing more rainfall, for example. The researchers found that by cutting runoff, plantations reduced stream flows within several years of planting, and that the reductions generally increased with time. Plantations that were 10 to 20 years old, for example, cut flows annually by more than half. In about 13 percent of cases, streams dried up completely for a year or more. Salinity and acidification of soils increased, as well. Trees also pump a lot of water vapor into the atmosphere. Modeling the effects of large-scale tree planting on climate revealed, however, that in most areas this would not result in more rain. In some cases, the researchers found, widespread tree plantations could actually result in less rainfall, making the stream-flow problem even worse. Valve Job All the water that trees use circulates through their tissues by means of strawlike cellular structures that serve as a plumbing system. The system is different depending upon the type of tree. Angiosperms, the flowering trees, have relatively long straws, while conifers have much shorter ones. In both cases, there are valvelike structures at the ends, where the straws meet. Since conifers have so many valves, it might be expected that water would encounter more resistance and circulate less efficiently in them. | OBSERVATORY |
1727910_4 | revenue for the government. It remains so. Freeport says that it provided Indonesia with $33 billion in direct and indirect benefits from 1992 to 2004, almost 2 percent of the country's gross domestic product. With gold prices hitting a 25-year high of $540 an ounce this month, the company estimates it will pay the government $1 billion this year. With Suharto's ouster in 1998, after 30 years of unchallenged power, Freeport's special place was left vulnerable. But its importance to Indonesia's treasury and its carefully cultivated cocoon of support have helped secure it against challenges from local people, environmental groups, and even the country's own Environment Ministry. Letters and other documents provided to The Times by government officials showed that the Environment Ministry repeatedly warned the company since 1997 that Freeport was breaching environmental laws. They also reveal the ministry's deep frustration. At one point last year, a ministry scientist wrote that the mine's production was so huge, and regulatory tools so weak, that it was like ''painting on clouds'' to persuade Freeport to comply with the ministry's requests to reduce environmental damage. That frustration stems from an operation that, by Freeport's own estimates, will generate an estimated six billion tons of waste before it is through -- more than twice as much earth as was excavated for the Panama Canal. Much of that waste has already been dumped in the mountains surrounding the mine or down a system of rivers that descends steeply onto the island's low-lying wetlands, close to Lorentz National Park, a pristine rain forest that has been granted special status by the United Nations. A multimillion-dollar 2002 study by an American consulting company, Parametrix, paid for by Freeport and its joint venture partner, Rio Tinto, and not previously made public, noted that the rivers upstream and the wetlands inundated with waste were now ''unsuitable for aquatic life.'' The report was made available to The Times by the Environment Ministry. Freeport says it strives to mitigate the environmental effect of its mine, while also maximizing the benefits to its shareholders. The Times made repeated requests to Freeport and to the Indonesian government to visit the mine and its surrounding area, which requires special permission for journalists. All were turned down. Freeport refused to make any official available for an interview and would respond to questions only in writing. A cover letter signed by its legal counsel, Stanley | Below a Mountain of Wealth, a River of Waste |
1727910_7 | military commanders in Papua saw Grasberg's increasing value as ripe for the plucking. To fortify itself, Freeport, working hand in hand with Indonesian military intelligence officers, began monitoring the e-mail messages and telephone conversations of its environmental opponents, said an employee who worked on the program and read the e-mail messages. The company also set up its own system to intercept e-mail messages, according to former and current employees, by establishing a bogus environmental group of its own, which asked people to register online with a password. As is often the case, many who registered used the same password for their own messages, which then allowed the company to tap in. Freeport's lawyers were nervous, a person who was at the company at the time said, but decided that nothing prohibited the company legally from reading e-mail messages abroad. Social tensions around the mine, meanwhile, were fast growing, as was Papua's population. Papua, mostly animist and Christian after long years of missionary work, is distinct in many ways from the rest of Indonesia, the world's largest Muslim country. Almost from Indonesia's independence, the province had rumblings of a separatist movement. Throughout Indonesia the military, a deeply nationalist institution, finances itself by setting up legal enterprises like shopping centers and hotels, or illicit ones, like logging. In Papua, the Grasberg mine became a chance for the military not only to profit but also to deepen its presence in a province where it had barely a toehold before Freeport arrived. For many years Freeport maintained its own security force, while the Indonesian military battled a weak, low-level insurgency. But slowly their security needs became entwined. ''Where Freeport really took it on the chin is the military who came in had no vehicles, and they would commandeer a Freeport bus or a Freeport driver,'' said the Rev. David B. Lowry, an Episcopalminister hired by Mr. Moffett to oversee social programs. ''We had no policies at that time.'' No investigation directly linked Freeport to human rights violations, but increasingly Papuans associated it with the abuses of Indonesian military units, in some cases using company facilities. An Australian anthropologist, Chris Ballard, who worked for Freeport, and Abigail Abrash, an American human rights campaigner, estimated that 160 people had been killed by the military between 1975 and 1997 in the mine area and its surroundings. Finally, in March 1996, long-simmering anger at the company erupted in | Below a Mountain of Wealth, a River of Waste |
1725013_3 | navigating,'' he said. ''The entire trip is downloaded in the first minute of a trip and is stored on your phone or BlackBerry as you're driving. If the G.P.S. goes offline, you will continue to be given guidance. It knows your last known location and speed.'' STMicroelectronics, the Italian-French semiconductor company, designs and makes motion-detection chips that provide similar predictive technologies to hand-held G.P.S. systems, including cellphones. Extras like these that are making G.P.S. easier to use, many retailers say, are speeding overall consumer adoption and acceptance. This holiday season, Radio Shack, with its 7,000 stores nationwide, is offering portable G.P.S. devices ranging in price from $100 to $1,000. Two years ago, Radio Shack was offering two models of G.P.S. devices, said Charles Hodges, a company spokesman. ''Today we have nine,'' he said. Among the offerings are versions of Magellan's RoadMate 760 ($1,000) and RoadMate 300 ($400). Both are designed strictly for use in cars and trucks, and each draws electrical power from a vehicle's cigarette lighter. But unlike earlier models of aftermarket automobile G.P.S. systems, they require no base station to be permanently installed in a car. Each system, no larger than a box of crackers, can be taken from vehicle to vehicle as simply as moving a video-game console from room to room. Magellan's navigation technology has been at the core of the NeverLost portable G.P.S. navigation systems used in many Hertz rental vehicles. At first blush the Magellan G.P.S. devices may appear intimidating, but once consumers start to use them, some retailers say, many report that they find them intuitive. ''We pride ourselves on how simple our systems are to use,'' said Angela Linsey-Jackson, a Magellan spokeswoman. Unlike most G.P.S.-enabled cellphones and personal organizers, the RoadMate 760 and 300 offer large touch screens and vastly greater memory to store detailed maps covering entire countries. The RoadMate devices can also store millions of programmed points of interest, including restaurants, gas stations and cash machines, Ms. Linsey-Jackson said. Similarly, another manufacturer, Mobile Crossing, offers hand-held devices that integrate G.P.S. abilities into Pocket PC personal organizers. Calvin Chu, a company spokesman, said cellphone screens tend to measure no more than two and a half inches. ''For most people, that's going to be tough to read a good amount of information,'' he said, ''especially when you are behind the wheel.'' The $750 WayPoint 200 National Edition from Mobile Crossing, for example, | Getting Around, Made Easier |
1725077_0 | The patent dispute between NTP and Research In Motion, maker of the BlackBerry, has become a marketing opportunity for its competitors in the wireless e-mail business. To that end on Wednesday, a wireless e-mail software provider, Visto, joined Good Technology and Nokia in licensing NTP's patents for reasons that appear to have as much to do with marketing as with law. ''We feel our technology is well covered by our intellectual property portfolio of patents,'' said Daniel Méndez, Visto's co-founder and senior vice president. ''But we took this step because we feel there is a lot of turbulence in the marketplace. Customers are confused by this situation. They don't want to have to worry about litigation.'' Research In Motion, which is based in Waterloo, Ontario, is exhausting its avenues for appeal in its defense against accusations that its software violates patents held by NTP, an intellectual property holding company based in Arlington, Va. While most analysts say a settlement will ultimately prevent a shutdown of BlackBerry service, several of Research In Motion's competitors say the dispute has prompted a noticeable increase in queries from potential customers, including many BlackBerry users. Danny Shader, the chief executive of Good Technology, which signed a license with NTP in March, noted the increase in inquiries but said it had not necessarily translated into sales. Seven Networks, another vendor of wireless e-mail software with more of a following among cost-sensitive consumers, has also seen increased interest from BlackBerry's woes. ''The litigation becomes more relevant when users are looking at the companies that are in play,'' said Jeff Damir, Seven's vice president of sales and business development. Seven has not taken a license from NTP, but its software uses a substantially different approach to wireless e-mail than other vendors'. Another wireless e-mail software maker, Intellisync, was acquired last month by Nokia. In an interview on Wednesday, Donald E. Stout, a co-founder of NTP, said Intellisync was now covered by Nokia's license. While NTP and its partners have not discussed the specific terms of the patent licenses, Mr. Stout has suggested that their value goes beyond just money. | BlackBerry Dispute Aids Rivals |
1725067_1 | are meant to avoid a repetition, but they have created new problems. The biggest difficulties involve plans by the United States, the European Union and Japan to eliminate duties and quota on almost all goods from up to 50 of the world's poor nations, 32 of which are W.T.O. members. Countries on this list complain that rich nations are excluding the few products in which they are most competitive -- the United States is leaving out textiles, for example. But the loudest complaints are coming from other developing countries that are just well off enough to escape the category of poorest countries, but still compete with these countries in many markets. The matter of bananas, for instance, dominated discussions here on Wednesday night. No Central American nation qualifies for the list of poorest countries. But their ministers said they fear competition some day from the poorest. Very poor countries like Angola grow few bananas now, but could start doing so if granted trade preferences, said Alicia Martin, Nicaragua's representative here. ''Multinationals could very easily go there,'' she warned early this week. Sugar-growing countries with incomes too high for special treatment are especially worried that they will lose markets to countries that do qualify for duty-free, quota-free access to markets in advanced economies, especially since sugar cane is a labor-intensive crop that may be appealing to nations with high unemployment. ''Any drastic tariff cut would squeeze us out of the market and leave us with nothing,'' said Kaliopate Tavola, Fiji's foreign minister and trade minister, while adding that he doubted that the W.T.O. would let this happen. The proposal for duty-free, quota-free treatment is so divisive among developing countries that even some negotiators from lands that qualify are saying that the plan must be broadened or scrapped. ''We do not want to segregate, or just ask for a few'' countries to benefit, said Love Mtesa, the ambassador to the W.T.O. of Zambia, a country that qualifies. Details of the aid packages being offered to poor nations are also a matter of dispute here. The United States trade representative, Rob Portman, announced on Wednesday that Washington planned to increase its annual aid to poor countries that may need help if new global trade rules are adopted. The Bush administration plans to seek an increase in assistance by 2010 to $2.7 billion, from $1.3 billion now. But other American officials said that they | Vows of New Aid to the Poor Leave the Poor Unimpressed |
1722848_4 | that both hunters and those who oppose them have the right to express their beliefs. But Mr. Rogalo said that bears have no rights. ''The United States Constitution says 'we the people, by the people, for the people,' '' said Mr. Rogalo, stopping behind frozen brush to load his gun and sip hot tea from a thermos. ''The animals aren't the people. They don't vote, they don't pay taxes and they don't have any legal rights in this country.'' But they do have support. Lynda Smith of the Bear Education and Resource Group, along with the New Jersey Animal Rights Alliance, were unsuccessful in their 11th-hour bid to block the hunt in the New Jersey Supreme Court last Friday. The groups contended that the state's comprehensive black bear management plan was not scientifically sound. They also argued that the state has not done enough to educate the public on avoiding bears and to implement a program to distribute bear-proof garbage cans. ''This is not about bears, this is about garbage,'' Ms. Smith said. ''Until we get our garbage under control there will continue to be a rise in nuisance complaints with or without bear hunts.'' From Jan. 1 to Nov. 1, there were 28 reports of bears breaking into homes and another 20 attempts, compared with 8 in 2004, according to Environmental Protection records. There were an additional 1,093 damage and nuisance complaints filed during the same time period compared with 777 during the same time period. Ms. Smith said that volunteers would be going into the woods searching for wounded bears that had survived and managed to escape. She said the group hoped to catch the bears and nurse them back to health, but admitted that it would be a challenge. ''The snow will help as far as the tracks and blood trails,'' she said. ''But that also helps the hunters.'' It did not help Mr. Rogalo or Mr. MacMillan, who, along with other hunters that were unsuccessful on the first day of the hunt, will have until Saturday to earn his or her own prize. ''Since that first night I moved here from Randolph five years ago, bears have been knocking at my front door,'' said Mr. MacMillan, tugging at a hunting knife that dangled from his belt as he spoke. ''I know they are out there hiding in the caves, and I plan on getting them tomorrow.'' | Using Guns and Honey, Hunters Take Aim at New Jersey's Bear Population |
1722759_0 | THERE'S good news for flying seamstresses, electricians and plumbers. In a policy change, the Transportation Security Administration said Friday that as of Dec. 22, scissors with blades up to four inches long are O.K. in carry-on bags, as are screwdrivers, wrenches and pliers up to seven inches long. The news media have made much of this. Some flight attendants, it seems, are aghast that the lout in 22-C who just downed five screwdrivers at the airport bar and two off the cart might be harboring a real one in his pocket and hankering for trouble. But the more important news from the T.S.A. isn't about packing a sewing kit or a tool belt. Starting Dec. 22, frequent fliers, who have long learned how to sail through the checkpoints and avoid a secondary screening, are more likely to be randomly hauled aside for one of those dreaded perp pat-downs. The rationale, as explained by Kip Hawley, the head of the agency, is that potential terrorists know just as well as you and I do how to game the current system for assigning secondary searches -- and thus have an advantage based on its very predictability. Freeing screeners from focusing on relatively harmless scissors and small tools -- which he said account for about 25 percent of all objects confiscated at checkpoints -- allows more resources to be directed at real risks, especially villains hoping to sneak chemical explosives and detonators on board. Asked at his news conference about how the system will change, Mr. Hawley said, ''So the idea is to make it not predictable, but expand the number of people who are touched, without jamming up the lines too much.'' Now every smart frequent flier knows generally how to avoid being tagged for a secondary inspection. First, you take care not to set off the magnetometer with, say, coins carelessly left in a pocket or, in the case of women, by wearing an underwire bra. We all also know that buying a one-way ticket is a sure-fire way to be waved into the pat-down corral. Most passengers loathe the pat-downs, women especially. Last year, you might remember, there was a rebellion by a sizable number of female travelers claiming that they were being humiliated and even sexually groped at the checkpoints. In response, the T.S.A. cracked down on the more aggressive patters-down and complaints fell off. But under the new | Get Ready, Frequent Fliers, For the 'Random' Pat-Down |
1722745_0 | On a highway west of this capital, roadside signs advertise marmot, fox and other wildlife, and stacks of skins stand on display. In open markets, traders conduct a gritty commerce in furs and hides, much of it illegal. Similar markets flourish elsewhere in Mongolia, especially along the border with China. If the good news in Mongolia is the gradual comeback of the Przewalski wild horses, the disturbing news is the diminishing numbers of other wildlife, under relentless siege by overhunting and excessive trade in skins and other animal products. A new study of wildlife, one of the country's most distinctive resources, has revealed alarming declines in most species, especially in the last 15 years. By some estimates, the populations of endangered species -- marmots, argali sheep, antelope, red deer, bears, Asiatic wild asses -- have plummeted by 50 to 90 percent. The only other possible exception to the woeful trend, conservation experts say, is the apparent increase in wolves. That is hardly welcomed by herders. If the animals wolves prey on become scarce, these predators can be expected to become a greater menace to livestock, and there is reported evidence that this is already happening. ''The country is facing a quite extraordinary and unnoticed extinction crisis, or at least the threat of one,'' said Peter Zahler, assistant director for Asia at the Wildlife Conservation Society in New York. The conservation society, with financing from the World Bank, conducted the comprehensive study of Mongolia's wildlife and concluded, ''There is near unanimous agreement among hunters, traders and biologists in Mongolia that continued wildlife trade at the volumes reported is unsustainable.'' In August, biologists, international conservation specialists and Mongolian government officials met here to review the study's findings. Participants, the conservation society reported, cited numerous shortcomings in the laws and the management and enforcement practices that contribute to the problem. They also said that corruption existed ''at all management levels.'' Even though the Mongolian Constitution declares wildlife to be a common resource of the people, the society's investigators found that the government had made only feeble efforts to regulate trade and control hunting. A draft report of the study, ''The Silent Steppe: The Illegal Wildlife Trade Crisis in Mongolia,'' was circulated recently. It noted that the country's independence from the Soviet Union, in 1990, ''was the undoing of Mongolia's century-long effort to control wildlife trade.'' Once on its own, the country's ''economy halved, | In Mongolia, an 'Extinction Crisis' Looms |
1722730_3 | movement disorders like Parkinson's disease could have delayed reactions to traffic dangers. People with insulin-dependent diabetes can experience sudden drops in blood sugar, impairing consciousness and coordination. They may also suffer a loss of sensation in their feet that can interfere with applying proper pressure to the brake or gas pedal. Drugs for various health problems can cause daytime sleepiness. Drivers should heed any label that warns against driving. Perhaps most challenging of all are older drivers with problems caused by ministrokes or dementia. Those in the early stages of mental decline may recognize their impairment and adapt their driving accordingly, but as dementia progresses, denial and decreasing driving ability can result in disaster. Those with anything more than a slight cognitive impairment should be advised not to drive, according to an expert committee of the American Academy of Neurology. Improving Driving Safety Self-awareness is the key to driving safely in your later years. Note whether you feel overwhelmed by having to pay attention to signs, signals, road markings, pedestrians and other vehicles at intersections, or by having to drive at high speeds or in heavy traffic. Are you slow to notice cars coming out of driveways or side streets or when the vehicle in front of you slows down or stops suddenly? Avoid distractions while driving, like eating, talking on the phone, listening to recorded books, engaging in emotionally draining discussions and disciplining children or pets. Stop in a safe place to take care of disturbances in your vehicle. Adjust your driving by taking familiar routes, avoiding rush hours and night driving, keeping a safe distance (one car length for every 10 miles of speed) between you and the vehicle ahead, having a passenger serve as a second pair of eyes, making left turns where there are green-arrow signals (or making three right turns to go left) and looking as far down the road as possible to anticipate problems. When driving in unfamiliar territory, use a map to plan your route in advance and write out the itinerary. Don't try to read a map while driving; pull off the road to refresh your memory or make route changes. Make adjustments, too, in your vehicle. If you have physical limitations, choose a car with automatic transmission, power steering and power brakes. You may also benefit from a back or seat cushion or changes to the pedals. Your line of vision | For Aging Drivers, the Signs Sometimes Say 'Stop' |
1723322_2 | a spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security. ''He then appeared to be reaching into a carry-on bag, and the air marshals proceeded consistent with their training,'' Mr. Doyle said. ''Shots were fired as the team attempted to subdue the individual.'' Mr. Bauer said that members of the Miami-Dade Police Department's bomb squad detonated Mr. Alpizar's luggage on the tarmac and that it had contained no explosives. Dogs sniffed luggage that had been loaded onto the plane but found nothing. One passenger on the flight, Mary Gardner, told a local television station that Mr. Alpizar's wife had said he was bipolar and had not taken his medication. Ms. Gardner told WTVJ-TV in Miami that Mr. Alpizar had suddenly run down the aisle from the back of the plane toward first class and that his wife had followed. ''She ran after him, and all of a sudden there were four or five shots,'' Ms. Gardner said. She added that the police boarded the plane afterward and told the passengers to put their hands on their heads. Ms. Gardner also told WTVJ that just before the incident, Mr. Alpizar's wife had gotten a phone call and briefly left the plane acting ''frantic.'' Jamie Clifford, who was preparing to board a flight to San Francisco when the incident occurred near her departure gate, said the shooting sounded like ''a bunch of soda cans falling on the floor.'' The flight, which had originated in Medellín, Colombia, was canceled. The concourse, one of eight at Miami International, was shut down for about half an hour. The last of the passengers were allowed to leave the Miami airport about 11 p.m. An F.B.I. spokeswoman, Judy Orihuelah, said, ''Obviously we would have to go through all of the passengers and say, 'Did you see anything?' '' Ms. Orihuelah added that anyone who responded that they had seen something was interviewed more extensively. ''None of the other 113 passengers onboard were affected or were ever in any danger,'' American Airlines said in a statement. ''This was an isolated incident.'' While there were only about 30 federal air marshals at the time of the Sept. 11 attacks, their numbers grew sharply afterward under sweeping new antiterrorism measures. One air marshal hired after Sept. 11, who asked not to be named because he said marshals are forbidden to talk to reporters, said their rules for use of force were ''basically | Air Marshals Shoot and Kill Passenger in Bomb Threat |
1721722_1 | of toxic benzene compounds into a major river, forcing a cutoff of the water supply for nearly a week to a city of several million people, the world paid some overdue attention. People everywhere watched with sympathy as the people of Harbin, a rust-belt metropolis in China's frozen northeast, coped with the challenges of doing without toilets, showers, and cooking and drinking water last weekend. Foreign governments, global health experts and prospective international investors also looked on with keen interest, availing themselves of an unusual chance to see how well China's habitually secretive authorities handled a difficult and unexpected problem. If an avian flu epidemic ever occurs among humans, the world's ability to cope will depend, among other things, on how transparently and effectively Beijing responds to any outbreak within its borders. The initial verdict on the spill and its aftermath is mixed. After an inexcusable and potentially disastrous attempt by the authorities to conceal the nature of the water problem, the Chinese government and local Harbin officials recovered relatively quickly. They organized a well-disciplined response, including trucked-in emergency water supplies, that lessened the hardships of affected city residents. The government might not have recovered so quickly without a rare and very useful push from below. The official cover-up came undone after dead fish began appearing in the Songhua River, and local environmentalists and journalists began sounding alarms. Chinese citizens still have very little opportunity to operate independently of the government, and do so at their own great peril. This episode demonstrates the importance of expanding that independent space as China's economy surges ahead and its environment becomes increasingly stressed. China's packed cities are now among the world's most environmentally degraded, its rivers are among most polluted, and careless land use is expanding deserts and putting urban drinking supplies at grave risk. China has fairly strong antipollution laws, but corrupt local officials continue to accept bribes and look the other way when these rules are bent or openly flouted. Whether that happened at the Jilin plant of the China National Petroleum Corporation, where the initial explosion occurred, should be one of the questions asked by the official investigation that Prime Minister Wen Jiabao has now promised. An equally important question is why, for almost 10 days, China's government did not think the people of Harbin deserved to share its knowledge of the cancer-causing chemicals that were streaming their way. Editorial | China, Reflected in a Chemical Slick |
1728394_1 | -- to girls who are publicly and perhaps falsely accused of having lost their virginity -- emotionally searing. This month, their arguments persuaded South Africa's Parliament to ban some virginity testing, with violations punishable by up to 10 years in prison. The ban is an example of how sub-Saharan Africa is slowly, but inexorably, enshrining into law basic protections that have long been denied women. But it also hints at the frailty of the movement toward women's rights in the region. Not only is the new law a watered-down version of what was proposed, but few here believe it will curb a tradition so deeply embedded in Zulu and to a lesser extent Xhosa culture. ''We will uphold our traditions and customs,'' said Patekile Holomisa, president of the Congress of Traditional Leaders, a political party in South Africa. ''There are laws that passed that do not necessarily have any impact on the lives of people. I imagine this will be one of those.'' The story is similar in much of this region: measured by laws and political status, women are making solid, even extraordinary, gains toward equality. Women's equity commissions are widespread in sub-Saharan Africa's 48 nations. Women are now deputy heads of state in at least seven nations and a woman is president of one, Liberia. They hold one in six parliamentary seats, matching the worldwide average. Women's rights legislation has also been enacted. Swaziland's new constitution, adopted this year, makes women the legal equals of men, able to own property, sign contracts and obtain loans without the sponsorship of a man. Zimbabwe this year allowed women to inherit property from their husbands and fathers. Liberia passed a stiff statute against rape, and president-elect Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, the first woman in modern Africa to be elected a head of state, pledged to enforce it. Last month, a comprehensive protocol on women's rights, ratified by 15 African nations, took effect as part of the African human rights charter. Even so, African governments are typically much quicker to adopt international protocols than to pass domestic laws. And they are quicker to pass domestic laws than to enforce them, or to tamper with the unwritten rules -- the so-called living law of custom -- that govern much of rural Africa. In Guinea, for example, female genital cutting has been a crime since 1965, punishable by life in prison or death. But in 40 | Women's Rights Laws and African Custom Clash |
1728338_3 | Greek men of letters who lived abroad, some of which are displayed here. And the big bang of the French Revolution reverberated in Greek ears. What's more, although European governments were generally pro-Ottoman, the Greek cause found solid support among their citizens. A movement known as philhellenism gained momentum, which supported the thrust to liberation materially as well as philosophically. George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788-1824), the English Romantic poet, was among the more than 1,000 volunteers who arrived in Greece after the bloody war of independence began in 1821. Through his poetry and utterances, he had played a vigorous role in promoting Greek culture and was a severe critic of the removal of sculpture from the Acropolis by Lord Elgin, the British ambassador to the Ottoman Court, in 1806. A member of the Philhellenic London Committee, Byron was dispatched in 1823 to Missolonghi, known as the bastion of Greek freedom and then under siege by the Turks, to lend his services. His death there of a fever the next year further amplified European awareness of conditions in Greece. A full-length portrait of him in Greek dress, done in 1830 by an unknown artist, shows him standing before the ruins of the Acropolis. During the second Turkish siege of Missolonghi, from 1825 to 1826, the population, much reduced by disease and starvation, made a pitiful attempt at escape. Only a third of the soldiers and a handful of women and children achieved it. The aged, feeble and wounded left behind took refuge in the gunpowder magazines, which they lighted when the enemy approached. ''Missolonghi Fugitives'' (circa 1830), by the French romantic artist Jean Michel Mercier (1788-1874), shows a family of survivors on a fishing boat, fleeing the flaming city. Two younger men row, as a man with a musket stands in the boat's prow. A woman sitting in front of him holds a child on her lap while tending to a baby lying beside her. Representations like this of war-ravaged humanity played powerfully on the emotions of 19th-century viewers. The depredations of revolution are not apparent in a beguiling section of foreign artists' idyllic scenes. Among them is a lyrical ''View of the Plain of Marathon'' (1854) by the British watercolorist (and nonsense poet) Edward Lear. He lived on Corfu from 1847 to 1864 and did more than 3,000 paintings of Greece. This one depicts the vast stretch of the plain, | Under the Ottomans, Greece at Work |
1724142_1 | on the population of the colonized lands.'' The Gaullists, on the right, stood by the law. Lionel Lucas expressed outrage that a history book for high school seniors didn't mention a massacre of French colonists in Algeria in 1962. Michel Diefenbacher lamented the omission of a list of awful diseases French physicians had treated in the colonies. The effort to change the law was voted down, with outraged Socialists hooting, ''Negationism!'' But that wasn't the end of it. Last week, the hard-line interior minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, postponed a trip to the French West Indies, rather than face an expected protest of the vote. ''What is the point,'' he asked, ''in going to Martinique at a time when one cannot work?'' Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin then broke with his fellow Gaullists on the issue, saying in a radio interview: ''There is no official history in France.'' Finally, President Jacques Chirac -- also a Gaullist -- tried to cool tempers by announcing that a scholarly committee of inquiry would ''evaluate the actions of Parliament in the fields of memory and history'' and report back in three months. ''Like all nations, France has known greatness but also difficult times,'' the president declared in a statement. ''It is a legacy we must assume in its entirety.'' History, he added, ''is the key to a nation's cohesion, but it only takes a little for history to become an agent of division, for passions to inflame and the wounds of the past to reopen.'' His conclusion echoed the prime minister's: ''The law's job is not to write history. The writing of history is the task of historians.'' As all of that was unfolding, France was also trying to figure out what to make of the 200th anniversary of the epic battle of Austerlitz, in which, on Dec. 2, 1805, Napoleon defeated the armies of Austria and Russia at a Czech village now called Slavkov. The battle was arguably Napoleon's greatest victory. But the French are still at odds about whether the emperor was a genius who fathered the modern French state, or a militarist who led hundreds of thousands of French youths to senseless deaths. The British feel no such ambiguity about the 200th anniversary of Lord Horatio Nelson's thrashing of Napoleon's fleet at Trafalgar. Joyful and elaborate celebrations of that victory began last summer and are still going on. The French celebration of Austerlitz, | The French: Married to the Past, And Thinking of Divorce |
1724183_0 | The Amazon River basin, the world's largest rain forest, is grappling with a devastating drought that in some areas is the worst since record keeping began a century ago. It has evaporated whole lagoons and kindled forest fires, killed off fish and crops, stranded boats and the villagers who travel by them, brought disease and wreaked economic havoc. In mid-October, the governor of Amazonas State, Eduardo Braga, decreed a ''state of public calamity,'' which remains in effect as the drought's impact on the economy, public health and food and fuel supplies deepens. But other Brazilian states have also been severely affected, as have Amazon regions in neighboring countries like Peru, Bolivia and Colombia. With hundreds of riverside settlements cut off from the outside world, the Brazilian Armed Forces have for three months mounted what officials describe as the biggest relief operation that they and civil defense agencies have carried out together. Nearly 2,000 tons of food and 30 tons of medicine have already been airlifted by plane and helicopter to affected communities just in Amazonas State, the region's largest. ''There have been years before in which we've had a deficit of rainfall, but we've never experienced drops in the water levels of rivers like those we have seen in 2005,'' said Everaldo Souza, a meteorologist at the Amazon Protection System, a Brazilian government agency in Manaus, the nine-state region's main city. ''It has truly been without precedent, and it looks like it is only going to be December or January, if then, that things return to normal.'' Scientists say the drought is most likely a result of the same rise in water temperatures in the tropical Atlantic Ocean that unleashed Hurricane Katrina. They also worry that if global warming is involved, as some of them suspect, it may be the beginning of a new era of more severe and frequent droughts in the region that accounts for nearly a quarter of the world's fresh water. ''The Amazon is a kind of canary-in-a-coal-mine situation,'' said Daniel C. Nepstad, a senior scientist at the Woods Hole Research Center in Massachusetts and the Amazon Institute of Ecological Research in Belém. ''We have no idea of the game we have played into by running this worldwide experiment of pumping so much greenhouse gases into the atmosphere,'' Mr. Nepstad said. Even more than in other parts of the world, people who live in the world's | A Record Amazon Drought, and Fear of Wider Ills |
1724091_3 | advantage over another through greater education, there might be no overall economic benefit. Today, economists suspect that the truth is somewhere in the middle. Jonathan Temple, an economist at the University of Bristol in England, says the research trend is moving back toward the earlier findings. The latest attempts to quantify the impact of education on total economic growth have tended to conclude that it is at least as significant as that measured for individuals. Because indirect benefits can't be counted accurately, Professor Temple suspects an even bigger impact. Insofar as education enhances worker productivity, there is a clear benefit to the economy. Two Harvard economists, Lawrence F. Katz and Claudia Goldin, studied the effect of increases in educational attainment in the United States labor force from 1915 to 1999. They estimated that those gains directly resulted in at least 23 percent of the overall growth in productivity, or around 10 percent of growth in gross domestic product. The most important factor was the move to universal high school education from 1910 to 1940. It expanded the education of the work force far more rapidly than at any other time in the nation's history, creating economic benefits that extended well into the remainder of the century, according to Professors Katz and Goldin. That moved the United States ahead of other countries in education and laid the foundation for the expansion of higher education. Today, more Americans attend college than ever before, but the rest of the world is catching up. The once-large educational gap between the United States and other countries is closing -- making it increasingly important to understand what education is really worth to a nation. If economists are right, it is not just part of the cost of maintaining a functioning democracy, but a source of wealth creation for all. That means that investing in the education of every American is in everyone's self-interest. Still, we're a long way from being able to judge the right level of spending on education -- and how to achieve it. With a college degree more important than ever, the cost of higher education is rising steeply, creating growing stress for many American families. With more study, researchers may be able to identify ways of reducing costs while increasing the payoff from education. Taking our cue from Socrates, the first step may be to recognize what we don't know. ECONOMIC VIEW | What's the Return On Education? |
1723774_1 | times to the present. Succinct and cleanly written, it is hugely readable and, in its journey across the epochs of human experience, often moving. For Paleolithic man, it was the hunt, the horror and elation of a kill, the blessing of lifeblood spilled that organized belief and ritual. From about 8,000 B.C., following the successful establishment of agriculture, the earth and all toil and hazard associated with its cultivation became the organizing concern. Later urbanization placed the old gods at some remove from daily life, and historical personages (like Gilgamesh) and events encroached on the mythic domain once exclusive to primordial gods and heroes. The Axial Age, from around 800 to 200 B.C., so called because of its pivotal importance to human history, was the beginning of what we know today as religion: ''People became conscious of their nature, their situation and their limitations with unprecedented clarity,'' Armstrong writes, and new systems of thought, ethical and rational as much as spiritual -- Confucianism, Buddhism, Hinduism and Greek rationalism -- arose to address these new anxieties. Armstrong's exposition is streamlined and uncluttered without being simplistic. She falters once, when she speculates that today it is novelists who can partly fill the void left by myth. Reading a novel ''can be seen as a form of meditation,'' she writes. ''A powerful novel becomes part of the backdrop of our lives.'' Given her own evocative insistence elsewhere on the essential ritualistic, sacred nature of myth, this doesn't quite ring true, and one has to wonder if her conclusion was influenced by the fact that her book was specifically commissioned to introduce a series of short novels. Thus with much anticipation does one turn to the actual novels, the myths, these ''universal and timeless stories that reflect and shape our lives'' as the series' preface states. ''The Penelopiad'' by Margaret Atwood is inspired by the story of Penelope, the faithful wife of Odysseus, and particularly by the grisly denouement of Book 22 of the ''Odyssey'': Odysseus, returned to his kingdom in Ithaca, has slaughtered the parasitic suitors who trashed his home and courted his wife in his absence. Next, he commands his son to slay those of the palace handmaids who had been faithless to him by sleeping with the suitors. The young heir obeys his father, but decides an ''unclean'' death is warranted and instead of killing them with his sword, he hangs | Myths Made Modern |
1724099_4 | consider immediately replacing that holding with shares of the Healthcare Select Sector SPDR or the iShares Dow Jones U.S. Healthcare Sector Index fund -- both exchange-traded funds that track major health care indexes. By investing in a similar but not ''substantially identical'' investment, you avoid the I.R.S.'s wash-sale rule, which says investors cannot take advantage of realized losses if they go into the same investment within 30 days of selling. DON'T BUY AN IMMEDIATE TAX BILL -- If you're thinking of using a mutual fund to step back into the market after selling stocks at a loss, be careful. Every year in late November or December, mutual funds distribute to their shareholders the gains they realized by selling stocks that year. While getting money back immediately sounds good, it's not. You are putting, say, $1,000 into a fund in late December, only for that portfolio to give back $100 of your money -- along with a tax bill for that distribution. In recent years, distributions have been relatively small because stock funds have used losses realized during the bear market to offset gains. This year is likely to be different because ''a lot of funds families have used up those tax-loss carry-forwards,'' said Tom Roseen, senior research analyst at Lipper, the fund tracker. Be particularly careful this month of stepping into real estate funds, natural resources sector funds, domestic value portfolios, small-cap portfolios and emerging-markets stock funds. According to the fund tracker Morningstar, these categories have some of the highest potential capital gains exposure. Categories expected to have low distributions include technology sector funds and large-cap growth funds, many of which have had sizable tax-loss carry-forwards since the bear market. So-called tax-efficient funds, which manage money with taxes in mind, are also considered a relatively safe bet. But be sure to hold these investments outside a tax-advantaged account because they are already tax-efficient. MAKE CHARITABLE DONATIONS -- It may be an especially good time for contributions if you have appreciated stock that you want to sell. You can give the appreciated stock to a charity and claim the full market value at the time of the donation. The charity can then sell the stock without tax consequences. It's one of the few win-win options the I.R.S. provides to investors. So don't waste the opportunity. FUNDAMENTALLY Paul J. Lim is a financial writer at U.S. News & World Report. E-mail: fund@nytimes.com. | Giving Yourself A Tax Cut on Investments |
1723962_0 | To the Editor: I am the general counsel to Global Exchange, a human rights organization that, until the Bush administration's travel crackdown, led hundreds of ''reality tours'' to Cuba. Cuba makes it extremely easy for U.S. citizens to visit, and they are welcomed just as the rest of the world is. If the truth be told, it is people like the wealthy Cuban-American Bacardi liquor family, who have spent millions lobbying for the travel ban and embargo, who hold the key to Cuba, not Fidel. Tom Miller Oakland, Calif. | CUBA WITHOUT CASTRO |
1723780_2 | closer, the battle lines are not so sharp as they seem. Here, for instance, is one writer in all-too-familiar high dudgeon: modern art, he says, is ''decadent,'' ''narcissistic,'' ''meaningless,'' ''valueless.'' These are not the words of some primitive from the outer reaches of rural Alabama. They come from a New York critic at the red-hot center of the contemporary art scene -- Donald Kuspit, the editor of Art Criticism, a contributing editor of Artforum, a professor of art history and philosophy at the State University of New York, Stony Brook -- and they appear in his most recent book, appropriately entitled ''The End of Art.'' Kuspit begins that book by quoting a news article certain to delight anyone who has grown skeptical about what is called art these days: In 2001, a high-priced gallery in London exhibited a work by Damien Hirst consisting of discarded coffee cups, empty beer bottles, candy wrappers and other detritus. It was valued at six figures. But a cleaning man, not being an art connoisseur, tossed the whole thing out with the trash. ''The cleaning man,'' Kuspit comments, ''was clearly the right critic.'' The fact is that the severest opponents of contemporary art come not from outside the art world but from its very heart. And unlike the demagogic preachers and politicians, they know what they are talking about. It's not individual artists or works they object to. Art itself, they believe, has taken a wrong turn, gone off the rails. Since these critics -- along with Kuspit they include writers like Michael Fried, Harold Rosenberg and Hilton Kramer -- have been among the most prominent and influential in the postwar period, their complaints have to be taken seriously. During the 1960's and 70's, Michael Fried occupied a pivotal position in the debates roiling the art world. His essay, ''Art and Objecthood,'' reprinted in a collection of his writings under the same title, is required reading for anyone interested in contemporary aesthetic issues. For Fried, a formalist, a painting was first and last a painting; a piece of sculpture was a piece of sculpture. An artist succeeded insofar as he articulated the conventions and requirements of his particular medium. Fried championed artists like Frank Stella, the color-field painters Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland and Jules Olitski, and the sculptor Anthony Caro. ''Art and Objecthood,'' published in 1967, was Fried's declaration of discontent. A new school of | State of the Art |
1723780_24 | shower-curtain sheets against the dour, flint-gray winter skies, then walking some more, stopping again. ''The Gates'' was the opposite of spectacle. It wasn't one thing. It was each individual's particular accumulation of perspectives, a different work of art for every person who entered Central Park. Seen only in this way, ''The Gates'' could be interpreted as an isolating experience, much as Taylor-Wood's party was an isolating experience. But Christo and Jeanne-Claude aren't interested in alienation, as she is. Theirs was a public work, and its success inhered in its publicness. Everyone who experienced the multiplicities of ''The Gates'' on those chilly days was supremely aware that he was sharing the overall occasion simultaneously with thousands of others; the crowd was an essential part of the work's impact. People smiled. They interacted in a spirit of mutual pleasure. Christo and Jeanne-Claude had succeeded in creating a secular festival, a carnival. As in medieval carnivals, participants were invited to take a holiday from the getting-and-spending responsibilities of their daily lives. What was ''The Gates''? It was spontaneity, motiveless and undirected play, a vacation from the dull, rational grind of routine, an invitation to people to be exuberant, open, childlike, naïve, sweet. Sweet New Yorkers! Countless photographs have tried to convey the feeling of ''The Gates,'' but they provide only static visuals, frozen (if eye-catching) moments in the flow of what was a kind of communal ecstasy. Modern technology does not help us here. But there is at least one way, an old-fashioned way, to capture the spirit of ''The Gates.'' And that is to contemplate the playful, frolicking peasants who romp across the canvases of Bruegel. Many New Yorkers dismissed ''The Gates,'' or did not take pleasure in it. Some even refused to experience it. Their objections were not to the quality of the work, to the color of the sheets, for instance, or to their height or placement. Technique was never the problem, and few complained that Central Park was being desecrated. Most of the objections went much deeper, reaching in fact to the philosophical issue at the heart of modern art. ''Why is this art?'' the skeptics asked. It's easy to imagine art snobs smirking at what they would consider the cultural naïveté behind such doubts. But the question, a fair and very serious one, has always deserved an answer. ESSAY Barry Gewen is an editor at the Book Review. | State of the Art |
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