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2,005 | For Ali G, More Fame But Fewer Dupes | Sacha Baron Cohen, the British comedian behind ''Da Ali G Show'' on HBO, is a master put-on artist. Playing one or another earnest yet ill-informed inquisitor, Mr. Baron Cohen seeks out the unsuspecting -- politicians preferred -- and tests their patience and good humor with inane, often offensive questions.
But as ''Ali G's'' popularity has grown, fewer and fewer targets are so unsuspecting.
Sacha Baron Cohen, the comedian behind "Da Ali G Show," is a master put-on artist. But as his popularity has grown, fewer targets are unsuspecting.
Sacha Baron Cohen, the British comedian behind ''Da Ali G Show'' on HBO, is a master put-on artist. Playing one or another earnest yet ill-informed inquisitor, Mr. Baron Cohen seeks out the unsuspecting -- politicians preferred -- and tests their patience and good humor with inane, often offensive questions.
But as ''Ali G's'' popularity has grown, fewer and fewer targets are so unsuspecting.
Take David All, for one. Last month, Mr. All, the communications director for Representative Jack Kingston, Republican of Georgia, received a call requesting an on-camera interview with the congressman for a documentary on American democracy. It struck him as odd when a ''scout'' with a mini-camera came to film the congressman's office -- even more so when the film crew panicked after a House vote forced a last-minute location change. But it was while Mr. All waited with the crew for the interviewer to arrive that everything became clear.
''The director mentioned that he was from Kazakhstan,'' Mr. All said.
As fans of Mr. Baron Cohen know -- and Mr. All counts himself one -- the intrepid Kazakh reporter was Borat Sagdiyev, one of Mr. Baron Cohen's alter egos on ''Da Ali G Show.''
''I said to the director, point blank, 'If this has anything to do with any kind of stunt or Ali G interview, we're not interested,''' Mr. All said. The crew quickly pulled the plug.
The episode is one of many recent Borat sightings as Mr. Baron Cohen travels the country conducting prank interviews for an upcoming Borat-centric movie. For a comedian whose work depends on the unwitting participation of the public, such exposure is an occupational hazard. When so many people are in on the joke, how long can it last?
Since he created the character of Ali G, a patois-speaking white boy with gangsta pretensions, in 1998 and began hoodwinking public officials on Britain's Channel 4, Mr. Baron Cohen has struggled to preserve the joke as his celebrity has grown. He grants few interviews and often declines to be photographed. (His spokesman declined an interview request.) Though his various characters (Bruno, an Austrian fashionista, is another) afford him a degree of cover, there are only so many public figures one can dupe before everyone starts to catch on.
Exporting ''Da Ali G Show'' to the United States in 2003 allowed Mr. Baron Cohen to fish new waters. Despite media buzz about his interviews with luminaries like Newt Gingrich and Ralph Nader in his first season on HBO, he still managed to lure Sam Donaldson and Pat Buchanan into second season sit-downs with Ali G to discuss Nixon's ''Waterworld'' scandal and the search for Iraq's ''B.L.T.'s.''
But the recent Capitol Hill incident may finally have poisoned the well in Washington. By the time an account appeared in the Hill newspaper Roll Call, Mr. All had sent e-mail messages to his fellow G.O.P. press secretaries (sorry, Democrats, you're on your own), warning that they might be contacted by Tim Schildberger, a producer identifying himself with One America Productions, which Mr. All termed a likely ''front'' for ''Da Ali G Show.''
To be sure, Mr. Baron Cohen has never limited himself to public figures. But even ordinary citizens are getting wise.
In January The Roanoke Times fingered Mr. Baron Cohen as the ''Middle Eastern man in an American-flag shirt and a cowboy hat'' who had angered the crowd at a rodeo in Salem, Va., by mangling the national anthem (''and your home in the grave!'') and calling on President Bush to ''drink the blood of every man, woman and child in Iraq.''
Mr. Baron Cohen has since been spotted as Borat at a gay pride parade in Washington and on the No. 4 train in Brooklyn.
Earlier this month, Mr. Baron Cohen and his crew visited a plantation house in Natchez, Miss., ostensibly to learn about Southern culture. In the course of a formal dinner with the owner, George Matthews Marshall IV, and his family, Borat disparaged Jews, gays and Yankees and inquired after his hosts' slaves. He was finally shown the door after he invited ''a friend'' -- an immodestly dressed black woman who showed up late, explaining that she ''worked nights'' -- and made as if to accompany her to the bathroom.
Probing prejudice is a motif for Mr. Baron Cohen, who is an observant Jew. In an episode broadcast on HBO last year, Borat's open-mic night performance at a Tucson bar inspired patrons to join in a chorus of ''Throw the Jew down the well!''
The Marshalls were not so accommodating. When Mr. Marshall recounted the evening to his daughter Heather, a documentary filmmaker, she became outraged and called several news outlets to alert others to the hoax. The New York Post published her account on Monday.
Matthew Labov, Mr. Baron Cohen's publicist, declined to comment on the incident. ''We're not actively seeking any press,'' Mr. Labov said in response to a question about the Borat film. ''If people are seeing him doing what he's doing, that's fine, but we're not going to comment on it.''
Variety has reported that 20th Century Fox is behind the project, but neither Mr. Labov nor Fox would confirm that a film is in production. An HBO spokesman, meanwhile, said that there were no plans for a third season of ''Da Ali G Show.''
Mr. Labov did acknowledge Mr. Baron Cohen's dilemma. ''The more times the press writes about this thing, the more it lowers the veil of secrecy,'' he said.
In those instances when the veil has slipped during filming, Mr. Baron Cohen appears to have taken it in stride, gamely posing for pictures with fans who then have posted them on their blogs. But when a Daily News photographer took a photograph of him with his fiancée, Isla Fisher, at the premiere party last week for her film ''The Wedding Crashers,'' he lunged for the photographer with what The Daily News called a ''one-handed martial arts-style hold.''
Robert Katz, a writer and producer who worked on ''Ali G'' segments in Britain, dismissed the notion that Mr. Baron Cohen's joke had worn out either in Britain or the United States.
''He just becomes better at what he does,'' he said. ''He's got the ingenuity to do anything.''
In Washington, David All agreed.
''I think he enjoys the game as much as we all do,'' he said. ''He's a very bright guy. He'll find new avenues and new approaches. His show will go on.''
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2,002 | Chris Matthews and Me | To the Editor:
Hats off to Russ Baker for articulating the frustration of sharing a famous name (''I'm the Other Guy,'' Op-Ed, May 6), especially when it applies to people in similar fields. As a former journalist who works in media and communications, I have experienced a fate not unlike Mr. Baker's: I am the ''other'' Chris Matthews.
Imagine the relish of the CNBC producer I called on recently as he said, ''Love your show.'' Or the standard phone line, ''Oh yeah, the guy from 'Hardball'!'' (even though I have no trace of that signature accent).
To the Editor:
Hats off to Russ Baker for articulating the frustration of sharing a famous name (''I'm the Other Guy,'' Op-Ed, May 6), especially when it applies to people in similar fields. As a former journalist who works in media and communications, I have experienced a fate not unlike Mr. Baker's: I am the ''other'' Chris Matthews.
Imagine the relish of the CNBC producer I called on recently as he said, ''Love your show.'' Or the standard phone line, ''Oh yeah, the guy from 'Hardball'!'' (even though I have no trace of that signature accent).
Still, there is an upside: being favorably confused for the more famous one can lead to, say, an answered phone call, or that elusive dinner reservation.
CHRISTOPHER E. MATTHEWS New York, May 6, 2002
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2,000 | A Late Goal by Elias Stuns Panthers | The head fake did it.
Patrik Elias remembered looking up at the game clock tonight with 8 seconds left in regulation. The Devils' left wing turned back to where Florida Panthers defenseman Robert Svehla had just taken control of the puck near the Panthers' net.
The head fake did it.
Patrik Elias remembered looking up at the game clock tonight with 8 seconds left in regulation. The Devils' left wing turned back to where Florida Panthers defenseman Robert Svehla had just taken control of the puck near the Panthers' net.
''I kind of turned my head away, like I was not going to play,'' Elias said. ''Then I stopped and went for it.''
A heartbeat later, Elias was jamming the stolen puck by the veteran goalie Mike Vernon with 1.7 seconds left, and the Devils had a stunning 3-2 victory over Florida before 15,689 at the National Car Rental Center.
Elias, who extended his Devils-record point-scoring streak to 14 games, dropped to his knees to absorb the moment, then lay flat on the ice for several moments. Center Bobby Holik was the first teammate to reach him as the Devils quickly mobbed him.
It was Elias's 20th goal in the last 21 games, but none has been as dramatic as this one pitting the Eastern Conference division leaders. The Devils raised their league-best record to 31-13-5-3.
''He cut the corner close tonight,'' said goalie Martin Brodeur, who stopped 21 shots. ''He's a hot fire right now, and he's doing the little things that great goal scorers do. He didn't get many chances to score all night, but he scored the big one.''
Brodeur grabbed a piece of history himself. He became only the fifth National Hockey League goalie to record at least 30 victories for five straight seasons.
Still, the night belonged to Elias. The veteran defenseman Ken Daneyko said: ''We've always missed that sniper, and he's a sniper right now. He's been scoring in big situations for us for two months now. He's really been our catalyst, our go-to guy.''
Elias seemed just as satisfied to have helped shut down the Panthers' best scoring threat, Pavel Bure.
''He's their most dangerous player, so we played him a little tighter,'' Elias said. ''We felt if we stopped him, we would have a better chance of winning.''
Twice in this game, the Devils fell behind. And twice they came back.
After right wing Randy McKay produced the Devils' first goal to tie the game at 5 minutes 21 seconds of the third, the Panthers recaptured the lead only 3:37 later. Wing Mark Parrish outlegged several pursuers along the right side to come open for a 15-foot shot.
But less than two minutes later, the Devils had tied the game again. Jason Arnott deflected Sheldon Souray's slap shot from straight-on and it bounced off a Panther and by Vernon.
Then came the shocking end.
The Devils took the game's first four shots, and it wasn't until there were less than 11 minutes left in the first period that Florida managed its initial shot, a close-range effort by center Ray Whitney.
From there, the Panthers picked up their tempo as a late-arriving crowd began to get into the game. They took 10 of the period's last 14 shots, one of which found its mark.
Center Viktor Kozlov took a pass from Svehla along the right side and skated past backpedaling Devils center Petr Sykora to get an unimpeded view of Brodeur. His 15-foot shot at 17:33 skidded into the net.
McKay, returning from a two-game absence with a strained hip flexor, tested Vernon early. But then there was a long dry spell before fellow right wing Claude Lemieux, at 15:05, forced Vernon to make a difficult stop near the net.
SLAP SHOTS
SCOTT NIEDERMAYER, the Devils' top-scoring defenseman with 28 points, was ill and did not play. The eighth-year veteran, usually teamed with KEN DANEYKO, was replaced by BRAD BOMBARDIR, who was on the ice when the Panthers scored their first goal.
HOCKEY
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2,006 | Malverne Joins Crackdown on Illegal Housing | The Village of Malverne has joined a crackdown on illegal rooming houses in Nassau County, and landlords there could pay a steep price for violating building codes and zoning laws.
At a news conference on Monday, Anthony Panzarella, the mayor of Malverne, said he was creating a task force to investigate illegal housing with the office of Harvey B. Levinson, the county assessor. Mr. Panzarella cited quality of life and safety issues as reasons for the crackdown.
The Village of Malverne has joined a crackdown on illegal rooming houses in Nassau County, and landlords there could pay a steep price for violating building codes and zoning laws.
At a news conference on Monday, Anthony Panzarella, the mayor of Malverne, said he was creating a task force to investigate illegal housing with the office of Harvey B. Levinson, the county assessor. Mr. Panzarella cited quality of life and safety issues as reasons for the crackdown.
Mr. Levinson began the effort countywide in May 2004; Oyster Bay and Malverne are the only municipalities to join the initiative so far. Mr. Levinson said that 36 illegal rooming houses in Nassau had been reclassified under his plan.
Under the initiative, which will begin in Malverne in a few weeks, houses that are zoned for single families but are found to have four or more families living in them can be reclassified to commercial property from residential until the violation is corrected. Commercial property is taxed at a rate two and a half times higher than residential property, which can make it unprofitable for landlords to run illegal rooming houses.
Mr. Panzarella said he would propose legislation requiring that property owners who rent illegally be fined twice the rent they charged the tenant.
Randolph Yunker, a spokesman for Mr. Levinson, said that police and fire department reports show that violations have included 25 to 30 people living in one residence; multiple external locks on doors, indicating the presence of more than one family; sheets hung to separate living quarters; and a lack of smoke detectors. A house in Franklin Square had 40 calls to emergency services in a three-year period, while a house in Garden City South had 47 calls, the records show.
Mr. Panzarella said that any house in violation of the codes ''must be identified and shut down for the safety of its inhabitants and emergency personnel who are called to these sites.''
The Rev. Allan B. Ramirez, a housing advocate and a pastor at the Brookville Reformed Church, said the plan was a way for political leaders to cover up their inability to provide affordable housing and would make residents homeless. ''Of course it's unsafe, nobody is arguing that,'' Mr. Ramirez said. ''But do you think people want to live that way by choice?''
THE WEEK
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2,001 | Democrat Vows to Alter Way 'Business Is Done in Trenton' | James E. McGreevey, the Democratic mayor of Woodbridge, easily won election Tuesday as New Jersey's 51st governor, defeating a fiery conservative Republican, Bret D. Schundler, who never gained the support of his party's moderate establishment.
With 98 percent of the vote counted, Mr. McGreevey had 56 percent of the vote to Mr. Schundler's 42 percent, a landslide by recent standards: the last two governor's races were decided by margins of one percentage point or less.
James E. McGreevey, the Democratic mayor of Woodbridge, easily defeated conservative Republican Bret D. Schundler in the New Jersey governor's race.
James E. McGreevey, the Democratic mayor of Woodbridge, easily won election Tuesday as New Jersey's 51st governor, defeating a fiery conservative Republican, Bret D. Schundler, who never gained the support of his party's moderate establishment.
With 98 percent of the vote counted, Mr. McGreevey had 56 percent of the vote to Mr. Schundler's 42 percent, a landslide by recent standards: the last two governor's races were decided by margins of one percentage point or less.
Mr. McGreevey's victory came as a Democrat, Mark R. Warner, won the governor's post in Virginia, loosening the iron grip that Republicans have had on top offices in that state. [Page A19.]
The entire New Jersey Legislature was up for re-election Tuesday as well, and Mr. McGreevey's coattails were lengthy enough for his party to recapture control of at least one house of the Legislature for the first time since 1991.
Democrats won control of the General Assembly, but the results of key races in the State Senate indicated that the upper house could be evenly divided for the first time in modern New Jersey history.
Indeed, Mr. McGreevey, in an exultant victory speech at 10:16 p.m., vowed that his administration would cross party lines to ''change the way business is done in Trenton.''
''The government that we build will be a government of Republicans, independents and, yes, Democrats -- a government for all the people,'' he shouted to a mobbed hotel ballroom in East Brunswick. ''A government that is accountable to you, and only to you.''
Mr. McGreevey, whose pregnant wife, Dina, remained hospitalized for pre-term labor, vowed to ''work day and night, with the full fiber of my being, with every measure of my strength,'' to tackle soaring property taxes, failing public schools, vanishing open space and official corruption and mismanagement.
''Now let's get to work!'' he cried.
Mr. McGreevey took the stage even before Mr. Schundler had wrapped up an extraordinary, rambling 23-minute concession speech, in which he acknowledged his defeat almost in passing -- and attributed it mainly to a lack of campaign money -- before issuing a warning that sounded like a demand for a rematch in four years.
''He has said he is committed to not raising taxes,'' Mr. Schundler said in one of several challenges he laid down before Mr. McGreevey. ''We're going to hold him to that.''
The finger-pointing in defeat started early this morning. And in a sign of how ugly the battle could soon get for control of the Republican Party, Bill Pascoe, Mr. Schundler's voluble campaign manager, assailed the acting governor, Donald T. DiFrancesco, for having undercut Mr. Schundler repeatedly since withdrawing from the primary last April.
''I think he's cut a deal, a long time ago, to sabotage the Republican gubernatorial campaign,'' Mr. Pascoe said.
Mr. DiFrancesco could not be reached early this morning to comment.
Mr. McGreevey, 44, nearly unseated Gov. Christie Whitman in 1997, then barely took a breath before resuming what would prove a six-year battle for the job. This time around, he enjoyed the overwhelming support of women, blacks, Democrats, independents, and poor and middle-class voters, according to a survey of voters leaving polling places.
Exit interviews with 1,718 voters found that taxes and the state's economy were foremost on people's minds. Those who said they were concerned about the economy tended to vote for Mr. McGreevey, while those who worried more about taxes tended to favor Mr. Schundler.
But education was the next most important issue cited by voters, who appeared to accept Mr. McGreevey's argument that Mr. Schundler's school choice proposals would threaten public schools: 70 percent of those concerned most about education said they voted for Mr. McGreevey.
If the result of the governor's race proved anticlimactic, it came at the end of what may well have been the most unpredictable political year in New Jersey history.
Mr. McGreevey, who fended off a surprise challenge last summer from another Democrat, United States Senator Robert G. Torricelli, had no rivals within his party when the year began.
But Mr. Schundler entered the Republican primary as a dark horse, a social conservative in a staunchly moderate state, who had never held a state office and who was unloved by the elite in his own party.
But Mr. Schundler's opponents proceeded to self-destruct in dramatic fashion. Mr. DiFrancesco, the president of the State Senate, was the early favorite to clinch the Republican nomination. But his ascension to the office as acting governor, following Mrs. Whitman's departure for Washington, subjected him to a new level of scrutiny. After an avalanche of reports about his past business dealings and allegations of ethical lapses, he withdrew from the race.
The Republican Party's moderate wing was still unwilling to embrace Mr. Schundler; instead, it drafted Bob Franks, a former congressman who had lost a close race for the United States Senate the previous November, and extended the primary by three weeks to give Mr. Franks extra time to raise money.
But Mr. Franks's hastily plotted campaign strategy proved catastrophically wrongheaded: he ran to the left of Mr. Schundler, painting him as an extremist on social issues. Mr. Franks seemed to succeed only in angering the party's right wing, however, and conservatives came out in force to give Mr. Schundler a 14-point margin of victory.
Mr. Schundler, for his part, had run a nearly perfect primary, even his detractors conceded. But in hindsight it appeared he had pushed so hard for conservatives' support that he found it hard to get back to the crucial political middle in the fall.
His flawless touch seemed to have deserted him soon after the June 26 primary, when Mr. Schundler tried to take the issues of abortion and guns off the table in the campaign. He stumbled badly in each case, digging himself a deeper hole. And he learned the hard way -- through devastating public opinion polls -- that supporting tighter firearms restrictions has become a prerequisite for statewide officeseekers.
Mr. McGreevey, meanwhile, quickly developed an effective, three-pronged campaign mantra to depict Mr. Schundler as an extremist. Mr. McGreevey said his opponent opposed abortion even in cases of rape and incest; favored a law making it easier for people to get permits to carry concealed weapons; and would drain the public schools of nearly $600 million. And to the welcome surprise of Mr. McGreevey's campaign aides, Mr. Schundler's heated efforts to rebut these charges -- in news conferences, television advertisements and debates -- often succeeded only in focusing greater public attention on them.
Mr. Schundler's challenges seemed to multiply by the hour. Mr. McGreevey and the Democratic Party built up a huge financial advantage, and Mr. Schundler never succeeded in plugging into the Republican fund-raising machine that had amply underwritten Mrs. Whitman and Mr. DiFrancesco for years.
Worse, while Mr. McGreevey had the entire Democratic Party rallying him on, Mr. Schundler faced a constant campaign of sabotage by Mr. DiFrancesco. The acting governor never hid his disdain for Mr. Schundler, whom he blamed for the news reports that had driven him to quit the race.
So as Mr. Schundler tried to cobble together a platform of popular pocketbook issues that would appeal to suburbanites, such as a vow to remove the tolls from the Garden State Parkway, Mr. DiFrancesco used the power of his office to denigrate Mr. Schundler's proposals as ''intellectually dishonest.''
Mr. Schundler also continued to hurt himself. His hopes of victory rested on winning over the blue-collar Democrats and independents in the broad middle of the New Jersey electorate. But he antagonized union members when it was reported that he favored laws that would curtail the rights of labor organizers.
Still, Mr. Schundler began the homestretch of the campaign after Labor Day assured that he would have the active support of President Bush and members of his cabinet; after all, an upset victory for a conservative in New Jersey would be viewed as a mighty validation for the new administration. And a surprise court ruling in New Jersey made it possible for Republicans in Washington to spend millions on TV commercials for Mr. Schundler without violating the state's campaign finance law.
Mr. Schundler, hoping to woo Jewish voters, then departed for a short trip to Israel. He was there on Sept. 11, when the hijacked airplanes struck their targets.
The terrorist attacks staggered both candidates. But it locked in, for several weeks, a sizable McGreevey lead in the polls. And it was Mr. McGreevey, cautious as ever, who benefited once politics resumed.
While Mr. McGreevey refrained from campaigning, Mr. Schundler, eager to demonstrate the leadership qualities he believed voters would seek in a time of crisis, sought out reporters to describe his many ideas for ways to improve New Jersey's defenses against terrorism and its readiness for emergencies. But he also spoke critically of some emergency workers who responded on Sept. 11, triggering criticism from members of both parties.
The episode, after which Mr. Schundler increasingly attacked the news media, struck even his own advisers as a turning point.
Mr. McGreevey, meanwhile, bathed in the adulation of every major police, fire and labor union, whose endorsements Mr. Schundler was left to dismiss as the tainted products of special interests.
But while Mr. Schundler was pouring forth with proposals for tax and toll cuts, a complicated overhaul of the public education system, and other ambitious measures, Mr. McGreevey said little that was specific and less that was controversial.
His reticence on the subject of taxes gave Mr. Schundler a huge opening, which he exploited during their televised debates. He pledged not to raise taxes, and lampooned Mr. McGreevey as the second coming of Jim Florio, the one-term governor who raised taxes by $2.8 billion in 1990.
In the final weeks of the campaign, Mr. Schundler finally seemed to have hit upon a resonant message: taxes, taxes, taxes.
For Mr. Schundler, however, the most poignant effect of the Sept. 11 attacks may have been an indirect one. His friend in the White House, President Bush, saw his favorability ratings rise to historic levels. But Mr. Bush was busy prosecuting a war, securing the nation's defenses and rallying its morale. The promised trip to New Jersey to aid Mr. Schundler's campaign would never come to pass.
THE 2001 ELECTIONS: GOVERNOR
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2,004 | World-Class Trains? Not Even Close | All over Europe, in Japan, and elsewhere, business travelers have the option of avoiding planes and taking sleek high-speed trains that link urban centers. In France, average train speeds on some corridors exceed 180 miles an hour. With direct links to airports for those continuing on for greater distances or flying overseas, these high-speed trains are vital components of an intelligent transportation system.
The United States managed to put the first man on the moon over a third of a century ago, but this country doesn't come anywhere close to having a world-class rail-transportation system. Oh, we have some great trains, including a few long-haul Amtrak ones that have been called cruise ships on tracks.
Efforts to make long-distance train trips more attractive for business travelers in America.
All over Europe, in Japan, and elsewhere, business travelers have the option of avoiding planes and taking sleek high-speed trains that link urban centers. In France, average train speeds on some corridors exceed 180 miles an hour. With direct links to airports for those continuing on for greater distances or flying overseas, these high-speed trains are vital components of an intelligent transportation system.
The United States managed to put the first man on the moon over a third of a century ago, but this country doesn't come anywhere close to having a world-class rail-transportation system. Oh, we have some great trains, including a few long-haul Amtrak ones that have been called cruise ships on tracks.
One example is the Sunset Limited, which runs 2,768 miles between Los Angeles and Orlando, Fla., Amtrak's longest route. While it does carry some passengers on shorter distances between cities in the South and Southwest, the Sunset Limited is marketed as a transcontinental tourist excursion train and kept in business by train romantics and their supporters in Congress. The Sunset Limited is projected to operate at a loss of about $30 million in the current fiscal year while carrying an estimated 109,000 passengers. All 14 Amtrak long-distance trains are projected to lose more than $500 million, according to Amtrak's operating budget, though long-distance ridership is rising.
But the United States has 8 or 10 shorter-haul rail corridors that transportation experts say make sense as real transportation systems, whether operated by Amtrak or by hybrid state, federal and private entities, and some of them are now making plans for high-speed trains, very far in the future.
Meanwhile, on our one existing relatively high-speed train line, passenger traffic is expected to break records this year, as air travel in the Northeast becomes ever more vexing. That's Amtrak's Acela line (top speed about 125 miles an hour on a few stretches of track) on the Northeast Corridor between Boston and Washington. This year, according to Amtrak's budget, Acela is projected to generate a ''net contribution'' to the bottom line of about $60.7 million, while carrying well over 2.5 million passengers.
Acela, which began service in late 2000, has certainly had its problems, including an inability to achieve maximum speeds and some engineering faults that caused service reductions last year. Also, deteriorating tracks on some stretches of the Northeast Corridor caused a 20 percent increase in delays from 2000 to 2003, though Amtrak says service is now back to normal.
A couple of weeks ago, when I visited an Amtrak administrative and training center in Wilmington, Del., to talk with the marketing people, no one there wanted to touch the hot potatoes: the Amtrak budget and the question of short-haul versus long-distance trains. In its budget request for the 2004 fiscal year ending Sept. 30, Amtrak said it asked for $1.8 billion, but got $1.2 billion. Amtrak says it needs $1.8 billion to maintain operations next year; the White House says it should get about half that.
''The greatest share of our revenue comes out of the Northeast,'' said Barbara J. Richardson, Amtrak's vice president for marketing. Right now, ''the No.1 priority,'' she said, is to return to basics and bring the national infrastructure ''up to a state of good repair.''
For the Acela, the goal is to market the train more to business travelers, who now make up about 80 percent of its riders. A simple, easy-to-understand fare structure, similar to the fare structures of low-cost airlines, has been put in place on Acela and also across the Amtrak system.
Unlike some low-cost airlines, whose guerilla warfare tactic of fare sales is currently staggering the network carriers, Amtrak maintains ''a commitment not to run massive national promotions with major discounts, because we think it causes confusion,'' Ms. Richardson said.
Energized by the inroads the Acela has made against air travel, Amtrak has become more aggressive in promoting Acela to corporate travel managers, said David Lim, the chief of marketing and sales promotions.
''Just as the airlines didn't think of us as competition, neither did the corporations think of us as sort of a viable option,'' he said of the days before Acela. ''With the launch of Acela, we really increased the emphasis on relationships with corporations.''
Acela says its fares are 35 to 59 percent below comparable walkup fares on airlines. But the train's greatest strength is the comfort in its two categories of service: business and first class. Seats have 42 inches of legroom and all have electrical power outlets, with large fold-down tables for working.
Passengers ''feel like they're in control, and they can decide how they spend their time,'' Ms. Richardson said. ''The hassle factor is low. I think about it as, 'You are always free to move about the cabin.'''
Train passengers, by the way, sometimes have good reason to move. But except to note that, I will refrain here from reprising the subject of two recent columns: the hellish annoyance on trains caused by braying cellphone louts. Instead, let's conclude with the kind of hot potato Amtrak is comfortable discussing: the food.
Lately, as the status of domestic airline food in general descends from joke to atrocity, Amtrak has been making a major push to upgrade the food on both Acela and on its long-distance trains. Menus are varied and they change frequently. In my opinion, the food in Acela's first-class car is actually pretty good.
''I have a lot more options on a train than on a plane,'' said Timothy J. Costello, the executive chef for the Amtrak account of the catering company Gategourmet.
On the Road appears each Tuesday.
BUSINESS TRAVEL: ON THE ROAD E-mail: jsharkey@nytimes.com
Correction: August 2, 2004, Monday The On the Road column in Business Day on July 13, about rail transportation systems, misstated the top speed of Amtrak's Acela on the route between Washington and Boston. It is 150 miles an hour, not 125.
Correction: August 2, 2004, Monday
The On the Road column in Business Day on July 13, about rail transportation systems, misstated the top speed of Amtrak's Acela on the route between Washington and Boston. It is 150 miles an hour, not 125.
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2,003 | The Edge of Hip: Vice, the Brand | YOU see a lot of strange things at fashion shows, but models chugging cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon is not usually one of them. Two weeks ago, however, at the show put on by Vice, a Lafayette Street boutique, a series of gaunt men and women in $200 overalls and $80 T-shirts applied their bee-stung lips to cans of beer and then gleefully tossed the remainder of the brew -- sometimes nearly half the can -- on the whimpering audience. In the front row, a slender woman with a fuchsia streak in her hair raised an umbrella.
After the show, a sendup of Fashion Week, the wet 20- and 30-something crowd gathered in a parking lot next to the store, gripping plastic cups of beer pumped from a keg and eating barbecued hot dogs served by waitresses on pink roller skates.
Can a downtown glossy and its retail tie-ins turn blue-collar chic into big bucks?
YOU see a lot of strange things at fashion shows, but models chugging cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon is not usually one of them. Two weeks ago, however, at the show put on by Vice, a Lafayette Street boutique, a series of gaunt men and women in $200 overalls and $80 T-shirts applied their bee-stung lips to cans of beer and then gleefully tossed the remainder of the brew -- sometimes nearly half the can -- on the whimpering audience. In the front row, a slender woman with a fuchsia streak in her hair raised an umbrella.
After the show, a sendup of Fashion Week, the wet 20- and 30-something crowd gathered in a parking lot next to the store, gripping plastic cups of beer pumped from a keg and eating barbecued hot dogs served by waitresses on pink roller skates.
In many ways, Vice, which is less known for retail lines than for publishing a free glossy magazine found at downtown boutiques like Seize sur Vingt and record stores like Other Music, embodies the apex of hipsterdom 2003. What that has meant this year is a trailer-park sensibility, embraced with and without irony, that has taken hold among postcollegiate society in the Silver Lake district of Los Angeles, in Brooklyn and on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.
The fashion aesthetic is epitomized by vintage shirts with high school football logos and the foam-front trucker hat. In entertainment, the touchstones are the Southern rock revivalists Kings of Leon and testosterone-charged skateboarder-influenced shows like ''Jackass'' and ''Punk'd.'' In contrast to older and gentler downtown style guides like Paper magazine, Vice shuns the Nirvana generation's wounded sense of responsibility, instead embracing a frat-boy crudity and ethnic stereotypes. Think of it as a lad magazine for the Williamsburg set.
''Of all the magazines that are out there, I think that's the one that nails hipster culture on the head,'' said Robert Lanham, author of ''The Hipster Handbook,'' a recent satire in the spirit of ''The Official Preppy Handbook.''
As Jimmy Kimmel, a comedian on ABC-TV, put it: ''People throw the term 'politically incorrect' around a lot, and normally it's a lot of bluster, but Vice truly is un-p.c. Their brand of humor is what I would do if there were no 'standards and practices' on TV.''
The magazine has its detractors, especially among women, and the retail store (which has three branches) is accused by online bloggers of commercializing hipsterdom. But so far the stores and the magazine have proven successful. The Cassandra Report, a trend survey issued by Youth Intelligence, part of the Creative Artists Agency, recently queried 300 ''trendsetters'' who ranked Vice as one of the top three magazines among people 19 to 30.
Founded in 1994 in Montreal by three out-of-work friends -- Gavin McInnes, now 33, Suroosh Alvi, 34, and Shane Smith, 33 -- Vice acquired a $10 million cash injection from a dot-com company (now defunct) and moved its operations to Manhattan, opening retail stores in SoHo, Los Angeles and Toronto.
The founders, who recently started British and Australian editions of the magazine, say their business plan is to use Vice's credibility with young people to form partnerships with record labels and clothing lines, something that is already under way.
At Vice stores the merchandise is a mix of high fashion and kitsch, including $1,000 Evisu men's suits and women's underpants with ''I Don't Have AIDS . . . Yet'' in blue script on the front. (Plans include opening another store in Tokyo and a pub in London.) The American edition of ''The Vice Guide to Sex, Drugs and Rock and Roll'' has just been published by Warner Books with cover endorsements from Rolling Stone (''Hot Book'') and Entertainment Weekly ('' 'It' Read'').
Atlantic Records is financing a Vice Records label, which has signed the Streets and issued a compilation of downtown cult bands like Interpol and Le Tigre. Showtime has ordered a ''Vice'' cable pilot, to star David Cross of ''Mr. Show'' fame. And Vice has five movies in production, the founders say, including one starring Casey Affleck and another written by Mr. Smith and Spike Jonze, the director of ''Adaptation'' and ''Being John Malkovich.''
''Spike is the one guy in Hollywood who's one of us,'' Mr. Smith said. ''He's not going to make a wack film. He's going to make a cool film with us.''
All of which raises a question: if Vice spreads its brand of fashion, journalism and entertainment across the map, how hip can it remain? Will they still love it on Lafayette Street if it's at the mall in Massapequa? By definition, hip taste is embraced by hipsters because the masses don't get it -- and can't buy it. (Nor should a hipster ever admit to being one; Mr. McInnes says hipsters are ''spoiled rotten.'')
Mr. McInnes, who has a full beard and a tattoo across his back that reads ''Destruction'' and who serves as the unofficial spokesman for Vice magazine, dismisses the notion of selling out.
''The term 'sell out' is juvenile and naïve,'' he wrote in an e-mail message from the company's unkempt offices in a graffiti-lined warehouse in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
Mr. Smith called the appeal of the trailer-park aesthetic purveyed by Vice the latest twist on bohemia's old nostalgie de la boue.
''For middle-class kids just out of university and living in Williamsburg,'' he said, ''the closest thing right now to bad-ass culture is blue-collar culture, so you have hipsters play-acting blue collar. Instead of saying, 'I'm a PlayStation-reared, e-mailing-all-the-time Friendster loser,' they're getting lots of tattoos and drinking Pabst Blue Ribbon and listening to the Yeah Yeah Yeahs.''
The magazine's content is often . . . well, offensive. It features expletive-laden articles with the tone of your most cynical friend, like this rant against wine: ''O.K., you've had your taste -- is it spoiled? No? Then nod at the waiter and let's get this date over with.'' (Add a few four-letter words to get the full effect).
Each issue also includes ''Dos & Dont's,'' a gallery of candid photos on the street and in bars with scathing, profane comments about people's clothes and hair.
''That is pure undiluted magazine genius,'' said Andy Pemberton, the editor of Blender, an indie music magazine. ''The rest of the magazine I find really hit or miss, but everyone loves that thing. I've been to parties downtown where the page will be stuck up on the lavatory wall.''
With photography by Terry Richardson and Ryan McGinley that sometimes falls just short of pornography, Vice's articles can be raunchy in the extreme. The magazine's contributors seem unconcerned about AIDS and sexually transmitted diseases, with one article arguing that safe-sex messages are ignorable propaganda for people who are not partners of gay men or injectable-drug users.
Mr. McInnes said he was a women's studies major in college. But his magazine would offend many women. An article offering a ''Guide to Guilty Pleasures'' calls Gwen Stefani lovable for ''that pouty face that you kinda want to kiss and slap at the same time.''
'' 'No means no' is puritanism,'' Mr. McInnes said, expanding on his view of romance. ''I think Steinem-era feminism did women a lot of injustices, but one of the worst ones was convincing all these indie norts that women don't want to be dominated.''
Many Vice readers defend the magazine's brand of political incorrectness, including some women. ''If you think Vice is misogynistic, then you are a self-centered white woman,'' said Sarah Silverman, a comedian (and Jimmy Kimmel's girlfriend). ''Because Vice is so much more. It harshly makes fun of men, women, all races, nerds, hipsters, the elderly, the short, the tall, the fashionable, the hopeless. It's without boundaries, which is what makes the playing field even.''
Few of Vice's fans or customers seem to realize just how deeply hostile Mr. McInnes is to the liberal live-and-let-live ethos of traditional bohemian culture. It is a fair bet that a majority of the downtown population opposed the Iraq war and dislikes the policies of George W. Bush. But in an interview Mr. McInnes advocated changing New York license plates to read ''Liberalism Gone Amok.'' Last month, he wrote an article for Patrick Buchanan in The American Conservative boasting of having converted Vice readers to conservatism.
He actually leans much further to the right than the Republican Party. His views are closer to a white supremacist's. ''I love being white and I think it's something to be very proud of,'' he said. ''I don't want our culture diluted. We need to close the borders now and let everyone assimilate to a Western, white, English-speaking way of life.''
In an interview in The New York Press last year, Mr. McInnes's views came through in the coarse ethnic expressions he used in saying how pleased he was that most Williamsburg hipsters are white. As a result, he became the focus of a letter-writing campaign by a black reader. Vice apologized for Mr. McInnes's comments.
Some people assume that such remarks are posturing, akin to the ethnic and anti-gay slurs that pepper the pages of Vice, establishing its rebel credentials. They argue that for 20-somethings raised in a multicultural society, ethnic slurs -- part of contemporary street patois -- do not have the sting they do for older generations.
Vice has female and gay contributors, and on a recent trip to hear some music Mr. McInnes was joined by a Bruce LaBruce, a pornographic-film maker who is gay and was wearing a jacket with a National Rifle Association logo. (Mr. LaBruce insisted that this was ''ironic.'') And Mr. McInnes's business partner Mr. Alvi was born in Pakistan and emigrated to North America as a child.
''I can't with a clear conscience purport the same political ideals as Gavin,'' Mr. Alvi said. ''But since Day 1, we tried not to censor ourselves or anyone else, both in the form of editorial and advertising, so if Gavin wants to make an argument for his political ideals, bring it on.''
Joe Levy, the music editor of Rolling Stone, said: ''It's always a disappointment when someone whose aesthetics are edgy and inclusive voices their politics and they're exclusionary. But this is not someone who pretended to be anything other than an offensive, opinionated jerk. So when he turned out to be an offensive, opinionated jerk who wasn't kidding, it wasn't entirely shocking.''
In any event, the Vice squad maintains that its readers and fans are ripe for further economic exploitation. In July, Vice added a marketing arm, AddVice, which assembles teams that, for example, promote bands by stuffing Peaches CD's into gift bags at the opening of a sexual aids shop in SoHo.
''We help companies tap into the typical Vice fan,'' said Nadine Gelineau, the head of AddVice. ''We put them in touch with a psychographic, if you will.'' Mr. McInnes, beside her in the office, pondered for a moment. ''Psychographic, huh,'' he said, the left side of his mouth curling up. ''Is that like one of those posters where if you look at it long enough you see a penguin or a horse?''
Not surprisingly, the hipster aesthetic as defined -- and sold -- by Vice has begun to stir a backlash. ''Hip culture is a little exposed at the moment,'' said Mr. Lanham, the ''Hipster Handbook'' author. ''Marketers are constantly scouting Williamsburg, catching trends immediately -- you see the lead singer from the Rapture in a T-shirt, and next week it's in Urban Outfitters. People are starting to realize that hipsters are just upper-middle-class kids in trucker hats and mesh T-shirts.''
At one blog, hipstersareannoying.com, the author posted a sendup of all things Williamsburg: ''I don't have any of those little T-shirts that say things about Little League football teams from little nowhere American towns. . . . I don't hang giant pictures of paint-by-number art on the fresh Sheetrock walls of the Williamsburg loft (that I don't have) that my parents (don't) rent for me. I don't go to art school. . . . I don't think Andy Warhol was brilliant, I don't think the Velvet Underground were 'totally underrated.' . . . I don't carry a digital camera everywhere I go shooting pictures of my other dumb hipster friends and putting them up on my dumb hipster photolog site.''
The confusion between authenticity and pose -- between earnestness and irony -- is hardly new south of 14th Street. ''If you walked into an East Village bar in the mid-80's,'' said Mr. Levy of Rolling Stone, ''you could find an all-female band playing Led Zeppelin's 'Whole Lot of Love,' with the lead singer telling you that she wanted to give you every bit of her love, and was that ironic or was it rock? It was both, and so it is now. If you have a bohemian neighborhood full of people drinking bad beer and wearing ugly T-shirts and trucker hats and dressing the exact same way as Justin Timberlake, it's real and it's ironic, and it's cool and it's uncool at the same time.''
Might the current hipster backlash imperil Vice's dreams of expansion? Mr. Lanham said hipsters are still reading the magazine, but ''they're just stuffing it under their seat covers.''
How long until they simply outgrow it? Mr. Alvi, for one, said the magazine's founders are not worried about overexposure and obsolescence. ''The downside to getting recognized,'' he conceded, ''is that we're seen as purveyors of hipsterdom to the masses, packaging cool and selling it to the mainstream.''
''The upside,'' he continued, ''is financial gain, and dreams and ambitions being realized. We're living the American dream. Hell, we'll all have houses with white picket fences and be wearing trucker hats when we're 65.''
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2,001 | Despite Ruling, Logan Official Predicts Ouster of Security Firm | Despite a judge's decision to let the beleaguered Argenbright Security Inc. continue to operate temporarily in Massachusetts, the interim security director for Logan International Airport in Boston still believes he will be able to revoke its permit and eject the company from the airport.
''I don't look at it as any kind of victory for Argenbright,'' said Col. John DiFava of the state police, who was appointed by Acting Gov. Jane Swift to revamp security at Logan.
The interim security director for Logan International Airport in Boston still believes he will be able to revoke the permit of the reinstated Argenbright Security Inc.
Despite a judge's decision to let the beleaguered Argenbright Security Inc. continue to operate temporarily in Massachusetts, the interim security director for Logan International Airport in Boston still believes he will be able to revoke its permit and eject the company from the airport.
''I don't look at it as any kind of victory for Argenbright,'' said Col. John DiFava of the state police, who was appointed by Acting Gov. Jane Swift to revamp security at Logan.
Colonel DiFava sought to oust Argenbright last week when he learned that the company pleaded guilty last year to federal felony charges of hiring convicts and falsifying employee records. ''The law is very clear,'' he said, ''If the holder of the license is convicted of a felony, they cannot have a license.''
But Colonel DiFava did not take action until last week, when 400 Delta passengers who had already passed through security had to be re-screened because an Argenbright guard left his post unattended. He said it was one of three security lapses at Logan since Sept. 11 that involved Argenbright guards.
Under orders from Colonel DiFava, the state police delivered a cease and desist order on Nov. 15 to Argenbright's offices in Somerville, Mass., taking the company's license to operate off the wall. Argenbright immediately filed for an injunction, arguing that it had not been given notice or a hearing. Judge Allen van Gestel granted the order the next day, saying the state police had not followed proper procedure.
Argenbright, based in Atlanta, will continue its work at Logan until at least Nov. 30, when a hearing is scheduled before the state police.
''We encouraged our employees to go to work realizing this is the busiest travel time of the year,'' said Sara Jackson, a spokeswoman for Argenbright.
In a statement, Argenbright's chief executive, David Beaton, criticized the state police for taking such swift action right before the holiday travel season.
''We are concerned that this decision would put our airline partners in a terribly difficult position,'' said Mr. Beaton, who was named chief executive by Securicor, Argenbright's parent company, on Nov. 9.
Meanwhile, Argenbright workers continue to screen passengers at three terminals, flanked by state troopers and national guardsmen, and say they are the ones being inspected.
''We are being criticized; we are being scrutinized,'' said Boutsady Alobwede, 27. She, like many other Argenbright employees, is applying for jobs with the other security firms that guard Logan. Losing her income is not an option. ''I have to take care of my baby,'' said Ms. Alobwede, who has five children.
Eventually, she hopes to become a federal employee, and earn a $35,000 salary. Argenbright's average pay is $6 an hour. A Laos native, she thinks her English is sufficient to pass a civil service exam. ''I feel sorry for those who don't speak English well,'' Ms. Alobwede said. ''I don't know where they are going to go.''
Colonel DiFava said he blamed Argenbright for its poor supervision, not the workers themselves, and had no problem with them joining the other security companies.
''They are basically people that are trying to get a break in this country, people who are trying to supplement Social Security,'' he said. ''They're workers. I respect them.''
A NATION CHALLENGED: THE BOSTON AIRPORT
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2,000 | Americans Of Two Minds On Sanctions, A Poll Finds | The more Americans know about the world, the more likely they are to favor diplomacy over punitive sanctions in dealing with troublesome foreign countries, a poll has found. Embargoes, they say, not only isolate the nations at which they are aimed but also hurt American business.
When Americans lack information about a country, or when their leaders do not adequately publicize and explain their policy thinking, many fall back on long-established stereotypes of ''bad'' and ''good'' nations, the poll found. Judgments about how to deal with those nations are then made on those images.
The more Americans know about the world, the more likely they are to favor diplomacy over punitive sanctions in dealing with troublesome foreign countries, a poll has found. Embargoes, they say, not only isolate the nations at which they are aimed but also hurt American business.
When Americans lack information about a country, or when their leaders do not adequately publicize and explain their policy thinking, many fall back on long-established stereotypes of ''bad'' and ''good'' nations, the poll found. Judgments about how to deal with those nations are then made on those images.
The survey -- by First International Resources, a business consulting group, and the polling organization Penn, Schoen & Berland -- was done in two parts for the sake of comparison. A national sample of 995 average voters was made first, and then 176 knowledgeable ''elites'' working in government, academic life and research institutes were surveyed.
The full poll results are expected to be made public next week. The survey, based on interviews from Feb. 28 to March 21, focused primarily on attitudes toward economic sanctions on Iran, but when respondents were asked to name ''good'' and ''bad'' countries, the findings suggest that the attitudes apply to sanctions policy toward other nations.
Respondents in the general public knew very little about Iran and the recent political changes there, including gains by moderates in parliamentary elections. Only 15 percent of them had heard about advances by Iranians who advocate reform; only 2 percent knew of the 1997 election of a more moderate Iranian president, Mohammad Khatami. Among more knowledgeable people, 58 percent had heard about the shifts toward moderation.
Both groups, however, were still instinctively unfavorable to Iran, based on its reputation for support of terrorism and Islamic militancy. Only Iraq outranked it on the enemies' list among the general population. But the elite respondents were far more likely to say that Iran had changed -- they ranked Serbia, Libya and Iraq as worse cases -- and that Iranian moderates should be helped. These more knowledgeable people also said that sanctions got in the way of dialogue with Iran.
''Both the general public and the elites believe it is extremely important to keep channels of communication open with countries like Iran,'' the poll concluded, ''and that penalizing or isolating rogue countries is not the way to get them to change.''
Sanctions have been a major policy tool of the Clinton administration, whether imposed by the United States alone or through the United Nations. Other nations, including American allies in Europe, have been critical of long-running embargoes and other sanctions, saying that they rarely hurt dictators but can harm ordinary people. They also get in the way of international business, or create tensions when the United States tries to force other nations to adhere to its own trade and investment restrictions.
Recently, an American embargo on Iran was eased to allow for importing certain goods like caviar, pistachios and Persian carpets -- a move of which 6 of 10 poll respondents in the general public were unaware. Sports exchanges that have taken place drew universal support in the poll, and 77 percent of average voters and 90 percent of the elite respondents said sanctions should be lifted if Iran responded favorably to an initial easing of the embargo.
In Congress, a small but widening movement is questioning the long-term value of inflexible embargoes. There are concerns that in Iraq, for example, a decade of sanctions may be strengthening the hand of Saddam Hussein while causing unacceptable hardships to the Iraqi people.
Representative Tony P. Hall, Democrat of Ohio, was in Iraq last week to assess the cumulative effects of the comprehensive sanctions imposed in 1990 after Iraq's invasion of Kuwait. He is expected to announce the results of his trip today.
The new poll found that while Americans continued to think that sanctions should remain a tool of foreign policy and that big business would from time to time have to make sacrifices because of embargoes, respondents in both groups preferred sanctions to be imposed through international organizations.
They also expressed concern about the use of sanctions if American jobs were at risk, and when presented with facts about American losses, were more likely to want sanctions lifted, or at least eased.
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2,003 | Turkey Demands $32 Billion U.S. Aid Package if It Is to Take Part in a War on Iraq | Turkish and American officials continued their diplomatic brinkmanship today, as the Turks said they were waiting for the Bush administration to answer their demand for an economic aid package worth as much as $32 billion to ensure their participation in a war with Iraq.
The American ambassador to Turkey, Robert Pearson, was summoned to the Turkish Foreign Ministry after 10 p.m. on Monday and handed the proposal, which he forwarded to Washington, American officials said.
Turkish officials demand an economic aid package worth as much as $32 billion to ensure their participation in a war with Iraq.
Turkish and American officials continued their diplomatic brinkmanship today, as the Turks said they were waiting for the Bush administration to answer their demand for an economic aid package worth as much as $32 billion to ensure their participation in a war with Iraq.
The American ambassador to Turkey, Robert Pearson, was summoned to the Turkish Foreign Ministry after 10 p.m. on Monday and handed the proposal, which he forwarded to Washington, American officials said.
The Turkish request is about $6 billion higher than what American officials said over the weekend was their final offer. Of the $26 billion Washington has offered, $20 billion is in loan guarantees and $6 billion in direct grants. Although a Western diplomat said the Turks were seeking about $10 billion in direct aid, the White House is adamant that $6 billion is the limit for direct aid.
It remains to be seen whether negotiations will begin anew or whether the administration's plan to use Turkey as a launching pad for an invasion of northern Iraq will fall through. That prospect seemed to put an unusual strain on the relationship between the longtime allies, who have been speaking of each other in increasingly harsh tones.
As of this evening, Turkish officials said they had received no answer from the Americans. As the day began in Washington, Ari Fleischer, President Bush's spokesman, called on the Turkish leaders to approve the deal that the Americans had offered.
''We continue to work with Turkey as a friend, but it is decision time,'' Mr. Fleischer said.
As Mr. Fleischer spoke, senior administration officials met at the White House to discuss the Turkish proposal, still hoping, at least in public, that Turkey would approve the smaller economic package.
That seemed increasingly unlikely here, as the day passed without a vote by Parliament on the deployment of American combat troops. Turkish officials had scheduled one, but canceled it on Monday, saying they would go forward only after they reached an agreement on an economic aid package.
There is a growing sense on both sides that time is running short. American military planners have drawn up two sets of war plans: one that includes Turkey as a staging area and one that does not.
Two senior American military officials said today that without Turkish consent by the end of the week, the Pentagon would be forced to shift to a less desirable backup plan.
''Two or three more days is about all that's left,'' said one of the senior officials.
With ships carrying equipment for more than 15,000 soldiers of the Fourth Infantry Division now approaching Turkish ports, the military can wait only so long before planners need to divert the equipment to the Persian Gulf in time to unload it and have it ready for troops there by early March.
Turkish leaders publicly warned that they might ultimately refuse to take part in an American operation against Iraq. In a speech that seemed intended for an American audience, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the leader of the majority Justice and Development Party, said Parliament's recent vote authorizing American engineers to upgrade Turkish military bases did not mean that the Turks would agree to open their bases to thousands of American troops.
''Our American friends should not interpret this decision to mean that Turkey has embarked on an irreversible road,'' Mr. Erdogan said. ''It is not possible for us to accept anything which we don't approve of, which we don't believe as necessary or which we can't explain to our people.''
Pentagon officials, seeking to put the best face on a bad situation, said that starting a northern offensive from Turkey, while desirable, was not essential to victory.
But officials clearly want to move ahead, one way or another. Paul D. Wolfowitz, the deputy defense secretary, told a Turkish reporter last week that ships ferrying American soldiers were in the Mediterranean Sea and could not wait indefinitely for an agreement.
''We can no longer keep our troops waiting on ships, wandering around the eastern Mediterranean,'' Mr. Wolfowitz said in the interview, printed in Hurriyet, a Turkish newspaper. Without a decision soon, he said, ''it is highly likely that we would order our ships in the eastern Mediterranean to shift their direction to the gulf.''
The deadlock seemed to grow out of the belief, held by each country, that it holds the upper hand in the negotiations. Turkish leaders believe that the Americans, whatever they say privately, desperately need the country's participation in a war against Iraq.
It is not just that a northern front would make an invasion easier, it is that Turkey is a Muslim country that is democratic and secular -- precisely the kind of government the Bush administration hopes an invasion of Iraq might help bring about in other corners of the Middle East.
At the same time, the Turkish public overwhelmingly opposes a war. For many here, the potential war with Iraq seems to promise a repeat of the Persian Gulf war of 1991, when Turkey was swamped with half a million refugees and its trade with Iraq plummeted.
For their part, the Americans believe that Turkey cannot afford to turn them down, and that Turkey's leaders will ultimately understand that.
THREATS AND RESPONSES: BARGAINING
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2,003 | Saving Dunes With a Touch of Grass and Wood | AN idea that began when a few blades of salt grass poked through the wood decking in Charles A. West's backyard in Mount Sinai has caught the attention of the federal government and could be used to reduce erosion on beaches everywhere.
For the 30 years he has lived on the water, Mr. West, 66, has looked for ways to combat the erosion that has claimed a lot of his beachfront property. He saw that traditional wooden bulkheads worked well at holding back waves but made beach erosion worse. ''It's just one force fighting another force,'' Mr. West said.
AN idea that began when a few blades of salt grass poked through the wood decking in Charles A. West's backyard in Mount Sinai has caught the attention of the federal government and could be used to reduce erosion on beaches everywhere.
For the 30 years he has lived on the water, Mr. West, 66, has looked for ways to combat the erosion that has claimed a lot of his beachfront property. He saw that traditional wooden bulkheads worked well at holding back waves but made beach erosion worse. ''It's just one force fighting another force,'' Mr. West said.
After an intense northeaster destroyed his deck and took nearly half his beach in 1994, Mr. West, a home builder, constructed an array of wooden slats curved like a wave on his property and that of his next-door neighbor. Then he buried the structure, which he called the Dune Ladder, with sand and replanted with salt grass. Over the years, the grass strengthened the Dune Ladder and the sand around it, creating a natural-looking barrier. Seven years later, the device has weathered several storms on Long Island Sound. Now, the Army Corps of Engineers wants to test the Dune Ladder on the oceanfront.
''It seems to be working very well on the North Shore,'' said Lynn Bocamazo, an Army Corps senior coastal engineer for the New York district who came to Mr. West's backyard almost three years ago. ''If it works here, it might work in other places.''
To test the Dune Ladder, the Army Corps needs the approval and cooperation of several federal, state and local agencies, including the federal Fish and Wildlife Service, the Department of Agriculture and the State Department of Environmental Conservation. For testing, the Army Corps is planning to build a three-section, 1,500-foot dune facing the ocean at Gilgo Beach State Park.
The demonstration site will include a 500-foot Dune Ladder next to 500 feet of planted bare dune and 500 feet of a California invention called a Rapidly Deployed Fortification Wall, an expandable plastic casing filled with cells of sand. The battle of the barriers will be judged by measuring sand losses or gains in each section.
The Gilgo Beach site was chosen because of its rapid rate of erosion. Every two years, the state and the Army Corps spend around $10 million to dredge sand from the Fire Island Inlet to repair the damage to Gilgo Beach and its dunes and to protect Ocean Parkway from waves. The cost of the Gilgo Beach test is estimated at less than $1 million and will be financed by the National Shoreline Erosion Control Development and Demonstration Program.
It cost Mr. West about $10,000 in materials to build his Dune Ladder, and his neighbor Al Kaplan gladly chipped in. ''We had a concrete deck when the no-name monster storm came, and everything crumbled down,'' said Mr. Kaplan, 77. ''We lost close to six feet of sand.''
Mr. Kaplan said his beach has been restored, and like Mr. West's, has gained sand since the Dune Ladder was installed. ''I think it's spectacular,'' Mr. Kaplan said. ''Everybody sees the value of it.''
Prodded by Mr. Kaplan and other friends, Mr. West joined Glenn Olsen, 44, and Glenn Gordon, 47, both from Huntington, to help patent his invention and form a company to market it.
Mr. Olsen said the Dune Ladder would first be marketed to property owners and later to insurance companies and municipalities. ''This has applications worldwide,'' Mr. Olsen said. ''Anywhere that is losing waterfront, which is the most valuable property there is, there will be a market for it.''
The trick is what happens where the Dune Ladder ends. Though a barrier can protect dunes behind it, it can worsen erosion adjacent to it, according to Steven Kenny, a Southampton Town councilman who has co-sponsored a bill that would ban permanent ''beach-hardening'' devices in the town.
''Artificial barriers tend to have a down-drift erosion effect,'' Mr. Kenny said, alluding to the natural east-to-west movement of sand along the South Shore's ocean beaches. ''It robs the sand from the west of the structure.''
Mr. Kenny said he favors ''strategic retreat'' -- actually moving a structure when it is threatened by the sea. But he added that if something like the Dune Ladder is proven to work, he would be interested in finding out more.
Mr. West said he has accounted for side erosion by constructing the ends of the Dune Ladder on a gradual angle into the hill behind. But to protect his neighbor's beach, Mr. West was required to install rock riprap, precisely the kind of structure the Dune Ladder was designed to replace.
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2,002 | Departing Leader Made Halting Progress | The departure of Zhu Rongji, the hard-driving prime minister, from the Communist Party's Central Committee makes him a lame duck for the next four months as he tries to promote his ambitious plan to overhaul China's economy.
The front-runner to replace Mr. Zhu as prime minister in March is Wen Jiabao, who in his post as deputy prime minister has gained a reputation as a capable manager with a more conciliatory style.
The departure of Zhu Rongji, the hard-driving prime minister, from the Communist Party's Central Committee makes him a lame duck for the next four months as he tries to promote his ambitious plan to overhaul China'seconomy.
The departure of Zhu Rongji, the hard-driving prime minister, from the Communist Party's Central Committee makes him a lame duck for the next four months as he tries to promote his ambitious plan to overhaul China's economy.
The front-runner to replace Mr. Zhu as prime minister in March is Wen Jiabao, who in his post as deputy prime minister has gained a reputation as a capable manager with a more conciliatory style.
Mr. Zhu became prime minister in 1998, having in his previous job steered China out of high inflation while preserving rapid growth. On his first day, he stirred the country with brash promises to make ailing state industries solvent, rebuild the banking system and cut bureaucracy in half -- all in three years.
Important but halting progress has been achieved in all these areas, and Mr. Zhu has said he is especially frustrated by the unresponsiveness of corrupt local officials. But with his style, which some call arrogant, he too has made policy missteps, and he was never closely embraced by President Jiang Zemin.
CHANGE IN CHINA
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2,001 | Survey Shows Overseas Use Of Napster Outstrips U.S. | While the court battle over Napster is being waged on American soil, use of the online music service is extending well beyond the borders. And, in a handful of nations, its use is more concentrated than in the United States, according to a survey to be released today.
The survey, by Jupiter Media Metrix, found that during February 30.3 percent of at-home Internet users in Canada downloaded songs from Napster. That is the highest rate among at-home Internet users in any nation in the survey, and compares to 16.1 percent of Internet users in the United States.
While the court battle over Napster is being waged on American soil, use of the online music service is extending well beyond the borders. And, in a handful of nations, its use is more concentrated than in the United States, according to a survey to be released today.
The survey, by Jupiter Media Metrix, found that during February 30.3 percent of at-home Internet users in Canada downloaded songs from Napster. That is the highest rate among at-home Internet users in any nation in the survey, and compares to 16.1 percent of Internet users in the United States.
The survey found that Argentina, Spain and Brazil also had a higher percentage of online users exchanging songs on Napster than was the case in the United States. The survey focused on people who gain access to Napster from their home computers, and did not include office access.
Dannielle Romano, an analyst with Jupiter, said the research validated a general understanding that ''Napster is an international phenomenon.'' She added that the demand indicated there was a potentially vast market for distribution of music via digital means.
Ms. Romana speculated that the reason that the rate of Napster use was greater in some countries than in the United States was because those countries were newer to the Internet in general. As a result, she said, the population of Internet users abroad is more likely to be comprised of technology's early adopters, who might be more prone to use a service like Napster. In the United States, she said, the Internet population more closely resembles the population at large.
Still, the report found that the United States had by far the highest absolute number of users during February, with around 13.5 million people exchanging songs via home computers. Over all, around 26 million people downloaded songs from Napster worldwide during February; after the United States, the second-highest total was Canada's, where four million residents used Napster, the survey found.
Napster declined to comment on whether the figures were consistent with its own internal analysis. In the past, Napster has said that the Jupiter Media Metrix figures underestimate the use of the online service.
Moreover, Napster has said that around 8.5 million people are presently using the service every day. That figure suggests that the absolute figures reported by Jupiter are below Napster's own measures, although comparison is difficult because Napster is also measuring use by people who gain access through computers at work, not just at home.
Last month, a federal court in San Francisco issued a preliminary injunction to force Napster to stop its users from exchanging copyrighted music owned by the major record companies.
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2,004 | Treatment of Prisoners | To the Editor:
''Life After Prison'' (letter, June 30) is good if one can survive the brutality of life behind bars where rapes, assaults and deaths are regular occurrences. Why are government officials and citizens not outraged about the torture of and lack of medical treatment and sometimes food for the men, women and juveniles in our own prisons?
To the Editor:
''Life After Prison'' (letter, June 30) is good if one can survive the brutality of life behind bars where rapes, assaults and deaths are regular occurrences. Why are government officials and citizens not outraged about the torture of and lack of medical treatment and sometimes food for the men, women and juveniles in our own prisons?
The abuse of Iraqi prisoners pales in comparison with how we abuse our own incarcerated citizens.
Our $40 billion correction system is badly broken and failing us at an enormous cost in tax money and danger to society. The taxpayer is the innocent victim in this system. If, as Dostoyevsky said, ''the degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons,'' we are in trouble.
GERALDINE GREEN Toms River, N.J., July 1, 2004
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2,003 | On the Bench Or in the Dock, That's Politics | IN the patois of the season, it can be awfully hard to know who's on first in New York politics.
Consider two running stories: the indictment of Brooklyn's Democratic leader, Clarence Norman Jr., on charges of grand larceny, mainly for alleged double dipping, and the nomination of Dora Irizarry to the federal bench.
In New York politics, an accusation is never just an accusation.
IN the patois of the season, it can be awfully hard to know who's on first in New York politics.
Consider two running stories: the indictment of Brooklyn's Democratic leader, Clarence Norman Jr., on charges of grand larceny, mainly for alleged double dipping, and the nomination of Dora Irizarry to the federal bench.
The Norman indictment came out of an investigation by the Brooklyn district attorney, Charles J. Hynes, into the possible buying and selling of judgeships. Mr. Hynes raised expectations several months ago that his investigation would lead to sweeping revelations about corruption in the judicial selection process.
It's common knowledge that Democratic party leaders control judicial nominations and that candidates show party fealty by buying tickets to Democratic club events and paying for voter drives with money that may stray into political pockets. But does the system spill into clear corruption -- direct payment for a judgeship?
That's the underlying suspicion that Mr. Hynes has been investigating. But now he has charged Mr. Norman, a state assemblyman, with appropriating a $5,000 check made out to his campaign, and with billing the Assembly for another $5,000 in travel expenses already covered by the party.
Not admirable, if true. But that kind of cheating is surely not hard to find in Albany, and doesn't deal with the bench. Why did Mr. Hynes announce this indictment (and handcuff Mr. Norman and insist on $25,000 bail)?
''We're investigating only seven months, for heaven's sake,'' the district attorney said in an interview. ''We have 12 separate investigative tracks. As each one of those tracks ripen, develop and result in indictments, we are going to announce them.'' In other words -- there is more to come.
Maybe. So far that is only more innuendo. But there are other possibilities: that Mr. Hynes is flexing his prosecutorial muscles to pressure Norman loyalists into sharing incriminating information. Or that Mr. Hynes is promoting himself to improve his chances of re-election. (No on both counts, he said.)
Also possible: that he is stymied. ''He couldn't find evidence to support the original contention that Norman was involved in the sale of judgeships, so how else does he get off this thing?'' asked former Mayor Edward I. Koch. He accused Mr. Hynes of ''persecuting, not prosecuting.''
He criticized Mr. Hynes during his radio commentary on Saturday, and then, as they tell it, told friends -- including his former press secretary, George Arzt. Mr. Arzt, a public relations consultant who advises Mr. Norman, knew a helpful news story when he saw one, contacted some reporters and editors, and the criticism appeared in the Sunday newspapers.
By yesterday, Mr. Hynes was accusing Mr. Koch of speaking out as a favor to Mr. Arzt and another old Koch friend, Arnold Kriss, who has told friends he is thinking about challenging Mr. Hynes. ''The whole thing is so transparent,'' Mr. Hynes said.
To which Mr. Koch laughed, noted that he has long championed judicial reform and asked months ago for a special prosecutor to investigate the state bench. ''What am I supposed to do, live like a hermit and not have friends?'' he asked.
It is hard to imagine Mr. Koch, ever-selfish of his reputation, risking it for friendship. But in this town, an accusation is never just an accusation, a policy is never just a policy, and merit is an overused word.
IT was on the merits, contends Governor Pataki, that he recommended Dora Irizarry, a former city and state judge, for presidential appointment to the federal bench. But Ms. Irizarry, an active participant in the governor's push for Hispanic votes last year when she ran a hopeless campaign as the Republican candidate for attorney general, was rated unqualified by the American Bar Association.
She is only the third of about 200 Bush judicial nominees to get that rating from the bar association. The issue is judicial temperament. Lawyers have described her as nasty, even known to throw things in court.
Yet Democratic Senator Charles E. Schumer -- an outspoken critic of President Bush's judicial nominations -- is supporting her, all but assuring confirmation. ''Ideology is the key,'' Mr. Schumer said, describing Ms. Irizarry as a moderate. ''Temperament is not at the top of my list.''
Mr. Schumer obviously picks his fights, and has chosen not take on Ms. Irizarry a year before his re-election campaign. ''They can say what they want,'' he said of critics who may impute ethnic politics to his motives.
This being New York, be assured -- they will.
Metro Matters
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2,003 | CRIME | Peter Lovesey loves strong women, cerebral killers and diabolical puzzles -- the very ingredients that make THE HOUSE SITTER (Soho, $24) one of the most cunning mysteries in his Inspector Diamond series. The story opens with a strategic stroke of misdirection, when a woman in a white bikini is strangled while sunbathing on a crowded public beach on the Sussex coast. The ingenious plot delivers its first twist when the bathing beauty turns out to be a criminal profiler working on the case of a serial killer who dispatches his victims with a crossbow and dispenses clues from Coleridge's ''Rime of the Ancient Mariner.'' Being ''the kind of murderer who plans his crime like an architect, every detail worked out, measured and costed,'' the Mariner is a fit adversary for Peter Diamond, although no more of a handful, it seems, than the spirited women who play key roles in this shape-shifting case. The tough-minded homicide detective is entranced by the murder victim, whose keen brain and lusty sexual appetites are revealed in her journals, and bowled over by Anna Walpurgis, the earthy rock star he must protect from the Mariner. Never a slave to gender politics, he also makes a buddy of Inspector Henrietta Mallin, a brisk, boisterous, cigar-smoking colleague who can match him in pigheadedness and teach him how to take a joke.
April Smith, who wasn't shy about breaking genre conventions in her first crime novel, ''North of Montana,'' puts her foot through more windows in GOOD MORNING, KILLER (Knopf, $24). This kidnapping thriller starts off like most kidnapping thrillers, with the abduction of a pampered teenager, 15-year-old Juliana Meyer-Murphy, that has the local cops running around in circles. But we know we're in uncharted territory here when Juliana returns home, raped, battered and deeply traumatized, and Ana Grey, the F.B.I. agent assigned to the case, is so distressed by the girl's condition that she ignores procedures and starts acting on impulse. Even more dangerous, the unstrung agent becomes obsessed with her cheating lover, a charismatic Santa Monica cop who draws women like flies to carrion, stalking him, harassing him and finally taking a couple of shots at him.
Peter Lovesey's new mystery is one of the most cunning in his Inspector Diamond series. Also reviewed this week, new books by April Smith, Erin Hart, David Rosenfelt and Michelle Blake.
Peter Lovesey loves strong women, cerebral killers and diabolical puzzles -- the very ingredients that make THE HOUSE SITTER (Soho, $24) one of the most cunning mysteries in his Inspector Diamond series. The story opens with a strategic stroke of misdirection, when a woman in a white bikini is strangled while sunbathing on a crowded public beach on the Sussex coast. The ingenious plot delivers its first twist when the bathing beauty turns out to be a criminal profiler working on the case of a serial killer who dispatches his victims with a crossbow and dispenses clues from Coleridge's ''Rime of the Ancient Mariner.'' Being ''the kind of murderer who plans his crime like an architect, every detail worked out, measured and costed,'' the Mariner is a fit adversary for Peter Diamond, although no more of a handful, it seems, than the spirited women who play key roles in this shape-shifting case. The tough-minded homicide detective is entranced by the murder victim, whose keen brain and lusty sexual appetites are revealed in her journals, and bowled over by Anna Walpurgis, the earthy rock star he must protect from the Mariner. Never a slave to gender politics, he also makes a buddy of Inspector Henrietta Mallin, a brisk, boisterous, cigar-smoking colleague who can match him in pigheadedness and teach him how to take a joke.
April Smith, who wasn't shy about breaking genre conventions in her first crime novel, ''North of Montana,'' puts her foot through more windows in GOOD MORNING, KILLER (Knopf, $24). This kidnapping thriller starts off like most kidnapping thrillers, with the abduction of a pampered teenager, 15-year-old Juliana Meyer-Murphy, that has the local cops running around in circles. But we know we're in uncharted territory here when Juliana returns home, raped, battered and deeply traumatized, and Ana Grey, the F.B.I. agent assigned to the case, is so distressed by the girl's condition that she ignores procedures and starts acting on impulse. Even more dangerous, the unstrung agent becomes obsessed with her cheating lover, a charismatic Santa Monica cop who draws women like flies to carrion, stalking him, harassing him and finally taking a couple of shots at him.
Although Ana is not your conventional heroine, with her unbridled passions and addiction to ''the pure oxygen of risk, of going over the edge,'' it's hard to peel your eyes from her -- especially when she persists in pursuing Juliana's attacker while standing trial for attempted murder. A risk taker herself, Smith writes in the forceful style of a true literary maverick, someone who has earned the right to break a few rules.
For all its melodramatic trappings -- a decaying mansion, a brooding master of the house and dark secrets buried deep in an Irish bog -- Erin Hart's first novel, HAUNTED GROUND (Scribner, $24), has a story sturdy enough to withstand the ornate romanticism of her style. While digging peat in Drumcleggan Bog to fuel his cottage in a remote corner of Galway, a farmer unearths the well-preserved head of a red-haired woman, a phenomenon that galvanizes the archaeology department of a Dublin university and stokes village gossip about the resident laird's missing wife and child. In an efficient bit of plotting, Cormac Maguire and Nora Gavin, the archaeologists entrusted with the human remains, are put up at the manor house, given the run of the village and taken into the confidence of the regional homicide detective, Garrett Devaney, who fears that, ''whoever she was, that red-haired creature in the bog had managed to set something loose, like the genie from a bottle.'' Although multiple perspectives tend to obfuscate a plot that is complicated enough, even the most fleeting characters are fully fleshed and articulate in the guarded way of country folk. Indeed, Hart writes with a lovely eloquence about how character is shaped by the music, the architecture and the history of this harsh and beautiful land.
Andy Carpenter, the wisenheimer defense lawyer from Paterson, N.J., who executed the tricky courtroom maneuvers in David Rosenfelt's first legal mystery, ''Open and Shut,'' comes down with ''lawyer's block'' in FIRST DEGREE (Mysterious Press/Warner, $23.95). He won't accept boring cases or guilty clients -- except those whose crimes win his moral approval -- and, having inherited $22 million from his father, he doesn't have to. Andy is jolted out of the doldrums when Laurie Collins, his private investigator and girlfriend, is arrested for the decapitation murder of a crooked cop, a crime so heinous you'd think it would take the edge off Andy's wisecracking wit and boyish amiability. But Rosenfelt smartly balances his hero's bushy-tailed charm with a fast-paced plot, sophisticated courtroom techniques and enough colorful sidekicks (and lovable dogs) to keep this new series on its entertaining track.
In the growing subgenre of clerical mysteries, Michelle Blake's series about an Episcopal priest named Lily Connor stands out for a couple of good reasons -- besides the essential one of being written with intelligence and grace -- that become self-evident in THE BOOK OF LIGHT (Putnam, $24.95). For one thing, these books take a long view of crime, finding meaningful lessons in antisocial acts. In ''Earth Has No Sorrow,'' the issue was hate crimes; in ''The Tentmaker,'' it was moral corruption; here, Blake explores individual commitment to truth. It sounds simple, but the truth can be dangerous, as one of Lily's seminary friends, now teaching at the university outside Boston where Lily serves as chaplain, discovers when she learns of an ancient Hebrew text that could undermine the foundation of Christian belief. Watching Lily struggle with this and further challenges to her faith is the other reason Blake's mysteries sustain their interest. ''There are many things the church calls sins that I see as . . . being human, what people do, who people are,'' she says, in the sweet but ever rational voice that defines who she is and why we like her.
Crime
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2,002 | FOLLOWING UP | Holding Gun Makers Liable for Shootings
Hamilton, et al. v. Accu-Tek, et al.
The kind of dry legal lingo that captions a lawsuit, but captures none of the emotions driving it.
A woman who sued gun manufacturers after her son was shot and killed in 1993 now advises other victims to pursue court actions like hers.
Holding Gun Makers Liable for Shootings
Hamilton, et al. v. Accu-Tek, et al.
The kind of dry legal lingo that captions a lawsuit, but captures none of the emotions driving it.
Freddie Hamilton, a Brooklyn woman, was in the news in the 1990's after her son Njuzi Ray, 17, was shot and killed in a street dispute. She gained attention not just as a grieving parent, but also as a leading force and trial witness in a suit in which she and relatives of five other victims killed with illegally obtained handguns sought to hold gun makers collectively liable for the shootings. A teenager wounded with such a gun also took part.
Accu-Tek Firearms was among 30 gun manufacturers named as defendants. They were accused of marketing practices that fostered illegal gun trafficking that put the weapons in the assailants' hands.
The jury verdict in 1999 was nationally publicized. Nine of the companies, not including Accu-Tek, were found liable in three of the shootings -- the first time an American court deemed gun makers jointly culpable, on grounds of negligent marketing, for harm caused by illegally obtained guns they had manufactured.
But the companies, which had argued that they could not control illicit trafficking in their products, succeeded last year in getting the verdict overturned on appeal.
Despite this outcome, Ms. Hamilton advises other victims these days to pursue court actions like hers. They just have to understand, she said last week, that ''it's not going to be an easy battle.''
Ms. Hamilton, 59, the executive director of a social service agency in Brooklyn, said she had not been disappointed that her son's shooting was not one of the three for which the jury found the companies liable.
''It wasn't about money damages,'' she said. The important result, she said, was that gun makers were held liable, at least at the trial level.
Meanwhile, Ms. Hamilton and her husband, Johnny Ray, cannot escape reminders of their son's 1993 killing, for which the only person prosecuted was acquitted.
''People who were his friends will call on the anniversary of his death or his birthday,'' she said. ''Sometimes it just pops into my head. At times we feel it very strongly, and at times it's easier.''
Neighborhood Tumult From Visits to a Grave
When Grand Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson, leader of the Lubavitch Hasidic movement, died eight years ago at 92, the shock was felt in Cambria Heights, Queens.
That is miles from Crown Heights in Brooklyn, where the Lubavitch movement is based and where there is a large Lubavitch community. But Cambria Heights, a largely black, middle-class area with no such community, has the Old Montefiore Cemetery, and the rabbi's funeral and burial there drew a horde of mourners who spilled onto lawns of nearby homes while their cars occupied or blocked driveways.
Such throngs continued daily as the rabbi's grave became a site for pilgrimages by Lubavitchers around the world. Local residents fumed and tensions grew.
But nowadays, even with some 200 visitors daily, things are much calmer, representatives of both sides agree. The residents ''started to see it would not turn into another Crown Heights, that people were just coming and going,'' said Rabbi Abba Refson, director of the Ohel Chabad Lubavitch Center at the cemetery's edge.
''Everybody seems pretty relaxed,'' said Leonard Joseph, chairman of the Cambria Heights Civic Association, though some residents cite visitors ''running stop signs and parking in driveways.''
Following Up
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2,001 | World Business Briefing | Europe: Spain: Profit Up At Telefónica | The Spanish telecommunications company Telefónica reported nine-month net profit up 7.2 percent, to 1.59 billion euros ($1.4 billion), helped by growth in mobile phones and strong fixed-line performance at home. Earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortization rose 8.5 percent, to 9.64 billion euros, slightly below analysts' forecasts. The company said a strong showing at Telefónica Móviles and a sharp fall in financial costs helped offset currency effects in Latin America. Telefónica shares rose 2.8 percent, to 15.94 euros.
Emma Daly (NYT)
The Spanish telecommunications company Telefónica reported nine-month net profit up 7.2 percent, to 1.59 billion euros ($1.4 billion), helped by growth in mobile phones and strong fixed-line performance at home. Earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortization rose 8.5 percent, to 9.64 billion euros, slightly below analysts' forecasts. The company said a strong showing at Telefónica Móviles and a sharp fall in financial costs helped offset currency effects in Latin America. Telefónica shares rose 2.8 percent, to 15.94 euros.
Emma Daly (NYT)
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2,003 | The People's Game | In Haikou, a city off the southern coast of China, a team of junior Olympic hopefuls drilled their way through another 40-hour workweek in the municipal arena. It was a warm day, like every day in Haikou. Outside the gym, walkers and cyclists in straw hats weaved sluggishly among the palm trees. Inside, the future of Chinese basketball couldn't stop himself from yawning.
Chen Jianghua had just turned 14. At 6-foot-1 and 165 pounds, with a vertical shock of black hair and a face full of fine, sharp angles, he resembled an underfed cockatiel. Stripped to his waist, Chen was so skinny that his ribs stuck out as he rose for his jump shots. He skimmed along on what an insider called ''Ray Allen legs,'' after the elegant N.B.A. sharpshooter: pipe stems through the ankle, with a pomegranate of fast-twitch muscle high in the calf. They were legs that portended explosion.
Following in the giant footsteps of Yao Ming, a new generation of supertalented (and not all overwhelmingly tall) Chinese players points to a future in which the Far East could rule basketball.
In Haikou, a city off the southern coast of China, a team of junior Olympic hopefuls drilled their way through another 40-hour workweek in the municipal arena. It was a warm day, like every day in Haikou. Outside the gym, walkers and cyclists in straw hats weaved sluggishly among the palm trees. Inside, the future of Chinese basketball couldn't stop himself from yawning.
Chen Jianghua had just turned 14. At 6-foot-1 and 165 pounds, with a vertical shock of black hair and a face full of fine, sharp angles, he resembled an underfed cockatiel. Stripped to his waist, Chen was so skinny that his ribs stuck out as he rose for his jump shots. He skimmed along on what an insider called ''Ray Allen legs,'' after the elegant N.B.A. sharpshooter: pipe stems through the ankle, with a pomegranate of fast-twitch muscle high in the calf. They were legs that portended explosion.
Those in the know -- in the tight circle of top-tier basketball in China -- told me three things about Chen. First, that he was a rare athlete, the youngest and best player on a precocious team. Second, that Chen tended to loaf, a trait on clear display this morning. His stretches were halfhearted; he ran his sprints midpack. He lagged on defense after carelessly missing a scoop shot. Every so often he'd run his long fingers through his hair, as if struggling to stay awake.
The third thing I'd heard was that Chen just might become China's first world-class point guard. That he might be the one to feed the ball to Yao Ming in 2008 in Beijing, when the host nation will strive for its first medal in Olympic basketball.
''That is their ultimate goal,'' said Tony Ronzone, an international scout for the Detroit Pistons. ''Do they have a shot? Definitely. They're playing at home; I think they can compete with anybody.''
Much is riding, in short, on this spindly adolescent's progress -- because China, quite simply, has gone hoops crazy. According to various surveys, more Chinese now play basketball than soccer or any other sport. New arenas are sprouting in the dustiest hinterlands, and you cannot find a schoolyard without a backboard and a rim. The high school and college games are in a renaissance, to the point where they're beginning to mount a challenge to the old state-run academy system. Meanwhile, a playground subculture teems with hotshots in N.B.A. replica jerseys and the latest signature footwear from Nike, Adidas and Reebok. China is ''our fastest growing global market,'' according to David Stern, the N.B.A.'s expansionist commissioner, who recently announced a pair of preseason games to be played next October in Beijing and Shanghai.
The professional Chinese Basketball Association, despite stunted marketing and tepid fan support, has established itself as a solid midtier league -- rungs below those in Italy or Spain, but higher than anything in Turkey or Russia. Three C.B.A. alumni now play in the N.B.A., including a 7-foot-5 wonder who has turned the Houston Rockets into China's Team while achieving the ultimate in celebrity: to be known by one name. When Yao squared off against Shaquille O'Neal and the Lakers last January, days after O'Neal had mocked a fifth of the world's population with a singsong satire of Mandarin, the game was beamed live on a Saturday morning to a Chinese audience into the hundreds of millions.
By the time that Yao, the pride of Shanghai, had blocked the shots of his hulking nemesis three times and sealed the outcome with a dunk, he'd done more than win a game. Around the world, he'd smashed the stereotype of the small, submissive Chinese. (In fact, tall Chinese are not at all uncommon, especially in the northern provinces. During a visit near the Mongolian border, Ronzone came upon 20 seven-footers under the age of 18, plus a 12-year-old who's already 6-11.)
Back home, Yao erased some stubborn doubts that Chinese players could succeed on the biggest stage. Around the corner from the Shanghai Ritz-Carlton, at Malone's American Café, Shawn Doyle served scrambled eggs and French toast that day to 200 people, the large majority of them locals, as they clustered around a couple of big screens. A few years ago, Doyle said, N.B.A. telecasts drew only foreigners, who came to watch the Lakers. ''There's a lot more interest now,'' he said.
To grasp the Chinese passion for basketball, consider the warmhearted, exuberant Xu Jicheng, known to all as Big Xu, who spent his teenage years playing for a junior team with the People's Liberation Army. Big Xu still has a foot in the old system as senior correspondent for Xinhua, the state-owned news service. He and his wife and their 9-year-old son -- a standard-issue nuclear family under China's one-child policy -- live in a two-bedroom apartment provided by Xinhua on the campus of its Beijing headquarters.
But Big Xu's other size-12 1/2 sneaker is planted squarely in more entrepreneurial turf. In addition to his full-time job, he is a color commentator for the Sunday N.B.A. games on China Central Television, a guest lecturer at Beijing Sports University, the M.C. of choice for any C.B.A. or N.B.A. function in Beijing and a columnist and consultant for N.B.A. Time and Space, a local edition of the league's official magazine. After four years in print, the Chinese version -- with all original content -- has tripled its circulation, to more than 200,000.
A true believer in the new China, the proud owner of a Volkswagen Passat, Big Xu exults in his ''freedom to do other jobs,'' even if he seems free, most of all, to run himself ragged. Two years after China's acceptance into the World Trade Organization, two decades after Deng Xiaoping extolled the glories of being rich, a burgeoning middle class grows short on patience. They are eager to enjoy their lives, as the contemporary slogan goes. But they also crave something deeper and broader -- to see China restored to the promise of its ancient civilization, before its wealth and confidence were drained by waves of invaders and centuries of isolation.
''It's a psychological theme that runs throughout China,'' noted Frank Hawke, who arrived from Arizona via Stanford in 1979 as a student at Peking University, and stayed. ''The Chinese feel they have this great culture, second to none, and yet here they are, a third-world developing country. Since 1949, their major goal has been to catch up and surpass the rest of the world in all aspects: culture, national defense, technology, sports. When they feel they've made a huge leap forward, there's incredible national pride.''
These are heady times in the Middle Kingdom, at least for those who can overlook the nation's massive unemployment and a widening gap between haves and have-nots. One day the Chinese are sending a man into space; the next, they are striding toward an East Asian free-trade zone. With 1.3 billion people (almost twice the population of the European Union and the United States combined), China already has the most cellphones, the largest market for TV sets and the fastest-growing one for automobiles. Now the world's sixth-largest economy, it is gaining fast on the top two, the United States and Japan.
And as the sleeping behemoth stirs, where do a Yao Ming -- and, with luck, a Chen Jianghua -- come in? Sport is an ideal medium for geopolitical conflict; the rules are set, the fray contained. In 1971, Ping-Pong diplomacy marked a pivot point in Chinese-American relations. Today, as China wades into the global market economy, as its children embrace Western youth culture, as a new urban professional set seeks self-expression at every turn, what better vehicle than basketball? What sweeter dream of ascendancy than the N.B.A., that brand of brands, that glittering symbol of U.S. hegemony and hipness and the good life?
Back in 1997, at the Jazz-Bulls finals in Salt Lake City, Xu Jicheng had a freighted exchange with David Stern. In a moment of hubris, or perhaps of stunning foresight, Big Xu suggested that China might someday become the N.B.A.'s second-largest market.
To which Stern replied: It should be the first.
Basketball arrived in China piggybacked on the moral fervor of Y.M.C.A. missionaries like Max Exner, an ex-roommate of James Naismith and a participant in the very first peach-basket scrimmage in Springfield, Mass. The novelty found fertile soil, and its roots dug in. Exner took it to Shanghai in 1908, during the last gasp of the last imperial dynasty. According to Judy Polumbaum, a China expert and journalism professor at the University of Iowa, the basketball craze lent momentum to social reform and the cutting of Manchu-style braids, which could get in the way of a two-hand set shot. By the 1920's, the game was a mainstay among urban students; in 1935, it was declared a national pastime. As in the U.S. at that time, the sport fared most prominently at the university level, with legendary squads like the Five Tigers from Nankai teachers' college.
With the establishment of Communism in 1949, everything changed -- and yet the bouncing rhythm of Naismith's game skipped nary a beat. If the Christians saw basketball as a wholesome alternative to big-city debaucheries, and the Kuomintang used it as a point of nationalist unity, the People's Republic would transform the game into a vehicle for revolutionary fitness, hard work and collectivism. Unlike baseball, where pitcher and catcher monopolize the ball, or soccer or American football, where certain positions dominate the scoring, basketball is at its heart egalitarian. While some players may get more opportunities to score by dint of size or talent (from each according to his ability!), everyone must be able to pass and dribble and play defense, and to make an open layup. All are expected to share the ball and work together to create the best shot.
The sport continued to flourish under the Cultural Revolution of the late 60's and into the mid-70's. Aside from Ping-Pong and badminton, basketball was about the only recreation available in those days. Every farm and factory and government bureau fielded a team. Fans lined up down the block to see the Shanghai city five take on visitors from Poland or Hungary. The purpose of these contests was to ''earn honor for the country.'' Individual statistics were not kept, except within players' heads.
When Jaime FlorCruz came to China in 1971 for a three-week tour with a delegation of Filipino dissidents, he was blocked from returning home by the Marcos government and wound up stranded in China as an exile. Nowhere was his culture shock more pronounced than on the basketball court. ''The slogan we heard never-endingly was 'Friendship first, competition second,' '' said FlorCruz, now the Beijing bureau chief for CNN, as he sipped a latte at a sun-drenched Starbucks. ''If someone bumped you, they'd pick you up and say, 'I'm sorry.' ''
Later on, FlorCruz joined the Peking University varsity team as a backup point guard, a year before the team added Frank Hawke as an aggressive if undersize power forward. The foreigners were impressed by the school's two well-kept gymnasiums, then chagrined to find most of their ''home games'' moved to outdoor blacktops off-campus, regardless of winter cold snaps. The idea, Hawke said, ''was to be equal for everybody. In order to be fair and maintain the friendship, we'd play on a neutral court.''
I met Hawke that afternoon at Dong Dan, a mile from Tiananmen Square, where he plays pickup ball with his 15-year-old son, Aaron. Beijing's most famous street-ball venue, Dong Dan consists of two dozen or so half-courts flanking a large soccer pitch. The state-managed facility is underwritten by Nike, which established a marketing base here in the early 90's, way ahead of its rivals. (Since 1997, when it brought Yao to its Euro Camp in Paris, Nike had been instrumental in Yao's development -- until Yao switched to Reebok this fall for a LeBron James-size contract, a stunning reversal in China's sneaker wars.) Nike keeps the concrete smooth and the nets fresh, and adorns each backboard with its telltale swoosh. It costs 15 yuan, about $2, to pass through the metal green-mesh fence.
School was out on this crisp March day, and every court was packed; idle players awaited their turns behind the painted baselines. They wore sweatshirts and warm-up pants and sneakers costing up to $150 a pop. The best Chinese playground players are fast and smooth and sweet shooters, but not particularly fond of defense. While a murmured ''fangui,'' or ''foul,'' might hike an eyebrow, calls are rarely challenged.
Still, something serious is wafting in this air, beyond the dust from the Gobi Desert. On the court next to Frank Hawke's, a blocky teenager pounded the ball outside the three-point arc. He owned a syncopation to his dribble, an in-and-out hesitation as he lurched toward the basket. The move wasn't especially quick or even legal (as he grossly carried the ball), but there was an endearing self-consciousness to it. The dribbler was a stylist, and style comes only from immersion -- from steeping in a subculture that fits your image of yourself.
The conquest of the 1992 Olympics by the Dream Team whetted satellite-driven appetites for more. In 1994, for the first time, the N.B.A. Finals were broadcast live to China. As Hakeem Olajuwon danced around and over the Knicks, in rebuke to the notion that centers must rule by brute force, among those glued to their tubes was a 13-year-old beanstalk named Yao Ming.
By the time that Michael Jordan returned from his first retirement, in 1995, the Chinese were primed for him -- and, with their weakness for dynasties, for the rest of Chicago's ''Red Oxen.'' As Alexander Wolff noted in his fine survey of global basketball, ''Big Game, Small World,'' the Chinese thrilled to Jordan's aerial exploits; they revered his stony will. He became the mainland's premier pop cultural hero -- more lionized, in one poll, than Mao.
In Beijing I met a member of this congregation at the Sports City Café, a bar from a parallel universe. They'd festooned a back room with framed photographs of Bob Cousy, Ted Williams and Pete Rose. The main bar rimmed a basketball court that patrons could use between beers. Suspended from the rafters were six life-size papier-mâché hoopsters, in assorted N.B.A. colors, tilting forward in slam-dunk mode.
An owlish 22-year-old with mop-top bangs, the son of a CCTV executive, Cheng Yang was a college student when I met him. He was also an N.B.A. addict who'd played hooky that morning to watch the Rockets with his 70-year-old grandmother: ''She knows nothing about basketball, but she loves Yao Ming.'' In addition to his TV habit, Cheng logged on to the new Mandarin edition of NBA.com at least once a day.
Cheng's dearest possession is his sneaker collection, which numbers 70 pairs and counting. He arrived this night in a pristine pair of red-and-white Vince Carter Nikes. He has 34 pairs of Air Jordans, but never puts them on. ''When I'm wearing a player's shoes,'' he explained, ''it gives me a feeling of what he feels on the court.'' But in donning the Jordans, he says: ''I'm trying to be like the gods. I don't measure up; I don't have the dignity to wear his shoes.''
Even as it fueled China's N.B.A. fan base, Barcelona marked a watershed for the sport's ruling bureaucrats, if only by framing the vast challenge ahead. After watching the likes of Barkley and Jordan up close, Jiang Xingquan, the dean of Chinese coaches, made ''a complete overhaul'' of the national team: ''I got players who were taller, faster and more competitive.''
The upshot has been less than impressive. China finished 10th in basketball in both the Atlanta and Sydney Olympics, and a disappointing 12th in the 2002 World Championships, even losing to Angola. Then came the shock of last year's Asian Games, where the Chinese had won five straight gold medals. This time they wasted a seven-point lead to South Korea in the final game's final minute. It was a devastating loss for a nation that teeters between can-do optimism and an age-old inferiority complex. The loss of face was complete.
On the Internet, the post-mortems were blistering. The players were overtrained and exhausted; the players were undertrained and out of shape. In either case, they had failed to match the Koreans' fighting spirit. Team officials, meanwhile, were denounced as overconfident in light of the semidefection of Wang Zhizhi, the first Chinese player to enter the N.B.A. (The anti-Yao, Wang had been expelled from the national team for ''indifference '' after he chose an N.B.A. summer league over training for international play.)
In the ensuing shakeup, the 62-year-old Coach Jiang was recalled to a third tour with the national team. On Oct. 1, 2003, he led his troops against South Korea in the Asian championships, with a berth in the 2004 Olympics on the line. As before, the smaller Koreans rained in three-point baskets against China's mechanical zone defense, a Jiang trademark. After watching their lead cut to one in the fourth quarter, the Chinese rode Yao's 30 points and 15 rebounds to survive and secure their date in Athens.
Once again, however, the team's soft spot had been exposed. The Chinese point guards were neither quick enough nor sure enough to make decisive plays. They imploded when trapped. Their shooting was too erratic to stop defenders from sagging back on Yao, and they often seemed flummoxed at getting their prized giant the ball. What good was an unstoppable big man when his team couldn't funnel him 20 shots a game? ''It's like the software that's missing from the hardware,'' said Terry Rhoads, who used to be Nike's marketing chief in China and now runs his own firm there.
It is no coincidence that China's first three exports to the N.B.A. -- Yao, Wang, and Mengke Bateer -- are all giants. Under the Soviet model, which the Chinese followed from the 1950's on, height was the holy grail. Enough of it could mask technical flaws or poor coaching -- it was, as per cliché, the one thing that couldn't be taught. Generations of Chinese children had their hands X-rayed. By age 10 or 12, the ones with outstanding growth potential were tracked into boarding academies for ''professionalized'' training. After three or four hours of morning academics, the rest of their waking lives revolved around basketball. The top talents rose to the senior provincial or P.L.A. level; lesser lights were eventually returned home, where they might wind down their careers on city or factory teams.
There are two problems with this system, which still holds sway today. First, it has produced thousands of ex-jocks with no future in a market economy. Second, it excluded the odd quicksilver prodigy who was too short to make the cut. The guards who emerged weren't rewarded for bold strokes or commanding personalities. They were schooled to defer to their coaches, follow set plays, make the simple pass. They might not inspire, but they were stable, predictable -- qualities much valued in China. They would not upset the order of things.
Though the system has loosened of late, to the point where C.B.A. teams now field some 5-foot-8 wisps, the point-guard gap remains. Chinese coaches and team managers, according to Jaime FlorCruz, hold that the problem is genetic -- that they cannot compete physically with African-Americans or Eurasians without a height advantage. (Similar thinking led to an internal Chinese experiment with a four-point shot in the 1980's, in the hope that their players' shooting skill -- born of numbing practice -- might outweigh their athletic limitations.)
''But I think it's more than physical,'' FlorCruz said. ''I think it's conceptual. I think it's the way point guards are taught. It's a matter of mind-set, training, coaching.''
Chris Herren, who has played the point for the Denver Nuggets and Boston Celtics, and moved last year to the Beijing Ducks, would agree. ''That position just hasn't developed here,'' he said. ''They're robotic -- there's no flair, no freedom, no individuality. The coaches don't let the reins go.''
The dominant N.B.A. point guards -- Jason Kidd, Gary Payton, Stephon Marbury -- are spontaneous and unbridled. They sense who should get the next shot, and where; when the pace needs to slow or accelerate; when the moment demands a lob, or a bullet pass, or a damning of torpedoes as they lunge into the foul lane and create for themselves. The great ones, as Rhoads noted, own a streak of ''rebellion, independence, unquestioned leadership.'' In the scheme of Chinese sports, where leadership long has been a top-down affair, these are not exactly traditional virtues.
But at the base of the pyramid, attitudes are shifting. Among Chinese youth, the favorite player of the post-Jordan era may be the league's prodigal son: Allen Iverson. The Chinese adore him as a normal-size person who takes on bigger men without fear, who never gives up. But there is more to Iverson's iconography than a profile in courage. From his intricate braids on down, he brings a whiff of subversion to the table. Of all the great American stars, Iverson is the least controllable. He does not conform.
On my last day in Beijing, a Saturday, I stopped by a recreational basketball clinic, a growing vogue for middle-class families since the advent of the five-day workweek. As their parents sat and watched intently from the sideline, seven small boys did their slide drills and dribbled up and down the court. One of them caught my eye, a bubbly, round-faced sixth grader with a cowlick. His name was Chen Lun, and I had only to look to his feet to guess at his role model.
Why Iverson? ''Because he plays all-out all the time, 110 percent,'' he said. ''And even though he's small, he can really score and make things happen.''
The boy's parents had university degrees, and his smiling, well-coiffed mother made it clear that Chen was headed the same way -- basketball was a fine hobby, no more. But when I asked him how far he wanted to go with the sport, he had no less grand a plan than any self-respecting 12-year-old in Brooklyn or Indianapolis. ''Like Iverson,'' he said. ''To Iverson's level -- the N.B.A.''
Halfway into the Haikou morning practice, in the first full-court scrimmage, Chen Jianghua abruptly became a different player: demonstrative, alert, in his element. From his seat in the stands, Zhang Weiping, the team's top executive, began to lean forward whenever his point guard touched the ball. The next minutes told why.
Chen startles, first of all, with his quickness: the lightning first stride, the full stops on a dime, the tommy-gun stutter steps as he veers in a new direction. Paired against an older, stronger, taller guard named Lu Wei, the team's toughest defender, he could not be contained. Chen feinted to rock Lu back, dribbled twice between his legs, then jabbed one more time before rising for a deft three-pointer -- a new toy for Chen, who'd only recently gained the upper-body strength to shoot from that far off. With his torso fading to gain space, the release came in a blink. The ball floated into the basket.
The next time, Lu crowded a few inches closer, spurring Chen to do what he loves best. He crossed over to his left hand to beat Lu and angled right by a second man -- only to find a seven-footer blocking entrée to the foul lane. It was too late to reconsider, and Chen seemed sure to be felled by his own momentum. But as he sprawled full-length to the floor, he somehow slung the ball to an open wingman on the baseline for a score.
As violent as Chen seems in motion, there is a logical sequence to his moves, a satisfying syntax. And as spectacular as he can be, there is no ''French pastry'' to his game, as the late Al McGuire liked to say. His work is clean, direct, unitalicized. He plays with nonpareil style, but no ego. He has somehow absorbed the global point guard idiom.
An hour after practice ended, as the sun set over a man-made lake by the team's dormitory in Haikou, I asked Chen if he'd been influenced by any N.B.A. players he'd seen on television. With his team leader translating, he said he admired Iverson, ''but some of his moves are too wild, and I don't like that.'' He'd learned more from a coach at a clinic he attended in Eugene, Ore., he said, who ''told me to dribble two balls at the same time. It helped me a lot to practice this way.''
Though Chen grew up in Guangdong, the mainland's southernmost province, where street ball is played year-round, he wasn't born into the sport. His father had no interest in it, nor did an older brother. The family was amused when Chen, 6 years old, hefted a basketball and refused to put it down. He took the ball to bed with him, hugging it as he slept.
An uncle took an interest. After Chen turned 10, he steered the boy to a strong sports school, where teachers eyed the frail newcomer and shook their heads. As Chen recalled, ''Some guys who thought they knew about basketball, they told me I was too small -- to forget about it.'' His voice was low and soft, his face impassive. ''I never thought about those kinds of things. I just kept practicing.''
Seeing the boy's intensity, the school's coach allowed Chen a rare degree of freedom on the floor. For two years he was ignored by the provincial sport ministry, left to develop on his own. Then, at 12, Chen shot up to 5-11. He gained national prominence in August 2001, at the national finals of a Nike-sponsored three-on-three tournament in Shanghai. ''I saw this kid, and boy, he was beautiful,'' said Rhoads, the former Nike marketer. ''And he played so street -- so street! I kept asking myself: Is he really Chinese?''
The secret was out. Chen was summoned to his provincial junior team and then lent out to the Olympic hopeful squad last February. After speaking with Bruce O'Neil, who has spent the last eight years bringing a coaching-certification program to the Far East, Zhang Weiping expected great things. But at Chen's first practice, the team leader said: ''I thought he was terrible. Lazy. Just half-speed; walked up court.''
Over the next weeks, Chen showed glimmers of surreal brilliance. At an exhibition for the Haikou townspeople, he spun one full revolution in the air -- a 360, in the trade -- and finished with a clean slam-dunk. Then he'd skip four of the next six practices. The coaching staff wanted to send him home. A bad influence, they said.
Instead, Zhang imported Jack Schalow, formerly with the Portland Trail Blazers. After observing a Haikou practice -- seven hours a day of repetitive drills, often taught the wrong way -- Schalow understood Chen's problem. Yes, the kid could be lazy, but most of all he was bored. He was Mozart being taught by Salieri.
Schalow halved the team's practice time; each drill now had a purpose. He appealed to Chen as a leader, and the boy fell into line. Toward the end of Schalow's stay, the hopefuls took on the perennial island champions, a veteran group of grown men. The game was never close. Chen ''just dominated,'' Schalow said. ''He had maybe 20 assists and 20 points, and he didn't even look to shoot. The crowd went crazy for him.''
Zhang Weiping was sold. ''I didn't understand that little guys can sometimes compete with big guys -- can beat big guys!'' he said. '' I've totally changed, because of Chen.'' It was only a matter of time, he felt sure, before Chen became the national team's starting point guard. ''If he works hard, puts on muscle,'' Zhang added, ''I think he can make the N.B.A. Because he can feel the game. It's inborn, not something you teach him.''
Meanwhile, Chen confesses to thinking about 2008 and the Chinese Olympic team. He imagines delivering the ball to Yao and a rehabilitated Wang, and to Yi Jianlian, the 6-foot-11 16-year-old whose raw athleticism reminds some of a young Tim Duncan. ''We should medal,'' the boy wonder said bluntly.
Much lies beyond his control, of course -- the needed upgrades in training and coaching techniques; the direction staked by the new basketball commissioner, Li Yuanwei. Chen is as fragile as the next teenager. He could be injured or burn out, or dull for lack of competition. Enter the new brainchild of O'Neil's U.S. Basketball Academy: a program to admit junior Chinese players to American high schools, then return them to their homelands at a higher level. Rhoads is praying for Chen to get his chance in time. ''With point guards, it's more art than science,'' he said. ''Right now, the kid is painting his own canvas, using the paint that's available. But he needs more colors, and he can get them from overseas exposure.''
If and when that happens, Max Exner's mission will have come full circle, and Naismith's grand old game may never be the same.
Jeff Coplon is working on a book about Bill Russell, Bob Cousy and the desegregation of the N.B.A.
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2,006 | Proposed Religion-Based Program for Federal Inmates Is Canceled | The Justice Department has canceled its proposal for a religion-based prison rehabilitation program that critics and constitutional law experts contended would violate the separation of church and state.
On March 31, the department announced that it was seeking proposals for a ''single-faith, residential re-entry program'' that would be adopted initially in as many as six federal prisons and run in each by an organization of a particular denomination. The proposed program, among others, was challenged in a lawsuit filed on May 4 in the Federal District Court in Madison, Wis., by the Freedom From Religion Foundation, a watchdog group.
Critics of the program and constitutional law experts contended that it would have violated the separation of church and state.
The Justice Department has canceled its proposal for a religion-based prison rehabilitation program that critics and constitutional law experts contended would violate the separation of church and state.
On March 31, the department announced that it was seeking proposals for a ''single-faith, residential re-entry program'' that would be adopted initially in as many as six federal prisons and run in each by an organization of a particular denomination. The proposed program, among others, was challenged in a lawsuit filed on May 4 in the Federal District Court in Madison, Wis., by the Freedom From Religion Foundation, a watchdog group.
By May 26, the department had suspended its request for proposals for the program, and on Thursday it canceled the program ''in its entirety,'' according to the Web site for the Office of Justice Programs of the federal Bureau of Prisons, a branch of the Justice Department.
A spokeswoman for the office did not return calls seeking comment.
Some multiple-faith religion-based prison rehabilitation programs have already faced legal challenges. Civil liberties groups say federal money is being used to proselytize inmates, many of whom do not have secular alternatives for rehabilitation.
Proponents of such programs maintain that religion gives inmates a strong moral foundation to help them re-enter society.
In June, a federal judge in Iowa ruled that a state-financed evangelical Christian prison program was unconstitutional because it was ''pervasively sectarian.'' That case is under appeal.
Robert W. Tuttle, a professor of law at George Washington University, said the proposed single-faith program ''was dead in the water'' upon introduction. The program would seemingly have indoctrinated inmates in a particular religion, he said, thus violating the Constituition.
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2,003 | Venezuelan Minister Says Chávez Won't Give In to Strikers | Venezuela's foreign minister said today that the government regretted the violence that erupted Friday during a march against President Hugo Chávez, and acknowledged that the monthlong strike aimed at forcing Mr. Chávez out of office had taken a serious toll on the nation's economy.
But the minister, Roy Chaderton, accused strike leaders -- particularly executives at the state-owned oil company -- of shutting down the heart of this nation's economy in an effort to overthrow the government. He also insisted that Mr. Chávez would not give in to opposition calls for early elections.
Venezuela's foreign minister accused strike leaders of shutting down the heart of the nation's economy in an effort to overthrow the government.
Venezuela's foreign minister said today that the government regretted the violence that erupted Friday during a march against President Hugo Chávez, and acknowledged that the monthlong strike aimed at forcing Mr. Chávez out of office had taken a serious toll on the nation's economy.
But the minister, Roy Chaderton, accused strike leaders -- particularly executives at the state-owned oil company -- of shutting down the heart of this nation's economy in an effort to overthrow the government. He also insisted that Mr. Chávez would not give in to opposition calls for early elections.
''Democracy cannot be subject to the rises and falls in the polls,'' Mr. Chaderton said, referring to Mr. Chávez's declining approval ratings. ''So, just because today is a bad day is not a reason to call for immediate elections and to pressure with violence, to paralyze a country, and strangle the economy just to force out a president.''
''It is true that this government has made many mistakes,'' the minister said. ''But errors in a democracy are paid in elections, within the norms of the Constitution.''
On Friday, a protest by Mr. Chávez's opponents turned into a street fight that lasted most of the day. Tens of thousands of opposition demonstrators marched toward a military base to demand the release of a dissident general who was a leader of a failed coup last spring and urge the military to support the strike.
Supporters of Mr. Chávez confronted the marchers, and a fight ensued. Later, shots rang out.
Newspaper reports said two men, one 22 and the other 24, were killed and five other people were wounded by the gunfire. Dozens of others suffered injuries from rocks thrown by the battling protesters and from rubber bullets and tear gas fired by national guard troops.
The streets of the capital returned to calm today, and an estimated 20,000 supporters of Mr. Chávez turned out to demonstrate their support for the government.
Mr. Chaderton said Mr. Chávez was trying to prevent a repeat of a coup attempt last April, when the Venezuelan president was forced by the military to leave office for 48 hours after a violent protest outside the presidential compound.
He suggested that the opposition, frustrated that it had not been able to force Mr. Chávez out of power, had begun provoking violence as a way to turn up the pressure on him. But Mr. Chaderton said this effort, like last year's coup attempt, would fail.
''Despite the problems, the country is moving forward except for the oil industry, which has been hit the hardest,'' he said. ''But the country is going forward. The stores are open. People are going to work.''
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2,002 | Korea Frets Over Animal Disease as World Cup Approaches | The Agricultural Ministry intensified its search today for signs of foot and mouth disease on farms throughout the country after President Kim Dae Jung expressed concern that an outbreak of the disease would reduce attendance at the World Cup soccer tournament that begins here this month.
A health official, Kim Ok Kyung, said he would consider the country safe from the disease if no more cases were discovered by May 26. The tournament opens on May 31.
South Korea has intensified the search for signs of foot and mouth disease, fearing that an outbreak will reduce attendance at the World Cup soccer tournament.
The Agricultural Ministry intensified its search today for signs of foot and mouth disease on farms throughout the country after President Kim Dae Jung expressed concern that an outbreak of the disease would reduce attendance at the World Cup soccer tournament that begins here this month.
A health official, Kim Ok Kyung, said he would consider the country safe from the disease if no more cases were discovered by May 26. The tournament opens on May 31.
Aware of the how images of burning carcasses vastly reduced tourism to Britain during a outbreak there last year, the government ordered all animals killed here to be buried in huge pits.
It also banned low-level flights by news teams over the areas where the animals have been slaughtered, saying the disease could spread through the atmosphere to airplanes.
Mr. Kim said on Wednesday that he was worried about ''the impact foot and mouth disease will have on foreign visitors as the World Cup finals are near at hand.''
The Agriculture Ministry said soldiers had already killed most of the 95,000 animals that it had marked for slaughter since the disease was first detected in a pig on May 4.
Health officials have warned that as many as 300,000 animals, mainly cows, sheep, goats and pigs, would be slaughtered if the disease spreads beyond the area to which it has so far been confined.
Korean officials said they were concerned that if the disease was found near any of the 10 new soccer stadiums built in South Korea for World Cup, which is being played this year in South Korea and Japan, the government might have to restrict the movements of some visitors to prevent the disease from spreading.
By enforcing severe measures now, the government was hoping to allay fears that visitors to the games could also carry the disease back to their home countries.
The discovery of new cases last weekend came as a severe disappointment to agricultural officials and farmers, who believed until one week ago that the slaughter of 12,000 pigs in the first days after the initial discovery had halted the epidemic.
The current slaughter has evoked memories of an epidemic two years ago in which several hundred thousand animals had to be killed.
The Korean authorities have stopped the export of pig products and suspended trading at most of the country's 106 livestock markets, and Japan, China and the Philippines have all halted imports of pork, beef and mutton from South Korea.
Before the current outbreak, Korean farmers had hoped that within another two or three years they would be able to earn $400 million a year from exporting pork, much of it to Japan. Japan suspended imports from South Korea after the epidemic of 2000 but had reinstated them briefly before the current outbreak.
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2,007 | Lost and Found | THE BURIED BOOK
The Loss and Rediscovery
of the Great Epic of Gilgamesh.
By David Damrosch.
Illustrated. 315 pp. Henry Holt & Company. $26.
A history of “The Epic of Gilgamesh,” the world’s oldest work of great literature, which sprang back to life in England in the 19th century.
THE BURIED BOOK
The Loss and Rediscovery
of the Great Epic of Gilgamesh.
By David Damrosch.
Illustrated. 315 pp. Henry Holt & Company. $26.
The stylized images of ancient Assyrian kings, with their braided beards and Art Deco muscles, riding out in chariots to hunt lions or men, are now familiar, but until the 19th century nothing was known of them. All evidence had been buried for more than two millenniums under the soil of what is today Iraq. How we came to uncover that world, and how that world reached out toward our own, is part of the story David Damrosch tells in ''The Buried Book: The Loss and Rediscovery of the Great Epic of Gilgamesh.''
But the kingdom of ancient Assyria held other secrets, even older, and Damrosch is telling that story too. One of the last Assyrian kings, Ashurbanipal, had the literary skills and interests of a scribe. To warfare and lion hunting he added reading, building a great library in his capital city of Nineveh and filling it with thousands of inscribed clay tablets, including several copies of ''The Epic of Gilgamesh,'' a story already ancient in Ashurbanipal's time. When Nineveh fell in 612 B.C., the library, loaded with the cultural heritage of ancient Mesopotamia, fell too, its contents lost until the middle of the 19th century, when British archaeologists dug up its remains and British scholars cracked the cuneiform code of the tablets. ''Gilgamesh,'' the oldest work of great literature we have, sprang back to life, surrounded by the shards of a prebiblical culture that challenged assumptions about the primacy of biblical authority, a concept already crumbling fast in Victorian England.
Damrosch, a professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia, crams more than 4,000 years of history into his narrative without making it feel crammed at all. He accomplishes this in part by telling his story backward, beginning with the 19th century and ending up somewhere around 2700 B.C., when the real Gilgamesh might actually have walked the earth. This is a highly effective strategy, giving the whole book a narrative urgency and a simultaneous sense of archaeological unfolding. Along the way, Damrosch creates vivid portraits of archaeologists, Assyriologists and ancient kings, lending his history an almost novelistic sense of character.
First we meet George Smith, a 19th-century scholar of humble origins who started out as an engraver of bank notes. Fascinated by biblical history, he was drawn to the vast collection of clay tablets in the British Museum, where he proved himself adept at assembling the fragments into a semi-coherent whole, earning himself a spot as assistant curator of the collection. Scholars were only just figuring out how to read cuneiform, the wedge-shaped symbols impressed into clay that look as if tiny birds had wandered over a patch of wet cement. Smith was soon reading it better than anyone else, and in 1872, in a now famous moment of scholarly discovery, he decoded the story of a flood very much like the biblical account of Noah and became so excited he began undressing.
The tablet Smith had translated formed a piece of the ''Gilgamesh'' narrative, the story of a great king who, after the death of his beloved friend Enkidu, goes searching for immortality. Gilgamesh consults a distant relative, a man who not only survived the terrible flood but was rewarded with eternal life. This relative gives Gilgamesh the bad news: he must die like everyone else.
Damrosch, an eloquent champion of world literature, makes a persuasive case for ''Gilgamesh'' as a unifying story that knits East and West together. The dramatic narrative of the book's fortunes accomplishes the same thing: Gilgamesh is a once and future king who fell asleep in ancient Mesopotamia and woke up in the British Museum.
For this reason, the most captivating 19th-century figure in Damrosch's narrative is Hormuzd Rassam, who seems to embody in his very person the confluence of East and West that fascinates Damrosch.
Rassam, who assisted Austen Henry Layard in his discovery of Ashurbanipal's library and eventually became a great archaeologist in his own right, was born in Mosul to an old Chaldean Christian family. He converted to the Anglican Church at age 14, was educated at Oxford and, promoted by Layard, became adept at uncovering the buried history of his homeland. His fluency in Arabic and his familiarity with the world of his birth helped him excavate a staggering number of artifacts, which were dutifully sent to the British Museum. Despite experiencing British discrimination, he settled in England. Though Damrosch calls him ''both a loyal son of Mosul and a proud participant in the British imperial enterprise,'' it is not entirely clear by whose definition he remained ''a loyal son of Mosul.''
Damrosch's eagerness for universal themes leads him to stumble awkwardly in his coda, where he compares Saddam Hussein's first novel, which draws loose inspiration from ''Gilgamesh,'' to Philip Roth's ''Great American Novel,'' which features a baseball player named Gil Gamesh. Damrosch writes that Hussein and Roth are ''both children of Abraham, and both heirs of their common literary father, the globe-trotting Papa Hemingway.'' Keen to make this point about ''disparate'' but ''interconnected'' authors, he ignores the import of his own chilling disclosure that Hussein most likely murdered the Iraqi writer he forced to work on the book; the notion of Hussein as ''author'' is a fiction that suits Damrosch's larger purpose -- which, however laudable in its longing for universality, elides differences that matter very much.
Having made his Hemingway-Hussein-Roth union, Damrosch writes that '' 'The Epic of Gilgamesh' powerfully illustrates the underlying unity of the extended family that the historian Richard Bulliet calls 'Islamo-Christian civilization.' '' The term comes from Bulliet's book ''The Case for Islamo-Christian Civilization,'' published in 2004. In that book, Bulliet explains that he has lopped off ''Judeo'' in his coinage because it evokes only a shared ancient scriptural heritage -- not, presumably, a modern political one. Beyond the oddness of enlisting Philip Roth in ''Islamo-Christian civilization'' is the larger oddness of invoking a book with a polemically exclusionary title. However recently coined and inaccurate the term ''Judeo-Christian'' may be, replacing it with ''Islamo-Christian'' -- and employing that coinage when arguing for the universal nature of a Middle Eastern epic -- is, to say the least, problematic.
Unlike ''Gilgamesh,'' the Hebrew Bible is at once a part of world literature and the expression of a people still alive in the world, with a modern Middle Eastern present as well as an ancient Mesopotamian past. But ancient Mesopotamian culture has, since its 19th-century discovery, stirred contemporary passions. Damrosch mentions the 19th-century Assyriologist Friedrich Delitzsch only in passing, but his story is instructive. Delitzsch, who became quite famous, came to feel that since ''Gilgamesh,'' and indeed all of Babylonian culture, were older than the Hebrew Bible -- and superior to it -- there was no need for the Hebrew Bible at all. An anti-Semite and a German nationalist, he proposed replacing the Old Testament with German folklore.
Though it is easy to dismiss the entirely discredited Delitzsch, the old battles for supremacy and supersession are felt today in subtler, secularized form. Damrosch, who could not be farther from Delitzsch in spirit or intent, blunders into another reductive master narrative. He has done a superb job bringing what was buried to life. Surely it is possible to do this without buying into a narrative that buries that which still lives.
Jonathan Rosen is the editorial director of Nextbook. His most recent novel is ''Joy Comes in the Morning.''
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2,006 | Newark Airport Safety Chief Ousted After Screening Lapses | The federal government is shaking up the management of security operations at Newark Liberty International Airport, which has been plagued by screening lapses and poor morale.
The Transportation Security Administration removed Marcus Arroyo from his position as federal security director at the airport and named Mark O. Hatfield Jr., who was Mr. Arroyo's deputy, as his temporary replacement, employees of the agency said yesterday. Russell White, who oversaw aviation-security inspectors at the airport, also was relieved of his duties, they said.
Newark Liberty International Airport, plagued by screening lapses and poor morale, has been a sore spot for the Transportation Security Administration.
The federal government is shaking up the management of security operations at Newark Liberty International Airport, which has been plagued by screening lapses and poor morale.
The Transportation Security Administration removed Marcus Arroyo from his position as federal security director at the airport and named Mark O. Hatfield Jr., who was Mr. Arroyo's deputy, as his temporary replacement, employees of the agency said yesterday. Russell White, who oversaw aviation-security inspectors at the airport, also was relieved of his duties, they said.
Mr. Hatfield, 45, whose father was a United States senator and the governor of Oregon, said he would seek a permanent appointment to the top job and would immediately begin looking for people to take the roles he and Mr. White had filled.
Newark's airport has been a sore spot for the security administration in the last few years. Screeners have repeatedly failed to spot weapons in luggage and carry-on bags.
Last year, the administration decided to reduce the number of screeners at the airport by about 15 percent, leaving the staff complaining about being overworked. Mr. Hatfield said that developing a more flexible workforce and improving morale had been among his main goals since he moved to Newark from the agency's headquarters in Washington in September.
He has been an assistant administrator of the agency and its chief spokesman. He has spent his entire career in politics and communications, but once was a member of the police reserves in Portland, Ore.
Neither Mr. Hatfield nor a spokeswoman for the agency, Ann Davis, would discuss Mr. Arroyo's departure. In a statement, the agency said only that Mr. Arroyo was ''considering other employment options, including one within T.S.A.''
Ms. Davis said that Mr. Arroyo was not available for comment.
Some local officials and employees of the agency said the shake-up was a long time in coming. More than a year ago, Anthony R. Coscia, the chairman of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, complained to Rear Adm. David M. Stone, who was chief of the security administration, about ''serious weaknesses'' in security.
Mr. Coscia said that in recent months, under a new administrator, Edmund S. Hawley, the agency had cooperated with the Port Authority in improving security at the region's three big airports, but that he was unhappy about the cutback in screeners.
''We're hopeful that T.S.A. will continue to be cooperative,'' he said. ''We are by no means done with what we need to get done. Clearly we have had issues, and in all likelihood will continue to.''
In his October 2004 letter to Admiral Stone, Mr. Coscia referred to an internal report of the security administration that found that screeners at Newark had failed 25 percent of the tests of their ability to spot fake explosive devices or real weapons that passed through their checkpoints.
In December 2004, a suitcase with a fake bomb passed by screeners in Terminal C and into the cargo hold of a plane going to Amsterdam. Less than two months later, a woman carried a butcher knife through Terminal A and onto a plane.
Mr. Coscia said he was not aware of a similar recent event that might have precipitated Mr. Arroyo's departure.
Representative William J. Pascrell Jr., a Democrat from Paterson, said he was not satisfied with the agency's response to criticism of its Newark operation. He said it should return a ''full complement'' of screeners and spend more money to close the gaps in the baggage-screening system.
''Replacing Marcus is not going to be the solution,'' Mr. Pascrell said. ''T.S.A. has a lot of problems.''
Mr. Pascrell said that Mr. Arroyo had alienated many of the screeners and, along with other officials of the agency, had withheld information from Congress about operational shortcomings.
''He chose to parrot the party line,'' Mr. Pascrell said. ''He took that path and the path led out of the building.''
Mr. Hatfield said he planned to hire more part-time screeners to reduce the high use of overtime at the airport and to allow adjustments in staffing to match the peaks and valleys of passenger traffic. He said that about 10 percent of the 1,100 screeners at Newark were part-timers but that he hoped to double that number.
More importantly, he said, he intended to reverse the airport's poor reputation for security. He said his mantra at staff meetings had become, ''Our reputation will be one of a center of excellence.''
''That's the kind of reputation that I think this airport can very definitely have,'' Mr. Hatfield said. ''You've got to build it one brick at a time."
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2,002 | Island Shows Weakness In Jobs Picture | Long Island added about 6,700 jobs last year, less than a quarter of the growth registered the previous year, while unemployment rose to 4.4 percent in January, up from 3.1 percent in January 2001, according to an employment report released on Tuesday by the state Labor Department.
The results suggest that while Long Island is not in a recession, the pockets of growth that had masked previous economic weakness are no longer absorbing excess workers, said Gary Huth, the state labor market analyst in Hicksville.
Long Island added about 6,700 jobs last year, less than a quarter of the growth registered the previous year, while unemployment rose to 4.4 percent in January, up from 3.1 percent in January 2001, according to an employment report released on Tuesday by the state Labor Department.
The results suggest that while Long Island is not in a recession, the pockets of growth that had masked previous economic weakness are no longer absorbing excess workers, said Gary Huth, the state labor market analyst in Hicksville.
''Before, job growth in some sectors masked the fact that there were at the same time a lot of layoffs going on,'' Mr. Huth said. ''During the boom time there was also a great deal of realigning and restructuring. Companies were ready to hire people who were laid off. In some cases people even got better jobs.
''Now,'' he continued, ''we're seeing the effects of the layoffs. You're seeing examples of companies taking out job ads and then not filling those positions. In many cases they're sitting on their hands.''
The largest job growth category was teaching. The new positions included some 2,900 new jobs in public schools and an additional 600 at universities and private schools. Other major employment gainers last year were construction and health care, according to the report. The biggest loss, 3,000, was in manufacturing jobs.
Warren Strugatch
IN BRIEF
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2,001 | A New Position For the Cardinal: Grand Marshal | Cardinal Edward M. Egan was named grand marshal of the 241st St. Patrick's Day Parade yesterday.
It sounds simple. But the job puts him into the shadow of a complicated struggle over who controls the annual extravaganza of Irish pride, and thrusts a relative newcomer into one of New York's most brightly lighted ceremonial roles.
Cardinal Edward M. Egan was named grand marshal of the 241st St. Patrick's Day Parade yesterday.
Cardinal Edward M. Egan was named grand marshal of the 241st St. Patrick's Day Parade yesterday.
It sounds simple. But the job puts him into the shadow of a complicated struggle over who controls the annual extravaganza of Irish pride, and thrusts a relative newcomer into one of New York's most brightly lighted ceremonial roles.
The cardinal appeared at a news conference to declare his Irish roots but said he had hesitated before accepting the job.
''I thought I would have to be around a little longer to prove my Irishness,'' said Cardinal Egan, a Chicago-area native who was appointed the Roman Catholic archbishop of New York in May 2000.
But he said he agreed when told that the parade would be dedicated to rescue workers who responded to the attack on the World Trade Center. A large number of the firefighters and police officers who died were Irish Catholics.
''There's nothing that any of us would hesitate to do to honor those who lost their lives,'' said Cardinal Egan, who is only the second cardinal to be grand marshal in recent memory, after Cardinal John O'Connor in 1995.
''We're going to show the world what New York's been showing the past three and a half months, and we're going to show it with an Irish twinkle in our eyes,'' he said.
But there has been little twinkling behind the scenes.
The parade, an event that draws at least a million people, large doses of liquid revelry and usually plenty of controversy, has traditionally been operated by the Ancient Order of Hibernians. But the order's national leadership charges that in recent years, a faction on the St. Patrick's Day Parade and Celebration Committee has hijacked the event and let financial and legal records fall into disarray.
The office of the state attorney general, Eliot L. Spitzer, was reported last summer to be reviewing the committee's finances. No one at Mr. Spitzer's press office responded to a phone message yesterday.
A spokesman for the Hibernians' national leadership, Michael J. Cummings, said Cardinal Egan's nomination was engineered by two committee members, James P. Barker, the executive secretary, and John T. Dunleavy, the chairman, both of whom were hosts of the news conference yesterday.
Their thinking went like this, Mr. Cummings said: ''What selection would take some of the heat off us and everyone would really want to gather around? And obviously the one that comes to mind is the cardinal.''
Mr. Barker denied that the committee was guilty of any financial or legal irregularities and said the cardinal had been chosen unanimously by the 18-member board for his leadership of the archdiocese. ''He's someone the entire Irish community is proud of and looks up to,'' he said. ''He epitomizes what the St. Patrick's Day Parade stands for.''
Msgr. Thomas P. Leonard, a former member of the parade committee who also favored changes in its management, said he thought the cardinal should not have accepted.
''I think that the cardinal may be being used by the parade committee for their own purposes,'' he said. ''Their purpose is to give themselves a cover for the Spitzer thing.
''He's only been in the city for two years,'' Monsignor Leonard said of the cardinal. ''There are others who have been here for a longer period of time and worked assiduously for the Irish community.''
Cardinal Egan's spokesman, Joseph Zwilling, said that the cardinal's only knowledge of the dispute came from news reports, and that he did not want to comment on it.
The grand marshal's job comes to the cardinal while he is facing a bitter strike by lay teachers at Catholic schools and grumbling from some priests and parishioners because he spent time at the Vatican in October -- at the pope's request -- weeks after the terror attacks.
The cardinal was at the Vatican to help lead a worldwide meeting of bishops. When asked if there was a connection between his absence from New York and his agreeing to be grand marshal, he said such a connection never entered his mind and pointed out that he had asked to leave Rome after delivering the opening speech at the synod and was turned down, returned to New York for five days in the middle of the monthlong meeting, and left nearly a week early.
''It may come as a surprise that the archbishop of New York has a boss,'' he said.
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2,001 | The Art World Returns to Venice, Dipping en Masse Into Nostalgia | Contemporary art has always thrived on the herd instinct, and when the herd gets wind of an event worth seeing, everybody comes. Love it or hate it, few serious contemporary art followers would dare miss a Venice Biennale, arguably one of the most important platforms for contemporary art. At this, the 49th Biennale, some 30,000 people turned out for the three preview days specially held for the art world in advance of the Biennale's formal opening to the public.
Around the shaded gardens at the tip of Venice that have been home to the Biennale for most of its 106 years, or amid the miles of art in the nearby Arsenale, the network of shipyards and warehouses where the Venetian fleets were once built, one could see dealers with artists in tow, museum directors walking arm-in-arm with important trustees and auction house experts shepherding their richest collectors through acres of exhibitions.
Contemporary art has always thrived on the herd instinct, and when the herd gets wind of an event worth seeing, everybody comes. Love it or hate it, few serious contemporary art followers would dare miss a Venice Biennale, arguably one of the most important platforms for contemporary art. At this, the 49th Biennale, some 30,000 people turned out for the three preview days specially held for the art world in advance of the Biennale's formal opening to the public.
Around the shaded gardens at the tip of Venice that have been home to the Biennale for most of its 106 years, or amid the miles of art in the nearby Arsenale, the network of shipyards and warehouses where the Venetian fleets were once built, one could see dealers with artists in tow, museum directors walking arm-in-arm with important trustees and auction house experts shepherding their richest collectors through acres of exhibitions.
There were long lines and waits of up to two hours to enter the national pavilions that the crowds deemed hottest. Opinions about the state of the art world, the economy and the Biennale itself were rampant.
''I've been to the movies for a day and a half, but where's the art?'' asked Amy Simon, an American-born artist living in Stockholm.
For several Biennales now, video and installation art have eclipsed painting and sculpture, and this year is no exception. Darkened rooms with often surreal video performances are everywhere. So are built environments where viewers find themselves becoming participants. At this Biennale, the first of the millennium, nostalgia seems to be what artists have focused on most.
''You can't get to the end of a century or the beginning of a new one without looking back,'' said Sir Nicholas Serota, director of the Tate Gallery in London. ''It's all about a very personal take on the past.''
Some people wondered if artists, concerned with the shaky economy, were conscious of creating salable work that would instantly appeal to collectors or museum curators. ''Artists are trying to make art that's collectible,'' said Maxwell L. Anderson, director of the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Not everyone agreed. ''Often it seemed artists were pushing the boundaries of art history and the definition of what they considered art,'' said Franck Giraud, international director of 19th- and 20th-century art at Christie's. ''Some of the things I've seen here are almost impossible to describe. They can only be experienced.''
Mr. Giraud was referring to several elaborate installations that received a lot of attention, including the winners of three of the prizes awarded by a jury of arts professionals. Each was experiential, and each was in some way about memory. The German pavilion, which won the award for best pavilion, showed the work of Gregor Schneider. Mr. Schneider recreated a distorted version of his parents' house in Rheydt, Germany, but he upended the notion of house. Visitors are thrust into a series of surprise spaces, entering narrow corridors, squeezing through awkward passageways, traveling from empty tunnel-like spaces into rooms within rooms, all crudely furnished but each with its own personality and distinctive scent. The project seems a muddle between construction and destruction -- a metaphor, the artist said, for an exploration of the soul.
Another winner, the French artist Pierre Huyghe, created three rooms that are all about music, sound and light. One contains an eight-minute computer-generated film of two tower blocks typical of the French housing projects that sprang up in the 1970's. Against a background of fog, windows light up and go dark in interludes marked by changes in the atmosphere, enhanced by Cédric Pigot's background music.
A third award went to Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, who are representing Canada. People stood in line for more than two hours to sit in a tiny old-fashioned movie theater with only 17 seats. Wearing headphones, they watched a video that the artists described as derived from spy novels, murder mysteries and film noir, while listening to the surrounding noise of a traditional movie theater complete. The experience is supposed to represent a labyrinthine structure of memories, dreams, echoes and fantasies.
Robert Gober, the 46-year-old sculptor who is representing the United States, was also inspired by memory. Known for his surreal re-creations of body parts and everyday objects, Mr. Gober relates his art to explicit sociopolitical themes.
In the circular entrance of the 1930's neo-Classical-style pavilion is a cast-bronze version of a plastic foam plinth made to resemble a piece of flotsam that washed up near his Long Island house. On top of it sits a toilet plunger fashioned from terra cotta and hand-carved oak.
The plunger, the artist said, plays upon several themes, the most obvious being that of water, which has been important in his past work and is an obvious metaphor for Venice. The plunger is also meant as a reference to Abner Louima, the Haitian immigrant sodomized and beaten by New York City police officers in 1997. Other Duchampian sculptures of Mr. Gober's on display here -- a butter churn, pieces of driftwood, body parts and one of his signature elements, a drain -- are symbols of the cycles of everyday life, he said.
Other pavilions are also rife with references from the cultural and political landscapes. The Japanese artist Masato Nakamura created a labyrinth of fluorescent tubes in the shape of the famous McDonald's golden arches. Luc Tuymans, the Belgian painter, examined the colonial history of his country, especially its role in Congo. Mark Wallinger, the conceptual artist representing Great Britain, replaced the red and blue of the Union flag with green and orange, the colors of the Irish flag. In the center of his pavilion is Ecce Homo, the Christlike statue that stood in Trafalgar Square in 1999. There is also ''Ghost,'' a play on the famous George Stubbs painting of the horse Whistlejacket, which Mr. Wallinger depicted as a unicorn.
Several older, well-known artists received much praise, especially Cy Twombly and Richard Serra, who were both awarded ''Golden Lions,'' the Biennale's lifetime achievement award.
Mr. Twombly's paintings are tucked in a room in the international exhibition that fills the Italian pavilion. A suite of 12 new paintings, they are uncharacteristically colorful and depict the defeat of the Turks in the 16th-century battle of Lepanto. At the farthest end of the Arsenale are two monumental steel labyrinths by Mr. Serra.
In years past the Arsenale was the place to go to discover new talent, while the pavilions were generally less interesting and more predictable. This year it is just the opposite. ''People weren't talking about the Arsenale as they had in years past,'' said William S. Lieberman, chairman of the department of 20th-century art at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, adding that he found the acres of artworks ''too strenuous'' to be enjoyable.
Harald Szeemann was this year's artistic director. It was his second year in a row of organizing both the show in the Italian pavilion and the works in the Arsenale.
Although nobody would speak publicly about Mr. Szeemann's curatorial efforts this year, the consensus seemed to be that not much was new. He chose ''The Plateau of Mankind'' as his theme and largely left it open to interpretation, pairing renowned established contemporary artists like Joseph Beuys with artists of the moment like Ernesto Neto, Maurizio Cattelan and Richard Billingham.
At the Arsenale visitors are greeted by the British artist Ron Mueck's sculpture of a giant crouching boy, a work shown earlier this year in London's Millennium Dome. A bit of a one-liner, it resembles a giant film prop and fits in well with other works that have specific movie themes. The American artist Paul Pfeiffer's ''Self Portrait as a Fountain'' uses an over-lighted bathtub with running water and video cameras to recreate the famous shower scene from ''Psycho.''
The Italian artist Francesco Vezzoli shows photographs of beautiful women taken from a book by Ira Von Fürstemberg, highlighting the faces with embroidery. At the center of the installation, Verushka, as an aging model, sits on a couch from Luchino Visconti's 1954 movie ''Senso'' creating a self-portrait in needlepoint.
But the work that most emphatically embraces the glamour and madness of the movies was created by Mr. Cattelan, the 41-year-old Italian artist. As part of the Biennale, Mr. Cattelan recreated the famous Hollywood sign, atop a garbage dump in Palermo, some 500 miles south of Venice. More than 150 people piled into a plane chartered by the Turin-based Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo per l'Arte to see the piece. After a two-hour plane trip visitors took a long bus ride through the hills of Palermo to view the work and later that day flew back to Venice. ''It just proves the limits to which we'll go to see something,'' said Howard Rachofsky, a collector from Dallas.
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2,007 | Paid Notice: Deaths SZLACHTER, MORRIS | SZLACHTER--Morris. The Claremont Preparatory School community is deeply saddened by the death of Morris Szlachter, beloved father of our headmaster, Irwin Shlachter. Morris was a wonderful husband for 59 years to his late wife Frida, as well as a dedicated father to Irwin Shlachter and Celia Kessel. He is also survived by his daughter-in-law, Renee and son-in-law, Shlomo; and his grandchildren, Jordan and Adam Shlachter and Tamar and Sarit Kessel. Morris was a Holocaust survivor and hero who helped save the lives of six others during World War II. He will be deeply missed. We extend our heartfelt condolences to the entire family. Claremont Prep Association
SZLACHTER--Morris. The Claremont Preparatory School community is deeply saddened by the death of Morris Szlachter, beloved father of our headmaster, Irwin Shlachter. Morris was a wonderful husband for 59 years to his late wife Frida, as well as a dedicated father to Irwin Shlachter and Celia Kessel. He is also survived by his daughter-in-law, Renee and son-in-law, Shlomo; and his grandchildren, Jordan and Adam Shlachter and Tamar and Sarit Kessel. Morris was a Holocaust survivor and hero who helped save the lives of six others during World War II. He will be deeply missed. We extend our heartfelt condolences to the entire family. Claremont Prep Association
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2,001 | MOVIE GUIDE | A selective listing by critics of The Times of new or noteworthy movies and film series playing this weekend in New York City. * denotes a highly recommended film or series. The ratings and running times are in parentheses. An index of reviews of films opening today appears on Page 10.
Now Playing
* ''BEFORE NIGHT FALLS,'' starring Javier Bardem and Johnny Depp. Directed by Julian Schnabel (R, 125 minutes). Mr. Schnabel's romanticized portrait of the exiled gay Cuban poet and novelist Reinaldo Arenas, who committed suicide while suffering from AIDS, imagines pre-Castro Cuba as a pagan paradise of endless erotic promise ruined by the puritanical Communists, whom Arenas embraced and then turned against. Mr. Bardem's arresting performance paints Arenas as an emotionally volatile daredevil. But this biography, which incorporates swaths of Arenas's writing, is sketchy, and the star's thick Spanish accent is daunting. It's still quite indelible (Stephen Holden).
A selective listing by critics of The Times of new or noteworthy movies and film series playing this weekend in New York City. * denotes a highly recommended film or series. The ratings and running times are in parentheses. An index of reviews of films opening today appears on Page 10.
Now Playing
* ''BEFORE NIGHT FALLS,'' starring Javier Bardem and Johnny Depp. Directed by Julian Schnabel (R, 125 minutes). Mr. Schnabel's romanticized portrait of the exiled gay Cuban poet and novelist Reinaldo Arenas, who committed suicide while suffering from AIDS, imagines pre-Castro Cuba as a pagan paradise of endless erotic promise ruined by the puritanical Communists, whom Arenas embraced and then turned against. Mr. Bardem's arresting performance paints Arenas as an emotionally volatile daredevil. But this biography, which incorporates swaths of Arenas's writing, is sketchy, and the star's thick Spanish accent is daunting. It's still quite indelible (Stephen Holden).
''BLOW DRY,'' starring Alan Rickman, Natasha Richardson, Heidi Klum, Peter McDonald, Rachel Griffiths, Rachael Leigh Cook and Josh Hartnett. Directed by Paddy Breathnach (R, 90 minutes). Based on a script by the author of ''The Full Monty,'' this is another sentimental comedy about ordinary Brits -- in this case a broken family of hairdressers in the Yorkshire town of Keighley -- who balance hearfelt emotion with winsome eccentricity in pursuit of slightly shabby glory. Mr. Rickman and Ms. Richardson bring more intelligence and nuance to the alternately maudlin and madcap story than it deserves. The pathos is overdone and the humor a bit tired, but the hairstyles displayed in the climactic coiffeur championship are impressive (A. O. Scott).
''CHOCOLAT,'' starring Juliette Binoche and Johnny Depp. Directed by Lasse Hallstrom (PG-13, 121 minutes). In the late 1950's during Lent, a free-spirited chocolatier (Ms. Binoche) takes on the hypocritical forces of morality in a small French town: in other words, ''Like Water, for Footloose.'' Mr. Hallstrom puts an impressive group of actors through their crowd-pleasing paces, a cast that includes Lena Olin, Victoire Thivisol, Judi Dench, Leslie Caron, John Wood, Alfred Molina (who's asked to do the work of several actors) and Mr. Depp. Ms. Binoche is such an aggressively wholesome proponent of good times -- D. H. Lawrence's ''Mary Poppins'' -- that the sanctimony practiced by the mayor (Mr. Molina) seems a lot more inviting (Elvis Mitchell).
* ''CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON,'' starring Chow Yun Fat, Michelle Yeoh and Zhang Ziyi. Directed by Ang Lee (PG-13, 120 minutes; in Mandarin with English subtitles). Mr. Lee puts his particular stamp on the Hong Kong action film, and it results in ''Sense and Sensibility'' with a body count. Mr. Lee and the writer James Schamus are careful to invoke all the conventions of the genre, affectionately exposing them to parodic excess: there's so much high-flying swordplay that the movie seems to have repealed the laws of gravity. Mr. Lee also gives the proceedings a soulfulness not endemic to the genre. Mr. Chow comes across as the Cary Grant of the blade. But Zhang Ziyi is the real focal point of the film, and she claims it for herself (Mitchell).
''THE DISH,'' starring Sam Neill. Directed by Rob Sitch (PG-13, 104 minutes). This likable film about the 1969 Apollo XI mission as experienced in Australia recalls the crucial role played by a satellite dish outside of the rural town of Parkes, New South Wales, in transmitting live images of the moon landing. Although much of the story is a race against time to correct a malfunction, the easygoing movie is really a quirky, affectionate portrait of late-60's rural Australia waking up from its bucolic innocence to the wonders of the modern world. Mr. Neill is the courtly, widowed operator of the dish. The cloying rah-rah self-congratulation that usually is affixed to this event is kept to a minimum (Holden).
''ENEMY AT THE GATES,'' starring Jude Law, Ed Harris and Joseph Fiennes. Directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud (R, 133 minutes). A big, hokey, old-style war picture, set during the Nazi siege of Stalingrad in 1942. The story is overloaded and often unconvincing, but Mr. Law, playing a real-life Soviet sniper named Vasily Zaitsev, has unquestionable movie-star charisma, and Mr. Harris, as Vasily's Nazi nemesis, is steely, sinister and surprisingly human. Their performances and the dexterity with which Mr. Annaud stages their confrontations stand out from the overloaded script. They are nearly overwhelmed by James Horner's score, which not even bombs and artillery fire can silence (Scott).
''15 MINUTES,'' starring Robert De Niro, Edward Burns, Kelsey Grammer, Karel Roden, Vera Farmiga and Oleg Taktarov. Written and directed by John Herzfeld (R, 119 minutes). Mr. De Niro plays a New York detective and Mr. Burns a fire marshal who team up to investigate a lurid series of crimes involving murder and arson. They are the work of a pair of Eastern European émigrés, Emil (Mr. Roden) and Oleg (Mr. Taktarov). Oleg, who is fascinated by movies, videotapes their crimes; Emil's plan is to use an insanity defense. The film is fleet-footed, merciless entertainment. But the mixture of laughs, bathos and brutality is a big turnoff (Mitchell).
* ''THE GLEANERS AND I,'' directed by Agnès Varda (not rated, 82 minutes; in French with English subtitles). This warm, funny, inventive documentary is both a diary and a kind of extended essay on poverty, thrift and the curious place of scavenging in French history and culture. Ms. Varda, an intrepid woman in her early 70's and one of the bravest and most idiosyncratic of French filmmakers, spent eight months traveling through France recording the lives of people who gather what others have thrown away or left behind. Ms. Varda's gleaners retain a resilient, generous humanity, which is clearly brought to the surface by her own tough, open spirit. The film is studded with found metaphors and serendipitous insights (Scott).
''HANNIBAL,'' starring Anthony Hopkins and Julianne Moore. Directed by Ridley Scott (R, 131 minutes). This sequel to ''The Silence of the Lambs'' is a movie for the whole family -- the Manson family. It's more gruesome than frightening, with more state-of-the-art organs and arterial sprays than a season of ''E. R.'' Mr. Hopkins returns as Dr. Hannibal Lecter, the world's wiliest working cannibal and serial killer, who serves up a cast that includes Ray Liotta, Gary Oldman and Giancarlo Giannini, whose doleful manner gives the movie a rare touch of humanity. (Frankie R. Faison supplies the other warmth.) Julianne Moore, as the F.B.I. agent Clarice Starling, is game but almost superfluous: Hannibal himself is rendered in such operatic terms that you half expect Mr. Hopkins to burst into an Andrew Lloyd Webber song. Mr. Scott delivers a movie that glows in various degrees of midnight blue, a soothing contrast to the sea of crimson that the titular figure unleashes (Mitchell).
* ''IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE,'' starring Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung. Written and directed by Wong Kar-wai (PG, 140 minutes; in Cantonese and Shanghainese, with English subtitles). Rapturous and oblique, Mr. Wong's tale of romance captures a restiveness that's almost voluptuous: like the first blush of love, a state of being that's so potent you can't concentrate on anything else. Narrative is not the motivating factor in this story of a couple (Mr. Leung and Ms. Cheung) married to other people who find that their spouses are cheating on them. Instead, it's the filmmaker's heart that spills onto the screen, and this breathtakingly gorgeous movie is dizzy with a nose-against-the-glass romantic spirit that has been missing from the cinema for years (Mitchell).
* ''MEMENTO,'' starring Guy Pearce, Carrie-Anne Moss and Joe Pantoliano. Directed by Christopher Nolan (R, 118 minutes). A dazzling feat of narrative sleight-of-hand, ''Memento'' runs its film-noir revenge plot in reverse. Mr. Pearce plays an insurance investigator afflicted with short-term amnesia (''I can't make new memories,'' he explains), trying to track down his wife's murderer with the help of a sheaf of Polaroids, a chest full of tattoos and a couple of shady characters (Mr. Pantoliano and Ms. Moss). The movie, a triumph of directorial style, is challenging and suspenseful, even if, in the end, nothing more than formal bravura seems to be at stake (Scott).
''THE MEXICAN,'' starring Brad Pitt, Julia Roberts and James Gandolfini. Directed by Gore Verbinski (R, 123 minutes). If the screwball road movie about the search for a priceless antique pistol isn't half as funny as it ought to be, it is reasonably diverting. Cut from the same cloth as ''Flirting With Disaster'' and ''Nurse Betty,'' it follows an air-headed mob gofer (Mr. Pitt), his psychobabbling girlfriend (Ms. Roberts), a gay hit man (Mr. Gandolfini) and others to Mexico. The movie lacks the satirical bite of its prototypes but has a strong plot and likable performances by its stars, especially Mr. Gandolfini, whose hit man is even more tortured with self-doubt than the actor's more familiar alter ego, Tony Soprano (Holden).
* ''POLLOCK,'' starring Ed Harris and Marcia Gay Harden. Directed by Mr. Harris (R, 118 minutes). Mr. Harris's directorial debut is a conventionally structured biography of the painter Jackson Pollock made exceptional by Mr. Harris's and Ms. Harden's bone-deep portrayals of Pollock, the explosive alcoholic Abstract Expressionist, and his wife and fellow painter, Lee Krasner. Their dual performances get to the heart of a difficult and complicated marriage, and the film's portrait of the New York art world in leaner times feels authentic. Best of all, the scenes of Pollock creating his famous drip paintings offer the same thrill as watching brilliantly choreographed action-adventure sequences (Holden).
''SWEET NOVEMBER,'' starring Keanu Reeves and Charlize Theron. Directed by Pat O'Connor (PG-13, 110 minutes). Remade, for no discernible reason, from a 1968 picture starring Anthony Newley and Sandy Dennis, this romantic weepie seems determined to avoid any hint of liveliness or originality. In the early scenes Mr. Reeves, as a selfish, driven advertising executive, has some fun playing against type, but Ms. Theron's character, a feckless, terminally ill bohemian with a fondness for knit scarves and cute little animals, soon restores him to the spaced-out befuddlement moviegoers know and love. The film is a tepid bubble bath of secondhand emotion (Scott).
* ''THE WIDOW OF ST. PIERRE,'' starring Juliette Binoche, Daniel Auteuil and Emir Kusturica. Directed by Patrice Leconte (R, 108 minutes; in French with English subtitles). This tale of crime, punishment and passion in 19th-century French Canada has the bold, earnest emotion of a classic 1940's Hollywood melodrama, and its three principals manifest all the ardor and stoicism of the great movie stars of old. Mr. Kusturica plays a fisherman convicted of a senseless murder, who is placed under the supervision of the local military commander (Mr. Auteuil) and his wife (Ms. Binoche) until a guillotine and an executioner can be found. The film's moral seriousness, coupled with the complex triangle of jealousy, honor and sympathy that develops between the condemned man and his protectors, makes ''The Widow of St. Pierre'' an unusually satisfying period drama. Even as it moves toward tragedy, it carries a heady, thrilling sense of artistic risk (Scott).
Film Series
''THE FILMS OF WILLIAM RANDOLPH HEARST.'' To mention the name William Randolph Hearst to a moviegoer is, more often than not, to evoke the response ''Citizen Kane.'' But Hearst (1863-1951) was more than the newspaper publisher who provided the inspiration for Orson Welles's celebrated 1941 film; he was a significant producer who quickly grasped the importance of the medium of film. As early as 1898, he worked with Thomas Edison to obtain film of the Spanish-American War, and he went on to bring world events to the screen through his Hearst International newsreels; to produce animated cartoons as early as 1915; to back early Pearl White serials including ''The Perils of Pauline''; to found Cosmopolitan Pictures to make feature films, and, of course, to promote the career of Marion Davies. This weekend, a monthlong retrospective at the American Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, Queens, focuses on some of the Cosmopolitan Pictures' co-productions, with MGM and Paramount, from the 1920's and 30's. Tomorrow brings two Marion Davies vehicles. At 2 p.m. the attraction is Sidney Franklin's ''Quality Street'' (1927), followed at 4 by his ''Beverly of Graustark'' (1926). On Sunday xenophobia rears its head at 2 p.m. in Frank Borzage's ''Pride of Palomar'' (1922), in which a returning World War I veteran learns that the Japanese are about to colonize his ancestral estates; and at 4 in ''The Mask of Fu Manchu'' (1932), directed by Charles Brabin and Charles Vidor and starring Boris Karloff and Myrna Loy. The series, continuing through April 1, is $8.50 for adults, $5.50 for people over 65 and students with I.D., $4.50 for children from 5 to 18 and free to children under 4. The museum is at 34-12 36th Street, at 35th Avenue. Information: (718) 784-0077 (Lawrence Van Gelder).
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2,000 | NEWS SUMMARY | INTERNATIONAL
A3-11
European Union Threatens Isolation for Austria The European Union warned that its 14 other members would diplomatically isolate Austria if its anti-immigrant Freedom Party led by Jorg Haider enters a coalition government. The statement said Austrian candidates for posts in international organizations would find no support, and Austrian ambassadors would only be received at a technical level.
Concerns About Iraqi Weapons Recent United States intelligence findings have raised concerns among Clinton administration officials that the Iraqi government, in the prolonged absence of weapons inspectors, has continued its pursuit of biological and chemical weapons.
INTERNATIONAL
A3-11
European Union Threatens Isolation for Austria The European Union warned that its 14 other members would diplomatically isolate Austria if its anti-immigrant Freedom Party led by Jorg Haider enters a coalition government. The statement said Austrian candidates for posts in international organizations would find no support, and Austrian ambassadors would only be received at a technical level.
Concerns About Iraqi Weapons Recent United States intelligence findings have raised concerns among Clinton administration officials that the Iraqi government, in the prolonged absence of weapons inspectors, has continued its pursuit of biological and chemical weapons.
Few Survivors of Plane Crash Airline officials in Nairobi said only 10 of the 179 people aboard survived the crash of a Kenya Airways plane on Sunday night in the Ivory Coast. State television reported that 95 bodies were found, and rescuers gave up hope of finding more survivors.
Decision on Pinochet Upheld A High Court judge in London issued a judgment supporting the British government's decision to release Gen. Augusto Pinochet and let him return home to Chile. But Belgium held up any final action by lodging an appeal against the ruling.
Warning in Northern Ireland The leader of the Ulster Unionists warned that Northern Ireland's new government could be indefinitely suspended if a report on disarmament does not disclose moves by the Irish Republican Army to scrap its arsenal.
3 Israelis Killed in Lebanon Three Israeli soldiers were killed in southern Lebanon as Iranian-backed guerrillas continued to escalate attacks during a lull in peace negotiations between Israel and Syria. Israeli planes responded with artillery attacks and air strikes on Hezbollah guerrilla targets in Lebanon.
Indonesian Military Accused A human rights panel in Jakarta accused top military officials, including the former armed forces commander, of involvement in crimes against humanity in East Timor.
World Briefing
NATIONAL
A12-19
Report Faults C.I.A. On Inquiry of Ex-Director A classified report by the Central Intelligence Agency's inspector general concludes that top officials of the agency impeded an internal investigation into evidence that the agency's former director, John Deutch, mishandled large volumes of secret material.
Jet Crashes Off California An Alaska Airlines jetliner bound from Mexico to San Francisco crashed into the Pacific Ocean northwest of Malibu in the afternoon with nearly 90 people aboard after reporting mechanical difficulties. Coast Guard boats, rescue helicopters and a Navy search plane scoured the choppy waters and found several bodies but no immediate survivors, the authorities said.
Moratorium on Executions Gov. George Ryan of Illinois halted all executions in the state, the first such moratorium in the nation. The governor, a Republican who supports the death penalty but questions its administration, cited a ''shameful record of convicting innocent people and putting them on death row.''
Deal on Vieques Exercises Puerto Rico agreed to let the Navy resume limited training on the island of Vieques, as part of a deal that includes up to $90 million in aid if residents of Vieques vote to allow exercises with live ammunition.
Final Pleas for Votes With the last hours before New Hampshire's primary ticking away and plenty of voters undecided, the candidates were making their final pleas, showing their best stripes and trying to conclude their campaigns on memorable grace notes.
Homelessness Documented About 1.35 million children in the United States -- nearly 2 percent of the nation's total -- are likely to become homeless at some point in the course of a year, a new analysis of national census and survey data being presented today has found.
Tax Plan From House G.O.P. House Republicans unveiled a proposal to give a tax cut to married couples, stepping up pressure on President Clinton and Democrats to agree to an election-year compromise on taxes. The plan would give a tax break to nearly all married couples and would be worth $182 billion over 10 years, more than four times as much as a plan proposed by Mr. Clinton.
NEW YORK/REGION
B1-7
Record Spending in Race For U.S. Senate Seat Jon S. Corzine, a candidate for the United States Senate from New Jersey who has a reported net worth of $300 million, spent more than $3.6 million on his campaign last year, according to records filed with the Federal Election Commission. Until this year, no nonincumbent had spent as much for a Senate race. But Mr. Corzine and Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani of New York, who also filed financial disclosures, appear to be setting a new benchmark in campaign finance.
5 Diallo Jurors Chosen Five jurors, including two black women, were chosen as jury selection began in the trial of four white police officers accused of murdering Amadou Diallo, a West African immigrant who was shot 19 times as he stood unarmed in the lobby of his Bronx apartment building one year ago.
Man Dies While Fleeing Fire A man who tried to escape a smoky fire in a garment district building was killed when he slipped from a makeshift rope and fell from a 10th-floor window, fire officials said. Two other people were injured while trying to escape the building, on West 36th Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenues, which became filled with smoke after the fire broke out in the basement around 9:30 a.m.
NEEDIEST CASES
SCIENCE TIMES
F1-12
Health & Fitness
F7-8
FASHION
ARTS
E1-12
SPORTS
D1-8
Rocker Suspended for Remarks Commissioner Bud Selig, saying John Rocker had dishonored Major League Baseball by disparaging many groups of society with his harsh comments in a magazine interview, suspended the Atlanta Braves' No. 1 relief pitcher yesterday for 73 days.
BUSINESS DAY
C1-25
Another Rate Increase Likely The Fed's policy makers are expected to vote to raise short-term interest rates at the end of a two-day meeting scheduled to begin today. But some of the tools that Alan Greenspan, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, has to cool the economy have been dulled, thanks to the Treasury. As a result, the central banker may have to be even more aggressive in raising rates than planned.
Mannesmann Welcomes Talks Mannesmann A. G. reversed its opposition to talks with Vodafone Airtouch P.L.C., seeking a face-saving friendly merger, executives close to the talks said. The executives said there is a growing feeling within Mannesmann that it cannot defeat Vodafone's $156 billion hostile takeover bid.
U.S. Markets Surge Stocks wrapped up their first losing month since September with a rally as investors bought beaten-down telecommunications and financial shares. The S.& P. 500 advanced 34.30 points, or 2.5 percent, to 1,394.46; the Dow gained 201.66, or nearly 1.9 percent, to 10,940.53, and the Nasdaq closed at 3,940.35, up 53.28, or almost 1.4 percent.
Business Digest
OBITUARIES
EDITORIAL
A20-21
Editorials: The uses of negative campaigns; a timeout on the death penalty; dangerous stall by the I.R.A. Columns: Thomas L. Friedman, Gail Collins.
Crossword
TV Listings
Public Lives
Weather
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2,002 | A Couture Icon In an Overhaul Finds Few Ads In Harsh Times | Glenda Bailey, whose July issue of Harper's Bazaar promises ''689 Fashion Hits,'' can come up with a million reasons why her magic will work on the troubled magazine she edits -- and she manages to squeeze in approximately half of them in a frenetic one-hour interview.
''Harper's Bazaar had lost its way,'' she said, speaking last Friday on the anniversary of her hiring. ''It was a blank canvas.''
Glenda Bailey, the editor in chief of Harper's Bazaar, has made substantial changes. But so far advertisers are staying away from the rejiggered magazine.
Glenda Bailey, whose July issue of Harper's Bazaar promises ''689 Fashion Hits,'' can come up with a million reasons why her magic will work on the troubled magazine she edits -- and she manages to squeeze in approximately half of them in a frenetic one-hour interview.
''Harper's Bazaar had lost its way,'' she said, speaking last Friday on the anniversary of her hiring. ''It was a blank canvas.''
Ms. Bailey, who had never edited a fashion magazine before her bosses at Hearst Magazines moved her over from Marie Claire, has been busily filling in the blanks. Save for her use of gigantic numbers on the cover, she has produced a neoclassic fashion magazine that features elegant typography, few celebrities and pure fashion bathed in white space.
But so far advertisers are staying away in droves from her rejiggered Harper's Bazaar. The magazine, squeezed both by an advertising recession that punishes category laggards and a revolution among women's magazines, remains mired at the bottom of the fashion magazine world.
Media buyers say Hearst has been wheeling and dealing on ad rates, but Harper's Bazaar's ad pages are down 25 percent through the first half of 2002, compared with the similar period last year, according to Media Industry Newsletter. Condé Nast's Vogue, edited by Anna Wintour, is down less than half that. Time Inc.'s InStyle, increasingly a player in fashion and beauty advertising, is down 14.4 percent. Only Hachette Filipacchi Media's Elle has performed worse than Harper's Bazaar.
The leadership at Hearst Magazines continues to stand behind their editor. ''We believe that Glenda Bailey is an extraordinary editor and over time, she can help us turn this around,'' said Cathleen P. Black, president of Hearst Magazines.
It was the success Ms. Bailey had running the British and American versions of Marie Claire, lippy, occasionally bawdy women's magazine, that convinced Hearst executives to replace Kate Betts at Harper's Bazaar, a 135-year old piece of American fashion iconography. In Ms. Bailey's five years at the American version of Marie Claire, circulation rose from 609,000 to nearly 930,000.
Hearst executives hoped that Ms. Bailey's instinct for discerning the needs of readers, along with a penchant for wowing advertisers, could stanch the financial hemorrhaging at Harper's Bazaar. The magazine suffered, along with the health of Liz Tilberis, its editor through much of the 90's, who died in 1999 of ovarian cancer. Hearst's last attempt at fixing it, the hiring of Ms. Betts from Vogue, resulted in a magazine that Hearst executives viewed as needlessly austere.
Ms. Bailey may not have the typical fashion-magazine résumé, but she is a tremendously savvy editor and a student of Harper's Bazaar's history. (And she does hold a bachelor's degree in fashion from Kingston University outside London.)
Ms. Bailey says she believes that by letting the magazine logo carry most of the color on the cover's always-white background, she can rebuild the name Harper's Bazaar into a meaningful brand for the fashion-aware. The former queen of the busy magazine cover now abhors clutter.
''I don't have to chase sale figures,'' Ms. Bailey said. ''We need to produce fashion coverage that appeals to sophisticated tastes. It's a very specialized audience.''
Rather than choosing to use her populist instincts to give Harper's Bazaar a radical makeover, Ms. Bailey has built on Bazaar's legacy in couture to make a magazine that is more about the clothes and accessories than the women who wear them.
Ms. Bailey's professional heritage is most apparent in the by-the-numbers approach she has taken since the redesign of the magazine in February. The June cover of Harper's Bazaar features a massive ''759 New Looks'' headline, not to be confused with May's ''573 Fashion Pieces'' and April's ''619 Best Fashion and Beauty Buys.''
''There is a very serious journalist who comes up with those counts,'' Ms. Bailey says with a laugh before returning to her message. ''We are in the business of building a brand and those numbers are meant to convey that we have many, many ideas in Harper's Bazaar.''
There has been a fair amount of joking about Ms. Bailey's numerical fixation at competing magazines -- some of which use numbers, but more chastely. Some in the fashion industry appreciate the numerology.
''I think that Glenda has made a serious attempt to organize the current chaos in fashion,'' said Simon Doonan, the creative director of Barneys. ''When she writes about 563 ideas, there are actually 40 million ideas and she is focused on editing them down to a more manageable level.''
And Ms. Bailey's decision to hire Stephen Gan, a former creative director of the fashion and art magazine Visionaire, has brought her immediate credibility on the runway. Observers in the fashion world say he has made the magazine more dynamic and colorful without injuring Bazaar's elegant visual legacy.
But much of the fashion community is wondering whether the magazine she was brought in to fix is even repairable in such a difficult environment.
''Business is tough, it hasn't bounced back,'' said Kal Ruttenstein, the fashion director of Bloomingdale's. ''We are trimming expenses, and one of the first expenses to be trimmed is always magazine advertising.''
''I think that Glenda is very talented, but the problem is that she is up against Anna Wintour, an icon whom designers worship,'' he added, referring to the editor in chief of Vogue. ''Anna is really at the top of her form right now and putting out a great magazine.''
Harper's Bazaar finds itself boxed in in other ways, too. Time Inc.'s fizzy mix of celebrity and couture, has all but redefined the category, making it more difficult for pure fashion magazines like Harper's Bazaar to compete. More recently, Condé Nast's Lucky has further democratized fashion by featuring moderately priced merchandise in accessible ways.
''The consumer is a little too smart these days to be told what to do,'' said Barbara Cirkva, executive vice president for fashion for Chanel. ''I think Glenda has picked up on that. Bazaar has a nice tone and is not dictating choices.''
Hearst executives insist that a more accurate reading on the effect of Ms. Bailey's changes will come in the fall fashion season, when they hope ad spending will rebound. They point to advertisers like L'Oréal, which will be will running a 14-page insert in the September issue. And, the executives said, since Ms. Bailey introduced her redesigned magazine, it is selling more than 10 percent better on the newsstand than last year. But others at Hearst say that the newsstand performance, a telling gauge of a magazine's appeal to readers, is up nominally at best.
Sitting in her 37th-floor office, below a rack of past covers she is very pleased with, Ms. Bailey said there is still tweaking to be done. The outsized numbers might have to go.
''It's not a perfect marriage, but Glenda has every right impulse,'' said someone who has edited a fashion magazine. ''She is digging out from a very deep hole and it still looks and feels very much like a work in progress. She could still pull it off.
''There is no one in this business who is more ambitious or focused than Glenda,'' she said. ''Taking over Bazaar was the fulfillment of a life's dream, and she is not going down without a huge fight.''
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